[Plura-list] The Case for a Job Guarantee; The real cyberwar is Goliath, slaughtering an army of Davids; Coders as RPG classes

[Cory Doctorow]

Today's links

* The Case for a Job Guarantee: Pavlina Tcherneva's urgent pamphlet, in
the midst of the employment crisis of the century.

* The real cyberwar is Goliath, slaughtering an army of Davids: It's
asymmetric, but the asymmetry goes the other way

* Coders as RPG classes: Product managers are bards.

* Podcast: Someone Comes to Town Pt 7: The Father's Day episode.

* This day in history: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2019

* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming appearances, current writing
projects, current reading

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🖖🏿 The Case for a Job Guarantee

It's hard to imagine a more timely moment for the publication of Pavlina
Tcherneva's "The Case for a Job Guarantee," a slim and sprightly book
that makes the plainest, most straightforward case yet for ending
involuntary employment.

https://politybooks.com/bookdetail/?isbn=9781509542093

The Jobs Guarantee is not a new idea - it came within a whisker being
part of FDR's New Deal - but with unemployment at levels to rival (or
exceed) the Great Depression, and with countries minting trillions to
cushion the pandemic, it's an idea whose time has come.

Tcherneva's argument has several strands:

* Unemployment is really terrible, and exacts a huge toll on unemployed
people, their families and society. This is both a human tragedy and a
massive economic drain.

* The private sector's job-creation is "pro-cyclical": it creates jobs
when the economy is good, and shed jobs when the economy is bad (that
is, when we most need new jobs)

* The private sector is really bad at valuing caring and sustaining work
- education, health care, climate remediation, eldercare, daycare

* No amount of money for private sector job-creation would end
unemployment: giving every unemployed person a $15/h job with good
benefits is MUCH cheaper than handing out subsidies or contracts to
private firms, and  even if we did that, millions would still be unemployed

* Minting money to buy the labor of unemployed people isn't
inflationary. Inflation isn't about the monetary supply, it's about
bidding wars - buying the labor of people who lack jobs won't bid up
their wages, because no one else wants their labor

* A Jobs Guarantee scheme would provide training, continuing education,
certification and rehabilitation and be especially good for formerly
incarcerated people, young people, people with disabilities, parents
re-entering the job market, etc

* Governments guarantee lots of things: price supports for agribusiness,
loans for mortgage lenders, education for every child. Guaranteeing jobs
is both a bargain (less than 1% of GDP, factoring in savings from ending
unemployment pathologies) and humane

Today, we protect against inflation by keeping people unemployed -
unemployed people are a "buffer stock" of workers who might be hired
when the economy grows.

Tcherneva proposes that we replace unemployment with a buffer-stock of
jobs: federally funded, locally determined, jobs that the private sector
won't do, jobs that pay well (and eliminate sub-subsistence private
sector work better than any minimum wage would).

These are the jobs that need doing, but not necessarily *now*:
remediating public spaces, doing after-school programs at the local
library or care home, weatherizing houses. When the economy sheds jobs,
laid off people know they can get good work the next day doing these.

When the economy grows, workers with newly acquired skills - and no gaps
in their employment history - can walk straight into the new jobs the
private sector is creating. When deflation is a risk, a Jobs Guarantee
heats up; when inflation is a risk, it cools off.

It's an "automatic stabilizer."

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/05/the-hard-stuff/#jobs-guarantee

Tcherneva clearly wrote most of this before the crisis (the introduction
does take note of it though), but despite that, it's eerily applicable
to this moment.

40 years of deficit hawkery has hollowed out our institutions, emptied
our stockpiles and replaced the social safety net with punitive
workfare. As the pandemic emergency surges, with the climate emergency
right behind it, we need capacity building.

We need care work. We need the Jobs Guarantee.

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🖖🏿 The real cyberwar is Goliath, slaughtering an army of Davids

"A tale of two cybers - how threat reporting by cybersecurity firms
systematically underrepresents threats to civil society," in Journal of
Information Technology & Politics by Lennart Maschmeyer, Ron Deibert and
Jon R. Lindsay, reveals a serious problem with infosec research.

The authors document how our dominant narrative of cybersecurity - that
it's about cyberterrorists using tech to leverage asymmetric attacks
against nations and powerful companies - has skewed how we investigate
and report on security incidents.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19331681.2020.1776658

What's more, since the majority of reporting comes from commercial firms
hoping to sell security services to corporations in the global north,
"threat reports" are absurdly skewed towards corporate espionage,
frauds, and attacks on powerful governments.

But this is completely skewed. Considered by both volume and
consequences, the commonest form of hack-attack is corporations and
governments attacking poorly resourced civil society groups - it's not
David felling Goliath, it's Goliath slaughtering armies of Davids.

"The original cyberwar narrative had things precisely backwards. The
information revolution does not portend a new anarchy rife with
destructive disruption but rather the encroaching hierarchy of the
surveillance state. Cyberspace may create asymmetric advantages, but
they are advantages of the strong to monitor and enforce the behavior of
the weak."

But embattled civil society groups do not procure expensive
threat-mitigation contracts from commercial cybersecurity firms, so they
are omitted from published case-studies in favor of the rare instance in
which companies or governments are the victims, not the aggressors.

This skews the entire cybersecurity narrative: from the scholarship to
the news-media's reportage to fictional portrayals, giving us the sense
of an invisible threat landscape in which tech acts as a
force-multiplier for otherwise lost causes.

But the problem isn't just one of distorted perceptions. Our false
conception of cybersecurity threats leads us to develop defenses that
benefit the habitual aggressors at the expense of mitigations for their
preferred victims.

The authors go to great lengths to quantify this selection bias, and
make a very compelling case. More significant are the case studies,
which come from the work of the Univerity of Toronto's Citizen Lab (with
which two of the three authors are affiliated).

Citizen Lab is the most prominent and successful entity when it comes to
researching and mitigating threats to journalists, human rights orgs,
and other civil society groups who are targeted by powerful corporations
and governments, using military-style cyberweapons.

These weapons are so cheap and readily available for the powerful that
they are used in *incredibly* petty ways.

For example, the Saudi government used the NSO Group's Pegasus malware
against Omar Abdulaziz, a Canadian university student who ran a comedic
Youtube channel that mocked the Saudi state.

NSO's Pegasus was also implicated in the murder and dismemberment of
Jamal Khashoggi.

There is seemingly no pretence so slight, no critic so minor, that the
rich and powerful don't sometimes target them with the same weapons that
nation-states use to attack each others' national security apparatus.

The authors make a compelling case that this asymmetry feeds on itself.
Not only do we have an enormous array of powerful weapons for rich and
powerful people (who are supposedly under constant assault from weirdly
threatening pipsqueaks); but we have almost *nothing* for the victims of
this aggression to use to defend themselves.

Ron Deibert, who runs Citizen Lab, wrote a powerful afterword for
*Attack Surface*, the forthcoming Little Brother novel.

https://read.macmillan.com/promo/attacksurfacepreordercampaign/

Attack Surface is about a cybersecurity contractor who can no longer
rationalize away her work building cyberweapons to attack dissident
movements for corrupt and powerful dictators.

She returns from Eastern Europe to Oakland, only to find the weapons she
developed being wielded against the social justice movements her friends
have founded, and has to reckon with the full consequences of her actions.

In his afterword, Deibert wrote, "I hope you will be inspired by this
book in the same way I have. I hope, like me, it encourages you to
question the technologies that you depend on, that you carry with you
wherever you go. Like Masha, I hope you find a way to turn them to your
advantage by knowing them from the inside-out in the way she does.

"Above all, I hope you become inspired to use them to create a better
world than the one in which we now live."

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🖖🏿 Coders as RPG classes

This morning, my attention snagged hard on Daniel J Thomason's Software
Engineer D&D; Classes ("Ever suspected that software development is more
like a big, poorly structured RPG than anyone admits at interviews?
You're going to enjoy this, then...")

https://dthomason.com/Software_Engineer_D&D;_Classes.pdf

After thinking about it, I realized that the explanation is right there
in the strapline: it's not merely that software development is nerdy and
D&D; is nerdy so they go together.

It's really a kind of backhanded critique of the software INDUSTRY, with
its back-breaking, human-destroying work schedules defined by arbitrary
demands for extra work, a ginned-up sense of urgency and the casino-like
possibility of an IPO or (more likely) acquisition by a Big Tech
company, which lines up neatly with the post-adventure denouement in the
tavern, except it's a cushy "campus" with massages and kombucha on tap.

I love the quotes on each: "Barbarian: Unit tests give you a false sense
of safety. coding should never feel safe. every line of code you write
should give you anxiety about how it'll destroy the rest of the program.
ride fiercely into that dark abyss."– Katerina Borodina.

And the special abilities: "Bard (AKA 'product manager'): You unfurl a
document (can be paper-based or electronic, your choice) that envelops a
single enemy of your choice and leaves them incapacitated until the
start of your next turn."

Some of the matchups are spookily good, like "Healer = Quality Engineer"
("Once per day you may rollback the codebase to an earlier state,
causing all party members to return to the HP and spell slots they had
at that point")

And who among us has never worked with a rogue ("security engineer")?:
"While fun to have in the party,rogues can sometimes be a little
unreliable, mysteriously disappears when it's time for regression
testing, for example."

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🖖🏿 Podcast: Someone Comes to Town Pt 7

My weekly podcast is up! This week, it's part 7 of my serialized reading
of my 2006 novel "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town," which
Gene Wolfe called "a glorious book unlike any book you’ve ever read."

https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/06/22/someone-comes-to-town-someone-leaves-town-part-07-2/

This week's reading, fortuitously, has a pretty powerful father/son
moment, something I didn't realize until I took a few minutes away from
yesterday's Father's Day family stuff to read it aloud. Here's an MP3:

https://ia601404.us.archive.org/4/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_347/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_347_-_Someone_Comes_to_Town_Someone_Leaves_Town_007.mp3

Thanks as always to Internet Archive for hosting - they'll host your
stuff to!

Here's the RSS for the podcast:

https://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

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🖖🏿 This day in history

#15yrsago Beloved Toronto singing cowboy/mayoral candidate Ben Kerr, RIP
https://boingboing.net/2005/06/22/beloved-toronto-sing.html

#10yrsago Canadian Heritage Minister smears DMCA opponents as "radical
extremists"
https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2010/06/moore-and-radical-extremists/

#10yrsago Bruce Sterling's Shareable.net story about astroturfer gulag
https://www.shareable.net/the-exterminators-want-ad/

#5yrsago Australia's own Immortan Joe turns off the water, I mean,
Internet
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/06/australia-passes-controversial-anti-piracy-web-censorship-law/

#5yrsago GCHQ psychological operations squad targeted Britons for
manipulation
https://theintercept.com/2015/06/22/controversial-gchq-unit-domestic-law-enforcement-propaganda/

#5yrsago GCHQ hacking squad worried about getting sued for copyright
violation
https://theintercept.com/2015/06/22/gchq-reverse-engineering-warrants/

#1yrago In a bid to avoid climate vote, Oregon Republican Senators cross
state lines, go into hiding, threaten to murder cops, as white
nationalist paramilitaries pledge armed support
https://www.vox.com/2019/6/21/18700741/oregon-republican-walkout-climate-change-bill

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🖖🏿 Colophon

Today's top sources: Four Short Links
(https://www.oreilly.com/feed/four-short-links), Naked Capitalism
(https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/).

Currently writing:

* My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and
reconciliation. Friday's progress: 503 words (29686 total).

* A short story, "Making Hay," for MIT Tech Review. Friday's progress:
317 words (2251 total)

Currently reading: Adventures of a Dwergish Girl, Daniel Pinkwater

Latest podcast: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 07)
https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/06/22/someone-comes-to-town-someone-leaves-town-part-07-2/

Upcoming appearances:

* In Conversation with Hank Green, Jul 10,
https://www.magersandquinn.com/product_info?isbn_id=26578312&products;_id=163359157

Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book
about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed
copy here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1562/_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer.html.

"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531

"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new
introduction by Edward Snowden:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies
here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

This work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.
That means you can use it any way you like, including commerically,
provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link
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https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla* -Joey "Accordion Guy"
DeVilla


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