[Plura-list] Female Furies; How to break up Google; Facebook and Trump collaborate on rule-rigging; NYC housing lottery favors the least-needy

[Cory Doctorow]

Today's links

* Female Furies: Cecil Castellucci finds the story that Jack Kirby missed.

* How to break up Google: A making things company, not a buying things
company.

* Facebook and Trump collaborate on rule-rigging: You can't break the
rules if you make the rules.

* NYC housing lottery favors the least-needy: The private sector cannot
and will not solve the housing crisis.

* Podcast: Part 8 of Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town:
Families are weird.

* This day in history: 2005, 2010, 2015

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

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🛌🏿 Female Furies

"Female Furies" are a deep Jack Kirby/DC Comics cut, dating to a 1972
issue of Mister Miracle; but in 2018, DC announced that it was rebooting
the book with Cecil Castellucci writing and Adriana Melo doing the art.

https://www.dccomics.com/blog/2019/12/23/female-furies-rise-and-rage-against-the-manchine

The run was collected in a trade paperback in December: "The Fourth
World Revolution." I read it yesterday.

It's amazing.

The Female Furies are a warrior squad on Apokolips, Darkseid's
militarized hell-planet. They were raised in Granny Goodness in her
brutal orphanage.

Granny is reimagined as a betrayed Darkseid lieutenant, who was rewarded
for carrying out the assassination that vaulted Darkseid to power by
being sexually assaulted by Darkseid and then cast aside in favor of a
male rival, banished to run the orphanage.

In Castellucci's telling, the Furies are Granny revenge, her long biding
scheme to capture Darkseid's favor, rise above her rivals in the power
structure, and become the true power behind the throne.

She has raised her Furies to fight better and harder then men,
fashioning them into living proof of her suitability to rule. She has
also trained them to be unquestioningly obedient to her, even when she
sacrifices them to be abused by the men in Darkseid's inner circle.

The setup is absolutely harrowing, far more hellish than the mere
Dante-esque horrors that Kirby imagined.

Castellucci's Apokolips is a place where self-preservation always
involves betrayal of the people around you. Granny betrays the Furies,
the Furies betray each other.

But these schemes are always overlaid with a performance of loyalty and
fawning admiration, as each character seeks to flatter or toady their
way to a better position. Every crumb of affection hides poison, every
claim to dignity is met with gaslighting and dismissal.

Because this is a story about women seeking places in a relentless
patriarchy, it's a story about how patriarchy replicates itself: how
women get ahead by treating other women they way they were treated by
men, how they sacrifice each other to men, how they blind themselves.

It's also a story about the only way to break the deadlock of a
low-trust society: solidarity. The solidarity Castellucci's characters
find is hard won and brittle, but it is also transformative, literally
remaking the planet.

Castellucci shows us how a reboot should be handled: revisiting source
material through a modern lens, finding the powerful stories that were
elided in the original telling.

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🛌🏿 How to break up Google

It's really hard to break up a monopoly; first, there are the practical
considerations - the protracted legal wrangle that  consume all the
resources that competition regulators have and then some.

The most recent attempt to break up IBM lasted from 1969-82, and in each
of those years, IBM's legal bills exceeded the *entire budget* of the
FTC's antitrust division. Toxic monopolists have deep pockets and huge
upsides, and they can and do spend like crazy.

But even unsuccessful breakup attempts can be worth it There's good
reason to believe IBM chose commodity components for the PC because of
the scars of the breakup fight, and likewise tchose not to shut down PC
clones because of that trauma.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/08/ibm-pc-compatible-how-adversarial-interoperability-saved-pcs-monopolization

There are persistent insider tales that Microsoft didn't strangle Google
because they were gunshy after the DoJ's failed breakup attempt. Last
year, Gates attributed the company's lack of interest in Android to the
fear of more DoJ scrutiny.

https://boingboing.net/2019/11/11/distracted-code-for-scared.html

So maybe we decide that despite the blood and treasure involved, we're
going to take a run at breaking up tech monopolies. Next question: how
should they be broken up?

That's a question XML co-inventor Tim Bray has been investigating.

Last month, Bray quit his job as a senior exec at Amazon over the
company's unethical conduct, particularly its treatment of warehouse
workers and the retaliation against tech workers who acted in solidarity
with them.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/04/which-side-are-you-on/#tim-bray

Earlier this month, he made the case for breaking up Amazon and made
some pretty definitive statements about how Amazon's cloud business
would be better off separated from the rest of the company.

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/The%20World/Tech%20Breakup/

Today, he assays some thoughts about how to break up Google.

It's harder to be definitive here because Google's financial disclosures
are really poor. We know how much revenue different divisions bring in,
but not how much PROFIT they represent.

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/06/25/Break-Up-Google

That makes it hard to know whether a given division is "a money-spinner
or strictly a traffic play." Notably, there are no figures as to the
profitability of Android, the most popular OS in the world. That's
actually pretty weird, when you think about it.

After looking at the market power vested in Gmail, Maps, Cloud, online
ads, Android and Youtube, Bray makes some suggestions for how Google
could be broken up.

First, split off ads. That's a no-brainer - every trustbuster I know
starts there.

Next, Youtube: "it’s got no real synergy that I can detect with any
other Google property."

What about Android? It's not even clear whether it's a business. Bray's
not sure what to do about it.

Maps is almost certainly a business, but it's really toxic and badly
run. Bray wants to start by forcing Google to publish its financials.

He thinks Cloud should be spun out as a competitor to Amazon, with
Google Office alongside of it as a competitive advantage.

He makes the point that "we could hope they’d break Google’s habit of
suddenly killing products heavily depended-on by customers. You just
can’t do that in the Enterprise space."

Bray: "Google’s whole is worth less than the sum of its parts. So a
breakup might be a win for shareholders...the fountain of money thrown
off by Web-search advertising leaves a lot of room for laziness and
mistakes in other sectors of the business."

From the outside, it certainly appears that the company has lost the
ability to make successful products: after search (a genuine innovation)
and Gmail (a GREAT Hotmail clone), the company had an (unbroken?) string
of failures in internal development.

All (?) of its other growth has come from buying up other companies. For
all its labs and R&D;, Google sure seems to be in the "buying great
things" business, not the "creating great things" business.

Of course, Google's also *really* good at scaling and operationalizing
other peoples' ideas, but that's always true of monopolists: there was
lots wrong with  Standard Oil, but it was really good at pumping oil.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/technical-excellence-and-scale

And let's not forget how much of Google's incredible scale and
operational excellence is the result of...buying companies that produce
scaling tools, hardware, and management.

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🛌🏿 Facebook and Trump collaborate on rule-rigging

Amid the clamor for better Big Tech moderation rules (and better
enforcement of those rules), it's important to remember that complex
laws favor those who can afford lawyers.

That goes whether we're talking about actual lawyers or "consultants"
who know the platforms rulebooks inside and out.

https://locusmag.com/2020/01/cory-doctorow-inaction-is-a-form-of-action/

"The lines between good conduct and bad conduct are necessarily
arbitrary: if you create a rule against 'harassment' then you have to
create a threshold beyond which conduct crosses over from merely
“unpleasant” and into 'harassing.'"

"The difference between 'harassment' and 'very nearly almost but not
quite harassment' is so arbitrary that the subjects of this v-n-a-b-n-q
harassment will probably not register that there’s any difference."

As bad as this power-imbalance is, it's even worse if the platform
collaborates with you to revise its rules so that any time you cross the
line, they move the line.

That's what Facebook did for Trump, according to a Washington Post
investigation by Elizabeth Dwoskin, Craig Timberg and Tony Romm.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/zuckerberg-once-wanted-to-sanction-trump-then-facebook-wrote-rules-that-accommodated-him/ar-BB164J8C

They cite multiple Facebook sources, including senior people who quit
over the practice and went on the record with their allegations.

Not only did Facebook collaborate with Trump to help reword his posts so
they wouldn't break the rules; sometimes, they changed the rules.

The Trump complicity began in 2015, when Facebook found a way to leave
up Trump's campaign promise to ban Muslims from entering the USA,
despite its clear violation of Facebook's policies.

Lurking in the background of this scale-thumbing is Vice President of
Global Policy Joel Kaplan, a far-right operator brought in to assuage
the victimization-complex of right-wing commentators who claimed FB was
biased against them.

It was Kaplan who, with a straight face, argued against banning
dangerous disinformation campaigns because this would disproportionately
affect right-wing users. Even worse: Zuckerberg reversed an anti-disinfo
plan on the basis of Kaplan's advice.

A leaked Kaplan memo reported on by the Post shows how Zuck's personal
Richilieu leads the company through the most torturous mental gymnastics
to justify complicity with political lies and obvious influence operations.

What's more, these policies have paved the way for dictator-friendly
policies that have created a set of custom-tailored rules that permit
Duterte, Bolsonaro, Modi and Orban to fuel autocracy and even genocide
while silencing their victims.

But Facebookers don't have to take it. There's a huge labor shortage for
skilled tech workers, and even junior employees can quit their jobs and
walk into a comparable one by just placing a call to a recruiter (or a
friend working at a rival, hoping to collect a bounty).

5,000 Facebook employees have denounced the company's pro-dictator
policies, and many have quit. The fact that so many were willing to go
on-the-record with their grievances suggests that they're past caring
about retaliation from the company.

It's not just employees, of course. Some of Facebook's biggest
advertisers have "paused" their business with the company, including
Unilever, Eddie Bauer , North Face, Coca-Cola, Verizon, Ben & Jerry's,
Patagonia, REI, Mozilla and Upwork.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2020/06/27/facebook-ad-boycott-hate-speech-biggest-brands-verizon-coca-cola/3270335001/

Of course, the joke's on us. Everyone who's fucked off with Facebook is
flocking to Instagram - a company Facebook bought *explicitly* because
Zuck viewed the company as a nascent competitor that could grow to
become a threat.

IG may be a groovy place to reboot the zine revolution, but all those
pixels from from the same organization, which combines and mines the
data from across its properties.

https://medium.com/swlh/zines-are-back-and-now-theyre-on-instagram-4e4b287e28ac

That's why the majority of the 15,000,000 13-34 year olds who broke all
records by quitting FB in 2018 ended up as Instagram users.

https://www.edisonresearch.com/infinite-dial-2019/

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🛌🏿 NYC housing lottery favors the least-needy

When Margaret Thatcher said, "There is no alternative" (to market-based
governance), she meant "*stop trying to think of an alternative*."

It worked.

Exhibit A: the utter failure of cities to provide affordable housing.

In NYC, the "affordable housing" strategy consists of giving developers
breaks if they designate some of the units in their buildings as
sub-market rent for people in housing poverty. These scarce units are
allocated by lottery.

This is an utter, utter failure.

Landlords are given a range of rents they're allowed to charge in these
"affordable" units. The lowest prices have the highest demand, thanks to
the large number of working poor and disabled people barely clinging to
life in the city.

https://www.thecity.nyc/2020/6/28/21306383/affordable-housing-lottery-chances-worst-low-income

Then there's the highest end: rents priced for people whose current
housing situation strains their finances but does not put them in danger
of eviction, starvation, or even having their utilities cut off. This
category has the least demand.

You'll never guess which kind of units landlords prefer to build.

Remember, it's a lotto. You can only get a lotto ticket if your income
is in the right bracket. Which means there are more tickets available
for high-priced units, while these are the units with lowest demand.

But don't worry, NYC has a plan to fix this.

They're building a system that won't let people who don't earn enough to
pay rent on the high-end places to put their names down for one. That
will spare renting agencies the bother of turning down these ineligible
bidders.

This is the kind of "solution" you only come up with if you start from
the premise that the answer to a "market failure" like huge swathes of
the workforce not being able to afford shelter is "market interventions."

That is, it's the kind of solution that starts from excluding any real,
muscular public action. Like, how about if instead of trying to
"incentivize" the super-profitable property sector who've torn down all
the affordable housing to throw New Yorkers the odd crumb...

...New York just builds the housing it needs?

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🛌🏿 Podcast: Part 8 of Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

My latest podcast is up! It's part 8 of my 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/2020/06/29/someone-comes-to-town-someone-leaves-town-part-08/

If you haven't been listening along, you can catch up with this link:

https://craphound.com/podcast/?s=%22someone%20comes%22

Here's a direct MP3 link (thanks to @internetarchive for hosting -
they'll host your stuff for free, too!):

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_348/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_348_-_Someone_Comes_to_Town_Someone_Leaves_Town_008.mp3

And here's my podcast feed:

https://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

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🛌🏿 This day in history

#15yrsago Wil Wheaton's Slashdot interview
https://slashdot.org/story/05/06/27/0926218/wil-wheaton-strikes-back

#10yrago G20 police used imaginary law to jail harass demonstrators and
jailed protestors in dangerous and abusive "detention center"
https://web.archive.org/web/20100701031334/http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/police-admit-deliberately-misleading-public-on-expanded-security-fence-law/article1622864/

#10yrsago Canada repeating Britain's dirty copyright legislation process
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jun/29/canada-copyright-digital-economy

#10yrsago London cops enforce imaginary law against brave, principled
teenaged photographer
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/officers-claim-they-dont-need-law-to-stop-photographer-taking-pictures-2012827.html

#5yrsago Why I'm leaving London
https://boingboing.net/2015/06/29/why-im-leaving-london.html

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🛌🏿 Colophon

Today's top sources: Four Short Links
(https://www.oreilly.com/feed/four-short-links), Slashdot
(https://slashdot.org).

Currently writing:

* My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and
reconciliation. Friday's progress: 559 words (32358 total).

* A short story, "Making Hay," for MIT Tech Review. Friday's progress:
304 words (3922 total)

Currently reading: Goliath, Matt Stoller.

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:

* 'What Big Tech does to discourse, and the forgotten tech tool that can
make tech less big', Jul 1, Oxford Internet Institute
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/6015930181073/WN_MnlH5x2XTRqiKKmhU0QPAg

* 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/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are
included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the
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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