[Plura-list] Free audio of Masque of the Red Death and When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth, Ada Palmer on censorship, Women of Imagineering, Glitch unionizes

Sat Mar 14 11:28:22 EDT 2020

Today's links

* Masque of the Red Death: Macmillan Audio gave me permission to share
the audiobook of my end-of-the-world novella.

* When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth: A new podcast audiobook of my 2005
end-of-the-world story.

* Ada Palmer on historical and modern censorship: Part of EFF's Speaking
Freely project.

* Glitch workers unionize: First-ever tech union formed without
management opposition.

* Women of Imagineering: A 384-page illustrated chronicle of the role
women play in Disney theme-park design.

* Tachyon celebrates 30 years of sff publishing with a Humble Bundle:
DRM-free and benefits EFF.

* Honest Government Ads, Covid-19 edition: Political satire is really
hard, but The Juice makes it look easy.

* TSA lifts liquid bans, telcos lift data caps: Almost as though there
was no reason for them in the first place.

* CBC postpones Canada Reads debates: But you can read a ton of the
nominated books online for free.

* Star Wars firepits: 750lbs of flaming backyard steel.

* This day in history: 2005, 2015, 2019

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

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☢️ Masque of the Red Death

Edgar Allan Poe wrote "The Masque of the Red Death" in 1842. It's about
a plutocrat who throws a masked ball in his walled abbey during a plague
with the intention of cheating death.

https://www.poemuseum.org/the-masque-of-the-red-death

My novella "The Masque of the Red Death" is a tribute to Poe; it's from
my book Radicalized. It's the story of a plute who brings his pals to
his luxury bunker during civlizational collapse in the expectation of
emerging once others have rebuilt.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250242334

Naturally, they assume that when they do emerge, once their social
inferiors have rebooted civilization, that their incredible
finance-brains, their assault rifles, and their USBs full of BtC will
allow them to command a harem and live a perpetual Frazetta-painting future.

And naturally – to anyone who's read Poe – it doesn't work out for them.
They discover that humanity has a shared microbial destiny and that you
can't shoot germs. That every catastrophe must be answered with
solidarity, not selfishness, if it is to be survived.

Like my story When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth, the Masque of the Red
Death has been on a lot of people's minds lately, especially since this
Guardian story of plutes fleeing to their luxury bunkers was published.
Hundreds of you have sent me this.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/11/disease-dodging-worried-wealthy-jet-off-to-disaster-bunkers

I got the message. Yesterday, I asked my agent to see if Macmillan Audio
would let me publish the audiobook of my Masque of the Red Death for
free. They said yes, and asked me to remind you that the audiobook of
Radicalized (which includes Masque) is available for your delectation.

I hope you'll check out the whole book. Radicalized was named one of the
WSJ's best books of 2019, and it's a finalist for Canada Reads, the
national book prize. It's currently on every Canadian national
bestseller list.

There's one hitch, though: Audible won't sell it to you. They don't sell
ANY of my work, because I don't allow DRM on it, because I believe that
you should not have to lock my audiobooks to Amazon's platform in order
to enjoy them.

Instead, you can buy the audio from sellers like libro.fm, Downpour.com,
and Google Play. Or you can get it direct from me. No DRM, no license
agreement. Just "you bought it, you own it."

https://craphound.com/shop/

And here's the free Macmillan Audio edition of Masque of the Red Death,
read with spine-chilling menace by the incredible Stefan Rudnicki, with
a special intro from me, freshly mastered by John Taylor Williams. I
hope it gives you some comfort.

https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/13/the-masque-of-the-red-death/

(Here's the direct MP3, too)

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_332/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_332_-_The_Masque_of_the_Red_Death.mp3

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☢️ Ada Palmer on historical and modern censorship

My EFF colleague Jillian C York's latest project is Speaking Freely, a
series of interviews with people about free expression and the internet,
including what Neil Gaiman memorably called "icky speech."

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/12/why-defend-freedom-of-icky-speech.html

The latest interview subject is the incomparable Ada Palmer: historian,
sf writer, musician, and co-host of last year's U Chicago seminar series
on "systems of information control during information revolutions,"
which I co-taught with her. Ada's interview synthesizes her historian's
distance from the subject ("yes, this is my subject, and these people
are terrible, and it's kind of fun in that way") with her perspective as
a writer and advocate for free speech.

"One of the victims of censorship is the future capacity to tell
histories of the period when censorship happened….. It renders that
historical record unreliable… makes it easier for people to make claims
you can't refute using historical sources… It's similar to how we see
people invalidating things now—like 'that climate study wasn't really
valid because it got funding from a leftist political group"—they're
invalidating the material by claiming that there has to be insincerity
its development.

"Pretty much every censoring operation post-printing press recognizes
that it isn't possible to track down and destroy every copy of a
thing…An Inquisition book burning was the ceremonial burning of one
copy. The Inquisition kept examples of all of the books they banned."

Fascinating perspecting on whether nongovernmental action can really be
called "censorship."

"The Inquisition wasn't the state – it was a private org like to Doctors
Without Borders or Unicef, run by private orgs like the Dominicans and
it often competed with the state." As she points out, everything the
Inquisition did would be fine alongside the First Amendment, because it
was entirely private action.

Next, Palmer talks about market concentration and how it abets this kind
of private censorship. This is something I've written a lot about, see
for example:

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

"If you have a plural set of voices, then you're always going to have
some spaces where things can be said, just like you have a plurality of
printers printing books, and some will only print orthodox things and
some will only print radical ones."

And while the internet *could* afford many venues for speech, in
practice a concentrated internet makes is plausible to accomplish the
censor's never-realized dream: "You can make a program that can hunt
down every instance of a particular phrase and erase it."

Tiny architectural choices make big differences here ("Architecture is
politics" -Mitch Kapor). Amazon can update your Kindle books without
your permission, Kobo can't. Amazon could delete every instance of a
book on Kindles, but Kobo would need cooperation from its customers.

Palmer is just the latest subject of Jillian's series. You can read many
other amazing interviews here:

https://www.eff.org/speaking-freely

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☢️ When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth

Over the past two weeks, hundreds of people have written to me to draw
comparisons between the pandemic emergency and my 2005 story "When
Sysamins Ruled the Earth" – an apocalyptic tale of network
administrators who survive a civilizational collapse.

https://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_-Overclocked-_When_Sysadmins_Ruled_the_Earth.html

I started writing this story in the teacher's quarters at the Clarion
Workshop, which was then hosted at MSU. It was July 6, 2005. I know the
date because the next day was 7/7, when bombs went off across London,
blowing up the tube train my wife normally rode to work. The attacks
also took out the bus I normally rode to my office. My wife was late to
work because I was in Michigan, so she slept in. It probably saved her
life. I couldn't work on this story for a long time after.

Eventually, I finished it and sold it to Eric Flint for Baen's Universe
magazine. It's been widely reprinted and adapted, including as a comic:

https://archive.org/details/CoryDoctorowsFuturisticTalesOfTheHereAndNow/mode/2up

I read this for my podcast 15 years ago, too, but the quality is
terrible. The more I thought about it, the more I thought I should do a
new reading. So I did, and John Taylor Williams mastered it overnight
and now it's live.

https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/13/when-sysadmins-ruled-the-earth-2/

There's a soliloquy in this where the protagonist reads a part of John
Perry Barlow's Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. Rather than
read it myself for the podcast, I ganked some of Barlow's own 2015
reading, which is fucking magnificent.

https://vimeo.com/111576518

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this. I've spent a lot of imaginary time
inhabiting various apocalypses, driven (I think) by my grandmother's
horrific stories of being inducted into the civil defense corps during
the Siege of Leningrad, which began when she was 12.

You can subscribe to the podcast here:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

And here's the MP3, which is hosted by the Internet Archive (they'll
host your stuff for free, too!).

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_331/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_331_-_When_Sysadmins_Ruled_the_Earth.mp3

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☢️ Glitch workers unionize

The staff of Glitch have formed a union. It seems to be the first-ever
white-collar tech-workers' union to have formed without any objections
from management (bravo, Anil Dash!).

https://cwa-union.org/news/releases/tech-workers-app-developer-glitch-vote-form-union-and-join-cwa-organizing-initiative

The workers organized under the Communications Workers of America, which
has been organizing tech shops through their Campaign to Organize
Digital Employees.

https://www.code-cwa.org/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIovDRsc-S6AIVCuDICh0rFQCMEAAYASAAEgJb1PD_BwE

"We appreciate that unlike so many employers, the Glitch management team
decided to respect the rights of its workforce to choose union
representation without fear or coercion."

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☢️ Women of Imagineering

Next October, Disney will publish "Women of Imagineering: 12 Careers, 12
Theme Parks, Countless Stories," a 384-page history of a dozen
pioneering woman Imagineers.

https://thedisneyblog.com/2020/03/13/new-book-highlights-stories-from-the-women-of-walt-disney-imagineering/

Featured are Elisabete Erlandson, Julie Svendsen, Maggie Elliott, Peggy
Fariss, Paula Dinkel, Karen Connolly Armitage, Katie Olson, Becky
Bishop, Tori Atencio, Lynne Macer Rhodes, Kathy Rogers, and Pam Rank.

When I worked at Imagineering, the smartest, most talented, most
impressive staff I knew were women (like Sara Thacher!). It's amazing to
see the women of the organization get some long-overdue recognition.

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☢️ Tachyon celebrates 30 years of sff publishing with a Humble Bundle

For 30 years, Tachyon has been publishing outstanding science fiction,
including a wide range of stuff that's too weird or marginal for the Big
5 publishers, like collections of essays and collections.

https://tachyonpublications.com/

Now, they've teamed up with Humble Bundle to celebrate their 30th with a
huge pay-what-you-like bundle that benefits EFF. There are *so many
great books* in this bundle!

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/celebrating-25-years-scifi-fantasy-from-tachyon-books

Like Bruce Sterling's Pirate Utopia, Eileen Gunn's Stable Strategies,
and books by Michael Moorcock, Thomas Disch, Jo Walton, Jane Yolen, Nick
Mamatas, Kameron Hurley, Lauren Beukes, Lavie Tidhar and so many more!

I curated the very first Humble Ebook Bundle and I've followed all the
ones since. This one is fucking amazeballs. Run, don't walk.

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☢️ Honest Government Ads, Covid-19 edition

Good political satire is hard, but The Juice's "Honest Government Ads"
are consistently brilliant.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKRw8GAAtm27q4R3Q0kst_g

The latest is, of course, Covi9-19 themed. It is funny, trenchant, and
puts the blame exactly where it belongs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hks6Nq7g6P4

If you like it, you can support their Patreon.

https://www.patreon.com/TheJuiceMedia

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☢️ TSA lifts liquid bans, telcos lift data caps

Your ISP is likely to lift its data-caps in the next day or two. ATT and
Comcast already did.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/v74qzb/atandt-suspends-broadband-usage-caps-during-coronavirus-crisis

And TSA has decided that 12 ounces of any liquid labelled "hand
sanitizer" is safe for aviation, irrespective of what's in the bottle.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/13/21179120/tsa-hand-sanitizer-liquid-size-airport-screening-coronavirus-covid-19

What do these two facts have in common? Obviously, it's that the
official narrative for things that impose enormous financial costs on
Americans, and dramatically lower their quality of lives, were based on
lies. These lies have been obvious from the start. The liquid ban, for
example, is based on a plot that never worked (making binary explosives
in airport bathroom sinks from liquids) and seems unlikely to ever have
worked, according to organic chemists.

Keeping your "piranha bath" near 0' C for a protracted period in the
bathroom toilet is some varsity-level terrorism, and the penalty for
failure is that you maim or blind yourself with acid spatter.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/08/on_the_implausi.html

And even if you stipulate that the risk is real, it's been obvious for
14 years that multiple 3oz bottles of Bad Liquid could be recombined
beyond the checkpoint to do whatever it is liquids do at 3.0001oz.The
liquid ban isn't just an inconvenience. It's not even just a burden on
travelers who've collectively spent billions to re-purchase drinks and
toiletries. It's a huge health burden to people with disabilities who
rely on constant access to liquids.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0m12mLXgO1A

And as we knew all along, the liquid ban was a nonsense, an
authoritarian response to a cack-handed, improbable terror plot. It
embodies the "security syllogism":

*Something must be done. There, I've done something.*

Think of all those checkpoints where all confiscated liquids were dumped
into a giant barrel and mingled together: if liquids posed an
existential threat to planes, they'd dispose of them like they were C4,
not filtered water. No one believed in the liquid threat, ever. TSA can
relax the restrictions and allow 12oz of anything labeled as hand-san
through the checkpoints. There was no reason to confiscate liquids in
the first place. But don't expect them to admit this. The implicit
message of the change is "Pandemics make liquids safe."

Now onto data-caps. Like the liquid ban, data-caps have imposed a
tremendous cost on Americans. In addition to the hundreds of millions in
monopoly rents extracted from the nation by telcos through overage
charges, these caps also shut many out of the digital world. They
represent a regressive tax on information, one that falls worst upon the
most underserved in the nation: people in poor and rural places, for
whom online access is a gateway to civic and political life, family
connection, employment and education.

We were told that we had to tolerate these caps because of the "tragedy
of the commons," a fraudulent idea from economics that says that shared
resources are destroyed through selfish overuse, based on no data or
evidence.

https://thebaffler.com/latest/first-as-tragedy-then-as-fascism-amend

(By contrast, actual commons are a super-efficient way of managing
resources)

https://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/elinor-ostroms-8-principles-managing-commmons

Telcos insisted that if they didn't throttle and gouge us, their
networks would become unusable – but really, what they meant is that if
they didn't throttle and gouge us, the windfall to their shareholders
would decline.

What's more likely: that pandemics make network management tools so
efficient that data-caps become obsolete, or that they were a shuck and
a ripoff from day one, enabled by a hyper-concentrated industry of
monopolists with cozy relationships with corrupt regulators?

So yeah, maybe this is the moment that kills Security Theater *and*
data-caps.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/12/coronavirus-could-force-isps-to-abandon-data-caps-forever/

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☢️ CBC postpones Canada Reads debates

The folks at the CBC have postponed next week's televised Canada Reads
debates, so we're going to have to wait a while to find out who wins the
national book prize.

https://www.cbc.ca/books/canada-reads-2020-postponed-1.5497678

Obviously, this is a bummer, though equally obviously, it's a relatively
small consequence of this ghastly circumstance.

And on the bright side, the CBC have just released a ton of excerpts
from the nominees:

https://www.cbc.ca/books/canadareads/read-excerpts-from-the-canada-reads-2020-books-1.5496637

If you're looking for some Canada Reads lit for this moment, my novella
"Masque of the Red Death" appears in my collection Radicalized, one of
the finalists. I put up the story as a free podast last night (thanks to
Macmillan Audio for permission).

https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/13/the-masque-of-the-red-death/

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☢️ Star Wars firepits

West Coast Firepits went viral when they produced a Death Star firepit,
though of course, I lusted after their Tiki Firepit.

https://www.westcoastfirepits.com/shop/tiki-firepit-69825

But now they're really leaning into the Star Wars themed pits, with an
Interceptor pit ($2500):

https://www.westcoastfirepits.com/shop/interceptor

Or, if you prefer a post-apocalyptic version, there's a Crashed
Interceptor pit, also $2500.

https://www.westcoastfirepits.com/shop/crashed-interceptor

If those prices seem high, consider that they're hand-made onshore, and
contain 750lbs of 1/4" and 1/8" steel.

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☢️ This day in history

#15yrsago How DRM will harm the developing world
https://web.archive.org/web/20050317005030/https://www.eff.org/IP/DRM/itu_drm.php

#5yrsago Anti-vaxxer ordered to pay EUR100K to winner of "measles aren't
real" bet
https://calvinayre.com/2015/03/13/business/biologist-ordered-to-pay-e100k-after-losing-wager-that-a-virus-causes-measles/

#1yrago A massive victory for fair use in the longrunning Dr Seuss vs
Star Trek parody lawsuit
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190313/09554041791/big-fair-use-win-mashups-places-youll-boldly-go-deemed-to-be-fair-use.shtml

#1yrago A detailed analysis of American ER bills reveals rampant,
impossible-to-avoid price-gouging
https://www.vox.com/health-care/2018/12/18/18134825/emergency-room-bills-health-care-costs-america

#1yrago Ketamine works great for depression and other conditions, and
costs $10/dose; the new FDA-approved "ketamine" performs badly in trials
and costs a fortune
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/11/ketamine-now-by-prescription/

#1yrago Facebook and Big Tech are monopsonies, even when they're not
monopolies
https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-not-monopoly-but-should-broken-up/

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☢️ Colophon

Today's top sources: EFF Deeplinks (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/),
Waxy (https://waxy.org/), Slashdot https://slashdot.org).

Currently writing: I've just finished rewrites on a short story, "The
Canadian Miracle," for MIT Tech Review. It's a story set in the world of
my next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and
reconciliation. I've also just completed "Baby Twitter," a piece of
design fiction also set in The Lost Cause's prehistory, for a British
think-tank. I'm getting geared up to start work on the novel next.

Currently reading: Just started Lauren Beukes's forthcoming Afterland:
it's Y the Last Man plus plus, and two chapters in, it's amazeballs.
Last month, I finished Andrea Bernstein's "American Oligarchs"; it's a
magnificent history of the Kushner and Trump families, showing how they
cheated, stole and lied their way into power. I'm getting really into
Anna Weiner's memoir about tech, "Uncanny Valley." I just loaded Matt
Stoller's "Goliath" onto my underwater MP3 player and I'm listening to
it as I swim laps.

Latest podcast: When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth
https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/13/when-sysadmins-ruled-the-earth-2/

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?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=socialpost&utm_term=na-poesycorypreorder&utm_content=na-preorder-buynow&utm_campaign=9781626723627

(we're having a launch for it in Burbank on July 11 at Dark Delicacies
and you can get me AND Poesy to sign it and Dark Del will ship it to the
monster kids in your life in time for the release date).

"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

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