[Plura-list] Tech in SF; Office 365 spies on employees for bosses; A state-owned Amazon

[Cory Doctorow]

Today's links

* Tech in SF: Annalee Newitz and Ken Liu in the final Attack Surface
Lecture.

* Office 365 spies on employees for bosses: It looks like you're
creating a technological dystopia. Would you like some help with that?

* A state-owned Amazon: Notes on Argentina's Correo Compras.

* Random Penguin to buy Simon & Schuster: And then there were four.

* This day in history: 2010, 2019

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

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🐮 Tech in SF

Today on the Attack Surface Lectures (8 panels exploring themes from the
third Little Brother book, hosted by Tor Books and 8 indie bookstores):
Tech in SF with Annalee Newitz and Ken Liu, recorded on Oct 16 by
Interabang.

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

You can watch it without Youtube's surveillance courtesy of the Internet
Archive:

https://archive.org/details/asl-tech

Or get the audio as an MP3:

https://archive.org/download/asl-tech/Tech%20in%20SF%20with%20Annalee%20Newitz%20and%20Ken%20Liu.mp3

Earlier instalments in the series:

I. Politics and Protest (Eva Galperin and Ron Deibert, hosted by The
Strand):

https://craphound.com/attacksurface/2020/11/16/the-attack-surface-lectures-politics-and-protest-fixed/

II. Cross-Media Sci-Fi (Amber Benson and John Rogers, hosted by the
Brookline Booksmith):

https://craphound.com/attacksurface/2020/11/17/the-attack-surface-lectures-cross-media-sci-fi/

III. Race, surveillance and tech (Meredith Whittaker and Malkia
Devich-Cyril, hosted by The Booksmith):

https://craphound.com/attacksurface/2020/11/18/the-attack-surface-lectures-intersectionality-race-surveillance-and-tech-and-its-history/

IV. Cyberpunk & Post-Cyberpunk (Christopher Brown and Bruce Sterling,
hosted by Anderson's Bookshop)

https://craphound.com/attacksurface/2020/11/19/the-attack-surface-lectures-cyberpunk-and-post-cyberpunk/

V. Little Revolutions (Tochi Onyebuchi and Bethany C Morrow, hosted by
Skylight Books)

https://craphound.com/news/2020/11/20/the-attack-surface-lectures-little-revolutions/

VI. Opsec and Personal Cybersecurity (Window Snyder and Runa Sandvik,
hosted by Third Place Books)

https://craphound.com/attacksurface/2020/11/23/the-attack-surface-lectures-opsec-and-personal-cyber-security/

VII. Sci-Fi Genre (Sarah Gailey and Chuck Wendig, hosted by Fountain Books)

https://craphound.com/attacksurface/2020/11/24/the-attack-surface-lectures-sci-fi-genre/

VIII. Tech in SF (Annalee Newitz and Ken Liu, hosted by Interabang)

https://craphound.com/attacksurface/2020/11/25/the-attack-surface-lectures-tech-in-sf/

Here's a master post with all the media:

https://craphound.com/news/2020/11/16/attack-surface-lectures-master-post/

And you can also get this as it's posted on my podcast feed – search for
"Cory Doctorow podcast" in your podcatcher or use the RSS:

https://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

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🐮 Office 365 spies on employees for bosses

The Shitty Tech Adoption Curve describes the process by which oppressive
technology is normalized and distributed through all levels of society.
The more privilege someone has, the harder it is to coerce them to use
dehumanizing tech, so it starts with marginalized people.

Asylum seekers, prisoners and overseas sweatshop workers get the first
version. Its roughest edges are sanded off against their tenderest
places, and once it's been normalized a little, we inflict it on
students, mental patients, and blue collar workers.

Lather, rinse, repeat: before long, everyone's been ropted in. If your
meals were observed by a remote-monitored CCTV 20 years ago, it was
because you were in a supermax prison. Today, it's because you bought a
home video surveillance system from Google/Apple/Amazon.

The lockdown has been a powerful accellerant for shitty technology
adoption curve: the combination of an atomized polity that can't have
in-person solidarity conversations and overall precarity has kicked off
a powerful shock doctrine for tech surveillance.

Pre-pandemic, work-from-home call-center workers (mostly poor Black
women) lived under surveillance that transformed "work from home" to
"live at work." The tech preserved the fiction that these misclassified
employees were "independent contractors."

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/02/chickenized-by-arise/#arise

Within days of the lockdown, this technological oppression raced up the
privilege gradient in the form of "invigilation" software like
Proctorio, cruel surveillance tools inflicted on university students.
The company is pursuing its critics in court.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/17/proctorio-v-linkletter/#proctorio

Now, every remote worker is in line to get the treatment previously
reserved for misclassified employees and college kids. Microsoft has
rolled out on-by-default workplace surveillance for Office 365.

https://twitter.com/WolfieChristl/status/1331221942850949121

The tool tracks every click and interaction by employees and presents
managers with leaderboards showing relative "productivity" of each
employee, down to how many mentions they get in workplace emails.

As Wolfie Christie points out in his thread, the arbitrary metrics that
Microsoft has chosen will have a hugely distorting effect on workplace
behavior. Remember Goodhart's Law: "Any measure becomes a target, and
then ceases to be a useful measure."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

This is the quantitative fallacy on steroids: software can't measure
qualitative factors like whether your work accomplished "soft goals"
like "a better product" or "a conceptual breakthrough."

So they blithely vaporize these qualitative elements and do math on the
dubious quantitative residue left behind. It's the data scientist's
version of looking for your keys under the lamp-post: "We can't do math
on it, so we won't consider it."

It's a far cry from the early days of Microsoft, when Bill Gates mocked
IBM for paying programmers by how many lines of code they produced,
calling it "the race to build the world's heaviest airplane."

I wonder if the programmers who built this feature are subjected to it
themselves? And if not, I wonder when they will be.

I mean, they won't be in the EU. This shit is radioactively illegal
under the GDPR. But Americans have *freedom*.

Now, you may be thinking, "I bet the managers who use this tool will
regret it when *their* bosses start using it on *them*."

You're thinking too small. Microsoft has ambition: they're not
subjecting *managers* to this, they're subjecting *companies* to it.

Microsoft incentivizes companies to turn on an industry-wide comparison
"feature" that sends *all your employee data* to Microsoft and then
gives you a chart telling you how your employees fare against their
counterparts elsewhere.

You get a chart. Microsoft gets fine-grained data on your company's
operations - data it can sell, or mine, or you know, just lose control
over and leak all over the internet. That's some unprecedented Shitty
Tech Adoption Curve accelerationism right there.

Not since the day when Amazon convinced Borders Books (RIP) to use it
for all digital ordering and fulfilment (giving Amazon 100% access to
all Borders' customer data) has a tech company offered a shadier B2B deal.

Last year, Slate's Future Tense and ASU's Center for Science and the
Imagination asked me to write some fiction illustrating the Shitty
Technology Adoption Curve. The result it "Affordances," a story that
grows dismally more relevant with each passing day.

https://slate.com/technology/2019/10/affordances-cory-doctorow-sf-story-algorithmic-bias-facial-recognition.html

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🐮 A state-owned Amazon

In most of the world, the lockdown has destroyed small businesses while
increasing the profits of Big Tech intermediaries like Amazon, who
control access to customers on one side, and access to merchants on the
other.

The government of Argentina is trying to avert this fate. Their postal
service is launching a "state-owned Amazon" called Correo Compras, which
will offer low-cost ecommerce listings to businesses, and do fulfilment
through  postal workers.

https://www.correocompras.com.ar/

Correo Compras competes directly with Mercadolibre, a latinamerican
ecommerce titan with a well-deserved reputation for squeezing suppliers
and workers - its deliveries are made by precarious gig economy drivers.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/what-would-state-owned-amazon-look-ask-argentina/

Correo Compras is making a bet: that by eliminating Mercadolibre's vast
margin (45%!), it can pay workers a living wage, offer fair treatment to
vendors, and still sell at competitive prices.

They're also rolling out digital payments (BNA+) provided by the Banco
Nacion, competing with Mercadolibre's Mercadopagos, which has seen a
surge in usage and profits (thanks to high fees) since the lockdown.
BNA+ also builds in instalment payments.

In many ways, Argentina is well-situated to try the experiment: it has
very high internet penetration, a thriving domestic tech industry, and
high levels of technological literacy.

It also struggles with structural poverty, thanks in part to US vulture
capitalists who absorb vast amounts of its GDP to service odious debts.

As Cecilia Rikap points out in her Open Democracy article on the
venture, Correo Compras will give Argentine state planners access to
important market information - data that currently sits in private hands
thanks to digital surveillance.

But while data can improve industrial policy, it can also serve state
oppression. The debt that is currently crushing the country is partly
the price-tag for the former military dictatorship's program of mass
surveillance, torture, murder and terror.

Data collected for beneficial purposes can be weaponized. The Dutch
government collected data on minorities so that they could provide
settlement services to them. Nazi occupiers used this data to locate
minorities and ship them to camps.

https://medium.com/@hansdezwart/during-world-war-ii-we-did-have-something-to-hide-40689565c550

This is not merely a historical fact. Australia's spy agencies were just
caught tapping into data generated by covid exposure notification apps -
data that Australians were promised would only be used for contact tracing.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/24/australia-spy-agencies-covid-19-app-data/

It's not a mere historical fact. There are people alive in Argentina
today who were spied upon, kidnapped and tortured by their government.
Argentina could certainly come under the sway of a brutal dictator again
- if it can happen in Brazil, it can happen in Argentina.

This isn't to condemn Correo Compras. It's an exciting experiment. But
it's an experiment. We should try lots of experiments. We could end the
practice of worker misclassification, turning low-waged Amazon workers
into employees and allowing them to unionize.

That's already starting to happen. Amazon workers in Alabama - a
viciously anti-union state - is having a union vote.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/23/amazon-warehouse-workers-union/

States could offer postal fulfilment and startup funding for worker
co-ops. They could enforce structural separation, forcing companies like
Amazon to either offer a platform or sell on it, but not both.

They could structure taxes so that profits from predatory listing fees
were annihilated by tax liabilities. NIST could offer bug-bounties for a
free/open source federated clone of Amazon's platform that any co-op
could stand up and run.

As always, the trick is to decide what's "infrastructure" - public goods
that need public ownership - and what's a "service" that should be
pluralized among many hands to make it harder to gain and abuse power
(even state power).

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🐮 Random Penguin to buy Simon & Schuster

Publishing is dominated by just five giant players: Penguin Random
House, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, Harpercollins and Macmillan.

Within that five-company oligarchy, one company stands out as a true
monopolist: Penguin Random House, the megafirm created when Random
House's owner, Bertelsmann, executed a merger-to-monopoly by buying
Penguin in 2013.

Now, Penguin is about to effect another monopolistic merger, by
acquiring Simon & Schuster from Viacom, which bought the company in
1994. The acquisition was always a bad fit: it was driven by a desire to
create a vertical monopoly.

Viacom leadership thought they could use the relatively small publishing
company to provide raw material for the larger, more profitable TV and
film divisions (the same logic that drove Time-Warner's acquisition of
DC Comics). It never really panned out.

Within Viacom, S&S; has always borne the brunt of corporate scheming,
protected from the princelings of the sprawling corporate empire by
erstwhile CEO Les Moonves's indulgence and favoritism.

So when Moonves was drummed out of his job in the midst of a truly
awful, disgusting #MeToo scandal, the writing was on the wall for S&S.;
Not even a string of successful anti-Trump tell-all books could save it.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/12/the-les-moonves-report-is-a-metoo-horror-show

The $2.175b acquisition is contingent on regulatory approval.

It should not receive regulatory approval.

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201125005459/en/ViacomCBS-to-Sell-Simon-Schuster-to-Penguin-Random-House-for-2.175-Billion

In a year in which the FTC, the Senate, the House, Republicans *and*
Democrats have all taken up antitrust, there is no better test of
whether they're serious about monopoly that this idiotic merger.

After all, we don't have to speculate about what Random House will do
after it absorbs S&S.; We have the historical record of what it did when
it bought Penguin: shut down imprints, fired workers, subjected writers
to worse deals, put the screws to booksellers.

This didn't happen in the shrouded mists of ancient history: it is still
happening *right now*. It's not a case of "When someone shows you who
they are, believe them the first time."

It's more:  "When a firm called 'Monopolists, Inc' sends a legal team
dressed as the Monopoly Guy to file regulatory documents printed on the
back of Monopoly money, and challenges you to a friendly game of
Monopoly before the meeting starts, assume they are monopolists."

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🐮 This day in history

#10yrsago London police brutally kettle children marching for education
https://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie-penny/2010/11/children-police-kettle-protest

#1yrago After Katrina, neoliberals replaced New Orleans’ schools with
charters, which are now failing
https://www.nola.com/news/education/article_0c5918cc-058d-11ea-aa21-d78ab966b579.html

#1yrago Networked authoritarianism may contain the seeds of its own
undoing
https://crookedtimber.org/2019/11/25/seeing-like-a-finite-state-machine/

#1yrago Leaked documents document China’s plan for mass arrests and
concentration-camp internment of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in
Xinjiang
https://www.icij.org/investigations/china-cables/exposed-chinas-operating-manuals-for-mass-internment-and-arrest-by-algorithm/

#1yrago Library Socialism: a utopian vision of a sustaniable, luxuriant
future of circulating abundance
https://memex.craphound.com/2019/11/25/library-socialism-a-utopian-vision-of-a-sustaniable-luxuriant-future-of-circulating-abundance/

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🐮 Colophon

Today's top sources: ACAB For Cutie (https://twitter.com/RamaTheVoice),
Naked Capitalism (https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/), Slashdot
(https://slashdot.org/).

Currently writing: My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel
about truth and reconciliation. Yesterday's progress: 525 words (87877
total).

Currently reading: The Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson

Latest podcast: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 24)
https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/11/23/someone-comes-to-town-someone-leaves-town-part-24/

Upcoming appearances:

* Keynote, Cybersummit 2020, Nov 26 https://www.cybera.ca/cyber-summit-2020/

* Keynote, Cologne Futures, Nov 27 http://medienpolitik.eu/

* Beaverbrook Lecture: How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism, Nov 30,
https://www.mcgill.ca/maxbellschool/channels/event/2020-beaverbrook-annual-lecture-part-ii-cory-doctorow-325538

* Teach-In Against Surveillance, Dec 1,
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/teach-in-against-surveillance-tickets-128926228821

* Keynote, NISO Plus, Feb 22-25,
https://niso.plus/cory-doctorow-to-keynote-at-niso-plus-2021/

Recent appearances:

* Nerdcanon Podcast:
http://nerdcanon.com/episode-25-cory-doctorow-and-attack-surface/

* Plutopia Podcast:
https://plutopia.io/2020/11/23/cory-doctorow-attack-surface/

* Talkingheadz Podcast:
https://talkingpointz.com/talkingheadz-with-cory-doctorow/

Latest book:

* "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone
technothriller for adults. The *Washington Post* called it "a political
cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution
and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

* "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet
analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a
solution.
https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59

* "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

* "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime,
gender, and kicking ass. 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.

This work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.
That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially,
provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link
to pluralistic.net.

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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