[Plura-list] Podcasting "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism"; Set My Heart to Five; Mediactive; America's economy is cooked

Tue Sep 1 10:43:35 EDT 2020

Today's links

* Podcasting "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": Monopolies are
more probable than mind-control.

* Set My Heart to Five: Sf satire in a Vonnegut mold.

* Mediactive: Three week masterclass in digital media literacy from Dan
Gillmor and ASU's News Co/Lab.

* America's economy is cooked: Debts that can't be paid won't be paid.

* This day in history: 2005, 2010, 2015

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

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🌬 Podcasting "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism"

This week on my podcast, I read a long excerpt from "How to Destroy
Surveillance Capitalism" - my book-length essay (AKA "nonfiction
novella") about the relationship between monopolies, surveillance and
conspiracism.

https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/08/31/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/

The essay is a response to Zuboff's 2019 book on the subject, which
focuses on the ability of Big Tech to persuade us with automated tools -
an ability I think is very overstated, thanks in large part to tech's
own boasts about their products' efficacy.

I think you can explain the same evils - conspiracism, nihilism - and
more (dictatorships, climate emergency) with a much more materialistic,
traditional explanations: wealth concentration begets monopoly,
monopolies destroy the world and our lives.

You can read the whole essay here for free:

https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59

(There's a print and ebook edition coming shortly too)

Here's the MP3 for this week's ep (hosted free by the Internet Archive,
who'll host your work free, too)

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_357/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_357_-_How_To_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.mp3

and here's my podcast feed:

https://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

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🌬 Set My Heart to Five

Set My Heart to Five is a satirical sf novel by Simon Stephenson in the
absurdist mode of Kurt Vonnegut: it's told from the PoV of Jared, a
biological robot - human body, robot brain - who works as a dentist in
Ypsilanti, MI, and who has started to malfunction.

https://www.harlequintradepublishing.com/shop/books/9781335551207_set-my-heart-to-five.html

Jared is experiencing emotions, something no bot is supposed to have. He
confides in the human MD he shares a practice with - a failed filmmaker
who diagnoses Jared with depression and sends him into Detroit to watch
old movies.

There aren't many old movies around. Ever since The Crash, where all of
humanity lost its passwords and locked itself out of the internet, huge
swathes of our culture has vanished. Most movies are modern films in
which bots try to exterminate humanity and have to be defeated.

Jared's forays into old film awaken a full suite of human emotions in
him, triggering the realization that he must free humanity from its
genocidal anti-bot bias, and that the best way to do that is to make a
movie about a heroic bot.

Lucky for him, he's got his doctor friend's old book of rules for
screenwriters. He travels covertly to LA by train, buys a new identity
barcode on the black market, gets a job at a taco joint, and enrolls in
a screenwriting class.

Jared's story is a tale of bravery, pure hearted simplicity, and
incomprehension in the face of venality, exploitation and betrayal -
it's got love, humor, sacrifice and bravery.

It's a funny, breezy book that is laid out like a screenplay - its
author, Simon Stephenson, is an ex-Pixar screenwriter - and has already
been purchased for adaptation by Edgar Wright, best known for the Scott
Pilgrim movie.

Set My Heart is meta without being insiderish, and, like Vonnegut, the
simplicity disguises some sharp social satire, making this a serious
book that is never dull.

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🌬 Mediactive

For decades, Dan Gillmor's been at the forefront of a rigorous, positive
view of what journalism should be in the digital era: relentlessly
committed to the truth, and relentless committed to the possibilities of
the medium, the importance of collaborating with his audience.

Gillmor has moved on from his perch as the longstanding star columnist
of the San Jose Mercury News - then the tech industry's paper of record,
where he was a clear-eyed terror of tech pitchmen - and is now teaching
journalism at ASU.

His latest project is Mediactive, an online course that builds on his
2010 open access book of the same title:

https://boingboing.net/2010/12/13/dan-gillmors-mediact.html

The subtitle says it all: "How to participate in our digital world." The
curriculum includes how:

* to spot misinformation

* the professional news media operate

* to assess credible sources/claims

* to use media to participate in your community

https://mediactive.newscollab.org/

This is the second time ASU's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and
Mass Communication News Co/Lab has run this three-week course, but it
stems from work they started in 2017. It starts on Sept 13:

https://newscollab.org/2020/08/31/our-new-online-media-literacy-course-is-launching-soon/

Here's how to sign up; most of the work is asynchronous but there are
also several live lectures.

https://courses.cpe.asu.edu/browse/cronkite/courses/cpe-cronkite-digital-world

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🌬 America's economy is cooked

We are in an extraordinary moment, but not an entirely unprecedented
one. Since the earliest days, societies have had to cope with disasters
that wiped out the ability of everyday people to service their debts and
thus threatened to destroy their societies.

If you've read U Missouri econ prof Michael Hudson's writings on the
subject, you know that for millennia, rulers in these circumstances
simply wiped out the debts, declaring a "jubilee" that allowed people to
rebuild after disasters rather than being trapped in debt spirals.

In a new essay on Naked Capitalism called "How an 'Act of God' Pandemic
Is Destroying the West: The US Is Saving the Financial Sector, Not the
Economy," Hudson reveals the abyss on whose brink we are balanced, and
what we must do to pull back from it.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/09/michael-hudson-how-an-act-of-god-pandemic-is-destroying-the-west-the-u-s-is-saving-the-financial-sector-not-the-economy.html

Hudson's oft-repeated golden rule is "Debts that can't be paid, won't be
paid." That is to say: making it harder to declare bankruptcy, or
binding debtors over to arbitration or wage-garnishing won't actually
get them to pay debts they cannot afford.

This is a very sharp observation in the US context. The 2008 crisis was
"solved" by bailing out finance, not people - and so the finance sector
was able to lend to consumers to buy things again, while consumer debt
mounted to spectacular levels.

Between mounting costs for housing, education, transport and health - a
place to sleep, a path to employment, a way to get to work, the physical
capacity to do your job - being alive has meant increasing your debt burden.

And now the US real economy - the wage-generating (and thus
debt-servicing) economy - has ground to a halt. The finance economy
continues to boom, largely on the (obviously false) premise that debts
will continue to be repaid.

It's worth contrasting the US approach - the $1200/person bailout, the
$6T finance bailout - with other countries that are less beholden to
their finance sectors.

Canada and many EU governments simply assumed the payrolls of firms,
relieving them of their major expense and providing ready cash to
consumers that the can use to purchase from those retailers that remain.

And in China, where most of the finance sector is state owned - where
banks are public utilities - debts were suspended: "debts, rents, taxes
and other carrying charges of living and doing business cannot resume
until economic normalcy is able to resume."

Contrast with the US, with ever-more-desperate measures to deny the iron
law that "debts that can't be paid won't be paid."

Regulators have unshackled new forms of predatory lending (aka
"fintech") with APRs in the hundreds or thousands of percent:

https://theintercept.com/2020/08/30/fintech-debt-personal-loans-economic-crisis/

And at the other end of that pipeline is a massive debt-collection
bubble, as fintech subprime darlings like Oportun unleash a tsunami of
debt lawsuits (more than 30/day!) against people with no means to pay:

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-loan-company-that-sued-thousands-of-low-income-latinos-during-the-pandemic

Desperate, broke people are willing to work for ever-lower wages, which
puts downward pressure on *everyone's* wages.

Hudson: "Rising debt overhead serves the business and financial sector
by lowering wages while extracting more interest, financial fees, rent
and insurance."

America's longest period of expansion - the post-war boom - kicked off
with the lowest levels of debt in living memory (wartime wages boomed,
while wartime shortages left consumers with nothing to buy). Every
recovery since has increased the economy's debt-to-asset ratio.

Eventually there comes a reckoning. Debts that can't be paid won't be
paid. Business as usual has been to "let creditors foreclose and draw
all the income and wealth over subsistence needs into their own hands."

But that's no longer possible. We've hit bottom.

US consumer debts can only be paid by "shrinking production and
consumption, leaving them as strapped as Greece has been since 2015."

Something has to give: "either the population’s broad economic
interests, or the vested interests insisting that labor, industry and
the government must bear the cost of arrears that have built up during
the economic shutdown."

The decision to to force businesses to pay rent during the shutdown led
mass bankruptcies: a business that closed for months while accruing a
rent buildup cannot recover - even a year of normal takings will leave
it with no profits, every penny diverted to the landlord.

19% of hotel mortgages are in arrears, 10% of retailers - commercial
real-estate mortgages stand at $2.4T. 40% of retail tenants are not
currently paying rent - building up more indebtedness that can't be paid
(debts that can't be paid won't be paid).

And while the US government can conjure money into existence by typing
numbers into a spreadsheet at the central bank, states and cities (now
starved of sales/property tax) cannot, and many are also bound by
"balanced budget" rules.

Neither the GOP nor the Dems are willing to confront this. McConnell has
advised states to meet bond obligations by raiding their pensions. Dems
have abandoned efforts to provide relief to working people.

It's a very different story in China: "China can recover financially and
fiscally from the virus disruption because most debts ultimately are
owned to the government-based banking system. Money can be created to
finance the material economy, labor and industry, construction and
agriculture. When a company is unable to pay its bills and rent, the
government doesn't stand by and let it be closed down and sold at a
distressed price to a vulture investor."

For thousands of years, governments have understood that crises can only
be weathered through debt forgiveness. The Anglo-American madness that
insists that debts that can't be paid will someday be paid has hit bottom.

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🌬 This day in history

#15yrsago Man is arrested for being the alleged subway wanker who was
caught on Flickr
https://web.archive.org/web/20050910185739/http://www.wnbc.com/news/4923338/detail.html

#10yrsago Woody Guthrie pencils
https://web.archive.org/web/20100225155309/http://www.youandmetheroyalwe.com/prod-facistpencils.html

#10yrsago News stories about stupid young people make old people feel
good
https://web.archive.org/web/20100903144343/http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100831/od_nm/us_elderly_news

#10yrsago Koko Be Good: complex and satisfying graphic novel about
finding meaning in life
https://boingboing.net/2010/09/01/koko-be-good-complex.html

#5yrsago Little Robot: nearly wordless kids' comic from Zita the
Spacegirl creator
https://boingboing.net/2015/09/01/little-robot-nearly-wordless.html

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🌬 Colophon

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel
about truth and reconciliation. Yesterday's progress: 526 words (55774
total).

Currently reading: Gideon the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir

Latest podcast: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 14)
https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/08/24/someone-comes-to-town-someone-leaves-town-part-14/

Upcoming appearances:

* Keynote for Law Via the Internet conference, Sept 22,
https://www.crowdcast.io/e/LVI2020/register

* Writing into an Uncertain Future, Afterwords Festival, Oct 1,
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/writing-into-an-uncertain-future-tickets-115378329690

Latest book:

* "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.

Upcoming books:

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

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provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link
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*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla* -Joey "Accordion Guy"
DeVilla

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