[Plura-list] Bust 'em all; Dark money and SCOTUS; Machine learning hieroglyphs

Tue Sep 29 12:12:20 EDT 2020

Today's links

* Bust 'em all: Bet you can't just break up one industry!

* Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, part 16: This week in the
podcast!

* Dark money and SCOTUS: The best Supreme Court money can buy.

* Machine learning hieroglyphs: Google's Fabricius.

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

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

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🚮 Bust 'em all

It's inevitable: whenever I talk about the need to curb concentrated
power in the tech sector, someone comes along to ask why I only care
about tech - why not do something about concentration in telecoms or
entertainment?

That's not wrong, but it's not right either. Yes, telecoms and
entertainment are grotesquely concentrated and abuse their monopoly
power to the great detriment of the rest of us.

But no, gunning for Big Tech does NOT mean that we're not gunning for
Big Content and Big Telco, too.

Bust 'em all!

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/09/bust-em-all-lets-de-monopolize-tech-telecoms-and-entertainment

The idea that these monopolized industries are somehow keeping each
other in check - rather than colluding to screw the rest of us - is
wrong. Google did an anti-Net Neutrality deal with Verizon. And all the
tech and content companies illegally fixed wages between 'em.

I fully believe that some of the money and energy for breaking up tech
is coming from astroturf campaigns run by ISPs and movie studios and
record labels - but they're betting that if we break up Big Tech,
that'll be the end of it.

Like trustbusting is Thanksgiving dinner, something that leaves you so
satiated that you can't even think about going back for seconds.

That is so wrong. If history teaches us anything, it's that trustbusting
is like potato chips, and once you start, you can't stop.

"If we're gonna make it through this monopolistic era of evidence-free
policy that benefits a tiny, monied minority at the expense of the rest
of us, we need to demand democratic accountability for market abuses,
demand a pluralistic market where dominant firms are subjected to
controls and penalties, where you finally realize birthright of
technological self-determination."

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🚮 Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, part 16

This week on my podcast: Part 16 of my reading of my 2006 novel "Someone
Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town," a book Gene Wolfe called "a
glorious book unlike any book you’ve ever read."

https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/09/28/someone-comes-to-town-someone-leaves-town-part-16/

This week's installment deals with the early 2000s awe at the idea that
eBay was "normalizing the contents of America's attics" (cf William
Gibson), to say nothing of its ewaste dumpsters.

Here's how to listen to the earlier installments:

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

and here's a direct MP3 link (hosting courtesy of the Internet Archive -
they'll host your stuff for free, forever, too!)

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_361/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_361_-_Someone_Comes_to_Town_Someone_Leaves_Town_016.mp3

And here's a link to my podcast feed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

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🚮 Dark money and SCOTUS

You've probably never heard of the Judicial Crisis Network and that's by
design: they're an ultradark money group whose funders are a secret, and
they bought the Supreme Court.

https://www.dailyposter.com/p/we-still-dont-know-who-is-paying

JCN spent $27m worth of dark money to block Obama's Supreme Court pick,
Merrick Garland and put Kavanaugh and Gorsuch on the court.

In 2018/19, they got $15.9m from a single, anonymous source, which they
are firehosing onto our public discourse to get Amy Coney Barrett seated
before Trump and the Senate are ousted and banished to Fox News and the
think-tank circuit.

They're not the only funders of this plute takeover of the court: the
Koch Network, the Chamber of Commerce and other fronts for the minuscule
number of eminently guillotinable modern aristos are making it rain, too.

In the Paily Poster, Andrew Perez calls JCN "the darkest of dark money
groups" whose entire funder roster is secret. They're puppeteered by
Federalist Society capo Leonard Leo, but the money is strictly a secret.

Historically, JCN's major funder is *another* dark-money group, the
Wellspring Committee, which raised $28.5m and funneled $23.5m of it to
JCN before shutting down.

This crime-matrioshke is now a dominant motif of late-stage capitalism,
reminiscent of the shell companies that own shell companies, as revealed
in the Panama and Paradise Papers.

Shells inside of other shells is the Fibonacci sequence of plutocracy, a
pattern that repeats everywhere, at every scale.

Hilariously, Barrett herself has decried dark-money spending on judicial
appointments: "I have not and will not solicit donations from anyone.
Indeed, doing so would be a violation of my ethical responsibilities as
a judicial nominee."

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🚮 Machine learning hieroglyphs

Fabricius is a new machine-learning tool from Google Arts and Culture
that classifies images of hieroglyphs and returns their translations.

It also works in reverse, allowing you to encode messages as hieroglyphs.

https://artsexperiments.withgoogle.com/fabricius/en

And while the tools aimed at the general public are mostly a webtoy,
there's an accompanying, serious, academic version for Egyptologists,
called "Workbench."

https://fabriciusworkbench.withgoogle.com/

Workbench offers a suite of image-enhancement tools and inference-based
classifiers that make weighted guesses about the meaning of damaged or
missing glyphs.

For example, when the suffix appended to the name of dead nobles appears
next to a damaged glyph, the system is smart enough to limit its guesses
for that glyph to names that make sense in this context.

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🚮 This day in history

#15yrsago Anti-MMORPG ads from D&D;
https://craphound.com/images/wowdanddad.jpg

#10yrsago Only 1.7% of sites blocked by Scandinavia’s “child-porn”
filters are actually child porn
https://ak-zensur.de/2010/09/29/analysis-blacklists.pdf

#10yrsago SUPERDAD: moving and infuriating memoir of fatherhood and
crack
https://memex.craphound.com/2010/09/29/superdad-moving-and-infuriating-memoir-of-fatherhood-and-crack/

#10yrsago Inside the finances of the UK “legal blackmail” copyright
enforcement company
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/09/p2p-settlement-factory-expects-10-million-from-mailing-letters/

#5yrsago Zeroes: it sucks to be a teen, even with powers
https://memex.craphound.com/2015/09/29/zeroes-it-sucks-to-be-a-teen-even-with-powers/

#5yrsago Jamaica wants slavery reparations from the UK
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/29/jamaica-calls-britain-pay-billions-pounds-reparations-slavery

#5yrsago Rush Limbaugh: water on Mars is a leftist conspiracy
https://www.mediamatters.org/rush-limbaugh/after-nasa-announces-it-found-water-mars-rush-limbaugh-says-its-part-climate-change

#5yrsago The FBI has no trouble spying on encrypted communications
https://theintercept.com/2015/09/28/hacking/

#5yrsago Execspeak singularity: the spectacular bullshit of Blackberry’s
CEO
https://web.archive.org/web/20150304093318/https://www.bloomberg.com/bw/magazine/content/10_42/b4199076785733.htm

#5yrsago Edward Snowden is now @snowden
https://theintercept.com/2015/09/29/edward-snowden-twitter-snowden/

#5yrsago Ta-Nehisi Coates wins a 2015 MacArthur Genius award
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/09/29/444221706/journalist-ta-nehisi-coates-among-2015-macarthur-genius-award-winners

#1yrago Jonathan Lethem on Edward Snowden’s “Permanent Record”
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/10/24/edward-snowden-labyrinth/

#1yrago Stealing Ur Feelings: interactive documentary on the snakeoil
“science” of facial emotion detection https://stealingurfeelin.gs/

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🚮 Colophon

Today's top sources: Boing Boing (https://boingboing.net/), David Sirota
(https://twitter.com/davidsirota).

Currently writing: My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel
about truth and reconciliation. Yesterday's progress: 551 words (66491
total).

Currently reading: Harrow the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir

Latest podcast: IP https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/09/14/ip/

Upcoming appearances:

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

* 3 Big Ideas To Fix the Internet, Oct 7,
https://www.nycmedialab.org/upcoming-events/summit2020

* The Attack Surface Lectures: 8 nights of bookstore-hosted events in
which I and a massive group of entertaining and knowledgeable experts
discourse on my latest novel's themes, Oct 13-22
https://read.macmillan.com/torforge/cory-doctorow-virtual-lecture-series/

Recent appearances:

* If Big Tech Is Toxic, How Do We Build Something Better? (panel)
https://blog.archive.org/2020/09/24/dweb-panel-if-big-tech-is-toxic-how-do-we-build-something-better/

* On ‘Attack Surface’ and WiFi Fridges (What a Hell of a Way to Die
Podcast):
https://soundcloud.com/hellofawaytodie/on-attack-surface-and-wifi-fridges-feat-cory-doctorow

* Little Brother vs. Big Audiobook (Techdirt podcast):
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200922/12403045358/techdirt-podcast-episode-256-little-brother-vs-big-audiobook-with-cory-doctorow.shtml

Latest book:

* "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.

Upcoming books:

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

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

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