[Plura-list] Podcasting How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism; The real cancel culture; Ad-tech's algorithmic cruelty

[Cory Doctorow]

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On April 13, I'm giving a workshop in collaboration with Phoenix's
Changing Hands bookstore: "All the Teachable Things I Know About Writing":

https://www.changinghands.com/event/april2021/virtual-writing-workshop-cory-doctorow-all-teachable-things-i-know-about-writing

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Today's links

* Podcasting How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism: Part one of five(ish).

* The real cancel culture: Multiple-choice union-busting.

* Ad-tech's algorithmic cruelty: What technology does isn't as important
as who it does it TO.

* Folio Society publishes Philip K Dick's short fiction: Books as artifacts.

* This day in history: 2011, 2016

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

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👶🏽 Podcasting How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism

This week on my podcast, the first part of a five (?) part serialized
reading of my 2020 One Zero book HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM,
a book arguing that monopoly - not AI-based brainwashing - is the real
way that tech controls our behavior.

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

The book is available in paperback:

https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907

and DRM-free ebook :

https://sowl.co/bm2F7c

and my local bookseller, Dark Delicacies, has signed stock that I'll
drop by and personalize for you!

https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html

Here's the podcast episode:

https://craphound.com/nonficbooks/destroy/2021/04/05/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-part-01/

and a direct link to the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the Internet Archive;
they'll host your stuff for free, forever):

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_383/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_383_-_How_To_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism_01.mp3

and here's the RSS feed for my podcast:

https://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

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👶🏽 The real cancel culture

"Cancel culture" - the prospect of permanent exclusion from your chosen
profession due to some flaw - has been a fixture in blue-collar labor
since the 1930s, as Nathan Newman writes in The American Prospect.

https://prospect.org/labor/how-workers-really-get-canceled-on-the-job/

In the 1930s, employers who wanted to keep labor "agitators" out of
their shops adapted the WWI recruitment screening tools to identify
"disgruntled" applicants who might organize their co-workers and form a
union.

Over the years, this developed into an phrenological-industrial complex,
with a huge industry of personality test companies that help employers -
especially large employers of low-waged workers - exclude those they
judged likely to demand better working conditions.

What began with large firms like Walmart and Marriott grew to consume
much of the economy, with 80% of the Fortune 500 relying on tests from
the $3+b/year phrenology industry, which is now all digital,
incorporating machine learning for an all-algorithmic cancel culture.

The results of these tests get warehoused by giant "HR" companies like
Kenexa (bought by IBM for $1.3b, holding 20m test results) and UKG
(owned by private equity, with hundreds of millions of worker records).

The latest wrinkle includes junk-science "microexpression" analysis,
with applicants being assessed by an algorithm that purports to be able
to read their minds by examining minute cues from their faces - a
discredited idea with no basis in science.

Indeed, the whole business of personality tests, and the more general
field of psychographics, with its touchstones like the "Big Five
Personality Types" are more marketing hype than science; Nature calls it
a "scant science."

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03880-4

Which probably explains why job satisfaction - the thing that all this
phrenology is supposed to improve - has remained static since 2000,
despite vast spending on career-destroying, life-destroying digital
palmistry.

https://www.inc.com/sonia-thompson/68-percent-of-employees-are-disengaged-but-there-i.html

So why do employers do it? Well, as is often the case with algorithmic
decision-support tools, the most tangible benefit is empiricism-washing.
Algorithms provide cover in the form of empirical facewash for illegal
employment discrimination.

An employer's personality test can facilitate illegal discrimination
against people with depression, for example, by asking whether "your
moods are steady from day to day," and video-based screening can exclude
people on the autism spectrum.

Personality assessment also provides cover for the ongoing use of
disciplinary technology, such as the bossware that spies on your
keystrokes and other online activity, which exploded during lockdown as
"work from home" was transformed into "live at work."

Employers can claim the ongoing surveillance is there to help measure
and improve job satisfaction, while the phrenology-industrial complex
sales reps quietly promise that they'll catch and expel "disgruntled"
workers - those apt to organize a union.

Workers won legal battles to ban workplace use of polygraphs, medical
exams, genetic screening, credit reports, criminal background checks,
and disclosure of social media passwords - but personality screening
filled the void, allowing discrimination through the back-door.

Newman thinks the National Labor Relations Board has the authority to
step in here and prohibit this kind of personality screening, both prior
to hiring and on the job.

"If we are going to have a national debate about free speech in the
workplace, stopping the use of personality tests to cancel 'disgruntled'
workers should be front and center."


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👶🏽 Ad-tech's algorithmic cruelty

The wife of one of my elementary school teachers once delivered a
full-term, stillborn baby. It was a great tragedy, but far worse came in
the months and years that followed, as direct-marketers bombarded them
with pitches that tracked the progress of their dead child.

College-savings plan ads, ads for baby food, annual birthday notices -
the whole thing running on autopilot as marketers pursued the Procter &
Gamble "lifecycle marketing" playbook that targets the turning points in
customers' lives, like parenthood.

This got automated. In 2014, Eric Meyer coined the term "inadvertent
algorithmic cruelty" to describe his experience of Facebook's "memories"
feature, which bombarded him with pictures of his young daughter on the
anniversary of her death.

http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2014/12/24/inadvertent-algorithmic-cruelty/

Meyer called it "inadvertent," but there's a strong argument to drop
that and simply call it "algorithmic cruelty." Facebook *should* have
known that promoting "high-engagement" posts would end up retraumatizing
people on the anniversaries of the worse moments in their lives.

And if the company didn't realize it in 2014, they certainly knew about
it after, and did not stop. In 2018, Patrick Gerard wrote about how
Facebook commemorated his mother's death with a video of animated
characters literally dancing on her grave.

https://twitter.com/PatrickGerard01/status/1031920228098355200

Algorithmic cruelty spread to other platforms: for example, Google's
smart address book began adding women's stalkers to their speed-dials,
sensing a high degree of mutual interactivity:

https://www.wired.com/story/the-problem-with-your-chatty-apps/

The problems of algorithmic cruelty - the predictable ghastliness of a
fire-and-forget system of idiotic, automatic cheer - have long been a
feature of science fiction.

Think of Bradbury's classic "There Will Come Soft Rains," where an empty
house cheerfully greets its dead owners with their daily routine after a
nuclear war has killed nearly every living thing.

https://www.btboces.org/Downloads/7_There%20Will%20Come%20Soft%20Rains%20by%20Ray%20Bradbury.pdf

Or David Marusek's pioneering, haunting story "The Wedding Album," about
the AI avatars of a couple, created to commemorate their wedding day,
outliving the couple and haunting virtual spaces for thousands of years:

https://gumroad.com/davidmarusek

Or Sarah Gailey's instant classic 2018 short story STET, which recounts
a particularly horrific sort of algorithmic cruelty in the editorial
notes on a scholarly paper about a self-driving car wreck:

https://firesidefiction.com/stet

None of these warnings were heeded. Indeed, algorithmic cruelty -
incubated in primitive direct marketing, supercharged by social media -
made the jump *back* to ad-tech, in a form that is thousands of times
more virulent than its prehistoric paper-based ancestor.

Writing in Wired, Lauren Goode describes the ad-tech algorithmic cruelty
trap she found herself in: eight years ago, she called off her wedding.
Today, she is still bombarded with messages that track the progress of a
marriage that never happened.

https://www.wired.com/story/weddings-social-media-apps-photos-memories-miscarriage-problem/

These are the product of the "memory monetization machine," which
surfaces your old social-media breadcrumbs as inventory for spot-market
advertising auctions: "This user got married eight years ago, who will
pay me top dollar to show them an ad?"

Naturally, this has all the failure modes of social memory monetization
- the dead children and parents, and commemorations of other traumas -
but with ad-tech's nonconsensual, eternal torture: you can quit
Facebook, but you can't control these background processes.

Goode quotes Kate Eichhorn, whose book THE END OF FORGETTING describes
how this nonconsensual external memory system disrupts the "memory
editing" that is key to overcoming trauma for the most marginalized
among us:

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674976696

Reading that, I was struck by the distance between the algorithmic
cruelty of nonconsensual memory-surfacing, and my own powerful, hugely
beneficial practice of combing through my own digital history, which is
in a database under *my* control - my 20-year blog archive.

For a decade, I've started each day by looking at my posts from this day
in the past - at first, it was #1yrago and #5yrsago - now I look back at
#15yrsago and #20yrsago, and republish the elements that seem
significant today. Here's yesterday's:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/05/zucks-oily-rags/#retro

I can't overstate beneficial this is: tracking my own predictions,
concerns and aspirations over time is an incredible tonic for anxiety, a
tool to refine and improve my goals, an empirical, external check on my
memories and feelings about where I am and where I've been.

It's like a subspecies of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, the process of
writing down your worries and aspirations, then revisiting them after
the fact to refine your understanding of when your intuition leads you
true...or astray.

The difference between what I do and algorithmic cruelty isn't
technology - it's control. I'm in charge not an unaccountable,
nonconsensual algorithm.

As is often the case with tech issues, the important thing isn't what
the tech does, it's who it does it *to* and *for*.

Indeed, thinking this through this morning made me realize how much I'd
like to revisit my photos every day; I've got 20 years worth of them
stashed on Flickr, where I was literally one of the first users:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/04/21/family-owned-smugmug-acquires-flickr-rescuing-it-from-the-sinking-post-yahoo-ship/

I tried it this morning, but Flickr's tools remain incredibly primitive
thanks to years of neglect under Yahoo's ownership. Its new owners,
Smugmug, have been making great strides, but they have a LOT of
technology debt to pay off.

But having manually pulled up photos from this day 5, 10, 15 and 20
years ago, I was absolutely delighted. I would welcome a Flickr change
to made it simple to see pics from a given date - maybe by editing the
URL itself  (currently a mess!):

https://www.flickr.com/search/?text=&min_taken_date=1586156400&max_taken_date=1586242799

The point I'm trying to make here is that we shouldn't mistake the
ability to revisit your past experiences and thoughts for algorithmic
cruelty - the answer to this cruelty isn't to destroy our digital
time-machines; it's to seize the means of computation.


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👶🏽 Folio Society publishes Philip K Dick's short fiction

I love books. I have many, many thousands of books. I was a bookseller
and a library worker. I write books. I am typing these words in my
backyard hammock as the sun rises, and scattered around me on the ground
are *eleven* books that I'm in the midst of reading.

I love books as objects for delivering type to my eyeballs; long-form
reading is *so* much easier with print, despite my worsening visual
disability. Reading on a screen is haunted by the omnipresent fact that
one tap away is a Tiktok video of a guy shoving a lemon up his nose.

But I also love books as artifacts: old pulps redolent of the moisture
they've absorbed, bus transfers and pawn tickets hidden in their pages;
beautiful first editions, unwieldy art-books with heavy, clay-coated
stock. I just *love* books.

I have an especial soft spot for really *fancy* books, limited-edition
hardcovers. Beehive Books has done astounding work producing
super-deluxe slipcased, hardcover editions of public domain classics:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/17/reverse-centaur/#beehive

But long before Beehive arrived on the scene, The Folio Society was
turning out these stupendous, mouth-watering editions of new and old
literary classics. They're pricey, but if I ever spot one at a used
story (Burbank's Iliad Bookshop is a frequent source), I snap it up.

The latest from The Folio Society is a $745 (!), four volume (!)
slipcased edition of the complete short fiction (!) of Philip K Dick
(!), introduced by Jonathan Lethem (!), limited to 750 hand-numbered
copies (!).

https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/the-complete-short-stories.html

The books include 24 original illustrations by 24 artists, including
Dave McKean, Georgia Hill, Hilary Clarcq and many, many others.

This set is too rich for my blood, to be honest, but just watching the
videos describing the production was profoundly satisfying to me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfLlxcY4F6w

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wD6TeIkBFg

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👶🏽 This day in history

#10yrsago Chicken Little: what do you sell to an immortal, vat-bound
quadrillionaire? https://www.tor.com/2011/04/06/chicken-little/?layout=print

#10yrsago Anya’s Ghost: sweet and scary ghost story about identity
https://memex.craphound.com/2011/04/06/anyas-ghost-sweet-and-scary-ghost-story-about-identity/

#5yrsago MIT panel on the W3C’s decision to make DRM part of the Web’s
“open” standards https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3kfXtXRgk0

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👶🏽 Colophon

Today's top sources: Tor.com (https://www.tor.com/).

Currently writing:

* A cyberpunk noir thriller novel, "Red Team Blues." Yesterday's
progress: 1001 words (51909 total).

Currently reading: Analogia by George Dyson.

Latest podcast: Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results
https://craphound.com/news/2021/03/28/past-performance-is-not-indicative-of-future-results/

Upcoming appearances:

* All the Teachable Things I Know About Writing, Apr 13,
https://www.changinghands.com/event/april2021/virtual-writing-workshop-cory-doctorow-all-teachable-things-i-know-about-writing

* Interop: Self-Determination vs Dystopia (FITC), Apr 19-21,
https://fitc.ca/presentation/interop/

* Book launch for Bruce Sterling's Robot Artists & Black Swans (Book
People), Apr 27,
https://www.bookpeople.com/event/virtual-event-bruce-sterling-robot-artists-black-swans

Recent appearances:

* The Right to Repair Movement, Monopolies, and Solarpunk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmosdDCrL-4

* The surveillance state, digital monopolies, and why we should be
worried (Podsongs)
https://anchor.fm/podsongs/episodes/Cory-Doctorow-on-the-Surveillance-State--digital-monopolies--and-why-we-should-be-worried-eso43k

* Conspiracy Theories (Utopian Horizons):
https://soundcloud.com/utopianhorizons/conspiracy-theory-w-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
(print edition:
https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907)
(signed copies:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

* "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:

* The Shakedown, with Rebecca Giblin, nonfiction/business/politics,
Beacon Press 2022

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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