[Plura-list] Jackpot; Bill Gates will kill us all; What "IP" means; Data-brokerages vs the world

[Cory Doctorow]

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Tonight, 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

* Jackpot: Inequality sucks...for everyone.

* Bill Gates will kill us all: Elite philanthropy created vaccine apartheid.

* What "IP" means: Control over customers, critics and competitors.

* Data-brokerages vs the world: The public-private partnership from hell.

* This day in history: 2006, 2011, 2016

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

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🧓🏾 Jackpot

JACKPOT is the debut book-length work from Michael Mechanic, the senior
editor at Mother Jones. It's a pitiless - but empathic - look at the
lives of the (mostly) American super-rich.

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Jackpot/Michael-Mechanic/9781982127213

The sociology of wealth is an odd paradox. On the one hand, many of the
wealthiest people are celebrities (both in the sense that celebrities
are wealthy, and that wealth creates celebrity). On the other, plutes
don't usually unburden themselves to social scientists.

By contrast, we know an awful lot about college kids (because they're
easy for university-affiliated researchers to study) and poor people
(who need the pitiful budgets available to researchers to compensate
their subjects).

The wealthy produce accounts of themselves, of course - through
publicists and reputation management firms and vicious attack lawyers
who send bowel-loosening threats to journalists who criticize them (I've
gotten these from multiple billionaires, including the Sacklers).

So with Jackpot, Mechanic has set himself a heroic - and, frankly -
impossible task: to find out what life is truly like for the wealthy.
Mechanic is a first-class investigative journalist and manages to pry
loose many tales from the enablers of the ultra-rich.

Shrinks, lawyers, PAs, managers, personal bankers, exclusive private
school administrators, and those who offer services like one-of-a-kind
status cars or ridiculous private-jet/private-island safaris.

He also talks to several people who "hit the jackpot" - lottery winners,
unexpected inheritors, and so on. And he manages to talk to a few of the
stratospherically wealthy people: lucky dotcommies, the odd VC, even a
few hereditary plutes.

The picture of obscene wealth that emerges is...obscene. Yes, there are
some genuine perks of ultrawealth - if every kid got the kind of
education that they give out in exclusive, $50k/year private schools,
the world would be a far better place.

But the rest of it - the transactional relationships, the paranoia and
fear, the greed, the lavish goods, the rootless pingponging from one
home to another, the feuding, ruined offspring, the constant
preoccuptation with accumulation... It's ghastly. Legitimately horrible.

Now, it's possible that this is all sampling bias. Maybe somewhere in
the system are dynastic fortunes of people whose money makes them happy,
but if so, none of them wanted to boast about it to Mechanic, and none
of them were procuring the services of Mechanic's sources.

I don't think so. From where I sit, it sure seems likely that the
corrupt, rotten system that the wealthy have created and make worse by
the day is only making them absolutely miserable - depressed birds in
diamond-crusted, gilded cages.

In the back half of the book, Mechanic documents this corruption with a
Mother Jones editor's eye, the way that their wealth isn't just their
misery - it's *our* misery, too. It's a system that serves no one.

Reading about the weird excesses of the super-rich was fun, then it was
astonishing ,then it was depressing, and finally, enraging. I imagine
that a plute reading the book might end up in the same place - but I
wonder if they'd do anything about it.

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🧓🏾 Bill Gates will kill us all

2.5b people in Earth's 130 poorest countries have not been vaccinated.
The 85 poorest countries won't be vaccinated until 2023. The
humanitarian cost is unforgivable - and self-defeating, as each infected
person is a potential source of new strains.

https://www.who.int/director-general/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-media-briefing-on-covid-19-5-february-2021

How the actual fuck did this happen?

What happened to the early pledges by governments, the WHO, public
health experts and leading research institutions to create global
cooperation in vaccine development, eschewing patents and secrecy so
that we could rescue our species?

That dream was smashed.

Many people helped create our vaccine apartheid, the single individual
who did the most to get us here is Bill Gates, through his highly
ideological "philanthropic" foundation, which exists to push his
pitiless doctrine of unfettered monopoly.

It was Gates who sabotaged the WHO Covid-19 Technology Access Pool
(C-TAP), replacing it with his failed ACT-Accelerator, a system of
patents and secrecy and vast profits for the pharma industry, ornamented
with nonbinding, failed promises of access for poor nations.

It was Gates who convinced Oxford to renege on its promise of
patent-free access to its publicly funded vaccine research for the
global south in favor of exclusive patent access for Astrazeneca.

https://khn.org/news/rather-than-give-away-its-covid-vaccine-oxford-makes-a-deal-with-drugmaker/

When we hear ghoul sellouts like Howard Dean pushing the racist,
genocidal lie that "patents don't matter" because brown people in poor
countries can't make vaccines, we're hearing Gates's talking points:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/08/howard-dino/#the-scream

Gates's role in vaccine apartheid is laid out in exquisite detail in
Alexander Zaitchik's outstanding New Republic feature, which delves into
Gates's longstanding project to sideline democratic governments and
cooperation in favor of monopoly tyranny.

https://newrepublic.com/article/162000/bill-gates-impeded-global-access-covid-vaccines

This goes way, way back. I mean, *waaaay* back, all the way to 1976,
when Gates wrote his infamous "Open Letter to Hobbyists," decrying the
dominant, cooperative mode of software development and calling its
practitioners thieves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

Gates's fortune depended on creating a software monopoly, and that
monopoly required "intellectual property" protection. Gates has always
been a monopolist, and so naturally, he loves IP (before "IP" was a
common term, copyrights and patents were called "monopolies").

Intellectual property is a very important part of the inequality story,
the story of how we got to a world where billions of people are denied
vaccines and where all people face new, more virulent strains as a result.

As UNCTAD chief economist Richard Kozul-Wright told Lynn Fries for GPE:
"[IP allows companies] to grab a larger share of what has already been
produced in the economy."

It's a means of extracting rents, not for doing things, but for *owning*
things.

IP is key to tax avoidance: companies like Ikea transfer "IP" (the Ikea
trademark) to a numbered company in a tax haven; each national Ikea
subsidiary pays "licensing fees" for the trademark equal to 100% of
their in-country profits, so they never earn a (taxable) cent.

The transformation of the world into a monopolized system of IP-heavy,
rent-extracting, tax-dodging companies really kicked into gear after
1999, with the signing of the WTO agreement and its IP adjunct, the
TRIPPS, and as Zaitchik details, Gates was instrumental there.

For this part of the story, Zaitchik talks to Jamie Love, who was at the
UN when NGOs like his were pushing to create vaccine and other pharma
pools for the global south, while pharma companies handed out pamphlets
bearing the Gates Foundation logo, smearing the plan.

Though the US delegation struggled for credibility, the combination of
the Gates Foundation, and former US trade officials fronting for  the
global pharma industry managed to sideline the project, which was being
driven by the demand for equitable access to AIDS drugs.

With Gates's help, the WTO emerged as an IP enforcement powerhouse.
Zaitchik cites Dylan Mohan Gray: "it took Washington 40 years to
threaten apartheid South Africa with sanctions and less than four to
threaten the post-apartheid Mandela government over AIDS drugs."

Incredibly, the Gates Foundation used this to burnish its humanitarian
image: they solicited donations from pharma companies and used them to
subsidize AIDS drugs in the global south, a maneuver that let them seem
like philanthropists.

When in reality, they had overseen a program to systematically deny the
world's poorest and most threatened people the right to make their own
drugs, making them dependent on the whims of multinational corporate
charity instead.

Sound familiar? Today, Gates runs around repeating the lie that poor
people can't make their own medicine,  saying that patent exemptions
won't make a difference now - to the extent he's right, the world *now*
is the crucial one.

Having sabotaged the efforts by poor countries to engage in the kind of
production ramp-up the rich world saw as vaccines were being developed,
it may *now* be too late. "Because of my bad ideas *then*, it's too late
*now*."

The connection between IP and elite philanthropy is deep and important.
IP's rent-seeking and tax-dodging has made poor countries beholden to
offshore monopolists in health, agriculture and IT, and then starved
them of taxes to build up domestic alternatives.

This, in turn, makes them dependent on "gifts" from the billionaires who
arm-twisted them into IP treaties, forced them to pay rent on all
domestic production, and then profit-shifted the funds out of the reach
of their tax-collectors.

As Anand Giridharadas reminded us in his seminal "Winners Take All," the
core purpose of elite philanthropy has been the same since the
robber-baron era: to burnish the reputations of monsters who take
everything and give back crumbs.

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/11/10/winners-take-all-modern-philanthropy-means-that-giving-some-away-is-more-important-than-how-you-got-it/

Reading Jamie Love's quotes in Zaitchik's article reminded me of my own
time working with Jamie and Knowledge Ecology International at WIPO in
Geneva, when I was an NGO delegate to a global DRM treaty.

You see, at WIPO, the vast majority of NGOs aren't human rights
organizations or other public interest groups - they're industry
associations representing tech, entertainment, broadcast and pharma
monopolists.

These guys - almost all guys - were just aghast when real NGOs started
showing up for these meetings and were absolutely shameless in their
sabotage of our efforts to balance their corporate lies (absolutely
bald-faced lies were routinely entered into the debates).

How petty? Well, they had been accustomed to writing up "fact-sheets"
for the day's debate and handing them off to WIPO staffers working for
the secretariat, who would photocopy them and set them out on literature
tables for the national delegates.

So we started doing this too: we'd take careful notes on the day's
debates, convene with global experts to debunk industry association
lies, get our Indymedia friends to translate them into six languages,
and hand them off to the secretariat in the morning for copying.

So they got the secretariat - a former US textiles negotiator who made
her bones helping create the conditions for slave labor in places like
Bangladesh - to end the practice of photocopying papers for all NGOs.

Of course the industry bodies had cushy offices in Geneva, whereas we
stayed in flophouses and youth hostels. They could ask their underlings
to come in early and do their copying for them, whereas we had to take a
bus to the all-night copy-shop to get our handouts copied.

Here's where it gets super-weird: our handouts started to go missing.
We'd set out our stacks of paper on the literature tables before the
morning session and an hour later, they'd all be gone, but none of the
delegates had managed to get a copy.

We found those missing handouts...in the garbage, behind potted plants
and in the *toilets*.

No, seriously.

And here's the kicker: during the ensuing furore, the main response from
the pharma lobbyists was to object to us calling ourselves "public
interest NGOs."

I'll never forget this smarmy sociopath in his expensive suit, with his
shit-eating grin, standing there saying, "Phamaceuticals serve the
public interest, and our industry association is a nonprofit. We are a
non-profit, public-interest NGO."

It was a remarkable sight. 20 years later, their version of the public
interest - the doctrine of Gates - has produced a multi-billion-person
reservoir of the sick and vulnerable who are doomed to serve as
factories for highly virulent variants.

This is a literally genocidal doctrine, and it threatens our very
civilization. It's a funny kind of non-profit, public interest move for
an industry and its billionaire ideologue funders to have made.

But hey, at least no one's "intellectual property" took a hit.

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🧓🏾 What "IP" means

Today, Project Reboot pubished "Unfair Use," an updated version of "IP,"
my September 2020 column for Locus Magazine, which I consider to be the
most important piece I have written in my 13 years as a Locus columnist.

https://thereboot.com/unfair-use-anti-interoperability-and-our-dwindling-digital-freedom/

In the article, I describe how the copyleft/commons/floss world has
spent decades fighting a losing battle to get people to stop saying
"IP," on the grounds that copyright, trademark and patents aren't
property, nor are they similar enough to group them under a single banner.

Instead, copyfighters insist that people either refer to specific laws
("copyright," "trademark," etc), or, if these disparate concepts *must*
be grouped, let them be referred to using the original term-of-art,
"authors' monopolies" or "creators' monopolies."

Now, working artists get understandably upset at being called
monopolists. In competition law, monopolists are entities whose market
power lets them set prices - I have a copyright in these words I'm
typing now, but I can't force anyone to pay me for them.

But last summer, I had something of a revelation. When you attune
yourself to how businesses use "IP," it has a very crisp meaning: "IP is
anything that lets me control the conduct of my competitors, customers
and critics."

Anti-circumvention law is IP because it lets companies decide who can
sell software for the devices they make - you can't buy software from
your phone which you own without permission from its manufacturer, even
if the person who made the software wants to sell it to you.

This is a very odd form of "author's monopoly" - a world in which
authors and their audiences are legally prohibited from doing business
with one another unless they get permission from a "market-power"
monopolist.

That's how IP gives its owners control over customers and competitors -
but this control also extends to critics.

The First Amendment guarantees US speakers the broad right to disclose
true facts.

But terms-of-service, anti-circumvention and other "IP" are routinely
used to silence security researchers who discover defects in products,
so that true, factual disclosures that inform customers about the risks
they face from defective products can be literally felonized.

IP gives businesses control over competitors, critics and customers -
and it gives monopolists an even more important power: the power to
maintain and expand monopolies without risking antitrust enforcement.

Antitrust law has been in a doldrums for 40 years, ever since Ronald
Reagan shot it in the guts, but one thing that rouses even our
somnambulant antitrust enforces from hibernation is action that is
explicitly in furtherance of the maintenance of monopoly.

That is, if you have a monopoly because your products sell better than
other peoples', you're pretty safe. But if you owe your monopoly to
activities that you specifically undertook to secure and expand a
monopoly, you're in trouble.

Mark Zuckerberg got his company into SERIOUS trouble by admitting in
writing that he wanted to buy Instagram in order to reduce his users'
ability to escape Facebook's surveillance (Instagram was attracting
millions of ex-Facebook users).

But if Zuckerberg used IP to shut down Instagram - say, enforcing a
patent against them, or using confidentiality and noncompete agreements
to block his key employees from jumping ship - the US government
wouldn't punish him, it would *help* him.

When you combine an "author's monopoly" with a "market-power monopoly,"
you get a terrifyingly effective hybrid: a monopoly that the government
will fight to preserve, not fight to break up.

What's more, IP is interpenetrating the fabric of our lives (or, if you
prefer, "software is eating the world"). Every IoT device with software
in it can be configured so that software gives IP protection - over
customers, critics and competitors.

All of this to say that rather than fighting to end use of the term
"IP," we should instead make explicit its latent meaning: the
monopolistic and nightmarish ability to control critics, customers and
competitors.

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🧓🏾 Data-brokerages vs the world

When I give talks about surveillance in Silicon Valley, techies will
say, "Well, I don't care if Google gets my data to show me better ads,
but the NSA is full of low-IQ sociopaths who couldn't get a job in tech."

When I speak in the Beltway, govies say, "I don't care about Uncle Sam
gathering data on me - the USG already knows all about me. But those
grifters in Silicon Valley would sell their mothers for a nickel."

What neither gets is that private surveillance is public surveillance -
and vice-versa. Why do governments exercise forbearance in regulating
the obviously harmful, toxic surveillance industry? Because they rely on
raiding private data to do mass surveillance on a budget.

Today in Wired, Justin Sherman explains how this works in exquisite
detail in "Data Brokers Are a Threat to Democracy," a piece on the vast,
shadowy private data brokerage industry.

https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-data-brokers-are-a-threat-to-democracy/

These companies - Acxiom, CoreLogic, and Epsilon - have deep dossiers on
billions of people, segmented in categories like "Rural and Barely
Making It" and "Ethnic Second-City Strugglers." Sometimes, they're also
tech companies - Oracle owns 80 data-brokerages!

These huge data-troves are raided by stalkers and spies, used to target
people illegally based on race, religion and sexual orientation, and are
also critical to US government surveillance.

As Sherman points out, there's not much sense in getting worked up about
Americans' data going to China because they're on Tiktok when that same
data - and more - is for sale in a vast, sleazy, unregulated smorgasbord.

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🧓🏾 This day in history

#15yrsago NOLA mayoral candidate uses photo of Disneyland New Orleans
Square
https://web.archive.org/web/20060414214356/https://www.wonkette.com/politics/new-orleans/not-quite-the-happiest-place-on-earth-166989.php

#10yrsago Historical first look into the Fed’s bailout payments reveals
breathtaking multi-trillion-dollar corruption
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/the-real-housewives-of-wall-street-246430/

#5yrsago How corporate America’s lobbying budget surpassed the combined
Senate and Congress budget
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/04/how-corporate-lobbyists-conquered-american-democracy/390822/

#5yrsago Panama Papers reveal offshore companies were bagmen for the
world’s spies
https://www.yahoo.com/news/panama-papers-reveal-spies-used-mossak-fonseca-231833609.html

#5yrsago Panama Papers: Mossack Fonseca law offices raided by Panama
authorities https://www.reuters.com/article/us-panama-tax-raid-idUSKCN0XA020

#5yrsago Piracy dooms motion picture industry to yet another
record-breaking box-office year
https://torrentfreak.com/piracy-fails-to-prevent-box-office-record-160413/

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🧓🏾 Colophon

Today's top sources: Naked Capitalism (https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/).

Currently writing:

* A cyberpunk noir thriller novel, "Red Team Blues." Yesterday's
progress: 1014 words (59519 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

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