[Plura-list] Robot Artists & Black Swans; Klobuchar on trustbusting; Pharma's anti-generic-vaccine lobbying blitz

[Cory Doctorow]

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Next Thursday, I'm helping Bruce Sterling launch "Robot Artists & Black
Swans," a book of sf short stories in the Italian "fantascienza" mode,
at Austin's Book People!

https://www.bookpeople.com/event/virtual-event-bruce-sterling-robot-artists-black-swans


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Today's links

* Robot Artists & Black Swans: The fantascienza of "Bruno Argento" (AKA
Bruce Sterling).

* Klobuchar on trustbusting: She's just published "Antitrust: Taking on
Monopoly Power from the Gilded Age to the Digital Age."

* Pharma's anti-generic-vaccine lobbying blitz: A civilization-ending
delusion about pools with "no-pissing" ends.

* Unpack the court with judicial overrides: Consumer Protection and
Recovery Act and beyond.

* Lexmark's toxic printer-ink: Every pirate wants to be an admiral.

* This day in history: 2011, 2020

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

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🧙🏽‍♀️ Robot Artists & Black Swans

"Fantascienza" is the Italian word for science fiction, but fantascienza
has its own tropes, rhythms and conventions that set it apart in
hard-to-summarize ways; these unique characteristics have fired the
Italian imagination for generations.

Very little fantascienza (or any other foreign literature) gets
translated to English. There's a kind of circular reasoning behind this:
there's so much stuff produced in English that there's no market for
foreign works, and no one reads foreign works so why translate any?

Which brings me to a very odd, very wonderful book: ROBOT ARTISTS AND
BLACK SWANS, Bruce Sterling's collection of fantascienza stories
originally published under his Italian pseudonym, "Bruno Argento."

https://tachyonpublications.com/product/robot-artists-and-black-swans-the-italian-fantascienza-stories-of-bruce-sterling-as-bruno-argento/

I am no expert on fantascienza, so I don't know if these are
representative of the field, but I am here to tell you that they are
completely different from any other sf I've read, including Sterling's,
and yet utterly and unmistakably Bruce Sterling stories (a neat trick).

They are mostly set in and around Sterling's adopted hometown of Turin,
and though they span a range from the Middle Ages to the late 22nd
Century, they paint a vivid picture of an ancient city whose fortunes
have ebbed and flowed through the centuries.

Turin - the city of a fake shroud, the once-upon-a-time capital of
silent horror film production, home to the once-high-tech giant Olivetti
and the once-industrial-titan Fiat - is arguably the most interesting
character in these tales.

A city that once-was, will-be-again, where life is both literarily
genteel and haunted by militarism, crisis and political upheaval.
Sterling gives us stories of crusader-era innkeepers, dimension-hopping
hackers, art-obsessed robot-chasers, all blended into Turin's stories.

These are wry and sardonic stories in the Sterling mode, and filled with
the kinds of technosocial insights that define his work, but they are
also madcap tales, Italian farces full of earthy humor, bunga-bunga
strongmen getting their comeuppances, all the grand passions.

Sterling - "Chairman Bruce" - was instrumental to the founding of both
cyberpunk and steampunk; started one of our most influential and
visionary "bright green" environmental movements, and serves as an
electronic art impresario.

He relishes the esoteric and his fiction brings it to life in ways that
no one else can match. In his Bruno Argento guise, he is both utterly
strange and wonderfully familiar, a new chapter in the weird, engrossing
artistic life of Bruce Sterling.

I'm helping Bruce launch this book on Thursday, in a free, livestreamed
event at Austin's Book People, a truly wonderful store.

https://www.bookpeople.com/event/virtual-event-bruce-sterling-robot-artists-black-swans

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🧙🏽‍♀️ Klobuchar on trustbusting

When Amy Klobuchar introduced her Competition and Antitrust Law
Enforcement Reform Act (CALERA), I called it a "big fucking deal,"
because it would do away with Ronald Reagan and Robert Bork's "consumer
welfare" standard for antitrust action.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/06/calera/#fuck-bork

Prior to the Reagan years, US courts and prosecutors went after
monopolies because monopolies were considered harmful on their own -
they gathered too much power into too few hands, to the detriment of
workers, suppliers, the environment, policy, and consumer pricing.

But Robert Bork - a Nixonite criminal whose actions were so odious the
Senate refused to confirm him for the Supreme Court - promoted a bizarre
Qanon-like theory that if you looked hard enough at the laws, that's not
what they said at all.

Rather, the US's four antitrust statutes were *only* concerned with
harms to "consumer welfare" (higher prices), and these harms could only
be predicted or proven through the use of mathematical models that only
Bork and his friends at the University of Chicago could interpret.

They established themselves as a kind of priesthood: whenever a merger
was contemplated or a post-merger company raised prices, the priests
would slaughter an ox (make a model) and read the truth in its guts.

Only they were qualified to perform this ritual and they never found a
monopoly they didn't like.

This was *obviously* a scam - and equally obvious was the fact that US
antitrust law unambiguously is not limited to "consumer welfare."

But replacing muscular antitrust with "consumer welfare" meant that rich
people could get much, much richer by creating monopolies. Huge sums
were spent to propagate this all over the world, including in places
where the law was even clearer, like the UK.

This is laid out beautifully in Michelle Meagher's COMPETITION IS
KILLING US, which traces the spread of this ideology in the UK and EU.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/08/competition-is-killing-us/#borked

Now, hot on the heels of historic Senate antitrust hearings, Klobuchar
has published her own book on the antitrust fight, ANTITRUST: TAKING ON
MONOPOLY POWER FROM THE GILDED AGE TO THE DIGITAL AGE, which comes out
today:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/586000/antitrust-by-amy-klobuchar/

Klobuchar spoke with Nilay Patel for The Verge's Decoder podcast about
the book; it was a long interview and they transcribed it. It's got some
great nuggets (though to be frank, it's a little rambling in text and
could use some abridgement).

https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/27/22404493/amy-klobuchar-interview-antitrust-book-hearings-big-tech

A couple areas that really struck me: first, Klobuchar's reminder that
monopoly isn't a tech phenomenon, that it extends to "pharma and ag and
everything," and that blocking mergers and reversing Borkism in every
sector is key to fighting monopoly.

And Patel pushes Klobuchar on this, pointing out that while there's a
bipartisan consensus in the Senate and Congress on trustbusting, that
consensus does *not* extend to killing the "consumer welfare" standard -
Republicans want to bust trusts, but keep this rule intact.

In other words, the GOP wants to fight monopolies selectively, where
their constituents care about them, but not create a broad antitrust
system that fights monopolies wherever they form.

So Chuck Grassley will fight ag monopolies to score points with Iowa
farmers, Josh Hawley will fight social media so that lies about election
fraud can spread unchecked, but that's as far as they go - they're fine
with monopolies that afflict people who don't vote for them.

Patel tries to press Klobuchar on this point a couple of times, but
Klobuchar evades the question, which is a pity.

I mean, I think there are lots of ways to address this.

For example, she could say, "Once we curb monopoly in a giant industry
like ag or tech, it will prime the American people to keep fighting
monopolies and make GOP fairweather trustbusters look like assholes."

This is what I tell people who correctly point out that some of the
antitrust energy against Google is astroturf from Comcast and AT&T:
"Sure, but if they think that success in curbing Google will mean *less*
appetite to slay Big Telco, they're in for a hell of a surprise!"

As to Klobuchar's book: the interview interested me enough that I've
ordered a copy, in part because I wanted to get a look at the "over 100
cartoons" from Gilded Age newspapers editorializing against monopolies
from the last century.

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🧙🏽‍♀️ Pharma's anti-generic-vaccine lobbying blitz

2.5 billion people in the Earth's 125 poorest countries have received
zero vaccine doses. The 85 poorest countries are projecting full
vaccination in 2023 or 2024. This isn't just a form of racist
mass-killing, it's also a civilizational and species-wide risk.

Every infected person, after all, makes billions and billions of copies
of the virus, and these copies are imperfect, producing mutations.
Eventually, there will probably be a mutation so contagious that it
bypasses vaccine-based defenses.

Worse still, if the virus circulates widely enough for enough time, the
likelihood that a mutant strain will emerge that is both more infectious
*and* more deadly goes up and up.

A half-vaccinated world is like a swimming pool where only one end has a
"no pissing" rule.

The global south does not have to go unvaccinated. Poor countries have
vast vaccine production capacity: scientists, factories and knowledge.
Some of the world's largest vaccine production facilities are in the
global south.

What the global south lacks is a patent-free vaccine that can be
domestically produced. Remember when Oxford promised that its vaccine
would be open access so that it could be produced by poor and rich
nations alike?

That dream died when the Gates Foundation - which cloaks monopolistic
ideology in elite philanthropy - pressured the university to do an
exclusive distribution deal with Astrazeneca.

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

Since then, Gates himself has been pushing the racist lie that countries
full of brown people are too primitive to make their own vaccines.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#gates-foundation

It's a lie that's been picked up by pharma shills like Howard Dean, the
one-time "liberal lion" turned corporate mouthpiece:

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

Gates and Dean are the public face of a vast pharma lobbying effort to
head off open access vaccines: more than 100 lobbyists are working DC
right now, trying to get the US to oppose a WTO petition to grant
emergency patent-waivers on covid vaccines.

https://theintercept.com/2021/04/23/covid-vaccine-ip-waiver-lobbying/

Lobbying disclosures reveal that Big Pharma is paying key Democrat
fundraisers, ex-US Trade Rep officials, and GOP power-brokers to fight
the proposal, as Lee Fang reports for The Intercept.

The effort is transatlantic, too: a biotech pharma lobbyist repeated the
racist lie about poor countries not being capable of manufacturing their
own vaccines in The Economist:

https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2021/04/20/michelle-mcmurry-heath-on-maintaining-intellectual-property-amid-covid-19

The Economist editorial really tips the industry's hand, admitting that
the industry's real concern is that if they are forced to subordinate
their shareholders to the public good, it will raise questions about the
whole pharma system.

After all, it's a system that does almost NO basic research, freeriding
on publicly funded labs and generates absurd monopoly margins on its
products by charging the public vast markups to buy the fruits of the
work it subsidized.

These profits are rolled into lobbying projects that keep prices high
AND shield pharma execs and investors from the consequences of faking
their safety data and deceiving the public (as with the opioid epidemic).

The pharma industry knows, in its heart, that it is engaged in
indefensible behavior, and it understands that *any* crack in the
rationalizations that secure its fortunes could shatter the illusion
altogether.

The industry is so unreasonable that its lobbyists are left with idiotic
talking points like: "giving up the IP could allow China and Russia to
exploit platforms such as mRNA, which could be used for other vaccines
or even therapeutics for conditions such as cancer and heart problems in
the future."

https://www.ft.com/content/fa1e0d22-71f2-401f-9971-fa27313570ab

Seriously, that's all you've got? We can't end #VaccineApartheid and
save the 2.5b unvaccinated people and forestall a species-destroying
supervariant because it might lead to...a cure for cancer and heart disease?

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🧙🏽‍♀️ Unpack the court with judicial overrides

One of the GOP's tells is that it accuses Democrats of its own sins.
Take "packing the court," a process we watched unfold with Trump's
appointments of Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett.

A Supreme Court filled with Federalist Society sociopaths chosen by
Donald Trump is scary, for two reasons: first, they are apt to take up
extreme Constitutional interpretations, and second, because they will
distort Congress's intent to serve the wealthy.

There's not much we can do about the former, but the latter is fully
addressable through lawmaking. Take SCOTUS's recent ruling that the FTC
doesn't have the authority to extract cash penalties from predatory
lenders to compensate their victims.

https://www.scotusblog.com/2021/04/unanimous-court-curtails-ftcs-ability-to-obtain-restitution-for-deceptive-practices/

It's a bullshit decision, but it's easily addressed: if SCOTUS says that
Congress's law that created the FTC doesn't let it claw back stolen
money from loan sharks, Congress can pass a new law that explicitly
gives the FTC that authority.

That's what the Consumer Protection and Recovery Act does. It's an
example of "judicial override": when Congress overrides the Supreme
Court's interpretations of its laws by making new laws that leave no
room for doubt.

https://energycommerce.house.gov/sites/democrats.energycommerce.house.gov/files/documents/BILLS-117hr2668ih%20Hearing%204.27.%20CPC.pdf

As Rachel M Cohen writes for The American Prospect and The Intercept,
there's lots of room for judicial override in response to extremist
Supreme Court rulings.

https://prospect.org/justice/congress-judicial-overrides-to-strengthen-consumer-protections/

Take the Non-Judicial Foreclosure Debt Collection Clarification Act,
which overrides a SCOTUS ruling that stripped people of the right to
redress when their houses were foreclosed by sleazy lenders.

Much of the harm from Trump's Supreme Court packing can be undone, but
only if the Dems control the Presidency, the House and the Senate.

Uh...

Of course, for that to actually work, we need Manchin and Sinema to
abandon their suicide-pact in defense of the filibuster.

But if we can, there's even scope for heading off the destructive power
of SCOTUS's wilful misinterpretations of the Constitution, by following
the example that Lincoln set.

The white supremacist Supreme Court of the Lincoln era consistently
struck down the abolitionist laws that Lincoln signed. But Lincoln kept
signing them, playing a game of high-stakes chicken with the court.

After all, the court's power springs from its legitimacy - that is, from
the public's perception that it *deserves* to have power. If the
unelected Supreme Court consistently reverses popular legislation, that
legitimacy evaporates, and with it, the court's power.

Lincoln understood that he had the will of the people behind him, and
the Supremes did, too - eventually...after they were sidelined and made
irrelevant for a decade.

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🧙🏽‍♀️ Lexmark's toxic printer-ink

"Every pirate wants to be an admiral." That is a truism of industrial
policy: the scrappy upstarts that push the rules to achieve success then
turn into law-and-order types who insist that anyone who does unto them
as they did unto others is a lawless cur in need of whipping.

This is true all over, but there's an especial deliciousness to see it
applied to printers and printer ink, always a trailblazer in extractive,
deceptive and monopolistic practices of breathtaking, shameless sleaze.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Pierre Beyssac, a director of Internet Europe, recounts his campaigns in
the Printer Wars, which start when he ordered a non-wifi-enabled Lexmark
printer but got shipped the wifi version.

https://twitter.com/pbeyssac/status/1386988213923983362

He didn't mind...except that the two models use different models of
ink-cartridge, and he'd preordered €450 worth of cartridges, which were
nonreturnable by the time he discovered the error.

The cartridges are identical; all that stops them from working is that
they're DRM-locked, with software that refuses to run if you put it in a
different model printer (this lets Lexmark charge more for an identical
product if they think some customers are price-insensitive).

But there's an answer - a Chinese vendor sells a €15 conversion kit that
bypasses the DRM (this is probably illegal in the EU under Article 6 of
2001's EUCD).  Beyssac was able to salvage his €450 ink investment.

But the adventure prompted him to investigate further. He discovered
that Lexmark uses DRM to "regionalize" cartridges (similar to DVD
regions): a cart bought in region 1 won't work in a printer bought in
region 2.

Hilariously, Lexmark claims that this is because each cartridge is
specially tuned for each region's "humidity." By way of rebuttal,
Beyssac points out that all of Russia shares a region with all of Africa
(!).

(Likewise, the Canadian Arctic shares a region with the Pacific
Northwest and the Arizona desert)

Now all of this would be idiotic enough if it were any old printer
monopolist, but because this is Lexmark, it is especially delicious,.

Lexmark, after all, fought one of the most important battles of the
Printer Wars - and lost. Lexmark vs Static Controls was brought by
Lexmark when it was a division of the early tech monopolist IBM.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/felony-contempt-business-model-lexmarks-anti-competitive-legacy

Lexmark sold toner cartridges filled with the cheap and abundant element
carbon, and it wanted to charge vintage Champagne prices for it. To that
end, Lexmark ran a 55-byte program in a "security chip" that flipped an
"I am full" bit to "I am empty" when the toner ran out.

Lexmark's competitor Static Controls reverse-engineered this trivial
program so you could refill a cartridge and flip it back to "I am full"
so the printer would recognize it. In 2002 Lexmark sued, under Sec 1201
of the recently passed Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

DMCA 1201 made it a felony to traffick in a device that "bypassed an
access control for a copyrighted work." The judge asked Lexmark which
copyrighted work was in its printer cartridges (it wasn't the carbon
powder!). Lexmark said it was the 55-bytle program.

The judge handed Lexmark its own ass, ruling that while software could
be copyrighted, a 55-byte I-am-full/empty program didn't rise to the
level of copyrightability - it wasn't even a haiku.

Lexmark lost, and today, Lexmark is...*a division of Static Controls.*

That's right, the company that's using all this bullshit DRM to prevent
people from using their printers the way they want to is the company
that did the exact same thing to IBM, won its court case, and then
merged with the company whose racket it had destroyed.

Every pirate *seriously* wants to be an admiral.

But here's the thing. Lexmark/Static turned on the fact that 55-byte
programs (all that fit affordably in a primitive 2002 chip) wasn't a
copyrighted work. The cartridges Lexmark sells now have thousands of
lines of code.

There's whole OSes in there. These *are* copyrightable. As is the OS in
every embedded system we buy, from car engine parts to smart speakers to
pacemakers. That means that companies can use DMCA 1201 to prevent
rivals from unlocking lawful features in their products.

They can use it to block independent repair and independent security
audits. They can make it illegal to use any product you own in ways that
disadvantages their shareholders, even if that's what's good for you.

Despite the "C" in DMCA standing for "copyright," this  isn't copyright
protection, it's felony contempt of business model - a legally
enforceable obligation to arrange your life to benefit multinational
corporations' shareholders.

And worse, this law has been spread around the world thanks to the US
Trade Rep: it's in 2001's EUCD and Canada's 2012 Copyright Modernization
Act. Last summer, Mexico passed an even more extreme version as part of
the USMCA.

If you think this shit is odious when it's in your printer, you're going
to hate it when it's in your toothbrush, wristwatch, car engine and toaster.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

In 2016, EFF brought a lawsuit to overturn DMCA 1201 on behalf of Bunnie
Huang and Matt Green. It has been working its way through the courts
ever since.

https://www.eff.org/cases/green-v-us-department-justice

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🧙🏽‍♀️ This day in history

#1yrago Hospital cuts healthcare workers' pay, pays six-figure exec
bonuses
https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/27/in-this-together/#all-in-this-together

#1yrago Pandemic proves ISP data-caps were always a pretense
https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/27/in-this-together/#concast

#10yrsago  Pinhole cameras made out of hollow eggs
https://www.lomography.com/magazine/71984-the-pinhegg-my-journey-to-build-an-egg-pinhole-camera

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🧙🏽‍♀️ Colophon

Today's top sources: Pretzel6666 (https://twitter.com/pretzel6666)

Currently writing:

* A Little Brother short story about pipeline protests.  RESEARCH PHASE

* A short story about consumer data co-ops.  PLANNING

* A Little Brother short story about remote invigilation.  PLANNING

* A nonfiction book about excessive buyer-power in the arts, co-written
with Rebecca Giblin, "The Shakedown."  FINAL EDITS

* A post-GND utopian novel, "The Lost Cause."  FINISHED

* A cyberpunk noir thriller novel, "Red Team Blues."  FINISHED

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:

* 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

* Book launch for Aminder Dhaliwal's Cyclopedia Exotica (Indigo), May
13, https://www.crowdcast.io/e/udbva8py/register

* Seize the Means of Computation, Ryerson Centre for Free Expression,
May 19,
https://cfe.ryerson.ca/events/how-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-seize-means-computation

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
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https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are
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basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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