[Plura-list] Criti-Hype; Right to Repair is back for 2021; The free market and rent-seeking

[Cory Doctorow]

Today's links

* Criti-Hype: Tech bros will settle for "evil genius."

* Right to Repair is back for 2021: Will Apple sabotage this one too?

* The free market and rent-seeking: Unauthorized bread and poor doors.

* This day in history: 2011, 2016

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

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🧵 Criti-Hype

There's a Yom Kippur joke I love: the rabbi and the richest man in town
are praying, "Oh Lord, I am nothing, I am nothing!"

The synagogue's janitor sees them and joins in: "I am nothing!"

The richest man says to the rabbi: "Look who thinks he's nothing."

The humblebrag is a wild phenomena, and it's endemic to a certain kind
of tech criticism. When a technologist - what Maria Farrell calls a
"prodigal tech bro" - confesses that he's an evil genius, then "genius"
is the point.

https://crookedtimber.org/2020/09/23/story-ate-the-world-im-biting-back/

Think of the "AI" scientists who claim that they are about to be
responsible for massive waves of technological unemployment, seeming to
confess to a sin while actually overpromising on their AI.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/24/grandparents-optional-party/#what-automation

Or the critique of "surveillance capitalism" that takes at face value
ad-tech's outlandish boasts about how good they are at changing peoples'
minds with data-mining, and then warns that we're all about to be
enslaved to mind-control tech.

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

Or the hand-wringing over the "trolley problem" of self-driving cars, as
though the issue with these cars will be their reliable fine-grained
judgments, rather than their unreliability and anticompetitive fealty to
their manufacturers.

https://this.deakin.edu.au/self-improvement/car-wars

This is what Lee Vinsel calls "criti-hype," criticism that actually
builds on - and depends on - maintaining the halo of devastating potency
that surrounds overhyped technologies.

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

While it's true that the social problems that technologies create have
unique, subtle elements that require a fine-grained understanding of the
underlying science, it's a mistake to assume this obviates historical
lessons.

Like, blockchain and proof-of-work and cryptography do bring unique
facets to the problems of financial engineering, money-laundering and
fraud - but all the problems of financial engineering and
money-laundering and fraud are still in the mix.

Ad-tech and engagement-maximization systems add new wrinkles to the
problems of communications monopolies and the epistemological chaos
created by corrupt institutions, but the chaos and the monopolies are
still central to these problems.

The problem with many metacritics of tech - people who criticize tech
critics - is their assumption that tech is irrelevant. The problem with
tech critics themselves is their assumption that tech is dispositive.

The reality is that tech has formal characteristics - the universality
of Turing completeness - that both expand the policy toolkit (the power
of interoperability mandates) and constrain it (the futility of
cryptography back-doors).

Criti-hype is real, and its remedy isn't to ignore technicalities and
criticize tech as though it was just another industry - the remedy is to
really understand what tech can and can't do, and to understand that the
industry isn't run by super-genuises (evil or otherwise) nor science
heroes (or villains).

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🧵 Right to Repair is back for 2021

2018 was almost the year we won the Right to Repair.

Instead, 2018 turned out to be the year we lost R2R: 20 bills defeated
in 20 state houses, and it was mostly Apple's fault.

Apple has a problem. As CEO Tim Cook warned his investors at the
conclusion of his company's repair-killing lobbying spree, Apple's
profits depend on people throwing away their devices, not fixing them.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/01/letter-from-tim-cook-to-apple-investors/

By monopolizing repairs, Apple doesn't just get to gouge you on parts
and service - the real action is in pronouncing your device DOA, beyond
repair. Then you have to buy another one.

Other companies lobbied hard against R2R: John Deere, GM, and other
monopolists backed Apple's play. But Apple wrote the playbook, coming up
with risible bullshit like claims that blocking independent repair is
essential to protecting privacy.

https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/democrats.judiciary.house.gov/files/documents/apple%20rfi%20-%20signed.pdf

Apple's anti-repair FUD got picked up and amplified by Big Car in 2020,
when they spent millions fighting an automotive R2R ballot initiative in
Massachusetts, claiming that letting independent mechanics at your car
would lead to your actual *murder*.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/13/said-no-one-ever/#r2r

2018 is the year we lost Right to Repair, but 2021 might be the year we
win it. We're only a month in and 14 states are already debating R2R
legislation, with more to come. The Repair Coalition and PIRG are
leading the fight, buoyed by massive R2R successes in the EU.

Independent repair isn't just fair and it isn't just good for the planet
- it's also good for the nation and its economy. The average US family
loses $330/year thanks to anti-repair practices, a $40b drag on the
American economy.

Repair creates local jobs for SMEs whose earnings - from helping their
neighbors - are taxed (not hidden in offshore tax-havens) and contribute
to their communities. These are on-shore, dignified tech jobs - not
slave labor in Xinjiang or coerced labor in a Foxconn plant.

Repair diverts ewaste from landfills. Each kiloton of ewaste creates <1
landfill jobs, or 15 recyling jobs.

But that same kiloton of ewaste creates 200 local repair jobs.

https://www.ifixit.com/Right-to-Repair/Jobs-Revolution

Repair creates a secondary market for low-cost devices that find their
way into the hands of people on the wrong side of the digital divide - a
divide that got starker and more consequential during the pandemic, and
will only get more important in years to come.

Speaking of the pandemic: anti-repair laws meant that when PB840
ventilators (the most common ventilator, sold by the monopolist
Medtronic, which benefits from the largest-ever tax-avoidance "reverse
takeover" in corporate history) broke, they couldn't be legally fixed.

Instead, desperate med-tech people turned to a lone Polish hacker who
built Medtronic defeat devices into old guitar-pedals and clock radios
to get around the anti-repair measures in the ventilators that hospitals
had bought and paid for.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/10/flintstone-delano-roosevelt/#medtronic-again

R2R is a fight for justice. For the right to decide who fixes your
stuff. For the right to set up shop and help your neighbors. For
self-reliance and resiliency over profits. For on-shore small businesses
over multinational cheaters.

Once again, a wave of R2R laws is sweeping the nation. The monopolists
who profiteered off our misery during the pandemic will once again turn
out to stop them. PIRG and the Repair Coalition need our support - as do
their coalition allies like EFF.

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🧵 The free market and rent-seeking

When you hear the phrase "free market," you probably think of "a market
that is free from regulation" but that's the opposite of the phrase's
original meaning!

Adam Smith used the term to describe a market that was free from
"economic rents" - money earned by owning things, rather than doing
things. Smith recognized that markets attract parasites - "rentiers" -
who seek to drain wealth by "investing" rather than building and doing.

Which meant that, in the absence of muscular state  intervention,
markets would become less and less free - more and more dependent on the
whims of rentiers who used money to breed money by creating
toll-barriers between parts of the productive economy.

For Smith, markets were only free if they were regulated. But that's the
opposite of the way that we talk about free markets today. Today, a free
market is a market where you are free to collect rents - passive income
from owning things, at the expense of people doing things.

This is true in so many metaphorical ways, but it's especially true when
we're talking about actual rent - actual homes that people need to
survive and produce, whose primary role today is to serve as an asset
class to be maximized, not a basic human right.

London is ground zero for the conversion of housing from a human right
to a speculative asset, a city at war with itself, filled up with empty
safe-deposit boxes in the sky, while productive workers - the "essential
workers" of the pandemic - triple-up in substandard housing.

The conversion of London from a city to an asset was hugely profitable,
primarily for offshore "investors," especially criminals who were
attracted by London's veneer of respectability, which allowed them to
convert their loot to legitimate earnings through property sales.

The overslosh of these tremendous cash flows has hopelessly corrupted
London's planning authorities, who are absolutely helpless and hopeless
at holding developers to their own promises - new builds get extra
storeys and shed public concessions without penalty.

And just as the tax-authorities who despair of enforcing against the
real cheats turn their efforts to everyday people who can't afford to
fight investigations, London's planners spend their days making life
miserable for homeowners trying to make minor improvements.

I spent two years fighting Hackney for the right to build a small,
windowed greenhouse on my flat's balcony, finally giving up on growing
my own veggies. Meanwhile, the for-profit "student residence" across the
street replaced hundreds of small offices, overbuilt and busted.

Today, it's a failed Wework, while the four-storey "boutique hotel"
across the street has been transformed into eight+ storeys, with
multiple storeys of office space, all without any planning enforcement.

The conversion of London into a tradeable asset was a deliberate
project. It started with the destruction of public council housing
through Thatcher's Right to Buy program, which left low-income people at
the mercy of concessions made by private landlords and developers.

Even before Thatcher, Tory local councils like Wandsworth's engaged in
ethnic cleansing by purging their public housing in favor of for-profit
schemes, with the explicit goal of replacing Labour-voting working
people with Tory landed gentry.

Decades later, London's property markets are purely unfree, dominated by
rentiers who have massively oversupplied the luxury property market,
then engaged in fraud - relisting the same property every couple days -
to make it seem like the market was thriving.

Planners give builders permission to make more of these empty, unneeded
super-luxe "homes" on the condition that they supply affordable housing
in the same development.

Builders like those behind the Battersea Power Plant conversion renege
without consequence: they pledged to make 15% of the new units
affordable, then slashed it to 9%, claiming "technical difficulties."

When they do make good on their promises, they do so in the most
meanspirited, disgusting ways. Remember when the almshouse that Dickens
based Oliver Twist's setting on was converted to luxury flats on
condition that the builder supply affordable homes?

The builder produced "segregated housing" - homes around a greenspace
where rich kids played, but which poor kids literally couldn't access.
The poor wing of the development had no gates that accessed the playground.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jul/19/london-officials-ban-segregated-play-areas-in-future-housing-developments

A commonplace in these developments is the "poor door." The developer
builds a high-rise with a fancy marble lobby and a doorman, then
literally puts a shitty little door around the back next to the garbage
bins for the low-income occupants.

The poor door - and its companion, the poor elevator, so the rich people
don't ever have to see poor neighbors - inspired me to write
UNAUTHORIZED BREAD, which explores all kinds of rentierism, from your
toaster to your fridge.

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

Dystopian sf is a warning, not a suggestion, but London's luxe
real-estate barons keep getting that wrong. In a wonderful, infuriating
longread, The Guardian's Oliver Wainwright explores the literal
structural inequality of London's Nine Elms.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/feb/02/penthouses-poor-doors-nine-elms-battersea-london-luxury-housing-development

The low-income residents at Nine Elms enjoy a uniquely cursed
arrangement with the building. They "own" (that is, pay a mortgage on)
25% of their homes, while the remaining 75% is "rented." They have all
the disadvantages of ownership and none of its advantages.

The building's management forces them into poor-doors, and denies them
access to the pool, the gym and other amenities ("to keep service
charges down"). Their neighbors - hereditary Emirati princelings - leave
their flats empty most of the time.

But when they do show up, they import their performance sports-cars,
which they park in the fire-lane and race up and down the street in the
middle of the night.

Building management skimps on maintenance and sells poor tenants out to
monopoly energy providers who practice merciless price-gouging on the
people who can least afford it.

Tellingly, when Wainwright questioned local Tory councillor Ravi
Govindia about the scams, cruelty, and meanness of his poor
constituents, Govindia shrugged it off, calling it the free market in
action and saying that "it's up to people to make their choices."

Govindia is more right than he knows. When we converted Smith's free
markets - free from rentierism - into Thatcher's - free *for* rentierism
- we made this kind of neo-Victorian class division inevitable.

Converting housing into property, human rights into assets, guaranteed
millions of people would be coerced into abusive commercial arrangements
just to survive - and that the profits from their exploitation would be
laundered to elect Tories who'd accelerate the process.

A market that is "free" from anti-rentier regulation is a market where
all the freedom is gathered into the hands of a few parasitic
toll-collectors who get to exact ever-higher tolls from the productive
sector.

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🧵 This day in history

#10yrsago Diane Duane’s crowdfunded publishing experiment finally
concludes
https://web.archive.org/web/20110430031854/https://www.dianeduane.com/The-Big-Meow-completion-info

#10yrsago Inside Sukey, the anti-kettling mobile app
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/feb/02/inside-anti-kettling-hq

#5yrsago Swatting attempted against Congresswoman who introduced
anti-swatting bill
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/02/01/cops-swarm-rep-katherine-clark-melrose-home-after-apparent-hoax/yqEpcpWmKtN6bOOAj8FZXJ/story.html

#5yrsago Exclusive: Snowden intelligence docs reveal UK spooks’ malware
checklist
https://memex.craphound.com/2016/02/02/exclusive-snowden-intelligence-docs-reveal-uk-spooks-malware-checklist/

#5yrsago Ross and Carrie become Scientologists: an investigative report
5 years in the making
https://ohnopodcast.com/investigations/2016/2/1/ross-and-carrie-audit-scientology-part-1-going-preclear

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🧵 Colophon

Today's top sources: Beka Valentine
(https://twitter.com/beka_valentine?, Naked Capitalism
(https://www.nakedcapitalism.com).

Currently writing:

* My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and
reconciliation. Yesterday's progress: 521 words (105723 total).

* A short story, "Jeffty is Five," for The Last Dangerous Visions.
Yesterday's progress: 263 words (2658 total).

Currently reading: Analogia by George Dyson.

Latest podcast: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 30)
https://craphound.com/articles/2021/01/31/someone-comes-to-town-someone-leaves-town-part-30/

Upcoming appearances:

* Launch for the young adult edition of Edward Snowden's memoir
PERMANENT RECORD, Feb 9,
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/edward-snowden-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-136734968973

* Boskone, 58, Feb 12-15, https://boskone.org/

* Keynote, NISO Plus, Feb 22-25,
https://niso.plus/cory-doctorow-to-keynote-at-niso-plus-2021/

Recent appearances:

* Monocle Reads
https://monocle.com/radio/shows/meet-the-writers/monocle-reads-87/play/

* Hedging Bets on the Future (Motherboard Cyber):
https://play.acast.com/s/cyber/hedgingbetsonthefuturewithauthorcorydoctorow

* Applying the Pandemic Mindset to Climate Change:
https://hbr.org/podcast/2020/12/applying-the-pandemic-mindset-to-climate-change-with-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)

* "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.

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.

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🧵 How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/web/accounts/303320

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and
advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

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

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 195 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://mail.flarn.com/pipermail/plura-list/attachments/20210202/dae59eaf/attachment.sig>