[Plura-list] Ad-tech is a bezzle; Google's unionizing; The Data Detective; Damon Knight's Why Do Birds is back; Endorsing the Forward 43 slate

[Cory Doctorow]

Today's links

* Ad-tech is a bezzle: The subprime attention crisis is upon us.

* Google's unionizing: Solidarity vs worker misclassification.

* The Data Detective: How to truth with statistics.

* Damon Knight's Why Do Birds is back: Reviving a grand master's comic
masterpiece.

* Endorsing the Forward 43 slate: For my California comrades.

* This day in history: 2016

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

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🎬 Ad-tech is a bezzle

There are lots of problems with ad-tech:

* being spied on all the time means that the people of the 21st century
are less able to be their authentic selves;

* any data that is collected and retained will eventually breach,
creating untold harms;

* data-collection enables for discriminatory business practices
("digital redlining");

* the huge, tangled hairball of adtech companies siphons lots (maybe
even most) of the money that should go creators and media orgs; and

* anti-adblock demands browsers and devices that thwart their owners'
wishes, a capability that can be exploited for even more nefarious purposes;

That's all terrible, but it's also *ironic*, since it appears that, in
addition to everything else, ad-tech is a fraud, a bezzle.

Bezzle was John Kenneth Galbraith's term for "the magic interval when a
confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the
victim does not yet understand that he has lost it." That is, a rotten
log that has yet to be turned over.

Bezzles unwind slowly, then all at once. We've had some important peeks
under ad-tech's rotten log, and they're increasing in both intensity and
velocity. If you follow Aram Zucker-Scharff, you've had a front-row seat
to the fraud.

https://twitter.com/Chronotope/status/1078003966863200256

Time and again, everything in the ad-tech stack has been demonstrated to
be fraudulent: fake audiences firing fake clicks at fake videos on fake
sites that suck real dollars out of advertisers' accounts.

This was masterfully elucidated in Tim Hwang's short 2020 book SUBPRIME
ATTENTION CRISIS, whose thesis is: we must deflate the ad-tech bubble
intentionally, lest we get a messy rupture that destroys many of the
good things the parasite has colonized.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/05/florida-man/#wannamakers-ghost

The ad-tech fraud is many-layered. On the surface, there's the counting
frauds: fake clicks, fake sites, fake videos, etc. But there's a deeper
fraud, a theory fraud, the fraud that with enough surveillance data and
machine learning, ad-tech can sell anyone anything.

That is: even if we count accurately, ads are still overvalued and
underperforming. This is also a lesson whose examples are coming with
increasing tempo, as when Ebay simply stopped buying Google search ads
and saw *no* decrease in sales.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/06/surveillance-tulip-bulbs/#adtech-bubble

In a piece for Forbes, marketer-turned-antifraud-auditor Dr Augustine
Fou rounds up some of the grossest things festering under the ad-tech log.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/01/02/when-big-brands-stopped-spending-on-digital-ads-nothing-happened-why/?sh=5a4f9c9a1166

Like that time in 2018 when Procter and Gamble - inventors of "brand
marketing" - turned off $200m worth of ad-tech buys and saw no change to
their sales. Or when Chase killed 95% of its advertising and kept all of
its business.

Most interesting is the tale of how Uber allowed itself to be defrauded
of $150m/year, for years, by ad-tech intermediaries. It's a story told
in detail by former Uber head of "performance marketing" Kevin Frisch on
the Marketing Today podcast:

https://www.marketingtodaypodcast.com/194-historic-ad-fraud-at-uber-with-kevin-frisch/

It starts with the revelation that $50m of its annual spend on customer
acquisitions - money paid when an ad leads to a new Uber customer
downloading the app, entering payment details and taking their first
ride - was fraudulent.

Here's how that worked: scummy marketers fielded low-quality apps (like
battery monitors) that requested root access. These apps spied on every
app you installed. If you installed Uber, they "fired a click" to the
system to report you as having been "converted" by an ad.

After clearing $50m of fraud, Frisch continued to dig into the system.
In the end, about $120m of the $150m was being stolen, pocketed for fake
clicks on fake sites by fake users.

In a fascinating turn, Frisch describes how his colleagues were
indifferent or actively hostile to his efforts. Uber was in "growth
mode," trying to beef up its numbers prior to the IPO where suckers
would relieve its Saudi royal investors.

Uber is a company that will never, ever be profitable. It, too, is a
bezzle. It only "works" if outside investors - marks - can somehow be
convinced to buy the insiders' stock, which requires the appearance of
growth - AKA "A pile of shit this big *must* have a pony under it!"

So execs like Frisch were required to "spend to budget" - to maintain
the appearance of growth, including (especially) the growth of its
"precision analytics" marketing, where ad-tech spends turned into
directly attributable customer acquisitions.

This is the story that keeps on giving, because it all starts with
Sleeping Giant's campaign to force Uber to stop advertising on
Breitbart, and Uber's inability to get its ad-tech "partners" to
definitively switch off Breitbart ads.

https://twitter.com/nandoodles/status/1345774768746852353

The system's layers of misdirection - there to hide the fraud - meant
that it behaved nondeterministically and couldn't fulfil simple
requests, which triggered the search.

There's a theory that the reason Big Tech spies on us so much is that
they're really good at turning data into sales (and, by extension,
influence, as in elections, referenda, etc). But it is increasingly
apparent that Big Tech's spying is part of a bezzle.

That is, we're being surveilled, doxed, placed under automated suspicion
and digitally discriminated against all to put on a show that separates
marks from their dollars.

This is the theme of my 2020 book HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM:

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

Namely, that we are under constant surveillane because monopolies can
get away with obviously fraudulent and dangerous conduct by mobilizing
their monopoly profits to buy political outcomes that serve their ends.

This is also what happened with California's Proposition 22, the most
expensive ballot initiative in US history: Uber didn't spearhead a $200m
campaign to legalize worker misclassification to become profitable.

Uber will never be profitable.

All that money was spent to maintain the fiction, the fraud, the bezzle
- it was an appeal to rescue the wholly fictional pony underneath that
gigantic pile of shit.

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🎬 Google's unionizing

Google workers have announced their intention to form a union, under the
auspices of CWA Local 1440. The union is called The Alphabet Workers
Union (Google maintains the legal and accounting fiction that it is a
division of a holding company called "Alphabet").

Speaking of legal fictions, the union is opening membership to "TVCs" -
temps, vendors and contractors - employees who have deliberately
misclassified so as to avoid paying them benefits or extending normal
workplace protections to them.

It's a bold move, a countermeasure to thwart the other commercial
advantage from worker misclassification: by creating multiple categories
of workers, bosses can pit employees against one another, by dangling
privileges in front of one group but not the other.

But it comes at a high price: to gain official legal recognition, more
than 50% of eligible workers must join the union. By including more
workers, the union is setting a higher bar for official status.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/3an5q9/google-workers-publicly-launch-union

But the union has momentum: a series of high-profile googler uprisings -
driven by official tolerance for sexual misconduct, complicity in US
military drone programs, secret collaboration with Chinese surveillance
and censorship, and more - show how radicalized googlers are.

Google's management - who cultivated an air of participatory, cuddly
collaboration - have arrived at a point where the contradictions between
their "values" and the company's profits can no longer be reconciled.

In Dec 2020, Google fired Timnit Gebru, an eminent Black AI scientist
who refused to retract a paper critical of its profitable Big Data
research. Management compounded their sins by making false claims about
Gebru's dismissal.

The unionization drive is under the CWA's #CODE (Coalition to Organize
Digital Employees) project. Though CODE is no stranger to conflict,
Google represents a serious challenge, thanks to its partnership with
notorious union-busters IRI Consultants.

(IRI's tactics pale in comparison to the mercenaries that Amazon has
hired to bust its unions: the Pinkerton company, who have spilled rivers
of workers' blood in their murderous history):

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dp3yn/amazon-leaked-reports-expose-spying-warehouse-workers-labor-union-environmental-groups-social-movements

For important context on the drive, check out Collective Action in
Tech's article on the announcement, which explains why googlers have
formed a "non-contract union" that does not yet have official recognition.

https://collectiveaction.tech/2021/the-abcs-of-googles-new-union/

"Non-contract unions embody the idea that worker power does not come
from legal processes, but rather through building power through solidarity."

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🎬 The Data Detective

Publishing works on long schedules, which means that long-planned books
can be overtaken by events...like covid.

2020 was tough for those of us with books in trail, especially
nonfiction. But for a few lucky writers, covid imparted a terrible
salience to their books.

One such writer is Tim Harford, host of BBC Radio 4's More or less,
which is hands-down the greatest statistical literacy program in the
world, using the numbers in each week's headlines to impart statistical
lessons and render the news in perspective.

Harford's latest book is THE DATA DETECTIVE (published as HOW TO MAKE
THE WORLD ADD UP in the UK), which should really have been entitled HOW
TO TRUTH WITH STATISTICS.

https://timharford.com/books/datadetective/

You've likely heard of Darrell Huff's 1954 classic HOW TO LIE WITH
STATISTICS, a classic, accessible guide to statistical malpractice in
service to pushing an agenda. What I didn't know (until I heard Harford
discourse on it) was that Huff himself had an ulterior motive.

Huff was a shill for the tobacco industry, which, in 1954, was
deliberately muddying the waters about the link between cancer and
smoking. Huff's book isn't just a guide to statistical malpractice -
it's a broadside against cancer science.

https://timharford.com/2020/09/statistics-lies-and-the-virus-five-lessons-from-a-pandemic/

(Huff's followup volume, HOW TO LIE WITH CANCER STATISTICS, was never
published)

Huff and his paymasters at Big Tobacco created the scientific doubt
playbook - a system that weaponizes critical thinking by demonizing
inconvenient science as junk science.

Superficially, Harford's work - especially More or Less - is a critique
of bad stats (certainly, it's grimly fun to listen to Harford and his
colleagues reveal the bad math behind the UK government's covid spin),
but as this book demonstrates, there's more going on there.

What Harford and More or Less strive for isn't merely debunking - it's
discovering truth. His brand of statistical sleuthing isn't merely a
critique, it's a fact-finding mission, a campaign to find out, to the
greatest possible extent, what is actually happening.

That's where Harford and Huff's approaches diverge. Huff's book is a
sharp critical toolsuite, but it's also a counsel of despair. Huff tells
you how to lie with statistics - but he never tells you how to use
statistics to discover the truth.

To read Huff - and his successors in various denial and doubt movements
- is to conclude that the world is unknowable. It is nihilism packaged
up as mathematics.

Enter THE DATA DETECTIVE: a book about statistical best practice AND
malpractice.

DATA DETECTIVE proffers ten rules for getting stats right:

I. Vaccinate yourself against motivated reasoning by examining your
emotional reaction to any statistical finding; use this check-in to
adjust your intuition about whether a claim is true or false

II. Neither the quantitative statistical picture ("bird's eye view") nor
the qualitative lived experience ("worm's eye view") is sufficient: to
understand a stat, you need both

III. Check carefully to determine what a statistical label refers to
(for example, in stories about links between "violent behavior and
violent video games," how are "violent behavior" and "violent games"
defined?)

IV. Get "comparisons and context" - numbers with a lot of zeroes after
them *sound* big, but are they? For example, if a bridge will cost $10m
to build, is that an expensive bridge, or a cheap one?

V. Understand survivor bias: if someone tells you that "every successful
business does X," find out whether every failed business also does X.

VI. Investigate statistical measurements for what's *not* being measured
- are mortality stats broken out by age? Sex? Was a study conducted on a
representative random sample, or just a bunch of grad students whose
prof ordered them to fill in a survey?

VII. Theory-free machine-learning algorithms have specific, pernicious,
and possibly irredeemable failure modes. Between bad training data,
spurious correlations, and opacity, they are a source of continuous
mischief.

VIII. Understand the "bedrock statistics" - censuses and other
important, widely relied-upon measures, generally produced by
governments, and defend the statisticians who produce them from
political interference and retaliation.

IX. Data visualization is a powerful tool for illuminating the meaning
of data, but also for convincing (and misleading) people. Learn to parse
visualizations and to spot their implicit arguments.

X. Curiousity (and its correlate, humility about the things you think
you know) is the best tonic against being deceived - by others, or yourself.

Harford is a gifted science communicator, a wonderful and sprightly
writer. He's spent many years teaching millions of people to consume
statistics critically - but with this book, he's doing something nobler:

He's teaching us to consume statistics *wisely*.

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🎬 Damon Knight's Why Do Birds is back

In the last days of 2018, my family rode our bikes over the Iliad
Bookshop, a treasure of a local bookstore. There I spotted an impeccable
first edition hardcover of one of my all-time favorite novels, Damon
Knight's 1992 WHY DO BIRDS? I bought it on the spot.

Three hours later, I'd re-read it and posted a review. It was every bit
as fantastic as I remembered:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/12/28/why-do-birds-damon-knights-amazing-underappreciated-science-fiction-novel-about-putting-all-of-humanity-in-a-box/

In 2002, a mysterious man is arrested for illegally occupying a hotel
room: he says his name is Ed Stone, and that he was kidnapped by aliens
from the same hotel room in 1931 and has just been returned to Earth,
not having aged a day.

The aliens have told him that Earth will be destroyed in 12 years and
that before then, the entire human race has to put itself in a giant box
(presumably for transport to somewhere else, though Ed is a little shaky
on the details).

To help Ed with this task, the aliens have given him a ring that makes
anyone who touches it fill with overwhelming good feelings for him and a
desire to help him.

Knight was an absurdist of the first order, a gifted author whose
economy and humor rival the likes of Kurt Vonnegut. Why Do Birds was his
penultimate novel, and I haven’t read it in more than 20 years, but I
have never forgotten key details.

There’s a great scene straight out of The Space Merchants where
marketing executives for The Cube Project discuss how they will float
rumors that poor people will not be allowed in The Cube, in order to
spark a mass movement demanding entry into the giant box.

Then there’s the scene where they figure out the rate at which humanity
will be reproducing itself as it is marshalled into great loading docks
for suspended animation and insertion into The Cube).

There are more laugh aloud moments galore in this, but also some really
fantastic, first-rate technical speculation, and wry political
commentary, and satirical pokes at the “golden age” of science fiction
pulps.

It’s not like any novel you’ve ever read, and it blends much of what was
wonderful about the early years of science fiction with a literary
sophistication that came from a distinguished writer at the peak of his
powers.

Knight founded the Science Fiction Writers of America and its
"Grandmaster" prize is named for him - a fitting tribute, given the
generations of writers he mentored along with Kate Wilhelm during the
decades they ran the Clarion Writers Workshop (he was one of my
teachers, and a friend).

When I posted my review, WHY DO BIRDS was technically still in print,
with paperback copies available at normal retail price on Amazon. But
within minutes, those copies had sold out and the pricing bots had
driven the cost of used books up to $75 and more.

They eventually stabilized, but, more importantly, there's new edition
of the book, from Reanimus Press:

https://reanimus.com/store/?i=1679

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🎬 Endorsing the Forward 43 slate

Hey, Los Angeles comrades! It's time to elect our delegates for District
43, and there's a slate of excellent, progressive DSA activists running
for the spot: Forward 43.

https://www.forward43.com/

Forward 43's platform treats housing, education and healthcare as human
rights. I won't be a US citizen until later this year, but if I could
vote for them, I would!

I wholeheartedly endorse Forward 43.

You can get your ballot here:

https://ademelections.com/

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🎬 This day in history

#5yrsago Thomas Piketty on Thomas Piketty
https://crookedtimber.org/2016/01/04/capital-predistribution-and-redistribution/

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🎬 Colophon

Today's top sources: Ken Snider (https://twitter.com/orenwolf), Slashdot
(https://slashdot.org/), Margo Rowder (https://twitter.com/margorowder).

Currently writing: My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel
about truth and reconciliation. Dec 16th's progress: 522 words (94687
total).

Currently reading: Analogia by George Dyson.

Latest podcast: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 26)
https://craphound.com/news/2020/12/14/someone-comes-to-town-someone-leaves-town-part-26/

Upcoming appearances:

* Evening with William Gibson, Jan 25,
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/william-gibson-cory-doctorow-agency-tickets-132831910821

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

Recent appearances:

* 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

* 2020 Beaverbrook Lectures:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y66r57bGG5w

* Bibliotherapy/Shelf Healing:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1509671/6580831

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

* "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.

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


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