[Plura-list] Mashapedia; The City We Became; Crowdsourcing a list of bad cops; Censorship, Parler and antitrust

[Cory Doctorow]

Today's links

* Mashapedia: A third-party glossary of the technical concepts from
Attack Surface.

* The City We Became: Jemisin relitigates Jacobs v Moses, with Lovecraft
refereeing.

* Crowdsourcing a list of bad cops: Who's on the Brady List?

* Censorship, Parler and antitrust: Just because it doesn't violate the
First Amendment...

* This day in history: 2006, 2016, 2020

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🥫 Mashapedia

Well this is pretty terrific: Pavel Anni was so taken with my 2020 novel
ATTACK SURFACE (the third Little Brother novel) that he's created
"Mashapedia," a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the real world
technologies in the tale.

https://pavelanni.github.io/attack-surface-tech/attack-surface-tech.html

Pavel is both comprehensive and comprehensible, with short definitions
and links for the mundane (MIT Media Lab, EL wire, PGP) to the exotic
(binary transparency, reverse shells, adversarial preturbation).

When I was an adolescent, my friend group traded secret knowledge as a
kind of social currency - tricks for getting free payphone calls, or
doubling the capacity of a floppy disc, or calling the White House
switchboard.

I doted on books that promised more of the same: Paladin Press and Amok
Catalog titles, Steal This Book, the Anarchist Cookbook, the Whole Earth
Review and the Whole Earth Catalog.

But when I sat down in 2006 to write the first Little Brother book, I
realized that facts were now cheap - anything could be discovered with a
single search. The thing in short supply now was search terms - knowing
what to search *for*.

As John Ciardi wrote,

The old crow is getting slow;
the young crow is not.
Of what the young crow does not know,
the old crow knows a lot.

The young crow flies above, below,
and rings around the slow old crow.
What does the fast young crow not know?
WHERE TO GO.

So I set out to write a book of realistic scenarios, dramatizing what
tech COULD do, on the assumption that readers would glean those
all-important search-terms from the tale, and that this could launch
them on a voyage of discovery.

That's the ethic I've stuck with through all three novels and the short
stories in the series. It seems to have worked. Anni's Mashapedia is the
apotheosis of that plan: a comprehensive set of search terms
masquerading as a glossary.

Anni's hosted Mashapedia on Github, and you can amend, extend or contest
his definitions by opening an issue in the repo. What a delight!

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🥫 The City We Became

Macarthur fellow and Hugo-award-winner NK Jemisin's 2019 book "The City
We Became" is both a fantastic contemporary fantasy novel and a
scorching commentary on the infantile nature of the racist dogma of HP
Lovecraft and his ilk.

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/n-k-jemisin/the-city-we-became/9780316509855/

It's a quest novel about a group of New Yorkers who awaken one day to
discover that they are mystical avatars of the city, which has awakened
and been reborn as a kind of powerful colony organism.

There's an avatar for each of the five boroughs, plus a "primary" who
represents the city as a whole. As with all births, this one is somewhat
traumatic - but NYC's birth is uniquely fraught.

First, the five boroughs must find one another and connect with the primary.

But they must do all this while under sustained assault from a mystical,
transdimensional, Lovecraftian horror, a great adversary to all of our
Earth's living cities - but an adversary that had been believed to be
powerless against cities after their births.

The enemy manifests as a Karen, a white woman clad all in white,
dogwhistling racist tropes, summoning police, weaponizing vast fortunes
to evict its enemies or distort their culture. It is attended by
harbingers - human beings infected with fluttering white tentacles.

The city's avatars are a BIPOC, queer, all-ages group, spiky and
disunified, forced to resolve their differences as they quest for one
another and battle the adversary in a race to save the city - and
ultimately, our universe - from its eldritch horrors.

As Lovecraft pastiches go, this is pretty fucking great stuff. Jemisin
invokes Lovecraft's purple prose and vivid imagery to evince the real
frisson of his horror, while simultaneously puncturing Lovcraft's
noxious racism, which famously manifested in his disgust for cities.

As with Matt Ruff's 2016 novel LOVECRAFT COUNTRY, Jemisin does fantastic
work in puncturing Lovecraft's atavistic horror of The Other by holding
the mirror to it - inviting the reader to empathize with the object of
that reflexive fear and disgust.

https://memex.craphound.com/2016/02/16/matt-ruffs-lovecraft-country-where-the-horror-is-racism-not-racist/

But THE CITY WE BECAME represents an advance on LOVECRAFT COUNTRY in an
important regard: the way that it treats with the simplicity of the
conservative worldview and the complexity of the real world.

Many have observed that onservativism's nostalgia for "simpler times" is
really a yearning for childhood: the reason life was simpler when you
were a child isn't because times were simpler - it's because you were a
child, sheltered from life's complexities by your parents.

Hence conservativism's daddy issues, its yearning for strongmen who'll
make the nation great through discipline, ordering and control.

In this telling, xenophobia is just the adult version of a toddler's
unwillingness to eat their peas if they touch the mashed potatoes.

An infantile, irrational fussiness that, in turn, is antithetical to
cities - the sprawling, organic, self-organizing, diverse, chaotic
places where ideas and languages and peoples and smells and tastes all
rub up against each other.

Jemisin's mythical battle of the messy city and the Lovecraftian
adversary's desire for sterile order is a kind of eldritch dramatization
of the fight between Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs - a fight that goes
all the way back to Plato.

Plato's Republic, after all, is the ultimate conservative work - the
belief that people are born to virtue, and that virtue determines who is
fit to rule and who must be ruled over because they cannot govern
themselves.

Plato even presaged Lovecraft's disgust with complex polyrhythms
("maddening drums"), decrying "broken rhythms" for their potential to
disorder the listener's self-control - a theme that repeats in Jemisin's
book as the avatar of Brooklyn spits weaponized rhymes.

An obsession with neatness, categories, purity and hierarchy are the
hallmark of both toddlers and conservatives, and Jemisin reveals that
Lovecraft's squamous, rugose revulsions are just three grossed-out
toddlers in a trenchcoat throwing their carrots on the floor.

There's many ways to carve our ideological divisions right now. One of
the most powerful fracture lines is simplicity-vs-complexity - the need
to bleach everything to sterility versus the understanding that complex,
thriving, diverse systems are necessary to our survival.

Like all the best "urban fantasy," THE CITY WE BECAME is a love-hymn to
cities themselves as living climax systems. More than that, Jemisin
wields her city against the forces of infantile reaction.

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🥫 Crowdsourcing a list of bad cops

In 1963, SCOTUS ruled in Brady v Maryland. They held that when
prosecutors called on police officers to testify against a defendant,
the prosecutors had a legal duty to inform defendants about the
officers' records of misconduct and false testimony.

Since then, prosecutors have created "Brady lists" of cops who can't be
trusted to take the stand. They avoid cases that rely on these officers'
testimony, or seek out alternate witnesses to call. Brady lists have
done much to advance the right to a fair trial in America.

Brady lists are secret, and they shouldn't be. An officer on their local
prosecutors' Brady list is an officer whom those prosecutors believe to
be a corrupt liar. Yes, that officer is unlikely to be called upon to
testify against you, but they still wield enormous power.

If a Brady-listed officer maims or kills you, you (or your relatives)
may never find out that local prosecutors have officially (but secretly)
determined that officer to be so corrupt that they can't be trusted not
to perjure themselves.

Enter PINAC, the Photography Is Not a Crime project, which has been
fighting for transparency in law enforcement and government for many
years. PINAC's latest project is "a national database of bad cops" who
appear on Brady lists.

https://newsmaven.io/pinacnews/eye-on-government/pinac-s-goal-for-2021-is-to-build-a-public-database-of-bad-cops-from-brady-lists-eF2ig02VQU-o7KxDLK5sAQ

PINAC is producing instructional videos to train people to file freedom
of information requests with their local governments to extract the
contents of Brady lists. These crowdsourced records will be pooled in a
searchable database.

PINAC just completed the "fiscal sponsorship" process that allows them
to collect tax-deductible donations through a third party. They're
fundraising to pay for the Brady project.

https://payorportal.revopay.com/index.php/USCenturyBank/properties/pinacnewsinc2/qpay


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🥫 Censorship, Parler and antitrust

As Parler disappears from the Android and Ios app stores and faces being
kicked off of Amazon's (and other) clouds, people who worry about
monopolized corporate control over speech are divided over What It Means.

There's an obvious, trivial point to be made here: Twitter, Apple and
Google are private companies. When they remove speech on the basis of
its content, it's censorship, but it's not *government* censorship. It
doesn't violate the First Amendment.

And yes, of course it's censorship. They have made a decision about the
type and quality of speech they'll permit, and they enforce that
decision using the economic, legal and technical tools at their disposal.

If I invited you to my house for dinner and said, "Just so you know, no
one is allowed to talk about racism at the table," it would be
censorship. If I said "no one is allowed to say racist things at the
table," it would also be censorship.

I censor my daughter when I tell her not to swear. I censor other
Twitter users when I hide their replies to my posts. I censor commenters
on my blog when I delete their replies.

Dress is up as "content removal" or "moderation" if you'd like, but it's
obviously censorship.

That's fine. Different social spaces have different rules and norms. I
disagree with some censorship and support other censorship. Some speech
is illegal (nonconsensual pornography, specific incitements to violence,
child sex abuse material) and the government censors it.

Other speech is distasteful or hateful (slurs, insults) and the
proprietors of different speech forums censor it. This
legal-but-distasteful speech is a mushy, amorphous category.

I'm totally OK with hilarious dunks on the insurrectionists who stormed
the capitol. Tell jokes about Holocaust victims and I'll throw you out
of my house or block you.

And when I do, you can go to your house and tell Holocaust jokes.

I'm not gonna lie. I don't like the idea of anyone telling Holocaust
jokes anywhere. Or rape jokes. Or racist jokes. But I have made my peace
with the fact that there are private spaces where that will happen.

I condemn those spaces and their proprietors, but I don't want them to
be outlawed.

Which brings me back to Parler. It's true that no one violates the First
Amendment (let alone CDA 230) (get serious) when Parler is removed from
app stores or kicked off a cloud.

But we have a duopoly of mobile platforms, an oligopoly of cloud
providers, a small conspiracy of payment processors. Their choices about
who make speak are hugely consequential, and concerted effort by all of
them could make some points of view effectively vanish.

This market concentration didn't occur in a vacuum. These vital sectors
of the digital economy became as concentrated as they are due to four
decades of shameful, bipartisan neglect of antitrust law.

And while failing to enforce antitrust law doesn't violate the First
Amendment, it can still lead to government sanctioned incursions on speech.

The remedy for this isn't forcing the platforms to carry objectionable
speech.

The remedy is enforcing antitrust so that the censorship policies of two
app stores don't carry the force of law; and it's ending the laws
(copyright, cybersecurity, etc) that allow these companies to control
who can install what on their devices.

https://locusmag.com/2020/01/cory-doctorow-inaction-is-a-form-of-action/

I got into a good discussion of this on a private mailing list this
morning and then I adapted them and published them in the public "State
of the World 2021" discussion on The WELL.

https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/510/State-of-the-World-2021-page04.html#post82

There are three posts: the first deals with Apple and Google's
insistence that they removed Parler because it lacked an effective
hate-speech filter. Given that there is no such thing as an effective
hate-speech filter, this is obvious bullshit.

The second addresses the fundamental problems of moderation at scale,
where you are entrusting a large number of employees to enforce policies
against "hate speech."

https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/510/State-of-the-World-2021-page04.html#post83

The biggest problem here is that "almost-hate-speech" is emotionally
equivalent to "hate speech" for the people it's directed at. If tech
companies specify hate speech, trolls will deploy almost-hate-speech
(and goad their targets into crossing the line, then narc them out).

And if tech companies tell moderators to nuke bad speech without
defining it, the mods will make stupid, terrible mistakes and users will
be thrown into the meat-grinder of the stupid, terrible banhammer
appeals process.

The final post asks what Apple and Google should do about Parler?

https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/510/State-of-the-World-2021-page04.html#post84

They should remove it, and tell users, "We removed Parler because we
think it is a politically odious attempt to foment violence. Our
judgment is subjective and may be wielded against others in future. If
you don't like our judgment, you shouldn't use our app store."

I'm 100% OK with that: first, because it is honest; and second, because
it invites the question, "How do we switch app stores?"

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🥫 This day in history

#15yrsago Hollywood’s Canadian politician: history of a sellout
https://web.archive.org/web/20060209050302/http://www.copyrightwatch.ca/?p=22

#5yrsago Now that they know the NSA is spying on them, Congress is
really worried about domestic surveillance
https://craphound.com/news/2020/12/14/someone-comes-to-town-someone-leaves-town-part-26/

-tickets-132831910821">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/

Upcoming appearances:

* What if the future of our public lives online looked like _____?
(panel at New_ Public), Jan 13,
https://newpublic.org/festival/event/783/all-star-world-cafe-what-if-the-future-of-our-public-lives-online-looked-like

* Keynote for linux.conf.au, Jan 22 (US) 23 (Australia)
https://linux.conf.au/schedule/

* 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
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basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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