[Plura-list] How to leak a Zoom meeting; Pandemics and peak indifference; Planet Money's free Great Gatsby audiobook

[Cory Doctorow]

Today's links

* How to leak a Zoom meeting: Watermarks, tile randomization, and more.

* Pandemics and peak indifference: Squandering history's most expensive
lessons.

* Planet Money's free Great Gatsby audiobook: The public domain in action.

* Honor MLK day with the Internet Archive: A fabulous, open access trove.

* Someone Comes to Town, Part 28: This week's podcast installment
carries on my friendly dispute with Manuel Castells.

* Facebook's community standards: JWZ's 0-follower, 0-post FB account
was suspended.

* This day in history: 2001, 2006, 2011, 2015, 2020

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

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🎇 How to leak a Zoom meeting

With the world in lockdown, most "white-collar" crime (AKA
"world-destroying corruption and looting") now takes place over Zoom. If
you witness such a crime, you might be tempted to record the meeting and
leak it to a journalist.

But leaking Zoom recordings is seriously fraught because they are full
of personally identifying details. Some of these are "traitor-tracing"
mechanisms, others are intrinsic to Zoom, and still others come from
your end of the recording.

https://theintercept.com/2021/01/18/leak-zoom-meeting/

Nikita Mazurov's guide to anonymizing Zoom videos for The Intercept
tackles each of these classes of identifiers.

Traitor-tracing: Zoom meeting hosts have the option to add visual and
audio watermarks to their videos.

The visual ones are perceptible - displaying your name/email on the
screen so that it will be present in any video-grab - but the audio
watermarks are a series of ultrasound chirps with unique identifiers in
them.

It's not clear where the audio watermark is inserted; Marzurov
hypothesizes that the ultrasonic watermarks are inserted by your copy of
the Zoom client, so using an external recording tool might bypass them.

Another important identifier in Zoom recordings is the arrangement of
the other participants; this is different for every viewer.

Any recording will reveal information that could identify the leaker:
not just the user's OS, but also pop-up alerts about emails and messages.

Source protection with Zoom captures is really hard - but that's all the
more reason for this discussion to take place in earnest.

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🎇 Pandemics and peak indifference

When I think about our historical, profound shifts in attitude and
discourse, the model I apply is "peak indifference."

Say you have real, existential problem. More often than not, these are
systemic problems, and those are the hardest problems.

https://locusmag.com/2016/07/cory-doctorow-peak-indifference/

Not just because systemic problems involve collective action (you can't
recycle your way out of climate change), but because the
cause-and-effect relationships of systemic problems can't be easily
known, so it's hard to know what you need to do to avert the problem.

Systemic problems pose a third difficulty: they enrich small minorities,
and those minorities can exploit causal ambiguity to deliberately sow
doubt.

To make that more concrete: think about cancer-tobacco denial.

Not everyone who smokes gets cancer. When it does give you cancer, the
tumor comes years after the puff that damages your genes. There's lots
of social pressure to smoke, and getting your friends to quit is even
harder than quitting yourself.

And on top of all of it, the tobacco industry made tons of money from
giving us cancer, and they could use some of that to fund
doubt-merchants who deliberately worsened the difficulty in linking
smoking and cancer.

https://timharford.com/2015/04/cigarettes-damn-cigarettes-and-statistics/

But denial doesn't make problems disappear - it just incurs policy debt,
and the interest on that debt is human suffering. Climate inaction,
tobacco inaction, and inequality inaction only delay the day of
reckoning, and make it worse when it arrives.

That's where peak denial comes in. Over time, the mounting harms from
policy debt make it harder and harder to deny the problem, At a certain
point - long before we take action - the number of people who deny the
problem starts to decline.

This happens naturally, without any need for activist urging. The
problem is that the natural peak denial point is often several steps
beyond the point of no return. And that's when denial slides into nihilism:

Here's what nihilism looks like:

"Well, I guess these things *did* give me stage 4 lung cancer after all.
No point in quitting now."

or

"You were right, rhino populations are in danger! But since there's only
one left, let's find out what he tastes like?"

That's why we can't wait for peak denial to arise on its own, why we
must hasten its arrival - because we want people to engage with systemic
problems *before* the point of no return.

That's where storytelling comes in.

Stories are a fuggly hack, an illusion played on our empathy, wherein
we're fooled into caring about the literally inconsequential fate of
made-up people (your breakfast yogurt's death was more tragic than Romeo
and Juliet's, for it was once alive).

https://locusmag.com/2014/11/cory-doctorow-stories-are-a-fuggly-hack/

But still, made up stories that make vivid and visceral the consequences
of inaction can spur us into action, can create a vocabulary for
discussing the lived experience of people in a future that has not yet
arrived.

Even better than stories, though, are *histories*, the real stories of
real people who really suffered through real experiences comparable to
those that we face on our horizon. Hence "those who forget history are
doomed to repeat it."

We're very good at forgetting history. The arrival of the covid pandemic
was filled with stories of the dimly remembered 1918 influenza pandemic.
Our failure to heed those warnings triggered tales of its brutal second
wave the following winter.

Herp derp.

Starting in 1968, successive US presidents began to dismantle
Glass-Steigel, a corrective put in place after a horrendous finance
sector collapse that triggered the Great Depression and WWII. Not one
president heeded historians' warnings about the consequences.

Derp.

Dismantling the checks on finance led to successive, worsening crises
followed by crushing austerity a deepening inequality. Historical
warnings about how this cycle ends with guillotines and Reichstag fires
were ignored.

Derp derp derp.

The ideology of finance is a subset of right-wing thought, defined by
Corey Robin (in "The Reactionary Mind") as the belief that some people
are born to rule, while the rest are born to be ruled over.

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-reactionary-mind-9780190692001

This belief has many guises (Dominionism, imperialism, racism,
monarchism, fascism, libertarianism) but they all boil down to one
thing: eugenics.

It's one thing to believe that markets are meritocratic during a moment
of dynamism, when the low-born can rise to riches.

But when their offspring pull up the ladder and social mobility halts,
"meritocracy" becomes hereditary: markets elevate the best people, and
the best people are all descended from the wealthy, so the wealthy must
be of better stock (cue Trump and his talk of "good blood").

Eugenics was once a mainstream American doctrine, and American
eugenicists inspired Nazi "race science." But after the Holocaust,
eugenics fell into disrepute and we dropped it down the same memory hole
that the 1918 flu disappeared into.

But eugenics made a comeback under another guise: the "human capital
theory," which holds that markets reward us in proportion to our value
to society, and thus the CEO is paid 10,000x more than the janitor
because the CEO provides 10,000x more value to the human project.

Eugenics isn't just repugnant, it's also wrong. To understand why, you
have to understand how desirable traits are social, not isolated in
individuals.

Blair Fix's essay on the link between eugenics and human capitol theory
is a must-read:

https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2021/01/14/the-rise-of-human-capital-theory/

By way of illustration, Fix describes geneticist William Muir's
experiments with improving chicken egg-production through artificial
selection, in which he only bred the best layers. The result? A
disaster. Egg-laying plummeted.

It plummeted because laying isn't an isolated trait. Chickens that
produced the most eggs did so by bullying other chickens out of *their*
feed and resources. Selecting for laying selected for bullying and
aggression and led to endless chicken-fights and no eggs.

When Muir bred another flock of chickens based on a *group*'s ability to
lay, *then* he got his eggs. Egg-laying is a social process.

This story will be familiar to anyone who's worked in a stack-ranked
software development shop.

Software managers have long noted that some coders can turn in 10X or
even 100X more code than their median colleagues. But attempts to build
"superstar" teams that fired all the median programmers end in chaos and
destruction.

If your 100X programmer is such a dick that no one can work with them,
then their aptitude is irrelevant - you'll never ship.

I assume there are analogies to this in the sporting world, but I am
vastly unqualified to discuss sports of any kind.

Despite the bankruptcy of human capital theory, the systemic dangers it
posed, and the obvious fact that it was just eugenics dressed up as
economics, the theory festered for decades, poisoning our world.

The C-suites of every major company are filled with hens whose
egg-laying prowess is the result of their suppression of their peers'
efficacy - while others whose social integration make them far more
productive are relegated to worse jobs or forced out altogether.

The lockdown provoked squeals of outrage from the world's wealthiest
people, who insisted that the factories be re-opened. As the slogan of
the day went, "If a billionaire needs you to go to work to maintain his
fortune, then you are the source of that fortune - not him."

We can't afford to be indifferent to any of our systemic problems any
more: not climate science, nor inequality, nor monopoly, nor the lurking
eugenics that justifies it all.

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🎇 Planet Money's free Great Gatsby audiobook

After the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Act extended copyright by 20 years,
putting existing public domain works back into copyright, we endured a
two-decade-long public domain drought. That ended in 2018, and since
then, each Jan 1 is a new public domain day.

This year's public domain day was a doozy, with a flood of works from
the 1925 entering the public domain, including vast swathes of the
Harlem Rernaissance and F Scott Fitzgerald's classic Gilded
Age/coming-of-age novel The Great Gatsby.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/16/fraught-superpowers/#public-domain-day

It's only been weeks and yet there have already been a slew of Gatsby
remixes: whimsical, serious, trenchant. You'd be hard pressed to find a
better fit for our day - a tale of grifting and impending collapse
amidst grotesque inequality.

https://bnet.substack.com/p/the-greater-gatsby

These remixes are best savored with the taste of the original Gastby
still in your mouth. For that, I recommend turning to NPR's Planet Money
free reading of the entire novel, with each host reading a chapter.

https://www.npr.org/2021/01/14/956800308/the-great-gatsby

Total running-time is 4h, 28m. Here's a direct link to the MP3:

https://edge2.pod.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/pmoney/2021/01/20210115_pmoney_pmpod1058.mp3/

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🎇 Honor MLK day with the Internet Archive

MLK Day isn't just an opportunity to remember Dr King; it's also a
moment to contest his legacy - to remember him for who he was, a radical
anti-capitalist who believed that racism was a tool first and foremost
for class oppression.

https://theintercept.com/2016/01/18/martin-luther-king-jr-celebrations-overlook-his-critiques-of-capitalism-and-militarism/

Thankfully, we have a wealth of primary and secondary King material
online and open access, especially in the Internet Archive.

Start with 20 minutes' worth of the March on Washington, courtesy of the
National Archive.

https://archive.org/details/gov.archives.arc.49737

Then King's Hofstra University commencement speech:

https://archive.org/details/podcast_mapping-african-american-p_martin-luther-king-jr-commenc_1000090058488

The Archive has thousands of books about King:

https://archive.org/search.php?query=martin+luther+king&and%5B%5D=mediatype%3A%22texts%22

A collection of his speeches:

https://archive.org/search.php?query=martin+luther+king&and%5B%5D=mediatype%3A%22texts%22&and%5B%5D=subject%3A%22Speeches%2C%20addresses%2C%20etc.%2C%20American%22

Books for kids:

https://archive.org/search.php?query=martin+luther+king&and%5B%5D=mediatype%3A%22texts%22&and%5B%5D=subject%3A%22King%2C%20Martin%20Luther%2C%20Jr.%2C%201929-1968%20--%20Juvenile%20literature%22

Detroit's Marygrove College shut its doors in 2019, and the contents of
its Geschke Library were entrusted to the Internet Archive: 70,000 books
and 3,000 journals, many related to King, scanned and online:

https://archive.org/details/marygrovecollege?&and%5B%5D=subject%3A%22King%2C%20Martin%20Luther%2C%20Jr.%2C%201929-1968%22

The #1000blackgirls campaign produced an extensive reading list for
kids, books featuring Black girls as protagonists. The ebooks are
available for checkout to anyone who gets a free Internet Archive
library card:

https://archive.org/details/1000blackgirlbooks

The Zora Canon is "a collection of the 100 most prominent books written
by African American women," also available for check-out as ebooks from
your local library and the Internet Archive's collection.

https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360044159771-100-Great-Books-by-Black-Women-The-Zora-Canon

You and your kids can enjoy this bibliography of books about racial
justice for children, with age ratings:

https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360044469471-Racial-Equality-Books-for-Kids

Here's a list of 47 Black-owned bookstores where you can buy physical
copies of all these books for your home:

https://ew.com/books/black-owned-bookstores-to-support/

This wealth of open-access MLK-related material came about as the result
of an intense, two-decade struggle over King's words. 15 years ago, you
couldn't get "I have a dream" online, but you could hear it in a car
commercial.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/14/AR2006011400980.html

And even with all this material available for everyone to read, think
about, debate and be inspired by, the history of the Civil Rights
movement is still only preserved in fragments.

If you have some of those fragments in your possession, the Internet
Archive will digitize, preserve and provide access to them for free,
forever, for everyone.

https://blog.archive.org/2021/01/05/downsizing-in-2021-donate-your-discarded-books-and-media-to-the-internet-archive/

Modern copyright began in the late 19th century, when Victor Hugo's
advocacy led to the creation of the Berne Convention, a global treaty
that is now part of all major trade deals, such as the WTO agreement.

Hugo's legacy has been distorted for ideological purposes - just as
King's has been. Today, we are told only that King believed in
nonviolence, while his calls for dismantling capitalism are conveniently
erased.

And we are likewise told that Hugo concerned himself with how authors'
descendants would steer their legacy - but no one mentions that Hugo was
intensely suspcious of the actual, biological descendants of authors.

Hugo thought children and grandchildren were not especially well-placed
to understand their forebears' significance in history and thought and
liable to flog off their inherited exclusive rights to grasping rentiers.

The "descendants" Hugo sought to protect were the ideological
descendants of great writers: the people who had been inspired by their
ideas and wanted to carry them forward.

King had far more to say than simply deploring violence. He was a
towering, radical, revolutionary figure. If we are to defend his legacy,
we must start by rejecting the erasure of his political and economic
program.

The treasure trove of King's work that we can access today - and every
day - are the raw materials for carrying out his legacy and his program:
for changing our society into a fundamentally more just, kind and
sustainable one.

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🎇 Someone Comes to Town, Part 28

This week on my podcast: part 28 of my serialized reading of "Someone
Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town," my 2006 novel that Gene Wolfe
called "a glorious book unlike any book you’ve ever read."

https://craphound.com/news/2021/01/18/someone-comes-to-town-someone-leaves-town-part-28/

You can catch up on the other installments here:

https://craphound.com/podcast/?s=%22someone%20comes%22

and subscribe to my podcast feed here:

https://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

Here's a direct link to the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the Internet
Archive; they'll host your stuff for free, forever, too!):

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_374/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_374_-_Someone_Comes_to_Town_Someone_Leaves_Town_028.mp3

A note about today's instalment: it features an argument about the
relative free speech afforded by internet-based communications versus
earlier technologies like phones. The argument isn't just very relevant
to today's deplatforming debate, it also has long roots.

That argument is basically a rehash of some intense discussions I had
with Manuel Castells when we were both fellows at USC's Annenberg
Center, leavened with citations from Howard Rheingold's classic SMART MOBS.

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🎇 Facebook's community standards

Amid the calls from all corners for Facebook and other social media
giants to do more moderation, let's take a moment to review these
companies' manifest unfitness to moderate at all.

Exhibit A: Jamie Zawinkski has a Facebook account with "zero friends,
zero posts, zero photos, and has made zero comments in the last 4+
years" (he uses it to manage accounts related to his business, the DNA
Lounge).

Facebook just suspended the account for "violating community standards."

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2021/01/apparently-i-have-violated-facebooks-community-standards/

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🎇 This day in history

#20yrsago Simson Garfinkel changes his tune about Java
https://web.archive.org/web/20010126064000/https://www.salon.com/tech/col/garf/2001/01/18/java_response/print.html

#15yrsago Iraq invasion as a text-adventure
https://www.defectiveyeti.com/archives/001561.html

#15yrsago Escape Pod podcast of "Craphound"
https://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/1/7/3/173207514d186206/EP037_Craphound.mp3?c_id=1647114&cs_id=1647114&expiration=1610901128&hwt=75df057eaf086fea450df06a59f9afad

#15yrsago Musician playing at Hollywood’s MP fundraiser owes success to
copying
https://web.archive.org/web/20080704112401/http://accordionguy.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2006/1/19/1714267.html

#15yrsago Hollywood’s MP caught lying on tape
https://web.archive.org/web/20061010121359/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1080

#10yrsago Among Others: extraordinary, magic story of science fiction as
a toolkit for taking apart the world
https://memex.craphound.com/2011/01/18/among-others-extraordinary-magic-story-of-science-fiction-as-a-toolkit-for-taking-apart-the-world/

#5yrsago Debullshitifying the “sleep science” industry: first up,
sleeplessness and obesity
https://askforevidence.org/articles/obesity-linked-to-not-getting-enough-sleep

#5yrsago Martin Luther King, socialist: “capitalism has outlived its
usefulness”
https://theintercept.com/2016/01/18/martin-luther-king-jr-celebrations-overlook-his-critiques-of-capitalism-and-militarism/

#5yrsago Reminder: Don’t put balls of tea leaves in your vagina
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/women-putting-herb-balls-vagina-detox-their-wombs-have-been-warned-dangers-a6814671.html

#1yrago Manhattan: a city of empty luxury condos and overflowing
homeless shelters
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/american-housing-has-gone-insane/605005/

#1yrago Brazilian authoritarian Bolsonaro fires his culture minister for
giving a speech plagiarized from Joseph Goebbels
https://theintercept.com/2020/01/18/bolsonaro-under-fire-dismisses-his-culture-minister-for-giving-a-nazi-speech-but-it-is-still-representative-of-brazils-governing-ethos/

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🎇 Colophon

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

Currently writing: My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel
about truth and reconciliation. Friday's progress: 516 words (99972 total).

Currently reading: Analogia by George Dyson.

Latest podcast: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 27)
https://craphound.com/news/2021/01/11/someone-comes-to-town-someone-leaves-town-part-27/

Upcoming appearances:

* 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

* 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

* "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.

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

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