[Plura-list] Stop saying "it's not censorship if it's not the government"; Trump's swamp gators find corporate refuge; and more!

[Cory Doctorow]

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Tomorrow night, I'll be helping William Gibson launch the paperback
edition of his novel AGENCY at a Strand Bookstore videoconference. Come
say hi!

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/william-gibson-cory-doctorow-agency-tickets-132831910821

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Today's links

* Stop saying "it's not censorship if it's not the government": I didn't
expect the Spanish Inquisition.

* Trump's swamp gators find corporate refuge: The Swamped project.

* This day in history: 2006, 2011, 2016, 2020

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

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👯‍♂️ Stop saying "it's not censorship if it's not the government"

If you think "It's not censorship unless the government does it," I want
to change your mind.

It's absolutely true that the First Amendment only prohibits government
action to suppress speech based on its content, but the First Amendment
is not the last word on censorship.

Here are some kinds of private speech-suppression that I think most of
us can agree are censorship: when the John Birch Society burned
mountains of rock records and novels - or when Tipper Gore's PMRC
pressured record stores to drop punk, metal and rap albums.

Or the Comics Code Authority, which signed up all comics publishers and
retailers to block comics if they contained anything unfit for small
children, which stunted American comics for generations while their
European counterparts created entire sophisticated genres.

Or MPAA ratings, in which a secret group of censors (falsely described
as frequently rotated, randomly selected parents - really they're
long-serving studio insiders) decides whether movies get NC-17 ratings
and thus be blocked from nearly every screen in the country.

(You can learn more about this from Kirby Dick's unmissable doc, "This
Film Is Not Yet Rated," which documents both how the MPAA misleads the
public about ratings, and uses them to block LGBTQ content)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Film_Is_Not_Yet_Rated

Do those feel like censorship to you? They do to me. They share a common
thread, too: monopoly. In each case, the number of retailers, producers,
distributors, etc is small enough that if they collude to block
something, it effectively vanishes.

Or the Inquisitions - which were not government censorship. The
Inquisitions undertaken by Church officials, who were not part of any
government - instead, they represented an unaccountable, transnational
authority that governments were largely powerless against.

Does that sound familiar? Our media, speech forums, and distribution
systems are all run by cartels and monopolists whom governments can't
even tax - forget regulating them.

The most consequential regulation of these industries is negative
regulation - a failure to block anticompetitive mergers and
market-cornering vertical monopolies.

When governments fail to block the monopolization of speech forums,
they're enabling censorship, just not in a way that violates the First
Amendment, so we have no recourse and no transparency and no right of
action when it happens.

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

If we only call something "censorship" when it involves state action,
then there's basically no such thing as internet censorship - not
because speech is never suppressed, but because under that theory the
First Amendment simply does not apply to the internet.

Social media is a duopoly. If neither will admit you, you can't use it.
So you start your own site! Cloud computing is also clustered into a
handful of companies (with AWS, a major military-intelligence
contractor, running >50% of that business).

If they block you, you'll need to host your own server. The majority of
data centers are also concentrated into a few hands, too. Oh, so are the
domain registrars. And the payment processors. Also the anti-DDoS
companies and CDNs. Search is run by one company.

How many companies need to collude to make it impossible for you to have
a detectable internet presence? It's less than 50. And really, since
losing any part of this stack can be a definitive blocker, it can be as
few as two companies (mobile apps), or even one (search).

You won't be completely unlocatable - the Inquisitons didn't seek to
snuff out every copy of banned works (indeed, they preserved many of
them in their private libraries!) and the PMRC, Comics Authority and
MPAA ratings board don't totally eliminate their targeted media.

But your speech will be marginalized and buried in ways that would be
totally illegal if this were the result of state action. Only this
speech is sidelined due to government *inaction*.

Ironically, the only corner of the networked world where the First
Amendment gets a look in is city-run broadband services - the same
services that conservatives who have newfound concerns about online
censorship deplore as "government intervention in the market."

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/17/turner-diaries-fanfic/#1a-fiber

40 years of antitrust malpractice created a situation in which
censorship is up, speech is perilous, and the First Amendment doesn't
apply in either case.

The answer is *not* to impose speech duties on private platforms.

"Fairness doctrines" are why the BBC spent years airing anti-vaxxers and
climate deniers every time they had a story about why you should get
vaccinated and vote for decarbonization.

Facebook and Twitter have demonstrated far worse editorial judgment than
Auntie.

The problem with the tech giants isn't just their bad judgment, it's how
consequential their mistakes are. Trying to improve the judgment of the
tech companies is a fool's errand, a project without precedent. No one's
ever convinced a monopolist to turn benevolent dictator.

If we can't stop the tech giants from making mistakes, at least we can
reduce the consequences of their errors by making them smaller. Block
mergers. Unwind mergers undertaken on false premises (like FB/IG/WA and
Google/YT/Ad/Doubleclick).

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/dont-believe-proven-liars-absolute-minimum-standard-prudence-merger-scrutiny

Force interoperability upon them as the EU's Digital Services Act and
the US ACCESS Act contemplate, then take away their right to block other
forms of interoperability:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

And for god's sake, stop talking about CDA 230 as an answer to any of
this. "You must moderate all your users" is a death sentence to anyone
who *doesn't* have an army of moderators - anyone who might challenge FB
and Twitter.

For Big Tech, a legal moderation duty is just an excuse to remove any
speech that anyone anywhere might complain about: "Sorry we removed your
anti-pipeline protest announcement, but we were worried we'd be sued if
we didn't."

When the government censors, it's "unconstitutional censorship," but
there are other forms of censorship that have always been with us and
that we should all be concerned about.

When it comes to communications tech, competition policy is speech policy.

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👯‍♂️ Trump's swamp gators find corporate refuge

Have you seen the stories about how Trump administration officials and
staffers for Ted Cruz are finding that no one in the private sector will
hire them because they are forever tainted by their former bosses'
disgraceful behavior?

They're bullshit.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/01/ted-cruzs-former-staff-disgusted-by-his-new-low-for-trump.html

The Swamped site from Little Sis is a crowdsourced list of Trump's
ugliest swamp-gators and the employers who put them in positions of
power and authority despite their complicity with a fascist would-be
dictator.

https://littlesis.org/swamped

On The American Prospect, Alexander Sammon provides highlights of the
swamp-to-industry pipeline.

Unsurprisingly, babykiller companies *love* Trump's gators. Jim Mattis?
Board member for General Dynamics. Andrea Thompson? Northrop Grumman. HR
McMaster? Zoom.

https://prospect.org/politics/as-the-revolving-door-turns-trump-staffers-corporate-jobs/

Rick Perry is back at Energy Transfer Partners, parleying his government
service into a plum role in energetically rendering the planet unfit for
human habitation.

Ryan Zinke's in fintech.

As punishment for his multitude of sins as the president's personal
attorney, Donald McGahn has been sentenced to the Wearing of the White
Shoes, threatening people on behalf of the clients of corporate law
powerhouse Jones Day.

Dina Powell's back at Goldman Sachs and Fiona Hill's back is nestled
snug at the Brookings Institute.

And lest we forget, the lying garbage-person Sean Spicer is a fellow at
Harvard, and used his clout to blackball the truth-telling hero Chelsea
Manning.

The swamp-to-industry pipeline was greased in the final hours of the
Trump regime, when Trump signed an executive order rescinding Obama's
rule that banned administration officials from immediately joining
lobbying firms.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/20/politics/trump-revokes-lobby-ban/index.html


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👯‍♂️ This day in history

#15yrsago A-Hole bill would make a secret technology into the law of the
land
https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2006/01/23/analog-hole-bill-would-impose-secret-law/

#15yrsago Hollywood’s MP loses the election — hit the road, Sam!
https://web.archive.org/web/20060116023614/https://www.cbc.ca/canadavotes/riding/175/

Stross and Doctorow’s “Appeals Court” free on Infinite Matrix
http://www.infinitematrix.net/stories/shorts/appeals_court.html

#15yrsago How William Gibson discovered science fiction
http://www.infinitematrix.net/faq/essays/gibson.html

#10yrsago Douglas Adams’ online encylopedia tries to buy itself back
from the BBC https://h2g2.com/entry/A80173361

#10yrsago Meet Obama’s new Solicitor General: the copyright industry’s
Donald Verrilli Jr
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/01/obama-nominates-former-riaa-lawyer-for-solicitor-general-spot/

#10yrsago Anti-capitalist rumba rave in a Spanish bank
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wv5dh8v7mDs

#10yrsago No one will sell sodium thiopental to American executioners
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jan/23/lethal-injection-sodium-thiopental-hospira

#10yrsago Comics Code Authority is dead
https://web.archive.org/web/20110125024419/http://www.newsarama.com/comics/archie-drops-CCA-in-february-110121.html

#5yrsago Disney’s prized theme-park no-fly zone means it can’t use
drones in its firework shows
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2016/01/22/disney-loved-its-no-fly-zone-until-it-wanted-to-fly-its-own-drones/

#1yrago Bipartisan consensus is emerging on reining in Big Tech
https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/23/21078903/podcast-house-antitrust-chairman-cicilline-tech-monopoly-vergecast

#1yrago London cops announce citywide facial recognition cameras
https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/24/21079919/facial-recognition-london-cctv-camera-deployment

#1yrago Canadian “protesters” at Huawei extradition hearing say they
were tricked, thought they were in a music video
https://thebreaker.news/news/paid-protest-meng/

#1yrago The case for replacing air travel with high-speed sleeper trains
https://theconversation.com/could-sleeper-trains-replace-international-air-travel-130334

#1yrago Youtube’s Content ID has become the tool of choice for grifty
copyfraudsters who steal from artists
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200115/17362843740/as-we-get-closer-closer-to-eu-requiring-contentid-everywhere-more-abuses-contentid-exposed.shtml

#1yrago Wells Fargo’s ex-CEO will pay $17.5m in fines and never work in
banking again (but he is still very, very rich)
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/money/business/2020/01/23/wells-fargo-ex-ceo-john-stumpf-banned-banking-fined-17-5-m/4555993002/

#1yrago Howto: roleplay a suit of armor filled with bees
https://twitter.com/snickelsox/status/1220422182045659143

#1yrago Jamie Dimon is a (highly selective) socialist
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YT9mzlC9rcU

#1yrago Majority of UK booze-industry revenues come from problem
drinkers
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jan/22/problem-drinkers-alcohol-industry-most-sales-figures-reveal

#1yrago US insurers, sick of being gouged by Big Pharma, will develop
cheap generics
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/01/sick-of-big-pharmas-pricing-health-insurers-pledge-55m-for-cheap-generics/

#1yrago White nationalists planned to murder cops and pro-gun protesters
in Virginia
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/gun-rally-virginia-documents-allege-base-members-discussed-starting-civil-war-2020-01-21/

#1yrago A sober look at kratom, a psychoactive plant that has many
claimed benefits, and has also inspired a moral panic
https://www.wired.com/story/release-the-kratom-inside-drug-culture/

#1yrago Microsoft employs a giant plush Clippy whose performer has a
large Clippy tattoo https://twitter.com/radmint/status/1214226032946905088

#1yrago Unauthorized Charcoal: GE fridges won’t dispense ice or water
unless your filter authenticates as an official ($55!) component
https://twitter.com/IamShaneMorris/status/1220367934947758080

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👯‍♂️ Colophon

Today's top sources: Late Stage Capitalism
(https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/).

Currently writing:

* My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and
reconciliation. Friday's progress: 525 words (102594 total).

* A short story, "Jeffty is Five," for The Last Dangerous Visions.
Friday's progress: 282 words (1077 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:

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

* Launch for the print edition of HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE
CAPITALISM, Jan 28,
https://medium.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_GfnYHzZCSY-cCMVL5ZCDBw

* 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

* "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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That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially,
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