[Plura-list] David Dayen's MONOPOLIZED

[Cory Doctorow]

Today's links

* David Dayen's MONOPOLIZED: Unraveling the grift and telling the tale.

* This day in history: 2006, 2011

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

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👶🏼 David Dayen's MONOPOLIZED

The world is beset by urgent, fantastically technical challenges -
vaccine logistics, financial misconduct, geoengineering proposals and
fights about what we should eat and how we should get from A to B.

These are thorny problems. Getting them right is urgent - and hard. Not
just because these are complicated questions, but also because there are
powerful, monied people who benefit when we get them wrong, and they pay
handsomely for doubt.

Worse: many of these problems involve far-off, probabilistic
consequences for actions we're taking today: "If we don't do something
about climate change, your grandkids will experience some bad stuff.
Probably. Maybe not yours. Someone's though."

Add it all up - complexity, bad-faith doubt-sowers, and probabilistic,
far-off consequences - and it's really hard to get people to treat these
issues with the warranted gravity and urgency.

Authors who write books on these subjects use two main tactics:

I. Explainers: demystify a complex subject, breaking it down until it
becomes legible to a lay audience, and

II. Storytelling: find people whose lives dramatize the technical issue
and tell their stories.

This is a pretty good strategy. Get the balance right and the explainers
become eye-opening jolts of recognition ("Oh, *that's* why things are
the way they are!") while the storytelling personalizes the new knowledge.

But both have their limits, especially when it comes to the monopolies
of late-stage capitalism. The thing is, every grift in the monopoly
playbook - evictions, CDOs, pharmacy benefit managers, ad-tech, patent
trolling - is just bullshit.

These things aren't hard to understand because they're complicated.
They're complicated so that they'll be hard to understand. The first
time you unravel one, it's quite gratifying: "Oh, I'm not stupid, it's
just all nonsense. Wow."

The fiftieth time, it's like, "God, not another one?"

It's like when I worked in a bookstore and hustlers would come in trying
to cadge money from me by telling me long stories about buying bus
tickets home to help an ailing relative.

The longer the story went on, the most obviously untrue it became. The
experience goes from amusing to weird to tedious.

Listen long enough to the idiotic scams of Gwyneth Paltrow/Alex Jones or
Reverse Factoring hustlers and your brains will start running out of
your ears.

And there's a storytelling failure mode, too: focusing down on
"characters" can make systemic problems seem like individual ones -
like, if we just punish that racist bully, we're driving out racism itself.

Writing an effective activist book on these lines is an art, not a
science: just enough explaining to make it clear how wicked and awful
the bad guys are, just enough storytelling so we know what the
consequences are.

Which brings me to David Dayen's MONOPOLIZED, a *superb* book about the
rise and rise of monopolies.

https://thenewpress.com/books/monopolized

If telling this kind of complicated, technical story and making it
personal and urgent is an art, then Dayen is an artist.

Chapter by chapter, Dayen weaves explainers and personal stories
together, unpicking snarled knots of bullshit and laying them straight
to reveal them for the turds they are; then showing how we're personally
drowning in crap.

From pharma to aviation, airlines to newspapers, Big Tech to Big
Funeral, Dayen's book connects together every one of the scams that
picks our pockets, robs us of dignity and life chances, and laughs in
our faces.

He shows how monopolists - and their court sorcerers from the Chicago
School of economics - have spent 40 years telling us that we can't
believe our own experience of the worsening, contracting world around
us, that the models prove it's getting better.

He shows us how both reviled mega-CEOs like Jeff Bezos and cuddly
"investors" like Warren Buffet are brutalizing workers, inventors,
customers, travelers, prisoners, and everyone in between.

His technical breakdowns are flawlessly understandable and witty, too -
and never lapse into the tedium of "not more of this bullshit, no,"
while the human stories are perfectly chosen to illustrate how these
scams hurt real people.

Dayen doesn't just break down his subjects - he builds them back up
again, illustrating, for example, how monopolies in pharma forced the
hospitals to monopolize in self-defense, and *that* led to monopolies in
insurance.

The point being that any monopolies lead to everything being monopolized
- and that the only sector of the economy that doesn't get to band
together under a single institution to push back is us, the public, the
workers, the consumers.

In the year since this book was published, the problems have only gotten
worse. I noted with irony as I finished the excellent audiobook that it
was recorded by a company that became a division of a notorious private
equity fund over that period.

Our new gilded age is coming apart at the seams. A transparently absurd
doctrine that assured us that monopolies were "efficient" and would
benefit us all has brought us to the brink of ruin.

MONOPOLIZED is the story of how we got here - who is to blame, what's
really going on, and most importantly what we need to do to turn it all
around.

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👶🏼 This day in history

#15yrsago WAP sucks
https://web.archive.org/web/20060315035650/http://www.suck.com/daily/2001/01/29/1.html

#10yrsago EFF: FBI may have committed more than 40K intelligence
violations since 9/11
https://www.eff.org/wp/patterns-misconduct-fbi-intelligence-violations

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👶🏼 Colophon

Currently writing:

* My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and
reconciliation. Yesterday's progress: 524 words (104680 total).

* A short story, "Jeffty is Five," for The Last Dangerous Visions.
Yesterday's progress: 258 words (2143 total).

Currently reading: Analogia by George Dyson.

Latest podcast: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 29)
https://craphound.com/news/2021/01/25/someone-comes-to-town-someone-leaves-town-part-29/

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.

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