From doctorow at craphound.com Thu Aug 1 11:54:32 2024 From: doctorow at craphound.com (Cory Doctorow) Date: Thu, 1 Aug 2024 08:54:32 -0700 Subject: [Plura-list] Why is this Canadian university scared of you seeing its Privacy Impact Assessment? Message-ID: <5566458b-a53d-456c-9f78-2a3728da50a8@craphound.com> Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/01/eruditio-libertas-est/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ I'm coming to Defcon! On Aug 9, I'm emceeing the EFF Poker Tournament (noon, Horseshoe Poker Room), and speaking on the Bricked and Abandoned panel (5PM, track 1). On Aug 10, I'm giving a keynote called "Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, track 1). https://defcon.org/html/defcon-32/dc-32-index.html ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop! https://clarionwriteathon.com/members/profile.php?writerid=293388 ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ Today's links * Why is this Canadian university scared of you seeing its Privacy Impact Assessment: What is Langara College so afraid of? * Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. * This day in history: 2009, 2019 * Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. * Recent appearances: Where I've been. * Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Colophon: All the rest. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Why is this Canadian university scared of you seeing its Privacy Impact Assessment? Barbra Streisand is famous for many things: her exciting performances on the big screen, the small screen, and the stage; her Grammy-winning career as a musician (she's a certified EGOT!); and for all the times she's had to correct people who've added an extra vowel to the spelling of her first name (I can relate!). But a thousand years from now, her legacy is likely to be linguistic, rather than artistic. The "Streisand Effect" - coined by Mike Masnick - describes what happens when someone tries to suppress a piece of information, only to have that act of attempted suppression backfire by inciting vastly more interest in the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect The term dates to 2003, when Streisand sued the website Pictopia and its proprietors for $50m for reproducing an image from the publicly available California Coastal Records Project (which produces a timeseries of photos of the California coastline in order to track coastal erosion). The image ("Image 3850") incidentally captured the roofs of Streisand's rather amazing coastal compound, which upset Streisand. But here's the thing: before Streisand's lawsuit, Image 3850 had only been viewed *six times*. After she filed the case, another *420,000 people* downloaded that image. Not only did Streisand lose her suit (disastrously so - she was ordered to pay the defendants' lawyers $177,000 in fees), but she catastrophically failed in her goal of keeping this boring, obscure photo from being seen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect Streisand has since called the suit "a mistake." On the one hand, that is *very obviously true*, but on the other hand, it's still admirable, given how many other failed litigants went to their graves insisting that their foolish and expensive legal gambit was, in fact, *very smart* and we are all *very stupid* for failing to understand that. Which brings me to Ian Linkletter and the Canadian Privacy Library. Linkletter is the librarian and founder of the nonprofit Canadian Privacy Library, a newish online library that collects and organizes privacy-related documents from Canadian public institutions. Linkletter kicked off the project with the goal of collecting the Privacy Impact Assessments from every public university in Canada, starting in his home province of BC. These PIAs are a legal requirement whenever a public university procures a piece of software, and they're no joke. Ed-tech vendors are pretty goddamned cavalier when it comes to student privacy, as Linkletter knows well. Back in 2020, Linkletter was an ed-tech specialist for the University of British Columbia, where he was called upon to assess Proctorio, a "remote invigilation" tool that monitored remote students while they sat exams. This is a *nightmare* category of software, a mix of high-tech phrenology (vendors claim that they can tell when students are cheating by using "AI" to analyze their faces); arrogant techno-sadism (vendors requires students - including those sharing one-room apartments with "essential worker" parents on night shifts who sleep during the day - to pan their cameras around to prove that they are alone); digital racism (products are so bad at recognizing Black faces that some students have had to sit exams with multiple task-lights shining directly onto their faces); and bullshit (vendors routinely lie about their tools' capabilities and efficacy). Worst: remote invigilation is grounded in the pedagogically bankrupt idea that learning is best (or even plausibly) assessed through high-stakes testing. The kind of person who wants to use these tools generally has *no* idea how learning works and thinks of students as presumptively guilty cheats. They monitor test-taking students in realtime, and have been known to jiggle test-takers' cursors impatiently when students think too long about their answers. Remote invigilation also captures the eye-movements of test-takers, flagging people who look away from the screen while thinking for potential cheating. No wonder that many students who sit exams under these conditions find themselves so anxious that they vomit or experience diarrhea, carefully staring directly into the camera as they shit themselves or vomit down their shirts, lest they be penalized for looking away or visiting the toilet. Linkletter quickly realized that Proctorio is a worst-in-class example of a dreadful category. The public-facing materials the company provided about its products were flatly contradicted by the materials they provided to educators, where all the really *nasty* stuff was buried. The company - whose business exploded during the covid lockdowns - is helmed by CEO Mike Olsen, a nasty piece of work who once doxed a child who criticized him in an online forum: https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/01/bossware/#moral-exemplar Proctorio's products are shrouded in secrecy. In 2020, for reasons never explained, all the (terrible, outraged) reviews of its browser plugin disappeared from the Chrome store: https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/04/hypervigilance/#radical-transparency Linkletter tweeted his alarming findings, publishing links to the unlisted, but publicly available Youtube videos where Proctorio explained how its products *really* worked. Proctorio then *sued* Linkletter, for *copyright infringement*. Proctorio's argument is that by linking to materials that *they* published on Youtube with permissions that let anyone with the link see them, Linkletter infringed upon their copyright. When Linkletter discovered that these videos *already* had publicly available links, indexed by Google, in the documentation produced by other Proctorio customers for students and teachers, Proctorio doubled down and argued that by collecting these publicly available links to publicly available videos, Linkletter had still somehow infringed on their copyright. Luckily for Linkletter, BC has an anti-SLAPP law that is supposed to protect whistleblowers facing legal retaliation for publishing protected speech related to matters of public interest (like whether BC's flagship university has bought a defective and harmful product that its students will be forced to use). *Unluckily* for Linkletter, the law is brand new, lacks jurisprudence, and the courts have decided that he can't use a SLAPP defense and his case must go to trial: https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/20/links-arent-performances/#free-ian-linkletter Linkletter *could* have let that experience frighten him away from the kind of principled advocacy that riles up deep-pocketed, thin-skinned bullies. Instead, he doubled down, founding the Canadian Privacy Library, with the goal of using Freedom of Information requests to catalog all of Canada's post-secondary institutions' privacy assessments. Given how many bodies he found buried in Proctorio's back yard, this feels like the kind of thing that should be made more visible to Canadians. There are 25 public universities in BC, and Linkletter FOI'ed them all. Eleven provided their PIAs. Eight sent him an estimate of what it would cost them (and thus what they would charge) to assemble these docs for him. Six requested extensions. One of them threatened to sue. Langara College is a 19,000-student spinout of Vancouver Community College whose motto is *Eruditio Libertas Est* ("Knowledge is Freedom"). Linkletter got their 2019 PIA for Microsoft's Office 365 when he FOI'ed the Nicola Valley Institute of Technology (universities often recycle one another's privacy impact assessments, which is fine). That's where the trouble started. In June, Langara sent Linkletter a letter demanding that he remove their Office 365 PIA; the letter CC'ed two partners in a law firm, and accused Linkletter of copyright infringement. But that's not how copyright - or public records - work. As Linkletter writes, the PIA is "a public record lawfully obtained through an FOI request" - it is neither exempted from disclosure, nor is it confidential: https://www.privacylibrary.ca/legal-threat/ Langara claims that in making their mandatory Privacy Impact Assessment for Office 365 available, Linkletter has exposed them to "heightened risks of data breaches and privacy incidents," they provided no evidence to support this assertion. I think they're full of shit, but you don't have to take my word for it. After initially removing the PIA, Linkletter restored it, and you can read it for yourself: https://www.privacylibrary.ca/langara-college-privacy-impact-assessments/ I read it. It is pretty goddamned anodyne - about as exciting as looking at the roof of Barbra Streisand's mansion. Sometimes, where there's smoke, there's only Streisand - a person who has foolishly decided to use the law to bully a weaker stranger out of disclosing some innocuous and publicly available fact about themselves. But sometimes, where there's smoke, there's fire. A lot of people who read my work are much more familiar with ed-tech, privacy, and pedagogy than I am. If that's you, maybe you want to peruse the Langara PIA to see if they are hiding something because they're exposing their students to privacy risks and don't want that fact to get out. There are plenty of potential privacy risks in Office 365! The cloud version of Microsoft Office contains a "bossware" mode that allows bosses to monitor their workers' keystrokes for spelling, content, and accuracy, and produce neat charts of which employees are least "productive." The joke's on the boss, though: Office 365 also has a tool that lets you compare your department's usage of Office 365 to your competitors, which is another way of saying that Microsoft is gathering your trade secrets and handing it out to your direct competitors: https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware So, yeah, there are lots of "features" in Office 365 that could give rise to privacy threats when it is used at a university. One hopes that Langara correctly assessed these risks and accounted for them in its PIA, which would mean that they are bullying Linkletter out of reflex, rather than to cover up wrongdoing. But there's only one way to find out: go through the doc that Linkletter has restored to public view. Linkletter has *excellent* pro bono representation from Norton Rose Fulbright, a large and powerful law-firm that is handling his Proctorio case. Linkletter writes, "they have put this public college on notice that any proceeding is liable to be dismissed pursuant to the Protection of Public Participation Act, BC?s anti-SLAPP legislation." Langara has now found themselves at the bottom of a hole, and if they're smart, they'll stop digging. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Hey look at this * #FakeYou An Activist?s Guide to Defeating Disinformation https://xnet-x.net/en/fakeyou-disinformation-free-download/ * What is the Fediverse? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzYozbNneVc * We need a new internet https://www.fierce-network.com/cloud/op-ed-we-need-new-internet ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? This day in history #15yrsago Call for submissions for an event to honor Toronto?s venerable, shuttered Pages Books https://quillandquire.com/book-news/2009/07/29/pages-requests-memories-for-send-off-bash/ #15yrsago Matrix Online goes out with a party, not a whimper https://web.archive.org/web/20090802104032/http://www.massively.com/2009/07/27/reminder-check-out-the-matrix-online-before-it-decompiles/ #15yrsago India?s airlines to ground all planes and press for bailout https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/no-private-airlines-to-fly-on-aug-18/articleshow/4842710.cms #5yrsago Summing up the Democrats? debate: Colbert?s scorching monologue https://www.thedailybeast.com/stephen-colbert-hits-longshot-democrats-for-spewing-republican-talking-points-at-cnn-debate #5yrsago A modest proposal to solve no-deal Brexit: insure all losses with the pensions of Brexit supporters https://web.archive.org/web/20190205121528/https://twitter.com/Sime0nStylites/status/1092343448483651589 ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Upcoming appearances * Launch for Adam Greenfield's *Lifehouse* at Page Against the Machine (Long Beach), Aug 3 https://www.facebook.com/events/837938428323731 * EFF Charity Poker Tournament (Defcon, Las Vegas, Horseshoe Poker Room), Aug 9 12h https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/betting-your-digital-rights-eff-benefit-poker-tournament-def-con-32 * Bricked & Abandoned: How To Keep The IoT From Becoming An Internet of Trash (Defcon, Las Vegas, Track 1), Aug 9 17h https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=54844 * Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification (Defcon, Las Vegas, Track 1), Aug 10 12h https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=54861 * Launch for Madeline Ashby's *Glass Houses* at Chevalier's Books (LA), Aug 16 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/book-talk-madeline-ashbys-glass-houses-tickets-965286486867 * Disenshittify or die! (Burning Man, Palenque Norte, 7&E), Aug 27, 13h * Talking caterpillar Q&A (Burning Man, Liminal Labs, 830&C), Aug 28, 12h * Albacon (Albany/remote), Sep 13-15 https://albacon.org/2024/ * TusCon (Tucson), Nov 8-10 https://tusconscificon.com/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Recent appearances * The Paradigm Shift https://paradigm-shift-on-4zzz.pinecast.co/episode/dbf12eaf/tech-criticism-with-cory-doctorow * How To Fix The Internet (EFF) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/podcast-episode-fighting-enshittification * Big Tech and the News (Tech Policy Press) https://www.techpolicy.press/big-tech-and-the-news/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Latest books * The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). * "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) * "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). * "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. * "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com * "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?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) * "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/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Upcoming books * Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 * Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Colophon Today's top sources: Currently writing: * Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay. Today's progress: 911 words (30817 words total). * A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING * Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 * Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM * Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: Unpersoned https://craphound.com/news/2024/07/29/unpersoned/ This work - excluding any serialized fiction - is 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. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla*" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_0x9026DBBE1FC237AF.asc Type: application/pgp-keys Size: 3480 bytes Desc: OpenPGP public key URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 203 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: From doctorow at craphound.com Fri Aug 2 18:43:10 2024 From: doctorow at craphound.com (Cory Doctorow) Date: Fri, 2 Aug 2024 15:43:10 -0700 Subject: [Plura-list] The reverse-centaur apocalypse is upon us Message-ID: Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/02/despotism-on-demand/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ I'm coming to Defcon! On Aug 9, I'm emceeing the EFF Poker Tournament (noon, Horseshoe Poker Room), and speaking on the Bricked and Abandoned panel (5PM, track 1). On Aug 10, I'm giving a keynote called "Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, track 1). https://defcon.org/html/defcon-32/dc-32-index.html ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop! https://clarionwriteathon.com/members/profile.php?writerid=293388 ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ Today's links * The reverse-centaur apocalypse is upon us: Microsoft, Oracle, and other bossware dealers are transforming our workplaces with "virtual whips." * Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. * This day in history: 2004, 2019 * Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. * Recent appearances: Where I've been. * Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Colophon: All the rest. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? The reverse-centaur apocalypse is upon us In thinking about the relationship between tech and labor, one of the most useful conceptual frameworks is "centaurs" vs "reverse-centaurs": https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/ A centaur is someone whose work is supercharged by automation: you are a human head atop the tireless body of a machine that lets you get more done than you could ever do on your own. A *reverse*-centaur is someone who is harnessed to the machine, reduced to a mere peripheral for a cruelly tireless robotic overlord that directs you to do the work that it can't, at a robotic pace, until your body and mind are smashed. Bosses love being centaurs. While workplace monitoring is as old as Taylorism - the "scientific management" of the previous century that saw labcoated frauds dictating the fine movements of working people in a kabuki of "efficiency" - the lockdowns saw an explosion of bossware, the digital tools that let bosses monitor employees to a degree and at a scale that far outstrips the capacity of any unassisted human being. Armed with bossware, your boss becomes a centaur, able to monitor you down to your keystrokes, the movements of your eyes, even the ambient sound around you. It was this technology that transformed "work from home" into "live at work." But bossware doesn't just let your boss spy on you - it lets your boss *control* you. \ It turns you into a reverse-centaur. "Data At Work" is a research project from Cracked Labs that dives deep into the use of surveillance and control technology in a variety of workplaces - including workers' own cars and homes: https://crackedlabs.org/en/data-work It consists of a series of papers that take deep dives into different vendors' bossware products, exploring how they are advertised, how they are used, and (crucially) how they make workers feel. There are also sections on how these interact with EU labor laws (the project is underwritten by the Austrian Arbeiterkammer), with the occasional aside about how weak US labor laws are. The latest report in the series comes from Wolfie Christl, digging into Microsoft's "Dynamics 365," a suite of mobile apps designed to exert control over "field workers" - repair technicians, security guards, cleaners, and home help for ill, elderly and disabled people: https://crackedlabs.org/dl/CrackedLabs_Christl_MobileWork.pdf It's...not good. Microsoft advises its customers to use its products to track workers' location every "60 to 300 seconds." Workers are given tasks broken down into subtasks, each with its own expected time to completion. Workers are expected to use the app every time they arrive at a site, begin or complete a task or subtask, or start or end a break. For bosses, all of this turns into a dashboard that shows how each worker is performing from instant to instant, whether they are meeting time targets, and whether they are spending more time on a task than the client's billing rate will pay for. Each work order has a clock showing elapsed seconds since it was issued. For workers, the system generates new schedules with new work orders all day long, refreshing your work schedule as frequently as twice per hour. Bosses can flag workers as available for jobs that fall outside their territories and/or working hours, and the system will assign workers to jobs that require them to work in their off hours and travel long distances to do so. Each task and subtask has a target time based on "AI" predictions. These are classic examples of Goodhart's Law: "any metric eventually becomes a target." The average time that workers take becomes the maximum time that a worker is *allowed* to take. Some jobs are easy, and can be completed in less time than assigned. When this happens, the average time to do a job shrinks, and the time allotted for normal (or difficult) jobs contracts. Bosses get stack-ranks of workers showing which workers closed the most tickets, worked the fastest, spent the least time idle between jobs, and, of course, whether the client gave them five stars. Workers know it, creating an impossible bind: to do the job well, in a friendly fashion, the worker has to take time to talk with the client, understand their needs, and do the job. Anything less will generate unfavorable reports from clients. But doing this will blow through time quotas, which produces bad reports from the bossware. Heads you lose, tails the boss wins. Predictably, Microsoft has shoveled "AI" into every corner of this product. Bosses don't just get charts showing them with workers are "underperforming" - they also get summaries of all the narrative aspects of the workers' reports (e.g. "My client was in severe pain so I took extra time to make her comfortable before leaving"), filled with the usual hallucinations and other botshit. No boss could exert this kind of fine-grained, soul-destroying control over *any* workforce, much less a workforce that is out in the field all day, without Microsoft's automation tools. Armed with Dynamics 365, a boss becomes a true centaur, capable of superhuman feats of labor abuse. And when workers are *subjected* to Dynamics 365, they become true reverse-centaurs, driven by "digital whips" to work at a pace that outstrips the long-term capacity of their minds and bodies to bear it. The enthnographic parts of the report veer between chilling and heartbreaking. Microsoft strenuously objects to this characterization, insisting that their tool (which they advise bosses to use to check on workers' location every 60-300 seconds) is not a "surveillance" tool, it's a "coordination" tool. They say that all the AI in the tool is "Responsible AI," which is doubtless a great comfort to workers. In Microsoft's (mild) defense, they are not unique. Other reports in the series show how retail workers and hotel housekeepers are subjected to "despot on demand" services provided by Oracle: https://crackedlabs.org/en/data-work/publications/retail-hospitality Call centers, are even worse. After all, most of this stuff *started* with call centers: https://crackedlabs.org/en/data-work/publications/callcenter I've written about Arise, a predatory "work from home" company that targets Black women to *pay* the company to work for it (they also have to pay if they quit!). Of course, they can be fired at will: https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/29/impunity-corrodes/#arise-ye-prisoners There's also a report about Celonis, a giant German company no one has ever heard of, which gathers a truly nightmarish quantity of information about white-collar workers' activities, subjecting them to AI phrenology to judge their "emotional quality" as well as other metrics: https://crackedlabs.org/en/data-work/publications/processmining-algomanage As Celonis shows, this stuff is coming for all of us. I've dubbed this process "the shitty technology adoption curve": the terrible things we do to prisoners, asylum seekers and people in mental institutions today gets repackaged tomorrow for students, parolees, Uber drivers and blue-collar workers. Then it works its way up the privilege gradient, until we're all being turned into reverse-centaurs under the "digital whip" of a centaur boss: https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/#clippys-revenge In mediating between asshole bosses and the workers they destroy, these bossware technologies do more than automate: they also *insulate*. Thanks to bossware, your boss doesn't have to look you in the eye (or come within range of your fists) to check in on you every 60 seconds and tell you that you've taken 11 seconds too long on a task. I recently learned a useful term for this: an "accountability sink," as described by Dan Davies in his new book, *The Unaccountability Machine*, which is high on my (very long) list of books to read: https://profilebooks.com/work/the-unaccountability-machine/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Hey look at this * Adverse impacts of revealing the presence of ?Artificial Intelligence (AI)? technology in product and service descriptions on purchase intentions: the mediating role of emotional trust and the moderating role of perceived risk https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19368623.2024.2368040 * Private Equity?s Dry-Powder Mountain Reaches Record Height https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/2di1vzgjcmzovkcea8f0g/portfolio/private-equitys-dry-powder-mountain-reaches-record-height (h/t Gregory Charlin) * namesake mcmansion https://www.tumblr.com/mcmansionhell/757564536938184704/namesake-mcmansion ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? This day in history #20yrsago EFF suing on JibJab?s behalf for ?This Land is Your Land? parody https://web.archive.org/web/20040803063125/http://www.corante.com/copyfight/archives/005452.html #5yrsago Man donates mother?s body to science, discovers it was sold to the military for ?blast testing? https://web.archive.org/web/20190801175813/https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ny-arizona-man-moms-body-sold-military-blast-testing-20190801-pwqfc4mfvzfnjf7tocr6pkrbja-story.html #5yrsago Paul Di Filippo on Radicalized: ?Upton-Sinclairish muckraking, and Dickensian-Hugonian ashcan realism? https://locusmag.com/2019/08/paul-di-filippo-reviews-radicalized-by-cory-doctorow/ #5yrsago Open archive of 240,000 hours? worth of talk radio, including 2.8 billion words of machine-transcription https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.07073 #5yrsago Triple Chaser: a short documentary that uses machine learning to document tear gas use against civilians, calling out ?philanthropist? Warren Kanders for his company?s war-crimes https://memex.craphound.com/2019/08/01/triple-chaser-a-short-documentary-that-uses-machine-learning-to-document-tear-gas-use-against-civilians-calling-out-philanthropist-warren-kanders-for-his-companys-war-crimes/ #5yrsago Data-mining reveals that 80% of books published 1924-63 never had their copyrights renewed and are now in the public domain https://www.crummy.com/2019/07/22/0 #5yrsago Amazon?s secret deals with cops gave corporate PR a veto over everything the cops said about their products https://gizmodo.com/everything-cops-say-about-amazons-ring-is-scripted-or-a-1836812538 #5yrsago Your massive surprise hospital bills are making bank for private equity https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/08/private-equity-the-perps-behind-destructive-hospital-surprise-billing.html #5yrsato Cisco?s failure to heed whistleblower?s warning about security defects in video surveillance software costs the company $8.6m in fines https://web.archive.org/web/20190801022718/https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Cisco-to-pay-8-6-million-fine-for-selling-14271226.php #5yrsago Teenaged girl becomes a resistance symbol for her peaceful reading of the Russian constitution to a Putin goon-squad (they beat her up later) https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/olga-misik-russia-protests-constitution-moscow-riot-police-putin-a9029816.html ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Upcoming appearances * Launch for Adam Greenfield's *Lifehouse* at Page Against the Machine (Long Beach), Aug 3 https://www.facebook.com/events/837938428323731 * EFF Charity Poker Tournament (Defcon, Las Vegas, Horseshoe Poker Room), Aug 9 12h https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/betting-your-digital-rights-eff-benefit-poker-tournament-def-con-32 * Bricked & Abandoned: How To Keep The IoT From Becoming An Internet of Trash (Defcon, Las Vegas, Track 1), Aug 9 17h https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=54844 * Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification (Defcon, Las Vegas, Track 1), Aug 10 12h https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=54861 * Launch for Madeline Ashby's *Glass Houses* at Chevalier's Books (LA), Aug 16 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/book-talk-madeline-ashbys-glass-houses-tickets-965286486867 * Disenshittify or die! (Burning Man, Palenque Norte, 7&E), Aug 27, 13h * Talking caterpillar Q&A (Burning Man, Liminal Labs, 830&C), Aug 28, 12h * Albacon (Albany/remote), Sep 13-15 https://albacon.org/2024/ * TusCon (Tucson), Nov 8-10 https://tusconscificon.com/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Recent appearances * The Paradigm Shift https://paradigm-shift-on-4zzz.pinecast.co/episode/dbf12eaf/tech-criticism-with-cory-doctorow * How To Fix The Internet (EFF) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/podcast-episode-fighting-enshittification * Big Tech and the News (Tech Policy Press) https://www.techpolicy.press/big-tech-and-the-news/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Latest books * The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). * "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) * "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). * "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. * "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com * "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?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) * "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/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Upcoming books * Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 * Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Colophon Today's top sources: Thomas Claburn (https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/31/microsoft_dynamics_365_surveillance/). Currently writing: * Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay. Today's progress: 779 words (31584 words total). * A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING * Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 * Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM * Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: Unpersoned https://craphound.com/news/2024/07/29/unpersoned/ This work - excluding any serialized fiction - is 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. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla*" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_0x9026DBBE1FC237AF.asc Type: application/pgp-keys Size: 3480 bytes Desc: OpenPGP public key URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 203 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: From doctorow at craphound.com Sat Aug 3 11:56:27 2024 From: doctorow at craphound.com (Cory Doctorow) Date: Sat, 3 Aug 2024 08:56:27 -0700 Subject: [Plura-list] Rsync corrump linkdump Message-ID: <2c24e6a8-fcb7-48e7-ab86-023370dcea31@craphound.com> Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/03/smorgasbord/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ I'm coming to Defcon! On Aug 9, I'm emceeing the EFF Poker Tournament (noon, Horseshoe Poker Room), and speaking on the Bricked and Abandoned panel (5PM, track 1). On Aug 10, I'm giving a keynote called "Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, track 1). https://defcon.org/html/defcon-32/dc-32-index.html ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop! https://clarionwriteathon.com/members/profile.php?writerid=293388 ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ Today's links * Rsync corrump linkdump: A roundup of stray but worthy links. * This day in history: 2004, 2009, 2019, 2023 * Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. * Recent appearances: Where I've been. * Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Colophon: All the rest. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Rsync corrump linkdump As per the uje, I've arrived upon a Saturday with a backlog of links that I have not managed to squeeze into the week's newsletters/blogs, so it's time for another linkdump, 22nd in an erratic series. Here's the previous 21: https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/ Let's start with some seasonal material, and by "seasonal," I of course mean *Hallowe'en.* Yes, August is the official start of Spooky Season, and yes, I am a monster for insisting on this, but being a monster is the *point* of Spooky Season (which is what differentiates Spooky Season pushers like me from the creeps who insist that you need to start prepping for Xmas in late September - they're monsters, too, but Yule Monsters are *bad*) (with the exception of Krampus). I was a monster kid and now I'm a monster adult. It all started when I was bitten by a radioactive Haunted Mansion at the age of six: https://memex.craphound.com/2012/10/22/how-a-haunted-mansion-addict-fell-in-love-with-the-greatest-ride-on-earth/ I am a sucker for all things monstrous, and so I was intrigued when I got a book of "creepy-cute" stickers in the mail from a publicist at Simon & Schuster: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Creepy-Cute-Sticker-Book/Gaynor-Carradice/Creepy-Cute-Gift-Series/9781507222515 "Creepy-Cute" turns out to be an official designation, embraced by the illustrator GaynorCarradice, who has created several books on these lines, featuring her chibi/monster crossover creations, which do exactly what it says on the tin, by which I mean, there's some genuinely *creepy* stuff in the mix, along with the cute. It's when the cute pastels rub up against the gore, skulls, eyeballs and other visceral viscera that these illustrations really kick off some heat - I've rounded up a few of my favorites here: https://craphound.com/images/creepycute.jpg One of the surefire signs that Spooky Season is upon us is that the (sometimes NSFW) Tumblr account Halloweenlandmotherfucker emerges from dormancy with a stream of images of vintage Hallowe'en cards (these were a thing!), photos of people in costume and other delightful visual novelties: https://www.tumblr.com/halloweenlandmotherfucker Monster culture isn't just for Hallowe'en, of course. The ancient and noble tradition of compiling and publishing bestiaries is alive and well, thanks to RPGs. In the beginning, there was the D&D Boxed Set, with its *Monsters and Treasure* booklet: https://www.americanroads.us/DandD/ODnD_Monsters_and_Treasure.pdf Then came the *Monster Manual*, the first hardcover D&D book, succeeded by the *Fiend Folio*, which featured Charlie Stross creations like the githzerai and slaad, Indeed, there was a whole, iconic library of hardcovers that fit perfectly in an oversized backpack that I dragged everywhere so that I could obsessively read and re-read them. Eventually, these gave way to new hardcovers with new rules as well as new corporate owners (Wizards of the Coast, then Hasbro), culminating in the release of the Open Gaming License, an "open content" license that was a) grossly defective; b) largely irrelevant; and c) hugely controversial in 2023, when Hasbro terminated it: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/12/beg-forgiveness-ask-permission/#whats-a-copyright-exception The Open Gaming License purported to license out game elements that weren't copyrightable (rules, tables, etc), as well as material that you could likely use under copyright exceptions like fair use: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/01/beware-gifts-dragons-how-dds-open-gaming-license-may-have-become-trap-creators And worst of all, it was revocable, so games publishers who tooled up to publish supplements and sourcebooks based on the OGL could have the rug yanked out from under them at any time (that time turned out to be early 2023). Hasbro's OGL rug-pull had three salutary effects: I. It gave gamers a crash-course in what was - and wasn't - copyrightable in an RPG design; 2. It encouraged game developers to look beyond D&D's OGL rules and into truly open (and often superior) alternatives; and 3. It inflicted so much reputational harm on Hasbro that, 20 months later, they announced that they would release a new set of D&D rules under the Creative Commons Attribution Only 4.0 license: https://www.dicebreaker.com/games/dungeons-and-dragons-5e/news/dungeons-and-dragons-2024-srd-wont-be-another-ogl-fiasco Now, CC BY 4.0 is a *real-ass license*. Notably, it corrects a defect in the earlier versions of the CC licenses that gave rise to a class of predatory copyleft trolls like the odious Pixsy: https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/24/a-bug-in-early-creative-commons-licenses-has-enabled-a-new-breed-of-superpredator/ If Hasbro follows through on their promise, the new CC materials will kick off with the 2025 release of the next edition of the *Monster Manual*: https://dungeonsanddragonsfan.com/new-2024-dnd-monster-manual/ It's wild to think that tabletop RPGs are now a cutting-edge way to learn about digital policy, but on the other hand, D&D arrived in my home around the same time as my Apple ][+, which was also around the time I first heard the name Ronald Reagan (rest in piss). The legacies of the 80s - RPGs, digital technology and Reaganomics - cast a long shadow. Last month, many of us discovered the hard way that Reaganomics - specifically, the embrace of monopolies as "efficient" - has produced a world of unimaginable brittleness. Millions of people around the world found themselves cut off from ATM cash, flights, hospital care, and many other essentials thanks to the Crowdstrike Blue Screen of Death outage. While many of the explainers have focused on how Crowdstrike fatfingered a software update that crashed all those computers, there's been a lot less commentary about how it is that *one company* had it in its power to do so much harm. Writing last week for EFF's Deeplinks blog, my colleague Rory Mir tackled that (far more important) issue: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/07/crowdstrike-antitrust-and-digital-monoculture Market concentration - monopoly - is the common thread wound around so many of our daily horribles. Think of the tech billionaires who threw in their lot with Trump last month. How did they get to be billionaires? Monopoly power. Remember back in 2017, that notorious photo of the tech industry meeting at the top of Trump Tower, with Peter Thiel at Trump's left hand? https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/14/donald-trump-meets-with-tech-leaders/ People were appalled that this group of corporate leaders, who between them controlled virtually all the technology in our lives, would debase themselves by paying fealty to this buffoonish would-be dictator. But far more consequential was the fact that *you could fit everyone who controlled all of our technology around a single table*. Once everyone important to an industry can fit around a single table, it's only a matter of time until they find a table to sit around, and that's when it all starts to go wrong. As the Communist firebrand Adam Smith once wrote, "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." Enshittification starts with market concentration. This is a subject I'm going to be going very deep on next Saturday, when I give my Defcon keynote, "Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification": https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=54861 When I give that talk - and afterwards at my book signing - I will be wearing an N95 mask, just as I did last year. Why am I wearing a mask? Two reasons: first, Long Covid is a horror. One of the best writers I know - a living legend - recently told me that their book-writing days are likely done because of Long Covid brain fog. A new *Lancet* article gets deep into the science of Long Covid: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S014067362401136X The principle author of the *Lancet* article is Oxford health professor Trish Greenhalgh, who gave an excellent lay summary in her newsletter: https://independentsage.substack.com/p/long-covid-a-dystopian-game-of-pinball In particular, Greenhalgh describes why some people don't get Long Covid, and some people do - and, most important, explains why the fact that you didn't get Long Covid *last* time doesn't mean you won't get it *next* time: https://independentsage.substack.com/p/long-covid-a-dystopian-game-of-pinball So I don't want to get covid, and so I'm gonna wear a mask. Because masks *fucking work*. A new study reveals just how *well* they work: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/ebiom/article/PIIS2352-3964(24)00192-0/fulltext The study shows that wearing *any* mask, even without knowing how to fit it well, offers substantial protection against both contracting and transmitting covid. Even better: wearing an N95 (even without paying attention to correct fit) offers "*near perfect*" protection against covid: https://today.umd.edu/n95-masks-nearly-perfect-at-blocking-covid-umd-study-shows I didn't get covid at Defcon last year, and I didn't get it at HOPE, and I didn't get it on our family vacation in July - all events where friends got sick. The difference? I wore a mask. Which works. OK, I need to go work on my Defcon speech some more, so I'm gonna sign off, but I will leave you with just one more link, the wonderful new public domain image search tool, Public Work, which crawls and indexes the Met, the NYPL, and other sources: https://public.work/ I rely on public domain, CC and other freely usable clip art to make the collages that accompany this newsletter/blog's stories. While I have very little talent in the visual arts, I'm getting steadily better. I mean, look at this amazing image I womped up for last week's story on Bitcoin bros' election campaign finance fraud: https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/53893519593/in/album-72177720316719208 You can see a collection of my recent collages in my Flickr gallery for them: https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/albums/72177720316719208?sd ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? This day in history #20yrsago How cellphones change teenagers https://web.archive.org/web/20040812081823/http://www.receiver.vodafone.com/08/articles/index07.html #20yrsago Webcomic creator turns down Universal Syndicate, offers works for free to any newspaper https://web.archive.org/web/20040810034621/http://www.pvponline.com/rants_panel.php3 #15yrsago CLIQ and other ?unpickable? locks pwned at DefCon https://www.wired.com/2009/08/electronic-locks-defeated/ #15yrsago Associated Press will sell you a license to quote the public domain http://laboratorium.net/archive/2009/08/03/the_ap_will_sell_you_a_license_to_words_it_doesnt #15yrsago Berlin?s luxury car arsonists https://www.theage.com.au/world/german-radicals-turn-to-arson-20090731-e4hf.html #5yrsago Elsevier sends copyright threat to site for linking to Sci-Hub https://twitter.com/Citationsy/status/1156626811398307840 #5yrsago Corruption is contagious: dirty cops make their partners dirty https://www.scholars.northwestern.edu/en/publications/the-network-structure-of-police-misconduct #5yrsago We could fund the transition to green energy with 10-30% of the world?s fossil fuel subsidy https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/01/fossil-fuel-subsidy-cash-pay-green-energy-transition #5yrsago Leaks reveal that disgraced, hacked surveillance company wrote Republican Congressman?s border security talking-points https://theintercept.com/2019/08/01/perceptics-hack-license-plate-readers/ #5yrsago Cathay Pacific?s new privacy policy: we are recording you with seatback cameras, spying on you in airports, and buying data on your use of competing loyalty programs https://www.flyertalk.com/articles/cathay-pacific-passengers-not-to-expect-any-privacy.html #5yrsago Amazon?s secret deals with local cops give them access to realtime 911 data for use in scary alerts sent to Ring owners https://gizmodo.com/cops-are-giving-amazons-ring-your-real-time-911-data-1836883867 #5yrsago A visit to Bosnia?s last pigeon post office https://balkaninsight.com/2019/08/01/youve-got-mail-bosnias-last-pigeon-post-office/ #5yrsago Paying for climate change: the question isn?t ?How?? but ?Who?? https://www.wired.com/story/dont-ask-how-to-pay-for-climate-change-ask-who/ #1yrago Forcing your computer to rat you out https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai Upcoming appearances (permalink) * Launch for Adam Greenfield's *Lifehouse* at Page Against the Machine (Long Beach), Aug 3 https://www.facebook.com/events/837938428323731 * EFF Charity Poker Tournament (Defcon, Las Vegas, Horseshoe Poker Room), Aug 9 12h https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/betting-your-digital-rights-eff-benefit-poker-tournament-def-con-32 * Bricked & Abandoned: How To Keep The IoT From Becoming An Internet of Trash (Defcon, Las Vegas, Track 1), Aug 9 17h https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=54844 * Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification (Defcon, Las Vegas, Track 1), Aug 10 12h https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=54861 * Launch for Madeline Ashby's *Glass Houses* at Chevalier's Books (LA), Aug 16 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/book-talk-madeline-ashbys-glass-houses-tickets-965286486867 * Disenshittify or die! (Burning Man, Palenque Norte, 7&E), Aug 27, 13h * Talking caterpillar Q&A (Burning Man, Liminal Labs, 830&C), Aug 28, 12h * Albacon (Albany/remote), Sep 13-15 https://albacon.org/2024/ * TusCon (Tucson), Nov 8-10 https://tusconscificon.com/ * Launch for Adam Greenfield's *Lifehouse* at Page Against the Machine (Long Beach), Aug 3 https://www.facebook.com/events/837938428323731 * EFF Charity Poker Tournament (Defcon, Las Vegas, Horseshoe Poker Room), Aug 9 12h https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/betting-your-digital-rights-eff-benefit-poker-tournament-def-con-32 * Bricked & Abandoned: How To Keep The IoT From Becoming An Internet of Trash (Defcon, Las Vegas, Track 1), Aug 9 17h https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=54844 * Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification (Defcon, Las Vegas, Track 1), Aug 10 12h https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=54861 * Launch for Madeline Ashby's *Glass Houses* at Chevalier's Books (LA), Aug 16 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/book-talk-madeline-ashbys-glass-houses-tickets-965286486867 * Disenshittify or die! (Burning Man, Palenque Norte, 7&E), Aug 27, 13h * Talking caterpillar Q&A (Burning Man, Liminal Labs, 830&C), Aug 28, 12h * Albacon (Albany/remote), Sep 13-15 https://albacon.org/2024/ * TusCon (Tucson), Nov 8-10 https://tusconscificon.com/ Recent appearances (permalink) * The Paradigm Shift https://paradigm-shift-on-4zzz.pinecast.co/episode/dbf12eaf/tech-criticism-with-cory-doctorow * How To Fix The Internet (EFF) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/podcast-episode-fighting-enshittification * Big Tech and the News (Tech Policy Press) https://www.techpolicy.press/big-tech-and-the-news/ Latest books (permalink) * The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). * "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) * "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). * "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. * "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com * "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?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) * "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/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books (permalink) * Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 * Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Kottke (https://kottke.org/). Currently writing: * Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay. Saturday's progress: 767 words (32349 words total). * A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING * Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 * Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM * Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: Unpersoned https://craphound.com/news/2024/07/29/unpersoned/ This work - excluding any serialized fiction - is 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. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_0x9026DBBE1FC237AF.asc Type: application/pgp-keys Size: 3480 bytes Desc: OpenPGP public key URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 203 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: From doctorow at craphound.com Mon Aug 5 12:14:14 2024 From: doctorow at craphound.com (Cory Doctorow) Date: Mon, 5 Aug 2024 09:14:14 -0700 Subject: [Plura-list] Leveraged buyouts are not like mortgages Message-ID: Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/05/rugged-individuals/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ I'm coming to Defcon! This Friday (Aug 9), I'm emceeing the EFF Poker Tournament (noon, Horseshoe Poker Room), and speaking on the Bricked and Abandoned panel (5PM, track 1). On Saturday (Aug 10), I'm giving a keynote called "Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, track 1). https://defcon.org/html/defcon-32/dc-32-index.html ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ Today's links * Leveraged buyouts are not like mortgages: Corporate raiders and investment banks conspiring to steal companies. * Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. * This day in history: 2004, 2009, 2019, 2023 * Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. * Recent appearances: Where I've been. * Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Colophon: All the rest. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Leveraged buyouts are not like mortgages Here's an open secret: the confusing jargon of finance is not the product of some inherent complexity that requires a whole new vocabulary. Rather, finance-talk is all obfuscation, because if we called finance tactics by their plain-language names, it would be obvious that the sector exists to defraud the public and loot the real economy. Take "leveraged buyout," a polite name for *stealing a whole goddamned company*: I. Identify a company that owns valuable assets that are required for its continued operation, such as the real-estate occupied by its outlets, or even its lines of credit with suppliers; II. Approach lenders (usually banks) and ask for money to buy the company, offering the company itself (which you don't own!) as collateral on the loan; III. Offer some of those loaned funds to shareholders of the company and convince a key block of those shareholders (for example, executives with large stock grants, or speculators who've acquired large positions in the company, or people who've inherited shares from early investors but are disengaged from the operation of the firm) to demand that the company be sold to the looters; IV. Call a vote on selling the company at the promised price, counting on the fact that many investors will not participate in that vote (for example, the big index funds like Vanguard almost *never* vote on motions like this), which means that a minority of shareholders can force the sale; V. Once you own the company, start to strip-mine its assets: sell its real-estate, start stiffing suppliers, fire masses of workers, all in the name of "repaying the debts" that you took on to buy the company. This process has its own euphemistic jargon, for example, "rightsizing" for layoffs, or "introducing efficiencies" for stiffing suppliers or selling key assets and leasing them back. The looters - usually organized as private equity funds or hedge funds - will extract all the liquid capital - and give it to themselves as a "special dividend." Increasingly, there's also a "divi recap," which is a euphemism for borrowing even more money backed by the company's assets and then handing it to the private equity fund: https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/17/divi-recaps/#graebers-ghost If you're a *Sopranos* fan, this will all sound familiar, because when the (comparatively honest) mafia does this to a business, it's called a "bust-out": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bust_Out The mafia does destroy businesses on a onesy-twosey, retail scale; but private equity and hedge funds do their plunder wholesale. It's how they killed Red Lobster: https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/23/spineless/#invertebrates And it's what they did to hospitals: https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/28/5000-bats/#charnel-house It's what happened to nursing homes, Armark, private prisons, funeral homes, pet groomers, nursing homes, Toys R Us, The Olive Garden and Pet Smart: https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben It's what happened to the housing co-ops of Cooper Village, Texas energy giant TXU, Old Country Buffet, Harrah's and Caesar's: https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/14/billionaire-class-solidarity/#club-deals And it's what's slated to happen to 2.9m Boomer-owned US businesses employing 32m people, whose owners are nearing retirement: https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/16/schumpeterian-terrorism/#deliberately-broken Now, you can't demolish that much of the US productive economy without attracting some negative attention, so the looter spin-machine has perfected some talking points to hand-wave away the criticism that borrowing money using something you don't own as collateral in order to buy it and wreck it is obviously a dishonest (and potentially criminal) destructive practice. The most common one is that borrowing money against an asset you don't own is just like getting a mortgage. This is *such* a badly flawed analogy that it is really a testament to the efficacy of the baffle-em-with-bullshit gambit to convince us all that we're too stupid to understand how finance works. Sure: if I put an offer on your house, I will go to my credit union and ask the for a mortgage that uses your house as collateral. But the difference here is that you own your house, and the only way I can buy it - the only way I can actually *get* that mortgage - is if you agree to sell it to me. Owner-occupied homes typically have uncomplicated ownership structures. Typically, they're owned by an individual or a couple. Sometimes they're the property of an estate that's divided up among multiple heirs, whose relationship is mediated by a will and a probate court. Title can be contested through a divorce, where disputes are settled by a divorce court. At the outer edge of complexity, you get things like polycules or lifelong roommates who've formed an LLC s they can own a house among several parties, but the LLC will have bylaws, and typically all those co-owners will be fully engaged in any sale process. Leveraged buyouts don't target companies with simple ownership structures. They depend on firms whose equity is split among many parties, some of whom will be utterly disengaged from the firm's daily operations - say, the kids of an early employee who got a big stock grant but left before the company grew up. The looter needs to convince a few of these "owners" to force a vote on the acquisition, and then rely on the idea that many of the other shareholders will simply abstain from a vote. Asset managers are ubiquitous absentee owners who own large stakes in literally every major firm in the economy. The big funds - Vanguard, Blackrock, State Street - "buy the whole market" (a big share in every top-capitalized firm on a given stock exchange) and then seek to deliver returns equal to the overall performance of the market. If the market goes up by 5%, the index funds need to grow by 5%. If the market goes down by 5%, then so do those funds. The managers of those funds are trying to match the performance of the market, not *improve* on it (by voting on corporate governance decisions, say), or to beat it (by only buying stocks of companies they judge to be good bets): https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/17/shareholder-socialism/#asset-manager-capitalism Your family home is *nothing* like one of these companies. It doesn't have a bunch of minority shareholders who can force a vote, or a large block of disengaged "owners" who won't show up when that vote is called. There isn't a class of senior managers - Chief Kitchen Officer! - who have been granted large blocks of options that let them have a say in whether you will become homeless. Now, there *are* homes that fit this description, and they're a fucking disaster. These are the "heirs property" homes, generally owned by the Black descendants of enslaved people who were given the proverbial 40 acres and a mule. Many prosperous majority Black settlements in the American South are composed of these kinds of lots. Given the historical context - illiterate ex-slaves getting property as reparations or as reward for fighting with the Union Army - the titles for these lands are often muddy, with informal transfers from parents to kids sorted out with handshakes and not memorialized by hiring lawyers to update the deeds. This has created an irresistible opportunity for a certain kind of scammer, who will pull the deeds, hire genealogists to map the family trees of the original owners, and locate distant descendants with homeopathically small claims on the property. These descendants don't even know they own these claims, don't even know about these ancestors, and when they're offered a few thousand bucks for their claim, they naturally take it. Now, armed with a claim on the property, the heirs property scammers force an auction of it, keeping the process under wraps until the last instant. If they're really lucky, they're the only bidder and they can buy the entire property for pennies on the dollar and then evict the family that has lived on it since Reconstruction. Sometimes, the family will get wind of the scam and show up to bid against the scammer, but the scammer has deep capital reserves and can easily win the auction, with the same result: https://www.propublica.org/series/dispossessed A similar outrage has been playing out for years in Hawai'i, where indigenous familial claims on ancestral lands have been diffused through descendants who don't even know they're co-owner of a place where their distant cousins have lived since pre-colonial times. These descendants are offered small sums to part with their stakes, which allows the speculator to force a sale and kick the indigenous Hawai'ians off their family lands so they can be turned into condos or hotels. Mark Zuckerberg used this "quiet title and partition" scam to dispossess hundreds of Hawai'ian families: https://archive.is/g1YZ4 Heirs property and quiet title and partition are a *much* better analogy to a leveraged buyout than a mortgage is, because they're ways of stealing something valuable from people who depend on it and maintain it, and smashing it and selling it off. Strip away all the jargon, and private equity is just another scam, albeit one with pretensions to respectability. Its practitioners are ripoff artists. You know the notorious "carried interest loophole" that politicians periodically discover and decry? "Carried interest" has nothing to do with the interest on a loan. The "carried interest" rule dates back to 16th century sea-captains, and it refers to the "interest" they had in the cargo they "carried": https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/29/writers-must-be-paid/#carried-interest Private equity managers are like sea captains in exactly the same way that leveraged buyouts are like mortgages: not at all. And it's not like private equity is good to its *investors*: scams like "continuation funds" allow PE looters to steal all the money they made from strip mining valuable companies, so they show no profits on paper when it comes time to pay their investors: https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/20/continuation-fraud/#buyout-groups Those investors are just as bamboozled as we are, which is why they keep giving more money to PE funds. Today, the "dry powder" (uninvested money) that PE holds has reached an all-time record high of *$2.62 trillion* - money from pension funds and rich people and sovereign wealth funds, stockpiled in anticipation of buying and destroying even more profitable, productive, useful businesses: https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/2di1vzgjcmzovkcea8f0g/portfolio/private-equitys-dry-powder-mountain-reaches-record-height The practices of PE are crooked as hell, and it's only the fact that they use euphemisms and deceptive analogies to home mortgages that keeps them from being shut down. The more we strip away the bullshit, the faster we'll be able to kill this cancer, and the more of the real economy we'll be able to preserve. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Hey look at this * How to Survive a Digital D&D Future https://slyflourish.com/survive_a_digital_dnd.html * Five tech companies are the undead monsters ruling our days. Let?s knock them over and take back what?s ours https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/five-tech-companies-are-the-undead-monsters-ruling-our-days-lets-knock-them-over-and/article_edde07dc-4dc5-11ef-8f09-03f2d8a30083.html * How dumpster diving went from taboo to trendy: ?It?s a treasure hunt? https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/04/dumpster-diving-cost-of-living-waste (h/t Roz Doctorow) ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? This day in history #20yrsago Arlo Guthrie on ?This Land? parody https://corante.com/importance/arlo-guthrie-on-jibjab-parody-an-incredibly-wonderful-bit-of-hilarity/ #20yrsago Stupid judge breaks porn, Internet https://web.archive.org/web/20040903175845/http://www.avnonline.com/index.php?Primary_Navigation=Web_Exclusive_Features&Action=View_Article&Content_ID=185024 #20yrsago EFF reply comments to RIAA?s digital radio proposal at the FCC https://web.archive.org/web/20041027065736/https://www.eff.org/IP/Video/HDTV/EFF-BC_DAB_reply.pdf #20yrsago Jack Valenti says stupid things ? really, really stupid things https://web.archive.org/web/20040805024304/http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/002065.shtml#002065 #15yrsago David Byrne?s live show: the highlight of the year https://memex.craphound.com/2009/08/03/david-byrnes-live-show-the-highlight-of-the-year/ #15yrsago Senator?s campaign website suffers search-engine death penalty for embedding invisible homophobic slur against opponent https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/08/hidden-gay-slur-search-terms-get-campaign-site-blacklisted/ #15yrsago HOWTO Present a poster session at a science meeting https://colinpurrington.com/tips/poster-design/ #15yrsago Black-market stem-cell clinic raided https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17551-guerrilla-stem-cell-clinic-raided-by-police/ #5yrsago Cookie Monster performs Tom Waits?s ?Hell Broke Luce? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbiioBFkD_Q #5yrsago Massachusetts says Purdue?s profits from a single opioid addict were $200,000 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-02/sacklers-are-massachusetts-ag-s-opioid-scapegoat-lawyer-says #5yrsago Elsevier: ?It?s illegal to Sci-Hub.? Also Elsevier: ?We link to Sci-Hub all the time.? https://eve.gd/2019/08/03/elsevier-threatens-others-for-linking-to-sci-hub-but-does-it-itself/ #5yrsago Hong Kong?s General Strike on Monday will include workers from Hong Kong Disneyland https://twitter.com/maree_jun/status/1157671896751599621 #5yrsago Medieval people bathed https://going-medieval.com/2019/08/02/i-assure-you-medieval-people-bathed/ #5yrsago Edelman PR drops GEO Group after employee revolt at the prospect of laundering the reputation of private US concentration camps https://memex.craphound.com/2019/08/04/edelman-pr-drops-geo-group-after-employee-revolt-at-the-prospect-of-laundering-the-reputation-of-private-us-concentration-camps/ #1yrago Fighting junk fees is "woke" https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/04/owning-the-libs/#swiper-no-swiping #1yrago Cloudburst https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/03/there-is-no-cloud/#only-other-peoples-computers ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Upcoming appearances * EFF Charity Poker Tournament (Defcon, Las Vegas, Horseshoe Poker Room), Aug 9 12h https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/betting-your-digital-rights-eff-benefit-poker-tournament-def-con-32 * Bricked & Abandoned: How To Keep The IoT From Becoming An Internet of Trash (Defcon, Las Vegas, Track 1), Aug 9 17h https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=54844 * Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification (Defcon, Las Vegas, Track 1), Aug 10 12h https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=54861 * Launch for Madeline Ashby's *Glass Houses* at Chevalier's Books (LA), Aug 16 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/book-talk-madeline-ashbys-glass-houses-tickets-965286486867 * Disenshittify or die! (Burning Man, Palenque Norte, 7&E), Aug 27, 13h * Talking caterpillar Q&A (Burning Man, Liminal Labs, 830&C), Aug 28, 12h * Albacon (Albany/remote), Sep 13-15 https://albacon.org/2024/ * TusCon (Tucson), Nov 8-10 https://tusconscificon.com/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Recent appearances * The Paradigm Shift https://paradigm-shift-on-4zzz.pinecast.co/episode/dbf12eaf/tech-criticism-with-cory-doctorow * How To Fix The Internet (EFF) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/podcast-episode-fighting-enshittification * Big Tech and the News (Tech Policy Press) https://www.techpolicy.press/big-tech-and-the-news/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Latest books * The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). * "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) * "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). * "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. * "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com * "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?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) * "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/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Upcoming books * Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 * Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Colophon Today's top sources: Currently writing: * Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay. Today's progress: words ( words total). * A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING * Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 * Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM * Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: AI's productivity theater https://craphound.com/news/2024/08/04/ais-productivity-theater/ This work - excluding any serialized fiction - is 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. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla*" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_0x9026DBBE1FC237AF.asc Type: application/pgp-keys Size: 3480 bytes Desc: OpenPGP public key URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 203 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: From doctorow at craphound.com Tue Aug 6 11:49:52 2024 From: doctorow at craphound.com (Cory Doctorow) Date: Tue, 6 Aug 2024 08:49:52 -0700 Subject: [Plura-list] Circular battery self-sufficiency Message-ID: <56f7b3a3-bd51-4793-ae87-7b14f48fd84f@craphound.com> Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/06/with-great-power/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ I'm coming to Defcon! This Friday (Aug 9), I'm emceeing the EFF Poker Tournament (noon, Horseshoe Poker Room), and speaking on the Bricked and Abandoned panel (5PM, track 1). On Saturday (Aug 10), I'm giving a keynote called "Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, track 1). https://defcon.org/html/defcon-32/dc-32-index.html ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ Today's links * Circular battery self-sufficiency: 125m of tons of battery material is one *seventeenth* of our annual road transportation oil extraction. * Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. * This day in history: 2004, 2014, 2019, 2023 * Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. * Recent appearances: Where I've been. * Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Colophon: All the rest. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Circular battery self-sufficiency If we are going to survive the climate emergency, we will have to electrify - that is, transition from burning fossil fuels to collecting, storing, transmitting and using renewable energy generated by e.g. the tides, the wind, and (especially) the Sun. Electrification is a big project, but it's not an insurmountable one. Planning and executing an electric future is like eating the elephant: we do it one step at a time. This is characteristic of big engineering projects, which explains why so many people find it hard to imagine pulling this off. As a layperson, you are *far* more likely to be exposed to a work of popular science than you are a work of popular engineering. Pop science is *great*, but its role is to familiarize you with *theory*, not *practice*. Popular engineering is a minuscule and obscure genre, which is a pity, because it's one of my favorites. Weathering the climate emergency is going to require a lot of politics, to be sure, but it's also going to require a lot of engineering, which is why I'm grateful for the nascent but vital (and growing) field of popular engineering. Not to mention, the practitioners of popular engineering tend to be a lot of *fun*, like the hosts of the Well That's Your Problem podcast, a superb long-form leftist podcast about engineering disasters (with slides!): https://www.youtube.com/@welltheresyourproblempodca1465 If you want to get started on popular engineering and the climate, your first stop should be the "Without the Hot Air" series, which tackles sustainable energy, materials, transportation and food as engineering problems. You'll never think about climate the same way again: https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/06/methane-diet/#3kg-per-day Then there's Saul Griffith's 2021 book *Electrify*, which is basically a roadmap for carrying out the electrification of America and the world: https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/09/practical-visionary/#popular-engineering Griffith's book is inspiring and visionary, but to really get a sense of how *fantastic* an electrified world can be, it's gotta be Deb Chachra's *How Infrastructure Works*: https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/#charismatic-megaprojects Chachra is a material scientist who teaches at Olin College, and her book is a hymn to the historical and philosophical underpinnings of infrastructure, but more than anything, it's a popular engineering book about what is *possible*. For example, if we want to give every person on Earth the energy budget of a Canadian (like an American, but colder), we would only have to capture 0.4% of the solar energy that reaches the Earth's surface. Now, this is a *gigantic* task, but it's a tractable one. Resolving it will require a very careful - and massive - marshaling of materials, particularly copper, but also a large number of conflict minerals and rare earths. It's gonna be hard. But it's not impossible, let along inconceivable. Indeed, Chachra's biggest contribution in this book is to make a compelling case for *reconceiving* our relationship to energy and materials. As a species, we have always treated energy as scarce, trying to wring every erg and therm that we can out of our energy sources. Meanwhile, we've treated materials as abundant, digging them up or chopping them down, using them briefly, then tossing them on a midden or burying them in a pit. Chachra argues that this is precisely backwards. Our planet gets a fresh supply of energy twice a day, with sunrise (solar) and moonrise (tides). On the other hand, we've only got one Earth's worth of materials, supplemented very sporadically when a meteor survives entry into our atmosphere. Mining asteroids, the Moon and other planets is a losing proposition for the long foreseeable future: https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead The promise of marshaling a *very* large amount of materials is that it will deliver effectively limitless, clean energy. This project will take a lot of time and its benefits will primarily accrue to people who come after its builders, which is why it is *infrastructure*. As Chachra says, infrastructure is inherently altruistic, a gift to our neighbors and our descendants. If all you want is a place to stick your own poop, you don't need to build a citywide sanitation system. What's more, we can trade energy for materials. Manufacturing goods so that they gracefully decompose back into the material stream at the end of their lives is energy intensive. Harvesting materials from badly designed goods is also energy intensive. But if once we build out the renewables grid (which will take a lot of materials), we will have all the energy we need (to preserve and re-use our materials). Our species' historical approach to materials is not (ahem) carved in stone. It is contingent. It has changed. It can change again. It *needs* to change, because the way we extract materials today is both unjust and unsustainable. The horrific nature of material extraction under capitalism - and its geopolitics (e.g. "We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.") - has many made comrades in the climate fight skeptical (or worse, cynical) about a clean energy transition. They do the back-of-the-envelope math about the material budget for electrification, mentally convert that to the number of wildlife preserves, low-income communities, unspoiled habitat and indigenous lands that we would destroy in the process of gathering those materials, and conclude that the whole thing is a farce. That analysis is important, but it's incomplete. Yes, marshaling all those materials in the way that we do today would be catastrophic. But the point of a climate transition is that we will *transition* our approach to our planet, our energy, and our materials. That transition can and should challenge *all* the assumptions underpinning electrification doomerism. Take the material bill itself: the assumption that a transition will require a linearly scaled quantity of materials includes the assumption that cleantech won't find substantial efficiencies in its material usage. Thankfully, that's a very bad assumption! Cleantech is just getting started. It's at the stage where we're still uncovering *massive* improvements to production (unlike fossil fuel technology, whose available efficiencies have been discovered and exploited, so that progress is glacial and negligible). Take copper: electrification requires a *lot* of copper. But the amount of copper needed for each part of the cleantech revolution is declining faster than the demand for cleantech is rising. Just one example: between the first and second iteration of the Rivian electric vehicle, designers figured out how to remove 1.6 miles of copper wire from each vehicle: https://insideevs.com/news/722265/rivian-r1s-r1t-wiring/ That's just one iteration and one technology! And yeah, EVs are only peripheral to a cleantech transition; for one thing, geometry hates cars. We're going to have to build a lot of mass transit, and we're going to be realizing these efficiencies with every generation of train, bus, and tram: https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/29/geometry-hates-uber/#toronto-the-gullible We have just lived through a *massive* surge in electrification, with unimaginable quantities of new renewables coming online and a stunning replacement of conventional vehicles with EVs, and throughout that surge, demand for copper *remained flat*: https://www.chemanalyst.com/NewsAndDeals/NewsDetails/copper-wire-price-remains-stable-amidst-surplus-supply-and-expanding-mining-25416#:~:text=Global%20Copper%20wire%20Price%20Remains%20Stable%20Amidst%20Surplus%20Supply%20and%20Expanding%20Mining%20Activities This isn't to say that cleantech is a solved problem. There are many political aspects to cleantech that remain pernicious, like the fact that so many of the cleantech offerings on the market are built around extractive financial arrangements (like lease-back rooftop solar) and "smart" appliances (like heat pumps and induction tops) that require enshittification-ready apps: https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/26/unplanned-obsolescence/#better-micetraps There's a quiet struggle going on between cleantech efficiencies and the finance sector's predation, from lease-back to apps to the carbon-credit scam, but many of those conflicts are cashing out in favor of a sustainable future and it doesn't help our cause to ignore those: we should be cheering them on! https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/12/s-curve/#anything-that-cant-go-on-forever-eventually-stops Take "innovation." Silicon Valley's string of pump-and-dump nonsense - cryptocurrency, NFTs, metaverse, web3, and now AI - have made "innovation" into a dirty word. As the AI bubble bursts, the very idea of innovation is turning into a punchline: https://www.wheresyoured.at/burst-damage/ But cleantech is excitingly, wonderfully innovative. The contrast between the fake innovation of Silicon Valley and the real - and vital - innovation of cleantech couldn't be starker, or more inspiring: https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/30/posiwid/#social-cost-of-carbon Like the "battery problem." Whenever the renewables future is raised, there's always a doomer insisting that batteries are an unsolved - and unsolvable - problem, and without massive batteries, there's no sense in trying, because the public won't accept brownouts when the sun goes down and the wind stops blowing. Sometimes, these people are shilling boondoggles like nuclear power (reminder: this is Hiroshima Day): https://theconversation.com/dutton-wants-australia-to-join-the-nuclear-renaissance-but-this-dream-has-failed-before-209584 Other times, they're just trying to foreclose on the conversation about a renewables transition altogether. But sometimes, these doubts are raised by comrades who really *do* want a transition and have serious questions about power storage. If you're one of those people, I have some very good news: battery tech is *taking off*. Some of that takes the form of wild and cool new approaches. In Finland, a Scottish company is converting a disused copper mine into a gravity battery. During the day, excess renewables hoist a platform piled with *tons* of rock up a 530m shaft. At night, the platform lowers slowly, driving a turbine and releasing its potential energy. This is incredibly efficient, has a tiny (and sustainable) bill of materials, and it's highly replicable. The world has sufficient abandoned mine-shafts to store 70TWh of power - that's the daily energy budget for the entire planet. What's more, every mine shaft has a beefy connection to the power grid, because you can't run a mine without a lot of power: https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/02/06/this-disused-mine-in-finland-is-being-turned-into-a-gravity-battery-to-store-renewable-ene Gravity batteries are great for utility-scale storage, but we also need a lot of batteries for things that we can't keep plugged into the wall, like vehicles, personal electronics, etc. There's great news on that score, too! "The Battery Mineral Loop" is a new report from the Rocky Mountain Institute that describes the path to "circular battery self-sufficiency": https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2024/07/the_battery_mineral_loop_report_July.pdf The big idea: rather than digging up new minerals to make batteries, we can recycle minerals from dead batteries to make new ones. Remember, energy can be traded for materials: we can expend more energy on designs that are optimized to decompose back into their component materials, or we can expend more energy extracting materials from designs that *aren't* optimized for recycling. Both things are *already* happening. From the executive summary: * The chemistry of batteries is rapidly improving: over the past decade, we've reduced per-using demand for lithium, nickle and cobalt by 60-140%, and most lithium batteries are being recycled, not landfilled. * Within a decade, we'll hit peak mineral demand for batteries. By the mid-2030s, the amount of new "virgin minerals" needed to meet our battery demand will stop growing and start declining. * By 2050, we could attain net zero mineral demand for batteries: that is, we could meet all our energy storage needs without digging up any more minerals. * We are on a path to a "one-off" extraction effort. We can already build batteries that work for 10-15 years and whose materials can be recycled with 90-94% efficiency. * The total quantity of minerals we need to extract to permanently satisfy the world's energy storage needs is about 125m tons. This last point is the one that caught my eye. Extracting 125m tons of anything is a tall order, and depending on how it's done, it could wreak a terrible toll on people and the places they live. But one question I learned to ask from Tim Harford and BBC More Or Less is "is that a big number?" 125m tons sure feels like a large number, but it is *one seventeenth* of the amount of fossil fuels we dig up *every year* just for *road transport*. In other words, we're talking about spending the next thirty years carefully, sustainably, humanely extracting about 5.8% of the materials we currently pump and dig *every year* for our cars. Do that, and we satisfy our battery needs more-or-less *forever*. This is a big engineering project. We've done those before. Crisscrossing the world with roads, supplying billions of fossil-fuel vehicles, building the infrastructure for refueling them, pumping billions of gallons of oil - all of that was done in living memory. As Robin Sloan wrote: > Did people say, at the dawn of the automobile: are you kidding me? This technology will require a ubiquitous network of refueling stations, one or two at every major intersection ? even if there WAS that much gas in the world, how would you move it around at that scale? If everybody buys a car, you?ll need to build highways, HUGE ones???you?ll need to dig up cities! Madness! https://www.robinsloan.com/newsletters/room-for-everybody/ That big project cost trillions and required bending the productive capacity of many nations to its completion. It produced a ghastly geopolitics that elevated petrostates - a hole in the ground, surrounded by guns - to kingmakers whose autocrats can knock the world on its ass at will. By contrast, *this* giant engineering project is relatively modest, and it will upend that global order, yielding energy sovereignty (and its handmaiden, national resliency) to every country on Earth. Doing it well will be hard, and require that we rethink our relationship to energy and materials, but that's a *bonus*, not a *cost*. Changing how we use materials and energy will make all our lives better, it will improve the lives of the living things we share the planet with, and it will strip the monsters who currently control our energy supply of their political, economic, and *electric* power. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Hey look at this * BOOM: Judge Rules Google Is a Monopolist https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/boom-judge-rules-google-is-a-monopolist * Hotel to Search Rooms During DEF CON Hacking Conference https://www.404media.co/hotel-to-search-rooms-during-def-con-hacking-conference/ * These People are Nazis https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/these-people-are-nazis ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? This day in history #20yrsago FCC: why should the courts interpret copyright when we can regulate it? https://web.archive.org/web/20040811223828/https://www.corante.com/importance/archives/005534.php #20yrsago Suspicious things I?ve done on an airplane https://web.archive.org/web/20040803082259/https://unmedia.blogspot.com/2004/07/suspicious-things-ive-done-on-airplane.html #20yrsago Paranoia game redesigned using open-source methodology https://web.archive.org/web/20040806032852/http://www.costik.com/weblog/2004_08_01_blogchive.html#109173202462615135 #10yrsago Lev Grossman?s The Magician?s Land https://memex.craphound.com/2014/08/05/lev-grossmans-the-magicians-land/ #5yrsago Podcast: ?IBM PC Compatible?: how adversarial interoperability saved PCs from monopolization https://ia903008.us.archive.org/16/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_306/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_306_-_IBM_PC_Compatible.mp3 #5yrsago A MIDI harmonica #5yrsago 46% of Scots want to separate from the UK; 43% want to remain https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/majority-of-scots-now-in-favour-of-independence-shock-poll-reveals #5yrsago From Tiananmen to Occupy Central to the Umbrella Movement to today?s General Strike: understanding the Hong Kong uprising https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n16/chaohua-wang/hong-kong-v.-beijing #5yrsago ?IBM PC Compatible?: how adversarial interoperability saved PCs from monopolization https://memex.craphound.com/2019/08/05/ibm-pc-compatible-how-adversarial-interoperability-saved-pcs-from-monopolization/ #1yrago America's largest hospital chain has an algorithmic death panel https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/05/any-metric-becomes-a-target/#hca Upcoming appearances (permalink) * EFF Charity Poker Tournament (Defcon, Las Vegas, Horseshoe Poker Room), Aug 9 12h https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/betting-your-digital-rights-eff-benefit-poker-tournament-def-con-32 * Bricked & Abandoned: How To Keep The IoT From Becoming An Internet of Trash (Defcon, Las Vegas, Track 1), Aug 9 17h https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=54844 * Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification (Defcon, Las Vegas, Track 1), Aug 10 12h https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=54861 * Launch for Madeline Ashby's *Glass Houses* at Chevalier's Books (LA), Aug 16 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/book-talk-madeline-ashbys-glass-houses-tickets-965286486867 * Disenshittify or die! (Burning Man, Palenque Norte, 7&E), Aug 27, 13h * Talking caterpillar Q&A (Burning Man, Liminal Labs, 830&C), Aug 28, 12h * Albacon (Albany/remote), Sep 13-15 https://albacon.org/2024/ * TusCon (Tucson), Nov 8-10 https://tusconscificon.com/ * EFF Charity Poker Tournament (Defcon, Las Vegas, Horseshoe Poker Room), Aug 9 12h https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/betting-your-digital-rights-eff-benefit-poker-tournament-def-con-32 * Bricked & Abandoned: How To Keep The IoT From Becoming An Internet of Trash (Defcon, Las Vegas, Track 1), Aug 9 17h https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=54844 * Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification (Defcon, Las Vegas, Track 1), Aug 10 12h https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=54861 * Launch for Madeline Ashby's *Glass Houses* at Chevalier's Books (LA), Aug 16 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/book-talk-madeline-ashbys-glass-houses-tickets-965286486867 * Disenshittify or die! (Burning Man, Palenque Norte, 7&E), Aug 27, 13h * Talking caterpillar Q&A (Burning Man, Liminal Labs, 830&C), Aug 28, 12h * Albacon (Albany/remote), Sep 13-15 https://albacon.org/2024/ * TusCon (Tucson), Nov 8-10 https://tusconscificon.com/ Recent appearances (permalink) * The Paradigm Shift https://paradigm-shift-on-4zzz.pinecast.co/episode/dbf12eaf/tech-criticism-with-cory-doctorow * How To Fix The Internet (EFF) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/podcast-episode-fighting-enshittification * Big Tech and the News (Tech Policy Press) https://www.techpolicy.press/big-tech-and-the-news/ Latest books (permalink) * The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). * "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) * "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). * "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. * "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com * "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?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) * "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/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books (permalink) * Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 * Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Bill McKibben (https://billmckibben.substack.com). Currently writing: * Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay. Today's progress: 759 words (33125 words total). * A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING * Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 * Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM * Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: AI's productivity theater https://craphound.com/news/2024/08/04/ais-productivity-theater/ This work - excluding any serialized fiction - is 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. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_0x9026DBBE1FC237AF.asc Type: application/pgp-keys Size: 3480 bytes Desc: OpenPGP public key URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 203 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: From doctorow at craphound.com Wed Aug 7 09:21:56 2024 From: doctorow at craphound.com (Cory Doctorow) Date: Wed, 7 Aug 2024 06:21:56 -0700 Subject: [Plura-list] The Google antitrust remedy should extinguish surveillance, not democratize it Message-ID: <4bac2258-9427-455a-b736-864250f9049c@craphound.com> Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ I'm coming to Defcon! This Friday (Aug 9), I'm emceeing the EFF Poker Tournament (noon, Horseshoe Poker Room), and speaking on the Bricked and Abandoned panel (5PM, track 1). On Saturday (Aug 10), I'm giving a keynote called "Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, track 1). https://defcon.org/html/defcon-32/dc-32-index.html ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ Community voting for SXSW is live! If you wanna hear Rida Qadri and me talk about how gig workers can disenshittify their jobs with interoperability, vote for this one! https://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/150498 ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ Today's links * The Google antitrust remedy should extinguish surveillance, not democratize it: "People like relevant ads" is a lie, and "attribution" is an abomination. * Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. * This day in history: 2004, 2009, 2019, 2023 * Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. * Recent appearances: Where I've been. * Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Colophon: All the rest. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ?? The Google antitrust remedy should extinguish surveillance, not democratize it If you are even slightly plugged into the doings and goings on in this tired old world of ours, then you have heard that Google has lost its antitrust case against the DOJ Antitrust Division, and is now an official, no-foolin', convicted *monopolist*. This is *huge*. Epochal. The DOJ, under the leadership of the fire-breathing trustbuster Jonathan Kantor, has done something that was *inconceivable* four years ago when he was appointed. On Kantor's first day on the job as head of the Antitrust Division, he addressed his gathered prosecutors and asked them to raise their hands if they'd never lost a case. It was a canny trap. As the proud, victorious DOJ lawyers thrust their arms into the air, Kantor quoted James Comey, who did the same thing on his first day on the job as DA for the Southern District of New York: "You people are the chickenshit club." A federal prosecutor who never loses a case is a prosecutor who only goes after easy targets, and leave the worst offenders (who can mount a serious defense) unscathed. Under Kantor, the Antitrust Division has been anything but a Chickenshit Club. They've gone after the biggest game, the hardest targets, and with Google, they bagged the hardest target of all. Again: this is *huge*: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/boom-judge-rules-google-is-a-monopolist But also: this is just the start. Now that Google is convicted, the court needs to decide what to do about it. Courts have lots of leeway when it comes to addressing a finding of lawbreaking. They can impose "conduct remedies" ("don't do that anymore). These are generally considered weaksauce, because they're hard to administer. When you tell a company like Google to stop doing something, you need to expend a lot of energy to make sure they're following orders. Conduct remedies are as much a punishment for the government (which has to spend millions closely observing the company to ensure compliance) as they are for the firms involved. But the court could also order Google to stop doing certain things. For example, since the ruling finds that Google illegally maintained its monopoly by paying other entities - Apple, Mozilla, Samsung, AT&T, etc - to be the default search, the court could order them to stop doing that. At the very least, that's a lot easier to monitor. The big guns, though are the *structural* remedies. The court could order Google to sell off parts of its business, like its ad-tech stack, through which it represents both buyers *and* sellers in a marketplace it owns, and with whom it competes as a buyer and a seller. There's already proposed, bipartisan legislation to do this (how bipartisan? Its two main co-sponsors are Ted Cruz and Elizabeth Warren!): https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/25/structural-separation/#america-act All of these things, and more, are on the table: https://www.wired.com/story/google-search-monopoly-judge-amit-mehta-options/ We'll get a better sense of what the judge is likely to order in the fall, but the case could drag out for quite some time, as Google appeals the verdict, then tries for the Supreme Court, then appeals the remedy, and so on and so on. Dragging things out in the hopes of running out the clock is a time-honored tradition in tech antitrust. IBM dragged out its antitrust appeals for 12 years, from 1970 to 1982 (they called it "Antitrust's Vietnam"). This is an expensive gambit: IBM outspent the *entire DOJ Antitrust Division* for 12 consecutive years, hiring more lawyers to fight the DOJ than the DOJ employed to run *all* of its antitrust enforcement, nationwide. But it worked. IBM hung in there until Reagan got elected and ordered his AG to drop the case. This is the same trick Microsoft pulled in the nineties. The case went to trial in 1998, and Microsoft lost in 1999. They appealed, and dragged out the proceedings until GW Bush stole the presidency in 2000 and dropped the case in 2001. I am 100% certain that there are lawyers at Google thinking about this: "OK, say we put a few hundred million behind Trump-affiliated PACs, wait until he's president, have a little meeting with Attorney General Andrew Tate, and convince him to drop the case. Worked for IBM, worked for Microsoft, it'll work for us. And it'll be a bargain." That's one way things could go wrong, but it's hardly the only way. In his ruling, Judge Mehta rejected the DOJ's argument that in illegally creating and maintaining its monopoly, Google harmed its users' privacy by foreclosing on the possibility of a rival that didn't rely on commercial surveillance. The judge repeats some of the most cherished and absurd canards of the marketing industry, like the idea that people actually *like* advertisements, provided that they're *relevant*, so spying on people is actually *doing them a favor* by making it easier to target the right ads to them. First of all, this is just obvious self-serving rubbish that the advertising industry has been repeating since the days when it was waging a massive campaign against the TV remote on the grounds that people would "steal" TV by changing the channel when the ads came on. If "relevant" advertising was so great, then no one would reach for the remote - or better still, they'd change the channel when the show came back on, looking for *more ads*. People don't like advertising. And they *hate* "relevant" advertising that targets their private behaviors and views. They find it creepy. Remember when Apple offered users a one-click opt-out from Facebook spying, the most sophisticated commercial surveillance system in human history, whose entire purpose was to deliver "relevant" advertising? *More than 96% of Apple's customers opted out of surveillance*. Even the most Hayek-pilled economist has to admit that this is a a *hell* of a "revealed preference." People don't want "relevant" advertising. Period. The judge's credulous repetition of this obvious nonsense is doubly disturbing in light of the nature of the monopoly charge against Google - that the company had monopolized the advertising market. Don't get me wrong: Google *has* monopolized the advertising market. They operate a "full stack" ad-tech shop. By controlling the tools that sellers and buyers use, and the marketplace where they use them, Google steals billions from advertisers and publishers. And that's before you factor in Jedi Blue, the illegal collusive arrangement the company has with Facebook, by which they carved up the market to increase their profits, gouge advertisers, starve publishers, and keep out smaller rivals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue One effect of Google's monopoly power is a global privacy crisis. In regions with strong privacy laws (like the EU), Google uses flags of convenience (looking at you, Ireland) to break the law with impunity: https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town In the rest of the world, Google works with other members of the surveillance cartel to prevent the passage of privacy laws. That's why the USA hasn't had a new federal privacy law since 1988, when Congress acted to ban video-store clerks from telling newspaper reporters about the VHS cassettes you took home: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act The lack of privacy law and privacy enforcement means that Google can inflict untold privacy harms on billions of people around the world. Everything we do, everywhere we go online and offline, every relationship we have, everything we buy and say and do - it's all collected and stored and mined and used against us. The immediate harm here is the haunting sense that you are always under observation, a violation of your fundamental human rights that prevents you from ever being your authentic self: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2013/jun/14/nsa-prism The harms of surveillance aren't merely spiritual and psychological - they're material and immediate. The commercial surveillance industry provides the raw feedstock for a parade of horribles, from stalkers and bounty hunters turning up on their targets' front doors to cops rounding up demonstrators with location data from their phones to identity thieves tricking their marks by using leaked or purchased private information as convincers: https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy The problem with Google's monopolization of the surveillance business model is that *they're spying on us.* But for a certain kind of competition wonk, the problem is that Google is *monopolizing* the violation of our human rights, and we need to use competition law to "democratize" commercial surveillance. This is deeply perverse, but it represents a central split in competition theory. Some trustbusters fetishize competition for its own sake, on the theory that it makes companies better and more efficient. But there are some things we don't want companies to be *better* at, like violating our human rights. We want to *ban* human rights violations, not *improve* them. For other trustbusters - like me - the point of competition enforcement isn't merely to make companies offer better products, it's to make companies small enough to hold account through the enforcement democratic laws. I want to break - and break up - Google because I want to end its ability to bigfoot privacy law so that we can finally root out the cancer of commercial surveillance. I don't want to make Google smaller so that *other surveillance companies* can get in on the game. There is a real danger that this could emerge from this decision, and that's a danger we need to guard against. Last month, Google shocked the technical world by announcing that it would not follow through on its years-long promise to kill third-party cookies, one of the most pernicious and dangerous tools of commercial surveillance. The reason for this volte-face appears to be concern that the EU would view killing third-party cookies as anticompetitive, since Google intended to maintain commercial surveillance using its Orwellian "Privacy Sandbox" technology in Chrome, with the effect that everyone *except* Google would find it harder to spy on us as we used the internet: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/googles-trail-of-crumbs It's true! This is anticompetitive. But the answer isn't to preserve the universal power of tech companies large and small to violate our human rights - it's to ban everyone, *especially Google* from spying on us! This current in competition law is still on the fringe, but the Google case - which finds the company illegally dominating surveillance advertising, but rejects the idea that surveillance is itself a harm - offers an opportunity for this bad idea to go from the fringe to the center. If that happens, look out. Take "attribution," an obscure bit of ad-tech jargon disguising a jaw-droppingly terrible practice. "Attribution" is when an ad-tech company shows you an ad, and then follows you everywhere you go, monitoring everything you do, to determine whether the ad convinced you to buy something. I mean that literally: they're combining location data generated by your phone and captured by Bluetooth and wifi receivers with data from your credit card to follow you everywhere and log everything, so that they can prove to a merchant that you bought something. This is unspeakably grotesque. It should be illegal. In many parts of the world, it *is* illegal, but it is so lucrative that monopolists like Google can buy off the enforcers and get away with it. What's more, only the *very* largest corporations have the resources to surveil you so closely and invasively that they can perform this "service." But again, some competition wonks look at this situation and say, "Well, that's not right, we need to make sure that *everyone* can do attribution." This was a (completely mad) premise in the (otherwise very good) 2020 Competition and Markets Authority market-study on "Online platforms and digital advertising": https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5fa557668fa8f5788db46efc/Final_report_Digital_ALT_TEXT.pdf This (again, otherwise sensible) document veers completely off the rails whenever the subject of attribution comes up. At one point, the authors propose that the law should allow corporations to spy on people who opt out of commercial surveillance, provided that this spying is undertaken for the sole purpose of attribution. But it gets even worse: by the end of the document, the authors propose a "user ID intervention" to give every Briton a permanent, government-issued advertising identifier to make it easier for smaller companies to do attribution. Look, I understand why advertisers like attribution and are willing to preferentially take their business to companies that can perform it. But the fact that merchants *want* to be able to peer into every corner of our lives to figure out how well their ads are performing is no basis for permitting them to do so - much less intervening in the market to make it even easier so more commercial snoops can get their noses in our business! This is an idea that keeps popping up, like in this editorial by a UK lawyer, where he proposes fixing "Google's dominance of online advertising" by making it possible for everyone to track us using the commercial surveillance identifiers created and monopolized by the ad-tech duopoly and the mobile tech duopoly: https://www.thesling.org/what-to-do-about-googles-dominance-of-online-advertising/ Those companies are doing something rotten. In dominating ads, they have stolen billions from publishers *and* advertisers. Then they used those billions to capture our democratic process and ensure that our human rights weren't being defended as they plundered our private data and put us in harm's way. Advertising will adapt. The marketing bros know this is coming. They're already discussing how to live in a world where you can't measure clicks and you can't attribute actions (e.g. the world from the first advertisements up until the early 2000s): https://sparktoro.com/blog/attribution-is-dying-clicks-are-dying-marketing-is-going-back-to-the-20th-century/ An equitable solution to Google's monopoly will not run though our right to privacy. We don't solve the Google monopoly by creating competition in surveillance. The reason to get rid of Google's monopoly is to make it easier to *end* surveillance. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ?? Hey look at this * Parody site ClownStrike refused to bow to CrowdStrike?s bogus DMCA takedown https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/08/parody-site-clownstrike-refused-to-bow-to-crowdstrikes-bogus-dmca-takedown/ * WordStar 7, the last ever DOS version, is re-released for free https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/06/wordstar_7_the_last_ever/ * Where Facebook's AI Slop Comes From https://www.404media.co/where-facebooks-ai-slop-comes-from ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ?? This day in history #20yrsago Fox News attacks Disney for insufficient homophobia https://web.archive.org/web/20040809000157/https://www.mediamatters.org/items/200408060012 #20yrsago Disney asks FCC to lock up all the record-buttons https://web.archive.org/web/20040814133636/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/001805.php #20yrsago Canadian Legion: ?We own all uses of the word ?poppy'? https://web.archive.org/web/20040811130036/http://anhedonia.imparte.com/gbook.html #20yrsago MMOs discourage heroism, FRPGs encourage it https://web.archive.org/web/20040808001510/http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2004/08/where_are_the_h.html #15yrsago Terry Pratchett on the right to die https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1203622/Ill-die-endgame-says-Terry-Pratchett-law-allow-assisted-suicides-UK.html #15yrsago Stupid pitfalls of social media https://web.archive.org/web/20090808193904/http://asis.org/Bulletin/Aug-09/AugSep09_Crumlish.html #15yrsago HOWTO make dust-goggles from a bra-strap, light-bulb screens, and an old biker jacket https://windfiredesigns.com/How-To/Dust-Goggles/ #5yrsago A loophole in nonprofit law means that corporate lobbying is at least double the official figure https://theintercept.com/2019/08/06/business-group-spending-on-lobbying-in-washington-is-at-least-double-whats-publicly-reported/ #5yrsago The only thing health insurance companies are good at is scaring us about socialized medicine https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-08-05/health-insurance-useless #5yrsago How Quebec?s health-care system uses ?vaccine whisperers? to keep ?vaccine hesitancy? from turning to anti-vax https://www.statnews.com/2019/08/05/the-vaccine-whisperers-counselors-gently-engage-new-parents-before-their-doubts-harden-into-certainty/ #5yrsago DOJ indicts man for paying AT&T employees to help him unlock millions of customers? phones https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/6/20756625/att-unlocking-crime-conspiracy-malware-hacking-paid-employees #5yrsago Amazon?s surveillance doorbell marketers help cops get warrantless access to video footage from peoples? homes https://www.vice.com/en/article/43kga3/amazon-is-coaching-cops-on-how-to-obtain-surveillance-footage-without-a-warrant #5yrsago Survey finds high levels of harassment in multiplayer games, as well as white supremacist recruiting attempts https://www.adl.org/resources/report/free-play-hate-harassment-and-positive-social-experiences-online-games #1yrago Fool Me Twice We Don?t Get Fooled Again https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/06/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get-fooled-again/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ?? Upcoming appearances * EFF Charity Poker Tournament (Defcon, Las Vegas, Horseshoe Poker Room), Aug 9 12h https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/betting-your-digital-rights-eff-benefit-poker-tournament-def-con-32 * Bricked & Abandoned: How To Keep The IoT From Becoming An Internet of Trash (Defcon, Las Vegas, Track 1), Aug 9 17h https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=54844 * Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification (Defcon, Las Vegas, Track 1), Aug 10 12h https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=54861 * Launch for Madeline Ashby's *Glass Houses* at Chevalier's Books (LA), Aug 16 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/book-talk-madeline-ashbys-glass-houses-tickets-965286486867 * Disenshittify or die! (Burning Man, Palenque Norte, 7&E), Aug 27, 13h * Talking caterpillar Q&A (Burning Man, Liminal Labs, 830&C), Aug 28, 12h * Albacon (Albany/remote), Sep 13-15 https://albacon.org/2024/ * TusCon (Tucson), Nov 8-10 https://tusconscificon.com/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ?? Recent appearances * Enzittification with Cory Doctorow & Brian Merchant https://omny.fm/shows/better-offline/enzittification-with-cory-doctorow-brian-merchant * The Paradigm Shift https://paradigm-shift-on-4zzz.pinecast.co/episode/dbf12eaf/tech-criticism-with-cory-doctorow * How To Fix The Internet (EFF) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/podcast-episode-fighting-enshittification ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ?? Latest books * The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). * "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) * "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). * "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. * "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com * "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?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) * "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/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ?? Upcoming books * Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 * Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ?? Colophon Today's top sources: Currently writing: * Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay. Today's progress: 787 words (33912 words total). * A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING * Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 * Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM * Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: AI's productivity theater https://craphound.com/news/2024/08/04/ais-productivity-theater/ This work - excluding any serialized fiction - is 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. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ?? How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla*" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_0x9026DBBE1FC237AF.asc Type: application/pgp-keys Size: 3480 bytes Desc: OpenPGP public key URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 203 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: From doctorow at craphound.com Thu Aug 8 10:42:04 2024 From: doctorow at craphound.com (Cory Doctorow) Date: Thu, 8 Aug 2024 07:42:04 -0700 Subject: [Plura-list] Private equity rips off its investors, too Message-ID: Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/08/sucker-at-the-table/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ I'm coming to Defcon! TOMORROW (Aug 9), I'm emceeing the EFF Poker Tournament (noon, Horseshoe Poker Room), and speaking on the Bricked and Abandoned panel (5PM, track 1). On SATURDAY (Aug 10), I'm giving a keynote called "Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, track 1). https://defcon.org/html/defcon-32/dc-32-index.html ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ Community voting for SXSW is live! If you wanna hear Rida Qadri and me talk about how gig workers can disenshittify their jobs with interoperability, vote for this one! https://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/150498 ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ Today's links * Private equity rips off its investors, too: Remorseless, greedy scumbags are - unsurprisingly - also disloyal. * Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. * This day in history: 2009, 2019 * Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. * Recent appearances: Where I've been. * Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Colophon: All the rest. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Private equity rips off its investors, too It's amazing how many of the scams that have devastated our economy and everyday people owe their success to the fact that we assume that rich people know what they're doing, so if they're doing something, it must be real. Think of how many people lost everything by gambling on junk bonds, exotic mortgage derivatives, cryptocurrency and web3, because they saw that the largest financial institutions in the world were going all-in on these weird, incomprehensible bets. Then there are the people who are *convinced* that online advertising is built around a mind-control ray, because tech companies claim that's what they have ("I am an evil dopamine-loop-hacking wizard and I can sell anything to anyone!"), and because huge, sober blue-chip companies hand billions to these soi dissant svengalis. Sure, online ads are a swamp of clickfraud and garbage, but would these super smart captains of industry spend so much on online advertising if it didn't work super-well? http://pluralistic.net/HowToDestroySurveillanceCapitalism From our worms'-eye-view here on the ground, it's easy to assume that rich people and the people who sell them stuff are all on the same side. "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product," right? If Facebook is tormenting you with surveillance advertising, it must be doing so on behalf of the surveillance *advertisers*, for whom Mark Zuckerberg has bottomless reservoirs of honest, forthright impulses. The reality is simultaneously weirder, and obvious in hindsight. The reason Zuck is tormenting you is that he's a remorseless sociopath who doesn't care who he hurts. He rips off everyone he *can* rip off, and that includes advertisers, who have seen steady price-hikes and lower-fidelity targeting, even as ad-fraud has skyrocketed while Facebook draws down its anti-fraud spending: https://www.404media.co/where-facebooks-ai-slop-comes-from/ This is not to say that Facebook advertisers have your best interests at heart, that they aren't engaged in active deception in order to better themselves at your expense. Rather, it's to say that there's no honor among thieves, and Zuck is an equal-opportunity predator. Moreover, both Zuck *and* his advertisers are credulous dolts, so the mere fact that they are pouring money into something (advertisers: FB ads; Zuck: metaverse) it doesn't follow that these are real or important or the coming thing. For me, the Ur-example of "rich people are dumb, even when it comes to money" is the private equity sector. I've written a *lot* about PE, and how destructive it is to the real economy, from Toys R Us to pet grooming: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/05/rugged-individuals/#misleading-by-analogy How they killed Red Lobster: https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/23/spineless/#invertebrates And how they actually created the death panels that Sarah Palin warned us about (it's OK, though: *these* death panels are run by the efficient private sector, not government bureaucrats): https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/26/death-panels/#what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-CMS The devastating effect of private equity on the real economy is increasingly well understood, and a curious side-effect of this is that people assume that if PE is destroying their lives, they must be doing so on behalf of their investors, who are making bank. But - like Zuck - PE bosses are just as happy to steal from their investors as they are to to steal from the workers and customers of the businesses they acquire on those investors' behalf. They swaddle this theft in performative complexity and specialized jargon, but when you strip all that away, you find more fraud. All the misery that PE inflicts on workers, communities and customers are just a convincer in a Big Store con, a bid to make the scam seem credible. For a certain kind of investor, any economic activity that destroys communities and workers' livelihoods *must* be a good bet. This is the dynamic at work in the pitch of AI image-generator companies, who spend tens of billions on technology that there is no substantial market for: https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/25/accountability-sinks/#work-harder-not-smarter AI image generators represent a high-profile, extremely visible example of "a job that AI can do." Nevermind that AI illustration went from a novelty to a tired cliche in less than a year. Even if you think that AI illustrations are a perfect substitute for commercial illustrations, that *still* won't come anywhere near making AI companies a profit. Add up the entire wage bill for every commercial illustrator in the world, hand it to Open AI, and you're not even gonna cover the kombucha budget for Open AI's staff kitchens. Hell, all the wages of every commercial illustrator that ever *lived* won't pay back even a *fraction* of the money the AI companies spent on image generators. The pauperization of an entire class of creative workers is just a canned demo, a way to fool investors into thinking that there is a whole universe of similarly situated workers whose wages can be diverted to AI companies. This is the logic of small-time spammers, scaled up to the scale of the entire S&P 500. Smalltime spammers looked at AI and thought, "OK, I can generate as much botshit as I want on demand for free. Science fiction magazines pay $0.10/word. So if I generate a *billion* words, I'll get *$100 million*." But that's not how any of that works: sf magazines don't buy botshit, and even if they did, the entire market for short fiction adds up to what Sam Altman spends on a single designer t-shirt. The point of destroying these beloved, useful things isn't to make a lot of money by taking their markets - it's to convince dopey, panicked rich people to give you lots of money you can steal, because they think you can do this to *every* market and they don't want to miss out on the opportunity of a lifetime: https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week Take "divi recaps": after a private equity firm acquires a company (by borrowing money against its assets), it typically declares a "special dividend," emptying out the company's cash reserves and pocketing them. A "divi recap" is when PE then takes out *another* massive loan against the company's (remaining) assets and pockets *that*: https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/17/divi-recaps/#graebers-ghost All of this happens under an opaque cloud, thanks to the light-to-nonexistent disclosure rules for PE. A public company has to open its books for the SEC, its investors, and the world. PE is private - and so are its finances. It is absolutely routine for PE bosses to put their spouses, kids, and pals on the payroll and hand them *millions* for doing little to nothing, all at the expense of their investors: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/02/sec-set-to-lower-massive-boom-on-private-equity-industry.html PE bosses charge *huge* fees to their investors - not merely the usual 2-and-20 (2% of the funds under management and 20% of any profits) - but also a wide variety of special one-off fees that pile to the sky. They also dip into their investors' funds to issue themselves massive loans that they use to make side-bets, without telling the investors about it: https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/10/monopoly-begets-monopoly/#gary-gensler PE investors are chickens ripe for the plucking: take "continuation funds," which allow PE bosses to *soak* the rich people and pension funds who supply them with billions: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/mergers-and-acquisitions/matt-levines-money-stuff-buyout-funds-buy-from-themselves Remember 2-and-20? 2% of all the money you manage, every year, and 20% of all the profits. You'd think that these would be somewhat zero sum, right? If you use some of your investors' cash to buy a company, and then sell off that company for a profit, you get the 20%, but now the pot of money you're managing has gone down by the amount you used to buy the company, and so your 2% carry goes down, too. But what if you sell your portfolio companies *to yourself*, using your investors' own money? When you do *that*, you continue to hold the company on your PE firm's books, meaning you continue to get the 2% carry, *and* you can pocket 20% of the sale price as a "profit": https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/20/continuation-fraud/#buyout-groups This is straight-up fraud, wrapped up in so much jargon that it can successfully masquerade as "financial engineering" ("financial engineering" is really just a euphemism for "fraud"). PE bosses keep coming up with new, exotic ways to steal from their investors. The latest scam is "tax receivable agreements": https://archive.ph/RczJ9 On its face, this is a *tax* scam. When a company goes public, early investors generally hold stock in the original partnership or LLC; this company ends up holding a ton of shares in the new, public company. When they sell those non-public shares in the LLC, this creates a (potentially gigantic) tax credit. A TRA hustle involves tracking down these LLC shareholders and convincing them to sign off on dumping the LLC's shares, which generates a huge tax credit for the public company. The hustler offers to split these credits with the LLC holders. All of this is especially attractive to PE bosses, who often take a company private, do a bunch of "financial engineering" and then take it public again, leaving the PE firm as the owner of those LLC shares that can be converted to a TRA and a huge windfall - which the PE bosses pocket, because they (not their investors) are holding those credits. This scam is really doing big numbers. KKR - the monsters who killed Toys R Us - just diverted *$650 million* in TRA loot, prompting a lawsuit from Steamfitters union pension fund, which had handed these jerks millions of its members' money to gamble with: https://archive.ph/kqQvI This highlights another very weird aspect of the PE scam: they are absolutely dependent on pension funds. To add insult to injury, PE funds are notorious union-busters - they use *union money* to buy companies and destroy their unions: https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/05/mr-gotcha/#no-ethical-consumption-under-capitalism People who try to understand the PE business model often give up, because it seems to make no sense, leading many to assume that they're too unsophisticated to grasp the complex financials here. For example, PE is absolutely dependent on massive loans as a way of looting its businesses, but it also often defaults on those loans. Why do banks and investors keep making huge loans to PE deadbeats? Because - like the PE fund investors - they are credulous dolts. The reason PE seems like a scam is that it *is* a scam. It is a *fractal* scam - every part of it is a scam. You might have heard about the "carried interest" tax loophole that allows PE bosses to avoid billions in taxes on the money they steal from their investors, creditors, workers and customers. Most people assume "carried interest" has something to do with "interest" on a loan. Nope: "carried interest" is a 16th century nautical tax rule designed for mercantalist sea-captains who had an "interest" in the cargo they "carried": https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/29/writers-must-be-paid/#carried-interest But rich people and other "sophisticated investors" (like pension fund investment managers) are no smarter than the rest of us. They are herd animals. When they see other rich people piling into some scheme or asset class, they rush to join them, which makes the asset price go up, which makes them think they're smart (until the inevitable rug-pull). When one plute jumps off the Empire State Building, the rest of them jump, too. Which is why there's more money flooding into PE than at any time in history, $2.62T in "dry powder," handed over to greedy, thieving PE bosses in a poker game where *everyone* is the sucker at the table: https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/2di1vzgjcmzovkcea8f0g/portfolio/private-equitys-dry-powder-mountain-reaches-record-height ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Hey look at this * Crow Jim: Project 2025?s Obsession With Reverse Racism https://prospect.org/politics/2024-08-07-crow-jim-project-2025-reverse-racism/ * Why are so many car YouTubers quitting? https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/7/24214600/car-youtube-quit-donut-car-throttle-hoonigan * Will Kamala Harris fire Lina Khan? https://twitter.com/matthewstoller/status/1821186767447278038 ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? This day in history #15yrsago Exhaustive index of fearmongering Daily Mail stories about cancer and its causes https://web.archive.org/web/20090815070522/http://kill-or-cure.heroku.com/ #5yrsago Hospital checklists work really well ? except when they?re not used https://www.nature.com/articles/523516a #5yrsago Science fiction and the law: beyond mere courtroom drama https://reactormag.com/will-there-be-justice-science-fiction-and-the-law/ #5yrsago Grifty ?Students For Trump? founder pleads guilty to wire fraud for pretending to be a lawyer https://www.nydailynews.com/2019/08/06/students-for-trump-founder-pleads-guilty-to-posing-as-lawyer-in-46k-scam/ #5yrsago Security researcher cracks high-security lock used for ATMs, Air Force One, military bases https://www.reuters.com/article/us-locks-cyber-exclusive/exclusive-high-security-locks-for-government-and-banks-hacked-by-researcher-idUSKCN1UW26Z/ #5yrsago Taiwanese sympathizers are shipping helmets and gas-masks to Hong Kong https://asiatimes.com/2019/08/helmets-goggles-sent-from-taiwan-to-hk-protesters/ #5yrsago Tiktok is valued at $75b, is spending $3m/day on US advertising, and in China, it has been turned into a state propaganda vehicle https://www.theverge.com/interface/2019/8/7/20757855/tiktok-growth-monetization-influencers-regulation #5yrsago Medical examiner quits after declaring that bloody, stabbed corpse had died of ?natural causes? https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/gwinnett-county-me-investigator-resigns-after-misinterpreted-autopsy #5yrsago CHESSES: chess variants for nonexperts, nonplayers, and the very playful https://pippinbarr.com/chesses/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Upcoming appearances * EFF Charity Poker Tournament (Defcon, Las Vegas, Horseshoe Poker Room), Aug 9 12h https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/betting-your-digital-rights-eff-benefit-poker-tournament-def-con-32 * Bricked & Abandoned: How To Keep The IoT From Becoming An Internet of Trash (Defcon, Las Vegas, Track 1), Aug 9 17h https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=54844 * Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification (Defcon, Las Vegas, Track 1), Aug 10 12h https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=54861 * Launch for Madeline Ashby's *Glass Houses* at Chevalier's Books (LA), Aug 16 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/book-talk-madeline-ashbys-glass-houses-tickets-965286486867 * Disenshittify or die! (Burning Man, Palenque Norte, 7&E), Aug 27, 13h * Talking caterpillar Q&A (Burning Man, Liminal Labs, 830&C), Aug 28, 12h * Albacon (Albany/remote), Sep 13-15 https://albacon.org/2024/ * TusCon (Tucson), Nov 8-10 https://tusconscificon.com/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Recent appearances * Enzittification with Ed Zitron & Brian Merchant https://omny.fm/shows/better-offline/enzittification-with-cory-doctorow-brian-merchant * The Paradigm Shift https://paradigm-shift-on-4zzz.pinecast.co/episode/dbf12eaf/tech-criticism-with-cory-doctorow * How To Fix The Internet (EFF) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/podcast-episode-fighting-enshittification ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Latest books * The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). * "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) * "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). * "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. * "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com * "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?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) * "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/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Upcoming books * Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 * Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Colophon Today's top sources: Naked Capitalism (https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/). Currently writing: * Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay. Today's progress: 766 words (34667 words total). * A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING * Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 * Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM * Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: AI's productivity theater https://craphound.com/news/2024/08/04/ais-productivity-theater/ This work - excluding any serialized fiction - is 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. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla*" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_0x9026DBBE1FC237AF.asc Type: application/pgp-keys Size: 3480 bytes Desc: OpenPGP public key URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 203 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: From doctorow at craphound.com Fri Aug 9 08:46:48 2024 From: doctorow at craphound.com (Cory Doctorow) Date: Fri, 9 Aug 2024 05:46:48 -0700 Subject: [Plura-list] "Carbon neutral" Bitcoin operation founded by coal plant operator wasn't actually carbon neutral Message-ID: <41905183-ac98-4c89-9d00-62a11eb1f237@craphound.com> Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/09/terawulf/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ I'm at Defcon! TODAY (Aug 9), I'm emceeing the EFF Poker Tournament (noon, Horseshoe Poker Room), and speaking on the Bricked and Abandoned panel (5PM, track 1). TOMORROW (Aug 10), I'm giving a keynote called "Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, track 1). https://defcon.org/html/defcon-32/dc-32-index.html ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ Community voting for SXSW is live! If you wanna hear Rida Qadri and me talk about how gig workers can disenshittify their jobs with interoperability, vote for this one! https://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/150498 ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ Today's links * "Carbon neutral" Bitcoin operation founded by coal plant operator wasn't actually carbon neutral: Score one for Hunterbrook Media. * Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. * This day in history: 2019, 2023 * Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. * Recent appearances: Where I've been. * Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Colophon: All the rest. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ?? "Carbon neutral" Bitcoin operation founded by coal plant operator wasn't actually carbon neutral Water is wet, and a Bitcoin thing turned out to be a scam. Why am I writing about a Bitcoin scam? Two reasons: I. It's also a climate scam; and II. The journalists who uncovered it have a unique business-model. Here's the scam. Terawulf is a publicly traded company that purports to do "green" Bitcoin mining. Now, cryptocurrency mining is one of the most *gratuitously* climate-wrecking activities we have. Mining Bitcoin is an environmental crime on par with opening a brunch place that only serves Spotted Owl omelets. Despite Terawulf's claim to be carbon-neutral, it is not. It plugs into the NY power grid and sucks up farcical quantities of energy produced from fossil fuel sources. The company doesn't buy even buy carbon credits (carbon credits are a scam, but buying carbon credits would at least make its crimes nonfraudulent): https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/31/carbon-upsets/#big-tradeoff Terawulf is a scam from top to bottom. Its NY state permit application promises not to pursue cryptocurrency mining, a thing it was actively trumpeting its plan to do even as it filed that application. The company has its roots in the very dirtiest kinds of Bitcoin mining. Its top execs (including CEO Paul Prager) were involved with Beowulf Energy LLC, a company that convinced struggling coal plant operators to keep operating in order to fuel Bitcoin mining rigs. There's evidence that top execs at Terawulf, the "carbon neutral" Bitcoin mining op, are also running Beowulf, the *coal* Bitcoin mining op. This is a very profitable scam. Prager owns a "small village" in Maryland, with more that 20 structures, including a private gas station for his Ferrari collection (he also has a five bedroom place on Fifth Ave). More than a third of Terawulf's earnings were funneled to Beowulf. Terawulf also leases its facilities from a company that Prager owns 99.9% of, and Terawulf has *showered * that company in its stock. So here we are, a typical Bitcoin story: scammers lying like hell, wrecking the planet, and getting indecently rich. The guy's even spending his money like an asshole. So far, so normal. But what's interesting about *this* story is where it came from: Hunterbrook Media, an investigative news outlet that's funded by a short seller - an investment firm that makes bets that companies' share prices are likely to decline. They stand to make a *ton* of money if the journalists they hire find fraud in the companies they investigate: https://hntrbrk.com/terawulf/ It's an amazing source of class disunity among the investment class: https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/08/money-talks/#bullshit-walks As the icing on the cake, Prager and Terawulf are pivoting to AI training. Because of course they are. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ?? Hey look at this * The neverending griefing discussion https://www.raphkoster.com/2024/08/07/the-neverending-griefing-discussion/ * The Ghost and the Golem https://www.choiceofgames.com/ghost-and-the-golem/ (h/t Ben Rosenbaum) * Warner Bros. Discovery Says Its TV Channels Are Worth $9 Billion Less https://www.indiewire.com/news/business/warner-bros-discovery-says-tv-channels-worth-9-billion-less-1235033624/ (h/t @jgriffaz_) ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ?? This day in history #5yrsago Bernie Sanders killed it on Joe Rogan https://jacobin.com/2019/08/bernie-sanders-joe-rogan-experience-podcast/ #5yrsago Whatsapp, Slack, Skype and apps based on popular Electron framework vulnerable to backdoor attacks https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/08/skype-slack-other-electron-based-apps-can-be-easily-backdoored/ #5yrsago Billionaire who gave Jeffrey Epstein power of attorney in order to manage his finances says Epstein stole ?vast sums of money? https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/07/business/wexner-epstein.html #5yrsago Baking bread from dormant, 4,500-year-old yeast extracted from Egyptian bread-making ceramics https://twitter.com/SeamusBlackley/status/1158264819503419392 #5yrsago Monsanto ran a psy-ops war-room to discredit journalists and spy on Neil Young https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/aug/07/monsanto-fusion-center-journalists-roundup-neil-young #5yrsago Wisconsin commissioned an independent report on how to fix the Foxconn deal. Result: it can?t be done. https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/6/20747166/wisconsin-foxconn-deal-state-report-lcd-factory-innovation-centers #5yrsago As New York State?s shareholder suit against Big Oil for climate denial proceeds, Exxonmobil caught intimidating witnesses https://insideclimatenews.org/news/09082019/exxon-climate-fraud-investigation-witness-pressure-investors-new-york-attorney-general/ #5yrsago After student arrested for carrying laser-pointers, Hong Kong protesters stage ?stargazing? laser-protest https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-49280030 #5yrsago Warshipping: attack a target network by shipping a cellular-enabled wifi cracker to a company?s mail-room https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/06/warshipping-hackers-ship-exploits-mail-room/ #5yrsago Billions on the line as Facebook loses appeal over violating Illinois facial recognition law https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/8/20792326/facebook-facial-recognition-appeals-decision-damages-payment-court #1yrago Private equity plunderers want to buy Simon & Schuster https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/08/vampire-capitalism/#kkr ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ?? Upcoming appearances * EFF Charity Poker Tournament (Defcon, Las Vegas, Horseshoe Poker Room), Aug 9 12h https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/betting-your-digital-rights-eff-benefit-poker-tournament-def-con-32 * Bricked & Abandoned: How To Keep The IoT From Becoming An Internet of Trash (Defcon, Las Vegas, Track 1), Aug 9 17h https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=54844 * Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification (Defcon, Las Vegas, Track 1), Aug 10 12h https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=54861 * Launch for Madeline Ashby's *Glass Houses* at Chevalier's Books (LA), Aug 16 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/book-talk-madeline-ashbys-glass-houses-tickets-965286486867 * Disenshittify or die! (Burning Man, Palenque Norte, 7&E), Aug 27, 13h * Talking caterpillar Q&A (Burning Man, Liminal Labs, 830&C), Aug 28, 12h * Albacon (Albany/remote), Sep 13-15 https://albacon.org/2024/ * TusCon (Tucson), Nov 8-10 https://tusconscificon.com/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ?? Recent appearances * Enzittification with Ed Zitron & Brian Merchant https://omny.fm/shows/better-offline/enzittification-with-cory-doctorow-brian-merchant * The Paradigm Shift https://paradigm-shift-on-4zzz.pinecast.co/episode/dbf12eaf/tech-criticism-with-cory-doctorow * How To Fix The Internet (EFF) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/podcast-episode-fighting-enshittification ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ?? Latest books * The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). * "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) * "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). * "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. * "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com * "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?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) * "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/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ?? Upcoming books * Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 * Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ?? Colophon Today's top sources: DSHR (https://blog.dshr.org/). Currently writing: * Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay. Today's progress: 766 words (35444 words total). * A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING * Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 * Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM * Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: AI's productivity theater https://craphound.com/news/2024/08/04/ais-productivity-theater/ This work - excluding any serialized fiction - is 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. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ?? How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla*" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_0x9026DBBE1FC237AF.asc Type: application/pgp-keys Size: 3480 bytes Desc: OpenPGP public key URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 203 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: From doctorow at craphound.com Mon Aug 12 13:18:57 2024 From: doctorow at craphound.com (Cory Doctorow) Date: Mon, 12 Aug 2024 10:18:57 -0700 Subject: [Plura-list] The paradox of choice screens Message-ID: <66f6d5bb-329a-421c-b330-440ba7dae06e@craphound.com> Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/12/defaults-matter/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ I'm coming to BURNING MAN! On TUESDAY (Aug 27) at 1PM, I'm giving a talk called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE!" at PALENQUE NORTE (7&E). On WEDNESDAY (Aug 28) at NOON, I'm doing a "Talking Caterpillar" Q&A at LIMINAL LABS (830&C). ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ Community voting for SXSW is live! If you wanna hear Rida Qadri and me talk about how gig workers can disenshittify their jobs with interoperability, vote for this one! https://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/150498 ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ Today's links * The paradox of choice screens: What does a post-Google world look like? * Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. * This day in history: 2009, 2019, 2023 * Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. * Recent appearances: Where I've been. * Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Colophon: All the rest. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? The paradox of choice screens It's official: the DOJ has won its case, and Google is a convicted monopolist. Over the next six months, we're gonna move into the "remedy" phase, where we figure out what the court is going to order Google to do to address its illegal monopoly power: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/#extinguish-v-improve That's just the beginning, of course. Even if the court orders some big, muscular remedies, we can expect Google to appeal (they've already said they would) and that could drag out the case for years. But that can be a feature, not a bug: a years-long appeal will see Google on its very best behavior, with massive, attendant culture changes inside the company. A Google that's fighting for its life in the appeals court isn't going to be the kind of company that promotes a guy whose strategy for increasing revenue is the make Google Search deliberately worse, so that you will have to do more searches (and see more ads) to get the info you're seeking: https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan It's hard to overstate how much good stuff can emerge from a company that's mired itself in antitrust hell with extended appeals. In 1982, IBM wriggled off the antitrust hook after a 12-year fight that completely transformed the company's approach to business. After more than a decade of being micromanaged by lawyers who wanted to be sure that the company didn't screw up its appeal and anger antitrust enforcers, IBM's executives were totally transformed. When the company made its first PC, it decided to use commodity components (meaning anyone could build a similar PC by buying the same parts), and to buy its OS from an outside vendor called Micros-Soft (meaning competing PCs could use the same OS), and it turned a blind eye to the company that cloned the PC ROM, enabling companies like Dell, Compaq and Gateway to enter the market with "PC clones" that cost less and did more than the official IBM PC: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/08/ibm-pc-compatible-how-adversarial-interoperability-saved-pcs-monopolization The big question, of course, is whether the court will order Google to break up, say, by selling off Android, its ad-tech stack, and Chrome. That's a question I'll address on another day. For today, I want to think about how to de-monopolize browsers, the key portal to the internet. The world has two extremely dominant browsers, Safari and Chrome, and each of them are owned by an operating system vendor that pre-installs their own browser on their devices and pre-selects them as the default. Defaults matter. That's a huge part of Judge Mehta's finding in the Google case, where the court saw evidence from Google's own internal research suggesting that people rarely change defaults, meaning that whatever the gadget does out of the box it will likely do forever. This puts a lie to Google's longstanding defense of its monopoly power: "choice is just a click away." Sure, it's just a click away - a click, you're pretty sure no one is ever going to make. This means that any remedy to Google's browser dominance is going to involve a lot of wrangling about defaults. That's not a new wrangle, either. For many years, regulators and tech companies have tinkered with "choice screens" that were nominally designed to encourage users to try out different browsers and brake the inertia of the big two browsers that came bundled with OSes. These choice screens have a mixed record. Google's 2019 Android setup choice screen for the European Mobile Application Distribution Agreement somehow managed to result in the vast majority of users sticking with Chrome. Microsoft had a similar experience in 2010 with BrowserChoice.eu, its response to the EU's 2000s-era antitrust action: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu Does this mean that choice screens don't work? Maybe. The idea of choice screens comes to us from the "choice architecture" world of "nudging," a technocratic pseudoscience that grew to prominence by offering the promise that regulators could make big changes without having to do any real regulating: https://verfassungsblog.de/nudging-after-the-replication-crisis/ Nudge research is mired in the "replication crisis" (where foundational research findings turn out to be nonreplicable, due to bad research methodology, sloppy analysis, etc) and nudge researchers keep getting caught committing academic fraud: https://www.ft.com/content/846cc7a5-12ee-4a44-830e-11ad00f224f9 When the first nudgers were caught committing fraud, more than a decade ago, they were assumed to be outliers in an otherwise honest and exciting field: https://www.npr.org/2016/10/01/496093672/power-poses-co-author-i-do-not-believe-the-effects-are-real Today, it's hard to find much to salvage from the field. To the extent the field is taken seriously today, it's often due to its *critics* repeating the claims of its boosters, a process Lee Vinsel calls "criti-hype": https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5 For example, the term "dark patterns" lumps together really sneaky tactics with blunt acts of fraud. When you click an "opt out of cookies" button and get a screen that says "Success!" but which has a tiny little "confirm" button on it that you have to click to *actually* opt out, that's not a "dark pattern," it's just a scam: https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/27/beware-of-the-leopard/#relentless By ascribing widespread negative effects to subtle psychological manipulation ("dark patterns") rather than obvious and blatant fraud, we inadvertently elevate "nudging" to a real science, rather than a cult led by scammy fake scientists. All this raises some empirical questions about choice screens: do they work (in the sense of getting people to break away from defaults), and if so, what's the best way to make them work? This is an area with a pretty good literature, as it turns out, thanks in part due to some natural experiments, like when Russia forced Google to offer choice screens for Android in 2017, but didn't let Google design that screen. The Russian policy produced a significant switch away from Google's own apps to Russian versions, primarily made by Yandex: https://cepr.org/publications/dp17779 In 2023, Mozilla Research published a detailed study in which 12,000 people from Germany, Spain and Poland set up simulated mobile and desktop devices with different kinds of choice screens, a project spurred on by the EU's Digital Markets Act, which is going to mandate choice screens starting this year: https://research.mozilla.org/browser-competition/choicescreen/ I'm spending this week reviewing choice screen literature, and I've just read the Mozilla paper, which I found very interesting, albeit limited. The biggest limitation is that the researchers are getting users to *simulate* setting up a new device and then asking them how satisfied they are with the experience. That's certainly a question worth researching, but a far *more* important question is "How do users feel about the setup choices they made later, after living with them on the devices they use every day?" Unfortunately, that's a much more expensive and difficult question to answer, and beyond the scope of this paper. With that limitation in mind, I'm going to break down the paper's findings here and draw some conclusions about what we should be looking for in any kind of choice screen remedy that comes out of the DOJ antitrust victory over Google. The first thing note is that people report liking choice screens. When users get to choose their browsers, they expect to be happy with that choice; by contrast, users are skeptical that they'll like the default browser the vendor chose for them. Users don't consider choice screens to be burdensome, and adding a choice screen doesn't appreciably increase setup time. There are some nuances to this. Users like choice screens *during device setup* but they *don't* like choice screens that pop up the first time they use a browser. That makes total sense: "choosing a browser" is colorably part of the "setting up your gadget" task. By contrast, the first time you open a browser on a new device, it's probably to *get something else done* (e.g. look up how to install a piece of software you used on your old device) and being interrupted with a choice screen at that moment is an unwelcome interruption. This is the psychology behind those obnoxious cookie-consent pop-ups that website bombard you with when you first visit them: you've clicked to that website because you need something it has, and being stuck with a privacy opt-out screen at that moment is predictably frustrating (which is why companies do it, and also why the DMA is going to punish companies that do). The researchers experimented with different kinds of choice screens, varying the number of browsers on offer and the amount of information given on each. Again, users *report* that they prefer more choices and more information, and indeed, more choice and more info is correlated with choosing indie, non-default browsers, but this effect size is small (<10%), and no matter what kind of choice screen users get, most of them come away from the experience without absorbing any knowledge about indie browsers. The *order* in which browsers are presented has a *much* larger effect than how many browsers or how much detail is present. People say they want lots of choices, but they usually choose one of the first four options. That said, users who get choice screens *say* it changes which browser they'd choose as a default. Some of these contradictions appear to stem from users' fuzziness on what "default browser" means. For an OS vendor, "default browser" is the browser that pops up when you click a link in an email or social media. For most users, "default browser" means "the browser pinned to my home screen." Where does all this leave us? I think it cashes out tho this: choice screens will probably make a appreciable, but not massive, difference in browser dominance. They're cheap to implement, have no major downsides, and are easy to monitor. Choice screens might be needed to address Chrome's dominance *even if* the court orders Google to break off Chrome and stand it up as a separate business (we don't want *any* browser monopolies, even if they're not owned by a search monopolist!). So yeah, we should probably make a lot of noise to the effect that the court should order a choice screen, as *part* of a remedy. That choice screen should be presented during device setup, with the choices presented in random order - with this caveat: Chrome should *never* appear in the top four choices. All of that would help address the browser duopoly, even if it doesn't solve it. I would love to see more market-share for Firefox, which is the browser I've used every day for more than a decade, on my laptop and my phone. Of course, Mozilla has a role to play here. The company says it's going to refocus on browser quality, at the expense of the various side-hustles it's tried, which have ranged from uninteresting to catastrophically flawed: https://www.fastcompany.com/91167564/mozilla-wants-you-to-love-firefox-again For example, there was the tool to automatically remove your information from scummy data brokers, that they outsourced to a scummy data-broker: https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/22/24109116/mozilla-ends-onerep-data-removal-partnership And there's the "Privacy Preserving Attribution" tracking system that helps advertisers target you with surveillance advertising (in a way that's less invasive than existing techniques). Mozilla rolled this into Firefox on an *opt out* basis, and made opting out *absurdly* complicated, suggesting that it knew that it was imposing something on its users that they wouldn't freely choose: https://blog.privacyguides.org/2024/07/14/mozilla-disappoints-us-yet-again-2/ They've been committing these kinds of unforced errors for more than a decade, seeking some kind of balance between monopolistic web companies and its users' desire to have a browser that protects them from invasive and unfair practices: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/14/firefox-closed-source-drm-video-browser-cory-doctorow These compromises represent the fallacy that Mozilla's future depends on keeping bullying entertainment companies and Big Tech happy, so it can go on serving its users. At the same time, these compromises have alienated Mozilla's core users, the technical people who were its fiercest evangelists. Those core users are the authority on technical questions for the normies in their life, and they know *exactly* how cursed it is for Moz to be making these awful compromises. Moz has hemorrhaged users over the past decade, meaning they have even *less* leverage over the corporations demanding that they make more compromises. This sets up a doom loop: make a bad compromise, lose users, become more vulnerable to demands for even worse compromises. "This capitulation puts us in a great position to make a stand in some hypothetical future where we don't instantly capitulate again" is a pretty unconvincing proposition. After the past decade's heartbreaks, seeing Moz under new leadership makes me cautiously hopeful. Like I say, I am dependent on Firefox and *want* an independent, principled browser vendor that sees their role as producing a "user agent" that is faithful to its users' interests above all else: https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet Of course, Moz depends on Google's payment for default search placement for 90% of its revenue. If Google can't pay for this in the future, the org is going to have to find another source of revenue. Perhaps that will be the EU, or foundations, or users. In any of these cases, the org will find it *much* easier to raise funds if it is standing up for its users - not compromising on their interests. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Hey look at this * Post Group Entrepreneurship https://nonprofit.ventures/ * The cornerstone of democracy... https://cornerstone.ghost.io *John Varley: An Appreciation https://www.discoursemagazine.com/p/john-varley-an-appreciation ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? This day in history #15yrsago Charlie Stross and Paul Krugman talk science fiction and economics at the WorldCon https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/08/a_fireside_chat.html #15yrsago Continental imprisons 50 passengers overnight in grounded plane with no food, overflowing toilets https://web.archive.org/web/20090812094858/https://www.startribune.com/local/east/52798827.html?elr=KArksLckD8EQDUoaEyqyP4O:DW3ckUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aUUF #15yrsago Stephenson?s Orth-speak Hugo acceptance speech https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/3810606986/ #15yrsago Bruce Sterling?s story on the merger of blogging and scientific discovery https://web.archive.org/web/20090813092704/https://www.discovermagazine.com/2009/jul-aug/10-in-the-future-doing-science-is-like-blogging #5yrsago How facial recognition has turned summer camp into a dystopia for campers, parents, counsellors and photographers (but not facial recognition vendors) https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/08/summer-camps-turn-facial-recognition-parents-demand-more-smiles-please/ #5yrsago Pressed about Amazon deforestation, Bolsonaro proposes only shitting on alternate days to remediate climate change https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-49304358 #5yrsago The FBI keeps boasting about all its ?domestic terror? arrests, but it can?t name a single one https://www.propublica.org/article/fbi-domestic-terrorism-arrest-data #5yrsago As police scrutiny tightens, Hong Kongers use Tinder and Pokemon Go to organize protests https://www.scmp.com/abacus/culture/article/3021560/how-hong-kong-protesters-are-using-tinder-and-pokemon-go #5yrsago Group sex dating app has ?the worst security for any dating app? https://www.pentestpartners.com/security-blog/group-sex-app-leaks-locations-pictures-and-other-personal-details-identifies-users-in-white-house-and-supreme-court/ #5yrsago Six charts that illuminate the state of US immigration https://www.bbc.com/news/world-46034400https://www.propublica.org/article/documents-show-nra-money-helped-chief-wayne-lapierre-search-personal-mansion #5yrsago Uber projected $8b in losses for 2019, but it just booked $5.2b in losses in a single quarter https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/8/20793793/uber-5-billion-quarter-loss-profit-lyft-traffic-2019 #5yrsago RIP, Linux Journal https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/linux-journal-ceases-publication-awkward-goodbye #5yrsago Barnes and Noble?s new boss is James Daunt, who rescued the UK?s Waterstones https://memex.craphound.com/2019/08/09/barnes-and-nobles-new-boss-is-james-daunt-who-rescued-the-uks-waterstones/ #5yrsago Facebook has filed a laughable patent-application for the well-known practice of ?shadow banning? https://memex.craphound.com/2019/08/09/facebook-has-filed-a-laughable-patent-application-for-the-well-known-practice-of-shadow-banning/ #5yrsago Florida police admit they will not be able to recover gun stolen during masked orgy https://www.nydailynews.com/2019/08/08/gun-stolen-during-anonymous-masked-orgy-police-admit-were-probably-not-going-to-solve-this-one/https://web.archive.org/web/20190808184605/https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3kxzk9/exclusive-critical-us-election-systems-have-been-left-exposed-online-despite-official-denials #1yrago No, Uber's (still) not profitable https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/09/accounting-gimmicks/#unter #1yrago The long bezzle: Verizon can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/10/smartest-guys-in-the-room/#can-you-hear-me-now ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Upcoming appearances * Launch for Madeline Ashby's *Glass Houses* at Chevalier's Books (LA), Aug 16 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/book-talk-madeline-ashbys-glass-houses-tickets-965286486867 * Disenshittify or die! (Burning Man, Palenque Norte, 7&E), Aug 27, 13h * Talking caterpillar Q&A (Burning Man, Liminal Labs, 830&C), Aug 28, 12h * Albacon (Albany/remote), Sep 13-15 https://albacon.org/2024/ * TusCon (Tucson), Nov 8-10 https://tusconscificon.com/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Recent appearances * Enzittification with Ed Zitron & Brian Merchant https://omny.fm/shows/better-offline/enzittification-with-cory-doctorow-brian-merchant * The Paradigm Shift https://paradigm-shift-on-4zzz.pinecast.co/episode/dbf12eaf/tech-criticism-with-cory-doctorow * How To Fix The Internet (EFF) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/podcast-episode-fighting-enshittification ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Latest books * The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). * "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) * "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). * "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. * "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com * "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?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) * "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/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Upcoming books * Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 * Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Colophon Today's top sources: Currently writing: * Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay. Saturday's progress: 772 words (36216 words total). * A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING * Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 * Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM * Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: AI's productivity theater https://craphound.com/news/2024/08/04/ais-productivity-theater/ This work - excluding any serialized fiction - is 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. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla*" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_0x9026DBBE1FC237AF.asc Type: application/pgp-keys Size: 3480 bytes Desc: OpenPGP public key URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 203 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: From doctorow at craphound.com Tue Aug 13 11:15:34 2024 From: doctorow at craphound.com (Cory Doctorow) Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2024 08:15:34 -0700 Subject: [Plura-list] Madeline Ashby's 'Glass Houses' Message-ID: Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/13/influencers/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ I'm coming to BURNING MAN! On TUESDAY (Aug 27) at 1PM, I'm giving a talk called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE!" at PALENQUE NORTE (7&E). On WEDNESDAY (Aug 28) at NOON, I'm doing a "Talking Caterpillar" Q&A at LIMINAL LABS (830&C). ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ Community voting for SXSW is live! If you wanna hear Rida Qadri and me talk about how gig workers can disenshittify their jobs with interoperability, vote for this one! https://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/150498 ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ Today's links * Madeline Ashby's 'Glass Houses': A savage, high-tech locked-room mystery. * Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. * This day in history: 2004, 2009, 2019, 2023 * Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. * Recent appearances: Where I've been. * Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Colophon: All the rest. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Madeline Ashby's 'Glass Houses' *Glass Houses* - published today by Tor Books - is Madeline Ashby's terrifying technothriller: it's an internet-of-things haunted house story that perfectly captures (and skewers) toxic tech culture while also running a *savage* whodunnit plot that'll keep you guessing to the end: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780765382924/glasshouses Kristen is the "Chief Emotional Manager" for Wuv, a hot startup that has defined the new field of "affective computing," which is when a computer tells you what everyone else around you is *really* feeling, based on the unsuppressible tells emitted by their bodies, voices and gadgets. "Chief Emotional Manager" is just a cutesy tech euphemism for "chief of staff." The only person whose emotions Kristen *really* manages is Sumter William, the boyish billionaire CEO and founder of Wuv. Sumter hired Kirsten because they share a key developmental trait: both were orphaned at an early age and had to raise themselves in a media spotlight. Both Sumter and Kristen had been in the spotlight even before their parents' death, though. Sumter was the focus of the intense attention that the children of celebrity billionaires always come in for. Kristen, though, was thrust into the spotlight by her parents: her prepper cryptocurrency hustling father, and her tradwife mother, whose livestreams of Kristen's childhoods involved letting the audience vote everything from whether she'd get dessert after dinner to whether her mother should give her bangs. Kristen's parents died the most Extremely Online death imaginable: a cryptocurrency price-spike sent her father's mining rigs into overdrive, and when they burst into flame, the IoT house system failed to alert him until it was too late. The fire left Kristen both alone and horribly burned, with scars over much of her body. Managing Sumter through Wuv's tumultuous launch is hard work for Kristen, but at last, it's paid off. The company has been acquired, making Kristen - and all her coworkers on the founding core team - into instant millionaires. They're flying to a lavish celebration in an autonomous plane that Sumter chartered when the action begins: the plane has a malfunction and crashes into a desert island, killing all but ten of the Wuvvies. As the survivors explore the island, they discover only one sign of human habitation: a huge, brutalist, featureless black glass house, which initially rebuffs all their efforts to enter it. But once they gain entry, they discover that the house is even harder to leave. This is the setup for a haunted house story where the house seems to be an unknown billionaire prepper's IoT house of horrors. As the survivors of the crash suffer horrible injuries and deaths on the island, the remaining Wuvvies bolt themselves inside, setting up a locked-room whodunnit that runs in parallel. This is a *fantastic* dramatic engine for Ashby's specialty: extremely pointed techno-criticism. The ensuing chapters, which flip back and forth between the story of Wuv's rise and rise to a top tech company, and the company's surviving staff being terrorized on a paradisaical tropical aisle, flesh out Ashby's speculation and the critique it embodies. For example, there's the political culture of Ashby's future America. Wuv are a Canadian company, headquartered in Toronto, and we gradually come to understand that Canada is the beneficiary of an exodus of tech companies from the US following a kind of soft Christian Dominionist takeover (Kristen and Sumter often have to wrangle rules about whether women are allowed to enter the USA in the company of men they aren't married to and who aren't their brothers or fathers). The flashbacks to this America are *beautifully* and subtly drawn, especially the scenes in Vegas, which manages to still be Vegas, even amidst a kind national, legally mandated *Handmaid's Tale* LARP. Ashby uses her futuristic speculation to illuminate the present, that standing wave where the past is becoming the future. Like everything in the shadows of a haunted house tale, this stuff will make the hair on the back of your neck stand on end. I'm a big Madeline Ashby fan. I have the honor of having published her first story, when I was co-editing one of the *Tesseracts* anthologies of Canadian SF. I've read and *really* enjoyed every one of her books, but this one feels like a step-change in Ashby's career, a leveling up to something even more haunting and brilliant than her impressive back-catalog. Madeline and I will be live at Chevalier's Books in LA on Aug 16 as part of her *Glass Houses* tour: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/book-talk-madeline-ashbys-glass-houses-tickets-965286486867 ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Hey look at this * DOJ antitrust chief is ?overjoyed? after Google monopoly verdict https://www.theverge.com/24215684/doj-jonathan-kanter-antitrust-google-monopoly-verdict-win-decoder-podcast-interview * Seeing Like a Matt https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/seeing-like-a-matt * Monopoly Money https://www.wheresyoured.at/monopoly-money/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? This day in history #20yrsago Waldrop: 1954 was a GREAT time to be a kid http://www.infinitematrix.net/columns/waldrop/waldrop13.html #15yrsago Seder for liberated robots https://web.archive.org/web/20090816092953/https://papersky.livejournal.com/443771.html #15yrsago Adobe: Once you license software in France, you can only use it in French https://web.archive.org/web/20090814174633/http://www.mcelhearn.com/?p=670 #15yrsago Visualizing a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book https://flowingdata.com/2009/08/11/choose-your-own-adventure-most-likely-youll-die/ #15yrsago EVE Online creates exotic financial instrument to combat gold-farming https://web.archive.org/web/20090813113841/http://www.massively.com/2009/08/11/the-fight-against-rmt-in-eve-online/ #15yrsago Anti-health-care loon says Stephen Hawking wouldn?t stand a chance under British health care system https://web.archive.org/web/20090806222911/https://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=333933006516877 #5yrsago Imagineering In a Box: free instructional video series from Disney and Khan Academy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dv7sBCHvBEA #5yrsago Brazil?s highest court rules that Bolsonaro cannot use criminal investigations to harass Glenn Greenwald and The Intercept https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/08/09/huge-victory-press-freedom-brazil-supreme-court-bars-bolsonaro-investigating-glenn #5yrsago Donor maps show just how widespread Sanders? support is https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/02/us/politics/2020-democratic-fundraising.html #5yrsago Big Pharma?s origin: how the Chicago School and private equity shifted medicine?s focus from health to wealth https://newrepublic.com/article/149438/big-pharma-captured-one-percent #5yrsago Adversarial Fashion: clothes designed to confuse license-plate readers https://adversarialfashion.com/collections/all #1yrago The Sacklers woulda gotten away with it if it wasn't for those darned meddling feds https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/11/justice-delayed/#justice-redeemed ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Upcoming appearances * Launch for Madeline Ashby's *Glass Houses* at Chevalier's Books (LA), Aug 16 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/book-talk-madeline-ashbys-glass-houses-tickets-965286486867 * Disenshittify or die! (Burning Man, Palenque Norte, 7&E), Aug 27, 13h * Talking caterpillar Q&A (Burning Man, Liminal Labs, 830&C), Aug 28, 12h * Albacon (Albany/remote), Sep 13-15 https://albacon.org/2024/ * TusCon (Tucson), Nov 8-10 https://tusconscificon.com/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Recent appearances * Enzittification with Ed Zitron & Brian Merchant https://omny.fm/shows/better-offline/enzittification-with-cory-doctorow-brian-merchant * The Paradigm Shift https://paradigm-shift-on-4zzz.pinecast.co/episode/dbf12eaf/tech-criticism-with-cory-doctorow * How To Fix The Internet (EFF) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/podcast-episode-fighting-enshittification ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Latest books * The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). * "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) * "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). * "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. * "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com * "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?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) * "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/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Upcoming books * Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 * Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Colophon Today's top sources: Currently writing: * Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay. Today's progress: 774 words (36898 words total). * A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING * Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 * Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM * Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: AI's productivity theater https://craphound.com/news/2024/08/04/ais-productivity-theater/ This work - excluding any serialized fiction - is 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. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla*" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_0x9026DBBE1FC237AF.asc Type: application/pgp-keys Size: 3480 bytes Desc: OpenPGP public key URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 203 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: From doctorow at craphound.com Wed Aug 14 08:42:13 2024 From: doctorow at craphound.com (Cory Doctorow) Date: Wed, 14 Aug 2024 05:42:13 -0700 Subject: [Plura-list] The one weird monopoly trick that gave us Walmart and Amazon and killed Main Street Message-ID: <8bcb414f-67b9-48e7-b9b4-86461d8d4831@craphound.com> Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/14/the-price-is-wright/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ I'm coming to BURNING MAN! On TUESDAY (Aug 27) at 1PM, I'm giving a talk called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE!" at PALENQUE NORTE (7&E). On WEDNESDAY (Aug 28) at NOON, I'm doing a "Talking Caterpillar" Q&A at LIMINAL LABS (830&C). ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ Community voting for SXSW is live! If you wanna hear Rida Qadri and me talk about how gig workers can disenshittify their jobs with interoperability, vote for this one! https://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/150498 ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ Today's links * The one weird monopoly trick that gave us Walmart and Amazon and killed Main Street: The Robinson-Patman Act is how we make sure companies aren't too big to jail nor too big to care. * Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. * This day in history: 2004, 2009, 2014, 2019, 2023 * Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. * Recent appearances: Where I've been. * Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Colophon: All the rest. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ?? The one weird monopoly trick that gave us Walmart and Amazon and killed Main Street Walmart didn't just *happen*. The rise of Walmart - and Amazon, its online successor - was the result of a specific policy choice, the decision by the Reagan administration not to enforce a key antitrust law. Walmart may have been founded by Sam Walton, but its success (and the demise of the American Main Street) are down to Reaganomics. The law that Reagan neutered? The Robinson-Patman Act, a very boring-sounding law that makes it illegal for powerful companies (like Walmart) to demand preferential pricing from their suppliers (farmers, packaged goods makers, meat producers, etc). The idea here is straightforward. A company like Walmart is a powerful buyer (a "monopsonist" - compare with "monopolist," a powerful seller). That means that they can demand deep discounts from suppliers. Smaller stores - the mom and pop store on your Main Street - don't have the clout to demand those discounts. Worse, because those buyers are weak, the sellers - packaged goods companies, agribusiness cartels, Big Meat - can actually charge them *more* to make up for the losses they're taking in selling below cost to Walmart. Reagan ordered his antitrust cops to stop enforcing Robinson-Patman, which was a huge giveaway to big business. Of course, that's not how Reagan framed it: He called Robinson-Patman a declaration of "war on low prices," because it prevented big companies from using their buying power to squeeze huge discounts. Reagan's court sorcerers/economists asserted that if Walmart could get goods at lower prices, they would *sell* goods at lower prices. Which was true...up to a point. Because preferential discounting (offering better discounts to bigger customers) creates a *structural advantage* over smaller businesses, it meant that big box stores would eventually eliminate virtually all of their smaller competitors. That's exactly what happened: downtowns withered, suburban big boxes grew. Spending that would have formerly stayed in the community was whisked away to corporate headquarters. These corporate HQs were inevitably located in "onshore-offshore" tax haven states, meaning they were barely taxed at the state level. That left plenty of money in these big companies' coffers to spend on funny accountants who'd help them avoid federal taxes, too. That's another structural advantage the big box stores had over the mom-and-pops: not only did they get their inventory at below-cost discounts, they didn't have to pay tax on the profits, either. MBA programs actually teach this as a strategy to pursue: they usually refer to Amazon's "flywheel" where lower prices bring in more customers which allows them to demand even lower prices: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaSwWYemLek You might have heard about rural and inner-city "food deserts," where all the independent grocery stores have shuttered, leaving behind nothing but dollar stores? These are the direct product of the decision not to enforce Robinson-Patman. Dollar stores target working class neighborhoods with functional, beloved local grocers. They open multiple dollar stores nearby (nearly all the dollar stores you see are owned by one of two conglomerates, no matter what the sign over the door says). They price goods below cost and pay for high levels of staffing, draining business off the community grocery store until it collapses. Then, all the dollar stores except one close and the remaining store fires most of its staff (working at a dollar store is incredibly dangerous, thanks to low staffing levels that make them easy targets for armed robbers). Then, they jack up prices, selling goods in "cheater" sizes that are smaller than the normal retail packaging, and which are only made available to large dollar store conglomerates: https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/27/walmarts-jackals/#cheater-sizes Writing in *The American Prospect*, Max M Miller and Bryce Tuttle1 - a current and a former staffer for FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya - write about the long shadow cast by Reagan's decision to put Robinson-Patman in mothballs: https://prospect.org/economy/2024-08-13-stopping-excessive-market-power-monopoly/ They tell the story of Robinson-Patman's origins in 1936, when A&P was using preferential discounts to destroy the independent grocery sector *and* endanger the American food system. A&P didn't just demand preferential discounts from its suppliers; it also charged them a fortune to be displayed on its shelves, an early version of Amazon's $38b/year payola system: https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola They point out that Robinson-Patman didn't really need to be enacted; America already had an antitrust law that banned this conduct: section 2 of the the Clayton Act, which was passed in 1914. But for decades, the US courts refused to interpret the Clayton Act according to its plain meaning, with judges tying themselves in knots to insist that the law couldn't possibly mean what it said. Robinson-Patman was one of a *series* of antitrust laws that Congress passed in a bid to explain in words so small even federal judges could understand them that the purpose of American antitrust law was to keep corporations weak: https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/14/aiming-at-dollars/#not-men Both the Clayton Act and Robinson-Patman reject the argument that it's OK to let monopolies form and come to dominate critical sectors of the American economy based on the theoretical possibility that this will lead to lower prices. They reject this idea first as a legal matter. We don't let giant corporations victimize small businesses and their suppliers just because that might help someone else. Beyond this, there's the realpolitik of monopoly. Yes, companies *could* pass lower costs on to customers, but *will they*? Look at Amazon: the company takes $0.45-$0.51 out of every dollar that its sellers earn, and requires them to offer their lowest price on Amazon. No one has a 45-51% margin, so every seller jacks up their prices on Amazon, but you don't notice it, because Amazon forces them to jack up prices *everywhere else*: https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/01/managerial-discretion/#junk-fees The Robinson-Patman Act did important work, and its absence led to many of the horribles we're living through today. This week on his Peoples & Things podcast, Lee Vinsel talked with Benjamin Waterhouse about his new book, *One Day I?ll Work for Myself: The Dream and Delusion That Conquered America*: https://athenaeum.vt.domains/peoplesandthings/2024/08/12/78-benjamin-c-waterhouse-on-one-day-ill-work-for-myself-the-dream-and-delusion-that-conquered-america/ Towards the end of the discussion, Vinsel and Waterhouse turn to Robinson-Patman, its author, Wright Patman, and the politics of small business in America. They point out - correctly - that Wright Patman was something of a creep, a "Dixiecrat" (southern Democrat) who was either an ideological segregationist or someone who didn't mind supporting segregation irrespective of his beliefs. That's a valid critique of Wright Patman, but it's got little bearing on the substance and history of the law that bears his name, the Robinson-Patman Act. Vinsel and Waterhouse get into that as well, and while they made some good points that I wholeheartedly agreed with, I fiercely disagree with the conclusion they drew from these points. Vinsel and Waterhouse point out (again, correctly) that small businesses have a long history of supporting reactionary causes and attacking workers' rights - associations of small businesses, small women-owned business, and small minority-owned businesses were all in on opposition to minimum wages and other key labor causes. But while this is all true, that doesn't make Robinson-Patman a reactionary law, or bad for workers. The point of protecting small businesses from the predatory practices of large firms is to maintain an American economy where business can't trump workers or government. Large companies are literally ungovernable: they have gigantic war-chests they can spend lobbying governments and corrupting the political process, and concentrated sectors find it comparatively easy to come together to decide on a single lobbying position and then make it reality. As Vinsel and Waterhouse discuss, US big business has traditionally *hated* small business. They recount a notorious and telling anaecdote about the editor of the Chamber of Commerce magazine asking his boss if he could include coverage of small businesses, given the many small business owners who belonged to the Chamber, only to be told, "Over my dead body." Why did - why does - big business hate small business so much? Because small businesses wreck the game. If they are included in hearings, notices of inquiry, or just given a vote on what the Chamber of Commerce will lobby for with their membership dollars, they will ask for things that break with the big business lobbying consensus. That's why *we* should like small business. Not because small business owners are incapable of being petty tyrants, but because whatever else, they will be *petty*. They won't be able to hire million-dollar-a-month union-busting law-firms, they won't be able to bribe Congress to pass favorable laws, they can't capture their regulators with juicy offers of sweet jobs after their government service ends. Vinsel and Waterhouse point out that many large firms emerged during the era in which Robinson-Patman was in force, but that misunderstands the purpose of Robinson-Patman: it wasn't designed to prevent *any* large businesses from emerging. There are some capital-intensive sectors (say, chip fabrication) where the minimum size for doing *anything* is pretty damned big. As Miller and Tuttle write: > The goal of RPA was not to create a permanent Jeffersonian agrarian republic of exclusively small businesses. It was to preserve a diverse economy of big and small businesses. Congress recognized that the needs of communities and people?whether in their role as consumers, business owners, or workers?are varied and diverse. A handful of large chains would never be able to meet all those needs in every community, especially if they are granted pricing power. The fight against monopoly is only secondarily a fight between small businesses and giant ones. It's foundationally a fight about whether corporations should have so much power that they are too big to fail, too big to jail, *and* too big to care. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ?? Hey look at this * Let Them Eat Invoices https://prospect.org/health/2024-08-13-let-them-eat-invoices/ * Digital Apartheid in Gaza: Big Tech Must Reveal Their Roles in Tech Used in Human Rights Abuses https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/08/digital-apartheid-gaza-big-tech-must-reveal-their-roles-tech-used-human-rights-0 * Vyvanse Synthesis Demo - DEF CON 2024 follow-up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtreuRmSDrU (h/t ?Mix?l Laufer?)3 ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ?? This day in history #20yrsago European copyright extension: protecting Elvis to the detriment of everyone else https://web.archive.org/web/20040906201355/http://www.indexonline.org/news/20040812_unitedstates.shtml #15yrsago Photos of science fiction writers? nests http://www.whereiwrite.org/index.php #15yrsago Guerilla gardens in newspaper boxes https://web.archive.org/web/20090806033424/http://www.bladediary.com/flyerplanterboxes-5/ #15yrsago Lethem and EFF on why Google Book Search needs privacy guarantees https://www.npr.org/2009/08/12/111797207/google-deal-with-publishers-raises-privacy-concerns #15yrsago Movie industry wants the right to take your house off the net without full judicial review https://torrentfreak.com/movie-studios-want-own-version-of-justice-for-3-strikes-090812/ #10yrsago Biology student in Colombia faces jail for reposting scholarly article https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/07/colombian-student-faces-prison-charges-sharing-academic-article-online #10yrsago Former NSA spook resigns from Naval War College in dick-pic scandal https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/08/snowden-critic-resigns-naval-war-college-over-online-penis-photo-flap/ #10yrsago Profile of Flickr and Slack founder Stewart Butterfield https://www.wired.com/2014/08/the-most-fascinating-profile-youll-ever-read-about-a-guy-and-his-boring-startup/ #10yrsago DOJ slams Riker?s Island for horrific violence against young inmates https://www.techdirt.com/2014/08/11/doj-report-details-massive-amount-violence-committed-rikers-island-staff-against-adolescent-inmates/ #10yrsago Profiles of brutalized laborers building Abu Dhabi?s Louvre and Guggenheim https://web.archive.org/web/20140806033053/https://www.vice.com/read/slaves-of-happiness-island-0000412-v21n8 #10yrsago NZ TV won?t air ads for geo-unblocking ISP https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/mediaworks-joins-sky-tvnz-in-banning-slingshot-ads/QI7UJYTMZBALFI6E7W32WYYMTU/?c_id=3&objectid=11304231 #10yrsago Weaseling about surveillance, Australian Attorney General attains bullshit Singularity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hw1ryLGs2ws #5yrsago WordPress is buying Tumblr https://www.axios.com/2019/08/12/verizon-tumblr-wordpress-automattic #5yrsago Your phone is a crimewave in your pocket, and it?s all the fault of greedy carriers and complicit regulators https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/08/who-owns-your-wireless-service-crooks-do/ #5yrsago The real meaning of plantation tours: American Downton Abbey vs American Horror Story https://afroculinaria.com/2019/08/09/dear-disgruntled-white-plantation-visitors-sit-down/ #5yrsago New York City raised minimum wage to $15, and its restaurants outperformed the nation https://gallery.mailchimp.com/a6170fa466dd7c8eed0aab6be/files/b2f3acd5-3884-42a7-a0bf-fa410b2b6544/Final_CNYCA_NELP_NYC_Min_Wage_Restaurants.pdf?mc_cid=5ce3fba121 #5yrsago Prior to Amazon acquisition, Ring offered ?swag? to customers who snitched on their neighbors https://www.vice.com/en/article/ring-told-people-to-snitch-on-their-neighbors-in-exchange-for-free-stuff/ #5yrsago Stephen Wolfram recounts the entire history of mathematics in 90 minutes https://soundcloud.com/stephenwolfram/a-very-brief-history-of-mathematics #5yrsago All flights in and out of Hong Kong canceled as protesters flood the airport https://twitter.com/erinhale/status/1160786319804493827 #5yrsago Rule of Capture: Inside the martial law tribunals that will come when climate deniers become climate looters and start rendering environmentalists for offshore torture https://memex.craphound.com/2019/08/12/rule-of-capture-inside-the-martial-law-tribunals-that-will-come-when-climate-deniers-become-climate-looters-and-start-rendering-environmentalists-for-offshore-torture/ #1yrago Paying consumer debts is basically optional in the United States https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/12/do-not-pay/#fair-debt-collection-practices-act ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ?? Upcoming appearances * Launch for Madeline Ashby's *Glass Houses* at Chevalier's Books (LA), Aug 16 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/book-talk-madeline-ashbys-glass-houses-tickets-965286486867 * Disenshittify or die! (Burning Man, Palenque Norte, 7&E), Aug 27, 13h * Talking caterpillar Q&A (Burning Man, Liminal Labs, 830&C), Aug 28, 12h * Albacon (Albany/remote), Sep 13-15 https://albacon.org/2024/ * TusCon (Tucson), Nov 8-10 https://tusconscificon.com/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ?? Recent appearances * Enzittification with Ed Zitron & Brian Merchant https://omny.fm/shows/better-offline/enzittification-with-cory-doctorow-brian-merchant * The Paradigm Shift https://paradigm-shift-on-4zzz.pinecast.co/episode/dbf12eaf/tech-criticism-with-cory-doctorow * How To Fix The Internet (EFF) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/podcast-episode-fighting-enshittification ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ?? Latest books * The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). * "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) * "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). * "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. * "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com * "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?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) * "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/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ?? Upcoming books * Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 * Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ?? Colophon Today's top sources: Currently writing: * Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay. Today's progress: 789 words (37782 words total). * A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING * Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 * Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM * Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: AI's productivity theater https://craphound.com/news/2024/08/04/ais-productivity-theater/ This work - excluding any serialized fiction - is 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. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ?? How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla*" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_0x9026DBBE1FC237AF.asc Type: application/pgp-keys Size: 3480 bytes Desc: OpenPGP public key URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 203 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: From doctorow at craphound.com Thu Aug 15 09:09:07 2024 From: doctorow at craphound.com (Cory Doctorow) Date: Thu, 15 Aug 2024 06:09:07 -0700 Subject: [Plura-list] Apple vs the "free market" Message-ID: <8f16c731-3869-4ee0-b534-04edeaf6f055@craphound.com> Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/15/private-law/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ I'm coming to BURNING MAN! On TUESDAY (Aug 27) at 1PM, I'm giving a talk called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE!" at PALENQUE NORTE (7&E). On WEDNESDAY (Aug 28) at NOON, I'm doing a "Talking Caterpillar" Q&A at LIMINAL LABS (830&C). ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ Community voting for SXSW is live! If you wanna hear Rida Qadri and me talk about how gig workers can disenshittify their jobs with interoperability, vote for this one! https://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/150498 ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ Today's links * Apple vs the "free market": Meet the new boss, worse than the old boss. * Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. * This day in history: 2009, 2014, 2019, 2023 * Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. * Recent appearances: Where I've been. * Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Colophon: All the rest. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Apple vs the "free market" Every artist, performer and creator on Patreon is about to get screwed out of 30% of their gross revenue, which will be diverted to Apple, the most valuable company on the planet. Apple contributes nothing to their work, but it will get to steal a third of their wages: https://news.patreon.com/articles/understanding-apple-requirements-for-patreon How is this possible? Enshittification: https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel Enshittification starts with companies being good to their end users. In this case, Apple made a high quality product - the Iphone and Ipad - and carefully tended to its App Store. That lured in a lot of customers, many of whom made owning an Apple device part of their very identity, as though buying a popular brand of consumer electronics made them part of an oppressed religious minority: https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones At the same time, Apple was locking those users in, selling them media that they couldn't play on non-Apple devices and tying their use of a mobile phone to their email, two-factor authentication, family photos, working files and consumer credit. Apple also avidly participated in the expansion of "IP law," which is to say, "laws that let Apple control the conduct of its customers, critics and competitors": https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/ In particular, Apple fought for a bizarre and expansive understanding of Section 1201 of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That's a law that makes it a felony to help someone jailbreak a device, even if this doesn't lead to a single instance of copyright infringement. Once removing a digital lock becomes a crime, then Apple can make *anything* into a crime - if Apple designs your device so that doing something you desire requires disabling a lock, and then doing that thing becomes illegal. For example, Apple designs its phones so that they won't accept new parts without a manufacturer-supplied unlock code. That means that even if you install an Apple part in your Apple phone, it won't work unless you get Apple's permission (not cheap!) to activate that part. This is called "parts pairing" and it's pure rent-seeking, and Oregon just outlawed it: https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/27/24097042/right-to-repair-law-oregon-sb1596-parts-pairing-tina-kotek-signed The reason Oregon had to ban parts-pairing is that bypassing parts-pairing is a felony under DMCA 1201, punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine. That means you can't just buy a tool that some clever reverse-engineer made that fakes the parts-pairing code - not because this is technically impossible, but because it is very, very illegal. DMCA 1201 gives Apple broad latitude to control how you can use your $1,000 phone. DMCA 1201 is why you can't just grab a little $0.99 dongle in the Walmart checkout line that jailbreaks your phone and lets you install a different app store. It's not against the law for an app author to sell you an app without Apple's blessing. It's not illegal for you to run an app you buy on your phone without Apple's blessing. But the *technical step* needed to let you run software you buy on a gadget you own is a felony, so all those activities become *de facto* felonies. Jay Freeman calls this "felony contempt of business model" - but you could also call it "private law." In passing DMCA 1201, Congress said to companies like Apple, "Just add a digital lock to anything you make, and then you can create felonies out of thin air, which the US courts will prosecute on your behalf." This is the Bizarro-world version of "Chevron deference," the idea that expert agencies, deputized by Congress to fairly and neutrally enforce the law, should have latitude to interpret Congressional intent. So, for example, even if Congress never *specifically* banned putting rat poison in kids' breakfast cereal, the FDA should still be allowed to make a "no strychnine in the Fruity Pebbles" rule. This is a common-sense proposition, but back in July, the Supreme Court killed it: https://prospect.org/justice/supreme-court-stages-coup-against-government-regulation/ So *regulators* are no longer allowed to regulate, but, thanks to DMCA 1201, corporations can just make up rules out of thin air and give them the force of both criminal and civil statute. The government can't govern, but corporations can. The fact that it's a felony to get your Iphone apps from anyone except Apple means that whatever policies Apple makes for the app store have the force of law. Apple's pristine execution of stage one of enshittification - luring in users, then locking those users in - mean that businesses can't survive without reaching Apple customers, and they can't reach Apple customers without abiding by the app store's rules. Remember when Tumblr banned pornography? It was a bizarre shitshow, especially given how important non-heteronormative, non-vanilla porn had been to Tumblr. To many Tumblr users, this looked like a rehash of the old pattern: get big by courting adult performers and sex workers, then kick the people who built your platform to the curb once you've attained scale. There's a lot of truth to that: under Yahoo and Verizon's ownership, Tumblr clearly didn't give a damn about its users, *especially* the sex workers (and that went double for the world of queer sex). But even after Tumblr was bought by Wordpress, and even after Wordpress did its best to restore *some* adult content to the platform, Tumblr still remains heavily moderated and heavily censored. Why? Because Apple kept kicking Tumblr out of the App Store on the basis that it contained sexual material, and without Apple users, Tumblr was dead in the water: https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/29/go-nuts-show-nuts/#chokepoints This is Apple's "private law" - Apple is using its "IP" (DMCA 1201, which lets it prevent its customers from choosing rival app stores) to reach beyond the walls of its own offices and into the offices of Tumblr, dictating Tumblr's standards for sexually explicit material. Apple claims this is merely a matter of "editorial standards," no different from a bookstore deciding not to shelve pornography. The difference is that in this case, Apple can block you from patronizing another bookstore, by forcing you to forfeit the $1,000 you spent on your device and potentially many thousands more in media and data and other switching costs. But that's not the end of Apple's ability to regulate the market. Apple doesn't enforce its ban on adult content equally. If Tumblr allows adult content, it gets kicked out of the app store. But Apple chooses not to enforce its sexual material ban against Reddit or Twitter, where the policy is "go nuts, show nuts." Apple's choosing the winners and the losers here, creating the "market distortion" that conservatives warn us against. Which brings me back to Patreon. Apple's content-based rules are mere ornaments on Apple's core market-structuring activity. The main event is Apple's 30% App Store Tax. Apple skims a 30% vig off the price of the apps you buy, *and* everything you buy in them: https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/22/reality-distortion-field/#three-trillion-here-three-trillion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money This is a *shocking* payment processing fee. For comparison, the highly concentrated credit-card sector charges 2-5% to process a payment - a tenth of Apple's charge. What's more, that 2-5% credit card fee is considered to be *extremely high* (it's gone up 40% since covid started). Apple backstops this payment rule with more content-based rules: app vendors may not send customers to the web to complete their payments through a regular website with a 2-5% fee. Users have to figure this out for themselves. Again, Apple picks winners and losers in this market. Not every app has to pay this fee - for example, Uber is exempted from it. But smaller ridehailing apps - say, one created by a driver co-op - gets soaked for the full amount, meaning that it can't possibly compete against Uber. Apple is effectively crowning Uber the perpetual overlord of ride-hailing apps. Apple also uses this market regulating power to scoop up parts of the market for itself. Apple directly competes with many of its vendors, selling books, music, videos, audiobooks and other digital media, as well as email, mass storage, photo storage, etc. Apple's rivals have to kick a 30% vig up to the Apple Crime Family, but Apple exempts itself from those fees. Again, Apple is picking the winner in the market - itself. It's not just businesses that compete with Apple that get wiped out by Apple's position as de facto supreme planner of the economy. Many businesses simply can't exist in a world in which 30% of their revenue is creamed off by another business. For that matter, *Apple* couldn't survive under that regime. As Slashdot's theodp writes, Apple netted $97b on revenues of $383b last year. If Apple had to pay a 30% app store tax on that gross revenue, it would be down $115b, for a net *loss* of $18b: https://apple.slashdot.org/story/24/08/13/1439258/ask-slashdot-could-apple-survive-if-it-had-to-pay-a-30-apple-tax?sbsrc=md Here we have Apple as the fully unfurled regulator of the digital economy. Apple decides what kinds of businesses are prohibited, based on three criteria: I. Does Apple want to compete with them? II. Do they carry sexually explicit material *without* being Twitter or Reddit? III. Are they an otherwise viable business that doesn't have an extra 30% margin they can afford to give away to Apple? Apple doesn't oppose regulation; Apple *loves* regulation, so long as they're the ones doing the regulating. They want to be able to shape and define the digital market, backed by the power of the state, but *without* any *input* from the state. In modern corporate orthodoxy, the state is an enforcer for corporate will. That's the animating force behind "binding arbitration" waivers, the now-ubiquitous contract terms that require you to give up your right to sue no matter what the other party does to you. These waivers are in your phone contract, your employment contract, your travel tickets, your concert tickets, your doctor's office forms, and the terms for most services: https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/12/hot-coffee/#mcgeico By forcing you to click "OK" to a binding arbitration waiver, corporations transform the courts from entities that interpret and enforce the law to entities that force the public to surrender every right and protection Congress ever gave them, in favor of the unilateral decisions of a corporate arbitrator paid by the company that wronged them. This is more private law - the state existing as an enforcer for the whims and fiat of corporate strategists. It's a terribly neat illustration of Wilhoit's law, "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect": https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288 Just like the digital locks lurking in your Iphone, you are subject to thousands of unseen and unsuspected binding arbitration waivers buried deep in fine print you have never read. You will only discover the existence of these waivers when you are horribly wronged, whereupon the company that hurt you will produce the waiver and force you to surrender your legal right to redress. The latest example of this is the viral story of a lawsuit brought against Disney by the widower of a doctor who died at Walt Disney World after being fed a meal containing allergens that she had been assured would not be present in her food: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/08/disney-fighting-restaurant-death-suit-with-disney-terms-absurd-lawyer-says/ Disney has filed a motion seeking to have the widower's case dismissed because he signed up for a free trial of the Disney+ streaming service, and in so doing, "agreed" to permanently give up his right to sue Disney for *anything*: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/2024-05-31-Defendant-Walt-Disney-Parks-and-Resorts-Motion-to-Compel-Arbitration-and-Stay-Case.pdf This is every bit as much market-structuring conduct as Apple's insistence that only Patreon performers who have an extra 30% in their monthly payments can go on making art. Liability rules - like a rule that makes corporations liable if they kill you by feeding you allergens they've promised not to feed you - are a key part of how we structure markets. By allowing customers who've been wronged, cheated or harmed to seek financial compensation in civil court, Congress created a system of incentives designed to shape the conduct of firms (the alternative is the prohibitively expensive prospect of having on-site round-the-clock inspectors, a measure reserved for a few sensitive industries like meat-packing plants, and, in a wildly imperfect fashion, Boeing). When a company unilaterally removes your ability to access the courts - while preserving its own right to have the courts force you to seek justice from its arbitrators - they incinerate every regulation, every law, and replace it with "whatever we feel like." The law protects them, it binds you. We live in the felony contempt of business model dystopia, where multinational corporations decide which laws apply and when; and where they get to decide who can be in business, and what kind of business they can do. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Hey look at this * Framework Laptop 13 reviewed, again: Meteor Lake meh, Linux upgrades good https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/08/framework-laptop-13-reviewed-again-meteor-lake-meh-linux-upgrades-good/ * The Neighborliness Option https://prospect.org/politics/2024-08-14-neighborliness-option-chicago-migrants-dnc/ * Animatronic Tropical Bird Build Kits http://www.tropitronics.com/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? This day in history #15yrsago Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede, one of the all-time great American comedy sf novels, will be a movie https://memex.craphound.com/2009/08/13/buddy-holly-is-alive-and-well-on-ganymede-one-of-the-all-time-great-american-comedy-sf-novels-will-be-a-movie/ #15yrsago Dingbat dictatorship in Belarus invents magical anti-cancer pockets for school uniforms https://web.archive.org/web/20090820215848/http://neteffect.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/08/13/belarus_develops_school_uniform_that_makes_tin_foil_hates_obsolete #10yrsago Comcast, Time Warner make huge ?donations? to party honoring their FCC overseer https://www.techdirt.com/2014/08/12/comcast-time-warner-cable-spend-big-to-honor-fcc-commissioner-overseeing-their-merger-review/ #10yrsago Comcast leaves customer on hold for 3 hours, closes the office and goes home https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/2ddxku/comment/cjoqmdo/ #10yrsago Brooklyn Law Clinic students scare away patent trolls https://medium.com/patents-technology-law/law-students-fend-off-a-patent-troll-2b8a708277fc #10yrsago Groucho Marx on comics and depression https://memex.craphound.com/2014/08/13/groucho-marx-on-comics-and-depression/ #10yrsago How Gary Gygax lost control over D&D and TSR https://medium.com/@increment/the-ambush-at-sheridan-springs-3a29d07f6836 #5yrsago If you think Jeffrey Epstein must have been murdered because no prison would treat an inmate that negligently? https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/thirty-two-stories-jeffrey-epstein-prison-death/596029/ #5yrsago Deep look at the Googler Uprising, drawing on insider interviews https://www.wired.com/story/inside-google-three-years-misery-happiest-company-tech/ #5yrsago The only path to victory in the Middle Earth election is to appeal to the moderate orc voter https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/we-need-a-wizard-who-can-appeal-to-the-moderate-orc-voter #5yrsago ?Productivity? is a perfect example of the pseudscience underpinning economics https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2019/07/08/no-productivity-does-not-explain-income/ #5yrsago If the election was held today, Bernie would beat Trump by 8 points https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/08/12/bernie-sanders-acing-electability-test-another-poll-shows-senator-crushing-trump #5yrsago Barstool Sports? president posts illegal termination threat against employees considering unionization https://web.archive.org/web/20190813133038/https://twitter.com/stoolpresidente/status/1161268795278790658 #5yrsago As Uber?s stock craters amid billions in unanticipated losses, a hiring freeze on engineers https://finance.yahoo.com/news/uber-imposes-engineer-hiring-freeze-as-losses-mount-exclusive-202234064.html #5yrsago Interoperability and Privacy: Squaring the Circle https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/08/interoperability-and-privacy-squaring-circle #1yrago Enshitternet https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/13/enshitternet/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Upcoming appearances * Launch for Madeline Ashby's *Glass Houses* at Chevalier's Books (LA), Aug 16 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/book-talk-madeline-ashbys-glass-houses-tickets-965286486867 * Disenshittify or die! (Burning Man, Palenque Norte, 7&E), Aug 27, 13h * Talking caterpillar Q&A (Burning Man, Liminal Labs, 830&C), Aug 28, 12h * Albacon (Albany/remote), Sep 13-15 https://albacon.org/2024/ * TusCon (Tucson), Nov 8-10 https://tusconscificon.com/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Recent appearances * Enzittification with Ed Zitron & Brian Merchant https://omny.fm/shows/better-offline/enzittification-with-cory-doctorow-brian-merchant * The Paradigm Shift https://paradigm-shift-on-4zzz.pinecast.co/episode/dbf12eaf/tech-criticism-with-cory-doctorow * How To Fix The Internet (EFF) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/podcast-episode-fighting-enshittification ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Latest books * The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). * "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) * "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). * "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. * "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com * "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?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) * "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/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Upcoming books * Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 * Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Colophon Today's top sources: Currently writing: * Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay. Today's progress: 763 words (38649 words total). * A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING * Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 * Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM * Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: AI's productivity theater https://craphound.com/news/2024/08/04/ais-productivity-theater/ This work - excluding any serialized fiction - is 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. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla*" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_0x9026DBBE1FC237AF.asc Type: application/pgp-keys Size: 3480 bytes Desc: OpenPGP public key URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 203 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: From doctorow at craphound.com Fri Aug 16 11:51:17 2024 From: doctorow at craphound.com (Cory Doctorow) Date: Fri, 16 Aug 2024 08:51:17 -0700 Subject: [Plura-list] MIT libraries are thriving without Elsevier Message-ID: Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/16/the-public-sphere/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ I'm coming to BURNING MAN! On TUESDAY (Aug 27) at 1PM, I'm giving a talk called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE!" at PALENQUE NORTE (7&E). On WEDNESDAY (Aug 28) at NOON, I'm doing a "Talking Caterpillar" Q&A at LIMINAL LABS (830&C). ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ Community voting for SXSW is live! If you wanna hear Rida Qadri and me talk about how gig workers can disenshittify their jobs with interoperability, vote for this one! https://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/150498 ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ Today's links * MIT libraries are thriving without Elsevier: $2 million here, $2 million there, pretty soon you're talking real money. * Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. * This day in history: 2009, 2019, 2023 * Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. * Recent appearances: Where I've been. * Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Colophon: All the rest. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? MIT libraries are thriving without Elsevier Once you learn about the "collective action problem," you start seeing it everywhere. Democrats - including elected officials - all wanted Biden to step down, but none of them wanted to be the first one to take a firm stand, so for months, his campaign limped on: a collective action problem. Patent trolls use bullshit patents to shake down small businesses, demanding "license fees" that are high, but much lower than the cost of challenging the patent and getting it revoked. Collectively, it would be *much* cheaper for all the victims to band together and hire a fancy law firm to invalidate the patent, but individually, it makes sense for them all to pay. A collective action problem: https://locusmag.com/2013/11/cory-doctorow-collective-action/ Musicians get *royally* screwed by Spotify. Collectively, it would make sense for all of them to boycott the platform, which would bring it to its knees and either make it pay more or put it out of business. Individually, any musician who pulls out of Spotify disappears from the horizon of most music fans, so they all hang in - a collective action problem: https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/21/off-the-menu/#universally-loathed Same goes for the businesses that get fucked out of 30% of their app revenues by Apple and Google's mobile business. Without all those apps, Apple and Google wouldn't have a business, but any single app that pulls out commits commercial suicide, so they all hang in there, paying a 30% vig: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/15/private-law/#thirty-percent-vig That's also the case with Amazon sellers, who get rooked for 45-51 cents out of every dollar in platform junk fees, and whose prize for succeeding despite this is to have their product cloned by Amazon, which underprices them because *it* doesn't have to pay a 51% rake on every sale. Without third-party sellers there'd be no Amazon, but it's impossible to get millions of sellers to all pull out at once, so the Bezos crime family scoops up *half* of the ecommerce economy in bullshit fees: https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens This is why one definition of "corruption" is a system with "concentrated gains and diffuse losses." The company that dumps toxic waste in your water supply reaps all the profits of externalizing its waste disposal costs. The people it poisons each bear a fraction of the cost of being poisoned. The environmental criminal has a fat warchest of ill-gotten gains to use to bribe officials and pay fancy lawyers to defend it in court. Its victims are each struggling with the health effects of the crimes, and even without that, they can't possibly match the polluter's resources. Eventually, the polluter spends enough money to convince the Supreme Court to overturn "Chevron deference" and makes it effectively impossible to win the right to clean water and air (or a planet that's not on fire): https://www.cfr.org/expert-brief/us-supreme-courts-chevron-deference-ruling-will-disrupt-climate-policy Any time you encounter a shitty, outrageous racket that's stable over long timescales, chances are you're looking at a collective action problem. Certainly, that's the underlying pathology that preserves the scholarly publishing scam, which is one of the most grotesque, wasteful, disgusting frauds in our modern world (and that's saying something, because the field is crowded with many contenders). Here's how the scholarly publishing scam works: academics do original scholarly research, funded by a mix of private grants, public funding, funding from their universities and other institutions, and private funds. These academics write up their funding and send it to a scholarly journal, usually one that's owned by a small number of firms that formed a scholarly publishing cartel by buying all the smaller publishers in a string of anticompetitive acquisitions. Then, other scholars review the submission, for free. More unpaid scholars do the work of editing the paper. The paper's author is sent a non-negotiable contract that requires them to permanently assign their copyright to the journal, again, for free. Finally, the paper is published, and the institution that *paid the researcher to do the original research* has to pay again - sometimes tens of thousands of dollars per year! - for the journal in which it appears. The academic publishing cartel insists that the millions it extracts from academic institutions and the billions it reaps in profit are all in service to serving as neutral, rigorous gatekeepers who ensure that only the best scholarship makes it into print. This is flatly untrue. The "editorial process" the academic publishers take credit for is virtually nonexistent: almost everything they publish is virtually unchanged from the final submission format. They're not even typesetting the paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00799-018-0234-1 The vetting process for peer-review is a joke. Literally: an Australian academic managed to get his *dog* appointed to the editorial boards of *seven* journals: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/olivia-doll-predatory-journals Far from guarding scientific publishing from scams and nonsense, the major journal publishers have stood up entire divisions *devoted* to pay-to-publish junk science. Elsevier - the largest scholarly publisher - operated a business unit that offered to publish fake journals full of unreveiwed "advertorial" papers written by pharma companies, packaged to look like a real journal: https://web.archive.org/web/20090504075453/http://blog.bioethics.net/2009/05/merck-makes-phony-peerreview-journal/ Naturally, academics and their institutions *hate* this system. Not only is it purely parasitic on their labor, it also serves as a massive brake on scholarly progress, by excluding independent researchers, academics at small institutions, and scholars living in the global south from accessing the work of their peers. The publishers enforce this exclusion without mercy or proportion. Take Diego Gomez, a Colombian Masters candidate who faced *eight years in prison* for accessing a *single* paywalled academic paper: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/07/colombian-student-faces-prison-charges-sharing-academic-article-online And of course, there's Aaron Swartz, the young activist and Harvard-affiliated computer scientist who was hounded to death after he accessed - but did not publish - papers from MIT's JSTOR library. Aaron had permission to access these papers, but JSTOR, MIT, and the prosecutors Stephen Heymann and Carmen Ortiz argued that because he used a small computer program to access the papers (rather than clicking on each link by hand) he had committed *13 felonies*. They threatened him with more than 30 years in prison, and drew out the proceedings until Aaron was out of funds. Aaron hanged himself in 2013: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz Academics know all this terrible stuff is going on, but they are trapped in a collective action problem. For an academic to advance in their field, they have to publish, and they have to get their work cited. Academics all try to publish in the big prestige journals - which also come with the highest price-tag for their institutions - because those are the journals other academics read, which means that getting published is top journal increases the likelihood that another academic will find and cite your work. If academics could all agree to prioritize other journals for reading, then they could also prioritize other journals for submissions. If they could all prioritize other journals for submissions, they could all prioritize other journals for reading. Instead, they all hold one another hostage, through a wicked collective action problem that holds back science, starves their institutions of funding, and puts their colleagues at risk of *imprisonment*. Despite this structural barrier, academics have fought tirelessly to escape the event horizon of scholarly publishing's monopoly black hole. They avidly supported "open access" publishers (most notably PLoS), and while these publishers carved out pockets for free-to-access, high quality work, the scholarly publishing cartel struck back with package deals that bundled their predatory "open access" journals in with their traditional journals. Academics had to pay *twice* for these journals: first, their institutions paid for the package that included them, then the scholars had to pay open access submission fees meant to cover the costs of editing, formatting, etc - all that stuff that basically doesn't exist. Academics started putting "preprints" of their work on the web, and for a while, it looked like the big preprint archive sites could mount a credible challenge to the scholarly publishing cartel. So the cartel members bought the preprint sites, as when Elsevier bought out SSRN: https://www.techdirt.com/2016/05/17/disappointing-elsevier-buys-open-access-academic-pre-publisher-ssrn/ Academics were elated in 2011, when Alexandra Elbakyan founded Sci-Hub, a shadow library that aims to make the entire corpus of scholarly work available without barrier, fear or favor: https://sci-hub.ru/alexandra Sci-Hub neutralized much of the collective action trap: once an article was available on Sci-Hub, it became much easier for other scholars to locate and cite, which reduced the case for paying for, or publishing in, the cartel's journals: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.14979 The scholarly publishing cartel fought back viciously, suing Elbakyan and Sci-Hub for tens of millions of dollars. Elsevier targeted prepress sites like academia.edu with copyright threats, ordering them to remove scholarly papers that linked to Sci-Hub: https://svpow.com/2013/12/06/elsevier-is-taking-down-papers-from-academia-edu/ This was extremely (if darkly) funny, because Elsevier's own publications are *full* of citations to Sci-Hub: https://eve.gd/2019/08/03/elsevier-threatens-others-for-linking-to-sci-hub-but-does-it-itself/ Meanwhile, scholars kept the pressure up. Tens of thousands of scholars pledged to stop submitting their work to Elsevier: http://thecostofknowledge.com/ Academics at the very tops of their fields publicly resigned from the editorial board of leading Elsevier journals, and published editorials calling the Elsevier model unethical: https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2012/may/16/system-profit-access-research And the *New Scientist* called the racket "indefensible," decrying the it as an industry that made restricting access to knowledge "more profitable than oil": https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24032052-900-time-to-break-academic-publishings-stranglehold-on-research/ But the real progress came when academics convinced their *institutions*, rather than one another, to do something about these predator publishers. First came funders, private and public, who announced that they would only fund open access work: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06178-7 Winning over major funders cleared the way for open access advocates worked both the supply-side *and* the buy-side. In 2019, the entire University of California system announced it would be cutting *all* of its Elsevier subscriptions: https://www.science.org/content/article/university-california-boycotts-publishing-giant-elsevier-over-journal-costs-and-open Emboldened by the UC system's principled action, MIT followed suit in 2020, announcing that it would no longer send $2m every year to Elsevier: https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/12/digital-feudalism/#nerdfight It's been four years since MIT's decision to boycott Elsevier, and things are going *great*. The open access consortium SPARC just published a stocktaking of MIT libraries without Elsevier: https://sparcopen.org/our-work/big-deal-knowledge-base/unbundling-profiles/mit-libraries/ How are MIT's academics getting by without Elsevier in the stacks? Just fine. If someone at MIT needs access to an Elsevier paper, they can usually access it by asking the researchers to email it to them, or by downloading it from the researcher's site or a prepress archive. When that fails, there's interlibrary loan, whereby other libraries will send articles to MIT's libraries within a day or two. For more pressing needs, the library buys access to individual papers through an on-demand service. This is how things were predicted to go. The libraries used their own circulation data and the webservice Unsub to figure out what they were likely to lose by dropping Elsevier - it wasn't much! https://unsub.org/ The MIT story shows how to break a collective action problem - through collective action! Individual scholarly boycotts did little to hurt Elsevier. Large-scale organized boycotts raised awareness, but Elsevier trundled on. Sci-Hub scared the shit out of Elsevier and raised awareness even further, but Elsevier had untold millions to spend on a campaign of legal terror against Sci-Hub and Elbakyan. But all of that, combined with high-profile defections, made it impossible for the big institutions to ignore the issue, and the funders joined the fight. Once the funders were on-side, the academic institutions could be dragged into the fight, too. Now, Elsevier - and the cartel - is in serious danger. Automated tools - like the Authors Alliance termination of transfer tool - lets academics get the copyright to their papers back from the big journals so they can make them open access: https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/26/take-it-back/ Unimaginably vast indices of all scholarly publishing serve as important adjuncts to direct access shadow libraries like Sci-Hub: https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/28/clintons-ghost/#cornucopia-concordance Collective action problems are never easy to solve, but they're impossible to address through atomized, individual action. It's only when we act as a collective that we can defeat the corruption - the concentrated gains and diffuse losses - that allow greedy, unscrupulous corporations to steal from us, wreck our lives and even imprison us. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Hey look at this * The West Bank: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqK3_n6pdDY * The UAW Is Now a Chief Antagonist of Donald Trump https://jacobin.com/2024/08/uaw-fain-trump-musk-unions/ * AI has all the answers ? even the wrong ones https://timharford.com/2024/08/ai-has-all-the-answers-even-the-wrong-ones/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? This day in history #15yrsago RECAP, a Firefox plugin that frees US caselaw one page at a time https://web.archive.org/web/20100106195800/https://www.recapthelaw.org/ #15yrsago Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede, free download https://memex.craphound.com/2009/08/14/buddy-holly-is-alive-and-well-on-ganymede-free-download/ #5yrsago Schadenfreude watch: Porno copyright trolls? investors sue, say the grifters they backed stole their money (the grifters say their lawyer stole the money from them first!) https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/malibu-media-litigious-porn-studio-sued-allegedly-cheating-financiers-1231192/ #5yrsago Manhattan DA served Google with a ?reverse search warrant? in a bid to prosecute antifa protesters https://www.thedailybeast.com/manhattan-da-cy-vance-made-google-give-up-info-on-everyone-in-area-in-hunt-for-antifa-after-proud-boys-fight #5yrsago Training bias in AI ?hate speech detector? means that tweets by Black people are far more likely to be censored https://maartensap.com/pdfs/sap2019risk.pdf #5yrsago My appearance on the MMT podcast: compelling narratives as a means of advancing complex political and economic ideas https://pileusmmt.libsyn.com/26-cory-doctorow-radicalize-this-part-1 #5yrsago Ohio State University files for a trademark on ?THE? https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=88571984&caseType=SERIAL_NO&searchType=statusSearch #5yrsago Grounded teen evades device confiscation by tweeting from the smart-fridge https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/aug/13/teen-smart-fridge-twitter-grounded #1yrago Open Circuits: The hidden beauty of electronics components https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/14/hidden-worlds/#making-the-invisible-visible-and-beautiful ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Upcoming appearances * Launch for Madeline Ashby's *Glass Houses* at Chevalier's Books (LA), Aug 16 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/book-talk-madeline-ashbys-glass-houses-tickets-965286486867 * Disenshittify or die! (Burning Man, Palenque Norte, 7&E), Aug 27, 13h * Talking caterpillar Q&A (Burning Man, Liminal Labs, 830&C), Aug 28, 12h * Albacon (Albany/remote), Sep 13-15 https://albacon.org/2024/ * TusCon (Tucson), Nov 8-10 https://tusconscificon.com/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Recent appearances * Tech Rights & The Future of Privacy (Synthetic Minds) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iD5iAV1YmO4 * Enzittification with Ed Zitron & Brian Merchant https://omny.fm/shows/better-offline/enzittification-with-cory-doctorow-brian-merchant * The Paradigm Shift https://paradigm-shift-on-4zzz.pinecast.co/episode/dbf12eaf/tech-criticism-with-cory-doctorow ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Latest books * The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). * "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) * "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). * "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. * "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com * "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?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) * "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/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Upcoming books * Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 * Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Colophon Today's top sources: Jef (https://mastodon.dias.ie/@jfbucas). Currently writing: * Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay. Today's progress: 761 words (39426 words total). * A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING * Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 * Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM * Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: AI's productivity theater https://craphound.com/news/2024/08/04/ais-productivity-theater/ This work - excluding any serialized fiction - is 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. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla*" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_0x9026DBBE1FC237AF.asc Type: application/pgp-keys Size: 3480 bytes Desc: OpenPGP public key URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 203 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: From doctorow at craphound.com Sat Aug 17 12:54:22 2024 From: doctorow at craphound.com (Cory Doctorow) Date: Sat, 17 Aug 2024 09:54:22 -0700 Subject: [Plura-list] "Disenshittify or Die" Message-ID: <351aa9dc-1754-4fdd-aa2e-22ccafc6eb8e@craphound.com> Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ I'm coming to BURNING MAN! On TUESDAY (Aug 27) at 1PM, I'm giving a talk called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE!" at PALENQUE NORTE (7&E). On WEDNESDAY (Aug 28) at NOON, I'm doing a "Talking Caterpillar" Q&A at LIMINAL LABS (830&C). ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ Community voting for SXSW is live! If you wanna hear Rida Qadri and me talk about how gig workers can disenshittify their jobs with interoperability, vote for this one! https://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/150498 ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ Today's links * "Disenshittify or Die": My speech from Defcon 32. * Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. * This day in history: 2009, 2014, 2019, 2023 * Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. * Recent appearances: Where I've been. * Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Colophon: All the rest. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? "Disenshittify or Die" Last weekend, I traveled to Las Vegas for Defcon 32, where I had the immense privilege of giving a solo talk on Track 1, entitled "Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification": https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=54861 This was a followup to last year's talk, "An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification," a talk that kicked off a lot of international interest in my analysis of platform decay ("enshittification"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rimtaSgGz_4 The Defcon organizers have earned a restful week or two, and that means that the video of my talk hasn't yet been posted to Defcon's Youtube channel, so in the meantime, I thought I'd post a lightly edited version of my speech crib. If you're headed to Burning Man, you can hear me reprise this talk at Palenque Norte (7&E); I'm kicking off their lecture series on Tuesday, Aug 27 at 1PM. == What the fuck *happened* to the old, good internet? I mean, sure, our bosses were a little surveillance-happy, and they were usually up for sharing their data with the NSA, and whenever there was a tossup between user security and growth, it was always YOLO time. But Google Search used to *work*. Facebook used to show you posts from people you *followed*. Uber used to be cheaper than a taxi *and* pay the driver more than a cabbie made. Amazon used to sell *products*, not Shein-grade self-destructing dropshipped garbage from all-consonant brands. Apple used to defend your privacy, rather than spying on you with your no-modifications-allowed Iphone. There was a time when you searching for an album on Spotify would get you that album - *not* a playlist of insipid AI-generated covers with the same name and art. Microsoft used to sell you software ? sure, it was buggy ? but now they just let you access apps in the cloud, so they can watch how you use those apps and strip the features you use the most out of the basic tier and turn them into an upcharge. What ? and I cannot stress this enough ? the *fuck* happened?! I?m talking about enshittification. Here?s what enshittification looks like from the outside: First, you see a company that?s being good to its end users. Google puts the best search results at the top; Facebook shows you a feed of posts from people and groups you followl; Uber charges small dollars for a cab; Amazon subsidizes goods and returns and shipping and puts the best match for your product search at the top of the page. That?s stage one, being good to end users. But there?s another part of this stage, call it stage 1a). That?s figuring out how to lock in those users. There?s *so many* ways to lock in users. If you?re Facebook, the users do it for you. You joined Facebook because there were people there you wanted to hang out with, and other people joined Facebook to hang out with you. That?s the old ?network effects? in action, and with network effects come ?the collective action problem." Because you love your friends, but god*damn* are they a pain in the ass! You all agree that FB sucks, sure, but can you all agree on when it?s time to leave? No way. Can you agree on where to go next? *Hell no*. You?re there because that?s where the support group for your rare disease hangs out, and your bestie is there because that?s where they talk with the people in the country they moved away from, then there?s that friend who coordinates their kid?s little league car pools on FB, and the best dungeon master you know isn?t gonna leave FB because that?s where her customers are. So you?re stuck, because even though FB use comes at a high cost ? your privacy, your dignity and your sanity ? that?s still less than the *switching cost* you?d have to bear if you left: namely, all those friends who have taken you hostage, and whom you are holding hostage Now, sometimes companies lock you in with money, like Amazon getting you to prepay for a year?s shipping with Prime, or to buy your Audible books on a monthly subscription, which virtually guarantees that every shopping search will start on Amazon, after all, you?ve already paid for it. Sometimes, they lock you in with DRM, like HP selling you a printer with four ink cartridges filled with fluid that retails for more than $10,000/gallon, and using DRM to stop you from refilling any of those ink carts or using a third-party cartridge. So when one cart runs dry, you have to refill it or throw away your investment in the remaining three cartridges and the printer itself. Sometimes, it?s a grab bag: * You can?t run your Ios apps without Apple hardware; * you can?t run your Apple music, books and movies on anything except an Ios app; * your iPhone uses parts pairing ? DRM handshakes between replacement parts and the main system ? so you can?t use third-party parts to fix it; and * every OEM iPhone part has a microscopic Apple logo engraved on it, so Apple can demand that the US Customs and Border Service seize any shipment of refurb Iphone parts as trademark violations. Think Different, amirite? Getting you locked in completes phase one of the enshittification cycle and signals the start of phase two: making things worse for you to make things better for business customers. For example, a platform might poison its search results, like Google selling more and more of its results pages to ads that are identified with lighter and lighter tinier and tinier type. Or Amazon selling off search results and calling it an ?ad? business. They make $38b/year on this scam. The first result for your search is, on average, 29% more expensive than the best match for your search. The first row is 25% more expensive than the best match. On average, the best match for your search is likely to be found *seventeen* places down on the results page. Other platforms sell off your feed, like Facebook, which started off showing you the things you *asked* to see, but now the quantum of content from the people you follow has dwindled to a homeopathic residue, leaving a void that Facebook fills with things that people *pay* to show you: boosted posts from publishers you haven?t subscribed to, and, of course, ads. Now at this point you might be thinking ?sure, if you?re not paying for the product, you?re the product.' Bullshit! *Bull.* *Shit*. The people who buy those Google ads? They pay more every year for worse ad-targeting and more ad-fraud Those publishers paying to nonconsensually cram their content into your Facebook feed? They *have* to do that because FB suppresses their ability to reach the people who actually subscribed to them The Amazon sellers with the *best* match for your query have to outbid everyone else just to show up on the first page of results. It costs so much to sell on Amazon that between 45-51% of every dollar an independent seller brings in has to be kicked up to Don Bezos and the Amazon crime family. Those sellers don?t have the kind of margins that let them pay 51% They have to raise prices in order to avoid losing money on every sale. "But wait!" I hear you say! [Come on, say it!] "But wait! Things on Amazon aren?t more expensive that things at Target, or Walmart, or at a mom and pop store, or direct from the manufacturer. "How can sellers be raising prices on Amazon if the price at Amazon is the same as at is everywhere else?" [Any guesses?!] That?s right, they charge more *everywhere*. They *have to*. Amazon binds its sellers to a policy called ?most favored nation status,? which says they can?t charge more on Amazon than they charge elsewhere, including direct from their own factory store. So every seller that wants to sell on Amazon has to raise their prices *everywhere else*. Now, these sellers are Amazon?s best customers. They?re paying for the product, and they?re *still* getting screwed. Paying for the product doesn?t fill your vapid boss?s shriveled heart with so much joy that he decides to stop trying to think of ways to fuck you over. Look at Apple. Remember when Apple offered every Ios user a one-click opt out for app-based surveillance? And *96%* of users clicked that box? (The other four percent were either drunk or Facebook employees or drunk Facebook employees.) That cost Facebook at least *ten billion dollars per year* in lost surveillance revenue? I mean, you *love* to see it. But did you know that at the *same time* Apple started spying on Ios users in the *same way* that Facebook had been, for surveillance data to use to target users for its competing advertising product? Your Iphone isn?t an ad-supported gimme. You paid a thousand fucking dollars for that distraction rectangle in your pocket, and you?re *still* the product. What?s more, Apple has rigged Ios so that you can?t mod the OS to block its spying. If you?re not *not* paying for the product, you?re the product, and if you *are* paying for the product, you?re *still* the product. Just ask the farmers who are expected to swap parts into their own busted half-million dollar, mission-critical tractors, but can?t actually *use* those parts until a technician charges them $200 to drive out to the farm and type a parts pairing unlock code into their console. John Deere?s not giving away tractors. Give John Deere a half mil for a tractor and you will be the product. Please, my brothers and sisters in Christ. Please! Stop saying ?if you?re not paying for the product, you?re the product.? OK, OK, so that?s phase two of enshittification. Phase one: be good to users while locking them in. Phase two: screw the users a little to you can good to business customers while locking *them* in. Phase three: screw *everybody* and take all the value for yourself. Leave behind the absolute bare minimum of utility so that everyone stays locked into your pile of shit. Enshittification: a tragedy in three acts. That?s what enshittification looks like from the outside, but what?s going on *inside* the company? What is the pathological mechanism? What sci-fi entropy ray converts the excellent and useful service into a pile of shit? That mechanism is called *twiddling*. Twiddling is when someone alters the back end of a service to change how its business operates, changing prices, costs, search ranking, recommendation criteria and other foundational aspects of the system. Digital platforms are a twiddler?s utopia. A grocer would need an army of teenagers with pricing guns on rollerblades to reprice everything in the building when someone arrives who?s extra hungry. Whereas the McDonald?s Investments portfolio company Plexure advertises that it can use surveillance data to predict when an app user has just gotten paid so the seller can tack an extra couple bucks onto the price of their breakfast sandwich. And of course, as the prophet William Gibson warned us, ?cyberspace is everting.' With digital shelf tags, grocers can change prices whenever they feel like, like the grocers in Norway, whose e-ink shelf tags change the prices *2,000 times per day*. Every Uber driver is offered a different wage for every job. If a driver has been picky lately, the job pays more. But if the driver has been desperate enough to grab every ride the app offers, the pay goes down, and down, and down. The law professor Veena Dubal calls this ?algorithmic wage discrimination.' It?s a prime example of twiddling. Every youtuber knows what it?s like to be twiddled. You work for weeks or months, spend thousands of dollars to make a video, then the algorithm decides that no one - not your own subscribers, not searchers who type in the exact name of your video - will see it. Why? Who knows? The algorithm?s rules are not public. Because content moderation is the last redoubt of security through obscurit: they can?t tell you what the como algorithm is downranking because then you?d cheat. Youtube is the kind of shitty boss who docks every paycheck for all the rules you?ve broken, but won?t tell you what those rules were, lest you figure out how to break those rules next time without your boss catching you. Twiddling can also work in some users? favor, of course. Sometimes platforms twiddle to make things *better* for end users or business customers. For example, Emily Baker-White from *Forbes* revealed the existence of a back-end feature that Tiktok?s management can access they call the ?heating tool.? When a manager applies the heating toll to a performer?s account, that performer?s videos are thrust into the feeds of millions of users, without regard to whether the recommendation algorithm predicts they will enjoy that video. Why would they do this? Well, here?s an analogy from my boyhood I used to go to this traveling fair that would come to Toronto at the end of every summer, the Canadian National Exhibition. If you?ve been to a fair like the Ex, you know that you can always spot some guy lugging around a comedically huge teddy bear. Nominally, you win that teddy bear by throwing five balls in a peach-basket, but to a first approximation, no one has *ever* gotten five balls to stay in that peach-basket. That guy ?won? the teddy bear when a carny on the midway singled him out and said, "fella, I like your face. Tell you what I?m gonna do: You get just *one* ball in the basket and I?ll give you this keychain, and if you amass two keychains, I?ll let you trade them in for one of these galactic-scale teddy-bears." That?s how the guy got his teddy bear, which he now has to drag up and down the midway for the rest of the day. Why the hell did that carny give away the teddy bear? Because it turns the guy into a walking billboard for the midway games. If that dopey-looking Judas Goat can get five balls into a peach basket, then so can you. Except you can?t. Tiktok?s heating tool is a way to give away tactical giant teddy bears. When someone in the TikTok brain trust decides they need more sports bros on the platform, they pick one bro out at random and make him king for the day, heating the shit out of his account. That guy gets a bazillion views and he starts running around on all the sports bro forums trumpeting his success: *I am the Louis Pasteur of sports bro influencers!" The other sports bros pile in and start retooling to make content that conforms to the idiosyncratic Tiktok format. When they fail to get giant teddy bears of their own, they assume that it?s because they?re doing Tiktok wrong, because they don?t know about the heating tool. But then comes the day when the TikTok Star Chamber decides they need to lure in more astrologers, so they take the heat off that one lucky sports bro, and start heating up some lucky astrologer. Giant teddy bears are all over the place: those Uber drivers who were boasting to the NYT ten years ago about earning $50/hour? The Substackers who were *rolling* in dough? Joe Rogan and his hundred million dollar Spotify payout? Those people are all the proud owners of giant teddy bears, and they?re a *steal*. Because every dollar they get from the platform turns into five dollars worth of free labor from suckers who think they just internetting wrong. Giant teddy bears are just one way of twiddling. Platforms can play games with every part of their business logic, in highly automated ways, that allows them to quickly and efficiently siphon value from end users to business customers and back again, hiding the pea in a shell game conducted at machine speeds, until they?ve got everyone so turned around that they take *all* the value for themselves. That?s the how: How the platforms do the trick where they are good to users, then lock users in, then maltreat users to be good to business customers, then lock in those business customers, then take all the value for themselves. So now we know *what* is happening, and *how* it is happening, all that?s left is *why* it?s happening. Now, on the one hand, the *why* is pretty obvious. The less value that end-users and business customers capture, the more value there is left to divide up among the shareholders and the executives. That?s *why*, but it doesn?t tell you *why now*. Companies could have done this shit at any time in the past 20 years, but they didn?t. Or at least, the successful ones didn?t. The ones that turned themselves into piles of shit got *treated* like piles of shit. We avoided them and they died. Remember Myspace? Yahoo Search? Livejournal? Sure, they?re still serving some kind of AI slop or programmatic ad junk if you hit those domains, but they?re *gone*. And there?s the clue: It *used* to be that if you enshittified your product, bad things happened to your company. Now, there are no consequences for enshittification, so everyone?s doing it. Let?s break that down: What stops a company from enshittifying? There are four forces that discipline tech companies. The first one is, obviously, competition. If your customers find it easy to leave, then you have to worry about them leaving Many factors can contribute to how hard or easy it is to depart a platform, like the network effects that Facebook has going for it. But the most important factor is *whether there is anywhere to go*. Back in 2012, Facebook bought Insta for a billion dollars. That may seem like chump-change in these days of eleven-digit Big Tech acquisitions, but that was a big sum in those innocent days, and it was an especially big sum to pay for *Insta*. The company only had 13 employees, and a mere 25 million registered users. But what mattered to Zuckerberg wasn?t how many users Insta had, it was where those users came from. [Does anyone know where those Insta users came from?] That?s right, they left Facebook and joined Insta. They were sick of FB, even though they liked the people there, they hated creepy Zuck, they hated the platform, so they left and they didn?t come back. So Zuck spent a cool billion to recapture them, A fact he *put in writing* in a midnight email to CFO David Ebersman, explaining that he was paying over the odds for Insta because his users hated him, and loved Insta. So even if they quit Facebook (*the platform*), they would still be captured *Facebook* (*the company*). Now, on paper, Zuck?s Instagram acquisition is illegal, but normally, that would be hard to stop, because you?d have to prove that he bought Insta with the intention of curtailing competition. But in this case, Zuck tripped over his own dick: *he put it in writing*. But Obama?s DoJ and FTC just let that one slide, following the pro-monopoly policies of Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II, and setting an example that Trump would follow, greenlighting gigamergers like the catastrophic, incestuous Warner-Discovery marriage Indeed, for 40 years, starting with Carter, and accelerating through Reagan, the US has *encouraged* monopoly formation, as an official policy, on the grounds that monopolies are ?efficient.? If everyone is using Google Search, that?s something we should celebrate It means they?ve got the very best search and wouldn?t it be perverse to spend public funds to *punish* them for making the best product? But as we all know, Google didn?t maintain search dominance by being best. They did it by paying bribes. More than *20 billion* per year to Apple alone to be the default Ios search, plus billions more to Samsung, Mozilla, and anyone else making a product or service with a search-box on it, ensuring that you never stumble on a search engine that?s better than theirs. Which, in turn, ensured that no one smart invested big in rival search engines, even if they were visibly, obviously superior. Why bother making something better if Google?s buying up all the market oxygen before it can kindle your product to life? Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon ? they?re not ?making things? companies, tey?re ?buying things? companies, taking advantage of official tolerance for anticompetitive acquisitions, predatory pricing, market distorting exclusivity deals and other acts *specifically prohibited* by existing antitrust law Their goal is to become too big to fail, because that makes them too big to jail, and that means they can be *too big to care*. Which is why Google Search is a pile of shit and everything on Amazon is dropshipped garbage that instantly disintegrates in a cloud of offgassed volatile organic compounds when you open the box. Once companies no longer fear losing your business to a competitor, it?s much easier for them to treat you badly, because what?re you gonna do? Remember Lily Tomlin as Ernestine the AT&T operator in those old SNL sketches? ?We don?t care. We don?t have to. We?re the phone company.? Competition is the first force that serves to discipline companies and the enshittificatory impulses of their leadership, and we just stopped enforcing competition law. It takes a special kind of smooth-brained asshole ? that is, an establishment economist - to insist that the collapse of every industry from eyeglasses to vitamin C into a cartel of five or fewer companies has nothing to do with policies that officially encouraged monopolization It?s like we used to put down rat poison and we didn?t have a rat problem.Then these dickheads convinced us that rats were good for us and we stopped putting down rat poison, and now rats are gnawing our faces off and they?re all running around saying, "Who?s to say where all these rats came from? *Maybe* it was that we stopped putting down poison, but *maybe* it?s just the Time of the Rats. The Great Forces of History bearing down on this moment to multiply rats beyond all measure!" Antitrust didn?t slip down that staircase and fall spine-first on that stiletto: they stabbed it in the back and then they *pushed it*. And when they killed antitrust, they also killed regulation, the *second* force that disciplines companies. Regulation *is* possible, but only when the regulator is more powerful than the regulated entities. When a company is bigger than the government, it gets damned hard to credibly threaten to punish that company, no matter what its sins. That?s what protected IBM for all those years when it had its boot on the throat of the American tech sector. Do you know, the DOJ fought to break up IBM in the courts from 1970-1982, and that every year, for 12 consecutive years, IBM spent more on lawyers to fight the USG than the DOJ Antitrust Division spent on *all* the lawyers fighting *every* antitrust case in the entire USA? IBM outspent Uncle Sam for 12 years. People called it ?Antitrust?s Vietnam.? All that money paid off, because by 1982, the president was Ronald Reagan, a man whose official policy was that monopolies were ?efficient." So he dropped the case, and Big Blue wriggled off the hook. It?s hard to regulate a monopolist, and it?s hard to regulate a cartel. When a sector is composed of hundreds of competing companies, they *compete*. They genuinely fight with one another, trying to poach each others? customers and workers. They are at each others? throats. It?s hard enough for a couple hundred executives to agree on *anything*. But when they?re legitimately competing with one another, really obsessing about how to eat each others? lunches, they can?t agree on *anything*. The instant one of them goes to their regulator with some bullshit story, about how it?s impossible to have a decent search engine without fine-grained commercial surveillance; or how it?s impossible to have a secure and easy to use mobile device without a total veto over which software can run on it; or how it?s impossible to administer an ISP?s network unless you can slow down connections to servers whose owners aren?t paying bribes for ?premium carriage"; there?s some *other company saying, ?That?s bullshit? ?We?ve managed it! Here?s our server logs, our quarterly financials and our customer testimonials to prove it.? 100 companies are a rabble, they're a mob. They can?t agree on a lobbying position. They?re too busy eating each others? lunch to agree on how to cater a meeting to discuss it. But let those hundred companies merge to monopoly, absorb one another in an incestuous orgy, turn into five giant companies, so inbred they?ve got a corporate Habsburg jaw, and they become a *cartel*. It?s easy for a cartel to agree on what bullshit they?re all going to feed their regulator, and to mobilize some of the excess billions they?ve reaped through consolidation, which freed them from ?wasteful competition," sp they can capture their regulators completely. You know, Congress used to pass federal consumer privacy laws? Not anymore. The last time Congress managed to pass a federal consumer privacy law was in 1988: The Video Privacy Protection Act. That?s a law that bans video-store clerks from telling newspapers what VHS cassettes you take home. In other words, it regulates three things that have effectively ceased to exist. The threat of having your video rental history out there in the public eye was *not* the last or most urgent threat the American public faced, and yet, Congress is deadlocked on passing a privacy law. Tech companies? regulatory capture involves a risible and transparent gambit, that is so stupid, it?s an insult to all the good hardworking risible transparent ruses out there. Namely, they claim that when they violate your consumer, privacy or labor rights, It?s not a crime, because they do it with an app. Algorithmic wage discrimination isn?t illegal wage theft: we do it with an app. Spying on you from asshole to appetite isn?t a privacy violation: we do it with an app. And Amazon?s scam search tool that tricks you into paying 29% more than the best match for your query? Not a ripoff. We do it with an app Once we killed competition - stopped putting down rat poison - we got cartels - the rats ate our faces. And the cartels captured their regulators - the rats bought out the poison factory and shut it down. So companies aren?t constrained by competition or regulation. But you know what? This is tech, and tech is different.IIt?s different because it?s flexible. Because our computers are Turing-complete universal von Neumann machines. That means that any enshittificatory alteration to a program can be disenshittified with another program. Every time HP jacks up the price of ink , they invite a competitor to market a refill kit or a compatible cartridge. When Tesla installs code that says you have to pay an extra monthly fee to use your whole battery, they invite a modder to start selling a kit to jailbreak that battery and charge it all the way up. Lemme take you through a little example of how that works: Imagine this is a product design meeting for our company?s website, and the guy leading the meeting says ?Dudes, you know how our KPI is topline ad-revenue? Well, I?ve calculated that if we make the ads just 20% more invasive and obnoxious, we?ll boost ad rev by 2%? This is a good pitch. Hit that KPI and everyone gets a fat bonus. We can all take our families on a luxury ski vacation in Switzerland. But here?s the thing: someone?s gonna stick their arm up - someone who doesn?t give a shit about user well-being, and that person is gonna say, ?I love how you think, Elon. But has it occurred to you that if we make the ads 20% more obnoxious, then 40% of our users will go to a search engine and type 'How do I block ads?'" I mean, what a nightmare! Because once a user does that, the revenue from that user doesn?t rise to 102%. It doesn?t stay at 100% It falls to *zero*, forever. [Any guesses why?] Because *no user ever went back to the search engine and typed, 'How do I start seeing ads again?'* Once the user jailbreaks their phone or discovers third party ink, or develops a relationship with an independent Tesla mechanic who?ll unlock all the DLC in their car, that user is *gone*, *forever*. Interoperability ? that latent property bequeathed to us courtesy of Herrs Turing and Von Neumann and their infinitely flexible, universal machines - that is a serious check on enshittification. The fact that Congress hasn?t passed a privacy law since 1988 Is countered, at least in part, by the fact that the *majority* of web users are now running ad-blockers, which are also tracker-blockers. But no one?s ever installed a tracker-blocker for an *app*. Because reverse engineering an app puts in you jeopardy of criminal and civil prosecution under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, with penalties of a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine for a first offense. And violating its terms of service puts you in jeopardy under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, which is the law that Ronald Reagan signed in a panic after watching Wargames (seriously!). Helping other users violate the terms of service can get you hit with a lawsuit for tortious interference with contract. And then there?s trademark, copyright and patent. All that nonsense we call ?IP,? but which Jay Freeman of Cydia calls ?Felony Contempt of Business Model." So if we?re still at that product planning meeting and now it?s time to talk about our app, the guy leading the meeting says, ?OK, so we?ll make the ads in the *app* 20% more obnoxious to pull a 2% increase in topline ad rev?? And that person who objected to making the website 20% worse? Their hand goes back up. Only this time they say ?Why don?t we make the ads 100% more invasive and get a 10% increase in ad rev?" Because it *doesn't matter* if a user goes to a search engine and types, ?How do I block ads in an app." The answer is: *you can't.* So YOLO, enshittify away. ?IP? is just a euphemism for ?any law that lets me reach outside my company?s walls to exert coercive control over my critics, competitors and customers,? and ?app? is just a euphemism for ?A web page skinned with the right IP so that protecting your privacy while you use it is a felony.? Interop used to keep companies from enshittifying. If a company made its client suck, someone would roll out an alternative client, if they ripped a feature out and wanted to sell it back to you as a monthly subscription, someone would make a compatible plugin that restored it for a one-time fee, or for free. To help people flee Myspace, FB gave them bots that you?d load with your login credentials. It would scrape your waiting Myspace messages and put ?em in your FB inbox, and login to Myspace and paste your replies into your Myspace outbox. So you didn?t have to choose between the people you loved on Myspace, and Facebook, which launched with a promise *never* to spy on you. Remember that?! Thanks to the metastasis of IP, all that is off the table today. Apple owes its very existence to iWork Suite, whose Pages, Numbers and Keynote are file-compatible with Microsoft?s Word, Excel and Powerpoint. But make an IOS runtime that?ll play back the files you bought from Apple?s stores on other platforms, and they?ll nuke you til you glow. FB wouldn?t have had a hope of breaking Myspace?s grip on social media without that scrape, but scrape FB today in support of an alternative client and their lawyers will bomb you til the rubble bounces. Google scraped every website in the world to create its search index. Try and scrape Google and they?ll have your head on a pike. When they did it, it was progress. When you do it to them, that?s piracy. Every pirate wants to be an admiral. Because this handful of companies has so thoroughly captured their regulators, they can wield the power of the state against *you* when you try to break their grip on power, even as their own flagrant violations of our rights go unpunished. Because they do them with an app. Tech lost its fear of competitin it neutralized the threat from regulators, and then put them in harness to attack new startups that might do unto them as they did unto the companies that came before them. But even so, there was a force that kept our bosses in check That force was *us*. Tech workers. Tech workers have historically been in short supply, which gave us power, and our bosses knew it. To get us to work crazy hours, they came up with a trick. They appealed to our love of technology, and told us that we were heroes of a digital revolution, who would ?organize the world?s information and make it useful,? who would ?bring the world closer together.? They brought in expert set-dressers to turn our workplaces into whimsical campuses with free laundry, gourmet cafeterias, massages, and kombucha, and a surgeon on hand to freeze our eggs so that we could work through our fertile years. They convinced us that we were being pampered, rather than being worked like government mules. This trick has a name. Fobazi Ettarh, the librarian-theorist, calls it ?vocational awe, and Elon Musk calls it being ?extremely hardcore.? This worked very well. Boy did we put in some long-ass hours! But for our bosses, this trick failed badly. Because if you miss your mother?s funeral and to hit a deadline, and then your boss orders you to enshittify that product, you are gonna experience a profound moral injury, which you are *absolutely* gonna make your boss share. Because what are they gonna do? Fire you? They can?t hire someone else to do your job, and you can get a job that?s even better at the shop across the street. So workers held the line when competition, regulation and interop failed But eventually, supply caught up with demand. Tech laid off 260,000 of us last year, and another 100,000 in the first half of this year. You can?t tell your bosses to go fuck themselves, because they?ll fire your ass and give your job to someone who?ll be only too happy to enshittify that product you built. That?s why this is all happening right now. Our bosses aren?t different. They didn?t catch a mind-virus that turned them into greedy assholes who don?t care about our users? wellbeing or the quality of our products. As far as our bosses have *always* been concerned, the point of the business was to charge the most, and deliver the least, while sharing as little as possible with suppliers, workers, users and customers. They?re not running charities. Since day one, our bosses have shown up for work and yanked as hard as they can on the big ENSHITTIFICATION lever behind their desks, only that lever didn?t move much. It was all gummed up by competition, regulation, interop and workers. As those sources of friction melted away, the enshittification lever started moving very freely. Which sucks, I know. But think about this for a sec: our bosses, despite being wildly imperfect vessels capable of rationalizing endless greed and cheating, nevertheless oversaw a series of actually *great* products and services. Not because they used to be better people, but because they used to be subjected to *discipline*. So it follows that if we want to end the enshittocene, dismantle the enshitternet, and build a new, good internet that our bosses can?t wreck, we need to make sure that these constraints are durably installed on that internet, wound around its very roots and nerves. And we have to stand guard over it so that it can?t be dismantled again. A new, good internet is one that has the positive aspects of the old, good internet: an ethic of technological self-determination, where users of technology (and hackers, tinkerers, startups and others serving as their proxies) can reconfigure and mod the technology they use, so that it does what they need it to do, and so that it can?t be used *against* them. But the new, good internet will *fix* the defects of the old, good internet, the part that made it hard to use for anyone who wasn?t *us*. And hell yeah we can do that. Tech bosses swear that it?s impossible, that you can?t have a conversation friend without sharing it with Zuck; or search the web without letting Google scrape you down to the viscera; or have a phone that works reliably without giving Apple a veto over the software you install. They claim that it?s a nonsense to even *ponder* this kind of thing. It?s like making water that?s not wet. But that?s bullshit. We can have nice things. We can build for the people we love, and give them a place that?s worth of their time and attention. To do that, we have to install constraints. The first constraint, remember, is competition. We?re living through a epochal shift in competition policy. After 40 years with antitrust enforcement in an induced coma, a wave of antitrust vigor has swept through governments all over the world. Regulators are stepping in to ban monopolistic practices, open up walled gardens, block anticompetitive mergers, and even unwind corrupt mergers that were undertaken on false pretenses. Normally this is the place in the speech where I?d list out all the amazing things that have happened over the past four years. The enforcement actions that blocked companies from becoming too big to care, and that scared companies away from even trying. Like Wiz, which just noped out of the *largest acquisition offer in history*, turning down Google?s $23b cashout, nd deciding to, you know, just be a fucking business that makes money by producing a product that people want and selling it at a competitive price. Normally, I?d be listing out FTC rulemakings that banned noncompetes nationwid. Or the new merger guidelines the FTC and DOJ cooked up, which ? among other things ? establish that the agencies should be considering whether a merger will negatively impact privacy. I had a whole section of this stuff in my notes, a real victory lap, but I deleted it all this week. [Can anyone guess why?] That?s right! This week, Judge Amit Mehta, ruling for the DC Circuit of these United States of America, In the docket 20-3010 a case known as *United States v. Google LLC*, found that ?Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly," and ordered Google and the DOJ to propose a schedule for a remedy, like breaking the company up. So yeah, that was pretty fucking *epic*. Now, this antitrust stuff is pretty esoteric, and I won?t gatekeep you or shame you if you wanna keep a little distance on this subject. Nearly everyone is an antitrust normie, and *that's OK*. But if you?re a normie, you?re probably only catching little bits and pieces of the narrative, and let me tell you, the monopolists know it and they are *flooding the zone*. The *Wall Street Journal* has published over 100 editorials condemning FTC Chair Lina Khan, saying she?s an ineffectual do-nothing, wasting public funds chasing doomed, quixotic adventures against poor, innocent businesses accomplishing nothing [Does anyone out there know who owns the *Wall Street Journal*?] That?s right, it?s Rupert Murdoch. Do you really think Rupert Murdoch pays his editorial board to write *one hundred editorials* about someone who?s not getting anything done? The reality is that in the USA, in the UK, in the EU, in Australia, in Canada, in Japan, in South Korea, even in *China*, we are seeing more antitrust action over the past four years than over the preceding *forty* years. Remember, competition *law* is actually pretty robust. The problem isn?t the law, It?s the enforcement priorities. Reagan put antitrust in mothballs 40 years ago, but that elegant weapon from a more civilized age is now back in the hands of people who know how to use it, and they?re swinging for the fences. Next up: regulation. As the seemingly inescapable power of the tech giants is revealed for the sham it always was, governments and regulators are finally gonna kill the ?one weird trick? of violating the law, and saying ?It doesn?t count, we did it with an app.? Like in the EU, they?re rolling out the Digital Markets Act this year. That?s a law requiring dominant platforms to stand up APIs so that third parties can offer interoperable services. So a co-op, a nonprofit, a hobbyist, a startup, or a local government agency wil eventuallyl be able to offer, say, a social media server that can interconnect with one of the dominant social media silos, and users who switch to that new platform will be able to continue to exchange messages with the users they follow and groups they belong to, so the switching costs will fall to damned near zero. That?s a very cool rule, but what?s even cooler is how it?s gonna be enforced. Previous EU tech rules were ?regulations? as in the GDPR - the General Data Privacy Regulation. EU regs need to be ?transposed? into laws in each of the 27 EU member states, so they become national laws that get enforced by national courts. For Big Tech, that means all previous tech regulations are enforced in *Ireland*, because Ireland is a tax haven, and all the tech companies fly Irish flags of convenience. Here?s the thing: every tax haven is also a crime haven. After all, if Google can pretend it?s Irish this week, it can pretend to be Cypriot, or Maltese, or Luxembougeious next week. So Ireland has to keep these footloose criminal enterprises happy, or they?ll up sticks and go somewhere else. This is why the GDPR is such a goddamned joke in practice. Big tech wipes its ass with the GDPR, and the only way to punish them starts with Ireland?s privacy commissioner, who barely bothers to get out of bed. This is an agency that spends most of its time watching cartoons on TV in its pajamas and eating breakfast cereal. So all of the big GDPR cases go to Ireland and they die there This is hardly a secret. The European Commission knows it?s going on. So with the DMA, the Commission has changed things up: The DMA is an ?Act,? not a ?Regulation.? Meaning it gets enforced in the EU?s federal courts, bypassing the national courts in crime-havens like Ireland In other words, the ?we violate privacy law, but we do it with an app? gambit that worked on Ireland?s toothless privacy watchdog is now a dead letter, because EU federal judges have no reason to swallow that obvious bullshit. Here in the US, the dam is breaking on federal consumer privacy law ? at last! Remember, our last privacy law was passed in 1988 to protect the sanctity of VHS rental history. It's been a minute. And the thing is, there's a *lot* of people who are angry about stuff that has some nexus with America's piss-poor privacy landscape. Worried that Facebook turned grampy into a Qanon? That Insta made your teen anorexic? That TikTok is brainwashing millennials into quoting Osama Bin Laden? Or that cops are rolling up the identities of everyone at a Black Lives Matter protest or the Jan 6 riots by getting location data from Google? Or that Red State Attorneys General are tracking teen girls to out-of-state abortion clinics? Or that Black people are being discriminated against by online lending or hiring platforms? Or that someone is making AI deepfake porn of you? A federal privacy law with a private right of action - which means that individuals can sue companies that violate their privacy - would go a long way to rectifying all of these problems There's a pretty big coalition for that kind of privacy law! Which is why we have seen a procession of imperfect (but steadily improving) privacy laws working their way through Congress. If you sign up for EFF?s mailing list at eff.org we?ll send you an email when these come up, so you can call your Congressjerk or Senator and talk to them about it. Or better yet, make an appointment to drop by their offices when they?re in their districts, and explain to them that you?re not just a registered voter from their district, you?re the kind of elite tech person who goes to Defcon, and *then* explain the bill to them. That stuff makes a difference What about self-help?How are we doing on making interoperability legal again, so hackers can just *fix shit* without waiting for Congress or a federal agency to act? All the action here these day is in the state Right to Repair fight. We?re getting state R2R bills, like the one that passed this year in Oregon that *ban* parts-pairing, where DRM is used to keep a device from using a new part until it gets an authorized technician?s unlock code. These bills are pushed by a fantastic group of organizations called the Repair Coalition, at Repair.org, and they?ll email you when one of these laws is going through your statehouse, so you can meet with your state reps and explain to the JV squad the same thing you told your federal reps. Repair.org?s prime mover is Ifixit, who are genuine heroes of the repair revolution, and Ifixit?s founder, Kyle Wiens, is here at the con. When you see him, you can shake his hand and tell him thanks, and that?ll be even better if you tell him that you?ve signed up to get alerts at repair.org! Now, on to the final way that we reverse enhittification and build that new, good internet: *you*, the tech labor force. For years, your bosses tricked you into thinking you were founders in waiting, temporarily embarrassed entrepreneurs who were only momentarily drawing a salary. You certainly weren?t *workers*. Your power came from your intrinsic virtue, not like those lazy slobs in unions who have to get their power through that kumbaya solidarity nonsense. It was a trick. You were scammed. The power you had came from scarcity, and so when the scarcity ended, when the industry started ringing up six-figure annual layoffs, your power went away with it. The only durable source of power for tech workers is as *workers*, in a union. Think about Amazon. Warehouse workers have to piss in bottles and have the highest rate of on-the-job maimings of any competing business. Whereas Amazon coders get to show up for work with facial piercings, green mohawks, and black t-shirts that say things their bosses don?t understand. They can piss whenever they want! That?s not because Jeff Bezos or Andy Jassy loves you guys. It?s because they?re scared you?ll quit and they don?t know how to replace you. Time for the second obligatory William Gibson quote: ?The future is here, it?s just not evenly distributed.? You know who?s living in the future?. Those Amazon blue-collar workers. They are the bleeding edge. Drivers whose eyeballs are monitored by AI cameras that do digital phrenology on their faces to figure out whether to dock their pay, warehouse workers whose bodies are ruined in just months. As tech bosses beef up that reserve army of unemployed, skilled tech worker, then those tech workers - *you all* - will arrive at the same future as them. Look, I know that you?ve spent your careers explaining in words so small your boss could understand them, that you refuse to enshittify the company?s products, and I thank you for your service. But if you want to go on fighting for the user, you need power that?s more durable than scarcity. You need a union. Wanna learn how? Check out the Tech Workers Coalition and Tech Solidarity, and get organized. Enshittification didn?t arise because our bosses changed. They were always that guy. They were always yankin? on that enshittification lever in the C-suite. What changed was the environment, everything that kept that switch from moving. And that?s good news, in a bankshot way, because it means we can make good services out of imperfect people. As a wildly imperfect person myself, I find this heartening. The new good internet is in our grasp: an internet that has the technological self-determination of the old, good internet, and the greased-skids simplicity of Web 2.0 that let all our normie friends get in on the fun. Tech bosses want you to think that good UX and enshittification can?t ever be separated. That?s such a self-serving proposition you can spot it from orbit. *We* know it, 'cause we built the old good internet., and we?ve been fighting a rear-guard action to preserve it for the past two decades. It?s time to stop playing defense. It's time to go on the offensive. To restore competition, regulation, interop and tech worker power so that we can create the new, good internet we?ll need to fight fascism, the climate emergency, and genocide. To build a digital nervous system for a 21st century in which our children can thrive and prosper. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Hey look at this * It?s the Land, Stupid: How the Homebuilder Cartel Drives High Housing Prices https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/its-the-land-stupid-how-the-homebuilder * 2 Fast 2 Legal: How EFF Helped a Security Researcher During DEF CON 32 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/08/2-fast-2-legal-how-eff-helped-security-researcher-during-def-con-32 * Matt Yglesias Is Wrong About Lina Khan?s Record https://therevolvingdoorproject.org/matt-yglesias-is-wrong-about-lina-khans-record/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? This day in history #15yrsago Campaign to get UK government to apologise for hounding Alan Turing to his death https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/campaign-to-win-official-apology-for-alan-927356 #10yrsago NYPD arrest NY gubernatorial challenger for videoing street-arrest https://web.archive.org/web/20140817215021/http://photographyisnotacrime.com/2014/08/14/new-york-governor-candidate-arrested-recording-aggressive-police-behavior/ #10yrsago EFF guide to cell phone use for US protesters https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/08/cell-phone-guide-protesters-updated-2014-edition #10yrsago Life-sized nude sculpture made from typewriter parts https://cargocollective.com/jeremymayer #10yrsago Paranoid Paul: get notified of silent, sneaky terms of service updates https://www.paranoidpaul.com #10yrsago Microsoft wants to rename Internet Explorer to shed negative associations https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/08/microsoft-considered-renaming-internet-explorer-to-escape-its-checkered-past/ #10yrsago FBI and AG sued by American muslims over no-fly list https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/08/five-american-muslims-sue-fbi-attorney-general-over-travel-watchlist/ #5yrsago Amazon pays happy warehouse workers to tweet about how happy they are whenever someone complains about warehouse conditions https://twitter.com/surasshu/status/1161916352468176896 #5yrsago Wework loses $5200/customer, lost $1.3B in H1/2019 https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wework-ipo-office-sharing-prospectus-s-1-shows-losses/ #5yrsago Googlers circulate petition demanding a moratorium on contracts with US border agencies https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-14/google-workers-demand-company-not-work-with-u-s-border-agencies #5yrsago Defeating Apple?s Faceid?s proof-of-life by putting tape over glasses? lenses https://threatpost.com/researchers-bypass-apple-faceid-using-biometrics-achilles-heel/147109/ #5yrsago The guy who figured out Bernie Madoff?s scam now says GE is about to go bankrupt https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/16/investing/ge-harry-markopolos-interview/index.html #5yrsago Announcement of Tumblr?s sale to WordPress classified as pornography by Tumblr?s notorious ?adult content? filter https://memex.craphound.com/2019/08/16/announcement-of-tumblrs-sale-to-wordpress-classified-as-pornography-by-tumblrs-notorious-adult-content-filter/ #5yrsago Judge orders the State of Georgia to be prepared for pen-and-paper balloting by March 2020 https://apnews.com/article/primary-elections-us-news-ap-top-news-voting-voting-machines-abd2949881514e42a50f2025595c9c2a #5yrsago Art Spiegelman pulled his Marvel Folio Society intro after Disney demanded that he not criticize Trump https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/16/art-spiegelmans-marvel-essay-refused-publication-for-orange-skull-trump-dig #5yrsago Major corporations blacklist ads on news stories that include the words ?Trump,? ?racism,? ?gun,? ?Brexit,? ?suicide? and more https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/08/advertisers-blacklisting-news-other-stories-with-controversial-words-like-trump.html #5yrsago In California, the 2020 elections will feature an epic battle to allow cities to reinstate property taxes https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/08/2020-property-tax-battle-in-california-could-be-epic.html #5yrsago 1000fps video reveals the underlying action of a stinging ant?s venom injection for the very first time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jygY-ZHPxQ #1yrago At long last, a meaningful step to protect Americans' privacy https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/16/the-second-best-time-is-now/#the-point-of-a-system-is-what-it-does ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Upcoming appearances * Disenshittify or die! (Burning Man, Palenque Norte, 7&E), Aug 27, 13h * Talking caterpillar Q&A (Burning Man, Liminal Labs, 830&C), Aug 28, 12h * Albacon (Albany/remote), Sep 13-15 https://albacon.org/2024/ * TusCon (Tucson), Nov 8-10 https://tusconscificon.com/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Recent appearances * Tech Rights & The Future of Privacy (Synthetic Minds) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iD5iAV1YmO4 * Enzittification with Ed Zitron & Brian Merchant https://omny.fm/shows/better-offline/enzittification-with-cory-doctorow-brian-merchant * The Paradigm Shift https://paradigm-shift-on-4zzz.pinecast.co/episode/dbf12eaf/tech-criticism-with-cory-doctorow ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Latest books * The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). * "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) * "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). * "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. * "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com * "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?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) * "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/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Upcoming books * Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 * Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Colophon Today's top sources: Currently writing: * Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay. Saturday's progress: 759 words (39641 words total). * A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING * Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 * Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM * Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: AI's productivity theater https://craphound.com/news/2024/08/04/ais-productivity-theater/ This work - excluding any serialized fiction - is 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. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla*" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_0x9026DBBE1FC237AF.asc Type: application/pgp-keys Size: 3480 bytes Desc: OpenPGP public key URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 203 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: From doctorow at craphound.com Mon Aug 19 11:02:38 2024 From: doctorow at craphound.com (Cory Doctorow) Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2024 08:02:38 -0700 Subject: [Plura-list] Corporate Bullshit Message-ID: Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/19/apologetics-spotters-guide/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ I'm coming to Burning Man! On Tuesday (Aug 27) at 1PM, I'm giving a talk called "Disenshittify or Die!" at Palenque Norte (7&E). On Wednesday (Aug 28) at noon, I'm doing a "Talking Caterpillar" Q&A at Liminal Labs (830&C). ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ Today's links * Corporate Bullshit: From manumission to minimum wages, it's always the same nonsense. * Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. * This day in history: 2009, 2014, 2019, 2023 * Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. * Recent appearances: Where I've been. * Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Colophon: All the rest. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Corporate Bullshit *Corporate Bullshit: Exposing the Lies and Half-Truths That Protect Profit, Power, and Wealth in America* is Nick Hanauer, Joan Walsh and Donald Cohen's 2023 book on the history of corporate apologetics; it's great: https://thenewpress.com/books/corporate-bullsht I found out about this book last fall when David Dayen reviewed it for the *The American Prospect*; Dayen did a great job of breaking down its thesis, and I picked it up for my newsletter, which prompted Hanauer to send me a copy, which I finally got around to reading yesterday (I have *gigantic* backlog of reading): https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/27/six-sells/#youre-holding-it-wrong The authors' thesis is that the business world has a well-worn playbook that they roll out whenever *anything* that might cause industry to behave even *slightly* less destructively is proposed. What's more, *we keep falling for it*. Every time we try to have nice things, our bosses - and their well-paid Renfields - dust off their talking points from the last go-round, do a little madlibs-style search and replace, and bust it out again. It's a four-stage plan: I. First, insist that there is no problem. Enslaved people are actually happy. Smoking doesn't cause cancer. Higher CO2 levels are imaginary *and* they're caused by sunspots *and* they're good for crop yields. The hole in the ozone layer is only a problem if you foolishly decide to hang around outside (this is real!). II. OK, there's a problem, but it's your fault. An epidemic of on-the-job maimings is *actually* an epidemic of sloppy workers. A gigantic housing crash is really a gigantic cohort of greedy, feckless borrowers. Rampant price gouging is actually a problem of too much "spending power" (that is, "money") in the hands of working people III. Any attempt to fix this will make it worse. Equal wages for equal work will cause bosses to fire women and people of color. Protecting people with disabilities will cause bosses to fire disable people. Minimum wages will cause bosses to buy machines and fire "unskilled" workers. Gun control will only increase underground gun sales. Banning carcinogenic pesticides will end agriculture as we know and we'll all starve to death. IV. This is socialism. Income tax is socialism. Estate tax is socialism. Medicare and Medicaid are socialism. Food stamps are socialism. Child labor laws are socialism. Public education is socialism. The National Labor Relations Act is socialism. Unions are socialism. Social security is socialism. The Fair Labor Standards Act is socialism. Obamacare is socialism. The Civil Rights Act is socialism. The Occupational Health and Safety Act is socialism. The Family Medical Leave Act is socialism. FDR is a socialist. JFK is a socialist. Lyndon Johnson is a socialist. Carter is a socialist. Clinton is a socialist. Obama is a socialist. Biden is a socialist (Biden: "I beat the socialist. That's how I got the nomination"). Though this playbook has been in existence since the nation's founding, the authors point out that from the New Deal until the Reagan era, it didn't get much traction. But starting in the Reagan years, the well-funded network of billionaire-backed think-tanks, endowed economics chairs, and latter-day propaganda vehicles like Prageru breathed new life into these tactics. We can see this playing out right now as the corporate world scrambles for a response to the Harris campaign's proposal to address price-gouging. Reading Matt Stoller's dissection of this response, we can see the whole playbook on display: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-price-gouging-vs First, corporate apologists insisted that greedflation didn't exist, despite the fact that CEOs kept getting on earnings calls and boasting to their investors about how they were using the excuse of inflation to jack up prices: https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/11/price-over-volume/#pepsi-pricing-power Or the oil CEOs who boasted that the Russian invasion of Ukraine gave them cover to just *screw* us at the pump: https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/15/sanctions-financing/#soak-the-rich There are all these out-in-the-open commercial entities whose *sole purpose* is to "advise" large corporations about their prices, which is just a barely disguised euphemism for price-fixing, from meat-packing: https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy To rents: https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/24/gouging-the-all-seeing-eye/#i-spy That's stage one: "there's no problem." Stage two is "it's your fault." That's Larry Summers and co insisting that a couple of stimulus checks a couple years ago are responsible for inflation, because it gave you too much "buying power," and so the only possible fix is to jack up interest rates and trigger mass layoffs and sharp wage decreases across the economy: https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/14/medieval-bloodletters/#its-the-stupid-economy Stage three is "any attempt to fix this will make it worse." When Isabella Weber pointed out that there was a long history of price-controls being used to fight price-gouging, corporate apologists *lost their minds* and brigaded her, calling her all kinds of nasty names and insisting that her prescription didn't even warrant serious discussion, because any attempt to control prices would *destroy the economy*: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/podcasts/lately/article-the-millennial-economist-who-took-on-the-world/ You may recognize this as cousin to the response to rent control proposals, which inevitably trigger a barrage of economists screaming that this will not work and will actually reduce the housing supply and drive up prices, which is true, provided that you ignore all evidence and history: https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/16/mortgages-are-rent-control/#housing-is-a-human-right-not-an-asset And stage four is "this is socialism." Look, I am a literal card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America and I can *assure you*, Kamala Harris is *not* a socialist (and more's the pity). But that didn't stop the most eminently guillotineable members of the investor class from hair-on-fire, ALL-CAPS denunciations of the Harris proposal as SOCIALISM and Harris herself as a COMMUNIST: https://twitter.com/Jason/status/1824580470052725055 The author's thesis is that by naming the playbook and giving examples of it - for example, showing how the "proof" that minimum wage increases will destroy jobs was also offered as "proof" not to abolish slavery, ban child labor, add fireproofing to textile factories, and pay women and Black people the same as white guys - we can vaccinate ourselves against it. Certainly, we've reached a moment where the public is increasingly skeptical of claims that we can't fix anything because the economists say that this is the best of all possible worlds, and if that means that we're all going to boil to death in our own skin, so be it: https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse In other words, after 40 years of subordinating politics to economics, there's a resurgence of belief in politics - that is, *doing stuff* - rather than hunkering down and waiting for the technocrats to fix everything: https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/seeing-like-a-matt *Corporate Bullshit* is a brisk and bracing read - I got through it in about an hour in my hammock yesterday - and, in laying out the bullshit playbook's long history of nonsensical predictions and pronouncements, it *does* make a very good case that we should stop listening to people who quote from it. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Hey look at this * Public Ownership of Public Goods https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/public-ownership-of-public-goods * Armed and Underground: Inside the Turbulent, Secret World of an American Militia https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-secret-ap3-militia-american-patriots-three-percent (h/t Jesse Eisinger) ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? This day in history #15yrsago How free ebooks are good for well-known and obscure writers https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/aug/18/free-ebooks-cory-doctorow #10yrsago Here?s all the stuff the Pentagon has sold to local law enforcement ? cheap! https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2014/aug/15/we-have-pentagon-1033-program-data/ #10yrsago Monopolists are perfectly impedence-matched with bureaucrats https://timharford.com/2014/08/monopoly-is-a-bureaucrats-friend-but-a-democrats-foe/ #10yrsago Videoing police violence is the new ?See something, say something? https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/16/fergusons-citizen-journalists-video #10yrsago Fictional products don?t violate trademark laws https://www.techdirt.com/2014/08/15/software-company-loses-trademark-case-against-batman-over-fictional-software/ #5yrsago Towards a better practice of online news-corrections https://newscollab.org/2019/08/15/bringing-news-corrections-further-into-the-digital-age/ #5yrsago The case for allowing children to vote https://crookedtimber.org/2019/08/17/give-children-the-vote/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Upcoming appearances * Disenshittify or die! (Burning Man, Palenque Norte, 7&E), Aug 27, 13h * Talking caterpillar Q&A (Burning Man, Liminal Labs, 830&C), Aug 28, 12h * Albacon (Albany/remote), Sep 13-15 https://albacon.org/2024/ * TusCon (Tucson), Nov 8-10 https://tusconscificon.com/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Recent appearances * HC4US https://soundcloud.com/hc4us/081224-cory-doctorow-a-canadian-british-science-fiction-author-activist-and-journalist * Tech Rights & The Future of Privacy (Synthetic Minds) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iD5iAV1YmO4 * Enzittification with Ed Zitron & Brian Merchant https://omny.fm/shows/better-offline/enzittification-with-cory-doctorow-brian-merchant ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Latest books * The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). * "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) * "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). * "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. * "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com * "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?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) * "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/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Upcoming books * Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 * Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Colophon Today's top sources: Currently writing: * Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay. Today's progress: words ( words total). * A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING * Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 * Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM * Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: AI's productivity theater https://craphound.com/news/2024/08/04/ais-productivity-theater/ This work - excluding any serialized fiction - is 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. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla*" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_0x9026DBBE1FC237AF.asc Type: application/pgp-keys Size: 3480 bytes Desc: OpenPGP public key URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 203 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: From doctorow at craphound.com Tue Aug 20 08:14:43 2024 From: doctorow at craphound.com (Cory Doctorow) Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2024 05:14:43 -0700 Subject: [Plura-list] Nalo Hopkinson's "Blackheart Man" Message-ID: <8fbe34f6-6069-484e-9b1b-6fdba86a07ce@craphound.com> Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/20/piche/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ I'm offline until mid-September, but you can catch me in person at Burning Man! On Tuesday (Aug 27) at 1PM, I'm giving a talk called "Disenshittify or Die!" at Palenque Norte (7&E). On Wednesday (Aug 28) at noon, I'm doing a "Talking Caterpillar" Q&A at Liminal Labs (830&C). ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ On September 24th, I'll be speaking in person at the Boston Public Library! https://bpl.bibliocommons.com/v2/events?startDate=2024-09-24&endDate=2024-09-24 ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ Today's links * Nalo Hopkinson's "Blackheart Man": Language and worldbuilding to drown in, and a cracking novel besides. * Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. * This day in history: 2004, 2009, 2014, 2019, 2023 * Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. * Recent appearances: Where I've been. * Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Colophon: All the rest. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Nalo Hopkinson's "Blackheart Man" In *Blackheart Man*, the new Nalo Hopkinson novel out today from Simon & Schuster, we get a tour-de-force from an author in full control of her prodigious powers: a story that will make you drunk on language, on worldbuilding, and on its roaring, relentless plot: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Blackheart-Man/Nalo-Hopkinson/9781668005101 The action is set on Chynchin, a fantastic Caribbean island(or maybe Caribbeanesque - it's never clear whether this is some magical, imaginary world, or some distant future of our own). Chynchin is a multiracial, creole land with a richly realized gift economy that Hopkinson deftly rounds out with a cuisine, languages, and familial arrangements. *Blackheart Man* boasts some of the finest "in-cluing" (Jo Walton's marvelous term for the way that sf/f writers can assemble a world in their readers' minds with subtle clues that act as a made-to-be-solved puzzle the reader delights in assembling) you could ask for, and before you know it, you've completely internalized this world, with its racial politics, its cultural institutions (like the colloquium, where every scholar is also a musician and getting your doctorate requires scoring a book to be sung - and thus memorized and preserved by a choir of your fellow students), and its relationships (the stable configuration is a thruple, with most women married to two co-husbands). Chynchin was founded through a slave rebellion, in which the press-ganged soldiers of the iron-fisted Ymisen empire were defeated by three witches who caused them to be engulfed in tar that they magicked into a liquid state just long enough to entomb them, then magicked back into solidity. For generations, the Ymisen have tolerated Chynchin's self-rule, but as the story opens, a Ymisen armada sails into Chynchin's port and a "trade envoy" announces that it's time for the Chynchin to "voluntarily" re-establish trade with the Ymisen. The story that unfolds is a staple of sf and fantasy: the scrappy resistance mounted against the evil empire, and this familiar backdrop is a sturdy scaffold to support Hopkinson's dizzying, phantasmagoric tale of psychedelic magic, possessed children, military intrigue, musicianship and sexual entanglements. Hopkinson's protagonist Veycosi is the kind of flawed hero whom you want to give a hug to half the time, and whose neck you want to wring. An aspiring scholar, Veycosi has the brash certainty of youth, convinced that he's the smartest (and sexiest) man in any room, and he's right just often enough to encourage him in a series of self-inflicted catastrophes that build to a terrible crescendo that sets up one of the most satisfying endings you could ask for. Hopkinson - a SFWA Grand Master and Macarthur Genius Grant awardee - is justly famed as one of the field's great afrofuturist pioneers. Her prodigious talent has been obvious since her debut novel, *Brown Girl In the Ring*, and her career is an unbroken string of literary feats that went from strength to strength. I've known her since we were both teenagers working at the same library in suburban Toronto, and I never cease to be dazzled by her talent, her wit, and her warmth. But even by those high standards, *Blackheart Man* is a triumph. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Hey look at this * Private equity: health care?s vampire https://www.statnews.com/2024/08/19/private-equity-health-cares-vampire/ (h/t Mike Rydzewski) * EFF Benefit Poker Tournament at DEF CON 32 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/08/eff-benefit-poker-tournament-def-con-32 * Death Is The Great Awakener (Bourbon Tabernacle Choir) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6RUb63Tx3w ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? This day in history #20yrsago EFF wins Grokster! Software doesn?t have to be easy for Hollywood to wiretap! https://web.archive.org/web/20041026154633/https://www.eff.org/IP/P2P/MGM_v_Grokster/20040819_mgm_v_grokster_decision.pdf #15yrsago Poor design-choices in the Star Wars universe https://web.archive.org/web/20090821185001/http://blogs.amctv.com/scifi-scanner/2009/08/bad-designs-in-star-wars.php #15yrsago Computers? limitations, as seen in 1967 https://web.archive.org/web/20090823020726/http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2009/08/19/computers-their-built-in-limitations/ #15yrsago WMD swag from a chemistry conference https://web.archive.org/web/20090824144536/http://cenblog.org/2009/08/19/wmd-goodie-bag/ #15yrsago Entertainment Weekly ad with a video-screen glued to the pages https://web.archive.org/web/20090821204702/https://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/08/cbs-embeds-a-video-playing-ad-in-a-print-magazine/ #15yrsago Brutal military dictatorship that backs Fiji Water https://web.archive.org/web/20090816093201/http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/09/fiji-spin-bottle #15yrsago Sipping Spiders Through a Straw: funny monster lyrics to traditional tunes https://memex.craphound.com/2009/08/19/sipping-spiders-through-a-straw-funny-monster-lyrics-to-traditional-tunes/ #10yrsago Copyright extortion startup wants to hijack your browser until you pay https://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-outfit-wants-to-hijack-browsers-until-fine-paid-140816/ #10yrsago Militarized cops: arms dealers bribed Congress to ramboize Barney Fife https://www.motherjones.com/criminal-justice/2014/08/how-defense-industry-made-room-militarized-police-today/ #10yrsago How the US government exerts control over ICANN https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2014/08/government-control-internet-governance-icann-proposes-giving-gac-increased-power-board-decisions/ #10yrsago WWII?s VD posters: exciting nexus of propaganda, Mad Men, gender and design https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/08/15/protect-yourself/ #10yrsago Great mistakes in English medieval architecture https://stainedglassattitudes.wordpress.com/2014/08/10/great-mistakes-in-english-medieval-architecture/ #10yrsago A prison visit with The Pirate Bay?s Peter ?brokep? Sunde https://felixreda.eu/2014/08/prison-is-a-bit-like-copyright-peter-sunde/ #10yrsago Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? https://memex.craphound.com/2014/08/18/whatever-happened-to-the-world-of-tomorrow/ #5yrsago A new biography reveals the Koch brothers? very early role in creating organized climate denial https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/kochland-examines-how-the-koch-brothers-made-their-fortune-and-the-influence-it-bought #5yrsago New Hampshire court to patent troll: it?s not libel when someone calls you a ?patent troll? https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/08/patent-troll-sues-over-patent-troll-label-loses/ #5yrsago An appreciation for Samuel Delany https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/08/books/samuel-delany-jordy-rosenberg.html #5yrsago More than 20 Texas cities and towns have been taken hostage by ransomware https://dir.texas.gov/news?id=210 #5yrsago Owner of Phoenix apartment building serves eviction notices to every tenant so he can turn their homes into unlicensed hotel rooms https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/phoenix-landlord-evicts-tenants-short-term-rental-wanderjaunt-11345084 #5yrsago Ecofascism isn?t new: white supremacy and exterminism have always lurked in the environmental movement https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/15/anti #5yrsago A cycle of renewal, broken: How Big Tech and Big Media abuse copyright law to slay competition https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/08/cycle-renewal-broken-how-big-tech-and-big-media-abuse-copyright-law-slay #5yrsago The TSA strip searched a grandmother on Mother?s Day and now says that she?s overreacting because it?s no different from a locker room https://professional-troublemaker.com/2019/08/19/tsa-forced-strip-search-no-more-offensive-than-voluntarily-using-a-locker-room/ #1yrago SoCal Gas spent millions on astroturf ops to fight climate rules https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/19/cooking-the-books-with-gas/#reichman-jorgensen #1yrago "Open" "AI" isn't https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/18/openwashing/#you-keep-using-that-word-i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Upcoming appearances * Disenshittify or die! (Burning Man, Palenque Norte, 7&E), Aug 27, 13h * Talking caterpillar Q&A (Burning Man, Liminal Labs, 830&C), Aug 28, 12h * Albacon (Albany/remote), Sep 13-15 https://albacon.org/2024/ * TusCon (Tucson), Nov 8-10 https://tusconscificon.com/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Recent appearances * HC4US https://soundcloud.com/hc4us/081224-cory-doctorow-a-canadian-british-science-fiction-author-activist-and-journalist * Tech Rights & The Future of Privacy (Synthetic Minds) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iD5iAV1YmO4 * Enzittification with Ed Zitron & Brian Merchant https://omny.fm/shows/better-offline/enzittification-with-cory-doctorow-brian-merchant ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Latest books * The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). * "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) * "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). * "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. * "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com * "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?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) * "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/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Upcoming books * Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 * Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Colophon Today's top sources: Currently writing: * Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay. Today's progress: 1106 words (41372 words total). * A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING * Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 * Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM * Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: AI's productivity theater https://craphound.com/news/2024/08/04/ais-productivity-theater/ This work - excluding any serialized fiction - is 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. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla*" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_0x9026DBBE1FC237AF.asc Type: application/pgp-keys Size: 3480 bytes Desc: OpenPGP public key URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... 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