[Plura-list] The Pizzaburger Presidencythe

Cory Doctorow doctorow at craphound.com
Wed May 29 14:09:39 EDT 2024 

Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/29/sub-bushel-comms-strategy/

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For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel *The Lost Cause* (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-lost-cause-4

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Today's links

* The Pizzaburger Presidency: Why the Biden administration talks so very little about the very small number of very good things it has done.

* 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.

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👘 The Pizzaburger Presidency

The corporate wing of the Democrats has objectively terrible political instincts, because the corporate wing of the Dems wants things that are very unpopular with the electorate (this is a trait they share with the Republican establishment).

Remember Hillary Clinton's *unimaginably* terrible campaign slogan, "America is already great?" In other words, "Vote for me if you believe that nothing needs to change":

https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/758501814945869824

Biden picked up the "This is fine" messaging where Clinton left off, promising that "nothing would fundamentally change" if he became president:

https://www.salon.com/2019/06/19/joe-biden-to-rich-donors-nothing-would-fundamentally-change-if-hes-elected/

Biden didn't so much win that election as Trump lost it, by doing *extremely unpopular* things, including badly bungling the American covid response and killing about a million people.

Biden's 2020 election victory was a squeaker, and it was absolutely dependent on compromising with the party's left wing, embodied by the Warren and Sanders campaigns. The Unity Task Force promised - and delivered - key appointments and policies that represented serious and powerful change for the better:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/10/thanks-obama/#triangulation

Despite these excellent appointments and policies, the Biden administration has remained unpopular and is heading into the 2024 election with worryingly poor numbers. There is a lot of debate about why this might be It''s undeniable that every leader who has presided over a period of inflation, irrespective of political tendency, is facing extreme defenstration, from Rishi Sunak, the far-right prime minister of the UK, to the relentlessly centrist Justin Trudeau in Canada:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-05-29-three-barriers-biden-reelection/

It's also true that Biden has presided over a genocide, which he has been proudly and significantly complicit in. That Trump would have done the same or worse is beside the point. A political leader who does things that the voters deplore can't expect to become more popular, though perhaps they can pull off *less unpopular*:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/the-left-is-not-joe-bidens-problem

Biden may be attracting unfair blame for inflation, and totally fair blame for genocide, but in addition to those problems, there's this: Biden hasn't gotten credit for the actual good things he's done:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoflHnGrCpM

Writing in his newsletter, Matt Stoller offers an explanation for this lack of credit: the Biden White House almost never talks about any of these triumphs, even the bold, generational ones that will significantly alter the political landscape no matter who wins the next election:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-does-the-biden-white-house-hate

Biden's antitrust enforcers have gone after price-fixing in oil, food and rent - the three largest sources of voter cost-of-living concern. They've done more on these three kinds of crime than all of their predecessors over the past forty years, *combined*. And yet, Stoller finds example after example of White House press secretaries being lobbed softballs by the press and refusing to even try to swing at them. When asked about any of this stuff, the White House demurs, refusing to comment.

The reasons they give for this is that they don't want to mess up an active case while it's before the courts. But that's not how this works. Yes, misstatements about active cases can do serious damage, but *not talking about cases* extinguishes the political will needed to carry them out. That's why a competent press secretary excellent briefings and training, because they *must* talk about these cases.

Think for a moment about the fact that the US government is - at this very moment - trying to break up Google, the largest tech company in the history of the world, and there has been virtually *no* press about it. This is a gigantic story. It's literally the biggest business story *ever*. It's practically a *secret*.

Why doesn't the Biden admin want to talk about this very small number of very good things it's doing? To understand that, you have to understand the hollowness of "centrist" politics as practiced in the Democratic Party.

The Democrats, like all political parties, are a coalition. Now, there are lots of ways to keep a coalition together. Parties who detest one another can stay in coalition provided that each partner is getting something they want out of it - even if one partner is bitterly unhappy about *everything else* happening in the coalition. That's the present-day Democratic approach: arrest students, bomb Gaza, but promise to do something about abortion and a few other issues while gesturing with real and justified alarm at Trump's open fascism, and hope that the party's left turns out at the polls this fall.

Leaders who play this game can't announce that they are deliberately making a vital coalition partner miserable and furious. Instead, they insist that they are "compromising" and point to the fact that "everyone is equally unhappy" with the way things are going.

This school of politics - "Everyone is angry at me, therefore I am doing something right" - has a name, courtesy of Anat Shenker-Osorio: "Pizzaburger politics." Say half your family wants burgers for dinner and the other half wants pizza: make a pizzaburger and disappoint all of them, and declare yourself to be a politics genius:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/17/pizzaburgers/

But Biden's Pizzaburger Presidency doesn't disappoint everyone equally. Sure, Biden appointed some *brilliant* antitrust enforcers to begin the long project of smashing the corporate juggernauts built through forty years of Reaganomics (including the Reganomics of Bill Clinton *and* Obama). But his lifetime federal judicial appointments are drawn heavily from the corporate wing of the party's darlings, and those judges will spend *the rest of their lives* ruling against the kinds of enforcers Biden put in charge of the FTC and DoJ antitrust division:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/judge-rules-for-microsoft-mergers

So that's one reason that Biden's comms team won't talk about his most successful and popular policies. But there's another reason: *schismogenesis*.

"Schismogenesis" is a anthropological concept describing how groups define themselves in opposition to their opponents (if *they're* for it, *we're* against it). Think of the liberals who became cheerleaders for the "intelligence community" (you know the CIA spies who organized murderous coups against *a dozen* Latin American democracies, and the FBI agents who tried to get MLK to kill himself) as soon as Trump and his allies began to rail against them:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/

Part of Trump's takeover of conservativism is a revival of "the paranoid style" of the American right - the conspiratorial, unhinged apocalyptic rhetoric that the movement's leaders are no longer capable of keeping a lid on:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/that-boy-aint-right/#dinos-rinos-and-dunnos

This stuff - the lizard-people/Bilderberg/blood libel/antisemitic/Great Replacement/race realist/gender critical whackadoodlery - was always in conservative rhetoric, but it was reserved for internal communications, a way to talk to low-information voters in private forums. It wasn't supposed to make it into your campaign ads:

https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/05/27/texas-republicans-adopts-conservative-wish-list-for-the-2024-platform/73858798007/

Today's conservative vibe is all about saying the quiet part aloud. Historian Rick Perlstein calls this the "authoritarian ratchet": conservativism promises a return to a "prelapsarian" state, before the country lost its way:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-05-29-my-political-depression-problem/

This is presented as *imperative*: unless we restore that mythical order, the country is doomed. We might just be the last generation of free Americans!

But that state never existed, and can never be recovered, but it doesn't matter. When conservatives lose a fight they declare to be existential (say, trans bathroom bans), they just pretend they never cared about it and move on to the next panic.

It's actually worse for them when they *win*. When the GOP repeals Roe, or takes the Presidency, the Senate and Congress, and still fails to restore that lost glory, then they have to find someone or something to blame. They turn on themselves, purging their ranks, promise ever-more-unhinged policies that will *finally* restore the state that never existed.

This is where schismogenesis comes in. If the GOP is making big, bold promises, then a shismogenesis-poisoned liberal will insist that the Dems must be "the party of normal." If the GOP's radical wing is taking the upper hand, then the Dems must be the party whose radical wing is marginalized (see also: UK Labour).

This is the trap of schismogenesis. It's possible for the things your opponents do to be wrong, but *tactically* sound (like promising the big changes that voters want). The difference you should seek to establish between yourself and your enemies isn't in promising to maintaining the status quo - it's in promising to make *better*, big muscular changes, *and keeping those promises*.

It's possible to acknowledge that an odious institution to do something good - like the CIA and FBI trying to wrongfoot Trump's most unhinged policies - without becoming a stan for that institution, and without abandoning your stance that the institution should either be root-and-branch reformed or abolished altogether.

The mere fact that your enemy uses a sound tactic to do something bad doesn't make that tactic invalid. As Naomi Klein writes in her magnificent *Doppelganger*, the right's genius is in co-opting progressive rhetoric and making it mean the opposite: think of their ownership of "fake news" or the equivalence of transphobia with feminism, of opposition to genocide with antisemitism:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

Promising bold policies and then talking about them in plain language at every opportunity is something demagogues do, but having bold policies and talking about them doesn't make you a demagogue.

The *reason* demagogues talk that way is that it works. It captures the interest of potential followers, and keeps existing followers excited about the project.

Choosing *not* to do these things is political suicide. Good politics aren't boring. They're *exciting*. The fact that Republicans use eschatological rhetoric to motivate crazed insurrectionists who think they're the last hope for a good future doesn't change the fact that we *are* at a critical juncture for a survivable future.

If the GOP wins this coming election - or when Pierre Poilievre's petro-tories win the next Canadian election - they will do everything they can to set the planet on fire and render it permanently uninhabitable by humans and other animals. We *are* running out of time.

We can't afford to cede this ground to the right. Remember the clickbait wars? Low-quality websites and Facebook accounts got *really* good at ginning up misleading, compelling headlines that attracted a lot of monetizable clicks.

For a certain kind of online scolding centrist, the lesson from this era was that headlines should a) be boring and b) not leave out any salient fact. This is *very* bad headline-writing advice. While it claims to be in service to thoughtfulness and nuance, it misses out on the most important nuance of all: there's a difference between a misleading headline and a headline that calls out the most salient element of the story and then fleshes that out with more detail in the body of the article. If a headline completely summarizes the article, it's not a headline, it's an *abstract*.

Biden's comms team isn't bragging about the administration's accomplishments, because the senior partners in this coalition *oppose* those accomplishments. They don't want to win an election based on the promise to prosecute and anti-corporate revolution, because they are counter-revolutionaries.

The Democratic coalition has some irredeemably terrible elements. It also has elements that I would march into the sun for. The party itself is a very weak institution that's bad at resolving the tension between both groups:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/30/weak-institutions/

Pizzaburgers don't make anyone happy and they're not supposed to. They're a convenient cover for the winners of intraparty struggles to keep the losers from staying home on election day. I don't know how Biden can win this coming election, but I know how he can lose it: keep on reminding us that all the good things about his administration were undertaken reluctantly and could be jettisoned in a second Biden administration.

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel *The Lost Cause* (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-lost-cause-4

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👘 Hey look at this

* Utopian Realism, a speech by Bruce Sterling https://bruces.medium.com/utopian-realism-a-speech-by-bruce-sterling-c315be2b0f44

* Kiwis! Support Aotearoa Right to Repair legislation https://www.repairnetworkaotearoa.org.nz/right-to-repair

* We're Watching Facebook Die https://www.wheresyoured.at/were-watching-facebook-die/

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👘 This day in history

#20yrsago 1940s telephone manual https://web.archive.org/web/20040404003350/contactsheet.org/junk/telephone1.html

#20yrsago Red Mars: a very belated appreciation https://memex.craphound.com/2004/05/28/red-mars-a-very-belated-appreciation/

#15yrsago East German spy fired notorious shot that changed West German politics https://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/world/europe/27germany.html

#15yrsago Conference Board of Canada admits that its publicly funded, plagiarized, biased copyright “research” is junk https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/conference-board-recalls-controversial-copyright-reports-1.811430

#15yrsago USA, Canada and the EU attempt to kill treaty to protect blind people’s access to written material https://memex.craphound.com/2009/05/28/usa-canada-and-the-eu-attempt-to-kill-treaty-to-protect-blind-peoples-access-to-written-material/

#15yrsago What will happen to your crypto-keys when you die? https://memex.craphound.com/2009/05/27/what-will-happen-to-your-crypto-keys-when-you-die/

#15yrsago Bayou: chilling ghost story, a graphic novel about race and haunts in the deep south https://memex.craphound.com/2009/05/27/bayou-chilling-ghost-story-a-graphic-novel-about-race-and-haunts-in-the-deep-south/

#15yrsago UK Tory MP added a servant’s wing to his house at public expense https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/may/28/john-butterfill-mps-expenses

#15yrsago Cambridge study: DRM turns users into pirates https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/05/landmark-study-drm-truly-does-make-pirates-out-of-us-all/

#10yrsago UK Home Office’s terrorist detection checklist https://memex.craphound.com/2014/05/27/uk-home-offices-terrorist-detection-checklist/

#10yrsago Peter Watts’s The Scorched Earth Society: A Suicide Bomber’s Guide to Online Privacy https://rifters.com/real/shorts/TheScorchedEarthSociety-transcript.pdf

#10yrsago You Are Not a Digital Native: on the publication of the Homeland paperback, a letter to kids https://reactormag.com/you-are-not-a-digital-native-privacy-in-the-age-of-the-internet/

#10yrsago Appeals court nukes the copyright troll business-model https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/05/major-victory-over-copyright-trolls-deeper-look

#10yrsago 2084 wants to have a word with 2014 about Net Neutrality https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEI9RtwcvhE

#5yrsago Congressional shaming prompts notorious Pentagon price-gouger to refund $16.1m https://theintercept.com/2019/05/28/ro-khanna-transdigm-refund-pentagon/

#5yrsago Supreme Court of Canada to rule on the enforceability of arbitration clauses https://www.osler.com/en/resources/regulations/2019/supreme-court-to-hear-arguments-about-enforceability-of-arbitration-clauses

#5yrsago Connecticut’s racist NIMBYs have used zoning laws and dirty tricks to make it one of the most unequal, racially segregated states in the union https://www.propublica.org/article/how-some-of-americas-richest-towns-fight-affordable-housing

#5yrsago Analysis of a far-right disinformation campaign aimed at influencing the EU elections https://blog.f-secure.com/live-coverage-of-a-disinformation-operation-against-the-2019-eu-parliamentary-elections/

#5yrsago AT&T’s dystopian advertising vision perfectly illustrates the relationship between surveillance and monopoly https://memex.craphound.com/2019/05/27/atts-dystopian-advertising-vision-perfectly-illustrates-the-relationship-between-surveillance-and-monopoly/

#5yrsago Profiles of young Americans who entered voluntary exile rather than paying their student loans https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/25/they-fled-the-country-to-escape-their-student-debt.html

#1yrago Steven Brust's "Tsalmoth" https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/27/mannerpunk/#ask-anyone

#1yrago Ideas Lying Around https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/27/ideas-lying-around/

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👘 Upcoming appearances

* Media Ecology Association keynote, Jun 6-9 (Amherst, NY)
https://media-ecology.org/convention

* HOPE XV, Jul 14 (Queens, NY)
https://www.hope.net/talks.html

* American Association of Law Libraries keynote, (Chicago), Jul 21
https://www.aallnet.org/conference/agenda/keynote-speaker/

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👘 Recent appearances

* RISD Debates in AI keynote:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdSEcmplaDs

* Author's Alliance 10th Anniversary (at 1:55:00)
https://archive.org/details/authors-alliance-10th-anniversary-presentation

* Upstream podcast
https://podscripts.co/podcasts/upstream/the-big-tech-con-w-cory-doctorow

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👘 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#/.

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👘 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

* Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay. Today's progress: 795 words (1630 words total).

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👘 Colophon

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

* 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:
  Wanna Make Big Tech Monopolies Even Worse? Kill Section 230 https://craphound.com/news/2024/05/26/wanna-make-big-tech-monopolies-even-worse-kill-section-230/

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