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Pluralistic: Fintech bullies stole your kid's lunch money (26 Jul 2024)
Fri, 26 Jul 2024 18:33:58 +0000 Today's links Fintech bullies stole your kid's lunch money: Taking 60 cents out of every reduced-lunch public school dollar. 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. Fintech bullies stole your kid's lunch money (permalink) Three companies control the market for school lunch payments. They take as much as 60 cents out of every dollar poor kids' parents put into the system to the tune of $100m/year. They're literally stealing poor kids' lunch money. In its latest report, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau describes this scam in eye-watering, blood-boiling detail: https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/documents/cfpb_costs-of-electronic-payment-in-k-12-schools-issue-spotlight_2024-07.pdf The report samples 16.7m K-12 students in 25k schools. It finds that schools are racing to go cashless, with 87% contracting with payment processors to handle cafeteria transactions. Three processors dominate the sector: Myschoolbucks, Schoolcafé, and Linq Connect. These aren't credit card processors (most students don't have credit cards). Instead, they let kids set up an account, like a prison commissary account, that their families load up with cash. And, as with prison commissary accounts, every time a loved one adds cash to the account, the processor takes a giant whack out of them with junk fees: https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/14/minnesota-nice/#shitty-technology-adoption-curve If you're the parent of a kid who is eligible for a reduced-price lunch (that is, if you are poor), then about 60% of the money you put into your kid's account is gobbled up by these payment processors in service charges. It's expensive to be poor, and this is no exception. If your kid doesn't qualify for the lunch subsidy, you're only paying about 8% in service charges (which is still triple the rate charged by credit card companies for payment processing). The disparity is down to how these charges are calculated. The payment processors charge a flat fee for every top-up, and poor families can't afford to minimize these fees by making a single payment at the start of the year or semester. Instead, they pay small sums every payday, meaning they pay the fee twice per month (or even more frequently). Not only is the sector concentrated into three companies, neither school districts nor parents have any meaningful way to shop around. For school districts, payment processing is usually bundled in with other school services, like student data management and HR data handling. For parents, there's no way to choose a different payment processor – you have to go with the one the school district has chosen. This is all illegal. The USDA – which provides and regulates – the reduced cost lunch program, bans schools from charging fees to receive its meals. Under USDA regs, schools must allow kids to pay cash, or to top up their accounts with cash at the school, without any fees. The USDA has repeatedly (2014, 2017) published these rules. Despite this, many schools refuse to handle cash, citing safety and security, and even when schools do accept cash or checks, they often fail to advertise this fact. The USDA also requires schools to publish the fees charged by processors, but most of the districts in the study violate this requirement. Where schools do publish fees, we see a per-transaction charge of up to $3.25 for an ACH transfer that costs $0.26-0.50, or 4.58% for a debit/credit-card transaction that costs 1.5%. On top of this, many payment processors charge a one-time fee to enroll a student in the program and "convenience fees" to transfer funds between siblings' accounts. They also set maximum fees that make it hard to avoid paying multiple charges through the year. These are classic junk fees. As Matt Stoller puts it: "'Convenience fees' that aren't convenient and 'service fees' without any service." Another way in which these fit the definition of junk fees: they are calculated at the end of the transaction, and not advertised up front. Like all junk fee companies, school payment processors make it extremely hard to cancel an automatic recurring payment, and have innumerable hurdles to getting a refund, which takes an age to arrive. Now, there are many agencies that could have compiled this report (the USDA, for one), and it could just as easily have come from an academic or a journalist. But it didn't – it came from the CFPB, and that matters, because the CFPB has the means, motive and opportunity to do something about this. The CFPB has emerged as a powerhouse of a regulator, doing things that materially and profoundly benefit average Americans. During the lockdowns, they were the ones who took on scumbag landlords who violated the ban on evictions: https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cfpb They went after "Earned Wage Access" programs where your boss colludes with payday lenders to trap you in debt at 300% APR: https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/01/usury/#tech-exceptionalism They are forcing the banks to let you move your account (along with all your payment history, stored payees, automatic payments, etc) with one click – and they're standing up a site that will analyze your account data and tell you which bank will give you the best deal: https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/let-my-dollars-go/#personal-financial-data-rights They're going after "buy now, pay later" companies that flout borrower protection rules, making a rogues' gallery of repeat corporate criminals, banning fine-print gotcha clauses, and they're doing it all in the wake of a 7-2 Supreme Court decision that affirmed their power to do so: https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/10/getting-things-done/#deliverism The CFPB can – and will – do something to protect America's poorest parents from having $100m of their kids' lunch money stolen by three giant fintech companies. But whether they'll continue to do so under a Kamala Harris administration is an open question. While Harris has repeatedly talked up the ways that Biden's CFPB, the DOJ Antitrust Division, and FTC have gone after corporate abuses, some of her largest donors are demanding that her administration fire the heads of these agencies and crush their agenda: https://prospect.org/power/2024-07-26-corporate-wishcasting-attack-lina-khan/ Tens of millions of dollars have been donated to Harris' campaign and PACs that support her by billionaires like Reid Hoffman, who says that FTC Chair Lina Khan is "waging war on American business": https://prospect.org/power/2024-07-26-corporate-wishcasting-attack-lina-khan/ Some of the richest Democrat donors told the Financial Times that their donations were contingent on Harris firing Khan and that they'd been assured this would happen: https://archive.is/k7tUY This would be a disaster – for America, and for Harris's election prospects – and one hopes that Harris and her advisors know it. Writing in his "How Things Work" newsletter today, Hamilton Nolan makes the case that labor unions should publicly declare that they support the FTC, the CFPB and the DOJ's antitrust efforts: https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/unions-and-antitrust-are-peanut-butter Don’t want huge companies and their idiot billionaire bosses to run the world? Break them up, and unionize them. It’s the best program we have. Perhaps you've heard that antitrust is anti-worker. It's true that antitrust law has been used to attack labor organizing, but that has always been in spite of the letter of the law. Indeed, the legislative history of US antitrust law is Congress repeatedly passing law after law explaining that antitrust "aims at dollars, not men": https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/14/aiming-at-dollars/#not-men The Democrats need to be more than The Party of Not Trump. To succeed – as a party and as a force for a future for Americans – they have to be the party that defends us – workers, parents, kids and retirees alike – from corporate predation. (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) Secure Boot is completely broken on 200+ models from 5 big device makers https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/07/secure-boot-is-completely-compromised-on-200-models-from-5-big-device-makers/ Electronic Frontier Foundation to Present Annual EFF Awards to Carolina Botero, Connecting Humanity, and 404 Media https://www.eff.org/press/releases/electronic-frontier-foundation-present-annual-eff-awards-carolina-botero-connecting Bad Trades Are Also Valuable https://archive.is/VH0V0 (h/t DSHR) This day in history (permalink) #20yrsago Woody Guthrie’s copyright used to defile his memory in lawsuit threat https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2004/07/land-isnt-your-land #15yrsago New Adrian Mole diary is dark, hopeless and hilarious https://memex.craphound.com/2009/07/26/new-adrian-mole-diary-is-dark-hopeless-and-hilarious/ #5yrsago Claiming your $125 from Equifax is a “moral duty” https://slate.com/technology/2019/07/equifax-settlement-money-how-to-claim.html #5yrsago Make the internet better by empowering users, not by demanding that platforms implement automated filters https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/key-safety-online-user-empowerment-not-censorship #5yrsago The Airbus 350 needs a hard reboot every 149 hours https://www.theregister.com/2019/07/25/a350_power_cycle_software_bug_149_hours/ #5yrsago Amazon struck secret deals with local cops to get them to push surveillance-camera doorbells https://www.vice.com/en/article/mb88za/amazon-requires-police-to-shill-surveillance-cameras-in-secret-agreement #5yrsago Siemens contractor hid “logic bomb” in complicated spreadsheet, guaranteeing future maintenance work https://www.zdnet.com/article/siemens-contractor-pleads-guilty-to-planting-logic-bomb-in-company-spreadsheets/ #5yrsago Activist blacksmith teaches gun violence survivors to melt down guns and turn them into farm implements https://billypenn.com/2019/07/25/using-fire-and-force-this-philly-author-turns-guns-into-garden-tools/ #5yrsago Grifty conservative PACs raised millions pushing racist Obama conspiracies to elderly, low-income supporters, then kept almost all of it https://www.propublica.org/article/conservative-majority-fund-political-fundraising-pac-kelley-rogers #1yrago The surprising truth about data-driven dictatorships https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/26/dictators-dilemma/#garbage-in-garbage-out-garbage-back-in 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 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: David Dayen (https://prospect.org/). Currently writing: Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay. Today's progress: 764 words (27508 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: The reason you can't buy a car is the same reason that your health insurer let hackers dox you https://craphound.com/news/2024/06/30/the-reason-you-cant-buy-a-car-is-the-same-reason-that-your-health-insurer-let-hackers-dox-you/ 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: Pluralistic: AI's productivity theater (25 Jul 2024)
Thu, 25 Jul 2024 16:57:38 +0000 Today's links AI's productivity theater: AI CAN'T do your job, but an AI salesman CAN convince your boss to fire you and replace you with AI. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2004, 2014, 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. AI's productivity theater (permalink) When I took my kid to New Zealand with me on a book-tour, I was delighted to learn that grocery stores had special aisles where all the kids'-eye-level candy had been removed, to minimize nagging. What a great idea! Related: countries around the world limit advertising to children, for two reasons: 1) Kids may not be stupid, but they are inexperienced, and that makes them gullible; and 2) Kids don't have money of their own, so their path to getting the stuff they see in ads is nagging their parents, which creates a natural constituency to support limits on kids' advertising (nagged parents). There's something especially annoying about ads targeted at getting credulous people to coerce or torment other people on behalf of the advertiser. For example, AI companies spent millions targeting your boss in an effort to convince them that you can be replaced with a chatbot that absolutely, positively cannot do your job. Your boss has no idea what your job entails, and is (not so) secretly convinced that you're a featherbedding parasite who only shows up for work because you fear the breadline, and not because your job is a) challenging, or b) rewarding: https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/19/make-them-afraid/#fear-is-their-mind-killer That makes them prime marks for chatbot-peddling AI pitchmen. Your boss would love to fire you and replace you with a chatbot. Chatbots don't unionize, they don't backtalk about stupid orders, and they don't experience any inconvenient moral injury when ordered to enshittify the product: https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification Bosses are Bizarro-world Marxists. Like Marxists, your boss's worldview is organized around the principle that every dollar you take home in wages is a dollar that isn't available for executive bonuses, stock buybacks or dividends. That's why you boss is insatiably horny for firing you and replacing you with software. Software is cheaper, and it doesn't advocate for higher wages. That makes your boss such an easy mark for AI pitchmen, which explains the vast gap between the valuation of AI companies and the utility of AI to the customers that buy those companies' products. As an investor, buying shares in AI might represent a bet the usefulness of AI – but for many of those investors, backing an AI company is actually a bet on your boss's credulity and contempt for you and your job. But bosses' resemblance to toddlers doesn't end with their credulity. A toddler's path to getting that eye-height candy-bar goes through their exhausted parents. Your boss's path to realizing the productivity gains promised by an AI salesman runs through you. A new research report from the Upwork Research Institute offers a look into the bizarre situation unfolding in workplaces where bosses have been conned into buying AI and now face the challenge of getting it to work as advertised: https://www.upwork.com/research/ai-enhanced-work-models The headline findings tell the whole story: 96% of bosses expect that AI will make their workers more productive; 85% of companies are either requiring or strongly encouraging workers to use AI; 49% of workers have no idea how AI is supposed to increase their productivity; 77% of workers say using AI decreases their productivity. Working at an AI-equipped workplaces is like being the parent of a furious toddler who has bought a million Sea Monkey farms off the back page of a comic book, and is now destroying your life with demands that you figure out how to get the brine shrimp he ordered from a notorious Holocaust denier to wear little crowns like they do in the ad: https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2004/hitler-and-sea-monkeys Bosses spend a lot of time thinking about your productivity. The "productivity paradox" shows a rapid, persistent decline in American worker productivity, starting in the 1970s and continuing to this day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox The "paradox" refers to the growth of IT, which is sold as a productivity-increasing miracle. There are many theories to explain this paradox. One especially good theory came from the late David Graeber (rest in power), in his 2012 essay, "Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit": https://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declining-rate-of-profit Graeber proposes that the growth of IT was part of a wider shift in research approaches. Research was once dominated by weirdos (e.g. Jack Parsons, Oppenheimer, etc) who operated with relatively little red tape. The rise of IT coincides with the rise of "managerialism," the McKinseyoid drive to monitor, quantify and – above all – discipline the workforce. IT made it easier to generate these records, which also made it normal to expect these records. Before long, every employee – including the "creatives" whose ideas were credited with the productivity gains of the American century until the 70s – was spending a huge amount of time (sometimes the majority of their working days) filling in forms, documenting their work, and generally producing a legible account of their day's work. All this data gave rise to a ballooning class of managers, who colonized every kind of institution – not just corporations, but also universities and government agencies, which were structured to resemble corporations (down to referring to voters or students as "customers"). Even if you think all that record-keeping might be useful, there's no denying that the more time you spend documenting your work, the less time you have to do your work. The solution to this was inevitably more IT, sold as a way to make the record-keeping easier. But adding IT to a bureaucracy is like adding lanes to a highway: the easier it is to demand fine-grained record-keeping, the more record-keeping will be demanded of you. But that's not all that IT did for the workplace. There are a couple areas in which IT absolutely increased the profitability of the companies that invested in it. First, IT allowed corporations to outsource production to low-waged countries in the global south, usually places with worse labor protection, weaker environmental laws, and easily bribed regulators. It's really hard to produce things in factories thousands of miles away, or to oversee remote workers in another country. But IT makes it possible to annihilate distance, time zone gaps, and language barriers. Corporations that figured out how to use IT to fire workers at home and exploit workers and despoil the environment in distant lands thrived. Executives who oversaw these projects rose through the ranks. For example, Tim Cook became the CEO of Apple thanks to his successes in moving production out of the USA and into China. https://archive.is/M17qq Outsourcing provided a sugar high that compensated for declining productivity…for a while. But eventually, all the gains to be had from outsourcing were realized, and companies needed a new source of cheap gains. That's where "bossware" came in: the automation of workforce monitoring and discipline. Bossware made it possible to monitor workers at the finest-grained levels, measuring everything from keystrokes to eyeball movements. What's more, the declining power of the American worker – a nice bonus of the project to fire huge numbers of workers and ship their jobs overseas, which made the remainder terrified of losing their jobs and thus willing to eat a rasher of shit and ask for seconds – meant that bossware could be used to tie wages to metrics. It's not just gig workers who don't score consistent five star ratings from app users whose pay gets docked – it's also creative workers whose Youtube and Tiktok wages are cut for violating rules that they aren't allowed to know, because that might help them break the rules without being detected and punished: https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/13/solidarity-forever/#tech-unions Bossware dominates workplaces from public schools to hospitals, restaurants to call centers, and extends to your home and car, if you're working from home (AKA "living at work") or driving for Uber or Amazon: https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/02/chickenized-by-arise/#arise In providing a pretense for stealing wages, IT can increase profits, even as it reduces productivity: https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no One way to think about how this works is through the automation-theory metaphor of a "centaur" and a "reverse centaur." In automation circles, a "centaur" is someone who is assisted by an automation tool – for example, when your boss uses AI to monitor your eyeballs in order to find excuses to steal your wages, they are a centaur, a human head atop a machine body that does all the hard work, far in excess of any human's capacity. A "reverse centaur" is a worker who acts as an assistant to an automation system. The worker who is ridden by an AI that monitors their eyeballs, bathroom breaks, and keystrokes is a reverse centaur, being used (and eventually, used up) by a machine to perform the tasks that the machine can't perform unassisted: https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men But there's only so much work you can squeeze out of a human in this fashion before they are ruined for the job. Amazon's internal research reveals that the company has calculated that it ruins workers so quickly that it is in danger of using up every able-bodied worker in America: https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-amazon-memo-warehouses-hiring-shortage Which explains the other major findings from the Upwork study: 81% of bosses have increased the demands they make on their workers over the past year; and 71% of workers are "burned out." Bosses' answer to "AI making workers feel burned out" is the same as "IT-driven form-filling makes workers unproductive" – do more of the same, but go harder. Cisco has a new product that tries to detect when workers are about to snap after absorbing abuse from furious customers and then gives them a "Zen" moment in which they are showed a "soothing" photo of their family: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ai-bringing-zen-first-horizons-192010166.html This is just the latest in a series of increasingly sweaty and cruel "workplace wellness" technologies that spy on workers and try to help them "manage their stress," all of which have the (totally predictable) effect of increasing workplace stress: https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/15/wellness-taylorism/#sick-of-spying The only person who wouldn't predict that being closely monitored by an AI that snitches on you to your boss would increase your stress levels is your boss. Unfortunately for you, AI pitchmen know this, too, and they're more than happy to sell your boss the reverse-centaur automation tool that makes you want to die, and then sell your boss another automation tool that is supposed to restore your will to live. The "productivity paradox" is being resolved before our eyes. American per-worker productivity fell because it was more profitable to ship American jobs to regulatory free-fire zones and exploit the resulting precarity to abuse the workers left onshore. Workers who resented this arrangement were condemned for having a shitty "work ethic" – even as the number of hours worked by the average US worker rose by 13% between 1976 and 2016: https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no AI is just a successor gimmick at the terminal end of 40 years of increasing profits by taking them out of workers' hides rather than improving efficiency. That arrangement didn't come out of nowhere: it was a direct result of a Reagan-era theory of corporate power called "consumer welfare." Under the "consumer welfare" approach to antitrust, monopolies were encouraged, provided that they used their market power to lower wages and screw suppliers, while lowering costs to consumers. "Consumer welfare" supposed that we could somehow separate our identities as "workers" from our identities as "shoppers" – that our stagnating wages and worsening conditions ceased mattering to us when we clocked out at 5PM (or, you know, 9PM) and bought a $0.99 Meal Deal at McDonald's whose low, low price was only possible because it was cooked by someone sleeping in their car and collecting food-stamps. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/20/disneyland-workers-anaheim-california-authorize-strike But we're reaching the end of the road for consumer welfare. Sure, your toddler-boss can be tricked into buying AI and firing half of your co-workers and demanding that the remainder use AI to do their jobs. But if AI can't do their jobs (it can't), no amount of demanding that you figure out how to make the Sea Monkeys act like they did in the comic-book ad is doing to make that work. As screwing workers and suppliers produces fewer and fewer gains, companies are increasingly turning on their customers. It's not just that you're getting worse service from chatbots or the humans who are reverse-centaured into their workflow. You're also paying more for that, as algorithmic surveillance pricing uses automation to gouge you on prices in realtime: https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/24/gouging-the-all-seeing-eye/#i-spy This is – in the memorable phrase of David Dayen and Lindsay Owens, the "age of recoupment," in which companies end their practice of splitting the gains from suppressing labor with their customers: https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-03-age-of-recoupment/ It's a bet that the tolerance for monopolies made these companies too big to fail, and that means they're too big to jail, so they can cheat their customers as well as their workers. AI may be a bet that your boss can be suckered into buying a chatbot that can't do your job, but investors are souring on that bet. Goldman Sachs, who once trumpeted AI as a multi-trillion dollar sector with unlimited growth, is now publishing reports describing how companies who buy AI can't figure out what to do with it: https://www.goldmansachs.com/intelligence/pages/gs-research/gen-ai-too-much-spend-too-little-benefit/report.pdf Fine, investment banks are supposed to be a little conservative. But VCs? They're the ones with all the appetite for risk, right? Well, maybe so, but Sequoia Capital, a top-tier Silicon Valley VC, is also publicly questioning whether anyone will make AI investments pay off: https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/ais-600b-question/ I can't tell you how great it was to take my kid down a grocery checkout aisle from which all the eye-level candy had been removed. Alas, I can't figure out how we keep the nation's executive toddlers from being dazzled by shiny AI pitches that leave us stuck with the consequences of their impulse purchases. (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) The Files are in the Computer: On Copyright, Memorization, and Generative AI https://james.grimmelmann.net/files/articles/the-files-are-in-the-computer.pdf This Machine Exposes Privacy Violations https://www.wired.com/story/webxray-online-privacy-violations/ World of Warcraft developers form Blizzard’s largest and most inclusive union https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/24/24205366/world-of-warcraft-developers-form-union-blizzard-entertainment This day in history (permalink) #20yrsago Kalashnikov: US gov’t is pirating my AK-47 design https://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/26/world/who-s-a-pirate-russia-points-back-at-the-us.html #20yrsago Real ships guerrilla DRM for the iPod https://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/26/business/media-realnetworks-plans-to-sell-songs-to-be-played-on-ipod.html #20yrsago 30,000 anti-Induce Act letters sent to Congress https://web.archive.org/web/20040723084653/https://action.eff.org/action/index.asp?step=2&item=2918 #10yrsago Journalist believes his phone was hacked by spooks at HOPE X, will upload image for forensics https://thecryptosphere.com/2014/07/23/report-from-hope-x-surveillance-snowden-stratfor-and-surprises/ #10yrsago What’s original? Cloning games versus making games https://www.raphkoster.com/2014/07/23/when-is-a-clone/ #10yrsago Great video explainer: Vint Cerf on ICANN and NTIA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd3dH90tdhk #5yrsago Trade war: Hasbro is shifting manufacturing to Vietnam and India, drawing down production in China https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-24/world-s-top-toymaker-joins-companies-leaving-china-s-factories #5yrsago #Rickyrenuncia: Bowing to popular pressure, Puerto Rican governor Ricardo Rossello has resigned https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-24/puerto-rico-lawmakers-push-to-impeach-crisis-beset-governor #5yrsago #29leaks: someone leaked 15 years’ worth of data from London’s most notorious shell-company factory https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/07/24/this-london-firm-helps-the-wealthy-hide-assets-or-steal-them-luckily-we-have-15-years-of-their-client-communications/ #5yrsago E-scooter companies are desperate for repo men to stop impounding their vehicles https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/24/20696405/dockless-scooters-share-repo-men-repossessor-lawsuit-tow-yard-lime-bird-lyft-uber-razor #5yrsago Adblocking: How about nah? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah #5yrsago Countries with higher levels of unionization have lower per-capita carbon footprints https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331445998_Is_Labor_Green #5yrsago Analyzing 800 daily tweets that say “Today was the day that Donald Trump became president” https://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/1154098035183329280 Upcoming appearances (permalink) Defcon 32 (Las Vegas), Aug 8-11 https://shop.defcon.org/products/def-con-32-las-vegas-convention-center 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: Baldur Bjarnason (https://toot.cafe/@baldur). Currently writing: Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay. Today's progress: 772 words (26520 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: The reason you can't buy a car is the same reason that your health insurer let hackers dox you https://craphound.com/news/2024/06/30/the-reason-you-cant-buy-a-car-is-the-same-reason-that-your-health-insurer-let-hackers-dox-you/ 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: Pluralistic: FTC vs surveillance pricing (24 Jul 2024)
Wed, 24 Jul 2024 17:54:46 +0000 Today's links FTC vs surveillance pricing: A prelude to an ass-kicking. 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. FTC vs surveillance pricing (permalink) In the mystical cosmology of economics, "prices" are of transcendental significance, the means by which the living market knows and adapts itself, giving rise to "efficient" production and consumption. At its most basic level, the metaphysics of pricing goes like this: if there is less of something for sale than people want to buy, the seller will raise the price until enough buyers drop out and demand equals supply. If the disappointed would-be buyers are sufficiently vocal about their plight, other sellers will enter the market (bankrolled by investors who sense an opportunity), causing supplies to increase and prices to fall until the system is in "equilibrium" – producing things as cheaply as possible in precisely the right quantities to meet demand. In the parlance of neoclassical economists, prices aren't "set": they are discovered. In antitrust law, there are many sins, but they often boil down to "price setting." That is, if a company has enough "market power" that they can dictate prices to their customers, they are committing a crime and should be punished. This is such a bedrock of neoclassical economics that it's a tautology "market power" exists where companies can "set prices"; and to "set prices," you need "market power." Prices are the blood cells of the market, shuttling nutrients (in the form of "information") around the sprawling colony organism composed of all the buyers, sellers, producers, consumers, intermediaries and other actors. Together, the components of this colony organism all act on the information contained in the "price signals" to pursue their own self-interest. Each self-interested action puts more information into the system, triggering more action. Together, price signals and the actions they evince eventually "discover" the price, an abstraction that is yanked out of the immaterial plane of pure ideas and into our grubby, physical world, causing mines to re-open, shipping containers and pipelines to spark to life, factories to retool, trucks to fan out across the nation, retailers to place ads and hoist SALE banners over their premises, and consumers to race to those displays and open their wallets. When prices are "distorted," all of this comes to naught. During the notorious "socialist calculation debate" of 1920s Austria, right-wing archdukes of religious market fundamentalism, like Von Hayek and Von Mises, trounced their leftist opponents, arguing that the market was the only computational system capable of calculating how much of each thing should be made, where it should be sent, and how much it should be sold for. Attempts to "plan" the economy – say, by subsidizing industries or limiting prices – may be well-intentioned, but they broke the market's computations and produced haywire swings of both over- and underproduction. Later, the USSR's planned economy did encounter these swings. These were sometimes very grave (famines that killed millions) and sometimes silly (periods when the only goods available in regional shops were forks, say, creating local bubbles in folk art made from forks). Unplanned markets do this too. Most notoriously, capitalism has produced a vast oversupply of carbon-intensive goods and processes, and a huge undersupply of low-carbon alternatives, bringing the human civilization to the brink of collapse. Not only have capitalism's price signals failed to address this existential crisis to humans, it has also sown the seeds of its own ruin – the market computer's not going to be getting any "price signals" from people as they drown in floods or roast to death on sidewalks that deliver second-degree burns to anyone who touches them: https://www.fastcompany.com/91151209/extreme-heat-southwest-phoenix-surface-burns-scorching-pavement-sidewalks-pets For market true believers, these failures are just evidence that regulation is distorting markets, and that the answer is more unregulated markets to infuse the computer with more price signals. When it comes to carbon, the problem is that producers are "producing negative externalities" (that is, polluting and sticking us with the bill). If we can just get them to "internalize" those costs, they will become "economically rational" and switch to low-carbon alternatives. That's the theory behind the creation and sale of carbon credits. Rather than ordering companies to stop risking civilizational collapse and mass extinction, we can incentivize them to do so by creating markets that reward clean tech and punish dirty practices. The buying and selling of carbon credits is supposed to create price signals reflecting the existential risk to the human race and the only habitable planet known to our species, which the market will then "bring into equilibrium." Unfortunately, reality has a distinct and unfair leftist bias. Carbon credits are a market for lemons. The carbon credits you buy to "offset" your car or flight are apt to come from a forest that has already burned down, or that had already been put in a perpetual trust as a wildlife preserve and could never be logged: https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/18/greshams-carbon-law/#papal-indulgences Carbon credits produce the most perverse outcomes imaginable. For example, much of Tesla's profitability has been derived from the sale of carbon credits to the manufacturers of the dirtiest, most polluting SUVs on Earth; without those Tesla credits, those SUVs would have been too expensive to sell, and would not have existed: https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#Rat What's more, carbon credits aren't part of an "all of the above" strategy that incorporates direct action to prevent our species downfall. These market solutions are incompatible with muscular direct action, and if we do credits, we can't do other stuff that would actually work: https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/31/carbon-upsets/#big-tradeoff Even though price signals have repeatedly proven themselves to be an insufficient mechanism for producing "efficient" or even "survivable," they remain the uppermost spiritual value in the capitalist pantheon. Even through the last 40 years of unrelenting assaults on antitrust and competition law, the one form of corporate power that has remained both formally and practically prohibited is "pricing power." That's why the DoJ was able to block tech companies and major movie studios from secretly colluding to suppress their employees' wages, and why those employees were able to get huge sums out of their employers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation It's also why the Big Six (now Big Five) publishers and Apple got into so much trouble for colluding to set a floor on the price of ebooks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Apple_(2012) When it comes to monopoly, even the most Bork-pilled, Manne-poisoned federal judges and agencies have taken a hard line on price-fixing, because "distortions" of prices make the market computer crash. But despite this horror of price distortions, America's monopolists have found so many ways to manipulate prices. Last month, The American Prospect devoted an entire issue to the many ways that monopolies and cartels have rigged the prices we pay, pushing them higher and higher, even as our wages stagnated and credit became more expensive: https://prospect.org/pricing For example, there's the plague of junk fees (AKA "drip pricing," or, if you're competing to be first up against the wall come the revolution, "ancillary revenue"), everything from baggage fees from airlines to resort fees at hotels to the fee your landlord charges if you pay your rent by check, or by card, or in cash: https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/07/drip-drip-drip/#drip-off There's the fake transparency gambit, so beloved of America's hospitals: https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/13/a-punch-in-the-guts/#hayek-pilled The "greedflation" that saw grocery prices skyrocketing, which billionaire grocery plutes blamed on covid stimulus checks, even as they boasted to their shareholders about their pricing power: https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-12-war-in-the-aisles/ There's the the tens of billions the banks rake in with usurious interest rates, far in excess of the hikes to the central banks' prime rates (which are, in turn, justified in light of the supposed excesses of covid relief checks): https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-11-what-we-owe/ There are the scams that companies like Amazon pull with their user interfaces, tricking you into signing up for subscriptions or upsells, which they grandiosely term "dark patterns," but which are really just open fraud: https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-10-one-click-economy/ There are "surge fees," which are supposed to tempt more producers (e.g. Uber drivers) into the market when demand is high, but which are really just an excuse to gouge you – like when Wendy's threatens to surge-price its hamburgers: https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-07-urge-to-surge/ And then there's surveillance pricing, the most insidious and profitable way to jack up prices. At its core, surveillance pricing uses nonconsensually harvested private information to inform an algorithm that reprices the things you buy – from lattes to rent – in real-time: https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again Companies like Plexure – partially owned by McDonald's – boasts that it can use surveillance data to figure out what your payday is and then hike the price of the breakfast sandwich or after-work soda you buy every day. Like every bad pricing practice, surveillance pricing has its origins in the aviation industry, which invested early on and heavily in spying on fliers to figure out how much they could each afford for their plane tickets and jacking up prices accordingly. Architects of these systems then went on to found companies like Realpage, a data-brokerage that helps landlords illegally collude to rig rent prices. Algorithmic middlemen like Realpage and ATPCO – which coordinates price-fixing among the airlines – are what Dan Davies calls "accountability sinks." A cartel sends all its data to a separate third party, which then compares those prices and tells everyone how much to jack them up in order to screw us all: https://profilebooks.com/work/the-unaccountability-machine/ These price-fixing middlemen are everywhere, and they predate the boom in commercial surveillance. For example, Agri-Stats has been helping meatpackers rig the price of meat for 40 years: https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy But when you add commercial surveillance to algorithmic pricing, you get a hybrid more terrifying than any cocaine-sharks (or, indeed, meth-gators): https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tennessee-police-warn-locals-not-flush-drugs-fear-meth-gators-n1030291 Apologists for these meth-gators insist that surveillance pricing's true purpose is to let companies offer discounts. A streaming service can't afford to offer $0.99 subscriptions to the poor because then all the rich people would stop paying $19.99. But with surveillance pricing, every customer gets a different price, titrated to their capacity to pay, and everyone wins. But that's not how it cashes out in the real world. In the real world, rich people who get ripped off have the wherewithal to shop around, complain effectively to a state AG, or punish companies by taking their business elsewhere. Meanwhile, poor people aren't just cash-poor, they're also time-poor and political influence-poor. When the dollar store duopoly forces all the mom-and-pop grocers in your town out of business with predatory pricing, and creating food deserts that only they serve, no one cares, because state AGs and politicians don't care about people who shop at dollar stores. Then, the dollar stores can collude with manufacturers to get shrunken "cheater sized" products that sell for a dollar, but cost double or triple the grocery store price by weight or quantity: https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/27/walmarts-jackals/#cheater-sizes Yes, fliers who seem to be flying on business (last-minute purchasers who don't have a Saturday stay) get charged more than people whose purchase makes them seem to be someone flying away for a vacation. But that's only because aviation prices haven't yet fully transitioned to surveillance pricing. If an airline can correctly calculate that you are taking a trip because you're a grad student who must attend a conference in order to secure a job, and if they know precisely how much room you have left on your credit card, they can charge you everything you can afford, to the cent. Your ability to resist pricing power isn't merely a function of a company's market power – it's also a function of your political power. Poor people may have less to steal, but no one cares when they get robbed: https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/19/martha-wright-reed/#capitalists-hate-capitalism So surveillance pricing, supercharged by algorithms, represent a serious threat to "prices," which is the one thing that the econo-religious fundamentalists of the capitalist class value above all else. That makes surveillance pricing low-hanging fruit for regulatory enforcement: a bipartisan crime that has few champions on either side of the aisle. Cannily, the FTC has just declared war on surveillance pricing, ordering eight key players in the industry (including capitalism's arch-villains, McKinsey and Jpmorgan Chase) to turn over data that can be used to prosecute them for price-fixing within 45 days: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/07/ftc-issues-orders-eight-companies-seeking-information-surveillance-pricing As American Prospect editor-in-chief David Dayen notes in his article on the order, the FTC is doing what he and his journalistic partners couldn't: forcing these companies to cough up internal data: https://prospect.org/economy/2024-07-24-ftc-opens-surveillance-pricing-inquiry/ This is important, and not just because of the wriggly critters the FTC will reveal as they use their powers to turn over this rock. Administrative agencies can't just do whatever they want. Long before the agencies were neutered by the Supreme Court, they had strict rules requiring them to gather evidence, solicit comment and counter-comment, and so on, before enacting any rules: https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff Doubtless, the Supreme Court's Loper decision (which overturned "Chevron deference" and cut off the agencies' power to take actions that they don't have detailed, specific authorization to take) will embolden the surveillance pricing industry to take the FTC to court on this. It's hard to say whether the courts will find in the FTC's favor. Section 6(b) of the FTC Act clearly lets the FTC compel these disclosures as part of an enforcement action, but they can't start an enforcement action until they have evidence, and through the whole history of the FTC, these kinds of orders have been a common prelude to enforcement. One thing this has going for it is that it is bipartisan: all five FTC commissioners, including both Republicans (including the Republican who votes against everything) voted in favor of it. Price gouging is the kind of easy-to-grasp corporate crime that everyone hates, irrespective of political tendency. In the Prospect piece on Ticketmaster's pricing scam, Dayen and Groundwork's Lindsay Owens called this the "Age of Recoupment": https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/03/aoi-aoi-oh/#concentrated-gains-vast-diffused-losses For 40 years, neoclassical economics' focus on "consumer welfare" meant that companies could cheat and squeeze their workers and suppliers as hard as they wanted, so long as prices didn't go up. But after 40 years, there's nothing more to squeeze out of workers or suppliers, so it's time for the cartels to recoup by turning on us, their customers. They believe – perhaps correctly – that they have amassed so much market power through mergers and lobbying that they can cross the single bright line in neoliberal economics' theory of antitrust: price-gouging. No matter how sincere the economics profession's worship of prices might be, it still might not trump companies that are too big to fail and thus too big to jail. The FTC just took an important step in defense of all of our economic wellbeing, and it's a step that even the most right-wing economist should applaud. They're calling the question: "Do you really think that price-distortion is a cardinal sin? If so, you must back our play." Hey look at this (permalink) One in six Conservative voters likely to die before next election, analysis shows https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/conserative-voters-age-next-general-election-b2583660.html (h/t Charlie Stross) What Would Kamala Harris Do About Corporate Power? https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/what-would-kamala-harris-do-about Breaking Up the Giants of Harm https://static1.squarespace.com/static/65c9daef199ea70aa66592fe/t/669f0cc835d34a76dcb9328d/1721699547182/Breaking+Up+the+Giants+of+Harm%2C+Balanced+Economy+Project_July+2024.pdf This day in history (permalink) #15yrsago Ask Google to guarantee privacy for the future of reading https://web.archive.org/web/20100703132925/https://secure.eff.org/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=433 #15yrsago Kadrey’s SANDMAN SLIM: a hard-boiled revenge novel from Hell https://memex.craphound.com/2009/07/24/kadreys-sandman-slim-a-hard-boiled-revenge-novel-from-hell/ #10yrsago Michigan sheriff issues inmates black-and-white striped uniforms https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/07/22/michigan-inmates-to-get-black-and-white-striped-uniforms-orange-is-now-too-cool-sheriff-says/ #10yrsago Back pain: Acetaminophen no better than placebos https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)60805-9/abstract #10yrsago Report from America’s militarized, constitution-free border-zone https://www.salon.com/2014/07/20/bring_the_battlefield_to_the_border_how_americas_immigration_wars_were_poisoned_by_the_military_industrial_complex/ #10yrsago Family kicked off Denver Southwest flight because Dad tweeted about the rude gate-agent https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/family-asked-to-leave-sw-plane-after-tweet/ #10yrsago Pirate Bay traffic doubles over three years https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-traffic-doubles-despite-isp-blockades-140717/ #10yrsago Comixology adds DRM-free option! Excelsior! https://memex.craphound.com/2014/07/24/comixology-adds-drm-free-option-excelsior/ #5yrsago Share prices slide as DOJ announces sweeping antitrust investigations of Big Tech https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/23/doj-reportedly-to-open-broad-antitrust-review-of-big-tech-tech-stocks-dip.html #5yrsago AP: the mob who attacked Hong Kong protesters were rural thugs hired by gangsters https://apnews.com/article/4867ea5aafbd45b78eb1747b8b84c04f #5yrsago A generalized method for re-identifying people in “anonymized” data-sets https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/health/data-privacy-protection.html #5yrsago William Barr’s terrible, stupid idea to ban working crypto is slightly less terrible and stupid than earlier ideas https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/24/william-barrs-terrible-stupid-idea-to-ban-working-crypto-is-slightly-less-terrible-and-stupid-than-earlier-ideas/ #5yrsago Because Internet: the new linguistics of informal English https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/24/because-internet-the-new-linguistics-of-informal-english/ #1yrago Autoenshittification https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon Upcoming appearances (permalink) Defcon 32 (Las Vegas), Aug 8-11 https://shop.defcon.org/products/def-con-32-las-vegas-convention-center 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: Currently writing: Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay. Today's progress: 751 words (25741 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: The reason you can't buy a car is the same reason that your health insurer let hackers dox you https://craphound.com/news/2024/06/30/the-reason-you-cant-buy-a-car-is-the-same-reason-that-your-health-insurer-let-hackers-dox-you/ 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 ftc, surveillance p: Pluralistic: Holy CRAP the UN Cybercrime Treaty is a nightmare (23 Jul 2024)
Tue, 23 Jul 2024 11:16:27 +0000 Today's links Holy CRAP the UN Cybercrime Treaty is a nightmare: "Cybercrime" is "anything any government dislikes" and every government will have to help every other government fight it. 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. Holy CRAP the UN Cybercrime Treaty is a nightmare (permalink) If there's one thing I learned from all my years as an NGO delegate to UN specialized agencies, it's that UN treaties are dangerous, liable to capture by unholy alliances of authoritarian states and rapacious global capitalists. Most of my UN work was on copyright and "paracopyright," and my track record was 2:0; I helped kill a terrible treaty (the WIPO Broadcast Treaty) and helped pass a great one (the Marrakesh Treaty on the rights of people with disabilities to access copyrighted works): https://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/marrakesh/ It's been many years since I had to shave and stuff myself into a suit and tie and go to Geneva, and I don't miss it – and thankfully, I have colleagues who do that work, better than I ever did. Yesterday, I heard from one such EFF colleague, Katitza Rodriguez, about the Cybercrime Treaty, which is about to pass, and which is, to put it mildly, terrifying: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/07/un-cybercrime-draft-convention-dangerously-expands-state-surveillance-powers Look, cybercrime is a real thing, from pig butchering to ransomware, and there's real, global harms that can be attributed to it. Cybercrime is transnational, making it hard for cops in any one jurisdiction to handle it. So there's a reason to think about formal international standards for fighting cybercrime. But that's not what's in the Cybercrime Treaty. Here's a quick sketch of the significant defects in the Cybercrime Treaty. The treaty has an extremely loose definition of cybercrime, and that looseness is deliberate. In authoritarian states like China and Russia (whose delegations are the driving force behind this treaty), "cybercrime" has come to mean "anything the government disfavors, if you do it with a computer." "Cybercrime" can mean online criticism of the government, or professions of religious belief, or material supporting LGBTQ rights. Nations that sign up to the Cybercrime Treaty will be obliged to help other nations fight "cybercrime" – however those nations define it. They'll be required to provide surveillance data – for example, by forcing online services within their borders to cough up their users' private data, or even to pressure employees to install back-doors in their systems for ongoing monitoring. These obligations to aid in surveillance are mandatory, but much of the Cybercrime Treaty is optional. What's optional? The human rights safeguards. Member states "should" or "may" create standards for legality, necessity, proportionality, non-discrimination, and legitimate purpose. But even if they do, the treaty can oblige them to assist in surveillance orders that originate with other states that decided not to create these standards. When that happens, the citizens of the affected states may never find out about it. There are eight articles in the treaty that establish obligations for indefinite secrecy regarding surveillance undertaken on behalf of other signatories. That means that your government may be asked to spy on you and the people you love, they may order employees of tech companies to backdoor your account and devices, and that fact will remain secret forever. Forget challenging these sneak-and-peek orders in court – you won't even know about them: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/un-cybercrime-draft-convention-blank-check-unchecked-surveillance-abuses Now here's the kicker: while this treaty creates broad powers to fight things governments dislike, simply by branding them "cybercrime," it actually undermines the fight against cybercrime itself. Most cybercrime involves exploiting security defects in devices and services – think of ransomware attacks – and the Cybercrime Treaty endangers the security researchers who point out these defects, creating grave criminal liability for the people we rely on to warn us when the tech vendors we rely upon have put us at risk. This is the granddaddy of tech free speech fights. Since the paper tape days, researchers who discovered defects in critical systems have been intimidated, threatened, sued and even imprisoned for blowing the whistle. Tech giants insist that they should have a veto over who can publish true facts about the defects in their products, and dress up this demand as concern over security. "If you tell bad guys about the mistakes we made, they will exploit those bugs and harm our users. You should tell us about those bugs, sure, but only we can decide when it's the right time for our users and customers to find out about them." When it comes to warnings about the defects in their own products, corporations have an irreconcilable conflict of interest. Time and again, we've seen corporations rationalize their way into suppressing or ignoring bug reports. Sometimes, they simply delay the warning until they've concluded a merger or secured a board vote on executive compensation. Sometimes, they decide that a bug is really a feature – like when Facebook decided not to do anything about the fact that anyone could enumerate the full membership of any Facebook group (including, for example, members of a support group for people with cancer). This group enumeration bug was actually a part of the company's advertising targeting system, so they decided to let it stand, rather than re-engineer their surveillance advertising business. The idea that users are safer when bugs are kept secret is called "security through obscurity" and no one believes in it – except corporate executives. As Bruce Schneier says, "Anyone can design a system that is so secure that they themselves can't break it. That doesn't mean it's secure – it just means that it's secure against people stupider than the system's designer": The history of massive, brutal cybersecurity breaches is an unbroken string of heartbreakingly naive confidence in security through obscurity: https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/05/battery-vampire/#drained But despite this, the idea that some bugs should be kept secret and allowed to fester has powerful champions: a public-private partnership of corporate execs, government spy agencies and cyber-arms dealers. Agencies like the NSA and CIA have huge teams toiling away to discover defects in widely used products. These defects put the populations of their home countries in grave danger, but rather than reporting them, the spy agencies hoard these defects. The spy agencies have an official doctrine defending this reckless practice: they call it "NOBUS," which stands for "No One But Us." As in: "No one but us is smart enough to find these bugs, so we can keep them secret and use them attack our adversaries, without worrying about those adversaries using them to attack the people we are sworn to protect." NOBUS is empirically wrong. In the 2010s, we saw a string of leaked NSA and CIA cyberweapons. One of these, "Eternalblue" was incorporated into off-the-shelf ransomware, leading to the ransomware epidemic that rages even today. You can thank the NSA's decision to hoard – rather than disclose and patch – the Eternalblue exploit for the ransoming of cities like Baltimore, hospitals up and down the country, and an oil pipeline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EternalBlue The leak of these cyberweapons didn't just provide raw material for the world's cybercriminals, it also provided data for researchers. A study of CIA and NSA NOBUS defects found that there was a one-in-five chance of a bug that had been hoarded by a spy agency being independently discovered by a criminal, weaponized, and released into the wild. Not every government has the wherewithal to staff its own defect-mining operation, but that's where the private sector steps in. Cyber-arms dealers like the NSO Group find or buy security defects in widely used products and services and turn them into products – military-grade cyberweapons that are used to attack human rights groups, opposition figures, and journalists: https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/24/breaking-the-news/#kingdom A good Cybercrime Treaty would recognize the perverse incentives that create the coalition to keep us from knowing which products we can trust and which ones we should avoid. It would shut down companies like the NSO Group, ban spy agencies from hoarding defects, and establish an absolute defense for security researchers who reveal true facts about defects. Instead, the Cybercrime Treaty creates new obligations on signatories to help other countries' cops and courts silence and punish security researchers who make these true disclosures, ensuring that spies and criminals will know which products aren't safe to use, but we won't (until it's too late): https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/if-not-amended-states-must-reject-flawed-draft-un-cybercrime-convention A Cybercrime Treaty is a good idea, and even this Cybercrime Treaty could be salvaged. The member-states have it in their power to accept proposed revisions that would protect human rights and security researchers, narrow the definition of "cybercrime," and mandate transparency. They could establish member states' powers to refuse illegitimate requests from other countries: https://www.eff.org/press/releases/media-briefing-eff-partners-warn-un-member-states-are-poised-approve-dangerou (Image: EFF, CC BY 3.0) Hey look at this (permalink) ICJ says Israel’s presence in Palestinian territory is unlawful https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2024/7/19/world-court-says-israels-settlement-policies-breach-international-law Brenda and Dylan Are Dead https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/brenda-and-dylan-are-dead Miniatures of Madness https://only-games.co/collections/miniatures-of-madness (h/t Super Punch) This day in history (permalink) #15yrsago Teach kids to be safe on the net by getting them to think critically about censorware https://web.archive.org/web/20090728034546/http://www.internetevolution.com/document.asp?doc_id=179505& #10yrsago The apology letter Google SHOULD have used to announce the end of G+ “Real Names” https://web.archive.org/web/20140716222946/https://infotrope.net/2014/07/16/meanwhile-in-an-alternate-universe/ #10yrsago White House caught secretly tracking Web visitors with sneaky spyware https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/07/white-house-website-includes-unique-non-cookie-tracker-despite-privacy-policy #10yrsago Fewer than 10% of UK families opt into “parental” filters https://web.archive.org/web/20140724004309/www.pcpro.co.uk/news/broadband/389926/those-parental-control-filters-as-few-as-4-are-signing-up #10yrsago Profile of a NYC pickpocket https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/nyregion/the-pickpockets-tale.html #10yrsago EFF unveils secure, sharing-friendly, privacy-minded router OS https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/07/building-open-wireless-router #5yrsago Clever hack that will end badly: playing copyrighted music during Nazis rallies so they can’t be posted to Youtube https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/23/clever-hack-that-will-end-badly-playing-copyrighted-music-during-nazis-rallies-so-they-cant-be-posted-to-youtube/ #5yrsago J Michael Straczynski’s “Becoming Superman”: a memoir of horrific abuse, war crimes, perseverance, trauma, triumph and doing what’s right https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/23/j-michael-straczynskis-becoming-superman-a-memoir-of-horrific-abuse-war-crimes-perseverance-trauma-triumph-and-doing-whats-right/ #5yrsago Steve Bannon used nonconsensually harvested location data to advertise to people who’d been to a Catholic church https://www.techdirt.com/2019/07/23/steve-bannon-latest-to-abuse-consumer-location-data/ #5yrsago Women are much more likely to be injured in car crashes, probably because crash-test dummies are mostly male-shaped https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-18/why-women-are-likelier-to-be-hurt-in-a-car-crash #5yrsago A deep dive into Elizabeth Warren’s plan to tame private equity https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/07/elizabeth-warren-seeks-to-cut-private-equity-down-to-size.html #5yrsago Facebook’s alleged growth is largely coming from countries where Facebook says it has a fake account problem https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/07/facebook-mark-zuckerbergs-fake-accounts-ponzi-scheme.html #5yrsago From #TelegramGate to #RickyLeaks: Puerto Rico is on fire https://web.archive.org/web/20190719213344/https://www.thenation.com/article/puerto-rico-protests-scandal-rossello/ #1yrago When the Town Square Shatters https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/23/when-the-town-square-shatters/ Upcoming appearances (permalink) Defcon 32 (Las Vegas), Aug 8-11 https://shop.defcon.org/products/def-con-32-las-vegas-convention-center 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: Currently writing: Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay. Today's progress: 751 words (25741 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: The reason you can't buy a car is the same reason that your health insurer let hackers dox you https://craphound.com/news/2024/06/30/the-reason-you-cant-buy-a-car-is-the-same-reason-that-your-health-insurer-let-hackers-dox-you/ 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: Pluralistic: Unpersoned (22 Jul 2024)
Mon, 22 Jul 2024 15:40:28 +0000 Today's links Unpersoned: My latest Locus Magazine column. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2004, 2009, 2014, 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. Unpersoned (permalink) My latest Locus Magazine column is "Unpersoned." It's about the implications of putting critical infrastructure into the private, unaccountable hands of tech giants: https://locusmag.com/2024/07/cory-doctorow-unpersoned/ The column opens with the story of romance writer K Renee, as reported by Madeline Ashby for Wired: https://www.wired.com/story/what-happens-when-a-romance-author-gets-locked-out-of-google-docs/ Renee is a prolific writer who used Google Docs to compose her books, and share them among early readers for feedback and revisions. Last March, Renee's Google account was locked, and she was no longer able to access ten manuscripts for her unfinished books, totaling over 220,000 words. Google's famously opaque customer service – a mix of indifferently monitored forums, AI chatbots, and buck-passing subcontractors – would not explain to her what rule she had violated, merely that her work had been deemed "inappropriate." Renee discovered that she wasn't being singled out. Many of her peers had also seen their accounts frozen and their documents locked, and none of them were able to get an explanation out of Google. Renee and her similarly situated victims of Google lockouts were reduced to developing folk-theories of what they had done to be expelled from Google's walled garden; Renee came to believe that she had tripped an anti-spam system by inviting her community of early readers to access the books she was working on. There's a normal way that these stories resolve themselves: a reporter like Ashby, writing for a widely read publication like Wired, contacts the company and triggers a review by one of the vanishingly small number of people with the authority to undo the determinations of the Kafka-as-a-service systems that underpin the big platforms. The system's victim gets their data back and the company mouths a few empty phrases about how they take something-or-other "very seriously" and so forth. But in this case, Google broke the script. When Ashby contacted Google about Renee's situation, Google spokesperson Jenny Thomson insisted that the policies for Google accounts were "clear": "we may review and take action on any content that violates our policies." If Renee believed that she'd been wrongly flagged, she could "request an appeal." But Renee didn't even know what policy she was meant to have broken, and the "appeals" went nowhere. This is an underappreciated aspect of "software as a service" and "the cloud." As companies from Microsoft to Adobe to Google withdraw the option to use software that runs on your own computer to create files that live on that computer, control over our own lives is quietly slipping away. Sure, it's great to have all your legal documents scanned, encrypted and hosted on GDrive, where they can't be burned up in a house-fire. But if a Google subcontractor decides you've broken some unwritten rule, you can lose access to those docs forever, without appeal or recourse. That's what happened to "Mark," a San Francisco tech workers whose toddler developed a UTI during the early covid lockdowns. The pediatrician's office told Mark to take a picture of his son's infected penis and transmit it to the practice using a secure medical app. However, Mark's phone was also set up to synch all his pictures to Google Photos (this is a default setting), and when the picture of Mark's son's penis hit Google's cloud, it was automatically scanned and flagged as Child Sex Abuse Material (CSAM, better known as "child porn"): https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/22/allopathic-risk/#snitches-get-stitches Without contacting Mark, Google sent a copy of all of his data – searches, emails, photos, cloud files, location history and more – to the SFPD, and then terminated his account. Mark lost his phone number (he was a Google Fi customer), his email archives, all the household and professional files he kept on GDrive, his stored passwords, his two-factor authentication via Google Authenticator, and every photo he'd ever taken of his young son. The SFPD concluded that Mark hadn't done anything wrong, but it was too late. Google had permanently deleted all of Mark's data. The SFPD had to mail a physical letter to Mark telling him he wasn't in trouble, because he had no email and no phone. Mark's not the only person this happened to. Writing about Mark for the New York Times, Kashmir Hill described other parents, like a Houston father identified as "Cassio," who also lost their accounts and found themselves blocked from fundamental participation in modern life: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html Note that in none of these cases did the problem arise from the fact that Google services are advertising-supported, and because these people weren't paying for the product, they were the product. Buying a $800 Pixel phone or paying more than $100/year for a Google Drive account means that you're definitely paying for the product, and you're still the product. What do we do about this? One answer would be to force the platforms to provide service to users who, in their judgment, might be engaged in fraud, or trafficking in CSAM, or arranging terrorist attacks. This is not my preferred solution, for reasons that I hope are obvious! We can try to improve the decision-making processes at these giant platforms so that they catch fewer dolphins in their tuna-nets. The "first wave" of content moderation appeals focused on the establishment of oversight and review boards that wronged users could appeal their cases to. The idea was to establish these "paradigm cases" that would clarify the tricky aspects of content moderation decisions, like whether uploading a Nazi atrocity video in order to criticize it violated a rule against showing gore, Nazi paraphernalia, etc. This hasn't worked very well. A proposal for "second wave" moderation oversight based on arms-length semi-employees at the platforms who gather and report statistics on moderation calls and complaints hasn't gelled either: https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/12/move-slow-and-fix-things/#second-wave Both the EU and California have privacy rules that allow users to demand their data back from platforms, but neither has proven very useful (yet) in situations where users have their accounts terminated because they are accused of committing gross violations of platform policy. You can see why this would be: if someone is accused of trafficking in child porn or running a pig-butchering scam, it would be perverse to shut down their account but give them all the data they need to go one committing these crimes elsewhere. But even where you can invoke the EU's GDPR or California's CCPA to get your data, the platforms deliver that data in the most useless, complex blobs imaginable. For example, I recently used the CCPA to force Mailchimp to give me all the data they held on me. Mailchimp – a division of the monopolist and serial fraudster Intuit – is a favored platform for spammers, and I have been added to thousands of Mailchimp lists that bombard me with unsolicited press pitches and come-ons for scam products. Mailchimp has spent a decade ignoring calls to allow users to see what mailing lists they've been added to, as a prelude to mass unsubscribing from those lists (for Mailchimp, the fact that spammers can pay it to send spam that users can't easily opt out of is a feature, not a bug). I thought that the CCPA might finally let me see the lists I'm on, but instead, Mailchimp sent me more than 5900 files, scattered through which were the internal serial numbers of the lists my name had been added to – but without the names of those lists any contact information for their owners. I can see that I'm on more than 1,000 mailing lists, but I can't do anything about it. Mailchimp shows how a rule requiring platforms to furnish data-dumps can be easily subverted, and its conduct goes a long way to explaining why a decade of EU policy requiring these dumps has failed to make a dent in the market power of the Big Tech platforms. The EU has a new solution to this problem. With its 2024 Digital Markets Act, the EU is requiring platforms to furnish APIs – programmatic ways for rivals to connect to their services. With the DMA, we might finally get something parallel to the cellular industry's "number portability" for other kinds of platforms. If you've ever changed cellular platforms, you know how smooth this can be. When you get sick of your carrier, you set up an account with a new one and get a one-time code. Then you call your old carrier, endure their pathetic begging not to switch, give them that number and within a short time (sometimes only minutes), your phone is now on the new carrier's network, with your old phone-number intact. This is a much better answer than forcing platforms to provide service to users whom they judge to be criminals or otherwise undesirable, but the platforms hate it. They say they hate it because it makes them complicit in crimes ("if we have to let an accused fraudster transfer their address book to a rival service, we abet the fraud"), but it's obvious that their objection is really about being forced to reduce the pain of switching to a rival. There's a superficial reasonableness to the platforms' position, but only until you think about Mark, or K Renee, or the other people who've been "unpersonned" by the platforms with no explanation or appeal. The platforms have rigged things so that you must have an account with them in order to function, but they also want to have the unilateral right to kick people off their systems. The combination of these demands represents more power than any company should have, and Big Tech has repeatedly demonstrated its unfitness to wield this kind of power. This week, I lost an argument with my accountants about this. They provide me with my tax forms as links to a Microsoft Cloud file, and I need to have a Microsoft login in order to retrieve these files. This policy – and a prohibition on sending customer files as email attachments – came from their IT team, and it was in response to a requirement imposed by their insurer. The problem here isn't merely that I must now enter into a contractual arrangement with Microsoft in order to do my taxes. It isn't just that Microsoft's terms of service are ghastly. It's not even that they could change those terms at any time, for example, to ingest my sensitive tax documents in order to train a large language model. It's that Microsoft – like Google, Apple, Facebook and the other giants – routinely disconnects users for reasons it refuses to explain, and offers no meaningful appeal. Microsoft tells its business customers, "force your clients to get a Microsoft account in order to maintain communications security" but also reserves the right to unilaterally ban those clients from having a Microsoft account. There are examples of this all over. Google recently flipped a switch so that you can't complete a Google Form without being logged into a Google account. Now, my ability to purse all kinds of matters both consequential and trivial turn on Google's good graces, which can change suddenly and arbitrarily. If I was like Mark, permanently banned from Google, I wouldn't have been able to complete Google Forms this week telling a conference organizer what sized t-shirt I wear, but also telling a friend that I could attend their wedding. Now, perhaps some people really should be locked out of digital life. Maybe people who traffick in CSAM should be locked out of the cloud. But the entity that should make that determination is a court, not a Big Tech content moderator. It's fine for a platform to decide it doesn't want your business – but it shouldn't be up to the platform to decide that no one should be able to provide you with service. This is especially salient in light of the chaos caused by Crowdstrike's catastrophic software update last week. Crowdstrike demonstrated what happens to users when a cloud provider accidentally terminates their account, but while we're thinking about reducing the likelihood of such accidents, we should really be thinking about what happens when you get Crowdstruck on purpose. The wholesale chaos that Windows users and their clients, employees, users and stakeholders underwent last week could have been pieced out retail. It could have come as a court order (either by a US court or a foreign court) to disconnect a user and/or brick their computer. It could have come as an insider attack, undertaken by a vengeful employee, or one who was on the take from criminals or a foreign government. The ability to give anyone in the world a Blue Screen of Death could be a feature and not a bug. It's not that companies are sadistic. When they mistreat us, it's nothing personal. They've just calculated that it would cost them more to run a good process than our business is worth to them. If they know we can't leave for a competitor, if they know we can't sue them, if they know that a tech rival can't give us a tool to get our data out of their silos, then the expected cost of mistreating us goes down. That makes it economically rational to seek out ever-more trivial sources of income that impose ever-more miserable conditions on us. When we can't leave without paying a very steep price, there's practically a fiduciary duty to find ways to upcharge, downgrade, scam, screw and enshittify us, right up to the point where we're so pissed that we quit. Google could pay competent decision-makers to review every complaint about an account disconnection, but the cost of employing that large, skilled workforce vastly exceeds their expected lifetime revenue from a user like Mark. The fact that this results in the ruination of Mark's life isn't Google's problem – it's Mark's problem. The cloud is many things, but most of all, it's a trap. When software is delivered as a service, when your data and the programs you use to read and write it live on computers that you don't control, your switching costs skyrocket. Think of Adobe, which no longer lets you buy programs at all, but instead insists that you run its software via the cloud. Adobe used the fact that you no longer own the tools you rely upon to cancel its Pantone color-matching license. One day, every Adobe customer in the world woke up to discover that the colors in their career-spanning file collections had all turned black, and would remain black until they paid an upcharge: https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process The cloud allows the companies whose products you rely on to alter the functioning and cost of those products unilaterally. Like mobile apps – which can't be reverse-engineered and modified without risking legal liability – cloud apps are built for enshittification. They are designed to shift power away from users to software companies. An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it. A cloud app is some Javascript wrapped in enough terms of service clickthroughs to make it a felony to restore old features that the company now wants to upcharge you for. Google's defenstration of K Renee, Mark and Cassio may have been accidental, but Google's capacity to defenstrate all of us, and the enormous cost we all bear if Google does so, has been carefully engineered into the system. Same goes for Apple, Microsoft, Adobe and anyone else who traps us in their silos. The lesson of the Crowdstrike catastrophe isn't merely that our IT systems are brittle and riddled with single points of failure: it's that these failure-points can be tripped deliberately, and that doing so could be in a company's best interests, no matter how devastating it would be to you or me. (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) CrowdStruck https://www.wheresyoured.at/crowdstruck-2/ Airlines Are Shrinking Carry-On Sizes, Forcing Travelers to Pay Checked Bag Fees https://www.frommers.com/blogs/arthur-frommer-online/blog_posts/airlines-are-shrinking-carry-on-sizes-forcing-travelers-to-pay-checked-bag-fees (h/t Boing Boing) IRS reports collecting $1 billion from rich households’ back taxes https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/07/11/millionaires-unpaid-taxes-irs/ (h/t JWZ) This day in history (permalink) #20yrsago Doonesbury to be dropped for being “too controversial” https://web.archive.org/web/20040723071326/https://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000581723 #20yrsago Secret Swing visit report https://web.archive.org/web/20040725050428/http://candycritic.bravejournal.com/entry/4178 #20yrsago Game developer: the real pirates are my publishers http://draginol.joeuser.com/article/21895 #20yrsago Imagineering head on Tiki Room rehab https://web.archive.org/web/20040806155355/http://www.laughingplace.com/default.asp?WCI=MsgBoard&WCE=T-51032-P-1&Refresh=0721171722 #20yrsago In-game product placement’s dystopian future https://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2004/07/oh_great.html #20yrsago Downloading isn’t killing music https://web.archive.org/web/20040724060140/http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1265840,00.html #15yrsago Last Galapagos Pinta turtle finally knocks up a mate’s eggs https://web.archive.org/web/20090725192130/http://scienceray.com/earth-sciences/paleontology/lonesome-george-to-finally-be-a-father/ #15yrsago Photographer who shot demolition of flyover arrested for terrorism https://web.archive.org/web/20090713000304/http://monaxle.com/2009/07/08/section-44-in-chatham-high-street/ #15yrsago New ebook publisher from publishing veterans with novel ideas https://web.archive.org/web/20090715095849/http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20090712/SMALLBIZ/307129981 #15yrsago Sussex cops try to suppress publication of damning traffic-cam photos by claiming copyright http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/28/2845.asp #15yrsago Giant database of English medieval soldiers online https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8160081.stm #15yrsago Why we should(n’t) go to space — Kim Stanley Robinson https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/17/AR2009071702018.html #15yrsago PowerPoint considered militarily harmful https://web.archive.org/web/20090715072249/http://www.afji.com/2009/07/4061641 #15yrsago Secrets of the injection moulder https://web.archive.org/web/20090724143647/https://idsamp.wordpress.com/2009/07/20/ejection-mark-on-angled-surface/ #10yrsago Snowden will develop pro-privacy crypto tools https://www.reuters.com/article/2014/07/19/us-usa-snowden-hackers-idUSKBN0FO0ZB20140719/ #10yrsago Ocala, FL criminalizes sagging pants https://web.archive.org/web/20140723182151/https://www.wftv.com/news/news/local/ocala-bans-sagging-pants-city-owned-property/nghFj/ #10yrsago Infamous SF “eviction” lawfirm abuses DMCA to censor video of protest https://web.archive.org/web/20140723193431/http://sfappeal.com/2014/07/infamous-sf-eviction-lawyers-use-dmca-claim-to-silence-protest-video/ #10yrsago UOregon police kept a “Eat a Bowl of Dicks List” for their enemies https://www.techdirt.com/2014/07/21/cops-wrong-firing-lawsuit-leads-to-public-release-vulgarly-titled-enemies-list/ #10yrsago California Highway Patrol seize medical records of woman beaten by cop https://www.techdirt.com/2014/07/21/california-highway-patrol-seizes-medical-records-woman-officer-was-caught-tape-beating/ #10yrsago Florida principal broke rules by cancelling summer read of Little Brother https://www.pnj.com/story/news/education/2014/07/21/thomas-policy-followed-little-brother-dispute/12957445/ #5yrsago Podcast: Adversarial Interoperability is Judo for Network Effects https://ia903006.us.archive.org/6/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_304/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_304_-_Adversarial_Interoperability_is_Judo_for_Network_Effects.mp3 #5yrsago Violent mobs of alleged Triad gangsters dole out savage beatings to Hong Kong democracy protesters, cops nowhere to be found https://globalvoices.org/2019/07/22/armed-mobs-attack-anti-extradition-protesters-in-a-suburban-hong-kong-subway-station/ #5yrsago FBI agent describes finding “Frankensteins” and a “cooler full of penises” at an unregulated Arizona body-donation center https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-health/2019/07/19/cooler-penises-frankenstein-head-found-phoenix-body-donation-company/1720254001/ #5yrsago Nebraska Weather Service commemorates climate emergency by baking biscuits inside a hot car https://twitter.com/NWSOmaha/status/1151879325257535488 #5yrsago Louvre purges every mention of the Sackler opioid family after artist’s protest https://www.france24.com/en/20190721-sackler-name-removed-louvre-opioid-crisis-france?ref=tw_i #5yrsago Elizabeth Warren’s banking proposals are designed to demolish the private equity sector and force finance to serve the people https://thereformedbroker.com/2019/07/21/elizabeth-warrens-banking-sector-napalm/ #5yrsago A 3D papercraft Haunted Mansion board game to print and assemble https://www.disneyexperience.com/activities/crafts/hm_game.php #5yrsago Massive trove of Russian spy-agency docs hacked from private sector contractor and passed onto media https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/russian-fsb-intel-agency-contractor-hacked-secret-projects-exposed/ Upcoming appearances (permalink) Defcon 32 (Las Vegas), Aug 8-11 https://shop.defcon.org/products/def-con-32-las-vegas-convention-center Albacon (Albuquerque/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: 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: The reason you can't buy a car is the same reason that your health insurer let hackers dox you https://craphound.com/news/2024/06/30/the-reason-you-cant-buy-a-car-is-the-same-reason-that-your-health-insurer-let-hackers-dox-you/ 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: Pluralistic: AI art has no anti-cooption immune system (20 Jul 2024)
Sat, 20 Jul 2024 12:11:56 +0000 Today's links AI art has no anti-cooption immune system: The seeming of intention, with no intender. 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. AI art has no anti-cooption immune system (permalink) One thing Myspace had going for it: it was exuberantly ugly. The decision to let users with no design training loose on a highly customizable user-interface led to a proliferation of Myspace pages that vibrated with personality. The ugliness of Myspace wasn't just exciting in a kind of outsider/folk-art way (though it was that). Myspace's ugliness was an anti-cooption force-field, because corporate designers and art-directors would, by and large, rather break their fingers and gouge out their eyes than produce pages that looked like that. In this regard, Myspace was the heir to successive generations of "design democratization" that gave amateur communities, especially countercultural ones, a space to operate in where authentic community members could be easily distinguished between parasitic commercializers. The immediate predecessors to Myspace's ugliness-as-a-feature were the web, and desktop publishing. Between the img tag, imagemaps, the blink tag, animated GIFs, and the million ways that you could weird a page with tables and padding, the early web was positively bursting with individual personality. The early web balanced in an equilibrium between the plunder-friendliness of "view source" and the topsy-turvy design imperatives of web-based layout, which confounded both print designers (no fixed fonts! RGB colorspaces! dithering!) and even multimedia designers who'd cut their teeth on Hypercard and CD ROMs (no fixed layout!). Before the web came desktop publishing, the million tractor-feed ransom notes combining Broderbund Print Shop fonts, joystick-edited pixel-art, and a cohort of enthusiasts ranging from punk zinesters to community newsletter publishers. As this work proliferated on coffee-shop counters and telephone poles, it was visibly, obviously distinct from the work produced by "real" designers – that is, designers who'd been a) trained and b) paid by a corporation to employ that training. All of this matters, and not just for aesthetic reasons. Communities – especially countercultural ones – are where our society's creative ferment starts. Getting your start in the trenches of the counterculture wars is no proof against being co-opted later (indeed, many of the designers who cut their teeth desktop publishing weird zines went on to pull their hair and roll their eyes at the incredible fuggliness of the web). But without that zone of noncommercial, antiestablishment, communitarian low weirdness, design and culture would stagnate. I started thinking about this 25 years ago, the first time I met William Gibson. I'd been assigned by the Globe and Mail to interview him for the launch of All Tomorrow's Parties: https://craphound.com/nonfic/transcript.html One of the questions I asked was about his famous aphorism, "The street finds its own use for things." Given how quickly each post-punk tendency had been absorbed by commercial culture, couldn't we say that "Madison Avenue finds its own use for the street"? His answer started me down a quarter-century of thinking and writing about this subject: I worry about what we'll do in the future, [about the instantaneous co-opting of pop culture]. Where is our new stuff going to come from? What we're doing pop culturally is like burning the rain forest. The biodiversity of pop culture is really, really in danger. I didn't see it coming until a few years ago, but looking back it's very apparent. I watch a sort of primitive form of the recommodification machine around my friends and myself in sixties, and it took about two years for this clumsy mechanism to get and try to sell us The Monkees. In 1977, it took about eight months for a slightly faster more refined mechanism to put punk in the window of Holt Renfrew. It's gotten faster ever since. The scene in Seattle that Nirvana came from: as soon as it had a label, it was on the runways of Paris. Ugliness, transgressiveness and shock all represent an incoherent, grasping attempt to keep the world out of your demimonde – not just normies and squares, but also and especially enthusiastic marketers who want to figure out how to sell stuff to you, and use you to sell stuff to normies and squares. I think this is what drove a lot of people to 4chan (remember, before 4chan was famous for incubating neofascism, it was the birthplace of Anonymous): its shock culture, combined with a strong cultural norm of anonymity, made for a difficult-to-digest, thoroughly spiky morsel that resisted recommodification (for a while). All of this brings me to AI art (or AI "art"). In his essay on the "eerieness" of AI art, Henry Farrell quotes Mark Fisher's "The Weird and the Eerie": https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/large-language-models-are-uncanny "Eeriness" here is defined as "when there is something present where there should be nothing, or is there is nothing present when there should be something." AI is eerie because it produces the seeming of intent, without any intender: https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand When we contemplate "authentic" countercultural work – ransom-note DTP, the weird old web, seizure-inducing Myspace GIFs – it is arresting because the personality of the human entity responsible for it shines through. We might be able to recognize where that person ganked their source-viewed HTML or pixel-optimized GIF, but we can also make inferences about the emotional meaning of those choices. To see that work is to connect to a mind. That mind might not necessarily belong to someone you want to be friends with or ever meet in person, but it is unmistakably another person, and you can't help but learn something about yourself from the way that their work makes you feel. This is why corporate work is so often called "soulless." The point of corporate art is to dress the artificial person of the corporation in the stolen skins of the humans it uses as its substrate. Corporations are potentially immortal, artificial colony organisms. They maintain the pretense of personality, but they have no mind, only action that is the crescendo of an orchestra of improvised instruments played by hundreds or thousands of employees and a handful of executives who are often working directly against one another: https://locusmag.com/2022/03/cory-doctorow-vertically-challenged/ The corporation is – as Charlie Stross has it – the "slow AI" that is slowly converting our planet to the long-prophesied grey goo (or, more prosaically, wildfire ashes and boiled oceans). The real thing that is signified by CEOs' professed fears of runaway AI is runaway corporations. As Ted Chiang says, the experience of being nominally in charge of a corporation that refuses to do what you tell it to is the kind of thing that will give you nightmares about autonomous AI turning on its masters: https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way The job of corporate designers is to find the signifiers of authenticity and dress up the corporate entity's robotic imperatives in this stolen flesh. Everything about AI is done in service to this goal: the chatbots that replace customer service reps are meant to both perfectly mimic a real, competent corporate representative while also hewing perfectly to corporate policy, without ever betraying the real human frailties that none of us can escape. In the same way, the shillbots that pretend to be corporate superfans online are supposed to perfectly amplify the corporate message, the slow AI's conception of its own virtues, without injecting their own off-script, potentially cringey enthusiasms. The Hollywood writers' strike was, at root, about the studio execs' dream that they could convert the "insights" of focus groups and audience research into a perfect script, without having to go through a phalanx of lippy screenwriters who insisted on explaining why they think your idea is stupid. "Hey, nerd, make me another ET, except make the hero a dog, and set it on Mars" is exactly how you prompt an AI: https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/20/everything-made-by-an-ai-is-in-the-public-domain/ Corporate design's job is to produce the seeming of intention without any intender. The "personality" we're meant to sense when we encounter corporate design isn't the designer's, nor the art director's, nor even the CEO's. The "personality" is meant to be the slow AI's, but a corporation doesn't have a personality. In his 2018 short story "Noon in the antilibrary," Karl Schroeder describes an "antilibrary" as an endlessly deep anaerobic lagoon of generative botshit: https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/08/18/104097/noon-in-the-antilibrary/ The antilibrary is a generative AI system that can produce entire librarys’-worth of fake books with fake authors, fake citations by other fake experts with their own fake books and biographies and fake social media accounts, on-demand and instantly. It was speculation in 2018; it’s possible now. Creating an antilibrary is just a matter of investing in a sufficient number of graphics cards and electricity. https://kschroeder.substack.com/p/after-the-internet Reading Karl's reflections on the antilibrary crystallized something for me that I've been thinking about for a quarter-century, since I interviewed Gibson at the Penguin offices in north Toronto. It snapped something into place that I've trying to fit since encountering Henry's thoughts on the "eeriness" of AI work and the intent without an intender. It made me realize why I dislike AI art so much, on a deep, aesthetic level. The point of an image generator is to buffer the intention of the prompter (which might be genuinely creative and bursting with personality) in layers of automated decision-making that flense the final product of any hint of the mind that caused its creation. The most febrile, deeply weird and authentic prompts of the most excluded outsiders produce images that feel the same as the corporate AI illustrations that project the illusion of personality from the immortal, transhuman colony organism that is the limited liability corporation. AI art is born coopted. Even the 4chan equivalent of AI – the deeply transgressive and immoral nonconsensual pornography – feels no different from the "official" AI porn churned out by "real" pornographers. "Shrimp Jesus" and other SEO-optimized Facebook slop is so uncanny because it is simultaneously "weird" ("that which does not belong") and yet it belongs in the same aesthetic bucket of the most anodyne Corporate Memphis ephemera: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis We call it "generative" but AI art can't generate the kind of turnover that aerates the aesthetic soil. An artform that can't be transgressive is sterile, stillborn, a dead end. (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; Jake, CC BY 2.0; modified) Hey look at this (permalink) A pathway forward for digital rights https://www.accessnow.org/a-pathway-forward-for-digital-rights/ (h/t Schneier) After the Internet https://kschroeder.substack.com/p/after-the-internet Not Insane 1980! Campaign Chronicles https://firesigntheatre.bandcamp.com/album/not-insane-1980-campaign-chronicles This day in history (permalink) #20yrsago Militant wing of the accessibility movement https://web.archive.org/web/20040722063824/http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,64253,00.html #15yrsago UK National Portrait Gallery threatens Wikipedia over scans of its public domain art https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8156268.stm #15yrsago Publishers’ shibboleths vs the future of publishing https://publishingperspectives.com/2009/07/why-publishing-cannot-be-saved-as-it-is/ #15yrsago Amazon’s Orwellian deletion of Kindle books https://memex.craphound.com/2009/07/20/amazons-orwellian-deletion-of-kindle-books/ #10yrsago Anti-NSA messages projected on US embassy in Berlin https://www.theverge.com/2014/7/19/5918473/german-artist-protests-nsa-with-light-graffiti-on-us-embassy-in-berlin #10yrsago US “suspected terrorist” database had 1.5M names added to it in past 5 years https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2014/07/18/terrorist-database-continues-to-grow-at-rapid-rate/ #10yrsago Audio from Snowden/Ellsberg panel at HOPEX https://www.mediafire.com/download/mu7yqb1b1y7jty5/Ellsberg-Snowden-at-HopeX.mp3 #5yrsago Three California Nazis sentenced to prison for their participation in the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdva/pr/three-members-california-based-white-supremacist-group-sentenced-riots-charges-related #5yrsago A free, accessible, hyperlinked version of the Mueller Report https://blog.archive.org/2019/07/19/the-mueller-report-now-with-linked-footnotes-and-accessible/ #5yrsago Eminent psychologists condemn “emotion detection” systems as being grounded in junk science https://www.psychologicalscience.org/publications/emotional-expressions-reconsidered-challenges-to-inferring-emotion-from-human-facial-movements.html #5yrsago Equifax settles with FTC, CFPB, states, and consumer class actions for $700m https://nypost.com/2019/07/19/equifax-agrees-to-pay-700m-after-massive-data-breach/ #5yrsago Chrome is patching a bug that lets sites detect and block private browsing mode, declares war on incognito-blocking https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/07/chrome-76-prevents-nyt-and-other-news-sites-from-detecting-incognito-mode/ #1yrago Private equity ghouls have a new way to steal from their investors https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/20/continuation-fraud/#buyout-groups Upcoming appearances (permalink) Exile in Bookville, (Chicago), July 20 https://exileinbookville.com/events/39808 American Association of Law Libraries keynote (Chicago), Jul 21 https://www.aallnet.org/conference/agenda/keynote-speaker/ Defcon 32 (Las Vegas), Aug 8-11 https://shop.defcon.org/products/def-con-32-las-vegas-convention-center Albacon (Albuquerque/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: Currently writing: Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay. Friday's progress: 810 words (24183 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: The reason you can't buy a car is the same reason that your health insurer let hackers dox you https://craphound.com/news/2024/06/30/the-reason-you-cant-buy-a-car-is-the-same-reason-that-your-health-insurer-let-hackers-dox-you/ 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: Pluralistic: FCC strikes a blow against prison profiteering (19 Jul 2024)
Fri, 19 Jul 2024 15:37:23 +0000 Today's links FCC strikes a blow against prison profiteering: The cost of a prison phone-call drops from $11.35 to $0.90. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2004, 2014, 2019, 2024 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. FCC strikes a blow against prison profiteering (permalink) Here's a tip for policymakers hoping to improve the lives of the most Americans with the least effort: help prisoners. After all, America is the most prolific imprisoner of its own people of any country in world history. We lock up more people than Stalin, than Mao, more than Botha, de Klerk or any other Apartheid-era South African president. And it's not just America's vast army of the incarcerated who are afflicted by our passion for imprisonment: their families and friends suffer, too. That familial suffering isn't merely the constant pain of life without a loved one, either. America's prison profiteers treat prisoners' families as ATMs who can be made to pay and pay and pay. This may seem like a losing strategy. After all, prison sentences are strongly correlated with poverty, and even if your family wasn't desperate before the state kidnapped one of its number and locked them behind bars, that loved one's legal defense and the loss of their income is a reliable predictor of downward social mobility. Decent people don't view poor people as a source of riches. But for a certain kind of depraved sadist, the poor are an irresistible target. Sure, poor people don't have much money, but what they lack even more is protection under the law ("conservativism consists of the principle that there is an in-group whom the law protects but does not bind, and an out-group whom the law binds but does not protect" -Wilhoit). You can enjoy total impunity as you torment poor people, make them so miserable and afraid for their lives and safety that they will find some money, somewhere, and give it to you. Mexican cartels understand this. They do a brisk trade in kidnapping asylum seekers whom the US has illegally forced to wait in Mexico to have their claims processed. The families of refugees – either in their home countries or in the USA – are typically badly off but they understand that Mexico will not lift a finger to protect a kidnapped refugee, and so when the kidnappers threaten the most grisly tortures as a means of extracting ransom, those desperate family members do whatever it takes to scrape up the blood-money. What's more, the families of asylum seekers are not much better off than their kidnapped loved ones when it comes to seeking official protection. Family members who stayed behind in human rights hellholes like Bukele's El Salvador can't get their government to lodge official complaints with the Mexican ambassador, and family members who made it to the USA are in no position to get their Congressjerk to intercede with ICE or the Mexican consulate. This gives Mexico's crime syndicates total latitude to kidnap, torture, and grow rich by targeting the poorest, most desperate people in the world. The private contractors that supply services to America's prisons are basically Mexican refugee-kidnappers with pretensions and shares listed on the NYSE. After decades of consolidation, the prison contracting sector has shrunk to two gigantic companies: Securus and Viapath (formerly Global Tellink). These private-equity backed behemoths dominate their sector, and have diversified, providing all kinds of services, from prison cafeteria meals to commissary, the prison stores where prisoners can buy food and other items. If you're following closely, this is one of those places where the hair on the back of your neck starts to rise. These companies make money when prisoners buy food from the commissary, and they're also in charge of the quality of the food in the mess hall. If the food in the mess hall is adequate and nutritious, there's no reason to buy food from the commissary. This is what economists call a "moral hazard." You can think of it as the reason that prison ramen costs 300% more than ramen in the free world: https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/20/captive-market/#locked-in (Not just ramen: in America's sweltering prisons, an 8" fan costs $40, and the price of water went up in Texas prisons by 50% during last summer's heatwave.) It's actually worse than that: if you get sick from eating bad prison food, the same company that poisoned you gets paid to operate the infirmary where you're treated: https://theappeal.org/massachusetts-prisons-wellpath-dentures-teeth/ Now, the scam of abusing prisoners to extract desperate pennies from their families is hardly new. There's written records of this stretching back to the middle ages. Nor is this pattern a unique one: making an unavoidable situation as miserable as possible and then upcharging people who have the ability to pay to get free of the torture is basically how the airlines work. Making coach as miserable as possible isn't merely about shaving pennies by shaving inches off your legroom: it's a way to "incentivize" anyone who can afford it to pay for an upgrade to business-class. The worse coach is, the more people you can convince to dip into their savings or fight with their boss to move classes. The torments visited upon everyone else in coach are economically valuable to the airlines: their groans and miseries translate directly into windfall profits, by convincing better-off passengers to pay not to have the same thing done to them. Of course, with rare exceptions (flying to get an organ transplant, say) plane tickets are typically discretionary. Housing, on the other hand, is a human right and a prerequisite for human thriving. The worse things are for tenants, the more debt and privation people will endure to become home-owners, so it follows that making renters worse off makes homeowners richer: https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/ For Securus and Viapath, the path to profitability is to lobby for mandatory, long prison sentences and then make things inside the prison as miserable as possible. Any prisoner whose family can find the funds can escape the worst of it, and all the prisoners who can't afford it serve the economically important function of showing the prisoners whose families can afford it how bad things will be if they don't pay. If you're thinking that prisoners might pay Securus, Viapath and their competitors out of their own prison earnings, forget it. These companies have decided that the can make more by pocketing the difference between the vast sums paid by third parties for prisoners' labor and the pennies the prisoners get from their work. Remember, the 13th Amendment specifically allows for the enslavement of incarcerated people! Six states ban paying prisoners at all. North Carolina caps prisoners' wages at one dollar per day. The national average prison wage is $0.52/hour. Prisoners' labor produces $11b/year in goods and services: https://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2024/0324bowman.html Forced labor and extortion are a long and dishonorable tradition in incarceration, but this century saw the introduction of a novel, exciting way of extracting wealth from prisoners and their families. It started when private telcos took over prison telephones and raised the price of a prison phone call. These phone companies found willing collaborators in local jail and prison systems: all they had to do was offer to split the take with the jailers. With the advent of the internet, things got far worse. Digitalization meant that prisons could replace the library, adult educations, commissary accounts, letter-mail, parcels, in-person visits and phone calls with a single tablet. These cheaply made tablets were offered for free to prisoners, who lost access to everything from their kids' handmade birthday cards to in-person visits with those kids. In their place, prisoners' families had to pay huge premiums to have their letters scanned so that prisoners could pay (again) to view those scans on their tablets. Instead of in-person visits, prisoners families had to pay $3-10/minute for a janky, postage-stamp sized video. Perversely, jails and prisons replaced their in-person visitation rooms with rooms filled with shitty tablets where family members could sit and videoconference with their incarcerated loved ones who were just a few feet away: https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/14/minnesota-nice/#shitty-technology-adoption-curve Capitalists hate capitalism. The capital classes are on a relentless search for markets with captive customers and no competitors. The prison-tech industry was catnip for private equity funds, who bought and "rolled" up prison contractors, concentrating the sector into a duopoly of debt-laden companies whose ability to pay off their leveraged buyouts was contingent on their ability to terrorize prisoners' families into paying for their overpriced, low-quality products and services. One particularly awful consequence of these rollups was the way that prisoners could lose access to their data when their prison's service-provider was merged with a rival. When that happened, the IT systems would be consolidated, with the frequent outcome that all prisoners' data was lost. Imagine working for two weeks to pay for a song or a book, or a scan of your child's handmade Father's Day card, only to have the file deleted in an IT merger. Now imagine that you're stuck inside for another 20 years. This is a subject I've followed off and on for years. It's such a perfect bit of end-stage capitalist cruelty, combining mass incarceration with monopolies. Even if you're not imprisoned, this story is haunting, because on the one hand, America keeps thinking of new reasons to put more people behind bars, and on the other hand, every technological nightmare we dream up for prisoners eventually works its way out to the rest of us in a process I call the "shitty technology adoption curve." As William Gibson says, "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed" – but the future sure pools up thick and dystopian around America's prisoners: https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware My background interest in the subject got sharper a few years ago when I started working on The Bezzle, my 2023 high-tech crime thriller about prison-tech grifters: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle One of the things that was on my mind when I got to work on that book was the 2017 court-case that killed the FCC's rules limit interstate prison-call gouging. The FCC could have won that case, but Trump's FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, dropped it: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06/prisoners-lose-again-as-court-wipes-out-inmate-calling-price-caps/ With that bad precedent on the books, the only hope prisoners had for relief from the FCC was for Congress to enact legislation specifically granting the agency the power to regulate prison telephony. Incredibly, Congress did just that, with Biden signing the "Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act" in early 2023: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/1541/text With the new law in place, it fell to the FCC use those newfound powers. Compared to agencies like the FTC and the NLRB, Biden's FCC has been relatively weak, thanks in large part to the Biden administration's refusal to defend its FCC nomination for Gigi Sohn, a brilliant and accomplished telecoms expert. You can tell that Sohn would have been a brilliant FCC commissioner because of the way that America's telco monopolists and their allies in the senate (mostly Republicans, but some Democrats, too) went on an all-out offensive against her, using the fact that she is gay to smear her and ultimately defeat her nomination: https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/19/culture-war-bullshit-stole-your-broadband/ But even without Sohn, the FCC has managed to do something genuinely great for America's army of the imprisoned. This week, the FCC voted in price-caps on prison calls, so that call rates will drop from $11.35 for 15 minutes to just $0.90. Both interstate and intrastate calls will be capped at $0.06-0.12/minute, with a phased rollout starting in January: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/07/fcc-closes-final-loopholes-that-keep-prison-phone-prices-exorbitantly-high/ It's hard to imagine a policy that will get more bang for a regulator's buck than this one. Not only does this represent a huge savings for prisoners and their families, those savings are even larger in proportion to their desperate, meager finances. It shows you how important a competent, qualified regulator is. When it comes to political differences between Republicans and Democrats, regulatory competence is a grossly underrated trait. Trump's FCC Chair Ajit Pai handed out tens of billions of dollars in public money to monopoly carriers to improve telephone networks in underserved areas, but did so without first making accurate maps to tell him where the carriers should invest. As a result, that money was devoured by executive bonuses and publicly financed dividends and millions of Americans entered the pandemic lockdowns with broadband that couldn't support work-from-home or Zoom school. When Biden's FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel took over, one of her first official acts was to commission a national study and survey of broadband quality. Republicans howled in outrage: https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/10/digital-redlining/#stop-confusing-the-issue-with-relevant-facts The telecoms sector has been a rent-seeking, monopolizing monster since the days of Samuel Morse: https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/18/the-bell-system/#were-the-phone-company-we-dont-have-to-care Combine telecoms and prisons, and you get a kind of supermonster, the meth-gator of American neofeudalism: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tennessee-police-warn-locals-not-flush-drugs-fear-meth-gators-n1030291 The sector is dirty beyond words, and it corrupts everything it touches – bribing prison officials to throw out all the books in the prison library and replace them with DRM-locked, high-priced ebooks that prisoners must toil for weeks to afford, and that vanish from their devices whenever a prison-tech company merges with a rival: https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch The Biden presidency has been fatally marred by the president's avid support of genocide, and nothing will change that. But for millions of Americans, the Biden administration's policies on telecoms, monopoly, and corporate crime have been a source of profound, lasting improvements. It's not just presidents who can make this difference. Millions of America's prisoners are rotting in state and county jails, and as California has shown, state governments have broad latitude to kick out prison profiteers: https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/08/captive-audience/#good-at-their-jobs (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; Flying Logos, CC BY-SA 4.0; KGBO, CC BY-SA 3.0; modified) Hey look at this (permalink) Common Ownership and Hedge Fund Activism: An Unholy Alliance? https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2024/07/08/common-ownership-and-hedge-fund-activism-an-unholy-alliance/ (h/t Nick Burch) What should have been said after the Trump shooting https://the.ink/p/you-should-say-true-things This day in history (permalink) #20yrsago Why registration sites suck https://www.wired.com/2004/07/we-dont-need-no-stinkin-login/ #20yrsago Academic paper about reputation systems https://web.archive.org/web/20040722060854/https://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_7/masum/index.html #10yrsago DRM-free indie ebooks outsell DRM-locked ones 2:1 https://web.archive.org/web/20140722161213/http://authorearnings.com/july-2014-author-earnings-report/ #10yrsago Snowden: Dropbox is an NSA surveillance target, use Spideroak instead https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2014/jul/17/edward-snowden-video-interview #10yrsago Ukrainian science fiction subgenre predicted current conflict https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/07/science-fiction-writers-predicted-ukraine-conflict-now-theyre-fighting-it.html #5yrsago Having burnished their reputations with extravagant promises, the billionaires who pledged €600m. to rebuild Notre Dame are missing in action https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/18/ruins-notre-dame-billionaires-french-philanthropy #5yrsago After the Oliver Twist poorhouse became luxury housing with a segregated playground, London bans segregated play-areas https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jul/19/london-officials-ban-segregated-play-areas-in-future-housing-developments #5yrsago Using university syllabi to map the connections between every scholarly and scientific discipline https://galaxy.opensyllabus.org #5yrsago Small town, independent and municipally owned ISPs offer America’s best connectivity https://www.vice.com/en/article/7xgne9/locally-run-isps-offer-the-fastest-broadband-in-america #5yrsago Vast majority of porn sites use Google Analytics and Facebook embeds that track you, even in incognito mode https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.06520 #5yrsago Stephen Fry explains the vast superiority of UK healthcare to America’s omnishambles, which Brexiteers hope to import https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSL3z55cT_c #1yrago Denazification, truth and reconciliation, and the story of Germany's story https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/19/stolpersteine/#truth-and-reconciliation Upcoming appearances (permalink) Exile in Bookville, (Chicago), July 20 https://exileinbookville.com/events/39808 American Association of Law Libraries keynote (Chicago), Jul 21 https://www.aallnet.org/conference/agenda/keynote-speaker/ Defcon 32 (Las Vegas), Aug 8-11 https://shop.defcon.org/products/def-con-32-las-vegas-convention-center Albacon (Albuquerque/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: Benjamin Jolley, Chris Messer. Currently writing: Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay. Today's progress: 973 words (23373 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: The reason you can't buy a car is the same reason that your health insurer let hackers dox you https://craphound.com/news/2024/06/30/the-reason-you-cant-buy-a-car-is-the-same-reason-that-your-health-insurer-let-hackers-dox-you/ 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: Pluralistic: Richard R John's "Network Nation" (18 Jul 2024)
Thu, 18 Jul 2024 15:22:07 +0000 Today's links Richard R John's "Network Nation": The definitive history of the Bell System is a must-read for 21st century Big Tech trustbusters. 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. Richard R John's "Network Nation" (permalink) The telegraph and the telephone have a special place in the history and future of competition and Big Tech. After all, they were the original tech monopolists. Every discussion of tech and monopoly takes place in their shadow. Back in 2010, Tim Wu published The Master Switch, his bestselling, wildly influential history of "The Bell System" and the struggle to de-monopolize America from its first telecoms barons: https://memex.craphound.com/2010/11/01/the-master-switch-tim-net-neutrality-wu-explains-whats-at-stake-in-the-battle-for-net-freedom/ Wu is a brilliant writer and theoretician. Best known for coining the term "Net Neutrality," Wu went on to serve in both the Obama and Biden administrations as a tech trustbuster. He accomplished much in those years. Most notably, Wu wrote the 2021 executive order on competition, laying out a 72-point program for using existing powers vested in the administrative agencies to break up corporate power and get the monopolist's boot off Americans' necks: https://www.eff.org/de/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby The Competition EO is basically a checklist, and Biden's agency heads have been racing down it, ticking off box after box on or ahead of schedule, making meaningful technical changes in how companies are allowed to operate, each one designed to make material improvements to the lives of Americans. A decade and a half after its initial publication, Wu's Master Switch is still considered a canonical account of how the phone monopoly was built – and dismantled. But somewhat lost in the shadow of The Master Switch is another book, written by the accomplished telecoms historian Richard R John: "Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications," published a year after The Master Switch: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674088139 Network Nation flew under my radar until earlier this year, when I found myself speaking at an antitrust conference where both John and Wu were also on the bill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VNivXjrU3A During John's panel – "Case Studies: AT&T & IBM" – he took a good-natured dig at Wu's book, claiming that Wu, not being an historian, had been taken in by AT&T's own self-serving lies about its history. Wu – also on the panel – didn't dispute it, either. That was enough to prick my interest. I ordered a copy of Network Nation and put it on my suitcase during my vacation earlier this month. Network Nation is an extremely important, brilliantly researched, deep history of America's love/hate affair with not just the telephone, but also the telegraph. It is unmistakably as history book, one that aims at a definitive takedown of various neat stories about the history of American telecommunications. As Wu writes in his New Republic review of John's book: Generally he describes the failure of competition not so much as a failure of a theory, but rather as the more concrete failure of the men running the competitors, many of whom turned out to be incompetent or unlucky. His story is more like a blow-by-blow account of why Germany lost World War II than a grand theory of why democracy is better than fascism. https://newrepublic.com/article/88640/review-network-nation-richard-john-tim-wu In other words, John thinks that the monopolies that emerged in the telegraph and then the telephone weren't down to grand forces that made them inevitable, but rather, to the errors made by regulators and the successful gambits of the telecoms barons. At many junctures, things could have gone another way. So this is a very complicated story, one that uses a series of contrasts to make the point that history is contingent and owes much to a mix of random chance and the actions of flawed human beings, and not merely great economic or historical laws. For example, John contrasts the telegraph with the telephone, posing them against one another as a kind of natural experiment in different business strategies and regulatory responses. The telegraph's early promoters, including Samuel Morse (as in "Morse code") believed that the natural way to roll out telegraph was via selling the patents to the federal government and having an agency like the post office operate it. There was a widespread view that the post office as a paragon of excellent technical management and a necessity for knitting together the large American nation. Moreover, everyone could see that when the post office partnered with private sector tech companies (like the railroads that became essential to the postal system), the private sector inevitably figured out how to gouge the American public, leading regulators to ever-more extreme measures to rein in the ripoffs. The telegraph skated close to federalization on several occasions, but kept getting snatched back from the brink, ending up instead as a privately operated system that primarily served deep-pocketed business customers. This meant that telegraph companies were forever jostling to get the right to string wires along railroad tracks and public roads, creating a "political economy" that tried to balance out highway regulators and rail barons (or play them off against each other). But the leaders of the telegraph companies were largely uninterested in "popularizing" the telegraph – that is, figuring out how ordinary people could use telegraphs in place of the hand-written letters that were the dominant form of long-distance communications at the time. By turning their backs on "popularization," telegraph companies largely freed themselves from municipal oversight, because they didn't need to get permission to string wires into every home in every major city. When the telephone emerged, its inventors and investors initially conceived of it as a tool for business as well. But while the telegraph had ushered in a boom in instantaneous, long-distance communications (for example, by joining ports and distant cities where financiers bought and sold the ports' cargo), the telephone proved far more popular as a way of linking businesses within a city limits. Brokers and financiers and businesses that were only a few blocks from one another found the telephone to be vastly superior to the system of dispatching young boys to race around urban downtowns with slips bearing messages. So from the start, the phone was much more bound up in city politics, and that only deepened with popularization, as phones worked their ways into the homes of affluent families and local merchants like druggists, who offered free phone calls to customers as a way of bringing trade through the door. That created a great number of local phone carriers, who had to fend off Bell's federally enforced patents and aldermen and city councilors who solicited bribes and favors. To make things even more complex, municipal phone companies had to fight with other sectors that wanted to fill the skies over urban streets with their own wires: streetcar lines and electrical lines. The unregulated, breakneck race to install overhead wires led to an epidemic of electrocutions and fires, and also degraded service, with rival wires interfering with phone calls. City politicians eventually demanded that lines be buried, creating another source of woe for telephone operators, who had to contend with private or quasi-private operators who acquired a monopoly over the "subways" – tunnels where all these wires eventually ended up. The telegraph system and the telephone system were very different, but both tended to monopoly, often from opposite directions. Regulations that created some competition in telegraphs extinguished competition when applied to telephones. For example, Canada federalized the regulation of telephones, with the perverse effect that everyday telephone users in cities like Toronto had much less chance of influencing telephone service than Chicagoans, whose phone carrier had to keep local politicians happy. Nominally, the Canadian Members of Parliament who oversaw Toronto's phone network were big leaguers who understood prudent regulation and were insulated from the daily corruption of municipal politics. And Chicago's aldermen were pretty goddamned corrupt. But Bell starved Toronto of phone network upgrades for years, while Chicago's gladhanding political bosses forced Chicago's phone company to build and build, until Chicago had more phone lines than all of France. Canadian MPs might have been more remote from rough-and-tumble politics, but that made them much less responsive to a random Torontonian's bitter complaint about their inability to get a phone installed. As the Toronto/Chicago story illustrates, the fact that there were so many different approaches to phone service tried in the US and Canada gives John more opportunities to contrast different business-strategies and regulations. Again, we see how there was never one rule that governments could have used if they wanted to ensure that telecoms were well-run, widely accessible, and reasonably priced. Instead, it was always "horses for courses" – different rules to counter different circumstances and gambits from telecoms operators. As John traces through the decades during which the telegraph and telephone were established in America, he draws heavily on primary sources to trace the ebb and flow of public and elite sentiment towards public ownership, regulation, and trustbusting. In John's hands, we see some of the most spectacular failures as more than a mismatch of regulatory strategy to corporate gambit – but rather as a mismatch of political will and corporate gambit. If a company's power would be best reined in by public ownership, but the political vogue is for regulation, then lawmakers end up trying to make rules for a company they should simply be buying giving to the post office to run. This makes John's history into a history of the Gilded Age and trustbusters. Notorious vulture capitalists like Jay Gould shocked the American conscience by declaring that businesses had no allegiance to the public good, and were put on this Earth to make as much money as possible no matter what the consequences. Gould repeated "raided" Western Union, acquiring shares and forcing the company to buy him out at a premium to end his harassment of the board and the company's managers. By the time the feds were ready to buy out Western Union, Gould was a massive shareholder, meaning that any buyout of the telegraph would make Gould infinitely wealthier, at public expense, in a move that would have been electoral poison for the lawmakers who presided over it. In this highly contingent way, Western Union lived on as a private company. Americans – including prominent businesspeople who would be considered "conservatives" by today's standards, were deeply divided on the question of monopoly. The big, successful networks of national telegraph lines and urban telephone lines were marvels, and it was easy to see how they benefited from coordinated management. Monopolists and their apologists weaponized this public excitement about telecoms to defend their monopolies, insisting that their achievement owed its existence to the absence of "wasteful competition." The economics of monopoly were still nascent. Ideas like "network effects" (where the value of a service increases as it adds users) were still controversial, and the bottlenecks posed by telephone switching and human operators meant that the cost of adding new subscribers sometimes went up as the networks grew, in a weird diseconomy of scale. Patent rights were controversial, especially patents related to natural phenomena like magnetism and electricity, which were viewed as "natural forces" and not "inventions." Business leaders and rabble-rousers alike decried patents as a federal grant of privilege, leading to monopoly and its ills. Telecoms monopolists – telephone and telegraph alike – had different ways to address this sentiment at different times (for example, the Bell System's much-vaunted commitment to "universal service" was part of a campaign to normalize the idea of federally protected, privately owned monopolies). Most striking about this book were the parallels to contemporary fights over Big Tech trustbusting, in our new Gilded Age. Many of the apologies offered for Western Union or AT&T's monopoly could have been uttered by the Renfields who carry water for Facebook, Apple and Google. John's book is a powerful and engrossing reminder that variations on these fights have occurred in the not-so-distant past, and that there's much we can learn from them. Wu isn't wrong to say that John is engaging with a lot of minutae, and that this makes Network Nation a far less breezy read than Master Switch. I get the impression that John is writing first for other historians, and writers of popular history like Wu, in a bid to create the definitive record of all the complexity that is elided when we create tidy narratives of telecoms monopolies, and tech monopolies in general. Bringing Network Nation on my vacation as a beach-read wasn't the best choice – it demands a lot of serious attention. But it amply rewards that attention, too, and makes an indelible mark on the reader. Hey look at this (permalink) Inside the Mafia of Pharma Pricing https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/inside-the-mafia-of-pharma-pricing Panquake Me https://pnqk.me (h/t Sean O'Brien) Cory Doctorow: Reckoning https://locusmag.com/2024/07/cory-doctorow-reckoning/ This day in history (permalink) #20yrsago Walkmen changed our social norms https://web.archive.org/web/20040803222231/http://www.belleville.com/mld/belleville/entertainment/music/9144361.htm #20yrsago Ultima preservation efforts: a guide https://web.archive.org/web/20040721014058/http://www.nelson.monkey.org/~nelson/weblog/culture/games/ultimaPreservation.html #15yrsago ATMs that spray attackers with pepper-spray https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jul/12/south-africa-cash-machine-pepper-spray #10yrsago TSA employee to security theater skeptics: “You don’t have shit for rights” https://memex.craphound.com/2014/07/18/tsa-employee-to-security-theater-skeptics-you-dont-have-shit-for-rights/ #10yrsago Documentary on the making of the Homeland audiobook with Wil Wheaton https://vimeo.com/100956787 #10yrsago Ontario police’s Big Data assigns secret guilt to people looking for jobs, crossing borders https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/police-chiefs-call-for-presumed-innocence-in-background-checks/article_f479a149-f184-5824-80ee-0427abfe4b71.html #10yrsago UK government “dries out” its “water damaged” CIA torture files https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10969535/Lost-US-extraordinary-rendition-files-have-dried-out-Foreign-Office-says.html #5yrsago SAMBA versus SMB: Adversarial interoperability is judo for network effects https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/samba-versus-smb-adversarial-interoperability-judo-network-effects #5yrsago An Indian research university has assembled 73 million journal articles (without permission) and is offering the archive for unfettered scientific text-mining https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/18/an-indian-research-university-has-assembled-73-million-journal-articles-without-permission-and-is-offering-the-archive-for-unfettered-scientific-text-mining/ #5yrsago How deceptive browser extensions snaffled up 4m users’ browsing history, including Nest videos, medical history and tax returns https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/07/dataspii-inside-the-debacle-that-dished-private-data-from-apple-tesla-blue-origin-and-4m-people/ #5yrsago Thousands of elderly Hong Kongers march in solidarity with young human rights activists https://hongkongfp.com/2019/07/17/no-rioters-tyrannical-regime-thousands-hong-kong-seniors-march-support-young-extradition-law-protesters/ #5yrsago Interactive map of public facial recognition systems in America https://www.banfacialrecognition.com/map/ #5yrsago Sony’s copyright bots remove a band’s own release of its new video https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/18/sonys-copyright-bots-remove-a-bands-own-release-of-its-new-video/ #1yrago Let the Platforms Burn https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/18/urban-wildlife-interface/#combustible-walled-gardens Upcoming appearances (permalink) Exile in Bookville, (Chicago), July 20 https://exileinbookville.com/events/39808 American Association of Law Libraries keynote (Chicago), Jul 21 https://www.aallnet.org/conference/agenda/keynote-speaker/ Defcon 32 (Las Vegas), Aug 8-11 https://shop.defcon.org/products/def-con-32-las-vegas-convention-center Albacon (Albuquerque/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: Currently writing: Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay. Today's progress: 801 words (22449 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: The reason you can't buy a car is the same reason that your health insurer let hackers dox you https://craphound.com/news/2024/06/30/the-reason-you-cant-buy-a-car-is-the-same-reason-that-your-health-insurer-let-hackers-dox-you/ 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: Pluralistic: Bowen McCurdy and Jordan Morris's "Youth Group" (16 Jul 2024)
Tue, 16 Jul 2024 10:34:04 +0000 Today's links Bowen McCurdy and Jordan Morris's "Youth Group": A fabulous graphic novel of applied demonology and Sunday school. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2009, 2014, 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. Bowen McCurdy and Jordan Morris's "Youth Group" (permalink) Youth Group is Bowen McCurdy and Jordan Morris's new and delightful graphic novel from Firstsecond. It's a charming tale of 1990s ennui, cringe Sunday School – and demon hunting. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250789235/youthgroup Kay is a bitter, cynical teenager who's doing her best to help her mother cope with an ugly divorce that has seen her dad check out on his former family. Mom is going back to church, and she talks Kay into coming along with her to attend the church youth group. This is set in the 1990s, and the word "cringe" hasn't yet entered our lexicon as an adjective, but boy is the youth group cringe. The pastor is a guitar-strumming bearded dad who demonstrates how down he is with the kids by singing top 40 songs rewritten with evangelical lyrics (think Weird Al meets the 700 Club). Kay gamely struggles through a session and even makes a friend or two, and agrees to keep attending in deference to her mother's pleas. But this is no ordinary youth group. Kay's ultra-boring suburban hometown is actually infested with demons who routinely possess the townspeople, and that baseline of demonic activity has suddenly gone critical, with a new wave of possessions. Suddenly, the possessed are everywhere – even Kay's shitty dad ends up with a demon inside of him. That's when Kay discovers that the youth group and its corny pastor are also demon hunters par excellence. Their rec-rooms sport secret cubbies filled with holy weapons, and the words of exorcism come as readily to them as any embarrassing rewritten devotional pop song. Kay's discovery of this secret world convinces her that youth group isn't so bad after all, and soon she is initiated into its mysteries, including the existence of rival demon-hunting kids from the local synagogue, Catholic church, and Wiccan coven. As the nature of the new demonic incursion becomes clearer, it falls on Kay and her pals to overcome these sectarian divisions over the protests of their guitar-strumming, magic-wielding leader. That takes on a special urgency when Kay learns why the demons are interested in her, personally, and a handful of other kids in town who all share a secret trait. I confess that as someone who lived through the 1990s as a young man, there is something disorienting about experiencing the decade of my young adulthood through the kind of retro lens I associate with the 1950s or 1960s. But while the experience is disorienting, it's not unpleasant. McCurdy's artwork and Morris's snappy dialog conjure up that bygone decade in a way that is simultaneously affectionate and critical, exposing the hollowness of its performative ennui and the brave face that performance represented even as the world was being swept up in corporate gigantism. McCurdy and Morris are really onto something here, implicitly asking us why the 1990s gave us Buffy and Sabrina (and The Coven, etc etc) – what was it about that decade in which Reaganomics and globalism consolidated the gains of the 1980s, where the climate emergency took on its undeniable urgency, where media monopolies mastered the art of commodifying counterculture faster than it could mutate into new forms? Morris's writing really shines here. If you enjoyed Bubble, his earlier outing based on the post-apocalyptic comedy podcast of the same name, you will love this one: https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/21/podcasting-as-a-visual-medium/#huntr Morris is also half of Jordan, Jesse Go!, the long-running podcast where he and Jesse Thorn do a weekly ha-ha-only-serious goofball schtick that never fails to smuggle in really clever and insightful ideas amidst the poop jokes. https://maximumfun.org/podcasts/jordan-jesse-go/ John Hodgman calls nostalgia a "toxic impulse." Church Group deftly avoids nostalgia's trap, managing to be a period piece without falling prey to the Happy Days pathology of ignoring the many flaws and problems of its era. And of course, it's a hoot and a blast. Hey look at this (permalink) The coming storm, part 2 https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/07/the-coming-storm-part-2.html Horrible UX: Selecting Time Zone in Google & Apple Calendar https://www.gregoryschmidt.ca/writing/timezone-ux-problems Brazilian Star Wars – Mashup by FAROFF https://soundcloud.com/miqulino/brazilian-star-wars This day in history (permalink) #15yrsago Britain will subject everyone who works with kids to multiple, repeated police-checkshttps://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/07/false_positives.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/07/false_positives.html #10yrsago Australian bill will put journos in prison for 10 years for reporting leaks https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/16/journalists-face-jail-leaks-security-laws #10yrsago NY DA says he won’t prosecute minor drug possession; NYPD officers ordered to go on arresting https://www.techdirt.com/2014/07/16/nypd-tells-brooklyn-officers-to-continue-making-low-level-drug-arrests-da-has-stated-he-wont-prosecute/ #10yrsago Fake TSA screener infiltrates SFO checkpoint, gropes women https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/Fake-screener-probes-passengers-at-SFO-5626732.php #10yrsago Google Plus drops “Real Names” policy https://web.archive.org/web/20140717024719/https://plus.google.com/+googleplus/posts/V5XkYQYYJqy #10yrsago New Mexico threatens inmate with 90 days’ solitary because his family made him a Facebook page https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/07/new-mexico-inmate-faces-90-days-solitary-over-facebook-profile #10yrsago Yet another TSA screener doesn’t know that DC is part of America https://web.archive.org/web/20140715200126/https://www.wftv.com/news/news/local/orlando-tsa-agents-getting-geography-refresher/ngfmH/ #5yrsago How F Scott Fitzgerald conjugated the verb “To cocktail” https://www.openculture.com/2015/06/f-scott-fitzgerald-conjugates-to-cocktail.html #5yrsago When Trump’s #TaxScam meant that affluent people no longer had to use the paid version of Turbotax, Turbotax started charging poor people, disabled people, students and elderly people https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-tax-law-threatened-turbotax-profits-started-charging-disabled-unemployed-and-students#164493 #5yrsago Tennessee police to drug users: don’t flush your dope or you’ll create “meth gators” https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tennessee-police-warn-locals-not-flush-drugs-fear-meth-gators-n1030291 #5yrsago Read: Trump’s grandfather’s letter, in which he begs not to be deported https://harpers.org/archive/2017/03/the-emigrants/ #5yrsago Lessons from testing decades of forgotten rape kits: serial rapists are common, they don’t follow a pattern, they’re not very bright, and they’re often the same men who commit acquaintance rape https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/an-epidemic-of-disbelief/592807/ #5yrsago In 1943, the chairman of the NY Fed backed Modern Monetary Theory: “Taxes for Revenue Are Obsolete” https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/16/in-1943-the-chairman-of-the-ny-fed-backed-modern-monetary-theory-taxes-for-revenue-are-obsolete/ #5yrsago How To: play Vlad Taltos in an RPG https://annarchive.com/files/Drmg220.pdf#[{"num"%3A197%2C"gen"%3A0}%2C{"name"%3A"Fit"}] #5yrsago Podcast: Occupy Gotham https://ia903008.us.archive.org/30/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_303/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_303_-_Occupy_Gotham.mp3 #5yrsago Many of the key Googler Uprising organizers have quit, citing retaliation from senior management https://googlewalkout.medium.com/onward-another-googlewalkout-goodbye-b733fa134a7d Upcoming appearances (permalink) Exile in Bookville, (Chicago), July 20 https://exileinbookville.com/events/39808 American Association of Law Libraries keynote (Chicago), Jul 21 https://www.aallnet.org/conference/agenda/keynote-speaker/ Defcon 32 (Las Vegas), Aug 8-11 https://shop.defcon.org/products/def-con-32-las-vegas-convention-center Albacon (Albuquerque/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: Currently writing: Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay. Today's progress: 766 words (21648 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: The reason you can't buy a car is the same reason that your health insurer let hackers dox you https://craphound.com/news/2024/06/30/the-reason-you-cant-buy-a-car-is-the-same-reason-that-your-health-insurer-let-hackers-dox-you/ 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: Pluralistic: Foxx Nolte's "Hidden History of Walt Disney World" (15 Jul 2024)
Mon, 15 Jul 2024 12:50:42 +0000 Today's links Foxx Nolte's "Hidden History of Walt Disney World": The rough edges are more interesting than the polished surfaces. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2004, 2009, 2014, 2019, 2024 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. Foxx Nolte's "Hidden History of Walt Disney World" (permalink) No one writes about Disney theme parks like Foxx Nolte; no one rises above the trivia and goes beyond the mere sleuthing of historical facts, no one nails the essence of what makes these parks work – and fail. I first encountered Nolte through her blog, Passport to Dreams Old and New, where her writing transformed the way I viewed the project of these giant, elaborate built environments. It was through articles like this one – about the sightlines from bathrooms! – that I came to truly understand what design criticism means: https://passport2dreams.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-awkward-transitions-of-disneyland.html While her work on queue design transformed how I thought about waiting, scarce-goods allocation, and the psychology of anticipation and desire: https://passport2dreams.blogspot.com/2010/12/third-queue.html But I really knew her for a kindred spirit when I read her masterful analysis of the historical context and enduring power of the Haunted Mansion: https://passport2dreams.blogspot.com/2010/05/history-and-haunted-mansion.html A decade after that Haunted Mansion post, Nolte published the definitive history of the Haunted Mansions, Boundless Realm, the very best book ever written on the subject: https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/09/boundless-realm/#fuxxfur This year, Nolte came back with another short, smart, endlessly fascinating history of Disney World, Hidden History of Walt Disney World: https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/products/9781467156189 There are many histories of Walt Disney World, but none are quite like this. Nolte – who worked at the park for many years – combines her insider's view with her deep historical knowledge and yields up a "hidden history" that will forever change how I look at the built environment and the natural landscape it sits atop. The path to Walt Disney World – an entertainment juggernaut that occupies a landmass twice the size of Manhattan – was anything but smooth. Its original design – Walt's design – barely survived groundbreaking, dying with Walt himself. Walt's successor, his brother Roy, used the occasion of Walt's death to assert his long-contested dominance over the park, drastically scaling back Walt's ambition for a bizarre residential/utopian community and replacing it with a kind of deluxe Disneyland with the idea of limiting the company's financial risk by re-creating a pre-existing, sure thing money-maker. But Roy died within a few years of Walt, and the company transitioned from a family business to a managerial one, its direction set by executives who weren't named "Disney." These managers were just as flawed as the Disney brothers, but in much different ways (one long-serving CEO insisted that Disney should stay out of the hotel business, leaving billions on the table for contractors and third parties. Of course, all of this is happening in Florida, and many of Nolte's funniest, juciest stories play Walt, then Roy, then various CEOs and execs off of flamboyant locals straight out of a Carl Hiaasen novel. In Nolte's capable hands, the many acres of Disney property come alive with the ghosts of Florida eccentrics and conmen who play against the deeply weird Disney brothers and their baffled corporate successors. The history of Walt Disney World is also a history of the American narrative from the 1960s to the turn of the millennium, especially once Epcot enters the picture and Disney sets out to market itself as a futuristic mirror to America and the world. There's a doomed plan to lead the nation in the provision of an airport for the largely hypothetical short runway aircraft that never materialized, the Disney company's love-hate affair with Florida's orange growers, and the geopolitics of installing a permanent World's Fair, just as World's Fairs were disappearing from the world stage. With Disney in disarray, corporate raiders smelled blood, and the company found itself on the brink of leveraged buyout hell, triggering another change in corporate leadership with the arrival of Michael Eisner. Nolte's portrait of Eisner is far more nuanced than the presentation in rival histories, surfacing his many forgotten gaffes – but also giving him credit where it was due. When the dust settles on the Eisner era, Disney has more theme parks in one place than can possibly be justified – in an America where workers get almost no paid vacation days, building more theme parks does not extend visitors' stays. It only adds to the expense of keeping those guests entertained during those brief, flitting visits. The Disney empire is rooted in contradictions. The Disney brothers cordially loathed one another and the company split into "Walt people" and "Roy people" who schemed against one another in secret and sometimes even erupted into open conflict. There's something Hegelian about the Walt/Roy split: Walt went bust trying to run a creative empire that ignored the financials, and fled the ashes of his first venture to work with Roy in California. Roy disciplined Walt with financial rigor, often to excess. When the company emerged from WWII with its outside shareholders in charge, Roy became their champion and Walt's tormentor, with the ability to exercise a firm veto when he couldn't win the day through moral suasion. Walt sought escape from his brother, proposing a series of ill-starred ventures that eventually became Disneyland. First, he proposed that he would transform his backyard ride 'em train-set into a public attraction that he would personally oversee, so that he wouldn't have to go to the office and let his brother boss him around. Then he proposed buying a locomotive and fitting out a train of railcars with exhibits promoting Disney movies, which he, personally, would drive around America, far from his brother. Finally, he hit on Disneyland, poaching the company's best animators for a separate firm that Roy was eventually forced to buy from Walt in order to bring it back into the corporate fold. These power struggles, in which Roy first took orders from Walt, before turning the tables, only to have them turned again, culminated in the uneasy detente that characterized the era from Disneyland's opening to Walt's death. Working with his brother may have made Walt miserable, but he evidently saw the benefit in this Hegelian dialectic, because he became infamous for putting together creative teams who were forever at each other's throats. The storied Sherman Brothers – Disney's star songwriting team – barely tolerated each other. The titans of early Imagineering were often at odds, and Walt took seemingly sadistic glee in forcing artists who disliked one another to work on joint projects. In focusing on the conflicts between different corporate managers, outside suppliers, and the gloriously flamboyant weirdos of Florida, Nolte's history of Disney World transcends amusing anaecdotes and tittle-tattle – rather, it illustrates how the creative sparks thrown off by people smashing into each other sometimes created towering blazes of glory that burn to this day. Hey look at this (permalink) “The Wonderful Power of Storytelling,” by Bruce Sterling, 1991 https://bruces.medium.com/the-wonderful-power-of-storytelling-by-bruce-sterling-1991-9d2846c2c5df Follow the Crypto https://www.followthecrypto.org New firefox "Website Advertising Preferences" https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1e1dim5/new_firefox_website_advertising_preferences/ This day in history (permalink) #20yrsago Differences between WorldCon and the DNC https://www.mcfi.org/noreascon4/not-the-dnc.html #15yrsago Top Shelf Jazz’s “Fast and Louche” — part Cab Calloway, part Atomic Fireballs, all good smutty Prohibition jazz https://memex.craphound.com/2009/07/15/top-shelf-jazzs-fast-and-louche-part-cab-calloway-part-atomic-fireballs-all-good-smutty-prohibition-jazz/ #15yrsago RIP, Phyllis Gotleib, the mother of Canadian science fiction https://memex.craphound.com/2009/07/15/rip-phyllis-gotleib-the-mother-of-canadian-science-fiction/ #15yrsago Kathe Koja’s KISSING THE BEE audiobook: betrayal and emotional whirlwinds told with originality and subtlety https://memex.craphound.com/2009/07/15/kathe-kojas-kissing-the-bee-audiobook-betrayal-and-emotional-whirlwinds-told-with-originality-and-subtlety/ #10yrsago The Shadow Hero: giving an origin story to comics’ first Asian-American superhero https://memex.craphound.com/2014/07/15/the-shadow-hero-giving-an-origin-story-to-comics-first-asian-american-superhero/ #5yrsago Ex-Fox & Friends host, accused of a Ponzi scheme that turned Indianapolis real-estate investors into slumlords, moves to Portugal https://www.indystar.com/story/news/2019/07/12/ex-fox-friends-host-clayton-morris-leaves-country-for-portugal-amid-fraud-allegations/1705521001/ #5yrsago 5G won’t fix America’s terrible broadband https://potsandpansbyccg.com/2019/07/11/will-broadband-go-wireless/?mc_cid=7a2fa307cd #5yrsago Putting a price on our data won’t make the platforms stop abusing our privacy https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/15/putting-a-price-on-our-data-wont-make-the-platforms-stop-abusing-our-privacy/ #5yrsago Presidential fundraising scorecard: who’s raising the most and who is most beholden to the ultra-wealthy and corporations? https://projects.propublica.org/itemizer/presidential-candidates/2020 #5yrsago Heirs’ property: how southern states allow white land developers to steal reconstruction-era land from Black families https://features.propublica.org/black-land-loss/heirs-property-rights-why-black-families-lose-land-south/#164706 #5yrsago The new £50 notes will feature Alan Turing (whilst HMG proposes bans on Turing complete computers AND working crypto) https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/15/the-new-50-notes-will-feature-alan-turing-whilst-hmg-proposes-bans-on-turing-complete-computers-and-working-crypto/ #1yrago Linkty Dumpty https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/15/in-the-dumps/#what-vacation Upcoming appearances (permalink) Exile in Bookville, (Chicago), July 20 https://exileinbookville.com/events/39808 American Association of Law Libraries keynote (Chicago), Jul 21 https://www.aallnet.org/conference/agenda/keynote-speaker/ Defcon 32 (Las Vegas), Aug 8-11 https://shop.defcon.org/products/def-con-32-las-vegas-convention-center Albacon (Albuquerque/remote), Sep 13-15 https://albacon.org/2024/ Tuscon (Tuscon), 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: 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: The reason you can't buy a car is the same reason that your health insurer let hackers dox you https://craphound.com/news/2024/06/30/the-reason-you-cant-buy-a-car-is-the-same-reason-that-your-health-insurer-let-hackers-dox-you/ 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