Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Pluralistic: Excuseflation (11 Mar 2023)

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 11 Mar 2023 14:18:51 +0000

Today's links

Excuseflation: Monopolists will never let a good emergency go to waste. +
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. +
This day in history: 2003, 2008, 2013, 2018, 2022 +
Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading +

Excuseflation (permalink)

The decision to pass modest sums out to working people to prevent them from starving or losing their homes during the covid lockdowns made the right furious, especially inflation hawks who insist that any improvement in everyday people's material lives will transform America into an amateur revival of Weimar, complete with wheelbarrows full of useless bank-notes.

"Democrats" like Larry Summers – a Clintonite ghoul who is on record as saying that women are biologically incapable of doing science – insisted that preserving workers' living standards was a terrible mistake, only prolonging the inevitable day when they would be shoveled into the furnace that keeps The Economy running.

And indeed, the lockdowns were followed by a series of price rises. Some of these were obviously the result of capacity problems:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/01/factories-to-condos-pipeline/#stuff-not-money

Cars got more expensive because panicked car executives canceled their microchip orders. That's a problem, because they redesigned our cars to be mobile surveillance platforms stuffed full of anti-repair digital locks, which means that cars need dozens of chips just to function:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

As a result, fully assembled, chipless cars piled up in warehouses around the world, inert and immobile, awaiting the breath of life to be kindled by semiconductors. At one point, car makers even bought up washing machines to shell them for the chips inside, discarding the husk of the machine:

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/desperate-times-companies-buy-washing-machines-just-to-rip-out-the-chips-187033.html

With fewer cars being made, and some cars being scrapped or retired, there was more demand than supply, and car prices rose, temporarily. This is obviously a capacity problem, not a demand problem. Working people don't cause capacity problems. Bosses do: by selling off buffer stocks, eliminating redundancies and safety margins, and chasing lax labor and environmental regulations to the corners of the world, stretching out supply chains across vast distances.

But not all the price rises were temporary, nor could they all be attributed to supply shocks. Reporters who tuned into earnings calls from large, monopolistic packaged goods companies like Colgate-Palmolive, Unilever and Procter and Gamble were amazed to hear CEOs and CFOs boasting about how they were able to use the excuse of inflation to raise prices:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/20/quiet-part-out-loud/#profiteering

Talk about saying the quiet part out loud! Here's the eminently guillotineable Colgate CEO Noel Wallace: "What we are very good at is pricing." Or the tumbril-ready Kroger CEO Gary Millerchip: "We’ve been very comfortable with our ability to pass on the increases that we’ve seen at this point, and we would expect that to continue to be the case."

Despite the CEOs literally boasting in public about how they were able to raise prices far in excess of any increase in their costs and rake in windfall profits, neoclassic economists kept pushing their perfectly spherical cows of uniform density around on their frictionless planes, insisting that the models predicted that this was impossible, therefore it wasn't happening.

Specifically, establishment economists claimed that since market concentration hadn't increased significantly over two years, that the inflation seen over that point couldn't be blamed on monopolies. But as Hal Singer wrote, that's not how monopolies raise prices: they wait for excuses to price-gouge, and then they use their market power to make us all poorer:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/02/its-the-economy-stupid/#overinflated

Two thirds of US companies increased their margins over the first two years of the pandemic. Prices didn't go up because poor people overspent their CARES Act money. Inflation wasn't just a matter of supply-shocks. I accuse monopolies, in the economy, with the profiteering:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/inflation-yellen-biden-price-increase-cost-shipping-supply-chain-labor-shortage-pandemic-11636934826

There is no evidence of a "wage-price spiral." Wage growth peaked in June at 4.8% and by October it had declined to 4.2%, making real wages 2.3% lower than they were in Oct 2021. As Joseph Stiglitz and Regmi Ira wrote for the Roosevelt Institute last December, "Weak unions, globalization, and changes in the structure of the economy" mean that workers generally can't demand inflation-tracking wage increases:

https://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/RI_CausesofandResponsestoTodaysInflation_Report_202212.pdf

Stiglitz and Ira lay out five causes of inflation: energy and food spikes, changes in what we want, supply interruptions, higher rents – and price-gouging (notably, none of these can be fixed by jacking up the interest rate at the central bank).

As the Stiglitz/Ira list of five causes shows, it's not just price-fixing that causes prices to go up – but every one of these causes feeds into price-fixing, thanks to a phenomenon called excuseflation, which Tracy aAlloway and Joe Weisenthal discuss in the latest OddLots podcast:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-09/corporate-earnings-calls-provide-clues-on-inflation-odd-lots-podcast

In the accompanying Bloomberg article, Alloway and Weisenthal run down innumerable examples in which executives boast about how real crises – war, climate events, blockages in the Suez Canal, bird flu – provide ready-made excuses for raising prices and then keeping them high:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-09/how-excuseflation-is-keeping-prices-and-corporate-profits-high

Take Ken Jarosch, owner of Chicago's Jarosch Bakery, who told investors, "Whether it’s rye flour, or bird flu that impacts eggs, when it makes national news, just running a business, it’s an opportunity to increase the prices without getting a whole bunch of complaining from the customers":

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-22/transcript-what-a-bakery-can-tell-us-about-the-economy-right-now

The analyst Samuel Rines describes this as a "Price Over Volume" (POV) strategy: companies know that if they raise prices, they'll sell fewer goods, because many working people won't be able to afford their products. But – thanks to inequality – these merchants can make up the losses by extracting much larger sums from the professional and managerial class.

Rines singles out several large American companies as hotspots of POV: Pepsi, Home Depot, and even discounters like Walmart and Dollar Tree. POV makes everyone worse off: low-income people are priced out of the market, and high-income people are ripped off. Only the shareholders benefit.

Take Pepsi: after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Pepsi pulled out of Russia. But its profits remained steady, because Pepsi was able to raise its prices in the rest of the world – blaming the war, of course. Rines calls this PPP: Pepsi Pricing Power. The pitchfork-friendly Pepsi CEO Ramon Laguarta describes this as "trying to create brands that can stand for higher value to consumers and consumers are willing to pay more for our brands."

https://investors.pepsico.com/docs/default-source/investors/q3-2022/q3-2022-pep_transcript_r9ltxf2sicuqx5kn.pdf

(Why don't customers switch to Coke? It turns out that duopolies like Pepsi-Coke are able to tacitly collude on pricing, and Coke is also raking in massive profits.)

UMass Amherst economists Isabella Weber and Evan Wasner call this "sellers inflation," documenting how "overlapping emergencies" allow companies to raise prices far in excess of their cost increases, and then keep them high even when the emergencies end:

https://scholarworks.umass.edu/econ_workingpaper/343/

Take Wingstop, whose chicken prices have shot up by 125% in a year, with "zero pushback from the consumer." Wholesale chicken prices are down 50%, but Wingstop's prices are still high, and its stock is up 250% from its Covid crisis low.

The power of excuseflation is that it allows apologists to, well, make excuses. When egg prices shot up in January, Big Egg was able to blame it all on bird-flu. There really was a bird-flu problem, but there's also a single company that sells all the eggs: Cal-Maine foods, a monopolist that increased its margins by 110% in a single year. Wholesale prices stabilized, but prices kept going up, and CALM's share price climbed by 47%:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/23/cant-make-an-omelet/#keep-calm-and-crack-on

CALM owns nearly every egg brand you've ever heard of: Farmhouse Eggs, Sunups, Sunny Meadow, Egg-Land’s Best and Land O’ Lakes eggs and more. When all those brands' prices shot up – conventional eggs hit $2.88/doz in Jan, a 100% increase over Jan 2022 – that was just one company raising prices.

If the price spikes were caused solely by bird flu, then you'd expect margins to fall, not rise. But bird-flu was the excuse for eggflation, not the cause.

Hey look at this (permalink)

Letter from Daniel Ellsberg, diagnosed with terminal cancer https://www.ceasefire.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/LETTER-FROM-DANIEL-ELLSBERG.pdf (h/t Gord Doctorow)

This day in history (permalink)

#20yrsago Kapor quits Groove board, reportedly over Total Info Awareness https://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/11/business/technology-software-pioneer-quits-board-of-groove.html

#15yrsago Lessig publicly humiliates Andrew Keen https://web.archive.org/web/20080313214128/http://lessig.org/blog/2008/03/there_he_goes_again_1.html

#15yrsago New-old stock of Bell Labs’s cardboard teaching computer, the CARDIAC https://web.archive.org/web/20080404064250/http://www.porticus.org/bell/belllabs_kits.html

#15yrsago HOWTO Be blogged https://web.archive.org/web/20080313153306/http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=206903066

#10yrsago Inside the awful world of RATters – the men who spy on people through their computers with “remote administration tools” https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/rat-breeders-meet-the-men-who-spy-on-women-through-their-webcams/

#10yrsago New Brazilian environmental political party based on social networking https://globalvoices.org/2013/03/09/former-brazilian-ministers-new-political-party-mixes-sustainability-social-media/

#5yrsago RIP Kate Wilhelm, science fiction great and co-founder of the Clarion Workshop https://www.facebook.com/richard.wilhelm.50/posts/10215208419699356

#5yrsago Singapore, where the government owns most of the land and housing and a stake in most business is the American right’s “capitalist ideal” https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2018/03/09/how-capitalist-is-singapore-really/

#1yrsago The SEC must not legitimize fake "carbon offsets" https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/11/a-market-for-flaming-lemons/#money-for-nothing

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: David Callahan.

Currently writing:

Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. Friday's progress: 528 words (114876 words total)
+
+
The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, WAITING FOR EDITORIAL REVIEW
+
+
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
+
+
Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. ON SUBMISSION
+
+
Moral Hazard, a short story for MIT Tech Review's 12 Tomorrows. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION
+
+
Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. ON SUBMISSION
+

Latest podcast: Twiddler https://craphound.com/news/2023/02/27/twiddler/

Upcoming appearances:

Ostrom Workshop: Beyond the Web Speaker Series, Mar 20
+https://events.iu.edu/ostromworkshop/event/806592-ostrom-workshop-beyond-the-web-speaker-series-cory
+
+
IFTF Changing the Register, Mar 22
+https://iftf.zoom.us/webinar/register/5916783211142/WN_0YsPkGH8Tk6RZ9eec_VVpg
+
+
Antitrust and Competition Conference – Beyond the Consumer Welfare Standard (Chicago), Apr 20-21
+https://www.chicagobooth.edu/research/stigler/events/2023-antitrust
+
+
Red Team Blues event with Tim Harford (Oxford), May 29
+https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cory-doctorow-red-team-blues-with-tim-harford-tickets-574673793787
+

Recent appearances:

Roskom Svoboda Privacy Day
+https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VBXU4HVFs0
+
+
Factually With Adam Conover:
+https://www.stitcher.com/show/factually-with-adam-conover/episode/choke-point-capitalism-with-cory-doctorow-300308750
+
+
Making Big Tech Better vs Making it Smaller (Brussels Antitrust Conference):
+https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjE-RpOR5FU&t=2744s
+

Latest books:

"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 (print edition: https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907) (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:

Red Team Blues: "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books, April 2023
+
+
The Internet Con: A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech, Verso, September 2023
+
+
The Lost Cause: a post-Green New Deal eco-topian novel about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias, Tor Books, November 2023
+

This work 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.

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

Pluralistic: The Right accuses their critics of the conspiracy they themselves engage in (10 Mar 2023)

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 10 Mar 2023 13:55:11 +0000

Today's links

The Right accuses their critics of the conspiracy they themselves engage in: Teneo works exactly like their claims about the nonexistent Vast Leftist Conspiracy. +
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. +
This day in history: 2003, 2008, 2018. +
Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading +

The Right accuses their critics of the conspiracy they themselves engage in (permalink)

People on the right have some really weird ideas about their ideological enemies: that we're "groomers," that we're secretly on some billionaire's payroll, that we hijacked the education system to promulgate revisionist histories, that we steal elections, and, of course, that we are secretly plotting to take over America and subjugate them.

The weirdest thing about this is that it's the right that engages in revisionist race-history:

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/the-myth-of-the-happy-slave-explained

And it's the right who stole a presidency:

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

Election-rigging is a right-wing specialty:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/23/state-of-play/#patchwork

It's the right who pay for fake grassroots activism:

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/raising-them-right-far-right-fight-college-campus-1234636392/

Any time some right-wing politician comes out against queers and calls them groomers, chances are good that he's spending his free time on Instagram, sending fire emojis to naked boys:

https://www.ibtimes.sg/randy-mcnally-tennessees-anti-lgbtq-lt-gov-caught-liking-commenting-young-gay-mans-racy-69364

That's especially true when we're talking about evangelical youth pastors:

https://www.newsweek.com/full-list-texas-pastors-charged-abusing-children-1765910

It's almost like that old playground rebuttal, "I know you are but what am I?" contains a deep political truth:

https://doctorow.medium.com/takes-one-to-know-one-104d7d749408

Of all the absurd libels of the right, the weirdest one is that leftists are secretly funded by woke billionaires spending dark money to foment the overthrow of the USA. The idea of "leftist billionaire" is laughable on its face: how did this imaginary billionaire make their billions while paying a living wage and providing decent working conditions?

But it's easy to understand how a group of people who are so positively aslosh in dark money – people whose every political maneuver is a carefully planned scheme to separate terrified xenophobes and rubes from their money – for "alternative" covid therapies, apocalypse-ready MREs, "sound money" gold coins, and so. much. culture. war. nonsense.

What I'm trying to say is: when the right accuses the left of being driven by cabals of shadowy, crepulent billionaires and their pathetic lickspittle Renfields, it is because the right is indeed in the thrall of those crepulent billionaires.

Meet Leonard Leo, a crepulent, shadowy billionaire. Leo was last seen around these parts when he was revealed to have been the bagman behind the ultradark money group Judicial Crisis Network. After spending $27m to block confirmation for Obama's SCOTUS pick, Merrick Garland, they spent tens of millions more on campaigns to seat Kavanaugh and Gorsuch. Coney Barrett was seated thanks to a $15.9m campaign to make an unqualified, unhinged ideologue seem like a viable lifetime member of the highest court in the land:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/29/betcha-cant-eat-just-one/#pwnage

Leo controls the Judicial Crisis Network, which worked with the Federalist Society to allow Trump to appoint a whopping 28% of all US federal judges – lifetime appointments for slavering Renfields who'll follow his political lead. Witness the firepower of a fully operational billionaire.

Leo's post-Trump side-hustle is a "Federalist Society for everything" – a secretive, lavishly funded cabal aimed at taking over campuses, corporations, news outlets with an army of "under 40s" conservative operatives. It's called Teneo, and it was a secret – until its internal memos, videos and other materials leaked to Propublica.

Propublica's Andy Kroll and Andrea Bernstein collaborated with Documented's Nick Surgey to report out the leaks, describing how Teneo when from "a dinner club with partisan overtones" to a dark-money juggernaut whose annual donations grew by leaps and bounds (2017, $750k; 2020, $2.3m; 2021, $5m):

https://www.propublica.org/article/leonard-leo-teneo-videos-documents

These financial good fortunes are not the result of excited small-money donors hoping to help Teneo with its good works – it's a handful of ultra-wealthy sociopaths hoping to use a minority of willing lackeys to project their will over all of us.

Teneo's network members are a Monster's Manual of the wildest wingnuts in public life, from Josh Hawley (who wrote its founding manifesto) to JD Vance to Elise Stefanik to BenShapiro to three of Ron DeSantis's top aides. Also: federal judge who struck down Biden's mask mandate and the heads of the Republican Attorneys General Association, Republican State Leadership Committee and Turning Point USA.

The stated goal of Teneo founder Evan Baehr (a tech bro turned conservative organizer) was for Teneo members to infiltrate "the House and the Senate, as governors — one might be elected president."

In a leaked video, Baehr identifies the "woke" enemy he seeks to vanquish, describing a hypothetical meeting between "a billionaire hedge funder, a film producer, a Harvard professor and a New York Times writer." These four cook up a plan to give middle-school kids "free access to sex-change therapy paid for by the federal government." The filmmaker promises to make a documentary to support the project. The Harvard professor promises to falsify studies to reassure people that the therapies are safe. The Times reporter vows to "profile people who feel trapped in the wrong gender."

This irony is that this unhinged conspiratorialism was hatched by someone who was and is actively conspiring to take over the country with members of his secret society. After years in the wilderness, Baehr connected with Leo, who turned on the money spigots. Together, they recruited an "inner core" of FedSoc members "and recruit[ed] them for either specific roles to serve as judges or to spin up and launch critical projects."

Other shadowy billionaires piled in: Home Depot's trumpy founder Bernie Marcus, Charles Koch, and Betsy DeVos and her family. The new "Teneo 2.0" sought to "to help members find jobs, write books, meet spouses, secure start-up financing or nonprofit donors and learn about public service."

Their vision is to create "Silicon Valley of Conservatism — a powerful network of communities where the most influential young leaders, the biggest ideas, and the most leveraged resources come together to launch key projects that advance our shared belief that the conservative worldview drives human flourishing."

They funnel money to speakers from the absolute depths of the swamp: Erik "Blackwater" Prince, David Brooks, Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy. New members are assured that their involvement with Teneo is "private and confidential" and the group has kept a low profile – Propublica asked Sheldon Whitehouse – a bitter critic of Leo's – about the group and got a blank stare.

Teneo's latest project is to recruit "state attorneys general, state financial officers, state legislators, journalists, media executives and best-in-class public affairs professionals" to fight ESG policies – all the froth you've encountered about the evils of ESG are the result of this secret, coordinated project.

(To be clear, ESG is bullshit, but not because it's bad for capitalism – ESG is a dumpster fire of greenwashing:)

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/15/sanctions-financing/#profiteers

Teneo organizes donors for members who run for local, state and federal office. Will Scharf, who's hoping to become Missouri's next attorney general, has received donations from dozens of Teneo members, giving the maximum allowable donation of $2650.

The paranoid style in American politics never went away. From the Witchfinders General of New England to Joe McCarthy and the John Birch Society, there has always been a rump of Americans who are very rich and very frightened and who want to put us all in their place.

For these fevered schemers, the Jack Chick tracts that depicted secret Satanic societies seducing innocent kids through Dungeons and Dragons games were hard-hitting documentaries, and as far as they're concerned, they're fighting fire with fire.

(Image: Jack Chick, Tendeo; fair use)

Hey look at this (permalink)

How Three Mergers Buttressed Google’s Ad Tech Monopoly, Per DOJ https://techpolicy.press/how-three-mergers-buttressed-googles-ad-tech-monopoly-per-doj/
+
+
HP outrages printer users with firmware update suddenly bricking third-party ink https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/03/customers-fume-as-hp-blocks-third-party-ink-from-more-of-its-printers/ (h/t Slashdot)
+
+
Silicon Valley Bank scrambles to reassure clients after 60% stock wipe-out https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/silicon-valley-bank-sell-stock-cope-with-cash-burn-2023-03-09/ (h/t Chris Brown)
+

This day in history (permalink)

#20yrsago Google notes from SXSW https://cruftbox.com/blog/archives/000592.html#000592

#15yrsago Rules against questioning security make us less secure https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/mar/11/politics.hitechcrime

#15yrsago Presidential candidates as Monster Manual monsters https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2008/03/politics_as_she_is_played.html

#15yrsago Canada’s DMCA: unnecessary, ill-starred and doomed https://web.archive.org/web/20080313025527/http://www.charlieangus.net/newsitem.php?id=301

#15yrsago Schneier: transparency is not security https://www.wired.com/2008/03/securitymatters-0306/

#15yrsago Maximum City: exhausting and beautiful love-note to Mumbai https://memex.craphound.com/2008/03/10/maximum-city-exhausting-and-beautiful-love-note-to-mumbai/

#15yrsago FBI interrogator: Torture doesn’t work, breeds terrorism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvsvO9kvSdo

#5yrsago Bad news: Omega 3s don’t confer any significant health benefits; good news: They’re mostly harmless https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/2670752

#5yrsago Wikimedia’s transparency report is a joy https://diff.wikimedia.org/2018/03/06/wikimedia-releases-eighth-transparency-report/

#5yrsago Thinking in Bets: a poker-master’s Jedi mind-trick for being less wrong https://memex.craphound.com/2018/03/10/thinking-in-bets-a-poker-masters-jedi-mind-trick-for-being-less-wrong/

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Eric Umansky (https://twitter.com/ericuman).

Currently writing:

Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. Yesterday's progress: 514 words (114348 words total)
+
+
The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, WAITING FOR EDITORIAL REVIEW
+
+
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
+
+
Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. ON SUBMISSION
+
+
Moral Hazard, a short story for MIT Tech Review's 12 Tomorrows. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION
+
+
Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. ON SUBMISSION
+

Latest podcast: Twiddler https://craphound.com/news/2023/02/27/twiddler/

Upcoming appearances:

SXSW Chokepoint Capitalism reading (Austin), Mar 10
+https://schedule.sxsw.com/2023/events/PP1143284
+
+
Ostrom Workshop: Beyond the Web Speaker Series, Mar 20
+https://events.iu.edu/ostromworkshop/event/806592-ostrom-workshop-beyond-the-web-speaker-series-cory
+
+
Antitrust and Competition Conference – Beyond the Consumer Welfare Standard (Chicago), Apr 20-21
+https://www.chicagobooth.edu/research/stigler/events/2023-antitrust
+
+
Red Team Blues event with Tim Harford (Oxford), May 29
+https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cory-doctorow-red-team-blues-with-tim-harford-tickets-574673793787
+

Recent appearances:

Roskom Svoboda Privacy Day
+https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VBXU4HVFs0
+
+
Factually With Adam Conover:
+https://www.stitcher.com/show/factually-with-adam-conover/episode/choke-point-capitalism-with-cory-doctorow-300308750
+
+
Making Big Tech Better vs Making it Smaller (Brussels Antitrust Conference):
+https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjE-RpOR5FU&t=2744s
+

Latest books:

"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
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"How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59 (print edition: https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)
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+
"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
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+
"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:

Red Team Blues: "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books, April 2023
+
+
The Internet Con: A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech, Verso, September 2023
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The Lost Cause: a post-Green New Deal eco-topian novel about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias, Tor Books, November 2023
+

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Pluralistic: The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble (09 Mar 2023)

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 09 Mar 2023 17:32:05 +0000

Today's links

The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble: Someday, we're gonna feel pretty silly about our autocomplete worship. +
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. +
This day in history: 2003, 2008, 2013, 2018, 2022 +
Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading +

The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble (permalink)

Back in 2017 Long Island Ice Tea – known for its undistinguished, barely drinkable sugar-water – changed its name to "Long Blockchain Corp." Its shares surged to a peak of 400% over their pre-announcement price. The company announced no specific integrations with any kind of blockchain, nor has it made any such integrations since.

LBCC was subsequently delisted from NASDAQ after settling with the SEC over fraudulent investor statements. Today, the company trades over the counter and its market cap is $36m, down from $138m.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/textbook-case-of-crypto-hype-how-iced-tea-company-went-blockchain-and-failed-despite-a-289-percent-stock-rise

The most remarkable thing about this incredibly stupid story is that LBCC wasn't the peak of the blockchain bubble – rather, it was the start of blockchain's final pump-and-dump. By the standards of 2022's blockchain grifters, LBCC was small potatoes, a mere $138m sugar-water grift.

They didn't have any NFTs, no wash trades, no ICO. They didn't have a Superbowl ad. They didn't steal billions from mom-and-pop investors while proclaiming themselves to be "Effective Altruists." They didn't channel hundreds of millions to election campaigns through straw donations and other forms of campaing finance frauds. They didn't even open a crypto-themed hamburger restaurant where you couldn't buy hamburgers with crypto:

https://robbreport.com/food-drink/dining/bored-hungry-restaurant-no-cryptocurrency-1234694556/

They were amateurs. Their attempt to "make fetch happen" only succeeded for a brief instant. By contrast, the superpredators of the crypto bubble were able to make fetch happen over an improbably long timescale, deploying the most powerful reality distortion fields since Pets.com.

Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. We're told that trillions of dollars' worth of crypto has been wiped out over the past year, but these losses are nowhere to be seen in the real economy – because the "wealth" that was wiped out by the crypto bubble's bursting never existed in the first place.

Like any Ponzi scheme, crypto was a way to separate normies from their savings through the pretense that they were "investing" in a vast enterprise – but the only real money ("fiat" in cryptospeak) in the system was the hardscrabble retirement savings of working people, which the bubble's energetic inflaters swapped for illiquid, worthless shitcoins.

We've stopped believing in the illusory billions. Sam Bankman-Fried is under house arrest. But the people who gave him money – and the nimbler Ponzi artists who evaded arrest – are looking for new scams to separate the marks from their money.

Take Morganstanley, who spent 2021 and 2022 hyping cryptocurrency as a massive growth opportunity:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/morgan-stanley-launches-cryptocurrency-research-team

Today, Morganstanley wants you to know that AI is a $6 trillion opportunity.

They're not alone. The CEOs of Endeavor, Buzzfeed, Microsoft, Spotify, Youtube, Snap, Sports Illustrated, and CAA are all out there, pumping up the AI bubble with every hour that god sends, declaring that the future is AI.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/wall-street-ai-stock-price-1235343279/

Google and Bing are locked in an arms-race to see whose search engine can attain the speediest, most profound enshittification via chatbot, replacing links to web-pages with florid paragraphs composed by fully automated, supremely confident liars:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/16/tweedledumber/#easily-spooked

Blockchain was a solution in search of a problem. So is AI. Yes, Buzzfeed will be able to reduce its wage-bill by automating its personality quiz vertical, and Spotify's "AI DJ" will produce slightly less terrible playlists (at least, to the extent that Spotify doesn't put its thumb on the scales by inserting tracks into the playlists whose only fitness factor is that someone paid to boost them).

But even if you add all of this up, double it, square it, and add a billion dollar confidence interval, it still doesn't add up to what Bank Of America analysts called "a defining moment — like the internet in the ’90s." For one thing, the most exciting part of the "internet in the '90s" was that it had incredibly low barriers to entry and wasn't dominated by large companies – indeed, it had them running scared.

The AI bubble, by contrast, is being inflated by massive incumbents, whose excitement boils down to "This will let the biggest companies get much, much bigger and the rest of you can go fuck yourselves." Some revolution.

AI has all the hallmarks of a classic pump-and-dump, starting with terminology. AI isn't "artificial" and it's not "intelligent." "Machine learning" doesn't learn. On this week's Trashfuture podcast, they made an excellent (and profane and hilarious) case that ChatGPT is best understood as a sophisticated form of autocomplete – not our new robot overlord.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/4NHKMZZNKi0w9mOhPYIL4T

We all know that autocomplete is a decidedly mixed blessing. Like all statistical inference tools, autocomplete is profoundly conservative – it wants you to do the same thing tomorrow as you did yesterday (that's why "sophisticated" ad retargeting ads show you ads for shoes in response to your search for shoes). If the word you type after "hey" is usually "hon" then the next time you type "hey," autocomplete will be ready to fill in your typical following word – even if this time you want to type "hey stop texting me you freak":

https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/provocations/neophobic-conservative-ai-overlords-want-everything-stay/

And when autocomplete encounters a new input – when you try to type something you've never typed before – it tries to get you to finish your sentence with the statistically median thing that everyone would type next, on average. Usually that produces something utterly bland, but sometimes the results can be hilarious. Back in 2018, I started to text our babysitter with "hey are you free to sit" only to have Android finish the sentence with "on my face" (not something I'd ever typed!):

https://mashable.com/article/android-predictive-text-sit-on-my-face

Modern autocomplete can produce long passages of text in response to prompts, but it is every bit as unreliable as 2018 Android SMS autocomplete, as Alexander Hanff discovered when ChatGPT informed him that he was dead, even generating a plausible URL for a link to a nonexistent obit in The Guardian:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/02/chatgpt_considered_harmful/

Of course, the carnival barkers of the AI pump-and-dump insist that this is all a feature, not a bug. If autocomplete says stupid, wrong things with total confidence, that's because "AI" is becoming more human, because humans also say stupid, wrong things with total confidence.

Exhibit A is the billionaire AI grifter Sam Altman, CEO if OpenAI – a company whose products are not open, nor are they artificial, nor are they intelligent. Altman celebrated the release of ChatGPT by tweeting "i am a stochastic parrot, and so r u."

https://twitter.com/sama/status/1599471830255177728

This was a dig at the "stochastic parrots" paper, a comprehensive, measured roundup of criticisms of AI that led Google to fire Timnit Gebru, a respected AI researcher, for having the audacity to point out the Emperor's New Clothes:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-ai-ethics-research-paper-forced-out-timnit-gebru/

Gebru's co-author on the Parrots paper was Emily M Bender, a computational linguistics specialist at UW, who is one of the best-informed and most damning critics of AI hype. You can get a good sense of her position from Elizabeth Weil's New York Magazine profile:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-chatbots-emily-m-bender.html

Bender has made many important scholarly contributions to her field, but she is also famous for her rules of thumb, which caution her fellow scientists not to get high on their own supply:

Please do not conflate word form and meaning
+
+
Mind your own credulity
+

As Bender says, we've made "machines that can mindlessly generate text, but we haven’t learned how to stop imagining the mind behind it." One potential tonic against this fallacy is to follow an Italian MP's suggestion and replace "AI" with "SALAMI" ("Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences"). It's a lot easier to keep a clear head when someone asks you, "Is this SALAMI intelligent? Can this SALAMI write a novel? Does this SALAMI deserve human rights?"

Bender's most famous contribution is the "stochastic parrot," a construct that "just probabilistically spits out words." AI bros like Altman love the stochastic parrot, and are hellbent on reducing human beings to stochastic parrots, which will allow them to declare that their chatbots have feature-parity with human beings.

At the same time, Altman and Co are strangely afraid of their creations. It's possible that this is just a shuck: "I have made something so powerful that it could destroy humanity! Luckily, I am a wise steward of this thing, so it's fine. But boy, it sure is powerful!"

They've been playing this game for a long time. People like Elon Musk (an investor in OpenAI, who is hoping to convince the EU Commission and FTC that he can fire all of Twitter's human moderators and replace them with chatbots without violating EU law or the FTC's consent decree) keep warning us that AI will destroy us unless we tame it.

There's a lot of credulous repetition of these claims, and not just by AI's boosters. AI critics are also prone to engaging in what Lee Vinsel calls criti-hype: criticizing something by repeating its boosters' claims without interrogating them to see if they're true:

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

There are better ways to respond to Elon Musk warning us that AIs will emulsify the planet and use human beings for food than to shout, "Look at how irresponsible this wizard is being! He made a Frankenstein's Monster that will kill us all!" Like, we could point out that of all the things Elon Musk is profoundly wrong about, he is most wrong about the philosophical meaning of Wachowksi movies:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/may/18/lilly-wachowski-ivana-trump-elon-musk-twitter-red-pill-the-matrix-tweets

But even if we take the bros at their word when they proclaim themselves to be terrified of "existential risk" from AI, we can find better explanations by seeking out other phenomena that might be triggering their dread. As Charlie Stross points out, corporations are Slow AIs, autonomous artificial lifeforms that consistently do the wrong thing even when the people who nominally run them try to steer them in better directions:

https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future

Imagine the existential horror of a ultra-rich manbaby who nominally leads a company, but can't get it to follow: "everyone thinks I'm in charge, but I'm actually being driven by the Slow AI, serving as its sock puppet on some days, its golem on others."

Ted Chiang nailed this back in 2017 (the same year of the Long Island Blockchain Company):

+ There’s a saying, popularized by Fredric Jameson, that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. It’s no surprise that Silicon Valley capitalists don’t want to think about capitalism ending. What’s unexpected is that the way they envision the world ending is through a form of unchecked capitalism, disguised as a superintelligent AI. They have unconsciously created a devil in their own image, a boogeyman whose excesses are precisely their own. +

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tedchiang/the-real-danger-to-civilization-isnt-ai-its-runaway

Chiang is still writing some of the best critical work on "AI." His February article in the New Yorker, "ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web," was an instant classic:

+ [AI] hallucinations are compression artifacts, but—like the incorrect labels generated by the Xerox photocopier—they are plausible enough that identifying them requires comparing them against the originals, which in this case means either the Web or our own knowledge of the world. +

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web

"AI" is practically purpose-built for inflating another hype-bubble, excelling as it does at producing party-tricks – plausible essays, weird images, voice impersonations. But as Princeton's Matthew Salganik writes, there's a world of difference between "cool" and "tool":

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2023/03/08/can-chatgpt-and-its-successors-go-from-cool-to-tool/

Nature can claim "conversational AI is a game-changer for science" but "there is a huge gap between writing funny instructions for removing food from home electronics and doing scientific research." Salganik tried to get ChatGPT to help him with the most banal of scholarly tasks – aiding him in peer reviewing a colleague's paper. The result? "ChatGPT didn’t help me do peer review at all; not one little bit."

The criti-hype isn't limited to ChatGPT, of course – there's plenty of (justifiable) concern about image and voice generators and their impact on creative labor markets, but that concern is often expressed in ways that amplify the self-serving claims of the companies hoping to inflate the hype machine.

One of the best critical responses to the question of image- and voice-generators comes from Kirby Ferguson, whose final Everything Is a Remix video is a superb, visually stunning, brilliantly argued critique of these systems:

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

One area where Ferguson shines is in thinking through the copyright question – is there any right to decide who can study the art you make? Except in some edge cases, these systems don't store copies of the images they analyze, nor do they reproduce them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

For creators, the important material question raised by these systems is economic, not creative: will our bosses use them to erode our wages? That is a very important question, and as far as our bosses are concerned, the answer is a resounding yes.

Markets value automation primarily because automation allows capitalists to pay workers less. The textile factory owners who purchased automatic looms weren't interested in giving their workers raises and shorting working days.
+'
+They wanted to fire their skilled workers and replace them with small children kidnapped out of orphanages and indentured for a decade, starved and beaten and forced to work, even after they were mangled by the machines. Fun fact: Oliver Twist was based on the bestselling memoir of Robert Blincoe, a child who survived his decade of forced labor:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59127/59127-h/59127-h.htm

Today, voice actors sitting down to record for games companies are forced to begin each session with "My name is ______ and I hereby grant irrevocable permission to train an AI with my voice and use it any way you see fit."

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d37za/voice-actors-sign-away-rights-to-artificial-intelligence

Let's be clear here: there is – at present – no firmly established copyright over voiceprints. The "right" that voice actors are signing away as a non-negotiable condition of doing their jobs for giant, powerful monopolists doesn't even exist. When a corporation makes a worker surrender this right, they are betting that this right will be created later in the name of "artists' rights" – and that they will then be able to harvest this right and use it to fire the artists who fought so hard for it.

There are other approaches to this. We could support the US Copyright Office's position that machine-generated works are not works of human creative authorship and are thus not eligible for copyright – so if corporations wanted to control their products, they'd have to hire humans to make them:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-office-reject-ai-generated-art-recent-entrance-to-paradise

Or we could create collective rights that belong to all artists and can't be signed away to a corporation. That's how the right to record other musicians' songs work – and it's why Taylor Swift was able to re-record the masters that were sold out from under her by evil private-equity bros::

https://doctorow.medium.com/united-we-stand-61e16ec707e2

Whatever we do as creative workers and as humans entitled to a decent life, we can't afford drink the Blockchain Iced Tea. That means that we have to be technically competent, to understand how the stochastic parrot works, and to make sure our criticism doesn't just repeat the marketing copy of the latest pump-and-dump.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

Burning Men by Maria Farrell https://westerlymag.com.au/burning-men-by-maria-farrell/
+
+
Gigi Sohn’s Full Statement On Withdrawing Her FCC Nomination https://www.techdirt.com/2023/03/08/gigi-sohns-full-statement-on-withdrawing-her-fcc-nomination/
+
+
United Auto Workers on Brink of Unprecedented Leadership Upset https://theintercept.com/2023/03/07/uaw-union-election-shawn-fain/
+

This day in history (permalink)

#20yrsago NYT reviews Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom https://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/09/books/does-that-mean-we-can-defrost-walt.html

#20yrsago Notes from “Doing Good Online” https://web.archive.org/web/20030604125836/http://cheesedip.com/?p=archives/week_2003_03_02.phtml

#20yrsago Left-wing media bias? In your dreams https://web.archive.org/web/20030411094341/weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor/archives/000838.shtml

#15yrsago Air Force lawyers send DMCA notice to YouTube https://www.wired.com/2008/03/air-force-cyber-2/

#15yrsago Cal State U forced to re-hire Quaker math teacher who inserted “non-violently” into loyalty oath https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-08-me-loyaltyoath8-story.html

#10yrsago AP: Chavez made “meager” gains, only reduced poverty, didn’t build the world’s tallest building https://fair.org/home/ap-chavez-wasted-his-money-on-healthcare-when-he-could-have-built-gigantic-skyscrapers/

#15yrsago Society of Automotive Engineers kills DRM on its journal following MIT boycott https://web.archive.org/web/20080308131031/http://news-libraries.mit.edu/blog/following-removal/1024/

#15yrsago Flowchart: How D&D is a gateway drug to every flavor of nerdiness https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/opinion/09rogers.html

#10yrsago Welcome to your Awesome Robot: instructional comic turns kids & cardboard boxes into AWESOME ROBOTS! https://memex.craphound.com/2013/03/09/welcome-to-your-awesome-robot-instructional-comic-turns-kids-cardboard-boxes-into-awesome-robots/

#10yrsago US Ninth Circuit says forensic laptop searches at the border without suspicion are unconstitional https://www.techdirt.com/2013/03/08/9th-circuit-appeals-court-4th-amendment-applies-border-also-password-protected-files-shouldnt-arouse-suspicion/

#10yrsago Austin Chronicle on Aaron Swartz and the future of computers https://www.austinchronicle.com/screens/2013-03-08/invaluable-information/

#10yrsago Random House responds to SFWA on its Hydra ebook imprint https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/content-and-e-books/article/56244-rh-responds-to-sfwa-slamming-its-hydra-imprint.html

#10yrsago NYPD will arrest you for carrying condoms: the women/trans/genderqueer version of stop-and-frisk https://www.vice.com/en/article/3b5mx9/new-york-cops-will-arrest-you-for-carrying-condoms

#10yrsago Canada’s National Post pretends fair dealing doesn’t exist, presents you with bill to copy a single word https://web.archive.org/web/20130311104536/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6802/125/

#5yrsago A mechanical, wooden Turing machine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vo8izCKHiF0

#5yrsago Florida students succeed where so many have failed, force state legislature to pass gun control rules despite ferocious NRA lobbying https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/florida-legislature-backs-new-gun-restrictions-after-parkland-school-shooting/2018/03/07/f97057ea-2229-11e8-badd-7c9f29a55815_story.html

#5yrsago Vendor lock-in, DRM, and crappy EULAs are turning America’s independent farmers into tenant farmers https://www.vice.com/en/article/a34pp4/john-deere-tractor-hacking-big-data-surveillance

#5yrsago A critical statistics education that fits on a postcard https://timharford.com/2018/03/your-handy-postcard-sized-guide-to-statistics/

#5yrsago An algorithm that converts 3D meshes into machine-knitting patterns https://textiles-lab.github.io/publications/2018-autoknit/

#5yrsago After Airbnb hosts converted New York’s available housing stock to unlicensed hotel rooms, rents soared https://www.mcgill.ca/newsroom/files/newsroom/channels/attach/airbnb-report.pdf

#5yrsago The company that turned Grenfell Tower into a deathtrap reports profits up 50% and anticipates no downside from the disaster https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/mar/08/rydon-profit-rises-grenfell-tower-contractor

#5yrsago The Warrior Within: a tight science fiction novella about a warrior who contains multitudes https://memex.craphound.com/2018/03/08/the-warrior-within-a-tight-science-fiction-novella-about-a-warrior-who-contains-multitudes/

#5yrsago How denialists weaponize media literacy and what to do about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0I7FVyQCjNg

#5yrsago Machine learning models keep getting spoofed by adversarial attacks and it’s not clear if this can ever be fixed https://www.wired.com/story/ai-has-a-hallucination-problem-thats-proving-tough-to-fix/

#5yrsago RIP John Sulston, open science hero and father of the Human Genome Project https://phys.org/news/2018-03-john-sulston-decoded-human-genome.html

#1yrago The cruelty isn't the point: The point is power https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/09/turkeys-voting-for-christmas/#culture-wars

#1yrago The Dawn of Everything: An essential reminder that we are in charge of our own destiny https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/08/three-freedoms/#anti-fatalism

#1yrago How and why to break up Big Tech https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/08/three-freedoms/#alphabet-soup

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Slashdot (https://slashdot.org/), Memex 1.1 (https://memex.naughtons.org/).

Currently writing:

Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. Yesterday's progress: 590 words (113834 words total)
+
+
The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, WAITING FOR EDITORIAL REVIEW
+
+
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
+
+
Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. ON SUBMISSION
+
+
Moral Hazard, a short story for MIT Tech Review's 12 Tomorrows. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION
+
+
Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. ON SUBMISSION
+

Latest podcast: Twiddler https://craphound.com/news/2023/02/27/twiddler/

Upcoming appearances:

UT School of Design and Creative Technologies (Austin), Mar 9
+https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-buckman-center-presents-cory-doctorow-tickets-526627556197
+
+
Ethics of Emerging Tech Lecture (U Manitoba), Mar 9
+https://eventscalendar.umanitoba.ca/site/science/event/ethics-of-emerging-technology-lecture—rebecca-giblin-and-cory-doctorow/
+
+
SXSW Chokepoint Capitalism reading (Austin), Mar 10
+https://schedule.sxsw.com/2023/events/PP1143284
+
+
Ostrom Workshop: Beyond the Web Speaker Series, Mar 20
+https://events.iu.edu/ostromworkshop/event/806592-ostrom-workshop-beyond-the-web-speaker-series-cory
+
+
Antitrust and Competition Conference – Beyond the Consumer Welfare Standard (Chicago), Apr 20-21
+https://www.chicagobooth.edu/research/stigler/events/2023-antitrust
+
+
Red Team Blues event with Tim Harford (Oxford), May 29
+https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cory-doctorow-red-team-blues-with-tim-harford-tickets-574673793787
+

Recent appearances:

Roskom Svoboda Privacy Day
+https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VBXU4HVFs0
+
+
Factually With Adam Conover:
+https://www.stitcher.com/show/factually-with-adam-conover/episode/choke-point-capitalism-with-cory-doctorow-300308750
+
+
Making Big Tech Better vs Making it Smaller (Brussels Antitrust Conference):
+https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjE-RpOR5FU&t=2744s
+

Latest books:

"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 (print edition: https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907) (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:

Red Team Blues: "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books, April 2023
+
+
The Internet Con: A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech, Verso, September 2023
+
+
The Lost Cause: a post-Green New Deal eco-topian novel about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias, Tor Books, November 2023
+

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:

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

Pluralistic: End to End (07 Mar 2023)

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 07 Mar 2023 12:49:12 +0000

Today's links

End to End: Willing speakers should reach willing listeners. +
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. +
This day in history: 2008, 2013, 2018 +
Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading +

End to End (permalink)

In "End to End," my new column for Locus Magazine, I propose a policy framework for a better internet: the "End to End" principle (E2E), a bedrock of the original design for the internet, updated for the modern, monopolized web, as a way of disenshittifying it:

https://locusmag.com/2023/03/commentary-cory-doctorow-end-to-end/

The original E2E marked the turning point from telco-based systems where power was gathered at the center, controlled by carriers, to the packet-switched internet, where power moved to the edges. Under the old model, only the network operator could add new features. If you wanted to create, say, Caller ID, you needed to convince the phone company to update its switches to support a new signaling system (and you probably had to rent a Caller ID box from the carrier, too).

But packet-switching made it possible for new services to be created by people at the edges of the network. Once your device was connected to the internet, it could exchange data with any other device on the internet. If someone set up a voice-calling system and you connected to it, they could add Caller ID to it without asking Ma Bell for permission.

End to end was the core ethic of this system: the idea that the telcos that sat beneath these systems should get out of the way of their users, serving only to deliver data from willing senders to willing receivers as quickly, efficiently and reliably as possible.

E2E was a powerful idea, one that truly treated the telcos as utilities – the plumbing that sat beneath the services, obliged to serve its subscribers by doing their bidding to the extent they could. If you chose to use a internet calling service instead of making phone calls, the carrier's job was to shuttle those packets around, not to slow them down or block them to funnel you into its rival service.

There's a powerful logic to this: no one rents a phone line because they want to make sure that the carrier's shareholders are getting the highest possible return on their investment. The reason we buy network connections is to get to the services we value.

We have no duty to arrange our affairs to the benefit of a carrier's shareholders. If those shareholders are so emotionally fragile that they can't bear the thought of network users making their own choices on which services to use, they should get into a different line of work.

E2E wasn't a law, it was a principle. Principles are useful! They can be embedded in laws (for example, the laws that establish most network providers as common carriers often include an E2E rule), but just as importantly, they can give us a vocabulary for critiquing or designing services: "Ugh, I won't use that service, it's not end to end," or "How can we make this work in an end to end way?"

Principles can be integrated into professional codes of ethics, or procurement rules for public bodies ("Our university only buys end to end services"). Tech groups and publications can use principles to rank competing technologies ("Which network providers are end to end?").

Network Neutrality is a way of operationalizing E2E: the idea of Net Neutrality is that carriers should be obliged to treat all traffic the same. If you request Youtube packets from Comcast, Comcast should deliver those packets as quickly and reliably as it can, even though its parent company, Universal, owns several competing services.

Net Neutrality can be treated as a principle ("This ISP sucks – it violates Net Neutrality") or as a regulation ("The FCC is fining your ISP because it violated Net Neutrality"). As a regulation, Net Neutrality has a problem: it's hard to administer, because it's very difficult to detect Net Neutrality violations. The internet is a "best effort" network, with no service guarantees, so when your Youtube connection starts to jitter, it's hard to prove that this is because Comcast is screwing with it, as opposed to regular network congestion.

Which brings me to my E2E proposal: end to end for services. Contemporary services have no E2E. If you search for a product on Amazon, Amazon often won't show you that product until you've looked at five screens' worth of other products that have paid Amazon to interrupt your search:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

If you hoist an email out of Gmail's spam folder and add the sender to your address book, Gmail will still send that message to spam, or even block its server. It's incredible that we had a Congressional debate about whether Gmail should mark politicians unsolicited fundraising emails as spam but not whether emails from your reps that you asked to receive should be delivered:

https://doctorow.medium.com/dead-letters-73924aa19f9d

Platform creators are workers whose boss is an algorithm that docks every paycheck to punish them for breaking rules they aren't allowed to know about, because if the boss told you the rules, you'd learn how to violate them without him being able to punish you for it. Again, it's wild that we're arguing about "shadowbanning" (a service choosing not to send your work to people who never asked to see it), while ignoring the fact that platforms won't deliver your posts to people who explicitly subscribed to your feed:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Alexander Graham Bell's first telephone operators were young boys who entertained themselves by deliberately misconnecting calls, putting you in contact with people you never asked to talk to and refusing to connect you with the people you were trying to converse with.

As Bruce Sterling wrote in The Hacker Crackdown:

+ The boys were openly rude to customers. They talked back to subscribers, saucing off, uttering facetious remarks, and generally giving lip. The rascals took Saint Patrick’s Day off without permission. And worst of all they played clever tricks with the switchboard plugs: disconnecting calls, crossing lines so that customers found themselves talking to strangers, and so forth. +

https://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html

Bell fired those kids. Even the original telecoms monopolist understood that the point of a telephone network was to connect willing speakers with willing listeners.

Today's tech barons are much more interested in charging other people to interrupt your consensual communications with nonconsensual and often irrelevant nonsense and ads. This is part of the enshittification cycle: first, the platforms lock you in by giving you a good deal, including feeds that contain the things you ask to see and search boxes that return the thing you're looking for.

Then, platforms take away your surplus and give it to business customers. They spy on you and use the data to help target you on behalf of advertisers, whom they charge low rates for ads that are reliably delivered. They insert performers' and media companies' posts into your feed, generating traffic funnels that result in clicks to off-platform sites. They offer low fees and even subsidies to platform sellers and creators who produce DRM media, like ebooks and audiobooks.

Users get locked into the platform – by the collective action problem of convincing their friends to leave, by the collapse of local retail that can't match the investor-funded subsidies of would-be monopolists, by DRM that they are legally prohibited from removing, causing them to lose their investment if they quit the service.

Business customers also get locked to the platform: platform sellers have to sell where the buyers are; publishers and creators have to provide media where the audiences are; advertisers have to run ads on the services they've optimized for.

Once everyone is locked in, the platform can fully enshittify, harvesting surpluses from users and business customers for themselves. Platforms can hike fees, charge media companies and creators to reach their own subscribers, block posts with links off-site, insert ads into media (like Audible is doing with paid audiobooks!), and so on.

This is the cycle that E2E seeks to interrupt. E2E for services would dictate that platforms should connect willing speakers and willing listeners. The best match for your search should be at the top of the results – even if someone is willing to pay more to put a worse match there. Emails should be delivered to people you've told your provider you want to correspond with – not sent to a spam folder or blocked.

As with the original E2E, there's lots of ways we can use this principle. It can simply be a term for criticizing platforms ("You aren't sending my posts to the people who follow me – that's a violation of the end to end principle!"). It can be a law ("It is a deceptive and unfair practice for ecommerce companies to deliberately return search results that are not the best match they can locate for the users' query"). It can be a punishment ("The FTC settled with Google today and ordered the company to implement a Gmail feature that permits users to identify senders whose messages will never be blocked or sent to spam").

Lots of people are pissed off about Big Tech and many have proposed that we could make it better by treating platforms as "utilities." But I don't want President DeSantis to run my email provider, or to decide what's too "woke" for me to see (or post) on social media.

An E2E rule, on the other hand, creates a role for government that doesn't determine who gets to speak or what they get to say – rather, it ensures that when people speak and to others who want to hear them, the message gets through.

Unlike Net Neutrality, E2E is easy to administer. If I claim that your emails are being sent to spam after I marked you as a sender I want to hear from, we don't have to do a forensic investigation into Google's mail servers to determine if I'm right. You just send me an email we observe where it lands.

Likewise for search: if I search Amazon for a specific product or model number, it's easy to tell whether that product is at the top of the search results or not.

Same goes for delivery to subscribers: if we suspect that Twitter is shadowbanning posters – say, for including their Mastodon addresses in their bios, or linking to posts on Mastodon – we just send some test messages and see whether they are delivered.

Beyond administratability, E2E has another advantage: cheap compliance. Lots of the rules we've created or proposed for service providers are incredibly complex and expensive to comply with. Take rules about "lawful but awful" content, which require platforms to somehow determine whether a message constitutes harassment and block it if it does.

These rules require an army of expensive human moderators or a vast, expensive machine learning system, or both – so they guarantee that Big Tech will rule the internet forever, because no one else can afford to launch a new service with better community norms and better practices.

By contrast, E2E is cheap to comply with. Trusted-sender lists for email providers, search engines that put best results first, and content delivery algorithms that show you the things you asked to see in the order that they were posted are all solved problems:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/social-media-algorithms-twitter-meta-rss-reader/673282/

This isn't to say that platforms wouldn't be allowed to offer algorithmic feeds and results. Think of how Tumblr does it: you can choose between a feed called "Following" (posts from people you follow) or "For You" (posts that Tumblr thinks you'll enjoy). Forcing platforms to clearly label their recommendations and give you the choice of controlling your own feed is a powerful check against enshittification.

If you know when you're in charge and when the platform is driving things, and if you can toggle away from platform-determined feeds to ones that you design, the platform has to be better than you at choosing what you see, or you won't choose its recommendations.

Platform owners have hijacked the idea that "freedom of speech isn't freedom of reach" to justify the now-ubiquitous practice of overriding users' decisions about what they want to see:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

The Old Internet had lots to going for it. It wasn't perfect, though. While it was easy to find the things you knew you liked, it could be hard to find things you didn't know you liked. Recommendations, whether they come from an algorithm or a human editor, are a source of endless delights. But when a we find something we like through one of those recommendations, we need to know that we can find more from that source if we choose to.

Sometimes it's nice to scroll an algorithmic feed and get a string of surprises. But we are forced to use those feeds, they will inevitably enshittify, to our detriment, and to the detriment of the people who make the things that please us.

As ever, the important thing about a technology isn't what it does, it's who it does it for and who it does it to. When we control our feeds, we can choose to let a recommender system do the driving. If we're locked into a recommendation system, it drives us.

(Image: Felix Andrews, CC BY-SA 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

Keep your AI claims in check https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2023/02/keep-your-ai-claims-check (h/t Jathan Sadowski)
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+
It's time to take back control of what we read on the internet https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/social-media-algorithms-twitter-meta-rss-reader/673282/ (h/t Kottke)
+
+
Inside the Suspicion Machine https://www.wired.com/story/welfare-state-algorithms/
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This day in history (permalink)

#15yrsago Heathrow Terminal 5 to fingerprint domestic passengers https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1580993/Heathrow-airport-first-to-fingerprint.html

#15yrsago Economic problems with interstellar commerce https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14777620801910818

#10yrsago Closer look at the scammy, awful contracts from Random House’s new ebook imprints https://whatever.scalzi.com/2013/03/06/a-contract-from-alibi/

#10yrsago Mind-croggling deposition of a Prenda Law copyright troll https://www.popehat.com/2013/03/06/deposition-reveals-prenda-law-business-model-monetizing-squalid-douchebaggery/

#5yrsago Gary Cohn served Donald Trump for 14 months, and made billions for his old bosses at Goldman Sachs https://theintercept.com/2018/03/07/gary-cohn-mission-accomplished-wall-street-goldman-sachs/

#5yrsago Illinois Democratic Party Chair is funding mailers smearing progressive Democrats with ridiculous lies https://theintercept.com/2018/03/07/illinois-democratic-party-michael-madigan-mailers/

#5yrsago Toronto’s real estate market is imploding https://wolfstreet.com/2018/03/06/home-prices-sink-sales-plunge-in-toronto/

Colophon (permalink)

Currently writing:

Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. Yesterday's progress: 621 words (112736 words total)
+
+
The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, WAITING FOR EDITORIAL REVIEW
+
+
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
+
+
Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. ON SUBMISSION
+
+
Moral Hazard, a short story for MIT Tech Review's 12 Tomorrows. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION
+
+
Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. ON SUBMISSION
+

Latest podcast: Twiddler https://craphound.com/news/2023/02/27/twiddler/

Upcoming appearances:

UT School of Design and Creative Technologies (Austin), Mar 9
+https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-buckman-center-presents-cory-doctorow-tickets-526627556197
+
+
Ethics of Emerging Tech Lecture (U Manitoba), Mar 9
+https://eventscalendar.umanitoba.ca/site/science/event/ethics-of-emerging-technology-lecture—rebecca-giblin-and-cory-doctorow/
+
+
SXSW Chokepoint Capitalism reading (Austin), Mar 10
+https://schedule.sxsw.com/2023/events/PP1143284
+
+
Ostrom Workshop: Beyond the Web Speaker Series, Mar 20
+https://events.iu.edu/ostromworkshop/event/806592-ostrom-workshop-beyond-the-web-speaker-series-cory
+
+
Antitrust and Competition Conference – Beyond the Consumer Welfare Standard (Chicago), Apr 20-21
+https://www.chicagobooth.edu/research/stigler/events/2023-antitrust
+
+
Red Team Blues event with Tim Harford (Oxford), May 29
+https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cory-doctorow-red-team-blues-with-tim-harford-tickets-574673793787
+

Recent appearances:

Making Big Tech Better vs Making it Smaller (Brussels Antitrust Conference):
+https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjE-RpOR5FU&t=2744s
+
+
Elevate Festival:
+https://elevate.at/medienarchiv/event/e23doctorow/
+
+
ANU/Canberra Times Meet The Author
+https://soundcloud.com/experience_anu/in-conversation-with-rebecca-giblin-and-cory-doctorow?si=67bcf6db3c4742bd973152e4b1b4e313
+

Latest books:

"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 (print edition: https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907) (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:

Red Team Blues: "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books, April 2023
+
+
The Internet Con: A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech, Verso, September 2023
+
+
The Lost Cause: a post-Green New Deal eco-topian novel about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias, Tor Books, November 2023
+

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:

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(Latest Medium column: "They're still trying to ban cryptography" https://doctorow.medium.com/theyre-still-trying-to-ban-cryptography-33aa668dc602)

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

Pluralistic: Biden set to appoint mass foreclosure cheerleader to the Fed (06 Mar 2023)

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 06 Mar 2023 20:18:20 +0000

Today's links

Biden set to appoint mass foreclosure cheerleader to the Fed: Janice Eberly provided cover for Tim Geithner's policy of No Banker Left Behind. +
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. +
This day in history: 2008, 2013, 2018, 2022 +
Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading +

Biden set to appoint mass foreclosure cheerleader to the Fed (permalink)

Personnel are policy, something that the Biden administration has proved again and again since the 2020 election. Biden himself is a kind of empty vessel into which different wings of the Democratic party pour their will, yielding a strange brew of appointments both great and terrible.

On the one hand, you have progressive appointments like Jonathan Kanter at the DoJ and Lina Khan at the FTC, leaders who are determined to challenge and curb corporate power:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/10/see-you-in-the-funny-papers/#bidens-legacy

On the other hand, you have deferential leaders like Pete Buttigieg, who fill their own staff with status quo counsel, and then let those timid corporate apologists run the show, leaving the substantial enforcement powers of a powerful agency to gather dust:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

While the Democrats' anti-corporate wing got to drive the administration's competition agencies, the corporate wing has enjoyed near-total dominance over finance regulations (with notable exceptions, e.g. Rohit Chopra), starting with Trump's Jerome Powell, a bloodletting monster happy to shovel workers into their bosses' crushers all day long:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/19/creditors-vs-workers/#finance-colored-glasses

Corporate Dems continue to flex their muscle. A seat has just opened up on the Federal Reserve Board, and the WSJ is pretty sure the seat is going to Janice Eberly, a corporate ghoul who helped Obama Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner steal Americans' houses on behalf of the bankers who destroyed the world economy in 2008:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-considers-two-economists-for-fed-vice-chair-58f13344

A quick refresher: Obama inherited the Great Financial Crisis, a massive global asset crash that followed from a decade of real-estate and derivatives deregulation that saw the world's largest banks issuing mortgages they knew would fail, and then placing massive bets on "collateralized debt obligations" that were supposed to offset the risk.

The banks gambled trillions, nearly destroyed the world's economy, and then blamed it all on reckless borrowers – mortgage holders who had been mis-sold predatory mortgages that were designed to trigger defaults thanks to low "teaser rates" that later "ballooned" into monthly payments the banks knew the borrowers couldn't afford.

Geithner was Obama's go-to guy for the GFC. It was under his leadership that billions were handed out to the banks to bail them out and keep them solvent during the crisis – and it was also under his leadership that bank execs were able to pay themselves millions in bonuses using that public money.

When the banks were in trouble, Geithner leapt into action. When the banks' customers faced crises, he was MIA – especially during the foreclosure epidemic that followed, as the banks stole our homes out from under us, often forging the paperwork. No bank was seriously punished for this policy.

Back to Janice Eberly, who served as Geithner's assistant secretary of the Treasury for economic policy – his hatchet-woman, in other words. Now, sometimes people in senior government roles stick around because they disagree with their bosses and want to mitigate the harm of their bosses' policies.

That's not why Eberly took the job. In 2014, she and Arvind Krishnamurthy co-wrote a Brookings Institute paper called "Efficient Credit Policies in a Housing Debt Crisis," that explained why Geithner had it right all along – bailing out the banks and leaving homeowners in foreclosure is "efficient":

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/fall2014bpea_eberly_krishnamurthy.pdf

Writing in The American Prospect, Max Moran from the Revolving Door Project breaks down "Efficient Credit Policies," explaining how Eberly's stated views should disqualify her from sitting on the Fed board, especially as we teeter on the brink of a deep financial crisis:

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-03-06-janice-eberly-fed-nominee-mortgage-crisis/

The first thing you need to understand here is HAMP, the Home Affordable Modification Program, which received the $100b Congress allocated to help homeowners whose mortgages were "underwater" – that is, whose houses were worth less than they owed for them.

That money could have gone to "principal reduction" – that is, to paying off part of your loan. If you owned $350,000 on a house that was now worth $300,000, the Feds could give the bank $50k and you wouldn't be underwater anymore. The FDIC proposed just this, in a plan that would have required homeowners to pay back the US government if the price of their homes rebounded.

If you want to keep Americans from losing their homes, principal reduction is a straightforward and reliable approach. But the banks hated this – and that meant Geithner wouldn't do it. Banks don't like principal reduction because it means that they'll lose out on future payments: reducing your principal by $50k now means that the banks won't get hundreds of thousands of dollars over the 30 years of your mortgage.

Using the money for principal reduction would have meant the banks' balance sheets would have looked a little worse – which, as Moran points out, is a perfectly fair outcome for banks that had just come close to destroying the world economy, especially since many of these underwater borrowers were destined to lose their houses and would never make those payments.

But Geithner didn't do principal reduction. Instead, he did HAMP, which was just a way to temporarily lower borrowers' monthly payments so they could stay in their homes. Geithner sold Obama on this plan, convincing him to renege on his election promise to support a "cramdown" on the banks, which would have saved homeowners:

https://www.propublica.org/article/dems-obama-broke-pledge-to-force-banks-to-help-homeowners

HAMP was full of the kinds of complex requirements and paperwork that the professional managerial class love, rules that made it almost impossible for homeowners to invoke HAMP and improve their payments. Meanwhile, the banks got "investor incentive payments" that let them take in public money even as they foreclosed on the public:

https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/principal-reduction-alternative-under-the-home-affordable-modification-program

HAMP was a disaster. Almost no one managed to use it, and even among the lucky few who did manage to do so, many were tricked into foreclosure.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/mar/30/government-program-save-homes-mortgages-failure-banks

This is the policy that Eberly and Krishnamurthy defend in their paper: rather than reducing debt, just temporarily restructure mortgage payments. One reason they defend this: it's cheaper, and Congress didn't allocate enough money to help everyone who needed principal reduction. But, as Moran points out, Geithner's anemic response to the crisis caused Congress to claw back $225b of the money allocated to deal with it – enough to do $50k principal reductions for 4.5m households. Under Geithner, HAMP only spent $10b.

But of course, the US government didn't need to pay the banks off to do principal reduction. They could simply order the banks to take a loss. That's how lending usually works: lenders who originate bad loans have to eat them – they don't get made whole by Uncle Sucker.

But when Eberly was working for Geithner, "federal officials convinced themselves this was impossible." Rather than hold banks to account for their reckless speculation, Geithner announced that he was going to "foam the runway" for the banks, pureeing Americans' homes to make the foam.

But Eberly's tenure coincided with the banks' rebound – by the time she went to work for Geithner, they were rolling in dough, posting massive profits. As @ryanlcooper@mastodon.social put it, "If you force them to eat a bunch of foreclosure losses, maybe a few hundred billion over several years, it probably wouldn’t have been that bad."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPLbnr1mxBs

Moran nails it here: "When a bad loan is made, it is both prudent and fair for the lender to bear the most responsibility. They are supposed to be wise stewards of their own capital. Instead, ordinary homeowners who did the least of any actor to cause the financial crisis ended up eating the losses."

Eberly and Krishnamurthy claimed that Geithner's policy would be efficient, and that it wouldn't lead to mass foreclosures. As neoclassical economists love to do, they "proved" this using elaborate mathematical models. And, also in the grand neoclassical tradition, they didn't bother to check whether their model was correct.

To quote Ely Devons: "If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’"

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

Here's what Eberly and Krishnamurthy missed: the choice to foreclose wasn't being made by the lenders, they were being made by the mortgage servicer, a kind of consequence-free middleman who made more money by foreclosing on homeowners, even if the lenders lost more money over the long term:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228125783_Why_Servicers_Foreclose_When_They_Should_Modify_and_Other_Puzzles_of_Servicer_Behavior_Servicer_Compensation_and_its_Consequences

Eberly and Krishnamurthy barely mention the existence of servicers, but another researcher was keenly aware of them: a law prof named Katie Porter, who delved into the servicers' role in foreclosure in a report for the California AG:

https://oag.ca.gov/sites/all/files/agweb/pdfs/mortgage_settlement/01-report-waiting-for-change.pdf

Porter identified the servicers' "dual track" approach to distressed mortgage borrowers: on the one hand, they slow-walked HARP-based changes to payments, and on the other hand, they raced to foreclose on those borrowers who were waiting for their payments to reset.

The servicers' hunger to throw people out of their homes knew no bounds: they set up massive robo-signing boiler-rooms where low-waged employees forged deeds to plug the paperwork holes created by the high-speed, unregulated speculation on mortgages that precipitated the Great Financial Crisis:

https://www.reuters.com/article/robosigning-plea/ex-mortgage-document-exec-pleads-guilty-in-robo-signing-case-idUSL1E8ML0C120121121

Eberly knew about robo-signing, she knew about servicers, she knew about foreclosures. It was her job to know. But she still wrote her paper defending Geithner's runway-foaming and all those ruined lives:

+ Principal reduction can be helpful, but it is a less efficient use of government resources, since it back-loads payments to households that cannot borrow against these future resources to support consumption today, and also because it is most helpful in reducing strategic default, rather than payment-distress-induced default, +

This is just means-testing by another name, a fetish for separating the "deserving poor" from "moochers" (AKA "strategic defaulters"). The PMC loves means-testing, but only for poor people. As Moran points out, rich people like Trump use strategic defaults all the time:

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/nyregion/donald-trump-atlantic-city.html

Elite economists and finance ghouls convinced themselves that helping people stay in their homes would enable waves of crooked "strategic defaulting" but there's no evidence this was ever widespread – rather, it was a fairy tale that justified mass foreclosure:

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27585/w27585.pdf

Eberly helped throw millions of Americans into the street in order to reward reckless banks, already wildly profitable banks, with even more profit. And far from regretting this, she went on to write elaborate justifications for the cruel policies she helped administer.

The historian Michael Hudson describes debt and debt cancellation as a key determinant of whether a given civilization survives. In every venture, producers have to borrow capital from lenders – farmers, for example, must borrow to pay for seed and fertilizer and labor. When the ventures are successful, the borrowers pay back the lenders.

But not every venture can succeed. There will always be blights, droughts, fires and other risks that can't be fully mitigated. When failure occurs, borrowers can't pay back creditors. If you farm long enough, you'll eventually lose a crop, and have to roll over your debts next year. Eventually, you'll owe so much that you can't even make the interest payments.

In the absence of some structured, periodic debt cancellation – such as the Bronze Age tradition of Jubilee – creditors eventually end up controlling the work of the entire productive sector. When that happens, your society stops producing what everyone needs, and instead just makes the things that rich people want:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/08/jubilant/#construire-des-passerelles

A civilization can't survive if all of its farmers are growing ornamental flowers for rich creditors' villas instead of staple crops. It can't survive if every productive worker is stuck in a dead-end job or a dead-end place because of medical or student debt.

Personnel are policy. Eberly has explained, in excruciating detail, exactly what policy she favors – policy that rewards reckless speculation by incinerating the life chances of everyday Americans. Appointing her to the Federal Reserve board would be a giant Fuck You from the Biden admin to every person who got their home stolen by a bank.

(Image: Medill DC, CC BY 2.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

Dumb Password Rules https://dumbpasswordrules.com (h/t Schneier)
+
+
How to Photobash Art for your Zines! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYrUzzS8SnE (h/t Super Punch)
+
+
can everyone kindly shut the fuck up about AI https://botharetrue.substack.com/p/can-everyone-kindly-shut-the-fuck (h/t Metafilter)
+

This day in history (permalink)

#15yrsago TSA endangers child’s life by contaminating his feeding tube despite pleas https://web.archive.org/web/20080308171124/http://www.wftv.com/irresistible/15511359/detail.html

#15yrsago Treasury Dept confiscates domain names of Brit travel agent who booked Cuba tours https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/us/04bar.html

#15yrsago TSA: laptops will stop making planes explode if you just build a bag like this one https://web.archive.org/web/20080306165027/https://gsnmagazine.com/cms/features/news-analysis/542.html

#15yrsago Nine Inch Nails made at least $750k from CC release in two days https://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2008/03/04/nin-ghosts/

#10yrsago Wikipedia and libraries: a match made in heaven https://everybodyslibraries.com/2013/03/04/from-wikipedia-to-our-libraries/

#10yrsago Transcript of Lessig’s talk: “Aaron’s Law” https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/03/transcript-lawrence-lessig-on-aarons-laws-law-and-justice-in-a-digital-age-section-i.html

#10yrsago How to be better at being pissed off at Big Tech https://locusmag.com/2018/03/cory-doctorow-lets-get-better-at-demanding-better-from-tech/

#10yrsago Access files on locked, encrypted Android phones by putting them in a freezer for an hour https://www.cs1.tf.fau.de/research/system-security-group/frost/

#10yrsago Fix the DMCA! Repeal anti-circumvention and truly own your devices https://web.archive.org/web/20130311112726/http://fixthedmca.org/

#10yrsago Random House launches ebook imprint that’s run like a predatory vanity press https://memex.craphound.com/2013/03/06/random-house-launches-ebook-imprint-thats-run-like-a-predatory-vanity-press/

#5yrsago Six immortal superweapons the Democrats made for the president, which Trump gets to wield https://www.truthdig.com/articles/six-ways-resistance-gave-trump-dictators-toolkit/

#5yrsago How 401(k)s created a class of suckers to be fleeced by the investor class https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/05/opinion/investor-class-pensions.html

#5yrsago Rhode Island proposes blocking all online porn and charging $20 to unblock it https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/03/20-porn-unblocking-fee-could-hit-internet-users-if-state-bill-becomes-law/

#5yrsago Geek Squad’s secret spying on behalf of the FBI went on for a decade and involved constant, ongoing collaboration https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/03/geek-squads-relationship-fbi-cozier-we-thought

#5yrsago Stalkerware vendor Retina-X capitulates to vigilante hacker, shuts down “indefinitely” https://www.vice.com/en/article/neqgn8/retina-x-spyware-shuts-down-apps

#5yrsago The UK government declined a chance to get £364m out of Carillion before it failed, and public purse is now on the hook for that money https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/mar/04/government-let-slip-chance-to-retrieve-364m-from-carillion

#1yrago Student debt strike called for May 1 https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/06/i-want-to-do-it-now-make-me-do-it/#may-day

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. Friday's progress: 513 words (112141 words total)
+
+
The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, WAITING FOR EDITORIAL REVIEW
+
+
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
+
+
Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. ON SUBMISSION
+
+
Moral Hazard, a short story for MIT Tech Review's 12 Tomorrows. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION
+
+
Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. ON SUBMISSION
+

Latest podcast: Twiddler https://craphound.com/news/2023/02/27/twiddler/

Upcoming appearances:

Seize the Means of Computation (TU Wien), Mar 7
+https://informatics.tuwien.ac.at/news/2373
+
+
UT School of Design and Creative Technologies (Austin), Mar 9
+https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-buckman-center-presents-cory-doctorow-tickets-526627556197
+
+
Ethics of Emerging Tech Lecture (U Manitoba), Mar 9
+https://eventscalendar.umanitoba.ca/site/science/event/ethics-of-emerging-technology-lecture—rebecca-giblin-and-cory-doctorow/
+
+
SXSW Chokepoint Capitalism reading (Austin), Mar 10
+https://schedule.sxsw.com/2023/events/PP1143284
+
+
Ostrom Workshop: Beyond the Web Speaker Series, Mar 20
+https://events.iu.edu/ostromworkshop/event/806592-ostrom-workshop-beyond-the-web-speaker-series-cory
+
+
Red Team Blues event with Tim Harford (Oxford), May 29
+https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cory-doctorow-red-team-blues-with-tim-harford-tickets-574673793787
+

Recent appearances:

Making Big Tech Better vs Making it Smaller (Brussels Antitrust Conference):
+https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjE-RpOR5FU&t=2744s
+
+
Elevate Festival:
+https://elevate.at/medienarchiv/event/e23doctorow/
+
+
ANU/Canberra Times Meet The Author
+https://soundcloud.com/experience_anu/in-conversation-with-rebecca-giblin-and-cory-doctorow?si=67bcf6db3c4742bd973152e4b1b4e313
+

Latest books:

"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 (print edition: https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907) (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:

Red Team Blues: "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books, April 2023
+
+
The Internet Con: A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech, Verso, September 2023
+
+
The Lost Cause: a post-Green New Deal eco-topian novel about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias, Tor Books, November 2023
+

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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.

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

Pluralistic: Solving the Moderator's Trilemma with Federation (04 Mar 2023)

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 04 Mar 2023 11:23:06 +0000

Today's links

Solving the Moderator's Trilemma with Federation: You CAN please all of the people all of the time (sorta). +
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. +
This day in history: 2003, 2008, 2013, 2018, 2022 +
Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading +

Solving the Moderator's Trilemma with Federation (permalink)

The classic trilemma goes: "Fast, cheap or good, pick any two." The Moderator's Trilemma goes, "Large, diverse userbase; centralized platforms; don't anger users – pick any two." The Moderator's Trilemma is introduced in "Moderating the Fediverse: Content Moderation on Distributed Social Media," a superb paper from Alan Rozenshtein of U of Minnesota Law, forthcoming in the journal Free Speech Law, available as a prepub on SSRN:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4213674#maincontent

Rozenshtein proposes a solution (of sorts) to the Moderator's Trilemma: federation. De-siloing social media, breaking it out of centralized walled gardens and recomposing it as a bunch of small servers run by a diversity of operators with a diversity of content moderation approaches. The Fediverse, in other words.

In Albert Hirschman's classic treatise Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, stakeholders in an institution who are dissatisfied with its direction have two choices: voice (arguing for changes) or exit (going elsewhere). Rozenshtein argues that Fediverse users (especially users of Mastodon, the most popular part of the Fediverse) have more voice and more "freedom of exit":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty

Large platforms – think Twitter, Facebook, etc – are very unresponsive to users. Most famously, Facebook polled its users on whether they wanted to be spied on. Faced with overwhelming opposition to commercial surveillance, Facebook ignored the poll result and cranked the surveillance dial up to a million:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/facebook-ignores-minimal-user-vote-adopts-new-privacy-policy-flna1c7559683

A decade later, Musk performed the same stunt, asking users whether they wanted him to fuck all the way off from the company, then ignored the vox populi, which, in this instance, was not vox Dei:

https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-twitter-inc-technology-business-8dac8ae023444ef9c37ca1d8fe1c14df

Facebook, Twitter and other walled gardens are designed to be sticky-traps, relying on high switching costs to keep users locked within their garden walls which are really prison walls. Internal memos from the companies reveal that this strategy is deliberate, designed to keep users from defecting even as the service degrades:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

By contrast, the Fediverse is designed for ease of exit. With one click, users can export the list of the accounts they follow, block and mute, as well as the accounts that follow them. With one more click, users can import that data into any other Fediverse server and be back up and running with almost no cost or hassle:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/23/semipermeable-membranes/

Last month, "Nathan," the volunteer operator of mastodon.lol, announced that he was pulling the plug on the server because he was sick of his users' arguments about the new Harry Potter game. Many commentators pointed to this as a mark against federated social media, "You can't rely on random, thin-skinned volunteer sysops for your online social life!"

https://mastodon.lol/@nathan/109836633022272265

But the mastodon.lol saga demonstrates the strength of federated social media, not its weakness. After all, 450 million Twitter users are also at the mercy of a thin-skinned sysop – but when he enshittifies his platform, they can't just export their data and re-establish their social lives elsewhere in two clicks:

Mastodon.lol shows us how, if you don't like your host's content moderation policies, you can exercise voice – even to the extent of making him so upset that he shuts off his server – and where voice fails, exit steps in to fill the gap, providing a soft landing for users who find the moderation policies untenable:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

Traditionally, centralization has been posed as beneficial to content moderation. As Rozenshtein writes, a company that can "enclose" its users and lock them in has an incentive to invest in better user experience, while companies whose users can easily migrate to rivals are less invested in those users.

And centralized platforms are more nimble. The operators of centralized systems can add hundreds of knobs and sliders to their back end and twiddle them at will. They act unilaterally, without having to convince other members of a federation to back their changes.

Centralized platforms claim that their most powerful benefit to users is extensive content moderation. As Tarleton Gillespie writes, “Moderation is central to what platforms do, not peripheral… [it] is, in many ways, the commodity that platforms offer":

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300261431/custodians-of-the-internet/

Centralized systems claim that their enclosure keeps users safe – from bad code and bad people. Though Rozenshtein doesn't say so, it's important to note that this claim is wildly oversold. Platforms routinely fail at preventing abuse:

https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/sexual-assault-harassment-bullying-trans-students-say-targeted-school-rcna7803

And they also fail at blocking malicious code:

https://www.scmagazine.com/news/threats/apple-bugs-ios-macos_new_class

But even where platforms do act to "keep users safe," they fail, thanks to the Moderator's Trilemma. Setting speech standards for millions or even billions of users is an impossible task. Some users will always feel like speech is being underblocked – while others will feel it's overblocked (and both will be right!):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/right-or-left-you-should-be-worried-about-big-tech-censorship

And platforms play very fast and loose with their definition of "malicious code" – as when Apple blocked OG App, an Instagram ad-blocker that gave you a simple feed consisting of just the posts from the people you followed:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/05/battery-vampire/#drained

To resolve the Moderator's Trilemma, we need to embrace subsidiarity: "decisions should be made at the lowest organizational level capable of making such decisions."

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/07/full-stack-luddites/#subsidiarity

For Rozenshtein, "content-moderation subsidiarity devolves decisions to the individual instances that make up the overall network." The fact that users can leave a server and set up somewhere else means that when a user gets pissed off enough about a moderation policy, they don't have to choose between leaving social media or tolerating the policy – they can simply choose another server that's part of the same federation.

Rozenshtein asks whether Reddit is an example of this, because moderators of individual subreddits are given broad latitude to set their own policies and anyone can fork a subreddit into a competing community with different oderation norms. But Reddit's devolution is a matter of policy, not architecture – subreddits exist at the sufferance of Reddit's owners (and Reddit is poised to go public, meaning those owners will include activist investors and large institutions that might not care about your little community). You might be happy about Reddit banning /r_TheDonald, but if they can ban that subreddit, they can ban any subreddit. Policy works well, but fails badly.

By moving subsidiarity into technical architecture, rather than human policy, the fediverse can move from antagonism (the "zero-sum destructiveness" that dominates current online debate) to agonism, where your opponent isn't an enemy – they are a "political adversary":

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/article/the-administrative-agon

Here, Rozenshtein cites Aymeric Mansoux and Roel Roscam Abbing's "Seven Theses On The Fediverse And The Becoming Of Floss":

https://test.roelof.info/seven-theses.html

+ For this to happen, different ideologies must be allowed to materialize via different channels and platforms. An important prerequisite is that the goal of political consensus must be abandoned and replaced with conflictual consensus… +

So your chosen Mastodon server "may have rules that are far more restrictive than those of the major social media platforms." But the whole Fediverse "is substantially more speech protective than are any of the major social media platforms, since no user or content can be permanently banned from the network and anyone is free to start an instance that communicates both with the major Mastodon instances and the peripheral, shunned instances."

A good case-study here is Gab, a Fediverse server by and for far-right cranks, conspiratorialists and white nationalists. Most Fediverse servers have defederated (that is, blocked) Gab, but Gab is still there, and Gab has actually defederated from many of the remaining servers, leaving its users to speak freely – but only to people who want to hear what they have to say.

This is true meaning of "freedom of speech isn't freedom of reach." Willing listeners aren't blocked from willing speakers – but you don't have the right to be heard by people who don't want to talk to you:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

Fediverse servers are (thus far) nonprofits or hobbyist sites, and don't have the same incentives to drive "engagement" to maximize the opportunties to show advertisements. Fediverse applications are frequently designed to be antiviral – that is, to prevent spectacular spreads of information across the system.

It's possible – likely, even – that future Fediverse servers will be operated by commercial operators seeking to maximize attention in order to maximize revenue – but the users of these servers will still have the freedom of exit that they enjoy on today's Jeffersonian volunteer-run servers – and so commercial servers will have to either curb their worst impulses or lose their users to better systems.

I'll note here that this is a progressive story of the benefits of competition – not the capitalist's fetishization of competition for its own sake, but rather, competition as a means of disciplining capital. It can be readily complemented by discipline through regulation – for example, extending today's burgeoning crop of data-protection laws to require servers to furnish users with exports of their follow/follower data so they can go elsewhere.

There's another dimension to decentralized content moderation that exit and voice don't address – moderating "harmful" content. Some kinds of harm can be mitigated through exit – if a server tolerates hate speech or harassment, you can go elsewhere, preferably somewhere that blocks your previous server.

But there are other kinds of speech that must not exist – either because they are illegal or because they enact harms that can't be mitigated by going elsewhere (or both). The most spectacular version of this is Child Sex Abuse Material (CSAM), a modern term-of-art to replace the more familiar "child porn."

Rozenshtein says there are "reasons for optimism" when it comes to the Fediverse's ability to police this content, though as he unpacked this idea, I found it much weaker than his other material. Rozenshtein proposes that Fediverse hosts could avail themselves of PhotoDNA, Microsoft's automated scanning tool, to block and purge themselves of CSAM, while noting that this is "hardly foolproof."

If automated scanning fails, Rozenshtein allows that this could cause "greater consolidation" of Mastodon servers to create the economies of scale to pay for more active, human moderation, which he compares to the consolidation of email that arose as a result of the spam-wars. But the spam-wars have been catastrophic for email as a federated system and produced all kinds of opportunities for mischief by the big players:

https://doctorow.medium.com/dead-letters-73924aa19f9d

Rozenshtein: "There is a tradeoff between a vibrant and diverse communication system and the degree of centralized control that would be necessary to ensure 100% filtering of content. The question, as yet unknown, is how stark that tradeoff is."

The situation is much simpler when it comes to servers hosted by moderators who are complicit in illegal conduct: "the Fediverse may live in the cloud, its servers, moderators, and users are physically located in nations whose governments are more than capable of enforcing local law." That is, people who operate "rogue" servers dedicated to facilitating assassination, CSAM, or what-have-you will be arrested, and their servers will be seized.

Fair enough! But of course, this butts up against one of the Fediverse's shortcomings: it isn't particularly useful for promoting illegal speech that should be legal, like the communications of sex workers who were purged from the internet en masse following the passage of SESTA/FOSTA. When sex workers tried to establish a new home in the fediverse on a server called Switter, it was effectively crushed.

This simply reinforces the idea that code is no substitute for law, and while code can interpret bad law as damage and route around it, it can only do so for a short while. The best use of speech-enabling code isn't to avoid the unjust suppression of speech – it's to organize resistance to that injustice, including, if necessary, the replacement of the governments that enacted it:

https://onezero.medium.com/rubber-hoses-fd685385dcd4

Rozenshtein briefly addresses the question of "filter bubbles," and notes that there is compelling research that filter bubbles don't really exist, or at least, aren't as important to our political lives as once thought:

https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2021-0002

Rozenshtein closes by addressing the role policy can play in encouraging the Fediverse. First, he proposes that governments could host their own servers and use them for official communications, as the EU Commission did following Musk's Twitter takeover:

https://social.network.europa.eu

He endorses interoperability mandates which would required dominant platforms to connect to the fediverse (facilitating their users' departure), like the ones in the EU's DSA and DMA, and proposed in US legislation like the ACCESS Act:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/04/eu-digital-markets-acts-interoperability-rule-addresses-important-need-raises

To get a sense of how that would work, check out "Interoperable Facebook," a video and essay I put together with EFF to act as a kind of "design fiction," in the form of a user manual for a federated, interoperable Facebook:

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

He points out that this kind of mandatory interop is a preferable alternative to the unconstitutional (and unworkable!) speech bans proposed by Florida and Texas, which limit the ability of platforms to moderate speech. Indeed, this is an either-or proposition – under the terms proposed by Florida and Texas, the Fediverse couldn't operate.

This is likewise true of proposals to eliminate Section 230, the law that immunizes platforms from federal liability for most criminal speech acts committed by their users. While this law is incorrectly smeared as a gift to Big Tech, it is most needed by small services that can't possibly afford to monitor everything their users say:

https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act/

One more recommendation from Rozenshtein: treat interop mandates as an alternative (or adjunct) to antitrust enforcement. Competition agencies could weigh interoperability with the Fediverse by big platforms to determine whether to enforce against them, and enforcement orders could include mandates to interoperate with the Fediverse. This is a much faster remedy than break-ups, which Rozenshtein is dubious of because they are "legally risky" and "controversial."

To this, I'd add that even for people who would welcome break-ups (like me!) they are sloooow. The breakup of AT&T took 69 years. By contrast, interop remedies would give relief to users right now:

https://onezero.medium.com/jam-to-day-46b74d5b1da4

Hey look at this (permalink)

After Backlash From Its Dumb Password Sharing Crackdown, Netflix Lowers Prices In 100 Countries (Just Not In The U.S.) https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/28/after-backlash-from-its-dumb-password-sharing-crackdown-netflix-lowers-prices-in-100-countries-just-not-in-the-u-s/
+
+
A Second Chance for Yesterday: Cover reveal and sneak peek of upcoming time-travel tale https://www.scifinow.co.uk/books/a-second-chance-for-yesterday-cover-reveal-and-sneak-peek-of-upcoming-time-travel-tale/
+
+
Law and Ordure: Scatalogic Rites of All Nations (1891) https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/scatalogic-rites
+

This day in history (permalink)

#20yrsago Spectrum Etiquette: Two Proposals https://memex.craphound.com/2003/03/02/spectrum-etiquette-two-proposals/

#20yrsago Farber and Faulhaber’s argument for commons spectrum allocation https://memex.craphound.com/2003/03/01/farber-and-faulhabers-argument-for-commons-spectrum-allocation/

#20yrsago “Easement commons” isn’t enough https://memex.craphound.com/2003/03/01/easement-commons-isnt-enough/

#20yrsago Commons spectrum isn’t like a park! https://memex.craphound.com/2003/03/01/commons-spectrum-isnt-like-a-park/

#20yrsago Moot court on property versus commons for spectrum allocation https://memex.craphound.com/2003/03/01/moot-court-on-property-versus-commons-for-spectrum-allocation/

#20yrsago The people’s First Amendment rights should not be auctioned off to media barons https://memex.craphound.com/2003/03/01/the-peoples-first-amendment-rights-should-not-be-auctioned-off-to-media-barons/

#15yrsago Public broadcaster + Bittorrent = massive public savings https://nrkbeta.no/2008/03/02/thoughts-on-bittorrent-distribution-for-a-public-broadcaster/

#15yrsago How (and why) the Great Firewall of China works https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/03/the-connection-has-been-reset/306650/

#15yrsago Nine Inch Nails goes Creative Commons remix-friendly with new album https://web.archive.org/web/20080305012426/http://ghosts.nin.com/main/home

#15yrsago Engineering approach to global climate change https://craphound.com/etech08_Saul_Griffith_energy_literacy.txt

#15yrsago Question Box: the Internet for remote places, no literacy or keyboards required https://www.questionbox.org

#15yrsago Why hardware ebook readers are a dead end (for now, anyway) https://www.locusmag.com/Features/2008/03/cory-doctorow-put-not-your-faith-in.html

#15yrsago Fake cold remedy Airborne settles lawsuit — get your cash back https://archive.nytimes.com/thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/makers-of-airborne-settle-false-ad-suit-with-refunds/

#10yrsago Cops abduct 6-y-o for going to the store on her own, initially refuse to return to her dad https://www.freerangekids.com/cops-detain-6-year-old-for-walking-around-neighborhood-and-it-gets-worse/

#10yrsago Inside the prosecution of Aaron Swartz https://finance.yahoo.com/news/life-inside-aaron-swartz-investigation-005452894.html

#10yrsago What’s the most utopian fiction of all? https://locusmag.com/2013/03/cory-doctorow-ten-years-on/

#10yrsago How an algorithm came up with Amazon’s KEEP CALM AND RAPE A LOT t-shirt https://web.archive.org/web/20130305012153/http://iam.peteashton.com/keep-calm-rape-tshirt-amazon/

#10yrsago America’s six-strikes copyright system is a nightmare https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/02/copyright-propaganda-machine-gets-new-agent-your-isp

#10yrsago Journalists took secret money for critical pieces about Malaysian opposition candidate https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosiegray/covert-malaysian-campaign-touched-a-wide-range-of-american-m

#10yrsago US Trade Rep orders Canada to comply with the dead-and-buried ACTA treaty, Canada rolls over and wets itself https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/03/us-trade-office-calls-acta-back-dead-and-canada-complies

#10yrsago Impulse: At long last, a new Jumper novel from Steven Gould https://memex.craphound.com/2013/03/01/impulse-at-long-last-a-new-jumper-novel-from-steven-gould/

#5yrsago Adblock will cache popular Javascript libraries, meaning adblocked pages will be faster and less janky https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/adblock-adds-feature-to-cache-popular-javascript-libraries/

#5yrsago Ajit Pai forced to return the gun the NRA gave him as a prize for his neutracidal rampage https://www.politico.com/story/2018/03/01/fccs-aji-pai-declines-nra-gun-award-381975

#5yrsago French Polynesia says it didn’t renew its deal with the Seasteaders, a group of libertarian separatists https://www.rnz.co.nz/international/pacific-news/351420/french-polynesia-sinks-floating-island-project

#5yrsago CEO of Trustico emails 23,000 HTTPS private keys, triggering panicked mass-revocation https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/03/23000-https-certificates-axed-after-ceo-e-mails-private-keys/

#5yrsago United axes its employee bonus program, replaces it with a lottery, saving millions https://thepointsguy.co.uk/2018/03/united-cutting-employee-bonuses/

#5yrsago Don’t give a dime to the DCCC, they’ll just use to front DINOs and smear Justice Democrats https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/when-dccc-calls-hang-up-the-phone/

#1yrago How English libel law enables Russian kleptocrats https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/04/londongrad/#enablers

#1yrago Defi and Shadow Banking 2.0 https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/02/shadow-banking-2-point-oh/#leverage

#1yrago How "hollowed" hotels are destroying worker rights: REITs aren't just for money laundering https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/01/reit-modernization-act/#reit-makes-might

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Ji Fu (https://libranet.de/profile/fu).

Currently writing:

Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. Friday's progress: 513 words (112141 words total)
+
+
The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, WAITING FOR EDITORIAL REVIEW
+
+
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
+
+
Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. ON SUBMISSION
+
+
Moral Hazard, a short story for MIT Tech Review's 12 Tomorrows. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION
+
+
Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. ON SUBMISSION
+

Latest podcast: Twiddler https://craphound.com/news/2023/02/27/twiddler/

Upcoming appearances:

Seize the Means of Computation (TU Wein), Mar 7
+https://informatics.tuwien.ac.at/news/2373
+
+
UT School of Design and Creative Technologies (Austin), Mar 9
+https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-buckman-center-presents-cory-doctorow-tickets-526627556197
+
+
Ethics of Emerging Tech Lecture (U Manitoba), Mar 9
+https://eventscalendar.umanitoba.ca/site/science/event/ethics-of-emerging-technology-lecture—rebecca-giblin-and-cory-doctorow/
+
+
SXSW Chokepoint Capitalism reading (Austin), Mar 10
+https://schedule.sxsw.com/2023/events/PP1143284
+
+
Ostrom Workshop: Beyond the Web Speaker Series, Mar 20
+https://events.iu.edu/ostromworkshop/event/806592-ostrom-workshop-beyond-the-web-speaker-series-cory
+

Recent appearances:

ANU/Canberra Times Meet The Author
+https://soundcloud.com/experience_anu/in-conversation-with-rebecca-giblin-and-cory-doctorow?si=67bcf6db3c4742bd973152e4b1b4e313
+
+
The Gould Standard
+https://pod.link/thegouldstandard/episode/8648b67fb7a6ccbf49a7d5406f8582c7
+
+
ABC Radio National:
+https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/drawingroom/chokepoint-capitalism/101973108
+

Latest books:

"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 (print edition: https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907) (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:

Red Team Blues: "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books, April 2023
+
+
The Internet Con: A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech, Verso, September 2023
+
+
The Lost Cause: a post-Green New Deal eco-topian novel about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias, Tor Books, November 2023
+

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/

(Latest Medium column: "United We Stand: Creation is collective - and so is bargaining" https://doctorow.medium.com/united-we-stand-61e16ec707e2)

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

Today's links

Solving the Moderator's Trilemma with Federation: You CAN please all of the people all of the time (sorta). +
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. +
This day in history: 2003, 2008, 2013, 2018, 2022 +
Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading +

Solving the Moderator's Trilemma with Federation (permalink)

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4213674#maincontent

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/facebook-ignores-minimal-user-vote-adopts-new-privacy-policy-flna1c7559683

A decade later, Musk performed the same stunt, asking users whether they wanted him to fuck all the way off from the company, then ignored the vox populi, which, in this instance, was not vox Dei:

https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-twitter-inc-technology-business-8dac8ae023444ef9c37ca1d8fe1c14df

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/23/semipermeable-membranes/

https://mastodon.lol/@nathan/109836633022272265

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300261431/custodians-of-the-internet/

https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/sexual-assault-harassment-bullying-trans-students-say-targeted-school-rcna7803

And they also fail at blocking malicious code:

https://www.scmagazine.com/news/threats/apple-bugs-ios-macos_new_class

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/right-or-left-you-should-be-worried-about-big-tech-censorship

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/05/battery-vampire/#drained

To resolve the Moderator's Trilemma, we need to embrace subsidiarity: "decisions should be made at the lowest organizational level capable of making such decisions."

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/07/full-stack-luddites/#subsidiarity

Rozenshtein asks whether Reddit is an example of this, because moderators of individual subreddits are given broad latitude to set their own policies and anyone can fork a subreddit into a competing community with different modeations norms. But Reddit's devolution is a matter of policy, not architecture – subreddits exist at the sufferance of Reddit's owners (and Reddit is poised to go public, meaning those owners will include activist investors and large institutions that might not care about your little community). You might be happy about Reddit banning /r_TheDonald, but if they can band that subreddit, they can ban any subreddit. Policy works well, but fails badly.

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/article/the-administrative-agon

Here, Rozenshtein cites Aymeric Mansoux and Roel Roscam Abbing's "Seven Theses On The Fediverse And The Becoming Of Floss":

https://test.roelof.info/seven-theses.html

+ For this to happen, different ideologies must be allowed to materialize via different channels and platforms. An important prerequisite is that the goal of political consensus must be abandoned and replaced with conflictual consensus… +

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

I'll note here that this is a progressive story of the benefits of competition – not the capitalist's fetishization of competition for its own sake, but rather, competition as a means of disciplining capital. It can be readily complimented by discipline through regulation – for example, extending today's burgeoning crop of data-protection laws to require servers to furnish users with exports of their follow/follower data so they can go elsewhere.

https://doctorow.medium.com/dead-letters-73924aa19f9d

https://onezero.medium.com/rubber-hoses-fd685385dcd4

https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2021-0002

https://social.network.europa.eu

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/04/eu-digital-markets-acts-interoperability-rule-addresses-important-need-raises

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act/

https://onezero.medium.com/jam-to-day-46b74d5b1da4

Hey look at this (permalink)

After Backlash From Its Dumb Password Sharing Crackdown, Netflix Lowers Prices In 100 Countries (Just Not In The U.S.) https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/28/after-backlash-from-its-dumb-password-sharing-crackdown-netflix-lowers-prices-in-100-countries-just-not-in-the-u-s/
+
+
A Second Chance for Yesterday: Cover reveal and sneak peek of upcoming time-travel tale https://www.scifinow.co.uk/books/a-second-chance-for-yesterday-cover-reveal-and-sneak-peek-of-upcoming-time-travel-tale/
+
+
Law and Ordure: Scatalogic Rites of All Nations (1891) https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/scatalogic-rites
+

This day in history (permalink)

#20yrsago Spectrum Etiquette: Two Proposals https://memex.craphound.com/2003/03/02/spectrum-etiquette-two-proposals/

#20yrsago Farber and Faulhaber’s argument for commons spectrum allocation https://memex.craphound.com/2003/03/01/farber-and-faulhabers-argument-for-commons-spectrum-allocation/

#20yrsago “Easement commons” isn’t enough https://memex.craphound.com/2003/03/01/easement-commons-isnt-enough/

#20yrsago Commons spectrum isn’t like a park! https://memex.craphound.com/2003/03/01/commons-spectrum-isnt-like-a-park/

#20yrsago Moot court on property versus commons for spectrum allocation https://memex.craphound.com/2003/03/01/moot-court-on-property-versus-commons-for-spectrum-allocation/

#15yrsago Public broadcaster + Bittorrent = massive public savings https://nrkbeta.no/2008/03/02/thoughts-on-bittorrent-distribution-for-a-public-broadcaster/

#15yrsago How (and why) the Great Firewall of China works https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/03/the-connection-has-been-reset/306650/

#15yrsago Nine Inch Nails goes Creative Commons remix-friendly with new album https://web.archive.org/web/20080305012426/http://ghosts.nin.com/main/home

#15yrsago Engineering approach to global climate change https://craphound.com/etech08_Saul_Griffith_energy_literacy.txt

#15yrsago Question Box: the Internet for remote places, no literacy or keyboards required https://www.questionbox.org

#15yrsago Why hardware ebook readers are a dead end (for now, anyway) https://www.locusmag.com/Features/2008/03/cory-doctorow-put-not-your-faith-in.html

#15yrsago Fake cold remedy Airborne settles lawsuit — get your cash back https://archive.nytimes.com/thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/makers-of-airborne-settle-false-ad-suit-with-refunds/

#10yrsago Inside the prosecution of Aaron Swartz https://finance.yahoo.com/news/life-inside-aaron-swartz-investigation-005452894.html

#10yrsago What’s the most utopian fiction of all? https://locusmag.com/2013/03/cory-doctorow-ten-years-on/

#10yrsago How an algorithm came up with Amazon’s KEEP CALM AND RAPE A LOT t-shirt https://web.archive.org/web/20130305012153/http://iam.peteashton.com/keep-calm-rape-tshirt-amazon/

#10yrsago America’s six-strikes copyright system is a nightmare https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/02/copyright-propaganda-machine-gets-new-agent-your-isp

#10yrsago Impulse: At long last, a new Jumper novel from Steven Gould https://memex.craphound.com/2013/03/01/impulse-at-long-last-a-new-jumper-novel-from-steven-gould/

#5yrsago Ajit Pai forced to return the gun the NRA gave him as a prize for his neutracidal rampage https://www.politico.com/story/2018/03/01/fccs-aji-pai-declines-nra-gun-award-381975

#5yrsago United axes its employee bonus program, replaces it with a lottery, saving millions https://thepointsguy.co.uk/2018/03/united-cutting-employee-bonuses/

#5yrsago Don’t give a dime to the DCCC, they’ll just use to front DINOs and smear Justice Democrats https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/when-dccc-calls-hang-up-the-phone/

#1yrago How English libel law enables Russian kleptocrats https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/04/londongrad/#enablers

#1yrago Defi and Shadow Banking 2.0 https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/02/shadow-banking-2-point-oh/#leverage

#1yrago How "hollowed" hotels are destroying worker rights: REITs aren't just for money laundering https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/01/reit-modernization-act/#reit-makes-might

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Ji Fu (https://libranet.de/profile/fu).

Currently writing:

Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. Friday's progress: 513 words (112141 words total)
+
+
The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, WAITING FOR EDITORIAL REVIEW
+
+
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
+
+
Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. ON SUBMISSION
+
+
Moral Hazard, a short story for MIT Tech Review's 12 Tomorrows. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION
+
+
Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. ON SUBMISSION
+

Latest podcast: Twiddler https://craphound.com/news/2023/02/27/twiddler/

Upcoming appearances:

Seize the Means of Computation (TU Wein), Mar 7
+https://informatics.tuwien.ac.at/news/2373
+
+
UT School of Design and Creative Technologies (Austin), Mar 9
+https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-buckman-center-presents-cory-doctorow-tickets-526627556197
+
+
Ethics of Emerging Tech Lecture (U Manitoba), Mar 9
+https://eventscalendar.umanitoba.ca/site/science/event/ethics-of-emerging-technology-lecture—rebecca-giblin-and-cory-doctorow/
+
+
SXSW Chokepoint Capitalism reading (Austin), Mar 10
+https://schedule.sxsw.com/2023/events/PP1143284
+
+
Ostrom Workshop: Beyond the Web Speaker Series, Mar 20
+https://events.iu.edu/ostromworkshop/event/806592-ostrom-workshop-beyond-the-web-speaker-series-cory
+

Recent appearances:

ANU/Canberra Times Meet The Author
+https://soundcloud.com/experience_anu/in-conversation-with-rebecca-giblin-and-cory-doctorow?si=67bcf6db3c4742bd973152e4b1b4e313
+
+
The Gould Standard
+https://pod.link/thegouldstandard/episode/8648b67fb7a6ccbf49a7d5406f8582c7
+
+
ABC Radio National:
+https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/drawingroom/chokepoint-capitalism/101973108
+

Latest books:

"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 (print edition: https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907) (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:

Red Team Blues: "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books, April 2023
+
+
The Internet Con: A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech, Verso, September 2023
+
+
The Lost Cause: a post-Green New Deal eco-topian novel about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias, Tor Books, November 2023
+

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/

(Latest Medium column: "United We Stand: Creation is collective - and so is bargaining" https://doctorow.medium.com/united-we-stand-61e16ec707e2)

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: VW wouldn't locate kidnapped child because his mother didn't pay for find-my-car subscription (28 Feb 2023)

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 13:29:39 +0000

Today's links

VW wouldn't help find kidnapped child because his mother wasn't paying for find-my-car subscription: All the harms of surveillance, none of the benefits. +
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. +
This day in history: 2003, 2008, 2013, 2018 +
Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading +

VW wouldn't help find kidnapped child because his mother wasn't paying for find-my-car subscription (permalink)

The masked car-thieves who stole a Volkswagen SUV in Lake County, IL didn't know that there was a two-year-old child in the back seat – but that's no excuse. A violent car-theft has the potential to hurt or kill people, after all.

Likewise, the VW execs who decided to nonconsensually track the location of every driver and sell that data to shady brokers – but to deny car owners access to that data unless they paid for a "find my car" subscription – didn't foresee that their cheap, bumbling subcontractors would refuse the local sheriff's pleas to locate the car with the kidnapped toddler.

And yet, here we are. Like most (all?) major car makers, Volkswagen has filled its vehicles with surveillance gear, and has a hot side-hustle as a funnel for the data-brokerage industry.

After the masked man jumped out of a stolen BMW and leapt into the VW SUV to steal it, the child's mother – who had been occupied bringing her other child inside her home – tried to save her two year old, who was still in the back seat. The thief "battered" her and drove off. She called 911.

The local sheriff called Volkswagen and begged them to track the car. VW refused, citing the fact that the mother had not paid for the $150 find-my-car subscription after the free trial period expired. Eventually, VW relented and called back with the location data – but not until after the stolen car had been found and the child had been retrieved.

Now that this idiotic story is in the news, VW is appropriately contrite. An anonymous company spokesman blamed the incident on "a serious breach" of company policy and threw their subcontractor under the (micro)bus, blaming it on them.

This is truly the worst of all worlds: Volkswagen is a company that has internal capacity to build innovative IT systems. Once upon a time, they had the in-house tech talent to build the "cheat device" behind Dieselgate, the means by which they turned millions of diesel vehicles into rolling gas-chambers, emitting lethal quantities of NOX.

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

But on the other hand, VW doesn't have the internal capacity to operate Car-Net, it's unimaginatively-named, $150/year location surveillance system. That gets subbed out to a contractor who can't be relied on to locate a literal kidnapped child.

The IT adventures that car companies get up to give farce a bad name. Ferraris have "anti-tampering" kill-switches that immobilize cars if they suspect a third-party mechanic is working on them. When one of these tripped during a child-seat installation in an underground parking garage, the $500k car locked its transmission and refused to unlock it – and the car was so far underground that its cellular modem couldn't receive the unlock code, permanently stranding it:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/15/expect-the-unexpected/#drm

BMW, meanwhile, is eagerly building out "innovations" like subscription steering-wheel heaters:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/02/big-river/#beemers

Big Car has loaded our rides up with so much surveillance gear that they were able to run scare ads opposing Massachusetts's Right to Repair ballot initiative, warning Bay Staters that if third parties could access the data in their cars, it would lead to their literal murders:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

In short: the automotive sector has filled our cars with surveillance gear, but that data is only reliably available to commercial data-brokers and hackers who breach Big Cars' massive data repositories. Big Car has the IT capacity to fill our cars with cheat devices – but not the capacity to operate an efficient surveillance system to use in real emergencies. Big Car says that giving you control over your car will result in your murder – but when a child's life is on the line, they can't give you access to your own car's location.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; Upsilon Andromedae, CC BY 2.0; modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

Amazon Removes Books From Kindle Unlimited After They Appear on Pirate Sites https://torrentfreak.com/amazon-removes-books-from-kindle-unlimited-after-they-appear-on-pirate-sites-230206/ (h/t Slashdot)
+
+
Future Fords Could Repossess Themselves and Drive Away if You Miss Payments https://www.thedrive.com/news/future-fords-could-repossess-themselves-and-drive-away-if-you-miss-payments (h/t Slashdot)
+

This day in history (permalink)

#20yrsago Ipsos-Reid sez P2P doesn’t hurt record sales https://web.archive.org/web/20030416231449/http://www.ipsos-na.com/dsp_tempo.cfm

#20yrsago Copyright Office posts anti-circumvention comments https://www.copyright.gov/1201/2003/reply/reply1.html

#20yrsago Weird confluence of Orthodox Judiasm and proprietary software in London https://web.archive.org/web/20030314104647/http://cheerleader.yoz.com/archives/000433.html

#20yrsago Skunk Works: Enron’s spiritual forebears https://www.wired.com/2003/03/silent-but-deadly/

#15yrsago Loony evangelical says he engineered Canadian film tax-credit changes that will doom edgy indie movies https://web.archive.org/web/20080304152637/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080229.wculture29/BNStory/National/home

#15yrsago Record companies don’t share money extorted from file-sharing fans with artists https://nypost.com/2008/02/27/infringement/

#15yrsago Shrine to bragging, deadly Internet “mall ninja” https://lonelymachines.org/mall-ninjas/

#15yrsago Clay Shirky’s masterpiece: Here Comes Everybody https://memex.craphound.com/2008/02/28/clay-shirkys-masterpiece-here-comes-everybody/

#10yrsago Bestiary of unimportant envelopes that look important https://www.evilmadscientist.com/2013/envelopes/

#5yrsago My short story about better cities, where networks give us the freedom to schedule our lives to avoid heat-waves and traffic jams https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/02/the-city-of-coordinated-leisure/554276/

#5yrsago The latest “reflection attack” gooses Denial of Service attacks by a factor of 51,000 https://blog.cloudflare.com/memcrashed-major-amplification-attacks-from-port-11211/

#5yrsago How citizenship-for-sale and statelessness change cities https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/02/virtual-citizenship-for-sale/553733/

Colophon (permalink)

Currently writing:

Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. Yesterday's progress: 521 words (110076 words total)
+
+
The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, WAITING FOR EDITORIAL REVIEW
+
+
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
+
+
Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. ON SUBMISSION
+
+
Moral Hazard, a short story for MIT Tech Review's 12 Tomorrows. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION
+
+
Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. ON SUBMISSION
+

Latest podcast: Twiddler https://craphound.com/news/2023/02/27/twiddler/

Upcoming appearances:

Antitrust, Regulation and the Political Economy (Brussels), Mar 2
+https://www.brusselsconference.com/registration
+
+
Elevate Festival (Graz), Mar 3
+https://elevate.at/diskurs/programm/event/e23doctorow/
+
+
Seize the Means of Computation (TU Wein), Mar 7
+https://informatics.tuwien.ac.at/news/2373
+
+
UT School of Design and Creative Technologies (Austin), Mar 9
+https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-buckman-center-presents-cory-doctorow-tickets-526627556197
+
+
Ethics of Emerging Tech Lecture (U Manitoba), Mar 9
+https://eventscalendar.umanitoba.ca/site/science/event/ethics-of-emerging-technology-lecture—rebecca-giblin-and-cory-doctorow/
+
+
SXSW Chokepoint Capitalism reading (Austin), Mar 10
+https://schedule.sxsw.com/2023/events/PP1143284
+

Recent appearances:

ANU/Canberra Times Meet The Author
+https://soundcloud.com/experience_anu/in-conversation-with-rebecca-giblin-and-cory-doctorow?si=67bcf6db3c4742bd973152e4b1b4e313
+
+
The Gould Standard
+https://pod.link/thegouldstandard/episode/8648b67fb7a6ccbf49a7d5406f8582c7
+
+
ABC Radio National:
+https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/drawingroom/chokepoint-capitalism/101973108
+

Latest books:

"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 (print edition: https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907) (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:

Red Team Blues: "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books, April 2023
+
+
The Internet Con: A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech, Verso, September 2023
+
+
The Lost Cause: a post-Green New Deal eco-topian novel about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias, Tor Books, November 2023
+

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.

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(Latest Medium column: "United We Stand: Creation is collective - and so is bargaining" https://doctorow.medium.com/united-we-stand-61e16ec707e2)

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

Pluralistic: Podcasting "Twiddler" (27 Feb 2023)

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 17:06:23 +0000

Today's links

Podcasting "Twiddler": What makes digital platforms so enshittification prone? +
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. +
This day in history: 2008, 2013, 2018, 2022 +
Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading +

Podcasting "Twiddler" (permalink)

This week on my podcast, I read "Twiddler," a recent Medium column in which I delve more deeply into enshittification, and how it is a pathology of digital platforms, distinct from the rent-seeking of the analog world that preceded it:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

Enshittification, you'll recall, is the lifecycle of the online platform: first, the platform allocates surpluses to end-users; then, once users are locked in, those surpluses are taken away and given to business-customers. Once the advertisers, publishers, sellers, creators and performers are locked in, the surplus is clawed away from them and taken by the platform.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Facebook is the poster-child for enshittification. When FB welcomed the general public in 2006, it sold itself as the privacy-respecting alternative to Myspace, promising users it would never harvest their data. The FB feed consisted of the posts that the people you'd followed – the people you cared about – published.

FB experienced explosive growth, thanks to two factors: "network effects" (every new user was a draw for other users who wanted to converse with them), and "switching costs" (it was practically impossible to convince all the people you wanted to hear from to leave FB, much less agree on what platform to go to next). In other words, every new user who joined FB both attracted more users, and made it harder for those users to leave.

FB attained end-user lockin and was now able to transfer users' surpluses to business customers. First, it started aggressively spying on users and offered precision targeting at rock-bottom prices to advertisers. Second, it offered media companies "algorithmic" boosting into the feeds of users who hadn't asked to see their posts.

Media companies that posted brief excerpts to FB, along with links to their sites on the real internet were rewarded with floods of traffic, as their posts were jammed into the eyeballs of millions of FB users who never asked to see them. Media companies and advertisers went all-in for FB, integrating FB surveillance beacons in their presence on the real internet, hiring social media specialists who'd do Platform Kremlinology in order to advise them on the best way to please The Algorithm.

Once those business customers – creators, media companies, advertisers – were locked into FB, the company harvested their surplus, too. On the ad side, FB raised rates and decreased expensive anti-fraud measures, meaning that advertisers had to pay more, even as an increasing proportion of their ads were either never served, or never seen.

With media companies and creators, FB not only stopped jamming their content in front of people who never asked to see it, they actively suppressed the spread of business users' posts even to their own subscribers. FB required media companies to transition from excerpts to fulltext feeds, and downranked or simply blocked posts that linked back to a business user's own site, be it a newspaper's web presence or a creator's crowdfunding service. Business users who wanted to reach the people who had explicitly directed FB to incorporate their media in users' feeds had to pay to "boost" their materials.

This is the (nearly) complete enshittification cycle: having harvested the surplus from users and business customers, FB is now (badly) attempting to surf the line where nearly all the value in the service lands in its shareholders' pockets, with just enough surplus left behind to keep end-users and business-users locked in (see also: Twitter).

There have been lots of other abusive "platform" businesses in the past – famously, 19th century railroads and their robber-baron owners were so obnoxiously abusive that they spawned the trustbusting movement, the Sherman Act, and modern competition law. Did the rail barons do enshittification, too?

Well, yes – and no. I have no doubt that robber barons would have engaged in zuckerbergian shenanigans if they could have – but here we run up against the stubborn inertness of atoms and the slippery liveliness of bits. Changing a railroad schedule to make direct connections with cities where you want to destroy a rival ferry business (or hell, laying track to those cities) is a slow proposition. Changing the content recommendation system at Facebook is something you do with a few mouse-clicks.

Which brings me to the thesis of "Twiddler": enshittification doesn't arise from the special genius or the unique wickedness of tech barons – rather, it's the product of the ability to twiddle. Our discourse has focused (rightly) on the extent to which platforms are "instrumented" – that is, the degree to which they spy on and analyze their users' conduct.

But the discussion of what the platforms do with that data – the ways they "react" to it – has echoed the platforms' own boasts of transcendental "behavior modification" prowess (c.f. "Surveillance Capitalism") while giving short shrift to the extremely mundane, straightforward ways that the ability to change the business-logic of a platform lets it allocate and withdraw surpluses from different kinds of users to get them on the hook, reel them in, and then skin and devour them.

The Twiddler thesis, in other words, is a counter to the narrative of Maria Farrell's Prodigal Tech Bros, who claim that they were once evil sorcerers, but, having seen the error of their ways, vow to be good sorcerers from now on, forswearing "hacking our dopamine loops" like vampires swearing off blood:

https://conversationalist.org/2020/03/05/the-prodigal-techbro/

People who repeat the claims of Prodigal Tech Bros are engaging in criti-hype, Lee Vinsel's term for criticism that repeats tech's own mystical narratives of their own superhuman prowess, rather than grappling with the mundanity of doing old conjurer's tricks very quickly, with computers:

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

That's what twiddling is – doing the same things that grocery store monopolists and rail monopolists and music label monopolists have always done, but very quickly, with computers. Whether it's Amazon rooking sellers and authors, or Apple and Google's App Stores rooking app creators, or Tiktok and Youtube rooking performers, or Uber rooking drivers, the underlying pattern of surplus-harvesting is the same, and so is the method. They do the same thing as their predecessors, but very quickly, with computers.

A grocer who wants to price-gouge on eggs needs to dispatch an army of low-waged employees with pricing guns. AmazonFresh does the same thing in an eyeblink, by typing a new number into a field on a web-form and clicking submit. As is so often the case when a magic trick is laid bare, the actual mechanic is very, very boring: the way to make a nickel appear to vanish is to spend hundreds of hours practicing before a mirror while you shift so it is clenched between your fingers, and protrudes from behind your hand (sorry, spoiler alert).

The trick can be baffling and marvellous when you see it, but once you know how it's done, it's pretty obvious – the difference is that most sleight-of-hand artists don't think they're sorcerers, while plenty of tech bros believe their own press.

There's a profound irony in twiddling's role in enshittification: early internet scholarship rightly hailed the power of twiddling for internet users. Theorists like Aram Sinnreich described this as configurability – the ability of end-users (aided by tinkerers, small businesses, and co-ops) to modify the services they used to suit their own needs:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vk8c2

Arguably the most successful configurability story is ad-blocking, which Doc Searls calls "the biggest boycott in human history." Billions of end-users of the web have twiddled their browsers so that they aren't tracked by ad-tech and don't see ads:

https://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2015/09/28/beyond-ad-blocking-the-biggest-boycott-in-human-history/

Configurability was at the heart of early hopes for mass disintermediation, because audiences and performers (or sellers and producers) could go direct to one another, assembling a customized, un-capturable conduit composed of an a-la-carte selection of payment processors, webstores, mail and web hosts, etc. Whenever one of these utilities tried to capture that relationship and harvest an unfair share of the surplus, both ends of the transaction could foil them by blocking, reverse-engineering, modding, or mashing them up, wriggling off the hook before it could set its barbs.

But – as we can all see – a funny thing happened on the way to the 21st century. The platforms seized the internet, turning it into "five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four":

https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040

Three factors let them do this:

I. They were able to buy or merge with every major competitor, and where that failed them, they were able to use predatory pricing to drive competitors out of the market:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/16/tweedledumber/#easily-spooked

II. They were able to twiddle their services, setting them a-bristle with surveillance beacons and digital actuators that could rearrange the virtual furniture every time some knob-jockey touched their dial:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

III. They were able to hoard the twiddling, using laws like the DMCA, CFAA, noncompetes, trade secrecy, and other "IP" laws to control the conduct of their competitors, critics and customers:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

That last point is very important: it's not just that big corporations twiddle us to death – it's that they have made it illegal for us to twiddle back. Adblocking is possible on the open web, but to ad-block your Iphone, you must first jailbreak it, which is a crime. Yes, Apple will block Facebook from spying on you – but even if you opt out of tracking, Apple still spies on you in exactly the same way Facebook did, to power their own ad-targeting business:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

This is what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business-model" – the literal criminalization of configuration. When Netflix wants to decide who is and isn't a member of your family, they just twiddle their back-end to block the child that moves back and forth between your home and your ex's, thanks to your joint custody arrangement:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/02/nonbinary-families/#red-envelopes

But woe betide the parent who twiddles back to restore their child's service, by jailbreaking an app or the W3C's official, in-browser DRM, EME – trafficking in a tool to bypass EME and reconfigure your browser to suit your needs, rather than Netflix's, is a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine, under Section 1201 of the DMCA:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/open-letter-w3c-director-ceo-team-and-membership

This is the supreme irony of twiddling: Big Tech companies love to twiddle you, but if you touch your own knob, they call it a crime. Just as Big Tech firms turned "free software" into "open source" and then took all the software freedom for themselves, configurability is now the exclusive purview of corporations – those transhuman, immortal colony paperclip maximizers that treat humans as inconvenient gut-flora:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&&v=vBknF2yUZZ8

If we are to take the net back, we'll need to seize the means of computation. There are three steps to that process:

I. Traditional antitrust: Merger scrutiny, breakups, and bans on predatory pricing and other anticompetitive practices:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/01/federal-trade-commission-justice-department-seek-strengthen-enforcement-against-illegal-mergers

II. Anti-twiddling laws for businesses: A federal privacy law with a private right of action, labor protections, and other rules that take knobs away from tech platforms:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/01/you-should-have-right-sue-companies-violate-your-privacy

III. Pro-twiddling laws for users: Interoperability (both mandatory and adversarial – AKA "Competitive Compatibility" or "comcom"):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/05/time-for-some-game-theory/#massholes

Monopolists and their handmaidens – witting and unwitting – want you to believe that their dominance is inevitable (shades of Thatcher's "there is no alternative"), because the great forces of history, the technical characteristics of digital technology, and the sorcerous mind-control of dopamine-hackers.

But the reality is much more mundane. Digital freedom was never a mirage. Indeed, it is a prize of enormous value – that's why the platforms are so intent on hoarding it all for themselves.

Here's this week's podcast episode:

https://craphound.com/news/2023/02/27/twiddler/

And here's a direct link to download the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the Internet Archive; they'll host your media for free, forever):

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_439/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_439_-_Twiddler.mp3

Here's the direct feed to subscribe to my podcast:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

And here's the original "Twiddler" article on Medium:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

(Image: Stephen Drake, CC BY 2.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

More on the Interest-Income Channel https://stephaniekelton.substack.com/p/more-on-the-interest-income-channel

This day in history (permalink)

#15yrsago GOP Senate hopeful got rich diverting corpsemeat from burn victims to enlarge penises https://web.archive.org/web/20080229172359/https://thehill.com/markos-moulitsas/gops-flesh-eating-zombie-candidate-2008-02-26.html

#15yrsago More Abu Ghraib torture photos https://www.wired.com/2008/03/gallery-abu-ghraib/

#10yrsago Akata Witch: young adult hero’s journey of a Nigerian witch https://memex.craphound.com/2013/02/27/akata-witch-young-adult-heros-journey-of-a-nigerian-witch/

#5yrsago Trumpcare added $33B to government healthcare spending, in order to cover 8.9m fewer Americans, who will pay more for less https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-trumpcare-urban-20180226-story.html

#5yrsago Senior Ben Carson staffer says she was demoted for refusing to “find money” to spend on lavish publicly funded perks for Carson’s home and office https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/27/politics/ben-carson-office-furniture-whistleblower/index.html

#5yrsago Blue Cross employees are instructed to donate to the boss’s daughter, a “Democrat” who opposes single-payer https://truthout.org/articles/blue-cross-pressures-employees-to-donate-to-opponent-of-single-payer-candidates/

#1yrago Amazon's $31b "ad business" isn't https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/27/not-an-ad/#shakedowns

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. Friday's progress: 526 words (109555 words total)
+
+
The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, WAITING FOR EDITORIAL REVIEW
+
+
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
+
+
Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. ON SUBMISSION
+
+
Moral Hazard, a short story for MIT Tech Review's 12 Tomorrows. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION
+
+
Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. ON SUBMISSION
+

Latest podcast: Tiktok's Enshittification https://craphound.com/news/2023/02/20/tiktoks-enshittification/

Upcoming appearances:

Antitrust, Regulation and the Political Economy (Brussels), Mar 2
+https://www.brusselsconference.com/registration
+
+
Elevate Festival (Graz), Mar 3
+https://elevate.at/diskurs/programm/event/e23doctorow/
+
+
Seize the Means of Computation (TU Wein), Mar 7
+https://informatics.tuwien.ac.at/news/2373
+
+
UT School of Design and Creative Technologies (Austin), Mar 9
+https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-buckman-center-presents-cory-doctorow-tickets-526627556197
+
+
Ethics of Emerging Tech Lecture (U Manitoba), Mar 9
+https://eventscalendar.umanitoba.ca/site/science/event/ethics-of-emerging-technology-lecture—rebecca-giblin-and-cory-doctorow/
+
+
SXSW Chokepoint Capitalism reading (Austin), Mar 10
+https://schedule.sxsw.com/2023/events/PP1143284
+

Recent appearances:

ANU/Canberra Times Meet The Author
+https://soundcloud.com/experience_anu/in-conversation-with-rebecca-giblin-and-cory-doctorow?si=67bcf6db3c4742bd973152e4b1b4e313
+
+
The Gould Standard
+https://pod.link/thegouldstandard/episode/8648b67fb7a6ccbf49a7d5406f8582c7
+
+
ABC Radio National:
+https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/drawingroom/chokepoint-capitalism/101973108
+

Latest books:

"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 (print edition: https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907) (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:

Red Team Blues: "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books, April 2023
+
+
The Internet Con: A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech, Verso, September 2023
+
+
The Lost Cause: a post-Green New Deal eco-topian novel about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias, Tor Books, November 2023
+

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.

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Pluralistic: Dow promised to turn sneakers into playground surfaces, then dumped them in Indonesia (26 Feb 2023)

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 26 Feb 2023 18:10:18 +0000

Today's links

Dow promised to turn sneakers into playground surfaces, then dumped them in Indonesia: Corporate "recycling" programs are just obfuscated landfills. +
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. +
This day in history: 2003, 2008, 2013, 2018 +
Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading +

Dow promised to turn sneakers into playground surfaces, then dumped them in Indonesia (permalink)

Dow Chemicals plastered Singapore with ads for its sneaker recycling program, promising to turn old shoes into playground tracks. But the shoes it collected in its "recycling" bins were illegally dumped in Indonesia. This isn't an aberration: it's how nearly all plastic recycling has always worked.

Plastic recycling's origin story starts in 1973, when Exxon's scientists concluded that plastic recycling would never, ever be cost-effective (#ExxonKnew about this, too). Exxon sprang into action: they popularized the recycling circular arrow logo and backed "anti-littering" campaigns that blamed the rising tide of immortal, toxic garbage on peoples' laziness.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/14/they-knew/#doing-it-again

Remember the campaign where an Italian guy dressed like a Native American shed a single tear as he contemplated plastic litter? Funded by the plastic industry, as a way of shifting blame for plastic waste from the wealthy, powerful corporations who lied about plastics recycling to the individuals who believed their lies:

https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-perspec-indian-crying-environment-ads-pollution-1123-20171113-story.html

When I was a kid in Ontario, we had centralized, regulated, reusable bottle depots – beer and soda bottles came in standard sizes, differentiated by paper labels that could be pressure-washed off. When you were done with your bottle, you returned it for a deposit and it got washed and returned to bottlers to be refilled again and again and again.

After intense lobbying from soda companies, brewers and the plastic industry, that program was replaced with curbside "blue boxes" that promised to recycle our plastic waste. 90% of the plastics created has never been – and will never be – recycled. Today, the plastic industry plans on tripling the amount of single-use plastic in use worldwide:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/26/plastic-fatalistic/#recycled-lies

You know those ads from companies like Bluetriton (formerly "Nestle Waters") that promise that your single-use plastic bottles are "100% recyclable…and can be used for new bottles and all sorts of new, reusable things?"

Bluetriton is a private equity-backed rollup that has absorbed most of the bottled water companies you're familiar with, including Poland Spring, Pure Life, Splash, Ozarka, and Arrowhead. When they were sued in DC for making false claims about their "recyclable" water-bottles, their defense was that these were "non-actionable puffery." According to Bluetriton, when it described itself as "a guardian of sustainable resources" and "a company who, at its core, cares about water," it was being "vague and hyperbolic."

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/26/plastic-fatalistic/#recycled-lies

With this high standard for plastic recycling, Dow's Singapore scam shouldn't come as a surprise, but it seems to have surprised the government of Singapore. Writing for Reuters, Joe Brock, Yuddy Cahya Budiman and Joseph Campbell describe how they caught Dow red-handed:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/global-plastic-dow-shoes/

The method is actually pretty straightforward: Reuters hid tracking devices in cavities in the soles of sneakers, dropped them in one of Dow's collection bins, and then followed them. The shoes were passed onto Dow's subcontractor, Yok Impex Pte Ltd, who sent them hopping from island to island throughout Indonesia, until they ended up in junk-markets.

Not all the shoes, though – one pair was simply moved from Dow's collection bin to a donation bin at a Singaporean community center. Of the 11 pairs that Reuters tracked, not one ended up at a recycling facility. So much for Dow's slogan: "Others see an old shoe. We see the future."

Dow blamed all this on Yok Impex, but didn't explain why its "recycling" program involved a company whose sole trade is exporting used clothing. Dow promised to cancel its deal with Yok Impex, but Yok Impex's accountant told Reuters that the deal would be remain in place until the end of the contract. Yok Impex, meanwhile, shifted the blame to the low-waged women who sort through the clothing donations it takes in from across Singapore.

Indonesia bans bulk imports of used clothes, on the grounds that used clothes are unhygenic, displace the local textiles industry, and shipments contain high volumes of waste that ends up in Indonesian incinerators, landfills and rivers.

In other words, Singaporeans thought they were saving the planet by putting their shoes in Dow bins, but they were really sending those shoes on a long journey to an unlicensed dump. Dow enlisted schoolchildren in used-shoe collection drives, making upbeat videos that featured students like Zhang Youjia boasting that they "contributed 15 pairs of shoes."

Dow does this all the time. In 2021, Dow's "breakthrough technology to turn plastic waste into clean fuel" in Idaho was revealed to be a plain old incinerator:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/environment-plastic-oil-recycling/

Also in 2021, in India, a Dow program to "use high-tech machinery to transform the [plastic from the Ganges] into clean fuel" was revealed to have ceased operations – but was still collecting plastic and promising that it was all being turned into fuel:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-environment-plastic-insight-idUSKBN29N024

Dow operates a nearly identical "shoe recycling" program in neighboring Malaysia, and did not return Reuters' requests for comment as to whether the shoes collected for "recycling" in the far more populous nation were also being illegally dumped offshore.

The global business lobby loves the idea of "personal responsibility" and its evil twin, "caveat emptor." Its pet economists worship the idea of "revealed preferences," claiming that when we use plastic, we may claim that we don't want to have our bodies poisoned with immortal, toxic microplastics, that we don't want our land and waters despoiled – but we actually love it, because otherwise we'd "vote with our wallets" for something else.

The obvious advantage of telling people to vote with their wallets is that the less money you have in your wallet, the fewer votes you get. Companies like Dow have used their access to the capital markets (a fancy phrase for "rich people") to gobble up their competitors, eliminating "wasteful competition" and piling up massive profits. Those profits are laundered into policy – like replacing Ontario's zero-waste refillable bottle system with a "recycling" system that sent plastics to the ends of the Earth to be set on fire or buried or dumped in the sea.

The ruling class's pet economists have a name for this policy laundering: they call it "regulatory capture." Now, when you hear "regulatory capture," you might think about companies that get so big that they are able to boss governments around, with the obvious answer that companies need to be regulated before they get too big to jail:

https://doctorow.medium.com/small-government-fd5870a9462e

But that's not how elite economists talk about regulatory capture: for them, capture starts with the very existence of regulators. For them, any government agency that proposes to protect the public from corporate fraud and murder inevitably becomes an agent of the corporations it is supposed to rein in, so the only answer is to eliminate regulators altogether:

https://doctorow.medium.com/regulatory-capture-59b2013e2526

This nihilism lets rich people blame the rest of us for their sins: "if you didn't want your children to roast or freeze to death in the climate emergency, you should have sold your car and used the subway (that we bribed your city not to build)."

Nihilism is contagious. Think of the music industry: before Napster, 80% of the music ever recorded was not for sale, banished to the scrapheap of history and the vaults of record companies who paid farcically low sums to their artists.

During the File Sharing Wars, listeners were excoriated for failing to pay for music – much of which wasn't for sale in the first place. But today, fans overwhelmingly pay for Spotify, a streaming service that notoriously pays musicians infinitesimal sums for their work.

Spotify is a creature of the Big Three labels – Sony, Universal and Warner – who own 70% of all the world's recorded music copyrights and 65% of all the world's music publishing. The rock-bottom per-stream prices that Spotify pays were set by the Big Three. Why would the labels want less money from Spotify?

Simple: as co-owners of Spotify, they make more money when Spotify pays less for music. Musicians have a claim on the money they take out of Spotify as royalties – but dividends, buybacks and capital gains from Spotify are the labels' to use as they see fit. They can share that bounty with some artists, all artists, or no artists.

Not only that, but the Big Three's deal with Spotify includes a "most favored nation" clause, which means that the independent artists who aren't under Sony/UMG/Warner's thumb have to take the rock-bottom rate the Big Three insisted on – likewise the small labels who compete with the Big Three. The difference is that none of these artists and small labels have massive portfolios of Spotify stock, nor do they get free advertising on Spotify, or free inclusion on hot Spotify playlists, or monthly minimum payouts from Spotify.

The idea that we shop at the wrong kind of monopolist in the wrong way is a recipe for absolute despair. It doesn't matter whether you listen to music with the Big Tech-owned monopoly service (Youtube) or the Big Content-owned monopoly service (Spotify). The money you hand over to these giant companies goes to artists the same way that the sneakers you put in a Dow collection bin goes to a recycling plant.

Think of the billions of human labor hours we all spent washing and sorting our plastics for a recycling program that didn't exist and will never exist – imagine if we'd spent that time and energy demanding that our politicians hold petrochemical companies to account instead.

At the end of Break 'Em Up, Zephyr Teachout's outstanding 2020 book on monopolies, Teachout has some choice words for "consumerism" as a theory of change. She writes that if you're on your way to a protest against a new Amazon warehouse but you never make it because you waste too much time looking for a mom-and-pop stationer's to sell you a marker to write your protest sign, Amazon wins:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/29/break-em-up/#break-em-up

The problem isn't that you shop the wrong way. Yes, by all means, support the creators and producers you care about in the way that they prefer, but keep your eye on the prize. Structural problems don't have individual solutions. The problem isn't that you have chosen single-use plastics – it's that in our world everything for sale is packaged in single-use plastics. The problem isn't that you've bought a subscription to the wrong music streaming service – it's that labels have been allowed to buy all their competitors, creators' unions have been smashed and degraded, and giant accounting scams by big companies generate minuscule fines.

The good news is that after 40 years of despair inducing regulatory nihilism and "vote with your wallet" talk, we're finally paying attention to systemic problems, with a new generation of trustbusting radicals working around the world to end corporate impunity.

Dow is a repeat offender. A repeat, repeat offender. Chrissakes, they're the linear descendants of Union Carbide, the company that poisoned Bhopal:

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

They shouldn't be trusted to run a lemonade stand, let alone a "recycling" program. The same goes for Big Tech and Big Content companies and the markets for creative labor. These companies have repeatedly demonstrated their unfitness, their habitual deception and immorality. These companies have captured their regulators, repeatedly, so we need better regulators – and weaker companies.

The thing I love about Teachout's book is that it talks about what we should be demanding from our governments – it's a manifesto for a movement against corporate power, not a movement for "responsible consumerism." That was the template that Rebecca Giblin and I followed when we wrote Chokepoint Capitalism, our book about the brutal, corrupt creative labor market:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

We have a chapter on Spotify (multiple chapters, in fact!). For our audiobook, we made that chapter a "Spotify Exclusive" – it's the only part of the book you can get on Spotify, and it's free:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/12/streaming-doesnt-pay/#stunt-publishing

Hey look at this (permalink)

A Christian Health Nonprofit Saddled Thousands With Debt as It Built a Family Empire Including a Pot Farm, a Bank and an Airline https://www.propublica.org/article/liberty-healthshare-healthcare-sharing-ministries-obamacare

This day in history (permalink)

#20yrsago Jailhouse cellphone used to command Brazillian terror campaign https://web.archive.org/web/20030415155023/http://smartmobs.com/archives/000720.html

#20yrsago Scottish accents incomprehensible to speech-to-text algorithms https://web.archive.org/web/20030301142928/http://www.eveningtimes.co.uk/lo/news/5012990.html

#20yrsago Google’s trademark counsel sending out dumb lawyer-letters over “to google” https://web.archive.org/web/20030401221254/https://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0302D&L=ads-l&P=R2450

#20yrsago Laboring mother liveblogs her daughter's birth http://www.ambiguous.org/quinn/birth/

#20yrsago 7.6 billion miles later, Pioneer 10 falls silent https://www.seattlepi.com/national/article/Pioneer-10-now-silent-is-on-a-journey-to-the-1108293.php

#20yrsago Suicide hotline operator finds work counselling data-loss victims https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Psychologist-helps-victims-of-data-loss-Some-2632946.php

#20yrsago ThreeDegress: Microsoft's DRM for Kids is unbelievably terrible https://web.archive.org/web/20030307140713/http://cheerleader.yoz.com/archives/000419.html

#15yrsago Apple TV DRM makes iTunes rentals incompatible with many TVs https://tidbits.com/2008/02/20/drm-foils-itunes-movie-rentals-for-some-apple-tv-owners/

#15yrsago Life and times of a Consumer Reports secret shopper https://www.wired.com/2008/02/ps-consumerreports/

#15yrsago New typography term: Keming (improper kerning) https://www.ironicsans.com/2008/02/idea_a_new_typography_term.html

#15yrsago Complaining about companies is part of the market https://web.archive.org/web/20080212060801/http://informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=206401189

#10yrsago Rage is Back: graffiti crews save NYC from its lurking demons https://memex.craphound.com/2013/02/25/rage-is-back-graffiti-crews-save-nyc-from-its-lurking-demons/

#5yrsago Koch brothers publish letter crowing about all the ways Trump spent the year carrying water for them https://theintercept.com/2018/02/25/koch-brothers-trump-administration/

#5yrsago Stock market gains to the richest 2% of Americans in 2017 could pay for the entire nation’s social programs https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/02/26/americas-richest-2-made-more-money-2017-cost-entire-safety-net

#5yrsago Man discovers he has been impersonated on Amazon by a money-launderer selling $555 “books” full of computer-generated word salad https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/02/money-laundering-via-author-impersonation-on-amazon/

#5yrsago Lobbyists release push-poll in an effort to tank Right to Repair bills and control independent security research https://securityledger.com/2018/02/new-lobbying-group-fights-right-repair-laws/

#5yrsago Why the voting age should be lowered to 16 https://www.eclectablog.com/2018/02/theres-no-good-argument-against-16-year-olds-voting.html

#5yrsago A cybersecurity style guide https://bishopfox.com/blog/intro-cybersecurity-style-guide

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Slashdot (https://slashdot.org/).

Currently writing:

Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. Friday's progress: 526 words (109555 words total)
+
+
The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, WAITING FOR EDITORIAL REVIEW
+
+
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
+
+
Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. ON SUBMISSION
+
+
Moral Hazard, a short story for MIT Tech Review's 12 Tomorrows. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION
+
+
Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. ON SUBMISSION
+

Latest podcast: Tiktok's Enshittification https://craphound.com/news/2023/02/20/tiktoks-enshittification/

Upcoming appearances:

Antitrust, Regulation and the Political Economy (Brussels), Mar 2
+https://www.brusselsconference.com/registration
+
+
Elevate Festival (Graz), Mar 3
+https://elevate.at/diskurs/programm/event/e23doctorow/
+
+
UT School of Design and Creative Technologies (Austin), Mar 9
+https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-buckman-center-presents-cory-doctorow-tickets-526627556197
+
+
Ethics of Emerging Tech Lecture (U Manitoba), Mar 9
+https://eventscalendar.umanitoba.ca/site/science/event/ethics-of-emerging-technology-lecture—rebecca-giblin-and-cory-doctorow/
+
+
SXSW Chokepoint Capitalism reading (Austin), Mar 10
+https://schedule.sxsw.com/2023/events/PP1143284
+

Recent appearances:

ANU/Canberra Times Meet The Author
+https://soundcloud.com/experience_anu/in-conversation-with-rebecca-giblin-and-cory-doctorow?si=67bcf6db3c4742bd973152e4b1b4e313
+
+
The Gould Standard
+https://pod.link/thegouldstandard/episode/8648b67fb7a6ccbf49a7d5406f8582c7
+
+
ABC Radio National:
+https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/drawingroom/chokepoint-capitalism/101973108
+

Latest books:

"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 (print edition: https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907) (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:

Red Team Blues: "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books, April 2023
+
+
The Internet Con: A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech, Verso, September 2023
+
+
The Lost Cause: a post-Green New Deal eco-topian novel about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias, Tor Books, November 2023
+

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:

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

Pluralistic: This is your brain on fraud apologetics (24 Feb 2023)

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 24 Feb 2023 15:04:23 +0000

Today's links

This is your brain on fraud apologetics: The curious comfort of victim-blaming. +
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. +
This day in history: 2003, 2008, 2013, 2018, 2022 +
Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading +

This is your brain on fraud apologetics (permalink)

In 1998, two Stanford students published a paper in Computer Networks entitled "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine," in which they wrote, "Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers."

https://research.google/pubs/pub334/

The co-authors were Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin, and the "large-scale hypertextual web search-engine" they were describing was their new project, which they called "Google." They were 100% correct – prescient, even!

On Wednesday night, a friend came over to watch some TV with us. We ordered out. We got scammed. We searched for a great local Thai place we like called Kiin and clicked a sponsored link for a Wix site called "Kiinthaila.com." We should have clicked the third link down (kiinthaiburbank.com).

We got scammed. The Wix site was a lookalike for Kiin Thai, which marked up their prices by 15% and relayed the order to our local, mom-and-pop, one-branch restaurant. The restaurant knew it, too – they called us and told us they were canceling the order, and said we could still come get our food, but we'd have to call Amex to reverse the charge.

As it turned out, the scammers double-billed us for our order. I called Amex, who advised us to call back in a couple days when the charge posted to cancel it – in other words, they were treating it as a regular customer dispute, and not a systemic, widespread fraud (there's no way this scammer is just doing this for one restaurant).

In the grand scheme of things, this is a minor hassle, but boy, it's haunting to watch the quarter-century old prophecy of Brin and Page coming true. Search Google for carpenters, plumbers, gas-stations, locksmiths, concert tickets, entry visas, jobs at the US Post Office or (not making this up) tech support for Google products, and the top result will be a paid ad for a scam. Sometimes it's several of the top ads.

This kind of "intermediation" business is actually revered in business-schools. As Douglas Rushkoff has written, the modern business wisdom reveres "going meta" – not doing anything useful, but rather, creating a chokepoint between people who do useful things and people who want to pay for those things, and squatting there, collecting rent:

https://rushkoff.medium.com/going-meta-d42c6a09225e

It's the ultimate passive income/rise and grind side-hustle: It wouldn't surprise me in the least to discover a whole festering nest of creeps on Tiktok talking about how they pay Mechanical Turks to produce these lookalike sites at scale.

This mindset is so pervasive that people running companies with billions in revenue and massive hoards of venture capital run exactly the same scam. During lockdown, companies like Doordash, Grubhub and Uber Eats stood up predatory lookalike websites for local restaurants, without their consent, and played monster-in-the-middle, tricking diners into ordering through them:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/19/we-are-beautiful/#man-in-the-middle

These delivery app companies were playing a classic enshittification game: first they directed surpluses to customers to lock them in (heavily discounting food), then they directed surplus to restaurants (preferential search results, free delivery, low commissions) – then, having locked in both consumers and producers, they harvested the surplus for themselves.

Today, delivery apps charge massive premiums to both eaters and restaurants, load up every order with junk fees, and clone the most successful restaurants out of ghost kitchens – shipping containers in parking lots crammed with low-waged workers cranking out orders for 15 different fake "virtual restaurants":

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/01/autophagic-buckeyes/#subsidized-autophagia

Delivery apps speedran the enshittification cycle, but Google took a slower path to get there. The company has locked in billions of users (e.g. by paying billions to be the default search on Safari and Firefox and using legal bullying to block third party Android device-makers from pre-installing browsers other than Chrome). For years, it's been leveraging our lock-in to prey on small businesses, getting them to set up Google Business Profiles.

These profiles are supposed to help Google distinguish between real sellers and scammers. But Kiin Thai has a Google Business Profile, and searching for "kiin thai burbank" brings up a "Knowledge Panel" with the correct website address – on a page that is headed with a link to a scam website for the same business. Google, in other words, has everything it needs to flag lookalike sites and confirm them with their registered owners. It would cost Google money to do this – engineer-time to build and maintain the system, content moderator time to manually check flagged listings, and lost ad-revenue from scammers – but letting the scams flourish makes Google money, at the expense of Google users and Google business customers.

Now, Google has an answer for this: they tell merchants who are being impersonated by ad-buying scammers that all they need to do is outbid them for the top ad-spot. This is a common approach – Amazon has a $31b/year "ad business" that's mostly its own platform sellers bidding against each other to show you fake results for your query. The first five screens of Amazon search results are 50% ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is "going meta," so naturally, Meta is doing it too: Facebook and Instagram have announced a $12/month "verification" badge that will let you report impersonation and tweak the algorithm to make it more likely that the posts you make are shown to the people who explicitly asked to see them:

https://www.vox.com/recode/2023/2/21/23609375/meta-verified-twitter-blue-checkmark-badge-instagram-facebook

The corollary of this, of course, is that if you don't pay, they won't police your impersonators, and they won't show your posts to the people who asked to see them. This is pure enshittification – the surplus from users and business customers is harvested for the benefit of the platform owners:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

The idea that merchants should master the platforms as a means of keeping us safe from their impersonators is a hollow joke. For one thing, the rules change all the time, as the platforms endlessly twiddle the knobs that determine what gets shown to whom:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

And they refuse to tell anyone what the rules are, because if they told you what the rules were, you'd be able to bypass them. Content moderation is the only infosec domain where "security through obscurity" doesn't get laughed out of the room:

https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-infosec-307f87004563

Worse: the one thing the platforms do hunt down and exterminate with extreme prejudice is anything that users or business-customers use to twiddle back – add-ons and plugins and jailbreaks that override their poor choices with better ones:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/29/23378541/the-og-app-instagram-clone-pulled-from-app-store

As I was submitting complaints about the fake Kiin scam-site (and Amex's handling of my fraud call) to the FTC, the California Attorney General, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau and Wix, I wrote a little Twitter thread about what a gross scam this is:

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1628948906657878016

The thread got more than two million reads and got picked up by Hacker News and other sites. While most of the responses evinced solidarity and frustration and recounted similar incidents in other domains, a significant plurality of the replies were scam apologetics – messages from people who wanted to explain why this wasn't a problem after all.

The most common of these was victim-blaming: "you should have used an adblocker" or "never click the sponsored link." Of course, I do use an ad-blocker – but this order was placed with a mobile browser, after an absentminded query into the Google search-box permanently placed on the home screen, which opens results in Chrome (where I don't have an ad-blocker, so I can see material behind an ad-blocker-blocker), not Firefox (which does have an ad-blocker).

Now, I also have a PiHole on my home LAN, which blocks most ads even in a default browser – but earlier this day, I'd been on a public wifi network that was erroneously blocking a website (the always excellent superpunch.net) so I'd turned my wifi off, which meant the connection came over my phone's 5G connection, bypassing the PiHole:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/28/shut-yer-pi-hole/

"Don't click a sponsored link" – well, the irony here is that if you habitually use a browser with an ad-blocker, and you backstop it with a PiHole, you never see sponsored links, so it's easy to miss the tiny "Sponsored" notification beside the search result. That goes double if you're relaxing with a dinner guest on the sofa and ordering dinner while chatting.

There's a name for this kind of security failure: the Swiss Cheese Model. We all have multiple defenses (in my case: foreknowledge of Google's ad-scam problem, an ad-blocker in my browser, LAN-wide ad sinkholing). We also have multiple vulnerabilities (in my case: forgetting I was on 5G, being distracted by conversation, using a mobile device with a permanent insecure search bar on the homescreen, and being so accustomed to ad-blocked results that I got out of the habit of checking whether a result was an ad).

If you think you aren't vulnerable to scams, you're wrong – and your confidence in your invulnerability actually increases your risk. This isn't the first time I've been scammed, and it won't be the last – and every time, it's been a Swiss Cheese failure, where all the holes in all my defenses lined up for a brief instant and left me vulnerable:

https://locusmag.com/2010/05/cory-doctorow-persistence-pays-parasites/

Other apologetics: "just call the restaurant rather than using its website." Look, I know the people who say this don't think I have a time-machine I can use to travel back to the 1980s and retrieve a Yellow Pages, but it's hard not to snark at them, just the same. Scammers don't just set up fake websites for your local businesses – they staff them with fake call-centers, too. The same search that takes you to a fake website will also take you to a fake phone number.

Finally, there's "What do you expect Google to do? They can't possibly detect this kind of scam." But they can. Indeed, they are better situated to discover these scams than anyone else, because they have their business profiles, with verified contact information for the merchants being impersonated. When they get an ad that seems to be for the same business but to a different website, they could interrupt the ad process to confirm it with their verified contact info.

Instead, they choose to avoid the expense, and pocket the ad revenue. If a company promises to "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," I think we have the right to demand these kinds of basic countermeasures:

https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/our-approach/

The same goes for Amex: when a merchant is scamming customers, they shouldn't treat complaints as "chargebacks" – they should treat them as reports of a crime in progress. Amex has the bird's eye view of their transaction flow and when a customer reports a scam, they can backtrack it to see if the same scammer is doing this with other merchants – but the credit card companies make money by not chasing down fraud:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosalindadams/mastercard-visa-fraud

Wix also has platform-scale analytics that they could use to detect and interdict this kind of fraud – when a scammer creates a hundred lookalike websites for restaurants and uses Wix's merchant services to process payments for them, that could trigger human review – but it didn't.

Where do all of these apologetics come from? Why are people so eager to leap to the defense of scammers and their adtech and fintech enablers? Why is there such an impulse to victim-blame?

I think it's fear: in their hearts, people – especially techies – know that they, too, are vulnerable to these ripoffs, but they don't want to admit it. They want to convince themselves that the person who got scammed made an easily avoidable mistake, and that they themselves will never make a similar mistake.

This is doubly true for readerships on tech-heavy forums like Twitter or (especially) Hacker News. These readers know just how many vulnerabilities there are – how many holes are in their Swiss cheese – and they are also overexposed to rise-and-grind/passive income rhetoric.

This produces a powerful cognitive dissonance: "If all the 'entrepreneurs' I worship are just laying traps for the unwary, and if I am sometimes unwary, then I'm cheering on the authors of my future enduring misery." The only way to resolve this dissonance – short of re-evaluating your view of platform capitalism or questioning your own immunity to scams – is to blame the victim.

The median Hacker News reader has to somehow resolve the tension between "just install an adblocker" and "Chrome's extension sandbox is a dumpster fire and it's basically impossible to know whether any add-on you install can steal every keystroke and all your other data":

https://mattfrisbie.substack.com/p/spy-chrome-extension

In my Twitter thread, I called this "the worst of all possible timelines." Everything we do is mediated by gigantic, surveillant monopolists that spy on us comprehensively from asshole to appetite – but none of them, not a 20th century payment giant nor a 21st century search giant – can bestir itself to use that data to keep us safe from scams.

Hey look at this (permalink)

Infinite-Storage-Glitch https://github.com/DvorakDwarf/Infinite-Storage-Glitch (h/t Joshua Bradley)
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Network Usage Fees Will Harm European Consumers and Businesses https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/12/network-usage-fees-will-harm-european-consumers-and-businesses
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I asked Popehat: Why isn't SBF in jail? https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/i-asked-popehat-why-isnt-sbf-in-jail
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This day in history (permalink)

#20yrsago Ghanan gov’t shuts down ISPs to keep email from displacing long-distance https://web.archive.org/web/20030424090724/http://lists.elistx.com/archives/interesting-people/200302/msg00189.html

#20yrsago Doctorow on Gibson in Mindjack https://www.mindjack.com/books/gibsonpr.html

#15yrsago Government and corporate employees engage in an “epidemic” of snooping into databases https://web.archive.org/web/20080229003253/http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5ghPenZUJTE7BfSfgQbj6RX597DEAD8V019TG0

#15yrsago Science Fiction Writers of America election is a referendum on copyright extremism https://whatever.scalzi.com/2008/02/18/a-gut-check-moment-for-sfwa/

#15yrsago Knowledge isn’t property https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/feb/21/intellectual.property

#10yrsago Marriage proposal in the form of a physics paper https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/194ilz/my_boyfriend_of_7_years_and_i_are_both_physicists/

#10yrsago Pastafarian denied religious freedom in New Jersey driver’s license scandal https://web.archive.org/web/20130225093656/http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/colander-religious-headwear-police-article-1.1271134

#5yrsago Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School was surrounded by cowering “good guys with guns” https://edition.cnn.com/2018/02/23/politics/parkland-school-shooting-broward-deputies/index.html

#5yrsago Gothamist unionized and its evil Trumpist billionaire owner shut it down; now public radio is bringing it back https://www.wired.com/story/gothamist-dcist-laist-return-wnyc-public-radio/

#5yrsago Paul Manafort’s inability to save Word files as PDFs provided the evidence necessary to indict him for fraud https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/02/how-manaforts-inability-to-convert-a-word-doc-to-pdf-helped-prosecutors/

#1yrago Mass arbitration attack could bring Intuit to its knees https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/24/uber-for-arbitration/#nibbled-to-death-by-ducks

Colophon (permalink)

Currently writing:

Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. Yesterday's progress: 554 words (109029 words total)
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The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, WAITING FOR EDITORIAL REVIEW
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A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. ON SUBMISSION
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Moral Hazard, a short story for MIT Tech Review's 12 Tomorrows. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION
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Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. ON SUBMISSION
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Latest podcast: Tiktok's Enshittification https://craphound.com/news/2023/02/20/tiktoks-enshittification/

Upcoming appearances:

Antitrust, Regulation and the Political Economy (Brussels), Mar 2
+https://www.brusselsconference.com/registration
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Elevate Festival (Graz), Mar 3
+https://elevate.at/diskurs/programm/event/e23doctorow/
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UT School of Design and Creative Technologies (Austin), Mar 9
+https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-buckman-center-presents-cory-doctorow-tickets-526627556197
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Ethics of Emerging Tech Lecture (U Manitoba), Mar 9
+https://eventscalendar.umanitoba.ca/site/science/event/ethics-of-emerging-technology-lecture—rebecca-giblin-and-cory-doctorow/
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SXSW Chokepoint Capitalism reading (Austin), Mar 10
+https://schedule.sxsw.com/2023/events/PP1143284
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Recent appearances:

ANU/Canberra Times Meet The Author
+https://soundcloud.com/experience_anu/in-conversation-with-rebecca-giblin-and-cory-doctorow?si=67bcf6db3c4742bd973152e4b1b4e313
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The Gould Standard
+https://pod.link/thegouldstandard/episode/8648b67fb7a6ccbf49a7d5406f8582c7
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ABC Radio National:
+https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/drawingroom/chokepoint-capitalism/101973108
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Latest books:

"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
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"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
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"How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59 (print edition: https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)
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"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
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"Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.
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Upcoming books:

Red Team Blues: "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books, April 2023
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The Internet Con: A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech, Verso, September 2023
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The Lost Cause: a post-Green New Deal eco-topian novel about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias, Tor Books, November 2023
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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.