Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist and journalist

His latest book is ATTACK SURFACE, a standalone adult sequel to LITTLE BROTHER. He is also the author HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM, nonfiction about conspiracies and monopolies; and of RADICALIZED and WALKAWAY, science fiction for adults, a YA graphic novel called IN REAL LIFE; and young adult novels like HOMELAND, PIRATE CINEMA and LITTLE BROTHER. His first picture book was POESY THE MONSTER SLAYER (Aug 2020). He maintains a daily blog at Pluralistic.net. He works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is a MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate, is a Visiting Professor of Computer Science at Open University, a Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of North Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in Los Angeles.

Publié le 30.03.2023 à 15:54

Pluralistic: We should ban TikTok('s surveillance) (30 Mar 2023)


Today's links


A modified vintage editorial cartoon. Uncle Sam peeks out over a 'frowning battlement' whose cannon-slots are filled with telescopes from which peer the red glaring eyes of HAL 9000 from '2001: A Space Odyssey.' Topping the battlements in a row are Uncle Sam and three business-suited figures with dollar-sign-bags for heads. The three dollar-bag men have corporate logos on their breasts: Facebook, Google, Apple. Standing on the strand below the battlements, peering up, is a forlorn figure with a Tiktok logo for a head. The fortress wall bears the words 'RESTRICT Act.'

We should ban TikTok('s surveillance) (permalink)

With the RESTRICT Act, Congress is proposing to continue Trump's war on Tiktok, enacting a US ban on the Chinese-owned service. How will they do this? Congress isn't clear. In practice, banning stuff on the internet is hard, especially if you don't have a national firewall:

https://doctorow.medium.com/theyre-still-trying-to-ban-cryptography-33aa668dc602

My guess is that they're thinking of ordering the mobile duopoly of Google and Apple to nuke the Tiktok app from their app stores. That's how they do it in China, after all: when China wanted to ban VPNs and other privacy tools, they just ordered Apple to remove them from the App Store, and Apple rolled over:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/11/foreseeable-consequences/#airdropped

That's the completely foreseeable consequence of arrogating the power to decide which software every mobile user on earth is entitled to use – as Google and Apple have done. Once you put that gun on the mantelpiece in Act I, you damn betcha that some strong-man backed by a powerful state is going to come along and shoot it by Act III.

The same goes for commercial surveillance: once you collect massive, nonconsensual dossiers on every technology user alive, you don't get to act surprised when cops and spies show up and order your company to serve as deputies for a massive, off-the-books warrantless surveillance project.

Hell, a cynic might even say that commercial surveillance companies are betting on this. The surveillance public-private partnership is a vicious cycle: corporations let cops and spies plunder our data; then the cops and spies lobby against privacy laws that would prevent these corporations from spying on us:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/25/nationalize-moderna/#hun-sen

Which makes the RESTRICT Act an especially foolish project. If the Chinese state wants to procure data on Americans, it need not convince us to install Tiktok. It can simply plunk down a credit card with any of the many unregulated data-brokers who feed the American tech giants the dossiers that the NSA and local cops rely on.

Every American tech giant is at least as bad for privacy as Tiktok is – yes, even Apple. Sure, Apple lets its users block Facebook spying with a single tap – but even if you opt out of "tracking," Apple still secretly gathers exactly the same kinds of data as Facebook, and uses it to power its own ad product:

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

There is no such thing as a privacy-respecting tech giant. Long before Apple plastered our cities with lying billboards proclaiming its reverence for privacy, Microsoft positioned itself as the non-spying alternative to Google, which would be great, except Microsoft spies on hundreds of millions of people and sells the data:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/#clippys-revenge

Tech's surveillance addiction means that Tiktok's own alternative to the RESTRICT Act is also unbelievably stupid. The company has proposed to put itself under Oracle's supervision, letting Oracle host its data and audit its code. You know, Oracle, the company that built the Great Firewall of China 1.0:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/01/selling-china-surveillance

We should not trust Tiktok any more than we trust Apple, Facebook, Google or Microsoft. Tiktok lied about whether it was sending data to China before:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emilybakerwhite/tiktok-tapes-us-user-data-china-bytedance-access

And even if it keeps its promise not to send user data to China, that promise is meaningless – it can still send the vectors and models it creates with that data to China – these being far more useful for things like disinformation campaigns and population-scale inferences than the mere logs from your Tiktok sessions.

There are so many potentially harmful ways to process commercial surveillance data that trying to enumerate all the things that a corporation is allowed to do with the data it extracts from us is a fool's errand. Instead, we should ban companies from spying on us, whether they are Chinese or American.

Corporations are remorseless, paperclip-maximizing colony organisms that perceive us as inconvenient gut-flora, and they lack any executive function (as do their "executives"), and they cannot self-regulate. To keep corporations from harming us, we must make it illegal for them to enact harm, and punish them when they break the law:

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

After all, the problem with Tiktok isn't the delightful videos or the fact that it's teaching a generation of children to be expert sound- and video-editors. The problem with Tiktok is that it spies on us. Just like the problem with Facebook isn't that it lets us communicate with our friends, and the problem with Google isn't that it operates a search engine.

Now, these companies will tell you that the two can't be separated, that a bearded prophet came down off a mountain with two stone tablets, intoning, "Larry, Sergey, thou shalt stop rotating thine logfiles and, lo, thou wilt data-mine them for actionable market intelligence." But it's nonsense. Google ran for years without surveillance. Facebook billed itself as the privacy-forward alternative to Myspace and promised never to spy on us:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3247362

The inevitabilist narrative that says that corporations must violate our rights in order to make the products we love is unadulterated Mr Gotcha nonsense: "Yet you participate in society. Curious. I am very intelligent":

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

Of course, corporations push this narrative all the time, which is why American Big Tech has been quietly supporting a ban on Tiktok, which (coincidentally) has managed to gain a foothold in the otherwise impregnable, decaying, enshittified oligarchy that US companies have created.

They have conspicuously failed to call for any kind of working solution, like a federal privacy law that would ban commercial surveillance, and extend a "private right of action," so people could sue tech giants and data-brokers who violated the law, without having to convince a regulator, DA or Attorney General to bestir themselves:

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

Instead, the tech giants have the incredible gall to characterize themselves as the defenders of our privacy – at least, so long as the Chinese government is the adversary, and so long as its privacy violations come via an app, and not buy handing a credit card to the data-brokers that are the soil bacteria that keeps Big Tech's ecosystem circulating. In the upside-down land of Big Tech lobbying, privacy is a benefit of monopoly – not something we have to smash monopolies to attain:

https://www.eff.org/wp/interoperability-and-privacy

Not everyone in Congress is onboard with the RESTRICT Act. AOC has come out for a federal privacy law that applies to all companies, rather than a ban on an app that tens of millions of young Americans love:

https://www.businessinsider.com/aoc-first-tiktok-congress-ban-without-being-clued-in-2023-3

You know who agrees with AOC? Rand Paul. Yes, that absolute piece of shit. Paul told his caucusmates in the GOP that banning an app that millions of young American voters love is bad electoral politics. This fact is so obvious that even Rand fucking Paul can understand it:

https://gizmodo.com/rand-paul-opposes-tiktok-ban-warns-republicans-1850278167

Paul is absolutely right to call a Tiktok ban a "national strategy to permanently lose elections for a generation." The Democrats should listen to him, because the GOP won't. As between the two parties, the GOP is far more in thrall to the Chamber of Commerce and the rest of the business lobby. They are never going to back a policy that's as good for the people and as bad for big business as a federal privacy law.

The Democrats have the opportunity to position themselves as "the party that wants to keep Tiktok but force it to stop being creepy, along with all the other tech companies," while the GOP positions itself as "the party of angry technophobes who want to make sure that any fun you have is closely monitored by Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pinchai and Tim Cook and their pale imitations of the things you love about Tiktok."

That's not just good electoral politics – it's good policy. Young voters aren't going to turn out to the polls for performative Cold War 2.0 nonsense, but they will be pissed as hell at whoever takes away their Tiktok.

And if you do care about Cold War 2.0, then you should be banning surveillance, not Tiktok; the Chinese government has plenty of US dollars at its disposal to spend in America's freewheeling, unregulated data markets – as do criminals, petty and organized, and every other nation-state adversary of the USA.

The RESTRICT Act is a garbage law straight out of the Clinton era, a kind of King Canute decree that goes so far as to potentially prohibit the use of VPNs to circumvent its provisions. America doesn't need a Great Firewall to keep itself safe from tech spying – it needs a privacy law.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

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#20yrsago Weezer’s symbolic value https://web.archive.org/web/20190519021721/https://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~mustaste/weezerthesis.htm

#15yrsago Griefers deface epilepsy message-board with seizure-inducing animations https://www.wired.com/2008/03/hackers-assault-epilepsy-patients-via-computer/

#15yrsago London’s Spitalfields market: shoot the architecture, we take away your camera https://memex.craphound.com/2008/03/30/remixed-generic-thrift-store-clothes/

#15yrsago Remixed generic thrift-store clothes https://memex.craphound.com/2008/03/30/remixed-generic-thrift-store-clothes/

#10yrsago Embarrassingly obvious undercover cops take to Twitter looking for house shows https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2013/03/boston-police-catfishing-indie-rockers-cops-pose-as-punks-on-the-internet.html

#10yrsago Mr Unpronounceable Adventures, spectacularly weird graphic novel in a Lovecraftian/Burroughsian vein https://memex.craphound.com/2013/03/30/mr-unpronounceable-adventures-spectacularly-weird-graphic-novel-in-a-lovecraftian-burroughsian-vein/

#10yrsago Group whose Wikipedia entry was deleted for non-notability threatens lawsuit against Wikipedian who participated in the discussion https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/the-institute-for-cultural-diplomacy-and-wikipedia

#5yrsago Georgia criminalizes routine security research https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/03/georgia-passes-anti-infosec-legislation

#5yrsago Trump administration will require every visitor to the USA to divulge all social media identities https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-29/us-to-seek-social-media-details-from-all-visa-applicants

#5yrsago Facebook deathwatch: a decade ago, it was impossible to imagine the fall of Myspace https://memex.craphound.com/2018/03/30/facebook-deathwatch-a-decade-ago-it-was-impossible-to-imagine-the-fall-of-myspace/

#5yrsago Oklahoma teachers walk out, sensing weakness from GOP legislators who caved on taxing the oil industry https://jacobin.com/2018/03/oklahoma-teachers-strike-west-virginia/

#5yrsago Referendums and low-engagement voters produce catastrophic outcomes (but what about corruption?) https://timharford.com/2018/03/how-referendums-break-democracies/

#5yrsago Five years after Google conquered and abandoned RSS, the news-reader ecosystem is showing green shoots https://www.wired.com/story/rss-readers-feedly-inoreader-old-reader/

#5yrsago “Kingpin: The Hunt for El Chapo”: Game designers review the CIA’s declassified tabletop training game https://www.vice.com/en/article/3kjkx8/cia-el-chapo-kingpin-board-game-review

#1yrago Hackers' code-free exploit: pretend to be cops https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/30/lawful-interception/#edrs


Colophon (permalink)

Currently writing:

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, WAITING FOR EDITORIAL REVIEW

  • The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, WAITING FOR EDITORIAL REVIEW

  • 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: Red Team Blues https://craphound.com/news/2023/03/26/red-team-blues/

Upcoming appearances:

Recent appearances:

Latest books:

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.

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

Publié le 29.03.2023 à 16:52

Pluralistic: Naomi Novik's Scholomance trilogy (29 Mar 2023)


Today's links


The covers of Naomi Novik's Scholomance trilogy in sequence from left to right: The Last Graduate, A Deadly Education and The Golden Enclaves. Each has a kind of brushed-gold effect frame around a solid rectangle on which is a woodcut-style figure (in order: a keyhole, a book, and a portal with an eye showing through it. The rectangles are, in order, forest green, black, and brushed gold.

Naomi Novik's Scholomance trilogy (permalink)

The Scholomance trilogy is Naomi Novik's take on a "school for wizardry":

It.

Is.

Superb.

Novik takes a belt-sander to all the crumbling tropes left by lesser writers to reveal fresh wood beneath, fashioning something breathtakingly new:

https://www.naominovik.com/category/scholomance/

Here's the premise: the wizards of the world live in constant peril from malificaria – the magic monsters that prey on those born with magic, especially the children. In a state of nature, only one in ten wizard kids reaches adulthood.

So the wizarding world built the Scholomance, a fully automated magical secondary school that exists in the void – a dimension beyond our world. The Scholomance is also an extremely dangerous place – three quarters of the wizard children who attend will die before graduation – but it is much safer than life on the outside.

The Scholomance's builders all hail from "enclaves" – magical palaces that have also been built in the void – and the enclave kids are the elites of the school, just as their parents are the elites of the world. Outside the scholomance, every "indie" wizard dreams of a place in an enclave, where they and their children might find a modicum of safety.

Inside the school, the indie kids suck up to the enclavers for four solid years, in the dim hope that they and their family might earn a place as second-class citizens to the enclaves. Indeed, the only reason the enclaves allow indie kids to attend the Scholomance is so that they will be servants for their own children, and cannon-fodder to stand between them and the monstrous hordes.

The Scholomance is a cross between Lord of the Flies and Harry Potter: an adult-free, highly lethal environment with no adults, where interactions between kids are strictly transactional. There is no love, nor honor – only the brutal logic of how much each person can bargain for from the others around them.

By the time I'd read the first couple chapters, I was thinking of it as Hobbeswarts, a place where life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Novik's school for wizards is a place where the supernatural is very definitely "red of tooth and claw."

Enter the protagonist, Galadriel "El" Higgins, whose mother is a legendary indie healer who raised her in a yurt in a Welsh forest commune after she graduated from the Scholomance already pregnant (El's father died in the final graduation battle for their year, sacrificing himself to save his pregnant teen girlfriend and their child).

El isn't just an indie, she's a "loser kid": one of those indies who is looked upon with contempt by the enclavers and unlikely to find a crew who will protect her through her years of schooling – let alone the lethal "graduation," where seniors battle their way through a dense cloud of malificaria, who devour fully half of the kids who survive that far.

But El isn't an outcast because she's a weakling with nothing to offer to her social betters. Far from it: El is, if anything, too powerful – so powerful that when she casts even minor workings, they cause major damage. While other young wizards are given low-powered defensive spells by the Scholomance, El is handed apocalyptic superweapons that can raze whole nations.

El does her best to hide all this, but something shines through. She gives off the kind of "evil sorceress" vibes that make her a social pariah. That sinister aura, combined with her prickly character, quick to anger and slow to forgive, leaves her isolated through her first two years of school.

And then, as the story starts, El has a run-in with Orion Lake, the golden boy of the ultra-powerful New York City enclave. Orion is one of the school's best fighters, and he alone among the student body seeks out malificaria to kill, leaping to the defense of weaker kids and demanding nothing in return.

After Orion defends her, repeatedly, from monsters she was prepared to deal with herself, she treats him to the kind of tongue-lashing that only an evil-sorceress-in-waiting who has spent years on the periphery, cordially loathing the popular kids, can dole out.

This is the meet-cute that begins El and Orion's journey to graduation and beyond, as they perform a kind of social magic trick that has no supernatural component, inadvertently and haltingly bringing solidarity to the Scholomance, in a kind of Rousseauvian revolution that could transform the lives of the entire student body – and perhaps the whole wizarding world.

I first read Novik's fiction last year, devouring her nine-volume Temeraire series, a retelling of the Napoleonic Wars in a world where dragons are real. The Temeraire books have it all: swashbuckling hand-to-hand combat; grand, sweeping battles; a huge cast of beautifully realized characters; a brilliantly wrought geopolitics, and a through-line that is fantastically tight, plotted to a fare-thee-well:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/08/temeraire/#but-i-am-napoleon

I had neglected the Temeraire books because I am generally not a fan of historical fiction, nor high fantasy, nor military stories, but Novik found depths in all three of these forms that I had never imagined, innovating fresh angles that transformed me into a true believer.

The Scholomance series performs the same trick. Novik's handling of the geopolitics and class warfare of the wizarding world – revealed through the subsequent two volumes as she progressively widens the tale's aperture – make JK Rowling's attempts look like they were scrawled in crayon. By a toddler.

This is true all the way down to the micro-level: Novik's thrilling innovations in high-stakes combat-school battle-tactics make Ender Wiggins look like a piker (and also makes me wonder if there's some intentional wordplay in the rhyming surnames).

And when it comes to complicating the "chosen one" trope, Novik leaves Rowling and Card so far behind in her dust, they basically disappear.

As for the cosmic horror of the void and the monsters that it spawns, Novik out-Lovecrafts Lovecraft, in a manner to rival such great post-Lovecraftian subverters as NK Jemisin:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/09/the-old-crow-is-getting-slow/#i-love-ny

Novik is part of a longstanding and brilliant tendency in genre that refuses to cede all the best, most engrossing tropes to racist pigs like Lovecraft, warmongers like Card, and bigots like Rowling. She wrestles these ideas out of their hands and works them, revealing the poverty of those reactionary writers' shriveled imaginations.

I read the Scholomance books as audiobooks, listening to Anisha Dadia's superb narration as I did my physiotherapy laps in the pool each day:

https://libro.fm/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=scholomance+novik

I was delighted to discover DRM-free editions on Libro.fm that would play on my cheapo underwater MP3 player:

https://sewobye.com/products/waterproof-mp3-player-for-swimming-underwater-sport-waterproof-headphones-clip-mp3-player-sewobye-8gb-shuffle

When I finished the final book yesterday, I literally gasped aloud. As with the Temeraire series, Novik's intricate plotting manages to sprout from a small personal tale to a world-shaking planetary-scale upheaval, and nails the landing in a way that is nothing less than dazzling.

What!

A!

Writer!

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#20yrsago SARS: The Mystery Illness https://web.archive.org/web/20030408021713/http://www.cbc.ca/news/sars/

#20yrsago KPMG makes hysterical, self-serving wardriving report http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2885339.stm

#20yrsago Facts don’t violate trademarks https://web.archive.org/web/20030803080408/https://www.eff.org/IP/20030328_taxes-com_pr.php

#15yrsago British Airways loses 15-20,000 bags since Thursday at supremely b0rked Heathrow Terminal 5 https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7320771.stm

#15yrsago Cartoon explains the difference between causality and covariation https://appliedabstractions.com/2008/03/29/covariation-and-causality/

#10yrsago Toronto Mayor Rob Ford about to lose his job coaching high-school football? https://www.thestar.com/news/city_hall/2013/03/29/rob_ford_mayor_cancels_meeting_with_toronto_catholic_board_to_discuss_his_coaching_future.html

#10yrsago When US money was nice to look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US-$10-LT-1901-Fr.114.jpg

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#10yrsago Lessons learned from YouTube’s $300M “Original Channel” fund https://web.archive.org/web/20130330055859/http://edwardspoonhands.com/post/46305605617/lessons-learned-from-youtubes-300m-hole

#10yrsago Florida polo tycoon has difficulty adopting his 42-year-old girlfriend in order to keep assets away from bio-kids, ex-wife, family of guy he killed in a hit-and-run https://www.loweringthebar.net/2013/03/whats-the-point-of-being-a-polo-tycoon-if-you-cant-adopt-your-girlfriend.html

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#5yrsago There’s a notorious Nazi concentration camp guard living in New York City and ICE won’t deport him https://www.thedailybeast.com/ice-wont-deport-the-last-nazi-war-criminal-in-america

#5yrsago The idea behind Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook data-harvesting app came from a Palantir employee, with support from Eric Schmidt’s daughter https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/us/cambridge-analytica-palantir.html


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, WAITING FOR EDITORIAL REVIEW

  • The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, WAITING FOR EDITORIAL REVIEW

  • 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: Red Team Blues https://craphound.com/news/2023/03/26/red-team-blues/

Upcoming appearances:

Recent appearances:

Latest books:

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

Publié le 28.03.2023 à 17:46

Pluralistic: What comes after neoliberalism? (28 Mar 2023)


Today's links


Air Force One in flight; dropping away from it are a parachute and its landing gear.

What comes after neoliberalism? (permalink)

In his American Prospect editorial, "What Comes After Neoliberalism?", Robert Kuttner declares "we’ve just about won the battle of ideas. Reality has been a helpful ally…Neoliberalism has been a splendid success for the top 1 percent, and an abject failure for everyone else":

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-03-28-what-comes-after-neoliberalism/

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/28/imagine-a-horse/#perfectly-spherical-cows-of-uniform-density-on-a-frictionless-plane

Kuttner's op-ed is a report on the Hewlett Foundation's recent "New Common Sense" event, where Kuttner was relieved to learn that the idea that "the economy would thrive if government just got out of the way has been demolished by the events of the past three decades."

We can call this neoliberalism, but another word for it is economism: the belief that politics are a messy, irrational business that should be sidelined in favor of a technocratic management by a certain kind of economist – the kind of economist who uses mathematical models to demonstrate the best way to do anything:

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

These are the economists whose process Ely Devons famously described thus: "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?'"

Those economists – or, if you prefer, economismists – are still around, of course, pronouncing that the "new common sense" is nonsense, and they have the models to prove it. For example, if you're cheering on the idea of "reshoring" key industries like semiconductors and solar panels, these economismists want you to know that you've been sadly misled:

https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/03/24/economy-trade-united-states-china-industry-manufacturing-supply-chains-biden/

Indeed, you're "doomed to fail":

https://www.piie.com/blogs/trade-and-investment-policy-watch/high-taxpayer-cost-saving-us-jobs-through-made-america

Why? Because onshoring is "inefficient." Other countries, you see, have cheaper labor, weaker environmental controls, lower taxes, and the other necessities of "innovation," and so onshored goods will be more expensive and thus worse.

Parts of this position are indeed inarguable. If you define "efficiency" as "lower prices," then it doesn't make sense to produce anything in America, or, indeed, any country where there are taxes, environmental regulations or labor protections. Greater efficiencies are to be had in places where children can be maimed in heavy machinery and the water and land poisoned for a millions years.

In economism, this line of reasoning is a cardinal sin – the sin of caring about distributional outcomes. According to economism, the most important factor isn't how much of the pie you're getting, but how big the pie is.

That's the kind of reasoning that allows economismists to declare the entertainment industry of the past 40 years to be a success. We increased the individual property rights of creators by expanding copyright law so it lasts longer, covers more works, has higher statutory damages and requires less evidence to get a payout:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

At the same time, we weakened antitrust law and stripped away limits on abusive contractual clauses, which let (for example) three companies acquire 70% of all the sound recording copyrights in existence, whose duration is effectively infinite (the market for sound recordings older than 90 is immeasurably small).

This allowed the Big Three labels to force Spotify to take them on as co-owners, whereupon they demanded lower royalties for the artists in their catalog, to reduce Spotify's costs and make it more valuable, which meant more billions when it IPOed:

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

Monopoly also means that all those expanded copyrights we gave to creators are immediately bargained away as a condition of passing through Big Content's chokepoints – giving artists the right to control sampling is just a slightly delayed way of giving labels the right to control sampling, and charge artists for the samples they use:

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

(In the same way that giving creators the right to decide who can train a "Generative AI" with their work will simply transfer that right to the oligopolists who have the means, motive and opportunity to stop paying artists by training models on their output:)

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

After 40 years of deregulation, union busting, and consolidation, the entertainment industry as a whole is larger and more profitable than ever – and the share of those profits accruing to creative workers is smaller, both in real terms and proportionally, and it's continuing to fall.

Economismists think that you're stupid if you care about this, though. If you're keeping score on "free markets" based on who gets how much money, or how much inequality they produce, you're committing the sin of caring about "distributional effects."

Smart economismists care about the size of the pie, not who gets which slice. Unsurprisingly, the greatest advocates for economism are the people to whom this philosophy allocates the biggest slices. It's easy not to care about distributional effects when your slice of the pie is growing.

Economism is a philosophy grounded in "efficiency" – and in the philosophical sleight-of-hand that pretends that there is an objective metric called "efficiency" that everyone can agree with. If you disagree with economismists about their definition of "efficiency" then you're doing "politics" and can be safely ignored.

The "efficiency" of economism is defined by very simple metrics, like whether prices are going down. If Walmart can force wage-cuts on its suppliers to bring you cheaper food, that's "efficient." It works well.

But it fails very, very badly. The high cost of low prices includes the political dislocation of downwardly mobile farmers and ag workers, which is a classic precursor to fascist uprisings. More prosaically, if your wages fall faster than prices, then you are experiencing a net price increase.

The failure modes of this efficiency are endless, and we keep smashing into them in ghastly and brutal ways, which goes a long way to explaining the "new commons sense" Kuttner mentions ("Reality has been a helpful ally.") For example, offshoring high-tech manufacturing to distant lands works well, but fails in the face of covid lockdowns:

https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/

Allowing all the world's shipping to be gathered into the hands of three cartels is "efficient" right up to the point where they self-regulate their way into "efficient" ships that get stuck in the Suez canal:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/29/efficient-markets-hypothesis/#too-big-to-sail

It's easy to improve efficiency if you don't care about how a system fails. I can improve the fuel-efficiency of every airplane in the sky right now: just have them drop their landing gear. It'll work brilliantly, but you don't want to be around when it starts to fail, brother.

The most glaring failure of "efficiency" is the climate emergency, where the relative ease of extracting and burning hydrocarbons was pursued irrespective of the incredible costs this imposes on the world and our species. For years, economism's position was that we shouldn't worry about the fact that we were all trapped in a bus barreling full speed for a cliff, because technology would inevitably figure out how to build wings for the bus before we reached the cliff's edge:

https://locusmag.com/2022/07/cory-doctorow-the-swerve/

Today, many economismists will grudgingly admit that putting wings on the bus isn't quite a solved problem, but they still firmly reject the idea of directly regulating the bus, because a swerve might cause it to roll and someone (in the first class seats) might break a leg.

Instead, they insist that the problem is that markets "mispriced" carbon. But as Kuttner points out: "It wasn’t just impersonal markets that priced carbon wrong. It was politically powerful executives who further enriched themselves by blocking a green transition decades ago when climate risks and self-reinforcing negative externalities were already well known."

If you do economics without doing politics, you're just imagining a perfectly spherical cow on a frictionless plane – it's a cute way to model things, but it's got limited real-world applicability. Yes, politics are squishy and hard to model, but that doesn't mean you can just incinerate them and do math on the dubious quantitative residue:

https://locusmag.com/2021/05/cory-doctorow-qualia/

As Kuttner writes, the problem of ignoring "distributional" questions in the fossil fuel market is how "financial executives who further enriched themselves by creating toxic securities [used] political allies in both parties to block salutary regulation."

Deep down, economismists know that "neoliberalism is not about impersonal market forces. It’s about power." That's why they're so invested in the idea that – as Margaret Thatcher endlessly repeated – "there is no alternative":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/08/tina-v-tapas/#its-pronounced-tape-ass

Inevitabilism is a cheap rhetorical trick. "There is no alternative" is a demand disguised as a truth. It really means "Stop trying to think of an alternative."

But the human race is blessed with a boundless imagination, one that can escape the prison of economism and its insistence that we only care about how things work and ignore how they fail. Today, the world is turning towards electrification, a project of unimaginable ambition and scale that, nevertheless, we are actively imagining.

As Robin Sloan put it, "Skeptics of solar feasi­bility pantomime a kind of technical realism, but I think the really technical people are like, oh, we’re going to rip out and replace the plumbing of human life on this planet? Right, I remember that from last time. Let’s gooo!"

https://www.robinsloan.com/newsletters/room-for-everybody/

Sloan is citing Deb Chachra, "Every place in the world has sun, wind, waves, flowing water, and warmth or coolness below ground, in some combination. Renewable energy sources are a step up, not a step down; instead of scarce, expensive, and polluting, they have the potential to be abundant, cheap, and globally distributed":

https://tinyletter.com/metafoundry/letters/metafoundry-75-resilience-abundance-decentralization

The new common sense is, at core, a profound liberation of the imagination. It rejects the dogma that says that building public goods is a mystic art lost along with the secrets of the pyramids. We built national parks, Medicare, Medicaid, the public education system, public libraries – bold and ambitious national infrastructure programs.

We did that through democratically accountable, muscular states that weren't afraid to act. These states understood that the more national capacity the state produced, the more things it could do, by directing that national capacity in times of great urgency. Self-sufficiency isn't a mere fearful retreat from the world stage – it's an insurance policy for an uncertain future.

Kuttner closes his editorial by asking what we call whatever we do next. "Post-neoliberalism" is pretty thin gruel. Personally, I like "pluralism" (but I'm biased).

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#5yrsago The Wall Street Journal on the decade since the crash: inequality, giant banks, regulatory failures, looming catastrophe https://graphics.wsj.com/how-the-world-has-changed-since-2008-financial-crisis/

#5yrsago Young people hate Facebook because it forces them to have a single identity https://theconversation.com/cambridge-analytica-scandal-facebooks-user-engagement-and-trust-decline-93814

#5yrsago Chinese jaywalkers are identified and shamed by facial recognition, and now they’ll get warnings over text message https://www.scmp.com/tech/china-tech/article/2138960/jaywalkers-under-surveillance-shenzhen-soon-be-punished-text

#5yrsago Teachers on four continents stage mass strikes https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/03/28/teac-m28.html

#5yrsago Lobbyist for AT&T and Verizon publishes a threat to “aggressively” sue any states that pass net neutrality laws https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/03/attverizon-lobbyists-to-aggressively-sue-states-that-enact-net-neutrality/

#1yrago Podcasting "The Byzantine Premium": The contradiction at the heart of Bitcoin advocacy https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/28/dumb-money/#sucker-at-the-table


Colophon (permalink)

Currently writing:

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

Publié le 27.03.2023 à 17:51

Pluralistic: Rural towns and poor urban neighborhoods are being devoured by dollar stores (27 Mar 2023)


Today's links


A ghost town; it is towered over by a haunted castle with a Dollar General sign on it, with the shadow of Count Orlock cast over its tower. One of its turrets is being struck by lightning.

Rural towns and poor urban neighborhoods are being devoured by dollar stores (permalink)

Across America, rural communities and big cities alike are passing ordinances limiting the expansion of dollar stores, which use a mix of illegal predatory tactics, labor abuse, and monopoly consolidation to destroy the few community grocery stores that survived the Walmart plague and turn poor places into food deserts.

"The Dollar Store Invasion," is a new Institute For Local Self Reliance (ILSR) report by Stacy Mitchell, Kennedy Smith and Susan Holmberg. It paints a detailed, infuriating portrait of the dollar store playback, and sets out a roadmap of tactics that work and have been proven in dozens of places, rural and urban:

https://cdn.ilsr.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/ILSR-Report-The-Dollar-Store-Invasion-2023.pdf

The impact of dollar stores is plainly stated in the introduction: "dollar stores drive grocery stores and other retailers out of business, leave more people without access to fresh food, extract wealth from local economies, sow crime and violence, and further erode the prospects of the communities they target."

This new report builds on ILSR's longstanding and excellent case-studies, augmenting them with the work of academic geographers who are just starting to literally map out the dollar store playbook, identifying the way that a dollar stores will target, say, the last grocery store in a Black neighborhood and literally surround it, like hyenas cornering weakened prey. This tactic is repeated whenever a new grocer opens in the neighborhood: dollar stores "carpet bomb" the surrounding blocks, ensuring that the new store closes as quickly as it opens.

One important observation is the relationship between these precarious neighborhood grocers and Walmart and its other big-box competitors. Deregulation allowed Walmart to ring cities with giant stores that relied on "predatory buying" (wholesale terms that allowed Walmart to sell goods more cheaply than its competitors bought them, and also rendered its suppliers brittle and sickly, and forced down the wages of those suppliers' workers). This was the high cost of low prices: neighborhoods lost their local grocers, and community dollars ceased to circulate in the community, flowing to Walmart and its billionaire owners, who spent it on union busting and political campaigns for far-right causes, including the defunding of public schools.

This is the landscape where the dollar stores took root: a nation already sickened by an apex predator, which left a productive niche for jackals to pick off the weakened survivors. Wall Street loved the look of this: the Private equity giant KKR took over Dollar General in 2007 and went on a acquisition and expansion bonanza. Even after KKR formally divested itself of Dollar General, the company's hit-man Michael M Calbert stayed on the board, rising to chairman.

The dollar store market is a duopoly. Dollar General's rival is Dollar Tree, another gelatinous cube of a company that grew by absorbing many of its competitors, using Wall Street's money. These acquisitions are now notorious for the weaknesses they exposed in antitrust practice. For example, when Dollar Tree bought Family Dollar, growing to 14,000 stores, the FTC waved the merger through on condition that the new business sell off 330 of them. These ineffectual and pointless merger conditions are emblematic of the inadequacy of antitrust as it was practiced from the Reagan administration until the sea-change under Biden, and Dollar Tree/Family Dollar is the poster child for more muscular enforcement.

The duopoly has only grown since then. Today, Dollar General and Dollar Tree have more than 34,000 US outlets – more than Starbucks, #Walmart, McDonalds and Target – combined.

Destroying a community's grocery store rips out its heart. Neighborhoods without decent access to groceries impose a tax on their already-struggling residents, forcing them to spend hours traveling to more affluent places, or living off the highly processed, deceptively priced (more on this later) goods for sale on the dollar store shelves.

Take Cleveland, once served by a small family chain called Dave's Market that had served its communities since the 1920s. Dave's store in the Collinwood neighborhood was targeted by Family Dollar and Dollar General, which opened seven stores within two miles of the Dave's outlet. The dollar stores targeted the only profitable part of Dave's business – the packaged goods (fresh produce is a money-loser, subsidized by packaged good).

The dollar stores used a mix of predatory buying and "cheater sizes" (packaged goods that are 10-20% smaller than those sold in regular outlets, which are not available to other retailers) to sell goods at prices that Dave's couldn't match, driving Dave's out of business.

Typical dollar stores stock no fresh produce or meat. If your only grocer is a dollar store, your only groceries are highly processed, packaged foods, often sold in deceptive single-serving sizes that actually cost more per ounce than the products that the defunct neighborhood grocer once sold.

Dollar stores don't just target existing food deserts – they create them. Dollar stores preferentially target Black and brown neighborhoods with just a single grocer and then they use predatory pricing (subsidizing the cost of goods and selling them at a loss) and predatory buying to force that grocery store under and tip the neighborhood into food desert status.

Dollar stores don't just target Black and brown urban centers; they also go after rural communities. The commonality here is that both places are likely to be served by independent grocers, not chains, and these indies can't afford a pricing war with the Wall Street-backed dollar store duopoly.

As mentioned, the "predatory buying" of dollar stores is illegal – it was outlawed in 1936 under the Robinson-Patman Act, which required wholesalers to offer goods to all merchants on the same terms. 40 years ago, we stopped enforcing those laws, leading the rise and rise of big box stores and the destruction of the American Main Street.

The lawmakers who passed Robinson-Patman knew what they were doing. They were aware of what contemporary economists call "the waterbed effect," where wholesalers cover the losses from their massive discounts to major retailers by hiking prices on smaller stores, making them even less competitive and driving more market consolidation.

When dollar stores invade your town or neighborhood, they don't just destroy the food choices, they also come for neighborhood jobs. Where a community grocer typically employs 12 or more people, Dollar General employs about 8 per store. Those workers are paid less, too: 92% of Dollar General's workers earn less than $15/h, making Dollar General the worst employer of the 66 large service-sector firms.

Dollar stores also lean heavily into the tactic of turning nearly every role at its store into a "management" job, because managers aren't entitled to overtime pay. That's how you can be the "manger" of a dollar store and take home $40,000 a year while working more than 40 hours every single week.

Understaffing stores turns them into crime magnets. Shootings at dollar stores are routine. Between 2014-21, 485 people were shot at dollar stores – 156 of them died. Understaffed warehouses are vermin magnets. In the Eastern District of Arkansas, Family Dollar was subpoenaed after a rat infestation at its distribution centers that contaminated the food, medicines and cosmetics at 400 stores.

The ILSR doesn't just document the collapse of American communities – it fights back, so this report ends with a lengthy section on proven tactics and future directions for repelling the dollar store invasion. Since 2019, 75 communities have blocked proposals for new dollar stores – more than 50 of those cases happened in 2021/22.

54 towns, from Birmingham, AB to Fort Worth, TX to Kansas City, KS, have passed laws to "sharply restrict new dollar stores, typically by barring them from opening within one to two miles of an existing dollar store."

To build on this momentum, the authors call for a "reinvigoration of antitrust laws," especially the Robinson-Patman Act. Banning predatory buying would go far to creating a level playing field for independent grocers hoping to fight off a dollar store infestation.

Further, we need the FTC and Department of Justice Antitrust Divition to block mergers between dollar-store chains and unwind the anticompetitve mergers that were negligently waved through under previous administrations (thankfully, top enforcers like Jonathan Kantor and Lina Khan are on top of this!).

We need to free up capital for community banks that will back community grocers. That means rolling back the bank deregulation of the 1980s/90s that allowed for bank consolidation and preferential treatment for large corporations, while reducing lending to small businesses and destroying regional banks. Congress should cap the market share any bank can hold, break up the biggest banks, and require banks to preference loans for community businesses. We also need to end private equity and Wall Street's rollup bonanza.

All of that sounds like a tall order – and it is! But the good news is that it's not just groceries at stake here. Every kind of community business, from pet groomers to hairdressers to funeral homes, falls into the antitrust "Twilight Zone," of acquisitions under $101m. With 60% of Boomer-owned businesses expected to sell in the coming decade, 2.9m businesses employing 32m American workers are slated to be gobbled up by private equity:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/16/schumpeterian-terrorism/#deliberately-broken

Whether you're burying a loved one, getting dialysis, getting your cat fixed or having your dog's nails trimmed, you are already likely to be patronizing a business that has been captured by private equity, where the service is worse, the prices are higher and the workers earn less for harder jobs. Everyone has a stake in financial regulation. We are all in this fight, except for the eminently guillotineable PE barons, and you know, fuck those guys.

At the state level, the authors propose new muscular enforcement regimes and new laws to protect small businesses from unfair competition. They also call on states to increase the power of local governments to reject new dollar store applications, amending land use guidelines to require "cultivating net economic growth, ensuring that everyone has access to healthy food, and protecting environmental resources.

If all of this has you as fired up as it got me this morning, check out ILSR's "How to Stop Dollar Stores in Your Community" resources:

http://ilsr.org/dollar-stores

(Image Mike McBey, CC BY 2.0, modified)

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#10yrsago What could a library do with a gigabit Internet connection? https://web.archive.org/web/20151009124701/https://www.ala.org/advocacy/pp

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#5yrsago Attacks that unmask anonymous blockchain transactions can be used against everyone who ever relied on the defective technique https://arxiv.org/pdf/1704.04299/

#5yrsago Zuck to Parliament: Drop dead https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-uk-parliament-data-cambridge-analytica-dcms-damian-collins-a8275501.html

#1yrago Amazon's relentless personal data foot-dragging https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/27/beware-of-the-leopard/#relentless


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: jim haigh (https://twitter.com/jmhaigh).

Currently writing:

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, WAITING FOR EDITORIAL REVIEW

  • The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, WAITING FOR EDITORIAL REVIEW

  • 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: Red Team Blues https://craphound.com/news/2023/03/26/red-team-blues/

Upcoming appearances:

Recent appearances:

Latest books:

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

Publié le 25.03.2023 à 18:18

Pluralistic: The Golden Rule (them what has the gold makes the rules) (25 Mar 2023)


Today's links


A kraken strangling a coin-operated judge automata whose robes of office bear text reading 'to obtain a verdict/put a penny in the slot' and 'with costs.' He bears two signs reading 'VERDICT.'

The Golden Rule (them what has the gold makes the rules) (permalink)

For many Constitutional law scholars, last years' Dobbs decision on abortion rights at the Supreme Court came as a dismaying shock, because it showed conclusively that conlaw wasn't a realm of ideologically consistent intellectual foment, but rather, a matter of politics.

Writing for Credit Slips, the finance law scholar Adam Levitin admits to feeling a bit of schadenfreude in that moment. The "blue collar" law scholars in "grubby" banking and money fields have always treated the conlaw set as "slightly clueless toffs":

https://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2023/03/the-death-of-dodd-frank-banking-laws-dobbs-moment.html

As a field, conlaw fiercely resists the idea that their field is "largely a battle of normative opinions, without any quasi-objective touchstone or clearly right or wrong answers." Finance law, by contrast, firmly roots its understanding of outcomes in expediency and politics as much as the text of the law.

And of course, every conlaw scholar must know that – at certain points – the Supremes' most consequential decisions were political, overturning jurisprudence based on shifting cultural attitudes.

Think of Abraham Lincoln, whose anti-slavery laws were repeatedly struck down by the SCOTUS of the day. Lincoln's predecessors had filled the court with pro-slavery southerners who remained on the bench long after their home states had seceded from the Union:

https://theconversation.com/packing-the-court-amid-national-crises-lincoln-and-his-republicans-remade-the-supreme-court-to-fit-their-agenda-147139

That court ruled in Dred Scott that Black people were "so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect, and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit":

https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/dred-scott-v-sandford/

Small wonder that the Supreme Court was considered "the last stronghold of Southern power." The court consistently ruled against Lincoln and Lincoln simply ignored their rulings:

https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/lincoln-and-taneys-great-writ-showdown

Eventually, Lincoln hit on a very honorable solution to an illegitimate court that frustrated the political will of democratically accountable lawmakers: pack the court. He reorganized the Federal Circuits to purge federal judges who supported the Confederacy.

He also filled SCOTUS vacancies with loyalists. Even so, that didn't get him a majority – but he didn't need a majority – the political support and momentum of the anti-slavery movement flipped those recalcitrant judges. The law didn't change, but once those judges saw that they were standing athwart a vast social upheaval, those judges' formerly iron certainties about the law crumbled.

That wasn't the only time the Supremes discovered heretofore unsuspected flexibilities in their granite certainty about the Constitution. Under FDR, a pro-oligarch Supreme Court consistently struck down the wildly popular New Deal policies that won him a landslide electoral victory.

These decisions were widely denounced by legal scholars – and the public. As the court annihilated worker protections and programs to rebuild the shattered economy, FDR used the bully pulpit to call the court a "no-man's-land where no Government— State or Federal—can function":

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-franklin-roosevelt-clashed-with-the-supreme-court-and-lost-78497994/

FDR proposed age limits on judges – which was just a roundabout way of forcing the retirement of the long-serving judges who'd been appointed by the Gilded Age plutocrats whose greed had precipitated the Great Depression. Forcing retirements on the "nine old men" would open up seats for FDR to fill.

When the Supremes refused to countenance such a matter, FDR went to Congress and demanded the authority to appoint a new, younger judge for every over-70 judge who wouldn't retire (contrary to popular mythology, there is no law that sets the number of Supreme Court justices at nine and the number has fluctuated widely through the history of the US).

For the next 168 days, the only newsworthy subject was the legitimacy of the Supreme Court. It filled every newspaper, barroom and workplace conversation. The GOP was demolished in the 1936 elections, which were seen as a referendum on the Supreme Court's legitimacy – a referendum that SCOTUS decisively lost.

Soon, it was clear that FDR had the majority he needed to let him appoint new judges. And then…The court found religion. They upheld a minimum wage law that was substantively identical to other laws they'd struck down just a little while before.

They upheld NLRB rulings that were basically indistinguishable from others they'd invalidated. They reversed themselves on interstate commerce and opened the door to regulating coal mines. Then they came for sweatshop garment factories. The political will to pack the court weakened – but FDR still got his court, without having to pack it. The law was subservient to politics.

In the decades since, we've allowed the myth of ivory-tower conlaw to grow unchallenged, maintaining the pretense – so beloved of the Federalist Society – that the law is a "textual" matter. The sleight of hand is obvious: every oppressor wants to claim that they're "normal" while their opponents are "political." Paying women less then men, or Black people less than white people, is "the market"; while demands for pay equity are "political."

Jurisprudence reflects politics and can only ever reflect politics. The law must deal in ideas like "fairness" and "reasonableness," and these concepts change and change again. Judges' authority only comes secondarily from their bailiffs and "peace officers" – a judge's true authority comes from their perceived legitimacy.

Judges and enforcers know this, even when they don't admit it, which is why they spend so much effort on set-dressing – robes and gavels and somber paneling and formal language. Deep down, they're theater kids with pretensions.

That's what makes the decision to bail out Silicon Valley Bank so distressing for finance law scholars like Levitin: they understand their law to be grounded in prudence and the SVB bailout is so reckless. That's why Levitin calls the SVB bailout "banking law's Dobbs moment."

SVB is a bank that increased its executive compensation in lockstep with the recklessness of their management, doubling CEO Greg Becker's bonuses as he decreased the bank's reliability:

https://www.ft.com/content/02ff2860-2d5b-4e21-96af-cef596bff58e

Becker liquidated his stock just before his bank collapsed, cashing out twice on that recklessness:

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/svb-execs-sold-millions-company-stock-lead-collapse/story?id=97937058

All of SVB's execs got bonuses just hours before the bank failed:

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/11/silicon-valley-bank-employees-received-bonuses-hours-before-takeover.html

That's what makes the bailout so dismaying. It involves an exotic (to put it mildly; "absurd" also springs to mind) interpretation of the FDIC's statutory authority and the contours of the Dodd-Frank Act, passed after the Great Financial Crisis to ensure that the public would never reward reckless banks for failure.

As Levitin writes, "I really don't know how one can teach prudential banking regulation after SVB. How can you teach the students the formal rules—supervision, exposure and concentration limits, prompt corrective action, deposit insurance caps—when you know that the rules aren't followed?"

In other words, as with Dobbs, we have enforcers and judges behaving as though they are certain that they can maintain legitimacy in the face of widespread dismay at their actions. The politics revealed by these choices are the politics of impunity, a bedrock belief that we don't matter anymore and we can all just go fuck ourselves.

That's why SVB's apologists are so unhinged. When they argue that we had to bail out SVB because otherwise depositors would pile into Jpmorgan and other already Too Big to Fail/Too Big to Jail banks, they excluded the possibility that we'd create public banks that would break free of this seeming necessity:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/15/mon-dieu-les-guillotines/#ceci-nes-pas-une-bailout

When they argue that giving $2B to SVB's investors (because they were also depositors in the bank they crashed) that it's not "bailing out investors," they're ignoring the possibility that if we're gonna make up new interpretations of Dodd-Frank, we could simply tack on a "no, fuck those guys, they get nothing" rider:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/18/2-billion-here-2-billion-there/#socialism-for-the-rich

When they argue that they just want to save "small businesses" and "startups," they ignore the possibility that if we're going to find political will to save a bank whose balance-sheet was 90+% billionaire VC money, we might also find political will to impose conditions on the bail-ees. Like, if we're gonna save those depositors in the name of "saving jobs" we could make them sign legally binding pledges never to lay off another worker within 10 years of a stock buyback or dividend:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/21/tech-workers/#sharpen-your-blades-boys

The fact that none of this is on the table tells us a lot about how elites view their position in society. Specifically, it tells us that they think that the majority of us should get nothing but scraps from their tables.

They haven't made a secret of this. 40 years ago, the antitrust bar underwent a hostile takeover by billionaires' lickspittles from the Chicago School of Economics, who explicitly argued that monopolies were good and demanded that judges ignore 75 years of jurisprudence and use antitrust law to defend monopolies:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby

The Chicago School's paymasters funded lavish junkets – the Manne Seminars – where 40% of the federal judiciary attended luxury re-education camps to teach them to love monopolies:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down

Today, those judges and the lawyers who appear before them argue that any "textual" interpretation of antitrust law – say, an interpretation that acts against monopolies – is laughable, ahistorical nonsense that "flies in the face of precedent." And yeah, it does:

https://publicknowledge.org/no-pain-no-gain-ftc-loses-bid-to-block-facebooks-acquisition-of-within/

It flies in the face of the illegitimate, corporate-purchased precedent that turned America into an oligarch's playground. It very strictly adheres to the new precedent that politics will (someday) force upon the law.

We see this in play with the copyright case against the Internet Archive, which a lower court badly fumbled yesterday, ruling against the right of libraries to scan their print holdings and lend them out because there is a "licensed" ebooks from publishers – ebooks that cost many multiples of the print editions and self-destruct after just a few lend-outs:

https://blog.archive.org/2023/03/25/the-fight-continues/

The politics here are obvious. As Brewster Kahle put it, this decision conceives of libraries as "customer service departments for corporate database products." The truth is that libraries are ancient, bedrock institutions. Libraries are older than copyright. They're older than printing. Than paper. Than commerce.

The realpolitik of this decision – and the publishing strategists at the Big Five publishers who support it – is that the party is over for us plebs, the age of public goods is behind us, and we should go back belowstairs and get used to tugging our forelocks again:

https://doctorow.medium.com/the-end-of-the-road-to-serfdom-bfad6f3b35a9

The law is political. The fight over these decisions to create socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor is a political fight. Yes, we can and should call on Congress to amend the statutes to clarify them, in small words that even Supreme Court judges and Chicago-poisoned economists can understand. But that in itself won't make change – what will make change is the same thing that has always made change: politics.

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This day in history (permalink)

#20yrsago Mexico sells out its future by extending copyright https://web.archive.org/web/20030313230051/https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/blog/archives/2003_03.shtml

#20yrsago Google’s Sergey Brin at PC Forum https://craphound.com/google.html

#20yrsago Social Software panel at PC Forum https://craphound.com/socialsoftware.html

#15yrsago Walmart infection-spread timelapse video https://web.archive.org/web/20080323083145/http://blog.kiwitobes.com/?p=51

#15yrsago Clay Shirky’s Harvard talk: Here Comes Everybody https://web.archive.org/web/20161226034209/http://wilkins.law.harvard.edu/events/Misc/2008-02-28_shirky/2008-02-28_shirky320web.mp4

#15yrsago New US Cyber-Security Czar has no cyber-security experience https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/19/AR2008031903125.html

#15yrsago How CBC torrented a TV show https://www.last100.com/2008/03/26/inside-story-the-making-of-a-legal-tv-torrent/

#15yrsago Mugabe opponents forced to eat campaign posters https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/mar/26/zimbabwe1

#10yrsago Why architects should stop drawing trees on top of skyscrapers https://www.archdaily.com/346374/can-we-please-stop-drawing-trees-on-top-of-skyscrapers

#10yrsago Your WiFi-enabled camera might be spying on you https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2013/03/25/digital-cameras-easily-turned-into-spying-devices-researchers-prove/

#10yrsago Store wants $5 browsing fee to deter “showrooming” by online shoppers https://consumerist.com/2013/03/25/store-combats-showrooming-with-5-just-looking-fee/

#10yrsago RPG inside an Excel workbook https://carywalkin.ca/2013/03/17/arena-xlsm-released/

#10yrsago Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s long history of public drunkenness and brawling https://www.thestar.com/news/city_hall/2013/03/26/rob_ford_intoxicated_toronto_mayor_asked_to_leave_military_ball.html

#10yrsago Summary of experimentally verified pricing heuristics https://cxl.com/blog/pricing-experiments-you-might-not-know-but-can-learn-from/

#5yrsago Cyber-arms-dealer Grey Heron really, really doesn’t want you to know about the connections between them and the disgraced Hacking Team https://www.vice.com/en/article/bjpnad/grey-heron-hacking-team

#5yrsago Women (but not men) with high GPAs are less likely to get job offers https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0003122418762291

#5yrsago A patchwork of state “incompetence” laws cost tens of thousands of Americans their vote every year https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2018/03/21/thousands-lose-right-to-vote-under-incompetence-laws

#5yrsago Rail barons and the new gilded age: one-percenters travel in style by hitching private “super-luxe” railcars to Amtrak trains https://www.wsj.com/articles/wealthy-train-buffs-are-traveling-cross-country-in-super-luxe-railcars-hitched-to-amtrak-trains-1521727200

#5yrsago Poll: Facebook is the least trusted custodian of private information, majority of Americans do not trust it https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-facebook-poll/americans-less-likely-to-trust-facebook-than-rivals-on-personal-data-reuters-ipsos-poll-idUSKBN1H10K3

#5yrsago ICE uses Facebook’s backend to hunt their prey, with help from Palantir https://theintercept.com/2018/03/26/facebook-data-ice-immigration/

#5yrsago Invisible, targeted infrared light can fool facial recognition software into thinking anyone is anyone else https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.04683.pdf

#5yrsago London police finally admit they fed intel to UK construction cartel to build illegal blacklist of labour organisers https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/23/officers-likely-to-have-passed-personal-files-to-blacklisters-says-met

#5yrsago Services that deliver the same functions as Facebook, for after you #DeleteFacebook https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-alternatives/

#5yrsago Republicans and Trump kill anti-wage-theft rule, will funnel your taxes to companies that rob and endanger workers https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-trump-wage-theft-unsafe-working-conditions-20170328-story.html

#5yrsago UK Information Commissioner’s Office raids Cambridge Analytica’s London office https://www.dw.com/en/british-authorities-raid-cambridge-analytica-offices-in-london/a-43111987


Colophon (permalink)

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

Publié le 23.03.2023 à 12:40

Pluralistic: The "small nonprofit school" saved in the SVB bailout charges more than Harvard (23 Mar 2023)


Today's links


A vast castle surrounded by a stately brick wall bearing an ornate gilt-framed sign reading 'Small, non-profit school,' in gothic lettering. Atop the wall is a caricature of Humpty Dumpty, looking distressed. He has a SVB logo over his chest. He is being restrained by tiny, top-hatted bankers.

The "small nonprofit school" saved in the SVB bailout charges more than Harvard (permalink)

There are no libertarians in a bank run. No sooner had venture capitalists whipped each other into a terrified Twitter frenzy at the imminent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank – a collapse caused by that selfsame frenzy – than the Ayn Rand-poisoned elite of Sand Hill Road started begging for Uncle Sucker to open the sluicegates:

https://twitter.com/EricNewcomer/status/1634300928621793283

Now, on the one hand, it's easy to dismiss these guys as very, very, very stupid. After all, they played a game of prisoner's dilemma in which they were allowed to talk to each other as much as they wanted – and they still sold each other out:

https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/the-venture-capitalists-dilemma

But they still have the commonsense to realize that an America where $10k in student debt cancellation, school lunches for hungry children, and library budgets are out of reach, handing billions to a bank rescue a balance sheet overwhelmingly made up the investments of "high net worth" investors wouldn't be popular.

After all, these guys have been crying about incipient guillotinism for years:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-08/billionaire-cartier-owner-sees-wealth-gap-fueling-social-unrest

Sure, they don't compare small rises in the top marginal tax-rate to Kristallnacht anymore:

https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2014/01/26/266685819/billionaire-compares-outrage-over-rich-in-s-f-to-kristallnacht

But they are locked and loaded for The Event, feathering elaborate subterranean, antipodean nests in the most luxurious bunkers New Zealand has to offer, against the day that the poors come to eat them:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/15/business/bunkers-new-zealand-intl-hnk/index.html

So amid the clamor for socialism-for-the-rich, these billionaires went on the hunt for average joes who could serve as the face of the bailout. Like the "Ohio mom with 4 kids and a husband who works in manufacturing, who owns a small business:"

https://www.businessinsider.com/mother-small-startup-ceo-fall-svb-not-1-problem-2023-3

She's ex-McKinsey and raised $4m in VC for a $600/month life-planning app; her husband, another McKinsey alum, is a senior manager at a steel company (that is, he "works in manufacturing").

Clearly, the ex-libertarian 0.01 percenters begging for relief needed to find someone else. Enter David Sacks, a billionaire Paypal mafiosi who waded into the debate with screenshots of an email from a "small, non-profit school" that would miss payroll if the bailout was not forthcoming:

https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1636054055121453057

Sacks held this up as evidence that SVB's depositors were "more diversified than the media narrative has allowed." Sacks went on to claim that the bailout saved "innocent bystanders" like "teachers" from being "laid off."

What is this small, nonprofit school? Writing in The American Prospect, Luke Goldstein sleuths it out: the "small, nonprofit school" is North Country School, an upstate New York boarding school where tuition runs $62k/year – more than Harvard or Yale:

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-03-22-david-sacks-bank-bailout/

North Country sounds like a great place to get an education. It's got its own private ski-slope. The local city raised a $7m municipal bond on its behalf. There's a rock-climbing range and horseback riding. The school emphasizes unstructured, outdoor education, with "farming, wilderness trips…even maple sugaring":

https://northcountryschool.org/

Let's be honest, this is the kind of education a lot of us dream of our kids having. No wonder that the alumna include numerous Rockefellers, and a scion of the Aga Khan family – claimed lineal descendants of the Prophet Muhammad.

As illustrious as the student body is, the trustees are even more gilt-edged. There's a former Jpmorgan managing director, a former Google exec, Austrian nobility, the Welch's grape heir and even JD Salinger's kid. The chair ran a booze delivery company that sold to Uber. Together, they manage $30m in assets and raise $3m/year in donations, on top of $9m/year in revenues.

As Goldstein points out, it might be a lot to ask of the median small, nonprofit school trustee to investigate the soundness of the school's bank. But these aren't the median trustees of the median school. They're raising millions from Vanguard and Fidelity and the JM Kaplan Fund. Perhaps it's not asking too much that high-flying financiers craft a risk management plan for their deposits – or, you know, just have the nous not to stash all their money in a single bank account, diversifying their risk the way that any financial planner would tell them to do.

According to Sacks, if the FDIC had frozen SVB withdrawals, or imposed a 10 percent haircut on depositors with more than $250k in the bank, the "modestly paid workers who tend not to have a lot of savings to fall back on" who worked at the school would have been out in the cold. But with donors on tap who give $50,000 at a pop, it seems likely that the trustees could have tapped someone for a bridge loan.

It's doubtless true that there are low-waged, precarious workers who would have been out in the cold if the FDIC hadn't stepped in, but the wealthy "investors" who clamored for the bailout spent the last several years consistently, brutally, loudly calling for an end to covid relief, no student debt cancellation, and cuts to public services. The idea that they were worried about saving the janitors and receptionists of Silicon Valley strains credulity:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/18/2-billion-here-2-billion-there/#socialism-for-the-rich

You can't be on record calling for tech billionaires to "Sharpen your blades boys 🔪" ahead of mass layoffs and also claim to be a champion of the middle-class:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/21/tech-workers/#sharpen-your-blades-boys

As Goldstein writes, "David Sacks couldn’t find a mom-and-pop institution to justify his cockeyed version of reality without turning to a VC colleague’s ultra-rich boarding school." There might be mom-and-pop institutions on the SVB balance-sheet, but David Sacks evidently doesn't know any of them.

New York State is a good place to be a Silicon Valley banker. For one thing, the Southern District of New York is an exceptionally nice place to be a bankrupt billionaire, which is why SVB's investors now claim that their headquarters are at 387 Park Ave, 2,951 miles from the Santa Clara HQ the company listed on all its filings:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/18/2-billion-here-2-billion-there/#socialism-for-the-rich

In New York, elite boarding schools get federal rescues, so long as they can claim some nexus with SVB. But, as Goldstein writes, NY city and state schools are in outright financial crisis, with no aid in sight. The State University of New York system is drowning in debt. NYC schools are about to bring down massive layoffs, having lost $469m out of their budgets:

https://comptroller.nyc.gov/newsroom/testimony-of-new-york-city-comptroller-brad-lander-to-the-new-york-city-council-committee-on-education-on-resolution-283-2022-to-immediately-reverse-doe-reductions-to-school-budgets-for-fy-2023/

The FDIC stepped in to rescue SVB, claiming that it wouldn't cost the public anything – instead, the money would come from increases in the entire bank system's insurance premiums. But as Adam Levitin writes for Credit Slips, banks "will pass those premiums through to customers because the market for banking services is less competitive than the market for capital…higher costs for increased insurance premiums are likely to flow to the least price-sensitive and most 'sticky' customers: less wealthy individuals"

"So average Joes are going to be facing things like higher account fees or lower APYs, without gaining any benefit. Instead, the benefit of removing the cap would flow entirely to wealthy individuals and businesses. This is one massive, regressive cross-subsidy."

https://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2023/03/the-regressive-cross-subsidy-of-uncapping-deposit-insurance.html

Nothing about this bailout intrinsically protects anyone's job. Yes, if the companies that banked with SVB went under, they'd have fired everyone. But tech companies are firing everyone anyway, 280,000 and counting, in profitable companies where they do stock-buybacks big enough to pay every worker's salary for the next quarter-century:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/21/tech-workers/#sharpen-your-blades-boys

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This day in history (permalink)

#10yrsago Sen Chuck Schumer took $100K from private prisons, now gets to help decide whether to send undocumented immigrants to jail https://act.presente.org/sign/schumermoney

#10yrsago Congressman boasts on Twitter about the money he got to support CISPA, then thinks better of it https://sunlightfoundation.com/2013/03/22/pro-cispa-lawmaker-deletes-retweet-about-money-received-from-pro-cispa-groups/

#10yrsago We have a choice about the world that technology will give us https://www.windley.com/archives/2013/03/build_the_world_you_want_to_live_in.shtml

#10yrsago How long should we expect Google Keep to last? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/mar/22/google-keep-services-closed

#10yrsago Skype’s IP-leaking security bug creates denial-of-service cottage industry https://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/03/privacy-101-skype-leaks-your-location/

#5yrsago The oil industry just told a judge that climate change is undeniably real, but they still found a way to weasel https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/22/17151532/climate-tutorial-san-francisco-oakland-lawsuits-judge-alsup-chevron-exxon

#5yrsago Seasteading meets the shock doctrine in Puerto Rico, where ethnic cleansing precedes Going Galt https://theintercept.com/2018/03/20/puerto-rico-hurricane-maria-recovery/

#1yrago Facebook's genocide filters are really, really bad https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/23/false-genocide-negative/#metacrap


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, WAITING FOR EDITORIAL REVIEW

  • The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, WAITING FOR EDITORIAL REVIEW

  • 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: Gig Work is the Opposite of Steampunk https://craphound.com/news/2023/03/19/gig-work-is-the-opposite-of-steampunk/

Upcoming appearances:

Recent appearances:

Latest books:

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.

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

Publié le 22.03.2023 à 12:57

Pluralistic: Kickstarting the Red Team Blues audiobook, which Amazon won't sell (21 Mar 2023)


Today's links


A graphic showing a phone playing the Red Team Blues audiobok, along with a quote from Booklist, 'Jam-packed with cutting-edge ideas about cybersecurity and crypto. Another winner from an sf wizard.'

Kickstarting the Red Team Blues audiobook, which Amazon won't sell (permalink)

Red Team Blues is my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller; it's a major title for my publishers Tor Books and Head of Zeus, and it's swept the trade press with starred reviews all 'round. Despite all that, Audible will not sell the audiobook. In fact, Audible won't sell any of my audiobooks. Instead, I have to independently produce them and sell them through Kickstarter:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-another-audiobook-that-amazon-wont-sell

Audible is Amazon's monopoly audiobook platform. It has a death-grip on the audiobook market, commanding more than 90% of genre audiobook sales, and every single one of those audiobooks is sold with Amazon's DRM on it. That means that you can't break up with Amazon without throwing away those audiobooks. Under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, I can't give you a tool to convert my own copyrighted audiobooks to a non-Amazon format. Doing so is a felony carrying a five year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for an act that in no way infringes anyone's copyright! Indeed, merely infringing copyright is much less illegal than removing Amazon's mandatory DRM from my own books!

I've got amazing publishers who support my crusade against DRM, but they're not charities. If they can't sell my audiobooks on the platform that represents 90% of the market, they're not going to make audio editions at all. Instead, I make my own audiobooks, using brilliant voice actors like Amber Benson and Neil Gaiman, and I sell them everywhere except Audible.

Doing this isn't cheap: I'm paying for an incredible studio (Skyboat Media), a world-class director (Gabrielle de Cuir), top-notch sound editing and mastering, and, of course, killer narrators. And while indie audiobook platforms like Libro.fm and downpour.com are amazing, the brutal fees extracted by Apple and Google on app sales means that users have to jump through a thousand hoops to shop with indie stores. Most audiobook listeners don't even know that these stores exist: if a title isn't available on Audible, they assume no audiobook exists.

That's where Kickstarter comes in: twice now, I've crowdfunded presales of my audiobooks through KS, and these campaigns were astoundingly successful, smashing records and selling thousands of audiobooks. These campaigns didn't just pay my bills (especially during lockdown, when our household income plunged), but they also showed other authors that it was possible to evade Amazon's monopoly chokepoint and sell books that aren't sticky-traps for Audible's walled garden/prison:

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blogs/cory-doctorow/article/90282-we-wrote-a-book-about-why-audible-won-t-sell-our-book-and-snuck-it-onto-audible.html

And today, I'm launching the Kickstarter for Red Team Blues, and even by the standards of my previous efforts, I think this one's gonna be incredible.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-another-audiobook-that-amazon-wont-sell

For starters, there's the narrator: Wil Wheaton, whose work on my previous books is outstanding, hands-down my favorite (don't tell my other narrators! They're great too!):

https://wilwheaton.net/

Beyond Wil's narration, there's the subject matter. The hero of Red Team Blues is a hard-charging forensic accountant who's untangled every Silicon Valley finance scam since he fell in love with spreadsheets as as a MIT freshman, dropped out, got his CPA ticket, and moved west. Now, at the age of 67, Marty Hench is ready to retire, but a dear old friend – a legendary cryptographer – drags him back for one last job – locating the stolen keys to the backdoor he foolishly hid in a cryptocurrency that's worth more than a billion dollars.

That's the starting gun for a "grabby next-Tuesday thriller" that sees Marty in between three-letter agencies and international crime syndicates, all of whom view digital technology as a carrier medium for scams, violence and predation. Marty's final adventure involves dodgy banks, crooked crypto, and complicit officials in a fallen paradise where computers' libertory promise has been sucked dry by billionaire vampires.

It's a pretty contemporary story, in other words.

I wrote this one before SVB, before Sam Bankman0Fried and FTX – just like I wrote Little Brother before Snowden's revelations. It's not that I'm prescient – fortune-telling is a fatalist's delusion – it's that these phenomena are just the most spectacular, most recent examples in a long string of ghastly and increasingly dire scandals.

Red Team Blues blasted out of my fingertips in six weeks flat, during lockdown, when technology was simultaneously a lifeline, connecting us to one another during our enforced isolation; and a tool of predatory control, as bossware turned our "work from home" into "live at work."

The last time I wrote a book that quickly, it was Little Brother, and, as with Little Brother, Red Team Blues is a way of working out my own anxieties and hopes for technology on the page, in story. These books tap into a nerve. I knew I had something special in my hands when, the night after I finished the first draft, I rolled over at 2AM to find my wife sitting up in bed, reading.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"I had to find out how it ended," she answered.

The next day, my editor sent me a four-line email:

That.
Was.
A! Fucking! Ride!
Whoa!

Within a week, he'd bought Red Team Blues…and two sequels. I finished writing the second of these on Monday, and all three are coming out in the next 22 months. It's gonna be a wild ride.

Kickstarter backers can get the usual goodies: DRM-free audiobooks and ebooks, hardcovers (including signed and personalized copies), and three very special, very limited-run goodies.

First, there's naming rights for characters in the sequels – I'm selling three of these; they're a form of cheap (or at least, reasonably priced) literary immortality for you or a loved one. The sequels are a lot of fun – they go in reverse chronology, and the next one is The Bezzle, out in Feb 2024, a book about prison-tech scams, crooked LA County Sheriff's Deputy gangs, and real-estate scumbags turned techbros. The third book is Picks and Shovels (Jan 2025), and it's Marty's first adventure after he comes west to San Francisco and ends up working for the bad guys, an affinity scam PC company called "Three Wise Men" that's run by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest and an orthodox rabbi who fleece their faithful with proprietary, underpowered computers and peripherals, and front for some very bad, very violent money-men.

Next, there's three Marty Hench short story commissions: the Hench stories are machines for turning opaque finance scams into technothrillers. While finance bros use MEGO ("my eyes glaze over") as a weapon to bore their marks into submission, I use the same performative complexity as the engines of taut detective stories. Commissioning a Hench story lets you turn your favorite MEGO scam into a science fiction story, which I'll then shop to fiction websites (every story I've written for the past 20 years has sold, though in the event that one of these doesn't, I'll put it up under a CC license).

Finally, there's a super-ultra-limited deluxe hardcover edition – and I do mean limited, just four copies! These leather-bound editions have Will Staehle's fantastic graphic motif embossed in their covers, and the type design legend John D Berry is laying out the pages so that there's space for a hidden cavity. Nestled in that cavity is a hand-bound early draft edition of The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues. The binding is being done by the fantastic book-artist John DeMerritt. Each copy's endpapers will feature a custom cryptographic puzzle created especially for it by the cryptographer Bruce Schneier.

I often hear from readers who want to thank me for the work I do, from the free podcast I've put out since 2006 to the free, CC BY columns I've written for Pluralistic for the past three years. There is no better way to thank me than to back this Kickstarter and encourage your friends to do the same:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-another-audiobook-that-amazon-wont-sell

Preselling a ton of audiobooks, ebooks, and print books is a huge boost to the book on its launch – incomparable, really. Invaluable.

What's more, helping me find a viable way to produce popular, widely heard audiobooks without submitting to Amazon's DRM lock-in sets an example for other creators and publishers: we have a hell of a collective action problem to solve, but if we could coordinate a response to Audible demanding the right to decide whether our work should have their DRM, it would force Audible to treat all of us – creators, publishers and listeners – more fairly.

I'll be heading out on tour to the US, Canada, the UK and Germany once the book is out. I'm really looking forward to as many backers in person as I can! Thank you for your support over these many long years – and for your support on this Kickstarter.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

This day in history (permalink)

#20yrsago How Slashdot girds its servers https://slashdot.org/~CmdrTaco/journal/27736

#15yrsago In the age of ebooks, you don’t own your library https://gizmodo.com/amazon-kindle-and-sony-reader-locked-up-why-your-books-369235

#10yrsago NY judge says running a search engine for news is a copyright violation https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/03/ap-v-meltwater-disappointing-ruling-news-search

#10yrsago Brazil’s music collecting societies convicted of forming an illegal cartel https://web.archive.org/web/20130321082647/http://oglobo.globo.com/cultura/ecad-condenado-por-formacao-de-cartel-por-orgao-de-defesa-da-concorrencia-7897081

#10yrsago How to fix the worst law in technology https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/fixing-the-worst-law-in-technology

#10yrsago GoPro sends fraudulent DMCA notice to site that ran a negative review of its products https://petapixel.com/2013/03/20/gopro-uses-dmca-to-take-down-article-comparing-its-camera-with-rival/

#5yrsago Data shows young people are free speech advocates, but mainstream support for censoring “anti-American” speech is rising https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/12/17100496/political-correctness-data

#5yrsago Dropbox has some genuinely great security reporting guidelines, but reserves the right to jail you if you disagree https://memex.craphound.com/2018/03/22/dropbox-has-some-genuinely-great-security-reporting-guidelines-but-reserves-the-right-to-jail-you-if-you-disagree/

#5yrsago A proposal to stop 3D printers from making guns is a perfect parable of everything wrong with information security https://memex.craphound.com/2018/03/22/a-proposal-to-stop-3d-printers-from-making-guns-is-a-perfect-parable-of-everything-wrong-with-information-security/

#5yrsago Science fiction, predicting the present, the adjacent possible, and trumpian comic dystopias https://memex.craphound.com/2018/03/22/science-fiction-predicting-the-present-the-adjacent-possible-and-trumpian-comic-dystopias/

#1yrago Ban surveillance advertising: EFF's technological and legal proposal for a surveillance-free internet. https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/22/myob/#adtech-considered-harmful


Colophon (permalink)

Currently writing:

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, WAITING FOR EDITORIAL REVIEW

  • The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, WAITING FOR EDITORIAL REVIEW

  • 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: Gig Work is the Opposite of Steampunk https://craphound.com/news/2023/03/19/gig-work-is-the-opposite-of-steampunk/

Upcoming appearances:

Recent appearances:

Latest books:

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.

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

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(Latest Medium column: "Culture War Bullshit Stole Your Broadband: Your internet sucks because telco monopolists kept Gigi Sohn off the FCC" https://doctorow.medium.com/culture-war-bullshit-stole-your-broadband-4ce1ffb16dc5)

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

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