Pluralistic

Cory Doctorow's blog

Doctorow 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 21.11.2024 à 11:41

Pluralistic: Expert agencies and elected legislatures (21 Nov 2024)


Today's links


A pair of balance scales high over the US Capitol Building. On one platform is a shouting banker holding a money-bag. On the other is a lap technician holding a giant testube larger than his torso, filled with various electronic gadgets. He uses tongs to hold a giant atomic motif over the tube's mouth. From behind the Capitol emerges an elephant in GOP logo livery, with the hair of Donald Trump. On the right is a gigantic telescoping platform terminating in a high-tech command chair from which a man observes the balance scales. Behind them is the DC cityscape, stretching off to the horizon.

Expert agencies and elected legislatures (permalink)

Since Trump hijacked the Supreme Court, his backers have achieved many of their policy priorities: legalizing bribery, formalizing forced birth, and – with the Loper Bright case, neutering the expert agencies that regulate business:

https://jacobin.com/2024/07/scotus-decisions-chevron-immunity-loper

What the Supreme Court began, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are now poised to finish, through the "Department of Government Efficiency," a fake agency whose acronym ("DOGE") continues Musk's long-running cryptocurrency memecoin pump-and-dump. The new department is absurd – imagine a department devoted to "efficiency" with two co-equal leaders who are both famously incapable of getting along with anyone – but that doesn't make it any less dangerous.

Expert agencies are often all that stands between us and extreme misadventure, even death. The modern world is full of modern questions, the kinds of questions that require a high degree of expert knowledge to answer, but also the kinds of questions whose answers you'd better get right.

You're not stupid, nor are you foolish. You could go and learn everything you need to know to evaluate the firmware on your antilock brakes and decide whether to trust them. You could figure out how to assess the Common Core curriculum for pedagogical soundness. You could learn the material science needed to evaluate the soundness of the joists that hold the roof up over your head. You could acquire the biology and chemistry chops to decide whether you want to trust produce that's been treated with Monsanto's Roundup pesticides. You could do the same for cell biology, virology, and epidemiology and decide whether to wear a mask and/or get an MRNA vaccine and/or buy a HEPA filter.

You could do any of these. You might even be able to do two or three of them. But you can't do all of them, and that list is just a small slice of all the highly technical questions that stand between you and misery or an early grave. Practically speaking, you aren't going to develop your own robust meatpacking hygiene standards, nor your own water treatment program, nor your own Boeing 737 MAX inspection protocol.

Markets don't solve this either. If they did, we wouldn't have to worry about chunks of Boeing jets falling on our heads. The reason we have agencies like the FDA (and enabling legislation like the Pure Food and Drug Act) is that markets failed to keep people from being murdered by profit-seeking snake-oil salesmen and radium suppository peddlers.

These vital questions need to be answered by experts, but that's easier said than done. After all, experts disagree about this stuff. Shortcuts for evaluating these disagreements ("distrust any expert whose employer has a stake in a technical question") are crude and often lead you astray. If you dismiss any expert employed by a firm that wants to bring a new product to market, you will lose out on the expertise of people who are so legitimately excited about the potential improvements of an idea that they quit their jobs and go to work for whomever has the best chance of realizing a product based on it. Sure, that doctor who works for a company with a new cancer cure might just be shilling for a big bonus – but maybe they joined the company because they have an informed, truthful belief that the new drug might really cure cancer.

What's more, the scientific method itself speaks against the idea of there being one, permanent answer to any big question. The method is designed as a process of continual refinement, where new evidence is continuously brought forward and evaluated, and where cherished ideas that are invalidated by new evidence are discarded and replaced with new ideas.

So how are we to survive and thrive in a world of questions we ourselves can't answer, that experts disagree about, and whose answers are only ever provisional?

The scientific method has an answer for this, too: refereed, adversarial peer review. The editors of major journals act as umpires in disputes among experts, exercising their editorial discernment to decide which questions are sufficiently in flux as to warrant taking up, then asking parties who disagree with a novel idea to do their damndest to punch holes in it. This process is by no means perfect, but, like democracy, it's the worst form of knowledge creation except for all others which have been tried.

Expert regulators bring this method to governance. They seek comment on technical matters of public concern, propose regulations based on them, invite all parties to comment on these regulations, weigh the evidence, and then pass a rule. This doesn't always get it right, but when it does work, your medicine doesn't poison you, the bridge doesn't collapse as you drive over it, and your airplane doesn't fall out of the sky.

Expert regulators work with legislators to provide an empirical basis for turning political choices into empirically grounded policies. Think of all the times you've heard about how the gerontocracy that dominates the House and the Senate is incapable of making good internet policy because "they're out of touch and don't understand technology." Even if this is true (and sometimes it is, as when Sen Ted Stevens ranted about the internet being "a series of tubes," not "a dump truck"), that doesn't mean that Congress can't make good internet policy.

After all, most Americans can safely drink their tap water, a novelty in human civilization, whose history amounts to short periods of thriving shattered at regular intervals by water-borne plagues. The fact that most of us can safely drink our water, but people who live in Flint (or remote indigenous reservations, or Louisiana's Cancer Alley) can't tells you that these neighbors of ours are being deliberately poisoned, as we know precisely how not to poison them.

How did we (most of us) get to the point where we can drink the water without shitting our guts out? It wasn't because we elected a bunch of water scientists! I don't know the precise number of microbiologists and water experts who've been elected to either house, but it's very small, and their contribution to good sanitation policy is negligible.

We got there by delegating these decisions to expert agencies. Congress formulates a political policy ("make the water safe") and the expert agency turns that policy into a technical program of regulation and enforcement, and your children live to drink another glass of water tomorrow.

Musk and Ramaswamy have set out to destroy this process. In their Wall Street Journal editorial, they explain that expert regulation is "undemocratic" because experts aren't elected:

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/musk-and-ramaswamy-the-doge-plan-to-reform-government-supreme-court-guidance-end-executive-power-grab-fa51c020

They've vowed to remove "thousands" of regulations, and to fire swathes of federal employees who are in charge of enforcing whatever remains:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/20/24301975/elon-musk-vivek-ramaswamy-doge-plan

And all this is meant to take place on an accelerated timeline, between now and July 4, 2026 – a timeline that precludes any meaningful assessment of the likely consequences of abolishing the regulations they'll get rid of.

"Chesterton's Fence" – a thought experiment from the novelist GK Chesterton – is instructive here:

There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.

A regulation that works might well produce no visible sign that it's working. If your water purification system works, everything is fine. It's only when you get rid of the sanitation system that you discover why it was there in the first place, a realization that might well arrive as you expire in a slick of watery stool with a rectum so prolapsed the survivors can use it as a handle when they drag your corpse to the mass burial pits.

When Musk and Ramaswamy decry the influence of "unelected bureaucrats" on your life as "undemocratic," they sound reasonable. If unelected bureaucrats were permitted to set policy without democratic instruction or oversight, that would be autocracy.

Indeed, it would resemble life on the Tesla factory floor: that most autocratic of institutions, where you are at the mercy of the unelected and unqualified CEO of Tesla, who holds the purely ceremonial title of "Chief Engineer" and who paid the company's true founders to falsely describe him as its founder.

But that's not how it works! At its best, expert regulations turns political choices in to policy that reflects the will of democratically accountable, elected representatives. Sometimes this fails, and when it does, the answer is to fix the system – not abolish it.

I have a favorite example of this politics/empiricism fusion. It comes from the UK, where, in 2008, the eminent psychopharmacologist David Nutt was appointed as the "drug czar" to the government. Parliament had determined to overhaul its system of drug classification, and they wanted expert advice:

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

To provide this advice, Nutt convened a panel of drug experts from different disciplines and asked them to rate each drug in question on how dangerous it was for its user; for its user's family; and for broader society. These rankings were averaged, and then a statistical model was used to determine which drugs were always very dangerous, no matter which group's safety you prioritized, and which drugs were never very dangerous, no matter which group you prioritized.

Empirically, the "always dangerous" drugs should be in the most restricted category. The "never very dangerous" drugs should be at the other end of the scale. Parliament had asked how to rank drugs by their danger, and for these categories, there were clear, factual answers to Parliament's question.

But there were many drugs that didn't always belong in either category: drugs whose danger score changed dramatically based on whether you were more concerned about individual harms, familial harms, or societal harms. This prioritization has no empirical basis: it's a purely political question.

So Nutt and his panel said to Parliament, "Tell us which of these priorities matter the most to you, and we will tell you where these changeable drugs belong in your schedule of restricted substances." In other words, politicians make political determinations, and then experts turn those choices into empirically supported policies.

This is how policy by "unelected bureaucrats" can still be "democratic."

But the Nutt story doesn't end there. Nutt butted heads with politicians, who kept insisting that he retract factual, evidence-supported statements (like "alcohol is more harmful than cannabis"). Nutt refused to do so. It wasn't that he was telling politicians which decisions to make, but he took it as his duty to point out when those decisions did not reflect the policies they were said to be in support of. Eventually, Nutt was fired for his commitment to empirical truth. The UK press dubbed this "The Nutt Sack Affair" and you can read all about it in Nutt's superb book Drugs Without the Hot Air, an indispensable primer on the drug war and its many harms:

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/drugs-without-the-hot-air-9780857844989/

Congress can't make these decisions. We don't elect enough water experts, virologists, geologists, oncology researchers, structural engineers, aerospace safety experts, pedagogists, gerontoloists, physicists and other experts for Congress to turn its political choices into policy. Mostly, we elect lawyers. Lawyers can do many things, but if you ask a lawyer to tell you how to make your drinking water safe, you will likely die a horrible death.

That's the point. The idea that we should just trust the market to figure this out, or that all regulation should be expressly written into law, is just a way of saying, "you will likely die a horrible death."

Trump – and his hatchet men Musk and Ramaswamy – are not setting out to create evidence-based policy. They are pursuing policy-based evidence, firing everyone capable of telling them how to turn the values espouse (prosperity and safety for all Americans) into policy.

They dress this up in the language of democracy, but the destruction of the expert agencies that turn the political will of our representatives into our daily lives is anything but democratic. It's a prelude to transforming the nation into a land of epistemological chaos, where you never know what's coming out of your faucet.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

This day in history (permalink)

#20yrsago Tech-support generation spends Thanksgiving patching for parents https://web.archive.org/web/20041120052426/http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6522314/site/newsweek/https://memex.craphound.com/2004/11/20/neal-stephensons-system-of-the-world-concludes-the-baroque-trilogy/

#20yrsago Internet “Hopkin” meme unravelled https://mike.whybark.com/archives/1951

#20yrsago Full-back HTML tattoo https://web.archive.org/web/20050126081525/http://www.bmezine.com/tattoo/A41118/high/tattoo4.jpg

#15yrsago Owner of trendy Manhattan restaurant Paradou plumbs new depths of evil bad-bossitude https://gothamist.com/food/restaurant-owners-email-to-staff-belongs-in-tyrant-hall-of-fame

#15yrsago Traffic cameras used to harass and limit movement of peaceful protestors https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/oct/25/surveillance-police-number-plate-recognition

#15yrsago Owner of trendy Manhattan restaurant Paradou plumbs new depths of evil bad-bossitude https://gothamist.com/food/restaurant-owners-email-to-staff-belongs-in-tyrant-hall-of-fame

#10yrsago Firefox switches default search from Google to Yahoo https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/in-major-shift-firefox-to-use-yahoo-search-by-default-in-us/

#10yrsago Blackpool’s Broadway Hotel fines guests £100 for negative review https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-30100973

#10yrsago Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: why only an anthropologist can tell the story of Anonymous https://web.archive.org/web/20141122163653/https://www.spectator.co.uk/books/9373852/the-anonymous-ghost-in-the-machine/

#10yrsago Secret history of the poop emoji https://www.fastcompany.com/3037803/the-oral-history-of-the-poop-emoji-or-how-google-brought-poop-to-america
#10yrsago Gates Foundation mandates open access for all the research it funds https://blogs.nature.com/news/2014/11/gates-foundation-announces-worlds-strongest-policy-on-open-access-research.html

#10yrsago Leaked docs detail Big Oil and Big PR’s plans for a opinion-manipulation platform https://www.vice.com/en/article/a-top-pr-firm-promised-big-oil-software-that-can-convert-average-citizens/

#5yrsago "Out of Home Advertising”: the billboards that spy on you as you move through public spaces https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics-computers/privacy/digital-billboards-are-tracking-you-and-they-want-you-to-see-their-ads-a1117246807/

#5yrsago How to recognize AI snake oil https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/talks/MIT-STS-AI-snakeoil.pdf

#5yrsago High prices and debt mean millennials don’t plan to stop renting, and that’s before their parents retire and become dependent on them https://www.businessinsider.com/more-millennials-planning-to-rent-forever-cant-afford-housing-2019-11

#5yrsago Mayor Pete: Obama should have left Chelsea Manning to rot in prison for 35 years https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/2020-candidate-pete-buttigieg-troubled-by-clemency-for-chelsea-manning/

#5yrsago In an age of disappearing prison libraries, jail profiteers provide “free” crapgadget tablets that charge prisoners by the minute to read Project Gutenberg ebooks https://appalachianprisonbookproject.org/2019/11/20/how-much-does-it-cost-to-read-a-free-book-on-a-free-tablet/

#5yrsago DoJ to scrap the Paramount antitrust rule that prohibits movie studios from buying or strong-arming movie theaters https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-film-antitrust/justice-department-asks-court-to-scrap-decades-old-paramount-antitrust-decrees-idUSKBN1XS2G0/

#5yrsago When Republicans say “How will you pay for Medicare for All?” Democrats should answer: “Mexico will pay for it” https://theintercept.com/2019/11/20/democratic-debate-budget-deficit/

#5yrsago Twitter censures UK Tory Party for changing its blue-check account name to “FactCheckUK” during the prime ministerial debates https://edition.cnn.com/2019/11/19/world/conservative-party-fact-check-twitter-intl/index.html

#1yrago Larry Summers' inflation scare-talk incinerated climate action https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/20/bloodletting/#inflated-ego

#1yrago Naomi Kritzer's "Liberty's Daughter" https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/21/podkaynes-dad-was-a-dick/#age-of-consent

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, holding a mic.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Today's progress: 812 words (85779 words total).

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: Spill, part four (a Little Brother story) https://craphound.com/littlebrother/2024/10/28/spill-part-four-a-little-brother-story/

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

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

Publié le 19.11.2024 à 11:05

Pluralistic: Forcing Google to spin off Chrome (and Android?) (19 Nov 2024)


Today's links


An early 20th century editorial cartoon depicting the Standard Oil Company an a world-spanning octopus clutching the organs of state - White House, Capitol dome, etc - in its tentacles. It has been altered: to its left, curled within its tentacles, stands an early 20th century cartoon depicting Uncle Sam as a policeman with a billyclub, with a DOJ Antitrust Division crest on his chest. On its right, one of its tentacles clutches an early Google 'I'm Feeling Lucky' button. Its head has been colored in with bands in the colors of the Google logo, surmounted by the Chrome logo. Its eyes have been replaced with the eyes of HAL9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' Nestled in one of its armpits is the Android robot.

Forcing Google to spin off Chrome (and Android?) (permalink)

Last August, a federal judge convicted Google of being "a monopolist" and acting "as one to maintain its monopoly." The judge concluded that key to Google's monopoly was the vast troves of data it collects and analyzes and asked the parties to come up with remedies to address this.

Many trustbusters and Google competitors read this and concluded that Google should be forced to share its click and query data. The technical term for this is "apocalyptically stupid." Releasing Google's click and query data into the wild is a privacy Chernobyl in the waiting. The secrets that we whisper to search engines have the power to destroy us a thousand times over.

Largely theoretical answers like "differential privacy" are promising, but remain theoretical at scale. The first large-scale live-fire exercise for these should not be something as high-stakes as Google's click and query data. If anything, we should delete that data:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/#extinguish-v-improve

The last thing we want to do is use antitrust to democratize surveillance so that everyone can spy as efficiently as Google does. In theory, we could sanitize the click and query data by limiting sharing to queries that were made by multiple, independent users (say, only sharing queries that at least 30 users have made), but it's unlikely that this will do much to improve the performance of rival firms' search engines.

Google only retains 18 months' worth of click and query data, thus once we cut off its capacity to collect more data, whatever advantage it has from surveillance will begin to decay immediately and fall to zero in 18 months.

(However: the 18 months figure is deceptive, and deliberately so. Google may only retain your queries for 18 months, but it is silent on how long it retains the inferences from those queries. It may discard your "how do I get an abortion in my red state" query after a year and a half, but indefinitely retain the "sought an illegal abortion" label it added to your profile. The US desperately needs a federal consumer privacy law!)

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

And just to be clear, there's other Google data that would be very useful to rival search engines, like Google's search index – the trove of pages from the internet. Google already licenses this out, and search engines like Kagi use it to produce substantially superior search results:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

The DOJ has just filed its proposal for a remedy, and it's a doozy: forcing Google to sell off Chrome, on the basis that both of these are the source of much of Google's data, and no rival search engine is likely to also have a widely used browser:

https://9to5google.com/2024/11/18/us-doj-google-sell-chrome/

This represents something of a compromise position: the DOJ had initially signalled that it would also demand a selloff of Android, and that's been dropped. I think there's a good case for forcing the sale of Android as a source of data, too.

In competition theory, these selloffs are referred to as "structural separation" – when a company that provides infrastructure to other firms is prohibited from competing with those firms:

https://locusmag.com/2022/03/cory-doctorow-vertically-challenged/

For example, it used to be that banks were prohibited from competing with the companies they loaned money to. After all, if you borrow money from Chase to open a pizzeria, and then Chase opens a pizzeria of its own across the street, you can see how your business would be doomed. You have to make interest payments to Chase, and your rival doesn't, and if Chase wants to, it can subsidize that rival so it can sell pizzas below cost until you're out of business.

Likewise, rail companies were banned from owning freight companies, because otherwise they would destroy the businesses of every freight company that shipped on the railroad.

In theory, you could create fair play rules that required the bank or the railroad to play nice with the business customers that used their platforms, but in practice, there are so many ways of cheating that this would be unenforceable.

This principle is well established in all other areas of business, and we recoil in horror when it is violated. You wouldn't hire a lawyer who was also representing the person who's suing you. Judges (with the abominable exception of Supreme Court justices!) are required to recuse themselves when they have a personal connection with either of the parties in a case they preside over.

One of the weirdest sights of the new Gilded Age is when lawyers for monopoly companies argue that they can play fair with their customers despite their conflicts of interest. Think of Google or Meta, with their ad-tech duopoly. These are companies that purport to represent sellers of ads and buyers of ads in marketplaces they own and control, and where they compete with sellers and/or buyers. These companies suck up 51% of the revenue generated by advertising, while historically, the share taken by ad intermediaries was more like 15%!

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/25/structural-separation/#america-act

Imagine if you and your partner discovered that the same lawyer was representing both of you in the divorce, while also serving as the judge, and trying to match with both of you on Tinder. Now imagine that when the divorce terms were finalized, lawyer got your family home.

No Google lawyer would agree to argue on the company's behalf in a case where the judge was employed by the party that's suing them, but they will blithely argue that the reason they're getting 51% of the ad-rake is that they're providing 51% of the value.

Structural separation – like judicial recusal – comprehensively and unarguably resolves all the perceptions and realities of conflict between parties. The fact that platform owners compete with platform users is the source of bottomless corruption, from Google to Amazon:

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

In other words, I think the DOJ is onto something here. That said, the devil is – as always – in the details. If Google is forced to sell off Chrome, rather than standing it up as its own competing business, things could go very wrong indeed.

Any company that buys Chrome will know that it only has a certain number of years before Google will be permitted to spin up a new browser, and will be incentivized to extract as much value from Chrome over that short period. So a selloff could make Chrome exponentially worse than Google, which, whatever other failings it has, is oriented towards long-term dominance, not a quick buck.

But if Google is forced to spin Chrome out as a standalone business, the incentives change. Anyone who buys Chrome will have to run it as a functional business that is designed to survive a future Google competitor – they won't have another business they can fall back on if Google bounces back in five years.

There's a good history of this in antitrust breakups: both Standard Oil and AT&T were forced to spin out, rather than sell off, parts of their empire, and those businesses stood alone and provided competitive pressure. That is, until we stopped enforcing antitrust law and allowed them to start merging again – womp womp.

This raises another question: does any of this matter, given this month's election results? Will Trump's DoJ follow through on whatever priorities the current DoJ sets? That's an open question, but – unlike so many other questions about the coming Trump regime – the answer here isn't necessarily a nightmare.

After all, the Google antitrust case started under Trump, and Trump's pick for Attorney General, the credibly accused sexual predator Matt Gaetz, is a "Khanservative" who breaks with his fellow Trumpians in professing great admiration for Biden's FTC chief Lina Khan, and her project of breaking up corporate monopolies:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/trump-nominates-khanservative-matt

What's more, Trump is a landing strip for a stroke or coronary, which would make JD Vance president – and Vance has also expressed his approval of Khan's work.

Google bosses seem to be betting on Trump's "transactional" (that is, corrupt) style of governance, and his willingness to overrule his own appointees to protect the interests of anyone who flatters or bribes him sufficiently, or convinces the hosts of Fox and Friends to speak on their behalf:

https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/comprehensive-review-revolving-door-between-fox-and-second-trump-administration

That would explain why Google capo Sundar Pichai ordered his employees not to speak out against Trump:

https://www.businessinsider.com/google-employees-memes-poke-fun-company-rules-political-discussion-2024-11

And why he followed up by publicly osculating Trump's sphincter:

https://twitter.com/sundarpichai/status/1854207788290850888

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

This day in history (permalink)

#20yrsago WIPO notes from day three: democracy == ignoring dissent https://web.archive.org/web/20041124024604/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/002130.php#002130

#15yrsago Britain’s new Internet law — as bad as everyone’s been saying, and worse. Much, much worse. https://memex.craphound.com/2009/11/19/britains-new-internet-law-as-bad-as-everyones-been-saying-and-worse-much-much-worse/

#5yrsago DJ Earworm: 100 songhttps://www.tumblr.com/thevaultoftheatomicspaceage/767410440115503104s from the past decade in one mashup https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=UhIte8t6BEg

#5yrsago Leaks reveal how the “Pitbull of PR” helped Purdue Pharma and the Sacklers ignite the opioid crisis https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-purdue-pharma-media-playbook-how-it-planted-the-opioid-anti-story#171238

#5yrsago Beyond the gig economy: “platform co-ops” that run their own apps https://www.vice.com/en/article/worker-owned-apps-are-trying-to-fix-the-gig-economys-exploitation/

#5yrsago Elizabeth Warren’s plan to denazify America https://medium.com/@teamwarren/fighting-back-against-white-nationalist-violence-87b0c550f51f

#5yrsago Youtube told them to use this “royalty-free” music; now rightsholders are forcing ads on their videos and claiming most of the revenue https://torrentfreak.com/royalty-free-music-supplied-by-youtube-results-in-mass-video-demonetization-191118/

#5yrsago The State of South Dakota wants you to know that it’s on meth https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2019/11/18/meth-were-it-says-south-dakota-new-ad-campaign/

#5yrsago Sand thieves believed to be behind epidemic of Chinese GPS jamming https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/11/15/131940/ghost-ships-crop-circles-and-soft-gold-a-gps-mystery-in-shanghai/

#5yrsago Quiet Rooms: Illinois schools lead the nation in imprisoning very young, disabled children in isolation chambers https://features.propublica.org/illinois-seclusion-rooms/school-students-put-in-isolated-timeouts/#170648

#5yrsago Terabytes of data leaked from an oligarch-friendly offshore bank https://web.archive.org/web/20191117042726/https://data.ddosecrets.com/file/Sherwood/

#5yrsago Naomi Kritzer’s “Catfishing on the CatNet”: an AI caper about the true nature of online friendship https://memex.craphound.com/2019/11/19/naomi-kritzers-catfishing-on-the-catnet-an-ai-caper-about-the-true-nature-of-online-friendship/

#5yrsago Girl on Film: a graphic novel memoir of a life in the arts and the biological basis for memory-formation https://memex.craphound.com/2019/11/19/girl-on-film-a-graphic-novel-memoir-of-a-life-in-the-arts-and-the-biological-basis-for-memory-formation/

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, holding a mic.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Today's progress: 791 words (84962 words total).

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: Spill, part four (a Little Brother story) https://craphound.com/littlebrother/2024/10/28/spill-part-four-a-little-brother-story/

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

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

Publié le 18.11.2024 à 09:49

Pluralistic: Harpercollins wants authors to sign away AI training rights (18 Nov 2024)


Today's links


A bookcase. Rupert Murdoch's grinning head rests between a gap in the books. Centered in his forehead is the glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.'

Harpercollins wants authors to sign away AI training rights (permalink)

Rights don't give you power. People with power can claim rights. Giving a "right" to someone powerless just transfers it to someone more powerful than them. Nowhere is this more visible than in copyright fights, where creative workers are given new rights that are immediately hoovered up by their bosses.

It's not clear whether copyright gives anyone the right to control whether their work is used to train an AI model. It's very common for people (including high ranking officials in entertainment companies, and practicing lawyers who don't practice IP law) to overestimate their understanding of copyright in general, and their knowledge of fair use in particular.

Here's a hint: any time someone says "X can never be fair use," they are wrong and don't know what they're talking about (same goes for "X is always fair use"). Likewise, anyone who says, "Fair use is assessed solely by considering the 'four factors.'" That is your iron-clad sign that the speaker does not understand fair use:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/27/nuke-first/#ask-questions-never

But let's say for the sake of argument that training a model on someone's work is a copyright violation, and so training is a licensable activity, and AI companies must get permission from rightsholders before they use their copyrighted works to train a model.

Even if that's not how copyright works today, it's how things could work. No one came down off a mountain with two stone tablets bearing the text of 17 USC chiseled in very, very tiny writing. We totally overhauled copyright in 1976, and again in 1998. There've been several smaller alterations since.

We could easily write a new law that requires licensing for AI training, and it's not hard to imagine that happening, given the current confluence of interests among creative workers (who are worried about AI pitchmen's proclaimed intention to destroy their livelihoods) and entertainment companies (who are suing many AI companies).

Creative workers are an essential element of that coalition. Without those workers as moral standard-bearers, it's hard to imagine the cause getting much traction. No one seriously believes that entertainment execs like Warner CEO David Zaslav actually cares about creative works – this is a guy who happily deletes every copy of an unreleased major film that had superb early notices because it would be worth infinitesimally more as a tax-break than as a work of art:

https://collider.com/coyote-vs-acme-david-zaslav-never-seen/

The activists in this coalition commonly call it "anti AI." But is it? Does David Zaslav – or any of the entertainment execs who are suing AI companies – want to prevent gen AI models from being used in the production of their products? No way – these guys love AI. Zaslav and his fellow movie execs held out against screenwriters demanding control over AI in the writers' room for 148 days, and locked out their actors for another 118 days over the use of AI to replace actors. Studio execs forfeited at least $5 billion in a bid to insist on their right to use AI against workers:

https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mje/2023/12/06/a-deep-dive-into-the-economic-ripples-of-the-hollywood-strike/

Entertainment businesses love the idea of replacing their workers with AI. Now, that doesn't mean that AI can replace workers: just because your boss can be sold an AI to do your job, it doesn't mean that the AI he buys can actually do your job:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/25/accountability-sinks/#work-harder-not-smarter

So if we get the right to refuse to allow our work to be used to train a model, the "anti AI" coalition will fracture. Workers will (broadly) want to exercise that right to prevent AI models from being trained at all, while our bosses will want to exercise that right to be sure that they're paid for AI training, and that they can steer production of the resulting model to maximize the number of workers they can fire after it's done.

Hypothetically, creative workers could simply say to our bosses, "We will not sell you this right to authorize or refuse AI training that Congress just gave us." But our bosses will then say, "Fine, you're fired. We won't hire you for this movie, or record your album, or publish your book."

Given that there are only five major publishers, four major studios, three major labels, two ad-tech companies and one company that controls the whole ebook and audiobook market, a refusal to deal on the part of a small handful of firms effectively dooms you to obscurity.

As Rebecca Giblin and I write in our 2022 book Chokepoint Capitalism, giving more rights to a creative worker who has no bargaining power is like giving your bullied schoolkid more lunch money. No matter how much lunch money you give that kid, the bullies will take it and your kid will remain hungry. To get your kid lunch, you have to clear the bullies away from the gate. You need to make a structural change:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

Or, put another way: people with power can claim rights. But giving powerless people more rights doesn't make them powerful – it just transfers those rights to the people they bargain against.

Or, put a third way: "just because you're on their side, it doesn't follow that they're on your side" (h/t Teresa Nielsen Hayden):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/19/gander-sauce/#just-because-youre-on-their-side-it-doesnt-mean-theyre-on-your-side

Last month, Penguin Random House, the largest publisher in the history of human civilization, started including a copyright notice in its books advising all comers that they would not permit AI training with the material between the covers:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/19/gander-sauce/#just-because-youre-on-their-side-it-doesnt-mean-theyre-on-your-side

At the time, people who don't like AI were very excited about this, even though it was – at the utmost – a purely theatrical gesture. After all, if AI training isn't fair use, then you don't need a notice to turn it into a copyright infringement. If AI training is fair use, it remains fair use even if you add some text to the copyright notice.

But far more important was the fact that the less that Penguin Random House pays its authors, the more it can pay its shareholders and executives. PRH didn't say it wouldn't sell the right to train a model to an AI company – they only said that an AI company that wanted to train a model on its books would have to pay PRH first. In other words, just because you're on their side, it doesn't follow that they're on your side.

When I wrote about PRH and its AI warning, I mentioned that I had personally seen one of the big five publishers hold up a book because a creator demanded a clause in their contract saying their work wouldn't be used to train an AI.

There's a good reason you'd want this in your contract; the standard contracting language contains bizarrely overreaching language seeking "rights in all media now known and yet to be devised throughout the universe":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/19/reasonable-agreement/

But the publisher flat-out refused, and the creator fought and fought, and in the end, it became clear that this was a take-it-or-leave-it situation: the publisher would not include a "no AI training" clause in the contract.

One of the big five publishers is Rupert Murdoch's Harpercollins. Murdoch is famously of the opinion that any kind of indexing or archiving of the work he publishes must require a license. He even demanded to be paid to have his newspapers indexed by search engines:

https://www.inquisitr.com/46786/epic-win-news-corp-likely-to-remove-content-from-google

No surprise, then, that Murdoch sued an AI company over training on Newscorp content:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/oct/25/unjust-threat-murdoch-and-artists-align-in-fight-over-ai-content-scraping

But Rupert Murdoch doesn't oppose the material he publishes from being used in AI training, nor is he opposed to the creation and use of models. Murdoch's Harpercollins is now pressuring its authors to sign away their rights to have their works used to train an AI model:

https://bsky.app/profile/kibblesmith.com/post/3laz4ryav3k2w

The deal is not negotiable, and the email demanding that authors opt into it warns that AI might make writers obsolete (remember, even if AI can't do your job, an AI salesman can convince Rupert Murdoch – who is insatiably horny for not paying writers – that an AI is capable of doing your job):

https://www.avclub.com/harpercollins-selling-books-to-ai-language-training

And it's not hard to see why an AI company might want this; after all, if they can lock in an exclusive deal to train a model on Harpercollins' back catalog, their products will exclusively enjoy whatever advantage is to be had in that corpus.

In just a month, we've gone from "publishers won't promise not to train a model on your work" to "publishers are letting an AI company train a model on your work, but will pay you a nonnegotiable pittance for your work." The next step is likely to be, "publishers require you to sign away the right to train a model on your work."

The right to decide who can train a model on your work does you no good unless it comes with the power to exercise that right.

Rather than campaigning for the right to decide who can train a model on our work, we should be campaigning for the power to decide what terms we contract under. The Writers Guild spent 148 days on the picket line, a remarkable show of solidarity.

But the Guild's real achievement was in securing the right to unionize at all – to create a sectoral bargaining unit that could represent all the writers, writing for all the studios. The achievements of our labor forebears, in the teeth of ruthless armed resistance, resulted in the legalization and formalization of unions. Never forget that the unions that exist today were criminal enterprises once upon a time, and the only reason they exist is because people risked prison, violence and murder to organize when doing so was a crime:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/11/rip-jane-mcalevey/#organize

The fights were worth fighting. The screenwriters comprehensively won the right to control AI in the writers' room, because they had power:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; Eva Rinaldi, CC BY-SA 2.0; modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

This day in history (permalink)

#20yrsago The Grey Video https://random.waxy.org/video/grey_video.mov

#20yrsago Canada’s DMCA: why is it a bad idea? https://web.archive.org/web/20050428093632/http://www.digital-copyright.ca/files/The_Truth__Final__clean__Nov_16_04_DAF.html

#20yrsago Internet Archive pages are admissable into evidence https://web.archive.org/web/20041120050733/https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/packets/vol_2_no_3/002728.shtml/

#15yrsago Demonstrating TSA futility by stabbing dead pigs with pens https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17325460/

#15yrsago Chumby One: handsome successor to the cutest computer ever https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2009/chumby-one

#15yrsago EFF analyzes the legal creepiness of ACTA, the secret copyright treaty https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/11/stopping-acta-juggernaut

#15yrsago Maricopa deputy steals defender’s paperwork during a court case http://www.heatcity.org/2009/11/judge-orders-officer-to-apologize-or-face-jail-for-taking-attorneys-file.html

#15yrsago SFPD cops from imaginary anti-dance-party squad steal laptops https://web.archive.org/web/20091120193839/https://www.sfweekly.com/2009-11-18/music/s-f-cops-may-have-gone-too-far-in-seizing-dj-gear-at-underground-parties/

#15yrsago David Moles’s “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” https://chrononaut.org/fiction/down-and-out-in-the-magic-kingdom/

#15yrsago Apple patents anti-user attention-complianceware https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/business/15digi.html

#15yrsago Struts & Frets: an indie-rock YA novel with heart and authenticity https://memex.craphound.com/2009/11/15/struts-frets-an-indie-rock-ya-novel-with-heart-and-authenticity/

#15yrsago UN goons destroy academic poster describing China’s censorwall https://web.archive.org/web/20091118143608/http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm

#15yrsago Viacom’s top lawyer thinks lawsuits were “terrorism” – but he’s learned nothing from the experience https://memex.craphound.com/2009/11/17/viacoms-top-lawyer-thinks-lawsuits-were-terrorism-but-hes-learned-nothing-from-the-experience/

#10yrsago London council threatens freedom of information site for “leaking” info they say doesn’t exist https://www.mysociety.org/2014/11/17/can-you-leak-a-decision-that-has-not-yet-been-made/

#10yrsago What “the worst ride in Disney World” teaches us about media strategy https://passport2dreams.blogspot.com/2014/11/stitchs-great-escape-ten-years.html

#10yrsago Rudy Rucker and Terry Bisson’s “Where the Lost Things Are” https://reactormag.com/where-the-lost-things-are-rudy-rucker-terry-bisson/

#10yrsago Mesmerizing rebuild of a mechanical Fourier calculator https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0INsTTU1k2UYO9Mck-i5HNqGNW5AeEwq

#10yrsago Rightscorp is running out of money https://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-firm-rightscorp-on-the-brink-of-bankruptcy-141114/

#10yrsago Spain’s top piracy-fighter goes to jail for embezzling $50K to spend in brothels https://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-boss-spent-50k-in-brothels-to-protect-copyright-141114/

#10yrsago EFF makes DoJ admit it lied in court about FBI secret warrants https://web.archive.org/web/20141115172425/http://www.nationaljournal.com/tech/justice-department-admits-it-misled-court-about-fbi-s-secret-surveillance-program-20141113

#10yrsago 1,000-room palace for Turkey’s President Erdogan will cost twice initial $615M pricetag https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-30061107

#10yrsago Director Lexi Alexander explains why she sides with pirates https://torrentfreak.com/why-hollywood-director-lexi-alexander-sides-with-pirates-141118/

#10yrsago Bumfights creator accused of stealing remains of dead children from Thai hospital museum https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/general/443837/body-parts-in-dhl-packages-stolen-from-siriraj-museum-hospital-says

#10yrsago New sf story: “Huxleyed into the Full Orwell” https://www.vice.com/en/article/huxleyed-into-the-full-cory-orwell-cory-doctorow/

#10yrsago Whatsapp integrates Moxie Marlinspike’s Textsecure end-to-end crypto https://www.wired.com/2014/11/whatsapp-encrypted-messaging/

#5yrsago Podcast: Jeannette Ng Was Right, John W. Campbell Was a Fascist https://ia803108.us.archive.org/19/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_315/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_315_-_Jeannette_Ng_Was_Right_John_W_Campbell_Was_a_Fascist.mp3

#5yrsago Coop’s tribute to Randotti Skulls, from the golden age of Haunted Mansion merchandise https://memex.craphound.com/2019/11/18/coops-tribute-to-randotti-skulls-from-the-golden-age-of-haunted-mansion-merchandise/

#5yrsago Beyond antitrust: the anti-monopoly movement and what it stands for https://onezero.medium.com/the-utah-statement-reviving-antimonopoly-traditions-for-the-era-of-big-tech-e6be198012d7

#5yrsago Massive leak of Chinese government documents reveal the “no mercy” plan for Muslims in Xinjiang https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/16/world/asia/china-xinjiang-documents.html

#5yrsago 900 pages of leaked Iranian spy cables reveal how America’s failures after invasions allowed Iran to seize control of Iraqi politics https://theintercept.com/2019/11/18/iran-iraq-spy-cables/

#5yrsago Majority of Americans know they’re under constant surveillance, don’t trust the companies doing it, and feel helpless to stop it https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/11/15/americans-and-privacy-concerned-confused-and-feeling-lack-of-control-over-their-personal-information/

#5yrsago Supercut of British voters insulting Boris Johnson on the campaign trail https://twitter.com/TheIDSmiths/status/1194954125772853248

#5yrsago Thanks to an article about why science fiction great John M Ford’s books are out of print, they’re coming back https://slate.com/culture/2019/11/john-ford-science-fiction-fantasy-books.html

#5yrsago Many Chinese manufacturers are behaving as though they have no future https://web.archive.org/web/20191114152903/https://www.chinalawblog.com/2019/11/how-to-conduct-business-with-chinese-companies-that-see-a-dark-future.html

#5yrsago Why are we still treating economics as if it were an empirical science that makes reliable predictions? https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/12/05/against-economics/

#5yrsago Uber pretended its drivers were contractors, and now it owes New Jersey $650m in employment tax https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/uber-hit-with-650-million-employment-tax-bill-in-new-jersey

#5yrsago Labour pledges universal broadband and nationwide fibre, will renationalise the farcical, terrible BT Openreach https://www.bbc.com/news/election-2019-50427369

#5yrsago “Hope literacy,” “functional denial” and other ways to keep going in this difficult time https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/articles/entry/despairing-about-climate-crisis

#5yrsago Hong Kong protesters’ little stonehenges impede police cars https://twitter.com/rhokilpatrick/status/1195350548062654465

#5yrsago Extinction Rebellion floats a drowned house down the Thames https://extinctionrebellion.uk/2019/11/10/act-now-our-house-is-flooding/

#5yrsago After workers tried to form a union, trans rights group ditches most of its staff https://npeu.org/news/2019/11/15/nonprofit-professional-employees-union-files-unfair-labor-practice-against-national-center-for-transgender-equality-leadership-for-retaliation-against-staff-organizing

#1yrago Red-teaming the SCOTUS code of conduct https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/17/red-team-black-robes/#security-theater

#1yrago Big Train managers earn bonuses for greenlighting unsafe cars https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/15/safety-third/#all-the-livelong-day

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, holding a mic.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Friday's progress: 786 words (83404 words total).

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: Spill, part four (a Little Brother story) https://craphound.com/littlebrother/2024/10/28/spill-part-four-a-little-brother-story/

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

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

Publié le 15.11.2024 à 09:26

Pluralistic: Canada's ground-breaking, hamstrung repair and interop laws (15 Nov 2024)


Today's links


An e-waste dump. In the foreground are two waste-barrels. A limp Canadian flag emerges from the left barrel; the nude head and shoulders of a grinning Tony Clement emerge from the right barrel.

Canada's ground-breaking, hamstrung repair and interop laws (permalink)

When the GOP trifecta assumes power in just a few months, they will pass laws, and those laws will be terrible, and they will cast long, long shadows.

This is the story of how another far-right conservative government used its bulletproof majority to pass a wildly unpopular law that continues to stymie progress to this day. It's the story of Canada's Harper Conservative government, and two of its key ministers: Tony Clement and James Moore.

Starting in 1998, the US Trade Rep embarked on a long campaign to force every country in the world to enact a new kind of IP law: an "anticircumvention" law that would criminalize the production and use of tools that allowed people to use their own property in ways that the manufacturer disliked.

This first entered the US statute books with the 1998 passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), whose Section 1201 established a new felony for circumventing an "access control." Crucially, DMCA 1201's prohibition on circumvention did not confine itself to protecting copyright.

Circumventing an access control is a felony, even if you never violate copyright law. For example, if you circumvent the access control on your own printer to disable the processes that check to make sure you're using an official HP cartridge, HP can come after you.

You haven't violated any copyright, but the ink-checking code is a copyrighted work, and you had to circumvent a block in order to reach it. Thus, if I provide you a tool to escape HP's ink racket, I commit a felony with penalties of five years in prison and a $500k fine, for a first offense. So it is that HP ink costs more per ounce than the semen of a Kentucky Derby-winning stallion.

This was clearly a bad idea in 1998, though it wasn't clear how bad an idea it was at the time. In 1998, chips were expensive and underpowered. By 2010, a chip that cost less than a dollar could easily implement a DMCA-triggering access control, and manufacturers of all kinds were adding superfluous chips to everything from engine parts to smart lightbulbs whose sole purpose was to transform modification into felonies. This is what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business-model."

So when the Harper government set out to import US-style anticircumvention law to Canada, Canadians were furious. A consultation on the proposal received 6,138 responses opposing the law, and 54 in support:

https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2010/04/copycon-final-numbers/

And yet, James Moore and Tony Clement pressed on. When asked how they could advance such an unpopular bill, opposed by experts and the general public alike, Moore told the International Chamber of Commerce that every objector who responded to his consultation was a "radical extremist" with a "babyish" approach to copyright:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/copyright-debate-turns-ugly-1.898216

As is so often the case, history vindicated the babyish radical extremists. The DMCA actually has an official way to keep score on this one. Every three years, the US Copyright Office invites public submissions for exemptions to DMCA 1201, creating a detailed, evidence-backed record of all the legitimate activities that anticircumvention law interferes with.

Unfortunately, "a record" is all we get out of this proceeding. Even though the Copyright Office is allowed to grant "exemptions," these don't mean what you think they mean. The statute is very clear on this: the US Copyright Office is required to grant exemptions for the act of circumvention, but is forbidden from granting exemptions for tools needed to carry out these acts.

This is headspinningly and deliberately obscure, but there's one anecdote from my long crusade against this stupid law that lays it bare. As I mentioned, the US Trade Rep has made the passage of DMCA-like laws in other countries a top priority since the Clinton years. In 2001, the EU adopted the EU Copyright Directive, whose Article 6 copy-pastes the provisions of DMCA 1201.

In 2003, I found myself in Oslo, debating the minister who'd just completed Norway's EUCD implementation. The minister was very proud of his law, boasting that he'd researched the flaws in other countries' anticircumvention laws and addressed them in Norway's law. For example, Norway's law explicitly allowed blind people to bypass access controls on ebooks in order to feed them into text-to-speech engines, Braille printers and other accessibility tools.

I knew where this was going. I asked the minister how this would work in practice. Could someone sell a blind person a tool to break the DRM on their ebooks? Of course not, that's totally illegal. Could a nonprofit blind rights group make such a tool and give it away to blind people? No, that's illegal too. What about hobbyists, could they make the tool for their blind friends? No, not that either.

OK, so how do blind people exercise their right to bypass access controls on ebooks they own so they can actually read them?

Here's how. Each blind person, all by themself, is expected to decompile and reverse-engineer Adobe Reader, locate a vulnerability in the code and write a new program that exploits that vulnerability to extract their ebooks. While blind people are individually empowered to undertake this otherwise prohibited activity, they must do so on their own: they can't share notes with one another on the process. They certainly can't give each other the circumvention program they write in this way:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/28/mcbroken/#my-milkshake-brings-all-the-lawyers-to-the-yard

That's what a use-only exemption is: the right to individually put a locked down device up on your own workbench, and, laboring in perfect secrecy, figure out how it works and then defeat the locks that stop you from changing those workings so they benefit you instead of the manufacturer. Without a "tools" exemption, a use exemption is basically a decorative ornament.

So the many use exemptions that the US Copyright Office has granted since 1998 really amount to nothing more than a list of defects in the DMCA that the Copyright Office has painstaking verified but is powerless to fix. We could probably save everyone a lot of time by scrapping the triennial exemptions process and replacing it with a permanent sign over the doors of the Library of Congress reading "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here."

All of this was well understood by 2010, when Moore and Clement were working on the Canadian version of the DMCA. All of this was explained in eye-watering detail to Moore and Clement, but was roundly ignored. I even had a go at it, publicly picking a fight with Moore on Twitter:

https://web.archive.org/web/20130407101911if_/http://eaves.ca/wp-content/uploads/2010/Conversations%20between%20@doctorow%20and%20@mpjamesmoore.jpg

Moore and Clement rammed their proposal through in the next session of Parliament, passing it as Bill C-11 in 2012:

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

This was something of a grand finale for the pair. Today, Moore is a faceless corporate lawyer, while Clement was last seen grifting covid PPE (Clement's political career ended abruptly when he sent dick pics to a young woman who turned out to be a pair of sextortionists from Cote D'Ivoire, and was revealed as a serial sex-pest in the ensuing scandal:)

https://globalnews.ca/news/4646287/tony-clement-instagram-women/

Even though Moore and Clement are long gone from public life, their signature achievement remains a Canadian disgrace, an anchor chain tied around the Canadian economy's throat, and an impediment to Canadian progress.

This week, two excellent new Canadian laws received royal assent: Bill C-244 is a broad, national Right to Repair law; and Bill C-294 is a broad, national interoperability law. Both laws establish the right to circumvent access controls for the purpose of fixing and improving things, something Canadians deserve and need.

But neither law contains a tools exemption. Like the blind people of Norway, a Canadian farmer who wants to attach a made-in-Canada Honeybee tool to their John Deere tractor is required to personally, individually reverse-engineer the John Deere tractor and modify it to talk to the Honeybee accessory, laboring in total secrecy:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/12/canada_right_to_repair/

Likewise the Canadian repair tech who fixes a smart speaker or a busted smartphone – they are legally permitted to circumvent in order to torture the device's repair codes out of it or force it to recognize a replacement part, but each technician must personally figure out how to get the device firmware to do this, without discussing it with anyone else.

Thus do Moore and Clement stand athwart Canadian self-reliance and economic development, shouting "STOP!" though both men have been out of politics for years.

There has never been a better time to hit Clement and Moore's political legacy over the head with a shovel and bury it in a shallow grave. Canadian technologists could be making a fortune creating circumvention devices that repair and improve devices marketed by foreign companies.

They could make circumvention tools to allow owners of consoles to play games by Canadian studios that are directly sold to Canadian gamers, bypassing the stores operated by Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo and the 30% commissions they charge. Canadian technologists could be making diagnostic tools that allow every auto mechanic in Canada to fix any car manufactured anywhere in the world.

Canadian cloud servers could power devices long after their US-based manufacturers discontinue support for them, providing income to Canadian cloud companies and continued enjoyment for Canadian owners of these otherwise bricked gadgets.

Canada's gigantic auto parts sector could clone the security chips that foreign auto manufacturers use to block the use of third party parts, and every Canadian could enjoy a steep discount every time they fix their cars. Every farmer could avail themselves of third party parts for their tractors, which they could install themselves, bypassing the $200 service call from a John Deere technician who does nothing more than look over the farmer's own repair and then type an unlock code into the tractor's console.

Every Canadian who prints out a shopping list or their kid's homework could use third party ink that sells for pennies per liter, rather than HP's official colored water that cost more than vintage Veuve Cliquot.

A Canadian e-waste dump generates five low-paid jobs per ton of waste, and that waste itself will poison the land and water for centuries to come. A circumvention-enabled Canadian repair sector could generate 150 skilled, high-paid community jobs that saves gadgets and the Earth, all while saving Canadians millions.

Canadians could enjoy the resliency that comes of having a domestic tech and repair sector, and could count on it through pandemics and Trumpian trade-war.

All of that and more could be ours, except for the cowardice and greed of Tony Clement and James Moore and the Harper Tories who voted C-11 into law in 2012.

Everything the "radical extremists" warned them of has come true. It's long past time Canadians tore up anticircumvention law and put the interests of the Canadian public and Canadian tech businesses ahead of the rent-seeking enshittification of American Big Tech.

Until we do that, we can keep on passing all the repair and interop laws we want, but each one will be hamstrung by Moore and Clement's "felony contempt of business model" law, and the contempt it showed for the Canadian people.

(Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tony_Clement_-_2007-06-30_in_Kearney,_Ontario.JPGJeffJ, CC BY-SA 3.0; Jorge Franganillo, CC BY 2.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

This day in history (permalink)

#20yrsgo My latest short story — CC-licensed, on Salon, all about gaming https://www.salon.com/2004/11/15/andas_game/

#10yrsago University of Michigan makes up a bunch of non-reasons why it doesn’t have to do record retention https://www.techdirt.com/2014/11/13/michigan-university-claims-its-public-records-retention-period-is-whatever-each-employee-wants-it-to-be/

#10yrsago Amazon and Hachette kiss and make up https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/14/technology/amazon-hachette-ebook-dispute.html

#5yrsago Tpmfail: a timing attack that can extract keys from secure computing chips in 4-20 minutes https://www.zdnet.com/article/tpm-fail-vulnerabilities-impact-tpm-chips-in-desktops-laptops-servers/

#5yrsago Banned from Youtube, Chinese propagandists are using Pornhub to publish anti-Hong Kong videos https://qz.com/1747617/chinese-users-go-to-pornhub-to-spread-hong-kong-propaganda

#5yrsago Hong Kong protests: “Might as well go down fighting” https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/11/escalating-violence-hong-kong-protests/601804/

#5yrsago Activists target Facebookers over “Gold Tier” sponsorship of Kavanaugh event https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/14/20963865/facebook-ads-brett-kavanaugh-federalist-society-employees

#5yrsago Trump’s signature tax break for poor people went to subsidize a superyacht marina in Florida https://www.propublica.org/article/superyacht-marina-west-palm-beach-opportunity-zone-trump-tax-break-to-help-the-poor-went-to-a-rich-gop-donor

#5yrsago Big Tech’s CEOs can’t possibly fix Big Tech https://medium.com/bloomberg-opinion/mark-zuckerberg-is-totally-out-of-his-depth-887682ba70b9

#5yrsago American health care’s life-destroying “surprise bills” are the fault of local, private-equity monopolies https://www.theamericanconservative.com/gougers-r-us-how-private-equity-is-gobbling-up-medical-care/

#5yrsago The poorest half of Americans have nothing left, so now the 1%’s growth comes from the upper middle class https://wolfstreet.com/2019/11/13/how-the-fed-boosts-the-1-even-the-upper-middle-class-loses-share-of-household-wealth-to-the-1-the-bottom-half-gets-screwed/

#1yrago The conservative movement is cracking up https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/14/when-youve-lost-the-fedsoc/#anti-buster-buster

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, holding a mic.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Today's progress: 792 words (82608 words total).

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: Spill, part four (a Little Brother story) https://craphound.com/littlebrother/2024/10/28/spill-part-four-a-little-brother-story/

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

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

Publié le 13.11.2024 à 20:16

Pluralistic: America's richest Medicare fraudsters are untouchable (13 Nov 2024)


Today's links


A man in a top hat smothering a girl in a bed with a pillow. The girl's protruding arm is blue. He is being handed a sack of money by Uncle Sam in a Santa suit. At their feet is a fizzing bomb with an oxygen tank label.

America's richest Medicare fraudsters are untouchable (permalink)

"When you're famous, they let you do it": eight words that encapsulate the terrifying rot at the heart of our lived experience, a world where impunity for the powerful trumps the pain of their victims.

"Populism," is shorthand for many things: rage, despair, distrust of institutions and a desire to destroy them. True populism seeks to channel those totally legitimate feelings into transformative change for a caring and fair society for all. So-called "right populism" exploits those feelings, using them to drive a wedge between different groups of victims, turning them against each other, so that elites can go on screwing the squabbling factions.

The far-right parties that are marching to victory through a series global elections are different in many ways, but they all share one trait: they appeal to mistrust of institutions, claiming that the government has been captured by elites who serve them at the expense of the governed. This has the benefit of being actually true, and while the fact that far-right parties are owned by these government-capturing elites might erode their credibility, the fact that so many "progressive" parties have stepped in to defend the institutional status quo leaves an open field for reactionary wreckers:

https://www.politico.com/blogs/2016-dem-primary-live-updates-and-results/2016/02/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-slogan-219908

Why would voters turn out to support a "Department of Government Efficiency," run by a bully whose career has been defined by abusing the people he is in charge of? Maybe they're turkeys voting for Christmas, but they also have personal, traumatic experience with government departments that protected the abusive corporations that preyed on them.

Today on Propublica, Peter Elkind tells the incredible story of Lincare, the nation's leading supplier of home oxygen, a repeat-offender fraudster and predator that has made billions in public money without any real consequences:

https://www.propublica.org/article/lincare-medicare-lawsuit-settlements-oxygen-equipment

Lincare has been repeatedly found guilty of defrauding Medicare; in this century alone, they have been put on probation four times, with a "death penalty" provision that would permanently disqualify them from ever doing business with the federal government. In every case, Lincare committed fresh acts of fraud, but never faced that death penalty.

Why not? Lincare is far too big to fail. In America's bizarre, worst-in-class, world-beatingly expensive privatized health care system, even public health provision (like Medicare) is outsourced to the private sector. Lincare has monopolized oxygen, a famously very important molecule for human survival, and if it were disqualified from serving Medicare, large numbers of Americans would literally asphyxiate.

Lincare clearly knows this. Too big to fail is too big to jail, and too big to jail is too big to care. They are the poster children for impunity, repeat offenders, multiply convicted, and still offending, even today. Lincare has been convicted of fraud under the administrations of GW Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden, and they're still in business.

What a business it is! Elkind takes us to the asbestos-poisoned town of Libby, Montana, where more than 2,000 of the 2.857 population suffer from respiratory diseases from the open-pit mine that operated there from 1963-1990. The elderly, dying population of this town rely on Medicare and Medicare Advantage oxygen concentrators to draw breath, and that means they rely on Lincare.

That means they are prey to Lincare's signature scam: charging Medicare (and 20% co-paying patients) to rent an oxygen concentrator every month, until they have paid for it several times over. This is illegal: under federal rules, patients are deemed to have bought their oxygen concentrators after 36 months and contractors are no longer allowed to charge them. Lincare doesn't give a fuck: the bills keep coming, and Lincare patients who survive long enough have paid the company $16,000 for a $799 gadget.

When Brandon Haugen, a local Lincare customer service rep, noticed this and queried the company's home office in Clearwater, Florida (home to Scientology and the Flexidisc), he was given the brushoff. After multiple attempts to get company leadership to acknowledge that this was illegal, he quit his job, along with his colleague and childhood friend Ben Montgomery. Between them, Haugen and Montgomery had 14 children who depended on their Lincare paychecks. Despite this, they both quit and turned whistleblower, with no job lined up. Eventually, Lincare paid $29m to settle the claim, with $5.7m to the whistleblowers and their lawyers. For Lincare, this was part of the cost of doing business and the fraud rolls on.

Lincare doesn't just defraud Medicare, they also have a high-pressure commissioned sales force that has repeatedly been caught defrauding Lincare customers – overwhelming sick, poor, elderly people. Patients are pressured to accept auto-billing, then Lincare piles medically dubious gadgets onto their monthly bills, as well as useless, overpriced "patient monitoring" services. Customers with apnea machines are mis-sold ventilators by salesmen who falsely claim these are medically necessary.

Salespeople illegally auto-shipped parts and consumables for Lincare machines to patients, then billed them for it. To satisfy the legal requirement that they telephone patients before placing these orders, sales agents would call patients, put them on hold, then part the call until the patient hung up.

Salespeople are motivated by equal parts greed and terror. Make quota and you can get up to $8,000 per month in bonuses. Miss that punishing quota and you're out on your ass (which is why one salesperson ordered a medically unnecessary ventilator).

Lincare also habitually ignores requests to pick up medically unnecessary equipment, because so long as the equipment is on the patient's premises, they can continue to bill for it. As one Ohio manager wrote to their staff: "As we have already discussed, absolutely no pick-ups/inactivation’s are to be do[ne] until I give you the green light. Even if they are deceased." Execs send out company-wide emails celebrating regional managers who have abandoned pick-ups, like a Feb 2022 "Achievement Rankings" email that touted the fact that most regional centers had at least 150 overdue pickups.

Lincare represents a deep, structural rot in American society. They are too big to punish, and too powerful to regulate. A 2006 law meant to curb oxygen payments was gutted by industry lobbyists. Today, Congress is weighing legislation, the SOAR (Supplemental Oxygen Access Reform) Act, which will allow Lincare to bill the public for hundreds of millions more every year, raising rates and eliminating competitive billing. The bill is supported by patient advocates who are rightly interested in getting oxygen to patients who have been locked out of the system, but the cost of that inclusion is that Lincare will be even more firmly insulated from its corruption.

The Trump Administration will doubtless crack down on some of America's worst companies, and the furious voters who elected the only candidate who campaigned on the idea that America was rotten will cheer him on. But Trump has made it clear that he will select the targets of his administration based on whether they are loyal to him or stand in his way, without regard to whether they harm his supporters:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/12/the-enemy-of-your-enemy/#is-your-enemy

Companies like Lincare, repeatedly caught paying illegal kickbacks, know how to play this game.

(Image: p.Gordon, CC BY 2.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

This day in history (permalink)

#20yrsago Aschroft: judges shouldn’t uphold the Constitution https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna6472084

#20yrsago Fighting spam shouldn’t mean fighting free speech https://web.archive.org/web/20041116043239/http://www.eff.org/wp/?f=SpamCollateralDamage.html

#20yrsago FCC thinks it has authority over PCs and everything that can play a show https://web.archive.org/web/20041117014541/http://scrawford.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2004/11/11/180969.html

#15yrsago TSA bans snowglobes. TSA, meet Archimedes. https://memex.craphound.com/2009/11/13/tsa-bans-snowglobes-tsa-meet-archimedes/

#10yrsago Americans believe things https://web.archive.org/web/20141102085809/https://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/3466/Perceptions-are-not-reality-10-things-the-world-gets-wrong.aspx

#10yrsago XKCD’s epic, day-long Rosetta mission flipbook https://xkcd.com/1446/

#10yrsago Roca Labs sends abusive, unwarranted DMCA notices to banish negative reviews https://www.techdirt.com/2014/11/12/roca-labs-issues-bogus-dmca-takedown-notices-to-google-to-try-to-hide-pissedconsumer-reviews/

#10yrsago When the FBI told MLK to kill himself (who are they targeting now?) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/fbis-suicide-letter-dr-martin-luther-king-jr-and-dangers-unchecked-surveillance

#10yrsago Cheap dates: the pitiful sums that Big Cable used to buy off the politicians who oversee it https://gizmodo.com/how-much-money-big-cable-gave-the-politicians-who-overs-1657002442

#5yrsago alt.interoperability.adversarial https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/11/altinteroperabilityadversarial

#5yrsago A woman’s stalker compromised her car’s app, giving him the ability to track and immobilize it https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/11/06/womans-stalker-used-an-app-that-allowed-him-stop-start-track-her-car/

#5yrsago Transcription service rev.com cuts “professional transcriptionists'” effective hourly wage from $6.35 to $4.50 https://gizmodo.com/transcription-platform-rev-slashes-minimum-pay-for-work-1839784941

#5yrsago Before you ask your Chinese factory for a discount, make sure you won’t be kidnapped and/or have your product cloned https://web.archive.org/web/20191113124342/https://www.chinalawblog.com/2019/11/the-right-way-to-reduce-your-china-product-costs.html

#5yrsago EFF and ACLU triumph as federal judge rules that warrantless, suspicionless device searches at the border are illegal https://www.eff.org/press/releases/federal-court-rules-suspicionless-searches-travelers-phones-and-laptops

#1yrago The (open) web is good, actually https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/13/this-is-for-everyone/#revisiting

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, holding a mic.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Today's progress: 788 words (81055 words total).

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: Spill, part four (a Little Brother story) https://craphound.com/littlebrother/2024/10/28/spill-part-four-a-little-brother-story/

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

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

Publié le 12.11.2024 à 15:13

Pluralistic: Boss politics antitrust (12 Nov 2024)


Today's links


An altered version of a Gilded Age editorial cartoon titled 'Who controls the Senate?' which depicts the Senate as populated by tiny, ineffectual politicians ringed by massive, bloated, brooding monopolists. A door labeled 'people's entrance.' is firmly locked. A sign reads, 'This is a senate of the monopolists, by the monopolists and for the monopolists.' The image has been altered: an editorial cartoon of Boss Tweed, portrayed as a portly man in a business suit with a money-bag for a head, stands in the foreground. He is wearing a MAGA hat. On his shoulder perches a tiny, 'big stick' swinging FDR from another editorial cartoon. The logos of the monopolists in the background have been replaced with logos for Chevron, Coinbase, Google, Microsoft, WB, PGA, Apple, Comcast, Realpage and KKR.

Boss politics antitrust (permalink)

Xi Jinping inaugurated his second term with an anti-corruption purge that ran from 2012-2015, resulting in a massive turnover in the power structures of Chinese society.

At the time, people inside and outside of China believed that Xi was using the crackdown to target his political enemies and consolidate power. Certainly, that was the effect of the purge, which paved the way for reforms to Chinese law that have effectively allowed Xi to hold office for life.

In 2018, Peter Lorentzen (USF Econ) and Xi Lu (NUS Policy) published a paper that used clever empirical methods to get to the bottom of this question:

https://web.archive.org/web/20181222163946/https://peterlorentzen.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Lorentzen-Lu-Crackdown-Nov-2018-Posted-Version.pdf

Working from the extensive data-files published during the corruption trials of the purged officials, Lorentzen and Xi Liu were able to estimate the likelihood that an official had really been corrupt. They concluded that overwhelmingly, the anti-corruption purges did target corrupt officials, some of them very highly placed.

But when they considered the social graph of those defenestrated officials, they found that they came from blocs that were rivals of Xi Jinping and his circle, while officials who were loyal to Xi Jinping's were spared, even when they were corrupt.

In other words, Xi Jinping's anticorruption efforts targeted genuinely corrupt officials – but only if they supported Xi's rivals. Xi's own cronies were exempted from this. Xi did use the anticorruption effort to consolidate power, but that doesn't mean he prosecuted the innocent – rather, he selectively prosecuted the guilty.

Donald Trump will be America's next president. He campaigned against "elites" and won the support of Americans who were rightly furious at being ripped off and abused by big business. The Biden administration had done much to tackle this corruption, starting with July 2020's 72-point executive order creating a "whole of government" approach to fighting corporate power:

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

Trump will have to decide what to do about these efforts. It's easy to say that Trump will just kill them all and let giant, predatory corporations rip, but I think that's wrong. After all, the Google antitrust case that the DoJ just won started under the last Trump administration. Trump also sued to block the absolutely terrible merger between Warner and AT&T.

I think it's safer to say that Trump will selectively target businesses for anticorruption enforcement – including antitrust – based on whether they oppose him or suck up to him. I think American business leaders know it, too, which is why every tech boss lined up to give Trump a public rim-job last week:

https://daringfireball.net/2024/11/i_wonder

Trump killed the AT&T-Time Warner merger to punish CNN. He went after Google to punish "woke" tech firms. That doesn't make AT&T, Time Warner or Google good. They're terrible monopolists and the US government should be making their lives miserable.

Trump will not need to falsify evidence against corporations that are disloyal to him. All of America's big businesses are cesspits of sleaze, fraud and predation. Every merger that is being teed up now for the coming four years is illegal under the antitrust laws that we stopped enforcing in the Reagan era and only dusted off again for four years under Biden. They're all guilty, which means that Trump will be able to bring a valid case against any of them.

This will create a trap for people who hate Trump but don't pay close attention to anticorruption cases. It's a trap that Trump sprung successfully in his first term, when he lashed out at the "intelligence community" – the brutal, corrupt, vicious, lawless American spy agencies that are the sworn enemies of working people and the struggle for justice at home and abroad – and American liberals decided that the enemy of their enemy was their friend, and energetically sold one another Robert Mueller votive candles:

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

Over the next four years, Trump will use antitrust and other corruption-taming regulations to selectively punish crooked companies. He won't target them because they're crooked: he'll target them because they aren't sufficiently loyal to him.

If you let your hatred of Trump blind you to the crookedness of these companies, you lose and Trump wins. The reason Trump will find it easy to punish these companies is that they are all guilty. If you let yourself forget that, if you treat your enemy's enemy as your friend, then Trump will point at his political rivals and call them apologists for corruption and sleaze – and he'll be right.

It is possible for Trump to fight corruption corruptly. That's exactly what he'll do. But just because Trump hates these companies, it doesn't follow that we should love them.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

This day in history (permalink)

#15yrsago Labels may be losing money, but artists are making more than ever https://web.archive.org/web/20091115091151/http://labs.timesonline.co.uk/blog/2009/11/12/do-music-artists-do-better-in-a-world-with-illegal-file-sharing/

#15yrsago Internet ghost-towns: the blocked IPs where the bad guys used to live https://web.archive.org/web/20110810225715/http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2009/11/a_year_later_a_look_back_at_mc.html

#10yrsago Stories are a fuggly hack https://locusmag.com/2014/11/cory-doctorow-stories-are-a-fuggly-hack/

#10yrsago Ambulance takes comatose, insured woman to “wrong” hospital, drives her to bankruptcy, too https://web.archive.org/web/20141112070957/https://www.channel3000.com/news/woman-taken-to-wrong-hospital-faces-bankruptcy/29648000/

#10yrsago ISPs caught sabotaging their customers’ email encryption https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/starttls-downgrade-attacks

#10yrsago Redskins owner sues Native Americans who testified on racism to Trademark Office https://www.techdirt.com/2014/11/11/redskins-decide-that-suing-offended-native-americans-should-really-help-their-case/

#10yrsago Peak indifference-to-surveillance https://memex.craphound.com/2014/11/12/peak-indifference-to-surveillance-2/

#5yrsago ​Twitter is awash in disinformation bots tweeting lies about the Kentucky gubernatorial election results https://web.archive.org/web/20191111073836/https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/newselection2020/close-election-in-kentucky-was-ripe-for-twitter-and-an-omen-for-2020/ar-BBWyujk

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, holding a mic.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Today's progress: 790 words (80230 words total).

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: Spill, part four (a Little Brother story) https://craphound.com/littlebrother/2024/10/28/spill-part-four-a-little-brother-story/

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

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

Publié le 11.11.2024 à 14:51

Pluralistic: General Strike 2028 (11 Nov 2024)


Today's links


The Wobbly One Big Union graphic, depicting several workers with raised fists, their fists all merging into a single giant fist. The giant fist has sent a man flying: he wears a loud checked suit and carries a carpet-bag, and his head is a skull with a human face that has been pushed back like a hat. The face has Trump's hair. In the top corners of the image are the Democratic donkey and Republican elephant.

General Strike 2028 (permalink)

Trump is a scab.

https://www.democracynow.org/2024/9/2/shawn_fain_2024_election

Trump is a scab and the Dems need unions. While working class votes were all over the place – lotsa turkeys voting for Christmas – union voters voted against Trump with near-unanimity.

Trump is a scab, the Dems need unions, and the Dems are not faithful friends to unions. Harris's campaign advisor – her brother-in-law Tony West – is Uber's chief legal officer and the architect of Prop 22, California's scab law that formalized "gig work" labor violations. The fact that when the eminently guillotineable union-buster Howard Schultz tries to win a presidential nomination he does so in the Democratic party speaks volumes. If your political party has room for Michael Bloomberg, it doesn't have room for workers. Seriously, fuck that guy.

Trump is a scab, the Dems need unions, Dems are not faithful friends to unions, and unions keep the Dems honest. The #RedForEd teachers' strikes of 2018 kicked off a wave of public support for unions – and worker interest in unionization – that has only grown in the years since:

https://theweek.com/articles/764828/teacher-strikes-could-future-alt-labor

Trump is a scab, Dems need unions, Dems are not faithful to unions, unions make the Dems better, workers want unions, the public loves unions, and union membership is falling.

It's falling! This one is on the union leadership. Unions are sitting on gigantic warchests that they are resolutely not spending organizing the workers who are clamoring to join unions:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/ten-times-this

Unions have historic high cash reserves and are doing historically low organizing. This part is the unions' fault:

https://www.radishresearch.org/_files/ugd/2357dd_135794f88aa140f2962ee5c71ac31ff0.pdf

Or rather, it's the union bosses' fault. Union leadership in America, broadly speaking, sucks. Bosses love shitty unions, and the biggest unions obliged bosses for decades, with leaders who established suicidal practices like "two-tier contracts." That's a union where all the workers have to pay dues, but only the senior workers get protection from the union those dues fund:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/20/a-common-foe/#the-multinational-playbook

If you sat down and said, "Let's design a union contract that will ensure that every worker hired from this day forward hates unions," this is the contract you'd come up with.

Those shitty union bosses? They're on the way out. In 2023, the UAW held its first honest elections for generations, and radicals, led by Shawn Fain, swept the board. How did workers win their union back? They unionized more workers! Specifically, the UAW organized the brutally exploited Harvard grad students, and the Harvard kids memorized the union by-laws, and every time the corrupt old guard tried to steal the leadership election, one or another of them popped to their feet, reciting chapter-and-verse from the union's own rules and keeping the vote going:

https://theintercept.com/2023/04/07/deconstructed-union-dhl-teamsters-uaw/

Fain led the UAW to an historic strike: the UAW took on all three of the Big Three automakers, and cleaned their clocks. UAW workers walked away with three new contracts, all set to expire in 2028. Fain then called upon every union to bargain for contracts that run out in 2028, because if every union contract expires in 2028, we've got the makings of a general strike.

That means that when the next presidential election rolls around, it's going to be in the middle of the most militant moment in a century of US labor history. That is an opportunity.

Labor movements fight fascists. They always have. Trump and the GOP are not on the side of workers, notwithstanding all that bullshit about supporting workers by fighting immigration. Sure, when the number of workers goes up, wages can go down – if you're not in a union. Conservatives have never supported unions. They hate solidarity. Conservatives want workers to believe that they can get paid more if labor is scarcer, and there's some truth to that, but solidarity endures in good times and bad, and scarcity ends any time bosses figure out how to offshore, outsource, or automate your job. Scarcity is brittle.

"Law-and-order" candidates want to throw millions of our neighbors in jail. By the way, the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, except for prisoners. America imprisons more people than any other country in the history of the world. We make Stalin's gulags and Chinese Cultural Revolution "re-education camps" look unambitious. American prisoners produce $9b worth of services and $2b worth of goods every year. The average US prison wage is $0.53/hour, but six states ban prison wages altogether and North Carolina caps them at $1/day:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch

If you think immigrants are bad for American workers' wages, wait'll you see what legions of newly imprisoned slave laborers earning $0.53/hour do to those wages. Also: Californians just voted down a ballot measure to abolish prison slavery:

https://www.kqed.org/news/12013392/californians-voted-against-outlawing-slavery-why-is-prop-6-failing

The GOP are not on workers' side, and workers will not earn more under Trump's policies. Workers will earn more if they join a union, which they will only do if union leaders focus on organizing, which will only happen if we get rid of shitty union bosses. Start with this asshole, who belongs on the scrapheap of history:

https://www.npr.org/2024/07/16/nx-s1-5041345/teamsters-president-sean-obrien-addresses-the-republican-national-convention

With the GOP running the country for the next four years, it's tempting to look for hope in social movements. Maybe Trump will be so terrible that people will band together in informal solidarity networks and #Resist. History teaches us otherwise. The people who need the most help under Trump will be too embroiled in the fight for their own survival to put together the kind of movement that can make a difference.

As Astra Taylor reminded us on the Know Your Enemy podcast, Occupy and Black Lives Matter formed under Obama, when things were eleven kinds of fucked up, but at least ICE wasn't raiding our neighbors' homes:

https://know-your-enemy-1682b684.simplecast.com/episodes/voting-what-is-it-good-for-w-astra-taylor-olufmi-taiwo-malcolm-harris-teaser

Occupy and BLM arose in a moment when people had just enough breathing room to think beyond their immediate survival. Even deeply flawed progressive administrations provide that breathing room.

By contrast, the #RedForEd teachers' strikes were a creature of the Trump years. Even if social movements struggle to find their power under authoritarian, far-right regimes, these are the conditions in which organized labor movements are renewed:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/to-unfuck-politics-create-more-union

Trump won the election because white men, especially young white men, voted for him, but he couldn't have done it without the votes of white women, and Black and Latino men. These voters may even conceive of themselves as being in favor of women's rights and of the rights of racial minorities, but they still voted for Trump, because some facet of their identity – their maleness, their whiteness – mattered more to them than everything else.

Bosses have always excelled at this game, bringing in Irish scabs to break strikes of German workers, or Polish scabs to break Irish workers' pickets. The Pinkertons relied on Black workers who were excluded from the lily white unions.

Our identities are complex and ever-shifting, and men who worry that women's power comes at their own expense, or whites who worry that this is true of Black and Latino power aren't entirely wrong. As the saying goes, "When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression."

But there's one part of your identity that is inherently solidaristic: whether you are a worker or an owner. If you own the business, you make more money when your workers earn less. If you work at the business, every dollar you earn is a dollar your boss doesn't get. Workers' gains are bosses' losses.

That's why they want us to "vote with our wallets." It's not just that those votes are rigged for the people with the fattest wallets. By tricking you into thinking of yourself as a "consumer" who benefits from low prices, they get you to stop thinking of yourself as a worker who suffers from low wages.

This remains true even after decades of "market based pensions" that forced workers to flush their savings into the stock market casino, to be the perennial suckers at the table in a game where their bosses have an unbeatable house advantage:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/06/the-end-of-the-road-to-serfdom/

Even after generations of this, the share of the stock market owned by workers is a negligible crumb. This is how GDP can rise, the stock market can surge, and you stay poor. Workers' fortunes don't rise and fall with the stock market. They're not owners.

You're a worker even if you're well-paid. Tech workers are just figuring this out, after a generation-long con in which bosses convinced techies that they were temporarily embarrassed entrepreneurs who definitely didn't need a union:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/16/narrative-capitalism/#sell-job

Tech workers' power came from scarcity, and scarcity is brittle. Tech fired 260,000 workers in 2023, and another 100,000 in the first six months of 2024. Tech bosses have smashed their workers' power, and we know what comes next.

We know what comes next because we know how tech bosses treat workers they can replace. Amazon warehouse workers piss in bottles and get maimed on the job at a rate that outstrips any other warehouse worker in America. Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy didn't welcome coders with pink mohawks, facial piercings and black t-shirts with incomprehensible slogans because they liked tech workers and hated warehouse workers. Amazon coders owed the privilege to pee whenever they felt like it to their bosses' fear that they couldn't be replaced. Now that coders are replaceable, their kidneys are on the firing line.

"The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." If you want to see the future of a replaceable Amazon coder, look at the working conditions of a replaceable Amazon delivery driver, monitored by a fucking AI that punishes them if they open their mouths while driving:

https://jalopnik.com/amazon-bans-its-drivers-from-moving-their-own-lips-too-1851639312

Remember lovely Tim Cook, the guy who took over Apple from its sainted juice-cleansing cofounder Steve Jobs? Cook's accomplishment, the one that earned him the CEOship and a personal net worth in excess of $2 billion, was to figure out how to offshore Apple's production to Chinese factories where the working conditions were so terrible that they needed to install suicide nets to catch workers who couldn't face another minute on the job:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-life-death-forbidden-city-longhua-suicide-apple-iphone-brian-merchant-one-device-extract

That's how Tim Cook treats workers he's not afraid of. Apple workers, no matter how well paid, no matter how pampered, need a union, because the instant Tim Cook can treat you like a Chinese iPhone assembly-line worker, he will.

Tim Cook had some choice words for Donald Trump this week:

Congratulations President Trump on your victory! We look forward to engaging with you and your administration to help make sure the United States continues to lead with and be fueled by ingenuity, innovation, and creativity.

It wasn't just Cook. Every tech boss lined up to kiss Trump's ass: Bezos ("Wishing @realDonaldTrump all success"); Zuck ("Looking forward to working with you"); Pichai ("We are in a golden age of American innovation"); Nadella ("Congratulations President Trump"):

https://daringfireball.net/2024/11/i_wonder

You don't just deserve a tech union, you need one, now:

https://abookapart.com/products/you-deserve-a-tech-union.html

Organizing a 2028 general strike under Trump won't be easy. Workers won't be able to secure support from the courts or the NLRB, whose brilliant Biden-era leadership team is surely doomed:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/06/goons-ginks-and-company-finks/#if-blood-be-the-price-of-your-cursed-wealth

But the NLRB only exists today because workers established unions when doing so was radioactively illegal and union organizers were beaten, jailed and murdered with impunity. The tactics those organizers used are not lost to the mists of time – they are a tradition that lives on to this day.

The standard-bearer for this older, militant, community-based union organizing was the great Jane McAlevey (rest in power). McAlevey ran organizing and strike drives as mass-movements; she wouldn't call for either without being sure of massive majorities, 70%-95%:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/

McAlevey understood union organizing as a source of worker power, but also as a source of community power. When she helped organize the LA #RedForEd Teachers' strike, the teachers didn't just demand better working conditions for themselves, but also green space for their students, and protection from ICE raids for their students' parents. They did this under Trump, and built a turnout organization that flipped key seats and delivered a House majority to the Democrats in 2020.

In her work, McAlevey excoriated the kind of shittyass Dem power-brokers who just lost an election to a convicted felon and rapist, condemning their technocratic conceit that the path to electoral victory was in winning over precisely 50.1% of the vote in each tactically significant precinct. McAlevey said that's how you get the nightmarish Manchin-Synematic Universe where Dems can't deliver and workers don't vote for Dems. To transform America, we need the kinds of majorities that McAlevey and her fellow organizers won in those strike votes – majorities that produced durable, anti-fascist power that turned into electoral victories, too.

McAlevey died last summer. But she left behind a legion of people she taught and inspired, and a playbook we all can follow:

https://jacobin.com/2024/07/jane-mcalevey-strategy-organizing-obituary

We've got four years. Join a union. Take over its leadership. Create solidarity with your fellow workers and your community. Bargain for a contract. Make it expire in 2028. Get ready.

Because in 2028, we're having a general strike.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

This day in history (permalink)

#20yrsago Jabberwocky in many languages https://web.archive.org/web/20041209010448/http://www.cd.chalmers.se/~jessica/Jabberwock/

#20yrsago Asimov’s magazine on DRM, copyright and Creative Commons https://web.archive.org/web/20041020235706/https://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0412/onthenet.shtml

#15yrsago MPAA shuts down entire town’s muni WiFi over a single download https://web.archive.org/web/20091114054844/http://www.coshoctontribune.com/article/20091109/UPDATES01/91109015

#15yrsago EFF lawyers grin like holy fools, surrounded by a fan of formerly secret government documents https://memex.craphound.com/2009/11/11/eff-lawyers-grin-like-holy-fools-surrounded-by-a-fan-of-formerly-secret-government-documents/

#15yrsago McDonald’s Gitmo is hiring! https://web.archive.org/web/20091112101249/http://www.azcentral.com/offbeat/articles/2009/11/10/20091110guantanamo-mcdonalds-ON.html

#15yrsago EFF to represent Yes Men in Chamber of Commerce lawsuit https://www.eff.org/press/archives/2009/11/11

#15yrsago Pratchett’s “Unseen Academicals” – a gift to Discworld lovers and an argument for the importance of sport https://memex.craphound.com/2009/11/11/pratchetts-unseen-academicals-a-gift-to-discworld-lovers-and-an-argument-for-the-importance-of-sport/

#15yrsago Slow News: designing reflection and contemplation into the news-cycle https://mediactive.com/2009/11/08/toward-a-slow-news-movement/

#15yrsago Rupert Murdoch vows to take all of Newscorp’s websites out of Google, abolish fair use, tear heads off of adorable baby animals https://www.inquisitr.com/46786/epic-win-news-corp-likely-to-remove-content-from-google

#15yrsago Ebook license “agreements” are a ripoff https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/nov/08/amazon-kindle-licence-orwell

#15yrsago Epoch: podcast of my story about the death of the first AI https://memex.craphound.com/2009/11/09/epoch-podcast-of-my-story-about-the-death-of-the-first-ai/

#15yrsago How EFF saved Indymedia from an unconstitutional subpoena for all its visitors’ IP addresses https://web.archive.org/web/20091122074424/http://www.eff.org/wp/anatomy-bogus-subpoena-indymedia

#15yrsago TSA doesn’t understand what “random” means https://web.archive.org/web/20091113094106/https://www.hlswatch.com/2009/11/10/where-are-all-the-white-guys-update-on-do-i-have-the-right-to-refuse-this-search/

#15yrsago BBC’s outrageous plan to put DRM on TV broadcasts shot down in flames — thanks to you! https://web.archive.org/web/20091122133719/https://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv/ifi/tvlicensing/BBC_letter.pdf

#10yrsago Creative Commons and Aaronsw’s sweet hack https://web.archive.org/web/20141108110122/http://www.takepart.com/article/2014/11/06/how-celebrate-aaron-swartzs-legacy-go-hackathon-weekend

#10yrsago Net Neutrality activists blockade FCC Chairman Wheeler’s house https://popularresistance.org/breaking-net-neutrality-activists-blockade-fcc-chairman-tom-wheelers-house/

#10yrsago DOJ helps local cops get around state limits on civil forfeiture https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2014/nov/10/asset-forfeiture-article/

#10yrsago New KKK organization open to people of color, Jews, LGBT https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/ku-klux-klan-opens-its-doors-hispanic-blacks-jews-gays-1473907

#10yrsago Italian scientists acquitted of culpability in L’Aquila quake https://web.archive.org/web/20160826014632/https://www.dw.com/en/court-acquits-natural-disaster-experts-over-laquila-quake/a-18055155

#10yrsago Expat activists and journalists leave USA for Berlin’s safety https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/09/berlins-digital-exiles-tech-activists-escape-nsa

#10yrsago Senate races were won by dump-trucks full of “dark money” https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/09/opinion/sunday/dark-money-helped-win-the-senate.html

#10yrsago The Oatmeal to Ted Cruz: Net Neutrality is not Obamacare https://theoatmeal.com/blog/net_neutrality

#5yrsago AOC really plays in Iowa https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/11/turns-out-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-is-huge-in-iowa/

#5yrsago Bill Gates just accidentally proved that even “unsuccessful” antitrust enforcement works https://memex.craphound.com/2019/11/11/bill-gates-just-accidentally-proved-that-even-unsuccessful-antitrust-enforcement-works/

#10yrsago Net Neutrality activists blockade FCC Chairman Wheeler’s house https://popularresistance.org/breaking-net-neutrality-activists-blockade-fcc-chairman-tom-wheelers-house/

#10yrsago DOJ helps local cops get around state limits on civil forfeiture https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2014/nov/10/asset-forfeiture-article/

#10yrsago New KKK organization open to people of color, Jews, LGBT https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/ku-klux-klan-opens-its-doors-hispanic-blacks-jews-gays-1473907

#10yrsago Italian scientists acquitted of culpability in L’Aquila quake https://web.archive.org/web/20160826014632/https://www.dw.com/en/court-acquits-natural-disaster-experts-over-laquila-quake/a-18055155

#10yrsago Expat activists and journalists leave USA for Berlin’s safety https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/09/berlins-digital-exiles-tech-activists-escape-nsa

#10yrsago Senate races were won by dump-trucks full of “dark money” https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/09/opinion/sunday/dark-money-helped-win-the-senate.html

#10yrsago The Oatmeal to Ted Cruz: Net Neutrality is not Obamacare https://theoatmeal.com/blog/net_neutrality

#5yrsago AOC really plays in Iowa https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/11/turns-out-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-is-huge-in-iowa/

#5yrsago Bill Gates just accidentally proved that even “unsuccessful” antitrust enforcement works https://memex.craphound.com/2019/11/11/bill-gates-just-accidentally-proved-that-even-unsuccessful-antitrust-enforcement-works/

#5yrsago UK spies secretly granted power to spy on journalists and lawyers https://web.archive.org/web/20141107223052/https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/11/06/uk-surveillance-of-lawyers-journalists-gchq/

#5yrsago Blizzard’s president apologized for suspending Blitzchung, but the suspension is still in force https://www.pcgamer.com/blizzard-president-clarifies-decision-to-ban-hearthstone-player-and-two-casters-over-hong-kong-controversy/

#1yrago The enshittification of garage-door openers reveals a vast and deadly rot https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

#1yrago Biden wants to ban ripoff "financial advisors" https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/08/fiduciaries/#but-muh-freedumbs

#1yrago "Brand safety" killed Jezebel https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/11/ad-jacency/#brand-safety

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, holding a mic.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Friday's progress: 765 words (79442 words total).

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: Spill, part four (a Little Brother story) https://craphound.com/littlebrother/2024/10/28/spill-part-four-a-little-brother-story/

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

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

 

 Persos A à L
Mona CHOLLET
Anna COLIN-LEBEDEV
Julien DEVAUREIX
Cory DOCTOROW
EDUC.POP.FR
Marc ENDEWELD
Michel GOYA
Hubert GUILLAUD
Gérard FILOCHE
Alain GRANDJEAN
Hacking-Social
Samuel HAYAT
Dana HILLIOT
François HOUSTE
Tagrawla INEQQIQI
Infiltrés (les)
Clément JEANNEAU
Paul JORION
Michel LEPESANT
Frédéric LORDON
Blogs persos du Diplo
LePartisan.info
 
 Persos M à Z
Henri MALER
Christophe MASUTTI
Romain MIELCAREK
Richard MONVOISIN
Corinne MOREL-DARLEUX
Fabrice NICOLINO
Timothée PARRIQUE
Emmanuel PONT
VisionsCarto
Yannis YOULOUNTAS
Michaël ZEMMOUR
 
  Numérique
Binaire [Blogs Le Monde]
Christophe DESCHAMPS
Louis DERRAC
Olivier ERTZSCHEID
Olivier EZRATY
Framablog
Francis PISANI
Pixel de Tracking
Irénée RÉGNAULD
Nicolas VIVANT
 
  Collectifs
Arguments
Bondy Blog
Dérivation
Dissidences
Mr Mondialisation
Palim Psao
Paris-Luttes.info
ROJAVA Info
 
  Créatifs / Art / Fiction
Nicole ESTEROLLE
Julien HERVIEUX
Alessandro PIGNOCCHI
XKCD
🌞