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Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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PLURALISTIC

Cory DOCTOROW

Science fiction author, activist and journalist.

▸ les 10 dernières parutions

12.11.2024 à 15:13

Pluralistic: Boss politics antitrust (12 Nov 2024)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3280 mots)


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.

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

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

11.11.2024 à 14:51

Pluralistic: General Strike 2028 (11 Nov 2024)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (5802 mots)


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.

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

07.11.2024 à 21:19

Pluralistic: Antiusurpation and the road to disenshittification (07 Nov 2024)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4720 mots)


Today's links


A diptych. On the left side, a dragon is biting the head off a man, posed on the 'Hell' background from Bosch's 'Garden of Earthly Delights.' The serpent has the glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' On the right, a saluting, smiling gas-jockey stands beside a vintage gas-pump, against a background cropped from the 'Heaven' third in 'Earthly Delights.' The pump's logo has been replaced with an oval of 'code waterfall' effect as seen in the credit sequences of the Wachowskis' 'Matrix' movies. The other panels and signage on the pump have been replaced with Right to Repair logos: a fist holding an adjustable wrench and a crossed wrench and hammer icon.

Antiusurpation and the road to disenshittification (permalink)

Nineties kids had a good reason to be excited about the internet's promise of disintermediation: the gatekeepers who controlled our access to culture, politics, and opportunity were crooked as hell, and besides, they sucked.

For a second there, we really did get a lot of disintermediation, which created a big, weird, diverse pluralistic space for all kinds of voices, ideas, identities, hobbies, businesses and movements. Lots of these were either deeply objectionable or really stupid, or both, but there was also so much cool stuff on the old, good internet.

Then, after about ten seconds of sheer joy, we got all-new gatekeepers, who were at least as bad, and even more powerful, than the old ones. The net became Tom Eastman's "Five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four." Culture, politics, finance, news, and especially power have been gathered into the hands of unaccountable, greedy, and often cruel intermediaries.

Oh, also, we had an election.

This isn't an election post. I have many thoughts about the election, but they're still these big, unformed blobs of anger, fear and sorrow. Experience teaches me that the only way to get past this is to just let all that bad stuff sit for a while and offgas its most noxious compounds, so that I can handle it safely and figure out what to do with it.

While I wait that out, I'm just getting the job done. Chop wood, carry water. I've got a book to write, Enshittification, for Farrar, Straus, Giroux's MCD Books, and it's very nearly done:

https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Adoctorow+%23dailywords&src=typed_query&f=live

Compartmentalizing my anxieties and plowing that energy into productive work isn't necessarily the healthiest coping strategy, but it's not the worst, either. It's how I wrote nine books during the covid lockdowns.

And sometimes, when you're not staring directly at something, you get past the tunnel vision that makes it impossible to see its edges, fracture lines, and weak points.

So I'm working on the book. It's a book about platforms, because enshittification is a phenomenon that is most visible and toxic on platforms. Platforms are intermediaries, who connect buyers and sellers, creators and audiences, workers and employers, politicians and voters, activists and crowds, as well as families, communities, and would-be romantic partners.

There's a reason we keep reinventing these intermediaries: they're useful. Like, it's technically possible for a writer to also be their own editor, printer, distributor, promoter and sales-force:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/19/crad-kilodney-was-an-outlier/#intermediation

But without middlemen, those are the only writers we'll get. The set of all writers who have something to say that I want to read is much larger than the set of all writers who are capable of running their own publishing operation.

The problem isn't middlemen: the problem is powerful middlemen. When an intermediary gets powerful enough to usurp the relationship between the parties on either side of the transaction, everything turns to shit:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/12/direct-the-problem-of-middlemen/

A dating service that faces pressure from competition, regulation, interoperability and a committed workforce will try as hard as it can to help you find Your Person. A dating service that buys up all its competitors, cows its workforce, captures its regulators and harnesses IP law to block interoperators will redesign its service so that you keep paying forever, and never find love:

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2024/02/13/1228749143/the-dating-app-paradox-why-dating-apps-may-be-worse-than-ever

Multiply this a millionfold, in every sector of our complex, high-tech world where we necessarily rely on skilled intermediaries to handle technical aspects of our lives that we can't – or shouldn't – manage ourselves. That world is beholden to predators who screw us and screw us and screw us, jacking up our rents:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/yes-there-are-antitrust-voters-in

Cranking up the price of food:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy

And everything else:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

(Maybe this is a post about the election after all?)

The difference between a helpmeet and a parasite is power. If we want to enjoy the benefits of intermediaries without the risks, we need policies that keep middlemen weak. That's the opposite of the system we have now.

Take interoperability and IP law. Interoperability (basically, plugging new things into existing things) is a really powerful check against powerful middlemen. If you rely on an ad-exchange to fund your newsgathering and they start ripping you off, then an interoperable system that lets you use a different exchange will not only end the rip off – it'll make it less likely to happen in the first place because the ad-tech platform will be afraid of losing your business:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-shatter-ad-tech

Interoperability means that when a printer company gouges you on ink, you can buy cheap third party ink cartridges and escape their grasp forever:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Interoperability means that when Amazon rips off audiobook authors to the tune of $100m, those authors can pull their books from Amazon and sell them elsewhere and know that their listeners can move their libraries over to a different app:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/07/audible-exclusive/#audiblegate

But interoperability has been in retreat for 40 years, as IP law has expanded to criminalize otherwise normal activities, so that middlemen can use IP rights to protect themselves from their end-users and business customers:

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

That's what I mean when I say that "IP" is "any law that lets a business reach beyond its own walls and control the actions of its customers, competitors and critics."

For example, there's a pernicious law 1998 US law that I write about all the time, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the "anticircumvention law." This is a law that felonizes tampering with copyright locks, even if you are the creator of the undelying work.

So Amazon – the owner of the monopoly audiobook platform Audible – puts a mandatory copyright lock around every audiobook they sell. I, as an author who writes, finances and narrates the audiobook, can't provide you, my customer, with a tool to remove that lock. If I do so, I face criminal sanctions: a five year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff

In other words: if I let you take my own copyrighted work out of Amazon's app, I commit a felony, with penalties that are far stiffer than the penalties you would face if you were to simply pirate that audiobook. The penalties for you shoplifting the audiobook on CD at a truck-stop are lower than the penalties the author and publisher of the book would face if they simply gave you a tool to de-Amazon the file. Indeed, even if you hijacked the truck that delivered the CDs, you'd probably be looking at a shorter sentence.

This is a law that is purpose-built to encourage intermediaries to usurp the relationship between buyers and sellers, creators and audiences. It's a charter for parasitism and predation.

But as bad as that is, there's another aspect of DMCA 1201 that's even worse: the exemptions process.

You might have read recently about the Copyright Office "freeing the McFlurry" by granting a DMCA 1201 exemption for companies that want to reverse-engineer the error-codes from McDonald's finicky, unreliable frozen custard machines:

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

Under DMCA 1201, the Copyright Office hears petitions for these exemptions every three years. If they judge that anticircumvention law is interfering with some legitimate activity, the statute empowers them to grant an exemption.

When the DMCA passed in 1998 (and when the US Trade Rep pressured other world governments into passing nearly identical laws in the decades that followed), this exemptions process was billed as a "pressure valve" that would prevent abuses of anticircumvention law.

But this was a cynical trick. The way the law is structured, the Copyright Office can only grant "use" exemptions, but not "tools" exemptions. So if you are granted the right to move Audible audiobooks into a third-party app, you are personally required to figure out how to do that. You have to dump the machine code of the Audible app, decompile it, scan it for vulnerabilities, and bootstrap your own jailbreaking program to take Audible wrapper off the file.

No one is allowed to help you with this. You aren't allowed to discuss any of this publicly, or share a tool that you make with anyone else. Doing any of this is a potential felony.

In other words, DMCA 1201 gives intermediaries power over you, but bans you from asking an intermediary to help you escape another abusive middleman.

This is the exact opposite of how intermediary law should work. We should have rules that ban intermediaries from exercising undue power over the parties they serve, and we should have rules empowering intermediaries to erode the advantage of powerful intermediaries.

The fact that the Copyright Office grants you an exemption to anticircumvention law means nothing unless you can delegate that right to an intermediary who can exercise it on your behalf.

A world without publishing intermediaries is one in which the only writers who thrive are the ones capable of being publishers, too, and that's a tiny fraction of all the writers with something to say.

A world without interoperability intermediaries is one in which the only platform users who thrive are also skilled reverse-engineering ninja hackers – and that's an infinitesimal fraction of the platform users who would benefit from interoperabilty.

Let this be your north star in evaluating platform regulation proposals. Platform regulation should weaken intermediaries' powers over their users, and strengthen their power over other middlemen.

Put in this light, it's easy to see why the ill-informed calls to abolish Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (which makes platform users, not platforms, responsible for most unlawful speech) are so misguided:

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

If we require platforms to surveil all user speech and block anything that might violate any law, we give the largest, most powerful platforms a permanent advantage over smaller, better platforms, run by co-ops, hobbyists, nonprofits local governments, and startups. The big platforms have the capital to rig up massive, automated surveillance and censorship systems, and the only alternatives that can spring up have to be just as big and powerful as the Big Tech platforms we're so desperate to escape:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/23/evacuate-the-platforms/#let-the-platforms-burn

This is especially grave given the current political current, where fascist politicians are threatening platforms with brutal punishments for failing to censor disfavored political views.

Anyone who tells you that "it's only censorship when the government does it" is badly confused. It's only a First Amendment violation when the government does it, sure – but censorship has always relied on intermediaries. From the Inquisition to the Comics Code, government censors were only able to do their jobs because powerful middlemen, fearing state punishments, blocked anything that might cross the line, censoring far beyond the material actually prohibited by the law:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/22/self-censorship/#hugos

We live in a world of powerful, corrupt middlemen. From payments to real-estate, from job-search to romance, there's a legion of parasites masquerading as helpmeets, burying their greedy mouthparts into our tender flesh:

https://www.capitalisnt.com/episodes/visas-hidden-tax-on-americans

But intermediaries aren't the problem. You shouldn't have to stand up your own payment processor, or learn the ins and outs of real-estate law, or start your own single's bar. The problem is power, not intermediation.

As we set out to build a new, good internet (with a lot less help from the US government than seemed likely as recently as last week), let's remember that lesson: the point isn't disintermediation, it's weak intermediation.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

This day in history (permalink)

#20yrsago Vintage glasses-frames at decent prices https://memex.craphound.com/2004/11/07/vintage-glasses-frames-at-decent-prices/

#15yrsago Toronto Star copyeditor edits memo announcing the elimination of copyeditor jobs https://web.archive.org/web/20091108015518/http://torontoist.com/2009/11/disgruntled_star_editor_takes_revenge.php

#15yrsago Danish anti-piracy group gives up https://web.archive.org/web/20091112102256/http://freeform101.org/?p=357

#10yrsago Book of seashell scans bound in a seashell https://www.tumblr.com/laurenabishop/84561495428/scallop-shell-artists-book-that-i-made-filled

#5yrsago The case for breaking up Disney https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/its-time-to-break-up-disney-part

#5yrsago Guillotine watch: Louis XVI’s final chateau, never occupied by royalty, is for sale, just in time for the next revolution https://www.messynessychic.com/2019/10/04/a-sleeping-chateau-untouched-since-the-revolution-is-for-sale/

#5yrsago Leaked internal docs show that Facebook shuts down access to user data to kill competitors, but claims it is protecting users https://www.nbcnews.com/news/all/leaked-documents-show-facebook-leveraged-user-data-fight-rivals-help-n1076986

#1yrago Naomi Alderman's 'The Future' https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/07/preppers-of-the-red-death/#the-event

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: 776 words (77789 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:

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

06.11.2024 à 20:45

Pluralistic: Every internet fight is a speech fight (06 Nov 2024)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4399 mots)


Today's links


A border fence. Behind it is a 'code-waterfall' effect as seen in the credit sequences of the Wachowskis' 'Matrix' movies. Looming over the fence is a panicked figure who has been gagged.

Every internet fight is a speech fight (permalink)

My latest Locus Magazine column is "Hard (Sovereignty) Cases Make Bad (Internet) Law," an attempt to cut through the knots we tie ourselves in when speech and national sovereignty collide online:

https://locusmag.com/2024/11/cory-doctorow-hard-sovereignty-cases-make-bad-internet-law/

This happens all the time. Indeed, the precipitating incident for my writing this column was someone commenting on the short-lived Brazilian court order blocking Twitter, opining that this was purely a matter of national sovereignty, with no speech dimension.

This is just profoundly wrong. Of course any rules about blocking a communications medium will have a free-speech dimension – how could it not? And of course any dispute relating to globe-spanning medium will have a national sovereignty dimension.

How could it not?

So if every internet fight is a speech fight and a sovereignty fight, which side should we root for? Here's my proposal: we should root for human rights.

In 2013, Edward Snowden revealed that the US government was illegally wiretapping the whole world. They were able to do this because the world is dominated by US-based tech giants and they shipped all their data stateside for processing. These tech giants secretly colluded with the NSA to help them effect this illegal surveillance (the "Prism" program) – and then the NSA stabbed them in the back by running another program ("Upstream") where they spied on the tech giants without their knowledge.

After the Snowden revelations, countries around the world enacted "data localization" rules that required any company doing business within their borders to keep their residents' data on domestic servers. Obviously, this has a human rights dimension: keeping your people's data out of the hands of US spy agencies is an important way to defend their privacy rights. which are crucial to their speech rights (you can't speak freely if you're being spied on).

So when the EU, a largely democratic bloc, enacted data localization rules, they were harnessing national soveriegnty in service to human rights.

But the EU isn't the only place that enacted data-localization rules. Russia did the same thing. Once again, there's a strong national sovereignty case for doing this. Even in the 2010s, the US and Russia were hostile toward one another, and that hostility has only ramped up since. Russia didn't want its data stored on NSA-accessible servers for the same reason the USA wouldn't want all its' people's data stored in GRU-accessible servers.

But Russia has a significantly poorer human rights record than either the EU or the USA (note that none of these are paragons of respect for human rights). Russia's data-localization policy was motivated by a combination of legitimate national sovereignty concerns and the illegitimate desire to conduct domestic surveillance in order to identify and harass, jail, torture and murder dissidents.

When you put it this way, it's obvious that national sovereignty is important, but not as important as human rights, and when they come into conflict, we should side with human rights over sovereignty.

Some more examples: Thailand's lese majeste rules prohibit criticism of their corrupt monarchy. Foreigners who help Thai people circumvent blocks on reportage of royal corruption are violating Thailand's national sovereignty, but they're upholding human rights:

https://www.vox.com/2020/1/24/21075149/king-thailand-maha-vajiralongkorn-facebook-video-tattoos

Saudi law prohibits criticism of the royal family; when foreigners help Saudi women's rights activists evade these prohibitions, we violate Saudi sovereignty, but uphold human rights:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-55467414

In other words, "sovereignty, yes; but human rights even more so."

Which brings me back to the precipitating incidents for the Locus column: the arrest of billionaire Telegram owner Pavel Durov in France, and the blocking of billionaire Elon Musk's Twitter in Brazil.

How do we make sense of these? Let's start with Durov. We still don't know exactly why the French government arrested him (legal systems descended from the Napoleonic Code are weird). But the arrest was at least partially motivated by a demand that Telegram conform with a French law requiring businesses to have a domestic agent to receive and act on takedown demands.

Not every takedown demand is good. When a lawyer for the Sackler family demanded that I take down criticism of his mass-murdering clients, that was illegitimate. But there is such a thing as a legitimate takedown: leaked financial information, child sex abuse material, nonconsensual pornography, true threats, etc, are all legitimate targets for takedown orders. Of course, it's not that simple. Even if we broadly agree that this stuff shouldn't be online, we don't necessarily agree whether something fits into one of these categories.

This is true even in categories with the brightest lines, like child sex abuse material:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/09/facebook-reinstates-napalm-girl-photo

And the other categories are far blurrier, like doxing:

https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/trump-camp-worked-with-musks-x-to

But just because not every takedown is a just one, it doesn't follow that every takedown is unjust. The idea that companies should have domestic agents in the countries where they operate isn't necessarily oppressive. If people who sell hamburgers from a street-corner have to register a designated contact with a regulator, why not someone who operates a telecoms network with 900m global users?

Of course, requirements to have a domestic contact can also be used as a prelude to human rights abuses. Countries that insist on a domestic rep are also implicitly demanding that the company place one of its employees or agents within reach of its police-force.

Just as data localization can be a way to improve human rights (by keeping data out of the hands of another country's lawless spy agencies) or to erode them (by keeping data within reach of your own country's lawless spy agencies), so can a requirement for a local agent be a way to preserve the rule of law (by establishing a conduit for legitimate takedowns) or a way to subvert it (by giving the government hostages they can use as leverage against companies who stick up for their users' rights).

In the case of Durov and Telegram, these issues are especially muddy. Telegram bills itself as an encrypted messaging app, but that's only sort of true. Telegram does not encrypt its group chats, and even the encryption in its person-to-person messaging facility is hard to use and of dubious quality.

This is relevant because France – among many other governments – has waged a decades-long war against encrypted messaging, which is a wholly illegitimate goal. There is no way to make an encrypted messaging tool that works against bad guys (identity thieves, stalkers, corporate and foreign spies) but not against good guys (cops with legitimate warrants). Any effort to weaken end-to-end encrypted messaging creates broad, significant danger for every user of the affected service, all over the world. What's more, bans on end-to-end encrypted messaging tools can't stand on their own – they also have to include blocks of much of the useful internet, mandatory spyware on computers and mobile devices, and even more app-store-like control over which software you can install:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/05/theyre-still-trying-to-ban-cryptography/

So when the French state seizes Durov's person and demands that he establish the (pretty reasonable) minimum national presence needed to coordinate takedown requests, it can seem like this is a case where national sovereignty and human rights are broadly in accord.

But when you consider that Durov operates a (nominally) encrypted messaging tool that bears some resemblance to the kinds of messaging tools the French state has been trying to sabotage for decades, and continues to rail against, the human rights picture gets rather dim.

That is only slightly mitigated by the fact that Telegram's encryption is suspect, difficult to use, and not applied to the vast majority of the communications it serves. So where do we net out on this? In the Locus column, I sum things up this way:

  • Telegram should have a mechanism to comply with lawful takedown orders; and

  • those orders should respect human rights and the rule of law; and

  • Telegram should not backdoor its encryption, even if

  • the sovereign French state orders it to do so.

  • Sovereignty, sure, but human rights even more so.

What about Musk? As with Durov in France, the Brazilian government demanded that Musk appoint a Brazilian representative to handle official takedown requests. Despite a recent bout of democratic backsliding under the previous regime, Brazil's current government is broadly favorable to human rights. There's no indication that Brazil would use an in-country representative as a hostage, and there's nothing intrinsically wrong with requiring foreign firms doing business in your country to have domestic representatives.

Musk's response was typical: a lawless, arrogant attack on the judge who issued the blocking order, including thinly veiled incitements to violence.

The Brazilian state's response was multi-pronged. There was a national blocking order, and a threat to penalize Brazilians who used VPNs to circumvent the block. Both measures have obvious human rights implications. For one thing, the vast majority of Brazilians who use Twitter are engaged in the legitimate exercise of speech, and they were collateral damage in the dispute between Musk and Brazil.

More serious is the prohibition on VPNs, which represents a broad attack on privacy-enhancing technology with implications far beyond the Twitter matter. Worse still, a VPN ban can only be enforced with extremely invasive network surveillance and blocking orders to app stores and ISPs to restrict access to VPN tools. This is wholly disproportionate and illegitimate.

But that wasn't the only tactic the Brazilian state used. Brazilian corporate law is markedly different from US law, with fewer protections for limited liability for business owners. The Brazilian state claimed the right to fine Musk's other companies for Twitter's failure to comply with orders to nominate a domestic representative. Faced with fines against Spacex and Tesla, Musk caved.

In other words, Brazil had a legitimate national sovereignty interest in ordering Twitter to nominate a domestic agent, and they used a mix of somewhat illegitimate tactics (blocking orders), extremely illegitimate tactics (threats against VPN users) and totally legitimate tactics (fining Musk's other companies) to achieve these goals.

As I put it in the column:

  • Twitter should have a mechanism to comply with lawful takedown orders; and

  • those orders should respect human rights and the rule of law; and

  • banning Twitter is bad for the free speech rights of Twitter users in Brazil; and

  • banning VPNs is bad for all Brazilian internet users; and

  • it’s hard to see how a Twitter ban will be effective without bans on VPNs.

There's no such thing as an internet policy fight that isn't about national sovereignty and speech, and when the two collide, we should side with human rights over sovereignty. Sovereignty isn't a good unto itself – it's only a good to the extent that is used to promote human rights.

In other words: "Sovereignty, sure, but human rights even more so."

(Image: © Tomas Castelazo, www.tomascastelazo.com/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0; modified)

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This day in history (permalink)

#15yrsago Corporate law firm targets whistle-blowers and anonymous commenters https://www.business-live.co.uk/professional-services/birmingham-wragge-team-focus-online-3938930

#15yrsago Teen sex belongs in teen lit https://web.archive.org/web/20091110003113/http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2009/11/cory-doctorow-teen-sex.html

#15yrsago Pigeons From Hell: Robert E Howard’s classic horror story adapted for comics by Joe R Lansdale https://memex.craphound.com/2009/11/06/pigeons-from-hell-robert-e-howards-classic-horror-story-adapted-for-comics-by-joe-r-lansdale/

#15yrsago Leaked text of secret copyright treaty vs. bland bureaucratic press-release describing same https://web.archive.org/web/20091108115049/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4516/125/

#10yrsago Pennsylvania passes a “Gag Mumia” law to silence prisoner’s voices https://kersplebedeb.com/posts/the-gag-mumia-law/

#5yrsago T-Mobile: because we have a (stupid) trademark on one magenta shade, no one can use pink in their logos https://adage.com/article/digital/t-mobile-says-it-owns-exclusive-rights-color-magenta/2212556

#5yrsago Two years ago, Juli Briskman was fired for flipping off the Trump motorcade; now she’s been elected as a Virginia county supervisor https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/the-cyclist-who-flipped-off-trumps-motorcade-is-running-for-public-office/2018/09/11/c12cc2d2-b5dc-11e8-a7b5-adaaa5b2a57f_story.html

#1yrago Amazon is a ripoff https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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Recent appearances (permalink)


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Latest books (permalink)


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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: words ( words total).

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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