Cory Doctorow #BLM's Threads

There are lots of problems with ad-tech:

* being spied on all the time means that the people of the 21st century are less able to be their authentic selves;

* any data that is collected and retained will eventually breach, creating untold harms;

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* data-collection enables for discriminatory business practices ("digital redlining");

* the huge, tangled hairball of adtech companies siphons lots (maybe even most) of the money that should go creators and media orgs; and

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* anti-adblock demands browsers and devices that thwart their owners' wishes, a capability that can be exploited for even more nefarious purposes;

That's all terrible, but it's also IRONIC, since it appears that, in addition to everything else, ad-tech is a fraud, a bezzle.

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Bezzle was John Kenneth Galbraith's term for "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it." That is, a rotten log that has yet to be turned over.

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Bezzles unwind slowly, then all at once. We've had some important peeks under ad-tech's rotten log, and they're increasing in both intensity and velocity. If you follow @Chronotope, you've had a front-row seat to the

The numbers are all fking fake, the metrics are bullshit, the agencies responsible for enforcing good practices are knowing bullshiters enforcing and profiting off all the fake numbers and none of the models make sense at scale of actual human users. https://t.co/sfmdrxGBNJ pic.twitter.com/thvicDEL29
— Aram Zucker-Scharff (@Chronotope) December 26, 2018

Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

Happy Birthday to the queen of the scream queens, Barbara Steele! https://t.co/qnhQvROGVa

Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

In 1997, the Clinton administration created the "1033" program, whereby the Pentagon gave away its "surplus" equipment to local law enforcement agencies, leading to the nationwide militarization of America's cops.

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In the decades since, 1033 became a $5B industry: beltway bandits lobby their pals in the DoD to place massive orders for weapons and materiel which are immediately declared "surplus" and transfered to undertrained cops

Opponents of this program hypothesized that it would obey Checkhov's Law: "A machine-gun in the police armory in Act One will go off by Act Three. And then again, and again, and again."

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They were right.

Empirical studies show that cops who get milspec penis surrogates through 1033 murder the fuck out of the people who pay their

But 1033's defenders insisted (without any evidence) that turning Deputy Dawg into a USMC Fallujah Street Patrol Cosplayer seriously improved the quality of US policing.

They were wrong.

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Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

#Prop22 was the most expensive ballot initiative in history: "gig economy" companies firehosed $200m over voters, outspending 48/50 state legislative races on a single question.

That question: can employers misclassify workers as contractors and escape legal obligations?

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That's a high-stakes question. US workers spent more than a century fighting for basic rights: the right not the maimed, raped or killed on the job; the right to a living wage; the right to a weekend; the right not to be discriminated against based on race or sex or religion.

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Above all: the right to form a union and bargain collectively with employers who otherwise hold all the negotiating leverage - to pool their resources in the same way that gig economy companies did to fund Prop 22.

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Workers died for those rights. Bosses fought labor reforms with terror and rape, with blackmail and dirty tricks, with jails and blackballing.

Prop 22 can only be repealed if 7/8th of the California legislature votes to do so. It is, effectively, a permanent fixture.

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$200m to pass Prop 22 is a BARGAIN. Every right for workers shifts money from bosses' side of the balance sheets to the workers' side. Prop 22 erased all those rights in a single stroke.

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Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

As Parler disappears from the Android and Ios app stores and faces being kicked off of Amazon's (and other) clouds, people who worry about monopolized corporate control over speech are divided over What It Means.

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There's an obvious, trivial point to be made here: Twitter, Apple and Google are private companies. When they remove speech on the basis of its content, it's censorship, but it's not GOVERNMENT censorship. It doesn't violate the First Amendment.

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And yes, of course it's censorship. They have made a decision about the type and quality of speech they'll permit, and they enforce that decision using the economic, legal and technical tools at their disposal.

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If I invited you to my house for dinner and said, "Just so you know, no one is allowed to talk about racism at the table," it would be censorship. If I said "no one is allowed to say racist things at the table," it would also be censorship.

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I censor my daughter when I tell her not to swear. I censor other Twitter users when I hide their replies to my posts. I censor commenters on my blog when I delete their replies.

Dress is up as "content removal" or "moderation" if you'd like, but it's obviously censorship.

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Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

Google workers have announced their intention to form a union, under the auspices of @CWAUnion Local 1440. The union is called @AlphabetWorkers (Google maintains the legal and accounting fiction that it is a division of a holding company called "Alphabet").

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Speaking of legal fictions, the union is opening membership to "TVCs" - temps, vendors and contractors - employees who have deliberately misclassified so as to avoid paying them benefits or extending normal workplace protections to them.

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It's a bold move, a countermeasure to thwart the other commercial advantage from worker misclassification: by creating multiple categories of workers, bosses can pit employees against one another, by dangling privileges in front of one group but not the other.

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But it comes at a high price: to gain official legal recognition, more than 50% of eligible workers must join the union. By including more workers, the union is setting a higher bar for official status.

But the union has momentum: a series of high-profile googler uprisings - driven by official tolerance for sexual misconduct, complicity in US military drone programs, secret collaboration with Chinese surveillance and censorship, and more - show how radicalized googlers are.

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Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

Arbitration was created to allow giant companies with equal bargaining power to settle disputes without incurring expensive court battles. So, when IBM and AT&T struck a deal, they'd agree that instead of going to court, they'd hire a neutral person to decide who was right.

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But in the 21st Century, a string of Supreme Court rulings have paved the way for "forced arbitration" - when a company tells its customers or workers that as a condition of doing business, they must give up all the legal protections that come with the right to sue.

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Once you've been bound over to arbitration, a company can maim, cheat or murder you and your only recourse is to ask a corporate judge, on the company's payroll, to decide whether you are entitled to compensation.

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You will not be surprised to learn that arbitrators overwhelmingly find in favor of the companies that pay their invoices.

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We've experienced a quiet epidemic of binding arbitration. Your dentist or physiotherapist probably expects you to sign one. So does your kid's piano teacher. Your ISP. And, of course, your boss.

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Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

Well this is pretty terrific: @PavelAnni was so taken with my 2020 novel ATTACK SURFACE (the third Little Brother novel) that he's created "Mashapedia," a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the real world technologies in the tale.

https://t.co/Z2aLwF1Ez3

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Pavel is both comprehensive and comprehensible, with short definitions and links for the mundane (MIT Media Lab, EL wire, PGP) to the exotic (binary transparency, reverse shells, adversarial preturbation).

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When I was an adolescent, my friend group traded secret knowledge as a kind of social currency - tricks for getting free payphone calls, or doubling the capacity of a floppy disc, or calling the White House switchboard.

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I doted on books that promised more of the same: Paladin Press and Amok Catalog titles, Steal This Book, the Anarchist Cookbook, the Whole Earth Review and the Whole Earth Catalog.

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But when I sat down in 2006 to write the first Little Brother book, I realized that facts were now cheap - anything could be discovered with a single search. The thing in short supply now was search terms - knowing what to search FOR.

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Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

Publishing works on long schedules, which means that long-planned books can be overtaken by events...like covid.

2020 was tough for those of us with books in trail, especially nonfiction. But for a few lucky writers, covid imparted a terrible salience to their books.

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One such writer is @TimHarford, host of @BBCRadio4's @bbcmoreorless, which is hands-down the greatest statistical literacy program in the world, using the numbers in each week's headlines to impart statistical lessons and render the news in perspective.

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Harford's latest book is THE DATA DETECTIVE (published as HOW TO MAKE THE WORLD ADD UP in the UK), which should really have been entitled HOW TO TRUTH WITH

You've likely heard of Darrell Huff's 1954 classic HOW TO LIE WITH STATISTICS, a classic, accessible guide to statistical malpractice in service to pushing an agenda. What I didn't know (until I heard Harford discourse on it) was that Huff himself had an ulterior motive.

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Huff was a shill for the tobacco industry, which, in 1954, was deliberately muddying the waters about the link between cancer and smoking. Huff's book isn't just a guide to statistical malpractice - it's a broadside against cancer

Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

US law enforcement has literal centuries of shameful history of infiltrating and spying on politically disfavored activist groups, from trade unionists to suffragists to abolitionists to civil rights advocates to antiwar advocates.

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Long before #cointelpro, federal agencies were intercepting communications and embedding as provocateurs in radical political movements, often with the help of mercenary "contractors" like the @pinkerton_agent. The digital age only ramped up this public-private surveillance.

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The #NoDAPL protests were infiltrated and surveilled by beltway bandits who billed the US taxpayer handsomely for the

2020's #BLM uprising was subjected to the full array of military and national intelligence surveillance: drones, IMSI catchers, mass interception, infiltrators, wiretaps, "reverse warrants" to recover location data from Big Tech monopolists and

And yet, federal and local agencies were seemingly totally unprepared for a mob of thousands of armed terrorists who stormed the capitol, disrupted the transition of presidential power, and threatened the lives of US legislators as well as the integrity of state documents.

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Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

Macarthur fellow and Hugo-award-winner @nkjemisin's 2019 book "The City We Became" is both a fantastic contemporary fantasy novel and a scorching commentary on the infantile nature of the racist dogma of HP Lovecraft and his

It's a quest novel about a group of New Yorkers who awaken one day to discover that they are mystical avatars of the city, which has awakened and been reborn as a kind of powerful colony organism.

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There's an avatar for each of the five boroughs, plus a "primary" who represents the city as a whole. As with all births, this one is somewhat traumatic - but NYC's birth is uniquely fraught.

First, the five boroughs must find one another and connect with the primary.

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But they must do all this while under sustained assault from a mystical, transdimensional, Lovecraftian horror, a great adversary to all of our Earth's living cities - but an adversary that had been believed to be powerless against cities after their births.

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The enemy manifests as a Karen, a white woman clad all in white, dogwhistling racist tropes, summoning police, weaponizing vast fortunes to evict its enemies or distort their culture. It is attended by harbingers - human beings infected with fluttering white tentacles.

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Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

In 2019, @propublica and @postandcourier ran blockbuster investigations into SC's magistrate judges: inexperienced political appointees with no training who held South Carolinians' lives in their hands - and who use the bench to extract bribes, deal in overt racism and worse.

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The first revealed that SC's magistrates got less training than its barbers, and their appointments, though subject to reapproval, were practically speaking lifelong and irrevocable, regardless of misconduct, bumbling, or actual criminal

The qualifications process is bizarre. SC magistrates need to pass a one-hour exam, but they can (and do) re-take it many times without penalty. That test includes questions like "Which of the following numbers is larger?" And magistrates fail that test. Repeatedly.

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Magistrates are so ill-qualified that the rare, decent appointee can end up repeatedly breaking the law without knowing it, as construction worker (and local GOP chairman) Arthur Bryngelson did, leading to him resigning in horror and reporting himself for breaches.

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Not all of the unqualified magistrates have Bryngelson's moral fiber: BBQ chef/magistrate Clemon Stocker got his relative Willie Earl Reese released on bail after he pistol-whipped a man. Reese murdered his wife five days later.

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Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

Captain America II: Death Too Soon (1979) https://t.co/S89X94JBZ7

Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Competition is Killing Us; Predatory lender seeks national bank charter; Militarizing cops was a failure; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/mFat1Fsadn

#Pluralistic

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Competition is Killing Us: Consumer harm considered harmful.

https://t.co/oJTENrDhFD

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2020 was a shitty year for most things, but it was a banner year for books about fighting monopolies, and for the fight itself.

It started (in Dec '19) with @matthewstoller's GOLIATH, a massive, comprehensive history of monopolies in America.https://t.co/qzY5dPnKRg

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— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) January 8, 2021

Predatory lender seeks national bank charter: Oportun led America in suing latinx borrowers during the pandemic.

https://t.co/FPK6NTwFjj

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"Partner with us today to build a better tomorrow" - that's the slogan for @oportun, a predatory lender that sued more poor latinx people during the pandemic than any other.https://t.co/ULX8hBCO5a

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— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) January 8, 2021

Militarizing cops was a failure: Water still wet.

https://t.co/OACizKzNru

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In 1997, the Clinton administration created the "1033" program, whereby the Pentagon gave away its "surplus" equipment to local law enforcement agencies, leading to the nationwide militarization of America's cops.

1/ pic.twitter.com/nfmqyqmGDx
— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) January 8, 2021

#15yrsago Hollywood’s Canadian MP claims she’s no dirtier than the rest https://t.co/iOEH3n3sON

#15yrsago John McDaid’s brilliant sf story Keyboard Practice free online https://t.co/ciVbtorYiV

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Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

Today's threads (a thread).

Inside: My Fellow Americans; Digital manorialism vs neofeudalism; SC GOP moots modest improvements to "magistrate judges"; Pavilions replacing union workers with "gig workers"; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/X4sEk5g09z

#Pluralistic

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My Fellow Americans: Audio, text and commentary for every president's inaugural address.

https://t.co/LR7wvnV8i0

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My Fellow Americans is Yuvraj Sing's open licensed (CC0) /name your price book tracing the histories of US presidential inaugural addresses; it reproduces each address along with a scholarly essay exploring its context.https://t.co/xbfkZNleKS

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— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) January 4, 2021

Digital manorialism vs neofeudalism: Tech companies as warlords with walled gardens.

https://t.co/uQ9rDCA8i3

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These warlords - Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft - all have the best cybermercenaries money can buy stationed at their gates and on their parapets, and they will defend you against anyone the warlord declares to be your enemy.

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— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) January 4, 2021

South Carolina GOP moots modest improvements to "magistrate judges": Lewis Carroll was an optimist.

https://t.co/1AQpZYwhOj

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In 2019, @propublica and @postandcourier ran blockbuster investigations into SC's magistrate judges: inexperienced political appointees with no training who held South Carolinians' lives in their hands - and who use the bench to extract bribes, deal in overt racism and worse.

1/ pic.twitter.com/61opolmPqD
— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) January 5, 2021

Pavilions replacing union workers with "gig workers": Prop 22's other shoe drops.

https://t.co/hlX0A0S96c

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#Prop22 was the most expensive ballot initiative in history: "gig economy" companies firehosed $200m over voters, outspending 48/50 state legislative races on a single question.

That question: can employers misclassify workers as contractors and escape legal obligations?

1/ pic.twitter.com/Ch3ySTq1Ub
— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) January 5, 2021

CodyyyGardner Authors Cory Doctorow #BLM