Cory Doctorow #BLM's Threads

If you think "It's not censorship unless the government does it," I want to change your mind.

It's absolutely true that the First Amendment only prohibits government action to suppress speech based on its content, but the First Amendment is not the last word on censorship.

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Here are some kinds of private speech-suppression that I think most of us can agree are censorship: when the John Birch Society burned mountains of rock records and novels - or when Tipper Gore's PMRC pressured record stores to drop punk, metal and rap albums.

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Or the Comics Code Authority, which signed up all comics publishers and retailers to block comics if they contained anything unfit for small children, which stunted American comics for generations while their European counterparts created entire sophisticated genres.

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Or MPAA ratings, in which a secret group of censors (falsely described as frequently rotated, randomly selected parents - really they're long-serving studio insiders) decides whether movies get NC-17 ratings and thus be blocked from nearly every screen in the country.

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(You can learn more about this from Kirby Dick's unmissable doc, "This Film Is Not Yet Rated," which documents both how the MPAA misleads the public about ratings, and uses them to block LGBTQ

Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

As the Qanon prophecies fail and the cult-members struggle to resolve their cognitive dissonance, it's a good time to revisit the history of paranoid, conspiratorial political movements in American history - the "paranoid style" that has dominated since the Revolution.

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After all, the very first skirmishes of the US war of independence were based on a conspiracy theory: that the levy on tea was a prelude to a sellout of the colonists to transnational mercantalist interests. US politics have always been conspiratorial.

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I found @zacharykarabell's @politico history of the Know Nothing party especially useful, as it tells the story of what happens when surging, paranoid, fractious political movements

The American Party was a secret 19th century organization founded on a conspiracy theory: that Irish immigrants were secretly planning a takeover of the US on behalf of the Pope.

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Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

After the 9/11 attacks, airlines and public buildings adopted a flurry of "security" measures, like taking away pen-knives from fliers or requiring visitors to office buildings to be photographed or present a driver's license.

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Bruce Schneier's seminal 2003 "Beyond Fear" called these measures: #securitytheater.

Schneier pointed out that these measures would be easy to circumvent, and were thus providing only the comforting appearance of security - not security

Security theater is worse than nothing. Security theater gives people the false impression that their risks have been mitigated, when actually things are just as dangerous.

After al, if you know that danger exists, you can take some steps to mitigate or avoid it.

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But if you have the false impression that you've been made safer, you might unwittingly engage in risky behavior.

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Like, if you know your car's brakes are flaky, you might nurse the car along to the mechanic at low speed on side-streets.

But if you don't know about the brakes, you're apt to discover their flaws at 75mph on the freeway.

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Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

It's been twenty years, to the day, since I published my first blog-post.

I'm a blogger.

Blogging - publicly breaking down the things that seem significant, then synthesizing them in longer pieces - is the defining activity of my days.

https://t.co/lksXhU6HKM

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Over the years, I've been lauded, threatened, sued (more than once). I've met many people who read my work and have made connections with many more whose work I wrote about. Combing through my old posts every morning is a journey through my intellectual development.

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It's been almost exactly a year I left Boing Boing, after 19 years. It wasn't planned, and it wasn't fun, but it was definitely time. I still own a chunk of the business and wish them well. But after 19 years, it was time for a change.

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A few weeks after I quit Boing Boing, I started a solo project. It's called Pluralistic: it's a blog that is published simultaneously on Twitter, Mastodon, Tumblr, a newsletter and the web. It's got no tracking or ads. Here's the very first

I don't often do "process posts" but this merits it. Here's how I built Pluralistic and here's how it works today, after nearly a year.

I get up at 5AM and make coffee. Then I sit down on the sofa and open a huge tab-group, and scroll through my RSS feeds using @newsblur.

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Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Stop saying "it's not censorship if it's not the government"; Trump's swamp gators find corporate refuge; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/7JMcAbaULj

#Pluralistic

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Monday night, I'll be helping William Gibson launch the paperback edition of his novel AGENCY at a Strand Bookstore videoconference. Come say hi!

https://t.co/k3fvBdqOK0

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Stop saying "it's not censorship if it's not the government": I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition.

https://t.co/7I0MpCTez5

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If you think "It's not censorship unless the government does it," I want to change your mind.

It's absolutely true that the First Amendment only prohibits government action to suppress speech based on its content, but the First Amendment is not the last word on censorship.

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— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) January 24, 2021

Trump's swamp gators find corporate refuge: The Swamped project.

https://t.co/MUJyIOr2iw

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Have you seen the stories about how Trump administration officials and staffers for Ted Cruz are finding that no one in the private sector will hire them because they are forever tainted by their former bosses' disgraceful behavior?

They're bullshit.https://t.co/XvYDPpR9yd

1/ pic.twitter.com/VxisK4d8jV
— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) January 24, 2021

#15yrsago A-Hole bill would make a secret technology into the law of the land https://t.co/57bJaM1Byr

#15yrsago Hollywood’s MP loses the election — hit the road, Sam! https://t.co/12ssYpV46B

#15yrsago How William Gibson discovered science fiction https://t.co/MYR0go37nW

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Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

The Night of the Short Fingers saw many of the US's largest tech companies blocking Trump and trumpist platforms like Parler, provoking a storm of punditry about What It All Means for the tech companies to have taken this content moderation step.

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The best expert I know on the subject is @jilliancyork, my @eff colleague. She's published "an ongoing list" of "everything pundits are getting wrong about this current moment in content moderation."

You should read it.

Here's some highlights:

“Deplatforming Trump sets a precedent."

York: "The only 'precedent' set here is that this is indeed the first time a sitting US president has been deplatformed by a tech company."

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But political leaders around the world have already received this treatment: Lebanon, Burma, etc. Even the reach of the deplatforming is nothing new: last summer's US Iran ban saw blocks of everything, up to and including Etsy listings for "Persian dolls."

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Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

Despite the massive triumphs of the world's largest corporations and most rapacious billionaires during the covid crisis, neoliberalism is in ideological retreat: more people are more critical of the idea that "free markets" can solve big problems than at any time in my life.

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The Democratic nomination race was a fight between the neoliberal wing of the party and the Democratic Socialists, with the candidates representing a spectrum between those two sides (and the odd outlier on either side).

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Supposedly, the party grandees brokered peace between the two main factions, but the left is rightfully suspicious about whether Biden - and Republicans-who-sit-as-Dems like Joe Manchin - will deliver anything beyond symbolic gestures.

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One bright spot: Bernie Sanders is finally chairing the Senate Budget Committee, giving him enormous power over muscular covid relief packages, Medicare expansion, and rolling back Trump and Bush tax-cuts on the

This is where Sanders' long experience in the Senate, and his virtuoso work using its procedures to advance his position, will serve him well. As we saw with McConnell, the ability to wield procedure is a powerful asset in getting stuff done.

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Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

While many Amazon warehouse workers in Europe have unionized, its brutalized, underpaid, routinely maimed US workforce remains tragically unorganized, thanks to the US's weak labor laws that make forming a union far harder than at any time since the Gilded Age.

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But all that may be about to change: 6000 warehouse workers in #BHM1, the massive Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, AL, will vote next month on a push to unionize under the

Amazon, like other tech giants, is absolutely reliant on building and maintaining a competitive advantage by exploiting technology to drive wages ever downward while ducking responsibility for harming workers.

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Big Tech is pants-wettingly afraid of unionization, and that goes double for any solidarity between high-paid tech workers and misclassified/outsourced warehouse workers and other "unskilled" laborers.

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Amazon has gone so far as to hire the Pinkertons, renowned as some of history's most violent anti-worker terrorists, to bust unionization drives in its

Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

I spend a lot of time looking in detail at abusive situations where tech plays a starring role: stalkerware, bossware, remote proctoring, etc. But nothing I'd read really prepared me for the tale of @arisevsinc, an abuser without parallel.

https://t.co/olExnSwEcW

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Arise sells itself as a "virtual call center" and boasts of blue-chip clients like Disney, Carnival Cruises, Comcast, Airbnb, Intuit etc. If you've ever called one of these companies, you may have spoken to an Arise worker.

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But that "worker" was not an employee. Arise is a pioneer in worker misclassification, and treats all the people who work for it as "independent contractors." So even though these workers are more tightly supervised and managed than any regular employee, they have no rights.

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You have to pay Arise for the privilege of working for them. Not just buying your own computer, but also paying to be trained in how to pretend to be an employee of Disney or Airbnb and Arise's other customers.

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Execs at these giant corps listen in on your calls while they are in progress or after the fact - and if they detect so much as a squeak from a child, or a noisy neighbor, they can terminate your contract and you lose the money and unpaid labor you spent on training.

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Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Criti-Hype; Right to Repair is back for 2021; The free market and rent-seeking; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/pXnzoWKJn2

#Pluralistic

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Criti-Hype: Tech bros will settle for "evil genius."

https://t.co/OyiM1vUS8Y

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There's a Yom Kippur joke I love: the rabbi and the richest man in town are praying, "Oh Lord, I am nothing, I am nothing!"

The synagogue's janitor sees them and joins in: "I am nothing!"

The richest man says to the rabbi: "Look who thinks he's nothing."

1/ pic.twitter.com/kHFKcNAnC4
— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) February 2, 2021

Right to Repair is back for 2021: Will Apple sabotage this one too?

https://t.co/3gcyEZQWfk

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2018 was almost the year we won the #RightToRepair.

Instead, 2018 turned out to be the year we lost #R2R: 20 bills defeated in 20 state houses, and it was mostly @apple's fault.

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— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) February 2, 2021

The free market and rent-seeking: Unauthorized bread and poor doors.

https://t.co/7Ob6AdmkDz

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When you hear the phrase "free market," you probably think of "a market that is free from regulation" but that's the opposite of the phrase's original meaning!

1/ pic.twitter.com/QNAuJhMNWI
— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) February 2, 2021

#10yrsago Diane Duane’s crowdfunded publishing experiment finally concludes https://t.co/qsRnZxiL8b

#10yrsago Inside Sukey, the anti-kettling mobile app https://t.co/puGNKw5XgF

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Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

When you hear the phrase "free market," you probably think of "a market that is free from regulation" but that's the opposite of the phrase's original meaning!

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Adam Smith used the term to describe a market that was free from "economic rents" - money earned by owning things, rather than doing things. Smith recognized that markets attract parasites - "rentiers" - who seek to drain wealth by "investing" rather than building and doing.

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Which meant that, in the absence of muscular state intervention, markets would become less and less free - more and more dependent on the whims of rentiers who used money to breed money by creating toll-barriers between parts of the productive economy.

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For Smith, markets were only free if they were regulated. But that's the opposite of the way that we talk about free markets today. Today, a free market is a market where you are free to collect rents - passive income from owning things, at the expense of people doing things.

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This is true in so many metaphorical ways, but it's especially true when we're talking about actual rent - actual homes that people need to survive and produce, whose primary role today is to serve as an asset class to be maximized, not a basic human right.

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Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

Many wonder how epidemiology could have become so politicized. But epidemiology - like climate science (the other "mysteriously politicized" subject) has intrinsic politics: to take epidemiology seriously, you have to acknowledge that our species has a shared destiny.

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Much of the debate over "liberty" can be summed up as "you do you" - I'll swing my arm over here, you keep your nose over there, and so long as we both respect each others' "freedom," I won't punch you in the nose and your nose will remain unpunched.

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This breaks down when applied to epidemiology: "You wear your mask, I'll leave mine at home, and we'll both exercise our freedoms" is like "You swim in the no-pissing end of the pool, I'll swim down here in the pissing end, and we'll both get our way."

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We're in the same epidemiological pool, and the science is clear: masking's benefit is primarily in protecting others from you - your presymptomatic, asymptomatic (or symptomatic) spread of particles. Your decision not to wear a mask puts me in danger.

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If your worldview ascribes political outcomes to individual choices (implying that poverty or misfortune are the result of a combination of laziness and inferiority), then anything that demands a systemic view challenges its very foundations.

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Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

"Public health" isn't just about vaccinations, clinics and urgent care: it's a holistic discipline that encompasses all the contributors to health outcomes, which include things like housing, employment, transportation, pollution and more.

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A new working paper from @nberpubs estimates the number of US covid deaths that could have been prevented with a coherent, effective eviction moratorium and a ban on utility cutoffs:

The paper, written by a multidisciplinary group of Duke researchers from medicine and economics, found that housing precarity (a risk of losing your home) drove risky behavior that increased the spread of the disease and the resulting deaths.

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For example, it forced people to double-up on lodgings, making social distancing impossible, to say nothing of self-isolating after an exposure. It also drove people to tolerate high-risk workplace conditions, including illegal conditions.

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The authors used regression techniques to control for confounding variables, and used like-for-like counties with different utility and eviction policies to estimate the effect that these had on infection rates.

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Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

2018 was almost the year we won the #RightToRepair.

Instead, 2018 turned out to be the year we lost #R2R: 20 bills defeated in 20 state houses, and it was mostly @apple's fault.

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Apple has a problem. As CEO Tim Cook warned his investors at the conclusion of his company's repair-killing lobbying spree, Apple's profits depend on people throwing away their devices, not fixing them.

By monopolizing repairs, Apple doesn't just get to gouge you on parts and service - the real action is in pronouncing your device DOA, beyond repair. Then you have to buy another one.

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Other companies lobbied hard against R2R: John Deere, GM, and other monopolists backed Apple's play. But Apple wrote the playbook, coming up with risible bullshit like claims that blocking independent repair is essential to protecting

Apple's anti-repair FUD got picked up and amplified by Big Car in 2020, when they spent millions fighting an automotive R2R ballot initiative in Massachusetts, claiming that letting independent mechanics at your car would lead to your actual MURDER.

Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Mashing the Bernie meme; Know Nothings, conspiratorialism and Pastel Q; and more!

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

#Pluralistic

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Mashing the Bernie meme: What if every video game, except Bernie with mittens?

https://t.co/Zcs71oUras

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The remix culture of the early 2000s left an indelible impression on me, an enduring delight in the power of whimsy, juxtaposition, virtuosity and ingenuity - and the ability of strangers all over the world to collaborate without any explicit coordination.

1/ pic.twitter.com/hMKzmoxjLu
— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) January 31, 2021

Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

The remix culture of the early 2000s left an indelible impression on me, an enduring delight in the power of whimsy, juxtaposition, virtuosity and ingenuity - and the ability of strangers all over the world to collaborate without any explicit coordination.

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The recent Bernie-mittens meme was a sterling example of this, tickling me right to my core, and I just happened on an especially delightful apex example of the form: @ToastedShoes's video of Sanders incorporated into eight AAA

Toasted Shoes got @JoeMashups to create a 3D model of Sanders, then tapped a bunch of different mashup artists to turn the Sanders sprite into playable characters in the games, showing them off in a narrated video.

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I'm not much of a fan of video-game streamers' narration, and I confess that I found the video more entertaining without the narration, but to each their own - Shoes was clearly enjoying himself, as were the commenters on the video.

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They had a lot to be pleased by.

Sanders as a Sith Lord in Star Wars Battlefront 2:

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Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

In 2003's Pattern Recognition, @greatdismal discusses the role of "apophenia" - finding patterns where none exist - in paranoid thinking. We are a pattern-matching animal, prone to seeing faces in clouds and hearing speech in static.

https://t.co/lKHfKbvzLN

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Apophenia is omnipresent and weird. It's why 5G conspiracy theorists started circulating a guitar-pedal circuit diagram as a leaked 5G cancer-microchip design (the diagram has a segment labeled "5G

But this kind of hilarious idiocy doesn't occur in a vacuum. It's got a business model. Companies like Devon's @Energydots1 prey on people who've been sucked in by their own apophenic misfirings to sell them "Smartdots" - stickers to protect them from "radiation."

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It will not surprise you to learn that Smartdots don't work. Indeed, they don't do anything, except, perhaps, produce a hard-to-remove gummy

Energydots claims that their stickers are programmed with "scalar energy" - a study by the University of Surrey's 6th Generation Innovation Centre, commissioned by the @BBC, was unable to detect "scalar energy".

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Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

One of the most fascinating revelations from the Snowden documents was the story of "fourth party collection," which is when the NSA hacks the spy agency of a friendly nation to suck up all the spy data it has amassed on its own people.

https://t.co/8WZ6WJigjU

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It's a devilishly effective spying technique and it surfaces a major risk of mass domestic surveillance - if your internal police get hacked by another nation, then that country can get all of your data. The secret police say they're spying to protect you - some protection!

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Even more mind-blowing is the existence of "fifth-party collection" (spying on a spy agency that's spying on another spy agency) and "SIXTH-party collection" (spying on a spy agency that's spying on another spy agency that's spying on another spy agency) .

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It's also fascinating because it's so obvious in retrospect. Willie Sutton robbed banks "because that's where the money is." Spooks spy on other spooks because that's where the kompromat is: gathered, sorted, filed and analyzed.

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This week, Google's Threat Analysis team published a warning to security researchers to be vigilant about a sophisticated threat-actor that is targeting the infosec

Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

Have you seen the stories about how Trump administration officials and staffers for Ted Cruz are finding that no one in the private sector will hire them because they are forever tainted by their former bosses' disgraceful behavior?

They're bullshit.

https://t.co/XvYDPpR9yd

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The Swamped site from @twittlesis is a crowdsourced list of Trump's ugliest swamp-gators and the employers who put them in positions of power and authority despite their complicity with a fascist would-be

On @TheProspect, @alex_sammon provides highlights of the swamp-to-industry pipeline.

Unsurprisingly, babykiller companies LOVE Trump's gators. Jim Mattis? Board member for General Dynamics. Andrea Thompson? Northrop Grumman. HR McMaster? Zoom.

Rick Perry is back at Energy Transfer Partners, parleying his government service into a plum role in energetically rendering the planet unfit for human habitation.

Ryan Zinke's in fintech.

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As punishment for his multitude of sins as the president's personal attorney, Donald McGahn has been sentenced to the Wearing of the White Shoes, threatening people on behalf of the clients of corporate law powerhouse Jones Day.

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Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Amazon warehouse union gets tech solidarity; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/KYnbqjE9Ws

#Pluralistic

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Amazon warehouse union gets tech solidarity: #DoItWithRealPower

https://t.co/cby43y3aaU

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While many Amazon warehouse workers in Europe have unionized, its brutalized, underpaid, routinely maimed US workforce remains tragically unorganized, thanks to the US's weak labor laws that make forming a union far harder than at any time since the Gilded Age.

1/ pic.twitter.com/b8ZnnC7y3T
— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) January 19, 2021

#15yrsago Mysterious birthday ritual at Poe’s graveside disrupted by rubberneckers https://t.co/16m4DbuG1h

#15yrsago Nutjob offers $100 bounty to UCLA students who wiretap lefty profs https://t.co/47JtauT8Vy

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#5yrsago Transreal Cyberpunk! Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling’s book of annotated, seminal cyberpunk fiction https://t.co/MTANIei5nB

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#5yrsago The Democratic Party’s SOPA-loving, Snowden-hating, Hillary-partisan power-broker has her first-ever primary challenger https://t.co/olMdn1u9Ey

#5yrsago Griefer hacks baby monitor, terrifies toddler with spooky voices https://t.co/m5VspAuXXa

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Mollyycolllinss Authors Cory Doctorow #BLM