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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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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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

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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Inequality requires narrative stabilizers. When you have too little and someone else has more than they can possibly use, simple logic dictates that you should take what they have.

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The forbearance exercised by the many when it comes to the wealth of the few isn't down to guards or laws - rather, the laws and the guards are effective because of the STORY, the story of why this is fair, even inevitable.

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Think of the story of monarchy and its relationship to the Church: the Church affirms that the monarch (and the aristocracy) was chosen by God ("dieu et mon droit") and the monarchy reciprocates by giving the Church moral and economic power within the kingdom.

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Capitalism replaced the story of divine will with a story of a self-correcting complex system: humans are born and raised with a variety of aptitudes and tastes, and at any moment, historical exigencies dictate that some individuals are better suited than others to do well.

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When it's railroad time, there are people who were born to oversee the laying of track and the coordination of rail networks: markets find those people, allocate capital to them, and allow them to mobilize that capital to produce shared prosperity for all of us.

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WTO e-commerce #digitaltrade consolidated draft leaked by @bilaterals_org Some interesting things (1/n)

(2/n) Intermediary liability is included without brackets, normally meaning there is some agreement. The text is based on US proposals but has more extensive caveats and exceptions than existing US trade deals

(3/n) No agreement on cross-border data flows at WTO #digitaltrade consolidated text

(4/n) FWIW The UK's (and US) position on WTO #digitaltrade exceptions to the liberalisation of cross-border data flows vs the EU's. Guess which one is which

(5/n) Financial data may be included in the ban on forced localisation of computing facilities, but with many caveats. US regulators had pushed against this in the past but they seem to be losing the battle. Several alt texts. UK to bring more proposals.

SoFi was founded in 2011 by 4 students who met at Stanford

🎓 The goal was to decrease the student debt burden by giving out lower rates than federal standards

💸 SoFi’s rates ranged from 5.99% to 6.5%, undercutting federal and privates rates which ranged from 6.8% to 16%

By September 2012, SoFi was reported to have commit over $ 200m in loans

📈 This increased to $ 450m by April 2014 and its borrowers reportedly got on average $ 9,400 in savings by refinancing their

💸 Today, SoFi wants to help its customers with every “financial” step of their journey, providing:

· Student loans

· Medical loans

· Home loans

· Renters insurance (powered by $LMND)

· ETFs

· Stocks & cryptos

· Credit card

· Auto insurance (powered by $ROOT)

& more!

⏱ It has also understood that time-pressed and convenience-seeking young professionals value the following elements:

· Speed

· Choice

· Content

· Education

And $SOFI thus turned itself into a convenient, affordable, transparent and user-friendly financial platform

This means that SoFi’s wants to be a “one-stop-shop” for its users

💸 Enabling it to cross-sell its different products and reduce its Customer Acquisition Cost

Time for #PapersThatMakeYouGoHmmm! A weekly summary of new ML papers from arXiv that make me think one or more of:

1. That looks useful!
2. That's an interesting approach!
3. A business could be built around this!
4. How did they do that?!

Argument Schemes and Dialogue for Explainable

Neural Fitted Q Iteration based Optimal Bidding Strategy in Real Time Reactive Power

A design of human-like robust AI machines in object

Single Shot Multitask Pedestrian Detection and Behavior

My path as a founder:

a. didn't do any marketing - no growth
b. hired an agency - no growth
c. became a marketer - 4x growth in 1 year

Skip a and b.

Step c. helped me make sales, and I had enough money to hire a content writer, then a marketing project manager.

She became head of content, then CMO, and now has her own team.

Now, when we know more about what works, we successfully hire agencies.

But as a founder, you never stop being a marketer.

You always think about the distribution of your product, ideas. And not just to your customers, to your investors, team, press, public.

Copywriting is a skill that never goes out of need.