Category: Medium

Nonstandard Measures

‘Stay Down’ rules reinforce monopoly and do nothing to put money in working creators’ pockets

A trio of sinister black robots on a black background; their eyes and the rollers on their tank-treads are circle-c copyright symbols. The front-and-center robot has a chest display that reads 'STAY DOWN.'

The U.S. Copyright Office has issued a Notice of Inquiry, seeking comment on whether online services should be legally required to filter all their users’ communications to block copyright infringement, as part of a “Stay Down” system.

The idea is that once a copyright holder notifies a service provider that a certain work can’t be legally posted, the service must filter all their user communications thereafter to ensure that this notice is honored.

I think that creators and creators’ groups should oppose this. Here’s why.

The “standard measures” being discussed are not standard. Indeed, they’re largely found in just two companies: Google (through its Content ID system for YouTube) and Meta/Facebook. There’s a reason only two companies have these filters: They are incredibly expensive. Content ID has cost $100,000,000 and counting (and it only does a tiny fraction of what is contemplated in the proposed rule).

That effectively cements Googbook as the permanent rulers of the internet, since they are the only two social media companies that can afford this stuff.

A nearly identical proposal to this one — Article 13 of the Copyright Directive, since renumbered to Article 17 — went through the EU Parliament in 2019, and both Facebook and YouTube came out in favor of it. They understand that this is a small price to pay for permanently excluding all competitors from the internet.

(It’s worth noting that actually implementing Article 17 with automated filters is likely a violation of both the e-Commerce Directive and the GDPR, both of which ban automated judgements of user communications without explicit opt-in and consent, and there’s every chance that Article 17 will not survive a constitutional challenge in the European Court of Justice.)

Now, some people may be thinking, why should I care if Googbook get to take over the internet, so long as they’re forced to police my copyrights?

I think those people are going to be very disappointed, for three reasons:

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Schismogenesis

Spies, voting machine companies and Big Pharma are still your natural enemies.

A membership card for the “Anti-Beatle Association.”

Rest in Power, David Graeber

The unexpected death of the anthropologist David Graeber in September 2020 ripped a hole in the hearts of millions of us whose lives had been altered by his books (Debt, The Utopia of Rules, Bullshit Jobs), his work as an anarchist organizer (he is credited with coining “We are the 99%”), his teaching, and his friendship. It’s hard to overstate the mark Graeber left on this world during his too-brief tenure here.

For those of us who counted him as an inspiration, 2021 brought a small consolation: the posthumous publication of The Dawn of Everything, a mammoth book he co-wrote with the archaeologist David Wengrow in a collaborative process that took most of a decade to come to fruition.

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The Ten Types of People

It’s spectrums all the way down.

Catconfetti/Teepublic

There’s an old nerd joke that goes, “There are 10 kinds of people in this world —those who understand binary and those who don’t.” The joke is that in binary math (that is, base two), you count using only one and zero, so 1 is 1, 10 is two, 11 is three, 100 is four, 101 is five, and so on.

There’s a slightly newer nerd joke that goes, “There are ten kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary, those who don’t — and those who understand ternary.” Ternary is base three, which counts like this: 1 is 1, 2 is two, 10 is three, 11 is four, 12 is five, 20 is six, and so on.

You could continue this joke ad infinitum, simply by referring to a handy list of numeral prefixes: “Those who understand binary, those who understand ternary, those who don’t, and those who understand quaternary” (base four) or “quinary” (base five) or senary (base six), etc etc etc.

The thing I like about this joke is that it challenges your assumptions about categorization, reminding you that there’s no way to really know how many buckets things might be sorted into.

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Give Me Slack

My parental worries, ca. 2021.

subgenius.com

I was a mere lad of fifteen when I first encountered the Church of the Subgenius, a joke religion started by a group of prankster surrealists out of Austin and parts elsewhere. The faith is represented by J.R. “Bob” Dobbs, a grinning, square-jawed salesman with a pipe clenched in his square, white teeth, who promises “slack” to all who profess the faith.

Slack was — and is — an enticing concept. I always interpreted “slack” as a synonym for “forgiveness,” that is, the idea that our systems would have graceful failure modes, in which errors and failings were never terminal, and could always be redone. A philosophy for an age of “Save Game” and ⌘-Z.

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Apple’s Right-to-Repair U-Turn

Celebrate, but keep your eye on the prize

A picture of a disassembled Iphone from Ifixit’s “IPhone 12 Pro Max Teardown,” it is surmounted with the Apple “Think Different” wordmark; in the bottom corner, behind the Ifixit logo, is Admiral Ackbar from Star Wars with a speech bubble that reads “It’s a trap?”
Image: Ifixit, Apple, Lucasfilm

It’s been a pretty great week. Ever since Apple announced that it would sell its customers spare parts and tools to affect their own repairs, and supply them with the documentation to do so, I’ve been thrilled to do my comrades’ online victory laps. For a decade, I’ve fought alongside my pals in the Right to Repair movement against a coalition of the best-capitalized, most powerful multinational companies in the world, who used their incredible might to trample all other considerations: fairness, climate justice, safety, and security.

We introduced dozens of state right to repair bills — bills that set out the principle that when you buy a product, you should get to decide who fixes it — and watched as, time and again, a coalition of big business, led by Apple, used lies and scare-talk to convince lawmakers to vote the bills down.

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Jam To-Day

Liberating Big Tech’s hostages on day one

A half-empty jam jar on a table; the jar is labelled with Tenniel’s engraving of the Red Queen wagging her finger at Alice in Through the Looking-Glass.
Oleg Sidorenko/CC BY 2.0

“The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday — but never jam to-day.”

-The Red Queen, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (Lewis Carroll)

The new, surging antitrust movement has given hope to many who yearn to throw off the yoke of Big Tech. After all, the tech giants’ dominance was attained through solidly illegal conduct, such as anti-competitive mergers and acquisitions, predatory pricing, and price-fixing. This produced conditions in which the companies were able to engage in more flagrant illegal conduct, including unambiguous, multi-billion-dollar acts of fraud.

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Bait and Switch

Capitalism’s Shell Game: From Robert Bork to John Deere.

A con artist playing the shell game lifts a shell to reveal a dancing Rich Uncle Pennybags who has removed his face to reveal a grinning skull.

John Deere’s workers are done with their employer’s bullshit.

When the 10,000 workers who keep the world’s largest agribusiness monopoly humming walked off the job last month, it was historic. As one John Deere worker put it, “Everything John Deere did to increase its stock price is now a liability.” Deere’s workforce loyalty had been eroded by decades of reduced pay, reduced benefits and increased hours, all amid skyrocketing profits, stock prices, and executive compensation,.

As the day of the strike vote drew nearer, the company put on a charm offensive, painting its workers as greedy and lazy, unhappy with $60,000 a year.

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Now, Put It Back!

What the tech giants' content replacement systems tell us about our free expression priorities

A CRT television in a darkened room, turned to static; on the screen is a drawing of a butler with a towel folded over his arm; his head has been replaced with the “sad Youtube” icon displayed for content that’s been taken offline.
Samy Menai/Noun Project/CC BY (modified)

Last week, the leftist British Novara Media (disclosure, I have been a guest on some Novara programs) was kicked off YouTube for “repeated violations” of the service’s policies. Novara’s workers were alarmed, dismayed and outraged in equal measure. After all, the channel had only ever attracted one violation warning from YouTube, and that had been an error — something YouTube itself had acknowledged after further investigation.

A few hours later, Novara’s channel was restored. The New York Times took notice, saying that the incident “shows [YouTube’s] power over media.” Which, you know, fair enough. YouTube is dominant, thanks to its parent company (Google, masquerading as a holding company called Alphabet that exists as an account fiction). Google is able to self-preference by giving pride of place to YouTube in its search results, and it is able to plug YouTube into its rigged ad-auction business, where it illegally colludes with Facebook to maximize its profits from ads while minimizing the amount it passes on to the creators who make the videos those ads run on.

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The Traitorous Eight and the Battle of Germanium Valley

How California’s ban on non-competes saved the tech industry from eugenics.

A circuit board with the silhouette of a hooded Klansman, his robes covered in circuit traces.
Image; Adam Jones, Ph.D./CC BY-SA (modified)

In 1956, the Nobel prize in physics went to William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain for their work on silicon transistors. Shockley, a Bell Labs alum, had already gone to work commercializing this invention, moving from New Jersey to Mountain View, California and founding Shockley Semiconductors, the first “silicon” company in Silicon Valley. In an important sense, Shockley invented Silicon Valley.

He was a terrible person.

After the Nobel, Shockley turned brooding and paranoid. He installed wiretaps to spy on his engineers and family members and administered polygraph tests to employees.

He lost interest in semiconductors and threw himself into eugenics and the extermination of “inferior” people. He offered cash bounties to Black women who underwent sterilizing surgeries. He toured the US, debating biologists to prove that the human race needed to be purified through “race science” to preserve and refine the superior genes of the very best white people.

All of this would have posed a significant barrier to inventing the commercial silicon transistor, of course. But even without the racism and paranoia, Shockley was a genuinely terrible manager. He was prone to starting and then halting projects, switching up the corporate priorities based on his whims without regard to the work that his employees had put into work that he was scrapping or de-emphasizing.

Within a year of the company’s founding, eight of its top engineers had had enough. They quit Shockley Semi and founded their own rival, Fairchild Semiconductor. Less than a year after that, Fairchild launched its first silicon transistor, the 2N696, dooming the germanium transistor to the scrap heap of history. Silicon Valley was finally making silicon.

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