Medium – Page 3 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Don’t Curb Your Enthusiasm

Marcus Yallow + 50 Years = Marty Hench?

The “Marty Hench” figure from the cover of Red Team Blues, next to the “M1k3y” figure (with large, binary-digit-lined red “X”) from the cover of Little Brother.

The old crow is getting slow;

the young crow is not.

Of what the young crow does not know,

the old crow knows a lot.

At knowing things,

the old crow is still the young crow’s master.

What does the old crow not know?

How to go faster.

The young crow flies above, below,

and rings around the slow old crow.

What does the fast young crow not know?

WHERE TO GO.

-John Ciardi, About Crows

Marcus Yallow is the 17-year-old hero of Little Brother, my 2008 novel about kids in San Francisco who wage high-tech guerrilla war on the Department of Homeland Security, who occupy the city after a terrorist attack.
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Weak Institutions

It’s not a fair fight.

A bank fault. In front of the vault is a guardhouse. it is guarded by a crying baby in an impressive, oversized uniform — Kyle Flood, CC BY-SA 2.0, modified

I don’t care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating.

— Boss Tweed.

Around 2010, I had a problem. My kid was just turning two, and finally starting to sleep through the night, which was a blessing, but then a mysterious company bought the building next door to our east London flat.

The building next door had been sitting empty for years, ever since a safety inspection determined that a) it was full of asbestos and b) it lacked a fire-exit. Either one of these made the building unfit for commercial or residential use, and the long-term tenants had moved into other office buildings in the neighborhood.
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A Collective Bargain

Workplace democracy is a training ground for true national democracy.

Now, if you want higher wages let me tell you what to do
You got to talk to the workers in the shop with you
You got to build you a union, got to make it strong
But if you all stick together, boys, it won’t be long
You get shorter hours, better working conditions
Vacations with pay. Take your kids to the seashore-

-Pete Seeger, Talking Union Blues

For years — decades — unions seemed like a relic, an elegant weapon for a more civilized age. American union participation nosedived in the Reagan years and continued to decline, year after year, with no bottom in sight.

Until 2018.
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How To Make the Least-Worst Mastodon Threads

(An opinionated guide) (for the perplexed).

The mastodon mascot tangled in a snarl of thread. — https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html Eugen Rotchko, AGPL, modified Apr 15 2023

Everyone Can Change Mastodon

Mastodon is great. I love it. I love that it’s based on an open protocol, ActivityPub, which is designed to prevent lock-in and thus enshittification.

Now, that doesn’t mean that I agree with every decision that went into Mastodon’s design, and that’s okay. Unlike, say, Twitter, if I don’t like Mastodon’s design, I can change it, by creating a new client or a server extension, or by convincing someone else to do so. Mastodon is an open, generative platform, built on software that is free-as-in-freedom —everyone can modify it.
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How To Make a Child-Safe TikTok

Have you tried not spying on kids?

Cryteria/CC BY 3.0; Vxla/CC BY 2.0 (modified)

Rep. Buddy Carter, Republican of Georgia: I wanna talk about biometric matrix, and I wanna talk specifically. Can you tell me right now, can you say, with one hundred percent certainty, that TikTok does not use the phone’s camera to determine whether the content that elicits a pupil dilation should be amplified by the algorithm? Can you tell me that?

TikTok CEO Shou Chew: We do not collect body, face or voice data to identify our users. We do not.

Carter: You don’t —

Chew: No. The only face data that you’ll get, that we collect is when you use the filters that put, say, sunglasses on your face, we need to know where your eyes are —

Carter: Why do you need to know where the eyes are if you’re not seeing if they’re dilated?

Chew: —and the data is stored locally on your local device and deleted after the use, if you use it for facial. Again, we do not collect body, face, or voice data to identify our users.

Carter: I find that hard to believe. It is our understanding that they’re looking at the eyes. How do you determine what age they are then?

Chew: We rely on age-gating as our key age assurance —

Carter: Age?

Chew: — gating. It’s when you ask the user what age they are. We’ve also developed some tools, where we look at their public profile, then go through the videos that they post to see whether —

Carter: Well, that’s creepy. Tell me more about that.

Chew: It’s public. So, if you post a video, you choose whether to go public, that’s how you get people to see your video. We look at those to see if it matches the age that you talked about. Now, this is a real challenge for our industry because privacy versus age assurance is a really big problem —

Carter: Look, look, you keep talking about the industry, we’re talking about TikTok here —

— House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on TikTok, March 23, 2023.
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Commafuckers Versus The Commons

Copyleft Trolls Are the Serpents in Our Garden of Ethical Sharing.

William Blake — The Temptation and Fall of Eve (Illustration to Milton’s “Paradise Lost”) — the snake has been recolored a vivid green and limned in shadow; the fruit has been colored a vivid pink.

pilkunnussija (Finnish)

pilkun (“of a comma”) +‎ nussija (“fucker”) (wiktionary.com)

As I processed yesterday’s news about Flickr updating its policies to prevent “copyleft trolls” from using its service to snare unsuspecting internet users and hit them for hundreds or thousands of dollars in “copyright settlement” fees, I began reflecting on why this phenomenon makes me so furious.

I’ve been blogging for more than 20 years. I’ve been an activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation for more than 20 years, too. I’ve also been a Creative Commons user for more than 20 years. And I’ve been a novelist for more than 20 years.
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Silicon Valley Noir

Red Team Blues and the Role of Bitterness in Technothrillers.

A section of a high-resolution image of a secure coprocessor; superimposed over it is the graphic from the cover of the Tor Books edition of Red Team Blues, which features a male figure sprinting out of a stylized keyhole. — Pauli Rautakorpi/CC BY 3.0 (modified)

My next novel is Red Team Blues, an anti-finance finance thriller starring Martin Hench, a high-tech forensic accountant who’s spent 40 years busting Silicon Valley grifters large and small.

At 67, Marty’s seen it all, and while he is full of compassion for the victims of the scams he unwinds, his overwhelming feeling is bitterness. As he says in the opening pages of the book, after landing a job that will change his life:

Truth be told, I also didn’t want to contemplate the possibility that, at the age of sixty-seven, the new work might stop coming in. Silicon Valley hates old people, but that was okay, because I hated Silicon Valley. Professionally, that is.

Red Team Blues is the first volume in the Martin Hench series, a series that runs in reverse chronological order. The next book, The Bezzle (Feb. 2024) is set in the mid-2010s, while the third, Picks and Shovels (Jan. 2025) is Marty’s origin story, starting in the early 1980s when Marty drops out of MIT and comes west to San Francisco in the first heroic years of the PC revolution.
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Culture War Bullshit Stole Your Broadband

Your internet sucks because telco monopolists kept Gigi Sohn off the FCC.

A Victorian gentleman and lady use a tin-can-and-string telephone while standing before a soiled and sooty American flag.

So, the next time you complain about your phone service, why don’t you try using two Dixie cups with a string? We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the Phone Company. — Lily Tomlin, The Phone Company

The internet is an American invention. It exists thanks to US public dollars that were showered on military contractors, with a little incidental spillover onto America’s institutes of higher learning.

54 years after the first Arpanet demo, America is an also-ran in the global internet league tables. Americans pay more for slower broadband than their counterparts, whether that’s in wealthy countries of the global north, or looted post-colonial nations in the global south.

This matters because the internet isn’t a mere pornography distribution system, nor a tool of extremist radicalization, nor a glorified video-on-demand service —nor any of the other dismissive epithets used to minimize the consequences of America’s worst-in-class internet service.

The internet is a single wire that delivers free speech, a free press, free assembly, access to education, civics, health care, community, politics, family, employment and even romance.

And America’s internet is terrible.

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Gig Work Is the Opposite of Steampunk

They turned the cottage into a factory.

A woodcut of a weaver’s loft, where a woman works at a hand-loom. Out of the window opposite her looms the glowing, menacing red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey.’ On the wall behind her is the poster from Magpie Killjoy’s ‘Steampunk Magazine’ that reads, ‘Love the machine, hate the factory.’ — Cryteria/CC BY 3.0 (modified)

Despite what you may have heard, the Luddites weren’t technophobes. They were skilled workers, expert high tech machine operators who supplied the world with fine textiles. Thanks to a high degree of labor organization through craft guilds, the workers received a fair share of the profit from their labors. They worked hard, but they earned enough through their labors to enjoy lives of dignity and comfort.

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They’re still trying to ban cryptography

The sales office to data localization pipeline for mass surveillance.

John/CC BY-SA 2.0 (modified)

Some bad ideas never die. Since the late 1980s, spy agencies and cops have argued that the public should not have access to working cryptography, because this would mean that terrorists, mafiosi, drug dealers and pedophiles will be able to communicate in perfect, unbreakable secrecy.

The problem is that working cryptography protects everyone, not just the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse: the same cryptographic tools that protect instant messages and “Darknet” sites also protect your communications with your bank, your Zoom therapy session, and the over-the-air updates for your pacemaker and your car’s anti-lock braking system.

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