Medium – Page 7 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Dare to Know

What if knowing the exact date of your death was a luxury good?

James Kennedy’s debut novel Order of the Odd-Fish ran like a very successful of dares between the author and himself — Kennedy just kept ratcheting up the weirdness in the book, piling up the comic and surreal, to the point where the book should, by all rights, have collapsed beneath its own silliness. But it didn’t!

Instead, Kennedy produced a tale of magic. As I wrote in my review, “This is what Harry Potter would be if its magic world was truly wondrous and magnificent, as opposed to plain reality with broomsticks and funny robes.”

Here’s how I ended that review: “An epic novel of exotic pie, Götterdämmerung, mutants, evil, crime, and musical theater, Odd-Fish is a truly odd fish, as mannered and crazy as an eel in a tuxedo dropped down your trousers during a performance of The Ring Cycle.”

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So You’ve Decided to Unfollow Me

We’re good, seriously.

A double exit-door, open to reveal a Matrix-style code waterfall. Over the door is a green exit sign with a green halo. — Sascha Kohlmann/CC BY SA 2.0 (modified)

It’s hard to overstate how liberating the early years of internet publishing were. After a century of publishing driven by the needs of an audience, we could finally switch to a model driven by the interests of writers.

That meant that instead of trying to figure out what some “demographic” wanted to read about, we wrote what we wanted to read, and then waited for people who share our interests to show up and read and comment and write their own blogs and newsletters and whatnot.

When the first ad networks came along, they leaned into this model: “Here is a writer whose audience has this approximate composition and interests; if that’s a group you’re trying to reach, then here’s a rate card to show those people ads.”

Back in those days, it seemed that ad targeting would enable more niches, more “long tail” publications tailoring to the esoteric, gnarly interests of writers and readers.

But that was wrong. As behavioral ad targeting took off, and with it, social networks and recommendation algorithms, the money shifted to follow readers around on the internet. Some readers were worth more than others. Showing an ad for a contingency liability lawyer to someone with a mesothelioma diagnosis was worth a bundle, for example, but you didn’t have to write about asbestos or lung cancer to score ad revenue from that user.
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View a SKU

Let’s Make Amazon Into a Dumb Pipe

Amazon

Downtrodden peasant: We should improve society somewhat.

Mr Gotcha: Yet you participate in society, curious! I am very intelligent. -Matt Bors, The Nib

I like supporting local retail for shopping whenever possible. But I will not shame people for buying from Amazon the magic markers they use to write “Break up Bezos’ power” on a big poster they parade outside their state attorney general’s office. -Zephyr Teachout, Break ’Em Up

Here’s a dirty secret of the antitrust movement: Amazon is very convenient!

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Shovel-Ready

A half-to-three-quarters-baked idea to fix capitalism.

A shovel in a pool of wet cement; from the left of the frame, we see the toe of a work-boot, seemingly poised to plunge the shovel into the wet concrete. — Alex Proimos/CC BY 2.0

America has a monopoly problem. The list of heavily concentrated industries grows longer by the day, even as the number of companies operating in each sector shrinks: pharmaceuticals, pharmaceutical benefit managers, health insurance, appliances, athletic shoes, books, alcohol, drug stores, office supplies, eyeglasses, TV ads, internet ads, internet search, semiconductors, enterprise software, LCDs, vitamin C, auto parts, glass bottles, bottle caps, pharmaceutical bottles, airlines, railroads, travel search, railroads, mattresses, lab equipment, lasik lasers, offshore oil services, onshore oil services, contract manufacturing, food services, Champagne, cowboy boots, home improvement stores, and candy.

Monopolists Declared War on America

Once an industry is concentrated, everyone suffers. Highly concentrated industries can abuse their workers with impunity, because there’s nowhere else for them to go. Once an industry is sufficiently concentrated, its workplaces become literal slaughterhouses where workers risk their lives every day, while their bosses place bets on which workers will die first.

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A Win For Harley Riders

Fuck you, I bought it, it’s MINE.

Right-to-Repair is a no-brainer. You bought a thing, you want to fix it — or nominate someone else to fix it for you — and the manufacturer doesn’t. How ever can we resolve this intractable difference of opinion?

It’s a real puzzler. Wait, how about this?

Fuck you, I bought it, it’s MINE.

That’s got a real ring to it, doesn’t it?

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Reasonable Agreement

On the Crapification of Literary Contracts

Two swordsmen cross blades while standing on the pages of an open book, an inkpot between them. The swords are antique pen-nibs.

I don’t want to pretend that freelance writing contracts were ever great, but in the 34 years since I sold my first short story — at 17 — I’ve observed firsthand how manifestly unfair contractual terms have become standard, and worse, non-negotiable.

I started selling to magazines back in 1980s, which were the the dawn of corporate publishing consolidation. Magazines changed owners frequently as they were snapped up by new owners who, in turn, merged or bought out their competitors (thank Ronald Reagan for neutering antitrust and allowing these mergers to be waved through).

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Direct: The Problem of Middlemen

Kathryn Judge’s debut book is a hymn to short supply chains.

Back in 2007, I published my second short story collection, Overclocked. I was elated; not just because I’d published another book (the thrill of a new book has yet to pale even today, after dozens of books), but because it was a short-story collection, the kind of book I’d devoured as a kid, the mainstay of writers I’d worshiped, from Harlan Ellison to Spider Robinson to Kate Wilhelm. The publisher was Avalon, which had recently acquired Four Walls Eight Windows, the small press that had published my first short story collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More. Selling a book to Four Walls had been its own thrill, as they were publisher to Abbie Hoffman, another writer I’d grown up on.

But then, something weird happened.

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Regulatory Capture

Beyond Revolving Doors and Against Regulatory Nihilism.

A Soviet editorial cartoon featuring an ogrish capitalist in top hat and tails yanking a dollar-sign-shaped lever that ejects a tiny bureaucrat from a seat; ranks of bureaucrats behind him wait their turns, grinning idiot grins.

The Murder of Net Neutrality Was Wild

Here’s a story about “regulatory capture”: Donald Trump appointed Ajit Pai, a former Verizon lawyer, to run the Federal Communications Commission, which is in charge of regulating companies like Verizon. Verizon — and the other big telcos and cable operators — wanted to kill Net Neutrality.

Net Neutrality is the idea that your ISP should send you the bits you request as quickly and reliably as it can. That means when you click a link, your ISP does its level best to get that link for you.

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Against Cozy Catastrophies

Cowering in a luxury bunker is a lousy retirement plan.

A lush lawn and garden hedge wall; through the gate and over the hedge, we see a smouldering, apocalyptic landscape. Desperate hands reach over the wall. In the foreground is a No Trespassing sign. — Djuradj Vujcic/CC BY 2.0; Gerald England/CC BY-SA 2.0; modified

In 1978, Jimmy Carter’s IRS created the 401(k) retirement program. Prior to this, most Americans had two ways to enjoy a dignified retirement: Social Security, and employer-provided defined-benefits pensions, which guaranteed you a proportion of your final salary every month from your retirement until your death.

The 401(k) was a third way to plan for retirement: you could gamble in the stock-market, and hope that you weren’t the sucker at the table. At first, this was a great deal: between the tax-breaks for 401(k) bets and generous employer-matching funds, many workers and unions were convinced to trade their sure-thing defined-benefits pensions for market-based alternatives.

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Apple’s Cement Overshoes

80 pounds’ worth of malicious compliance in two Pelican cases.

Conall/CC BY 2.0, modified

A Feature, Not a Bug

Apple CEO Tim Cook rang in 2019 with his annual shareholder letter, fulfilling his legal requirement to warn his investors about the risks the company saw on its horizon. One of Apple’s leading risks for 2019? Repair.

Apple makes a lot of money from the absence of repair. The transition from desktop PCs to laptops and then tablets and phones was a fantastic opportunity for hardware companies. A desktop PC might go obsolete, but it’s rare for your iMac to suffer a broken screen, fall into the toilet, get run over by a city bus, or fall down a sewer-grate.

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