Back in 2016, I coined the term “peak indifference” to describe a political phenomenon, when people who have denied an urgent problem begin to self-radicalize, not because of activists or public education, but because the problem has caught up with them, personally.
As I’ve written here, a neat microcosm of peak indifference is smoking: even if you convince yourself that tobacco isn’t that bad for you, if you keep smoking long enough, you will likely come to understand that it is very bad for you, because Stage 4 lung-cancer is convincing in a way that even the most persuasive talk with your family doctor can never be.
Then the pandemic struck, and terrible internet service became a matter of survival: it was how your kids went to school, how you visited the doctor, how you saw family, how you participated in civics and politics, and, for those of us who were lucky enough to have remote-capable jobs, how you earned your living.
The dismal state of the American telecoms industry, where monopolies divided up the country into non-competing exclusive territories like Pope Alexander VI dividing up the “New World,” suddenly became a lot more important.
If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity. — Senator John Sherman, 1890, arguing for the passage of the Sherman Act
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. — Frank Wilhoit, Crooked Timber
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. — Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
In January, I published an article describing how a company called Pixsy sent me repeated legal threats in a bid to get me to pay $600 for a Creative Commons imageI’d used. Pixsy falsely claimed that I had violated the Creative Commons license by failing to correctly attribute it to its creator, the photographer Nenad Stojkovic. After I challenged them on this, they apologized and withdrew the threats, but refused to answer any of my questions about how this happened or how their business operates (Stojkovic also failed to answer multiple messages seeking clarification).
No, you can’t own a fucking color, you absolute lunatic
The world of crypto is full of scams, grifts, and absolutely foreseeable flops. The underlying ideology of crypto — the much-vaunted “system design” — starts from the principle that systems are most stable when they appeal to each participant’s self-interest, rather than their solidarity, generosity or empathy. This is an extension of the “greed is good” / ”there’s no such thing as society” ideology of the Thatcher-Reagan revolution. It’s an ideology grounded in empirically false propositions about how people actually behave in markets.
In a recent interview, Yanis Varoufakis describes his experience running an economy in God-mode when he was chief economist of Valve, overseeing game economies with “access to the full data set in real time,” lured by the prospect of “playing ‘god; i.e. being able to do with these digital economies things that no economist can do in the ‘real’ world, e.g. alter rules, prices, and quantities to see what happens.”
“Did you know that 87% of all conversations about blockchain technology are nonconsensual?”
It’s already an old joke, but it’s sure aged well.
Hardly a day goes by without someone demanding that I listen to their explanation of their blockchain idea. A lot of times, I listen. Look, a lot of people I consider to be smart and thoughtful are really excited by this stuff, and I know them well enough to believe them when they say they’re not excited about the possibility that they can get in on the ground floor of a Ponzi scheme and exit with a bunch of suckers’ money.
But because of a small oversight in old versions of the licenses created 12 years ago, a new generation of legal predator has emerged to wage a new campaign of legal terror.
To make matters worse, this new kind of predator specifically targets people who operate in good faith, only using materials that they explicitly have been given permission to use.
Even today, I can’t tell if the entertainment execs and their tech collaborators that I sparred with in the DRM wars were brilliant schemers or overconfident fools.
When these men — almost all men — set out to create laws that would give their corporations a collective veto over which programs all computers could run, and which real-world data could be captured by computers, were they really doing it all for the sake of controlling how we watch TV? Or did they grasp just how this power over our digital tools would translate into control over our lives in an increasingly digital era?
I still don’t know. It’s easy to believe in unlimited corporate hubris, but it’s just as easy to believe in unlimited corporate foolishness. What’s more, it’s possible that some of the players were along for the ride, while others had a very precise understanding of the stakes.
What were those stakes?
Well, for starters, how about the definition of “the family.”
Last week, I began the story of the Broadcast Flag, a law that would make it illegal to build a general-purpose computer unless it conformed to a set of privately negotiated restrictions. The law had been promised by Billy Tauzin, then a lavishly corrupt Congressman, and its contours were being hammered out in an inter-industry body called the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group (BPDG), convened by the MPAA and attended by movie studios, TV studios, broadcasters, consumer electronics companies, and PC companies.
That’s what the movie studio executive said he wanted to create.
It was my first day at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. One of our supporters had been at the National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas the week before; coming back through the Convention Center late at night, he stumbled on an “open meeting” being held by the Motion Picture Association of America’s Copy Protection Technical Working Group. It was an “open meeting” in the sense that anyone who knew about it was welcome to attend, but they didn’t actually tell anyone it was happening, and they held it in the dead of night.
On the spur of the moment, that supporter decided to attend. What he heard was genuinely bizarre, and would have been absurd if it wasn’t so alarming.
That dead-of-night NAB meeting’s purpose was to announce the formation of a new interindustry consortium: the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group (BPDG), which would hold its inaugural “open meeting” the following week, at an LAX airport hotel that would be convenient for tech reps who flew in from Silicon Valley and for studio and TV reps based in LA.
