Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
No trackers, no ads. Black type, white background. Privacy policy: we don't collect or retain any data at all ever period.
For most of the modern era, most people in the rich world have been poor, just like their parents and their children. Social mobility was more dream than reality. Most people were born to serve, as were their children.
The ruling minority liked to imagine that the human oxen laboring in their fields and the women who cleaned their homes and cooked their meals were happy with their lot, and professed shock and horror whenever these hereditary servers sought out ways to improve their stationâââwhether that was by joining the industrial revolution or striking out for a colonized land and the promise of stolen estates and downtrodden servants of their own.
Theyâre called âanti-featuresâ: artificial limitations built onto the products we buy. These are limitations no customer asked forâââand indeed, theyâre limitations customers would pay to removeâââif only they could.
The first anti-features were âDRMâ (Digital Rights Management), like the âregion-locksâ on DVD players that stopped you from using a player you bought in one country to play back a disc you bought somewhere else.
Continue reading "How to Fix Cars* By Breaking âFelony Contempt of Business Modelâ"
Continue reading "Pluralistic: 24 Aug 2022 Moderna's Vaccine Apartheid"
The world of crypto is full of scams, grifts, and absolutely foreseeable flops. The underlying ideology of cryptoâââthe much-vaunted âsystem designââââstarts from the principle that systems are most stable when they appeal to each participantâs self-interest, rather than their solidarity, generosity or empathy. This is an extension of the âgreed is goodâ / âthereâs no such thing as societyâ ideology of the Thatcher-Reagan revolution. Itâs 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 âaccess to the full data set in real time,â lured by the prospect of âplaying âgod; i.e. being able to do with these digital economies things that no economist can do in the ârealâ world, e.g. alter rules, prices, and quantities to see what happens.â
Note: This is Part II in a series; Part I is here, Part III is here.
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.
