Cory Doctorow #BLM's Threads

Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Mashing the Bernie meme; Know Nothings, conspiratorialism and Pastel Q; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/cKWPSzuYHE

#Pluralistic

1/

Mashing the Bernie meme: What if every video game, except Bernie with mittens?

https://t.co/Zcs71oUras

2/

The remix culture of the early 2000s left an indelible impression on me, an enduring delight in the power of whimsy, juxtaposition, virtuosity and ingenuity - and the ability of strangers all over the world to collaborate without any explicit coordination.

1/ pic.twitter.com/hMKzmoxjLu
— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) January 31, 2021

Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

The remix culture of the early 2000s left an indelible impression on me, an enduring delight in the power of whimsy, juxtaposition, virtuosity and ingenuity - and the ability of strangers all over the world to collaborate without any explicit coordination.

1/

The recent Bernie-mittens meme was a sterling example of this, tickling me right to my core, and I just happened on an especially delightful apex example of the form: @ToastedShoes's video of Sanders incorporated into eight AAA

Toasted Shoes got @JoeMashups to create a 3D model of Sanders, then tapped a bunch of different mashup artists to turn the Sanders sprite into playable characters in the games, showing them off in a narrated video.

3/

I'm not much of a fan of video-game streamers' narration, and I confess that I found the video more entertaining without the narration, but to each their own - Shoes was clearly enjoying himself, as were the commenters on the video.

4/

They had a lot to be pleased by.

Sanders as a Sith Lord in Star Wars Battlefront 2:

5/

Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

Many wonder how epidemiology could have become so politicized. But epidemiology - like climate science (the other "mysteriously politicized" subject) has intrinsic politics: to take epidemiology seriously, you have to acknowledge that our species has a shared destiny.

1/

Much of the debate over "liberty" can be summed up as "you do you" - I'll swing my arm over here, you keep your nose over there, and so long as we both respect each others' "freedom," I won't punch you in the nose and your nose will remain unpunched.

2/

This breaks down when applied to epidemiology: "You wear your mask, I'll leave mine at home, and we'll both exercise our freedoms" is like "You swim in the no-pissing end of the pool, I'll swim down here in the pissing end, and we'll both get our way."

3/

We're in the same epidemiological pool, and the science is clear: masking's benefit is primarily in protecting others from you - your presymptomatic, asymptomatic (or symptomatic) spread of particles. Your decision not to wear a mask puts me in danger.

4/

If your worldview ascribes political outcomes to individual choices (implying that poverty or misfortune are the result of a combination of laziness and inferiority), then anything that demands a systemic view challenges its very foundations.

5/

Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

Republican North Dakota legislators have introduced #SB2333, a bill that prohibits large tech companies from locking their users into a single app store or payment processor.

https://t.co/PgyhgOhFAl

1/

While his has implications for Android and other large tech platforms, its most immediate and far-reaching effects with be on Apple, whose Ios platform uses lock-in to monopolize both apps and payments (and another domain, not mentioned in the bill: repairs).

2/

Predictably, this has thrown Apple into a fury, with Apple's privacy chief @erikn telling the SD legislature that Apple uses its monopoly over the app store to protect its users' privacy and

Neuenschwander makes a good, but incomplete, point. To the extent that Apple has the same interests as its users, it uses its app store monopoly to lock out bad apps (to the best of its ability).

4/

But when Apple's interests diverge from its users' interests, the prohibition on sideloading apps actively harms those users' privacy and security. Think of how Apple caved to Chinese state demands to remove working VPNs from the Ios app store to facilitate mass surveillance.

5/

Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

2022 is shaping up to be a bloodbath. The Trump census cooked the numbers to advantage Republicans, and GOP statehouses are poised to redistrict in ways that will hand potentially permanent minority rule to the GOP in Congress.

1/

There's a potential way out: #HR1, an omnibus bill of electoral reforms that would create durable, structural protections for voting rights and a level playing field for campaigning.

2/

To get a sense of how urgent the looming crisis is - and of how important HR1 is - listen to @ryangrim interviewing @schwarz and Rep @JohnSarbanes [D-MD] on this week's

In theory, HR1 could be blasted through - Dems control the Senate, Congress, and the White House, and the future of the party depends on it, but I'm far from confident that they'll find the discipline and political will to make it happen.

4/

The Democrats keep squandering their majorities and wasting opportunities to make real change - changes that are must-haves, not nice-to-haves; changes needed to head off existential threats to the nation itself.

5/

Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

We are in an extraordinary moment, but not an entirely unprecedented one. Since the earliest days, societies have had to cope with disasters that wiped out the ability of everyday people to service their debts and thus threatened to destroy their societies.

1/

If you've read U Missouri econ prof Michael Hudson's writings on the subject, you know that for millennia, rulers in these circumstances simply wiped out the debts, declaring a "jubilee" that allowed people to rebuild after disasters rather than being trapped in debt spirals.

2/

In a new essay on @NakedCapitalism called "How an 'Act of God' Pandemic Is Destroying the West: The US Is Saving the Financial Sector, Not the Economy," Hudson reveals the abyss on whose brink we are balanced, and what we must do to pull back from

Hudson's oft-repeated golden rule is "Debts that can't be paid, won't be paid." That is to say: making it harder to declare bankruptcy, or binding debtors over to arbitration or wage-garnishing won't actually get them to pay debts they cannot afford.

4/

This is a very sharp observation in the US context. The 2008 crisis was "solved" by bailing out finance, not people - and so the finance sector was able to lend to consumers to buy things again, while consumer debt mounted to spectacular levels.

5/

Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

Publishing works on long schedules, which means that long-planned books can be overtaken by events...like covid.

2020 was tough for those of us with books in trail, especially nonfiction. But for a few lucky writers, covid imparted a terrible salience to their books.

1/

One such writer is @TimHarford, host of @BBCRadio4's @bbcmoreorless, which is hands-down the greatest statistical literacy program in the world, using the numbers in each week's headlines to impart statistical lessons and render the news in perspective.

2/

Harford's latest book is THE DATA DETECTIVE (published as HOW TO MAKE THE WORLD ADD UP in the UK), which should really have been entitled HOW TO TRUTH WITH

You've likely heard of Darrell Huff's 1954 classic HOW TO LIE WITH STATISTICS, a classic, accessible guide to statistical malpractice in service to pushing an agenda. What I didn't know (until I heard Harford discourse on it) was that Huff himself had an ulterior motive.

4/

Huff was a shill for the tobacco industry, which, in 1954, was deliberately muddying the waters about the link between cancer and smoking. Huff's book isn't just a guide to statistical malpractice - it's a broadside against cancer

Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

#Prop22 was the most expensive ballot initiative in history: "gig economy" companies firehosed $200m over voters, outspending 48/50 state legislative races on a single question.

That question: can employers misclassify workers as contractors and escape legal obligations?

1/

That's a high-stakes question. US workers spent more than a century fighting for basic rights: the right not the maimed, raped or killed on the job; the right to a living wage; the right to a weekend; the right not to be discriminated against based on race or sex or religion.

2/

Above all: the right to form a union and bargain collectively with employers who otherwise hold all the negotiating leverage - to pool their resources in the same way that gig economy companies did to fund Prop 22.

3/

Workers died for those rights. Bosses fought labor reforms with terror and rape, with blackmail and dirty tricks, with jails and blackballing.

Prop 22 can only be repealed if 7/8th of the California legislature votes to do so. It is, effectively, a permanent fixture.

4/

$200m to pass Prop 22 is a BARGAIN. Every right for workers shifts money from bosses' side of the balance sheets to the workers' side. Prop 22 erased all those rights in a single stroke.

5/

Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

Each year, @freedomhouse publishes "Freedom on the Net," an annual snapshot of internet policy and outcomes in different countries, from #netneutrality to internet shutdowns to domestic surveillance.

This year's report is a grim read.

https://t.co/OVoaYjJz5n

1/

The new report, spanning Jun 2019 to May 2020, tracks the steady (pre- and post-pandemic) march to a locked down internet robbed of its liberatory power and perverted in service to control, censorship and

Even before the pandemic, things were bad, but the pandemic accelerates everything: inequality, monopoly, and internet crackdowns. In the name of epidemiology, the world's governments have criminalized some online speech and then arrested journalists and activists.

3/

These speech restrictions also created a simple pretense for national website blocking and site takedowns, used to remove "unfavorable health statistics, corruption allegations, and other Covid-19-related content."

4/

The Chinese model of tech as an autocrat's dashboard and control panel is surging around the world, and exposure notification apps are a powerful accelerant for the model, with mandatory location tracking, call-record harvesting, even mandatory quarantine "selfie checkins."

5/

Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

Macarthur fellow and Hugo-award-winner @nkjemisin's 2019 book "The City We Became" is both a fantastic contemporary fantasy novel and a scorching commentary on the infantile nature of the racist dogma of HP Lovecraft and his

It's a quest novel about a group of New Yorkers who awaken one day to discover that they are mystical avatars of the city, which has awakened and been reborn as a kind of powerful colony organism.

2/

There's an avatar for each of the five boroughs, plus a "primary" who represents the city as a whole. As with all births, this one is somewhat traumatic - but NYC's birth is uniquely fraught.

First, the five boroughs must find one another and connect with the primary.

3/

But they must do all this while under sustained assault from a mystical, transdimensional, Lovecraftian horror, a great adversary to all of our Earth's living cities - but an adversary that had been believed to be powerless against cities after their births.

4/

The enemy manifests as a Karen, a white woman clad all in white, dogwhistling racist tropes, summoning police, weaponizing vast fortunes to evict its enemies or distort their culture. It is attended by harbingers - human beings infected with fluttering white tentacles.

5/

Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

Well this is pretty terrific: @PavelAnni was so taken with my 2020 novel ATTACK SURFACE (the third Little Brother novel) that he's created "Mashapedia," a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the real world technologies in the tale.

https://t.co/Z2aLwF1Ez3

1/

Pavel is both comprehensive and comprehensible, with short definitions and links for the mundane (MIT Media Lab, EL wire, PGP) to the exotic (binary transparency, reverse shells, adversarial preturbation).

2/

When I was an adolescent, my friend group traded secret knowledge as a kind of social currency - tricks for getting free payphone calls, or doubling the capacity of a floppy disc, or calling the White House switchboard.

3/

I doted on books that promised more of the same: Paladin Press and Amok Catalog titles, Steal This Book, the Anarchist Cookbook, the Whole Earth Review and the Whole Earth Catalog.

4/

But when I sat down in 2006 to write the first Little Brother book, I realized that facts were now cheap - anything could be discovered with a single search. The thing in short supply now was search terms - knowing what to search FOR.

5/

Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Mexican indigenous telco wins spectrum fight; How apps steal your location; Understanding /r/wallstreetbets; Knowledge is why you build your own apps; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/6BOyhL3tEj

#Pluralistic

1/

Join me this afternoon for the launch of the print edition of my 2020 book HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM!

https://t.co/8Op6IEocPB

2/

Mexican indigenous telco wins spectrum fight: First Nations treaties do not sign away electromagnetic franchises.

https://t.co/BBsxXuGQe3

3/

In the early 2000s, dramatic shifts in radio spectrum allocation for mobile data applications, combined with advances in radio transmission and receiving prompted some networking engineers to propose a radical rethink of radio.

1/ pic.twitter.com/o3sO4fNa5Z
— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) January 27, 2021

How apps steal your location: A deep dive into the murky depths of surveillance markets.

https://t.co/mV7u2FYylT

4/

A new research report from @seanodiggity and @expressvpn in honor #DataPrivacyDay reveals the incredible extent of commercial location tracking hidden in everyday apps.https://t.co/eKRquZjxP7

1/ pic.twitter.com/vO1G4Ullvb
— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) January 28, 2021

Understanding /r/wallstreetbets: More than a bull run, a symbiosis of a market maker and market destroyers.

https://t.co/7zr1N4vkjV

5/

There is no shortage of takes about what's going on with Gamestop (and other surging stocks), Robinhood and Reddit's r/wallstreetbets, many of them contradictory - at least on the face of them. But I think it's possible for most of these takes to be right. Here's how.

1/ pic.twitter.com/n9oBXu3MJW
— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) January 28, 2021

Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

I've been talking to @polygon's @TashaRobinson about my books for nearly two decades. She was one of the reviewers to dig into Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, my debut novel, all the way back in 2003 when she was at @theonion's @TheAVClub.

https://t.co/t55DCpCNAl

1/

She's always had smart things to say about my books (and is never shy about criticizing them) so I was delighted to talk with her about my latest, ATTACK SURFACE, for an interview: "Cory Doctorow on his drive to inspire positive

As the title suggests, the interview digs into the relationship between our narratives about the future and the future itself when it arrives - the delights and perils of dystopianism, a philosophy that I find seductive even as I reject it.

3/

Many conversations and books disabused me of dystopianism, but the turning points came from a pair of woman historians. First: Rebecca Solnit's "A Paradise Built In Hell" - a gorgeous, brilliantly researched book about the true histories of

And second was @Ada_Palmer's legendary end-of-year event with her undergrad Renaissance history students at the University of Chicago:

Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Privacy Without Monopoly; Broad Band; $50T moved from America's 90% to the 1%; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/QgK8ZMRKp7

#Pluralistic

1/

This weekend, I'm participating in Boskone 58, Boston's annual sf convention.

https://t.co/2LfFssVcZQ

Tonight, on a panel called "Tech Innovation? Does Silicon Valley Have A Mind-Control Ray, Or a Monopoly?" at 530PM Pacific.

2/

Privacy Without Monopoly: A new EFF white paper, co-authored with Bennett Cyphers.

https://t.co/TVzDXt6bz6

3/

Today, @EFF published "Privacy Without Monopoly: Data Protection and Interoperability," a major new paper by Bennett Cyphers and me. https://t.co/Ma2FE2vZ9u

1/ pic.twitter.com/RzCkQdQRxy
— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) February 13, 2021

Broad Band: Claire L Evans's magesterial history of women in computing.

https://t.co/Lwrej6zVYd

4/

One of the most Monkey's Paw things about my life is my relationship to books. When I was a teenager, I read all the way through the school and public libraries, spent everything I had on books, and still couldn't get enough and dreamt of more.

1/ pic.twitter.com/Lgkdk5a7YA
— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) February 13, 2021

$50T moved from America's 90% to the 1%: The hereditary meritocracy is in crisis.

https://t.co/TquaxOmPi8

5/

Inequality requires narrative stabilizers. When you have too little and someone else has more than they can possibly use, simple logic dictates that you should take what they have.

1/ pic.twitter.com/BUFyq9H2n4
— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) February 13, 2021

Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

Trump was a very specific kind of disaster: a chaos agent, who lacked the wit, patience and executive function to recruit the powerful institutions of the US military-industrial complex to fight his corner.

1/

The kind of guy who demands the impossible and then fires and publicly humiliates any allies who fail to deliver - or dare to contradict him - is not the kind of guy who can build new, enduring, evil institutions.

2/

The best he can hope for is to get some trumpalike goblins into positions of power (where they will replicate his chaos, but without the broad impunity of the presidential office, resulting in a series of resignations and prosecutions), back by executive orders.

3/

The last months of the Trump admin were an orgy of executive branch rulemakings that dismantled public safety, health, labor, anticorruption and (especially) environmental protections.

4/

Trump is a debt kingpin. His MO is running across a river on the backs of alligators, hoping to move so fast that none of them takes a leg: borrow, refinance, restructure, borrow, blow town, borrow, restructure, bribe, blow town.

5/

Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

It took decades after the passage of America's landmark antitrust laws - the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act - for trustbusting to occur in earnest, and what spurred the action wasn't mere corporate bullying, not just price hikes and labor abuses.

1/

What tipped America over into a state where a leader (FDR) who told activists "I want to do it, now make me do it" found the political will to "do it" was the corruption that attended the extreme concentration of wealth.

2/

Monopoly was never merely an issue of economics - it's fundamentally an issue about POLITICS. Yes, the monopolist bleeds workers and suppliers, sucks them dry and amasses a tremendous fortune, but that's just accumulating ammunition.

3/

What the monopolist does with that ammunition is far more consequential: when the powerful are small in number and command vast fortunes, they can come to a consensus about how to deploy their fortunes to corrupt the political process.

4/

The economic harms are just a warmup, the political harms are the real deal.

Hoover was beholden to plutes, had a cabinet full of them, turned over the nation's treasury to a sociopathic monster called Andrew Mellon whose stated ambition was to own all the world's aluminum.

5/

Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

Ring - Amazon's surveillance doorbell division - has 4,000 "partnerships" with US police ("public safety") orgs. The company has lied about how these work for years, but the basic deal is that they give cops free stuff to buzz-market their products.

https://t.co/716iaXUXWR

1/

Ring tells its customers that they get to choose whether to share the footage from their street-facing cameras with cops, but that's a lie, too. If you say no, the cops still get to look through your

That's why cops debase themselves to serve as buzz-marketers for Ring - in exchange, they get an off-the-books, free-to-use, warrantless, city-scale, video surveillance grid.

3/

It's an investment that pays off. Back in July, @EFF documented how the @SFPD was able to commandeer 200 Ring cameras to produce surveillance data on #BLM

And in a new blockbuster report, EFF's @maassive and @mguariglia document how @LAPDHQ did the same thing, fraudulently using "unusual occurance" protocols to gain access to last summer's BLM

Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

https://t.co/no0C8ANzwr

Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

As Parler disappears from the Android and Ios app stores and faces being kicked off of Amazon's (and other) clouds, people who worry about monopolized corporate control over speech are divided over What It Means.

1/

There's an obvious, trivial point to be made here: Twitter, Apple and Google are private companies. When they remove speech on the basis of its content, it's censorship, but it's not GOVERNMENT censorship. It doesn't violate the First Amendment.

2/

And yes, of course it's censorship. They have made a decision about the type and quality of speech they'll permit, and they enforce that decision using the economic, legal and technical tools at their disposal.

3/

If I invited you to my house for dinner and said, "Just so you know, no one is allowed to talk about racism at the table," it would be censorship. If I said "no one is allowed to say racist things at the table," it would also be censorship.

4/

I censor my daughter when I tell her not to swear. I censor other Twitter users when I hide their replies to my posts. I censor commenters on my blog when I delete their replies.

Dress is up as "content removal" or "moderation" if you'd like, but it's obviously censorship.

5/

Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

Today's threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Twitter's Project Blue Sky; Brazil's world-beating data breach; Evictions and utility cutoffs are covid comorbidities; "North Korea" targets infosec researchers; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/eCzogk14kg

#Pluralistic

1/

Join me this Thursday for the launch of the print edition of my 2020 book HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM!

https://t.co/8Op6IEocPB

2/

Twitter's Project Blue Sky: Fix the internet, not the platforms.

https://t.co/KoZNABMJrE

3/

It's been more than a year since @jack announced Project Blue Sky, inspired by @mmasnick's "Protocols, Not Platforms," paper - a critical work explaining how walled gardens can be transformed into open protocols.https://t.co/1yDSNJehRP

1/ pic.twitter.com/xwDIErMFLJ
— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) January 26, 2021

Brazil's world-beating data breach: More than 100% of the population doxed.

https://t.co/6tcbcX2gQ6

4/

Brazil's public health agency has suffered what is arguably the worst data-exposure in world history, losing 243m+ records in a country of 211m people (the excess represents dead peoples' records).https://t.co/VsQUtIEnC7

1/ pic.twitter.com/DV6k2NfvHW
— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) January 26, 2021

Evictions and utility cutoffs are covid comorbidities: 143,000 covid deaths due to economic precarity.

https://t.co/pZM80W5DuR

5/

"Public health" isn't just about vaccinations, clinics and urgent care: it's a holistic discipline that encompasses all the contributors to health outcomes, which include things like housing, employment, transportation, pollution and more.

1/ pic.twitter.com/UQRgLVoczQ
— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) January 26, 2021

Authors Cory Doctorow #BLM