In most of the world, the lockdown has destroyed small businesses while increasing the profits of Big Tech intermediaries like Amazon, who control access to customers on one side, and access to merchants on the other.

1/
The government of Argentina is trying to avert this fate. Their postal service is launching a "state-owned Amazon" called Correo Compras, which will offer low-cost ecommerce listings to businesses, and do fulfilment through postal workers.

correocompras.com.ar

2/
Correo Compras competes directly with Mercadolibre, a latinamerican ecommerce titan with a well-deserved reputation for squeezing suppliers and workers - its deliveries are made by precarious gig economy drivers.

opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/…

3/
Correo Compras is making a bet: that by eliminating Mercadolibre's vast margin (45%!), it can pay workers a living wage, offer fair treatment to vendors, and still sell at competitive prices.

4/
They're also rolling out digital payments (BNA+) provided by the Banco Nacion, competing with Mercadolibre's Mercadopagos, which has seen a surge in usage and profits (thanks to high fees) since the lockdown. BNA+ also builds in instalment payments.

5/
In many ways, Argentina is well-situated to try the experiment: it has very high internet penetration, a thriving domestic tech industry, and high levels of technological literacy.

6/
It also struggles with structural poverty, thanks in part to US vulture capitalists who absorb vast amounts of its GDP to service odious debts.

7/
As @CeciliaRikap points out in her @opendemocracy article on the venture, Correo Compras will give Argentine state planners access to important market information - data that currently sits in private hands thanks to digital surveillance.

8/
But while data can improve industrial policy, it can also serve state oppression. The debt that is currently crushing the company is partly the price-tag for the former military dictatorship's program of mass surveillance, torture, murder and terror.

9/
Data collected for beneficial purposes can be weaponized. The Dutch government collected data on minorities so that they could provide settlement services to them. Nazi occupiers used this data to locate minorities and ship them to camps.

medium.com/@hansdezwart/d…

10/
This is not merely a historical fact. Australia's spy agencies were just caught tapping into data generated by covid exposure notification apps - data that Australians were promised would only be used for contact tracing.

techcrunch.com/2020/11/24/aus…

11/
It's not a mere historical fact. There are people alive in Argentina today who were spied upon, kidnapped and tortured by their government. Argentina could certainly come under the sway of a brutal dictator again - if it can happen in Brazil, it can happen in Argentina.

12/
This isn't to condemn Correo Compras. It's an exciting experiment. But it's an experiment. We should try lots of experiments. We could end the practice of worker misclassification, turning low-waged Amazon workers into employees and allowing them to unionize.

13/
That's already starting to happen. Amazon workers in Alabama - a viciously anti-union state - is having a union vote.

washingtonpost.com/technology/202…

14/
States could offer postal fulfilment and startup funding for worker co-ops. They could enforce structural separation, forcing companies like Amazon to either offer a platform or sell on it, but not both.

15/
They could structure taxes so that profits from predatory listing fees were annihilated by tax liabilities. NIST could offer bug-bounties for a free/open source federated clone of Amazon's platform that any co-op could stand up and run.

16/
As always, the trick is to decide what's "infrastructure" - public goods that need public ownership - and what's a "service" that should be pluralized among many hands to make it harder to gain and abuse power (even state power).

eof/
ETA: in tweet 9, "crushing the company" should read "crushing the country"

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Cory Doctorow #BLM

Cory Doctorow #BLM Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @doctorow

26 Nov
Follow Us to Walt Disney World (1984) adventurelandia.tumblr.com/post/635810395…
Follow Us to Walt Disney World (1984) adventurelandia.tumblr.com/post/635810395…
Follow Us to Walt Disney World (1984) adventurelandia.tumblr.com/post/635810395…
Read 5 tweets
25 Nov
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Tech in SF; Office 365 spies on employees for bosses; A state-owned Amazon; Random Penguin to buy Simon & Schuster; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the…

#Pluralistic

1/ Image
On Monday, Nov 30, I'm giving a talk based on my short book "HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM" as part of McGill University's Beaverbrook Lectures; it's a counterpoint to a lecture delivered by Shoshanna Zuboff last Monday. It's free to attend:

mcgill.ca/maxbellschool/…

2/ Image
Tech in SF: Annalee Newitz and Ken Liu in the final Attack Surface Lecture.



3/ Image
Read 20 tweets
25 Nov
Publishing is dominated by just five giant players: Penguin Random House, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, Harpercollins and Macmillan.

1/
Within that five-company oligarchy, one company stands out as a true monopolist: Penguin Random House, the megafirm created when Random House's owner, Bertelsmann, executed a merger-to-monopoly by buying Penguin in 2013.

2/
Now, Penguin is about to effect another monopolistic merger, by acquiring Simon & Schuster from Viacom, which bought the company in 1994. The acquisition was always a bad fit: it was driven by a desire to create a vertical monopoly.

3/
Read 11 tweets
25 Nov
The Shitty Tech Adoption Curve describes the process by which oppressive technology is normalized and distributed through all levels of society. The more privilege someone has, the harder it is to coerce them to use dehumanizing tech, so it starts with marginalized people.

1/
Asylum seekers, prisoners and overseas sweatshop workers get the first version. Its roughest edges are sanded off against their tenderest places, and once it's been normalized a little, we inflict it on students, mental patients, and blue collar workers.

2/
Lather, rinse, repeat: before long, everyone's been ropted in. If your meals were observed by a remote-monitored CCTV 20 years ago, it was because you were in a supermax prison. Today, it's because you bought a home video surveillance system from Google/Apple/Amazon.

3/
Read 18 tweets
25 Nov
Today in the final instalment of the Attack Surface Lectures (panels exploring themes from the third Little Brother book, hosted by @torbooks and 8 indie bookstores): Tech in SF, with @annaleen and @kyliu99 recorded on Oct 20 at @interabangbooks.



1/
You can watch it without Youtube's surveillance courtesy of the @internetarchive:

archive.org/details/asl-te…

Or get the audio as an MP3:

archive.org/download/asl-t…

2/
Earlier instalments in the series:

I. Politics and Protest (with @evacide and @rondeibert, hosted by @strandbookstore):

craphound.com/attacksurface/…

II. Cross-Media Sci-Fi (with @amber_benson and @jonrog1 hosted by the @booksmithtweets):

craphound.com/attacksurface/…

3/
Read 7 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!