Thread by @doctorow

It's not surprising that the debate over digital rights is dominated by technologists - after all, spotting risks (and promises) of technology requires a technical understanding. 1/

If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2021/11/16/cop… 2/

Likewise, it's not surprising that technologists are accused of #solutionism - they've got a hammer, and they're gonna look for nails. The problem with this critique is that not every tech intervention is solutionism. 3/

I mean, sure, social problems are caused by social relations, but tech *can* change social relations. Anyone who doubts it needs to study the Industrial Revolution, the printing press, the telephone... 4/

Solutionism is the idea that tech solves everything, but the inverse - that tech solves *nothing* - is just nihilism.

Solutionism isn't the only incomplete theory of social change. 5/

How many times have you heard someone say that if you don't like how a tech company acts, you should just boycott it, "voting with your wallet?"

That's #consumerism, and it, too, can't solve a lot of problems. You can't shop your way out of monopoly capitalism. 6/

You can't opt out of Googbook when every app and page you visit has an ad-tech tracker on it.

But boycotts *do* work...sometimes. 7/

History is replete with moments when applying commercial leverage changed corporate behavior - or weakened corporate power to the point where it could be tamed regulation.

So what about regulation? 8/

I've got *lot* of first-hand experience being patronized by Hill Rats about how all the levers of power are in the legislature and the courtroom. 9/

There's a name for this sin: it's called #proceduralism - the belief that the most important games are won by the last person to get bored and walk away.

But only a fool would say that laws and their enforcement don't matter. 10/

The problem with the laws against wage-theft, pollution and discrimination is that they're not enforced, not that they exist in the first place. Our society wouldn't be improved by getting rid of those laws.

What about direct action, though? 11/

You can go on strike, chain yourself to a pipeline, call out your boss on social media. Sure, there's lots of time that's failed - but the whole history of the labor movement, from coal-strikes to #MeToo, tells us that #SocialJusticeWarriors get shit done...sometimes. 12/

You've probably figured it out by now. The problem isn't proceduralism, or consumerism, or solutionism, or social movements. The problem is in the insistence that only *one* of those tactics should be used - when really, they are all intensely complementary. 13/

Social media gives us a tool for reaching wide audiences, even for unpopular messages. Calling out your boss on social media for being a rapey asshole is a path to insisting on better anti-harassment laws and more enforcement of the laws we have. 14/

Boycotts and threats of boycotts can keep companies from seeking to block that legal enforcement.

The problem isn't using hammers to drive nails. The problem is in insisting that only hammers should ever be used, irrespective of whether there's a nail involved. 15/

This is great news, actually. Because some of us are better at community organizing, and some of us have law degrees, and some of us are hackers, and some of us really care about where our dollars go. That just means that we have room for *everyone* in the fight. 16/

A corollary: though organizations are often born to fight on just one of these fronts, over time, it's likely that it will expand to work on multiple fronts. 17/

For example, @EFF really began as a campaigning law firm (an "impact litigator") with cases like Bernstein, which killed the NSA's ban on civilian access to cryptography.

eff.org/deeplinks/2015… 18/

But over time, as EFF ran up against limits on who it could sue or defend, its other arms - activism, community organizing, and tech projects - grew.

We shipped code, like Privacy Badger, the leading tracker-blocker:

privacybadger.org 19/

We organized worldwide activism campaigns, like the one that saved the .ORG registry from being sold to private equity robber-barons:

eff.org/deeplinks/2020… 20/

And we created the Electronic Frontier Alliance, a network of independent, grassroots community groups:

eff.org/fight

This is a kind of "full-stack activism," with a diversity of tactics. It gets stuff done. 21/

EFF has just launched the new season of its podcast, How to Fix the Internet. As the show name suggests, the point isn't just to moan about looming dystopia, it's about making things better. 22/

Take the debut episode, in which @harlanyu of @TeamUpturn talks with EFF exec director Cindy Cohn and EFF special advisor @mala about how they've successfully fought cop-tech:

eff.org/deeplinks/2021… 23/

Cop-tech is a fungus, experiencing wild growth in the dark. Any small-town cop, it seems, can get access to milspec spying devices that follow you around and suck your phone dry during pretextual stops. 24/

These tools are generally acquired without disclosure or debate, and while their use is nominally regulated by cases like *Riley v California*, cops have figured out how to dodge those restrictions. It's a free-for-all.

But it doesn't have to be. 25/

As Yu describes, there are leverage-points in the regulation of cop-tech, places where small changes to the law and its application can bring oversight and accountability to high-tech policing. 26/

This is the kind of podcast I love - I learned a *lot* about cop-tech that I didn't know, much of it scary and disheartening. But I also learned what we can do about it - what the path of least resistance is to preventing this kind of dystopian hellscape. 27/

That's the best kind of technopolitics: one that draws on an understanding of social forces, markets, the law and technology to both analyze problems - *and* do something about them.

Here's a direct link to the MP3:

archive.org/download/h2fti… 28/

And here's the RSS for the rest of this coming season of How to Fix the Internet:

feeds.eff.org/howtofixtheint… 29/