@doctorow's Threads
Here's the thing about "performative depth" -- that is, creating things that are deliberately long and bit dull as a way of signaling that you are serious, unlike all those tweeters and clickbait hustlers --
It's not hard to counterfeit.
I've watched waves of performative depth come and go online -- long-ass articles, videos, podcasts, with quotes from Kierkegaard or dozens of neologisms that all mean approximately the same thing and express nuance for its own sake.
I've watched waves of performative depth come and go online -- long-ass articles, videos, podcasts, with quotes from Kierkegaard or dozens of neologisms that all mean approximately the same thing and express nuance for its own sake.
These waves have the same basic structure: Someone who's got something thoughtful and worth reading that requires real length to dig into comes along and posts a blockbuster, or series of blockbusters.
If you think the passage of the #CopyrightDirective is an indicator of how old people are stupid and don't understand the internet, you're making a mistake.
After all, a bunch of old people who CREATED the internet were opposed to this from the start.
eff.org/deeplinks/2018…
eff.org/deeplinks/2018…
Lawmakers don't have to be experts to make good decisions. We don't need a parliament of microbiologists and epidemiologists to keep us all from dying of lysteria or cholera.
1. That's not how property works. I bought it, I own it, and I am not under any obligation to arrange my affairs to benefit the shareholders of HP at my own expense.
2. The ink is not subsidized. They are charging 100s of % markup on this ink. (they normally charge 1000s)
2. The ink is not subsidized. They are charging 100s of % markup on this ink. (they normally charge 1000s)
3. There is no choice. HP and a handful of other companies effectively own the industry and EVERY SINGLE ONE uses countermeasures to lock out competitive ink offerings.
4. When a customer refills their own cartridge, or buys third party ink, that is "the customer deciding"
4. When a customer refills their own cartridge, or buys third party ink, that is "the customer deciding"
The choices are not "Behave exactly as the company would have you behave" or "do nothing." You are not an ambulatory wallet: you have the right and duty (in a market) to punish firms for bad conduct by subverting it with both political and commercial choices.
I've been thinking a lot about anti-majoritarian institutions like the Senate and the Electoral College and I confess that I think these represent a kind of impossible conundrum.
We're rightly skeptical of anti-majoritarian systems; they are apt to be hijacked by powerful minorities, and there is no minority more powerful than the wealthy.
If you're trying to figure out how to do things that benefit the few at the cost of the many, start by taking over small places with outsized representation in the political sphere (looking at you, Wyoming).
Lately, I've been talking about how monopolization in the tech sector has been attended in a rise of defensive legal tools to prevent new competitors from "disrupting" the firms that gained dominance through disruption (the golden age for pirates who become admirals)
Here's a good concrete example: when Uber and Lyft walked away from Austin, TX (a tantrum over drivers being regulated like taxi drivers), the drivers formed a co-op and cloned the rideshare app: @ride_austin
Ride is just fuckin' great. Seriously. It works exactly like Uber and Lyft, but the drivers get an extra 25% -- the share that would normally be siphoned off for Uber/Lyft's shareholders.
I used to write POs for >$1MM worth of Apple equipment/year and spent hundreds of hours dealing with their service centers. The argument that allowing total monopolization of the repair process "maintains system integrity" isn't supported by the actual service experience.
It should not surprise anyone that a company that arrogates the right to sue competing service centers and thus need not fear any competition does not perform as though its customers might choose to take their business elsewhere.
There is literally no corporation on Earth that couldn't make this argument: "Why should we let farmers fix their tractors? How can we maintain their integrity unless we get a monopoly? Do you know how important the food supply is?"
This is now a daily occurrence. Wake up, discover which lie Crispin has been told and repeated in public, all the while dodging the substance of the critique of his organisation's support for mass internet surveillance and censorship.
Who can forget the day he said that my (bestselling) first novel was a failure, and that my publisher thereafter rejected me? (All my novels are bestsellers, and my publisher just bought another one from me).
Or the day he found a hatchet-piece about seven-year-old blog post I'd written defending copyright, and tweeted that it was evidence that I didn't respect copyright?
Giving creators more copyright powers to combat exploitation by monopolistic corporations is like giving your kid more cash to compensate for having his lunch money stolen by schoolyard bullies. They'll take that too.
Give creators 100 years of copyright, and corporations will require that it be assigned to them for the full duration as a condition of publication.
Give them the right to license - and thus, prohibit - excerpting, and corporations will take that right as a condition of access to the market.
You mean, that thing I've been saying all along is true? That large corporations routinely commit copyfraud, that they act with impunity, and there there are no real remedies? And that once we create automated filters these corporations can use to claim our work, it'll be worse?
Or that you found a blog by someone whose understanding of my position on copyright is just as flawed and cartoonish as yours?
In small words, then: giving creators more "copyright" does no good if we're in concentrated markets where intermediaries (entertainment & tech companies, who have interlocking boards and overlapping major investors and are basically the same thing) rule all.
Dude. They literally just voted down "freedom of panorama" (the right to take pix in public spaces without getting clearance for every t-shirt, billboard and architectural facade) and voted in mandatory filters that will block anything that appears to match a copyrighted work.
The day this goes into effect will be the last day that independent photogs can operate. Without a rights-clearance house behind you, you won't be able to post any street-scenes: riots, parades, stock, police brutality, etc to any platform.
Multiply by all the other ways that filters will catch dolphins in tuna nets: without the backing of multinational entertainment corps, no artist will be able to publish their works. What do you suppose that will do to our negotiating leverage with Big Content?
In case you're wondering: the #EU just voted to impose filters on all the text, audio, photos, videos, etc you might post. If you think this will help photographers or other creators, you don't understand filters.
First of all: pirates laugh at filters. The most sophisticated image filters in the world - those used for state censorship in China - are trivial to evade citizenlab.ca/2018/08/cant-p… Anyone whose occupation is beating filters will beat filters.
But people who are legit? Including photogs? They're FUCKED. Filters can be intentionally bypassed if you know the trick, but if you're (say) a news photog whose photo of a protest includes a bus-ad with some stock imagery, the filters will not be able to know that you're legit.
Your daily reminder that James Clapper isn't your friend: he's a guy who lied and lied and lied about mass surveillance, including to Congress, including to the Congressional committee he specifically answered to (that is to say, perjured himself).
And he used his ongoing security-cleared status to amass a private-sector fortune as a military/intelligence contractor, a role he propped up with regular appearances on TV where his access to classified data was an implicit source of credibility for him.
He's one of thousands of ex-spook, ex-military far-right jerks who believe in, and were complicit in, secret assassination programs, mass surveillance, psyops against peaceful protesters, illegal arms deals to prop up dictators, etc etc.
Science fiction sucks at predicting the future, but it sure is good at predicting the present (c.f. @greatdismal): that is, the stuff that seems plausible in science fiction at any given moment is a good source of insight into what's on our collective minds.
Lots of people have noted that the fear of AIs taking over the world (especially when evinced by the super-rich) is really just a tell that capitalism has spawned transhuman, immortal colony lifeforms that use humans for gut flora (AKA corporations, AKA "slow AIs").
(References: me, boingboing.net/2015/07/03/why…; @cstross, antipope.org/charlie/blog-s…; Ted Chiang, buzzfeednews.com/article/tedchi…)
Here's a little-appreciated fact about podcast feeds: they're just RSS feeds with "enclosures," where the "enclosure" is a http link to any MP3, anywhere on the internet.
That means you can create podcast feeds of literally any publicly downloadable MP3 in the world. I do this all the time: when I appear on someone else's podcast, I push that MP3 out in my own feed.
The tantalizing possibility here is for an anthology feed, like "Here are five podcasts that (say) @stephenfry enjoyed this week" (ZOMG would I listen to that). Fry could just paste the MP3 URLs of his top five into a suitably configured Wordpress form and away we go.
There's an interesting parallel between the record industry's experience with file-sharing services and the GOP's experience with public sector unions.
Back in 1999, there was Napster, and it had a CEO, and venture capital, and a business plan. Napster's pitch to the labels was "Just tell us how many zeroes to put on the end of the check to get legit, we just polled our users and they'll pay $15/month"
But @RIAA killed Napster, and then successive generations of file-sharing platforms; each "victory" begat more decentralized -- and less label-friendly -- platforms. It was like breeding antibiotic resistant bacteria.
If you want to understand the incompleteness of "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product," just go to the movies. We spent $75 on four tickets yesterday and had to watch 35 minutes of ads.
It's much more accurate to say, "In markets that have been cornered by huge, uncompetitive business, you will be treated as an ambulatory wallet to be harvested, regardless of how much you pay.
Tech grew up at the same time that effective antitrust was being eliminated (thanks, Chicago School!), and so tech businesses have matured in a market where competition is optional and there are no limits on size, so they fit the bill.
Here's the thing about the "foreign interference" narrative that bugs me: it seems undeniable that Russian state elements (and quasi-state elements like "patriotic hackers") interfered in the 2016 election
It's also a matter of undisputed historic record that the USA has been doing this for decades (often with consequences that were worse than Trump - imposing Pinochet on Chile; deposing an elected Iranian leader and giving rise to the Ayatollah)
Indeed, both of the Cold War powers have a long history of interfering in the elections of weak, vulnerable states to bring them more firmly into their spheres of influence and/or to neutralize the other superpower's own client states
All right folks, let's talk about zero rating, provisioning, network management, #NetNeutrality and the convenient myth of the "bandwidth hog"
To understand anything, you must first understand that there is no such thing as a private company that builds telcoms infrastructure with its own money. Every telcoms company is the recipient of massive public subsidies.
That's because any company that had to buy the right to every foot of sidewalk, every mile of transnational railtrack-trench, piecemeal, on the open market, would spend a trillion dollars and still never be done.
Had an eye-opening talk with a bank teller yesterday whose nephews went into the business; they (juniors) were under constant pressure...
...to convince friends/family to open accounts to meet quotas. So bad they ended up pressuring vulnerable/elderly relatives into...
...signing up for expensive products. Her mother-in-law is facing collections agencies who want to raid her Social Security because...
