"Capitalists don't want market economies, where they have to compete with one another, eroding their margins and profits – they want a planned economy, like Amazon, where Party Secretary Bezos and his commissars tell merchants what they can sell and tell us what we must pay."
"New Zealand is far, far too small to bring the likes of Netflix, Google and Facebook to heel. California for example, is said to be the fifth largest economy in the world. Yet Meta and Google are threatening to cut off news items (and searches) about California if the state proceeds with... legislation [that] would require the social media giants to pay a “journalism useage fee” for linking to news sites based in California."
This is why a tax on digital advertising makes way more sense than any futile attempts to allow selected websites to charge certain other huge websites for links. Better Public Media pointed this out in their submission on the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill.
But this is just first aid. As #CoryDoctorow has pointed out, what the public really need from our legislators is robust regulation of the digital ad industry, with a focus on protecting privacy and ensuring fair competition.
‘‘‘Left’ and ‘right’ mean the same thing today that they’ve meant since the French Revolution. Ask someone, ‘What’s more important: property rights, or human rights?’ If they answer: ‘Property rights are human rights,’ they are on the right.’’
"You can deplore starvation and recoil in horror from the prospect of someone dying of exposure on the streets of your city, but if you take the side of the owner of a vacant home over the right of the person sleeping on its doorstep, you’re taking the side of property rights over human rights. You value both human rights and property rights – but you value property rights more than human rights."
Cory explains why earlier in the piece. The implication is that a socialist society can have rents and profits, as long as wages reliably trump both in their share of the income of business.
@pluralistic I purchased your 18 books on Humble Bundle 🙂 I'll starting reading them in the next weeks. I also read your Information Doesn't Want To Be Free and I liked it so much, and one of my friend is your fan 🙂 I've known of you from him. Thanks a lot. #book#humblebundle#reading#CoryDoctorow
@junkman@press_rouch@pluralistic I have great respect and admiration for #CoryDoctorow and enjoyed RTB, but to this 71-year old, Martin Hench reads like he could be 50 or there abouts. He should at least be plagued with an enlarged prostate, geriatric presbyopia, or the need for a daily nap.
So, if you've read my other book reviews this year, you'll be familiar with the name Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic). If not, become familiar! His work (published in books, delivered by RSS feed or Xitter, or appearing on various websites) is always entertaining and informative.
The infotaining nature of his writing is clearly evident in his latest book: The Bezzle. I backed the Kickstarter that successfully funded an audiobook version, although audiobooks aren't my thing and I read it in eBook form on my Pixel 6a. It's the second Martin Hench book, a period piece starting in the dotcom boom era, years before the first Hench book, Red Team Blues. Here we see a less established Martin (sans tour bus) stepping unwittingly into the attention of a sleazy robber baron. Events spiral wildly away from a burger-supply Ponzi scheme (no, really) as the book progresses.
The book structure is a little odd; it felt like the pelt of two-and-a-half Last Week Tonight With John Oliver episodes stitched onto the bones of a modern-day Grisham novel. Here the blend of entertaining and informative comes to bear; you know you're being educated as you read, but it's enjoyable, so it doesn't feel like a lecture. There's lessons about MLM investment traps, the hideous state of the California prison-for-profit system, unfair music royalty practises, and more.
The Bezzle was a quick and excellent read, and I'll be delving more into Doctorow's back catalogue as the year progesses, thanks to a tasty Humble Bundle deal that's still active as I write.
If you're running a business, you can either invest at being good at your business, or good at Google SEO. Choose the former and your customers will love you – but they won't be able to find you, thanks to the people who choose the latter. And if you're going to invest in top-notch SEO, why bother investing in quality at all? https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/05/the-map-is-not-the-territory/
"That's why the only serious competitor to Google is Bing, another Big Tech company (Bing is also the primary source of results on Duckduckgo, which is why DDG sometimes makes exceptions for Microsoft's privacy-invading tracking)."
Hey kiwis, if you know a market fundamentalist who still thinks commercialising healthcare makes it more "efficient", please get them to read this;
"... PE-backed hospital chain Steward Health, a company that bought and looted hospitals up and down the country, starving them of everything from heart valves to prescription paper, ripping off suppliers, doctors and nurses, and callously exposing patients to deadly risk."
"The Nuremberg trials are famous for the Nazi officers who insisted that they were 'just following order' but were nonetheless executed for their crimes. 24 Farben executives were also tried at Nuremberg, where they offered a very different defense: 'We had a fiduciary duty to our shareholders to maximize our profits'. 19 of the 24 were acquitted on that basis."
<sarcasm> Yes, the last thing we want is democratic governments funding the public interest work of journalists, without fear or favour, even when they work for commercial publishers. What we want is news media companies financially dependent on funding from anti-democratic tech corporations. </sarcasm> 🤦♂️
The solution is not to force the online advertising oligopoly to fund the news media, but to ban the monopolistic practices that allow them to suck up all the ad oxygen in the first place. Starting with surveillance ads.
The future AI #callcenters will condition folks to get used to having to repeat statements, hearing mispronounced names (of your Credit Union Bank, etc)
When a REAL ⭕️scammer calls, No RED flags go up from your Social Engineering warning skills, you just assume the AI is making some data errors
The influencer that the internet needs - Cory Doctorow (find him at @pluralistic, pluralistic.net, craphound.com) - is back in my reading list with a second book for 2024. I backed the Kickstarter for the audiobook of the sequel to Red Team Blues (The Bezzle, review coming as soon as it's released!), choosing to take ebooks of Red Team Blues and The Bezzle rather than the audiobook as I like to read rather than listen. Cory chooses to Kickstart his books because Amazon forces reader-hostile DRM onto his works, and in his infinite wisdom, he wants his readers to be able to consume his content in they way they see fit, not in the way a rapacious tech giant demands. It's a publishing strategy that's worked out well for him so far. I wish more authors had the same opportunity to avoid being ensnared in the Amazon flywheel which operates to the detriment of both content creators and content consumers. (For more on this, read Chokepoint Capitalism by Cory and Rebecca Giblin, reviewed by me as Book 1 of my 2024 reading list!)
But I digress. What's Red Team Blues about? It's a hardboiled tale by way of Silicon Valley, where the protagonist just wants to do one more job before a well-earned retirement... and you can guess how well that goes. There's cryptocurrency and financial shenanigans that 67-yo Martin Hench is ably equipped to deal with, even if the blowback from his investigations take him well out of his comfort zone (a tricked-out tour bus named The Unsalted Hash). Hench is good with the ladies and knows his way around the dark corners of the internet like a Chandleresque gumshoe knows which bar to find a lead. There's social commentary that spans a gamut of problems with Big Tech and those left behind when the money floats to the top.
The writing leads you along at a brisk pace - I read this over a few days easily - but at times I found I could see Cory behind the veil of two characters having a particularly erudite and wordy discourse about computing or crypto. I pushed this aside when I realised that this was probably a case where a very intelligent author was supplying dialogue for a pair of equally intelligent characters, and perhaps I was just a little dumber than everyone involved.
I can't wait for the release of The Bezzle; it's not yet on sale, but you can get a copy of Red Team Blues from Cory's webstore at craphound.com/shop/ while you wait for the sequel's release!
"Federations are (potentially) good! But federalism has a vulnerability: the autonomy of the federated states means that they can be played against each other by national or transnational entities, like corporations. This doesn't mean that it's impossible to regulate powerful entities within a federation – but it means that federal regulation needs to account for the risk of jurisdiction-shopping."
"#Apple is about to get a nasty shock. For one thing, the DMA allows wronged parties to start their search for justice in the European federal court system – bypassing the Irish regulators and courts. For another, there is a global movement to check corporate power, and because the tech companies do the same kinds of fuckery in every territory, regulators are able to collaborate across borders to take them down."
"... the Political Editor at Stuff is Luke Malpass who was a policy wonk for the NZ Initiative, one of the connected free market think tanks Atlas Network feeds."
... and the state-corporate news media take great offence at the notion they're biased, and can't understand why less than 50% of people now trust them. As #CoryDoctorow put it, in some cases, the swivel-eyed loons have a point;