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pluralistic

@pluralistic@mamot.fr

By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)
@doctorow.

Archived at pluralistic.net

I post long threads. If you don't like these in your timeline but want to read them, I suggest unfollowing me here and subscribing to my RSS, or my newsletter, or any of my various long-form feeds. Links at https://pluralistic.net.

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pluralistic, to random
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Today's threads (a thread)

Inside: How Amazon makes everything you buy more expensive, no matter where you buy it; and more!

Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/26/greedflation/

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pluralistic,
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Tonight (Apr 25) at 7PM I'll be in for the launch of my new novel, Red Team Blues, at Books, hosted by . Please come and say hi!

https://www.mystgalaxy.com/event/42523Doctorow

Tomorrow (Apr 26), you can catch me in at Dark Delicacies at 6PM:

https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2873/Wed%2C_Apr_26th_6pm%3A_Red_Team_Blues%3A_A_Martin_Hench_Novel_HB.html#

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pluralistic,
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How Amazon makes everything you buy more expensive, no matter where you buy it: Most Favored Nation is my least favorite scam.

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/110260912605591851

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pluralistic, to random
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Amazon is very proud of its : at first, the company offered subsidies to customers, which lured in sellers. Then, it demanded that those sellers lower their prices, which lured in more customers. With more customers, more sellers piled in. Faster and faster, the flywheel spins, creating the :

https://fourweekmba.com/amazon-flywheel/

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pluralistic, to random
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Today's threads (a thread)

Inside: How Goldman Sachs's "tax-loss harvesting" lets the ultra-rich rake in billions tax-free; Happy Independent Bookstore Day; and more!

Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/24/tax-loss-harvesting/

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pluralistic, to random
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A Collective Bargain: Workplace democracy is a training ground for true national democracy

https://doctorow.medium.com/a-collective-bargain-a48925f944fe

pluralistic, to random
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Competition is just a click (and $45b) away
https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1328941/download

> pays $45 billion a year for contracts to lock out rivals, signing deals with “Apple, LG, Motorola, and Samsung; major U.S. wireless carriers such as AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon; and browser developers such as Mozilla, Opera, and UCWeb— to secure default status for its general search engine and, in many cases, to specifically prohibit Google’s counterparties from dealing with Google’s competitors.”

pluralistic,
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buys an entire EVERY SINGLE YEAR to make sure we don't ever use its competitors' products.

pluralistic, to random
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Does anyone have a recommendation for a tool or web app that can ingest a @Kickstarter survey results spreadsheet and then spit out custom reports, e.g. "Email addresses for everyone whose reward or add-on includes a specific item, who completed a survey since my last d/l"?

pluralistic, to random
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My next novel is Red Team Blues, a grabby thriller about how finance curdled the dream of tech as a force for human thriving. It comes out in a matter of days, and to get you ready for that release, I've been serializing the first chapter all week - and today, I wrap up the series.

--

If you'd like an essay-formatted 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:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/21/bondage-fees/#henched

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pluralistic, to random
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Versus : Are the Serpents in Our Garden of Ethical Sharing

https://doctorow.medium.com/commafuckers-versus-the-commons-4e8dcdcf7dee

pluralistic, to random
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Today's threads (a thread)

Inside: Kickstarting the Red Team Blues audiobook, which Amazon won't sell; and more!

Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/21/anti-finance-financial-thriller/

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pluralistic, to random
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Red Team Blues is my next novel, a anti-finance finance ; it's a major title for my publishers Tor Books and Head of Zeus, and it's swept the trade press with starred reviews all 'round. Despite all that, will not sell the . In fact, Audible won't sell any of my audiobooks. Instead, I have to independently produce them and sell them through Kickstarter:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-another-audiobook-that-amazon-wont-sell

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pluralistic, to random
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Today's threads (a thread)

Inside: Podcasting "Gig Work Is the Opposite of Steampunk"; and more!

Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/19/love-the-machine/

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pluralistic, to Signal
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They’re still trying to ban

https://doctorow.medium.com/theyre-still-trying-to-ban-cryptography-33aa668dc602

Call this the “enforcement nexus” — for a government to enforce a law, it needs something to seize. Governments have broad latitude to seize things and people within their territorial borders (though this is not absolute, as I’ll discuss below). But when it comes to conduct outside a government’s territory, enforcement depends upon the cooperation of another government — this is why so many crime dramas turn on a desperate dash for countries that don’t have extradition treaties. Governments can project enforcement power into any territory that will allow it to seize the people or property of its adversaries. When the Argentinian government defaulted on its bonds, it failed to reckon with the fact that its US dollar holdings were stashed in the US Federal Reserve Bank in New York. That meant that the vulture capitalists seeking to squeeze Argentina could argue their case in their home court in the USA, seeking a judgment that could be enforced domestically — that is, by seizing the Argentinian government’s assets held on US soil.
National firewalls are everywhere today. Sometimes, they’re sold as turnkey solutions — by both Chinese and western firms — to poor countries with very little technical capacity of their own. Spy agencies from large, powerful countries love it when poor countries install foreign-made national firewalls, as these are key to “third-party collection” (when a spy agency taps into another spy agency’s files) and “fourth-party collection” (when a spy agency taps into another spy agency that has tapped into another spy-agency’s files). As national firewalls proliferate, so too do enforcement nexuses. After Edward Snowden revealed that US tech giants were allowing US spy agencies to plunder their user data, the EU imposed a (perfectly reasonable) data localization regulation that required US tech companies to keep Europeans’ data on servers within the EU (this regulation remains contentious and fragile). The EU doesn’t have a regional or national firewall, so tech giants who don’t want to comply with the regulation could simply withdraw their sales offices and engineering departments and lobbyists from the EU and ignore the rule — at least to the extent that they could convince US courts not to enforce EU judgments against them. But the EU has other enforcement nexuses it could rely upon. It could order European banks and payment processors to block payments to tech firms that ignore the localization rule. Payment processing remains a
Enter American culture-war nonsense. In Texas, they want to ban websites that explain how to get an abortion, as well as sites that ship the pills for a medication abortion. In Florida, they want to force bloggers who write about the state government to pay a fee and register with the state, prohibiting anonymous commentary about the state legislature and its actions. Florida has also required that online providers cease permitting their users to display pronouns other than the ones they were assigned at birth. Of course, online services have no way to know what pronouns any of their users were assigned at birth, so sites like Github are complying with Florida law by simply not displaying pronouns to Floridian users. The biggest barrier to enforcing these laws is the US Constitution, which these laws assuredly violate. It’s entirely possible that a lower court will uphold these laws. It’s conceivable that an appeals court will do so as well. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that the current Supreme Court — illegitimately stacked with far-right partisan hacks lacking any shred of principle — will follow suit. But it’s far from a sure thing. It’s not even clear whether the legislatures that passed these laws and the governors who signed them want them to be enforced. After all, if these policies do come into force, large numbers of corporations are likely to shutter their offices and move out of state (especially in Florida, an increas

pluralistic, to random
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The classic trilemma goes: "Fast, cheap or good, pick any two." The Moderator's Trilemma goes, "Large, diverse userbase; centralized platforms; don't anger users - pick any two." The Moderator's Trilemma is introduced in "Moderating the Fediverse: Content Moderation on Distributed Social Media," a superb paper from @arozenshtein U of Minnesota Law, forthcoming in the journal Free Speech Law, available as a prepub on SSRN:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4213674#maincontent

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pluralistic,
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By moving subsidiarity into technical architecture, rather than human policy, the fediverse can move from antagonism (the "zero-sum destructiveness" that dominates current online debate) to , where your opponent isn't an enemy - they are a "political adversary":

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/article/the-administrative-agon

Here, Rozenshtein cites @320x200 and @rra's "Seven Theses On The Fediverse And The Becoming Of Floss":

https://test.roelof.info/seven-theses.html

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pluralistic,
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> For this to happen, different ideologies must be allowed to materialize via different channels and platforms. An important prerequisite is that the goal of political consensus must be abandoned and replaced with conflictual consensus...

So your chosen Mastodon server "may have rules that are far more restrictive than those of the major social media platforms."

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pluralistic,
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But the whole Fediverse "is substantially more speech protective than are any of the major social media platforms, since no user or content can be permanently banned from the network and anyone is free to start an instance that communicates both with the major Mastodon instances and the peripheral, shunned instances."

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pluralistic,
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A good case-study here is , a Fediverse server by and for far-right cranks, conspiratorialists and white nationalists. Most Fediverse servers have defederated (that is, blocked) Gab, but Gab is still there, and Gab has actually defederated from many of the remaining servers, leaving its users to speak freely - but only to people who want to hear what they have to say.

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pluralistic,
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This is true meaning of "freedom of speech isn't freedom of reach." Willing listeners aren't blocked from willing speakers - but you don't have the right to be heard by people who don't want to talk to you:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

Fediverse servers are (thus far) nonprofits or hobbyist sites, and don't have the same incentives to drive "engagement" to maximize the opportunties to show advertisements.

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pluralistic,
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Fediverse applications are frequently designed to be - that is, to prevent spectacular spreads of information across the system.

It's possible - likely, even - that future Fediverse servers will be operated by commercial operators seeking to maximize attention in order to maximize revenue.

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pluralistic,
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But the users of these servers will still have the freedom of exit that they enjoy on today's volunteer-run servers - and so commercial servers will have to either curb their worst impulses or lose their users to better systems.

I'll note here that this is a progressive story of the benefits of competition - not the capitalist's fetishization of competition for its own sake, but rather, competition as a means of disciplining capital.

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pluralistic,
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It can be readily complimented by discipline through regulation - for example, extending today's burgeoning crop of data-protection laws to require servers to furnish users with exports of their follow/follower data so they can go elsewhere.

There's another dimension to decentralized content moderation that exit and voice don't address - moderating "harmful" content. Some kinds of harm can be mitigated through exit.

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pluralistic,
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If a server tolerates hate speech or harassment, you can go elsewhere, preferably somewhere that blocks your previous server.

But there are other kinds of speech that must not exist - either because they are illegal or because they enact harms that can't be mitigated by going elsewhere (or both). The most spectacular version of this is (), a modern term-of-art to replace the more familiar "child porn."

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pluralistic,
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Rozenshtein says there are "reasons for optimism" when it comes to the Fediverse's ability to police this content, though as he unpacked this idea, I found it much weaker than his other material. Rozenshtein proposes that Fediverse hosts could avail themselves of , 's automated scanning tool, to block and purge themselves of CSAM, while noting that this is "hardly foolproof."

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