Cory Doctorow

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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Last Notes

2024-06-21 01:28:29

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Recent appearances:
* Living Your Principles
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTfqxF5KyCc
* Reimagining the Internet
https://publicinfrastructure.org/podcast/102-cory-doctorow-enshittification/
* Circulating ideas
https://circulatingideas.com/2024/06/11/261-the-bezzle-by-cory-doctorow-summer-reading-spectacular/
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2024-06-21 01:25:26

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How to design a tech regulation: A modest proposal for a transatlantic self-equilibriating system.
https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/112651374338215256
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2024-06-21 01:23:44

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: How to design a tech regulation; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/20/scalesplaining/
#Pluralistic
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2024-06-21 00:56:05

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Image:
Noah Wulf (modified)
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thunderbirds_at_Attention_Next_to_Thunderbird_1_-_Aviation_Nation_2019.jpg
CC BY-SA 4.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en
eof/

2024-06-21 00:55:15

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It would be very on-brand for the EU to create the DMA and tell tech companies how they *must* operate, and for the USA to simply withdraw the state's protection from the Big Tech companies and let smaller companies try their luck at hacking new features into the big companies' servers without the government getting involved.
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2024-06-21 00:54:44

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In other words, if Facebook can't shut down Ethan Zuckerman's browser automation tool in the courts, and if they're sincerely worried that a browser automation tool will uncheck its user interface buttons so quickly that it crashes the server, all it has to do is offer an official "unsubscribe all" button and no one will use Zuckerman's browser automation tool.
35/

2024-06-21 00:53:53

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These tactics have a long and honorable history, but they have been slowly choked out of existence with a thicket of IP rights, like the IP rights that allow Facebook to shut down browser automation tools, which Ethan Zuckerman is suing to nullify:
https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/
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2024-06-21 00:53:02

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Given that the tech industry is so concentrated, it's going to be *very* hard for us to define standard interop interfaces that don't end up advantaging the tech companies. Standards bodies are *extremely* easy for big industry players to capture:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/30/weak-institutions/
28/

2024-06-21 00:52:25

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Figuring out whether a platform will continue to forward your messages to and from the people you left there is a *much* simpler technical matter than agreeing on what harassment is, whether something is harassment by that definition, and whether the company was negligent in permitting harassment.
But as much as I like the DMA's interop rule, I think it is badly incomplete.
27/

2024-06-21 00:51:58

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Then we have to figure out whether something one user did to another satisfies that definition. Finally, we have to determine whether the platform took reasonable steps to detect and prevent the harassment.
Each step of this is a huge lift, especially that last one, since to a first approximation, everyone who understands a given VLOP's server infrastructure is a partisan, scalesplaining engineer on the VLOP's payroll.
25/

2024-06-17 18:24:02

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Bankruptcy is very, very good; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/17/lovilee-jubilee/
#Pluralistic
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2024-06-17 17:52:25

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If the farmers succeed, everyone can eat, and that means they can do all the other things, all the not-farming work of your society.
To farm successfully, you need credit. Farmers enter the growing season in need of inputs: seed, fertilizer, labor; they need still more labor during the harvest. Without some way to acquire these inputs *before* the farmer has a crop that can pay for them, there can be no crop.
8/

2024-06-17 06:46:02

"We do not guarantee steaks cooked medium well or above"
https://static.mamot.fr/media_attachments/files/112/630/136/996/138/853/original/e002d0658d029bf8.jpg

2024-06-15 19:10:01

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They describe how redlining - the formalization of anti-Black racism in New Deal housing policy - led to the ruin of Toledo's once-thriving Dorr Street neighborhood, a "Black Wall Street" where a Black middle class lived and thrived. New Deal policies starved the neighborhood of funds, then ripped it in two with a freeway, sacrificing it and the people who lived in it.
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2024-06-15 19:05:36

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When that happens, we're going to have to decide what to do about products created through mass-scale privacy violations, like Clearview AI - but also all of OpenAI's products, Google's AI, Facebook's AI, Microsoft's AI, and so on. Do we offer them a deal like the one Clearview's angling for in Illinois, fining them an affordable sum and grandfathering in the products they built by violating our rights?
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2024-06-15 19:03:26

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I've loved *Inferno* since middle-school, when I read the John Ciardi translation, principally because I'd just read Niven and Pournelle's weird (and politically odious) (but cracking) sf novel of the same name:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(Niven_and_Pournelle_novel)
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2024-06-14 21:02:25

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You know what? I bet they'll sell this lie. It won't be the first time they've convinced Serious People in charge of billions of dollars and/or lives to ignore that all-important maxim, "When someone tells you who they are and you get fooled again, shame on you."
39/

2024-06-14 20:52:58

As the old saying goes, "When someone tells you who they are and you get fooled again, shame on you." That goes double for Microsoft, especially when it comes to security promises.
--
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/2024/06/14/patch-tuesday/#fool-me-twice-we-dont-get-fooled-again
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2024-06-13 22:33:18

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The hospital system responded by "upcoding' patients: if you showed up with a broken leg and a history of coronary disease, they would code you as a heart patient *and* someone who needed a cast. They'd collect both lump sums, slap a cast on you, and wheel you out the door:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4195137/
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2024-06-13 22:32:41

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For members of the "efficient market" cult, reality's stubborn refusal to behave the way it does in their thought experiments is a personal affront. Panged by cognitive dissonance, the cult members insist that any market failures in the real world are illusions caused by not doing capitalism hard enough. When deregulation and markets fail, the answer is *always* more deregulation and more markets.
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2024-06-13 22:30:59

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Capitalism's most dogmatic zealots have a mystical belief in the power of markets to "efficiently allocate" goods and services. For them, the process by which goods and services are offered and purchased performs a kind of vast, distributed computation that "discovers the price" of everything.
2/

2024-06-11 15:36:14

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Robin Sloan's "Moonbound"; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/11/penumbraverse/
#Pluralistic
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2024-06-10 15:44:33

Let's take a sec here and notice something *genuinely great* happening in the US government: the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau's stunning, unbroken streak of *major*, muscular victories over the forces of corporate corruption, *with* the backing of the Supreme Court (yes, *that* Supreme Court), and which is only speeding up!
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2024-06-08 13:31:57

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On June 20th, I'll be in Oakland, CA to keynote the @npub16aa…hxlh Awards:
https://locusmag.com/2024-locus-awards-weekend/
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2024-06-08 13:29:15

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When America threw off the Gilded Age, we charted two courses to prosperity for working people: labor unions and home ownership. The ruling class cannily convinced us to rely solely on the latter. The housing emergency raging across the country is the inevitable result of that decision:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/
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2024-06-06 20:41:42

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Recent appearances:
* Capitalist Realism vs. Science Fiction
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz-iHWzqGK0
* All Tech is Human
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKThzsYGjEQ
* RISD Debates in AI keynote:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdSEcmplaDs
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2024-06-05 23:37:52

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Image:
Cryteria (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg
CC BY 3.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
eof/

2024-06-05 23:37:46

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This weekend (June 7–9), I'm in Amherst, New York to keynote the 25th Annual Media Ecology Association Convention and accept the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity:
https://media-ecology.org/convention
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2024-06-05 23:37:39

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Someone needs to read some Adam Smith to Chairman Powell: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
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2024-06-05 23:37:22

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But of course, interest rates are inflationary: when interest rates go up, it gets more expensive to pay your credit card bills, lease your car, and pay a mortgage. And where we see the price of goods shooting up, there's abundant evidence that this is the result of greedflation - companies jacking up their prices and blaming inflation.
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2024-06-05 23:37:09

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Not every federal agency has gotten the message, though. Trump's Fed Chairman, Jerome Powell - whom Biden kept on the job - has been hiking interest rates in a bid to reduce our purchasing power by making millions of Americans poorer and/or unemployed. He's doing this to fight inflation, on the theory that inflation is being cause by us being too well-off, and therefore trying to buy more goods than are for sale.
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2024-06-05 23:36:48

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We are *desperately* overdue for a new consumer privacy law, but every time this comes up, the pro-surveillance coalition defeats the effort. but as people who care about conspiratorialism, kids' mental health, spying by foreign adversaries, phishing and fraud, and surveillance pricing all come together, they will be an unbeatable coalition:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy
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2024-06-05 23:34:54

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For example, Plexure boasts that it can predict what day a given customer is getting paid on and use that information to raise prices on all the goods the customer shops for on that day, on the assumption that you're willing to pay more when you've got a healthy bank balance.
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2024-06-05 23:34:41

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These companies use the enshittification playbook to trap you into using their apps. First, they offer discounts to customers who order through their apps - then, once the customers are fully committed to shopping via app, they introduce surveillance pricing and start to jack up the prices.
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2024-06-05 23:34:28

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One of these companies is Plexure, partly owned by McDonald's, which provides the surveillance-pricing back-ends for McD's, Ikea, 7-Eleven, White Castle and others - basically, any time a company gives you a hard-sell to order via its apps rather than its storefronts or its website, you should assume you're getting twiddled, hard.
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2024-06-05 23:34:21

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Companies know this, which is why surveillance pricing happens in secret. Over and over, every day, you are being gouged through surveillance pricing. The sellers you interact with won't tell you about it, so to root out this practice, we have to look at the B2B sales-pitches from the companies that sell twiddling tools.
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2024-06-05 23:34:03

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That shielding is hugely important. The public *hates* surveillance pricing. Time and again, through all of American history, there have been massive and consequential revolts against the idea that every price should be different for every buyer. The Interstate Commerce Commission was founded after Grangers rose up against the rail companies' use of "personalized pricing" to gouge farmers.
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2024-06-05 23:33:02

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The grocer whose e-ink shelf-tags flicker and reprice their offerings every few seconds can be collectively observed by people who are in the same place and can start a conversation about, say, whether to come back that night a throw a brick through the store's window to express their displeasure. A digital transaction is a lonely thing, atomized and intrinsically shielded from a public response.
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2024-06-05 23:31:35

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Apps are a twiddler's playground. Not only can they "customize" every interaction you have with them, but they can block you (or researchers seeking to help you) from recording and analyzing the app's activities. Worse: digital transactions are *intimate*, contained to the palm of your hand.
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2024-06-05 23:29:23

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It's a form of "empiricism washing": if computers are working in the abstract realm of pure numbers, they're just moving the objective facts of the quantitative realm into the squishy, imperfect qualitative world. Davies' interview on Trashfuture is *excellent*:
https://trashfuturepodcast.podbean.com/e/fire-sale-at-the-accountability-store-feat-dan-davies/
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2024-06-05 23:29:14

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Sticking a rent-gouging computer between landlords and the people whose lives they ruin is a classic "accountability sink," as described in Dan Davies' new book "The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - and How The World Lost its Mind":
https://profilebooks.com/work/the-unaccountability-machine/
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2024-06-05 23:29:05

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But he came back to serve as Realpage's "principal scientist" - the architect of a nationwide scheme to make rental housing *vastly* more expensive. For Roper, the barrier to low rents was empathy: landlords felt stirrings of shame when they made shelter unaffordable to working people. Roper called these people "idiots" who sentimentality "costs the whole system."
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2024-06-05 23:28:01

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For forty years, pro-monopoly cheerleaders insisted that we could allow companies to grow to unimaginable scale and still prevent cheating. They passed rules banning companies from explicitly forming agreements to rig prices. About ten seconds later, new middlemen popped up offering "information brokerages" that helped companies rig prices without talking to one another.
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2024-06-05 23:27:46

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This is Dieselgate times a billion: VW rigged its cars to detect when they were undergoing emissions testing and switch to a less polluting, more compliant mode. But when they were on the open road, they spewed lethal quantities of toxic gas, killing people by the thousands. Computers don't make corporate leaders more evil, but they let evil corporate leaders execute far more complex and nefarious plans.
8/

2024-06-05 23:27:27

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40 years later, nearly every industry is dominated by a handful of companies, and these companies price-gouge us with abandon. Worse, they use their gigantic ripoff winnings to fill war-chests that fund the corruption of democracy, capturing regulators so that they can rip us off even more, while ignoring labor, privacy and environmental law and ducking taxes.
6/

2024-06-05 23:27:06

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Starting in the neoliberal era - Carter, then Reagan - we changed our tune. We *liked* big business. A business that got big was doing something *right*. It was perverse to shut down our best companies. Instead, we'd simply ban big companies from rigging prices. This was called the "consumer welfare" theory of antitrust. It was a total failure.
5/

2024-06-05 23:25:49

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Despite being a raving commie loon, Smith's observation was so undeniably true that regulators, policymakers, and economists couldn't help but acknowledge that it was true. The trustbusting era was defined by this idea: if we let the number of companies in a sector get too small, or if we let one or a few companies get too big, they'll eventually start to rig prices.
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2024-06-04 02:47:07

* Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay. Today's progress: 884 words (5023 words total).

2024-05-30 22:36:56

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Silicon Valley is the place where you get rich without creating jobs. It's run by investors who *hate* the idea of paying people. That's why AI is so exciting for Silicon Valley types: it lets them fantasize about making humans obsolete. A company without employees is a company without labor issues, without messy co-determination fights, without any moral consideration for others.
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2024-05-27 18:52:59

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The deaths of Romeo and Juliet were less tragic than the death of the yogurt you had for breakfast. That yogurt was alive and now it's dead, whereas R&J never lived, never died, and *don't matter*:
https://locusmag.com/2014/11/cory-doctorow-stories-are-a-fuggly-hack/
Hijacking a stranger's empathic response is intrinsically adversarial. While storytelling is a benign activity, its underlying mechanic is *extremely dangerous*.
5/

2024-05-24 23:02:25

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For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel *The Lost Cause* (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-lost-cause-4
eof/

2024-05-24 22:58:18

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40 years ago, these moral sentiments were conveniently set aside by pro-monopoly economists, who developed the "consumer welfare" theory of antitrust enforcement. Under this theory, monopolies were treated as evidence of "efficiency": any time you saw a monopoly in the wild, it meant that you'd found a business that was so good, everyone chose to patronize them to the exclusion of all others.
3/

2024-05-24 18:49:27

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@npub1w68…7fc6 it got compressed - here's the original:
https://craphound.com/static.html

2024-05-24 18:38:48

I can't get a definitive answer on whether TV static (see attached) constitutes a strobe effect that could endanger people with photosensitive epilepsy. Anyone know? PEAT (the only tool that measures this, seemingly?!) is Windows-only and won't run under WINE.
https://static.mamot.fr/media_attachments/files/112/497/047/895/985/833/original/33369d4b2e8e06d7.mp4

2024-05-23 15:18:37

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My ebooks and audiobooks (from Tor Books, Head of Zeus, McSweeneys, Beacon, Verso and others) are for sale all over the net, but I sell 'em too, and when you buy 'em from me, I earn twice as much and you get books with no DRM and no license "agreements."
https://craphound.com/shop/
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2024-05-20 20:09:35

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Upcoming appearances:
* Media Ecology Association keynote (Amherst, NY), Jun 6-9
https://media-ecology.org/convention
* HOPE XV, Jul 14 (Queens, NY)
https://www.hope.net/talks.html
* American Association of Law Libraries keynote (Chicago), Jul 21
https://www.aallnet.org/conference/agenda/keynote-speaker/
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2024-05-20 19:38:01

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This is why labor power matters, and why a fusion of American labor and social justice movements matters - and why an international fusion of a labor-social justice coalition is our best hope for a habitable planet and a decent lives for our families.
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2024-05-20 19:37:54

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The problem is that these blue-collar voters are atomized. They no longer meet in union halls - they belong to gun clubs affiliated with the NRA. There are enough people who are a) undecided and b) union members in these swing states to defeat Trump.
40/

2024-05-20 19:35:24

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A key recent example is Mercedes, part of the Daimler global octopus. Mercedes' home turf is Germany, which boasts some of the strongest autoworker unions in the world. In the USA, Mercedes - like other German auto giants - preferentially manufactures its cars in the South, America's "onshore-offshore" crime havens, where labor laws are both virtually nonexistent and largely unenforced.
31/

2024-05-18 17:20:25

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My ebooks and audiobooks (from Tor Books, Head of Zeus, McSweeneys, Beacon, Verso and others) are for sale all over the net, but I sell 'em too, and when you buy 'em from me, I earn twice as much and you get books with no DRM and no license "agreements."
https://craphound.com/shop/
11/
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2024-05-17 17:05:01

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Yesterday's threads: Utah's getting some of America's best broadband; and more!
https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/112451787428199602
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2024-05-17 16:51:15

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In other words: "Die a disillusioned jetpack fan or live long enough to become the fraudster who cooked up the jetpack lie you despise."
25/

2024-05-17 16:51:00

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Cyberpunk was a warning, not a suggestion. Please, I beg you, stop building the fucking torment nexus:
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/torment-nexus
These techno-billionaires profess to be fulfilling a broken promise, but surely they know that the promises were made by liars - showmen using parlor tricks to sell the impossible.
23/

2024-05-17 16:50:21

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The AI version of this is that if we just keep throwing orders of magnitude more training data and compute at the stochastic parrot, it will eventually come to life and become our superintelligent, omnipotent techno-genie. In other words, if we just keep breeding these horses to run faster and faster, eventually one of our prize mares will give birth to a locomotive:
https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/
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2024-05-17 16:49:59

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The AI grocery store where you just pick things up and put them in your shopping basket without using the checkout turns out to be a call-center full of low-waged Indian workers desperately squinting at videos of you, trying to figure out what you put in your bag:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/31/neural-interface-beta-tester/#tailfins
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2024-05-17 16:48:02

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What's more, they played a double game: all the public enthusiasm they manufactured with their carefully stage-managed, canned demos was designed to help them win more defense contracts to keep their dream alive. Ultimately, Uncle Sucker declined to continue funding their boondoggle, and the demos petered out, and the "promise" of a jetpack was broken.
12/

2024-05-17 16:45:46

As a science fiction writer, I find it weird that some sf tropes - like space colonization - have become culture-war touchstones. You know, that whole "we were promised jetpacks" thing.
--
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/2024/05/17/fake-it-until-you-dont-make-it/#twenty-one-seconds
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2024-05-16 18:56:42

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Yesterday's threads: Even if you think AI search could be good, it won't be good; and more!
https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/112447081413546378
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2024-05-16 16:55:44

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Image:
4028mdk09 (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rote_LED_Fiberglasleuchte.JPG
CC BY-SA 3.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en
eof/

2024-05-16 16:55:20

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That's not the only vast, impersonal, implacable force that Musk claims he can best with his incredible reality-distortion field. Musk also claims that he can somehow add so many cars to the road that he will *end traffic* - in other words, he will best *geometry* too:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money
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2024-05-16 16:53:36

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Satellite can make sense for an RV or a boat or remote scientific station.
But wireless services are *orders of magnitude* slower than fiber. With satellite service, you share your bandwidth with an entire region or even a state. If there's only a couple of users in your satellite's footprint, you might get great service, but when your carrier adds a thousand more customers, your connection is sliced into a thousand pieces.
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2024-05-16 16:50:11

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2. Frontier knew that it could make *a billion dollars* in profit over a decade by investing in fiber build-out, but it chose not to, because stock analysts will downrank any carrier that made capital investments that took more than five years to mature.
11/

2024-05-16 16:47:41

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In a sense, the people who say we can't pull wires anymore are right: these are relics of a lost civilization. Specifically, electrification and later, universal telephone service was accomplished through massive federal grants under the New Deal - grants that were typically made to either local governments or non-profit co-operatives who got everyone in town connected to these essential modern utilities.
4/

2024-05-16 16:47:18

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This broadband service is, of course, delivered via fiber optic cable. *Of course it is*. Fiber is vastly superior to all other forms of broadband delivery, including satellites, but also cable and DSL. Fiber caps out at 100tb/s, while cable cans out at 50gb/s - that is, fiber is *1,000* times faster:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/why-fiber-vastly-superior-cable-and-5g
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2024-05-15 22:52:54

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Even if you think AI search could be good, it won't be good: It's just too goddamned easy to cheat.
https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/112447022069996461
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2024-05-15 22:40:18

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Google is fearless. It doesn't fear losing your business, or being punished by regulators, or being mired in guerrilla warfare with rival engineers. It certainly doesn't fear its workers.
Making search worse is good for Google. Reducing search quality increases the number of queries, and thus ads, that each user must make to find their answers:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan
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2024-05-15 22:39:10

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What changed wasn't the character of the leaders of these businesses, nor their capacity to cheat us. What changed was the *consequences* for cheating. When the tech companies merged to monopoly, they ceased to fear losing your business to a competitor.
Google's 90% search market share was attained by bribing everyone who operates a service or platform where you might encounter a search box to connect that box to Google.
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2024-05-13 21:22:24

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But for any company contemplating selling an AI-generated work, the fact that it is born in the public domain presents a substantial hurdle, because anyone else is free to take that work and sell it or give it away.
Whether or not AI "art" will ever be good art isn't what our bosses are thinking about when they pay for AI licenses.
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2024-05-11 12:40:33

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Recent appearances:
* Suur Futuroloogiline Kongress
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hITj793htg&t=398s
* That Word Chat
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miwEy_mACEY
* Come sfuggire al “Merdocene” e costruire un Internet migliore (Torino Biennale Tecnologia)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5NC2EZCYBg
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2024-05-11 12:34:51

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Algorithmic feeds are a twiddler's playground; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/11/for-you/
#Pluralistic
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2024-05-09 11:07:16

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Ostrom described how commons can be wisely managed, over very long timescales, by communities that self-governed. Part of her work concerns how users of a commons must have the ability to exclude bad actors from their shared resources.
When that breaks down, commons *can* fail - because there's always someone who thinks it's fine to shit in the well rather than walk 100 yards to the outhouse.
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2024-05-09 11:02:02

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Get that? If control over a key resource is diffused among the people who rely on it, then (Garrett claims) those people will all behave like selfish assholes, overusing and undermaintaining the commons. It's only when we let someone own that commons and charge rent for its use that (Hardin says) we will get sound management.
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2024-05-09 11:01:29

Fun fact: "The Tragedy Of the Commons" is a hoax created by the white nationalist Garrett Hardin to justify stealing land from colonized people and moving it from collective ownership, "rescuing" it from the inevitable tragedy by putting it in the hands of a private owner, who will care for it properly, thanks to "rational self-interest":
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/04/analytical-democratic-theory/#epistocratic-delusions
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2024-05-07 12:13:11

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@npub14q4…2kk6 Thanks!

2024-05-05 00:53:32

Cyberpunk trifecta
https://static.mamot.fr/media_attachments/files/112/385/271/388/901/610/original/78c86135c009c632.jpg
https://static.mamot.fr/media_attachments/files/112/385/271/471/479/273/original/c9762c4c5d205edf.jpg
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2024-05-04 14:17:26

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Afterwards, our hosts from Harvard Berkman-Klein Center took us to a campus pizza joint/tiki bar for dinner and drinks, and we had a great chat about a great many things. Naturally, we talked about books we loved, and Randall said, "Hey, have you ever read Rosemary Kirstein's *Steerswoman* novels?"
(I hadn't.)
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2024-05-03 12:03:16

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I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel *The Bezzle*! Catch me TONIGHT (May 3) in CALGARY and TOMORROW (May 4) in VANCOUVER. Next is Tartu, Estonia, and beyond!
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/16/narrative-capitalism/#bezzle-tour
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2024-05-03 12:01:55

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My ebooks and audiobooks (from Tor Books, Head of Zeus, McSweeneys, Beacon, Verso and others) are for sale all over the net, but I sell 'em too, and when you buy 'em from me, I earn twice as much and you get books with no DRM and no license "agreements."
https://craphound.com/shop/
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2024-05-03 11:58:53

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I'm coming to Tartu, Estonia!
May 8, 6PM: Prima Vista Literary Festival keynote, "Overcoming the Enshittocene,"
University of Tartu Library (Struwe 1)
May 10, 8AM: Science Fiction Research Association talk, "AI, copyright and creative workers’ labor rights"
Institute of Foreign Languages and Cultures building (Lossi 3, lobby)
May 10, 3PM: A talk for hackers on seizing the means of computation
(University of Tartu Delta Centre, Narva 18, room 1037)
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2024-05-03 11:47:04

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Image:
freezelight (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Spam_wall_-_Flickr_-_freezelight.jpg
CC BY-SA 2.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en
eof/

2024-05-03 11:46:55

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I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel *The Bezzle*! Catch me TONIGHT (May 3) in CALGARY and TOMORROW (May 4) in VANCOUVER. Next is Tartu, Estonia, and beyond!
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/16/narrative-capitalism/#bezzle-tour
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2024-05-03 11:46:32

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Google's response - laying off core developers, outsourcing to low-waged territories with weak labor protections and spending billions on stock buybacks - presents a picture of a company that is too big to care:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi
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2024-05-03 11:46:15

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Google search has a problem. AI botshit is dominating Google's search results, and it's not just in product reviews. Searches for infrastructure code samples are dominated by botshit code generated by Pulumi AI, whose chatbot hallucinates nonexistence AWS features:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/01/pulumi_ai_pollution_of_search/
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2024-05-03 11:46:05

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All of this comes at a price, and it's only incidentally paid by legitimate sites like Housefresh. The real price is borne by all of us, who are funneled by the 90%-market-share search engine into "review" sites that push low quality, high-price products. Housefresh's top budget air purifier costs $79. That's *hundreds of dollars* cheaper than the "budget" pick at other sites, who largely perform *no* original research.
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2024-05-03 11:45:14

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Now, none of this is particularly sophisticated. It doesn't take much discernment to spot when a site is engaged in "site reputation abuse." Presumably, the 12,000 googlers the company fired last year could have been employed to check the top review keyword results manually every couple of days and permaban any site caught cheating this way.
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2024-05-03 11:45:06

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Advon claims that its botshit is, in fact, written by humans. But Advon's employees' Linkedin profiles tell a different story, boasting of their mastery of AI tools in the industrial-scale production of botshit:
https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Advon-AI-LinkedIn.jpg
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2024-05-03 11:44:59

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A variety of AI service bureaux have popped up to provide AI botshit as a service to news brands. While Navarro doesn't say so, I'm willing to bet that for news bosses, outsourcing your botshit scams to a third party is considered an excellent way of avoiding your journalists' wrath. The biggest botshit-as-a-service company is ASR Group (which also uses the alias Advon Commerce).
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2024-05-03 11:44:50

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As Gizmodo, *Sports Illustrated* and *USA Today* have learned the hard way, AI can't write factual news pieces. But it *can* pump out bullshit written for the express purpose of drafting on the good work human journalists have done and tricking Google - the search engine 90% of us rely on - into upranking bullshit at the expense of high-quality information.
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2024-05-03 11:44:42

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All of this is made ten million times worse by AI, which can spray out superficially plausible botshit in superhuman quantities, letting spammers produce thousands of variations on their shitty reviews, flooding the zone with bullshit in classic Steve Bannon style:
https://escapecollective.com/commerce-content-is-breaking-product-reviews/
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2024-05-03 11:44:35

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*Money* is one of the many sites whose air purifier reviews Google gives preference to, despite the fact that they do no testing. According to Google, Money is also a reliable source of information on reprogramming your garage-door opener, buying a paint-sprayer, etc:
https://money.com/best-paint-sprayer/
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