Quinque gazump linkdump
A sprinkling of inklings for the weekend.
On October 23 at 7PM, I’ll be in Decatur, presenting my novel The Bezzle at Eagle Eye Books.
It’s Saturday and any fule kno that this is the day for a linkdump, in which the links that couldn’t be squeezed into the week’s newsletter editions get their own showcase. Here’s the previous 23 linkdumps:
https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/
Start your weekend with some child’s play! Ada & Zangemann is a picture book by Matthias Kirschner and Sandra Brandstätter of Free Software Foundation Europe, telling the story of a greedy inventor who ensnares a town with his proprietary, remote-brickable gadgets, and Ada, his nemesis, a young girl who reverse engineers them and lets their users seize the means of computation:
https://fsfe.org/activities/ada-zangemann/index.en.html
Ada & Zangemann is open access — you can share it, adapt it, and sell it as you see fit — and has been translated into several languages. Now, there’s a cartoon version, an animated adaptation that is likewise open access, with digital assets for your remixing pleasure:
https://fsfe.org/activities/ada-zangemann//movie
Figuring out how to talk to kids about important subjects is a clarifying exercise. Back in the glory days of SNL, Eddie Murphy lampooned Fred “Mr” Rogers style of talking to kids, and it was indeed very funny:
https://snl.fandom.com/wiki/Mr._Robinson
But Mr Rogers’ rhetorical style wasn’t as simple as “talk slowly and use small words” — the “Fredish” dialect that Mr Rogers created was thoughtful, empathic, inclusive, and very effective:
Lots of writers have used the sing-songy fairytale style of children’s stories to make serious political points (see, e.g. Animal Farm). My own attempt at this was my 2011 short story “The Brave Little Toaster,” for MIT Tech Review’s annual sf series. If the title sounds familiar, that’s because I nicked it from Tom Disch’s tale of the same name, as part of my series of stolen title stories:
https://locusmag.com/2012/05/cory-doctorow-a-prose-by-any-other-name/
My Toaster story is a tale of IoT gone wild, in which the nightmare of a world of “smart” devices that exert control over their owners is shown to be a nightmare. A work colleague sent me this adaptation of the story as part of an English textbook, with lots of worksheet-style exercises. I’d never seen this before, and it’s very fun:
http://ourenglishclass.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2024/09/bravetoaster.pdf
If you like my “Brave Little Toaster,” you’ll likely enjoy my novella “Unauthorized Bread,” which appears in my 2019 collection Radicalized and is currently being adapted as a middle-grades graphic novel by Blue Delliquanti for Firstsecond:
Childlike parables have their place, but just because something fits in a “just so” story, that doesn’t make it true. Cryptocurrency weirdos desperately need to learn this lesson. The foundation of cryptocurrency is a fairytale about the origin of money, a mythological marketplace in which freely trading individuals who struggled to find a “confluence of needs.” If you wanted to trade one third of your cow for two and a half of my chickens, how could we complete the transaction?
In the “money story” fairy tale, we spontaneously decided that we would use gold, for a bunch of nonsensical reasons that don’t bear even cursory scrutiny. And so coin money sprang into existence, and we all merrily traded our gold with one another until a wicked government came and stole our gold with (cue scary voice) taaaaaaxes.
There is zero evidence for this. It’s literally a fairy tale. There is a rich history of where money came from, and the answer, in short is, governments created it through taxes, and money doesn’t exist without taxation:
https://locusmag.com/2022/09/cory-doctorow-moneylike/
The money story is a lie, and it’s a consequential one. The belief that money arises spontaneously out of the needs of freely trading people who voluntarily accept an arbitrary token as a store of value, unit of account, and unit of exchange (coupled with a childish, reactionary aversion to taxation) inspired cryptocurrency, and with it, the scams that allowed unscrupulous huxters to steal billions from everyday people who trusted Matt Damon, Spike Lee and Larry David when they told them that cryptocurrency was a sure path to financial security:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/15/your-new-first-name/#that-dagger-tho
It turns out that private money, far from being a tool of liberation, is rather just a dismal tool for ripping off the unsuspecting, and that goes double for crypto, where complexity can be weaponized by swindlers:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/13/the-byzantine-premium/
We don’t hear nearly as much about crypto these days — many of the pump-and-dump set have moved on to pitching AI stock — but there’s still billions tied up in the scam, and new shitcoins are still being minted at speed. The FBI actually created a sting operation to expose the dirtiness of the crypto “ecosystem”:
They found that the exchanges, “market makers” and other seemingly rock-ribbed institutions where suckers are enticed to buy, sell, track and price cryptos are classic Big Store cons:
http://www.amyreading.com/the-9-stages-of-the-big-con.html
When you, the unsuspecting retail investor, enter one of these mirror-palaces, you are the only audience member in a play that everyone else is in on. Those vigorous trades that see the shitcoin you’re being hustled with skyrocketing in value? They’re “wash trades,” where insiders buy and sell the same asset to one another, without real money ever changing hands, just to create the appearance of a rapidly appreciating asset that you had best get in on before you are priced out of the market.
This scam is as old as con games themselves and, as with other scams- S&Ls, Enron, subprime — the con artists have parlayed their winnings into social respectability and are now flushing them into the political system, to punish lawmakers who threaten their ability to rip off you and your neighbors. A massive, terrifying investigative story in The New Yorker shows how crypto billionaires stole the Democratic nomination from Katie Porter, one of the most effective anti-scam lawmakers in recent history:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/14/silicon-valley-the-new-lobbying-monster
Big Tech — like every corrupt cartel in history — is desperate to conjure a kleptocracy into existence, whose officials they can corrupt in order to keep the machine going until they’ve maximized their gains and achieved escape velocity from consequences.
No surprise, then, that tech companies have adopted the same spin tactics that sowed doubt about the tobacco-cancer link, in order to keep the US from updating its anemic privacy laws. The last time Congress gave us a new consumer privacy law was 1988, when they banned video store clerks from disclosing our VHS rental history to newspapers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act
By preventing confining privacy law to the VCR era, Big Tech has been able to plunder our data with impunity — aided by cops and spies who love the fact that there’s a source of cheap, off-the-books, warrantless surveillance data that would be illegal for them to collect.
Writing for Tech Policy Press, the Norcal ACLU’s Jake Snow connects the tobacco industry fight over “pre-emption” to the modern fight over privacy laws:
In the 1990s, Big Tobacco went to war against state anti-smoking laws, arguing that the federal government had the right — nay, the duty — to create a “harmonized” national system of smoking laws that would preempt state laws. Strangely, politicians who love “states’ rights” when it comes to banning abortion, tax-base erosion and “right to work” anti-union laws suddenly discovered federal religion when their campaign donors from the Cancer-Industrial Complex decided that states shouldn’t use those rights to limit smoking.
This is exactly the tack that Big Tech has taken on privacy, arguing that any update to federal privacy law should abolish muscular state-level laws, like Illinois’s best-in-class biometric privacy rules, or California’s CPPA.
Like Big Tobacco, Big Tech has “funded front groups, hired an armada of lobbyists, donated millions to campaigns, and opened a firehose of lobbying money,” with the goal of replacing “real privacy laws with fake industry alternatives as ineffective as non-smoking sections.”
Whether it’s understanding the origin of money or the Big Tobacco playbook, knowing history can protect you from all kinds of predatory behavior. But history isn’t merely a sword and shield, it’s also just a delight. Internet pioneer Ethan Zuckerman is road-tripping around America, and in August, he got to Columbus, IN, home to some of the country’s most beautiful and important architectural treasures:
https://ethanzuckerman.com/2024/08/29/road-trip-the-company-town-and-the-corn-fields/
The buildings — clustered in within a few, walkable blocks — are the legacy of the diesel engine manufacturing titan Cummins, whose postwar president J Irwin Miller used the company’s wartime profits to commission a string of gorgeous structures from starchitects like the Saarinens, IM Pei, Kevin Roche, Richard Meier, Harry Weese, César Pelli, Gunnar Birkerts, and Skidmore. I had no idea about any of this, and now I want to visit Columbus!
I’m planning a book tour right now (for my next novel, Picks and Shovels, which is out in February) and there’s a little wiggle-room in the midwestern part of the tour. There’s a possibility that I’ll end up in the vicinity, and if that happens, I’m definitely gonna find time for a little detour!
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/12/pasticcio/#brave-little-toaster
