I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me TODAY (Feb 15) for a virtual event with YANIS VAROUFAKIS, and on MONDAY (Feb 17) for an event at KEPLER'S in MENLO PARK with CHARLIE JANE ANDERS. More tour dates here.
It's Saturday and I'm on a book tour, and the world is in chaos, and there are more links to write about than I could fit in to this week's newsletter, so time for a cubic linkdump, the 27th such:
https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/
Let's start with the best thing I saw all week: a 3D-printed, spring-loaded, clockwork chess pawn that uses a magnet to sense when it has reached the end of the board and SPROING! turns into a queen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSOnnle3zbA
The whole video is a fascinating account of the design process, from idea to prototype to finished item, but if you're impatient and want to skip right to the eyeball kick, it's at 12:27-12:35. And if you want to print your own, the files are $12 (cheap!):
Regrettably, not every tech project is a good one. This week, Google abandoned its AI ethics pledge. Unlike most AI ethics pledge, which are full of nonsense about not accidentally creating a vengeful god that turns the human race into paperclips, Google's AI pledge was actually very important, in that the company promised not to make AI that violates human rights, international law, or privacy. There comes a point where harping on Google's abandoned "don't be evil" motto can feel a little hacky, but in this case, I'll make an exception. My EFF colleague Matthew Guariglia tears Google a much-deserved new AIhole over this latest heel turn:
Not all bad technology is evil. Some of it is merely very, very stupid. How stupid? Check out Thom Dunn's Wirecutter review of The Heatbit Trio, a space-heater that uses Bitcoin-mining GPUs to generate some of its heat, very slightly offsetting the cost of warming your room – but at a rate that would take decades to recoup the $700 price-tag. Thom got some spicy quotes from Molly White for this one – possibly the first time she's been cited in a home appliance review:
Staying with crypto freaks for a moment here, Adam Levitin dissects the cryptocurrency "industry"'s latest chorus of aggrieved whining over "debanking":
As Levitin writes, banks aren't kicking cryptocurrency "companies" off their books because the government wants to punish them. Banks have a very good reason to want to avoid doing business with high-dollar scams that have highly correlated implosions, which is to say, times when everyone wants their money back from the cryptocurrency "company" the bank is handling charges for. For a longer explanation that gets into the nitty gritty of bank supervision, check out Patio11's excellent, detailed explainer:
As all the real heads know, "crypto means cryptography," and cryptographers continue to contrive privacy marvels. This week, Kagi – the best search engine, a million times better than Google – released a Privacy Pass authentication plugin, which lets you login to Kagi and run searches without Kagi being able to connect any of the searches you make with your account:
https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass
As an sf/crime writer who sometimes (often) searches for information on committing ghastly crimes and 'orrible murders, the fact that my favorite search engine will be technically incapable of tying those searches to my identity is quite a relief. Read my review of Kagi here:
If you're one of those marvel-contriving hackers, cryptographers, security researchers or tinkerers, you should really consider attending this summer's Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE), 2600 Magazine's (now) annual (formerly biennial) hacker con. They've just posted their CFP – get those submission in!
https://www.hope.net/cfp-talks.html
Well, I have to post this and get ready for this morning's virtual book tour event with Yanis Varoufakis:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkIDep7Z4LM
But before I go, one more link: Kevin Steele's 2005 essay on Hypercard, "When Multimedia Was Black & White," an absolute classic, and a beautiful meditation on the art and promise of early hypertext:
I've known Kevin for most of my life, long before he helped found Mackerel, the pioneering Toronto multimedia company. Long after Mackerel, Kevin went on making wonderful things. In 2023, he published a monumental act of portraiture – a "sequential art" time-series of panoramas of Toronto's hip, ever-changing Queen Street West strip:
Comparing Kevin's more recent work with that lovely old essay reveals deep correspondences and the progress of a unique and creative soul.
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:
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Ravelry designer page Petra Foubister https://www.ravelry.com/designers/petra-foubister
Ravelry crochet shawl paid pattern Sarah’s Grove https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/sarahs-grove
Ravelry crochet shawl pattern Edlothia (some of you my recognize this from one of the most popular posts on my fiber arts sideblog) https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/edlothia
Solstice scents - perfume oil Winter 2021 drop, some scents of interest for me https://www.solsticescents.com/WINTER-2021_c_60.html
Stormy Gail Art -Black beanie with skeleton flipping the bird, because Middlest loves beanies https://stormygailart.com/collections/new-year-new-stuff/products/the-finger-beanie
Fragrance net - Parfums de Marly because someone in the internet wears it and I want to know what that smells like https://www.fragrancenet.com/ni/fragrances/parfums-de-marly/parfums-de-marly-layton?mv_pc=gawus_m_parfums_de_marly_layton_u_31288_parfums_de_marly_layton_fragrance_e&gclid=CjwKCAjwjbCDBhAwEiwAiudBy8GMKk_ao5Exh1uEOEj-ID2JPbzOaNSRK-7mxoaXcYaWls82wDbEhxoCW7YQAvD_BwE
IKEA: SATSUMAS plant stand https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/satsumas-plant-stand-with-5-plant-pots-bamboo-white-10258155/
Roller skates (I miss skating), red leather https://www.litimee.com/products/unisex-wine-red-leather-breathable-outdoor-roller-skates?variant=0cff97a5-aaf3-47cc-8f2b-ee4cb4596c8a
Graphic novel: Dick Fight Island https://www.bookdepository.com/Dick-Fight-Island-Vol.-1-Reibun-Ike/9781974717200?redirected=true&utm_medium=Google&utm_campaign=Base5&utm_source=US&utm_content=Dick-Fight-Island-Vol.-1&selectCurrency=USD&w=AFCCAU96VZJ17HA8VRX9
Etsy search results: coaster (tired of drinks sweating on my work desk) https://www.etsy.com/search?q=coaster
Face masks featuring art by Shannon Sorensen https://pixels.com/profiles/1-shannon-sorensen/shop/face+masks
Terrarium Treasures - Etsy shop, cottage city jewelry and accessories https://www.etsy.com/shop/terrariumtreasuress
Vera Bradley fitted masks with adjusters https://verabradley.com/products/fitted-mask-with-adjusters-28178x12?variant=34566794477612
Modern Millie: vintage alt stylie dresses that actually fit me and look good https://modernmillieshop.com/collections/sale?sort=price-ascending&_=pf&pf_opt_size=3X-Large&pf_v_vendor=Hell%20Bunny
The Enchanted Wren Etsy shop - cottagecore/witchy sundries and stickers https://www.etsy.com/shop/TheEnchantedWren?page=2#items
Word By Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/word-by-word-the-secret-life-of-dictionaries_kory-stamper/11643791/item/47982723/?gclid=Cj0KCQiAuP-OBhDqARIsAD4XHpeSBl0uYSpieWqcFQpGiIf9d5RRdV-jpYdrroCydqHiyQOh7BUNNNAaAvjaEALw_wcB#isbn=110187094X&idiq=47982723
Hips and Curves: plus size intimates https://www.hipsandcurves.com/plus-size-sale/intimates
Richard Berner: visual art https://richardberner.com
Crow and Crescent Yarn Etsy shop - hand dyed yarn, patterns, stitch counters https://www.etsy.com/shop/CrowandCrescentYarn?fbclid=IwAR32O1hFbwCm1YJyaUirjjojcgqGrj0CUVThg3GPIRiMItUX-1wFjPJiXLI
Humble Bundle: Alice the Madness Returns https://www.humblebundle.com/store/alice-madness-returns-the-complete-collection?utm_campaign=01_0550&utm_medium=paid&utm_source=facebook&utm_content=single_none_none_catalog&utm_term=lal_catalog_purchase_targeting&fbclid=IwAR2ztqBSFLIgCFVD5pyKJkj50531p_cjaet3DxQ2okIrWpTK1XPpaizfq0w_aem_Aa7PkrWjZ31SSiPoRshridC8N1CByGe-f1U0tA2CblKDDfdLfHJ_FYgIBQmSRUUQDww46dYA-i9m66AKEISDQY5hNwJKMYCCvlKXfNDQStA5YYCRFuKfypvFF2_VT-n2PhQ
Google search: pomaire chile chanchitos pomaire chile chanchitos - Google Shopping
Link tree: thecarefreeartist https://linktr.ee/Thecarefreeartist
The carefreeartist stickers https://thecarefreeartist.com/collections/all
The Tabula Rasa Farms one of my two fave soap vendors https://thetabularasafarm.com
eBay: firebird analog pocket watch https://www.ebay.com/itm/384232321912
Local research:
Showcase Cinema Now Playing https://www.showcasecinemas.com/movies/showcase-cinema-de-lux-legacy-place?gclid=Cj0KCQiAzMGNBhCyARIsANpUkzPoOl_P-3erg6E3cr-nIJWg7YHK3VHd9irqO2UpD-pBgN9tl7e-yUcaAnF5EALw_wcB
Turners Seafood Salem MA https://www.turners-seafood.com/locations/salem-at-lyceum-hall/
Sticks and Stones Mediterranean Grill https://www.24seveneatsonline.com/ordering/restaurant/menu?restaurant_uid=53d0ace9-a1d3-4cea-8bcc-8cbce54aa260&client_is_mobile=true
Beacon Hill Chocolates https://beaconhillchocolates.com
Article: “Space debris, Kessler Syndrome, and the unreasonable expectation of certainty” https://room.eu.com/article/Space_debris_Kessler_Syndrome_and_the_unreasonable_expectation_of_certainty
Article: “Forbidden to Dream Again: Orwell and Nostalgia” https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/20664763.pdf
ee Cummings' These Childrens Singing in Stone a (50 Poems, 37) https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00144940.1950.11481520?journalCode=vexp20
A certain sorceror’s prideful boast - unable to find - my longhouse is perfectly constructed "a certain sorcerer's prideful boast just went majorly viral" longhouse perfectly - Google Search
What was my first post on tumblr https://callmebliss.tumblr.com/post/452939472/my-mind-to-me-a-kingdom-is-such-present-joys#notes
Origami paper crane Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orizuru
Article: Ginger Rogers and the Pain of Professionalism https://wordsofwomen.com/watch-ginger-rogers-do-everything-fred-astair-does-only-backwards-in-high-heels-wearing-a-20-pound-dress-and-bleeding/
Wikipedia: islets of langerhans https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancreatic_islets
What Sugoi means https://www.alexrockinjapanese.com/the-meaning-of-sugoi-and-how-to-use-it-in-japanese/
Cursed text generator https://lingojam.com/CursedText
Wikipedia: David Thewlis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Thewlis
Does sumatriptan go bad? https://www.nyheadache.com/blog/do-not-throw-away-expired-medications/
Google search: emerald stockings emerald stockings - Google Search
Net making with gauge block and netting needle https://www.motherearthnews.com/diy/net-making-zmaz83mjzraw
One pot Spanish rice and beans https://dishingouthealth.com/spanish-rice-and-beans-one-pot/
Media/fandom:
Google search: sand over bridge and iron (SPN) sand over bridge and iron - Google Search
Lyrics: “Carry You” carry you - Google Search
Indie gaming https://itch.io
Orbit magazine, short story: Adjustment Team by Philip K Dick https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/sffaudio-usa/usa-pdfs/AdjustmentTeamByPhilipK.Dick.pdf
Short story, Plane of Animals by Markham Sigler https://everydayfiction.com/plane-of-animals-by-markham-sigler/
David B Mattingly (artist of Animorphs, Honor Harrington, etc) https://davidmattingly.com
SCP Foundation SCP 5031 https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-5031
WEBTOON: The Touch of Sunlight: First for Ennui https://m.webtoons.com/en/challenge/the-touch-of-sunlight/first-for-ennui/viewer?title_no=472531&episode_no=1&webtoon-platform-redirect=true
Short story from Clarkesworld, I Sexually Identify As An Attack Helicopter by Isabel Fall https://archive.is/oXDEt
Band camp: Dalton Moon https://daltonmoon.bandcamp.com
Gif set: Misha Collins cooking with West https://m.imgur.com/gallery/QkJW6
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I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in PDX on Jun 20 at BARNES AND NOBLE with BUNNIE HUANG. After that, it's LONDON (Jul 1) and MANCHESTER (Jul 2).
It's linkdump time, in which I skillfully weave together all the links that I was too busy to cram into the week's newsletter issues. Here's the previous 31 (!) installments:
https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/
This week's linkdump comes with a great excuse: I was off at the staff retreat for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, for intensive policy work (and a lot of team-bonding socializing – I karaoked "The Piano Has Been Drinking") with my colleagues on the front lines of the battle to disenshittify the internet. If you'd like to join that fight, here's a chance to do so: we're hiring a staff technologist!
Of course, you don't have to work for EFF to make disenshittificatory tech. "Just a QR Code" is a new site that generates QR codes, operating entirely in your browser, without transmitting any data to a server or trying to cram ads into your eyeballs. The fact that it runs entirely in-browser means you can save this webpage and work with an offline copy to generate QR codes forever – even if the site goes down:
https://justaqrcode.com/
One of the best, longest-tenured gatherings of anti-enshittification technologists is HOPE, the Hackers On Planet Earth con spawned by 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. After getting evicted from their traditional digs at the Hotel Pennsylvania (which was bought by a billionaire who turned it into a crater and then lost interest), HOPE had to find new digs. The new location, St John's University in Queens, is fantastic, and the last event was so great they decided to go from biennial to annual:
https://hope.net/
But then, Trump hit. HOPE draws a sizable cohort of international attendees and speakers, and most of these people have decided that attending a genuinely fantastic hacker con isn't worth risk being sent to a Salvadoran slave-labor camp by a surly border guard. As a result, HOPE's numbers are dangerously low:
Please consider attending! HOPE is consistently one of the best events I've attended. The vibes are impeccable and the information is deep, gnarly and fantastic, and has a long, long track record of just being great.
Another beloved, long-running, print based institution is The Onion, which got a new lease on life when former disinformation reporter Ben Collins bought the site after quitting NBC, which had censured him for being too mean to Elon Musk:
Having been burned by corporate journalistic cowardice, Collins decided to revive The Onion's tradition of merciless, trenchant parody. He also revived The Onion's tradition of showing up in the world as a printed artifact, spraying gallons of ink onto tons of vegetable pulp and shipping the result to mailboxes around the world (including mine):
https://membership.theonion.com/
Collins sat down for a long interview with Vanity Fair's Chris Murphy that is full of so many excellent moments and quips that I actually cheered aloud while reading it, more than once!
Collins believes he saved The Onion from "AI death," and I think he's right. Instead, he's produced a site that fights fascism using one of history's most reliable methods, satire: "There’s nothing fascists hate more than getting truly ripped on." Collins points out something interesting about Trump: "He never laughs…He’s funny in the sense that callous people can be particularly biting, but he’s not funny."
Here's his advice to other would-be media barons: "Kowtowing to power— your job is not that, nobody fucking wants that."
Among other things, Collins used The Onion to acquire Alex Jones's Infowars out of bankruptcy, only to have far-right legal shenanigans interrupt the hostile takeover (it's still in the courts).
(Paywall-busting version here:)
https://archive.is/aV2av
Another funny – but much angrier – independent media voice is Ed Zitron, one of the best ranters in technology. Ed's motto is "I hate them for what they did to the computer," a phrase I like so much I used it as the epigraph for my next book. Ed's just published the longest-ever post on his excellent "Where's Your Ed At?" newsletter, called "The Era of the Business Idiot":
In this post, Ed tried to answer the burning question, "Why are these objectively very stupid people given so much power over so much capital, and the lives of so many of us?" He lashes out at everyone – MBA programs, sociopathic Jack Welch-alikes, the supine press, and more. And he coins a truly excellent epithet for one of our most cherished business idiots, Open AI CEO Sam Altman:
SLOPPENHEIMER.
I love Ed's work, which focuses extensively on the internal ideological and personal traits of business leaders. But I think that any study of the enshittocene – and any effective opposition to enshittification – needs to start with policy, the legal arrangements that create an enshittogenic environment that allow the business idiots to wreak havoc without the constraints of competition, regulation, an empowered workforce or technological countermeasures.
In the EU, the epicenter of enshittogenesis is Ireland, a tax haven that has attracted the largest and worst American tech companies who maintain the fiction that they are based in Eire. But these companies are hardly loyal to Dublin: any company footloose enough to pretend that it's Irish this week can pretend to be Maltese, Luxembourgeois, Cypriot or Dutch next week. To keep those companies from upping sticks, Ireland must not only offer them criminally favorable tax treatment, they have to slow walk or ignore all regulations that discipline the enshittificatory impulses of Big Tech:
In particular, Drea identifies the risk that Ireland will shelter US companies from enforcement of the Digital Markets Act, the EU's "crowning legislative jewel." Ireland's PM has been carrying water for Trump, pressuring the EU to "considered and measured" in its response to Trump's aggression; he's also vowed to "resist" the EU's digital taxes. Drea argues that centralizing enforcement of EU tech regulation in Brussels and the federal courts will relieve Ireland of the pressure to defend Trump's policies, since they will no longer be in a position to protect tech companies from Europe's rules.
When it comes to flouting EU rules, of the most egregious "Irish" tech offenders is Meta. In a long article for Ars Technica, Ashley Belanger looks at Zuckerberg's recent statements about Facebook's future as a place where lonely people, having been alienated from their actual friends and families by a system that downranks posts from your social network to create space for ads and boosted posts, befriend AI chatbots instead:
I contributed a little to Belanger's excellent reporting, discussing my work with EFF on what an interoperable Facebook might look like, and how it might set Facebook's prisoners free:
https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook
Mark Zuckerberg's transformation from a historically awful person to a historically monstrous person has been really something to see. In this week's Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal webtoon, Zach Wienersmith scores a body-blow on Zuck that was so perfect it made me bark with laughter:
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/gently
I firmly believe that Zuckerberg's transformation isn't due to the decay of his character. I think Zuck was always a creep, as any reader of Sarah Wynn-Williams's tell-all Facebook memoir Careless People can attest:
Rather, I think the collapse of the internet into what Tom Eastman calls "five giant websites filled with screenshots of the other four" relieved Zuck of his nagging fear that a competitor would poach his users if he abused them too much. This is the enshittogenic environment at work – when we let firms form cartels, their owners become oligarchs.
Tech is far from the only cartel. In publishing, we only have five major publishers left, and the largest, Bertelsmann, dwarfs the other four. It's hard to overstate how gigantic Bertelsmann is, but here's a trenchant example: Bertelsmann owns Penguin-Random House, and PRH has publishing deals with five sitting Supreme Court justices. This meant that a majority of the court had to recuse itself from hearing a plagiarism case involving a Ta-Nehisi Coates book. It's the first time a mass-recusal has scuppered a Supreme Court case since 1945, when the majority of justices disclosed that they were stockholders in the Alcoa, a monopolist:
Oligarchs are intrinsically enshittogenic. Oligarchs use their money and power to support strongmen who will trade money for government action, like Donald Trump, who offered a private dinner for major holders of his TRUMP shitcoin. The announcement prompted a ferocious bidding war among foreign agents and convicted criminals to buy up Trumpcoins and get a seat at the table:
Trump defenders claimed that the president was just rewarding people who understood the value of his coin, and not selling influence at all. Apparently, the attendees didn't get the memo, with many of them dumping their Trumpcoins the instant they were added to the guest-list:
Joke's on them, though: Trump stiffed them! He showed up, gave a 15 minute speech (practically a haiku by Trump's normal standard of bloviation), then climbed into a helicopter and flew away, hundreds of millions of dollars richer thanks to the suckers left to their rubber chicken banquet:
Those specific oligarchs didn't get a chance to petition Trump to enact their favored policies, but Trump is still delivering for oligarchs. The "Big Beautiful Bill" that was passed in the dead of night last week included a whole raft of "sleeper" provisions, each worse than the last, as enumerated by The American Prospect's Robert Kuttner:
taking away the courts' ability to use federal funds to hold government officials in contempt;
$45 billion for immigration gulags, to be built by Trump's favorite beltway bandits;
a nonprofit killer that lets the president cancel the nonprofit status of any org that challenges him (this died earlier last week and was revived in the "Big Beautiful Bill");
doubling the threshold for estate taxes, so a couple can leave $30m to their heirs tax-free, meaning that only 0.8% of US households will face any estate tax;
gutting the child tax credit, taking away support from 4.5m children of taxpaying parents who lack a Social Security Number and making millions more ineligible;
cutting health coverage for millions of people dependent on Obamacare; and
getting rid of the excise tax on gun silencers.
We're heading into some dark times indeed. It can be hard to imagine things ever getting better, but there was one author who consistently imagined bold, utopian, audacious far futures: Iain M. Banks, whose "Culture" series remain one of the greatest science fiction visions ever published:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series
Banks's books are available in cheap paperbacks, and there's no shortage of used copies, but if you're looking to get a truly gorgeous Banks volume, the Folio Society has you covered, with a new, slipcased edition of Use of Weapons:
I love Folio books and often give them as Christmas gifts to the people who matter most to me on my list. This one comes with seven full-page illustrations by Dániel Taylor.
In other publishing news, I got a care-package from my publisher this week: a box of advance review copies of my next book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, which Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish next October:
I'm going into the studio to record the audiobook in August, and there's a graphic novel and documentary in the offing.
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:
On OCTOBER 23 at 7PM, I'll be in DECATUR, presenting my novel THE BEZZLE at EAGLE EYE BOOKS.
Trigger warning for #eikositriophobia: this is my 23d linkdump (Hail Discordia!), an erratic Saturday purge of the open tabs I haven't managed to blog this week; here's the previous 22:
https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/
When I was a kid, I idolized Harlan Ellison. I loved his prose styling, his stage presence, the way he blended activism and fiction, and the way he mixed critical nonfiction with fiction. As a 17 year old, I attended a writing workshop that Ann Crispin was giving at a local science fiction convention and she told me that I had the makings of a great writer, just as soon as I stopped trying to be Harlan Ellison.
But Harlan was a complicated figure. I attended the Clarion Workshop in 1992 specifically because he was our instructor, and came away bitterly disillusioned after he targeted one of my fellow students for relentless, cruel bullying, a performance that was so ugly that the board fired the director and permanently barred him from teaching the workshop.
Later on, Harlan became the kind of copyright maximalist who called for arbitrary internet surveillance and censorship in the name of shutting down ebook piracy. During a panel about this at a sf convention, he called one of the other panelists a "motherfucker" and threatened to punch him in the face. He took to badmouthing me in interviews, painting my position – whose nuances he certainly understood – in crude caricature.
But Harlan and I had many friends in common, people I really liked, and they were adamant that Harlan's flaws were not the whole story: if Harlan liked you, he would do anything to stand up for you, no matter the cost to himself. Famously, when Harlan taught Octavia Butler's Clarion, he demanded to know why she wasn't writing full time, and she replied that there was the inconvenient matter of making rent and groceries. He replied, "If that's all that's stopping you, come live in my guest house for as long as it takes, eat my groceries, and write." Which she did.
Which is great, but also: one of my own Clarion students told me about when his then-teenaged mother met Harlan at a sf convention and told him that she dreamed of becoming a writer, and he propositioned her. She was so turned off that she stopped writing forever (her son, my student, is now an accomplished writer).
So Harlan was a mixed bag. He did very, very good things. He did very, very bad things. When Harlan died, in 2018, I wrote an obit where I grappled with these two facts:
In it, I proposed a way of thinking about people that tried to make sense of both Harlans – and of all the people in our lives. There's an unfortunate tendency to think of the people that matter to us as having their deeds recorded in a ledger, with good deeds in one column and wicked deeds down the other.
In this formulation, we add up the good deeds and the bad deeds and subtract the bad from the good. If the result is a positive number, we say the good outweighs the bad, and therefore the person is, on balance, good. On the other hand, if the bad outweighs the good, then the person is bad, and the good deeds are irrelevant.
This gets us into no end of trouble. It means that when someone we admire slips up, we give them a pass, because "they've earned it." And when someone who's hurt us does something selfless and kind and brave, we treat that as though it doesn't matter, because they're an asshole.
But the truth is, no amount of good deeds can wipe away the bad. If you hurt someone, the fact that you've helped someone else doesn't make that hurt any easier to bear. And the kindnesses you do for other people make their lives better, no matter what bad things you've done to others.
Rather than calculating the balance of our goodness or badness, I think we should just, you know, sit with our sins and virtues. Let all the harm and joy exist in a state of superposition. Don't cancel out the harm. Don't wave away the good. They both exist, neither cancels the other, and we should strive to help more, and to do less harm. We should do everything we can to help those we harm. No one owes us a pass because of the good we've done.
That's the lesson Harlan taught me, and he taught it to me by absolutely failing to live his life this way – a fact that exists alongside all of the good he did, including the great art he made, which I love, and which inspired me.
Not long after Harlan's death, I got a phone call from J Michael Straczynski, Harlan's literary executor. As part of his care for Harlan's literary legacy, Joe was editing a new anthology of short stories, The Last Dangerous Visions, and did I want to contribute a story?
Of course I did. Harlan edited Dangerous Visions in 1967: a groundbreaking anthology of uncomfortable science fiction that featured everyone from Philip K Dick to Samuel Delany. The followup, 1972's Again, Dangerous Visions, was, if anything, even more influential, including Le Guin's The Word For World IS Forest, as well as work by Joanna Russ, Kurt Vonnegut, David Gerrold, and James Tiptree, Jr.
Though some of the stories in these books haven't aged well, together, they completely changed my view of what science fiction was and what it could be. But The Last Dangerous Visions was a different (ahem) story. For complicated reasons (which all cashed out to "Harlan being very difficult to work with, sometimes for damned good reasons, other times for completely petty ones), TLDV was, at the time of Harlan's death, fifty years behind schedule. It was "science fiction's most famous unpublished book." Harlan had bought early work from writers who had gone on to have major careers – like Bruce Sterling – and had sat on them for half a century.
Then Joe called me to tell me that he was starting over with TLDV and did I want to contribute a story – and of course I did. I wrote a story for him with the title "Jeffty Is Five," part of my series of stories with the same titles as famous works of sf:
Joe liked the story, but not the title. He thought Harlan wouldn't have approved of this kind of appropriation, and he wanted to do right by the memory of his old friend. My first reaction was very Harlan-like: this is supposed to make you mad, it's my art, and if it offends you, that's your problem.
But I remembered the most important lesson I learned from Harlan, about good deeds and bad ones, and I thought about Joe, a writer I admired and liked, who was grappling with his grief and his commitment to Harlan's legacy, and I changed my mind and told him of course I'd change the title. I changed the title because Harlan would never have done so, and that's rather the point of the story.The story is (now)) called "The Weight of a Heart, the Weight of a Feather" (a very Harlanish title), and it's about the legacy of complicated people, whose lives are full of noble selflessness *and careless or deliberate cruelty. It's about throwing away the ledger and just letting all those facts sit together, about lives that are neither washed of sin by virtue, nor washed of virtue by sin.
It's a good story, I think, and I'm proud of it, and I'm interested in what the rest of you think now that the book is out:
Harlan was the writer who made me want to get good at reading my stories aloud. I was a charter member of the Harlan Ellison Record Club, as you can see for yourself from the time Harlan (accidentally) doxed me:
http://harlanellison.com/text/paladin.txt
After nearly 20 years of podcasting, I'm actually pretty good at this stuff. I'm going to be podcasting a reading of this story – eventually. I am nearly done "de-googling" my podcast feed, ripping it out of Feedburner, a service that I started using nearly two decades ago to convert a WordPress RSS feed to a podcast feed. In the intervening years, WordPress has come to support this natively and Feedburner has become a division of Google, so I've been methodically removing Feedburner's hooks from my feed, which is now proudly available here, without any surveillance or analytics:
https://craphound.com/feeds/doctorow_podcast
I'll be writing up the process eventually. In the meantime, I'm about to embark on another podcast fiction project, serializing my novella Spill, a "Little Brother" story that Tor's Reactor just published:
https://reactormag.com/spill-cory-doctorow/
The first part of "Spill" will go out tomorrow or Monday. Reactor also just published another "Little Brother" story, "Vigilant," which I read in last week's podcast:
One of my long-running beefs with Harlan was his insistence that the answer of copyright infringement online was to create an obligation on intermediaries – like ISPs – to censor their users' communications on demand from anyone claiming to have been wronged by a post or upload.
This would be bad for free expression under any circumstances, but it's an especially dangerous vision for ISPs, who are among the worst-run, most venal businesses in modern society ("We don't care, we don't have to, we're the phone company" -L Tomlin).
It's hard to overstate just how terrible ISPs are, but even in a field that includes Charter and Comcast, there's one company that rises above the pack when it comes to being grotesquely, imaginatively awful: Cox Communications.
Here's the latest from Cox: they sell "unlimited" gigabit data plans that cost $100 for the base plan and $50 to add the "unlimited" data. But – as Jon Brodkin writes for Ars Technica – Cox uniquely defines "unlimited" as severely limited:
Now, you're probably thinking, ho-hum, another company that offered unlimited service and then acted like dicks when a customer treated it as unlimited, ::laughs in American Airlines::
But that's not the Cox story! Cox doesn't just throttle "unlimited" customers' internet to 2006-vintage DSL speeds – they slow down the entire neighborhood around the unlimited customer to those speeds.
As Brodkin writes, every Cox customer in the same neighborhood as an "unlimited" customer named "Mike" had their upload speeds reduced by more than two thirds, from 35mbps to 10mbps, to punish Mike. And they're not the only ones!
Cox confirmed they were doing this, saying "performance can be improved for all customers in the neighborhood by temporarily increasing or maintaining download speeds and changing upload speeds for some of our service tiers."
Cox has been on a roll lately, really going for the shitty-telecoms-company gold. Back in August, 404 Media published a leaked pitch deck in which Cox promised advertisers that they were secretly listening to their customers' smart devices, transcribing their private conversations, and using them to target ads:
This isn't just appalling, it's also almost certainly fraudulent. As terrible as "smart" devices are (and oh God are they terrible), the vast majority of them don't do this. That's something a lot of security researchers have investigated, doing things like hooking up a protocol analyzer to a LAN with a smart device on it and looking for data transmissions that correspond to ambient speech in earshot of the gadget's mic.
My guess is that Cox has done a deal with a couple of the bottom-feedingest "smart TV" companies (as a cable operator, Cox will have relationships with a lot of these companies) to engage in this conduct. Smart TVs have emerged as one of the worst categories of consumer technology, on every axis: performance, privacy, repairability. The field has raced to the bottom, hit it, and then started digging to find new lows to sink to. This is just my hunch here, but I think it's highly likely that if there's a class of devices that are bugging your living room and selling the data to Cox, it's gonna be a smart TV (top tip: buy a computer monitor instead, and use your phone or laptop to stream to it).
Ask a certain kind of very smooth-brained, Samuelson-pilled economist about the enshittification of smart TVs and they'll tell you that this is a "revealed preference":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference
As in, sure, you may say that you don't want your TV to secretly record your private conversations and sell them to Cox, but actually you quite like it, because you have a TV.
While this is a facially very stupid argument, it's routinely made by people who think they're very smart, a point famously made by Matt Bors's "Mr Gotcha":
https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/
Comics turn out to be a very good medium for stringing up the revealed preferences crowd on their own petards. This week, Juan Santapau's "The Secret Knots" added to the Mr Gotcha canon with an equally brilliant webcomic, albeit one with a very different vibe, entitled "Remind Me Later":
https://thesecretknots.com/comic/remind-me-later/
Santapau really catches the zeitgeist with this one, which is more of a slow burn than a zinger, and which shows how online "revealed preferences" nonsense grooms us for the same bullshit in every corner of our lives, even our psychotherapist's office. Highly recommended – an instant classic.
"Revealed preferences" comes from the Chicago School of Economics, a field that decided that a) economics should be a discipline grounded in mathematical models; and b) it was impossible to factor power relationships into these models; so c) power doesn't matter.
Once you understand this fact, everything else snaps into focus – like, why the Chicago School loves monopolies. If you model an economy dominated by monopolists without factoring the power that monopolists wield, then you can very easily assume that any monopoly you discover is the result of a lot of people voluntarily choosing to spend all their money with the company they love best.
The fact that we all hate the monopolists we have to deal with is dismissed by these economists as a mirage: "sure, you say you hate them, but you do business with them, therefore, your 'revealed preference' shows that you actually love them."
Which is how we end up with absolutely outrageous rackets like the scholarly publishing cartel. Scholarly journals acquire academics' work for free; get other academics to edit the work for free; acquire lifetime copyright to those finished works; and charge the institutions that paid those "volunteer" academics salaries millions of dollars to access their publications:
These companies don't just lock up knowledge and tie an anchor around the scientists' and scholars' ankles, dragging them down. Their market power means that they can hurt their customers and users in every way, including through rampant privacy violations.
A new study from SPARC investigates the privacy practices of Springerlink, and finds them to be a cesspit of invasive, abusive conduct that would make even a Cox executive blush:
https://zenodo.org/records/13886473
Yes, on the one hand, this isn't surprising. If a company can screw you on pricing, why wouldn't they scruple to give you the shaft on privacy as well? But The fact that a company as terrible as Springer can be the dominant firm in the sector is still shocking, somehow.
But that's terminal-stage capitalism for you. It's not just that bad companies companies thrive – it's that being a bad company is a predictor of sky-high valuations and fawning coverage from the finance press.
Take Openai, a company that the press treats as a heptillion-dollar money-printer whose valuation will eventually exceed the rest of the known universe. Openai has a lot of problems – a mass exodus of key personnel, a product that doesn't work for nearly all the things it's claimed as a solution to – but the biggest one is that it's a bad business.
That's the theme of a fantastic, characteristically scathing-but-deep Ed Zitron article called (what else?) "Openai is a bad business":
https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai-business/
Zitron does something that no one else in the business press does: takes Openai's claims about its business fundamentals – its costs, its prices, its competitors, and even its capabilities – at face value, and then asks, "Even if this is all true, will Openai ever turn a profit?"
The answer is a pretty convincing "no." Zitron calls it a "subprime AI crisis" in a nod to Tim Hwang's must-read 2020 book about the ad-tech bezzle, Subprime Attention Crisis:
The fascinating thing about both Zitron and Hwang's analysis isn't that there are big companies that suck – it's that they are able to suck up so much money and credulous excitement, despite how badly they suck.
That's where power – the thing that neoliberal economists say doesn't matter – comes in. Monopoly power is a self-accelerating flywheel, as Amazon's famous investor pitch explains:
https://vimeo.com/739486256/00a0a7379a
Once a monopolist or a cartel wields market power, they can continue to dominate a sector, even though they're very bad – and even if they use their power to rip off both their customers and very powerful suppliers.
That's the lesson of Michael Jordan's lawsuit against NASCAR, as Matt Stoller explains in his latest BIG newsletter:
Jordan is one of the most famous basketball players, but after retiring from the game, he became a NASCAR owner, and as such, has been embroiled in a monopoly whose abuses are both eerily familiar to anyone who pays attention to, say the pharmacy benefit manager racket:
But on the other hand, the fact this is all happening to race-cars and not pharmacies makes it very weird indeed. As with, say, PBMs, NASCAR's monopoly isn't just victimizing the individuals who watch racing, but also the racecar teams. These teams are owned by rich, powerful people (like Jordan), but are "almost always on the verge of bankruptcy."
Why is that? NASCAR rips them off. For example, teams have to buy all their parts from NASCAR, at huge markups, and the purchase contract prohibits them from racing at any rival event. There are a million petty schemes like this, and NASCAR carefully titrates its bleed-off to leave its victims almost at death's door, but still (barely) solvent enough to keep racing.
NASCAR also bought out all the rival leagues, and most of the tracks, and then locked the remaining tracks to exclusivity deals. Then the teams all had to sign noncompetes as a condition of competing in NASCAR, the only game in town – forever.
Hence Michael Jordan, a person who steadfastly refused to involve himself in politics during his basketball career, becoming a firebreathing trustbuster. Stoller cites Jordan's transformation as reason to believe that the anti-monopoly agenda will survive even in the event that Harris wins but bows to corporate donors who insist on purging the Biden administration's trustbusters.
That's a hopeful note, and I'd add my own to it: the fact that the NASCAR scam is so similar to the pharma swindles, academic publishing swindles, and all the other monopoly rip-offs means that there is a potential class alliance between university professors, NASCAR owners, and people with chronic health conditions and big pharmaceutical bills.
That high note brings me to the end of this week's linkdump! And here's a little dessert in case you've got room for one more little link: Kitowares "Medieval Mules", a forthcoming clog styled as trompe l'oeil plate armor:
https://www.kitowares.la/
Pair with old favorites like lycra armor leggings:
Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER s tories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; a nd SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.
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:
