Reblogged dduane
The Hollywood Citizen News building at the southwest corner Wilcox and Selma Ave
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Villa Roex-Gekiere (1972) in Genk, Belgium, by Marc Dessauvage
Source: beeldbank.onroerenderfgoed.be
Posted by mouthbeef
"In other words, we are not primarily trying to convert those who do not agree with us; we are trying to reinforce and rally those who do. We have enough and more than enough people on our side: the job is not to recruit people to our worldview but to recruit them to action. In the current situation, we – the we who believe in human rights, climate action, justice, science, the rule of law – are the vast majority, facing down a regime that has to try to seize the powers of authoritarianism exactly because it lacks this popular support. Building and reinforcing opposition – active, engaged opposition – is important work."
-Rebecca Solnit, Protect Our Neighbors: The Journey of a Sign
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There's one thing EVERY government can do to shrink Big Tech
I'm on a tour with my new book, the international bestseller Enshittification: catch me next in Miami, Burbank, Lisbon! Full schedule here.
As the old punchline goes, "If you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here." It's a gag that's particularly applicable to monopolies: once a company has secured a monopoly, it doesn't just have the power to block new companies from competing with it, it also has the power to capture governments and thwart attempts to regulate it or break it up.
40 years ago, a group of right-wing economists decided that this was a feature, not a bug, and convinced the world's governments to stop enforcing competition law, anti-monopoly law, and antitrust law, deliberately encouraging a global takeover by monopolies, duopolies and cartels. Today, virtually every sector of our economy is dominated by five or fewer firms:
These neoliberal economists knew that in order to stop us from getting there ("there" being a world where everyday people have economic and political freedom), they'd have to get us "here" – a world where even the most powerful governments find themselves unable to address concentrated corporate power. They wanted to drag us into a oligarchy, and take away any hope of us escaping to a fairer, more pluralistic world.
They succeeded. Today, rich and powerful governments struggle to do anything to rein in Big Tech. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney contemplated levying a 3% tax on America's tax-dodging tech giants…for all of five seconds. All Trump had to do was meaningfully clear his throat and Carney folded:
Canada also tried forcing payments to Canadian news agencies from tech giants, and failed in the most predictable way imaginable. Facebook simply blocked all Canadian news on its platforms (this being exactly what it had done in every other country where this was tried). Google paid out some money, and the country's largest newspaper killed its long-running investigative series into Big Tech's sins. Then Google slashed its payments.
These payments were always a terrible idea. The only beneficial part of how Big Tech relates to the news is in making it easy for people to find and discuss the news. News you're not allowed to find or talk about isn't "news," it's "a secret." The thing that Big Tech steals from the news isn't links, it's money: 30% of every in-app payment is stolen by the mobile duopoly; 51% of every ad dollar is stolen by the ad-tech duopoly; and social media holds news outlets' subscribers hostage and forces news companies to pay to "boost" their content to reach the people who follow them.
In other words, extracting payments for links is a form of redistribution, a clawback of some of Big Tech's stolen loot. It isn't predistribution, which would block Big Tech from stealing the loot in the first place.
Canada is a wealthy nation, but only 41m people call it home. The EU is also wealthy, and it is home to 500m people. You'd think that the EU could get further than Canada, but, faced with the might of the tech cartel, it has struggled to get anything done.
Take the GDPR, Europe's landmark privacy law. In theory, this law bans the kind of commercial surveillance that Big Tech thrives on. In practice, these companies just flew an Irish flag of convenience, which not only let them avoid paying their taxes – it also let them get away with illegal surveillance, by capturing the Irish privacy regulator, who does nothing to defend Europeans' privacy:
It's hard to overstate just how supine the Irish state is in relation to the American tech giants that pretend to call Dublin their home. The country's latest privacy regulator is an ex-Meta executive!
(Perhaps he can hang out with the UK's newly appointed head of competition enforcement, who used to be the head of Amazon UK:)
For the EU, Ireland is just part of the problem when it comes to regulating Big Tech. The EU's latest tech regulations are the sweeping, even visionary Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act. If tech companies obeyed these laws, that would go a long way to addressing their monopoly abuses. So of course, they're not obeying the laws.
Apple has threatened to leave the EU altogether rather than comply with a modest order requiring it to allow third party payments and app stores:
And they've buried the EU in complex litigation that could drag on for a decade:
And Trump has made it clear that he is Big Tech's puppet, and any attempt to get American tech companies to obey EU law will be met with savage retaliation:
When it comes to getting Big Tech to obey the law, if we wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here.
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Me? No, this must be some other roguishly handsome fellow (Jeff Easley, The Complete Druid's Handbook for AD&D 2e by David Pulver, TSR, 1994) Chapter 2, "Druid Kits," includes rationales for druids with varied backgrounds. "In a region where evil forces have triumphed and hold a position of authority, good people who resist have turned outlaw."
Posted by mouthbeef
Object permanence: Someone tried to buy the UK; “Made to Kill”; #Audiblegate.
I'm on a tour with my new book, the international bestseller Enshittification: catch me next in Miami, Burbank, Lisbon! Full schedule here.
#15yrsago Science fiction tells us all laws are local — just like the Web https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-a-cosmopolitan-literature-for-the-cosmopolitan-web/
#15yrsago UK Lord claims mysterious "foundation" wants to give Britain £17B, no strings attached http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/11/conspiracy-theories.html
#10yrsago EPA finds more Dieselgate emissions fraud in VW’s Audis and Porsches https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/business/some-porsche-models-found-to-have-emissions-cheating-software.html
#10yrsago Ranking Internet companies’ data-handling: a test they all fail https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/nov/03/ranking-digital-rights-project-data-protection
#10yrsago Big Data refusal: the nuclear disarmament movement of the 21st century https://booktwo.org/notebook/big-data-no-thanks/
#10yrsago Made to Kill: 1960s killer-robot noir detective novel https://memex.craphound.com/2015/11/03/made-to-kill-1960s-killer-robot-noir-detective-novel/
#5yrsago A hopeful future https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/03/somebody-will/#somebody-will
#5yrsago Get an extra vote https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/03/somebody-will/#nudge-nudge
#5yrsago How Audible robs indie audiobook creatorshttps://pluralistic.net/2020/11/03/somebody-will/#acx
#5yrsago Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/03/somebody-will/#a-not-i
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The third edition of Champions (1984) is basically a quality-of-life upgrade that leverages three years of publishing and design experience to produce a clearer, more polished experience. There’s typesetting and spacious layout! If you think that’s a silly thing to crow about, you’ve not tried to navigate the mono-spaced first and second edition rules to make a character.
I am sure there are changes to the rules that came with a third editing pass and a greater attention to the larger universal rules ecosystem, but I can’t really tell. But it certainly reads better. Also, as with Justice, Inc. (which we’ll see in a couple days), we have the addition of a campaign book that gives advice on running campaigns, building worlds and writing scenarios. This is complimented by a series of scenarios detailing actions against the local VIPER cell and a suite of character profiles to start populating your world.
Cover art by mainstay Mark Williams. He’s joined inside by Mike Witherby; those two have similar styles that mesh nicely. Pat Zircher’s art is a little rougher, but then Denis Loubet is a little more polished. I find his line work to be almost unnervingly smooth. In a good way!
Also, copyright is listed as 1984 on the insides, but the text casually mentions the possibility that player might have experience with Danger International, which did not hit shelve until 1985. Did this actually hit shelves in 1985? I can’t find any ads in a random pull of three 1984 issues of Dragon Magazine. On the other hand, it is possible that the text originally referred to Espionage! and was changed to reflect the forthcoming revamp of that game. That would be smart and clever!
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If you’re looking for a reason to not care about what happens to other human beings, then what you are trying to redeem is almost certainly not your humanity, and what you are trying to effect is probably not redemption.
The Death of Shame (via wilwheaton)
Source: the-reframe.com
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East Coast peeps! I am coming to you!
On MONDAY I'll be at the Franklin Park Reading Series in Brooklyn.
11/17-11/18: JMU and Parentheses Books in Harrisonburg, VA
11/19: Little District Books and As You Are in DC
11/20: Trans Day of Remembrance at GMU followed by the Arthur C. Clarke Awards
11/22-11/23: Miami Book Fair!