Disruption for Thee, But More for Me

That’s where the trouble starts. Tech law is a minefield of overly broad, superannuated rules that have been systematically distorted by companies that used ‘disruption’ to batter their way into old industries, but now use these laws to shield themselves from any pressure from upstarts to seek to disrupt them.

Disruption for Thee, But More for Me , Cory Doctorow's takedown of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, Locus Magazine, 7 January 2019

The article continues,

[The DMCA] is used for “business model enforcement,” to ensure that disruptive, but legal, ways of using a product or service are made illegal – from refilling your printer’s ink cartridge to getting your car or phone serviced by an independent neighborhood repair shop.

Together, the CFAA and DMCA have given digital businesses access to a shadowy legal doctrine that was never written by Congress but is nevertheless routinely enforced by the courts: Felony Contempt of Business-Model.

“And that was the problem with 1968. People went ahead and built those things without worrying much about the consequences, because they figured that, by 2018, we’d have come up with all the answers.”

— From What 2018 Looked Like Fifty Years Ago, by Jill Lapore, New Yorker, 7 January 2019

“[By 2018] the transmission of pictures and texts and the distant manipulation of computers and other machines will be added to the transmission of the human voice on a scale that will eventually approach the universality of telephony. What all this will do to the world I cannot guess. It seems bound to affect us all.”

— J. R. Pierce, Bell Labs, 1968. From “Toward the Year 2018”, edited by Emmanuel G. Mesthene, as quoted in What 2018 Looked Like Fifty Years Ago, New Yorker, 7 January 2019

Sparse prose (a sociology of love)

Pager wrote in sparse prose and fought with co-authors who wanted to bog down papers with jargon and technical details. “Devah had this rare ability,” says the Princeton sociologist Mitchell Duneier, “to both do the most rigorous social science, and then to translate those findings so that they would be discussed by people of different political persuasions.”

It was this kind of grounding that led Pager’s work to have such a profound impact on public policy … It was research compelled by moral commitments — racism is evil, poverty steals our gifts — and Pager’s ability to see the best in us, including those among us who have been convicted and caged. Hers was a sociology in the service of the dispossessed, a sociology of love.

Devah Pager: Her Work As A Sociologist Highlighted Racial Injustice In The United States, by Matthew Desmond, New York Times Magazine, 27 December 2018

“Your house better be clean, your clothes ironed, but only a sucker would sweep the sidewalk.”

— Don’t do as the Romans do: Some worry that the city is in danger of becoming a dump, by Jason Horowitz, 24 December 2018

“By nearly any measure, Netflix has had a ridiculous year. When all is said and done, the company will have spent upwards of $10 billion (and perhaps as much as $13 billion) to produce more than 550 new movies and shows. ”

— How The Surprise New Interactive Black Mirror Came Together by Peter Rubin, Wired, 28 December 2018

Uncontrolled Space

Historically, the GRU has been Russia’s main agency for operating in uncontrolled spaces, which has meant civil wars and the like. In some ways, the Internet is today’s uncontrolled space.

Mark Galeotti, Institute of International Relations in Prague, as qoted in How Russia's military intelligence agency became the covert muscle in Putin's duels with the West, by Anton Troianovski and Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post, 28 December 2018

The article continues,

“What the GRU demonstrate very consistently is profound innovation with available resources,” said Joe Cheravitch, a Russia analyst with Rand Corp., a nonprofit, federally funded research institute. “That’s what really makes them dangerous.”

The Bottomless Pinocchio

Just this month, the newspaper’s Fact Checker was forced to create a new category of lying just for the Trump era: the ‘Bottomless Pinocchio’ for ‘when a politician refuses to drop a claim that has been fact checked as three or four Pinocchios, keeps saying it over and over and over again, so that it basically becomes disinformation, propaganda.’

It is so much worse than I thought by Charles M. Blow, New York Times, 19 December 2018

Speed

Just reminded myself that the distance between NYC and Chicago is almost exactly that between Beijing and Shanghai, and that the 1st is served by 1 train/day that takes 19 hours, and the 2nd is served by 35 trains/day that take as few as 4.5 hours.

Also, the Beijing—Shanghai route carries about 180 million riders a year, about as many as rode on all of Delta Airlines' network in 2017.

@yfreemark, 21 December 2018

“‘This is a problem a lot of historians don’t grasp,’ Kruse says. ‘We think that because we know it, because we’ve proven it, and because we’ve written it down in a book and put it on a shelf somewhere, that everyone knows it. And they don’t.’”

— How Kevin Kruse Became History’s Attack Dog by Emma Pettit, Chronicle of Higher Education, 16 December 2018

We are what we celebrate

There are two popular explanations for this mayhem. One is that Europe was always destined to tear Britain apart, since too many Britons loathe the evolution of the common market into a European Union. A second is that Brexit has provided a catalyst for a long-simmering civil war between successful Britain (which is metropolitan and liberal) and left-behind Britain (which is provincial and conservative). Both explanations have merit. But there is also a third: that the country’s model of leadership is disintegrating. Britain is governed by a self-involved clique that rewards group membership above competence and self-confidence above expertise. This chumocracy has finally met its Waterloo.

The elite that failed: Britain’s political crisis exposes the inadequacy of its leaders, The Economist, 22 December 2019

4th of July, CC-BY

Ravelry

How do you keep bigots off social media?

FACEBOOK: Wow, it's tough but we're trying! ❤️👍
TWITTER: What is "bigotry", really?
RAVELRY: Our grandmothers wrote code into scarves that sunk Nazi submarines. We carry razor sharp needles everywhere and we will fuck. you. up.

@bentev28, 30 June, 2019

In the midst of a withering year or two of big platforms abdicating (or outright denying) their civic responsibilities, fiber arts website/community Ravelry announced a new content policy that bans support for President Donald Trump on its platform.

New Policy: Do Not Post In Support of Trump or his Administration

Sunday, June 23rd 2019

We are banning support of Donald Trump and his administration on Ravelry.

This includes support in the form of forum posts, projects, patterns, profiles, and all other content. Note that your project data will never be deleted. We will never delete your Ravelry project data for any reason and if a project needs to be removed from the site, we will make sure that you have access to your data. Even if you are permanently banned from Ravelry, you will still be able to access any patterns that you purchased. Also, we will make sure that you receive a copy of your data.

We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy. Support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy.

The Community Guidelines have been updated with the following language: “Note that support of President Trump, his administration, or individual policies that harm marginalized groups, all constitute hate speech.”

New Policy: Do Not Post In Support of Trump or his Administration, Ravelry, 23 June 2019

“Everyone uses Ravelry”: why a popular knitting website’s anti-Trump stance is so significant by By Aja Romano (@ajaromano) is an excellent, long, detailed article in Vox about the new Ravelry policy.

I was curious about the reference to grandmothers who “wrote code into scarves that sunk Nazi submarines” in @bentev28’s tweet. Vox/Romano linked to this fascinating Atlas Obscura article by Natalie Zarrelli, 1 June 2017, The Wartime Spies Who Used Knitting as an Espionage Tool.

DURING WORLD WAR I, A grandmother in Belgium knitted at her window, watching the passing trains. As one train chugged by, she made a bumpy stitch in the fabric with her two needles. Another passed, and she dropped a stitch from the fabric, making an intentional hole. Later, she would risk her life by handing the fabric to a soldier—a fellow spy in the Belgian resistance, working to defeat the occupying German force.

Also in the Vox article I learned that the gaming site RPG.net banned Trump support in October 2018.

The following policy announcement is the result of over a year of serious debate by the moderation team. The decision is as close to unanimous as we ever get. It will not be the subject of further debate. We have fully considered the downsides and ultimately decided we have to stay true to our values. We will not pretend that evil isn’t evil, or that it becomes a legitimate difference of political opinion if you put a suit and tie on it.

We are banning support of Donald Trump or his administration on the RPGnet forums. This is because his public comments, policies, and the makeup of his administration are so wholly incompatible with our values that formal political neutrality is not tenable. We can be welcoming to (for example) persons of every ethnicity who want to talk about games, or we can allow support for open white supremacy. Not both. Below will be an outline of the policy and a very incomplete set of citations.

We have a community here that we’ve built carefully over time, and support for elected hate groups aren’t welcome here. We can't save the world, but we can protect and care for the small patch that is this board.

New Policy: Do Not Post In Support of Trump or his Administration, by Forum Administrator, 29 October 2018

Untitled, British Museum, June 2019, CC-BY

“It’s not easy to persuade citizens of a democracy to accept real financial sacrifice in the here and now for the sake of a diffuse benefit in the future.”

— It’s time to look at the (political) science behind climate change, by Charles Lane, Washington Post, 10 December 2018

But there are so many of them

Former YouTube engineer Guillaume Chaslot, an artificial intelligence expert who once worked to develop the platform’s recommendation algorithm, says he discovered the severity of the problem, which he believes he helped create, on a long bus ride through his native France in 2014, the year after he left the company. A man sitting on the seat next to him was watching a succession of videos claiming that the government had a secret plan to kill one-quarter of the population. Right after one video finished, another started automatically, making roughly the same claim.

Chaslot tried to explain to the man that the conspiracy was obviously untrue and that YouTube’s recommendation engine was simply serving up more of what it thought he wanted. The man at first appeared to understand, Chaslot said, but then concluded: “But there are so many of them.”

Two years after #Pizzagate showed the dangers of hateful conspiracies, they’re still rampant on YouTube, by Craig Timberg, Elizabeth Dwoskin, Tony Romm and Andrew Ba Tran, Washington Post, 10 December 2018

Regardless of who you are

Today, the risks exist regardless of who you are, what platform you write or speak for, what language you choose to use. The bounds of right and wrong now extend beyond the parameters of a political system, to what is deemed to be moral for the culture and conscientious for the nation. This is a moment of crisis, when new forms of expression and resistance must emerge.

It's not just the government suppressing free expression, it's our neighbors — and ourselves, by Yasmine El Rashidi, New York Times, 8 December 2019

“A question occupies me today: How to silence the censor inside me when faced with a growing sense of foreboding, even at times fear? How to invent, from this moment and this pressure, something radical, bound-breaking, new?”

— It's not just the government suppressing free expression, it's our neighbors — and ourselves, by Yasmine El Rashidi, New York Times, 8 December 2019

“Talking to the Kuiper belt is like talking to an Ent, from the other side of the forest.”

— Astrophysicist @ascendingNode, on communicating with the New Horizons spacecraft at the edge of the solar system, 8 December 2018. Note the distance between Earth and the probe (1.57 billion KM) and the power of the signal we receive from it (1.46 x 10^-21 kW, which is a very very very small voice to hear.