#COMCom

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Antiusurpation and the road to disenshittification

THIS WEEKEND (November 8-10), I'll be in TUCSON, AZ: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.

Nineties kids had a good reason to be excited about the internet's promise of disintermediation: the gatekeepers who controlled our access to culture, politics, and opportunity were crooked as hell, and besides, they sucked.

For a second there, we really did get a lot of disintermediation, which created a big, weird, diverse pluralistic space for all kinds of voices, ideas, identities, hobbies, businesses and movements. Lots of these were either deeply objectionable or really stupid, or both, but there was also so much cool stuff on the old, good internet.

Then, after about ten seconds of sheer joy, we got all-new gatekeepers, who were at least as bad, and even more powerful, than the old ones. The net became Tom Eastman's "Five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four." Culture, politics, finance, news, and especially power have been gathered into the hands of unaccountable, greedy, and often cruel intermediaries.

Oh, also, we had an election.

This isn't an election post. I have many thoughts about the election, but they're still these big, unformed blobs of anger, fear and sorrow. Experience teaches me that the only way to get past this is to just let all that bad stuff sit for a while and offgas its most noxious compounds, so that I can handle it safely and figure out what to do with it.

While I wait that out, I'm just getting the job done. Chop wood, carry water. I've got a book to write, Enshittification, for Farar, Straus, Giroux's MCD Books, and it's very nearly done:

https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Adoctorow+%23dailywords&src=typed_query&f=live

Compartmentalizing my anxieties and plowing that energy into productive work isn't necessarily the healthiest coping strategy, but it's not the worst, either. It's how I wrote nine books during the covid lockdowns.

And sometimes, when you're not staring directly at something, you get past the tunnel vision that makes it impossible to see its edges, fracture lines, and weak points.

So I'm working on the book. It's a book about platforms, because enshittification is a phenomenon that is most visible and toxic on platforms. Platforms are intermediaries, who connect buyers and sellers, creators and audiences, workers and employers, politicians and voters, activists and crowds, as well as families, communities, and would-be romantic partners.

There's a reason we keep reinventing these intermediaries: they're useful. Like, it's technically possible for a writer to also be their own editor, printer, distributor, promoter and sales-force:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/19/crad-kilodney-was-an-outlier/#intermediation

But without middlemen, those are the only writers we'll get. The set of all writers who have something to say that I want to read is much larger than the set of all writers who are capable of running their own publishing operation.

The problem isn't middlemen: the problem is powerful middlemen. When an intermediary gets powerful enough to usurp the relationship between the parties on either side of the transaction, everything turns to shit:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/12/direct-the-problem-of-middlemen/

A dating service that faces pressure from competition, regulation, interoperability and a committed workforce will try as hard as it can to help you find Your Person. A dating service that buys up all its competitors, cows its workforce, captures its regulators and harnesses IP law to block interoperators will redesign its service so that you keep paying forever, and never find love:

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2024/02/13/1228749143/the-dating-app-paradox-why-dating-apps-may-be-worse-than-ever

Multiply this a millionfold, in every sector of our complex, high-tech world where we necessarily rely on skilled intermediaries to handle technical aspects of our lives that we can't – or shouldn't – manage ourselves. That world is beholden to predators who screw us and screw us and screw us, jacking up our rents:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/yes-there-are-antitrust-voters-in

Cranking up the price of food:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy

And everything else:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

(Maybe this is a post about the election after all?)

The difference between a helpmeet and a parasite is power. If we want to enjoy the benefits of intermediaries without the risks, we need policies that keep middlemen weak. That's the opposite of the system we have now.

Take interoperability and IP law. Interoperability (basically, plugging new things into existing things) is a really powerful check against powerful middlemen. If you rely on an ad-exchange to fund your newsgathering and they start ripping you off, then an interoperable system that lets you use a different exchange will not only end the rip off – it'll make it less likely to happen in the first place because the ad-tech platform will be afraid of losing your business:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-shatter-ad-tech

Interoperability means that when a printer company gouges you on ink, you can buy cheap third party ink cartridges and escape their grasp forever:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Interoperability means that when Amazon rips off audiobook authors to the tune of $100m, those authors can pull their books from Amazon and sell them elsewhere and know that their listeners can move their libraries over to a different app:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/07/audible-exclusive/#audiblegate

But interoperability has been in retreat for 40 years, as IP law has expanded to criminalize otherwise normal activities, so that middlemen can use IP rights to protect themselves from their end-users and business customers:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

That's what I mean when I say that "IP" is "any law that lets a business reach beyond its own walls and control the actions of its customers, competitors and critics."

For example, there's a pernicious law 1998 US law that I write about all the time, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the "anticircumvention law." This is a law that felonizes tampering with copyright locks, even if you are the creator of the undelying work.

So Amazon – the owner of the monopoly audiobook platform Audible – puts a mandatory copyright lock around every audiobook they sell. I, as an author who writes, finances and narrates the audiobook, can't provide you, my customer, with a tool to remove that lock. If I do so, I face criminal sanctions: a five year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff

In other words: if I let you take my own copyrighted work out of Amazon's app, I commit a felony, with penalties that are far stiffer than the penalties you would face if you were to simply pirate that audiobook. The penalties for you shoplifting the audiobook on CD at a truck-stop are lower than the penalties the author and publisher of the book would face if they simply gave you a tool to de-Amazon the file. Indeed, even if you hijacked the truck that delivered the CDs, you'd probably be looking at a shorter sentence.

This is a law that is purpose-built to encourage intermediaries to usurp the relationship between buyers and sellers, creators and audiences. It's a charter for parasitism and predation.

But as bad as that is, there's another aspect of DMCA 1201 that's even worse: the exemptions process.

You might have read recently about the Copyright Office "freeing the McFlurry" by granting a DMCA 1201 exemption for companies that want to reverse-engineer the error-codes from McDonald's finicky, unreliable frozen custard machines:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/28/mcbroken/#my-milkshake-brings-all-the-lawyers-to-the-yard

Under DMCA 1201, the Copyright Office hears petitions for these exemptions every three years. If they judge that anticircumvention law is interfering with some legitimate activity, the statute empowers them to grant an exemption.

When the DMCA passed in 1998 (and when the US Trade Rep pressured other world governments into passing nearly identical laws in the decades that followed), this exemptions process was billed as a "pressure valve" that would prevent abuses of anticircumvention law.

But this was a cynical trick. The way the law is structured, the Copyright Office can only grant "use" exemptions, but not "tools" exemptions. So if you are granted the right to move Audible audiobooks into a third-party app, you are personally required to figure out how to do that. You have to dump the machine code of the Audible app, decompile it, scan it for vulnerabilities, and bootstrap your own jailbreaking program to take Audible wrapper off the file.

No one is allowed to help you with this. You aren't allowed to discuss any of this publicly, or share a tool that you make with anyone else. Doing any of this is a potential felony.

In other words, DMCA 1201 gives intermediaries power over you, but bans you from asking an intermediary to help you escape another abusive middleman.

This is the exact opposite of how intermediary law should work. We should have rules that ban intermediaries from exercising undue power over the parties they serve, and we should have rules empowering intermediaries to erode the advantage of powerful intermediaries.

The fact that the Copyright Office grants you an exemption to anticircumvention law means nothing unless you can delegate that right to an intermediary who can exercise it on your behalf.

A world without publishing intermediaries is one in which the only writers who thrive are the ones capable of being publishers, too, and that's a tiny fraction of all the writers with something to say.

A world without interoperability intermediaries is one in which the only platform users who thrive are also skilled reverse-engineering ninja hackers – and that's an infinitesimal fraction of the platform users who would benefit from interoperabilty.

Let this be your north star in evaluating platform regulation proposals. Platform regulation should weaken intermediaries' powers over their users, and strengthen their power over other middlemen.

Put in this light, it's easy to see why the ill-informed calls to abolish Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (which makes platform users, not platforms, responsible for most unlawful speech) are so misguided:

https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act/

If we require platforms to surveil all user speech and block anything that might violate any law, we give the largest, most powerful platforms a permanent advantage over smaller, better platforms, run by co-ops, hobbyists, nonprofits local governments, and startups. The big platforms have the capital to rig up massive, automated surveillance and censorship systems, and the only alternatives that can spring up have to be just as big and powerful as the Big Tech platforms we're so desperate to escape:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/23/evacuate-the-platforms/#let-the-platforms-burn

This is especially grave given the current political current, where fascist politicians are threatening platforms with brutal punishments for failing to censor disfavored political views.

Anyone who tells you that "it's only censorship when the government does it" is badly confused. It's only a First Amendment violation when the government does it, sure – but censorship has always relied on intermediaries. From the Inquisition to the Comics Code, government censors were only able to do their jobs because powerful middlemen, fearing state punishments, blocked anything that might cross the line, censoring far beyond the material actually prohibited by the law:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/22/self-censorship/#hugos

We live in a world of powerful, corrupt middlemen. From payments to real-estate, from job-search to romance, there's a legion of parasites masquerading as helpmeets, burying their greedy mouthparts into our tender flesh:

https://www.capitalisnt.com/episodes/visas-hidden-tax-on-americans

But intermediaries aren't the problem. You shouldn't have to stand up your own payment processor, or learn the ins and outs of real-estate law, or start your own single's bar. The problem is power, not intermediation.

As we set out to build a new, good internet (with a lot less help from the US government than seemed likely as recently as last week), let's remember that lesson: the point isn't disintermediation, it's weak intermediation.

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/2024/11/07/usurpers-helpmeets/#disreintermediation

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

[azspot]

Governments can — and should — have rules about interoperability in their procurement policies. They should require companies hoping to receive public money to supply the schematics, error codes, keys and other technical matter needed to maintain and improve the things they sell and provide to our public institutions.

Freeing Ourselves From The Clutches Of Big Tech

[abyssmalice]

(why do i have these pictures again)

[apocalypse-alert]

ssoda

-☄ (Comet, I jsut don't have another blog for her,,)

SODAAA!!!!

[dsfa265162]

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[apocalypse-alert]

yuh huhhh…

ew

- @apocalypse-alert

nuh uh...

[tellthemeerkatsitsfine]

Life update, and unlike some of them, this one is positive, so does feel like horrible oversharing that I feel bad for posting and will delete within a day (I mean, it's still technically oversharing, but it's not complaining about my life this time, just describing it). I performed comedy last night, I had a good time, here's the story of that if anyone wants to know about it.

I performed stand-up last night for the first time in months. I know exactly how long it's been, because the last time I performed was on Valentine's Day. A show that I didn't realize until I got there would be Valentine's Day themed until I got there, and everyone before me did romance-based jokes, and I didn't have any of those, so I did an awkward little speech about how I won't be doing any jokes about my love life because I've not been performing for long so I don't have a big enough joke repertoire to be able to pick some out based on a theme and also because I don't have a love life, which got too big a laugh, to be honest, for such a cheap joke. I was slightly annoyed with myself for getting a laugh at that; jokes based on "Being single is terrible, let me be self-deprecating about how little sex I have" annoy me because I think not having sex is fine, so I didn't love that I accidentally made one of those while simply reporting an accurate fact about my life. But I did know when I said it that it would get a laugh because those "Isn't it terrible being single?" jokes always get a laugh, and it always annoys me.

Anyway. What was I talking about again? Not that weird set I did on Valentine's Day, this post wasn't meant to be about that. The guy who runs a different night saw me on that show and told me I was good and gave me a spot on his night a few weeks later, but I had to pull out because I got severe stomach flu, and then I just didn't sign up for any more. I got stressed at work, I got busy. I had to listen to a lot of white men talk to each other in British radio studios in 2014, okay? There was a lot going on.

Around July I started going out to watch local comedy a bunch of times again, didn't put my name in to perform, just wanted to get re-used to it. I went to the UK for a couple of weeks, and last week, when I was back, I went to watch this local night again. Got asked every time if I want to put my name in - they have this system where 6 or 7 comics will be booked beforehand to perform in a certain order, but there will be 1 or 2 spots left blank for anyone who wants to turn up and put their name in a draw for a chance to perform. Last year I performed a few times on those blank spots (I have a remarkably good track record with getting my name picked nearly every time I put it in the draw, even when there are a bunch of names in there), and a few times when I was actually booked, based on requesting spots and having those spots granted by producers who saw and liked me on those other performances. "Producers" is definitely too strong a word, they're just people who weekly or monthly run open mic nights at local pubs where 8 or 9 comedians do 6-minute spots and no one pays to see it and no one gets paid to do it and they run it all from a Facebook group.

We do have a few actual comedy clubs in the city too, I performed at the amateur night of one of them exactly once, it went very well but was also terrifying and I've not tried again. I've been to them as an audience member lots during the past 15 years or so (my brother's been performing stand-up since we were teenagers and I used to go watch him a lot), but not much in recent years, because why would I pay to see comics do the same material that they work out at open mic nights for free? Except when John Hastings was in town earlier this summer and I went to see him headline a club two weekends in a row, and he was great. The local club that he headlined is one that he called, on the ComCom podcast, "The Jongleurs of Canada" - he didn't mean it as a compliment. Hearing John Hastings call it that immediately made me understand 1) exactly what comedians mean when they refer to "Jongleurs" as a shorthand for a certain type of comedy, and 2) how comedians from outside our local scene would see that particular club, which isn't particularly different from the other two clubs in our city, which tells you something about our local comedy in general.

Anyway. I also did not mean for this post to be about John Hastings' ComCom interviews, even though there are two of those and they're both interesting. I think I went so long without trying to perform again because I got nervous about the fact that I'm supposed to be developing my set. The first time I ever performed, about 13 months ago now, I was absolutely terrified and expected zero laughs, so when I got some laughs, I was delighted. Then I refined a few things, and performed the same material but put together better, and it worked again. I did that a couple more times, and one time it didn't really work, and I figured I'm supposed to be adding stuff. That initial set was basically one story that I told across six minutes, and there was a bunch of padding to get to the six minutes - I didn't add much filler on purpose, but there were definitely lines that didn't need to be there. I know it would be shocking to anyone who reads my blog that sometimes I'm not all that concise.

So I edited it down, pulled the punchlines closer together, took out the bits that didn't get laughs, and got my 6-minute story down to about 3.5. And then I decided to take the massive step of adding: a second bit. And I'm joking when I call that a massive step, but it actually scared the hell out of me at the time, because I knew my one story was funny, but maybe I just happen to only know one funny story, and if I try anything else it'll be terrible. But I tried it, doing a 2.5-minute thing before going into my now-3.5-minute original story, and they both worked! In fact, my 2.5-minute new routine got an even better reaction than the original story. Success! This was all last fall across a few open mic pub nights, I then signed up for the comedy club amateur night in November, performed my two-routine set there, and actually got the best reaction yet. I had a great time.

Then I didn't perform for about 4 months, because I got anxious about where to go with it from there. I went out to watch a few nights, including that weird Valentine's Day where I put my name in for a blank spot, got picked from the draw and called up, did the awkward love life joke before stumbling through my regular set and messing it up a bit as I'd not really prepared, but still apparently did well enough for the producer to book me on another night. Which I was excited about, getting back into it, but then I threw up for about 36 hours straight and cancelled and didn't go back for months.

Again, I knew I should try something at least slightly different when I go back, but was scared of adding something completely new. So what I was suddenly inspired to do this week was re-write my original story in a way that it could be a, as I think they might say in showbusiness, "tight six". I added several new bits to that same story, ones that added some new jokes while also, I hoped, clarifying some parts of the story that I thought didn't fully make sense. That story that was originally 6 minutes with filler, then I cut the filler to make it 3.5, I had it back up to 6 with, I hoped, better stuff and not filler. I left out my second bit entirely.

But that new version of the story does sort of open it up a bit, so if I had more time, I could probably fit my "second bit" into the middle of it, rather than awkwardly doing one routine and then transitioning to a completely separate one. I can see a way I could do that, make everything I've said before all part of one cohesive thing. So I think, at this point, I probably have ten minutes of material that are sort of tested and sort of all right. I might be able to fill a ten-minute spot, if I tried for one of those sometime, after getting more experience at the much more common and easier to get 6-minute ones.

Last night I turned up at my favourite of the local open mic pub nights. It's the first one I went to, last spring, when I decided it's silly that I'm such a huge comedy fan and there is comedy in my own city (which I know full well, as my brother performs professionally) and I never go see it. It's conveniently about a 20-minute walk from my house, it's run by two guys whom I like and who seem to like me, and it regularly gets a small crowd, but a crowd of people who aren't just other comedians, so that's nice.

I got there last night, half an hour before start time as usual, and was surprised to see the whole room full of audience members, aside from a few tables that were reserved. Normally the place is nearly empty at that time. I awkwardly looked around and nearly left, but one of the guys who runs it told me to just hang out in the "comedian holding pen" at the back, so I did that, and felt fairly cool. I normally sit in the audience for any show where I'm not booked, even if I've put my name in the draw, and hang out in the holding pen only if my name is actually on the bill. Lots of comedians hang out in the holding pen even when they're not performing that night, but I'm not really a comedian, just someone who's done a few open spots, and I'm not actually friends with the comedians, so I feel weird about doing that. However, I did feel fairly cool and like an actual comic when the guy told me to just hang out with the comedians since the audience area was full.

I put my name in for the blank spot, because I had finally done all this re-writing to add some stuff to my story, and I'd spent time rehearsing it to make sure I could remember the thing I hadn't performed in months, and I felt fairly prepared. There were about eight names in the draw for two spots, but I still spent the whole evening reading my notes and rehearsing in my head and getting anxious as though I would definitely be performing, because, like I said, I have a weirdly good track record of getting in nearly every time I try for that. And, unsurprisingly, my name got drawn for the second blank spot.

And oh my God, guys, it went so well! I mean, I'm not saying, like, "I completely killed it". But it was quite good. The things that got laughs last year, got laughs again. And the new things also got laughs. There wasn't a single point when I said something that I'd thought of as a punchline, or a point that might be funny, and it didn't get at least a little chuckle. A few points got a smaller laugh than I'd thought they might, but those were outnumbered by the parts that got a notably bigger laugh than I was expecting. I did overrun slightly, came in at 6 minutes and 22 seconds, largely because when I timed it to 6 minutes at home, I factored in shorter pauses for laughter than what I ended up getting. But I think it's all right, I'm pretty sure an overrun by under 30 seconds isn't a huge deal. I'd still love to try ten minutes someday, add my "second bit" into that and be able to take my time more. There were a few points where I think I could have made it funnier by pausing a bit, but I didn't because I was worried about overrunning. But there were also some bits where I stumbled or repeated myself necessarily because I hadn't performed in a while, and being better rehearsed could clean that up and cut the time down a little bit.

It was just such a relief to do it again, be reminded that it does work, and try some stuff I'd not said before and have that work too, as further proof that I can keep coming up with new ideas and sometimes they'll be funny. I mean, it was still all part of the same story. I can't help but want to format things that way. The comedians here don't usually do that, stay on one topic for more than a couple of minutes. But I like to. I've been brought to comedy via too many Edinburgh hours, I can't help but envision my set, in my mind, as a mini one of those. I haven't got a themed, structured hour, but I can do a themed, structured six minutes. I think I could do a fairly well-structured ten, if I got the opportunity. My new lines even added what I think is a pretty decent callback, for a six-minute set. Not sure you can call it much of a callback when the whole thing is only six minutes, but I liked it.

After the show, a woman in the comedian's holding pen told me she'd liked my set a lot. She's performed earlier on the bill, and I told her I liked her a lot too, which was mostly true. In that I'd quite liked what I'd heard of her set, which wasn't all that much, because I was busy reading my own notes and rehearsing my own set in my head. But I liked her jokes. I'd never seen her before, and I do remember at some point being surprised at how good her material was, for some I didn't recognize, so she was presumably new.

We got talking, and she told me she was new to comedy but had been doing theatre professionally for years, and recently got into comedy because she was at the Edinburgh Festival last year and saw how comedy there can be a vehicle for cool theatre-like performances, so she wanted to try that out too. Which immediately explained why I'd never seen her before, and yet she seemed quite good at it. Like when someone you've never heard of shows up to a wrestling tournament and is very good, and you don't know why until you find out they were a champion in judo or some other martial art, and they're new to wrestling but all the skills transfer. I realize I used the proverbial "you" a lot in that sentence, for something so entirely unrelatable to almost the entire population. But it's like that.

Anyway, she was so cool and I kind of want to be her new friend. I told her I just go back from the Edinburgh Festival, she said she couldn't go this year but loved that I went, we talked for a bit about how fucking cool it is to just walk around Edinburgh and see all the posters and all the different stuff going on. We talked about the way they do comedy at the Edinburgh Festival, the way comedy there gets reviewed not just on jokes but on structure and coherence and message, and you don't see any of that here, and she told me that stuff is why she liked my set so much, that it reminded her of that other model, which is pretty much the highest compliment I could possibly get.

She also told me that she's close friends with, and used to live with in Edinburgh, a UK-based comedian whose Edinburgh hour I watched just a few days ago, as it streamed on NextUp. I also described that comedy hour in a Tumblr post, in which I opened the description with "I hated this" and then went on for a few sentences elaborating on why I hated it so much, which I now feel slightly guitly about. I mean, it was genuinely one of the very worst stand-up comedy hours I've ever seen, but I was pretty careful not to mention that when talking to her good friend, and that was a reminder that these are real people. I usually don't even do that - normally, if I hear a stand-up hour I don't like, I just don't mention it on Tumblr. I made an exception for that one, and now I feel bad, because her friend was so nice. Also, that's still pretty cool. It doesn't matter how much I disliked the comedy, I was still pretty impressed to realize I was chatting with someone who used to live with a comedian I just watched stream her Edinburgh hour on NextUp.

So that was great, we had a good time and then added each other on Facebook. While we were chatting, a few audience members stopped on their way out to tell me I was funny, and one even asked if she can add me on Instagram to follow more of my comedy. I said I don't have Instagram, and that was the first time in my life that I've ever had the thought, however brief - "Should I get Instagram?" No, obviously I should not get Instagram. Aside from anything else, I do not perform comedy nearly enough to have things to put on Instagram. But I have to admit I quite liked hearing that someone thought I was enough of a comedian to do that.

On the way out, while I was waiting to pay, an older guy came in to talk to the guy who produces the show. We were both standing and awkwardly waiting together, while the last audience member left, and told me on her way by that she'd liked my set. The older guy asked me if I'm a comedian and I said "sort of", and the guy who produces the show said yes I am a comedian. I happen to like that producer guy a lot but had not really talked to him before (besides brief "hellos"), so I was very pleased about that. The producer guy then told me that my set was great tonight and I really have potential, and that was so cool. And then, high on the adrenaline of all that, I stopped before leaving to very awkwardly tell him "I have hugely enjoyed every time I've seen you perform, often more than anyone else on the bill, and thought the set you did tonight was the best I'd seen you do, you are very good at this." A thing I had been thinking for about a year, but not previously said, because I don't know him, and you know, social anxiety. But he seemed pleased, if somewhat surprised at my sudden directness, so that's nice, and I'm glad he likes me because he runs my favourite open mic night that I'm hoping will give me spots if I start requesting them again, rather than just turning up and putting my name in draws. But that's not why I said it; I genuinely think he's good at comedy, better than most people here.

So that is the story, in probably far too much detail, of what I did last night. I then went home and hung out with my roommate, and it was really good. I wrote a now-deleted fairly bleak post the other week about how that was going badly, how it was like we had nothing to say to each other now that we're not running a sports team together and he's not interested in any other stuff I do, but he and I had some talks about that this week (I did, amazingly, manage to actually communicate with the people closest to me about this problem, rather than just complain on Tumblr), and he pointed out that I usually assume he won't be interested in the stuff I do so I don't open up about it, which is fair. So last night I got home and told him all about my evening and he was happy for me, and then I told him a few things about how comedy works, and I somehow ended up showing him a Dan Rath clip on YouTube to explain the story of how I got caught up in crowd work when I saw him in Edinburgh and told that guy, truthfully, that my job is "autism therapist" (a moment that is only funny if you've seen his comedy, which is why I had to show my roommate bits of it, and I recommend that anyone reading this also go watch the clip I showed my roommate, so you too can understand how funny it is that guy asked me what I do for a living and I said "autism therapist").

Anyway, it was just nice. I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago about how everything felt horribly bleak and I didn't feel socially connected to anyone, and last night things seemed pretty good, on that metric. Also I have today off work because my client's gone out of town, and it's the Friday before a long weekend so that means I get a 4-day weekend, and August is ending and the heat is finally breaking, it's still going to be hot off and on for a bit but at least we're getting into more bearable temperatures and it'll only get better from here, and honestly, after months of inescapable summer (unless you go up to Edinburgh, that was a lovely 5-day escape from the heat), I tend to forget just how much worse I feel about everything when I'm miserable due to heat, and how much better everything gets when that stops. The trade-off is that the end of unbearable heat comes at the same time as my allergies that get really bad in late summer/early fall, but even those have been fairly manageable so far. I feel pretty good right now.

[sandmans-plattform]

Siblings ❤️ ❤️ TomSturridge #actors #Actor #thesandmanofficial #Netflix #netflixseries #neilgaiman #comicbooks #comiclover #mazikeen #amazing #lordmorpheusedit #lordofdreams #Morpheus #follow4followback #followformore #likeforlikeback #likesforlikesback #liketime #waitingfornewseason #season2 #threewayjunction #comcom #kainandabel #lucienne #kain #abel #sweetbitter

Follow new WhatsApp chanel:

https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaGGg9cFsn0YjxsZ6L3

Link in bio

[status-updates]

ntntoice: therehs's somsoemthing in One's calaleldner calledled "Sisyphean Saturday" comcoming uppu nenenxx weeke?

[thecirclecalls]

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[dijonbeaune]

Comcom Gevrey-Nuits : quels projets pour le cinéma Le Nuiton ?

Le 1er juillet dernier, la comcom Gevrey-Chambertin & Nuits-Saint-Georges a repris la gestion du cinéma Le Nuiton à Nuits-Saint-Georges, confiée depuis 1984 à la MJC locale. Pascal Bortot, vice-président en charge de la Culture, détaille le projet de la collectivité. Le cinéma Le Nuiton est désormais géré par la communauté de communes de Gevrey-Chambertin & Nuits-Saint-Georges. © D.R. Une page…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Netflix wants to chop down your family tree

Netflix has unveiled the details of its new anti-password-sharing policy, detailing a suite of complex gymnastics that customers will be expected to undergo if their living arrangements trigger Netflix’s automated enforcement mechanisms:

https://thestreamable.com/news/confirmed-netflix-unveils-first-details-of-new-anti-password-sharing-measures

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/2023/02/02/nonbinary-families/#red-envelopes

Netflix says that its new policy allows members of the same “household” to share an account. This policy comes with an assumption: that there is a commonly understood, universal meaning of “household,” and that software can determine who is and is not a member of your household.

This is a very old corporate delusion in the world of technology. In the early 2000s, I spent years trying to bring some balance to an effort at DVB, whose digital television standards are used in most of the world (but not the USA) when they rolled out CPCM, a DRM system that was supposed to limit video-sharing to a single household.

Their term of art for this was the “authorized domain”: a software-defined family unit whose borders were privately negotiated by corporate executives from media companies, broadcasters, tech and consumer electronics companies in closed-door sessions all around the world, with no public minutes or proceedings.

https://onezero.medium.com/the-internet-heist-part-iii-8561f6d5a4dc

These guys (they were nearly all guys) were proud of how much “flexibility” they’d built into their definition of “household.” For example, if you owned a houseboat, or a luxury car with seatback displays, or a summer villa in another country, the Authorized Domain would be able to figure out how to get the video onto all those screens.

But what about other kinds of families? I suggested that one of our test cases should be a family based in Manila: where the dad travels to remote provinces to do agricultural labor; the daughter is a nanny in California; and the son is doing construction work in the UAE. This suggestion was roundly rejected as an “edge case.”

Of course, this isn’t an edge case. There are orders of magnitude more people whose family looks like this than there are people whose family owns a villa in another country. Owning a houseboat or a luxury car makes you an outlier. Having an itinerant agricultural breadwinner in your family does not.

But everyone who is in the room when a cartel draws up a standard definition of what constitutes a household is almost certainly drawn from a pool that is more likely to have a summer villa than a child doing domestic work or construction labor half a world away. These weirdos, so dissimilar from the global majority, get to define the boxes that computers will shove the rest of the world into. If your family doesn’t look like their family, that’s tough: “Computer says no.”

One day at a CPCM meeting, we got to talking about the problem of “content laundering” and how the way to prevent it would be to put limits on how often someone could leave a household and join another one. No one, they argued, would ever have to change households every week.

I put my hand up and said, “What about a child whose divorced parents share custody of her? She’s absolutely going to change households every week.” They thought about it for a moment, then the rep from a giant IT company that had recently been convicted of criminal antitrust violations said, “Oh, we can solve that: we’ll give her a toll-free number to call when she gets locked out of her account.”

That was the solution they went with. If you are a child coping with the dissolution of your parents’ marriage, you will have the obligation to call up a media company every month — or more often — and explain that Mummy and Daddy don’t love each other any more, but can I please have my TV back?

I never forgot that day. I even wrote a science fiction story about it called (what else?) “Authorized Domain”:

https://craphound.com/news/2011/10/31/authorised-domain/

I think everyone understood that this was an absurd “solution,” but they had already decided that they were going to complete the seemingly straightforward business of defining a category like “household” using software, and once that train left the station, nothing was going to stop it.

This is a recurring form of techno-hubris: the idea that baseline concepts like “family” have crisp definitions and that any exceptions are outliers that would never swallow the rule. It’s such a common misstep that there’s a whole enre* called “Falsehoods Programmers Believe About ______”:

https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood

In that list: names, time, currency, birthdays, timezones, email addresses, national borders, nations, biometrics, gender, language, alphabets, phone numbers, addresses, systems of measurement, and, of course, families. These categories are touchstones in our everyday life, and we think we know what they mean — but then we try to define them, and the list of exceptions spirals out into a hairy, fractal infinity.

Historically, these fuzzy categorical edges didn’t matter so much, because they were usually interpreted by humans using common sense. My grandfather was born “Avrom Doctorovitch” (or at least, that’s one way to transliterate his name, which was spelled in a different alphabet, but which was also transliterating his first name from yet another alphabet). When he came to Canada as a refugee, his surname was anglicized to “Doctorow.” Other cousins are “Doctorov,” “Doctoroff,” and “Doktorovitch.”

Naturally, his first name could have been “Abraham” or “Abe,” but his first employer (a fellow Eastern European emigre) decided that was too ethnic and in sincere effort to help him fit in, he called my grandfather “Bill.” When my grandfather attained citizenship, his papers read “Abraham William Doctorow.” He went by “Abe,” “Billy,” “Bill,” “William,” “Abraham” and “Avrom.”

Practically, it didn’t matter that variations on all of these appeared on various forms of ID, contracts, and paperwork. His reparations check from the German government had a different variation from the name on the papers he used to open his bank account, but the bank still let him deposit it.

All of my relatives from his generation have more than one name. Another grandfather of mine was born “Aleksander,” and called “Sasha” by friends, but had his name changed to “Seymour” when he got to Canada. His ID was also a mismatched grab-bag of variations on that theme.

None of this mattered to him, either. Airlines would sell him tickets and border guards would stamp his passport and rental agencies would let him drive away in cars despite the minor variations on all his ID.

But after 9/11, all that changed, for everyone who had blithely trundled along with semi-matching names across their official papers and database entries. Suddenly, it was “computer says no” everywhere you turned, unless everything matched perfectly. There was a global rush for legal name-changes after 9/11 — not because people changed their names, but because people needed to perform the bureaucratic ritual necessary to have the name they’d used all along be recognized in these new, brittle, ambiguity-incinerating machines.

For important categories, ambiguity is a feature, not a bug. The fact that you can write anything on an envelope (including a direction to deliver the letter to the granny flat over the garage, not the front door) means that we don’t have to define “address” — we can leave it usefully hairy around the edges.

Once the database schema is formalized, then “address” gets defined too — the number of lines it can have, the number of characters each line can have, the kinds of characters and even words (woe betide anyone who lives in Scunthorpe).

If you have a “real” address, a “real” name, a “real” date of birth, all of this might seem distant to you. These “edge” cases — seasonal agricultural workers, refugees with randomly assigned “English” names — are very far from your experience.

That’s true — for now (but not forever). The “Shitty Technology Adoption Curve” describes the process by which abusive technologies work their way up the privilege gradient. Every bad technological idea is first rolled out on poor people, refugees, prisoners, kids, mental patients and other people who can’t push back.

Their bodies are used to sand the rough edges and sharp corners off the technology, to normalize it so that it can climb up through the social ranks, imposed on people with more and more power and influence. 20 years ago, if you ate your dinner under an always-on #CCTV, it was because you were in a supermax prison. Today, it’s because you bought a premium home surveillance system from Google, Amazon or Apple.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/29/impunity-corrodes/#arise-ye-prisoners

The Netflix anti-sharing tools are designed for rich people. If you travel for business and stay in the kind of hotel where the TV has its own Netflix client that you can plug your username and password into, Netflix will give you a seven-day temporary code to use.

But for the most hardcore road-warriors, Netflix has thin gruel. Unless you connect to your home wifi network every 31 days and stream a show, Netflix will lock out your devices. Once blocked, you have to “contact Netflix” (laughs in Big Tech customer service).

Why is Netflix putting the screws to its customers? It’s part of the enshittification cycle, where platform companies first allocate surpluses to their customers, luring them in and using them as bait for business customers. Once they turn up, the companies reallocate surpluses to businesses, lavishing them with low commissions and lots of revenue opportunities. And once they’re locked in, the company starts to claw back the surpluses for itself.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Remember when Netflix was in the business of mailing red envelopes full of DVDs around the country? That was allocating surpluses to users. The movie companies hated this, viewed it as theft — a proposition that was at least as valid as Netflix’s complaints about password sharing, but every pirate wants to be an admiral, and when Netflix did it to the studios, that was “progress,” but when you do it to Netflix, that’s theft.

Then, once Netflix had users locked in and migrated to the web (and later, apps), it shifted surpluses to studios, paying fat licensing fees to stream their movies and connect them to a huge audience.

Finally, once the studios were locked in, Netflix started to harvest the surplus for its shareholders: raising prices, lowering streaming rates, knocking off other studios’ best performing shows with in-house clones, etc. Users’ surpluses are also on the menu: the password “sharing” that let you define a household according to your family’s own idiosyncratic contours is unilaterally abolished in a quest to punish feckless Gen Z kids for buying avocado toast instead of their own Netflix subscriptions.

Netflix was able to ignore the studios’ outraged howls when it built a business by nonconsenually distributing their products in red envelopes. But now that Netflix has come for your family, don’t even think about giving Netfix some of what it gave to the MPAA.

As a technical matter, it’s not really that hard to modify Netflix’s app so that every stream you pull seems to come from your house, no matter where you are. But doing so would require reverse-engineering Netflix’s app, and that would violate Section 1201 of the DMCA, the CFAA, and eleventy-seven other horrible laws. Netflix’s lawyers would nuke you until the rubble bounced.

When Netflix was getting started, it could freely interoperate with the DVDs that the studios had put on the market. It could repurpose those DVDs in ways that the studios strenuously objected to. In other words, Netfix used adversarial interoperability (AKA Competitive Compatibility or ComCom) to launch its business:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

Today, Netflix is on the vanguard of the war to abolish adversarial interop. They helped lead the charge to pervert W3C web-standards, creating a DRM video standard called EME that made it a crime to build a full-featured browser without getting permission from media companies and restricting its functionality to their specifications:

https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/the-end-of-indie-web-browsers/

When they used adversarial interoperability to build a multi-billion-dollar global company using the movie studios’ products in ways the studios hated, that was progress. When you define “family” in ways that makes Netflix less money, that’s felony contempt of business model.

[Image ID: A Victorian family tree template populated by tintypes of old-timey people. In the foreground stands a menacing, chainsaw-wielding figure, his face obscured by a hoodie. The blade of the chainsaw is poised to chop down the family tree. A Netflix 'N' logo has been superimposed over the man's face.]

[calliopeservices2]

Présentation de l'Intelligence Artificielle par Florent Beranger aux membres du Club Entreprise Amplitude à Albon

Présentation de l'Intelligence Artificielle par Florent Beranger aux membres du Club Entreprise Amplitude à Albon ce Mardi 17 Septembre 2024

Le Club Entreprise Amplitude, sous la coordination d’Aurélie Gardon (Facilitatrice à la ComCom Porte DrômArdèche), a eu le plaisir d’accueillir l’entrepreneur Florent Beranger pour une présentation exclusive sur le thème de l’intelligence artificielle (IA). Cet événement, très attendu, qui s’est tenu à La Fabrique à Albon, a rassemblé des membres passionnés et curieux d’en apprendre plus sur les…

[abyssmalice]

(me somehow Just realising that latest tonitoni comcom can be New Icon........)

[apocalypse-alert]

oh

ALSO WAIT I FORGOR MY MASK AND SUIT WAI

-☄

Too late comcom we’re playing the second ever copy of Mario kart

[myphotoshootsinspirations]

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