#25yrsago Camgirls use Amazon wishlists for payouts https://web.archive.org/web/20010821234935/http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/08/13/cam_girls/index.html
#25yrsago State of the tech industry 2021 https://web.archive.org/web/20011216222920/http://latimes.com/technology/la-000064605aug09.story
#25yrsago List of scenes cut from Looney Tunes reissues https://web.archive.org/web/20011214095249/http://www.toonzone.net/looney/ltcuts/
#20yrsago Strategy behind using liquids to threaten planes https://web.archive.org/web/20060813001626/https://wondermark.com/d/220.html
#20yrsago RIAA to grieving family: We depose your children in 60 days https://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/2006/08/riaa-wants-to-depose-dead-defendants.html
#15yrsago Stasi spywear: the inept art of commie disguise https://web.archive.org/web/20120000000000*/http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,777716,00.html
#15yrsago 1968: when Britain’s Daily Mirror tried to overthrow Parliament https://www.bbc.co.uk/webarchive/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2Fblogs%2Fadamcurtis%2F2011%2F07%2Fevery_day_is_like_sunday.html
#15yrsago My panel with Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf and Al Gore at Mexico City’s Campus Party https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXPZnpsN4-s
#15yrsago Doctor tried to "cure homosexuality" by tasping gay man while he had sex with a female sex-worker https://web.archive.org/web/20111004080028/https://blog.ketyov.com/2011/08/self-stimulating-brain-for-heterosexual.html
#10yrsago How a digital-only smartphone opens the door to DRM (and how to close the door) https://memex.craphound.com/2016/08/12/how-a-digital-only-smartphone-opens-the-door-to-drm-and-how-to-close-the-door/
#10yrsago Forget Skynet: AI is already making things terrible for people who aren’t rich white dudes https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/opinion/sunday/artificial-intelligences-white-guy-problem.html
#10yrsago How self-driving cars could make everything worse, and what to do about it https://web.archive.org/web/20170918192128/https://www.wired.com/2016/08/self-driving-cars-will-improve-our-cities-if-they-dont-ruin-them/
#10yrsago The Tor Project’s social contract: we will not backdoor Tor https://blog.torproject.org/tor-social-contract/
#10yrsago Cash grants to people with unexpected bills successfully prevents homelessness https://www.science.org/content/article/bit-cash-can-keep-someone-streets-2-years-or-more
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:
In the summer of 2013, two esoteric, technical, incredibly important texts were published within weeks of one another: the first is the Snowden leaks, which revealed a system of global, pervasive digital surveillance; the second was Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, a book about the economic inevitability (and political instability) of oligarchy:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
In 2013, it wasn't immediately apparent how these two works connected with one another, but in the years since, I've grown increasingly convinced that Snowden and Piketty can only be properly understood as describing two aspects of the same phenomenon.
Piketty's landmark volume was grounded in a detailed analysis of 300 years' (!) worth of global capital flows, painstakingly compiled by a large team of grad students from a massive set of heterogeneous records. The book's conclusion is the statement that "returns to capital exceed the rate of growth over the long term" (abbreviated as "r > g").
This may sound innocuous, but it is explosive. If r > g, then the most wealth will inevitably accumulate in the hands of people who start with the most wealth, irrespective of whether they do anything productive with that money. This means that the alleged heroes of the market system – the entrepreneurs who found and manage the firms that increase public prosperity – are doomed to play second fiddle to the mere plumbers of money, people who "contribute" by accumulating.
The starkest example of this in Capital 21C is Piketty's contrast between L'Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt (then the richest woman in the world) and Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft (then the most successful corporation in the world). Piketty compares the growth in the fortunes of Bettencourt and Gates over two periods: first, the period between Microsoft's founding and Gates' retirement as CEO; and second, the period after Gates's retirement from his executive role, when he became a mere investor, no longer an entrepreneur.
During that first period, in which Gates was founding and running the most successful corporation in the world, he accumulated less wealth than did Liliane Bettencourt, who did precisely nothing of value over that period. Bettencourt didn't even manage her investments – that was all handled by some very clever financial planners, lawyers and accountants. In other words: for Bettencourt, doing nothing at all produced more wealth as founding the most successful corporation in the world did for Gates. Bettencourt, a person who owned things, did better than Gates, a person who did things.
And then Gates retired. He stopped doing things and started owning things. He became an investor, whereupon he out-earned both Bettencourt and Gates-the-entrepreneur. Again, the market system allocated fewer rewards to the most successful person in the doing things business than it allocated to that same person once he quit that job and got into the owning things business.
Piketty shows that this holds true across markets and nations and eras: all other things being equal, the market system produces a class of hereditary aristocrats who command the world's capital and direct its deployment, despite never having done anything. The market's most lavish rewards do not go to its most productive participants, but rather, to those participants who have the good fortune to emerge from the luckiest of orifices.
Worse: winning the orifice lottery in no way qualifies you to direct the capital you've inherited. Liliane Bettencourt had no revolutionary new business ideas, invented no miraculous new materials or processes, produced no brilliant art. She merely accumulated, thanks to the professional services of skilled technicians whose job description includes hiring their own successors to ensure that another generation of winners of the Bettencourt orifice lottery could continue to accumulate, commanding more capital and power in society.
Perhaps if these orifice winners were content to allow their bloodless Renfields to allocate their capital while consuming bonbons and attending yacht parties, this could yield a stable politics. But inevitably, people who win the orifice lottery observe that they come from a long line of wealthy people, a line that will continue with their own descendants, and conclude that they have some kind of special, heritable virtue – magic blood – that the system has recognized with their great fortunes and the power those fortunes confer.
That's when things get dangerous: when aristocrats grow bored with their leisure and mobilize their inherited capital to change the way the rest of us live. Billionaire dilettantes are weapons of mass destruction, and their special projects have a wide blast radius and inflict a lot of collateral damage.
Take Bill Gates: his ideological projects have been a catastrophe. A patent maximalist, he funded the lobbyists who successfully blocked South Africa from producing its own AIDS drugs under an IP waiver program, and then deployed them again to stop the Global South from making their own covid vaccines:
Closer to home, Gates's hatred of public institutions led him to allocate millions to dismantling public schools and replacing them with charter schools, particularly for poor and racialized kids, with disastrous results:
Capital's tendency to accumulate in the hands of the already wealthy (r > g) means that these aristocrats end up setting an ever-larger proportion of our societal agenda, despite their manifest unfitness to govern and their absence of any kind of democratic legitimacy.
Piketty argues that inequality is inherently politically destabilizing. A society ruled over fools and monsters who were not voted into power and can't be voted out of power is a doomed society. Eventually – the French Revolution, the World Wars – these societies grow so unstable that they collapse altogether.
This is where Piketty and Snowden converge. When the Snowden leaks broke, there was a lot of talk about the mechanics and the legality of the NSA's global digital surveillance, but precious little consideration was given to the reason for all this surveillance. In 2013, the idea that this spying was about "security" was so obvious as to be self-evident. The questions at the time were whether spying could produce security. We weren't asking why things were so insecure.
In retrospect, the answer is to be found in Piketty. Piketty's Capital includes a long, impassioned plea to both lawmakers and aristocrats to consider redistributive policies (like a wealth tax) as the most affordable way to achieve political stability. Fundamentally, Piketty argues that the cheapest way to stop people from building a guillotine on your lawn is to build hospitals and schools; this is cheaper than paying for guards and prisons to lock up would-be guillotine builders.
Today's AI debates swirl around the question of whether AI can truly make us more productive – that is, if chatbots will allow one person to do the work of two, or three, or four – or 100. But when it comes to surveillance, the digital revolution unquestionably produced a massive productivity dividend.
Consider the spying apparatus of the former East Germany ("the GDR") widely considered the most surveilled society in human history. When the Berlin Wall collapsed, there were about 16m people in the country. Of those East Germans, about 90,000 worked directly for the Stasi (the secret police), aided by another 100-200,000 paid informants:
Call it 200,000 people to spy on 16m. In other words, it took one spy to watch 80 of their neighbors. Contrast this with NSA spying: they accumulated detailed surveillance dossiers on about 6 billion internet users using a staff of no more than 5 million spooks (in 2013, about 5 million Americans were eligible for security clearance). If every single person with security clearance in the USA was working on the NSA's surveillance program, that would mean that by 2013, computers had made it possible for a spy to keep tabs on more than a thousand people.
Orders of magnitude improvements in a mere generation! This is the kind of productivity lift that economists dream of when they fantasize about the dividends from automation.
But why? Why spy?
East Germany spied on its people because the system was so unjust and cruel that its beneficiaries understood that their neighbors forever on the brink of rising up against them. East Germany's leaders were right about that – but if anything, they didn't put enough people onto the spying project. We can tell, because the Berlin Wall fell in 1989!
Of course, the GDR was already paying more than 1.2% of its population to spy on everyone else. It's likely that East Germany's leaders believed that their society simply lacked the fiscal space to hire more spies, even if short-staffing the Stasi risked societal collapse. Now, if Piketty is right, East Germany's leaders could have solved this problem by giving people fewer reasons to want to overthrow the state. They could have taken their hands out of the cookie jar, could have instituted democratic reforms – they could have made a bid for democratic legitimacy and public material comfort. But that would have come at the leaders' own power and wealth, and, lacking the stomach for this sacrifice, they lost everything.
Enter the NSA: the digitization of human civilization has drastically reduced the cost of surveillance, and – again, per Piketty – this vastly increases the amount of inequality the world can sustain before the illegitimacy, incompetence and cruelty of rule by the neoaristocratic winners of the orifice lottery brings the whole thing crashing down.
The Trump years are proof of this. We've reached a high-water mark for rule by illegitimate billionaire dilettantes. The second Trump admin began with DOGE's Bonfire of the Stupidities, where Musk cultists dismantled vast swathes of the American administrative state. Musk didn't just attack foreign aid – though the fact that the world's richest man murdered hundreds of thousands of the world's poorest children for the lulz isn't merely cruel, but also massively destabilizing in a way that will shake the world's politics for generations – but also domestic institutions. It was a DOGE cultist who fed the part of the NIH that tracks cyclosporin outbreaks into the wood-chipper:
Today, tens of thousands of Americans are experiencing the literal enshittification of the American state, and this isn't just a human tragedy (though it is), it's also an economic tragedy, with massive knock-on effects for the businesses that rely on those sickened Americans and for the agricultural sector whose outputs are now being shunned by millions. Whether it's letting Bill Gates decide how your schools will work or letting Elon Musk decide how your public health system runs, the result is political chaos and a societal nudge away from the rule of law and towards guillotines.
Which brings me back to Snowden. The Snowden revelations did spur a global conversation about digital surveillance, with the result that the majority of the world's digital traffic is encrypted today. That's not nothing.
But the American state found new ways to conduct mass-scale, global surveillance, often by collaborating directly with tech giants. Billionaires like Peter Thiel capitalized on Big Tech's conflicted feelings about openly participating in surveillance by founding Palantir, with the express mission of murdering the political opponents of oligarchy:
Over the past decade, the steady march of digital technology, dominated by a cartel of giant global firms who collude with the US government's system of political repression in exchange for tax breaks, antitrust forbearance and fat federal contracts has yielded more mass surveillance productivity gains than the previous 25 years:
The Trump administration is the most unpopular in more than a century. Trump has stolen more money in office than any president in history. Trump presides over spiraling greedflation and collapsing buying power. The Trump administration has also presided over a titanic increase in state-aligned, privatized surveillance. The Trump years are the Flock years:
Trump's authoritarianism is a function of his misrule, and his misrule is enabled by his authoritarianism. The more he steals, the more he destroys with wars of choice, and incoherent tariff policies, and official pronouncements linking autism and vaccinations, the more he needs spy cameras, internet surveillance, vehicle tracking, and facial recognition. Every time Trump talks about a third term in office, or canceling elections, or suppressing the vote, he creates demand for mass surveillance to catch and imprison the people this drives into the streets. The more mass surveillance there is, the safer it is for him to commit unpopular, corrupt acts. It's the world's worst self-licking ice-cream cone.
It's not just Trump, of course. Trump is the vanguard of a movement of orifice lottery winners whose delight in stealing, cheating, maiming and despoiling gives rise to political instability and requires them to divert some of their yacht money to mercenaries:
Take AI: the Trump years are also the AI years. This is the time in which a wildly unpopular technology is being shoved into every part of every app we rely on:
It's an era where corporate bosses can't stop gloating about how many jobs they're planning to destroy and how many paycuts they plan on imposing on the surviving workers:
And – most visibly – it's an era in which people's cities and towns are being despoiled by data centers they don't want, by local governments operating in the most extreme secrecy, who silence and even arrest citizens who demand a democratically legitimate process for deciding whether they will have to give up their power and water and land and peace:
An economist would tell you that there's an equilibrium being sought here: between the cost of bribing a town council to ram through data center approvals, the cost of building a more modest and palatable data center, and the cost of mollifying public critics. The cost of bribing towns to foist a data center on the townsfolk is low, because there are lots of towns that fit the bill, so data center barons can shop around.
But as data center protests grow larger and better organized (oligarchy is destabilizing), the cost of dealing with public opposition is mounting. Which is why the Trump administration is teaming up with its preferred tech and military contractors to engage in detailed surveillance of data center and AI critics:
These corporate spooks aren't just spying on data center critics: they've got a whole portfolio of oligarchy-stabilizing surveillance services, targeting "antifa," immigrants' rights and anti-ICE groups.
They're joined by hardware vendors who offer corporations, the wealthy, and enclaves where both are to be found on literal robocops, the ultimate in cheap guard labor (alas, the robots suck):
Trump and his orifice-winning army are caught in the same trap as the leaders of the GDR. Every gain in guard-labor efficiency creates the space for more of them to stick more of their hands even further into the cookie jar. Every time they do, American society grows more unstable, demanding more guard labor.
As we saw in Minneapolis, guard labor – be it mass surveillance, robocops or ICE chuds – is itself destabilizing. Police states make the people who live in them want to overthrow the state, requiring yet more cops, creating more partisans for tearing the whole thing down.
In theory, the orifice class could decide to stop stealing, cheating and maiming. The problem is that for every plute who realizes that the cheapest way to keep the guillotines off his lawn is to play fair, there are three more who lack the executive function to stop cheating. That means that you might as well keep on cheating, since the instability – and the guard labor bills – are coming no matter what.
In the tale of the "Tragedy of the Commons," a common pasture is grazed to dust by shepherds who each understand that if they don't graze their flock until everything is gone, some other shepherd will do so. The original "Tragedy of the Commons" paper was a racist hoax perpetrated by an academic fraud who wanted to make the case for the expulsion of black and Brown people from America and their mass extermination abroad:
But when it comes to the commons that is "a stable society," the orifice class is caught in an inescapable tragedy, certain of the knowledge that if they don't cheat us, the next American aristo will. Thus the demand for guard labor continues to mount…as does the demand for guillotines.
One of the most recognizable examples of Soviet branding - packaging for “Alyonka” chocolate bar.
Original photo was made by Alexander Gerinas of his eight months daughter Lena in 1960.
In 1966, the photo was redrawn by Nikolai Maslov, Krasny Oktyabr’s artist, and appeared on the chocolate bar. To this day it’s used on Alyonka wrappers.
The bureaucratic AI arms-race is mutually assured destruction
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:
According to an Economist editorial, "AI is breaking the British state" by making it too easy to file complaints, demands and appeals, which will "drown the state" with "demands as well-crafted as a first-class lawyer's":
https://archive.is/VTrj9
Let's pause a moment to appreciate the Economist's touching credulity about AI's coming legal mastery. The law seems to be the area where AI is most prone to "hallucinate" (that is, "produce defective outputs"), which can only be sorted through by skilled practitioners whose experience gives them the discernment to distinguish useful arguments from foolish ones:
(And this requires those skilled practitioners to avoid the "automation blindness" that afflicts people who are asked to remain vigilant for things that seldom occur, a phenomenon that has turned every TSA agent into the water-bottle-detectingest motherfucker the human race has ever produced, who still misses 95% of the guns that red teams bring through the checkpoint):
More notable than the Economist's faith-based predictions about the impending army of hyper-competent robo-lawyers is the magazine's proposed solution to this looming crisis: "stop creating entitlements that are ripe for AI-fuelled claims…prune the mass of procedural rights." Above all, replace the bureaucrats who process your "complaints, demands and appeals" with more AI, which will arbitrarily decide who gets what, through "personalised welfare interventions" that are not based on any kind of guaranteed rights.
Writing on his blog, the political scientist Henry Farrell tells us where this will inevitably end up: with AI-based robot wars in which increasingly stingy and pernickety robo-bureaucrats create demand for progressively more aggressive robo-lawyers:
As Farrell writes, this end-time was foretold by the prophet Alan Moore with his 1980s 2000 AD character Abelard Snazz, "the man with the two-storey brain":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abelard_Snazz
Snazz "solves" the street crime epidemic on the planet Twopp with "Big Police Robots," who spiral out of control, arresting the citizens of Twopp for trivial crimes like wearing brown shoes with a blue suit ("breaking the laws of good taste"). To solve this new problem, Snazz invents "Big Criminal Robots" whose "cunning, efficient" crimes "take up all the police's time."
Twopp is left in a state of high-stakes Big Robot crimewars, in which the most efficient criminals imaginable battle the most ruthless robocops science can deliver, with the Twoppians caught in the crossfire, collateral damage in a robotic forever war (on crime).
As Farrell writes, this is already afflicting the US health system, where an army of insurance company robo-claim-deniers have been countered with a doctors' army of robot-claim-appealers:
The point being that people need health care, people need public services, and while there will always be some waste at the margins (whether due to incompetence or dishonesty) responding to this by beefing up the system's defenses with more advanced red tape just requires the people who legitimately need these services to employ more aggressive tactics.
In support of this, Farrell points to a great, long essay by Dan "Accountability Sink" Davies for the Niskanen Center, "'The Problem Factory' – Preemptive risk aversion in infrastructure planning and the role of professional services":
Davies' essay describes how increasing bureaucratic defenses against frivolous or dishonest claims drives the participants in these processes to assume a war footing and approach the system as a battlefield, leading to the very runaway cost inflation that the bureaucratic process was instituted to prevent.
(Davies, a cybernetician, has some fascinating advice about how to structure planning processes to minimize this, but that's out of scope for this particular post.)
This reminds me of nothing so much as the spam wars. There was a time when it was very easy to set up a mail server and provide email access for anyone who wanted it – including spammers. Increased spam begat increased anti-spam countermeasures, notably the creation of blocklists that allowed mail administrators to automatically reject email from "insecure" mail servers.
Inevitably, spammers figured out how to send spam from "secure" servers, resulting in stricter, more onerous standards for mail server configuration. Spammers – for whom the ability to send spam is an existential matter – figured out how to meet these standards, so the security demands jumped again – and again, and again.
Today, sending and receiving mail is so technically challenging that most of the internet's email is run by a handful of giant, mostly US-based corporations. If any of these companies decides your mail server is spamming, you effectively disappear from the internet and good luck getting them to acknowledge an error. Meanwhile, these companies emit an avalanche of spam, but no one will ever block their servers, because to do so would be to cut off billions of legitimate email users:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/10/dead-letters/
And since most of these companies are US-based, they are liable to being weaponized by Trump, who has taken to ordering his tech giants to block foreign officials whose policy decisions make him angry:
Another parallel is the content moderation wars that saw the large platforms coming up with progressively more detailed rules about what constituted harassment and hate speech, only to have dedicated trolls master these rule-books. Trolls – for whom harassment was a full-time vocation – became the world's greatest experts on the platforms' speech policies, which let them skate right up to the line when abusing their victims, and to get those victims kicked off the platforms if they could be lured into putting a single toe over the line in response:
Farrell criticizes the Economist's answer to the (allege) looming robo-lawyer threat as "solutionism," Evgeny Morozov's word for "Recasting all complex social situations either as neat problems with definite, computable solutions":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_fix
Using AI to root AI-generated bureaucratic appeals sacrifices the system's putative purpose – delivering services – in the name of defending that service from abuse and misuse of the system's resources. As the pioneering cybernetician Stafford Beer famously wrote, "the purpose of a system is what it does." If your bureaucracy is more concerned with fighting fraud than delivering service, then it isn't a service delivery system at all – it's a service denial system.
As Farrell writes, the people of Twopp can tell you how this ends – in a war of giant robots in which we are all collateral damage.
(A brief postscript: Farrell is a font of science fictional analogies to modern policy issues. This weekend in the FT, he and Dan Wang published an excellent editorial on the relevance of the paranoid, claustrophobic fiction of Philip K Dick to our present political reality:)
"Using AI to root AI-generated bureaucratic appeals sacrifices the system's putative purpose – delivering services – in the name of defending that service from abuse and misuse of the system's resources."
But GUYS!!! This is peak on-brand behavior for any capitalist system.
I bought Sea Serpents, Sailors & Sceptics (1978) on a lark while buying some other stuff from the ongoing sale of the late ghost story chronicler Richard Dalby’s massive library. Basically, because I liked the cover illustration and it was cheap (I dunno how I feel about “skeptic” spelled with a “C” though). As someone who is profoundly ill at ease with the idea of sea serpents, the back cover was a bit startling when I took it out of the box, I admit.
Another surprise: the book is rather fun in an RPG sense. It’s sort of the main sourcebook for White Wolfs Sea Serpent: The Swimming, a pretty exhaustive collection of serpent sightings and related data, including a visual identification system not unlike bird or airplane silhouettes. McEwan is clearly in the camp that believes that the oceans are too big and hide too much for us to rule out the existence of sea serpents, pointing to the giant squid, which was once believed a legend and in McEwan’s day was confirmed to exist; now there are even larger squid known to science. Eels, too, likely grow to monstrous size but have just never been seen. So why not sea serpents? I tend to agree. And also shudder. Fuck oceans, man, how do people stand going in them?
I was so entertained and impressed by this book that I looked up McEwan’s other work. He has a book on mysterious animals of Britain and one on hauntings, both of which I’d like to grab at some point, but the one I did buy immediately was Crypts, Caves and Catacombs: Subterranea of Derbyshire and Nottingham. It’s amazing! But that’s a story for another time…
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