#centralization

[kenyatta]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Dinkclump Linkdump

I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT in LA (Saturday night, with Adam Conover), Seattle (Monday, with Neal Stephenson), then Portland, Phoenix and more!

Some Saturday mornings, I look at the week's blogging and realize I have a lot more links saved up than I managed to write about this week, and then I do a linkdump. There've been 14 of these, and this is number 15:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

Attentive readers will note that this isn't Saturday. You're right. But I'm on a book tour and every day is shatterday, because damn, it's grueling and I'm not the spry manchild who took Little Brother on the road in 2008 – I'm a 52 year old with two artificial hips. Hence: an out-of-cycle linkdump. Come see me on tour and marvel at my verticality!

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/16/narrative-capitalism/#bezzle-tour

Best thing I read this week, hands down, was Ryan Broderick's Garbage Day piece, "AI search is a doomsday cult":

https://www.garbageday.email/p/ai-search-doomsday-cult

Broderick makes so many excellent points in this piece. First among them: AI search sucks, but that's OK, because no one is asking for AI search. This only got more true later in the week when everyone's favorite spicy autocomplete accidentally loaded the James Joyce module:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/02/chatgpt-alarms-users-by-spitting-out-shakespearean-nonsense-and-rambling/

(As Matt Webb noted, Chatbots have slid rapidly from Star Trek (computers give you useful information in a timely fashion) to Douglas Adams (computers spout hostile, impenetrable nonsense at you):

https://interconnected.org/home/2024/02/21/adams

But beyond the unsuitability of AI for search results and beyond the public's yawning indifference to AI-infused search, Broderick makes a more important point: AI search is about summarizing web results so you don't have to click links and read the pages yourself.

If that's the future of the web, who the fuck is going to write those pages that the summarizer summarizes? What is the incentive, the business-model, the rational explanation for predicting a world in which millions of us go on writing web-pages, when the gatekeepers to the web have promised to rig the game so that no one will ever visit those pages, or read what we've written there, or even know it was us who wrote the underlying material the summarizer just summarized?

If we stop writing the web, AIs will have to summarize each other, forming an inhuman centipede of botshit-ingestion. This is bad news, because there's pretty solid mathematical evidence that training a bot on botshit makes it absolutely useless. Or, as the authors of the paper – including the eminent cryptographer Ross Anderson – put it, "using model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects":

https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493

This is the mathematical evidence for Jathan Sadowski's "Hapsburg AI," or, as the mathematicians call it, "The Curse of Recursion" (new band-name just dropped).

But if you really have your heart set on living in a ruined dystopia dominated by hostile artificial life-forms, have no fear. As Hamilton Nolan writes in "Radical Capital," a rogues gallery of worker-maiming corporations have asked a court to rule that the NLRB can't punish them for violating labor law:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/radical-capital

Trader Joe’s, Amazon, Starbucks and SpaceX have all made this argument to various courts. If they prevail, then there will be no one in charge of enforcing federal labor law. Yes, this will let these companies go on ruining their workers' lives, but more importantly, it will give carte blanche to every other employer in the land. At one end of this process is a boss who doesn't want to recognize a union – and at the other end are farmers dying of heat-stroke.

The right wing coalition that has put this demand before the court has all sorts of demands, from forced birth to (I kid you not), the end of recreational sex:

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/02/getting-rid-of-birth-control-is-a-key-gop-agenda-item-for-the-second-trump-term

That coalition is backed by ultra-rich monopolists who want wreck the nation that their rank-and-file useful idiots want to wreck your body. These are the monopoly cheerleaders who gave us the abomination that is the Pharmacy Benefit Manager – a useless intermediary that gets to screw patients and pharmacists – and then let PBMs consolidate and merge with pharmacy monopolists.

One such inbred colossus is Change Healthcare, a giant PBM that is, in turn, a mere tendril of United Healthcare, which merged the company with Optum. The resulting system – held together with spit and wishful thinking – has access to the health records of a third of Americans and processes 15 billion prescriptions per day.

Or rather, it did process that amount – until the all-your-eggs-in-one-badly-maintained basket strategy failed on Wednesday, and Change's systems went down due to an unspecified "cybersecurity incident." In the short term, this meant that tens of millions of Americans who tried to refill their prescriptions were told to either pay cash or come back later (if you don't die first). That was the first shoe dropping. The second shoe is the medical records of a third of the country.

Don't worry, I'm sure those records are fine. After all, nothing says security like "merging several disparate legacy IT systems together while simultaneously laying off half your IT staff as surplus to requirements and an impediment to extracting a special dividend for the private equity owners who are, of course, widely recognized as the world's greatest information security practitioners."

Look, not everything is terrible. Some computers are actually getting better. Framework's user-serviceable, super-rugged, easy-to-repair, powerful laptops are the most exciting computers I've ever owned – or broken:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/13/graceful-failure/#frame

Now you can get one for $500!

https://frame.work/blog/first-framework-laptop-16-shipments-and-a-499-framework

And the next generation is turning our surprisingly well, despite all our worst efforts. My kid – now 16! – and I just launched our latest joint project, "The Sushi Chronicles," a small website recording our idiosyncratic scores for nearly every sushi restaurant in Burbank, Glendale, Studio City and North Hollywood:

https://sushichronicles.org/

This is the record of two years' worth of Daughter-Daddy sushi nights that started as a way to get my picky eater to try new things and has turned into the highlight of my week. If you're in the area and looking for a nice piece of fish, give it a spin (also, we belatedly realized that we've never reviewed our favorite place, Kuru Kuru in the CVS Plaza on North Hollywood Way – we'll be rectifying that soon).

And yes, we have a lavishly corrupt Supreme Court, but at least now everyone knows it. Glenn Haumann's even set up a Gofundme to raise money to bribe Clarence Thomas (now deleted, alas):

https://www.gofundme.com/f/pzhj4q-the-clarence-thomas-signing-bonus-fund-give-now

The funds are intended as a "signing bonus" in the event that Thomas takes up John Oliver on his offer of a $2.4m luxury RV and $1m/year for life if he'll resign from the court:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE-VJrdHMug

This is truly one of Oliver's greatest bits, showcasing his mastery over the increasingly vital art of turning abstruse technical issues into entertainment that negates the performative complexity used by today's greatest villains to hide their misdeeds behind a Shield of Boringness (h/t Dana Clare).

The Bezzle is my contribution to turning abstruse scams into a high-impact technothriller that pierces that Shield of Boringness. The key to this is to master exposition, ignoring the (vastly overrated) rule that one must "show, not tell." Good exposition is hard to do, but when it works, it's amazing (as anyone who's read Neal Stephenson's 1,600-word explanation of how to eat Cap'n Crunch cereal in Cryptonomicon can attest). I wrote about this for Mary Robinette Kowal's "My Favorite Bit" this week:

https://maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/my-favorite-bit/my-favorite-bit-cory-doctorow-talks-about-the-bezzle/

Of course, an undisputed master of this form is Adam Conover, whose Adam Ruins Everything show helped invent it. Adam is joining me on stage in LA tomorrow night at Vroman's at 5:30PM, to host me in a book-tour event for my novel The Bezzle:

https://www.vromansbookstore.com/Cory-Doctorow-discusses-The-Bezzle

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/2024/02/23/gazeteer/#out-of-cycle

Image: Peter Craven (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aggregate_output_%287637833962%29.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[airbrickwall]

[choppedcowboydinosaur]

I’ve noticed that progressives and a lot of American politics (including conservatives) have this obsession with centralization of everything. I guess they think centralizing everything makes it more efficient and logical when it doesn’t.  At best it provides the illusion of control but it can’t handle the different circumstances and variances in local communities. Because not all regions and communities of the same. Some of them have unique problems that only they can handle. This top down way of solving problems in America will be one of the factors in its undoing.

[yngwrthr]

Fuck small business - Конфликт

“There is nothing more vulgar than a petty bourgeois life with its halfpence, its victuals, its futile talk, and its useless conventional vi

Oh, the pain of bourgeois cannibalism. As large capital continues to threaten their petit bourgeois rivals with total liquidation, small capitalists face serious problems in the vicious cycle of market forces and competition. However, this is merely part of the capitalist process that generally comprises dissolution of small business. There are areas where they are particularly strong. But according to Marx’s account of normal historical development, the PB lose increasing significance and influence in the class structure of society and, ultimately, the big bourgeois become preeminent with emergence of large scale production. In any case, we want both as our enemy totally vanquished, but a return to small property, which disintegrates the innate potential of social production by dispersing its forces, is unrealistic if socialism, which unites and masters the social forces of production, is to reign supreme. Establishment of future communal society is thus impossible in the absence of centralization.

By banding a great deal of productive forces together, centralization of property within capitalism is the first step along the path of socialization. The necessity of communism demands this as an essential stage of development. This is a “positive” for capitalism because future communal production is based on a model of a highly centralized economy — to keep labor time to a minimum while maintaining productivity and social cohesiveness and warding-off breakdown of production/ distribution/ consumption. In order to avoid frustration and stress later in undergoing the transition from capitalism — the more easily for transition to take place — we must therefore strive for the total neutralization of small masters to go through to completion immediately. Again, we need not limit its scope. Relinquishment of small capital by large capital prepares the way for relinquishment of the entire capitalist class by the proletariat. And in a simple expression of healthy aggression and the distinguishing harshness of a Marxist critic — who — also — advises profanity in his writing — “Fuck em”, those yuppie tyrants!

[ultraviolet-techno-ecology]

Political Landscaping & Games for Children

Every point of centralization is a metaphorical hill which political enemies can capture - the larger the hill the greater it’s strategic value. It takes fewer people to capture a hill than a field - but from a hill you can easily conquer the fields around it. Popular rebellions in the fields can be squashed by the few bunkering down in the hills - but even the leftist standing on the hill is a temporary ruler whose assets may be easily turned against their own cause when another force someday takes that hill. 

In less metaphorical words - Hills (centralization) provides short term victories but long term success of popular revolution requires us to flatten the hills (decentralization) so that counter-revolutionaries cannot claim victory simply by taking the largest hill for themselves.

In the flat field the creation of a hill is most visible - the creation of a hill takes longer than it’s capture. When surrounded by hills the creation of a a new one is never as notable as it’s flattening. 

Every hill we claim or build must not be considered in terms of our benefit alone, but to the benefit of our enemies when the opportunity someday rises that they may claim it for themselves. (And as history suggests - that will eventually happen. Humans cannot keep up their guard forever.)

[indizombie]

Healthcare expenditure on females was found to be lower than on males across all demographic and socio-economic groups, for both short-term and major morbidity. A study conducted by Pednekar et al. in 2011 found that out of 100 boys and girls with congenital heart disease, 70 boys would have an operation while only 22 girls will receive similar treatment. Centralised, corporatized, urban centric models of healthcare will not serve a purpose to the thousands of women living in remote and rural areas. It is important to remember that healthcare is not only a curative model. Social determinants of health such as women’s literacy, education, legal support, land rights, access to public spaces, livelihood etc. are necessary precursors for public health rights of women.

Sylvia Karpagam, 'Public Health for Women in India: Some Thoughts', Gauri Lankesh News