I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me at NEW ZEALAND'S UNITY BOOKS in AUCKLAND on May 2, and in WELLINGTON on May 3. More tour dates (Pittsburgh, PDX, London, Manchester) here.
Walk down any street in California for more than a couple minutes and you will come upon a sign warning you that a product or just an area "contains chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer."
These warnings are posted to comply with Prop 65, a 1986 law that requires firms to notify you if they're exposing you to cancer risk. The hope was that a legal requirement to warn people about potential carcinogens would lead to a reduction in the use of carcinogens in commonly used products. But the joke's on us: since nearly everything has chemicals that trigger Prop 65 warnings, the warnings become a kind of background hiss. I've lived in California five times now, and I've never once seen a shred of evidence that a Prop 65 warning deters anyone from buying, consuming, using, or approaching anything. I mean, Disneyland is plastered in these warnings.
The idea behind Prop 65 was to "inform consumers" so they could "vote with their wallets." But "is this carcinogenic?" isn't a simple question. Many chemicals are carcinogenic if they come into contact with bare skin, or mucus membranes, but not if they are – for example – underfoot, in contact with the soles of your shoes. Other chemicals are dangerous when they're fresh and offgassing, but become safe once all the volatiles and aromatics have boiled off of them.
Prop 65 is often presented as a story of overregulation, but I think it's a matter of underregulation. Rather than simply telling you that there's a potential carcinogen nearby and leaving you to figure out whether you've exceeded your risk threshold, a useful regulatory framework would require firms to use their products in ways that minimize cancer risk. For example, if a product ships with a chemical that is potentially carcinogenic for a couple weeks after it is manufactured, then the law could require the manufacturer to air out the product for 14 days before shipping it to the wholesaler.
"Caveat emptor" has its place – say, at a yard-sale, or when buying lemonade from a kid raising money for a school trip – but routine shopping shouldn't be a life-or-death matter than you can only survive if you are willing and able to review extensive, peer-reviewed, paywalled toxicology literature. When a product poses a serious threat to our health, it should either be prohibited, or have its use proscribed, so that a reasonable, prudent person doing normal things doesn't have to worry that they've missed a potentially lethal gotcha.
In other words, transparency is nice, but it's not enough.
Think of the "privacy policies" you're asked to click through a thousand times a day. No one reads these. No one has ever read these. For the first six months that Twitter was in business, its privacy policy was full of mentions to Flickr, because that's where they ganked the policy from, and they missed a bunch of search/replace operations. That's funny – but far funnier is that no one at Twitter read the privacy policy, because if they had, they would have noticed this.
You know what would be better than a privacy policy? A privacy law. The last time Congress passed a consumer privacy law was in 1988, when they banned video store clerks from disclosing which VHS cassettes you took home. The fact is that virtually any privacy violation, no matter how ghastly or harmful to you, is legal, provided that you are "notified" through a privacy policy.
Which is why privacy policies are actually privacy invasion policies. No one reads these things because we all know we disagree with every word in them, including "and" and "the." They all boil down to, "By being stupid enough to use this service, you agree that I'm allowed to come to your house, punch your grandmother, wear your underwear, make long distance calls, and eat all the food in your fridge."
And like Prop 65 warnings, these privacy policies are everywhere, and – like Prop 65 warnings – they have proven useless. Companies don't craft better privacy policies because so long as everyone has a terrible bullshit privacy policy, there's no reason to.
My blog, pluralistic.net has two privacy policies. One sits across the top of every page:
Privacy policy: we don't collect or retain any data at all ever period.
The other one appears in the sidebar:
By reading this website, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.
The second one is a joke, obviously (it sits above a sidebar element that proclaims "Optimized for Netscape Navigator."). But what's most funny is that when I used to run it at the bottom of all my emails, I totally freaked out a bunch of reps from Big Tech companies on a standards committee that was trying to standardizes abusive, controlling browser technology and cram it down two billion peoples' throats. These guys kvetched endlessly that it was unfair for me to simply declare that they'd agreed that they would do a bunch of stuff for me on behalf of their bosses.
My first response was, of course, "Lighten up, Francis." But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that these guys actually believed that showering someone in endless volleys of fine print actually created legal contracts and consent, and that I might someday sue their employers because I had cleverly released myself from their BOGUS AGREEMENTS.
Of course, that would be very stupid. I can't just wave a piece of paper in your face, shout "YOU AGREED" and steal your bike. But substitute "bike" for "private data" and that's exactly the system we have with privacy policies. Rather than providing notice of odious and unconscionable behavior and hoping that "market forces" sort it out, we should just update privacy law so that doing certain things with your private data is illegal, without your ongoing, continuous, revocable consent.
Obviously, this would come as a severe shock to the tech economy, which is totally structured around commercial surveillance. But the fact that an extremely harmful practice is also extremely widespread is not a reason to keep on doing it – it's a reason to stop. There was a time when we let companies sell radium suppositories, and then, one day, we just banned companies from telling you to put nuclear waste up your asshole:
We didn't fall back on the "freedom to contract" or "bodily autonomy." Sure, what you do with your body is your own business, but that doesn't imply that quacks should have free rein to trick you into using their murderous products.
And just as there are legitimate, therapeutic uses of radioisotopes (I'm having a PT scan on Monday!), there are legitimate reasons to share your private data. We don't need to resort to outright bans – we can just regulate things. For example, in 2022 Stanford Law's Mark Lemley proposed an absolutely ingenious answer to abusive Terms of Service:
Lemley proposes constructing a set of "default rules" for routine agreements, made up of the "explicit and implicit" rules of contracts, including common law, the Uniform Commercial Code, and the Restatement of Contracts. Any time you're presented with a license agreement, you can turn it down in favor of the "default rules" that everyone knows and understands. Anyone who accepts a EULA instead must truly be consenting to a special set of rules. If you want your EULA to get chosen over the default rules, you need to make it short, clear and reasonable.
If we're gonna replace "caveat emptor" with rules that let you go about your business without reading 10,000,000 words of bullshit legalese every time you leave your house (or pick up your phone), we need smart policymakers to create those rules.
Since 2010, America has had an agency that was charged with creating and policing those rules, so you could do normal stuff without worrying that you were accidentally signing your life away. That agency is called the the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, and though it did good work for its first decade of existence, it wasn't until the Biden era, when Rohit Chopra took over the agency, that it came into its own.
Under Chopra, the CFPB became a powerhouse, going after one scam after another, racking up a series of impressive wins:
The CFPB didn't just react, either. They staffed up with smart technologists and created innovative, smart, effective initiatives to keep you from getting ripped off:
Under Chopra, the CFPB was in the news all the time, as they scored victory after victory. These days, the CFPB is in the news again, but for much uglier reasons. For billionaire scammers like Elon Musk, CFPB is the most hated of all the federal agencies. Musk's Doge has been trying to "delete the CFPB" since they arrived on the scene, but their hatred has made them so frenzied that they keep screwing up and losing in court. They just lost again:
Trumpland is full of the people on the other side of those EULAs, the people who think that if they can trick you out of your money, "that makes me smart":
If Musk can trick you into buying a Tesla after lying about full self driving, that doesn't make him a scammer, "that makes him smart." If Trump can stiff his contractors, that doesn't make him a crook, "that makes him smart."
It's not a coincidence that these guys went after the CFPB. It's no mystery why they've gone after every watchdog that keeps you from getting scammed, poisoned or maimed, from the FDA to the EPA to the NLRB. They are the kind of people who say, "So long as it was in the fine print, and so long I could foist that fine-print on you, that's a fair deal." For them, caveat emptor is a Latin phrase that means, "Surprise, you're dead."
It's bad enough when companies do this to us, be they Big Tech, health insurers or airlines. But when the government takes these grifters' side over yours – when grifters take over the government – hold onto your wallets:
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:
Because of the topics covered in the last few chapters, I can finally start giving more general info about curses! Yay for no longer having to be secretive about the cause of illness in [redacted]. xP
Below is an overview of Curse illnesses, including the names of some curses, their rarity, how they are spread, and how outbreaks are managed in the Zone on a country level. I'll get into more detail later about specific illnesses and their symptoms and prognosis, as long as that curse doesn't play a major role in some pre-planned future fic.
Enjoy the lore noms below the cut!
Overview:
Ghost illnesses are often spiritual plagues/curses passed on through energy and not through ectoplasm. Because ghosts don’t breathe, something being passed through energy is like something being airborne. Something going through ecto is closer to it being like fluid based, like bodily fluids: saliva/sweat/urine/feces/ect. Many of the most virulent ghost plagues are spread by energy, allowing it to move through the Zone like a wildfire with little slowing its progress.
In an ordinary ghost, it resolves on its own in a few weeks of feeling malaise as long as you rest. Though some especially vulnerable ghosts(children, otherwise ill, ect.) need medical aid in order to recover. And of course, none of the vulnerable inanimate objects(liminal objects) have immune systems. They can contract a curse and not be able to remove it on their own, their spirit stricken “evil”. In that case, human intervention can purge the “negative energy” from the object and return it to its former self. These purifying rituals were traditionally undertaken by spiritually active members of a community, often found in priesthoods, shrine maidens, temple attendants, ect.
Immunity:
In general, this is how immunity is passed between ghosts:
After encountering an illness and recovering, their cores produce sub-fluctuations/sub-oscillations in their energy signature that act to repel the illness/curse, similar to how living things antibodies neutralize viral or bacterial invaders. This eventually slows plagues to a stop, as herd immunity causes the R0 to fall below 1 and the plague peters out naturally.
Because of how natural immunity works, ghosts who have recently recovered often attend to the still ill, helping them recover much quicker. This is especially helpful in the case of children or chronically ill, who can have trouble clearing an infection on their own. To this end, ghosts have adapted the typical method of sharing energy done between one energized ghost to another to most effectively clear an illness. This requires closer energy contact than just sharing some of your energy, and so is not usually done with strangers.
However, between family and friends, it’s quite common. It’s like giving someone a long hug if they feel under the weather. The cuddles could be platonic, familial, or romantic, it all depends on the persons involved and just signifies affection and closeness.
Example of Immunity in Action:
Dr. Airmid came over to help Technus feel better, since she’d caught this curse years back, although the amplitude of her signals are much weaker now that so much time has passed. Danny's visit does a lot to perk Technus up, even without consciously sharing energy because he’s just radiating a bunch of antibodies as he’s nearly(though not totally) mended. His system changing his ecto-signature is why he got so tired all of a sudden.
A Few Common Illnesses:
Whispering Panic
Love's Longing
Olive Pox
A Few Uncommon Illnesses:
Rictus Grasp
Frosttouch Breath
Hearthstone’s Heat
A Few Rare Illnesses:
The Decay
The Pale Lady
The Black Rider
Outbreak Phenomena:
The chances for any of these to form an outbreak depends on a number of factors, chief among them: the number of potential hosts. Some illnesses can only afflict certain sub-variations of ghosts. Others, prey on those who are essentially immunocompromised with cores that are already infected with other curses.(opportunistic infectious curse behavior) Still others have disease progressions or infection vectors that prohibit or repress the growth of outbreaks. The most serious of curses have outbreaks that are brief, not because of lack of hosts, but because of severity of symptoms. They burn through the potential hosts and avenues of infection too quickly to sustain permanent presence in an area. (An infamous example of this is Stranger's Skin.)
Assuming a curse does not have a long-term reservoir, and liminal objects often served this purpose historically, and that immunity is temporary(common in the least serious curses) then outbreaks can be tracked in waves and even predicted. The most ardent followers of Eulas include doctors, surgeons, and ghostly epidemiologists. If not cloistered in the temples of Kunnzkapp, they are most often found in major cities in the largest countries throughout the Zone. There is a large contingent in Kingdom Drazi, as a trade hub it seems more than the typical share of migration of potentially infected beings. And as the country is the most urbane in the Local Zone, it also possesses the highest being density, far higher than is common anywhere else outside of the country. As a result, most of the recent outbreaks have started in the Kingdom, especially in one of its many port towns. From there, disease specialists can trace the spread across traveling vessels and caravans to all of their trading partners. This makes inspections of goods and people heading into and out of Kingdom Drazi of the highest priority to national security, involving disease efforts. Multi-regional collaboration is the norm in this case, and supersedes all other treaties involving freedom of movement, of goods and people, or the need to be renewed be new signatory members at the crowning of new leaders.
This position was pioneered by a combination of the leaders of Kingdom Drazi and Malproksime Frostiĝinta .
Treatment of, and deterrence of spread for, curses are handled on a case by case basis for every known major curse common in the Local Zone. Additionally, there are groups of well funded researchers in Malproksime Frostiĝinta who study the development of novel curses, curse types, or resurgences of extinct variants. All other major research is pursued by the acolytes, incarnations, and servants of Eulas, though there is much crossover.
The Newell-Howard board voted today in favor of rolling out a new EULA, further restricting end-user modifications to Consortium licensed lightware. The new license will go into effect later this year, and is expected to render millions of devices inoperable, including those sporting previously legal alterations.
A spokesperson for the minority opinion clarified that lightware with explicit support for modifications will remain functional, citing CyKEA's "hackpack" subscription tier.
REDMOND (AP) - Microsoft defended its controversial decision today to start packaging single-user licenses for its remote administration toolkit in lootboxes, saying the scheme "allows talent to rise to the top." Administrators will now need to either uncrate or purchase the previously free toolkit to remain employable.
By playing Fortnite without his mother’s permission, technically speaking, C.R. is outside of the EULA. But also technically speaking, playing Fortnite without being covered under the EULA might be a digital trespass, or worse, computer fraud and abuse. That might sound wild and ridiculous in a world where minors are almost certainly clicking through EULAs without their parents’ permission, but the whole underage internet exists on the precarious legal fiction that all these teens are being supervised by their parents, who are bound by these contracts that no one is actually reading.
Sarah Jeong, The curious case of the Fortnite cheater
