Metaphors Are Lies -

There’s No Crying in AI Regulation

Read Time:8 Minute, 27 Second

As I get older, despite Churchill’s supposed wisdom, I find myself getting more and more radical about most subjects. From civil rights of all kinds to capitalism to labor rights to the bloody loser point in hockey, I am more and more in favor of maximalist solutions. I think this is in part because we live in such reactionary time (c’mon Bettman. The loser point only servers the needs of cowardly GMs!), but I also think in part it is because we are surrounded by so much bullshit, intentional or not. And since I read a couple of articles that highlight some of the weak thinking around AI regulation, you, lucky person that you are, get a rant-y little screed about, well, AI regulation.

This could take a bit. You might want to get a snack.

Both this Tim B. Lee article and this interview with Stuart Russell express a certain reluctance to engage with the plausibility of regulating AI. Now, Russell himself is much better on this point than Lee — he comes right out and says that there are regulations that can be put into place today that can control some of the worst aspects of what imitative or generative AI can do right now. But even he says that he cannot think of many examples of creatures controlling other creatures who are smarter than them — giving into the paranoia about so-called general-purpose AI.

Lee, though? Lee’s point is that since many aspects of regulating AI will be hard there is no real point in trying to.

First, he uses a recently passed law in California, AB 316, to try and paint regulation is inherently harmful. In his words, the bill “… could lead to a future where California becomes something of an economic backwater. Perhaps driverless trucks will carry freight to the California border before a human driver hops into the cab and drives it on to the final destination.” This is hyperbole to the point of dishonesty, a recurring theme in the Lee’s article.

The bill actually does two things: requires safety drivers to be present in all large trucks and required a report no later than 2029 on the safety of such vehicles. A real report, mind you, not one created by the companies themselves or dependent upon the data that companies deign to release, as almost all such reports are today. Both of those sound like perfectly reasonable regulations to me — in fact, the vast, vast majority of heavy truck autonomous testing is done with safety drivers. The argument that you cannot design testing protocols that leverage well trained test drivers and still get to fully autonomous vehicles is ludicrous.

Driving a large truck, especially in an urban environment, is hard, skilled labor. I worked in warehouses in the center of cities — I have seen for myself the difference between good drivers and bad. Input from these drivers is in fact, if used correctly, more likely to speed up the process of developing reasonably safe vehicles than retard it. But that means paying such drivers, something tech companies are loathe to do. And why not? Lee himself doesn’t seem to think of drivers as deserving of respect. His comment about having to have drivers haul material around California (again, not what these law does, mind you) certainly doesn’t seem to find value in their work, or value in their concerns. Which is another massive blind spot in his outlook.

Technological advances do not automatically make society better off. There are whole books about this, books that Lee apparently has never read or who would not be so blase about people wanting to protect their families from AI. There is no guarantee that an AI future is a better future if we simply allow companies to do what they want. No technological revolution has ever shared its spoils without a fight. If Lee really does believe that AI is going to make driving safer, for example, than he owes it to the people whose lives are going to be ruined by AI to come up with a way to prevent them from being immiserated. Why shouldn’t people fight tooth and nail against AI if it means hunger and homelessness for them and their families? The lives of truck drivers matter just as much as the lives of programmers or AI journalists.

Lee does suggest something approaching regulations, to be fair, but they aren’t in the AI world. His response to the notion that AI makes it easier to damage things in the real word is to harden certain targets. First, that is woefully inadequate. Putting aside the universal cyber-security rule that defending is always harder than attacking: if AI is really that world altering, then how can we expect biolabs, for instance, to stay ahead of whatever attacks AIs come up with? Second, his response does nothing to deal with AIs that spread disinformation, or deep fakes, or discriminate against people, or get in the way of emergency vehicles on the road. In his world, apparently, we shouldn’t do anything about those dangers because we just aren’t collectively smart enough, and never have been:

Suppose you took a time machine back to 2001 to warn George W. Bush that there was about to be a thing called social media that would worsen teenage depression, destabilize governments in the Middle East, and aid the election of an nativist demagogue in the US in 2016 (or, if you prefer, engage in large-scale censorship of right-leaning political speech).

Do you think Congress could have passed legislation that would have averted these outcomes? I don’t. Even with everything we know today, it’s hard to think of a regulatory framework that would have led to a better outcome.

That is a level of incorrect that approaches deliberate disingenuousness. We could have prevented these companies from selling personalized target ads. We could have prevented them from collecting the information needed to sell those ads. We could have forced companies to show only a reserve chronological feed instead of feeds designed to drive engagement. We could have forced them or make their algorithms public so we could have known when they dialed up the outrage to get people to stay on the sites. We could have prevented them from forming ad and social media monopolies. We could have held them responsible for their moderation failures. Nothing would have been perfect, but there were things we could have done to make things turn out better, and many of those things were discussed at the time these companies were wreaking havoc. I know — I was there.

To Ministry of Truth those ideas and that history is just the worst kind of intellectual erasure. We have a past so that we know what not to do in the future, not so that we smugly assert “Welp, too bad we could not have ever stopped someone from building the Destruction Engine. Let’s see if it works better this time!”

Either Lee genuinely believes that no regulation is worth the cost in terms of AI advancements, in which he is wrong. Or he believes that the people collectively through their government cannot be trusted to and so it should all be left to the companies — in which case he is wrong.

In the first case, there is no point to AI if it is not going to benefit society. We have a thousand years of history that shows us that unregulated technological change almost always makes most of society worse off, that the benefits have to be wrested away from the monopolizers and the powerful. Without meaningful regulations, you will either face a backlash that will derail progress or a society worse off than the one we have today.

In the second case: there is so much potential in these systems. They can help us do so much good, from medicine to climate change to personal assistants. But we will not get those benefits relying solely on unrestrained capitalism to provide them to us. Look around at the extractive, exploitative economy the social media titans have built. Look at how the AI companies are focused not on fields such as medical research but on driving out of business writers, artists, and therapists. That is what shareholder value means — extracting as much money from as many people as possible, damn the consequences, for the people at the top of these companies. Without regulations reigning them in, we get a repeat of the social media era. Except the enshitification probably does even more damage.

Lee titles his article “Regulating AI Won’t be Easy” and then goes on to essentially argue that because its hard we shouldn’t bother to try. Well, no shit it is going to be hard. It is complex area with a lot of competing interests that can do real good and real harm. But that it is hard is not an excuse not to try. Lots of things are hard. Being the starting center for the Blackhawks is hard. Writing well is hard. Being a good person can be hard. Preserving democracy is hard. To quote the preeminent moral philosopher of our era: “It’s supposed to be hard … The hard is what makes it great.”

We can do great things with AI, but only if we stop acting like children, stop shrinking our responsibilities, stop pretending that some Big Tech Daddy knows best and will save us. Of course, it’s hard. That is what adults do — the hard things. If we act like adults, if we collectively take responsibility for our society the way countless other generations have done in the past, than we can shape AI to benefit us all. But if we give into the petty little whine of “it’s too hard”, to the allure of doing nothing and expecting others to save us? Well, then we will wake up one day and find we have traded in our futures for a bit of misdirected calm.

Rant over. Hope you enjoyed your snacks.

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The Writing Life’s Discontents: A Review of End Credits by Patty Lin

Read Time:2 Minute, 31 Second

I really enjoyed this book. Lin, a writer for multiple hit, and not so hit, television shows, has written a book about her life in writing and how largely terrible it was. The book is a blast.

Lin, who wrote for Friends and Freaks and Geeks, among other shows you have probably never heard or wish you never heard of, writes honestly about her life in and out of writing and what drove her form writing for television. It is fascinating on two levels. First, I am always fascinated by the creative process, any creative process. Lin’s descriptions of how she made herself create, even in terrible circumstances, are catnip to me. She is unsparing about her own foibles, the effects she had on those around her, and the effect those around her had on her own process, both good and bad. It is a fascinating look at how one perosn made art in good times and in bad and why.

It also, and I cannot believe I am going to say this, made me appreciate human resource departments. Directors and showrunners are given an enormous amount of power in the television industry with very little apparent guidance or interference. Sometimes, like with the creators of Freaks and Geeks, it works because they are decent enough and mature enough to handle the pressures. Sometimes, like with the creator of Breaking Bad, it turns into a passive aggressiveness nightmare because they aren’t mature enough to handle the responsibility. Other times, on many other shows, it turns into a horror show version of high school with petty power games and cliques making the writer’s room a gauntlet.

In addition to the difficulties of often being the only, or one of the only, women and/or minorities on the staff, Lin kept describing situations that I could only think of as “unprofessional”. Obviously, these kinds of activities happen in some other corporate environments, but a lot of what she describes I have seen shutdown in normal businesses if for no other reason than fear of the HR/legal department. In most professional environments you simply cannot treat people the way Lin and her fellow writers were treated as a matter of course. I know the WGA has a lot of issues in strike to resolve, but I hope some thought is given to better protecting their workers.

And yes, there is something that passes for celebrity gossip in these pages. But it more about how these people are warped by the camera and the fame. Not an original observation, but one that Lin handles deftly with a few sharp details. The entire book is like that — written with both generosity and the kind of wry humor that you don’t realize is a blade until it has cut Lin’s deserving target.

It’s a light, breezy read about creating art, enduring commerce, how Hollywood sucks even if a lot of the people are great, and I wholeheartedly recommend picking it up.

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Magic Toasters and You: UK Flubs AI Regulations

Read Time:2 Minute, 21 Second

The UK regulators have come out with proposed regulations and they are half-hearted to be charitable:

Companies making foundation models should follow seven principles. That includes making sure developers and businesses that use these models are accountable for the output that consumers are given, ensuring broad access to chips and processors and the training data needed to develop these AI systems, and offering a diversity of business models by including open and closed models. The CMA also said companies should provide a choice for businesses to decide how to use the model, offer flexibility or interoperability to switch to other models or use multiple models at the same time, avoid anti-competitive actions like bundling or self-preferencing, and offer transparency into the risks and limitations of generative AI content.

There is nothing especially wrong with those principles, but there is nothing especially right about them either. They are entirely focused on ensuring market competetivness and that, frankly, is the least of the worries around AI.

Algorithms, and that is all AI is at its heart, have been used to deny people jobs, to racial discriminate in policing and sentencing, to skew welfare denials, to falsely accuse people of crimes they did not commit. Imitative or generative AI has all of those problems, plus a host of others. It has been caught plagiarizing and copying the works it is trained on. There are real questions about the ethics and legality of how most of these companies build these training sets, and, of course, it lies —I’m sorry, hallucinates is the industry chosen term — all the freaking time. Imitative AI is a misinformation super power.

Those are the real issues we should be concerned about. Who is responsible for the damage these systems do? How can we know that the algorithms in them are or are not biased? Who is to blame when these systems lie? Any regulator that punts on these issues, as the UK has done here, is not regulating AI at all. It doesn’t matter if AI companies can compete effectively in the marketplace if that competition is to see who can best burn down society.

We have to stop treating AI as if it is magic. It is just tech. We made this mistake with the internet, acting as if it was some strange creature we had never encountered before. That attitude was bullshit then and it is bullshit now. If someone came to us today and said this toaster is great — it makes the best toast, but it randomly incinerates a house within a fifty-block radius we would tell them to pound sand. Well, that’s all AI is — a fancy toaster. We should stop pretending otherwise and give it precisely the respect a fancy toaster deserves. No more. No less.

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Death and Crypto Lies: A Review of Number Go Up

Read Time:4 Minute, 36 Second

I keep finding myself writing the wrong kind of book review.

Or at least, I keep finding myself writing the kind of book review that I do not think is entirely fair to the author. Because I should be recommending Number Go Up by Zeke Faux (who, by the way, has the single best name in reporting) unreservedly. It is really well written about an important, ongoing, relevant topic. But I cannot escape the nagging voice at the back of my head that the book misses the really interesting stories that it should have told instead.

I do not mean to imply that the story Faux (if that is his real name) tells is not interesting. Uses his search for whether or not the so-called stablecoin Tether (a stablecoin is a crypto coin that is allegedly backed one for one by a real currency. This alleged peg allows for all sorts of financial activity that would be difficult to perform without that backing.) actually had the reserves of dollars it claimed it did to track the rise and fall of the latest crypto bubble.

It is a distressing story, filled with the worst sorts of human beings and the wildest of scams, told extremely well. Faux is an excellent storyteller, not afraid to let his own mix of jealousy that these lunatics are making real money, disgust at their excesses and immorality, and ‘I want to believe’ cautious hopefulness at the grand philanthropic plans of people like Sam Bankmen-Fried. He is open about the frustrations of reporting on such a slippery subject filled with what appear to be conmen, and not afraid to let us now when he failed to properly follow threads that he should have. The fall of Bankman-Fried and the immorality of the crypto ecosystem provide the most compelling threads in the story and show Faux at his best and worst.

Faux discovers, essentially by accident, that crypto has enabled a world-wide network of slavery dedicated to committing telemarketing scams of one form or another. Not only have these scams financially ruined countless lives, they have also literally made it possible to enslave countless human beings to perpetrate those scams. Faux’s reporting here is chilling, compelling, dogged, and makes absolutely clear both that crypto makes this kind of criminality much, much easier and that no one he talked to in the crypto world at any level gives a tinker’s damn.

His chapters on the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried, or SBF, highlight, conversely, how his reporting instincts failed him. Faux is open about how he missed the real story and how his soft-focused feature about whether or not SBF would actually give away the money he claimed he would drew focus away from all the questions about how his companies were actually run. Faux was nowhere near the worst offender, of course. One of the most interesting aspects of the book was how deeply corrupting Effective Altruism — the “ethical” framework that SBF claimed to follow and claimed to be concerned with making the most effective use of charity — was on so many rich, powerful and famous people. Whatever the philosophy claimed in theory, in practice it turned into an excuse to make as much money as possible today in order to focus on longer term problems of the far future, a kind of prosperity gospel for atheists (not my phrase, but I cannot find the originator). The climax of the book is the collapse of SBF’s businesses in what appears to be a comically obvious fraud and the subsequent fallout. And this is where the questions about what story Faux should have been telling come to the fore.

To his credit, Faux himself recognizes these shortcomings. The fallout from what appear to be massive, obvious frauds appears to be very limited. A few small players outside of SBF face charges. No one seems to even attempt to deal with the slavery operations or crypto’s role in them. No one seems to question why Tether, which appears to be almost as shady as SBF’s companies, is allowed to continue to work. No one in power seems to wonder why it took the SEC so long to take the limited actions it did. Those, to me, seem to be the real stories. Why was this bubble of fraud and criminality allowed to grow so large for so long? And even now, as it collapses in on itself, why are there so few consequences for so few people, and why are the deep and dangerous criminals given so little attention?

I feel bad asking these questions. Faux spent years reporting the stories in this book, and it is not his fault that the tack he took was not the most interesting he could have taken in retrospect. Hindsight is twenty-twenty. And much of the reporting he did was revelatory and fascinating. His work on the slavery enabled by crypto is legitimately life altering or could be if anyone in power would give a damn. The book itself is a great read and I recommend it.

Just know that it’s not the most important part of the story. As much as you are going to enjoy it, when you close the covers, you are going to be left with as many questions as you open the books with, even if they are different questions than you started with. Hopefully, Faux is hard at work on the sequel.

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America Has No Bottom. Or Why It’s So Hard for the Media to Call Trump A Loser.

Read Time:3 Minute, 2 Second

Trump is a loser.

A massive, massive loser. Has been for most of his life. This is not an opinion; it is a fact. He inherited his money. He failed at most of his businesses. He had to have his dad bail out his casino in a fashion that was almost certainly illegal — a business where the government allows you to rig the game in your favor. He almost single-handedly destroyed a football league. In the United States. Not even Roger Goodell, a man whose picture is in the dictionary next to the phrase “empty suit” could do that. He lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, a woman who had spent thirty years at the center of a constant two minutes of hate, by about seven million votes, then lost the reelection to the only politician running who was older than him despite being the incumbent. And then he screwed up a simple coup.

Trump was born on third and stole second.

And yet our media has been extremely reluctant to lay out any of these simple facts. Part of it is that, as Josh Marshall says, DC is wired for the GOP. Part of it is sexism. Part of it is a simple inability to do their jobs beyond the basic horse race reporting (political reporters tend not to be remotely interested in policy). But I think a significant portion of the reason is the idea that in America you get what you deserve. Trump is rich, and so he should be rich. More importantly, he is the son of a rich person, and so the elite press see their children in him and see that their children, too, deserve to be rich.

There is no bottom in America. If you fall, you can fall all the way to destitution. There is no safety net to catch you. And so it is reasonable for people to worry about the future of their children, what will happen to them if they do not have the same combination of luck and skill their parents had. It must be easy, then for these people to believe that Trump deserves his fame and fortune. That the benefits he received from his father are as a minor consideration in his life as they would surely be in the lives of their own children.

I don’t think this is the only reason, but I think it is an under played one. Some of our elites got their positions through nepotism or legacy admission or the benefits of coming from a rich family. Many of these people have a hard time admitting that such luck significantly contributed their positions in life. The cult of meritocracy almost forces people to pretend that all outward markers of success are true indicators, and that all success is entirely earned. Neither are true, but admitting such means admitting luck plays a large role in life, something that our elites are not constitutionally capable of as a class.

Because if they did, then they would have to admit that our society should have a bottom; that it not just that the wrong accident, the loss of a job, the wrong medical bill could ruin a person. They would have to admit that it is better to care for all than pretend for a few. They would have to admit that we are a society, not a collection of economic units. They would have to admit that they were, at least in part, lucky.

Easier, surely, to pretend that a man who could not make gambling and football work in America is a business genius.

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Life With an Amazon Scribe

Read Time:4 Minute, 1 Second

This may read a little weird given what I wrote on Monday, but I really like my Amazon Scribe.

Yes, Amazon is in fact a monopoly doing terrible damage to the country. But so are most companies, and even the ones that aren’t monopolies are far from perfect. There are no easy outs in late-stage capitalism. I understand if you don’t want to give Amazon any business, but E-readers are a boon to book readers. The screens are as easy to read on as paper and their storage means that I no longer have to forgo books for lack of space, a real issue for most of my life. When we moved cross country, we had so many books to give away Goodwill literally refused to take them all.

E-readers in the United States are largely limited to Kindles. You can get Barnes and Nobles and Kobe devices, among others, but the Kindle devices are far superior, in my experience. Kobo’s store does not have the selection the Amazon store has. Barnes and Nobles devices seem to consistently perform worse in the little areas like page turning and menu responsiveness that make a small but noticeable difference in the quality of your reading experience.

The scribe itself is a nice reader. The ten inch or so screen feels like a trade paperback, which is my preferred size, the device is light and easy to hold, even one-handed, and the screen is excellent. The main page is the usual mix of helpful and hard sales push, but you learn to ignore the suggestions, which range from good to insulting, and focus on your library. Which, by the way, you can fill with library books and purchases from other places. It’s fairly easy to get books onto the device, especially with the expanded “send to Kindle” apps and website. Where the Scribe really excels, for me, is note taking.

The experience is not seamless. It is not a full-fledged e-ink tablet like the Onyx Book 2, for example, nor a note taking device first, like the Remarkable 2. Taking notes in books is a touch odd. The notes aren’t really in-line — you hit a button and they are appended to the text in hidden boxes, kind of like post-it notes that you can make appear and disappear at a whim (text with associated notes have an indicator). And the handwriting-to-text isn’t perfect, though that may be a function of my terrible handwriting.

But I take a lot of notes throughout the day. My typing is terrible. If you think the typos that get through in these posts are bad, you should see them before they go live — a sea of red squiggles. The interface actually begs me to take remedial typing classes (in an unrelated note: I took typing in high school and got an A. Let’s hear it for South Jersey’s educational system!). It is a running joke at my job, trying to interpret my chat messages. It’s bad is what I am saying. And while my handwriting is not good either, it is somehow still easier to be on a call or reading a document/bit of code and have the Scribe open and jot down some notes rather than trying to type then into Onenote. By having them in an electronic format, I can transfer them to PDF and incorporate them into Onenote easily. Transferring notes from paper almost never happened, making retrieval and research much harder.

The Scribe is not a complex organizational system — the note organization is primarily at the notebook level and syncing is pretty straightforward, with limited options. It does let you send Word docs right from your computer to the device that can then be marked up, and I am hopeful for Onenote integration in the future. This is a basic, supplementary tool that they have slowly iterated on since its release.

Onyx puts out a line of Android e-ink tablets. In theory those should work much better. They have the same kinds of abilities, and they offer, for example, the Onenote app right on the device — I could take my notes right in the app. But in practice, the screens were not as good for either writing on or reading from. The Scribe screen feels almost like writing on paper — it is not slick; it has real resistance — and it is almost paperwhite at the right settings.

There you are: if you need a device that both reads and allows you to take simple notes, and if you can live with the compromises of embedding deeper into Amazon, then the Scribe is good device to consider.

Okay, now back to our regularly scheduled capitalism bashing.

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The EFF and the Fantasy of the Marketplace of Ideas

Read Time:5 Minute, 27 Second

The Washington Post has an excellent piece on a group of people who have chased one of the worst troll farms across the internet, playing whack-a-mole with it in an attempt to stop it from getting people physically hurt. You should read the story, because it is remarkable. But I am not here to talk about those incredible people, as much as they deserve the accolades. I am here to talk about the fantasy world the EFF appears to live in.

The group these people are trying to take down is vile. They allowed users to dox and stalk people, at least three times to the point of suicides. They have allowed users to harass people’s employers and parents. They had a particular focus on trans people, though their targets could range as far as field as Congresswoman Taylor Greene. Eventually, tis group got a tier one ISP, one of the backbones of the internet, to drop them for terms violations. The EFF responded with a statement deriding the decision. The statement shows a ludicrous misunderstanding of freedom and power.

The EFF argues that “Tier 1 ISPs have little if any context to make good decisions about their speech.” And that “We’ve warned that endorsing censorship in one context can (and does) come back to bite us all when, inevitably, that same approach is used in another context. Pressure on basic infrastructure, as a tactic, will be re-used, inevitably, against unjustly marginalized speakers and forums. It already is.” And finally, that “For example, an ISP, under pressure from the attorney general of a state that bans abortions, might decide to interfere with traffic to a site that raises money to help people get abortions, or provides information about self-managed abortions.”

Frankly, the people who wrote this act as if they have no connection to reality at all.

The last example is pure scaremongering, disconnected from the issue completely. It is going to happen regardless. Pretending that if Tier 1 ISPs are pressured into upholding their terms of service in a manner that makes it less likely marginalized people will be driven to suicide also makes it less likely that ambitious politicians will misuse their power is so naive that I have to wonder if it trips into deliberately dishonest. Look around at the rash of book banning legislation in red states today and ask yourself: which anti-abortion politician is going to leave this in his or her toolbelt because an ISP didn’t enforce its TOS on a hate site? And when you find that politician, tell me what color unicorn they were riding.

The argument that because we established a precedent such action would be harder holds little weight. First, we have seen these courts don’t hold much respect for precedent. But second, different things are in fact different. Doxing people for the purpose of stalking, harassment, and abuse in order to drive them off the internet is not the same thing as sharing information about a medical procedure, and we should not be afraid of the argument. One of these things is not like the other. One of these things restricts freedom, one of these things advances it.

And that is the point. Not all speech advances the cause of freedom, which should be the concern here. If you really care about freedom, you should be concerned about making sure people that people aren’t afraid for their lives when they speak. Speach that drives people underground is not speech that deserves protection. Freedom is not advanced by anti-freedom.

The EFF argues two points to defend stalking and doxing and making people feel unsafe. Frist, they claim that bad speech should be driven out by good speech. This fundamentally misunderstands power and markets. If your speech is drowned out by a constant wave of threats, you cannot really participate in the marketplace of ideas, can you? If Coke threw eggs at Pepsi salespeople every time they tried to make a delivery, that’s not much of a market, as amusing as that might be for bystanders.

Their other argument is that the government should punish people who commit these acts. Well, yes. And the sky is blue. Thank you for participating in today’s game of “What’s obvious”. But this response is infuriating coming from the EFF. As their own statement notes, governments are often terrible at prosecuting harassment that starts at the internet. Second, they generally oppose broadening laws to reduce online harassment. Third, they take a very hard line stance against encryption, making it hard to track harassers coordinated activity.

There is nuance to all of these issues, but the EFF doesn’t really see it. If you were to tell me that the EFF thinks that all harassment should be handled by trying to talk the harassers into being nicer people, well, I would have a hard time arguing the point based on their actions. In fact, they kind of say this themselves: “Instead, we think the best course of action will be rooted in the core ideals underpinning the Internet: decentralization, creativity, community, and user empowerment.” Well, as long as that community doesn’t use its creativity to get ISPs to enforce their terms of service, of course.

So good luck, abuse victim. Don’t look to ISPs or the government for help when the mob comes howling for you — hope you have the time to turn defending your right to speak on the internet into a full-time job. The EFF seems to think that’s what’s best.

We can do better than this. We have to do better than this. Man, I am not even all that radical when it comes to trans rights. I think it’s overboard when people start taking the word woman out of woman’s issues — especially given the reaction to feminism right now and the need to rally against that reaction. In some sports, I am concerned about the implications of letting people who have gone through a male puberty play against those who have not. But we are taking about using speech to attack the very basic right to live. We have to be sophisticated enough to understand that speech that is anti-freedom, that is designed not to criticize positions but to dehumanize, terrorize, and physically threaten is not speech worth defending. Otherwise, we allow the violent to silence the rest of us.

And that is not a principle worth defending.

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Amazon Apparently Deliberately Destroyed Genre Magazines to Enrich Itself

Read Time:4 Minute, 4 Second

This behavior should be illegal, and I will discuss how it can be controlled in a little bit. But Amazon appears to have deliberately destroyed genre magazines in a bid to control their distribution for its own benefit. Mobsters could not have done this better.

The Verge article, unsurprisingly since the Verge editors are almost constitutionally incapable of seeing the downsides of capitalism, doesn’t lay this out clearly, but Amazon seems to have used its market control to force magazines to choose between Amazon’s preferred distribution method or going under.

Amazon used to run a subscription service in its Kindle store. Subscribe to a magazine and it would show up in your Kindle when the new issue was released. It was a nice service for subscribers, but under the covers, it was not so helpful for the magazines.

According to the article, Amazon kept all the subscriber information to itself. Meaning that when I subscribed to a magazine, the magazine got most of my money but didn’t get any of my contact information. Why was that important? Because the relationship was owned by Amazon. And when Amazon decided this year that they would no longer support subscriptions on Kindles, the magazines had no means of contacting the subscribers directly. And since Amazon is a de facto e-magazine monopoly in the US, these magazines are screwed. Fantasy, for example, is closing.

Amazon has a solution though. They are inviting select magazines to participate in their Kindle Unlimited program. Readers who subscribe get to read whatever they want, and authors and magazines get a percentage of subscription fees based on an algorithm that Amazon determines. Of course, to participate in Kindle Unlimited, your product cannot be sold on any other e-book platform. Meaning, of course, that these magazines are forced to be tied even closer to Amazon.

Sammy “The Bull” wishes he had it this good.

This is the perfect example of Cory Doctorow’s “enshitification”. Amazon has effectively captured a market and is now squeezing all of the value out of the producers. It harms the consumers, because it limits choice and raises prices in the long run. It obviously harms the producers, as it drives them into the economic ground. And it harms the creators, as it forces the economic benefits of creation into Amazon’s hands rather than theirs. It should not be allowed.

Outside of AWS — what most of us know as the cloud — Amazon largely does not make money. They use the money from investors and AWS to scale to the point where they can price out competitors and use that power to enforce damaging conditions, like the ones described here, on their suppliers. This should not be allowed.

Even if you want to grant that Kindles have come to their monopoly status honestly, through nothing other than consumer choice, Amazon still should not have been allowed to do some of the things that they did. They should not have been allowed to keep the subscription contact information away from the magazines. They should not have been allowed to force producers of Kindle Unlimited content into exclusive contracts.

To those that argue that those contracts were entered into willingly, I have two comments. First, given the power disparities between content creators and the largest content distributor in the world, the idea that such contracts are between equals is ludicrous. Second, I don’t care.

Amazon is a corporation, a creation of the government. They get substantial benefits from that status and as a result, it is the responsibility of the government to ensure that those advantages do not rebound against the rest of the society. In this case, society is clearly being harmed by Amazon. Suppliers, creators, and consumers are being damaged by the power Amazon has been allowed to accumulate to itself. And even if Amazon was not the creation of the government, the market that it operates in is. The laws the ensure competition operates at a level more sophisticated than “here is my gun, give me your goods” are created and enforced by a democratic government. If those laws do not ensure a healthy society, if that market does not serve to create a healthy society, then they need to change.

Democratic control of the economy is the first and primary principle. When we don’t have that, when we abdicate our responsibility to ensure that the economy works for everyone, we end up with companies allowed to crush smaller businesses and creators at a whim. We end up with all the money and power flowing to a handful of companies, and thus people, instead of being shared throughout society, as it should be. The loss of magazines is a small story, but it reveals so much about what has gone so wrong with our economy and our society.

We can choose better.

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Hello World, McGuffins, and Little Wooden Bridges

Read Time:3 Minute, 23 Second

I was going to be a lawyer.

It was a dream that never really died. When I was eight, I was going to be Perry Mason and free the unjustly convicted. When I was an early teen, I was going to argue in front of the Supreme Cout. When I was heading off to college, I was going to be a labor lawyer. I even took the PSAT mid-career and did well enough to get enough law school brochures to paper my whole house. But it was never to be.

I have always written. Ever since I could remember, I told stories on paper. Badly, probably — certainly no one has ever paid me for the privilege. But I also grew up poor, often very poor, especially after my parents’ divorce. Writing, whether it was journalism or fiction, would not pay for an upper middle-class lifestyle (academia was not even a consideration for me. My family had not sent people to college before — college was a goal for us as means of bettering our financial situations. That one could spend one’s life in study was not a path I knew existed.) Lawyers? Lawyers made money.

But then I attended an engineering school, where they made me take an introductory engineering course. You did little mechanical tasks — including building little wooden bridges to take weight. Mine was not good, though it did explode rather spectacularly upon failure. The C+ I got was probably generous. Building it was a blast, though. It was as creative as writing, and a lot more immediate. I switched to electrical engineering, where I discovered programming.

Programming was even closer to writing. You took a problem, your own imagination, and a language and created a solution. The first time you get “Hello, world.” to appear on a screen, the traditional tutorial for every programming language I have run across, you feel the same rush of creativity as when you first made a story come together.

All right, so what is the point of this little biographical indulgence? Creativity is the heart of what makes us humans. Other creatures use tools, but we are the only ones we know of that shape the world around us to create those tools. We are the only ones that look at a rock and see an axe for chopping wood, or other animals, inside it. In the same way, we are the only ones that look at slab of marble and see a statue or gaze into the night sky and feel compelled to make up a story about the wolf eating the moon. Creativity, stories, are what make us human.

Our economy is no longer built around that kind of creativity. It is built on exploitation and rent seeking, not on rewarding people who make things. Not on fostering connection and creativity. Our economy, and thus our society, is designed to isolate and immiserate. Part of the reason we have seen so many strikes in so many seemingly unrelated areas of the economy this summer is that the powers that be simply do not respect the idea of a job well done. It is unsurprising that such disrespect eventually garnered a response.

When I was putting the final touches the novel I just sent out on query (wish me luck) I realized that a Mcguffin I introduced as a throwaway device in an earlier scene as a device to get one character to trust another slightly more than they did was the perfect device to use at the climax, both plot-wise and thematically. Those moments of creative serendipity, when my subconscious and conscious work come together, are one of the reasons I still write even though it is very unlikely I will ever be published. We would all be better off if we reoriented our economy away from rewarding rent seeking and back toward rewarding creativity and production.

Those are what make us human, after all. And a society that reinforces our humanity has to be better than one that does not.

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Technology as a Salve for Society’s Gun Problem

Read Time:2 Minute, 52 Second

The New Yorker has an interesting article on a private school that uses virtual reality to teach students in the “classical” mode. It does not go well, as you can imagine. Students act out, don’t absorb the lessons, do things like point out on a virtual trip to Everest that loud noises cause avalanches and then scream as loud as they can. (On an entirely unrelated note: to every middle school teacher I ever had I am deeply, deeply sorry.) You know — they act like kids.

Remote schooling during covid was likely the best of a serious of bad choices but it was still a bad choice. Remote school is not like remote work because kids don’t have the higher executive functions that most adults possess. Virtual schooling likely makes that even worse because you are essentially giving the kids a toy as a school environment. Of course, they are going to play with it. Play can have value, mind you, but not as a full-on replacement for classroom education. But what really caught my eye was a heartbreaking comment at the very end of the piece.

One mom is quite happy with the isolation the VR school provides. Her son Rylan used to be crippled with anxiety about going to school. Now, with a virtual school, he no longer is. In the words of his mother: “He doesn’t have to worry about a school shooter coming in,” Hill said. “He doesn’t even have to worry about the drills anymore.”

America is a failed state that does not love its children.

Ms. Hill’s son is terrified of physical school in part because of the not entirely unreasonable fear of school shootings. On a regular basis, he is reminded, by the active shooter drills, that he could be killed for merely attempting to learn. His parents are advertised bullet proof backpacks for him to wear. We, as a society, have decided that his life means nothing compared to the desire of people to own weapons of war with no restrictions on how and when they can be purchased, stored, or carried. No other industrialized country has this issue, because no other industrialized country cares so little for its children.

Faced with this complete societal disregard for the lives of its children, Ms. Hill turned to a technological solution. But it won’t work. It never works. I have said this over and over again, but there are no technological solutions to societal problems. At best, they can tinker at the edges, mitigate a worst case here or there. Rylan can be shot in our NRA hellscape at a Target or a movie theater just as easily as he can be at school. Keeping him at home for class won’t save him. Fixing our gun problem might.

But we cannot imagine a collective response to our collective problems, in part because our technological industries sell us on the notion of individual solutions based on the technology they want to sell to us. So we devolve into atomized units, isolated and desperate for solutions that cannot come from isolated action. If we want to solve our problems, if we want a society that cares about murdered children more than gun manufacturers’ profits, we have to make that society together, through political action.

It’s not going to be easy, and it’s not going to come through a VR helmet.

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