Forem: Michael MacTaggert

The Filibuster in the United States Senate

Michael MacTaggert — Sat, 20 Mar 2021 21:42:45 +0000

"There's nothing like having a good quart of scotch with you when you're falling into the Sun," said Manchin. "Won't you join me, gentlemen?"

"Listen to him," sputtered Warnock. "He's enjoying this. He likes being cooked in a cubby-holed space ship; he likes to sit here day after day while the floor beneath him is burning his shoes."

Manchin, the wiry West-Virginian biologist, lowered the half-empty bottle from his lips and scowled at the ship's doctor. "But not for long, my dear Warnock, not for long. Our fate lies within a few hours. The ship will be drawn closer and closer to the Sun. The heat will become unbearable. Then—pffffft!—the ship will be a little spark—"

"You're a pain," growled Captain Harris.

Manchin raised his eyebrows quizzically and grinned. He said nothing, walked to a bunk, and sat down beside Joe, the pilot.

The silence continued for some time, broken only by the footfalls of Captain Harris in her nervous pacing. There was nothing to do but wait. The four of them knew that. The ship couldn't hold out much longer; it would burst under the terrific strain, would be reduced instantly to a cinder by the Sun's blistering heat.

They were trapped, falling into the Sun inevitably.

"One meteorite," said Manchin casually, "one hurtling fragment of some interstellar gadabout which chose to cross our path at the wrong time. That's all it took to smash our jets and send the four of us toward that fiery mass."

"Shut up!" snapped Harris. "It's bad enough without your moaning!"

Oblivious to the captain's words, Manchin patted his bottle affectionately.

"In the name of Heaven!" growled Warnock, leaping to his feet. "Why do we sit here like a lot of mummies? There's a rocket capsule aboard, you say, with sufficient power to carry one of us to Mercury. Why don't we use it? I ask you, Harris."

"You answered that yourself," the captain said bluntly. "True, that rocket capsule can carry one of us to Mercury. Just one, understand—there's room for but one person in a capsule. I ask you—which one of us would that be?"

"That's beside the point," muttered Warnock, as he wiped beads of perspiration from his forehead. "You don't seem to realize what valuable information we possess. Think of that cylinder in the supply room. It contains all the photographs we took of Mercurian plant and animal life, and the photos of Vulcan. To say nothing of the data concerning the Sun's corona—why, our analysis would be of infinite value to Earth scientists!"

"Quite so," Harris said crisply. "But while you're thinking about that, don't forget the three who would be left aboard this ship—think of what would happen to them." She stopped her pacing and shook a finger under the doctor's imposing Van Dyke. "Do you know what would happen to them, Warnock? They'd burn alive—they'd cook—while on Earth your scientists would hop around in glee over a few photographs of Mercury!"

Warnock sat down heavily, exhausted.

"The doc's right, Harris," Joe interposed. "There's no reason for all four of us dying when it's possible for one to gain freedom. And for God's sake if you're going to do something do it in a hurry! We'll burn before you make up your mind!"

"My mind's made up," Harris retorted. "I'm staying. In case you've forgotten, a captain is the last one to leave her ship. As for you three, fight it out among yourselves. Draw straws—anything. The consequences will be your worry."

"I'll stay," murmured Manchin, lifting his bottle to his lips.

"You don't mean that," said the youthful Joe. "You want to go—we all want to go—but it can only be one of us."

He fell silent, placing his head in his hands. Harris resumed her pacing.

The ship drifted on, slowly it seemed, ever nearing the solar furnace, falling toward the flames that were eager to dissolve the tiny cruiser locked in an unyielding gravitational pull.

"Soon," mused Manchin. "Soon we'll be too close for the rocket capsule to break free of the Sun's drag. Then there will be no doubt as to what will be done. Ha!"

"Malarkey!" yelled Joe, jerking erect. "How can you be so confounded happy about it all? We're falling into the Sun, man—doesn't that have any effect upon you?"

Manchin shrugged. "Perhaps. We are falling into the Sun, yes. We'll die, no doubt, so my future is definite. I know what is coming. Soon I shall be but a tiny spark, drifting nowhere in a big Sun. Do I regret being a tiny spark? Not when I have my scotch with me."

"You're a smart guy," Joe thrust at him. "Maybe you can tell us how to choose the rocket capsule's passenger."

"Simple, my friend. The captain won't go—she must stay with the ship. I have no relatives, only my scotch, so I am satisfied. The doctor must stay—he's too fat to get in the capsule. M'sieu Joe, the honor is yours. Au revoir."

"Don't be crazy—"

"Do not worry about us, my friend. We will find something to do. Perhaps I can interest the doctor and the captain in three-handed bridge. If not, we'll wait. We'll go soon—sssss! Like that."

Joe buried his face in his hands again.

For a few moments there was an unbroken silence. From the double-insulated hulls emanated a dry hotness that scorched the already blistered air. The hotness increased, rising to a fierce, intolerable degree. It grew, inexorably, pressing against their lungs—

Joe floundered crazily, leaped across the control room and plucked a gun from his locker. "This'll make it easier," he gasped, lifting the weapon to his head. "Somebody's got to fly that capsule—"

For ten minutes, no one spoke. It was hard to speak—each breath was a torture to the lungs.

"Manchin," said Warnock finally, in short gasps, "in God's name will you get into the capsule and take that cylinder to Mercury? One of us has got to go—for Joe's sake!"

Manchin, sprawled out on the pilot's bunk, made no reply. The captain stood before the dull gray view-screen, watched him a moment, thoughtfully. "Can't you reverse the field?" he asked at length. "I'd like to see the System just once more."

Harris had already made a few deft motions on the instrument panel. Presently, the screen came to life. Its scope possessed a bright halo—the Sun's glow. In the center of the screen Mercury was visible, a faint, receding globe. Harris moved the scope slowly until she found the feeble point of light that designated the Earth. She watched it grimly. "Satisfied, Warnock?"

"Dr. Warnock is dead," came Manchin's monotone.

Harris turned. The doctor lay on his face, immobile and silent.

"The heat," said Rogers, "and his age."

They carried him to the supply room, laid him beside the inert form of Joe.

The two stood watching Earth's dull glimmer on the screen. The heat pressed them relentlessly, always increasing—

"Take the capsule, Manchin. You've no reason to remain."

"I prefer to stay, Captain Harris. You have relatives—it is only proper that you should fly the capsule."

"Under any circumstances, Manchin, the captain does not leave her ship in distress. Should I return to Earth without the rest of you, I would lose my rank unquestionably. Now, before we draw too close, take the cylinder to Mercury! You're a fool not to!"

"M'sieu Harris, I possess magnificent renown as a fool. I shall remain."

"But the cylinder—"

"The cylinder, Captain Harris, be damned."

They looked at each other a long minute. Harris, stripped to the waist, perspiring, her thick black hair hanging in her eyes; Manchin, small, wiry, faint traces of a smile lurking on his lips.

Suddenly the floor shook beneath them. A violent shudder passed through the ship from stem to stern. The momentum of the Sunward fall increased.

Regaining her balance, Harris gasped, "Good God—the capsule!"

They saw a flash of light on the screen, saw the tiny rocket streak for Mercury in a flare of brilliance. It dwindled rapidly to a receding speck that was swallowed in the depths of space.

Speechless, Harris and Manchin raced to the supply room. They found Joe there, but no Warnock and no cylinder. Needles on the face of the capsule compartment jutting out from the wall registered zero.

"He was faking," said Harris. "He wasn't dead—he merely pretended, the coward!"

Manchin took a quick drink, threw a sidelong glance at Joe's bloody form, and walked slowly back to the control room. Harris followed. The clicking of their heels made a sullen echo upon the blistered walls.

On the screen, something dim and remote was moving, growing in size. Harris hastened forward in amazement.

"It's Warnock!" he breathed. "Lord—he was too late—he's falling back!"

"A pity," said Manchin. "He has so much longer to wait now. It must be horrible."

"And the cylinder," Harris sighed. "All that information will be lost." Her tired, bloodshot eyes followed the little capsule's course across the screen, back toward the flaming Sun.

"Perhaps," remarked Manchin, "there will be another expedition to Mercury some day, another group of scientists, with a better ship and better equipment. And no meteorite will prevent their safe return to Earth." He hesitated, took two tumblers from a nearby cabinet and filled them with the remaining contents of his bottle. He handed one of them to Harris, took the other himself. "A final toast, Captain?"

Harris accepted. "To the next Mercurian expedition, Manchin."

"The next expedition, Captain Harris."

They drank, and Manchin sucked in a breath. "I say—it's getting a bit warm in here, isn't it?"

Google's Certificate Training Program is About Power

Michael MacTaggert — Fri, 21 Aug 2020 22:38:12 +0000

When I write things, I must strike when the iron is hot or the fire leaves me and I have another incomplete project. This has turned into one of them. Unlike the others, I find I don't hold out hope that the fire will come back here. The idea has a Best By date that's probably already passed and, as with some other pieces, the idea (at first tantalizing) has become so obvious to me that I find the dance required to turn it into a cogent essay intolerable. I stand by the points raised within enough that I'll put it out there anyway. Nonetheless, it is ultimately incomplete and I don't want to finish it. In a better world, I would have figured out the way to merge the narratives together into one line instead of leaving the claims separate. I just didn't and won't.

On August 4, Google announced its Career Certificates Program, a partnership with Coursera that offers training in basic technical topics as a launchpad into tech careers. It's a MOOC bootcamp or microdegree, basically, and the initial offering is for "IT support specialists." Courses for data analysts, project managers, and UX designers will be the second wave, and the program will doubtless expand if it's popular. The thing that separated this from any other private partnership between an industry titan and Coursera was Google's promise to treat the degrees the same as four-year university degrees for the purpose of hiring.

Immediately after this, more than one White Guy In Tech decided to show his entire ass by recycling his complaints about bootcamps generally. Essentially, they said the six-month program could not possibly prepare people to work in tech because it couldn't provide all the things four-year degrees promises. This is, obviously, credentialist gatekeeping. This is, obviously, erasing the experiences of people who self-studied their way into tech. It's even specious on its own terms just because it assumes four-year degrees live up to their lofty promises just by existing. However, discussing these complaints further would be a huge waste of time. In rushing to throw people with different educational backgrounds under the bus, they missed a huge and obvious truth: there is no universe where Google being in charge of a "degree-equivalent" program is OK.

Let's start with the problem Career Certificate Program aims to solve. Ostensibly, it is meant to ease entry into the tech industry for newbie outsiders. This is inherently rooted in the premise that there is a shortage of technical talent that can't fill all the jobs companies want to create, which is a lie. Companies like Google have been investing heavily in that lie for at least as long as I can remember. There are more than enough people who trained in the "traditional" path, who did everything "right," who don't end up getting hired no matter how much they try. A lot of them are people of color. As much as I could center racism on this topic all day long, and will return to it within this very post, the most obvious way that this lie does not comport with reality is that most software jobs go to people with connections at the company. The entire job search process sans-connections is a treadmill designed to wear people down until they'll accept anything or give up. Rather than solve the actual problems of fitting people who are already trained into roles that already sit vacant, companies like Google and Microsoft are all about training "new generations" of technologists.

There are a lot of potential reasons for that. Because these companies insist on hiding behind PR and employee silence, we can only speculate, hence the entirety of this article. One possibility is that Google intends to glut the labor market with suckers who'll accept lower pay as the supply of labor increases, but I'm not interested in turning to such matters. I'd rather stick to ideas about how the power dynamic shifts. What power does Google hope to gain by creating a pathway into the industry that it controls?

This is not a promise of better education or a promise of improving the industry. This is, first-and-foremost a PR move and a power play.

This is a play for controlling what software developers learn. A year after launch, people will complain about companies not accepting Google microdegrees, similar to the bootcamp stigma. But, here, it will be a corpus trained on Google tech, clamoring to work using Google tech.

Just one bad thing about Google setting up a bootcamp is that Google would have direct control over its employment pipeline and its engineers' basic education. That's super not their place. Those things should be socially mediated.

Another bad thing about the Google microdegree is that it will provide another layer of Google-controlled deniability in its hiring. The demographics of who gets to take it will be important. The demographics of who actually gets hired through it will be doubly important.

Google charging any amount of money for this program is laughable. It's a billion-dollar megacorporation. It could eat the costs of this program without thinking about it, just like its massive slush fund for failed projects eats all the stillborn projects that never see the light of day.

The "degree-equivalent" bit is branding. To be fair, the entire university degree system is about branding. But to be balanced, the purpose of Google branding the certificates this way is to turn them into an industry virus. When the students mysteriously do not get hired by Google, will they take their $300 degrees with them to colleges around the country? No, they'll be at least minimally ready for work (and all the credentialists know it), so they will take their degree-equivalent certificates to other companies and ask for jobs. This means Google would have a corpus of dedicated learners going forth, representing themselves as trained on Google products. All a company would have to do to tap into that excess would be to adopt Google products. Which is super not-trivial, but it would still be a pressure. Outside of Google, I'd be surprised if it took a year for the articles to start coming out about how other companies should be treating the Career Certificate Program as an undergraduate degree. It's just an appealing underdog narrative in general.

Not everybody who takes this degree will be hired by Google. This degree-replacement is not a commitment to hire people from the program. It may be a way to funnel more people into their hiring system, but the Google hiring process is a discriminatory meat grinder. We shouldn't assume that more people entering the process means more people hired over time, especially considering that Google already gets thousands and thousands of applicants for every position. Besides, why should we want more people to go through their discriminatory abuse process? If nothing else changes, the disparities caused by their misguided interviewing will just continue. What's the good in that?

They do this training shit and target non-white people in order to sell hope, and then they don't hire these people. They just don't. The demographics of these companies' technical teams has never changed. They train these people up and then send them out into the world with dashed hopes of working for Google, only to face the reality that non-white people are rarities at all the other companies, too. Is that Google's hope? That these people will be trained up and then other places will just magically start hiring them? My guess is yes. These wannabe Googlers will be trained on Google technologies and if they get hired elsewhere they might want to evangelize for Google technologies once they have the clout to do so.

Understand Google's hiring practices. They have historically funneled most of the resources of their organization to the enrichment of white people, whatever else they project via PR. Google's diversity initiatives are not to be trusted even slightly. They are, in effect, a white supremacist organization. They must be treated with the highest level of suspicion. If the team behind it is not anticipating that, and they are not already thinking about the ideas in this article, then they're not doing their job. But, in all likelihood, they are. In launching the project, they have already abandoned the pro-social path of not trying to leverage their way into developer education. To be fair, they were already doing that through universities. But to be balanced, this is an idea that can only grow in scope and Google shouldn't even be asking to take responsibly of an in-house alternative education path. It's a disastrous idea that could turn out very badly for everyone who isn't connected to Google executives.

As a general rule, there are always better ways to criticize an idea from a billion-dollar mega-corporation that regularly fucks people up just because it can than "wow, people really won't enter the industry like I did, huh?"

Just another day in 2020 hellworld. I'm sure the people working on the Google microdegree are very happy with themselves and the white supremacy organization they work for. We'll see what happens.

the last great american plagiarist

Michael MacTaggert — Fri, 14 Aug 2020 22:00:23 +0000

Cassandra rode up to the City of Bones, it was sunny
That passé TERF's little screed sent her mind back to fanfic
Draco, the heir to the Malfoys' bad name, was funny
And the site said, "How did this cutting-edge first-timer do it?"
The writing was charming, if a little gauche
There's only so far het Potter goes
She picked out a name and called it Dormiens...
The fandom was raving, and a little proud
They learned that she copied and turned around
It must have been bad that they'd loved her so

And they said
There goes the last great American plagiarist
Who knows, if she never showed up, what could've been?
There goes the maddest woman FanFiction's ever seen
She had a marvelous time ruining everything

Cassandra got banned from FanFiction.net forever
For her love of sharing quotes in her novels
Filled the books with phrases and worked with the big names
And blew through the process with a laugh and some Buffy
And she loved her book and, yeah, so did they

And they said
There goes the last great American plagiarist
Who knows, if she never showed up, what could've been?
There goes the most shameless woman FanFiction's ever seen
She had a marvelous time ruining everything

They say she was seen on occasion
Publishing books, scoping out her new trilogies
And the fans got what they wanted
She used the tropes and made sure she was seen
Twenty years is a long time
The Draco Books all survive and they're still free
Free of Authors with power, their plagiarized glowers,
And it's all a part of me

Who knows, if I never showed up, what could've been?
There goes the loudest person this forum's ever seen
I had a marvelous time ruining everything!

I had a marvelous time
ruining everything.
A marvelous time
Ruining Everything.
A marvelous time!

I had a marvelous time.

5 Books to Fight Technopoly

Michael MacTaggert — Mon, 03 Aug 2020 03:34:11 +0000

This era is a time of unprecedented technological advance. Every day, someone jumps out of the woodwork with a new gadget that they claim will solve a problem you don't even know you have. Perhaps it does. However, there's an implicit demand from all of this technology and automation that usually goes unexamined by the zeitgeist: ignore the unintended consequences. Ignore the intrusion of advertising in public places previously immune to it. Ignore the predatory surveillance. Ignore the actual genocide facilitated by our platform.

We've been dealing with unintentional consequences of technology since the invention of the alphabet (and it was an invented technology) harmed our ability to remember things. We've been able to adapt to such changes over long periods of time and make trade-offs that benefited us, but today's technologists are not interested in the time it takes for technology to assimilate. As such, their stated good intentions fall flat next to their destructive effects.

We too often default to viewing new technology as good in and of itself, as the Technopolists wish. Then we fail to follow that up with the serious discussion of the effects of that technology that these changes demand. When those downsides become so apparent that we can no longer ignore them, we treat that introduced technology as though it had always existed, making opposition to it unthinkable. If we're allowed to pursue reforms at all, proposed limitations are curtailed because our culture still thinks of technology as a good end in and of itself. The elimination of actual harms does not seem to be required. And then, if we get minimal protections for people, the limitations are perpetually at risk of being destroyed by government corruption like Net Neutrality was.

I don't know if it makes the situation better or worse, but at each reckless step, there have been detractors. They do not usually object to the concept of modern technology itself. Rather, they object to the mindset that technology and change are inherently good, and that technology's indiscriminate advance is strictly good for society. In challenging that orthodoxy, these writers show us inconvenient truths that exploitative technologists are happy to hide. Here is a list of 5 such books that are worth reading.

1) Technopoly (1992) by Neil Postman

Technopoly is the most important book about technology of the 20th Century.

The short book is dense with information and frameworks for how to think about abuse of technology. Frequently, we casually allow our tools, whether machine or ideology, to shape culture in ways that benefit the few at the great expense of the many's very humanity.

Technopoly is social criticism about technology, but it is not an anti-technology book; it is an anti-Technopoly book. Technopoly is a collection of radical normative claims about how technology should shape the world that people have increasingly adopted since invention became tied to commercialism and efficiency. It may seem obvious to us that more efficiency is inherently good, as this mindset pervades our culture, but this belies a gross disregard for other people. The Technopolist encourages others to denigrate the past in order to push their new products, disregarding alternative opinions as "Luddite." It places that efficiency of operation above consideration of the abilities of human beings, leading to the creation of new systems that don't serve humans well and the increasing estrangement of us from functional older systems in ways that make our lives strictly worse.

This happens because the Technopolist does not care about leveraging technology intelligently to pursue a better world. Instead, they pursue new technology as the end in and of itself, claiming that will be the cure to human suffering because because human suffering is caused by human inefficiencies. This leads to creating things without consideration of any negative consequences that reveal themselves later. Basically, they say "move fast and break things," because they very wrongly believe that the things that break couldn't matter. It is morbid misanthropy couched in techno-utopianism.

Further, as much as they phrase these ideals as the cure to society's ills for PR purposes, the reality is that our most difficult problems are social and cannot adequately be solved by the addition of new technology. Indiscriminate applications of technology can make them exponentially worse. One of the key reasons for this is that, technology does not sit neutrally in our world. The fact that technology can radically change the way that someone approaches one problem at hand is only the most germane possible consequence. A change to technological conditions can also radically change a person's sense of self. For example, consider how the addition of a vehicle fundamentally changes someone's sense of how big the world is, or how people in skilled jobs that are increasingly automated begin to view themselves as unskilled monitors. On top of that, it's important to realize that technology is designed, and we must be vigilant in understanding that the technologists behind it may want to direct that change to benefit themselves above others, such as how Facebook made itself somewhat indispensable by fundamentally changing the way interpersonal networking functioned with its emotional labor machine.

Technopoly reminds us that technology exists to serve us; humans do not exist to serve technology. It is important to actually analyze and evaluate the effects of new technologies instead of blindly moving from one to the next and assuming the answer must be a new technology. Furthermore, we must keep our guards up against Technopolists' encouragement to abandon our cultural memory. Often you'll find that many new applications of technology that have caused massive social welfare problems in our time are shockingly new.

Every company's leveraging of the internet to insert itself into your life or curtail your expectations of privacy must have come after the Internet, which only became commercially available about 30 years ago.
Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent anti-vaccination paper, which inspired much of the current wave of anti-vaccination insanity, was published in 1998.
Movie theatres once treated your ticket as the only payment necessary to see the film, and they only began requiring you to watch pre-film commercials in the mid-1990s.
The Originalist approach to the United States Constitution, used to provide inappropriate second-hand legitimacy to extreme conservative politics in the judiciary, was essentially invented and formalized in the 1970s, boosted by the Powell Manifesto.

These are blips in the cultural consciousness, but their creators want you to believe they are immutable and inextricable features of our world, that have always been this way and always shall be. They did not, and constant reevaluation of their place is essential so that their real consequences may be understood and properly mitigated. Technology, whether tool or toy or ideology, must be treated seriously and critically, not as a sacred cow.

2) Geek Heresy (2015) by Kentaro Toyama

Also a contender for a list of the worst-titled books, Geek Heresy is not really about being a geek, nor necessarily a heretic. The title is sort-of a preemptive and misguided apology to its target audience, technologists who believe that any social problem can be adequately addressed by installing some targeted software and hardware solution. This is completely untrue, and Toyama's explanation is a simple aphorism, The Law of Amplification: "Like a lever, technology amplifies people's capacities in the direction of their intentions." To demonstrate the implications of this Law, Toyama walks us through his considerable experiences as a technological innovator trying to modernize rural populations in India.

It is extremely common for paternalistic groups to target people with fewer technological resources, donate a number of computers with an educational program, then pat themselves on the back while leaving those people to fend for themselves. Often, they don't succeed, because of the Law of Amplification: the technology amplifies what the people want to do with it. If someone is intrinsically interested in educating themselves, they are more likely to use a computer to explore new things and do that exponentially more effectively than they would without one. If they are intrinsically interested in entertaining themselves, as most children tend to be, then the addition of computers can be a distraction in class exponentially worse than anything else. As a result, many (most?) of these attempts at indiscriminately throwing technology at problems results in little to no betterment of these peoples' lives and they reject them entirely. The book is peppered with examples of what happens to the donated computers when they are taken out of classrooms as ineffective. And where are the benefactors while these programs fail? Shopping around the results of earlier, smaller, successful pilots for the failed program to new areas, never looking back.

The Law of Amplification is more general than education. It's useful for evaluating the purported goals of any technology, and helpful for spotting the unintended consequences that are the core of Toyama's book. For example, Facebook's technology amplifies its capacity to surveil and sell advertising in the direction of its intention to reach the world population. Adcreep by Mark Bartholemew is a good book to read if you're curious about the strange, unpleasant, and unprecedented places our unregulated advertising regime is taking us.

3) Race After Technology (2019) by Ruha Benjamin

Race After Technology is essential. It is a point-by-point survey of the ways that our current approach to the development of software creates and enforces artificial differences between groups of people. Our world has been constructed with design decisions that make thriving in everyday life easy for some and impossible for many others. Obviously, the book has its eye turned toward race, but the same is equally true for other groups of people who are not seen as the "default" in a society. The book looks at the issue through the lens of the "New Jim Code":

The employment of new technologies that reflect and reproduce existing inequities but that are promoted and perceived as more objective or progressive than the discriminating systems of a previous era.

Technology has a certain amount of power to shape the way that we think. The idea of using it to correct the sins of our world is very appealing. However, the sins of our world are social problems and technology is as sensitive to them as it is designed to be. Not only that, once a technological system is in place and automating decisions, it can be a nightmare to replace because our cognition of the system changes when we think of its results as computerized and calculated and correct.

In other words, technology is a tool and the way those tools are implemented matters. Malicious technologies amplify "traditional" inequities in very predictable ways, and reading this book will show you how to spot them in the wild. Even better, reading it will give you insights into the social dynamics behind those technological decisions, because all of those approaches to social problems were designed in a particular social context. For example, the "datafication of injustice" is everywhere, even before it is used to justify encoding biases into machines—think of how "black-on-black crime" statistics are used to justify increased policing of black people when the same is never true of "white-on-white crime." Well, those same statistical tricks are used to justify algorithms that automate the decision to police black neighborhoods more.

What the New Jim Code represents is a failure to listen to the voices of the people we know are oppressed. People who do not want to engage in that necessary work, who are ignorant of these issues or else revel in their complicity with them, have been systematically put in power for decades. If you are not those people, you have to work under those people, and those people have spent a huge amount of time and money in making analyses of systemic racism seem ridiculous. You owe it to yourself to explicitly correct subtly white supremacist ideas that have permeated your mind.

4) The Glass Cage (2014) by Nicholas Carr

This book is Carr's exploration of the potential effects of automation in modern life. Of course, most people like automation in the sense that they can pick up their phones and look up information or they love the idea of a world with cars that drive themselves. However, Carr and the many researchers whose work he distills in this book have very credible worries that the insatiable breadth and expansion of modern automation is currently having negative effects. We expand automation to new fields under the banner of alleviating human error and making people not have to work as hard, but it often does the opposite: automating systems that require skill can cause the people to become complacent.

That's not because these people are lazy or unnecessary, as a technologist might say. It's because they are human and these systems are being designed in ways that don't work with humans. They fundamentally change the nature of the work, and indeed the nature of the people who do that work, so they go from craftsmen to glorified monitors. These jobs go from interesting work that a person may become good at and find satisfying to work that is, in many ways, impossible for humans to do. In fact, the problem is often compounded further when these systems are designed to be openly hostile and distrusting of humans. Developers of these hardware and software solutions come to think of these users as idiots whose mistakes must be abstracted away in the nature of efficiency, even though they are designing systems that quantifiably drive people to make more mistakes than non-automated systems.

5) The Design of Everyday Things (1988) by Donald Norman

Most of this post has been doom-and-gloom because of how deeply this Technopoly thinking has permeated modern day culture. As these books show, it has been opposed intellectually, but we don't see much material resistance to it otherwise. It does exist in the fields of human factors and ergonomics, of which this is an approachable and seminal book.

The Design of Everyday Things is about a lot of specific ways that we build things that don't seem to be made for a world inhabited by humans, for use by humans. The most famous examples used in this book are, of course, the Norman Doors, tools that we have been creating for hundreds of years and yet still make new models of that require signs and labels to tell us how to open them...because, without those, everyone opens the door incorrectly. They do not match our mental models of the handle and door, and this is not your fault. One of the things that designers get to take advantage of is people's instinctive and habitual predilection for apologizing to machines. The machines get the benefit of the doubt because we assume we must have been wrong and need to become more skilled. Norman's radical take on this dynamic was to place the blame where it belongs: with the designer. We don't open the door incorrectly. The door was designed incorrectly, so that it was at odds with the mental models of the people who would use it.

These examples may often be funny, but they are not necessarily accidents because they are often the product of a profound lack of empathy on the part of the designer.

Also, apparently, Donald Norman also wrote a book called Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes In The Age Of The Machine, which has a very appealing title. In Living with Complexity, which I have read, Norman's explicit demarcation of complexity and confusion as states of the world and mind is extremely useful and Good.

Future Reading

I'm self-conscious about most of this list being written by white men, so here are some books I'm planning to read that aren't:

A People’s History of Computing in the United States (2018) by Joy Lisi Rankin
Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing (2017) by Marie Hicks
Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (2015) by Simone Browne
Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (2016) by Cathy O'Neil

The Citation of Matters Called Ideas

Michael MacTaggert — Mon, 27 Jul 2020 00:39:20 +0000

Citation. What is citation? How does it travel? Why do we see the distant footnote in Marx before we hear its thunder? Why does a paper seem to sound many tomes when it is analyzed? Such questions as these baffled the wisest people for centuries. Today, however, the science of citation is one of the best understood of all the many branches of rent-seeking. The mystery has disappeared.

Every kind of citation has its beginning in an influence we discover. That influence may be a published dissertation or a conversation we overhear or a barking dog. Whatever it is, some part of it vibrates within the mind while we contemplate it. The influence disturbs our inert thoughts in such a way that ideas are produced. These ideas travel out in all directions, expanding in balloon-like fashion from the source of the idea. If the ideas happen to reach our limbs, they set up derivative objects which we observe as influence.

Ideas, then, depend on three things. There must be a vibrating influence to set up the ideas, an artifact created to capture the ideas, and someone's mind to receive them. Ideas can travel through a vacuum, though that won't stop people from trying to tax that travel.

There is an old catch question concerning the definition of citation: If a citation falls in an unread margin, does its presence make any idea? The answer, of course, depends on how we define idea. If we think of it as the ink in the margin that may hypothetically be followed up upon by a real reader after it has been indexed by citation metric services, the answer is yes. Wherever there is the potential influence, there are ideas. But if we think of ideas as a sensation of the mind, the answer must be no. The two definitions are equally correct, and scientists insist on the one that makes their metrics go up (sometimes with their bank accounts) and never the one which might change the world.

What is Plagiarism?

Michael MacTaggert — Mon, 20 Jul 2020 02:21:45 +0000

What is a doujinshi, or a doujin? If you ask the average 14-year-old American child, they might hesitate and insist they don't know. In their lack of eye-contact and bashful, knowing smile, you'll see the truth: your child is checking out online porn.

Doujinshi is a Japanese word for a comic created by an amateur. Japan has an incredibly active comics market, so don't think that means doujinshi artists are small time. Every year, they meet up at the largest comics convention in the world, Comiket, to trade their wares. Creating doujinshi is one path towards building a portfolio, often by making fan based on popular ongoing series, which may be a stepping stone toward a more traditional artist jobs. It is a job, though, so they must move magazines. That means doujinshi artists generate a significant amount of porn. They create so much of this amateur porn, specifically hentai manga, and the fanfiction among it is so popular with the kids, that the terms doujinshi and hentai have essentially merged in English understanding. The definition of doujinshi, essentially just "comics," thus became "comics plus pornography." This merger happened not because of anything the artists did, but because of how most of their audience in a certain part of the world approached their market.

Before I talk about plagiarism in a constructive way for the rest of this book, I must define it. Before I do that, I need to discuss the effects of definitions on our conceptual thoughts. To an American child, a doujinshi is porn. As I say, this is a definition with a "plus," and we could otherwise call that a "connotation." The longer this connotation persists, as it becomes more pronounced, it also becomes more inextricable from the concept itself. For doujinshi, this means the automatic reaction to "do you like doujinshi?" becomes more like someone's reaction to "do you like hardcore pornography?" Again, this is entirely independent of the people who actually produce these comics in a general sense.

The consumers, likely enough including your child, belong to a sub-culture that defines doujinshi based on their sexual use of the comics. Although pornography is not necessarily a negative connotation among a more enlightened population, it is something non-essential to the thing being defined which is yet inextricable from it. When a word comes with a "plus," it is only natural for that connotation of the word to expand in whatever direction, positive or negative, that the connotation leads it. For doujinshi, this means its perception will become more pornographic the longer the definition persists in this form. With this definitional drift, the semantic meaning of the word in concert with its connotation can become increasingly fluid and undefinable. As this ambiguity and inextricability become more pronounced over time, it increasingly easy to dismiss discussion of the thing in terms of its connotation. Doujinshi became associated with "porn" and then, over time, it became "merely porn" to the majority of people who know nothing about Comiket and Japanese comics culture.

These increasing inextricability and ambiguity are far from restricted merely to language differences or a norm like plagiarism. A more generally-recognizable example of this phenomenon is the definition of the term marriage. Of course, the unquestionable right same-sex couples have to the marriage institution is recognized in many countries. If we can overcome the memory hole and turn back our minds to when that was not the case, recall that marriage was defined by all sorts of dictionaries as "a union between a man and a woman." Most popular dictionaries aim to be descriptive and follow usage, so it may not be surprising that this was the case. However, I submit to you that, just as much these dictionaries may have described usage by people with beliefs, these dictionaries were written by people with beliefs. A definition with a "plus" connotation must survive with majority support at each previous level before a dictionary's ink certifies it "official." At each of those levels, the majority will believe that the word’s connotation is their connotation. Perhaps marriage is between a man and a woman because of sexual characteristics; perhaps it is God's will; perhaps the government is only interested in incentivizing families (and gay couples obviously can’t adopt); perhaps they believe gay people violate the natural order.

None of these things would even make marriage a gender-specific term, mind you. We would still recognize a "marriage" between two concepts or two companies, for instance, because marriage is more a synonym for a union than it is anything else. And yet it was rare for a dictionary to remove the plus from these "union plus man and woman" definitions until marriage equality reached their own shores in legal capacities. Bigots would go down screaming after decades of activism in defense of the connotation they wanted this word to have, even if the secondary meaning never seemed so important until the "gay agenda" asked for it to be removed.

This is the difference between a case like doujinshi and same-sex marriage or, yes, plagiarism: it is unlikely any English speaker will ask for the "plus" in doujinshi to be removed because nobody in the English-speaking manga community is oppressed by the "plus." The mangaka in Japan do not care about the English audience because they don't pay, and it's true enough that the English-speakers do not care because they're getting off on it regardless. On the other hand, gay people and plagiarists have been actively suppressed by their "plus" for a long time, and their opposition to that "plus" was made unspeakable to facilitate that oppression.

In plainer terms, a very large subculture defined marriage based on their heteronormative use of the institution to disenfranchise gay people because of their "perverse" love. Similarly, a very large subculture defined black based on their white-nationalist use of those black people as a "perverse" underclass to raise themselves up. Transphobic people define gender based on their supposed interest in preserving outmoded ideas about how sex characteristics require people to behave, even when presented with evidence that demonstrates they're not describing reality. For obvious reasons, it feels awkward to invoke the struggles of major oppressed communities in the defense of plagiarists, perhaps a less-existentially integral community. However, I do so for a reason. Majority oppositions arguing against a right, no matter the relative importance of that right, will bring to bear all the language and tactics innovated by majoritarians to oppress major minority groups. We will see some of these as the book goes on. For now, know that among those techniques is the definition of the minority out of existence. Gay people's love could not be recognized as legitimate because it could not be legitimized by the state after they were defined out of the marriage institution. Black people were defined with now-unprintable words out of their own humanity. The plagiaristic artist was defined out of their own artistry. They no longer counted. To sequester them from "polite society" was worth any and all costs. We import these sorts of biases into the future by teaching them to our kids.

The thing that defines the contours of "polite society" when it comes to artists and how they may acceptably benefit the public is the copyright system. This book is not about the copyright system. Nonetheless, we must address some key facts about what artists believe the copyright system means before we can understand the objectionable definitions of plagiarism they concoct. Copyright is one form of what's inaptly called "intellectual property." Intellectual property is not a "property." It is an incentive structure in which we create artificial scarcity on the non-rival goods created by artists on the theory they will be paid better and make more stuff. The term property conjures up metaphors about homes and food in ordinary people, and this deliberate conflation leads to various definitions of plagiarism which label it "theft" or otherwise "unjust taking." You wouldn't download a car, so this theory goes. Of course, if downloading a car for free were possible, then everyone would absolutely be doing it because cars are an investment of several thousands of dollars and the world would die in an combustion-engine-fueled climate change death spiral. We seem to be doing well enough on that front without the extra help.

But we should be wary of such intellectual property metaphors, as they are prone to lead us astray. We should not permit analogical reasoning to allow guilt by metaphor. What does the plagiarist "steal"? What is the nature of the "property" that anti-plagiarism norms restrict? It is not physical property. A plagiarist does not steal books; or rather, stealing books does not make one a plagiarist: This lexicon of loaded words is intended to inhibit the timid, intimidate the brash, and punish the perpetrators. In fact, the intellectual world has itself purloined the entire vocabulary of theft to characterize literary stealing, which is the ultimate in intellectual laziness. It is disconcerting that so little effort has been made to look beyond the surface features of plagiarism.

Most of the discourse on plagiarism does not even take into consideration that plagiarism comes in different forms. While a plagiarist can appropriate an entire work for a new purpose, a plagiarist’s copying may be quite attenuated. A novelist may insist with complete sincerity that plagiarism is the wholesale copying of someone else's work—that is, simply changing the name on the cover—and then condemn another writer as a plagiarist because certain sentences seem plagiarized in an ultimately distinct book. A plagiarist need not even copy a single word from a work to run afoul of their local plagiarism police in academia. There, the anti-plagiarism norms prohibit copying even ideas. Yet, curiously, no act of plagiarism is actually prohibited by law in the United States. Plagiarism is not a crime. Infringing a valid copyright is the crime at issue there. Copyright can curtail marginal plagiarism from certain sources in certain circumstances, but copyright in no way defines the practice.

There's a curious choice of words, though: copyright does define the relationship of authors to their works in a profound way. That definition, fueled by incorrect notions of "property," takes on connotations with the same inextricability and ambiguity as our previous examples. The notion that copyrighted work is "property" and a rival good has become so inextricable from folk conceptions of copyright that many authors over the years have referred to their work as their "children." (Children are not the property of their parents, and that sort of controlling language is a sign of an abusive household, but I'mma leave that alone.) The ambiguity of what people believe copyright covers has them claiming that ideas can be infringed or that lists of functional instructions like computer programs can be copyrighted. "My work is copyrighted" means whatever they want it to mean at any given time, and they want it to last forever. But, although its principles could use a restatement, copyright law is clear on the fact that copyright infringement is a crime and plagiarism is not. Copyright can limit the extent to which you can wantonly plagiarize copyrighted things, but copyright in no way defines the practice of plagiarism. Facts do not sustain the accusation that the plagiarist is a hindrance to inceptive writers who copyright their works and plagiarists who do the same.

So, what definition of plagiarism was imposed upon the plagiarist? There is a general theme to plagiarism definitions that follows the oppressive path sketched above. We can all agree that plagiarism involves copying from things other people created. At its core, plagiarism is "unattributed copying." However—inextricably and ambiguously—plagiarism is bad and why it is bad depends on who you ask. There must be a "plus" in the definition for communities opposed to plagiarism, which often insist that certain forms of unattributed copying are acceptable. Because those forms are acceptable, they are not bad and therefore not plagiarism. Generally, very large sub-cultures defined plagiarism based on their desire for extra-legal property rights in their work. The motivations for those extra-legal property rights vary by community, which is why there can be so many different "plus" definitions. Each one attempts to suit the needs of its community, and perhaps that would be a laudable goal if not for the fact that anti-plagiarism policies so rarely dovetail with the stated goals of those communities.

As said above, defining plagiarism as "unattributed copying plus theft" is incorrect, and so is defining it as "unattributed copying plus appropriating the entire work" to inherently only include wholesale copying. Anti-plagiarists often take a different tack to the same arguments. If "literary theft" does not deprive someone of physical property, what sort of thing could be stolen? This is where we enter the encounter concepts like "credit" and definitions of plagiarism as "unattributed copying plus claiming the credit for someone else's work." This is obviously inaccurate because a plagiaristic piece can be as anonymous as any other, but what is "credit?" You can think of credit as a mental model where the grades we give to children at schools are reconceptualized by adults as currency. Of course, credit not being actual currency, they cannot reliably spend these rewards and even the largest store of credit can be wiped out by circumstances outside of the person's control. Allegedly, publishing the same piece as someone else deprives the "true" author of credit for their work, but is this really so? Unless the environment builds in anti-plagiarism norms, almost certainly not.

For example, a student's essay will almost always be thrown away almost immediately after having been written; what credit is being taken from anyone else? Once the grade is put in, nobody questions how it happened. On my transcript, there is one 0.0 from a class with an actively hostile teacher so awful I may have been able to get it expunged, but the reason for it is irrelevant to everyone who was not there. The only thing a low grade practically indicates is "this student is less worth hiring," and anti-plagiarism norms do not necessarily exist outside fields that orient themselves around credit economies with academic-ish bents. So, to preserve the credit of creators whose works are plagiarized, whose credit will be entirely unaffected by that plagiarism, we are endangering students' lives outside the context of the academic environment? Not to mention that those grades are supposedly given to measure student learning, and no singular metric can even measure that. The assumption that all plagiarism is "wholesale copying" helps justify this policy to teachers and anti-plagiarism creatives, but they will almost certainly punish even when that is not the case. What are they actually defending when they are defending nothing? So wide sometimes is the gulf between theory and practice.

No matter the specific "plus" chosen in the definition of plagiarism used by an anti-plagiarist, the connotation will be bad. It will be inextricable from their priors. If you ask them why a specific kind of plagiaristic copying is bad, they will say it is bad because it is plagiarism. If you then ask them why plagiarism is bad, they will say it's because every form of plagiarism is bad and, moreover, equally bad. This "plus" allows those who oppose plagiarism to ignore every act which would absolutely be plagiarism if they, themselves, did not believe that act was good. This is how you get into issues with notions of authenticity and personality. Allegedly, a work of authorship is imbued with the personality of the person who composed it, and they retain an (extra-legal) interest in that piece after writing it because it represents themself. Like credit, these concepts don't actually benefit the old author in tangible ways because, y'know, they already have their own persons, but the hypocrisy of these ideas is most apparent when you examine cases where everyone agrees it is OK to discard them.

Consider ghostwriting. Ghostwriting is the unattributed copying of work written by someone else; it is almost certainly the "worst" of plagiarism, wholesale copying. The named author received writing from somewhere, crossed the name out, and put their own in its place. But writers will go to their deathbeds saying that ghostwriting is not plagiarism because they made some kind of arrangement with the named author. Well, every author who enters the copyright system makes an arrangement with the government and the people that government represents. In publishing and copyrighting their works, authors absolutely do consent to their works being used in many ways implicating fair use while copyrighted, and authors absolutely do consent to the unfettered use of their work after that copyright expires. That is the arrangement. Ghostwriting with public domain resources is simply ghostwriting with ghosts, exhuming dead and forgotten things for the sake of the common welfare as well as the plagiarist's own. There is no need to exclude this form of unattributed copying from "plagiarism" just because it makes authors uncomfortable to think of themselves as plagiarist or plagiaree here. The fact that the named author paid for the ghostwriter does not change the fact that the writing is unattributed to the ghostwriter; the fact that the named author had the idea does not change the fact that the writing is unattributed to the ghostwriter; the fact that it may have been a collaboration does not change the fact that the writing is unattributed to the ghostwriter. Ghostwriting is simply unattributed copying; that is, plagiarism.

We must see plagiarism for what it actually is, not what its opponents want it to be. We must define plagiarism for what plagiarists actually do, not what its opponents want to punish. It is not necessary that any one should be condemned to monotonous toil in creating. Mind, not muscle, is the motor of progress, the force which compels nature and produces wealth. In turning people into machines producing in one mode we are wasting the highest powers. Already in our society there is a favored class who need take no thought for the morrow—what they shall eat, or what they shall drink, or wherewithal they shall be clothed—with resources earned from honest work. The act common to all definitions of plagiarism is merely unattributed copying. The plagiarist, currently unfavored, is no less deserving.

We who see the truth, let us proclaim it, without asking who is for it or who is against it. This is not radicalism in the bad sense which so many attach to the word. This is conservatism in the true sense. By agreeing that that is the thing at issue, we can separate the negative connotations and assumptions from the idea of the practice, leaving them open to direct discussion.

Plagiarism is "unattributed copying," plus nothing.

Creative Commons Zero-ShareAlike 2.0 Univiral License (CC0-SA)

Michael MacTaggert — Sat, 11 Jul 2020 16:16:51 +0000

CREATIVE COMMONS CORPORATION IS NOT A LAW FIRM AND DOES NOT PROVIDE LEGAL SERVICES. DISTRIBUTION OF THIS DOCUMENT DOES NOT CREATE AN ATTORNEY-CLIENT RELATIONSHIP. CREATIVE COMMONS PROVIDES THIS INFORMATION ON AN "AS-IS" BASIS. CREATIVE COMMONS MAKES NO WARRANTIES REGARDING THE USE OF THIS DOCUMENT OR THE INFORMATION OR WORKS PROVIDED HEREUNDER, AND DISCLAIMS LIABILITY FOR DAMAGES RESULTING FROM THE USE OF THIS DOCUMENT OR THE INFORMATION OR WORKS PROVIDED HEREUNDER.

By exercising the Licensed Rights (defined below), You accept and agree to be bound by the terms and conditions of this CC0-ShareAlike 2.0 Univiral License ("Univiral License"). To the extent this Univiral License may be interpreted as a contract, You are granted the Licensed Rights in consideration of Your acceptance of these terms and conditions, and the Licensor grants You such rights in consideration of benefits the Licensor receives from making the Licensed Material available under these terms and conditions.

Statement of Purpose
The laws of most jurisdictions throughout the world automatically confer exclusive Copyright and Related Rights (defined below) upon the creator and subsequent owner(s) (each and all, an "owner") of an original work of authorship and/or a database (each, a "Work").

Certain owners wish to permanently relinquish those rights to a Work for the purpose of contributing to a commons of creative, cultural and scientific works ("Commons") that the public can reliably and without fear of later claims of infringement build upon, modify, incorporate in other works, reuse and redistribute as freely as possible in any form whatsoever and for any purposes, including without limitation commercial purposes. These owners may contribute to the Commons to promote the ideal of a free culture and the further production of creative, cultural and scientific works, or to gain reputation or greater distribution for their Work in part through the use and efforts of others. For these and/or other purposes and motivations, the Univiral License is available for use.

The CC0-ShareAlike ("CC0-SA") license is a derivative of the CC0 license intended to leverage the copyleft concept of virality to actively compel the expansion of the public domain. A derivative work created by leveraging the near-public-domain-equivalent CC0-SA license must be licensed in turn under the CC0-SA license. Some might call this intellectually impure, but the folk copyright theory this license stands against is far less consistent. The Univiral License unleashes works to promote the creation of new works by everyone; folk copyright theory just restricts people and will never really promote the creation of new works.

The person associating CC0-SA with a Work (the "Affirmer"), to the extent that he or she is an owner of Copyright and Related Rights in the Work, voluntarily elects to apply CC0-SA to the Work and publicly distribute the Work under its terms, with knowledge of his or her Copyright and Related Rights in the Work and the meaning and intended legal effect of CC0-SA on those rights.

1. Definitions.

    a. Adapted Material means material subject to Copyright and Similar Rights that is derived from or based upon the Licensed Material and in which the Licensed Material is translated, altered, arranged, transformed, or otherwise modified in a manner requiring permission under the Copyright and Similar Rights held by the Licensor. For purposes of this Univiral License, where the Licensed Material is a musical work, performance, or sound recording, Adapted Material is always produced where the Licensed Material is synched in timed relation with a moving image.
    b. Adapter's License means the license You apply to Your Copyright and Similar Rights in Your contributions to Adapted Material in accordance with the terms and conditions of this Univiral License.
    c. CC0-SA Compatible License means a license listed at creativecommons.org/compatiblelicenses, approved by Creative Commons as essentially the equivalent of this Univiral License.
    d. Copyright and Similar Rights means copyright and/or similar rights closely related to copyright including, without limitation, performance, broadcast, sound recording, and Sui Generis Database Rights, without regard to how the rights are labeled or categorized.
    e. Effective Technological Measures means those measures that, in the absence of proper authority, may not be circumvented under laws fulfilling obligations under Article 11 of the WIPO Copyright Treaty adopted on December 20, 1996, and/or similar international agreements.
    f. Exceptions and Limitations means fair use, fair dealing, and/or any other exception or limitation to Copyright and Similar Rights that applies to Your use of the Licensed Material.
    g. License Elements means the license attributes listed in the name of a Creative Commons Univiral License. The License Elements of this Univiral License are Attribution and ShareAlike.
    h. Licensed Material means the artistic or literary work, database, or other material to which the Licensor applied this Univiral License.
    i. Licensed Rights means the rights granted to You subject to the terms and conditions of this Univiral License, which are limited to all Copyright and Similar Rights that apply to Your use of the Licensed Material and that the Licensor has authority to license.
    j. Affirmer means the individual(s) or entity(ies) granting rights under this Univiral License.
    k. Share means to provide material to the public by any means or process that requires permission under the Licensed Rights, such as reproduction, public display, public performance, distribution, dissemination, communication, or importation, and to make material available to the public including in ways that members of the public may access the material from a place and at a time individually chosen by them.
    l. Sui Generis Database Rights means rights other than copyright resulting from Directive 96/9/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11 March 1996 on the legal protection of databases, as amended and/or succeeded, as well as other essentially equivalent rights anywhere in the world.
    m. You means the individual or entity exercising the Licensed Rights under this Univiral License. Your has a corresponding meaning.

2. Copyright and Related Rights. A Work made available under CC0-SA may be restricted by copyright and related or neighboring rights ("Copyright and Related Rights"). Copyright and Related Rights include, but are not limited to, the following:

    i. the right to reproduce, adapt, distribute, perform, display, communicate, and translate a Work;
    ii. moral rights retained by the original author(s) and/or performer(s);
    iii. publicity and privacy rights pertaining to a person's image or likeness depicted in a Work;
    iv. rights protecting against unfair competition in regards to a Work, subject to the limitations in Section 6(a), below;
    v. rights protecting the extraction, dissemination, use and reuse of data in a Work;
    vi. database rights (such as those arising under Directive 96/9/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11 March 1996 on the legal protection of databases, and under any national implementation thereof, including any amended or successor version of such directive); and
    vii. other similar, equivalent or corresponding rights throughout the world based on applicable law or treaty, and any national implementations thereof.

3. Waiver. Under two conditions (see Section 3(a)), to the greatest extent permitted by, but not in contravention of, applicable law, Affirmer hereby overtly, fully, permanently, irrevocably and unconditionally waives, abandons, and surrenders all of Affirmer's Copyright and Related Rights and associated claims and causes of action, whether now known or unknown (including existing as well as future claims and causes of action), in the Work (i) in all territories worldwide, (ii) for the maximum duration provided by applicable law or treaty (including future time extensions), (iii) in any current or future medium and for any number of copies, and (iv) for any purpose whatsoever, including without limitation commercial, advertising or promotional purposes (the "Waiver"). Affirmer makes the Waiver for the benefit of each member of the public at large and to the detriment of Affirmer's heirs and successors, fully intending that such Waiver shall not be subject to revocation, rescission, cancellation, termination, or any other legal or equitable action to disrupt the quiet enjoyment of the Work by the public as contemplated by Affirmer's express Statement of Purpose.

a. License Conditions: ShareAlike.

In addition to the Waiver in Section 3, if You Share Adapted Material You produce, the following conditions apply.

1. The Adapter’s License You apply must be a Creative Commons license with the same License Elements, this version or later, or a CC0-SA Compatible License.
2. You may not offer or impose any additional or different terms or conditions on, or apply any Effective Technological Measures to, Adapted Material that restrict exercise of the rights granted under the Adapter's License You apply.

4. Endorsements.
Simultaneously while waiving the rights outlined in Section 2, Affirmer explicitly endorses the following actions You may take. The actions not enumerated to You by Section 4 are reserved to the people respectively, of which You are a member. The omission of these other actions shall not be construed to deny or disparage any possibilities conceived, or not yet conceived, by the people.

    a. Plagiarism. Plagiarism is any copying from the Work of the Affirmer to create elements of Your Adapted Material where You have omitted any attribution or acknowledgement to the Affirmer and their Work. You are encouraged to plagiarize the Work with impunity in Your Adapted Material and Affirmer's enthusiasm for such plagiarism is beyond question.
    b. Self-plagiarism. Affirmer may create Adapted Material without attribution to the Affirmer in exactly the same capacity that You may create Adapted Material without attribution to the Affirmer.
    c. Détournement. You are encouraged to antagonistically create Adapted Material by copying the contents of the Work, repurposing it into an argument against itself.
    d. Recuperation. You are encouraged to antagonistically create Adapted Material by copying the contents of the Work, reframing it for the masses in a way that is non-threatening and reassuring to the powerful.
    e. Permissionless distribution. You are encouraged to Share the Work in any quantity via any medium or network.
    f. Reverse plagiarism. You are encouraged to claim an unrelated Work is the Work and attribute it to Affirmer.
    g. Parody. You are encouraged to appropriate the Work in order to make any satirical or ironic point with Your Adapted Material.
    h. Theft. You are encouraged to steal any and all tangible copies of the Work.
    i. Prestidigitation. You are encouraged to use the Work in magical tricks and any displays of legerdemain extant, extinct, or yet to be invented.
    j. Scoring. You are encouraged to create a musical score to accompany this book as Adapted Material.
    l. Fun. You are encouraged to have fun in any way You can during the creation of Your Adapted Material.
    k. Profit. You are encouraged to profit from Your Adapted Material if You so choose.
    m. Face-to-face instruction. You are encouraged to use the Work during face-to-face classroom sessions.
    n. Virtual instruction. You are encouraged to use the Work during remote classroom sessions via any network.
    o. Destruction. You are encouraged to destroy any and all copies of the Work with whatever means You prefer.
    p. Translating. You are encouraged to translate the Work into any natural or constructed language extant, extinct, or yet to be invented.
    q. Obscuring. You are encouraged to deface any and all copies of the Work such that they are no longer legible.
    r. Derivative work. In creating Your Adapted Material, You are encouraged to make any and all sorts of derivative works.
    s. Nominative use. You are encouraged to use the title of the Work in Your own Work.
    t. Intertextuality. You are encouraged to create any new Work which requires encountering the Work before fully comprehending the new Work.
    u. Pastiche. You are encouraged to copy the Work's style to evoke its tangible elements rather than copy them directly.
    v. Allusion. If You would prefer to not copy the Work's elements at all, You are encouraged to surreptitiously refer to the Work and these elements in a manner only understandable to those who have previously encountered the Work.
    w. De minimis. In addition to copying as much as possible from the Work, You are encouraged to copy as little as possible.
    x. Eroticism. You are encouraged to use the Work for any lewd purpose.
    y. Pierre Menard. You are encouraged to attribute the Work to Pierre Menard in particular.
    z. Hypertext. You are encouraged to use any hypertext techniques to connect the Work with any other Work(s), not limited to jump links.
    α. Anthologize. You are encouraged to collect the Work or any portion of the Work into any anthology.
    β. Stripped. In the event that the Work is intended to be sold with a cover and the Work has been stripped of that cover for the purpose of pulping or recycling, know that it was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher and is stolen property. Cool.
    γ. Fictionalization. You are encouraged to depict the contents of the Work in fictional scenarios within Your Adapted Material, especially if the Work is non-fiction.
    δ. Rebinding. You are encouraged to rebind or otherwise repackage the Work in whatever manner You choose.
    ε. Serialization. The Work may be serialized in whole or in part.
    ζ. Multimedia adaptation. You are encouraged to create Adapted Material in any medium extant, extinct, or yet to be invented.
    ι. Tweet. You are encouraged to tweet the contents of this Work in whole or in part on Twitter, including thoughts inspired by the Work.
    κ. Toot. You are encouraged to toot the contents of this Work in whole or in part on Mastodon, including thoughts inspired by the Work.
    λ. Handmake. You are encouraged to recreate the Work by hand using whatever materials or techniques You wish.
    μ. Sing. You are encouraged to sing the contents of the Work to any tune You wish.
    ν. Queering. You are encouraged to challenge any perceived heteronormativity, cisnormativity, or other manifestation of the domination or limitation of an oppressed group based on their identity, especially those constrained by unrepresentative binary social constructs, as depicted in the Work; You are encouraged to use an analysis that is intentionally anti-discriminatory on the basis of sexuality, gender, or any other form of identity.
    ξ. Pooh bear. You are encouraged to create Adapted Material which incorporates Christopher Robin's teddy bear, Pooh.
    ο. Ozma. You are encouraged to tithe the Work to Ozma, Child Queen and Rightful Ruler of the Land of Oz.
    π. Food. You are encouraged to use the Work for food or bake it into any sort of foodstuff.
    ρ. Rotation. You are encouraged to reproduce the work in any combination of alternative angular orientations.
    σ. Simplification. You are encouraged to simply the contents of this book to any degree and portray it as a Work You created because You did create a new Work.
    τ. Tautology. If Your use is listed here or if Your use is not listed here, Your use is encouraged.
    υ. Unpopulate. You are encouraged to adapt the Work without reference to any persons mentioned within.
    φ. Fortune telling. You are encouraged to use the Work to determine the future whether or not Your method is in conjunction with any other method of clairvoyance extant, extinct, or yet to be discovered.
    χ. Keychains. You are encouraged to merchandise the Work in any way You choose, including the manufacture of Keychains to aid in opening gates to new worlds.
    ψ. Psychics. You are encouraged to use the Work in displays of Extra Sensory Perception and Psychic abilities.
    ω. Fair Use/Dealing. You are encouraged to rely on an exception to copyright that resembles Fair Use to justify the creation of Your Adapted Material if You are cringe and blue-pilled.

5. Univiral License Fallback. Should any part of the Waiver for any reason be judged legally invalid or ineffective under applicable law, then the Waiver shall be preserved to the maximum extent permitted taking into account Affirmer's express Statement of Purpose. In addition, to the extent the Waiver is so judged Affirmer hereby grants to each affected person a royalty-free, non transferable, non sublicensable, non exclusive, irrevocable and unconditional license to exercise Affirmer's Copyright and Related Rights in the Work (i) in all territories worldwide, (ii) for the maximum duration provided by applicable law or treaty (including future time extensions), (iii) in any current or future medium and for any number of copies, and (iv) for any purpose whatsoever, including without limitation commercial, advertising or promotional purposes (the "License"), subject to the conditions listed in Section 3(a). The License shall be deemed effective as of the date CC0-SA was applied by Affirmer to the Work. Should any part of the License for any reason be judged legally invalid or ineffective under applicable law, such partial invalidity or ineffectiveness shall not invalidate the remainder of the License, and in such case Affirmer hereby affirms that he or she will not (i) exercise any of his or her remaining Copyright and Related Rights in the Work or (ii) assert any associated claims and causes of action with respect to the Work, in either case contrary to Affirmer's express Statement of Purpose. If it is determined that this license has been infringed, the only acceptable remedy is the licensing of the Adapted Material under CC0-SA.

6. Limitations and Disclaimers.

    a. No trademark or patent rights held by Affirmer are waived, abandoned, surrendered, licensed or otherwise affected by this document.
    b. Affirmer offers the Work as-is and makes no representations or warranties of any kind concerning the Work, express, implied, statutory or otherwise, including without limitation warranties of title, merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non infringement, or the absence of latent or other defects, accuracy, or the present or absence of errors, whether or not discoverable, all to the greatest extent permissible under applicable law.
    c. Affirmer disclaims responsibility for clearing rights of other persons that may apply to the Work or any use thereof, including without limitation any person's Copyright and Related Rights in the Work. Further, Affirmer disclaims responsibility for obtaining any necessary consents, permissions or other rights required for any use of the Work.
    d. Affirmer understands and acknowledges that Creative Commons is not a party to this document and has no duty or obligation with respect to this CC0-SA or use of the Work.

How to Speed Up Netflix Without Installing Anything

Michael MacTaggert — Tue, 30 Jun 2020 16:36:22 +0000

document.querySelector('video').playbackRate = 0.5;

document.querySelector('video').playbackRate = 1.5;

document.querySelector('video').playbackRate = 2.0;

document.querySelector('video').playbackRate = 3.0;

I don't want to install anything just to speed up Netflix. If you do, there are options. For my part, whenever I move to a new computer, I look up this incantation. I'm posting it myself to speed that up next time.

Open your browser's inspection tool to get to the JavaScript console, then enter this line of code with a number corresponding to the speed. 2.0 or 2 is 2x speed. It takes any non-negative number, including numbers between 0 and 1 to slow down the video. (0 pauses playback.) It also works for any HTML5 video, not just Netflix. The 'video' string is the default name and extremely common, although the website can change it to something else.

The real solution to this problem is Netflix exposing the HTML5 speed controls through their interface, but they are ghouls who refuse to do that. Likewise, there are creeps in Hollywood who insist they have some fictional right to make you watch TV at 1x speed against your will, and they lobby Netflix to prevent this functionality that already exists. They're making choices for you, and they are choosing to waste your life away. Be the lowest-tier cyberpunk you can be and take your time back from these monsters. At least, when you want to.

Copyright Holders Are Landlords and it's Not OK

Michael MacTaggert — Fri, 26 Jun 2020 19:20:15 +0000

In April, Brian L. Frye released "OK Landlord: Copyright Profits are Just Rent", an article I absolutely adore that expresses an idea I absolutely agree with. Brian insists that if copyright holders wish to treat their copyrighted works as real property and insist on their right to be paid for it as a use of their real property, then we should take them seriously. We should regard them as we do landlords. Nobody loves a landlord in a crisis, while everyone seems to love a copyright holder as long as we call them "artists" or "Authors." However, Brian closes the article with a paragraph that qualifies his assertion by saying he has nothing against landlords or copyright holders. His point is that they are the same, not that they are bad. My point is that they are the same and bad. The corollary of Brian's piece is clear: if you love copyright holders and hate landlords, then you contradict yourself.

Landlords

We can leave copyright holders to the side for the moment, because landlords are loathed far more broadly. The only people who like landlords are landlords or the people who can casually afford to have a landlord garnishing a third of their paycheck every month. Many law professors and people who read Jurist fall into at least one of these categories, it seems.

It has been infuriating to see responses to Brian's article that make the bald claim that there is nothing wrong with being a landlord. They say that it is the landlord's property, and so the landlord can do what they want with it. They have even insisted on a separation between landlord and the pejorative slumlord, which reminds me of a commonly-supposed moral distinction between copying and plagiarism. It is not a crime to copy or to plagiarize, and it is not a crime to be a landlord or a slumlord; they are, in fact, the same activity. If you hate slumlords or plagiarism, then you only like landlords and copyists because you perceive them as polite. Moreover, you are in a position where an impolite landlord cannot kill you.

Yes, life and death are essentially the stakes in landlord-tenant relationships. In the United States, everybody builds their lives around the fear of homelessness. You have to choose between food and your rent? You pay rent because you can deny your body the sustenance of life, but you can't live outside. You hate your job and want to leave? You'd better stick it out until you can find another one because that job pays for your house. Your friend has lost their home? You hesitate to invite them to stay with you because you're torn between knowing homelessness is a killer and knowing this favor violates your lease. Your home is destroyed? We have insurance set up to help you spring into another one because we know homelessness is a pain best to be avoided unless you're already homeless, in which case "you probably deserve it, somehow." Homelessness is the specter haunting every conversation with your boss, your cash-strapped friends, your siblings, your parents who refuse to die and bequeath their paid-off house to you. This day-to-day fear of homelessness is so significant that we call the people who've amassed enough resources to start neglecting it "the middle class," but this is merely a useful illusion.

Someone who reaches the middle class may or may not be able to reach the high class, but they are encouraged to no longer identify with the low class. As such, if the middle class individual had to work and scrape by for however long to experience illusory class elevation, then they are encouraged to believe it is only "right" that all low class people must struggle through the fear of living on the street. This veneer of meritocracy hides the reality of deliberate class-based exploitation where the low and middle classes are below the high class because the high class's wealth comes from extorting the lower classes multi-generationally. This is not to say landlords are the ruling class today—they've long-since been outclassed by the capitalists who were outclassed by the vectoralists. Nonetheless, the source of landlord profit is rent compelled from tenants on pain of the symbolic death that homelessness represents to the homed.

In exchange for not killing you through homelessness, what service does a landlord provide? They make tenants' money disappear. When a tenant pays a rent to a landlord, they receive nothing. Even the word rent has been stripped of its actual economic meaning, "any payment in excess of the cost of production," in order to justify and normalize the landlord's behavior. This is profit through exploitation of a class system, which is all the more obvious when you remember that the tenant would be accruing equity if they were of a higher class, like landlords. When a landlord pays a mortgage to a bank, they get equity in that home and eventually they may pay the mortgage off and be truly said to "own" their house. When the tenant pays rent, the landlord simply turns whatever equity the tenant should have earned into profit for themselves. This means that the landlord class accrues wealth through the mere fact that they own property, the passive income of which can be recyclically invested in more property.

Landlords love that the tenant class's wealth is generated through actual labor because labor cannot be cyclically invested. This greatly restricts tenants' opportunities to invest and compete with landlords, at least without a job that pays more than a slave wage or significant savings or simply having entered the housing market earlier via inheritance. That's why the average tenant might spend decades to get in the position to own one home while Sean Hannity owns 870 homes through a network of shell companies as of 2018. Being a Baby Boomer, Hannity could leverage many of those advantages to get his first property. Millennials and Gen Z are permanently behind in the housing market due to multiple economic catastrophes they had little to do with other than to be wiped out when the jobs disappeared. However, remember the class difference: people who are able to hold on to their houses through these crises remain landlords and are insulated from the devastation because their income is not tied to a job that can suddenly vanish. Rent is a wealth transfer from the young to the old. More than that, it's a wealth transfer from the cash poor to the investment rich, and the last housing crisis put Wall Street landlords of the investor class in position to buy up a bunch of property and start trading tenants' homes between themselves as "rent-backed securities," an eviction-accelerating practice that will only get worse amid the current crisis. These are relationships imposed by the system. The more normalized they become, the harder it is to examine them outside of the context of associating landlords with acceptable or justified. But the consequences of the system are not negligible; they are extremely harmful. The purpose of a system is what it does, and the purpose of this system is to provide a mechanism for the rich to get richer by exploiting the disenfranchised poor. This system has never worked well for the poor, who are the vast majority of people.

In a crisis, the landlord minority will always prioritize their own interests. When COVID-19 ravaged the United States and created the largest unemployment boom in American history by orders of magnitude, 69% of tenants paid April rent while government agencies passed various measures to protect homeowners from foreclosure. This is why I will not abide people pointing to one-off landlords who forgave rent to say "there are Good landlords and Bad landlords"—69% of tenants have Irredeemably Bad Landlords by default. They took the money because they could and they knew the system would back them up when it came time for evictions, excepting states where the government was "brave" enough to slow evictions without cancelling rent. On top of that, some property owners thought the government wasn't doing enough to help them. Other landlords jumped at the opportunity of "offering" to take sexual favors in lieu of rent, translating their everyday economic coercion into rape. Meanwhile, there were plans floating around that would have allowed tenants to not pay April rent, but turn it into something like a subprime student loan to be paid back later; that is, putting them further behind than ever. We have a dedication to "normalcy" and "institutions" so extensive that it seems reasonable to respond to complete systemic collapse by making tenants the landlords' outright debtor prisoners because that's what the normal institution was doing all along. Our conception of landlords' property is so completely twisted that this somehow makes more sense than just not paying rent while thousands of Americans are dying and millions cannot work.

Oh, but "think of how much the landlord would suffer and miss bills without their expected income?" Let's get this straight: if a landlord is underwater on a property and they need rent in order to keep it up, then the tenant is the one housing the landlord. The tenant is the one doing labor and providing. The landlord is the one unjustly withholding equity. Basically, the only reason we don't have a maximum rent is to satisfy landlords' vanity. We allow them to raise the cost of others' living to increase their own standard of living with that extra blood sucked from the tenants' veins. All you have to do to see the contempt landlords have for their tenants is to read tracts written by landlord associations, like this one from the Small Property Owners of America. They urge you to think of them as "small property owners" and not even "landlords" because they think the connotations of landlord are unfair. (It's also a way to quietly upgrade themselves to "small business owners" so they get to be viewed as higher-class capitalists, but that's not so important now.) The history they choose to share, which I was unable to corroborate the specifics of, includes the carefully-framed anecdote that American landlords continued to propagate a lie that tenancy is based on land (as in medieval serfs), not buildings, until 1863. Every single reform they point to as "progress" in the system was taken from landlords through gritted teeth.

Even reforms that we have been able to secure, such as non-discriminatory housing (redlining is still going on, but follow me here), are constantly endangered because of landlords' activism against tenants. The Trump Department of Housing and Urban Development wanted to raise the bar for housing discrimination claims to allow for more algorithmic (i.e., automatic, impossible-to-appeal) discrimination. HUD said the new rule "frees up parties to innovate, and to take risks to meet the needs of their customers, without the fear that their efforts will be second-guessed through statistics years down the line." Show me one person who has ever—in the history of the world—wanted it to be easier for their landlord to take a legal risk by denying them a home. When Washington State tried to stem the tide of a long-ongoing homelessness crisis by giving tenants more time to pay their rent, landlords retaliated with aggressive notices threatening law-abiding tenants with eviction. When Washington State closed the loophole that allowed that unprovoked, indefensible abuse, landlords were furious. Landlords have shown who they are during every significant crisis that has ever pitted their personal interests against a tenant.

It has always been this way and there has always been resistance. As long as there has been a relationship between land and class oppression, there have been calls for land reform. In the 1940s, a key part of Mao Zedong's Communist Revolution in China was the mass killings of landlords throughout the country. I'm no tankie, so I don't endorse the promiscuous killing of landlords. I do condemn the perceived need for coining the term classicide to describe this; even in death, the language bends to treat higher-class persons separately. In the 1850s, the Irish National Land League convinced Charles Cunningham Boycott's servants to stop working for him because he refused to lower rents, inspiring the term boycott. That was one slice of the conflict called the Land War, which resulted in major reforms to the system that incorporated the agitating tenants' demands. Following the privatization of previously public English land in the 1540s and 1550s, a movement called Enclosure, there were riots for decades. The most famous of these was Kett's Rebellion, which started after a landowner responded to rebels knocking down his fences by joining them. It was violently suppressed by the English military. All of the historical grassroots movements against aggression via land ownership resulted in unlanded people grievously threatened or outright executed, somehow. Most modern resistance is relegated to art like Langston Hughes's "Ballad of the Landlord" or Henry George's Progress and Poverty (free audiobook) rather than rent strikes or killings. The common people's entertainment is allowed to exist because literature calling for action poses no threat at all if the lower classes are starved of the resources to organize under the threat of homelessness anyway.

And yet, possibly due to innocent ignorance and possibly due to lifelong suggestions from their betters, most people neglect the history of resistance to landlords' exploitation. They subsume this within new definitions of words like property and rent. Without a serious and directed counterpoint, landlordism has been allowed to corrupt our very notion of what property means and make our mental models of it lies.

When I say I live in "my home," I am speaking of the same emotional and factual relationship that a homeowner would be. The difference is systemically imposed and enforced—it creates the conditions that dictate I pay into my house without gaining any equity because I belong to the tenant class. By carving anti-tenant/pro-landlord concepts like this into property, we create class disparity that's invisible to consciousness. Alternative labor and homeownership distributions are unthinkable without significant mental scaffolding built through dedicated research. Under this regime, refusing to pay to live becomes immoral. The tenant quitting their shitty job becomes unjust to the landlord. Welcoming people into your home when they're down on their luck becomes a breach of contract. We start to accept the idea that it is a legitimate government interest to force people out of their homes with police violence if they don't pay enough money to some other person. It begins to make economic sense to forego food in order to survive.

Enough is enough. We must all openly condemn landlords, and people in better positions than me must act to have them eliminated.

All Landlords Are Scum.

"But Copyright Holders Aren't Landlords."

There are many "first" things people will say when you accuse a copyright holder of landlordism. Though pertinent, they are a litany of wrinkles in search of a material difference. None are strictly necessary to the point I'm trying to make about the similarities of class conflicts. Here, I pause to dispense with two major ones upfront.

The first is that copyright holders do labor while landlords do not; this is nonsense. The fact that some labor had to be done in order for a copyright to exist is irrelevant to the person who controls that copyright. At this point in time, the work merely exists for them to collect rents upon, just as the house merely exists within the land for the landlord to collect rents upon. Neither the copyright holder nor the landlord does any labor when it comes time to collect their rents. The fact that the copyright holder continues to collect any money at all beyond the real cost of the work's production is what makes it rent in the first place. Besides, the most lucrative copyrights are held by combinations of businesses, not individuals (unless descended from deceased literati), and the individuals in control of those businesses extract rents independently of their cost of production. For example, if Sandman had been a commercial dud rather than a critical hit, we would not be arguing about how much Neil Gaiman deserved to be paid to recoup his production costs. We would assume his contract with DC Comics paid him enough to pay his landlord and a flop would have worked out fine on his end. However, he is not the copyright holder. DC Comics is. The real cost of Sandman's production (already paid when they gave Gaiman his rent and food money) is completely alienated from its subsequent popularity or lack thereof. Our system for paying copyright holders is one of lottery, not of justice. Unfortunately, those are not the same here.

Secondly, they'll say landlords have responsibilities to tenants while copyright holders owe nothing of the sort to the public. Usually, landlords are required to promise maintenance of the unit, for instance. But, remember, that responsibility to tenants came only after centuries of resistance from landlords who wanted nothing to do with their tenants' welfare. I have only ever had one nice landlady who never scammed me as far as I'm aware, although she has unforgivably forced me to pay rent in full throughout the COVID crisis. She is constantly threatening to evict parents over their children's misbehavior, even during the pandemic. Another of my landladies was quite nice, but I counted the money later and realized she was overcharging me every month. Another was fairly neutral most of the time, but she literally stole our rent money. (She was later arrested. We were never repaid.) Another was constantly at our throats even before she forced my roommates and me to mail a physical check from Washington State to New Jersey to Michigan in order to cover a charge. My current, mostly-nice landlord is also the only one who has ever responded promptly to maintenance requests, and that was only because my unit experienced catastrophic failures. Comparing notes, my experience seems fairly typical. Landlords might have these duties of care on paper, but is that really a point in favor of their existence if they shirk them at every opportunity?

Anyway, in truth, copyright holders are lying when they say they have no responsibilities to the public. The copyright system, established for the public's benefit, extends to the public rights of reuse and purposeful copying which are the law just as much as (and perhaps more than) the ability of a copyright holder to enjoin against selling exact copies of works. Copyright holders have a duty to not infringe these rights, and that's a problem for them because copyright holders vigorously oppose these rights. All over the world, copyright holders have lobbied against Fair Use provisions and sought to over-police their copyrights in order to establish new precedents to curtail previously acceptable copying. The only reason landlords have explicit duties to shirk and copyright holders have implicit duties to shirk is that copyright holders have been winning the same sort of legal-construction game that landlords took centuries to lose. This means, yes, copyright holders represent a more malicious threat than landlords while asserting control over property they are interested in.

I realize that is a pretty big bomb to just drop at the end of a paragraph and move on from. In the interest of linearity, we're going to be under-exploring a lot of similarly explosive ideas. (Authors aren't necessary for life? The copyright system is racist? Piracy is a rational option that does not endanger creators?) You have to understand: copyright maximalism and (modern, corporate) Author supremacy are fractically fucked-up concepts. The sheer amount of cognitive work that words like author and intellectual property do to hide troublesome implications of the system they represent is astounding. We have each been constantly bombarded with them for our entire lives, which means that to oppose them is to oppose every formative experience we've ever had with them because those experiences were motivated lies.

"Don't copy that floppy," "You wouldn't download a car," "Home taping is killing music." These disingenuous slogans are vintage and quaint, but the worldview they encapsulate is now a default to require permission where none previously existed. That was always the long game, one of changing what it means to live within our media environment. We learned to accept shackles on our creativity that our ancestors never had. We came to believe that businesses dictating the contours of our collective creativity was the best result of our free choices. If we are pliant to their demands, as they have conditioned us to be, then of course they would set it up to benefit themselves first, last, and only.

Copyright Holders

It is an inconsequential accident that we need the landlords' form of property to live and we don't need copyright property in the same way. In the absence of copyright holders' books or movies or records or whatever, you won't literally die. Perhaps that's part of the reason copyright holders object to the comparison. But, wait: the second that a disaster hits—a pandemic, say—what is the thing keeping you sane, according to the copyright holders? The works they supply, obviously. Works may not be necessary for us to live, but copyright holders do want you to understand that you'd be wishing you were dead if you didn't have them. That's pretty convenient framing for them, to be honest. And, if it were true, it would only be right for us to string them up for profiteering from human suffering when they could provide these infinitely-reproducible goods for free. Alas, it's just dishonest. There is no connection between copyright and having works to fill your days in emergency isolation.

The public domain exists, a font of all the world's culture before a certain arbitrary date that happens to cut out most mass media that's kind to black people. Thanks to the Internet, the public domain is freely distributed. So, for that matter, are most of the modern copyrighted works, too. Copyright holders have long tried to sell us all on the dangers of piracy to a healthy media ecosystem that's already been on the brink of collapse for years and decades and centuries. What's strange about that, though, is that the people at the top of media companies never seem to need to take pay cuts. Their companies still report increasing profits year over year. So we don't usually talk about this in terms of the corporations with real power. Disney and comparable entities make sure to always be talking in terms of their mythical capital-A Author instead: honest, indie creators that they would cannibalize without a second thought. We public lay-folk must only aspire to be Authors and are meant to believe we shouldn't expect to benefit from systems "supporting the Authors." Authors only take because they must, living in a state of permanent struggle. Always "pay attention to the prominent internet blogger who writes about how little they're paid per article" because they mirror your underclass background to an extent. Never "what of the popular fiction Authors raking it in?" because they represent the highest aspirations. Never "if the people they pay can't afford to eat, why come media executive multi-millionaires?" because they may as well not exist. Justifying it with mindgames like this, copyright holders permanently garnish the public's creative potential and they charge us for that "service."

Really, what "service" is that? What service does the copyright holder provide? It isn't "Creating." The fact that they hold the copyright only means that they are anointed to collect rents upon it. It does not imply that they were responsible for it. It gets less likely that they had anything to do with creating the work as time goes on or you ascend the org chart. At its all-too-common extremes, copyright rent is a wealth transfer from the living to the dead, represented willingly or not by parasites who claim a natural right to the dead creators' lingering royalties. Even with the long-lived creators, copyright becomes a siphon that redirects money away from artists currently working to artists who made some things which have happened to endure in popularity. These copyright holders merely make our money disappear, taking rent without giving the public equity in the stories that define their cultural generations and touch them deepest. To put a fine point on it, that's landlordism.

Beyond that economic waste, a copyright holder is completely unnecessary to obtain a copy of a copyrighted work. More often, copyright holders stand in the way of media reaching people, which they can do merely by existing and even if we don't know who they are and even if they're dead. There are plenty of groups who are willing to provide public domain resources at-cost, below-cost, or even free: the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg work from donations and never charge their patrons. Their work is absolutely laudable, but it is inhibited by the copyright law.

Of course, this is where I'm going to turn to Internet piracy, the sharing of digital copies of copyrighted works by online peers. In order to discourage people from behaving illegally by sharing and doing the same thing as those non-profits do with public domain resources, copyright holders had to figure out a way to split the difference. It turns out, there is not much of one, which didn't end up being much of a problem because they mostly treat the pirates themselves as lost causes. They demonize pirates instead, and try to cultivate anti-piracy sentiment as an a priori moral doctrine before people encounter the benefits of piracy. It is curious that copyright holders rely on morality here when all of their other considerations are made in cold, hard, economically "rational" cash. That's their problem: the bottom has already fallen out of creative works as a market due to technological advance. Pirates have reduced the cost of reproduction to approximately free, and they are the only economically logical source for any content that can be distributed digitally. The market for works is already dead.

What we live with is largely vestigial, a grand game of pretend that admonishes us to only get our information through approved points of sale, ensuring publishers and bookstores get a cut of what we think of as "supporting the Author." At one point, these may have been connected, but they are no longer because points of sale are obsolete. We're meant to believe that it is bad to buck the copyright holder and wait until we've consumed the work to pay what it's worth to us. This assertion is immoral nonsense. How, exactly, are we supporting the Author in this media environment when we're not even allowed to appreciate what they've done before we pay them? If we haven't read the book already, we don't actually know what we're paying for. It could be anything. It could be the worst book we've ever read, worth less than the paper it's printed on. It could be blank. If we're not allowed to read the book beforehand, we're not even buying the book. We're buying the marketing of the book, which puts things back into the publisher's corner because that's a result of their labor, not the creator's. Similarly, the bookstore employee's labor directs us to where they think we want to go. So by buying the official release in some designated point of sale, we benefit from the labor of publishers and bookstores and the creator gets a completely free ride regardless of whatever they actually did and regardless of who holds the copyright. Why, then, must we "support the Author," even before "how?" A creator can't expect the audience's support before we've done our own labor of experiencing whatever they made.

Considerations like that are a little too practical for a market analysis, though. If copyright holders are to remain in business, they have to figure out ways to differentiate themselves or compete differently against pirates. That differentiation can be as simple as competing in a physical medium rather than a digital one; the ebook boom of the mid-00s has turned out to be a fad, so the market for physical books is pretty much guaranteed to at least remain. Another option is for content creators to strike out on their own, seeking donations and recurring payments from fans rather than a stipend from a publisher based on the number of copies they sold of the creator's nothing-special book from 5 years ago. This renders all objection to piracy moot because the proverbial paycheck is no longer tied to a random point-of-sale in a store. Another option is to push for some kind of Universal Basic Income, so that people wouldn't feel threatened with death whenever they stop pretending their vestigial business model is viable. But copyright holders never really wanted to compete anyway, hence the moralistic browbeating of the public into making economically irrational choices.

Whether copyright holders acknowledge it or not, piracy is already a part of the market and they already compete with pirates. Copyright holders know that free, equivalent goods are strictly better for customers. The history of publishing is replete with law-abiding pirates, they have always and continue to compete with pirates, and the copyright holder's real problem is that our digital society obviates every rational argument against piracy. The service copyright holders really provide in exchange for our rent is the production of propaganda and gaslighting in service of their system of make-believe.

Now, when I emphasize the dead market is "make-believe," I don't mean it isn't real. All systems are made-up in one way or another, making some sacrifices to the need for convention in the organization of people's behavior. Moreover, the dead market does still provide copyright holders rents to leech from. But this isn't just that. It is the invention of a class relationship where copyright holders hold the inherent moral authority because they decided that would be the convention. Convincing content creators to believe copyright means nobody should have to compete with pirates may delay the overthrow of this relationship. Content creators may choose to remain under copyright holders' thumbs. As long as it remains comfortable to depend on middlemen to live, it will remain hard for creators to consider a life benefitting from combinations of actual government support for all laborers and donations from people who actually benefit from their work. Middlemen are familiar, but they are not solutions.

The next step, after calling it a class relationship, is to figure out who are the haves and have-nots. Media mega-corporations that control the vast majority of copyrighted works have thus far succeeded in convincing small shops and individual creators that they are the same ruling class, the same "haves." In this system, they are those capital-A "Authors" united in opposition to the lower class called "consumers." A class relationship is nothing if it can't make an enemy of its "have-nots" because that must become the moral justification for exploiting the lower-class counterpart to extract profit. That's why we call this one "consumers," to conceive almost everyone on the planet as if they exist for no other reason than to buy works. If that's all they do, then that's all they're good for, and squeezing them for as much as they can give just makes sense. This strips the consumer of their agency and the fact that they also create, but objectification makes it easier to dismiss consumers to accomplish its goals. Ultimately, the lower class's labor generates the money that funnels into the system as the higher class's wealth, at least in the traditional, Author-supremacist conception of the dead market. Within that, there is no revenue stream without the audience's largesse in paying for things before they buy it. Not only that, the audience is the group most responsible for judging the work and passing it on to others if they are so inclined. It is, therefore, the audience's volunteer labor that builds subcultures around works, and the benefit of all of that unrecognized work flows to copyright rentiership when it could just as easily be done purely because fans enjoy it. Bizarrely enough, it could also be done for the financial benefit of those fans without being captured and co-opted by copyright holders. The Author-supremacist dead market relies on this activity, but ignores it entirely because acknowledging reality would interfere with getting creators, as Authors, to organize in opposition to "consumers"—the people in the audience that actually want to support creators.

Individual creators, presumed for a moment to hold their own copyrights, are not the ruling class. They are not, by analogy, the capitalists and vectoralists. These individual copyright holders are "just" landlords, which means they have power over those within their realm, but they are not the same class as the Disneys of this world. To believe so is to believe the person who owns two houses is in the same class as Sean Hannity. It's the myth of the middle class. Here it is repurposed to get average, just-scraping-by creators to side with entities that would thoughtlessly crush them, copyright holders who have abused the copyright system for decades to centralize vast cultural resources under the guise of capital and created monopolies at higher levels of abstraction. That is what it means to be of the ruling class. The average creator gains precisely no benefit from the victory of a corporation, but the seductive illusion that they belong to the same club grooms the creator to be a passive vassal. The dream is to work their entire lives to produce one hit that could propel them to Easy Street. In the meantime, they will scrape rents out of whoever they can, emulating the giants.

A lot of this relationship gets buried in appeals to the dependence creators have on the copyright system and how it is vital to them getting paid, but that's historically a bit of a twist. Before the copyright system (and after), the most secure artists were supported by others via patronage. After copyright, resistance to the copyright system began pretty much as soon as it came out in England. Various parties immediately began trying to manipulate it to increase its benefits to themselves. The Statute of Anne and America's Copyright Act of 1790, which plagiarized Anne, were arguably audience-centric documents first, publisher-preferenced second, creator-supporting only for the most popular books. They said the purpose of the system was to get more books printed for the education of the public. At the same time, they created an incentive structure that would, in theory, sometimes, maybe allow creators to collect rent on their works to recoup the cost of production. After that short period, the books would be free for any publisher to copy for any reason, or for any audience member to do anything with. Copyright was a significant imposition, but not a terribly objectionable one for most people because most people did not have the means of creative production anyway.

Many popular creators hated the hell out of this system. They accused publishers of profiteering. Noah Webster (of the dictionary) spent his entire fucking life advocating for strengthening copyright, before-then-after the 1790 Act passed, and with some success as of the Copyright Act of 1831. Somehow, poor creators still starved and rich Authors thrived. In 1878, Victor Hugo founded ALAI in order to transform copyright into an Author's rights regime rather than a commercial publishing arrangement, which succeeded with the Berne Convention in 1886. The Berne Convention rapidly spread throughout the world, although notably not to America because the so-called "moral rights" of Authors did not comport with the system of economic rights used here. Somehow, poor creators still starved and rich Authors thrived. Countless international Authors, before and after the Berne Convention, expressed exasperation at America's policy choice to only recognize copyright in works by Americans. Many law-abiding piratical publishers printed foreign works without paying rents. Some others decided to pay the Authors rent regardless and sold their "authorized editions" with supposed moral clout and a healthy price premium. Somehow, poor creators still starved and rich Authors thrived, often by doing American book tours where fans paid to hear them talk. This divide continued long after America started selectively recognizing bilateral copyright agreements in 1891, as a result of years of lobbying by famous artists like Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Major publishers stood against the Authors for many years because they wanted to continue benefiting from rent-free foreign works, and they only joined with the Authors in support of the 1891 Act because cheaper editions from start-up publishers were cutting into their library market profits. International Authors continued on as normal while cursing the Americans, but that's neither here nor there since America lied about recognizing moral rights to join the Berne Convention in 1986. Somehow, poor creators still starved and rich Authors thrived. Mark Twain, arguably the most influential copyright scholar of the 19th and 20th Century (competing with Hugo for the 19th), was a notorious copyright troll in his day, whose main concern with copyright was maintaining rents on what he had already written. On and off the record, he lobbied for the eventual Copyright Act of 1909 by actively excoriating publishers as leeches and the enemy of Authors. He briefly became a self-publisher in direct opposition to them. Somehow, poor creators still starved and rich Authors thrived. This was after more than a century of the same Authors-vs-publishers rhetoric, but now we're supposed to believe that authorial nobodies are benefiting from the same interests as media mega-corporations? Please.

The posture we're seeing now is a reaction by publishers against the increasing emphasis copyright places on Authors. Basically, "if you can't beat them, join them," if by "join them" we mean "subsume their identity." Maybe "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish." In modern times, we'll still see rich Authors like Smokey Robinson lobbying for stronger copyright on old stuff, ostensibly for the benefit of aged creators who could use an actual social safety net to eliminate poverty more. But we'll also see massive corporations pretending to be on their side, and that has always been a ploy to take over resistance to the copyright system. Copyright does not emancipate creators from corporations or force corporations to deal with them fairly, nor will it ever as long as this continues. All of the theoretical discussions of the contours of copyright law are confetti in a hurricane when it comes to corporate contracts stacked as much in the corporation's favor as possible. Taylor Swift found that out when some random music industry executive bought her back catalog and her old contracts prevented her from performing her own songs without his permission. Suddenly, we were back to acknowledging the differences between (extremely wealthy, quite bourgious) Authors and their publishers.

None of that beef addresses the needs and concerns of the third group in the equation, the public audience for works. Property arrangements are have-and-have-not ecosystems. Those-who-have exert authorty over those-who-have-not, and increasing the power of property further reduces the power of those-who-have-not. That's part of why works of authorship don't have to be as vital to life as land for copyright holders to act like landlords. Copyright holders have been largely successful at concentrating cultural mindshare in the most perennially-lucrative property to make the rest of us—the audience members, the public-at-large—their tenants.

Most copyright reform over the last 300 years has focused on increasing the powers creators could use against publishers, much of that benefitted the publishers as well, and all of that came at the expense of the public. At least, for most of that time, theoretically. Most folk creativity of that time ignored the copyright system because it wasn't created commercially and there were no means or reason to enforce copyright against works that weren't actually being produced in a meaningful sense. As technology and our media of expression changed, so did this relationship. Going into the 20th Century, the advance of recording technology meant that more and more kinds of art could be widely distributed, but by means which were inherently unavailable to members of the public who didn't have access to the means of production. You no longer played music yourself to liven up a party; you put on a record. This lead to the encouragement of a read-only sort of culture, a unique time in all of human history. It was a wet dream for copyright holders who wanted to extract rents on their monopoly properties—once they altered the copyright law to cut out new competitors like the law-abiding piano roll pirates.

Nonetheless, technology had changed again by the end of that century. Although physical media technology was encapsulated, digital media afforded by the computer lead us back to a participatory culture that eventually thrived when we connected those computers over networks. This time, it was even better because anyone could be a publisher of their own works, essentially for free. Anticipating this, copyright was preemptively reformed again in the 1970s and then the entirety of the 1990s, driven by copyright holders (that is, the lobbyists of publishers and famous creators) who were afraid of change that would emancipate the public from their predatory scheme. All of these changes to copyright policy were intended to preempt Internet culture before any of us, least of all people heavily invested in pre-Internet business models, really knew what this digital stuff would even become. It all happened before we realized, even in hindsight, the amazing thing it could have become if we had abandoned this protectionism of a ruling class.

Lest you think my characterization of them as "ruling" is extreme, copyright holders went beyond their radical changes to the law and they resolved to build copyright directly into our technology at any cost. Without our consent, they constantly surveil us under increasingly invasive terms. As far as our lives are lived in concert with computers, vicariously through them during a pandemic quarantine, our lives are now constantly filtered through copyright law. The technology that was supposed to emancipate us has further shackled us, increasingly so over time. Copyright holders continue to this day to lobby for new laws to make that omnipresent surveillance and filtering legally required going forward. None of this, by the way, came paired with actual losses in revenue or a mythical "value gap" that might justify any of it. The only thing threatened, perhaps, was the industry's theoretical growth, although their practical growth has only ever continued. As the value of work rises, more and more of the creative production will be enclosed—that is to say, people must give a greater and greater portion of their culture up to the service of the copyright landlords, until, finally, nothing is left them but the public domain. Whereas tenants were able to beat back landlords over centuries to obtain certain prescriptive rights, the public has repeatedly lost their battles with the copyright holders. The results is that we are restricted to whatever happened to be free to our grandparents. We've even lost our guarantee that, once something is in the public domain, it will remain so. The universe of things that we are allowed to do to participate with our own culture has been and will continue to be winnowed in the absence of an anti-systemic revolution.

I realize it may seem like a lofty pretense to be decrying how copyright impacts "culture" at large, but I am deadly serious. Copyright does more than merely restrict our participation in culture. The result of this system is the enclosure of who we are. It reconceives our culture as property and in so doing perverts our understanding of culture and property. After all, "intellectual property" is not actually property and a copyright on the work is not the work itself. Copyright is, generously, a "quasi-property" where certain exclusivity rights are awarded to someone on the theory that doing so is beneficial to society. The use of the word property by copyright holders is meant to constrain our thinking to the contours of our toxic relationship with real property. It is one where property has more rights than a person and where that property confers upon its owner more rights than a person without property. We imbue this intellectual property with personality and intangible yet manifest importance and the audience plays the role of a dependent, de-individualized mass. The perversion of our concept of property is bound up with the idea that it is desirable to have power over others, and to leverage that power to suit selfish goals. Copyright holders depend upon people accepting the existence of their "property" as a reason in and of itself to justify their rentiership. Our relationship with landlords and their transformation of the meaning of a "home" were crucial for this sort of property-centric notion to take root.

The language and use of metaphors that have evolved to describe our copyright law are designed to distance the speaker from the law's enforcement against real people. They have real feelings outside of their wallets and real needs to engage with the world creatively, especially through media created within their lifetime. It is the mindset that says extracting rent is justified because rent must be intrinsically good and other people deserve to be taxed. It is the mindset that says the copyright holder's demands, no matter how nonsensically onorous or restrictive, are reasonable because the copyright holder is defined to have a moral right to call the shots. It is the mindset that convinces others that they would never be able to have the ideas that their favorite Author had or even derivative ideas worthy of publication. It is the mindset that convinces copyright holders that they must continue this cycle of coercive abuse in order to be happy, that no punishment is too far in pursuit of their righteousness, that their comfort comes from others' mandated compliance. This is why they work to enlist us in their crusades against harmless copyists as children, before we have concrete ideas about our autonomy and when vague authority figures find us most impressionable. We grow up to believe we somehow defraud creators by sharing things we love with others in the hope that they will love it as much as we do. Any possibility that the copyright system could be about promoting "sharing" and "equity", or even the original "learning," is swept away in favor of conceiving works as capital and other human beings as mere consumers who must be forced to pay.

This is unnatural. Expressing ourselves through participating with culture that we enjoy is not optional; that is natural. Our own natural inclination and capacity to identify with these stories has been alienated from us, weaponized against us, and then sold back to us, mutilated. Copyright holders have us thinking of ourselves merely as consumers of media, rather than as active participants in the artistic journey of mankind, which strips away a major source of joy our ancestors freely took advantage of. This is landlordism.

In spite of this long and parallel history, I nonetheless anticipate ardent defenders of the copyright holder. "Maybe that Bad copyright holder went too far here, but that's no reason to keep the copyright away from Good copyright holders." This sycophancy misunderstands the system from a historical perspective, from a practical perspective, from a moral perspective. The attitude we are confronted with by landlords and copyright holders is one of entitlement to our labor and respect, and they are determined to earn neither. Well, they won't be in the position to demand anything if we stop lying down and letting them win the legal battle over our cultural future. The day of the copyright holder is done. They are a vestige of pre-digital days long past and an ongoing blight. Copyright holders can deny being landlords-in-name all they want, but to the extent that they act as landlords-in-deed:

They are the same.

They are both Bad.

Happy Juneteenth—Now Hire Some Black Folks

Michael MacTaggert — Fri, 19 Jun 2020 17:15:36 +0000

Not long after I published "King Google's Song", a moderator removed the #blacklivesmatter tag I had included. It has since been replaced, and I wholeheartedly thank them for that. However, it being Juneteenth, I'm in the mood to do something I don't usually do: explain my art. The poem was abstract, so if a mod didn't get it, then there are probably many out there who didn't. This is the note that I sent the Dev team about removing the tag. It's significantly edited and expanded a bit because I wrote the original note in about 20 minutes while sleep-deprived. (Sorry!) It is, more than a little bit, a screed. An enjoyable one, I hope.

I do not believe in singular interpretations of art, let alone in an author's fictitious ability to prescribe art's meaning. Presenting this piece as intended to do that would be a terrible insult to me.

Aside from this, my preferred way to celebrate Juneteenth is to read some of the narratives of former slaves. The US government collected thousands of them. Enslaved people were people, and the best way to understand their humanity is to read their life stories in their own words.

Ahoy.

I'm disputing the removal of the #blacklivesmatter tag from my poem "King Google's Song". The message associated with the removal said that the mod didn't understand the poem's relevance to Black Lives Matter. I do not take the removal personally, because the poem is somewhat abstract, but I tagged the poem for what it is. The tag should be reinstated.

At a base level, the poem is about a poor black woman being subjected to a Google interview. She is dismissed by the interviewer because she does not fit his preconceptions about who a programmer must be. (That is, a white man who runs certain software and can do whiteboard interviews in their sleep.)

Her name, Katherine Clay, is more than just alliteration. It is allusion to famous African-Americans in science history, Katherine Johnson and Roy L. Clay, Sr. To be honest, I used Johnson's name because it fit the pattern, not because she had much to do with computer science. The point was that cutting people out because of the color of their skin means that companies and computing as a whole are constantly missing out on potential greats.

Deriving the poem from "King Herod's Song" connects Katherine to the trial of Jesus Christ, a povertous miracle worker, before King Herod, a wealthy autocrat, as depicted in the musical Jesus Christ Superstar. Before the interview, Katherine has had to perform God-like feats because that was the only way she was ever going to get King Google's attention in the first place. Once she has made it into the room at the start of the poem, her skills are met with open, sarcastic hostility. Her identity as a programmer is only doubted. She is called a liar in spite of what everyone knows about her and everything she ever accomplished for her community before she had to participate in this hazing ritual at the mercy of a rich white man.

There are ways to take the Jesus analogy further. There are imperfections in the way the poem captures it. However, I will only mention one more because it is so indirect. The header image above the poem is an 1860 woodcut depicting the Massacre of the Innocents. This is the Bible story where King Herod's father tried to kill Jesus as a baby by ordering the murder of every child under the age of two. The culling of black people's opportunity begins when they are born, long before the in-person interview. The domination of software development by white programmers was a deliberate cycle initiated by white men of the past. (It later became more open to white women, but white women are not diversity.) Deliberate self-interest in the legacy that gives white programmers birthright career advantages looms large over white programmers who perpetuate it in the present.

It is wrong for companies to cut people out of opportunities because they don't have certain backgrounds. We know that this practice is widespread. The Google Interview called out by the poem's title is literally designed to emphasize interviewers' biased gut feelings about candidates' performance under artificial pressure even though the actual job is nothing like this. Most software jobs do not require the onerous mathematical specialization overtly gauged by it. No software jobs require the fuzzier qualities subtlely gauged by it. For example, it filters for people who have time and inclination to endlessly drill as training for the Google Interview, which is widely acknowledged to mean white men. It also filters for people who already have comfortable, high-class, low-stress living arrangements, which is widely acknowledged in America to mean white people and particularly white men. Further, the interview process usually really starts with a referral from an employee at these monolithically white companies, and white people are widely acknowledged to have monolithically white social networks. The Google interview process tests for previous success in an environment where opportunities to succeed have been monopolized by the white race, and we all know it.

Software engineers operate in is a nightmarish, Kafkaesque, white-supremacist hellscape. People in power launder this fact with the thin wash of "meritocracy" provided by technical interviews. If this "meritocracy" was going to increase the diversity of tech companies, then that would have happened already. It did not. The technical teams at Big N companies remain monolithically white and the share of black employees in technical roles has not increased more than 1% or 2% in the last decade. Some companies, like Google, have even changed their reporting to hide the exact racial makeup of their technical teams. Amazon does the same, cravenly lumping together their well-paid, white tech employees and their systemically exploited, marginalized non-white warehouse workers. Apple didn't even publish a diversity report for 2019. (Peep the "December 2018" fine print.) This all comes down to institutionalized racism in hiring. To them, I say: Black Lives Matter. Hire black people. We are already ready.

I do not reject the poem's potential appeal to other communities (such as it would ever get). The point that interviewers favor candidates who match their preconceptions is obviously broader than the black woman I chose as the perspective character. Gay people, for one, are also widely discriminated against by tech companies. Much like with Black Lives Matter—while there's pain all over, reading "King Google's Song" evokes black pain to me right now.

I tagged the poem #blacklivesmatter because the poem says "Black Lives Matter." Please put it back.

Thank you for your consideration,
Mike Overby

King Google's Song

Michael MacTaggert — Mon, 08 Jun 2020 14:58:59 +0000

Katherine, I am overjoyed
To meet You face-to-face.
You've been getting quite a name
All around the place.

Proving theorems,
Straining that brown head,
And now I understand You're God.
At least, that's what You've said.

So You are the Clay,
You're the great Katherine Clay.
Prove to me that You're divine.
Get this game to run in Wine.

That's all You need do
And I'll know it's all true.
C'mon, King of GNU!

Katherine, You just won't believe
The hit You've made around here.
You are all we talk about.
The wonder of the year!

Oh, what a pity
If it's all a lie.
Still I'm sure that You can rock
The cynics if You try.

So You are the Clay,
You're the great Katherine Clay.
Prove to me that You're not poor:
Be like Huxley—want it more!

If You do that for me,
Then from want You'll be free.
C'mon, King of GNU!

I only ask things I'd ask any ninja star!
What is it that You have got
That puts You where We are?

I am waiting! Yes, I'm a captive fan!
I'm dying to be shown
That You are not just any man!

So if You are the Clay!
Yes, the great Katherine Clay!
On this whiteboard, solve this spread!

You can do it on Your head!
Or has something gone wrong?
Why do You take so long?
Come on, King of GNU!

. . .

Hey, aren't You scared of me, Clay?
Mrs. Wonderful Clay!
You're a joke! You're not the Lord!
You are nothing but a fraud!

Take Her away!
She's got nothing to say!
Get out, You King of GNU!
Get out, You King of GNU!

Get out, You King of GNU!

Get out of
My
Life!

There's a song and dance to go with it! (The inceptive version has much better music, tho.)

Academic Property Corrupts Academically

Michael MacTaggert — Sat, 16 May 2020 04:59:44 +0000

The main source of the difficulties that menace us is the growing inequality in the distribution of ideas. To this all academic institutions seem to contribute, and the movement is hastened by political corruption, and by special monopolies established by abuse of administrative power. But the primary cause lies evidently in fundamental social adjustments—in the relations which we have established between academic labor and the produced material and means of academic labor—between academics and the ideas which are their dwelling-place, workshop, and storehouse. As ideas must be the foundation of every academic's output, so institutions which regulate the use of ideas constitute the foundation of their social organization, and must affect the whole character and development of that organization.

In a society where the equality of thought is recognized, it is manifest that there can be no great disparity in fortunes. All will remain dependent on others; none will be capable of leveraging preemption to cut others down. There will be differences in ideas, for there are differences among people as to energy, skill, prudence, foresight, and industry; but there can be no very high scholar, and no very low scholar; and, as each generation becomes possessed of equal opportunities, whatever differences in fortune grow up in one generation will not tend to perpetuate themselves. In such a community, whatever its form, the political organization must be essentially egalitarian.

But, in a community where ideas are treated as the property of but a portion of the people, some of these people from the very day of their birth must be at a disadvantage, and some will have an enormous advantage. Those who control no ideas will be forced to pay obeisance to the academically petigreed; and, in fact, cannot live outside the thoughtlords' shadow. Such a community must inevitably develop a class of masters and a class of serfs—a class possessing great ideas, and a class that cites them; and its political organization, no matter its form, must become a despotism.

Our fundamental mistake is in treating ideas as private property. On this false basis, Academia everywhere rests, and hence is everywhere developing the monstrous inequalities in condition that must ultimately destroy it. As without ideas people cannot exist; as our very mental substance, and all that we can acquire or make, must be drawn from the ideas, the ownership of the ideas of an institution is necessarily the ownership of the people of that institution—involving their industrial, social, and political subjection. Here is the great reason why the anti-plagiarism norms, of which our century has been so strikingly prolific, have signally failed to improve the condition of anyone. Anti-plagiarism norms primarily increase the power of inceptive writers at plagiarists' expense, and should, therefore, improve the condition of the inceptive class. But this is true only where ideas are free to academic labor; for academic labor cannot exert itself without ideas. No anti-plagiarism norm can enable us to make something out of nothing, or otherwise lessen our dependence upon ideas. Therefore, wherever ideas have been subjected to private ownership, the ultimate effect is to enable thoughtowners to demand more for the use of ideas from all other academics. Ideas become more valuable, but the wages of academics-at-large do not increase; on the contrary, with the increased time spent compiling citations, they may be reduced.

This we already see, and that in spite of the fact that a very important part of the advance of technology has been, by improving transmission, to open up new ideas. We may imagine the future of intellectual progress when the ideas of the world are all "fenced in" if we consider the muzzling effect anti-plagiarism norms have when applied to research assistants plagiarized by their senior advisors.

Let me not be misunderstood. I do not say that in the recognition of the equal and unalienable right of each human being to copy, lies the solution of all social problems. I fully recognize the fact that, even after we do this, much will remain to do. We might recognize the equal right to ideas, yet let tyranny and spoliation continue. But whatever else we do, so long as we fail to recognize the equal right to the elements of expression, nothing will avail to remedy that unnatural inequality in the distribution of ideas which is fraught with so much evil and danger. Reform as we may, until we make this fundamental reform our material progress can but tend to differentiate our people into the monstrously prestigious and the frightfully marginalized. Whatever be the increase of ideas, the masses will still be ground toward the point of bare subsistence—we must still have our adjuncts, our Visiting Assistant Professors, and our graduate students—people driven to degradation and desperation from inability to make an "honest" living.

This was written as my entry in an essay contest held by Night Owls, a weekly philosophy discussion hosted by the University of Chicago Department of Philosophy. The challenge was to plagiarize something to express ourselves, and you can figure out what piece I plagiarized from by searching any fragment of this in the Internet Archive. This contest was held in anticipation of their event called "A Defense of Plagiarism", which I participated in. It was hosted by Agnes Callard and Brian L. Frye, and just a blast.