Pluralistic: 24 May 2021

doctorow · 24 May 2021 16:25

Originally published at: Pluralistic: 24 May 2021 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Today's links

Podcasting "The Memex Method": Reading my inaugural Medium column for my podcast.
Watomatic, for lower Whatsapp switching costs: Comcom in action.
This day in history: 2006, 2011, 2016, 2020
Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading

The very tangled wires on an early parallel computer backplane at the Computer History Museum.

Podcasting "The Memex Method" (permalink)

This week on my podcast, I read "The Memex Method," my inaugural weekly column for Medium, in which I reflect on 20 years' worth of blogging, and how it made me a better writer.

https://doctorow.medium.com/the-memex-method-238c71f2fb46

Blogging is the process by which I take everything that seems significant and fix it in my memory; the process of explaining why something seems significant for strangers is powerfully mnemonic in exactly the way that scrawling tones in a private notebook isn't.

Do it long enough and your unconscious becomes a supersaturated solution of fragmentary ideas that click together, until they nucleate, crystalizing into nonfiction, fiction, essays, stories,novels.

The fulltext, searchable, tagged database of everything I've ever given real thought to is how I synthesize whatever new things snag my attention into longer, more reflective pieces – which go into the searchable, tagged database, too.

Blogging – as Clay Shirky observed many years ago – inverts the traditional "select, then publish" dynamic and turns it into "publish, then select" – where the reader acts as the editor, deciding which stories are worth their attention.

But that inversion is only one of three. Blogging is a way to discover what your next book or essay or speech is about. Rather than being inspired and doing research, the blogging method is to do research to be inspired – to discover the book you never knew you had in you.

The final inversion is in the audience. Rather than deciding what audience you want to appeal to (who will pay you or whom advertisers will pay to reach), this method involves creating the publication you'd want to read in order to discover the audience for it.

I've written and published more than 20 books (novels, short story collections, graphic novels, YA, middle-grades, picture books, nonfiction, scholarly work) since I started blogging. Far from taking away time from "serious" writing, blogging made that work possible.

Not just because it created a daily writing habit, nor because it helped me organize my thoughts – but also because it is iterative, a way of structuring and auditioning arguments for an audience that refines how to present technical, difficult material.

The podcast episode is live now, here:

https://craphound.com/news/2021/05/23/the-memex-method/

Here's a direct link to the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the Internet Archive; they'll host your stuff for free forever, too):

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_390/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_390_-_The_Memex_Method.mp3

and here's the RSS feed:

https://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

The Watomatic app store card, featuring a screenshot of the app in action, with the autoreply text for people who try to reach you on Whatsapp.

Watomatic, for lower Whatsapp switching costs (permalink)

Any discussion of monopolization of the web is bound to include the term "network effects," and its constant companion, "natural monopolies." This econojargon is certainly relevant to the discussion, but really needs the oft-MIA idea of "switching costs."

A technology has "network effects" when its value grows as its users increase, attracting more users, making it more valuable, attracting more users.

The classic example is the fax machine: one fax is useless, two is better, but when everyone has a fax, you need one too.

Social media and messaging obviously benefit significantly from network effects: if all your friends are on Facebook (or if it's where your kid's Little League games are organized, or how your work colleagues plan fun activities), you'll feel enormous pressure to join.

Indeed, in these days of Facebook's cratering reputation, it's common to hear people say, "I'm only on FB because my friends are there," and then your friends say, "I'm only there because you are there."

It's a form of mutual hostage-taking.

That hostage situation illustrates (yet) another economic idea: "collective action problems." There are lots of alternatives to Facebook, but unless you can convince everyone on Facebook to pick one and move en masse, you'll just end up with yet another social account.

This combination of network effects and collective action problems leads some apologists for tech concentration to call the whole thing a "natural monopoly" – a system that tends to be dominated by a single company, no matter how hard we try.

Railroads are canonical "natural monopolies." Between the costs of labor and capital and the difficulty in securing pencil-straight rights-of-way across long distances, it's hard to make the case for running a second set of parallel tracks for a competing company's engines.

Other examples of natural monopolies include cable and telephone systems, water and gas systems, sewer systems, public roads, and electric grids.

Not coincidentally, these are often operated as public utilities, to keep natural monopolies from being abused by greedy jerks.

But the internet isn't a railroad. Digital is different, because computers are universal in a way that railroads aren't – all computers can run all programs that can be expressed in symbolic logic, and that means we can almost always connect new systems to existing ones.

Open up a doc in your favorite word processor and choose "Save As…" and just stare in awe and wonder at all the different file-formats you can read and write with a single program. Some of those formats are standardized, while others are proprietary and/or obsolete.

It's easier to implement support for a standard, documented format, but even proprietary formats pose only a small challenge relative to the challenge presented by, say, railroads.

Throw some reverse-engineering and experimentation at a format like MS DOC and you can make Apple Pages, which reads and writes MS's formats (which were standardized shortly after Pages' release, that is, after the proprietary advantage of the format was annihilated).

This is not to dismiss the ingenuity of the Apple engineers who reversed Microsoft's hairball of a file-format, but rather, to stress how much harder their lives would have been if they were dealing with railroads instead of word-processors.

During Australia's colonization, every state had its own governance and its own would-be rail-barons. Each state laid its own gauge of rail-track, producing the "multi-gauge muddle" – which is why, 150+ years later, you can't get a train from one end of Oz to the other.

Hundreds of designs for interoperable rolling stock have been tried, but it's proven impossible to make a reliable car that retracts one set of wheels and drops a different one.

The solution to the middle-gauge muddle? Tear up and re-lay thousands of kilometers of track.

Contrast that with the Windows users who discovered that Pages would read and write the thousands of documents they'd authored and had to exchange with colleagues: if they heeded the advice of the Apple Switch ads, they could buy a Mac, move their files over, and voila!

An animation captured from the conclusion Ellen Feiss's iconic Apple Switch campaign ad.

Which brings me to switching costs. The thing that make natural monopolies out of digital goods and services are high switching costs, including the collective action problem of convincing everyone to quit Facebook or start using a different word-processor.

These switching costs aren't naturally occurring: they are deliberately introduced by dominant firms that want to keep their users locked in.

Microsoft used file format obfuscation and dirty tricks (like making a shoddy Mac Office suite that only offered partial compatibility with Windows Word files) to keep the switching costs high.

By reverse-engineering and reimplementing Word support, Apple obliterated those switching costs – and with them, the collective action problem that created Word's natural monopoly.

Once Pages was a thing, you didn't have to convince your friends to switch to a Mac at the same time as you in order to continue collaborating with them.

Once you get an email-to-fax program, you can discard your fax machine without convincing everyone else to do the same.

Interoperability generally lowers switching costs. But adversarial interoperability – making something new that connects to something that already exists, without its manufacturer's consent – specifically lowers deliberate switching costs.

Adversarial interoperability (or "competitive compatibility," AKA "comcom") is part of the origin story of every dominant tech company today. But those same companies have gone to extraordinary lengths to extinguish it.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

Just as a new company may endorse standardization when it's trying to attract customers who would otherwise be locked into a "ecosystem" of apps, service, protocols and parts, so too do new companies endorse reverse-engineering and comcom to "fix" proprietary tech.

But every pirate wants to be an admiral. Once companies attain dominance, they start adding proprietary extensions to the standard and fighting comcom-based interoperability, decrying it as "hacking" or "theft of intellectual property."

In the decades since Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Facebook were upstarts, luring users away from the giants of their days, these same companies have labored to stretch copyright law, terms of service, trade secrecy, patents and other rules to ban the tactics they once used.

This has all but extinguished comcom as a commercial practice. Today's comcom practitioners risk civil and criminal liability and struggle to get a sympathetic hearing from lawmakers or the press, who have generally forgotten that comcom was once a completely normal tactic.

The obliteration of comcom is why network effects produce such sturdy monopolies in tech – and there's nothing "natural" about those monopolies.

If you could leave Facebook but still exchange messages with your friends who hadn't wised up, there'd be no reason to stay.

In other words, the collective action problem that the prisoners of tech monopolies struggle with is the result of a deliberate strategy of imposing high technical and legal burdens to comcom, in order to impose insurmountable switching costs.

I wrote about this for Wired UK back in April, comparing the "switching costs" the USSR imposed on my grandmother when she fled to Canada in the 1940s to the low switching costs I endured when I emigrated from Canada to the UK to the USA:

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/social-media-competitive-compatibility

Today, there's a group of tech monopoly hostages who are stuck behind their own digital iron curtain, thanks to Facebook's deliberate lock-in tactics: the users of Whatsapp, a messaging company that FB bought in 2014.

Whatsapp was a startup success: founded by privacy-focused technologists who sensed users were growing weary of commercial surveillance, they pitched their $1 service as an alternative to Facebook and other companies whose "free" products extracted a high privacy price.

Facebook bought Whatsapp, stopped the $1 charge, and started spying. In response to public outcry, the Facebook product managers responsible for the app assured its users that the surveillance data WA extracted wouldn't be blended with Facebook's vast database of kompromat.

That ended this year, when every Whatsapp user in the world got a message warning them that Facebook had unilaterally changed Whatsapp's terms of service and would henceforth use the app's surveillance data alongside the data it acquired on billions of people by other means.

Downloads of Whatsapp alternatives like Signal and Telegram surged, and Facebook announced it would hold off on implementing the change for three months. Three months later, on May 15, Facebook implemented the change and commenced with the promised, more aggressive spying.

Why not? After all, despite all of the downloads of those rival apps, Whatsapp usage did not appreciably fall. Convincing all your friends to quit Whatsapp and switch to Signal is a lot of work.

If the holdout is – say – a beloved elder whom you haven't seen in a year due to lockdown, then the temptation to keep Whatsapp installed is hard to resist.

What if there was a way to lower those collective action costs?

It turns out there is. Watomatic is a free/open source "autoresponder" utility for Whatsapp and Facebook that automatically replies to messages with instructions for reaching you on a rival service.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.parishod.watomatic

It's not full interoperability – not a way to stay connected to those friends who won't or can't leave Facebook's services behind – but it's still a huge improvement on the nagging feeling that people you love are wondering why you aren't replying to their messages.

The project's sourcecode is live on Github, so you can satisfy yourself that there isn't any sneaky spying going on here:

https://github.com/adeekshith/watomatic

It's part of a wider constellation of Whatsapp mods, which have their origins in a Syrian reverse-engineer whose Whatsapp comcom project was picked up and extended by African modders who produced a constellation of Whatsapp-compatible apps.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/african-whatsapp-modders-are-masters-worldwide-adversarial-interoperability

These apps are often targeted for legal retaliation by Facebook, so it's hard to find them in official app stores where they might be vetted for malicious code.

It's a strategy that imposes a new switching cost on Whatsapp's hostages, in the form of malware risk.

Legal threats are Facebook's default response to comcom. That's how they responded to NYU's Ad Observer, a plugin that lets users scrape and repost the political ads they're served.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/04/553000000-reasons-not-let-facebook-make-decisions-about-your-privacy

Ad Observer lets independent researchers and journalists track whether Facebook is living up to its promises to block paid political disinformation. Facebook has made dire legal threats to shut this down, arguing that we should trust the company to mark its own homework.

Whatsapp lured users in by promising privacy. It held onto them post-acquisition by promising them their data would be siloed from Facebook's main databases.

When it reneged on both promises, it papered this over with a dialog box where they had to click I AGREE.

This "agreement" is a prime example of "consent theater," the laughable pretense that Facebook is "making an offer" and the public is "accepting the offer."

https://onezero.medium.com/consent-theater-a32b98cd8d96

Most people never read terms of service – but even when they do, "agreements" are subject to unilateral "renegotiation" by companies that engineered high switching costs as a means of corralling you into clicking "I agree" to things no rational person would ever agree to.

Consent theater lays bare the fiction of agreement. Real agreement is based on negotiation, and markets are based on price-signals in which buyers and sellers make counteroffers.

A "market" isn't a place where a dominant seller names a price and then takes it from you.

Comcom is a mechanism for making these counteroffers. Take ad-blockers, which Doc Searls calls "the largest consumer boycott in history." More than a quarter of internet users have installed an ad-block, fed up with commercial surveillance.

This is negotiation, a counteroffer. Big Tech – and the publications it colonizes – demand you give them everything, all the data they can extract, for every purpose they can imagine, forever, as a condition of access.

Ad-block lets you say "Nah."

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

The fiction that tech barons have "discovered" the "price" that the public is willing to pay for having a digital life is a parody of market doctrine. Without the ability to counteroffer – in code, as well as in law – there is no price discovery.

Rather, there is price-setting.

Not coincidentally, "the ability to set prices" is the textbook definition of an illegal monopoly.

This day in history (permalink)

#15yrsago Kids turn “teen repellent” sound into teacher-proof ringtone https://metro.co.uk/2006/05/24/pupils-perform-alarming-feat-155361/

#10yrsago Falun Gong sues Cisco over complicity in China’s “Golden Shield” – allege torture, murder https://web.archive.org/web/20110524065718/http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20065219-93.html

#10yrsago Scenes from Los Angeles’s teacher-librarian witch-hunt https://mizzmurphy.blogspot.com/2011/05/message-received.html

#5yrsago Philippines’ new “dictator” will give a hero’s burial to Ferdinand Marcos https://web.archive.org/web/20160526135257/http://www.msn.com/en-ph/news/world/philippine-dictator-marcos-to-get-heros-burial-duterte/ar-BBtnPJH

#5yrsago Judge handcuffs public defender for speaking out in court https://web.archive.org/web/20171213203122/https://www.reviewjournal.com/

#5yrsago Algorithmic risk-assessment: hiding racism behind “empirical” black boxes https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments-in-criminal-sentencing

#5yrsago Grass in the park at the center of San Francisco gentrification debate is now for rent https://sfist.com/2016/05/23/rec_parks_pilot_program_allows_you/

#5yrsago Technology’s “culture of compliance” must be beaten back in the name of justice http://bb9.berlinbiennale.de/all-problems-can-be-illuminated-not-all-problems-can-be-solved/

#5yrsago Lawsuit: Texas’s largest jail is full of people who are locked up for being poor https://web.archive.org/web/20160610181932/http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2016/05/23/3781076/texas-bail-lawsuit/

#5yrsago After the precariat, the unnecessariat: the humans who are superfluous to corporations https://morecrows.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/unnecessariat/

#1yrago Coronagrifting and other bad design fictions https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/24/coronagrifting/#coronagrifting

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Red Ferret (https://www.redferret.net/).

Currently writing:

Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. Friday's progress: 254 words (1854 words total).
A short story about consumer data co-ops. PLANNING
A Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. PLANNING
A nonfiction book about excessive buyer-power in the arts, co-written with Rebecca Giblin, "The Shakedown." FINAL EDITS
A post-GND utopian novel, "The Lost Cause." FINISHED
A cyberpunk noir thriller novel, "Red Team Blues." FINISHED

Currently reading: Analogia by George Dyson.

Latest podcast: How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism (Part 06) https://craphound.com/nonficbooks/destroy/2021/05/10/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-part-06/
Upcoming appearances:

In conversation with David Dayen (Second Life Book Club), Jun 4, http://www.draxtor.com/sl-book-club-coming-up/corydavid
Book launch for Terry Miles's Rabbits (Book Soup), Jun 7, https://www.eventbrite.com/e/terry-miles-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-discusses-rabbits-tickets-154613644573

Recent appearances:

How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism: Seize the Means of Computation
https://cfe.ryerson.ca/key-resources/podcasts/how-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-seize-means-computation
Interoperability and Alternative Social Media
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlKDlBagkj0
Mohanraj and Rosenbaum Are Humans
https://open.spotify.com/episode/01dGJO8sqjQ9IoLy58f1rR

Latest book:

"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
"How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59 (print edition: https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)
"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html
"Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1562/_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer.html.

Upcoming books:

The Shakedown, with Rebecca Giblin, nonfiction/business/politics, Beacon Press 2022

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