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Gordon Onslow Ford, The Birth Of Venus, 1947

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Lexmark’s Toxic Printer-Ink

“Every pirate wants to be an admiral.” That is a truism of industrial policy: the scrappy upstarts that push the rules to achieve success then turn into law-and-order types who insist that anyone who does unto them as they did unto others is a lawless cur in need of whipping.

This is true all over, but there’s an especial deliciousness to see it applied to printers and printer ink, always a trailblazer in extractive, deceptive and monopolistic practices of breathtaking, shameless sleaze.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Pierre Beyssac, a director of Internet Europe, recounts his campaigns in the Printer Wars, which start when he ordered a non-wifi-enabled Lexmark printer but got shipped the wifi version.

https://twitter.com/pbeyssac/status/1386988213923983362

He didn’t mind…except that the two models use different models of ink-cartridge, and he’d preordered €450 worth of cartridges, which were nonreturnable by the time he discovered the error.

The cartridges are identical; all that stops them from working is that they’re DRM-locked, with software that refuses to run if you put it in a different model printer (this lets Lexmark charge more for an identical product if they think some customers are price-insensitive).

But there’s an answer - a Chinese vendor sells a €15 conversion kit that bypasses the DRM (this is probably illegal in the EU under Article 6 of 2001’s EUCD). Beyssac was able to salvage his €450 ink investment.

But the adventure prompted him to investigate further. He discovered that Lexmark uses DRM to “regionalize” cartridges (similar to DVD regions): a cart bought in region 1 won’t work in a printer bought in region 2.

Hilariously, Lexmark claims that this is because each cartridge is specially tuned for each region’s “humidity.” By way of rebuttal, Beyssac points out that all of Russia shares a region with all of Africa (!).

Now all of this would be idiotic enough if it were any old printer monopolist, but because this is Lexmark, it is especially delicious,.

Lexmark, after all, fought one of the most important battles of the Printer Wars - and lost. Lexmark vs Static Controls was brought by Lexmark when it was a division of the early tech monopolist IBM.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/felony-contempt-business-model-lexmarks-anti-competitive-legacy

Lexmark sold toner cartridges filled with the cheap and abundant element carbon, and it wanted to charge vintage Champagne prices for it. To that end, Lexmark ran a 55-byte program in a “security chip” that flipped an “I am full” bit to “I am empty” when the toner ran out.

Lexmark’s competitor Static Controls reverse-engineered this trivial program so you could refill a cartridge and flip it back to “I am full” so the printer would recognize it. In 2002 Lexmark sued, under Sec 1201 of the recently passed Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

DMCA 1201 made it a felony to traffick in a device that “bypassed an access control for a copyrighted work.” The judge asked Lexmark which copyrighted work was in its printer cartridges (it wasn’t the carbon powder!). Lexmark said it was the 55-bytle program.

The judge handed Lexmark its own ass, ruling that while software could be copyrighted, a 55-byte I-am-full/empty program didn’t rise to the level of copyrightability - it wasn’t even a haiku.

Lexmark lost, and today, Lexmark is…*a division of Static Controls.*

That’s right, the company that’s using all this bullshit DRM to prevent people from using their printers the way they want to is the company that did the exact same thing to IBM, won its court case, and then merged with the company whose racket it had destroyed.

Every pirate *seriously* wants to be an admiral.

But here’s the thing. Lexmark/Static turned on the fact that 55-byte programs (all that fit affordably in a primitive 2002 chip) wasn’t a copyrighted work. The cartridges Lexmark sells now have thousands of lines of code.

There’s whole OSes in there. These *are* copyrightable. As is the OS in every embedded system we buy, from car engine parts to smart speakers to pacemakers. That means that companies can use DMCA 1201 to prevent rivals from unlocking lawful features in their products.

They can use it to block independent repair and independent security audits. They can make it illegal to use any product you own in ways that disadvantages their shareholders, even if that’s what’s good for you.

Despite the “C” in DMCA standing for “copyright,” this isn’t copyright protection, it’s felony contempt of business model - a legally enforceable obligation to arrange your life to benefit multinational corporations’ shareholders.

And worse, this law has been spread around the world thanks to the US Trade Rep: it’s in 2001’s EUCD and Canada’s 2012 Copyright Modernization Act. Last summer, Mexico passed an even more extreme version as part of the USMCA.

If you think this shit is odious when it’s in your printer, you’re going to hate it when it’s in your toothbrush, wristwatch, car engine and toaster.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

In 2016, EFF brought a lawsuit to overturn DMCA 1201 on behalf of Bunnie Huang and Matt Green. It has been working its way through the courts ever since.

https://www.eff.org/cases/green-v-us-department-justice

by Cory Doctorow, Read more:

Image: uncredited

How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism

Belief in conspiracy is a raging fire that has done real damage and poses real danger to our planet and species, from epidemics kicked off by vaccine denial to genocides kicked off by racist conspiracies to planetary meltdown caused by denial-inspired climate inaction. Our world is on fire, and so we have to put the fires out — to figure out how to help people see the truth of the world through the conspiracies they’ve been confused by.

But firefighting is reactive. We need fire prevention. We need to strike at the traumatic material conditions that make people vulnerable to the contagion of conspiracy. Here, too, tech has a role to play.

There’s no shortage of proposals to address this. From the EU’s Terrorist Content Regulation, which requires platforms to police and remove “extremist” content, to the U.S. proposals to force tech companies to spy on their users and hold them liable for their users’ bad speech, there’s a lot of energy to force tech companies to solve the problems they created.

There’s a critical piece missing from the debate, though. All these solutions assume that tech companies are a fixture, that their dominance over the internet is a permanent fact. Proposals to replace Big Tech with a more diffused, pluralistic internet are nowhere to be found. Worse: The “solutions” on the table today require Big Tech to stay big because only the very largest companies can afford to implement the systems these laws demand.

Figuring out what we want our tech to look like is crucial if we’re going to get out of this mess. Today, we’re at a crossroads where we’re trying to figure out if we want to fix the Big Tech companies that dominate our internet or if we want to fix the internet itself by unshackling it from Big Tech’s stranglehold. We can’t do both, so we have to choose.

I want us to choose wisely. Taming Big Tech is integral to fixing the internet, and for that, we need digital rights activism.

Digital rights activism, a quarter-century on (...)

Tech exceptionalism, then and now (...)

Don't believe the hype (...)

What is persuasion? (...)

1. Segmenting
2. Deception
3. Domination
4. Bypassing our rational faculties

If data is the new oil, then surveillance capitalism’s engine has a leak (...)

What is Facebook? (...)

Monopoly and the right to the future tense (...)

Search order and the right to the future tense (...)

Monopolists can afford sleeping pills for watchdogs (...)

Privacy and monopoly (...)

Ronald Reagan, pioneer of tech monopolism (...)

Steering with the windshield wipers (...)

Surveillance still matters (...)

Dignity and sanctuary (...)

Afflicting the afflicted (...)

Any data you collect and retain will eventually leak (...)

Critical tech exceptionalism is still tech exceptionalism (...)

How monopolies, not mind control, drive surveillance capitalism: The Snapchat story (...)

A monopoly over your friends (...)

Fake news is an epistemological crisis (...)

Tech is different (...)

Ownership of facts (...)

Persuasion works… slowly (...)

Paying won’t help (...)

An “ecology” moment for trustbusting (...)

Make Big Tech small again (...)

20 GOTO 10 (...)

The surveillance capitalism hypothesis — that Big Tech’s products really work as well as they say they do and that’s why everything is so screwed up — is way too easy on surveillance and even easier on capitalism. Companies spy because they believe their own BS, and companies spy because governments let them, and companies spy because any advantage from spying is so short-lived and minor that they have to do more and more of it just to stay in place.

As to why things are so screwed up? Capitalism. Specifically, the monopolism that creates inequality and the inequality that creates monopolism. It’s a form of capitalism that rewards sociopaths who destroy the real economy to inflate the bottom line, and they get away with it for the same reason companies get away with spying: because our governments are in thrall to both the ideology that says monopolies are actually just fine and in thrall to the ideology that says that in a monopolistic world, you’d better not piss off the monopolists.

Surveillance doesn’t make capitalism rogue. Capitalism’s unchecked rule begets surveillance. Surveillance isn’t bad because it lets people manipulate us. It’s bad because it crushes our ability to be our authentic selves — and because it lets the rich and powerful figure out who might be thinking of building guillotines and what dirt they can use to discredit those embryonic guillotine-builders before they can even get to the lumberyard.

Up and through

With all the problems of Big Tech, it’s tempting to imagine solving the problem by returning to a world without tech at all. Resist that temptation.

The only way out of our Big Tech problem is up and through. If our future is not reliant upon high tech, it will be because civilization has fallen. Big Tech wired together a planetary, species-wide nervous system that, with the proper reforms and course corrections, is capable of seeing us through the existential challenge of our species and planet. Now it’s up to us to seize the means of computation, putting that electronic nervous system under democratic, accountable control.

I am, secretly, despite what I have said earlier, a tech exceptionalist. Not in the sense of thinking that tech should be given a free pass to monopolize because it has “economies of scale” or some other nebulous feature. I’m a tech exceptionalist because I believe that getting tech right matters and that getting it wrong will be an unmitigated catastrophe — and doing it right can give us the power to work together to save our civilization, our species, and our planet.

by Cory Doctorow, OneZero |  Read more:

Image: Shira Inbar

[ed. Comprehensive analysis of one of the biggest threats we face going forward (and no one better than Mr. Doctorow to exlain it). If this is too much to take in one sitting, keep coming back and dropping in to whatever chapter interests you. You'll learn more than you can imagine.]

Break Up the Ivy League Cartel

The nature of power in America flows through the Ivy Leagues and top universities. To take one example, academic economists use their academic credentials to launder fraudulent arguments about consolidation. But the gatekeeping power of elite higher education goes far beyond that. These are the institutions that validate and structure the boundaries of knowledge.

Today I’m pleased to welcome a guest writer, Sam Haselby (@samhaselby), who thinks deeply about the history of the Ivy League, its role today, and its religious roots as a set of institutions designed around exclusion.

The Ivy League vs Democracy

One of the great puzzles of American society is the position of the Ivy Leagues. They are a bastion of privilege and power, and yet the campuses are rife with left-leaning professors who one might imagine seek to redistribute wealth. According to the Harvard Crimson, 77.6% of Harvard professors define themselves as left-leaning, and just 2.9% as conservative. What explains this dynamic? Former Harvard College Dean Harry Lewis said that it gets to the basic point of the school, which is to advance radical ideas. “It’s almost by definition anti-preservationist because we place such a high value on the creation of new knowledge,” he said.

A wildly different explanation is apparent from watching Netflix’s Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal, the highly publicized fiasco in which wealthy parents used bribery to get their kids into top colleges. What I found most interesting about this episode wasn’t the actual corruption, but a different and more poignant feature of American meritocracy. Even in the midst of acts of bribery, many of the parents were beset with fear that their children might find out about the crooked machinations to win their admission to elite schools. They took desperate steps to shield the kids from facing real questions of “merit” or deservedness. And in fact, while most involved in meritocracy don’t use bribery, a tremendous amount of energy now goes into preserving similar basic fictions about the nature of elite private education and its role in the United States.

We most often hear about inequality in terms of super-rich corporations and individuals or families. But it is important that the same gulf, separating haves and have nots, has opened between U.S. colleges and universities. Since the pandemic began, 650,000 jobs have disappeared in American academic institutions. More than 75% of college faculty in the U.S. are contingent workers or non tenure-track. Meanwhile, as of 2020, the aggregate value of the endowments of the richest 20 U.S. schools rose to over $311 billion, all of which are subsidized by taxpayers through the tax-free treatment we offer nonprofit educational institutions. The common joke, that Harvard is a hedge fund with an educational arm, is not so far off.

According to the IMF, the value of these endowment funds is greater than the GDP of New Zealand, Finland, or Chile. In the last 5 years the U.S. has fallen in the UN’s Human Development Index, but its elite universities have risen in the world rankings and gotten richer. America’s richest colleges and universities, in effect, exist in a country of their own (though paid for in part with the public’s money).

This inequity reflects a restructuring of political power, towards an aristocracy. In historical perspective, we are seeing the collapse of the great post World War II democratization of post-secondary arts and sciences education alongside the appearance of a meritocracy alienated from the public and at odds with democracy. If anyone points out the role of elite education in the reproduction of inequality today, Americans tend to see it as flawed or compromised meritocracy rather than “true” meritocracy. But such responses are signs of a kind of Stockholm Syndrome. The “merit” of meritocracy has little to nothing to do with the abilities, or worth, or value of people as human beings and citizens.

Meritocracy and democracy are not the same thing. The goal of meritocracy is to produce, or reproduce, an elite. There is nothing necessarily democratic about that. The Puritans who founded the Ivy league schools were very good at building stable and exclusive institutions, for many reasons, including that the elite, for them, was the elect: those specially chosen to receive God’s grace, to be one of the sanctified and saved few among the masses of the damned. In the early United States, however, New Englanders quickly discovered, to their dismay, that being the elect did not mean much to many Americans and they would be hard pressed to win national elections. The Puritan schools are designed to serve the elect, not for democratic education. Thomas Jefferson feared and reviled the Puritan schools, and founded the University of Virginia to counter what he saw as their anti-democratic influence.

The Civil War and Reconstruction, first, and the Civil Rights Movement, second constitute the greatest achievements in modern American democracy. Both also were high marks of public education. In the former, radical Republicans who had seized control of the government created America’s great land grant universities, while the Civil Rights Movement unfolded after a generation of Cold War investment in high quality public university education. The United States has spent a generation moving away from this kind of democratic education toward a gilded meritocracy. America’s elite private schools are now one of the last strongholds of the drunken post-Cold War triumphalism that hoarded wealth and privilege to private institutions at the expense of public and democratic ones.

There is no way that I know of to have truly democratic elections without widely available and high-quality public education. But as everyone knows, the consolidation of wealth by elite, mostly private, schools has gone hand-in-hand with damaging political campaigns that have weakened even the country’s greatest public universities, such the University of Wisconsin- Madison and the University of California-Berkeley, for example.

In 1940, the acceptance rate at Harvard was eighty-five percent. In 1970, it was twenty percent. This year, for the class of 2025, it was 3.4 percent. On the surface, a far more selective Ivy League seems to support the notion of meritocracy as something approximating what Jefferson characterized as the purpose of (unrealized plans for) free public schooling in 18th century Virginia: “the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually.” In practice though American meritocracy has become skewed to elite reproduction. The economist Raj Chetty has found that nearly 40 of the country’s elite colleges and universities, including five in the Ivy League, accept more students from families in the top 1% of income earners than from the bottom 60%. Computer scientist Alison Morgan recently released a study examining 7,218 professors in PhD granting departments in the United States across the arts and sciences. She found that the faculty come from families almost 34% richer than average and are twenty-five times more likely than average to have a parent with a PhD. Faculty at prestigious universities are fifty times more likely than average person to have a parent with a PhD. American meritocracy has become a complex, inefficient, and rigged system conferring a series of “merits” on ambitious children of highly educated and prosperous families.

In the mid 20th century, when Harvard accepted 80% of its applicants, its graduates voted Republican. Today Ivy league acceptance rates are in the single digits and its graduates, as well as 70% of people with graduate degrees, vote Democratic. This is why Thomas Piketty refers to the U.S.’s (as well as the UK and France’s) “Brahmin left.” Yes, the Brahmin left - sometimes lumped in with the conservative punching bag ‘woke capital’ - is a favorite target of right-wing propaganda, so Democrats might assume that this reservoir of elite expertise is good for democracy and progressive ideas. (...)

There are some countervailing signs. Three hundred Princeton faculty signed an anti-racism letter that called on the university to increase the university’s financial support for the people of Trenton, New Jersey. Columbia, Cornell, and NYU are all building new science research centers in New York City. These will offer the institutions fresh opportunities to be decent neighbors and good citizens. But reform will not solely come from within the Ivy League, or within higher education itself. Philanthropic organizations are still giving big grants to America’s richest universities, recirculating resources among the richest institutions always while chanting social justice keywords. The change has to come from politics, from a broader debate about the point of higher education.

That debate is happening. Politicians in Massachusetts sometimes float taxing Harvard’s endowment fund, and in fact, last year, as a result of Trump’s inclusion of a minor ‘endowment tax’ in his otherwise reactionary 2017 tax cut, the top schools had to actually pay a modicum of taxes. More importantly, last week, Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal and Senator Bernie Sanders introduced legislation that would go a long way to restoring democratic education in the U.S, rescuing it from the regime of our gilded meritocracy and its Brahmin byways. Jayapal and Sanders’ proposal would make public college and university tuition free for families making under $125,000. It would transform American life and help the public universities, colleges, and community colleges that have for decades been starved and battered. I hope Joe Biden recognizes the impact restoring these non-Ivy League institutions could have. He has certainly reoriented the Democrats in other ways. It was not meritocrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama who abandoned decades of austerity economics that threw elite education into the center of the oligarchy economy. It was Joe Biden, a University of Delaware and Syracuse Law School graduate.

by Sam Haselby, BIG via Matt Stollar | Read more:
Image: uncredited

The Chauvin Trial’s Jury Wasn’t Like Other Juries

The jury convicted the former Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin on the weight of the evidence before it: video footage, expert testimony, and eyewitness accounts.

But even with all that evidence, convictions don’t happen on their own. Twelve people, selected by lot from the public, must come to a unanimous decision. That jury—who it comprised, how those people saw the world—was of enormous consequence. This wasn’t just any jury, and the difference that made should invite a major reckoning with how juries—the deciding bodies of the country’s judicial system—are selected in America.

I have been studying juries for many years. I have written about juries in historic trials such as those for the Camden 28, the Central Park Five, and Angela Davis. But starting late last year, one took over my work: the Chauvin trial. Great interest in it led the Hennepin County clerk to make public the initial questionnaire sent to jurors, and District Judge Peter Cahill decided to allow television cameras in the courtroom, a first for the state of Minnesota. From voir dire—the interview between the judge, attorneys, and each potential juror before a jury is selected—to the attorneys’ opening and closing statements to the testimony of more than 40 witnesses during the trial, everything was viewable via live-stream. What I saw was a jury-selection process that substantially departed from the country’s norms, resulting in a racially mixed jury, a number of whose members criticized American law enforcement for systematically discriminating against Black people.

All the jurors interviewed during voir dire were familiar with the case, and some had seen the video of George Floyd’s death. To varying degrees, they all understood the weight of the case and the intense media scrutiny it would undoubtedly receive, yet many were eager to serve. When interviewed by the defense counsel, Juror 27, who identifies as Black and an immigrant and who ultimately ended up on the jury, said that he had spoken with his wife about the killing shortly after it happened. “We talked about how it could have been me,” he said. Juror 91 put it simply when she said, “I’m Black and my life matters.” That these people held these views and still served on the jury shows a path toward greater democratic representation in America’s courtrooms.

There were many reasons to think things would not go this way—that Chauvin would be tried by a mostly white or all-white jury, and that people with systemic critiques of how criminal justice works in America would be struck from the jury pool. For one, Hennepin County, where the killing took place and where the trial was held, is nearly three-quarters white. For another, studies have found that Black jurors are less likely to be called for jury duty and less likely to be selected to serve. And finally, there was the complication of having the trial during the coronavirus pandemic, which has disproportionately affected Black and brown communities. According to the former Minneapolis public defender Mary Moriarty, during the pandemic, juries have been even whiter, on average, than before the pandemic.

Yet ultimately the jury seated in the Chauvin case included four Black people, two people who identify as mixed race, and six white people. (The jury comprised 14 people, including two alternates who were both white.) Much of the credit goes to Judge Cahill, who conducted the jury-selection process. Cahill set a tone of honesty and inclusivity during jury selection, emphasizing that he would consider the totality of a juror’s answers and not focus on individual statements when determining whether a juror was qualified to serve. He expected jurors to have strong feelings about Floyd’s death, but what was most important to him was a juror’s willingness to take on the responsibilities of legal judgment, including a commitment to the conventions of a fair trial.

Evidence of his approach was apparent from the start. The selection process began in December when an in-depth questionnaire was mailed to more than 300 prospective jurors. It contained detailed questions about Black Lives Matter, Blue Lives Matter, and impressions of the police. Given how Floyd’s killing galvanized the Black Lives Matter movement, both sides in the trial had an interest in learning how jurors understood the protests and the concurrent civil unrest, including instances of looting and the destruction of property.

But stating views sympathetic to Black Lives Matter did not result in jurors getting removed from the jury pool. During voir dire, a majority of the 12 seated jurors said they “somewhat agreed” or “strongly agreed” with the statement on the questionnaire that “Blacks and whites don’t receive equal justice in this country,” implying that they believe that racial discrimination in the legal system goes beyond isolated incidents and a few bad actors. The same majority also had favorable opinions of Black Lives Matter and disagreed with a statement that the media exaggerate claims of racial discrimination.

It’s difficult to overstate how significant a departure from the norm this is. In many similar cases, a potential juror’s mere intimation of a belief in systemic injustice makes judges and attorneys nervous—especially when the juror is a person of color. (...)

But in the Chauvin trial, the attorneys and the judge did not treat critiques of racial bias in the legal system as something that would inherently bias a juror. This was clear once voir dire began. In one instance, a potential juror—a Black man—spoke about the sadness and outrage he felt at seeing the cellphone video that had circulated around the world: “It’s another Black man being murdered at police hands,” he said. Judge Cahill said that he believed this was an “honest opinion,” “widely held,” and not necessarily an obstacle to being an impartial juror. This may seem like a small thing, but to say that jurors can hold systemic critiques and still be fair inverts the old paradigm, which saw an absence of such critiques as a harbinger of neutrality—which of course is its own kind of bias. (...)

In voir dire, potential jurors can be rejected either by the judge—which is called dismissal for cause—or by the attorneys via peremptory strike. As is clear, Judge Cahill did not dismiss jurors who held systemic critiques of law enforcement. But what’s maybe even more surprising is that neither did the attorneys. The only limitation on the use of strikes is that a juror cannot be dismissed on the basis of race alone. In the Chauvin case, the defense was entitled to 18 peremptory strikes and the prosecution 10, but both sides had strikes remaining when all jurors, including the alternates, had been selected.

by Sonali Chakravarti, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Getty/The Atlantic

Arts and Architecture, Dean Monogenis

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An Open Letter to Green New Dealers

I write this as a friend who wants your movement to succeed. Your cause is just and, due to decades worth of political inaction (some of which, I’m sorry to say, I have to personally account for), the hour is late. As the U.N.’s sixth Global Environmental Outlook declared this month, “urgent action at an unprecedented scale” is necessary to address climate change and the degradation of critically important ecosystems. The 2019 Global Risks Report, published by the World Economic Forum (an international, nonprofit institute serving as a forum for top business, political, and academic elites from around the world), concludes that climate-related risks now account for three of the top five global risks by likelihood, and four of the top five by impact. While there is a wide distribution of possible outcomes from climate change, we are already incurring serious risks from existing greenhouse gas concentrations, and the most likely outcomes by 2100 (imperfectly and conservatively accounted for by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, otherwise known as the IPCC) are frightening. The worst-case scenarios — many of which are as likely to occur as the best-case scenarios — suggest that catastrophic tipping points might be crossed before we realize it, with the real possibility of severe and irreversible ecological, economic, and human damage if we fail to act. (...)

I worry, however, that despite all of the new energy you’ve unleashed on the political scene, you are setting your cause back, not moving it forward. Nothing about the seriousness of the threat we are facing changes the fact that politics is “the art of the possible,” not exhortation for the impossible. Given that serious action on climate will have to come out of the institutions we have — not those we might wish for — the strategies and tactics you are pursuing through the Green New Deal amount to political malpractice. Moreover, the policy initiatives you’re promoting are rightly difficult for political actors to swallow. As veteran Democratic operative Stuart Eizenstat warned this month, “Speaking from experience, by demanding the moon, their proposals will crash on the launching pad and lead to nowhere good.”

Wishing for Ponies

What makes your Green New Deal innovative is that it ties climate action to a host of extremely ambitious progressive initiatives that have little or nothing to do with climate change. The Green New Deal resolution (introduced in the House by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York’s 14th district and in the Senate by Ed Markey of Massachusetts) is literally 10-parts “New Deal” to 1-part “climate.” Beyond the climate-related goals it asks Congress to adopt, the resolution also calls for:

• “guaranteeing a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States,
• “strengthening and protecting the right of all workers to organize, unionize, and collectively bargain free of coercion, intimidation, and harassment,
• “strengthening and enforcing labor, workplace health and safety, antidiscrimination, and wage and hour standards across all employers, industries, and sectors,
• “ensuring a commercial environment where every businessperson is free from unfair competition and domination by domestic or international monopolies,
• “providing all people of the United States with high-quality health care,
• “providing all people of the United States with affordable, safe, and adequate housing,”
• “providing all people of the United States with economic security,
• “promot(ing) justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth (referred to in this resolution as ‘frontline and vulnerable communities’),
• “providing resources, training, and high-quality education, including higher education, to all people of the United States, with a focus on frontline and vulnerable communities,” all while
• “supporting family farming.”

Beyond that, the resolution tackles just about every non-climate-related concern on the environmental agenda, calling for new federal programs to:

• increase soil health,
• provide for a “sustainable food system that ensures universal access to healthy food,
• “restoring and protecting threatened, endangered, and fragile ecosystems through locally appropriate and science-based projects that enhance biodiversity,
• “cleaning up existing hazardous waste and abandoned sites, ensuring economic development and sustainability on those sites,” and
• “providing all people of the United States with clean water, clean air, healthy and affordable food, and access to nature.”

Republican demagoguery aside, it’s unclear what any of that would actually mean in terms of public policy. And that’s by design. Maybe “providing all people of the United States with high-quality health care” means a Bernie Sanders Medicare-for-All plan. But it could also mean fixes to the Affordable Care Act. Maybe “providing all people of the United States with economic security” means a $15 federal minimum wage and Universal Basic Income. Or perhaps it simply entails increases in existing welfare programs. The idea, I gather, is to establish where the Green New Deal is going and to politically commit Congress to the trip. The length of the journey (policy ambition) and detailed itinerary (policy design) is TBD based on the political give and take that is to come. This is a resolution after all, not a bill, and that’s typically what resolutions are designed to do.

These commitments, however, are so unqualified and open-ended that members don’t know what to make of them. That has provided Republicans with an opening to characterize the Green New Deal in the most lurid terms, which has naturally made Democrats deeply uncomfortable. When asked about the Green New Deal on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, for instance, Sen. Dick Durbin (IL) said “I’ve read it and I’ve reread it and I asked Ed Markey, what in the heck is this?” Speaker Nancy Pelosi has referred to it dismissively as “‘The Green Dream,’ or whatever they call it. Nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it, right?” (...)

Rule number one in politics is not to let your opponents define you or your ideas. The vague but suggestive Green New Deal resolution, however, was an open invitation for Republicans to do exactly that. The FAQ and background material coming out of the progressive community gave everyone to your right plenty of ammunition to define you as radicals bent on a sweeping, revolutionary enterprise. “I think the idea is you never let your message get too far out ahead of the substance, and we have definitely created a vacuum and left space for people to fill with what they think the Green New Deal is based on their assumptions and past experiences,” conceded Rhiana Gunn-Wright of New Consensus. “It’s certainly a danger, but it’s a danger worth taking by ensuring we get frontline voices in.”

That last line is really the key to understanding the politics animating, and the policies constituting, the Green New Deal. Allow me to try my hand at making the very best case for your strategy as I understand it.

by Jerry Taylor, Niskanen Center |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

There’s an Art to Making Your Bed

There’s an Art to Making Your Bed (NYT)

Image: Area

Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Miyamoto no Musashi Attacking the Giant Whale, 1847-50
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Johnny Cash

[ed. Johnny Cash covering Nine Inch Nails (and background ). See also: David Bowie and Trent Resnor's version.]

Transcript: Shame, Safety and Moving Beyond Cancel Culture

EZRA KLEIN: I’m Ezra Klein, and this is “The Ezra Klein Show.” [ed. Podcast here.]

I always found myself in an uncomfortable place in the cancel culture debate. I think fights over the boundaries of acceptable speech aren’t just legitimate, but they’re actually needed and overdue, and I think the way they play out online leads to excesses, disproportionate punishments, oftentimes the wrong people being targeted for the wrong things, and then, over time, a crappy speech environment and a lot of political backlash for everyone.

So here I want to get beyond the cancel culture is it real or fake, is it good or bad debate. There’s something real that people are referring to when they talk about cancel culture, and it’s both good and bad. There are good parts, and there are bad parts. And so the deeper question is, what do we actually want to achieve here, and how do we go about achieving it? For me, and I’m the only person I can answer for, it’s a world in which we speak about each other more respectfully, in which we listen to each other more openly, and that becomes a foundation, and this part is important. (...)

So there’s a lot to talk about here, but I’m joined for it by, I think, the perfect two guests, Will Wilkinson and Natalie Wynn. Will is the former vice president for research at the Niskanen Center. He actually got canceled. He was fired from his job because a right-wing online mob grabbed a clearly satirical tweet of his and pushed Niskanen to fire him. If you think, by the way, that cancel culture or online cancellation is somehow a left-wing phenomenon, yeah, Will Wilkinson is proof that that is not true. He writes regularly for for Times Opinion and now has a great newsletter, Model Citizen, and a podcast of the same name.

Natalie Wynn is my favorite YouTuber where she makes these remarkable videos. It combines social theory and politics under the moniker ContraPoints. You’ll hear us reference a video she made on cancellation and J.K. Rowling in here, and I really do recommend looking them up. Both of them have had experience on both sides of this issue, and they’ve come out of it on the other end with, in my view, unusually complex, nuanced views of how this plays out and what it all means. So this is a great conversation, one I wanted to have for a long time, and I’m glad we did.

I want to start a bit in the experiences both of you have had with the thing that gets called cancel culture. And Will, I’ll with you. Describe what being cancelled was like for you, not necessarily exactly what happened, but how did it feel.

WILL WILKINSON: It was a shock. There was an immediacy to what happened. I had tweeted. The tweet created controversy. I tweeted my bad tweet a minute before I went to bed. And then first thing in the morning, I wake up too just like a world of shit. I’m just getting piled on by all sorts of opportunistic right-wingers who were taking my very funny joke out of context and claiming that I was really calling for the hanging the vice president of the United States, just the most ridiculous bad faith, but it was causing such a kerfuffle that I was immediately called into a meeting at work, and then my job was over.

It had a guillotine kind of quality to that initial aspect because I just woke up, experienced this terror, and then got my head chopped off, and then the rest of the day was just shock. I was literally, I think, in shock because I was just like, what the hell just happened?

EZRA KLEIN: I know the folks well who work at Niskanen, which was the think tank you were at. I don’t believe they misunderstood that your tweet was a joke. So what happened there? Why do you think you got fired?

WILL WILKINSON: I think generalizing from my individual case, and I think this is indicative of one of the issues that has become prevalent, is that anybody that works at your institution, if they say something that’s a little bit controversial or that is taken out of context, it can cause a huge, very temporary storm of controversy online that draws attention to the institution.

Your boss might start getting hundreds of emails. They might start getting phone calls from people they don’t know, and it just escalates to this point where they feel like they have this really urgent PR crisis on their hands, and they have to do something quickly to manage it. And I think that that’s often a misperception and that managers panic because this is something that hasn’t happened before.

It wasn’t the case that your employee would go to a restaurant and tell a racy joke, and then all of a sudden the phone at your office is inundated with 250 voicemails, right? That didn’t used to happen. So people, I don’t think, are acclimated to this climate where anybody who’s associated with your organization can create this little crisis situation, but I think these are actually like tempests in teacups, and they do just blow over.

And in one way, social media has the memory of a goldfish. In another way, it never forgets anything and can dredge things from many years ago, but these things just pass, and they don’t really actually have that much of a, I don’t think, effect on the reputation of these institutions for long. It’s just that the technology that we’ve had is enough to create an experience that managers don’t know how to handle, and they flip out. (...)

EZRA KLEIN: Yeah I do think one of the strange things about this kind of political action is people in it don’t realize what they’re doing. I think you had quoted, Natalie, the line from Jon Ronson that the snowflake doesn’t take responsibility for the avalanche. I’m paraphrasing that from memory, but there’s something in that where you’re on Twitter, something’s trending or everybody’s talking about something, and you’re just jumping in with a joke.

You’re just participating in the day’s online conversation, and it doesn’t mean a lot to you. And Will, to what you were saying, and the individual might not even mean a lot to the person you’re making fun of or you’re attacking or you’re criticizing, but it is the emergent scale helped along by algorithms that ends up making it meaningful.

WILL WILKINSON: It’s definitely true what you say that a lot of times people just want to pipe up and have their say. This thing starts trending, or they see other people that they follow complaining about a particular article or about the particular horrible thing that somebody did, and they just chip in their two cents just to feel like they’re involved, and sometimes that scales up to something that’s really traumatic for the person who’s on the receiving end of it. But I think, over time, the way things have evolved is that people actually do understand this dynamic pretty well, and I only get this from people on the right.

I my own case, I could feel the dynamic. I could feel that there are people on Twitter who are looking for openings that they can strike through. Somebody saw the opening in my tweet, threw the harpoon into it, the horn went off, [HORN SOUND], called all the troops, and then people started swarming, but then there’s another layer. There’s these reporters for Breitbart and the Federalist and Fox News who are looking for these controversies because the fact that it becomes a controversy online is what makes it a story.

So the people who are creating the controversy know that they’re making a story. So there’s a kind of symbiosis there, and then my own case got picked up as a story in The Washington Examiner and the Federalist and Fox News, and then the top level of it is if it makes it all the way up to cable news broadcast on Fox.

EZRA KLEIN: Yeah. I had a line in my recent piece on this that Fox News isn’t anti-cancel culture. They just want to control the cancel culture, which I think is very much the right way to understand their prime time, but I want to start zooming out on this because I think a lot of what we end up talking about here is the purpose and utility of social shame. So Natalie, I ask this of you, what’s the case for and against in your view using social shame as a tool for social change?

NATALIE WYNN: Well, the for, the reason that people initially sort of were attracted to this, like the #MeToo movement, for example, I would say that it used social shaming often as a last resort against someone like Harvey Weinstein, who has used his position of power to abuse women for decades. In situations like that, it can be very good. It can attract a problem to an injustice or to someone who is abusing power.

The word accountability has kind of lost all meaning, but I think accountability is really just the left-wing word for punishment, but it can be used to punish people who seem immune to every other means of punishing and who, I suppose by most estimations, deserve it, but the negative is that, again, this is punishment administered without any kind of legal system. It’s pure mob justice.

And I think if you look at the history of mob justice, it’s pretty clear that that often can lead to witch trials and things like that where you basically have social resentments. People are being scapegoated. You have anger sort of directed almost arbitrarily at objects on whom all this kind of built up rage is unleashed. And oftentimes, the choice of target doesn’t make any sense.

by Ezra Klein with Natalie Wynn and Will Wilkinson, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Illustration by The New York Times; Photographs by Natalie Wynn Parrott and, via Will Wilkinson

Richard Estes, Grand Luncheonette, Oil on Canvas, New York City, 1969

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[ed. Phot0-realistic paintings]

Kurt Cobain
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Daniel Kaminsky, Internet Security Savior, Dies at 42

Daniel Kaminsky, a security researcher known for his discovery of a fundamental flaw in the fabric of the internet, died on Friday at his home in San Francisco. He was 42.

His aunt, Dr. Toby Maurer, said the cause was diabetes ketoacidosis, a serious diabetic condition that led to his frequent hospitalization in recent years.

In 2008, Mr. Kaminsky was widely hailed as a latter-day, digital Paul Revere after he found a serious flaw in the internet’s basic plumbing that could allow skilled coders to take over websites, siphon off bank credentials or even shut down the internet. Mr. Kaminsky alerted the Department of Homeland Security, executives at Microsoft and Cisco, and other internet security experts to the problem and helped spearhead a patch.

He was a respected practitioner of “penetration testing,” the business of compromising the security of computer systems at the behest of owners who want to harden their systems from attack. It was a profession that his mother, Trudy Maurer, said he first developed a knack for at 4 years old after his father gifted him a computer from Radio Shack. By age 5, Mrs. Maurer said, Mr. Kaminsky had taught himself to code.

His childhood paralleled the 1983 movie “War Games,” in which a young child, played by Matthew Broderick, unwittingly accesses a U.S. military supercomputer. When Mr. Kaminsky was 11, his mother said, she received an angry phone call from someone who identified himself as a network administrator for the Western United States. The administrator said someone at her residence was “monkeying around in territories where he shouldn’t be monkeying around.”

Without her knowledge, Mr. Kaminsky had been examining military websites. The administrator vowed to “punish” him by cutting off the family’s internet access. Mrs. Maurer warned the administrator that if he made good on his threat, she would take out an advertisement in The San Francisco Chronicle denouncing the Pentagon’s security.

“I will take out an ad that says, ‘Your security is so crappy, even an 11-year-old can break it,’” Mrs. Maurer recalled telling the administrator, in an interview on Monday.

They settled on a compromise punishment: three days without internet.

Nearly two decades after he lost his access to the internet, Mr. Kaminsky wound up saving it. What Mr. Kaminsky discovered in 2008 was a problem with the internet’s basic address system, known as the Domain Name System, or DNS, a dynamic phone book that converts human-friendly web addresses like NYTimes.com and Google.com into their machine-friendly numeric counterparts. He found a way that thieves or spies could covertly manipulate DNS traffic so that a person typing the website for a bank would instead be redirected to an impostor site that could steal the user’s account number and password.

Mr. Kaminsky’s first call was to Paul Vixie, a longtime steward of the internet’s DNS system. The usually unflappable Mr. Vixie recalled that his panic grew as he listened to Mr. Kaminsky’s explanation. “I realized we were looking down the gun barrel of history,” Mr. Vixie recalled. “It meant everything in the digital universe was going to have to get patched.”

Mr. Vixie asked Mr. Kaminsky if he had a fix in mind. “He said, ‘We are going to get all the makers of DNS software to coordinate a fix, implement it at the same time and keep it a secret until I present my findings at Black Hat,’” Mr. Vixie said, referring to an annual hacking conference in Las Vegas.

Mr. Kaminsky, then the director of penetration testing at IOActive, a security firm based in Seattle, had developed a close working relationship with Microsoft. He and Mr. Vixie persuaded Microsoft to host a secret convention of the world’s senior cybersecurity experts.

“I remember calling people and telling them, ‘I’m not at liberty to tell you what it is, but there’s this thing and you will need to get on a plane and meet us in this room at Microsoft on such-and-such date,’” Mr. Vixie said.

Over the course of several days, they cobbled together a solution in stealth, a fix that Mr. Vixie compared to dog excrement. But given the threat of internet apocalypse, he recalled it as being the best dog excrement “we could have ever come up with.”

By the time Mr. Kaminsky took the stage at Black Hat that August, the web had been spared. Mr. Kaminsky, who typically donned a T-shirt, shorts and flip flops, appeared onstage in a suit his mother had bought for him. She had also requested that he wear closed-toed shoes. He sort of complied — twirling onto the stage in roller skates.

When his talk was complete, Mr. Kaminsky was approached by a stranger in the crowd. It was the administrator who had kicked Mr. Kaminsky off the internet years earlier. Now, he wanted to thank Mr. Kaminsky and to ask for an introduction to “the meanest mother he ever met.”

While his DNS fix was Mr. Kaminsky’s most celebrated contribution to internet security, it was hardly his only contribution. In 2005, after researchers discovered Sony BMG was covertly installing software on PCs to combat music piracy, Sony executives played down the move. Mr. Kaminsky forced the issue into public awareness after discovering Sony’s software had infected more than 568,000 computers.

“He did things because they were the right thing to do, not because they would elicit financial gain,” his mother, Mrs. Maurer, said.

(When a reporter asked Mr. Kaminsky why he did not exploit the DNS flaw to become immensely wealthy, he said that doing so would have been morally wrong, and that he did not want his mother to have to visit him in prison.)

Silicon Valley’s giants often sought Mr. Kaminsky’s expertise and recruited him with lucrative job offers to serve as their chief information security officers. He politely declined, preferring the quiet yeoman’s work of internet security.

In a community known for its biting, sometimes misogynistic discourse on Twitter, Mr. Kaminsky stood out for his consistent empathy. He disdained Twitter pile-ons and served as a generous mentor to journalists and aspiring hackers. Mr. Kaminsky would often quietly foot a hotel or travel bill to Black Hat for those who could not otherwise afford it. When a mentee broke up with her boyfriend, Mr. Kaminsky bought her a plane ticket to see him, believing they were meant to be. (They married.) (...)

Security was always Mr. Kaminsky’s lifework, most recently as the chief scientist at White Ops, a security company he helped found that was recently renamed HUMAN. He was not above criticizing his own industry. In a 2016 keynote address at Black Hat, he said the industry had fallen far short of expectations. “Everybody looks busy, but the house still burns,” he said, before pitching the cyber equivalent of the Manhattan Project.

“The internet was never designed to be secure,” Mr. Kaminsky recalled in a 2016 interview. “The internet was designed to move pictures of cats. We are very good at moving pictures of cats.” But, he added, “we didn’t think you’d be moving trillions of dollars onto this. What are we going to do? And here’s the answer: Some of us got to go out and fix it.”

by Nicole Perlroth, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

Paid in Full

Among the pillars of the creator economy is Patreon, a service that individuals with blogs or podcasts can use to administer subscriber paywalls and raise money from their audiences. Musician Jack Conte founded the company in 2013 after watching his YouTube ad revenue dwindle despite his massive audience. According to a 2019 Wired profile, Conte felt a “growing fury at the pittance” that YouTube paid. “In one 28-day period, during which his account generated 1,062,569 views, he received a measly $166.10 payout.”

Other platforms, including Twitch, Substack, and OnlyFans, have emerged as similar alternatives to big social media and the meager earning potential it offers. The rise of these alternative forms of monetization has pushed the centralized web to modify its own incentive structures. When, earlier this year, Twitter announced its Super Follow feature — a paywall for tweets — it represented the latest acknowledgement by a social network that Web 2.0 was over: If the platforms themselves did not provide adequate monetization tools, users would generate their content elsewhere.

Such features, Will Oremus argues, signal a departure from social media’s established model of holding users’ attention with algorithmically sorted feeds: “Users will deliberately choose to forge ongoing connections with their favorite creators rather than simply trusting an algorithm to surface engaging free content from a vast, impersonal reservoir.” This points to social media just becoming mass media again; instead of everyone making content for one another, an elite group of “creators” produce it for the mass of “users.” Of course, the creators who already amassed large followings during the “free” era of social media are best positioned to benefit from subscription platforms, paywalls, and collectible content, and they will continue to draw upon feed-powered social media to promote themselves and attract their paying customers. Those without followings, meanwhile, will have a harder time monetizing their output. The creator economy’s highly visible success stories conceal a huge population of users who cannot make a living from selling subscriptions any more than they could from YouTube ad money. In a 2018 piece for the Verge, Patricia Hernandez described the Twitch streamers who spend months or years broadcasting without an audience: “Many streamers actually remember the exact moment their view counter went from zero to one.”

For every high-profile streamer earning millions, there are many others earning nothing; subscription services and Super Follows are unlikely to change this. But in the meantime, we’ll have normalized an internet where everything is increasingly for sale and content must embed its own marketing within itself, in order to maximize its financial return. That is, we will have the world of NFTs.

NFTs are among the most visible manifestations of what’s being called Web3, a transformation of the backend architecture of the internet in response to Web 2.0’s limitations and asymmetries. Its vision is a blockchain-based internet that works less like an open network circulating “free information” and more like an expansive matrix of built-in ownership and payment infrastructure.

As with Web 2.0, third-party applications will mediate most Web3 activity for ordinary users. These decentralized apps will not necessarily look and feel altogether different than traditional web apps but will likely incorporate functionality that blockchain technology specifically facilitates, allowing mechanisms like crowdfunding to be incorporated directly into works themselves. Interactions will become transactions, and more types of information will likely be traded in NFT-like marketplaces. As such transactions become more fundamental to the web, users will have to hold cryptocurrency in digital wallets to pay as they go.

Web3 replaces one starry-eyed vision of the internet with something seemingly more pragmatic, where creators are directly compensated for content they produce while users are never allowed to forget the true cost of information circulation. Web 2.0 has already demonstrated that information can’t be free; it can only be subsidized, most likely by entities with deep pockets and nefarious interests. Its “open network” largely consists of centralized servers owned by major corporations whose dominance grows with each passing year. Yes, the internet has generally been free for users, but ethereal metaphors like “the cloud” have concealed its increasingly proprietary nature, its ongoing consolidation into a few monopolies. That centralization has proceeded in tandem for the internet’s back-end hosting, which is increasingly handled by Amazon Web Services along with Microsoft and Google, just as much of the front end is handled by Google and Facebook. In the face of these giants, individual efforts to monetize content without their involvement can seem absurd: one’s own personal webpage vs. a billion-user site.

But with blockchains and built-in transactionality, the picture would presumably look different. Web3 is decentralized and inherently monetized at its core through tokenization: Users who contribute computing resources to the collective, peer-to-peer effort of storing the internet’s data and validating that data’s transfer (replacing the centralized servers that currently predominate) receive compensation in the form of bitcoin or another cryptocurrency. In her 2020 book The Token Economy, Shermin Voshmgir writes that blockchain “introduces a governance layer that runs on top of the current internet, that allows for two people who do not know or trust each other to reach and settle agreements over the web.” In other words, Web3 makes the internet’s traditional intermediaries — the centralized corporate platforms — less essential to its ongoing existence, both as providers of its backend capacity and as subsidizers of its content via ad revenue. The social platforms’ role as distribution channels might endure, but their overall importance to the web will have diminished. In a sense, technologist Jaron Lanier’s old idea of an internet based on micropayments has finally arrived, but it has been transformed into an internet of micro-ownership.

by Drew Austin, Real Life |  Read more:

Image: Chat (2021) by Viktor Timofeev

The Knock

Spending the first night in my 1995 GMC camper van, I lay awake for hours in my sleeping bag, watching the window shades glow — white, then red, over and over — as cars sped past in the dark. Is that one slowing down? I wondered. Can they see I’m in here? Will they call the cops?

Van dwellers had told me about “the knock” — usually three sharp raps at the door, often by the police. The risk of getting jolted awake and kicked off my patch of asphalt kept me uneasy and made it hard to sleep.

I was living in a van as a journalist, as research for my book “Nomadland.” Over the course of three years, I followed Americans who had been squeezed out of traditional housing and moved into vans, late-model RVs, even a few sedans. I drove more than 15,000 miles — from coast to coast, from Mexico to the Canadian border. And night after night, I bedded down in a new place, whether a truck stop or the Sonoran Desert. Sometimes I stayed on city streets or in suburban parking lots, which rattled me in ways I’d never expected.

For people whose only home is a vehicle, the knock is a visceral, even existential, threat. How do you avoid it? You hide in plain sight. Make yourself invisible. Internalize the idea that you’re unwelcome. Stay hypervigilant to avoid trouble. Apart from telling you to clear out, the police can harass you with fines and tickets or get your home-on-wheels towed away to an impound lot.

I think about “the knock” a lot these days. More people are moving into vehicles as shelters of last resort, and their ranks are likely to swell when Covid-19 eviction bans expire. Laws punishing the unhoused population have been appearing around the country in a wave of NIMBYism.

We are emerging from what may be the most introspective year in American history. The meditative film based on my book, which is up for six Oscars this weekend, fits that mood well. The pandemic has prompted much talk of interconnectedness and empathy, what we owe one another as a society. “Nomadland” reminds us that our bonds should extend to those who live in homes-on-wheels. No one should have to live in constant fear of the knock.

In the film, Fern, played by Frances McDormand, is startled by a knock that interrupts a quiet meal. She looks up with a start and swears. A face hovers at the window, and a fist pounds once, twice, three times on the door. Then comes a gruff voice. “No overnight parking! You can’t sleep here.”

Watching the character’s panic at the sudden sound of a fist hitting her van gave me anxious flashbacks. Then it made me sad. Then I felt angry, because that scene was just too accurate, and I wished it didn’t reflect the reality of how people treat one another.

Some of the nomads from my book play versions of themselves in the film. They know this phenomenon too well. Swankie, 76, told me she had nightmares about it while sleeping in her 2006 Chevy Express van.

“I have this strange, surreal dream of someone knocking,” she explained. “Usually happens if I am not 100 percent comfortable with where I am parking.”

Bob Wells, 65, has a popular video, “Avoiding the Knock,” and has been lecturing on the topic for ages. I first heard him talk about it seven years ago in the Sonoran Desert, at a gathering called the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous. He shared tactics for “stealth parking,” such as creating police-friendly alibis and making your van look like a contractor’s work vehicle.

At first listen, I thought about how clever and resourceful those strategies were. But after hearing them a few times, I reached a second conclusion: In a better world, people wouldn’t have to go to such lengths to stay out of sight.

The nonprofit National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty keeps tabs on over 180 urban and rural cities across America, more than half of which have enacted laws that make it hard or nearly impossible to live in vehicles.

Over the past decade, Tristia Bauman, an attorney at the center, has seen the regulations multiply. Some places forbid overnight parking. Others outlaw inhabiting a vehicle outright. Penalties can pile up fast. Unpaid, they lead to the cruelest punishment of all: towing. Failing to pay an impound fee means losing not just a car but a home.

by Jessica Bruder, NY Times | Read more:

Image: Adria Malcolm for The New York Times

Army of Pharmaceutical Lobbyists Descend on Washington to Block Generic Covid-19 Vaccines

The pharmaceutical industry is pouring resources into the growing political fight over generic coronavirus vaccines.

Newly filed disclosure forms from the first quarter of 2021 show that over 100 lobbyists have been mobilized to contact lawmakers and members of the Biden administration, urging them to oppose a proposed temporary waiver on intellectual property rights by the World Trade Organization that would allow generic vaccines to be produced globally.

Pharmaceutical lobbyists working against the proposal include Mike McKay, a key fundraiser for House Democrats, now working on retainer for Pfizer, as well as several former staff members to the U.S. Office of Trade Representative, which oversees negotiations with the WTO.

Several trade groups funded by pharmaceutical firms have also focused closely on defeating the generic proposal, new disclosures show. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, and the International Intellectual Property Alliance, which all receive drug company money, have dispatched dozens of lobbyists to oppose the initiative.

The push has been followed by a number of influential voices taking the side of the drug lobby. Last week, Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., released a letter demanding that the administration “oppose any and all efforts aimed at waiving intellectual property rights.” Howard Dean, the former Democratic National Committee chair, has similarly criticized the proposal, echoing many of the arguments of the drug industry.

Currently, only 1 percent of coronavirus vaccines are going to low-income countries, and projections show much of the world’s population may not be vaccinated until 2023 or 2024. In response, a coalition of countries, led by India and South Africa, have petitioned the WTO to temporarily suspend intellectual property rights on coronavirus-related medical products so that generic vaccines can be rapidly manufactured.

The waiver requests a suspension of IP enforcement under the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, or TRIPS, treaty. If granted, local pharmaceutical plants could be granted compulsory licenses to produce coronavirus vaccines without the threat of being sued by the license holder.

The proposal has gained traction globally, with hundreds of members of the European Parliament, dozens of American lawmakers led by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and increasingly vocal voices in the public health community expressing support.

But the waiver petition has encountered fierce opposition from leading drug companies, who stand to lose profit and who fear that allowing a waiver would lead to less stringent IP enforcement in the future. (...)

But global public health activists remain skeptical.

“The drug company lobbyists are saying the TRIPS waiver won’t increase the supply of vaccines, but if that’s true, why do they oppose it? Because they think it will in fact expand production,” noted James Love, director of Knowledge Ecology International, a group that supports the waiver petition.

“The waiver itself, from a legal point of view, is most important for eliminating two restrictive provisions on the TRIPS, both dealing with exports,” added Love. “From a political point of view, it is more important, giving a green light to use existing compulsory licensing authority and putting pressure on vaccine manufacturers to do more voluntary agreements.”

by Lee Fang, The Intercept |  Read more:

Image: Ben Hasty/MediaNews Group via Getty Images

[ed. Even as hundreds of thousands die in India. See also: Maintaining Intellectual Property Amid Covid-19 (The Economist).]

In the Mood

You are reading this in a café, the steam wafting gently off your coffee, a soft rain pattering on the window outside. You are in an old library late at night, with the creak of old chairs and the scratching of a pencil from a writer immersed in their thoughts. You are in a dense, foggy forest in the shadow of a mountain where your party has set up temporary camp, hoping no belligerent creatures wander through during the night. Hours tick by as these atmospheres spool out from your computer screen and speakers. Before moving to your next piece of business, you glance at your browser window to confirm: The coffee is still hot; the monsters have yet to arrive. The scene is set for your everyday activities, but only within the frame of the platform itself.

These “ambience videos,” each streaming on YouTube, epitomize a transformation in mood-regulating media: Where ambient media once intervened in the mood of an existing space, newer forms promise instead an atmospheric escape from wherever you find yourself. (...)

Today’s ambience videos share many of the same basic aesthetic principles as the earlier ambient works. They invite audiences to let them play while attending to other things, and they are designed to accompany everyday activities like studying, reading, and sleeping. However, ambience videos break decisively with the earlier focus on augmenting existing locations, aiming instead to act as an immersive perceptual substitute for the immediate physical environment. They provide not just an accompaniment but an alternative space within which everyday activities can take place. Like Kotler’s in-store atmospherics, these ambiences are both branded and self-contained.

Both ambient and ambience approaches aim to make everyday life more atmospherically controllable through media, but ambience shifts the locus of this control away from those in the local environment and toward more fully commodified ambience channels. By reframing everyday mood regulation as an escapist activity, ambience videos bring it more completely within the walled-garden logic of platform capitalism. Rather than a person curating their own local ambience, YouTube ambience channels situate moods as accessible via the platform alone, just as long as the browser tab stays open. (...)

In 2017, taking advantage of YouTube’s then-novel streaming features, channels began popularizing “live” ambiences that audiences could tune into anytime they like. The most famous among these is the 200+ million view “lo-fi hip hop radio – beats to relax/study to” (launched in February 2017), which depicts a girl studying in front of a large window looking out on an atmospheric cityscape. Throughout the day, that landscape shifts to feature soft glowing city lights and, at times, rain falling softly just beyond the glass. A cat on the windowsill keeps continuous watch over what is happening outside, providing both the girl and stream audiences reassurance that it is safe to look away and return to our work. Neither the girl nor the cat pay any attention to the rest of the room, including the open laptop nearby and the wide range of physical media visible around the edges of the scene. In this way, the lo-fi girl models the new approach to ambience as entirely contained by the frame: Pay no mind to the cluttered room in which you find yourself; seek to draw your mood instead entirely from the scene streaming in through a nearby window.

The YouTube ambience videos emerging in lo-fi girl’s wake take a cue from this frame-within-a-frame format, deploying on-screen windows to hint at an external world of atmospheric weather while simultaneously providing reassurance this larger world won’t intrude on the cozy space the viewer is ensconced within. Channels like Calmed by Nature that had provided more generic relaxation videos (“Calming Wave Sounds,” “Mountain Creek”) began adopting the out-the-window ASMR ambience with videos like “Winter Snowstorm Ambience in Fire Lookout Tower with cracking fire, wind, & blizzard sounds” (April 2017).

Eventually the virtual café emerged as a favored place to situate these cozy moods, particularly after actual cafes became inaccessible amidst the 2020 pandemic lockdown. Calmed by Nature’s “Rainy Night Coffee Shop Ambience with Relaxing Jazz Music and Rain Sounds – 8 Hours” (March 2020) provides a typical example. The visual aesthetic is heavy on the hygge: soft pools of light, hot beverages, and colors that one ambience video creator describes as “warm, buttery hues” are conspicuous in an otherwise empty coffee shop. These interior designs are paired with a steady evening rain dripping from the eaves just outside the large street-facing windows. Candles flicker and mugs steam next to an open book and an open journal, as if their owners had just stepped away briefly (for eight hours). Smooth jazz lies low in the audio mix underneath the rain and the slightest hint of people talking somewhere offscreen. The attached hashtag #coffeeshopambience currently appears on over 650 videos across 168 different YouTube channels, each a variation on this basic style.

As Eliza Brooke notes in a recent New York Times piece, the pandemic appeal of these videos is pronounced: Their focus on the threshold of indoors and outdoors signals protection in the face of environmental exposure while simultaneously offering a warm and compensatory — yet never distracting — sense of community and spatial belonging for the socially distanced. But the focus on a specifically retail atmospherics is also far from accidental, echoing Kotler’s earlier promotion of the atmospheric in-store brand. Much like a latte purchase now often serves as a ticket to dwell for a few hours in a well-curated, comfortably franchised space, these videos situate ambience as an on-demand branded experience. If after eight hours you still want more, channels like ASMR Rooms and Calmed by Nature have in-platform stores with the usual mugs, T-shirts, and tote bags.

by Paul Roquet, Real Life | Read more:
Image: Cozy Coffee Shop (YouTube)