pluralistic (original) (raw)
Premature Internet Activists
ALT
I’m on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS . Catch me TOMORROW (Feb 14) in BOSTON for FREE at BOSKONE , and SATURDAY (Feb 15) for a virtual event with YANIS VAROUFAKIS . More tour dates here.
“Premature antifacist” was a sarcastic term used by leftists caught up in the Red Scare to describe themselves, as they came under ideological suspicion for having traveled to Spain to fight against Franco’s fascists before the US entered WWII and declared war against the business-friendly, anticommunist fascist Axis powers of Italy, Spain, Greece, and, of course, Germany:
The joke was that opposing fascism made you an enemy of America – unless you did so after the rest of America had woken up to the existential threat of a global fascist takeover. What’s more, if you were a “premature antifascist,” you got no credit for fighting fascism early on. Quite the contrary: fighting fascism before the rest of the US caught up with you didn’t make you prescient – it made you a pariah.
I’ve been thinking a lot about premature antifascism these days, as literal fascists use the internet to coordinate a global authoritarian takeover that represents an existential threat to a habitable planet and human thriving. In light of that, it’s hard to argue that the internet is politically irrelevant, and that fights over the regulation, governance, and structure of the internet are somehow unserious.
And yet, it wasn’t very long ago that tech policy was widely derided as a frivolous pursuit, and that tech organizing was dismissed as “slacktivism”:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell
Elevating concerns about the internet’s destiny to the level of human rights struggle was delusional, a glorified argument about the rules for forums where sad nerds argued about Star Trek. If you worried that Napster-era copyright battles would make it easy to remove online content by claiming that it infringed copyright, you were just carrying water for music pirates. If you thought that legalizing and universalizing encryption technology would safeguard human rights, you were a fool who had no idea that real human rights battles involved confronting Bull Connor in the streets, not suing the NSA in a federal courtroom.
And now here we are. Congress has failed to update consumer privacy law since 1988 (when they banned video store clerks from blabbing about your VHS rentals). Mass surveillance enables everything from ransomware, pig butchering and identity theft to state surveillance of “domestic enemies,” from trans people to immigrants. What’s more, the commercial and state surveillance apparatus are, in fact, as single institution: states protect corporations from privacy law so that corporations can create and maintain population-scale nonconsensual dossiers on all the intimate facts of our lives, which governments raid at will, treating them as an off-the-books surveillance dragnet:
Trump’s Tiktok two-step is a lesson for future presidents
ALT
I’m about to leave for a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS . Catch me on Feb 14 in BOSTON for FREE at BOSKONE , and on Feb 15 for a virtual event with YANIS VAROUFAKIS . More tour dates here.
Remember the Tiktok ban? I know, it was ten million years ago (in Musk years, anyway), so it may have slipped your mind, but let me remind you: Congress passed a law saying Tiktok was banned. Trump said he wouldn’t enforce the law. The end.
No, really. I mean, sure, there’s a bunch of bullshit about whether Trump will pick up the ban again after Tiktok’s grace period ends, depending on whether they sell themselves to his creepy wax museum pal Larry Ellison. Maybe he will. Maybe Tiktok’ll buy so many trumpcoins that he forgets about. Whatevs.
The important thing here is: Congress passed a (stupid) law and Trump said, “I’ve decided not to enforce that law” and then that was it:
https://prospect.org/justice/2025-01-31-trump-administration-test-supreme-court-tiktok/
Sure, there’s some big rule of law/checks and balances/separation of powers problems here, and there are plenty of laws I’m mad about Trump not enforcing (like the law that says corporations can’t bribe foreign governments, say). But this one? Sure, it’s fine. The problem with Tiktok is that it invades our privacy in creepy ways, not that it is owned by a Chinese company. I don’t want Zuck or Musk or (especially) Trump invading my privacy.
Congress hasn’t passed a consumer privacy law since 1988, when they banned video store clerks from telling newspapers about your VHS viewing habits. That’s why Tiktok is a problem. Pass that law, and if any president decides not to enforce it, I’ll be mad as hell and I’ll be right there in the streets next to you, in head-to-toe CV dazzle, with all my distraction rectangles in Faraday pouches, shlepping a placard bearing the Social Security Numbers of every Cabinet member in giant writing.
But the point is, the president defied Congress, which is a thing that Very Serious Grownups told us radicals Joe Biden mustn’t do under any circumstances, lest the resulting constitutional crisis tear the country apart, or, at the very least, alienate so many voters that Donald Trump would become the next president.
We let Very Serious Grownups call the shots, and Donald Trump is president. Maybe we should stop listening to Very Serious Grownups?
Look, presidents ignore Congress’s laws all the time. The Comstock Act (which effectively bans transporting pornography and contraception) is almost entirely ignored, and has been for generations (though Trump’s creepy Heritage Foundation puppetmasters have promised to bring it back). The Robinson-Patman Act hasn’t been enforced since the Reagan years, which is a damned shame, because Robinson-Patman would put Walmart, Amazon, Dollartree and Dollar General out of business (Biden started to enforce Robinson-Patman again during his last year in office):
https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/14/the-price-is-wright/#enforcement-priorities
I’m not trying to say that enforcing (or ignoring) the Comstock Act is the same as ignoring (or enforcing) the Robinson-Patman Act. The Comstock Act is bad, and the Robinson-Patman Act is good. I am capable of making that moral judgment, and I would like to have a president who does the same.
The fear about Trump ignoring the laws and procedures is justified, but not because of the damage he’s doing to laws and procedures – it’s because of the damage he’s doing to the people of this country and the world.
Musk steals a billion dollars from low-income Americans and sends it to Intuit
ALT
I’m about to leave for a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS . Catch me on Feb 14 in BOSTON for FREE at BOSKONE , and on Feb 15 for a virtual event with YANIS VAROUFAKIS . More tour dates here.
Let me tell you about the most wasteful US federal government spending I know about. It’s a humdinger. You and everyone you know are mired in it for weeks, or perhaps months, every year. It will cost you, personally, thousands of dollars over your lifetime. I’m talking about filing your taxes.
Not paying your taxes. Paying your taxes is fine. It keeps the country running, though not because the government needs our “tax dollars” to pay for things. The government annihilates the money it taxes away from us, and creates new money to pay for programs. The USA needs US citizens’ dollars to build highways the same way Starbucks needs its Starbucks gift cards to make lattes – that is, not at all:
https://theglobepost.com/2019/03/28/stephanie-kelton-mmt/
I’m talking about filing your taxes. In nearly every case, a tax return contains a bunch of things the IRS already knows: how much interest your bank paid you, how much your employer paid you, how many kids you have, etc etc. Nearly everyone who pays a tax-prep place or website to file their tax return is just sending data to the IRS that the IRS already has. This is insanely wasteful.
In most other “advanced” countries (and in plenty of poorer countries, too), the tax authority fills in your tax return for you and mails it to you at tax-time. If it looks good to you, you just sign the bottom and send it back. If there are mistakes, you can correct them. You can also just drop it in the shredder and hire an accountant to do your taxes for you, if, for example, you run a small business, or are self-employed, or have other complex tax needs. A tiny minority of tax filers fall into that bucket, and they keep the tax-prep industry in other countries alive, albeit in a much smaller form than in the USA.
In the US, we have a duopoly of two gigantic tax-prep outfits: H&R Block, and Intuit, owners of Turbotax. These companies make billions from low-income, working Americans every year, charging them to format a bunch of information the IRS already has, and then sending it to the IRS on their behalf. These companies lobbied like crazy for the right to tax you when you pay your taxes.
In 2003, it looked like the IRS would start sending Americans pre-completed returns, so H&R Block and Turbotax went into lobbying overdrive, whipping up a “public private partnership” called the “Free File Alliance,” that promised to do free tax prep for most Americans. But once the threat of IRS free filing was killed, they turned Free File into a sick joke. Americans who tried to use Free File were fraudulently channeled into filing products that cost money – sometimes hundreds of dollars – to use, a fact that was only revealed after the taxpayer had spent hours keying in their information. Free File sites were also used to peddle unrelated financial products to tax filers, with deceptive language that implied that buying these services was needed to file your return:
Hugh D’Andrade’s “The Murder Next Door”
ALT
I’m about to leave for a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS . Catch me on Feb 14 in BOSTON for FREE at BOSKONE , and on Feb 15 for a virtual event with YANIS VAROUFAKIS . More tour dates here.
Hugh D'Andrade is a brilliant visual communicator, the art director responsible for the look-and-feel of EFF’s website. He’s also haunted by a murder – the killing of the mother of his childhood playmates, which cast a long, long shadow over his life, as he recounts in his debut graphic novel, The Murder Next Door:
https://www.streetnoisebooks.com/the-murder-next-door-a-graphic-memoir
In 1978, Hugh was a normal ten year old, always drawing and obsessed with riding his dirt bike around his quiet suburban neighborhood. The brothers next door, Derek and Ari, were his constant playmates. One day, he came home from school to find them standing on the lawn. The brothers were crying, arguing. When Hugh asked them what was going on, Derek said there was a dead body in their house, then Ari quickly said, “It’s someone else, Derek, it’s not her.” Ari insisted that it was their mother.
As they argued, Derek told Hugh to go inside and look for himself. That’s how he found the dead body of his next door neighbor.
This became the defining moment of Hugh’s life. For the rest of his life, he felt like there was a before-Hugh and an after-Hugh, the Hugh before the trauma and the Hugh after it. Passing strangers on the street, he wonders about their rifts, the moments that transformed them, that haunt them.
After finding the body, Hugh ran to his own parents, who called the police, gathered in Derek and Ari, and took charge of the situation. When the dust settled, Derek and Ari had disappeared, sent off to a neighbor’s place. A week later, when Hugh returned to school, a classmate told him that the whole school had “decided not to talk about it.” So he didn’t.
But he was haunted by the murder, seized by spasms of fear that the murderer would return for him. He threw tantrums, broke things, smashed things. His parents said it was “just a phase.” He interrogated his parents relentlessly about what they would do if the murderer came back. Their answers were meant to reassure him, but failed. Life went on. Whispers blamed his neighbor’s husband – a doctor who was at the hospital at the time of the killing – for the murder.
Murder Next Door is told in a series of interleaved scenes of Hugh’s childhood, his adolescence, his contemporary therapy sessions, his life today in Oakland. He interrogates his own motivations for engaging endlessly with online conspiracists. He reflects on the years he spent with his mother, campaigning for the Equal Rights Amendment, and how that informed both his lifelong feminist beliefs, and his view of the murder of a woman in the house next door. He comes to see a pathway from harassment and sexist remarks to sexual violence and murder, and to notice how the boys at school exhibited the same sexist attitudes that he was noticing in wider society. He struggles to figure out what masculinity is, and what kind of man he wants to be – a strong man, who protects women from men like the murderer? But the murderer was a strong man, too.
Dinkscrump Linkdump
ALT
I’m about to leave for a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS . Catch me on Feb 14 in BOSTON for FREE at BOSKONE , and on Feb 15 for a virtual event with YANIS VAROUFAKIS . More tour dates here.
Well, Saturday’s come around and I have a gigantic list of links that didn’t fit into this week’s newsletter, so it’s time for another linkdump, 26th in the series:
https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/
My posting is about to get a lot more erratic, as I’m days away from leaving on a 20+ city book-tour, which starts in Boston on Feb 14, with a sold-out event at the Brookline Booksmith:
https://brooklinebooksmith.com/event/2025-02-14/sold-out-cory-doctorow-ken-liu-picks-and-shovels
But Bostonians get another bite at the apple: I’m appearing at Boskone, the city’s venerable sf convention, a few hours before my Brookline gig, and admission is free:
https://schedule.boskone.org/62/
The rest of the tour (including a virtual event with Yanis Varoufakis on the 15th) is here, and more dates (New Zealand, possibly Pittsburgh and Atlanta) are being added all the time:
https://craphound.com/novels/redteamblues/2025/02/06/announcing-the-picks-and-shovels-book-tour/
Of course, even as I scramble to get ready to hit the road for months, I’m regrettably forced to give some rent-free space in my head to Elon Fucking Musk. This week, I wrote about DOGE as a government-scale private-equity style plundering of the nation:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/07/broccoli-hair-brownshirts/#shameless
But that was before I read Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman’s Lawfare article about how Musk’s seizure of payment chokepoints will allow him (and Trump) to surveil the entire economy and wield unilateral, unaccountable power:
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/elon-musk-weaponizes-the-government
In 2023, Farrell and Newman published an important book called Underground Empire, explaining how, during the War on Terror, GWB (and then Obama) weaponized global payment processing systems (most notably SWIFT) and other boring, technical systems, and then used them to wield enormous power around the world:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties
Farrell and Newman’s point isn’t merely that this power was used unwisely or cruelly, but also that the co-opted systems had an actual, useful, important job to do – a job that was only possible if these systems were widely viewed as credibly neutral and apolitical. The book ends with a sobering message about the chaos on the horizon if (when) other countries walk away from these system, leaving infrastructure vacuums in their wake. In their new Lawfare piece, Farrell and Newman imply not just that Musk and Trump are fashioning a powerful weapon out of the nation’s digital infrastructure, but also that this could permanently undermine the vital national systems they’re seizing control over, with no obvious candidates to replace them.
Meanwhile, the Democrats are still trying to find their asses with both hands, even as voters across the nation bombard them with demands to actually do something. I’m gonna call my senators and rep right after I finish this and remind them that when South Korea’s autocratic president attempted a coup, lawmakers stormed the capital, leaping the fences while livestreaming to voters:
https://www.axios.com/2025/02/06/democrats-congress-trump-musk-doge-calls
But not everyone is taking Musk’s bullshit lying down. The AFL-CIO has led a coalition of unions in suing DOGE:
And they’ve launched a counterinitiative with the delightful name of “The Department of People Who Work for a Living”:
https://deptofpeoplewhowork.org/
It’s nice to see some inside/outside strategy underway. After all, Musk is cruel and disgusting, but he – and the lawyers and creeps who back him – are also very, very stupid, and they’re fucking up all over the place.
Take shutting down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency charged with defending America from financial predators (e.g. would-be usurers hoping to turn their social media sites into payment processing platforms). Under Biden’s CFPB chief Rohit Chopra, the Bureau was an absolute powerhouse, adopting rules, investigating scammers, and punishing wrongdoers, all in service to the American people:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/26/taanstafl/#stay-hungry
So naturally Musk and Trump have shut down the Bureau. But, as Adam Levitin writes for Credit Slips, this was a profoundly stupid move. You see, under Dodd-Frank – the post-2008 financial crisis law that created the CFPB – state attorneys general are empowered to enforce its rules. Those rules can’t be amended or rescinded for so long as the CFPB is in a coma. What’s more, any “violation of an enumerated consumer law is a violation of the Consumer Financial Protection Act,” which can be gone after by state AGs. Another thing: the Truth in Lending Act has a threshold for small loans, below which the Act doesn’t apply. The CFPB is supposed to adjust that threshold for inflation, but without a CFPB, that threshold will be frozen in amber like the federal minimum wage, bringing every-larger constellations of financial activity within scope for AG enforcement in any or every state in the Union. Also: none of this can be changed without a 60-vote Senate majority. Nice one, Elon:
That isn’t the only way that Trump shot himself in the dick last week. As Luke Savage writes, threatening to put tariffs on Canadian goods (and to annex Canada and make it the 51st state) had a profound effect on Canadian politics:
https://www.lukewsavage.com/p/all-bets-are-off
“The Fagin figure leading Elon Musk’s merry band of pubescent sovereignty pickpockets”
ALT
This week only, Barnes and Noble is offering 25% off pre-orders of my forthcoming novel Picks and Shovels. ENDS TODAY!.
While we truly live in an age of ascendant monsters who have hijacked our country, our economy, and our imaginations, there is one consolation: the small cohort of brilliant, driven writers who have these monsters’ number, and will share it with us. Writers like Maureen Tkacik:
https://prospect.org/topics/maureen-tkacik/
Journalists like _Wired_’s Vittoria Elliott, Leah Feiger, and Tim Marchman are absolutely crushing it when it comes to Musk’s DOGE coup:
https://www.wired.com/author/vittoria-elliott/
And Nathan Tankus is doing incredible work all on his own, just blasting out scoop after scoop:
But for me, it was Tkacik – as usual – in the pages of The American Prospect who pulled it all together in a way that finally made it make sense, transforming the blitzkreig Muskian chaos into a recognizable playbook. While most of the coverage of Musk’s wrecking crew has focused on the broccoli-haired Gen Z brownshirts who are wilding through the server rooms at giant, critical government agencies, Tkacik homes in on their boss, Tom Krause, whom she memorably dubs “the Fagin figure leading Elon Musk’s merry band of pubescent sovereignty pickpockets” (I told you she was a great writer!):
https://prospect.org/power/2025-02-06-private-equity-hatchet-man-leading-lost-boys-of-doge/
Krause is a private equity looter. He’s the guy who basically invented the playbook for PE takeovers of large tech companies, from Broadcom to Citrix to VMWare, converting their businesses from selling things to renting them out, loading them up with junk fees, slashing quality, jacking up prices over and over, and firing everyone who was good at their jobs. He is a master enshittifier, an enshittification ninja.
Krause has an unerring instinct for making people miserable while making money. He oversaw the merger of Citrix and VMWare, creating a ghastly company called The Cloud Software Group, which sold remote working tools. Despite this, of his first official acts was to order all of his employees to stop working remotely. But then, after forcing his workers to drag their butts into work, move back across the country, etc, he reversed himself because he figured out he could sell off all of the company’s office space for a tidy profit.
Krause canceled employee benefits, like thank you days for managers who pulled a lot of unpaid overtime, or bonuses for workers who upgraded their credentials. He also ended the company’s practice of handing out swag as small gifts to workers, and then stiffed the company that made the swag, wontpaying a $437,574.97 invoice for all the tchotchkes the company had ordered. That’s not the only supplier Krause stiffed: FinLync, a fintech company with a three-year contract with Krause’s company, also had to sue to get paid.
Announcing the Picks and Shovels book tour
ALT
This week only, Barnes and Noble is offering 25% off pre-orders of my forthcoming novel Picks and Shovels.
My next novel, Picks and Shovels, is officially out in the US and Canada on Feb 17, and I’m about to leave on a 20+ city book-tour, which means there’s a nonzero chance I’ll be in a city near you between now and the end of the spring!
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels
Picks and Shovels is a standalone novel starring Martin Hench – my hard-charging, two-fisted, high-tech forensic accountant – in his very first adventure, in the early 1980s. It’s a story about the Weird PC era, when no one was really certain what shape PCs should be, who should make them, who should buy them, and what they’re for. It features a commercial war between two very different PC companies.
The first one, Fidelity Computing, is a predatory multi-level marketing faith scam, run by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest, and an orthodox rabbi. Fidelity recruits people to exploit members of their faith communities by selling them third-rate PCs that are designed as rip-off lock-ins, forcing you to buy special floppies for their drives, special paper for their printers, and to use software that is incompatible with everything else in the world.
The second PC company is Computing Freedom, a rebel alliance of three former Fidelity Computing sales-managers: an orthodox woman who’s been rejected by her family after coming out as queer; a Mormon woman who’s rejected the Church over its opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, and a nun who’s quit her order to join the Liberation Theology movement in the struggle for human rights in America’s dirty wars.
In the middle of it all is Martin Hench, coming of age in San Francisco during the PC bubble, going to Dead Kennedys shows, getting radicalized by ACT UP!, and falling in love – all while serving as CFO and consigliere to Computing Freedom, as a trade war turns into a shooting war, and they have to flee for their lives.
The book’s had fantastic early reviews, with endorsements from computer historians like Steven Levy (Hackers), Claire Evans (Broad-Band), John Markoff (What the Doormouse Said) and Dan'l Lewin (CEO of the Computer History Museum). Stephen Fry raved that he “hugely enjoyed” the “note perfect,” “superb” story.
And I’m about to leave on tour! I have nineteen confirmed dates, and two nearly confirmed dates, and there’s more to come! I hope you’ll consider joining me at one of these events. I’ve got a bunch of fantastic conversation partners joining me onstage and online, and the bookstores that are hosting me are some of my favorite indie booksellers in the world.