Digital Feudalism

In Cory Doctorow's early January LOCUS column, he discusses in considerable technical depth the surveillance and privacy (or anti-privacy) policies of big tech companies, mainly Apple but also others such as Facebook and Google:

Neofeudalism and the Digital Manor

He draws an extended analogy with the medieval feudal system. Private citizens besieged by cyberworld bandits have no practical recourse but to ally themselves with "warlords" who offer protection through powerful security measures unavailable to ordinary users. Behind the nearly impregnable walls constructed by the warlords—Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, etc.—we can consider ourselves fairly safe from encroachment by predators. Safe from everyone, that is, except the warlords themselves.

Doctorow's example of Apple's "feudalistic" practices: "For more than a year, Apple has engaged in a covert, global surveillance of its users through its operating system, which automatically sent information about which apps you were running to Apple, and which gave Apple a remote veto over whether that program would launch when you double-clicked it." The corporation might claim this feature protects users from malicious software, but it doesn't prevent Apple from blocking any software it chooses, whether harmful or beneficial. Furthermore, Apple also locks out programs consumers might use to turn off the surveillance and blocking feature.

The article cites various examples from other major corporations. It also explores entanglement between big tech and government, with the state claiming the right to mine data collected by technology giants. How chilling to contemplate that "the US government viewed the tech companies as host organisms to be parasitized at will, a force that would mobilize market investments to erect a vast, expensive surveillance apparatus that the state could then wield at bargain-basement prices."

If the only thing that stops Apple or any big tech lord of the manor "from blocking you from running legitimate apps – or from gathering information about your movements and social activities – is its goodwill and good judgment," what can we peasants do? Doctorow, of course, has some suggestions, but they're solutions no individual or small group of consumers can implement on our own.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

More on AI

Cory Doctorow's latest LOCUS column continues his topic from last month, the sharp divide between the artificial intelligence of contemporary technology and the self-aware computers of science fiction. He elaborates on his arguments against the possibility of the former's evolving into the latter:

Past Performance

He explains current machine learning "as a statistical inference tool" that "analyzes training data to uncover correlations between different phenomena." That's how an e-mail program predicts what you're going to type next or a search engine guesses your question from the initial words. An example he analyzes in some detail is facial recognition. Because a computer doesn't "know" what a face is but only looks for programmed patterns, it may produce false positives such as "doorbell cameras that hallucinate faces in melting snow and page their owners to warn them about lurking strangers." AI programs work on a quantitative rather than qualitative level. As remarkably as they perform the functions for which they were designed, "statistical inference doesn’t lead to comprehension, even if it sometimes approximates it." Doctorow contrasts the results obtained by mathematical analysis of data with the synthesizing, theorizing, and understanding processes we think of as true intelligence. He concludes that "the idea that if we just get better at statistical inference, consciousness will fall out of it is wishful thinking. It’s a premise for an SF novel, not a plan for the future."

While I'd like to believe a sufficiently advanced supercomputer with more interconnections, "neurons," and assimilation of data than any human brain could hold might awaken to self-awareness, like Mike in Heinlein's THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS, I must admit Doctorow's argument is highly persuasive. Still, people do anthropomorphize their technology, even naming their Roomba vacuum cleaners. (I haven't done that. Our Roomba is a low-end, fairly dumb model. Its intelligence is limited to changing direction when it bumps into obstacles and returning to its charger when low on power, which I never let it run long enough to do. But nevertheless I give the thing pointless verbal commands on occasion. It doesn't listen to me much less than the cats do, after all.) People carry on conversations with Alexa and Siri. I enjoy remembering a cartoon I saw somewhere of a driver simultaneously listening to the GPS apps on both the car's system and the cell phone. The two GPS voices are arguing with each other about which route to take.

Remember Eliza, the computer therapist program? She was invented in the 1960s, and supposedly some users mistook for a human psychologist. You can try her out here:

Eliza

As the page mentions, the dialogue goes best if you limit your remarks to talking about yourself. When I tried to engage her in conversation about the presidential election, her lines quickly devolved into, "Do you have any psychological problems?" (Apparently commenting that one loathes a certain politician is a red flag.) So these AI therapists don't really pass the Turing test. I've read that if you state to one of them, for instance, "Einstein says everything is relative," it will probably respond, "Tell me more about your family." Many years ago, when the two youngest of our sons were preteens, we acquired a similar program, very simple, which one communicated with by typing, and it would type a reply that the computer's speaker would also read out loud. The kids had endless fun writing sentences such as, "I want [long string of numbers] dollars," and listening to the computer voice retort with something like, "I am not here to fulfill your need for ten quintillion, four quadrillion, nine trillion, fifty billion, one hundred million, two thousand, one hundred and forty-one dollars."

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

On Intellectual Property

Cory Doctorow has an unusually long, information-dense post this bimonth, about the background of the concept of intellectual property:

IP

He reviews the history of open source software and the shift toward increasingly stringent restrictions, leading up to the present situation in which taking the wrapper off a box legally commits users to agreements they haven't yet had a chance to read. He discusses in great detail the principle of "interoperability," which lets all railroads run on the same tracks, all brands of lightbulbs work in lamps from different manufacturers, in general all the benefits of standardization. "Interoperability lowers 'switching costs' –- the cost of leaving behind whatever you’re using now in favor of something you think will suit you better." This advantage to consumers, naturally, is something a lot of commercial interests would like to eliminate or minimize. Doctorow analyzes how companies such as Google and Facebook make it easy for customers to start using their services but hard to get out, sometimes impossible to do so without abandoning a wide network of services and contacts. He explores the differences among copyright, patent, and trademark and how those different "creators' monopolies" became bundled together under the single term "intellectual property" -- a development he disapproves of, by the way.

Market monopolists, according to Doctorow, often strip power from the alleged "creator's monopoly." Corporate monopolists also tilt the balance of power as far as possible from the consumer to the seller. The abuse of DRM, one of Doctorow's recurrent topics, is a conspicuous example. Laws against bypassing software, as more and more devices in common use become computerized, will inevitably lead (according to him) to this result: "Software isn’t just a way to put IP into otherwise inert objects. It’s also a way to automate them, to make them into unblinking, ever-vigilant enforcers for the manufacturer/monopolist’s interests. They can detect and interdict any attempt at unauthorized interoperability, and call the appropriate authorities to punish the offenders." Furthermore, "Even where tech is challenging these monopolies, it is doing so in order to create more monopolies." He mentions the Kindle program and Amazon's dominance of the audiobook market as examples.

This article contains much to reread, digest, and debate. Is Doctorow's concluding manifesto valid? "There are no digital rights, only human rights. There is no software freedom, only human freedom."

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

AI and Human Workers

Cory Doctorow's latest LOCUS essay explains why he's an "AI skeptic":

Full Employment

He believes it highly unlikely that anytime in the near future we'll create "general AI," as opposed to present-day specialized "machine learning" programs. What, no all-purpose companion robots? No friendly, sentient supercomputers such as Mike in Heinlein's THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS and Minerva in his TIME ENOUGH FOR LOVE? Not even the brain of the starship Enterprise?

Doctorow also professes himself an "automation-employment-crisis skeptic." Even if we achieved a breakthrough in AI and robotics tomorrow, he declares, human labor would be needed for centuries to come. Each job rendered obsolete by automation would be replaced by multiple new jobs. He cites the demands of climate change as a major driver of employment creation. He doesn't, however, address the problem of retraining those millions of workers whose jobs become superseded by technological and industrial change.

The essay broadens its scope to wider economic issues, such as the nature of real wealth and the long-term unemployment crisis likely to result from the pandemic. Doctorow advances the provocative thesis, "Governments will get to choose between unemployment or government job creation." He concludes with a striking image:

"Keynes once proposed that we could jump-start an economy by paying half the unemployed people to dig holes and the other half to fill them in. No one’s really tried that experiment, but we did just spend 150 years subsidizing our ancestors to dig hydrocarbons out of the ground. Now we’ll spend 200-300 years subsidizing our descendants to put them back in there."

Speaking of skepticism, I have doubts about the premise that begins the article:

"I don’t see any path from continuous improvements to the (admittedly impressive) 'machine learning' field that leads to a general AI any more than I can see a path from continuous improvements in horse-breeding that leads to an internal combustion engine."

That analogy doesn't seem quite valid to me. An organic process (horse-breeding), of course, doesn't evolve naturally into a technological breakthrough. Development from one kind of inorganic intelligence to a higher level of similar, although more complex, intelligence is a different kind of process. Not that I know enough of the relevant science to argue for the possibilities of general AI. But considering present-day abilities of our car's GPS and the Roomba's tiny brain, both of them smarter than our first desktop computer only about thirty years ago, who knows what wonders might unfold in the next fifty to a hundred years?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

The Rules of Writing

Cory Doctorow's latest LOCUS column explores the issue of whether there are any truly unbreakable writing rules:

Rules for Writers

You're probably acquainted with the collection of "rules" he cites, the Turkey City Lexicon, to which he faithfully adhered for many years. It's a list of colorfully labeled errors into which writers can fall, many of them specific to science fiction:

Turkey City Lexicon

The page begins with a long introduction by Bruce Sterling about the origin and background of the Lexicon. The errors and frequently perpetrated SF tropes are divided into categories such as Words and Sentences, Plots, Common Workshop Story Types, etc. Some of the entries now familiar to most speculative fiction writers include: Tom Swifties (although I prefer to think of them as "Tom Swiftlies," in keeping with the adverbial theme), e.g., "I'm not lying," Pinocchio said woodenly. "Said-bookisms," substituting an outlandishly obtrusive dialogue tag for a simple "said," e.g., "No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die," Goldfinger gloated. "Call a Rabbit a Smeerp," sticking an exotic name on a mundane animal without changing the creature in any material way. Hand waving, "An attempt to distract the reader with dazzling prose or other verbal fireworks, so as to divert attention from a severe logical flaw."

Doctorow's article links the topic of writing rules to Sterling's nonfiction book THE HACKER CRACKDOWN, leading into the hacker's task of analyzing "which devices were likeliest to contain a fatal error." Inherent difficulty—proneness to error—according to Doctorow, is what the writing "rules" are really all about. At some point in his career, he received the epiphany that the guidelines he'd revered for so long "weren't rules at all! They're merely things that are hard to do right!" In the hands of a Heinlein or an Asimov, for example, an "expository lump" can be fascinating. The rule against exposition is better understood as a warning that "most exposition isn't good, and bad exposition is terrible."

It's sometimes said that there's only one truly unbreakable rule in writing: "Don't be boring." Excellent advice, although hardly specific enough to put into practice. It's on the level of Heinlein's rules for how to succeed as an author, which go something like this: (1) Write. (2) Finish what you write. (3) Submit it to an editor who might buy it. (4) Keep sending it out until it sells. He also advised, "Never rewrite except to editorial order," by which I can't imagine he meant one should submit rough drafts without revision. He apparently meant a writer shouldn't bother rewriting an unsuccessful piece from scratch but should devote his or her energy to producing a new work. Yet Heinlein didn't consistently follow his own advice on that point, as demonstrated by his recent posthumously released book THE PURSUIT OF THE PANKERA. It comprises the abandoned original version of the novel published as THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST. The first half of the text has some differences in detail, while the second half radically diverges. (Personally, I prefer the original draft, which reads much more like "vintage Heinlein" than the fun but meandering, self-indulgent NUMBER OF THE BEAST.)

In short, no ironclad rules, just wise guidelines.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

The "Catch" in Author's Monopoly

Cory Doctorow's March LOCUS column asserts, "A Lever Without a Fulcrum Is Just a Stick":

Lever Without a Fulcrum

The "lever" here is copyright law, the "author's monopoly." The article focuses on some ways the common practices of major publishers can use this "lever" as a "stick" to beat creators. According to Doctorow, broad copyright protections designed in theory to safeguard the rights of authors often don't accomplish that goal in practice if publishers' contracts demand control over the exercise of those provisions. Authors, particularly novice writers, usually can't negotiate changes in standard publishing deals; they face "take it or leave it" offers. E-book and audio rights, for example, are seldom left under the creator's control. This situation effectively strips the "author's monopoly" of much of its power. "The fact that the company can’t reproduce your book without your permission doesn’t mean much if the only way to get your book into the public’s hands is through that company, or one of a small handful of companies with identical negotiating positions."

Doctorow analyzes phenomena such as music sampling, record contracts, Audible (the audiobook provider), video streaming, and DRM in relation to the general problem that, "Market concentration at every part of the supply chain is conspiring to make life harder for artists." His proposed solutions involve rights reversion clauses, changes in licensing rules, and unionization, among other possibilities.

I might suggest that authors deal with small presses (both print and e-book) rather than the Big Five. Small publishers can provide a personal touch and, often, more flexible contractual terms. But, of course, the mammoth corporations offer bookstore exposure and high-volume sales; the latter are almost impossible to achieve online without strong marketing skills. Also, an author who feels she lacks the expertise, resources, or time to exploit subsidiary rights effectively might prefer to leave those outlets in the hands of a publisher with the connections and experience to do so for her. It's a puzzlement.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Freedom of Speech Online

Cory Doctorow's latest LOCUS column explores the distinction between freedom of speech in the legal sense and the pragmatic limitations encountered on the Internet:

Inaction Is a Form of Action

He focuses on the effects of the dominance exerted by tech giants such as Facebook and Google. The Constitution forbids government interference with freedom of speech, but it doesn't prevent private businesses from setting their own rules. Constructing a parable of two restaurants, one that forbids political conversation on its premises and another with no such prohibition, he acknowledges that customers who don't like the restrictions of No Politics Diner can eat at Anything Goes Bistro. But suppose No Politics Diner not only buys up all its competitors but branches out to own a variety of other kinds of businesses as well? It's theoretically possible that soon there won't be any privately owned public spaces in town where customers can discuss politics. Without any interference by government, freedom of speech has effectively been limited.

With the pithy comment that Facebook "has hostages, not users," he applies this analogy to online services. When the giants have swallowed up so many of their competitors that (in an exaggerated but still chilling quote) the Internet has become “five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four,” policies set by these companies can restrict online speech even though no state censorship is involved. Services such as Facebook make rules, followed by exceptions to the rules, then additional layers of regulations to close the loopholes created by the exceptions. The resulting incomprehensibly complex tangle of exceptions and loopholes, according to Doctorow, "will always yield up exploitable vulnerabilities to people who systematically probe it." While the trolls run rampant, the rest of us may have no means of defending ourselves against them.

He has a list of suggestions for "fixing" the Internet to transform it into an environment "that values pluralism (power diffused into many hands) and self-determination (you get choose which tech you use and how you use it)." One thing he urges is breaking up the Big Tech monopolies. I have reservations about whether this course of action is practical (or, under current law, legal, but that's an area I don't know much of anything about). It's hard to argue with his summary of the problem, however: "When the state allows the online world to become the near-exclusive domain of a small coterie of tech execs, with the power to decide on matters of speech – to say nothing of all the other ways in which our rights are impacted by the policies on their platforms, everything from employment to education to romance to (obviously) privacy – for all the rest of us, they are making policy."

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Good Art, Problematic Creators

Cory Doctorow's latest LOCUS column discusses the renaming of the John W. Campbell Award. We might also mention (although Doctorow doesn't) other similar controversies recently arising in the SF/fantasy world, such as the renaming of the Tiptree Award and the retiring of the H. P. Lovecraft bust as a trophy for the World Fantasy Award.

Campbell Was a Fascist

A panel at a recent Chessicon (which I participated in) addressed the quandary of how to deal with the works of an author whose personal life and/or beliefs violate our contemporary norms. Do the creator's flaws as a human being negate the value of his or her art? One all-too-recent example outside the realm of literature whom we discussed was Bill Cosby. If not aware of his real-life transgressions, wouldn't we still consider his comedy and TV programs worthwhile? And what about the other actors, innocent of wrongdoing, who suffer when reruns of those programs are made unavailable? Similarly, when a certain deceased editor is credibly accused of immoral conduct, would it make sense to boycott volumes edited by that person when the editor isn't alive to suffer, but innocent authors whose stories appear in those volumes are?

I recently heard a podcast reacting against (as I understood the part I heard) a movement to demote Paul Gauguin from the artistic canon because, as shown by his behavior in Tahiti, he was a pedophile and a racist. Should we deal with problematic authors, artists, filmmakers, actors, etc., differently depending on whether they're alive or dead, and if the latter, how long ago? It's understandable that a reader (viewer, etc.) may not want to give his or her money to living creators guilty of reprehensible behavior or known to hold beliefs the reader considers repellent. In cases of long-dead authors and artists, they're unable to either benefit or suffer from audience response to their works. What about recently deceased objectionable creators? Some audience members may object to giving money to such people's estates, but why? More often than not, the heirs are probably innocent of the dead person's offenses.

Concerning creators who lived so long ago that nobody now alive can be harmed or benefited by our treatment of their works, I see no problem with separating the art from the artist. The former can be great even if the latter was a terrible person. Of course, any individual or group has the right to boycott an artist's work as a form of principled protest. Moreover, the issue of actively honoring a problematic creator by naming an award after him or her is a different, more complicated question. In general, however, it seems to me that if we rejected the work of all artists who were flawed or immoral, we wouldn't have much of a canon left.

Doctorow puts it this way:

"Life is not a ledger. Your sins can’t be paid off through good deeds. Your good deeds are not cancelled by your sins. Your sins and your good deeds live alongside one another. They coexist in superposition."

Likewise, the sins of creators who are or were deplorable human beings coexist alongside their accomplishments as artists. Neither cancels out the other.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Digital Media Bait-and-Switch

Cory Doctorow's latest column targets DRM but touches upon the abusive business practices of digital marketing in general:

DRM Broke Its Promise

The philosophy behind restricted access to the media we "buy" begins with the premise, "The problem with markets is that selling things is inefficient. There are so many people who don’t need the thing, just a momentary use of the thing." So the promise of DRM was, "Thanks to a technology called 'Digital Rights Management,' sellers and buyers could negotiate a subset of rights and a reduced payment for same.. . .In other words, we were told that we must reject the promise of unfet­tered digital in favor of locked-down digital, and in return, we would enter a vibrant marketplace where sellers offered exactly the uses we needed, at a price that was reduced to reflect the fact that we were getting a limited product." As Doctorow sardonically summarizes, "In the futuristic digital realm, no one would own things, we would only license them, and thus be relieved of the terrible burden of ownership." The actual outcome: "We got the limited product, all right—just not the discount." For example, the DRM-protected books from publishers who use that technology cost no less than Tor's unrestricted e-books. The promise of "flexibility and bargains" gave way to the reality of "price-gouging and brittleness."

Doctorow discusses several limitations and abuses arising from the fact that we don't own the digital media products we thought we were purchasing. Without warning or recourse, customers can suddenly lose access to books, music, or video content (e.g., Microsoft's e-book store). Libraries pay more for e-books than print books and have restrictions on the number of times a book can be borrowed. Streaming services control how consumers can use the content they rent or "buy" (e.g., inability to skip commercials). College textbooks are a particularly egregious example. Electronic texts should be cheaper than hardcovers, but that's not necessarily so. Moreover, the login codes for mandatory online supplements have to be purchased afresh every year. Having finished my terminal degree well before e-textbooks, I had no idea of this catch before reading the article. I have a personal gripe with academic publishers (those that publish scholarly works rather than college textbooks): When they started producing electronic as well as print editions of their exorbitantly overpriced books—clearly marketed with libraries, not individual scholars, in mind—the e-book versions should have been cheaper. Much cheaper, within reach of individual would-be readers. Instead, they're typically priced only a few dollars lower than the hardcover editions. A $90 book discounted to $80, to pick a typical pair of figures at random, is still too expensive for the average unemployed or under-employed academic to justify buying. Granted, producing an e-book requires paid labor, just as a print book does. But in the case of an electronic edition of an existing print book, most of that work (editing, proofreading, etc.) has already been done. I often mentally rage, "Don't those people WANT anybody to read their books?" Some of us who would like to do so don't have access to a university library.

In an electronic media market where consumers have little or no choice but to spend "more for less," Doctorow summarizes the state of affairs thus: "DRM never delivered a world of flexible consumer choice, but it was never supposed to. Instead, twenty years on, DRM is revealed to be exactly what we feared: an oligarchic gambit to end property ownership for the people, who become tenants in the fields of greedy, confiscatory tech and media companies." Don't hold back, Mr. Doctorow; what do you REALLY think? :)

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Learning from Fake News

Cory Doctorow's latest LOCUS column explores what "fake news," conspiracy theories, and hoaxes can reveal about our culture:

Fake News Is an Oracle

He begins by discussing the mistaken idea that science fiction predicts the future. Instead, SF "can serve as a warning or an inspiration, influencing the actions that people take and thus the future that they choose." A second function of SF, where the analogy with fake news comes in, is to expose "our societal fears and aspirations for the future" somewhat the way a Ouija board planchette reveals the fears and desires of the users by responding to unconscious movements of their hands. As Doctorow points out, even the most innovative spec-fic creators must choose their material from an existing array of tropes that resonate with their audience. Authors write "stories about the futures they fear and rel­ish." The fiction that gets published, achieves bestseller status, and captures the imaginations of readers reflects hopes and fears dominant in the current popular culture: "The warning in the tale is a warning that resonates with our current anxieties; the tale’s inspiration thrums with our own aspirations for the future."

Similarly, a hoax, conspiracy theory, or false or deceptive news item that gets believed by enough people to make it socially significant "tells you an awful lot about the world we live in and how our fellow humans perceive that world." As an example, Doctorow analyzes the anti-vaccine movement and why its position on the alleged dangers of vaccination seems plausible to so many people. Asking what makes people vulnerable to conspiracy theories and false beliefs, he speculates, "I think it’s the trauma of living in a world where there is ample evidence that our truth-seeking exer­cises can’t be trusted." While the first step in fighting fake news is "replacing untrue statements with true ones," a deeper solution that addresses the roots of the problem is also needed.

Speaking of true and false beliefs, and harking back to the topic of my post of the week before last, I was boggled by a widely quoted comment from a certain junior congresscritter: "I think that there's a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right." Say WHAT? As one article about this remark is quick to point out, using precise language and accurate facts isn't mutually exclusive with being morally right. Ideally, we should aspire to do both:

CNN

The article summarizes the attitude behind the Congresswoman's remark this way, noting that it's not exclusive to her: "My specific fact may be wrong, but the broader point I was making still holds. The problem with that thinking is that it says that the underlying facts don't matter as long as the bigger-picture argument still coheres." This attitude is said (correctly, in my opinion) to lead to a moral "slippery slope."

I would go further, though. I'd call having the correct facts one of the essential preconditions to being morally right. How can we make moral judgments if we aren't certain of the objective materials we're working with? If a speaker's statements about concrete, verifiable facts can't be trusted, should we trust that speaker's version of truth on more complex, abstract matters?

As writers, we in particular should place a high value on accuracy of language. Referring again to C. S. Lewis (as I frequently tend to do), his book THE ABOLITION OF MAN, first published way back in 1947, begins with an analysis of a couple of secondary-school English textbooks sent to him for review. From certain passages in those texts implying that all value is subjective, Lewis expands the discussion to wider philosophical issues and constructs a detailed argument in defense of the real existence of objective values, "the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are. . . . And because our approvals and disapprovals are thus recognitions of objective value or responses to an objective order, therefore emotional states can be in harmony with reason. . . or out of harmony with reason." And how can we recognize which values are "true" or "false" in this higher sense without verifiable knowledge of "the kind of thing the universe is"?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Monopolies, Publishing, and Online Media

Cory Doctorow's latest column briefly surveys the history of antitrust enforcement, considers the effect on creative artists of the concentration of market share in a few mega-organizations, and analyzes a provision of the European Union's new Copyright Directive. Spoiler: He's against it (that one clause, anyway).

Steering with the Windshield Wipers

I must admit my initial reaction to the first paragraph was amusement at a tangential thought. Doctorow illustrates the monopolizing of an industry by a few corporations or only one with this suggestion: "Take off your glasses for a sec (you’re a Locus reader, so I’m guessing that you, like me, are currently wearing prescription eyewear) and have a look at the manufacturer’s name on the temples." If you need glasses to read text on a screen, how are you supposed to read the brand name on them when you take them off? I tried, and as I expected, the print is way too small. LOL. Anyway, Doctorow reveals that most eyeglass frames and lenses are made by the same company that owns the major retailers in the field. (So my personal choice, Lenscrafters, isn't really independent of its alleged competitors such as Pearle Vision. We live in a weird world, all right.) From that point, he asks how we got into this situation and proceeds to discuss Facebook and other Internet social media engines. He offers examples of "overconcentration blues" in film and TV, the music industry, publishing, and social media sites (with particular emphasis on Facebook's privacy problems).

He strenuously objects to the EU Copyright Directive's clause that requires online providers to "block anything that might be unlicensed, using automated filters." In Doctorow's opinion, "This is a plan of almost unfathomable foolishness." One of his primary objections is that the policy won't stop infringement, because filters are susceptible to abuse, "imperfect and prone to catching false positives," and "cheap and easy to subvert." He also believes the rule will be so expensive to comply with that smaller companies will be squeezed out, to the benefit of the mega-conglomerates.

In near-apocalyptic language, he works up to the conclusion that "monopolies are strangling the possibility of a pluralistic, egalitarian society." This article, however, doesn't answer the logical next question: What must we do to be saved? As for the publishing industry, it doesn't seem to me that the dominance of the Big Five (possibly soon to become four) is quite so dire for authors as it used to be. We now have alternative outlets that didn't exist in the past, in the form of a multitude of small presses and e-publishers, as well as inexpensive self-publishing.

Some services, in my opinion, SHOULD be provided by monopolies. Maintaining utility infrastructure such as the electrical grid or the sewer system, for instance. But not publishing.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

What Makes Private Property Private?

Cory Doctorow's latest column explores the doctrine of "terra nullius" (nobody's land), which he traces back to John Locke's 1660 work TWO TREATISES OF GOVERNMENT:

Terra Nullius

Under this theory, private property is created by "a human taking an unclaimed piece of the common property of humanity and mixing it with their labor" to create something new, which then "belongs" to the creative innovator. The catch in this theory, according to Doctorow, is the problem of deciding what constitutes "unclaimed," "common property," or unimproved "nature." European colonizers, for example, viewed the lands of "primitive" people as available for settlement and exploitation because they weren't "owned" by any individual according to the Western concept of ownership—in an act of radical "erasure" of the indigenous peoples. As Doctorow puts it, if those lands belonged to nobody, the "primitives" who lived there must be "nobody."

How does this distinction apply to intellectual property? Doctorow summarizes the claim as follows: "The labor theory of property always begins with an act of erasure: 'All the people who created, used, and improved this thing before me were doing something banal and unimportant—but my contribution is the step that moved this thing from a useless, unregarded commons to a special, proprietary, finished good.'” One application he cites is the example of the Beatles. The R&B rhythms the Beatles incorporated into their music didn't count as owned; they were considered common property, available to anyone who chose to use them. On the other hand, if any musician nowadays takes recognizable elements of the Beatles' songs and incorporates them into new material, that's considered theft. How do we decide what's owned and what's free for use without acknowledgment or compensation? A similar phenomenon that occurred to me, not mentioned by Doctorow, is the 20th-century folk revival. Some folk musicians recorded traditional songs and copyrighted them, thereafter claiming ownership of the song (not simply of their particular arrangement of the song). Here's a forum thread discussing what elements of traditional songs can be copyrighted, as opposed to changes by individual singers that should be considered part of the "folk process" rather than private property:

Folk Song Collectors and Copyright

Two remarks in Doctorow's article that particularly struck me:

"The Ayn Randian hero is delusional: his (always his) achievements are a combination of freeriding on the people whose contributions he’s erased, and bleating that everyone who had the same idea as him was actually stealing his idea, rather than simply living in the same influences he had."

Here's how Doctorow applies this principle to authorship, using his own work as an example: "I wrote my books. They were hard work. I made real imaginative leaps that contributed to the field. Also: I wrote them because I read the works of my peers and my forebears. If I hadn’t written them, someone else would have written something comparable. All these things can be true. All these things are true. Originality exists, it just doesn’t exist in a vacuum."

In my opinion, that last sentence makes a valid and important point. Nothing in his essay, however, supplies guidelines on how to determine what creative elements qualify as "original" contributions that deserve protection as private property.

For example, here's an update about the ongoing lawsuit among Tom Clancy's estate, his widow, and his first wife over who gets to profit from past and future works featuring Clancy's character Jack Ryan:

Who Has Custody of Jack Ryan?

While I don't think anyone would deny that Clancy created and therefore "owned" Jack Ryan according to both ethical and legal principles, the question of who holds rights to the character after Clancy's death (or should the profits be split on some kind of chronological basis, depending on when the particular books or films were released?) is tangled up in a dense legal and contractual controversy.

Speaking of "commons," if we could trace back far enough, we'd find that every creative work was originally made by some individual or particular group of creators. It's just that once a work gets so old we can't identify the creator(s), we categorize it as "traditional" and part of the "common property of humanity."

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Is the Internet Revolutionary?

Happy American Thanksgiving!

Cory Doctorow's latest LOCUS column discusses whether the Internet qualifies as "revolutionary":

What the Internet Is For

His answer: The Internet runs on a revolutionary principle but is not, in itself, revolutionary. The principle, as he describes it, is "the 'end-to-end' principle, which states that any person using the internet can communicate with any other person on the internet without getting any third party’s permission." We've become so used to the capacity to do this that we forget how mind-boggling it is. He goes on to examine computers and encryption from the same perspective. Finally, he asserts that the Internet is "a necessary but insufficient factor for effecting revolution" and offers support for that view. An exciting and optimistic article, recommended reading for the detailed explanations I haven't summarized.

This weekend, as usual, ChessieCon will be held just north of Baltimore, and my husband and I will appear on the program. I'll report on the panels and other events next week. Jo Walton will be this year's Guest of Honor!

ChessieCon

Meanwhile, happy turkey day (or whatever your feast of choice may be).

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Pro-Tech and Anti-Tech

Cory Doctorow's current LOCUS essay is titled "Let's Get Better at Demanding Better from Tech":

Demanding Better from Tech

Doctorow rejects the "anti-tech/pro-tech false dichotomy" in favor of a more nuanced analysis of the issues. As he puts it, there's no getting around the fact that "your future is going to have more technology in it, so the question isn’t, 'Should we use technology?' but rather, 'Which technology should we use?'” Is it possible to enjoy the advantages of high-tech and connectivity without losing our privacy? He urges us to embrace "the ability to separate a technology from its social and economic context," a process science fiction can help with. This article touches on surveillance, privacy, licensing agreements, advertising, the Internet age, market forces, and "neoliberal capitalism." He maintains that we can find ways to benefit from tech without surrendering our individual rights and resigning ourselves to the dominance of corporations that equate to "colony life-forms that use us like gut-flora, maneuvering us to help them thrive and reproduce, jettisoning us or crushing us if we cease to serve their needs."

The dilemma of convenience versus privacy also applies to the practice of tracking through fitness devices, which Rowena discusses in her latest blog, although Doctorow doesn't mention that issue. As for Alexa, I don't use her, but if I did, I would be quite disturbed at the idea of her betraying my trust by ratting on me to higher authority.

Doctorow suggests that "AI-apocalypses"—scenarios in which super-intelligent computers become our "overlords"—remain popular because they "resonate with our current corporate situation." Corporations, however, unlike actual gut-flora, comprise people who, we hope, can be reasoned with. So Doctorow ends with a upbeat message that all isn't necessarily lost, where personal rights and privacy are concerned, and there's hope.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Grabbing Attention

Cory Doctorow's latest LOCUS essay expounds upon the "arms race" for our attention in the media. He compares the "race" between the purveyors of memes and the consumers of them to the evolution of our immune response in reaction to the mutations of pathogens.

Arms Race for Your Attention

A fresh meme—for instance, the exciting new game everybody's playing—hits the "attentional soft spot" by deploying "cognitive traps" that lure the target into an "escape-proof limbic dopamine loop." Most people do eventually escape, though, as they build up resistance to the allure. So the forces clamoring for our attention have to escalate their intensity and develop new tricks.

By comparing old-style advertisements to those we see today, Doctorow illustrates how much harder we are to captivate than earlier generations of audiences. I'm reminded of how tame the TV commercials of my childhood in the 1950s and early 60s were, in contrast to those on the networks nowadays. Viewing some of those old commercials on DVDs of vintage TV programs vividly highlights the difference. Although I wouldn't go back to the 50s unless a time-twisting genie offered to compensate me with wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, in some ways that really was a more innocent era. Of course, nowadays we can fast-forward through commercials, so the ads have to become really flashy and cool-looking to snag our attention and keep us from skimming past them. As for Facebook ads, the scam e-mails that flood our in-boxes, and phone solicitations (which appear positively quaint compared to the Internet messages), does anybody actually respond to any of those appeals? Strange as it seems to me, SOMEBODY must, or the would-be sellers wouldn't keep producing them.

Doctorow also remarks that the battle for our attention is waged for more serious purposes than selling stuff and hooking people on games. It has political applications, too. So it's important to keep our "immune systems" healthy.

As for us authors, how can we best attract the attention of potential readers—in polite ways that don't backfire by turning them off? I've never paid for an Internet ad (although I've accepted the offer of free ads on a review website, where at least people visit voluntarily and are interested in finding new books). Since I ignore those kinds of things myself, why would I expect potential buyers of my books to respond to them? I don't want to become one of the scammers (which is the only issue discouraging me from trying that "boost post" strategy Facebook keeps nagging me about). On the other hand, if I don't promote myself in some way, nobody will know my books exist. When e-books were a novelty, being an e-published novelist was enough to attract attention. When my former publisher Ellora's Cave, the pioneer of erotic romance for a female audience, was practically the only game in town for the erotic paranormal romance subgenre, being one of their authors distinguished a writer from the throng, at least in a modest way. Now it's become a prime example of Doctorow's thesis that potential audiences invariably develop resistance to each new "attentional soft spot."

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Optimistic Disaster Fiction

In the current LOCUS, Cory Doctorow writes about his forthcoming novel WALKAWAY, which he labels a "utopian disaster novel." In a deliberate "rebuttal" of the disaster scenario or post-apocalyptic saga where civilization disintegrates into chaos and most people turn into raging savages the moment our technological infrastructure collapses, he has written a story "about people doing right for one another under conditions of adversity." He describes this book as "a weaponized counternarrative of human goodness":

Weaponized Narrative

After all, in the present state of society, do most people indulge in any greedy, lawless behavior they can get away with? No, says Doctorow, most of us are restrained by our sense of what's normal and decent. Although I applaud his message about empathizing with the people "who are picking up the pieces and starting over again. The helpers" (a term he borrows from Mr. Rogers' famous statement about how to discuss scary news stories with children), the word "weaponized" in the context of celebrating goodness irresistibly reminds me of the maxim, "Fighting for peace is like fornicating for chastity." The imagery contains a certain inherent dissonance. Still, Doctorow deserves praise for rejecting what he calls the "old narrative, the xenophobia story," which "makes crises into tragedies."

A good example of the kind of disaster fiction he favors can be found in one of my favorite series, S. M. Stirling's "Emberverse," which begins with the apocalyptic novel DIES THE FIRE. Granted, civilization does collapse, with a great deal of violence involved. As the inciting catastrophe, every form of advanced technology—electricity, internal combustion, nuclear reactions, gunpowder or any other kind of explosion, steam power—instantaneously and permanently stops working. Our large cities and their surrounding suburbs can't sustain themselves in preindustrial conditions, so of course millions perish horribly. The focus of DIES THE FIRE and the series as a whole, however, centers on the people who work together to save as many of their neighbors as possible and build new communities. Despite the mass die-off, the cannibalism (which we only hear about, not see firsthand), and the brutal gangs that seize power in some areas, this is the most humane and, yes, optimistic post-apocalyptic series I've ever read.

What other examples of optimistic disaster fiction exist in recent fantasy and SF? (With a positive tone overall, that is, not just culminating in a "happy ending" reversal at the conclusion like the "Hunger Games" series.)

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Cory Doctorow on Despotic Dominion

Cory Doctorow's latest LOCUS column delves into some oddities of copyright, intellectual property, and the DMCA (which he calls "a giant, gnarly hairball of a law"), beginning with a quotation from William Blackstone (the great 18th-century legal authority) on private property as "sole and despotic dominion" over the entity of which ownership is claimed:

Sole and Despotic Dominion

The essay first discusses the history of "intellectual property," a relatively recent term. He cites the notice that used to appear in paperbacks, warning the reader that the book couldn't be copied, lent, resold, etc., under penalty of law—in short, strictly speaking the buyer couldn't even give away the book. Doctorow calls BS on this warning. However, he applies the same judgment to the similar warning in current books, "No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical..." without the publisher's permission—which seems more problematic.

He remarks, "If copyright law were a system of magic in a fantasy novel, we'd never buy it." In his opinion, it's riddled with "exceptions and carve-outs that ignore its alleged underlying rationale and just fiddle things around for the sake of narrative convenience." Most of the article deals with the application of the DMCA to software, with wide-ranging effects many consumers never think about. The mind boggles to contemplate the number and variety of common devices that contain electronic software—and therefore fall under protection of the DMCA. Nowadays our homes are full of gadgets that have copyrighted software inside them. As with all those computer programs whose conditions of use most customers never read, under this system we don't really own many of the objects we buy, in the sense that what we can do with them is legally limited. Doctorow labels this system "feudalism."

Doctorow's essays on copyright always leave me ambivalent. As an author, of course I want strong copyright protection. As a reader, researcher, and occasional anthologist (decades ago), however, I don't want copyright to last forever. The main effect of an absurdly extended copyright period on older obscure authors is to guarantee that they remain obscure; an editor who might want to reprint a story by such an author, resurrecting the work from the grave as it were, could find it prohibitively hard to discover who holds the rights. And as a fan I get irked with Disney (for example) for locking away films they keep unavailable to potential viewers and researchers but don't make any profit from themselves, e.g. the very early cartoon shorts (which would be out of copyright by now if they were books) or SONG OF THE SOUTH (permanently taken off the market because its depiction of race relations has been Overtaken by Events). Regarding music: I've heard that authors can get in trouble if they reproduce so much as half a line from a copyright-protected song in a work of fiction without paying for permission to quote. Where's the logic in that restriction? Either the song is well known or not. If so, a brief snippet from it does the creator no harm, and you're quoting something your audience is probably familiar with anyway. If not, the quotation does the creator a favor, in effect, by drawing attention to an otherwise neglected musical work.

Even in a capitalist society, no ownership right is absolute. (You can't burn down your own house with impunity or build an addition onto it without a permit.) But where should lines be drawn?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Privacy Under Siege?

Speaking of privacy, as Rowena's recent post does: Cory Doctorow's column in the latest LOCUS delivers warnings about privacy threats from the Internet and the cutting-edge "Internet of Things."

Privacy Wars

Doctorow discusses the "absurd legal fiction" of the ubiquitous "notice and consent" requirement. You know, those policy statements and conditions of use for which we have to check "accept" before we can run software or access certain web content. As Doctorow points out, nobody can really read all that stuff. To do so in detail with every device or program would eat up most of our waking hours. Yet by checking "accept," we often give permission for all sorts of tracking software to interact with our computers and phones, without even realizing we've done so. Pokemon Go players probably realize the game "knows" where they are at all times, but they accept that knowledge as part of the cost of playing the game.

I don't own a smart phone and never plan to get one (unlike my husband, who upgraded to such a device a while back). So at present my activities and movements in the physical world can't be tracked by any incarnation of Big Brother (public or private—and isn't it interesting that Orwell envisioned an all-seeing government, yet nowadays it's mainly commercial entities that observe us?). I'd direly miss the convenience of ordering from my regularly-visited websites without having the enter information every time, though. And it's a great boon, when I'm not sure whether I own copy of a certain book, to learn from a glance at the Amazon book page whether I've bought it already. To get that convenience, we have to accept cookies and all that comes with them.

Doctorow's vision of the totally connected future takes on an apocalyptic tone, as in this paragraph:

"You will ‘interact’ with hundreds, then thou­sands, then tens of thousands of computers every day. The vast majority of these interactions will be glancing, momentary, and with computers that have no way of displaying terms of service, much less presenting you with a button to click to give your ‘consent’ to them. Every TV in the sportsbar where you go for a drink will have cameras and mics and will capture your image and process it through facial-recognition software and capture your speech and pass it back to a server for continu­ous speech recognition (to check whether you’re giving it a voice command). Every car that drives past you will have cameras that record your like­ness and gait, that harvest the unique identifiers of your Bluetooth and other short-range radio devices, and send them to the cloud, where they’ll be merged and aggregated with other data from other sources."

Do you think our digital footprints will, on a practical level, become that detailed and all-pervasive anytime in the near future? What company or agency would have the time, resources, or motivation to aggregate and make active use of so much miscellaneous data? On the other hand, I agree with Doctorow that the mere fact of having all this information unguardedly accessible SOMEWHERE is frightening.

Coincidentally, in an interview in the same issue of LOCUS, Charles Stross speculates on the benefits and potential hazards of living surrounded by interactive objects. He narrates an anecdote from the pioneering days of microprocessors, back in the 1970s. Someone joked that eventually the chips would become so cheap we'd put them in doorknobs. Everybody laughed. If you've stayed at a hotel lately, you've routinely encountered computerized door locks. Stross proposes the example of replacing city sidewalk pavement with stones containing chips that have "the equivalent of an iPhone 4 in computing power." Then suppose most pedestrians are wearing clothes with radio ID tags designed to interact with the washing machine for optimal cleaning—which incidentally also contain unique identifying data. If a person collapses from a heart attack, the sidewalk could summon an ambulance instantly. But a fully networked city could also track us everywhere we go.

Forsooth, smart technology can indeed be a mixed blessing.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

E-Books and Libraries

Cory Doctorow's latest LOCUS column:

Peace in Our Time

The "peace" in the title refers to the "e-book wars" that pit authors, publishers, and libraries against each other. Giant online booksellers such as Amazon come into the equation, too. I'm not sure I understand the practical details of Doctorow's plan for authors to retail their own books, but I definitely agree (judging from the numbers cited in this article) that publishers are currently ripping off libraries with exorbitant e-book prices. And I didn't know that the Overdrive system was imposed on libraries by publishers.

My personal experience of borrowing an e-book from our local library through Overdrive involved a monumental tome, PAUL AND THE FAITHFULNESS OF GOD, by N. T. Wright, my favorite New Testament scholar. Like most academic-level publications, the book is priced beyond the usual budget of a casual reader. To read it for free from the library, I had a long wait because our county system owns only one "copy" of this volume. Now I know the probable reason for this bottleneck—the library's cost of "buying" from the publisher the right to lend multiple "copies."

Doctorow's article contains lots of information new to me. Interesting discussion even if you don't completely agree with his proposals.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt