AE

Cory Doctorow is the cooler, more radical version of Douglas Rushkoff. This book is like a shorter, less boring version of the book “Surveillance Capitalism”.
So few people are going to understand these comparisons....

Doctorow is one of the few great technologists who isn't a grifter or an oligarch demon. He understands the power of modern technology and how it is being used for the enrichment of the wealthy rather than the betterment of masses.

The problem is that neoliberal deregulation spearheaded by Reagan, and Thatcher resulted in every industry becoming overly monopolistic, including the tech industry. The tech monopolists achieved their power not because they're smarter or better than their competitors, but because they leveraged the broken system to keep competition down.

The Chicago School of Demons and Ghouls, led by the hellhounds Friedman and Bork, have indoctrinated courts into accepting their crackpot economic ideals, such as that monopolies are actually good, as normal: “Bork's investors consolidated their gains. They sponsored economics chairs and whole economics departments and created the Manne Seminars, an annual junket in Florida, where federal judges were treated to luxury accommodations and ‘continuing education' workshops on Bork's unhinged theories.”

This is what we're supposed to believe qualifies as a “democracy.”

These corporations could never get this big if not for the shift in economic theory spearheaded by the Chicago Ghouls. The corporations then use their power to strengthen regulations that primarily benefit themselves and not the people. The “lovers of free market” will always leverage the arm of the state to protect their corporate interests. This is inevitable under capitalism.

This includes fighting against, say, the right to repair. The power of the state is used to crush you from doing what you want with the product you own. “Apple uses patent to prevent the independent manufacture of some parts; it uses anti-circumvention to prevent the independent installation of other parts; it uses contractual arrangements with recyclers to ensure that most used phones are not broken down for parts; it uses trademark to block the re-importation of parts that have escaped the recyclers' shredders.” All of this behavior should be criminalized. People who care about deflating or breaking up big tech should look precisely at THIS to do so. This is what needs to be deregulated. Yet conservatives never talk about this. Isn't that curious? Like they actually stand on the side of capital and not the people....

Some more fun quotes as a reflection of our “democracy”...

“Regulators can't regulate tech because they're clueless, sure. But why are they clueless? Because the process by which regulators and lawmakers understand issues starts from the presumption that there will be an adversarial process and a neutral referee, and monopolies turn that into a chummy backroom deal between a handful of executives from the industry and a handful of their former colleagues who are temporarily regulating their former colleagues.”

Or look up the story of Mark, who took medical photos of his son's groin to send to his doctor, but that photo was uploaded to the Google Cloud, got marked as CSAM (child sexual abuse material). The cops talked to him, realized this was all a misunderstanding, but not Google...

“Google deleted his account and all his data, including every family photo he'd ever taken. He lost his phone number (he was a Google Fi customer). He lost his phone, too (he was an Android user). He lost his email address. He lost the two-factor authentication he used to log in to accounts, which meant that he lost every other account that relied on either 2FA, a phone number or email to log in. He lost every document he had on Google's cloud.”
What a great thing to have one company have all this power with absolutely zero oversight!

“Today's tech giants have not invented an interop-proof computer. They've invented laws that make interoperability illegal unless they give permission for it. A new, complex thicket of copyright, patent, trade secret, noncompete and other IP rights has conjured up a new offense we can think of as ‘felony contempt of business model'—the right of large firms to dictate how their customers, competitors and even their critics must use their products.”

The book goes into detail as to how to fix the problem.

It's all very interesting stuff. I highly suggest it to anyone who cares about understanding the tech industry.

They FINALLY released a Parenti book as an audiobook. This guy is the much better Noam Chomsky and if I had gotten ahold of this book 2 years ago, I think it would have accelerated my ideological development much faster, saving me a lot of time. I recomend this book to ANYONE interested in expanding their political horizons, reinterpreting their preconceived understanding of modern history, or if you think the Soviet Union was bad.

The author has a strong criticism of Soviet Russia, rightfully so. But he does not see things in black and white like what we in The West have been led to believe. He asserts, and backs up with hard evidence, that the collapse of the Soviet Union has resulted in an overall decrease in the material wellbeing of the people within Soviet countries. Capitalism didn't make their lives better; It made them worse.

Here ares some of my favorite quotes:
~~
Fascism & Capitalism:

Speaking about Germany in 1932, “True to form, the Social Democrat leaders refused the Communist party's proposal to form an eleventh-hour coalition against Nazism. As in many other countries past and present, so in Germany, the Social Democrats would sooner ally themselves with the reactionary Right than make common cause with the Reds.” This holds true to this day. SocDems are not allies to the left because they will inevitably support fascism if it means maintaining capitalism.

“In both Italy in the 1920s and Germany in the 1930s, old industrial evils, thought to have passed permanently into history, re-emerged as the conditions of labor deteriorated precipitously. In the name of saving society from the Red Menace, unions and strikes were outlawed. Union property and farm cooperatives were confiscated and handed over to rich private owners. Minimum-wage laws, overtime pay, and factory safety regulations were abolished. Speedups became commonplace. Dismissals or imprisonment awaited those workers who complained about unsafe or inhumane work conditions. Workers toiled longer hours for less pay. The already modest wages were severely cut, in Germany by 25 to 40 percent, in Italy by 50 percent. In Italy, child labor was reintroduced.” This is excellent evidence to show how similar modern conservatism is to fascism. They support the same economic policies.

“Italian fascism and German Nazism had their admirers within the U.S. business community and the corporate-owned press. Bankers, publishers, and industrialists, including the likes of Henry Ford, traveled to Rome and Berlin to pay homage, receive medals, and strike profitable deals. Many did their utmost to advance the Nazi war effort, sharing military-industrial secrets and engaging in secret transactions with the Nazi government, even after the United States entered the war. During the 1920s and early 1930s, major publications like Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, Saturday Evening Post, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and Christian Science Monitor hailed Mussolini as the man who rescued Italy from anarchy and radicalism.“
As I've said in previous book reviews, the fact that the USA backed the Allies in WW2 instead of the Axis powers is a historical fluke. The predominant ideology of US elites at the time were far closer to the fascists. This is shown by how much the US media and oligarchs fawned over the fascists, even helping them after the US started fighting them. Corps love fascists. The US took in as many fascists as they could as the war was ending. Fascists learned from the US in order to do fascism better. The West did a far worse job De-Nazifying countries than the Soviets. And all of this is because Capitalism and Fascism are 2 heads of the same monster. Fascism is Capitalism in decay.

“Under the protection of U.S. occupation authorities, the police, courts, military, security agencies, and bureaucracy remained largely staffed by those who had served the former fascist regimes or by their ideological recruits—as is true to this day. [...] “In comparison, when the Communists took over in East Germany, they removed some 80 percent of the judges, teachers, and officials for their Nazi collaboration; they imprisoned thousands, and they executed six hundred Nazi party leaders for war crimes.” Woulda killed more Nazi's but the rest fled to the open arms of The West.

“Corporations like DuPont, Ford, General Motors, and ITT owned factories in enemy countries that produced fuel, tanks, and planes that wreaked havoc on Allied forces. After the war, instead of being prosecuted for treason, ITT collected $27 million from the U.S. government for war damages inflicted on its German plants by Allied bombings.” Imagine that for a moment. A company collaborated with the Nazis and then got money from the US government because they bombed the company's factory. Insane.

The fascists were never removed from Italy because the US prefers fascism over socialism “The Italian neofascists were learning from the U.S. reactionaries how to achieve fascism's class goals within the confines of quasidemocratic forms: use an upbeat, Reaganesque optimism; replace the jackbooted militarists with media-hyped crowd pleasers; convince people that government is the enemy—especially its social service sector—while strengthening the repressive capacities of the state; instigate racist hostility and antagonisms between the resident population and immigrants; preach the mythical virtues of the free market; and pursue tax and spending measures that redistribute income upward.” This is literally what Faux News and Republicans do every day.
~~~
US Terrorism (Post WW2)

“In pursuit of counterrevolution and in the name of freedom, U.S. forces or U.S.-supported surrogate forces slaughtered 2,000,000 North Koreans in a three-year war; 3,000,000 Vietnamese; over 500,000 in aerial wars over Laos and Cambodia; over 1,500,000 in Angola; over 1,000,000 in Mozambique; over 500,000 in Afghanistan; 500,000 to 1,000,000 in Indonesia; 200,000 in East Timor; 100,000 in Nicaragua (combining the Somoza and Reagan eras); over 100,000 in Guatemala (plus an additional 40,000 disappeared); over 700,000 in Iraq; over 60,000 in El Salvador; 30,000 in the “dirty war” of Argentina (though the government admits to only 9,000); 35,000 in Taiwan, when the Kuomintang military arrived from China; 20,000 in Chile; and many thousands in Haiti, Panama, Grenada, Brazil, South Africa, Western Sahara, Zaire, Turkey, and dozens of other countries, in what amounts to a free-market world holocaust.”
The Black Book of Capitalism is thicker than anyone would like to admit. But when the US does terrorism, that's good, right? We've never been known for invading countries for unjust reason, right?


This is my favorite quote: “There is no such thing as freedom in the abstract. There is freedom to speak openly and iconoclastically, freedom to organize a political opposition, freedom of opportunity to get an education and pursue a livelihood, freedom to worship as one chooses or not worship at all, freedom to live in healthful conditions, freedom to enjoy various social benefits, and so on. Most of what is called freedom gets its definition within a social context.”

Both negative freedoms and positive freedoms must come together for the betterment of all people. Arguing just for negative freedoms is absurd.

This quote was in the context of revolutionary governments, and how many of them throughout the last ~100 years were not sufficiently democratic. This gave the US empire justification to overthrow the countries.

“U.S. policymakers argue that social revolutionary victory anywhere represents a diminution of freedom in the world. The assertion is false. The Chinese Revolution did not crush democracy; there was none to crush in that oppressively feudal regime. The Cuban Revolution did not destroy freedom; it destroyed a hateful U.S.-sponsored police state. The Algerian Revolution did not abolish national liberties; precious few existed under French colonialism. The Vietnamese revolutionaries did not abrogate individual rights; no such rights were available under the U.S.-supported puppet governments of Bao Dai, Diem, and Ky.”

These revolutions improved the material conditions of the people within the country. Did they become Western-style democracies? No. But that wasn't the goal. The goal was making people's lives better. Those don't necessarily coincide. The US does not have a perfect system and forcing it upon other countries that do not want it is evil. The West's goal isn't really to improve the wellbeing of the countries with their invasions, coups, and terror campaigns. It's to “open up the economy” and infect the countries with US-based corporate interests.

The West doesn't care about the freedom of the people to live a healthy, fulfilling life. It cares about the “freedom” of corporations to exploit the people. US-backed propagandists poison the minds of those in the West to claim these countries aren't “free”.

“So a conservative think tank like the Heritage Foundation rated Cuba along with Laos, Iraq, and North Korea as countries with the lowest level of ‘economic freedom.' Countries with a high level of economic freedom were those that imposed little or no taxes or regulations on business, and did without wage protections, price controls, environmental safeguards, and benefits for the poor. Economic freedom is the real concern of conservatives and plutocrats; the freedom to utilize vast sums of money to accumulate still vaster sums, regardless of the human and environmental costs.”

We cannot look at a country's “freedom” based on the metrics of our own country. We must look at it on the metrics of its own history. Not “more or less free than us” just “more or less free than before”: “But what of the democratic rights that these peoples were denied? In fact, with the exception of Czechoslovakia, these countries had known little political democracy in the days before communism. Russia was a czarist autocracy, Poland a rightist dictatorship with concentration camps of its own, Albania an Italian fascist protectorate as early as 1927, Cuba a U.S.-sponsored dictatorship. Lithuania, Hungary, Rumania, and Bulgaria were outright fascist regimes allied with Nazi Germany in World War II.”

State socialism “transformed desperately poor countries into modernized societies in which everyone had enough food, clothing, and shelter; where elderly people had secure pensions; and where all children (and many adults) went to school and no one was denied medical attention.” That'd be nice.

~~~
Left Anticommunism

This was the most interesting aspect of the book, the arguments against self-described anti-capitalists who denigrate the Soviet Union as “not real socialism”. I've dabbled in this myself and I was impressed by how well the author provided a thorough, nuanced retort against such a belief.

Was the Soviet Union perfect? No. But “In the three decades after the Bolshevik revolution, the Soviets made industrial advances equal to what capitalism took a century to accomplish—while feeding and schooling their children rather than working them fourteen hours a day as capitalist industrialists did and still do in many parts of the world.”

What matters is the material conditions of the people. Were they better or worse in Socialist countries pre-1990 vs Capitalist countries then? Depends on the metric. It certainly didn't help that the West strove to topple them at every turn: “As with Nicaragua, so with Mozambique, Angola and numerous other countries in which U.S.-financed mercenary forces destroyed farmlands, villages, health centers, and power stations, while killing or starving hundreds of thousands—the revolutionary baby was strangled in its crib.” Hard to improve the material conditions of the people when you've got Coca Cola death squads and the US Marines trying to kill you.

Many people in socialist countries took for granted their lack of consumer debt, their universal healthcare, their guaranteed employment, universal housing, their met basic material needs, and focused instead on the lack of consumer goods: “People took for granted what they had in the way of human services and entitlements while hungering for the consumer goods dangling in their imaginations. [...] “Once our needs are satisfied, then our wants tend to escalate, and our wants become our needs. A rise in living standards often incites a still greater rise in expectations. As people are treated better, they want more of the good things and are not necessarily grateful for what they already have.” The people of the second-world weren't “yearning for freedom”. They were yearning for stuff.

This failure to meet the wants of the people was not inevitable under the economic system. It was because the socialist countries were too busy fighting off an endless barrage of attacks on all fronts from the capitalist countries: “One reason siege socialism could not make the transition to consumer socialism is that the state of siege was never lifted. As noted in the previous chapter, the very real internal deficiencies within communist systems were exacerbated by unrelenting external attacks and threats from the Western powers. Born into a powerfully hostile capitalist world, communist nations suffered through wars, invasions, and an arms race that exhausted their productive capacities and retarded their development.” Bombs, not blue jeans.

The entire history of the USSR from its very inception was being constantly under siege. “One might recall how, in 1918-20, fourteen capitalist nations, including the United States, invaded Soviet Russia in a bloody but unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the revolutionary Bolshevik government.” When your enemy has literally committed a nuclear holocaust against civilians, and has also invaded you once already, it makes sense why you might want to stock up on nukes. It's a shame that this arms race took place, because if the US (AKA the aggressor) chose to seek a true genuine peace, we might be living in a more peaceful world today, with a less massive military industrial complex.

~~~
Capitalist “freedom”

Meanwhile in the first-world capitalist countries, we don't get universal healthcare, universal housing, job guarantees, free higher education, unions, pensions. Not then, before the wall fell, and after it did fall, there was no reason for Capital to capitulate to Labor's demands because Labor had no standard bearer to hold up and say “the Soviets have this, why don't we?” So the social safety net was gutted in the West.

What is very clear is that countries that were once part of the Soviet Bloc and then became capitalist are objectively worse for the majority of people. This is an undeniable fact. Their social safety nets and state-owned factories were sold off for pennies on the dollar to private firms, creating vast inequalities and absolutely destroying the wellbeing of the people.

“Without making compensation, West German capitalists grabbed almost all the socialized property in [East Germany], including factories, mills, farms, apartments and other real estate, and the medical care system—assets worth about $2 trillion—in what has amounted to the largest expropriation of public wealth by private capital in European history.
The end result of all this free-market privatization in East Germany is that rents, once 5 percent of one's income, have climbed to as much as two-thirds; likewise the costs of transportation, child care, health care, and higher education have soared beyond the reach of many.” Don't you feel so free??

“The overthrow of communism brought a rising infant mortality and soaring death rates in Russia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Latvia, Moldavia, Rumania, Ukraine, Mongolia, and East Germany. One-third of Russian men never live to sixty years of age. In 1992, Russia's birth rate fell below its death rate for the first time since World War II. In 1992 and 1993, East Germans buried two people for every baby born. The death rate rose nearly 20 percent for East German women in their late thirties, and nearly 30 percent for men of the same age.” Things have not gotten much better. How is it possible for capitalism to be the pinnacle of an economic system of the people within newly capitalist countries are objectively worse off than they were before? Why do 2/3rds of Russian people think things were better under the USSR? Because it was better.

“The overthrow of communism has brought a sharp increase in gender inequality. The new constitution adopted in Russia eliminates provisions that guaranteed women the right to paid maternity leave, job security during pregnancy, prenatal care, and affordable day-care centers.” Crazy how they had that decades ago and “the richest, freest country on earth” still hasn't figured it out.

Here's my 2nd favorite quote from the book:

“According to Noam Chomsky, communism ‘was a monstrosity,' and ‘the collapse of tyranny' in Eastern Europe and Russia is ‘an occasion for rejoicing for anyone who values freedom and human dignity.' I treasure freedom and human dignity yet find no occasion for rejoicing. The postcommunist societies do not represent a net gain for such values. If anything, the breakup of the communist states has brought a colossal victory for global capitalism and imperialism, with its correlative increase in human misery, and a historic setback for revolutionary liberation struggles everywhere.”
~~~
Marxism

Then the book ends with a basic overview of Marxism which was good too. It's as pertinent today as it was in 1867. Good stuff.

I'm not gonna pretend to know what it's like being black in the USA. But after reading this book and “We Were 8 Years in Power: An American Tragedy” (2017) by Ta-Nehisi Coates in 2019, and a few others, I'm starting to pick up some patterns. There seems to be two camps in the black community:

• Those who see the poverty and brutality and suffering faced by people in their communities as being directly caused by their material conditions and those in power. This is exemplified by Coates, MLK, Ibram X. Kendi, and Du Bois. And...

• Those who see the poverty and brutality and suffering faced by people in their communities as being the fault of those suffering in the communities. This is best exemplified by Booker T. Washington, Bill Cosby, Barrack Obama, Ben Shapiro, every conservative ever, and most white Democrats.

As an aside, it's always a lot of fun reading really old books and seeing the author dedicate an entire chapter to just completely trashing their intellectual colleagues in the most eloquent ways possible. Couldn't tweet your shade back then, had to send it through a publishing house. Du Bois had an entire chapter dedicated to verbally destroying Booker T. Washington and it's the best chapter of the book, IMO.

So anyway, I fall into the former of those two categories and this book provides fascinating insight into the failure of Reconstruction. We've never reconciled with this failure and we're still reeling from it to this day.

I found this book fascinating and would recommend it to anyone interested in a snapshot of history not discussed enough.

This falls into the category: “The Lie of American Exceptionalism”

It's interesting to read this book and think about the media trying to scare us about China's “oppressive social credit score” system.
Meanwhile we have a patchwork of far less transparent black box systems that control...
• if you get into college
• if you get offered a job
• If you get a mortgage
• If you get targeted by scam universities or scam credit systems
• if you get approve to rent a home
• if you get fired or promoted
• if you get stopped by the police
• if you get bail
• if you get a longer criminal sentence
• if you get probation
And more. Existing systemic bias is coded into these algorithms, resulting in a venire of “science” and “objectivity” used to justify further systemic oppression.
Racist cops find more crime in poor non-white neighborhoods → algorithms designed to find “where crime might happen” takes this garbage data and outputs garbage results → Cops further oppress these neighborhoods, locking up more poor people → An algorithm looks at the material conditions of a defendant and determines that since he's poor, his friends and family are and have had run-ins with the law, and he has few professional prospects, he is likely to reoffend and gets a more stringent sentence.
This feedback loop reinforces our racist, classist criminal justice system while claiming to use “scientific, non-biased” tools. This is just one of the many examples of “big data” run amuck outlined in ths book.

Many more include leveraging big data to suck as much money out of poor people as they can possibly get away with. Because when we have a global economic system primarily driven by profit instead of helping people, the newest technological revolutionary tools will be used not to push humanity forward, but to suck up all our personal information to serve us targeted ads, many of which include ads to scam us.

Great book. highly recommended.

Short book. And a little bit closer to what I want: a book arguing that intellectual property laws hinder art more than they help. The author's biography proves that he walks the walk. And while he does not call for the complete abolition of all IP laws, he does call for a sensible middle ground that prioritizes the interests of artists and the security of the people over the interests of the mega-corporations. This is a middle-ground I can get behind.

I am still looking for a book elaborating on what a society with zero IP laws might look like, and how it would be a net benefit to society. My next book on this journey will be: “Against Intellectual Monopoly” by Michele Boldrin & David Levine. Though I worry that it will be more libertarian theorizing....

This book focuses on how copyright laws as they exist today are not well equipped to function in the internet age, and that the calls for more stringent enforcement mechanis are resulting in, and will continue to result in a less secure, more surveillance-riddled internet that benefits no one except for the already rich & powerful, as well as authoritarian governments.

The current enforcement of copyright laws have resulted in intentionally insecure products that are designed to deliberately disobey their owner in order to primarily protect mega-corporations. The laws criminalize individuals from simply being able to access their own legally purchased content in the privacy of their own homes in ways that outside eyes do not appreciate. Want to rip your Blu-Rays? That's a crime. Want to jailbreak your device? Well now it's intentionally bricked.

Digital locks like DRM do not benefit the artist, only the distributor. We do not own our content if purchased with DRM. It can be locked away at any time for any reason by the corporate middleman. This has happened before. Books we buy getting deleted because of some rights issue, entire digital libraries getting destroyed because the service shuts down. And they call pirates “criminals.” Piracy is the only rational action in this insanely irrational landscape.

“We can't stop copying on the Internet, because the Internet is a copying machine. Literally. There is no way to communicate on the Internet without sending copies. You might think you're ‘loading' a web page, but what's really happening is that a copy is being placed on your computer, which then displays it in your browser.”

Stronger laws or more stringent enforcement cannot stop violations without fundamentally destroying the Internet. Though destruction of the fundamental principles of the internet are ultimately the goal of the corporate middlemen that benefit from trademark laws and the corrupt, out of touch, authoritarian members of government.

“Viacom told the court that its industry couldn't peacefully coexist with an option to keep your personal data private.” If that is the case, then I choose privacy over the existence of Viacom and the capitalist system that perpetuates them.

“Though SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, the TPP, the WCT, and their ilk differ in their specifics, they share certain broad themes that represent the legislative agenda for the entertainment lobby. And if you wanted to sum up that agenda in a single sentence, it would be this: More intermediary liability, with fewer checks and balances.”

“Adding censorship to the Internet means adding surveillance to the Internet. Creating Great Firewalls means creating secret, unaccountable lists of censored material that result in mass abuse, even in the most liberal of democracies. It doesn't matter if you're censoring for copyright infringement or for human-rights reports. The result is the same: a surveillance state.”

“If you weaken the world's computer security—the security of our planes and nuclear reactors, our artificial hearts and our thermostats, and, yes, our phones and our laptops, devices that are privy to our every secret—then no amount of gains in the War on Terror will balance out the costs we'll all pay in vulnerability to crooks, creeps, spooks, thugs, perverts, voyeurs, and anyone else who independently discovers these deliberate flaws and turns them against targets of opportunity.
So where does all this tie in with the copyfight? The laws behind digital locks make it illegal to determine what your computer is doing. They make it illegal to stop your computer from doing things you don't like. And they make it illegal to tell other people about what's going on inside your computer.
As you read this, digital locks are proliferating in new and deadly ways.”

His reasonable middle-ground is thus: Blanket licenses. “Here's how blanket licenses work: first, we collectively decide that the ‘moral right' of creators to decide who uses their work and how is less important than the ‘economic right' to get paid when their works are used Then we find entities who would like to distribute or perform copyrighted works, and negotiate a fee structure. The money goes into a ‘collective licensing society.'
Next we use some combination of statistical sampling methods (Nielsen families, network statistics, etc.) to compile usage statistics for the entity's pool of copyrighted works, and divide and remit the collective-licensing money based on the stats.”

This is how radio DJ's are able to play almost any song. It's a noble solution that would “enables the largest diversity of creators making the largest diversity of works to please the largest diversity of audiences.” Though I still think full abolition would be better.

I think this book really needs a new edition, as a lot of its references and statistics appear dated. I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in knowing more about copyright in the digital age.