CBP: “Our Predator drone flying over U.S. cities and monitoring protests is causing confusion and raising questions that are mostly answered by the name of the drone.”
Elite modernism is the only way to the future: if you don’t have manifestos printed with sleek fonts, if you don’t have engineering blueprints of moon gulags and actual recipes to dethrone god, then most probably you found job in a wrong ministry of propaganda.
Radical Curiosity, the show revisiting the legacy of Buckminster Fuller I’ve curated with @rosapera, opens in september at @EspacioFTef Madrid. Here’s an interview going into the whys of the project, and how we are still living under Bucky’s shadowhttps://t.co/KiSx6MIsxH
— Jose Luis de Vicente (@Macroscopist) June 19, 2020
“It is well known that intracranial lesions can be associated with psychiatric symptomatology. But this is he first and only instance I have come across in which hallucinatory voices sought to reassure the patient of their genuine interest in her welfare, offered her a specific diagnosis (there were no clinical signs that would have alerted anyone to the tumour), directed her to the type of hospital best equipped to deal with her problem, expressed pleasure that she had at last received the treatment they desired for her, bid her farewell, and thereafter disappeared.”
Last weekend, Nnedi Okarafor and I did a really fun, wide-ranging panel on politics and sf for Tor Books’ TorCon, moderated by Kayti Burt; it was the closing panel, and Tor has transcribed some of the highlights.
Nnedi talked about how her writing process always starts with characters: “I’ve been writing about this particular character for a pretty long time, and she’s kind of existed in different ways and stories, but writing about her—it started with her.”
And we discussed how sf can present “challenging issues and diverse world views for conversation and change.”
Nnedi talked about how genre is a “skewed lens” to see painful issues with new eyes, “and when you see it with new eyes, you can see more.”
I talked about how sf can give you a (possibly false and sometimes harmful) story to reach for when you need to understand what’s going to happen in moments of crisis or extremis:
“As pulp writers, science fiction writers don’t want to confine themselves to man-against-man or man-against nature, we like the plot-forward twofer, where it’s man-against-nature-against-man, where the tsunami blows your house over and your neighbors come over to eat you. That kind of story of the foundational beastiality of humans does make for great storytelling, but it’s not true. That’s not actually what happens in crises.
“In crises, the refrigerator hum of petty grievance stops and leaves behind the silence to make you realize that you have more in common with your neighbors. It’s when people are are their best.”
So, the Internet Archive copyright lawsuit thing is more complicated than it appears. This is a good rundown of the legal questions involved, while this NPR piece describes the reaction to “National Emergency Library” that pushed things to the brink.
TL;DR, the IA provides crucial archiving services (including the Wayback Machine), but they’ve recently started a large-scale illegal lending model that put their other services at risk.This is really disappointing to me and I’m going to write a long, dry post about it.
Essentially, the Internet Archive has historically only allowed books to be “lent out” digitally to as many people as the IA has physical copies stored. So if they have 2 copies of Mary Sue’s new book, only 2 people can be reading their PDF scans at a time. This was enough for many publishers and authors to look the other way (although groups like the Science Fiction Writers of America has been decrying the practice for years, since in many cases they were “lending” books they didn’t have licensing for.)
Because, while this is
similarto the system used by libraries,
libraries
payfor each lending copy of their book (ensuring that the authors, artists, publicists, editors, etc are getting paid). the IA, from many accounts, did not pay for all of these books in the first place. but again, small-scale enough that nobody went after them for it.
Due to the pandemic, they removed the waiting list for these books, arguing it was in the national public interest to have access to knowledge. Great! I respect this ideology.
Except that rather than paying ~$0 for two digital copies w/o author permission, they’re now paying ~$0 for
unlimitedcopies w/o author permission. Writers who put years of labor into these books began kicking up a fuss (including Chuck Wendig, who’s receiving death threats because I guess he’s the most recognizable name involved?) and publishers sued.
So nobody’s goal is to get the Archive taken down entirely. Instead, the argument is that the damages claimed in the lawsuit could absolutely be large enough to cripple them. The IA ended the emergency lending program earlier than planned, so we’ll see if the suit goes through after all.
So, why is this complicated?
On the one hand, copyright law sucks right now and many are understandably infuriated at the idea of huge publishing companies suing a free library.
On the other hand, they
were not operating as a library,and creators were failing to be paid for their work. with the new lending model, Mary Sue Author (who, as an average author, receives wages below the poverty line) is worried that this change is actively preventing her from making a living. If she’s a new author, an impact to her numbers is enough to ensure that the publisher doesn’t buy her next book.
If Mary Sue is a marginalized author, she’s especially at risk of economic insecurity. If Mary Sue and authors like her cannot afford to write books, writing remains a domain of privilege.
(Also, there’s some legal argument that if Mary Sue fails to actively protect her copyright, she could lose it. I’m not an expert and won’t weigh in on this.)
But wait! (Common Counterarguments swirling on the Twitters):
“Writing should be a hobby anyway. If you care about making money for your art, you’re not a real artist.” Hopefully we are all familiar by now with how shit this argument is; we see it a lot around here flung at visual artists. Pay people for their work! Also, again: this is how you get a bunch of WASP authors and nobody else.
“It’s actually the publishers screwing the authors, so this is a punishment for the publishers.”Except it is…not. It is not. The people most likely to suffer would be the writers, not the publishers.
“Libraries are closed, so what are we supposed to do about it?”This one is tricky right now, but I’d first check to see if your library participates in an e-lending service (many do). check out OverDrive or Audible, which do pay authors. Project Gutenberg has free classics in the public domain. Amazon has its own problems, but Kindle Unlimited allows access to many,
manyfree books where the author is actually seeing payment.
“Okay, but why should the digital library of Alexandria go down because some authors are mad?”I honestly
reallywant to ask this question to whoever was making these lending decisions at the IA, because I also am very pissed about it. I don’t know why they thought publishers would ignore this very blatantly illegal thing (not even “grey area”–just under current copyright law, completely illegal). Regardless of whether copyright law currently sucks ass, it was a weird move! And now bad things are happening.
“
Fuck off, everybody mad about this writes YA and science fiction, not real literature. Who cares if those guys get paid?” Seriously. This is a very common rebuttal on Twitter right now. Burn Twitter.
“Honestly you’re right but I just want free shit.” is it weird that this is the response I most respect
In case you skimmed all that, my point isn’t “copyright law is good, actually.” It’s that the issue is more complex than donation drive posts have portrayed it as.
They only thing I would add to this very comprehensive account is that it’s not, actually, complicated.
IA were NEVER acting as a library. They were ALWAYS stealing. Libraries are awesome. NO ONE IS COMING AFTER LIBRARIES.
They weren’t acting as a library,
they were just stealing.
P.S. when I was dirt poor I never stole fucking books. Unlike Disney and behemoth visual production companies, publishing companies operate on tiny margins. Producing a book is a fuck of a lot of labour. On top of the author, who often spends literal years writing the book, you have the agent, the commissioning editor, proofreaders, copy editors, possibly structural and line editors, typesetters, cover artists, marketing bods AND MORE.
Most of these are highly skilled jobs that take years of training. When I was a freelance proofreader and copy editor, my standard rates were £27.50 and £33 an hour respectively.
Making books is EXPENSIVE. And readers have a low tolerance for paying for books, so there’s often not a lot of profit on any individual book. One book not selling well and covering that expense puts the author’s ability to publish future books in danger.
So you just DON’T FUCKING STEAL BOOKS.
When I was dirt poor, I read the many books that are now in the public domain. The Count of Monte Cristo is fucking fantastic - and I might never have read it had I not been too poor to read anything else.
It is EASY to continue to read without stealing from living authors.
Don’t be a dick.
So there are some pretty important factual errors in this post.
1. Libraries pay authors every time they lend books.
Not in the USA. They do in some other territories, but not directly; rather, governments create separate pots of money for authors that are administered by collecting societies to compensate them for library use.
But in the USA, libraries don’t - and never have, and almost certainly never, ever will - pay a lending right. This is 100% iron-clad fact and totally indisputable, and any argument that starts with an assertion to the contrary is either bad faith or wrong on the facts.
2. The Archive is not a library.
Of course the Archive is a library. “Library” is not the same as “public library.” There are thousands - probably tens of thousands - of private lending libraries, including those maintained by artists’ organizations. SFWA actually hosts an annual event in one of these libraries in NYC.
3. Digital lending is illegal.
This was comprehensively settled by the Hathi Trust decision.
Libraries are absolutely allowed to scan their holdings and lend them to to their patrons.
4. Libraries need licenses to lend books.
Again, this is 100% false as a matter of copyright law and practice.
Precisely ZERO of the books on the shelves of your local library were “licensed” to be lent. Libraries don’t require permission to lend books (and other materials) that they lawfully acquire. They never, ever have, and they almost certainly never will.
There are open questions about the legality of the National Emergency Library, though it’s important to note several facts about its holdings and usage:
*
Every book in the NEL is more than 5 years old. There are zero current releases.
*
The average NEL checkout is <30m - that is to say, people look up quotes or facts from these books, then check them back in - suggesting that the NEL is more like the refernece desk at your local library than its shelves.
*
The vast majority of the books in the NEL have NO ebook edition. You can’t check these books out on Overdrive. They are utterly unavailable for so long as libraries are closed.
*
The NEL’s ebooks are scanned pages, not OCR’ed text. They don’t readily substitute for Epubs or other “real” ebooks and are - and always will be - a distant second choice and reference of last resort for the people who use them.
Again, I’m here for a factual or legal or ethical argument about the NEL - but if we’re going to have that argument, let’s actually confine ourselves to the facts, not incorrect statements of law, or incorrect statements about the NEL’s holdings or usage.
“Subcultures, countercultures, and fringe communities all serve as insulated social experiments and testing grounds that allow us to transgress memes and ultimately detect weak signals on probable futures.”
Would also be really annoying if they wore heat resistant gloves to throw back the hot tear gas canisters and if this got shared to all those protesting…
Would be a further shame if people started covering cameras (as seen in Hong Kong, with protestors using poles and rakes to lift cardboard boxes over security cameras), blinding drone optics with laser pointers, and flooding police-run reporting apps with junk data.
It would be a shame if the protesters noted that plainclothes cops can be identified a number of ways, such as wearing steel-toed boots; an armband or wristband of a particular color; driving white, black, or dark blue cars with concealed lights; or having the outline of cuffs visible in the back pocket or the bumps of an armor vest’s shoulder straps under their shirt.
It would be a shame if the protesters began making their signs out of inch-thick plywood to stop rubber bullets, forming a tight shield wall to prevent police from singling out and mobbing individual protesters. It would be a shame if the people behind the shield wall held up umbrellas so that tear gas canisters fired over the heads of the front line will be bounced away. It would be a shame if protesters began constructing improvised armor vests out of duct tape, hardback books, and ceramic tiles.
It would be a shame if protesters started wearing safety glasses, hard hats, respirators, and gardening gloves, all of which can be found at the same hardware stores as the plywood. It would be a shame if they started using traffic cones (the kind without the hole in the top) upside-down buckets, or other improvised lids to contain tear gas by placing them over the canisters.
It would be a shame if protesters learned that police scanners are legal to own in the US, allowing them to learn where police are moving and what routes they intend to take. It would be a shame if they discovered that these scanners can be used to send as well as receive, allowing them to flood the scanner frequencies with noise.
Even if you don’t follow Avi Schiffmann, you’re probably familiar with the 17-year-old’s work: he’s the creator of http://nCoV2019.live and http://2020Protests.com, the two leading tracking tools for covid cases and protests you can join.
In an interview with Tanya Basu for MIT Tech Review, Schiffmann describes how he taught himself to build these dashboards when he made a site that scraped his school’s athletic stats portal and made it legible and useful.
When he decided to use those skills to build his covid tracker, he put a call out on some coding sites and attracted a dozen high-school aged volunteers, many in Asia, who helped write the scrapers that pull in the data for http://nCoV2019.live.
As the project grew more sophisticated and then begat his protest tracker, he used online tutorials and communities to acquire the knowledge he needed to overcome new challenges (“The thing is, you can learn anything online”).
Since the first days of the maker movement, it’s been clear that the ability to search and discuss is the major thing that differentiates “makers” from earlier generations of tinkerers, like the radio and electronics hobbyists that kept Modern Mechanix in business.
Schiffmann is a self-confessed “bad student” with a 1.7GPA and 60% attendance, which he attributes to his consuming passion for his programming projects. It’s a testament to how much of pedagogy turns on getting out of the student’s way when their passions are inflamed.
I read my first novel - Alice in Wonderland - one day in second grade. I pulled it off the shelf before class started and sat on the carpet to read it, and my teacher, Bev Panikkar, saw that I was engrossed in it and didn’t call me to class.
She let me sit there for two consecutive school days while I read, and while I was kicking off a lifelong passion for literature (also, I married a woman called Alice!).
As interesting as the pedagogical and makerish implications of Schiffmann’s story, I’m also fascinated by the role that scraping plays in making these essential information resources.
Scraping went from a honorable practice (the core of Google Search, for example) to a potential felony over the course of decades, as companies that made their fortunes scraping others turned around and sued, banned and blocked anyone who returned the favor.
But scraping is one of the key tools for attaining Adversarial Interoperability, which once kept tech dynamic and responsive to users, and the absence of which has contributed greatly to its stagnation and corruption.
The people who perpetrated genocidal settler colonialism needed a way to square their slaughter and theft with their conception of themselves as moral actors. They settled their consciences with the doctrine of “terra nullius.”
Terra nullius - empty land - is a variation on Locke’s labor theory of value, the idea that the only thing you can be said to truly own is your body and its labor, and when you blend your labor with natural resources, the finished product is yours.
Locke is a key grifter thinkfluencer, because at the core of Locke’s theory is the idea that there are natural things that no one else is using for you to come along and pick up and blend with your labor to turn into property.
Inevitably “stuff no one is using” turns out to be a fancy way of saying “stuff that is widely used by people I consider to be subhuman.”
So when settler colonialists arrived in Australia, they declared it to be empty land, and the people who’d lived there for as long as behaviorally modern humans have existed to be non-persons.
This relegation to subhuman status created the conditions for genocide, enslavement, torture, rape, and more.
The Australian establishment’s means of escaping this legacy is to simply pretend it doesn’t exist.
That’s why Australian PM (and noted piece of shit) Scott Morrison’s response to the Black Lives Matter protests in Australia by flatly stating that there was “no slavery in Australia” and accusing protesters of not being “honest about our history.”
Morrison’s claims are easily refuted. For example, the State Library of Western Australia has an 1896 image of enslaved aboriginal people in neck-chains, outside Roebourne Gaol. This image was posted to Facebook as part of the discourse of Australia’s history of slavery.
But it was immediately removed by Facebook’s nudity filter, a fully automated machine learning system that enforces the system’s “community standards.” The user who posted it had his account restricted in punishment for violating these standards.
Facebook removed 39.5m “nudity” images in the first quarter of this year. At that rate, you won’t be surprised to learn that more than 99% of these removals were fully automated and untouched by human hands.
It’s true that FB is largely free from nudity, and this fact is often cited by advocates of other kinds of filtering - say, copyright filtering - as evidence that FB COULD block the content they object to, but it chooses not to.
In a sense, those critics are correct. FB has demonstrated that it is willing to accept immense collateral damage from its filtering - whether that’s censoring survivors of terrorist atrocities in the name of filtering out “extremist content.”
Or blocking images that prove the genocidal history of a nation at a moment when its leadership is denying that history even exists.
FB doesn’t intend to block this speech, but it knows this “overblocking” is inevitable when it turns over moderation to automated filters.
By its actions, FB is telling us that this is an acceptable price to pay.
But that doesn’t mean that filtering on broader criteria - harassment, profanity, libel, copyright infringement - is just more of the same. These categories are FAR broader than “nudity.”
What’s more, the consequences of overblocking are far more damaging to the purpose these filters are supposed to serve. A copyright filter that is supposed to protect artists and then goes on to censor artistic work that’s mistaken for infringement HARMS artists.
An “extremist content” filter that is supposed to protect us from terrorist violence and then goes on to block the images and stories of survivors of that violence literally adds insult to injury.
An anti-harassment filter that blocks the discussions of harassment targets who describe the words used to harass them helps harassers, not their victims.
FB got 2.5 million takedown appeals in Q1/2020, and restored 613,000 pieces of content. Even if you accept the dubious claim that FB’s human checkers got it right, that’s 613,000 acts of illegitimate censorship.
As for the photo of the enslaved aboriginal people, it was restored too – after The Guardian’s Josh Taylor asked FB embarrassing questions about the removal.
“Getting reporters to take up your cause” is not a scalable solution to errors in mass automated filtering.
FB can’t moderate at scale. No one can. Adding filters “works” in the sense that you can block most “bad content” if you don’t care how much good content gets blocked by mistake alongside of it.
And the fallout from this overblocking is not evenly distributed. Not only are some disfavored minorities (sex workers, queer people, people of color) more likely to have their discussions censored.
They’re also less likely to have access to reporters who’ll embarrass FB and it into taking action.
The answer isn’t to lard FB with more censorship duties for it to fuck up even worse - it’s to cut FB down to size, to a scale where communities can set and enforce norms.
Because the problem with FB isn’t merely that Mark Zuckerberg is uniquely unsuited to making decisions about the social lives and political discourse of 2.6 billion people.
It’s that NO ONE is capable of doing that job. That job should not exist.
PS: Scott Morrisson retracted his no-slavery claim:
it is 2100. we have long since entered post-scarcity due to Kuiper belt mining and the Dyson sphere around Sun. your consciousness, hosted on Amazon’s Europa server, is about to be erased by MIT Press, now part of Disney, because you shared a DRM-protected PDF with a friend
Sprite Lightning in HD : This phenomenon occurs in the sky over our heads, not the sea. It is a type of lightning known as red sprite, and rarely has it ever been photographed in this detail. Even though sprites have been recorded for over 30 years, their root cause remains unknown. Some thunderstorms have them, but most don’t. These mysterious bursts of light in the upper atmosphere momentarily resemble gigantic jellyfish. A few years ago high speed videos were taken detailing how red sprites actually develop. The featured image was captured last month in high definition from Italy. One unusual feature of sprites is that they are relatively cold – they operate more like long fluorescent light tubes than hot compact light bulbs. In general, red sprites take only a fraction of a second to occur and are best seen when powerful thunderstorms are visible from the side. via NASA
“I cut the cake, you pick your half” is basically the only good political idea anyone has ever had. Everything else is either derived from that, or self-serving behavior dressed up to look like an idea.
The transformation of Teen Vogue into a radical leftist publication is one of the brightest spots in this ridiculous timeline. I am so here for their big think pieces explaining socialist feminism:
And for their timely dunks on the likes of Andrew Cuomo, whose shuck they were onto long before he publicly sided with the violent criminals in uniform that have turned NYC into a battleground.
And now, true to the spirit of lifestyle mags, they’ve got some practical advice for readers: “What to Do If the Police Shoot You With a Rubber Bullet,” by Laura Pitcher.
tldr: Rubber bullets aren’t (just, or always) rubber, and they can kill or maim you. Wear protective clothing. Watch out for collateral injuries as you race to flee the cops who are shooting you for protesting police violence.
Seek medical care, because fractures aren’t always obvious (co-signed - I once stood up and walked for like 15 mins after getting creamed by a drunk on my bike; I didn’t walk without crutches for 6 months afterwards).
If a fragment is lodged in your body (or eye socket, etc), get a doctor to remove it. Don’t try to remove it for yourself.
Look, it’s fucking terrible that Teen Vogue has to explain this stuff to its readers.
But it’s fucking AMAZING that they’re there to explain it.
Request from Great Ormond Street hospital for 1,500 face masks from Cornwall Cloth Mask volunteer makers, needed by Sunday (just in case anyone was under the mistaken impression that our government was handling anything, anything at all). Anyone ready to get making?
Speculative fiction writer, sustainability researcher and friend of the blog Andrew Dana Hudson pointed us towards a show piece he wrote on the new gameplay footage for the new VR FPS shooter ‘Solarpunk’
Perhaps I’m being ungenerous to an early-stage trailer for a game that will eventually be very different. But in less than three minutes, the gameplay video seems to embrace most everything solarpunk as I’ve known it has been reacting against: soulless corporate aesthetics (covered up by plants), a future empty of diverse peoples and cultures, gunplay as the answer to delicate social and environmental problems, the centering individual heroes rather than collective action.
Worth a read if you are interested in the future of Solarpunk and how its aesthetic will get used as it moves into its new more widely known phase in culture, out in the sun. I think it speaks to our communities need to continually restate our commitments to create a multitude of spaces for indigenous sovereignties, reproductive justice, and radical queer politics.
Between 17th March 2020 and 17th May 2020 we found ourselves in isolation within the extended cityscape of Singapore. As inhabitants of what become known as “The Circuit Breaker” we watched and listened…
“What the word means is simple enough in German. Antifa is short for antifaschistisch, or anti-fascist. In the most literal sense, one might hope this label could apply to almost all modern German people and politicians.”
“Ethnographers can provide accounts that start from first-person experiences of otherwise-global phenomena, like changing rainfall patterns and frequent, high-intensity wildfires, and demonstrate how these layer into other lived encounters with sociality and infrastructure, like supply-chain ruptures, ventilator shortages, vaccine distribution, and digital contact tracing.”
“I hope us in the space sector can help young black, hispanic, white & asian kids have hope. Hope is having a future to look forward to. We are responsible for changing that narrative from despair to hope. Space is that future, not to abandon Earth but to help save it.” @capogloupic.twitter.com/d96e0ug1Kr
“Progress means: humanity emerges from its spellbound state no longer under the spell of progress as well, itself nature, by becoming aware of its own indigenousness to nature and by halting the mastery over nature through which nature continues its mastery.”
