This week on my podcast, part one of a serialized reading of my 2020 Onezero/Medium book How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism, now available in paperback (you can also order signed and personalized copies from Dark Delicacies, my local bookstore).
This week on my podcast, I read my November 2020 Locus column, Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results, a critical piece on machine learning and artificial intelligence that takes aim at the fallacy that improvements to statistical inference will someday produce a conscious, cognitive software construct. It’s a followup to my July 2020 column, Full Employment, which critiques the fear/aspiration of automation-driven unemployment.
The problems of theory-free statistical inference go far beyond hallucinating faces in the snow. Anyone who’s ever taken a basic stats course knows that “correlation isn’t causation.” For example, maybe the reason cops find more crime in Black neighborhoods because they harass Black people more with pretextual stops and searches that give them the basis to unfairly charge them, a process that leads to many unjust guilty pleas because the system is rigged to railroad people into pleading guilty rather than fighting charges.Understanding that relationship requires “thick description” – an anthropologist’s term for paying close attention to the qualitative experience of the subjects of a data-set. Clifford Geertz’s classic essay of the same name talks about the time he witnessed one of his subjects wink at the other, and he wasn’t able to determine whether it was flirtation, aggression, a tic, or dust in the eye. The only way to find out was to go and talk to both people and uncover the qualitative, internal, uncomputable parts of the experience.
Quantitative disciplines are notorious for incinerating the qualitative elements on the basis that they can’t be subjected to mathematical analysis. What’s left behind is a quantitative residue of dubious value… but at least you can do math with it. It’s the statistical equivalent to looking for your keys under a streetlight because it’s too dark where you dropped them.
This week on my podcast, I read my lastest Locus column, Free Markets, a postmortem of sorts on the delivery issues with my record-breaking audiobook Kickstarter for Attack Surface, the third Little Brother book.
This week on my podcast, the third and final part of “Privacy Without Monopoly: Data Protection and Interoperability,” a major new EFF paper by my colleague Bennett Cyphers and me.
It’s a paper that tries to resolve the tension between demanding that tech platforms gather, retain and mine less of our data, and the demand that platforms allow alternatives (nonprofits, co-ops, tinkerers, startups) to connect with their services.
This week on my podcast, Part Two of “Privacy Without Monopoly: Data Protection and Interoperability,” a major new EFF paper by my colleague Bennett Cyphers and me.
It’s a paper that tries to resolve the tension between demanding that tech platforms gather, retain and mine less of our data, and the demand that platforms allow alternatives (nonprofits, co-ops, tinkerers, startups) to connect with their services.
This week on my podcast, Part One of “Privacy Without Monopoly: Data Protection and Interoperability,” a major new EFF paper by my colleague Bennett Cyphers and me.
It’s a paper that tries to resolve the tension between demanding that tech platforms gather, retain and mine less of our data, and the demand that platforms allow alternatives (nonprofits, co-ops, tinkerers, startups) to connect with their services.
Here’s part thirty-one, the conclusion of my new reading of my novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (you can follow all the installments, as well as the reading I did in 2008/9, here).
This is easily the weirdest novel I ever wrote. Gene Wolfe (RIP) gave me an amazing quote for it: “Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is a glorious book, but there are hundreds of those. It is more. It is a glorious book unlike any book you’ve ever read.”
Here’s how my publisher described it when it came out:
Alan is a middle-aged entrepeneur who moves to a bohemian neighborhood of Toronto. Living next door is a young woman who reveals to him that she has wings—which grow back after each attempt to cut them off.Alan understands. He himself has a secret or two. His father is a mountain, his mother is a washing machine, and among his brothers are sets of Russian nesting dolls.
Now two of the three dolls are on his doorstep, starving, because their innermost member has vanished. It appears that Davey, another brother who Alan and his siblings killed years ago, may have returned, bent on revenge.
Under the circumstances it seems only reasonable for Alan to join a scheme to blanket Toronto with free wireless Internet, spearheaded by a brilliant technopunk who builds miracles from scavenged parts. But Alan’s past won’t leave him alone—and Davey isn’t the only one gunning for him and his friends.
Whipsawing between the preposterous, the amazing, and the deeply felt, Cory Doctorow’s Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is unlike any novel you have ever read.
Here’s part thirty of my new reading of my novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (you can follow all the installments, as well as the reading I did in 2008/9, here).
This is easily the weirdest novel I ever wrote. Gene Wolfe (RIP) gave me an amazing quote for it: “Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is a glorious book, but there are hundreds of those. It is more. It is a glorious book unlike any book you’ve ever read.”
Here’s how my publisher described it when it came out:
Alan is a middle-aged entrepeneur who moves to a bohemian neighborhood of Toronto. Living next door is a young woman who reveals to him that she has wings—which grow back after each attempt to cut them off.Alan understands. He himself has a secret or two. His father is a mountain, his mother is a washing machine, and among his brothers are sets of Russian nesting dolls.
Now two of the three dolls are on his doorstep, starving, because their innermost member has vanished. It appears that Davey, another brother who Alan and his siblings killed years ago, may have returned, bent on revenge.
Under the circumstances it seems only reasonable for Alan to join a scheme to blanket Toronto with free wireless Internet, spearheaded by a brilliant technopunk who builds miracles from scavenged parts. But Alan’s past won’t leave him alone—and Davey isn’t the only one gunning for him and his friends.
Whipsawing between the preposterous, the amazing, and the deeply felt, Cory Doctorow’s Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is unlike any novel you have ever read.
In an interview in the LA Review of Books, Technology and Politics Are Inseparable: An Interview with Cory Doctorow, Eliot Peper digs into the backstory and ethos of the Little Brother books in general and Attack Surface in particular:
Attack Surface explores how technology is not the solution to social problems, but a morally neutral accelerant to political action, and that ultimately only politics can solve social problems. How did you learn this lesson? How did it change your worldview? What does it mean for someone who wants to contribute to building a better future?
I started in politics — my parents are activists who started taking me to protests when I was in a stroller. But in 1977, when I was six, we got our first computer (a teletype terminal and acoustic coupler that let me connect to a DEC minicomputer at the university my dad was studying at). I never thought that computers on their own could solve our political problems — but I always thought that computers would play an important role in social and political struggles.
Technology and politics are inseparable. There’s a kind of nerd determinism that denies politics (“Our superior technology makes your inferior laws irrelevant”). But just as pernicious is the inverse, the politicos who insist that technology is irrelevant to struggle, sneering about “clicktivism” and “solutionism.” I have logged innumerable hours wheatpasting posters for demonstrations to telephone poles. I can’t believe that anyone who claims networked computers don’t change how politics work has ever wheatpasted a single handbill.
Cryptography cannot create a stable demimonde that is impregnable to oppressive, illegitimate states — over time, you and your co-dissidents will make a mistake, and the protection of math will vanish. But the fact that it’s not impregnable doesn’t disqualify cryptography from being significant to political struggle. Nothing is impregnable. Crypto is a tool — not a tool for obviating politics, but a tool for doing politics.
Moreover, the existence of crypto — the fact that everyday people can have secrets that can’t be read without their consent — changes the equilibrium in oppressive states. The privilege of the powerful — secrecy — has spread to the general public, which means that leaders who are tempted to take oppressive action have to take account of the possibility that the people they oppress will be able to plan their downfall in ways that they will struggle to detect.
Science Fiction Cirklen is a Danish collective that works to translate and publish science fiction in Danish; years ago, they published a print edition of the book and have now released a free, Creative Commons-licensed ebook edition in Epub and PDF!
