This week on my podcast, I read a recent post from my Pluralistic.net blog/newsletter: “AI’s productivity theater,” about the severe mismatch between the bosses who buy AI to increase their workers’ efficiency, and the utter bafflement of the workers who are expected to use the AI…somehow.

A new research report from the Upwork Research Institute offers a look into the bizarre situation unfolding in workplaces where bosses have been conned into buying AI and now face the challenge of getting it to work as advertised:

https://www.upwork.com/research/ai-enhanced-work-models

The headline findings tell the whole story:

* 96% of bosses expect that AI will make their workers more productive;

* 85% of companies are either requiring or strongly encouraging workers to use AI;

* 49% of workers have no idea how AI is supposed to increase their productivity;

* 77% of workers say using AI decreases their productivity.

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(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus Magazine column, Unpersoned>; about the enormous power that we’ve given to tech giants to determine who can participate in modern life, and why the answer to the giants’ failure to wield that power wisely is to take it away, rather than attempting to perfect their use of it.

AT THE END OF MARCH 2024, the romance writer K. Renee discovered that she had been locked out of her Google Docs account, for posting “inappropriate” content in her private files. Renee never got back into her account and never found out what triggered the lockout. She wasn’t alone: as Madeline Ashby recounts in her excellent Wired story on the affair, many romance writers were permanently barred from their own files without explanation or appeal. At the time of the lockout, Renee was in the midst of ten works in progress, totaling over 200,000 words (Renee used Docs to share her work with her early readers for critical feedback).

This is an absolute nightmare scenario for any writer, but it could have been so much worse. In 2021, “Mark,” a stay-at-home dad, sought telemedicine advice for his young son’s urinary tract infection (this was during the acute phase of the covid pandemic, all but the most urgent medical issues were being handled remotely). His son’s pediatrician instructed Mark to take a picture of his son’s penis and upload it using the secure telemedicine app.

Mark did so, but his iPhone was running Google Photos, with auto-synch turned on, so the image was also uploaded to his private Google Photos directory. When it arrived there, Google’s AI scanned the photo and flagged it for child sexual abuse material. Google turned the issue over to the San Francisco Police Department, and furnished the detective assigned to the case with all of Mark’s data — his location history, his email, his photos, his browsing history, and more.

At the same time, Google terminated Mark’s account and deleted all of their own copies of his data. His phone stopped working (he had been using Google Fi for mobile service). His email stopped working (he was a Gmail user). All of his personal records disappeared from his Google Drive. His Google Authenticator, used for two-factor authentication, stopped working. Every photo was deleted from his Google Photos account, including every photo he’d taken of his son since birth.

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This week on my podcast, I read The reason you can’t buy a car is the same reason that your health insurer let hackers dox you, a column from one of last week’s editions of my Pluralistic newsletter; it describes a monopoly pattern whereby companies execute a series of mergers to dominate a sector, leaving their IT systems brittle and tangled – and vital to the nation.

Just like with Equifax, the 737 Max disasters tipped Boeing into a string of increasingly grim catastrophes. Each fresh disaster landed with the grim inevitability of your general contractor texting you that he’s just opened up your ceiling and discovered that all your joists had rotted out – and that he won’t be able to deal with that until he deals with the termites he found last week, and that they’ll have to wait until he gets to the cracks in the foundation slab from the week before, and that those will have to wait until he gets to the asbestos he just discovered in the walls.

Drip, drip, drip, as you realize that the most expensive thing you own – which is also the thing you had hoped to shelter for the rest of your life – isn’t even a teardown, it’s just a pure liability. Even if you razed the structure, you couldn’t start over, because the soil is full of PCBs. It’s not a toxic asset, because it’s not an asset. It’s just toxic.

Equifax isn’t just a company: it’s infrastructure. It started out as an engine for racial, political and sexual discrimination, paying snoops to collect gossip from nosy neighbors, which was assembled into vast warehouses full of binders that told bank officers which loan applicants should be denied for being queer, or leftists, or, you know, Black

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This week on my podcast, I read my Microsoft DRM talk, first delivered 20 years and one day ago in Redmond, Washington. It was a viral hit in the nascent blogosphere and became a defining document in the fight against DRM.

Greetings fellow pirates! Arrrrr!

I’m here today to talk to you about copyright, technology and DRM, I work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation on copyright stuff (mostly), and I live in London. I’m not a lawyer — I’m a kind of mouthpiece/activist type, though occasionally they shave me and stuff me into my Bar Mitzvah suit and send me to a standards body or the UN to stir up trouble. I spend about three weeks a month on the road doing completely weird stuff like going to Microsoft to talk about DRM.

I lead a double life: I’m also a science fiction writer. That means I’ve got a dog in this fight, because I’ve been dreaming of making my living from writing since I was 12 years old. Admittedly, my IP-based biz isn’t as big as yours, but I guarantee you that it’s every bit as important to me as yours is to you.

Here’s what I’m here to convince you of:

1. That DRM systems don’t work

2. That DRM systems are bad for society

3. That DRM systems are bad for business

4. That DRM systems are bad for artists

5. That DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT

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This week on my podcast, I read Against Lore, a recent piece from my Pluralistic blog/newsletter, about writing and the benefits of nebulously defined backstories.

Warning: the last few minutes of this essay contain spoilers for Furiosa. In the recording, I give lots of warning so you can switch off when they come up.

One of my favorite nuggets of writing advice comes from James D Macdonald. Jim, a Navy vet with an encylopedic knowledge of gun lore, explained to a group of non-gun people how to write guns without getting derided by other gun people: “just add the word ‘modified.'”

As in, “Her modified AR-15 kicked against her shoulder as she squeezed the trigger, but she held it steady on the car door, watching it disintegrate in a spatter of bullet-holes.”

Jim’s big idea was that gun people couldn’t help but chew away at the verisimilitude of your fictional guns, their brains would automatically latch onto them and try to find the errors. But the word “modified” hijacked that impulse and turned it to the writer’s advantage: a gun person’s imagination gnaws at that word “modified,” spinning up the cleverest possible explanation for how the gun in question could behave as depicted.

In other words, the gun person’s impulse to one-up the writer by demonstrating their superior knowledge becomes an impulse to impart that superior knowledge to the writer. “Modified” puts the expert and the bullshitter on the same team, and conscripts the expert into fleshing out the bullshitter’s lies.

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Today for my podcast, I read Wanna Make Big Tech Monopolies Even Worse? Kill Section 230, my EFF Deeplinks Blog post on the competition aspects of sunsetting Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act:

In an age of resurgent anti-monopoly activism, small online communities, either standing on their own, or joined in loose “federations,” are the best chance we have to escape Big Tech’s relentless surveillance and clumsy, unaccountable control.

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No One Is the Enshittifier of Their Own Story

Today for my podcast, I read No One Is the Enshittifier of Their Own Story , my latest Locus Magazine column, about the microfoundations of enshittification:

Therein lies the tale. The same people, running the same companies, are all suddenly behaving very differently. They haven’t all suffered a change of heart, a reverse-enscroogening that caused them all to go to bed the kinds of good-natured slobs who made services we love and wake up cruel misers who clawed away all the value we created together.

Rather, these people – leaders of tech companies and the managers and product designers they command – have found themselves in an environ­ment where the constraints that kept them honest have melted away. Whereas before a manager who was tempted to enshittify their offerings had their hand stayed by the fear of some penalty, today, those penalties are greatly reduced or eliminated altogether.

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Today for my podcast, I read Precaratize Bosses, a recent essay from my Pluralistic.net newsletter.

I recorded this on a day when I was home between book-tour stops (I’m out with my new techno crime-thriller, The Bezzle). Catch me this Thursday (May 2) in Winnipeg with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, then in Calgary with Wordfest on May 3, then in Vancouver at Massy Arts om May 4, then in Tartu, Estonia for a series of events with the Prima Vista Literary Festival (May 6-11), and beyond! The canonical link for the schedule is here.

Combine Angelou’s “When someone shows you who they are, believe them” with the truism that in politics, “every accusation is a confession” and you get: “Every time someone accuses you of a vice, they’re showing you who they are and you should believe them.”

Let’s talk about some of those accusations. Remember the moral panic over the CARES Act covid stimulus checks? Hyperventilating mouthpieces for the ruling class were on every cable network, complaining that “no one wants to work anymore.” The barely-submerged subtext was their belief that the only reason people show up for work is that they’re afraid of losing everything – their homes, their kids, the groceries in their fridge.

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Today for my podcast, I read Capitalists Hate Capitalism, my latest column from Locus Magazine. It’s a meditation on the difference between feudalism and capitalism, and how to know which one you’re living under.

I recorded this on a day when I was home between book-tour stops (I’m out with my new techno crime-thriller, The Bezzle). Catch me this Wednesday (Apr 17) in Chicago at Anderson’s Books, then in Torino for the Biennale keynote on Apr 21, then in Marin County at Book Passage Corte Madera on Apr 27, then in Winnipeg, Calgary, Vancouver, and beyond! The canonical link for the schedule is here.

Varoufakis’s argument turns on an important distinction between two types of income: profits and rents. These terms have colloquial meanings that are widely understood, but Varoufakis is interested in the precise technical definitions used by economists.

For an economist, ‘‘profit’’ is income obtained by mixing capital – tools, machines, systems – with your employees’ labor. The value created by that labor is then divided between the worker, who draws a wage, and the capitalist, who takes the rest as profit.

‘‘Rent,’’ meanwhile, was income derived from owning something that the capitalist needs in order to realize a profit. In feudal times, hereditary lords owned plots of land that serfs were bound to, and those serfs owed an annual rent to their lords. This wasn’t a great deal for the serfs, but it also needled the nascent capitalist class, who would have very much preferred to have those lands enclosed for sheep grazing. The sheep would produce wool, which could be woven into cloth in the ‘‘dark, Satanic mills’’ of the industrial revolution. The former serfs, turned off their land, could be set to work in those factories.

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Today for my podcast, I read Subprime gadgets, originally published in my Pluralistic blog:

I recorded this on a day when I was home between book-tour stops (I’m out with my new techno crime-thriller, The Bezzle). Catch me on April 11 in Boston with Randall Munroe, on April 12th in Providence, Rhode Island, then onto Chicago, Torino, Winnipeg, Calgary, Vancouver and beyond! The canonical link for the schedule is here.

The promise of feudal security: “Surrender control over your digital life so that we, the wise, giant corporation, can ensure that you aren’t tricked into catastrophic blunders that expose you to harm”:

https://locusmag.com/2021/01/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-the-digital-manor/

The tech giant is a feudal warlord whose platform is a fortress; move into the fortress and the warlord will defend you against the bandits roaming the lawless land beyond its walls.

That’s the promise, here’s the failure: What happens when the warlord decides to attack you? If a tech giant decides to do something that harms you, the fortress becomes a prison and the thick walls keep you in.

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