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#praxis
whereserpentswalk · 8 months
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Fuck hostile architecture, I want unhostile architecture. I want benches to be designed to be as easy as possible to sleep on. I want little places for pigeons to nest to be purposefully put on buildings. I want people designing public spaces to think about what they'd be like to skateboard on. I want "Please loiter" signs. I want people to be kind. I want...
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anarchywoofwoof · 8 months
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typhlonectes · 10 months
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phoenixyfriend · 30 days
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Michigan just gave us the rhetorical weapon that could push Biden and the DNC to turn their backs on Israel.
Okay so this is amazing news. Michigan was going to be a key state in the push to get Biden, and the DNC as a whole, to start pressuring Israel, and they have just proven that they have that power.
Background: Michigan is a swing state, and it has 16 votes in the electoral college. Winning Michigan was a major factor in Biden's win back in 2020, and much of that rested on the Arab-American vote. It was also a major factor in Hillary Clinton's loss to Donald Trump in 2016. She lost the state by ten thousand, seven hundred votes.
Praxis: For obvious reasons, Arab-Americans are incredibly upset with Biden's support for Israel, and support in that demographic has gone from 59% in the 2020 election to less than 17% now. As a form of protest, Arab-Americans in Michigan started a campaign to get voters to check "uncommitted" in the Democratic primary. This is an actual box that can be checked, though some less-organized pushes also suggested writing in 'ceasefire' like New Hampshire primary voters did.
The goal was to get at least 10,000 'uncommitted' votes, as that is how many Hillary lost by.
As Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, the first Arab mayor of this majority-Arab city, said:
"We're not sizable enough to make a candidate win, but we're sizable enough to make a candidate lose."
(Source: NPR, 2/25/24)
Result:
As of 10:49 PM EST, 2/27, there are thirty-nine thousand uncommitted votes, according to CNN, which is doing live coverage.
NPR was reporting 30k at 10:14.
As a caveat, New York Times is saying that each of the last three Michigan Dem Primaries had about 20k uncommitted votes, so the 35k isn't all the push for pro-Palestine stances in Congress, but that's still a jump of almost 20k, which is way, way more than the goal.
And they aren't done counting the votes yet. Barely 30% of votes are in. The goal has been blown out of the water.
Other states are reaching out for advice on how to replicate the results.
This is big news.
So can we relax?
Fuck no.
Do what Michigan did. Vote in the Dem primary, and vote uncommitted or write in "ceasefire."
But on a more daily basis, if you have a Democratic candidate, lean on this.
Tell them it will be repeated elsewhere.
This could very well lose the election for Biden and more. The Democrats can't afford another four years of Trump, and they know it. The loss of Michigan can and will tank this election for them, especially since other states that helped Biden win, like Georgia, were also won on demographics that are growing increasingly upset by the situation in Gaza.
Go to the Michigan section of this post and use that in your calls and emails.
But remember. Call your reps. Call your senators. Call your governor, if you'd like. And if they're a Democrat, you bring this up. Be polite, the staffer isn't making these decisions. They might just be an intern. But bring it up and tell them that we are going to lose the presidency if we do not sanction Israel and actually pressure them into not only pulling out of Gaza and the West Bank, but paying reparations.
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praxis-app · 3 months
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join the praxis discord - mastodon - github
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slithymomerath · 11 months
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“I am typing these words as June 2003 surges with Pride. What year is it now, as you read them? What has been won; what has been lost? I can’t see from here; I can’t predict. But I know this: You are experiencing the impact of what we in the movement take a stand on and fight for today. The present and past are the trajectory of the future. But the arc of history does not bend towards justice automatically—as the great Abolitionist Frederick Douglass observed, without struggle there is no progress . . .”
- Leslie Feinberg
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anarchistfrogposting · 4 months
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A common response to “you should and can break laws” is “so we should just rape/kill/steal from people’s homes????”. The answer to that ridiculous false equivalency is that no, we obviously shouldn’t, but I think it’s interesting that that is the first thing to jump into people’s heads when you suggest challenging and circumventing the legal system.
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schrodingers-slut · 7 months
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I had a big fuckin essay post about in how doing real life mutual aid and community work doesn’t make you immune to the Protestant Work Ethic mindset and how it plays into ableism in leftist spaces in usamerica but I don’t have spoons so I made a meme instead
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sensemami · 6 months
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dipperdesperado · 7 months
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Notes Toward Finding Community, Or, How to Find Community When You Feel Isolated
Neoliberalism sucks for a ton of reasons. From the enclosure of every common, to the commodification of every creation, it feels like a muzzle on humanity that gets tighter and tighter. One of the most underexplored aspects of neoliberalism is the way in which it creates and reinforces isolation. People don’t really have communities outside of consumption or compulsion. This is problematic for a ton of reasons, namely that it prevents us from fulfilling our basic needs. Humans are social creatures. People need to have connections with folks. People may not all need the same levels or intensity of connections, but connections are important nonetheless. To lack in the ability to socialize meaningfully is to ensure worse health outcomes, mentally, emotionally, and physically. But, I don’t mean to freak you out. I think that there are steps we can take to star building community, bridging gaps with the people around us.
Think About What You Want
When folks feel very isolated, it can be easy to accept anything. If we’re in a vulnerable state, that could leave us open for ending up in precarious situations. One way to fight against this is to start from the position of imagining what community looks like. Is the type of space we want to occupy based around interests (fandom, hobbies)? Religions, spiritualities, social issues? If we are able to list the things that excite us, we have a good idea of what to look for, and can focus our efforts towards finding those spaces.
Find the Watering Holes
With the spaces we’re interested in on hand, youcan find where folks gather. Every community has virtual and/or in-person spaces. For example, if you’re a film fan, you can look for indie cinemas, folks putting on screenings, or look into film societies where you live. For activism, I’ve written a whole guide on how to get started. Looking for those spaces will allow you to start getting integrated in the space. Really think about how you can occupy the same physical and digital spaces of people who are into what you’re into.
Go Meet Folks
Now, this may be difficult, depending on your disposition. The quickest way to meet folks is to put yourself out there. It’s always vulnerable to put yourself on the line in this way, but it’s super necessary. When you’re in spaces with similar folks, you have talking points built in! You don’t have to worry if the folks around you will like movies at film club. If you are enjoyable to be around, through being nice, interesting, and/or being an active listener, you’ll be making connections in no time. If you’re not willing to talk to folks, it’ll be hard to make connections. Being open is an asset towards the end of getting connected. At the very least, consistently go to events and spaces in your interest area(s). Maybe you’ll bump into an extroverted person that can show you the ropes.
Be the Change You Want to See
As you get out there, think about how you can start catalyzing community. Maybe you host a dinner for neighbors. Maybe you start a book club. Or even a neighborhood garden, or cleanup event. In this way, you’re flipping the issue on its head. You’re creating the space to meet folks yourself. It’s like being a magnet, drawing others to you.
We need community. It’s a necessary thing, you know? So, hopefully, keeping these things in mind helps in that regard.
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aberration13 · 7 months
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I don't think enough people are paying attention to project 2025. I know it's a big document and I don't really expect the average person to read it all or anything like that but being aware of it and knowing some of the key plans/goals it describes is probably pretty useful.
Like you know how in movies the evil villain goes on a monologue describing their whole evil plan and you think "they just revealed everything, If that were me I would know exactly how to stop them now"
This is that. Conservatives just outlined their whole evil plan in detail down to the who, what, when, where, how, and why's of the things they intend to do if they take the presidency again, the thing is 900 pages long and basically anything you might want to know or plan countermeasures for is in there.
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whereserpentswalk · 3 months
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Activist burnout isn't a moral failing of a community, it's not people being selfish. It's a natural result of how human minds work, and you can't expect communities to out-moral human psychology.
When people are exposed to the same upsetting thing over and over again, either it fucks with their mental health and makes them more depressed and anxious, or alternatively it makes them apathetic and desensitized. Neither of those things are good for a movement, and those are the ways humans are going to react to constant upsetting messages. You cannot avoid this by telling people to just be better people, you cannot use higher reasoning to make an entire community's emotions work in a fundamentally different way to how human emotions normal work.
Every successful movement account for the fact that people can't be at 100% all the time. Movements that ask for a level of extreme and undying anger, burn bright and die fast, it's a useful way of organizing a very immediate response, but cannot be done for something larger scale. If you give people, the ultimatum of either being at 100% or 0% all the time, they will choose 0% because the alternative isn't possible for most people.
If you're constantly showing the same disturbing images over and over again, they will lose their effectiveness quickly. If I see a post detailing the horrors of the current genocide, I'm probably just going to scroll past it, because it's all things I already know, and I've seen it so many times there's no emotional reaction, and this is how a lot of people are with posts like this, because you can't ask people to have the same emotional reaction to the same information hundreds of times over.
You can't stop activist burnout by being a better person because burnout isn't a choice, it's a psychological response. If your activism doesn't account for the material reality of the community (in this case being humans with human minds), then that's on you for organizing badly.
Also, if you need to hear this: you are not a bad person for experiencing compassion fatigue, it's literally part of being a person. Don't hurt yourself.
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catnip-kitty · 25 days
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Why Gay Sex is Dialectic, an Essay
As a petite proletariat (twink) who reads theory, I was pondering the nature of homosexuality in terms of dialectical materialism, in particular, how gay sex fit into Engel's three laws of dialectics.
Just as Engels posits that internal contradictions or tensions drive change in the law of unity and conflict of opposites, the same could be said for the homoerotic tension of a top-bottom relationship. While tops and bottoms appear to exist as binary oppositional roles, they coexist internally within a relationship. While the duality may give rise to differences in preferences, desires, and dynamics these differences can be resolved through negotiation between the partners. The act of say gex, is thus, the ultimate act of such negotiation, a synthesis of contradictions.
Furthermore, the law of the passage of quantitative changes into qualitative changes could be seen the complications to that top-bottom dynamic. The roles of tops and bottoms can be redefined through the process of negotiation. In fact, surveys from Autostraddle [1] show that the majority of people in a gay relationships are switches, not strictly tops or bottoms. This indicates that the physical designation of top or bottom is thus the result of an accumulation of decisions and preferences, culminating in the qualitative dynamic. This is exemplified by the ways in which masculine-feminine attributes or sub-dom dynamics play a role in gay sex — these attributes, which can be seen as mostly qualitative assignations are the result of the accumulation of quantitative changes.
I would further propose that, through the collaborative dialectic process of negotiation, the social dynamics of gay relationships can change, including that top-bottom dynamic. Engel's law of the negation of the negation captures these changes precisely. The traditional associations between masculinity and feminity, subordination and domination are, to an extent, being subverted in many 21st gay relationships in contrast to the strict gender roles seen in Greco-Roman times [2] or the Tokugawa period [3]. For example, I want a femboy to top me. Whether through the process of resolving contradictions in homosexual intercourse, the top-bottom dynamic or between other qualitative attributes, the process of negation and transformation dialectically results in a more egalitarian understanding of say gex. This is the socialist means of reproduction.
In conclusion, gay sex is praxis.
[1] Riese. “Tops, Bottoms, Switches: One Last Look at All the Survey Data.” Autostraddle, 7 Aug. 2018, www.autostraddle.com/tops-bottoms-switches-one-last-look-at-all-the-survey-data-424953/. Accessed 3 Mar. 2024.
[2] Hubbard, Thomas K. Homosexuality in Greece and Rome : A Sourcebook of Basic Documents. Berkeley, Univ. Of California Press, 2010.
[3] Leupp, Gary P. Male Colors : The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan. Berkeley, University Of California Press, 2011.
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In defense of bureaucratic competence
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Sure, sometimes it really does make sense to do your own research. There's times when you really do need to take personal responsibility for the way things are going. But there's limits. We live in a highly technical world, in which hundreds of esoteric, potentially lethal factors impinge on your life every day.
You can't "do your own research" to figure out whether all that stuff is safe and sound. Sure, you might be able to figure out whether a contractor's assurances about a new steel joist for your ceiling are credible, but after you do that, are you also going to independently audit the software in your car's antilock brakes?
How about the nutritional claims on your food and the sanitary conditions in the industrial kitchen it came out of? If those turn out to be inadequate, are you going to be able to validate the medical advice you get in the ER when you show up at 3AM with cholera? While you're trying to figure out the #HIPAAWaiver they stuck in your hand on the way in?
40 years ago, Ronald Reagan declared war on "the administrative state," and "government bureaucrats" have been the favored bogeyman of the American right ever since. Even if Steve Bannon hasn't managed to get you to froth about the "Deep State," there's a good chance that you've griped about red tape from time to time.
Not without reason, mind you. The fact that the government can make good rules doesn't mean it will. When we redid our kitchen this year, the city inspector added a bunch of arbitrary electrical outlets to the contractor's plans in places where neither we, nor any future owner, will every need them.
But the answer to bad regulation isn't no regulation. During the same kitchen reno, our contractor discovered that at some earlier time, someone had installed our kitchen windows without the accompanying vapor-barriers. In the decades since, the entire structure of our kitchen walls had rotted out. Not only was the entire front of our house one good earthquake away from collapsing – there were two half rotted verticals supporting the whole thing – but replacing the rotted walls added more than $10k to the project.
In other words, the problem isn't too much regulation, it's the wrong regulation. I want our city inspectors to make sure that contractors install vapor barriers, but to not demand superfluous electrical outlets.
Which raises the question: where do regulations come from? How do we get them right?
Regulation is, first and foremost, a truth-seeking exercise. There will never be one obvious answer to any sufficiently technical question. "Should this window have a vapor barrier?" is actually a complex question, needing to account for different window designs, different kinds of barriers, etc.
To make a regulation, regulators ask experts to weigh in. At the federal level, expert agencies like the DoT or the FCC or HHS will hold a "Notice of Inquiry," which is a way to say, "Hey, should we do something about this? If so, what should we do?"
Anyone can weigh in on these: independent technical experts, academics, large companies, lobbyists, industry associations, members of the public, hobbyist groups, and swivel-eyed loons. This produces a record from which the regulator crafts a draft regulation, which is published in something called a "Notice of Proposed Rulemaking."
The NPRM process looks a lot like the NOI process: the regulator publishes the rule, the public weighs in for a couple of rounds of comments, and the regulator then makes the rule (this is the federal process; state regulation and local ordinances vary, but they follow a similar template of collecting info, making a proposal, collecting feedback and finalizing the proposal).
These truth-seeking exercises need good input. Even very competent regulators won't know everything, and even the strongest theoretical foundation needs some evidence from the field. It's one thing to say, "Here's how your antilock braking software should work," but you also need to hear from mechanics who service cars, manufacturers, infosec specialists and drivers.
These people will disagree with each other, for good reasons and for bad ones. Some will be sincere but wrong. Some will want to make sure that their products or services are required – or that their competitors' products and services are prohibited.
It's the regulator's job to sort through these claims. But they don't have to go it alone: in an ideal world, the wrong people will be corrected by other parties in the docket, who will back up their claims with evidence.
So when the FCC proposes a Net Neutrality rule, the monopoly telcos and cable operators will pile in and insist that this is technically impossible, that there is no way to operate a functional ISP if the network management can't discriminate against traffic that is less profitable to the carrier. Now, this unity of perspective might reflect a bedrock truth ("Net Neutrality can't work") or a monopolists' convenient lie ("Net Neutrality is less profitable for us").
In a competitive market, there'd be lots of counterclaims with evidence from rivals: "Of course Net Neutrality is feasible, and here are our server logs to prove it!" But in a monopolized markets, those counterclaims come from micro-scale ISPs, or academics, or activists, or subscribers. These counterclaims are easy to dismiss ("what do you know about supporting 100 million users?"). That's doubly true when the regulator is motivated to give the monopolists what they want – either because they are hoping for a job in the industry after they quit government service, or because they came out of industry and plan to go back to it.
To make things worse, when an industry is heavily concentrated, it's easy for members of the ruling cartel – and their backers in government – to claim that the only people who truly understand the industry are its top insiders. Seen in that light, putting an industry veteran in charge of the industry's regulator isn't corrupt – it's sensible.
All of this leads to regulatory capture – when a regulator starts defending an industry from the public interest, instead of defending the public from the industry. The term "regulatory capture" has a checkered history. It comes out of a bizarre, far-right Chicago School ideology called "Public Choice Theory," whose goal is to eliminate regulation, not fix it.
In Public Choice Theory, the biggest companies in an industry have the strongest interest in capturing the regulator, and they will work harder – and have more resources – than anyone else, be they members of the public, workers, or smaller rivals. This inevitably leads to capture, where the state becomes an arm of the dominant companies, wielded by them to prevent competition:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/
This is regulatory nihilism. It supposes that the only reason you weren't killed by your dinner, or your antilock brakes, or your collapsing roof, is that you just got lucky – and not because we have actual, good, sound regulations that use evidence to protect us from the endless lethal risks we face. These nihilists suppose that making good regulation is either a myth – like ancient Egyptian sorcery – or a lost art – like the secret to embalming Pharaohs.
But it's clearly possible to make good regulations – especially if you don't allow companies to form monopolies or cartels. What's more, failing to make public regulations isn't the same as getting rid of regulation. In the absence of public regulation, we get private regulation, run by companies themselves.
Think of Amazon. For decades, the DoJ and FTC sat idly by while Amazon assembled and fortified its monopoly. Today, Amazon is the de facto e-commerce regulator. The company charges its independent sellers 45-51% in junk fees to sell on the platform, including $31b/year in "advertising" to determine who gets top billing in your searches. Vendors raise their Amazon prices in order to stay profitable in the face of these massive fees, and if they don't raise their prices at every other store and site, Amazon downranks them to oblivion, putting them out of business.
This is the crux of the FTC's case against Amazon: that they are picking winners and setting prices across the entire economy, including at every other retailer:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos
The same is true for Google/Facebook, who decide which news and views you encounter; for Apple/Google, who decide which apps you can use, and so on. The choice is never "government regulation" or "no regulation" – it's always "government regulation" or "corporate regulation." You either live by rules made in public by democratically accountable bureaucrats, or rules made in private by shareholder-accountable executives.
You just can't solve this by "voting with your wallet." Think about the problem of robocalls. Nobody likes these spam calls, and worse, they're a vector for all kinds of fraud. Robocalls are mostly a problem with federation. The phone system is a network-of-networks, and your carrier is interconnected with carriers all over the world, sometimes through intermediaries that make it hard to know which network a call originates on.
Some of these carriers are spam-friendly. They make money by selling access to spammers and scammers. Others don't like spam, but they have lax or inadequate security measures to prevent robocalls. Others will simply be targets of opportunity: so large and well-resourced that they are irresistible to bad actors, who continuously probe their defenses and exploit overlooked flaws, which are quickly patched.
To stem the robocall tide, your phone company will have to block calls from bad actors, put sloppy or lazy carriers on notice to shape up or face blocks, and also tell the difference between good companies and bad ones.
There's no way you can figure this out on your own. How can you know whether your carrier is doing a good job at this? And even if your carrier wants to do this, only the largest, most powerful companies can manage it. Rogue carriers won't give a damn if some tiny micro-phone-company threatens them with a block if they don't shape up.
This is something that a large, powerful government agency is best suited to addressing. And thankfully, we have such an agency. Two years ago, the FCC demanded that phone companies submit plans for "robocall mitigation." Now, it's taking action:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/10/telcos-filed-blank-robocall-plans-with-fcc-and-got-away-with-it-for-2-years/
Specifically, the FCC has identified carriers – in the US and abroad – with deficient plans. Some of these plans are very deficient. National Cloud Communications of Texas sent the FCC a Windows Printer Test Page. Evernex (Pakistan) sent the FCC its "taxpayer profile inquiry" from a Pakistani state website. Viettel (Vietnam) sent in a slide presentation entitled "Making Smart Cities Vision a Reality." Canada's Humbolt VoIP sent an "indiscernible object." DomainerSuite submitted a blank sheet of paper scrawled with the word "NOTHING."
The FCC has now notified these carriers – and others with less egregious but still deficient submissions – that they have 14 days to fix this or they'll be cut off from the US telephone network.
This is a problem you don't fix with your wallet, but with your ballot. Effective, public-interest-motivated FCC regulators are a political choice. Trump appointed the cartoonishly evil Ajit Pai to run the FCC, and he oversaw a program of neglect and malice. Pai – a former Verizon lawyer – dismantled Net Neutrality after receiving millions of obviously fraudulent comments from stolen identities, lying about it, and then obstructing the NY Attorney General's investigation into the matter:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/31/and-drown-it/#starve-the-beast
The Biden administration has a much better FCC – though not as good as it could be, thanks to Biden hanging Gigi Sohn out to dry in the face of a homophobic smear campaign that ultimately led one of the best qualified nominees for FCC commissioner to walk away from the process:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/15/useful-idiotsuseful-idiots/#unrequited-love
Notwithstanding the tragic loss of Sohn's leadership in this vital agency, Biden's FCC – and its action on robocalls – illustrates the value of elections won with ballots, not wallets.
Self-regulation without state regulation inevitably devolves into farce. We're a quarter of a century into the commercial internet and the US still doesn't have a modern federal privacy law. The closest we've come is a disclosure rule, where companies can make up any policy they want, provided they describe it to you.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out how to cheat on this regulation. It's so simple, even a Meta lawyer can figure it out – which is why the Meta Quest VR headset has a privacy policy isn't merely awful, but long.
It will take you five hours to read the whole document and discover how badly you're being screwed. Go ahead, "do your own research":
https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/articles/annual-creep-o-meter/
The answer to bad regulation is good regulation, and the answer to incompetent regulators is competent ones. As Michael Lewis's Fifth Risk (published after Trump filled the administrative agencies with bootlickers, sociopaths and crooks) documented, these jobs demand competence:
https://memex.craphound.com/2018/11/27/the-fifth-risk-michael-lewis-explains-how-the-deep-state-is-just-nerds-versus-grifters/
For example, Lewis describes how a Washington State nuclear waste facility created as part of the Manhattan Project endangers the Columbia River, the source of 8 million Americans' drinking water. The nuclear waste cleanup is projected to take 100 years and cost 100 billion dollars. With stakes that high, we need competent bureaucrats overseeing the job.
The hacky conservative jokes comparing every government agency to the DMV are not descriptive so much as prescriptive. By slashing funding, imposing miserable working conditions, and demonizing the people who show up for work anyway, neoliberals have chased away many good people, and hamstrung those who stayed.
One of the most inspiring parts of the Biden administration is the large number of extremely competent, extremely principled agency personnel he appointed, and the speed and competence they've brought to their roles, to the great benefit of the American public:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff
But leaders can only do so much – they also need staff. 40 years of attacks on US state capacity has left the administrative state in tatters, stretched paper-thin. In an excellent article, Noah Smith describes how a starveling American bureaucracy costs the American public a fortune:
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-needs-a-bigger-better-bureaucracy
Even stripped of people and expertise, the US government still needs to get stuff done, so it outsources to nonprofits and consultancies. These are the source of much of the expense and delay in public projects. Take NYC's Second Avenue subway, a notoriously overbudget and late subway extension – "the most expensive mile of subway ever built." Consultants amounted to 20% of its costs, double what France or Italy would have spent. The MTA used to employ 1,600 project managers. Now it has 124 of them, overseeing $20b worth of projects. They hand that money to consultants, and even if they have the expertise to oversee the consultants' spending, they are stretched too thin to do a good job of it:
https://slate.com/business/2023/02/subway-costs-us-europe-public-transit-funds.html
When a public agency lacks competence, it ends up costing the public more. States with highly expert Departments of Transport order better projects, which need fewer changes, which adds up to massive costs savings and superior roads:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4522676
Other gaps in US regulation are plugged by nonprofits and citizen groups. Environmental rules like NEPA rely on the public to identify and object to environmental risks in public projects, from solar plants to new apartment complexes. NEPA and its state equivalents empower private actors to sue developers to block projects, even if they satisfy all environmental regulations, leading to years of expensive delay.
The answer to this isn't to dismantle environmental regulations – it's to create a robust expert bureaucracy that can enforce them instead of relying on NIMBYs. This is called "ministerial approval" – when skilled government workers oversee environmental compliance. Predictably, NIMBYs hate ministerial approval.
Which is not to say that there aren't problems with trusting public enforcers to ensure that big companies are following the law. Regulatory capture is real, and the more concentrated an industry is, the greater the risk of capture. We are living in a moment of shocking market concentration, thanks to 40 years of under-regulation:
https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers
Remember that five-hour privacy policy for a Meta VR headset? One answer to these eye-glazing garbage novellas presented as "privacy policies" is to simply ban certain privacy-invading activities. That way, you can skip the policy, knowing that clicking "I agree" won't expose you to undue risk.
This is the approach that Bennett Cyphers and I argue for in our EFF white-paper, "Privacy Without Monopoly":
https://www.eff.org/wp/interoperability-and-privacy
After all, even the companies that claim to be good for privacy aren't actually very good for privacy. Apple blocked Facebook from spying on iPhone owners, then sneakily turned on their own mass surveillance system, and lied about it:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar
But as the European experiment with the GDPR has shown, public administrators can't be trusted to have the final word on privacy, because of regulatory capture. Big Tech companies like Google, Apple and Facebook pretend to be headquartered in corporate crime havens like Ireland and Luxembourg, where the regulators decline to enforce the law:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town
It's only because of the GPDR has a private right of action – the right of individuals to sue to enforce their rights – that we're finally seeing the beginning of the end of commercial surveillance in Europe:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/07/americans-deserve-more-current-american-data-privacy-protection-act
It's true that NIMBYs can abuse private rights of action, bringing bad faith cases to slow or halt good projects. But just as the answer to bad regulations is good ones, so too is the answer to bad private rights of action good ones. SLAPP laws have shown us how to balance vexatious litigation with the public interest:
https://www.rcfp.org/resources/anti-slapp-laws/
We must get over our reflexive cynicism towards public administration. In my book The Internet Con, I lay out a set of public policy proposals for dismantling Big Tech and putting users back in charge of their digital lives:
https://www.versobooks.com/products/3035-the-internet-con
The most common objection I've heard since publishing the book is, "Sure, Big Tech has enshittified everything great about the internet, but how can we trust the government to fix it?"
We've been conditioned to think that lawmakers are too old, too calcified and too corrupt, to grasp the technical nuances required to regulate the internet. But just because Congress isn't made up of computer scientists, it doesn't mean that they can't pass good laws relating to computers. Congress isn't full of microbiologists, but we still manage to have safe drinking water (most of the time).
You can't just "do the research" or "vote with your wallet" to fix the internet. Bad laws – like the DMCA, which bans most kinds of reverse engineering – can land you in prison just for reconfiguring your own devices to serve you, rather than the shareholders of the companies that made them. You can't fix that yourself – you need a responsive, good, expert, capable government to fix it.
We can have that kind of government. It'll take some doing, because these questions are intrinsically hard to get right even without monopolies trying to capture their regulators. Even a president as flawed as Biden can be pushed into nominating good administrative personnel and taking decisive, progressive action:
https://doctorow.medium.com/joe-biden-is-headed-to-a-uaw-picket-line-in-detroit-f80bd0b372ab?sk=f3abdfd3f26d2f615ad9d2f1839bcc07
Biden may not be doing enough to suit your taste. I'm certainly furious with aspects of his presidency. The point isn't to lionize Biden – it's to point out that even very flawed leaders can be pushed into producing benefit for the American people. Think of how much more we can get if we don't give up on politics but instead demand even better leaders.
My next novel is The Lost Cause, coming out on November 14. It's about a generation of people who've grown up under good government – a historically unprecedented presidency that has passed the laws and made the policies we'll need to save our species and planet from the climate emergency:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause
The action opens after the pendulum has swung back, with a new far-right presidency and an insurgency led by white nationalist militias and their offshore backers – seagoing anarcho-capitalist billionaires.
In the book, these forces figure out how to turn good regulations against the people they were meant to help. They file hundreds of simultaneous environmental challenges to refugee housing projects across the country, blocking the infill building that is providing homes for the people whose homes have been burned up in wildfires, washed away in floods, or rendered uninhabitable by drought.
I don't want to spoil the book here, but it shows how the protagonists pursue a multipronged defense, mixing direct action, civil disobedience, mass protest, court challenges and political pressure to fight back. What they don't do is give up on state capacity. When the state is corrupted by wreckers, they claw back control, rather than giving up on the idea of a competent and benevolent public system.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/23/getting-stuff-done/#praxis
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dionysianfreak · 2 months
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I'm interested to see how the people here prefer to spend time with the Gods :) I tried to be general, but feel free to add your specific favorite activity if you share !
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praxis-app · 4 months
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join the praxis discord - mastodon - github
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