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The "dictator's dilemma" pits a dictator's desire to create social stability by censoring public communications in order to prevent the spread of anti-regime messages with the dictator's need to know whether powerful elites are becoming restless and plotting a coup:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Closely related to the dictator's dilemma is "authoritarian blindness," where an autocrat's censorship regime keeps them from finding out about important, socially destabilizing facts on the ground, like whether a corrupt local official is comporting themself so badly that the people are ready to take to the streets:
The modern Chinese state has done more to skillfully navigate the twin hazards of the dictator's dilemma and authoritarian blindness than any other regime in history. Take Xi Jinping's 2012-2015 anticorruption purge, which helped him secure another ten year term as Party Secretary.
Xi targeted legitimately corrupt officials in this this sweeping purge, but - crucially - he only targeted corrupt officials in the power-base of his rivals for Party leader, while leaving corrupt officials in his own power base unscathed:
Chinese online surveillance is often paired with censorship, both petty (banning Winnie the Pooh, whom Xi is often mocked for resembling) and substantial (getting Apple to modify Airdrop for every user in the world in order to prevent the spread of anti-regime messages before a key Party leadership contest).
But there are many of instances where China spies on people but *doesn't* censor them, even when they express dissatisfaction with the state. Chinese censors allow a surprising amount of complaint about official incompetence, overreach and corruption, but they completely suppress any calls for *mobilization* to address these complaints. You can be as angry as you want with the government online, but you can't call for protests to do something about it:
This makes perfect sense in the context of "authoritarian blindness": by allowing online complaint, an autocrat can locate the hot-spots where things are reaching a boiling-over point, and by blocking public manifestations, the autocrat can prevent the public from turning their failings into a flashpoint that endangers the autocracy.
In other words, autocrats can reserve to themselves the power to decide how to defuse public anger: they can suppress it, using surveillance data about the people who led the online debate about official failures to figure out who to intimidate, arrest, or disappear.
Or they can address it through measures like firing corrupt local officials or funding local social programs (toxic waste cleanups, smokestack regulation, building schools and hospitals, etc) that make people feel better about their government.
Autocracy is an inherently unstable social situation. No society can deliver everything that everyone in it desires: if you tear down existing low-density housing and build apartment blocks to decrease a housing shortage, you'll delight people who are un- or under-housed, and you'll infuriate people who are happily housed under the status quo. In every society, there's always someone getting their way at the expense of someone else.
Obviously, widespread unhappiness is inherently socially destabilizing. After all, no society can police every action of every person. From littering to parking in disabled parking spots, from paying your taxes to washing your hands before serving food, a society relies primarily on people following the rules without even though their face little to no risk of being punished for breaking them.
The easiest way to get people to follow the rules is to foster a sense of the rules' legitimacy: people may not agree with or understand the rationale for a rule, but if they view the process by which the rule was decided on as a legitimate one, then they may follow it anyway.
This legitimacy is a source of social stability. Sure, your candidate might lose the election, or the government might enact a policy you hate, but if you think the election was fair and you believe that you can change the policy through democratic means, then you will be on the side of preserving the system, rather than overturning it.
A democracy's claim to legitimacy lies in its popular mandate: "Sure, I don't like this decision, but it was fairly made." By contrast, a dictator's legitimacy comes their claims to *wisdom*: "Sure, I don't like this decision, but the Supreme Generalissimo is the smartest man in history, and he says it was the right call."
You can see how this is a brittle arrangement, even if the dictator is a skilled autocrat who makes generally great decisions: even a great decision is going to have winners and losers, and it might be hard to convince the losers that they keep losing because they deserve to lose. And that's the *best* outcome, where an autocrat is *right*. But what about when the autocrat is *wrong*?
What about when the autocrat makes a bunch of decisions that make nearly everyone consistently worse off, either because the autocrat is a fool, or because they are greedy and are stealing everything that isn't nailed down?
Every society needs stabilizers, but autocracies need more stabilizers than democracies, because the story about why you, personally, are getting screwed is a lot less convincing in an autocracy ("The autocrat is right and you are wrong, suck it up") than it is in a democracy ("This was the fairest compromise possible, and if it wasn't, we need to elect someone new so it changes").
The Snowden revelations taught us that there is no distinction between commercial surveillance and government surveillance. Governments spy, sure, but the most effective way for governments to spy on us is by raiding the data troves assembled by technology companies (for one thing, these troves are assembled at our own expense - we foot the bill for this spying whenever we send money to a phone or tech company).
The tech companies were willing participants in this process: the original Snowden leak, about the "PRISM" program, showed how tech companies made millions of dollars by siphoning off user data to the NSA on demand:
It was only later that we learned about another NSA program, "Upstream," through which the NSA wiretapped the tech companies' data-centers, acquiring *all* of their user data, and then requesting the data that interested them through PRISM, as a form of "parallel construction," which is when an agency learns a fact through a secret system, and then uses a less-secret system to acquire the same fact, in order to maintain the secrecy of the first system:
Upstream *really* pissed off the tech companies. After all, they'd been dutifully rolling over and handing out their users' data in violation of US law, risking their businesses to help the NSA do mass spying, and the NSA paid them back by secretly spying on the tech companies themselves! That's a hell of a way to say thank you to your co-conspirators.
After Upstream, the tech companies finally started encrypting the links between their data-centers, which made Upstream-style collection infinitely harder:
But that hardly ended the mass surveillance private-public partnership. Congress continued to do nothing about privacy (the last federal consumer privacy law Congress gave Americans is 1988's Video Privacy Protection Act, which bans video store clerks from telling newspapers about the VHS cassettes you take home) (we used to be a *country*).
That meant that tech companies could collect our data will-ye or nil-ye, and that data brokers could buy and sell that data without any oversight or limitation:
There's many reasons that Congress failed to act on privacy. Obviously, they face immense pressure from lobbyists for the commercial surveillance industry - but they also face covert and powerful pressure from public safety agencies, cops, and spies, who rely on private sector data as a source of off-the-books, warrantless, ubiquitous surveillance.
Why does America need so much spying? Well, because America has always been imperfectly democratic, from its inception as a enslaving nation where millions of people were denied both the ballot and personhood; and as a patriarchal nation where half of the remaining people were *also* denied the franchise; and as a colonialist nation where an entire culture of people had been subject to genocide, land theft, and systematic oppression. This is an obviously unstable arrangement.
Whether in chains, on a reservation, or under the thumb of a husband or father, there were plenty of Americans who had no reason to buy into the system, accept its legitimacy, or follow its rules. To keep the system intact, it wasn't enough to terrorize these populations - America's rulers had to know where to inflict terror, which is to say, where order was closest to collapsing.
Some of America's first spies were private sector union-busters, the Pinkerton agency, who served as a private spy army for bosses who wanted to find the leverage points in the worker uprisings that swept the country. The Pinkerton's pitch was that it was cheaper to pay them to figure out who the most important union leaders were and target them for violence, kidnapping, and killing than it was to give all your workers a raise.
This is an important aspect of the surveillance project. Spying is part of a broader class of activities called "guard labor" - anything you might pay someone to do that results in fewer guillotines being built on your lawn. Guard labor can be paying someone to build a wall around your estate or neighborhood. It can be paying security guards to patrol the wall. It can be paying for CCTV operators, or drone operators. It can be paying for surveillance, too.
Guard labor isn't free. The pitch for guard labor is that it is a cheaper way to get social stability than the alternative: building schools and hospitals, paying a living wage, lowering prices, etc. It follows that when you make guard labor cheaper, you can build fewer schools and hospitals, pay lower wages, and raise prices more, and buy more guard labor to counter the destabilizing effect of these policies, and still come out ahead.
American politics have been growing ever more unstable since the 1970s, when oil crisis gave way to the Reagan revolution and its raft of pro-oligarch, anti-human policies. Since then, we've seen an unbroken trend to wage stagnation and widening inequality. As a new American oligarch class emerged, they gained near-total control over the levers of power.
In a now-famous 2014 paper, political scientists reviewed 1,779 policy fights and found that the only time these cashed out in a way that reflected popular will is when elites favored them, too. When elites objected to something, it literally didn't matter how popular it was with everyone else, it just didn't happen:
It's pretty hard to make the case that the system is legitimate when it *only* does things that rich people want, and *never* does things the vast majority of people want when these conflict with rich peoples' desires. Some of these outcomes are merely disgusting and immoral, like abetting genocide in Gaza.
But more frequently, the policies elites favor are ones that make the rich richer: climate inaction, blocking Medicare for All, smashing unions, dismantling anti-corruption and campaign finance laws.
I don't think it's a coincidence that America's democracy has become significantly less democratic at the same time that mass surveillance has grown.
Mass surveillance makes guard labor *much* cheaper, which means that the rich can make their lives better at all of our expense and still afford the amount of guard labor it takes to keep the guillotines at bay.
Cheap guard labor also allows the rich to strike devil's bargains that would otherwise be instantaneously destabilizing.
For example, the second Trump election required an alliance between the tiny minority of ultra-rich with the much larger minority of virulent racists who were promised the realization of their psychotic fantasy of masked, armed goons snatching brown people off the streets and sending them to offshore slave labor camps.
That alliance might be a good way to elect a president who'll dismantle anticorruption law and slash taxes, but it won't do you much good if the resulting ethnic cleansing terror provokes a popular uprising. But what if ICE can rely on Predator drones and cell-site simulators to track the identities of everyone who comes out to a protest:
What if ICE can buy off-the-shelf facial recognition tools and use them to identify people who are brave enough to step between snatch-squads and their neighbors?
The new tool, called Mobile Fortify, uses the CBP system which ordinarily takes photos of people when they enter or exit the U.S., according to internal ICE emails viewed by 404 Media. Now ICE is using it in the field.
Each advance in surveillance tech makes worse forms of oppression, misgovernance and corruption possible, by making it cheaper to counter the destabilizing effect of destroying the lives of the populace, through identifying the bravest, angriest, and most effective opposition figures so they can be targeted for harassment, violence, arrest, or kidnapping.
America's private sector surveillance industry has always served as a means of identifying and punishing people who fought for a better country. The first credit reporting bureau was the Retail Credit Company, which used a network of spies and paid informants to identify "race mixers," queers, union organizers and leftists so that banks could deny them credit, landlords could deny them housing, and employers could deny them jobs:
Retail Credit continued to do this until *1975*, when, finally, popular opinion turned against the company, so it changed its name...
...to *Equifax*.
Today, Equifax is joined by a whole industry of elite enforcers who use spying, legal harassments, mercenaries and troll armies to offset the socially destabilizing effects of the wealthy's misrule:
But despite centuries of American mass surveillance, America's oligarchs keep finding themselves in the midst of great existential crises. That's because guard labor - even surveillance-supercharged guard labor - is no substitute for policies that make the country better off.
Oligarchs may want to tend the nation like a shepherd tends its flock, leaving enough lambs around to grow next year's wool. But they're all competing with one another, and they understand that the sheep they spare will like as not end up on a rival's dinner table. Under those circumstances, every oligarch ends up in a race to see who can turn us into lambchops first.
This is the dictator's dilemma, American style. The rich always overestimate how much social stability their guard labor has bought them, and they're easy mark for any creepy, malodorous troll with a barn full of machine-gun equipped drones:
They accumulate mounting democratic debts, as destabilizing rage builds in the public, erupting in the Civil War, in the summer of 68, in the Battle of Seattle, in the Rodney King uprising, in the George Floyd protests, in Los Angeles rebellion. They think they can spy their way into a country where they have everything and we have nothing, and we *like it* (or at least, never dare complain about it).
Blogger, author, and activist Cory Doctorow is the most provocative, original, and widely admired thinker on the politics of Big Tech in the world today.
Sorry, you use the wrong Software for the fediverse... You definitely need something with more characters per posting... or no limit... and embedded pictures.
No. Sorry... i'm not interested anymore. You love threads. I hate them. I followed your advice for people who don't like thresds from your own spreaded link.
Because... I don't like threads. I don't like them. You like them. So i unfollowed you.
>People who use CC licenses suddenly get angry when the CC is okay with AI training.
I get the whole lack of attribution thing, but unless you are licensing your work under a non-commercial license (which I don't seem many people do as it's not a libre license), you are already letting billionaires profit off of your work.
Developers used C++ and GameCube-specific libraries. Nintendo provided a GameCube SDK, which allowed developers to take advantage of the console's capabilities, including 3D graphics management.
Ist halt bei den meisten Parteien wirklich nur LARP, d.h. sie machen größtenteils nur Lippenbekenntnisse. Gerade SPD und FDP (also die Teile, die nicht ständig wie AfD-Politiker reden) sind da oft ziemlich unglaubwürdig.
How Canadian media covered up the destruction of Gaza
Edited by Martin Lukacs, Dania Majid and Jason Toney
As Canadians bear witness to live-streamed horrors in #Gaza, the country’s most powerful media have distorted the unfolding #genocide—whitewashing Israeli violence, dehumanizing Palestinians, and smearing a growing protest movement."
Ashoka, also known as Ashoka the Great, was an emperor of the Maurya dynasty in India, ruling from 268 to 232 BCE. He is famous for his spiritual transformation and for the way he promoted Buddhism after experiencing a period of violence and military conquests.
At the end of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, a prominent Philadelphia citizen asked Benjamin Franklin, “Well, do we have a monarchy or a republic?” Wise Franklin’s reply: "A republic, if you can keep it."
Depuis l’automne 2024, un collectif revendique des dégradations, des menaces, et des agressions contre des soutiens à la #Palestine, souvent pour un simple affichage de drapeaux. Ils s’inscrivent dans les combats de l’extrême droite identitaire. #france streetpress.com/sujet/17508584…
Depuis l’automne 2024, un collectif revendique des dégradations, des menaces, et des agressions contre des soutiens à la Palestine, souvent pour un simple affichage de drapeaux. Ils s’inscrivent dans les combats de l’extrême droite identitaire.
Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara told the High Court that Netanyahu has a conflict of interest and must be barred from involvement, as the Shin Bet leads sensitive investigations nearing key decisions involving his closest aides
In autumn 2024, California’s Monterey Bay experienced an outsized phytoplankton bloom that attracted fish, dolphins, whales, seabirds, and – for a few weeks in October – scientists. A team from NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, with partners at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), and the Naval Postgraduate School, spent two weeks […]
💸 Avez-vous déjà rêvé de donner un sens à votre argent au lieu de le voir fondre dans un café 18$ sans couvercle ? Voici votre chance.
Notre petit refuge pour animaux à Québec, c’est : 🐹 des sauvetages, 💩 du ménage quotidien, ❤️ de l’amour à revendre …et un mari (le Shoshin) qui s’occupe, plutôt que de parler tout seul au toaster.
Soutenir notre refuge, c’est soutenir :
Les animaux abandonnés.
Un projet de cœur.
La santé mentale d’un humain tout ce qu’il y a de plus vrai.
Un grand merci de la part de Nancy, Shoshin, et toute la clique poilue 🐾
Aidez-nous et aidez notre refuge animal Toute aide financière de votre part sera dirigée vers notre petit refuge pour animaux à Québec. Le refuge procure une occupation à mon mari (le Shoshin)...
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is testing a series of large spacecraft rolls that will help it hunt for water. After nearly 20 years of operations, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) is on a roll, performing a new maneuver to squeeze even more science out of the busy spacecraft as it circles the Red Planet. Engineers […]
Extrait : Alors la vraie récompense ? C’est d’avoir marché à ta manière, même si c’est en zigzaguant comme un gars bourré sur un sentier de montagne. Parce qu’au fond, le seul juge, c’est toi, et ça, ça vaut tous les nirvanas du monde.
Transport Evolved are pretty great if you want info on electric cars. They dip into other related topics, too, and also happen to be pretty great people. peertube.tv/a/transportevolved…
i've been wanting to switch from mastodon to gotosocial at some point too. i think there's even a tool to carry over your toots, not that i have a lot.
"The modern state of Israel often stirs intense debate, especially among Christians navigating its place in biblical prophecy and today’s geopolitics.
Some equate the modern government of Israel with the biblical Israel of old, demanding unwavering support — a conversation that has been trending on social media as of recent, due to a fiery ...
Tucker Carlson/Ted Cruz face-off. Others veer into antisemitism, demonizing Jewish people as a whole.
Both extremes miss the mark.
Scripture, particularly Romans 9–11, offers clarity: the modern Israeli government is not biblical Israel, but God’s covenant with the Jewish people endures, and hatred toward them is sin. Let’s unpack this with biblical truth, clarity, and apply it to our fractured world.
‘It’s proven that Zionism is a paper tiger in Democratic politics’: breaking down Zohran Mamdani’s stunning New York victory #Palestinemondoweiss.net/2025/06/its-pro…
Mondoweiss talks to political consultant Peter Feld to break down Zohran Mamdani’s historic victory in New York City: “It’s proven that Zionism is a paper tiger in Democratic politics and that the emperor has no clothes.”
Dedicated to this country that is Canada. Talking about the country... its politics... its culture... activities happening in Canada... pictures... things for sale between Canadians... whatever... open to everyone
On 26 June 2025 ESA project astronaut Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski from Poland and his crewmates arrived to the International Space Station on the Axiom-4 mission (Ax-4). The Polish project astronaut is the second of a new generation of European astronauts to fly on a commercial human spaceflight opportunity with Axiom Space. Sponsored by the Polish government and supported by ESA, the Polish Ministry of Economic Development and Technology (MRiT), and the Polish Space Agency (POLSA), the mission will include an ambitious technological and scientific programme with several experiments led by ESA and proposed by the Polish space industry.
@GM7077 NO WAY hahahahahahaha. did you guys see trump's comments on iran that i can't find anywhere in the media? maybe its deep fake? who knows anymore these days, but if true its very good for iran (or another distraction while he plots israel's next cowardly strike). youtube.com/shorts/6w7BtNNQbG8
**Humor: Guinea pigs against their will — thanks to whom? Thanks to the State! Read the full text here : leshoshin.ca/the-free-shoshin/…
Fragment : So for all the good folks who say, "No way, the government would never harm its own people," I invite you to pull your head out of the sand... or the microwave, whichever’s hotter.
When two stars orbit one another in such a way that one blocks the other’s light each time it swings around, that’s an eclipsing binary. A new paper from NASA’s Eclipsing Binary Patrol citizen science project presents more than 10,000 of these rare pairs – 10,001 to be precise. These objects will help future researchers study […]
New eclipsing binary stars discovered: Citizen scientists help identify 7,936 new pairs, advancing research on stellar physics and exoplanet detection.
Extrait : Tu vois, dans les années 50-60, pendant que tout le monde écoutait Elvis, l’État, lui, testait le LSD sur des gens sans leur demander leur avis. Sympa, hein ? Une belle démonstration de démocratie... version camisole chimique.
Ramallah, Jun 25 (Prensa Latina) The Palestinian National Council (PNC) denounced on Wednesday the crimes conducted by Israeli security forces and settlers in the occupied East Jerusalem, which it described as a colonial strategy.
Recently completed cherry loveseat.I have had most of the components set aside and ready and finally got around to finishing this . The blue tweed cushions look outstanding on this mid century inspired two seater.
Contrary to the ALT text, it's not the ladder that melted here, but the concrete directly beneath the ladder. The ladder is a good conductor of electricity stay relatively cold and transfers the energy from the overhead line directly to the concrete, which, due to its high resistance, heated up considerably and melted at a high temperature. Thx to @Laberpferd, @australopithecus & @dianea for information and explanations. 👌
sorry, a bit late for crashing the party, but against what exactly is the ladder leaning on, when it leans to the back and all of the cables shown are in front of it?
I'm a little confused though because in the video it looks like the ladder is behind the power lines, leaning on the roof top, not the power lines.
The image is too low resolution and I can't say absolutely for certain it's not touching the power lines, but they seem slack as if there is no pressure on them to me. I think it's unlikely it's touching the main lines at least.
Could concrete even conduct sufficiently enough to allow that much power to continuously go through (even after it melts)?
A brand new 68k Mac emulator quietly dropped last night!!
“Snow” can emulate the Mac 128k, 512k, Plus, SE, Classic, and II. It supports reading disks from bitstream and flux-floppy images, and offers full execution control and debugging features for the emulated CPU. Written using Rust, it doesn't do any ROM patching or system call interception, instead aiming for accurate hardware-level emulation.
Just a couple of days ago, during my archiving efforts, I teased about a disk I imaged that won’t run under emulation. It doesn’t work on BasiliskII or Mini vMac due to the hardware types and OS versions that are supported.
So I tried it on Snow…and it worked perfectly 😮 More to share on that in a day or two.
I found a way to make it reliably “crash”, by trying to select a colour using the colour picker on System 6 (see attached screenshot)
Except, instead of crashing, it just pauses execution and says that there’s an unimplemented FPU instruction. And then you can click the resume button and carry on your merry way.
It was pointed out to me (thanks to @gloriouscow ) that the author of Snow, Thomas “twvd” has a blog where he wrote up a bunch of his research into the IWM chip and low-level Mac floppy emulation. Check it out here:
We still don’t have a full IWM clone in hardware, but there’s been a few shims and works-in-progress - see links below. Maybe his research can help to push these efforts forward (and bring us one step closer to the dream of new SE/30 boards without having to cannibalize parts from a donor board)?
Ladies and gentlemen, my next trick is impossible improbable...
It seems like the IWM is the only (or at least the biggest) thing standing in the way of a Plus or SE made of entirely new parts -...
huh I found that on GitHub back in March. I guess the author decided it needed more work before it was ready for a proper launch. mastodon.decentralised.social/…
Shame on all those who do business with Israeli capital which is founded on the ongoing massacre of Palestinians, their historical displacement and the looting of their land.
Οι Μητέρες κατά της Γενοκτονίας βρέθηκαν σε συνέδριο επενδυτών realestate στο Metropolitan Expo το Σάββατο 31/5 στην Αθήνα. (επισυνάπτεται βίντεο της δράσης)
Ντροπή και αίσχος σε όσους κάνουν μπίζνες με το ισραηλινό κεφάλαιο πουείναι χτισμένο πάνω στη σφαγή Παλαιστίνιων, στον ακατάπαυστο εκτοπισμότους, στη λεηλασία της γης τους.
https://twitter.com/cucumberfeet1https://discord.gg/hW48vVzeCH=============================================Dive into the madness of Fishtank Season 3! In thi...
Iranian TV cited sources who said the nuclear #scientist, Mohammad Reza Seddiqi Saber, was killed at his parents' home in Astaneh-ye Ashrafiyeh, in Gilan province. All those 12 people marked in this image were murdered by #Israel shortly before #ceasefire. #WarOnIran #IranUnderAttack #StopIsrael
Just out of idle curiosity. I went to music school and teach at a local music shop, so I'm very familiar with music theory but I'm aware that my experience is most likely not the norm.
If you are familiar with any theory (even just scales and keys), where did you pick it up? Lots of the resources I've seen both in and outside of formal education can be both confusing, and it's often hard to see the application of what you learn in the short term.
I know some basics from learning electric bass, but don't ask me about chords (beyond major and minor) or chord progressions. I'm definitely aware that this is a huge blindspot even for electronic music.
In Euskadi (Basque country), solidarity with Palestine is super high. Saw Palestinian flags and solidarity graffiti everywhere, in working class neighborhoods, as well as many of the tourist hot spots. Sometimes the majority of windows in a single apartment complex displayed Palestinian flags.
This should come as no surprise in light of the history of colonialism and oppression of the Basque people by the Spanish state, in general. And, in particular, the mass slaughter of Basque civilians in Guernika on April 26, 1937 by Hitler's Condor Legion, in support of Spanish Fascist leader Francisco Franco.
This can be seen in the accompanying mural, which includes the portion of Picasso's famous Guernica painting depicting a grieving woman holding her dead child, reminiscent of so many of the horrifying images we are seeing coming out of Israel's genocide in Gaza.
@ChestyPullerGst I'm sorry New Yorkers, our esteemed Senator Ted Zodiac Cruz misspoke.
Texas is awful. Horribly expensive. Roving bands of homeless people addicted to bath salts who will eat your face if you don't give them money. It's 130 degrees in November. The mosquitos have voting rights.
Don't move here.
@tedcruz To all my friends in New York who are not communists;
Microsoft has confirmed that its Family Safety parental control service is blocking users from launching Google Chrome and other web browsers on Windows systems. [...] posted by pod_feeder by tresronours
Since childhood, Derrick Bailey always had an early fascination with aeronautics. Military fighter jet pilots were his childhood heroes, and he dreamed of joining the aerospace industry. This passion was a springboard into his 17-year career at NASA, where Bailey plays an important role in enabling successful rocket launches. Bailey is the Launch Vehicle Certification […]
Basta! actualise son recensement des missions des forces de l'ordre ayant entraîné la mort. On fait le point sur les décès par armes « non létales » ; ceux liés à des refus d'obtempérer ; ceux survenus dans les locaux des forces de l'ordre et les CRA…
🚨 #URGENT – NOUS CHERCHONS UN LOCAL AVEC MON ASSOCIATION ! L’ #association Press Start doit quitter son local à #Villefranche-sur-Saône d’ici septembre. 📦 Notre #collection de +50 ans d’histoire vidéo-culturelle cherche un nouveau foyer. ➤ Tu connais un local libre ? Une piste ? Une MJC, une mairie, une école, un partenaire possible ? Contacte nous ou partage ce post pour nous aider à ne pas nous retrouver Game Over. 🙏 --> press-start-retrogaming.com/ #videogame #retrogaming #association #patrimoine #lyon
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Closely related to the dictator's dilemma is "authoritarian blindness," where an autocrat's censorship regime keeps them from finding out about important, socially destabilizing facts on the ground, like whether a corrupt local official is comporting themself so badly that the people are ready to take to the streets:
pluralistic.net/2020/02/24/plu…
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Pluralistic, your daily link-dose: 24 Feb 2020 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
The modern Chinese state has done more to skillfully navigate the twin hazards of the dictator's dilemma and authoritarian blindness than any other regime in history. Take Xi Jinping's 2012-2015 anticorruption purge, which helped him secure another ten year term as Party Secretary.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Xi targeted legitimately corrupt officials in this this sweeping purge, but - crucially - he only targeted corrupt officials in the power-base of his rivals for Party leader, while leaving corrupt officials in his own power base unscathed:
web.archive.org/web/2018122216…
How did Xi accomplish this feat? Through intense, fine-grained surveillance, another area in which modern China excels.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Chinese online surveillance is often paired with censorship, both petty (banning Winnie the Pooh, whom Xi is often mocked for resembling) and substantial (getting Apple to modify Airdrop for every user in the world in order to prevent the spread of anti-regime messages before a key Party leadership contest).
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
But there are many of instances where China spies on people but *doesn't* censor them, even when they express dissatisfaction with the state. Chinese censors allow a surprising amount of complaint about official incompetence, overreach and corruption, but they completely suppress any calls for *mobilization* to address these complaints. You can be as angry as you want with the government online, but you can't call for protests to do something about it:
science.org/doi/10.1126/scienc…
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
This makes perfect sense in the context of "authoritarian blindness": by allowing online complaint, an autocrat can locate the hot-spots where things are reaching a boiling-over point, and by blocking public manifestations, the autocrat can prevent the public from turning their failings into a flashpoint that endangers the autocracy.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
In other words, autocrats can reserve to themselves the power to decide how to defuse public anger: they can suppress it, using surveillance data about the people who led the online debate about official failures to figure out who to intimidate, arrest, or disappear.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Or they can address it through measures like firing corrupt local officials or funding local social programs (toxic waste cleanups, smokestack regulation, building schools and hospitals, etc) that make people feel better about their government.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Autocracy is an inherently unstable social situation. No society can deliver everything that everyone in it desires: if you tear down existing low-density housing and build apartment blocks to decrease a housing shortage, you'll delight people who are un- or under-housed, and you'll infuriate people who are happily housed under the status quo. In every society, there's always someone getting their way at the expense of someone else.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Obviously, widespread unhappiness is inherently socially destabilizing. After all, no society can police every action of every person. From littering to parking in disabled parking spots, from paying your taxes to washing your hands before serving food, a society relies primarily on people following the rules without even though their face little to no risk of being punished for breaking them.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
The easiest way to get people to follow the rules is to foster a sense of the rules' legitimacy: people may not agree with or understand the rationale for a rule, but if they view the process by which the rule was decided on as a legitimate one, then they may follow it anyway.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
This legitimacy is a source of social stability. Sure, your candidate might lose the election, or the government might enact a policy you hate, but if you think the election was fair and you believe that you can change the policy through democratic means, then you will be on the side of preserving the system, rather than overturning it.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
A democracy's claim to legitimacy lies in its popular mandate: "Sure, I don't like this decision, but it was fairly made." By contrast, a dictator's legitimacy comes their claims to *wisdom*: "Sure, I don't like this decision, but the Supreme Generalissimo is the smartest man in history, and he says it was the right call."
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
You can see how this is a brittle arrangement, even if the dictator is a skilled autocrat who makes generally great decisions: even a great decision is going to have winners and losers, and it might be hard to convince the losers that they keep losing because they deserve to lose. And that's the *best* outcome, where an autocrat is *right*. But what about when the autocrat is *wrong*?
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
What about when the autocrat makes a bunch of decisions that make nearly everyone consistently worse off, either because the autocrat is a fool, or because they are greedy and are stealing everything that isn't nailed down?
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Every society needs stabilizers, but autocracies need more stabilizers than democracies, because the story about why you, personally, are getting screwed is a lot less convincing in an autocracy ("The autocrat is right and you are wrong, suck it up") than it is in a democracy ("This was the fairest compromise possible, and if it wasn't, we need to elect someone new so it changes").
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
The Snowden revelations taught us that there is no distinction between commercial surveillance and government surveillance. Governments spy, sure, but the most effective way for governments to spy on us is by raiding the data troves assembled by technology companies (for one thing, these troves are assembled at our own expense - we foot the bill for this spying whenever we send money to a phone or tech company).
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
The tech companies were willing participants in this process: the original Snowden leak, about the "PRISM" program, showed how tech companies made millions of dollars by siphoning off user data to the NSA on demand:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
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electronic surveillance program
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
It was only later that we learned about another NSA program, "Upstream," through which the NSA wiretapped the tech companies' data-centers, acquiring *all* of their user data, and then requesting the data that interested them through PRISM, as a form of "parallel construction," which is when an agency learns a fact through a secret system, and then uses a less-secret system to acquire the same fact, in order to maintain the secrecy of the first system:
eff.org/pages/upstream-prism
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Upstream vs. PRISM
Electronic Frontier FoundationCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Upstream *really* pissed off the tech companies. After all, they'd been dutifully rolling over and handing out their users' data in violation of US law, risking their businesses to help the NSA do mass spying, and the NSA paid them back by secretly spying on the tech companies themselves! That's a hell of a way to say thank you to your co-conspirators.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
After Upstream, the tech companies finally started encrypting the links between their data-centers, which made Upstream-style collection infinitely harder:
arstechnica.com/information-te…
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Yahoo will encrypt between data centers, use SSL for all sites
Sean Gallagher (Ars Technica)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
But that hardly ended the mass surveillance private-public partnership. Congress continued to do nothing about privacy (the last federal consumer privacy law Congress gave Americans is 1988's Video Privacy Protection Act, which bans video store clerks from telling newspapers about the VHS cassettes you take home) (we used to be a *country*).
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
That meant that tech companies could collect our data will-ye or nil-ye, and that data brokers could buy and sell that data without any oversight or limitation:
pluralistic.net/2025/02/20/pri…
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Pluralistic: Ad-tech targeting is an existential threat (20 Feb 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
There's many reasons that Congress failed to act on privacy. Obviously, they face immense pressure from lobbyists for the commercial surveillance industry - but they also face covert and powerful pressure from public safety agencies, cops, and spies, who rely on private sector data as a source of off-the-books, warrantless, ubiquitous surveillance.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Why does America need so much spying? Well, because America has always been imperfectly democratic, from its inception as a enslaving nation where millions of people were denied both the ballot and personhood; and as a patriarchal nation where half of the remaining people were *also* denied the franchise; and as a colonialist nation where an entire culture of people had been subject to genocide, land theft, and systematic oppression. This is an obviously unstable arrangement.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Whether in chains, on a reservation, or under the thumb of a husband or father, there were plenty of Americans who had no reason to buy into the system, accept its legitimacy, or follow its rules. To keep the system intact, it wasn't enough to terrorize these populations - America's rulers had to know where to inflict terror, which is to say, where order was closest to collapsing.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Some of America's first spies were private sector union-busters, the Pinkerton agency, who served as a private spy army for bosses who wanted to find the leverage points in the worker uprisings that swept the country. The Pinkerton's pitch was that it was cheaper to pay them to figure out who the most important union leaders were and target them for violence, kidnapping, and killing than it was to give all your workers a raise.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
This is an important aspect of the surveillance project. Spying is part of a broader class of activities called "guard labor" - anything you might pay someone to do that results in fewer guillotines being built on your lawn. Guard labor can be paying someone to build a wall around your estate or neighborhood. It can be paying security guards to patrol the wall. It can be paying for CCTV operators, or drone operators. It can be paying for surveillance, too.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Guard labor isn't free. The pitch for guard labor is that it is a cheaper way to get social stability than the alternative: building schools and hospitals, paying a living wage, lowering prices, etc. It follows that when you make guard labor cheaper, you can build fewer schools and hospitals, pay lower wages, and raise prices more, and buy more guard labor to counter the destabilizing effect of these policies, and still come out ahead.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
American politics have been growing ever more unstable since the 1970s, when oil crisis gave way to the Reagan revolution and its raft of pro-oligarch, anti-human policies. Since then, we've seen an unbroken trend to wage stagnation and widening inequality. As a new American oligarch class emerged, they gained near-total control over the levers of power.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
In a now-famous 2014 paper, political scientists reviewed 1,779 policy fights and found that the only time these cashed out in a way that reflected popular will is when elites favored them, too. When elites objected to something, it literally didn't matter how popular it was with everyone else, it just didn't happen:
cambridge.org/core/journals/pe…
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Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens | Perspectives on Politics | Cambridge Core
Cambridge CoreCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
It's pretty hard to make the case that the system is legitimate when it *only* does things that rich people want, and *never* does things the vast majority of people want when these conflict with rich peoples' desires. Some of these outcomes are merely disgusting and immoral, like abetting genocide in Gaza.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
But more frequently, the policies elites favor are ones that make the rich richer: climate inaction, blocking Medicare for All, smashing unions, dismantling anti-corruption and campaign finance laws.
I don't think it's a coincidence that America's democracy has become significantly less democratic at the same time that mass surveillance has grown.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Mass surveillance makes guard labor *much* cheaper, which means that the rich can make their lives better at all of our expense and still afford the amount of guard labor it takes to keep the guillotines at bay.
Cheap guard labor also allows the rich to strike devil's bargains that would otherwise be instantaneously destabilizing.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
For example, the second Trump election required an alliance between the tiny minority of ultra-rich with the much larger minority of virulent racists who were promised the realization of their psychotic fantasy of masked, armed goons snatching brown people off the streets and sending them to offshore slave labor camps.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
That alliance might be a good way to elect a president who'll dismantle anticorruption law and slash taxes, but it won't do you much good if the resulting ethnic cleansing terror provokes a popular uprising. But what if ICE can rely on Predator drones and cell-site simulators to track the identities of everyone who comes out to a protest:
wired.com/story/cbp-predator-d…
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
What if ICE can buy off-the-shelf facial recognition tools and use them to identify people who are brave enough to step between snatch-squads and their neighbors?
404media.co/ice-is-using-a-new…
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ICE Is Using a New Facial Recognition App to Identify People, Leaked Emails Show
Joseph Cox (404 Media)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Each advance in surveillance tech makes worse forms of oppression, misgovernance and corruption possible, by making it cheaper to counter the destabilizing effect of destroying the lives of the populace, through identifying the bravest, angriest, and most effective opposition figures so they can be targeted for harassment, violence, arrest, or kidnapping.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
America's private sector surveillance industry has always served as a means of identifying and punishing people who fought for a better country. The first credit reporting bureau was the Retail Credit Company, which used a network of spies and paid informants to identify "race mixers," queers, union organizers and leftists so that banks could deny them credit, landlords could deny them housing, and employers could deny them jobs:
jacobin.com/2017/09/equifax-re…
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Retail Credit continued to do this until *1975*, when, finally, popular opinion turned against the company, so it changed its name...
...to *Equifax*.
Today, Equifax is joined by a whole industry of elite enforcers who use spying, legal harassments, mercenaries and troll armies to offset the socially destabilizing effects of the wealthy's misrule:
pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/lau…
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Pluralistic: How the kleptocrats and oligarchs hunt civil society groups to the ends of the Earth (24 August 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
But despite centuries of American mass surveillance, America's oligarchs keep finding themselves in the midst of great existential crises. That's because guard labor - even surveillance-supercharged guard labor - is no substitute for policies that make the country better off.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Oligarchs may want to tend the nation like a shepherd tends its flock, leaving enough lambs around to grow next year's wool. But they're all competing with one another, and they understand that the sheep they spare will like as not end up on a rival's dinner table. Under those circumstances, every oligarch ends up in a race to see who can turn us into lambchops first.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
This is the dictator's dilemma, American style. The rich always overestimate how much social stability their guard labor has bought them, and they're easy mark for any creepy, malodorous troll with a barn full of machine-gun equipped drones:
twitter.com/postoctobrist/stat…
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
They accumulate mounting democratic debts, as destabilizing rage builds in the public, erupting in the Civil War, in the summer of 68, in the Battle of Seattle, in the Rodney King uprising, in the George Floyd protests, in Los Angeles rebellion. They think they can spy their way into a country where they have everything and we have nothing, and we *like it* (or at least, never dare complain about it).
They're wrong.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
I'm at the end of my 24-city book tour for my new novel *Picks and Shovels*!
Catch me in #LONDON with RILEY QUINN from #TRASHFUTURE NEXT TUESDAY (July 1):
howtoacademy.com/events/cory-d…
And in #MANCHESTER at Blackwell's Bookshop on July 2:
eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-…
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Cory Doctorow – The Fight Against the Big Tech Oligarchy | How To Academy
How To AcademyCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Image:
Cryteria (modified)
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil…
CC BY 3.0
creativecommons.org/licenses/b…
eof/
File:HAL9000.svg - Wikimedia Commons
commons.wikimedia.orgKhleedril
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
jakob 🇦🇹 ✅
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •@Cory Doctorow
Sorry, you use the wrong Software for the fediverse...
You definitely need something with more characters per posting... or no limit... and embedded pictures.
Friendly greetings from #Friendica
Cory Doctorow
in reply to jakob 🇦🇹 ✅ • • •How To Make the Least-Worst Mastodon Threads – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netjakob 🇦🇹 ✅
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •@Cory Doctorow
Wow.
So many words to say a simple "go fuck yourself".
Ok... bye.
Cory Doctorow
in reply to jakob 🇦🇹 ✅ • • •@jakob Actually, when I want to say "Go fuck yourself," I say, "Go fuck yourself."
"Friendly greetings" indeed.
Hiker
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Much too long - nobody will read this.
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Hiker • • •Sensitive content
How To Make the Least-Worst Mastodon Threads – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netjakob 🇦🇹 ✅
in reply to Hiker • • •@Hiker @Cory Doctorow
I did not read it.
I unfollowed him.
Cory Doctorow
in reply to jakob 🇦🇹 ✅ • • •@jakob @hiker
No, you told me to "go fuck myself."
Because that's how grownups talk to strangers.
jakob 🇦🇹 ✅
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •@Cory Doctorow @Hiker
😳
No.
Sorry... i'm not interested anymore.
You love threads.
I hate them.
I followed your advice for people who don't like thresds from your own spreaded link.
Because...
I don't like threads. I don't like them. You like them. So i unfollowed you.
🖖
Cory Doctorow
in reply to jakob 🇦🇹 ✅ • • •Hiker
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •No no.
@jakob
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Hiker • • •@hiker @jakob
snopes.com/uploads/images/phot…
-rb
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
huh. Regional slang perhaps, but I always heard the term as “all Willy Nilly”. So “will-ye or nill-ye” is a new one for me!
(I’m in the mid Atlantic region, eastern US. What about y’all: what is the expression and where are you from?)
Cory Doctorow
in reply to -rb • • •Sensitive content
@dashrb
See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willy-ni…
English slang for unplanned or haphazard
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)-rb
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content