Jessica Bruder

Snowden's Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance
by Jessica Bruder and Dale Maharidge
Published 29 Mar 2020

SNOWDEN’S BOX SNOWDEN’S BOX Trust in the Age of Surveillance By Jessica Bruder and Dale Maharidge First published by Verso 2020 © Jessica Bruder, Dale Maharidge 2020 Parts of this book appeared originally under the same title in Harper’s Magazine, May 2017 All rights reserved The moral rights of the authors have been asserted 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-343-4 ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-346-5 (US EBK) ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-345-8 (UK EBK) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bruder, Jessica, author. | Maharidge, Dale, author.

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SNOWDEN’S BOX SNOWDEN’S BOX Trust in the Age of Surveillance By Jessica Bruder and Dale Maharidge First published by Verso 2020 © Jessica Bruder, Dale Maharidge 2020 Parts of this book appeared originally under the same title in Harper’s Magazine, May 2017 All rights reserved The moral rights of the authors have been asserted 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-343-4 ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-346-5 (US EBK) ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-345-8 (UK EBK) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bruder, Jessica, author. | Maharidge, Dale, author. Title: Snowden’s box : trust in the age of surveillance / By Jessica Bruder and Dale Maharidge. Description: First edition hardback. | London ; New York : Verso, 2020. | “Parts of this book appeared originally under the same title in Harper’s Magazine, May 17, 2017”—T.p verso. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019038432 | ISBN 9781788733434 (hardback) | ISBN 9781788733465 (ebk) | ISBN 9781788733458 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Snowden, Edward J., 1983– | Electronic surveillance—United States. | Confidential communications—United States. | Journalism—Political aspects—United States—History—21st century.

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It’s what lets people come together in any kind of cooperative action, from social movements to marriages and markets. When shared between members of a civic-minded community, trust is the one thing that can keep state power in check — unless, of course, we allow ourselves to be manipulated by fear and, in the silence that follows, grow apart from one another. — Jessica Bruder and Dale Maharidge 1. Winter Nights Dale Maharidge It was a frigid winter, and the Manhattan loft was cold — very cold. Something was wrong with the gas line, and there was no heat. In a corner, surrounding the bed, sheets had been hung from cords to form a de facto tent with a small electric heater running inside.

Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century
by Jessica Bruder
Published 18 Sep 2017

U.S. most unequal: “Inequality Update,” Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, November 2016, https://www.oecd.org/social/OECD2016-Income-Inequality-Update.pdf. 248. Comparing nations’ inequality: http://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/SI.POV.GINI/rankings. 248. Octopus in a coconut: https://www.facebook.com/LADbible/videos/2969897786390725. ALSO BY JESSICA BRUDER Burning Book: A Visual History of Burning Man Photographs by Jessica Bruder. Photograph page 34 courtesy of Linda May. Copyright © 2017 by Jessica Bruder All rights reserved First Edition For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110. For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact W.

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Nomadland SURVIVING AMERICA IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY JESSICA BRUDER W. W. NORTON & COMPANY INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS SINCE 1923 NEW YORK LONDON For Dale “There’s a crack in everything. That is how the light gets in.” —LEONARD COHEN “The capitalists don’t want anyone living off their economic grid.” —ANONYMOUS COMMENTER, AZDAILYSUN.COM CONTENTS FOREWORD Part One 1. The Squeeze Inn 2. The End 3. Surviving America 4. Escape Plan Part Two 5. Amazon Town 6. The Gathering Place 7. The Rubber Tramp Rendezvous 8. Halen 9. Some Unbeetable Experiences Part Three 10.

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech
by Brian Merchant
Published 25 Sep 2023

These quotes are from our interviews. Part VI: The Owners of the New Machine Age 1. “Companies do not care” Douglas Schifter, Facebook post, February 5, 2018. 2. He was proud Ginia Bellafante, “A Driver’s Suicide Reveals the Dark Side of the Gig Economy,” New York Times, February 6, 2018. 3. With his large frame Jessica Bruder, “Driven to Despair,” New York, May 2018. The Great Comet Returns 1. Closed for Business signs “Retail Trade Employment: Before, During, and After the Pandemic,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, Beyond the Numbers, vol. 11, no. 4 (April 2022). 2. By the end of the ’00s According to Forbes in 2007, “The high-tech hub of San Jose leads the list of Forbes 400 members per capita.”

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By the end of the ’00s According to Forbes in 2007, “The high-tech hub of San Jose leads the list of Forbes 400 members per capita.” San Francisco was second. 3. France’s interior minister “French Government Vows to Shut Down Uber,” Deutsche Welle, June 26, 2015. 4. “We are facing extinction” Douglas Schifter, Black Car News, quoted in Jessica Bruder, “Driven to Despair.” The New Tech Titans 1. “We’re going to see our already record-high inequality” This and many subsequent quotes are taken from an interview I conducted with the then presidential candidate in 2018. 2. Mass production of self-driving “Ease the Transition to Self-Driving Vehicles,” Yang2020.com. 3.

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At Amazon, even before the ALU’s historic victory I attended a handful of events Smalls headlined to talk about the labor movement, and spoke with him about organizing at Amazon in Los Angeles. The quotes about Amazon Go stores are taken from an event at Stories bookstore in LA. 8. He published the post to his Facebook page Jessica Bruder, ”Driven to Despair,” New York, May 2018. 9. But like the Luddites By the end of the next year, the city had enacted a cap on the number of Uber and Lyft drivers that could operate in the city, extending a lifeline to Schifter’s taxi-driving peers. Afterword 1. On the one hand, the answer is no Aaron Benanav, Automation and the Future of Work (London and New York: Verso, 2020). 2.

Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work
by Alex Rosenblat
Published 22 Oct 2018

True to his word, he made my book a priority at all hours of the day and night as deadlines neared. He is more than a talented editor—he is a great friend. I’m also grateful to David Lyon, Annette Burfoot, and David Murakami Wood, who first gave me confidence to pursue sociological work. And to Ruth Donsky, my first teacher. To Natasha Singer, Anne L. Washington, Tom Igoe, and Jessica Bruder, whose brilliance and kindness were deeply encouraging to me as I wrote this book. To Labor Tech, a group of scholars organized by Winifred Poster, who, along with Michael Palm, offered generous feedback on my manuscript. To Frank Pasquale, who has a rare ability to detect and draw intellectual connections across different fields of research and to connect scholars accordingly.

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Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Elia Zureik, “Theorizing Surveillance: The Case of the Workplace,” in Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk and Digital Discrimination, ed. David Lyon (London, UK: Routledge, 2002): 31–56; Alex Rosenblat and Luke Stark, “Algorithmic Labor and Information Asymmetries: A Case Study of Uber’s Drivers,” International Journal of Communication 10, no. 27 (2016): 3772, http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/4892. 15. Jessica Bruder, “These Workers Have a New Demand: Stop Watching Us,” The Nation, May 27, 2015, www.thenation.com/article/these-workers-have-new-demand-stop-watching-us/; Monique Girard and David Stark, “Distributing Intelligence and Organizing Diversity in New Media Projects,” Environment and Planning A 34, no. 11 (2002): 1927–1949; Rosenblat and Stark, “Algorithmic Labor,” 3772. 16.

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane
by Emily Guendelsberger
Published 15 Jul 2019

Shipler Precarious Lives: Job Insecurity and Well-Being in Rich Democracies, Arne Kalleberg The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences, Louis Uchitelle The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, Juliet Schor Free Time: The Forgotten American Dream, Benjamin Hunnicutt The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, Guy Standing Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, Arlie Hochschild The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker, Steven Greenhouse The Working Life: The Promise and Betrayal of Modern Work, Joanne B. Ciulla The Betrayal of Work: How Low-Wage Jobs Fail 30 Million Americans, Beth Shulman Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, Jessica Bruder Where Bad Jobs Are Better: Retail Jobs Across Countries and Companies, Francoise Carre and Chris Tilly “We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now”: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages, Annelise Orleck On Wanda Stone Age Economics, Marshall Sahlins Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, Robert Sapolsky Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir The Panopticon Writings, Jeremy Bentham Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work, Paul Babiak and Robert D.

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* Songs with a glockenspiel, songs with just a first name as the title, songs where someone yells “YEE-OW!,” etc. * I even get all the way through an Amazon-themed “I’m going to the picnic” one afternoon, from Advil to a Zero-tolerance policy about stealing. * For more about workamping, check out Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017). * Or I’m pretty sure that’s what he said—I can still only sort of decipher anything said through the megaphone. I confirm it later. * “Water spider” is another odd Amazonian job title. From the few days I spent in packing, I gather that it involves running around keeping stationary workers supplied with materials

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy
by Christopher Mims
Published 13 Sep 2021

Nearly everyone who has ever worked in an Amazon fulfillment center has a story about the moment they realized this. “America’s appetite for sex toys—indicated by the sheer number and variety of dildos and butt plugs passing through Amazon warehouses—is a subject of fascination to many workers,” wrote Jessica Bruder, who interviewed dozens of temporary Amazon workers for Nomadland, her chronicle of America’s surprisingly large population of itinerant temps. Because Tyler is a triumph of evolution who was protected and nurtured as an infant by an extended network of caring adults who tolerated in him, as is the case with all human babies, a period of neoteny longer than that of any other animal on Earth, he was able to acquire the intelligence and finesse required to reach into the (frequently overstuffed) bin and, based only on a name and the two-dimensional image he just glanced at, grab just the right item.

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“robot arms race”: Kim Bhasin and Patrick Clark, “How Amazon Triggered a Robot Arms Race,” Bloomberg News, June 29, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-29/how-amazon-triggered-a-robot-arms-race. “Amazon Prime effect”: Christopher Mims, “The Prime Effect: How Amazon’s Two-Day Shipping Is Disrupting Retail,” Wall Street Journal, September 20, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-prime-effect-how-amazons-2-day-shipping-is-disrupting-retail-1537448425. cover of Wired magazine: Jessica Bruder, “Meet the Immigrants Who Took On Amazon,” Wired, November 12, 2019, https://www.wired.com/story/meet-the-immigrants-who-took-on-amazon. Chapter 15: The Unbearable Complexity of Robotic Warehousing 350 pounds: Staten Island Advance, “A Peek Inside the New Amazon Fulfillment Center: The Robots,” YouTube, June 19, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America
by Alec MacGillis
Published 16 Mar 2021

fired by an algorithm: Colin Lecher, “How Amazon Automatically Tracks and Fires Warehouse Workers for ‘Productivity,’” The Verge, April 25, 2019, https://theverge.com/2019/4/25/18516004/amazon-warehouse-fulfillment-centers-productivity-firing-terminations. somewhat higher-skilled jobs: “What Amazon Does to Wages,” The Economist, January 20, 2018. the CamperForce of retirees: Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017). almost designed to isolate employees: Emily Guendelsberger, On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane (New York: Little, Brown, 2019), 52. the company deployed tried-and-true defenses: See discussion of failed 2014 unionizing effort by Amazon equipment maintenance and repair technicians in Delaware in Duhigg, “Is Amazon Unstoppable?”

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In Kentucky, an employee at an Amazon call center: Benjamin Romano, “Fired Amazon Employee with Crohn’s Disease Files Lawsuit over Lack of Bathroom Access,” The Seattle Times, February 2, 2019. “Associates are allowed to use the toilet whenever needed”: From Amazon’s written response to questions submitted by the author, July 13, 2020. a group of Somali American workers: Jessica Bruder, “Meet the Immigrants Who Took On Amazon,” Wired, November 12, 2019. a study of twenty-three Amazon warehouses by the Center for Investigative Reporting: Will Evans, “Behind the Smiles,” Reveal, November 25, 2019, https://revealnews.org/article/behind-the-smiles/. another in-depth report: “Packaging Pain: Workplace Injuries Inside Amazon’s Empire,” Amazon Packaging Pain, https://amazonpackagingpain.org/the-report.

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future
by Ben Tarnoff
Published 13 Jun 2022

Google acquisitions: CB Insights, “The Google Acquisition Tracker,” available at cbinsights.com/. 124, Moreover, there aren’t … Decline in GDP and labor productivity growth rates: Aaron Benanav, Automation and the Future of Work (London: Verso, 2020), 31–32; Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945–2005 (Verso: London, 2018 [2006]), 341. Richest .01 percent of Americans quintupling their share of national wealth: Howard R. Gold, “Never Mind the 1 Percent. Let’s Talk about the 0.01 Percent,” Chicago Booth Review (Winter 2017). 8. Inclusive Predators 126, Doug Schifter spent more … Jessica Bruder, “Driven to Despair,” New York Magazine, May 14, 2018; Ginia Bellafante, “A Driver’s Suicide Reveals the Dark Side of the Gig Economy,” New York Times, February 6, 2018. 126, He wanted his suicide … Schifter’s columns are available at drivingguild.org/doug-schifter-black-car-news-column-archive/.

The Smartphone Society
by Nicole Aschoff

The company says mobile shopping now accounts for more than 40 percent of its revenue and it’s growing by leaps and bounds.47 Every time we impulsively tap a purchase on our phones, someone is on the other end, filling a box with whatever we ordered before handing it to someone else to drop it on our doorstep. Amazon alone employs more than 613,000 warehouse workers worldwide, and adds about 100,000 more temp workers during peaks.48 Jessica Bruder, in Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, follows the lives of Amazon’s “CamperForce,” a large group of (mainly) retirees who can’t afford to retire, so they live in their RVs and other vehicles and find temporary work in the warehouses of “the everything store” during the holidays.

The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era
by Ellen Ruppel Shell
Published 22 Oct 2018

Amazon promised 1,476 full-time jobs In 2015, when Amazon announced it was hiring more workers in Chattanooga, the hourly wage on offer was $11.25, below the poverty line for a family of four. That meant that at least some of these workers would actually incur costs in the form of housing and other subsidies. See Jessica Bruder, “With 6,000 New Warehouse Jobs, What Is Amazon Really Delivering?,” Reuters, June 17, 2015, http://blogs.reuters.com/​great-debate/​2015/​06/​17/​with-6000-new-warehouse-jobs-what-is-amazon-really-delivering/. To ward off theft, employees were checked twice daily In December 2014, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that a contract agency was not required to pay workers at Amazon warehouses for the time they spent undergoing a twice-daily security screening, a process workers claimed can take as long as twenty-five minutes.

Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World
by Anthony Sattin
Published 25 May 2022

It also lets us glimpse – in the way they live lightly, more freely, in the way they have learned to adapt and to be nimble and flexible in their thoughts and actions, and in the balance they have maintained with the natural world – another way of living, the way that the ‘other’ branch of humankind has chosen to go since the days when we all hunted as a single pack in the generous gardens of the deep past. * For more on the ‘houseless’ in the United States I recommend Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland, the book behind the film. PART I The Balancing Act It will not last. All is change, all is ephemeral. John Stewart Paradise, 10,000 BCE Global population: perhaps 5 million1 Nomad population: most of that number Once upon a time we were all hunters and gatherers.

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future
by Noreena Hertz
Published 13 May 2020

To what extent they were accounted for in this assessment was not made clear. 15 Terena Bell, ‘This bot judges how much you smile during your job interview’, Fast Company, 15 January 2019, https://www.fastcompany.com/90284772/this-bot-judges-how-much-you-smile-during-your-job-interview. 16 ‘Jane’ is a composite character. 17 Cogito Corporation, https://www.cogitocorp.com. 18 ‘Jack’ is also a composite character. 19 Ron Miller, ‘New Firm Combines Wearables And Data To Improve Decision Making’, TechCrunch, 24 February 2015, https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/24/new-firm-combines-wearables-and-data-to-improve-decision-making/. 20 Jessica Bruder, ‘These Workers Have a New Demand: Stop Watching Us’, The Nation, 27 May 2015, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/these-workers-have-new-demand-stop-watching-us/. 21 Ceylan Yeginsu, ‘If Workers Slack Off, the Wristband Will Know. (And Amazon Has a Patent for It.)’, New York Times, 1 February 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/01/technology/amazon-wristband-tracking-privacy.html. 22 James Bloodworth, Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain (Atlantic Books, 2018). 23 Luke Tredinnick and Claire Laybats, ‘Workplace surveillance’, Business Information Review 36, no. 2 (2019), 50–2, https://doi.org/10.1177/0266382119853890. 24 Ivan Manokha, ‘New Means of Workplace Surveillance: From the Gaze of the Supervisor to the Digitalization of Employees’, Monthly Review, 1 February 2019, https://monthlyreview.org/2019/02/01/new-means-of-workplace-surveillance/. 25 Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. 26 Olivia Solon, ‘Big Brother isn’t just watching: workplace surveillance can track your every move’, Guardian, 6 November 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/06/workplace-surveillance-big-brother-technology. 27 Ibid. 28 Note that by ‘sales’ I am including trials.

The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier
by Ian Urbina
Published 19 Aug 2019

They were often called seasteads: My full bibliography on seasteading is as follows: Jerome Fitzgerald, Sea-Steading: A Life of Hope and Freedom on the Last Viable Frontier (New York: iUniverse, 2006); “Homesteading the Ocean,” Spectrum, May 1, 2008; Oliver Burkeman, “Fantasy Islands,” Guardian, July 18, 2008; Patri Friedman and Wayne Gramlich, “Seasteading: A Practical Guide to Homesteading the High Seas,” Gramlich.net, 2009; Declan McCullagh, “The Next Frontier: ‘Seasteading’ the Oceans,” CNET News, Feb. 2, 2009; Alex Pell, “Welcome Aboard a Brand New Country,” Sunday Times, March 15, 2009; Brian Doherty, “20,000 Nations Above the Sea,” Reason, July 2009; Eamonn Fingleton, “The Great Escape,” Prospect, March 25, 2010; Brad Taylor, “Governing Seasteads: An Outline of the Options,” Seasteading Institute, Nov. 9, 2010; “Cities on the Ocean,” Economist, Dec. 3, 2011; Jessica Bruder, “A Start-Up Incubator That Floats,” New York Times, Dec. 14, 2011; Michael Posner, “Floating City Conceived as High-Tech Incubator,” Globe and Mail, Feb. 24, 2012; Josh Harkinson, “My Sunset Cruise with the Clever, Nutty, Techno-libertarian Seasteading Gurus,” Mother Jones, June 7, 2012; Stephen McGinty, “The Real Nowhere Men,” Scotsman, Sept. 8, 2012; Michelle Price, “Is the Sea the Next Frontier for High-Frequency Trading?