do-ocracy

Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America

by Conor Dougherty  · 18 Feb 2020  · 331pp  · 95,582 words

Loefflers lived in a six-room bungalow in Glendale that was full of modern appliances and had a backyard patio and lemon tree. “The Campbells do not live as differently from the Loefflers as might be supposed from the difference in incomes,” Life noted. There’s plenty about this picture

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people walked up to her in the marble hallway to try to figure out if someone had sent her. What’s your name? Sonja. What do you do? I’m a high school math teacher. What brought you here today? I’m just a member of the public. The sorts of people

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sensible business of shopping for a new house, Irwin was calling investors and talking to banks and dealing with tenants and haggling with contractors and doing repairs. The impression it made on Sonja was that it was possible for a regular person to insert himself into a big and complicated

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UC Berkeley. Frieden wrote in the preface that he had gone west with the intention of writing a book about things the federal government could do to improve housing affordability for young families, and upon arriving in California and encountering the Bay Area’s rampant and toxic NIMBYism, had decided to

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of environmentalism to prevent people from moving to denser corridors where housing was actually supposed to go. Frieden didn’t believe nature had much to do with this—such policies were actually anti-environment, because they only promoted sprawled growth elsewhere—and he seemed baffled that the press wasn’t calling

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of new homes,” he wrote. “These have been separate stories: headlines such as ‘Nation’s Cities Fighting to Stem Growth’ simply had nothing to do with the other headlines about the end of the American Dream.” As for how to fix it, Frieden seemed pessimistic that a political solution could

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go on to produce a number of influential studies that essentially put numbers on the arguments in The Environmental Protection Hustle. The studies wouldn’t do much to change policy, but they helped bring attention to the housing shortage—“Changing San Francisco Is Foreseen as a Haven for Wealthy and Childless

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,” blared a New York Times headline in 1981—and would in turn inspire more economists to do more studies as the problem continued to metastasize. Three days after the Times’s “Wealthy and Childless” headline, one of Rosen’s students, an

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establishing itself as the nation’s foremost center of technology and a really good place to get rich. Zoning rules and NIMBYism had nothing to do with these underlying trends. They would nevertheless run into them. The collisions grew in intensity and raised the cost of living a little more

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said. “No. It does not,” she answered herself. She continued, “Rents rise and new homes are built at the same time. Which causes the other? Do new houses cause rents to rise?” “Yes!” several people yelled out from behind her. “Nooooo. Rising rents cause capitalists to build houses,” she said. “Take

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amused by, which makes the club more fun for you, and generally a more rewarding social experience for everybody. ’Cause that is what we’re doing, is building a social world.” The conference’s days were professional, full of meeting room breakout sessions with titles like “Building a Progressive Urbanist Coalition

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During a breakout session one troubled lefty said he didn’t want to be associated with a movement that accepted “libertarian fuckboys.” And what to do about developers? The overall goal of the YIMBY movement was to increase the amount of housing and pace of construction, which almost inevitably meant making

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tested better than “development” and “density” should be eschewed for “walkable and convenient.” Nobody ran this test, but it seemed likely that such phrasing would do even better with opponents when the messenger didn’t sound like a patronizing asshole. That sentiment was telegraphed by the conference’s second keynote speaker

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increases out and raise the cost of displacement by escalating political pressure and making gentrification plays like Trion’s considerably more uncomfortable. He had to do something, anyway, because his kids were getting picked off and leaving the neighborhood for cheaper homes seventy miles away in Tracy, or welling up

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packet to her front door. Stephanie lived in a two-bedroom apartment with her divorced parents and little brother. Her dad worked early to late doing construction. Her mom, Sandy Hernandez, made about $14 an hour cleaning houses and taking care of elderly people. Sandy’s schedule went something like

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Siena Center. A 45 percent rent increase was a brutal thing for a teenager to be trained for, but she at least knew what to do. * * * — STEPHANIE STARTED SPENDING her after-school hours knocking on her neighbors’ doors and asking them if they wanted to organize and challenge the landlord.

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right, yeah.” The group took a moment to translate into Spanish. “Everyone has a right to housing,” Ana continued later. “What we’re doing, what you guys are doing, what you’re fighting for is a human rights issue.” Ana found another volunteer to read article 27 on page 17. “Everyone has

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the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific . . . advancement. And its benefits,” another girl read. “Mmm hmm. What do you guys hear when you read that one?” “Everyone, like, has the right to, like, participate,” one girl answered. “When you think about North Fair

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center had combated the influence of gangs by becoming a well-lit place where kids whose parents worked two or three jobs could play and do their homework surrounded by watchful adults and an uplifting soccer mural. Gang members had initially protested by showing up at the grand opening and

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“NIMBY.” * * * — IT WAS AN ODD TIME to be a twentysomething embarking on a career as a city planner, which was what Rick Holliday was now doing. Rick had rewarded his father’s decision to move the family to a state with an inexpensive university system by graduating from Berkeley, and he

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that the best kind of housing was affordable housing built densely, preferably at state expense and in an environmentally conscious manner. Later, when Rick started doing internships to learn the practicalities of his career choice, the on-the-job lesson he walked away with was that the things they told you

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the 315 apartments being whittled down to 215 or 115, and probably no world in which they would be okay with anything having anything to do with apartments whatsoever. This left two possibilities. Either Lagiss’s daughter had teamed up with an idiotic developer who had no idea how Lafayette

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cities couldn’t rezone their land just because a developer proposed something they didn’t like on it, or exactly what Lafayette was planning to do. Even though the Housing Accountability Act had been on the books for decades, developers rarely used it. That was why nobody in Lafayette could

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“property values will be destroyed” were some of the things they wrote in letters. “The project would strain our already crowded and underfunded schools.” “I do not understand why Lafayette would approve additional housing when there is already plenty of housing available within commuting distance of San Francisco.” “Don’t expect

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settled in by the fire exit and watched as SF BARF and Save Lafayette collided. BRIAN HANLON: It’s a really egregious time to be doing this, given the acute need for new housing, especially for new moderate-income housing. SONJA TRAUSS: An ordinary political process like a sales tax,

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to sidestep the legislative grinder by starting a legal nonprofit that would file racial discrimination lawsuits against exclusive suburbs (something fair housing groups had been doing since the 1960s) in hopes of getting judges to make them build housing. Then Sonja went a step further, unearthing the Housing Accountability Act,

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reduced. To believe that shopping for cities is like shopping for groceries is to believe that the reason poorer and nonwhite families settle where they do is that they’ve gone around their region and surveyed all the available options and after careful consideration decided that a higher-tax city with

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time: climate change, income inequality, and housing affordability. I believe that adding multifamily housing at the BART station is the best way for Lafayette to do its part, and it has therefore become increasingly difficult for me to support, advocate for, or implement policies that would thwart transit density. My conscience

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mattered in local elections, first because there was no point of differentiation and second because city politics revolve around neighborhood arguments that have little to do with the federal government. San Francisco’s solution to its political mass sameness was to create two hyper-local factions that warred over hyper-local

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long-run benefit of more supply is eclipsed by the immediate, short-run threat of displacement,” Hankinson wrote in his paper, which was called “When Do Renters Behave Like Homeowners? High Rent, Price Anxiety, and NIMBYism.” Scott Wiener was all too aware of this attitude, and it wasn’t hard

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Sonja, but this was not to say they were exactly alike. Sonja’s roughness bordered on performance art and she described SF BARF as a “do‐ocracy” where anyone could work on anything they wanted, so long as they actually did it. This wasn’t just a motivator. It was a means

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the legislature had introduced, it was all but guaranteed that by the end of the session it would end up passing something having something to do with housing. The question was which bill or bills would be signed. Democrats were already writing various affordable housing funding bills, which legislators like

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of the economy. That is, when job opportunities improved, housing conditions did too. This new thing, this literal homelessness, seemed to have little to do with the number of jobs or the level of interest rates or foreign wars or bank runs, and instead served as the most extreme example

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threats from the carpenters. The more popular modular construction became, the louder this fight would get. It was out of fashion to believe you could do well and good at the same time. Too many scars from the financial crisis, too many tech monopolies, too many flippers who evicted entire buildings

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seeking schemes that portrayed a capitalism that had lost its way. Rick still believed it. He’d spent his life jumping between the worlds of do-gooding and moneymaking and had come away believing that each needed the other for progress to occur. Governments had good intentions and lofty ideals,

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operating. Who knew, maybe one day there would be some wildly ambitious national building program. Until then, faster and cheaper construction could help to do more with what was there, and like any new technology it held the power to open the public imagination to the idea that big problems

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homeless housing, where we as a community will take our responsibility to get a homeless project approved, in our neighborhood, next to us, and we do it enthusiastically, with open eyes,” he told the commissioners when the proposal came up for a vote. “We have our reservations about what this

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bought it for $15 million. Shortly after Trion’s purchase, Sister Christina tried to buy it back. Trion refused and started renovating. * * * — WORDS LIKE “HOMELESS” do not appear in investor newsletters or the various how-to books and blogs and podcasts that surround the apartment investing industry. The language is of

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their bullet-point list of green policy proposals. This didn’t make the politics any easier, however, because unlike solar panels or electric cars, which do not fundamentally change how cities operate or what neighborhoods look and feel like, 827 was asking for a degree of sacrifice that even liberal-minded

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climate politics. Various polls and California’s own experience showed that voters were willing to support climate action only to the degree that “these initiatives do not demand a significant alteration of lifestyle,” according to one survey. People who politely hated 827 referred to it as “heavy handed.” Some other

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meant a million to compensate for duplicates, nonregistered voters, and the various other names (“Beavis M. Butthead”) that the state would deem ineligible. You could do it like Howard Jarvis and spend a decade building buzz while assembling a volunteer army, but the faster method was to pay people to stand

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other than “price signaling”—telling us what we need to make more of. The practical question for California was what if anything the government should do to protect the potential victims of displacement when local politics refused to listen to what prices were telling them, and even if they had listened

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didn’t agree with them were defensively using some version of “build” in their pitch. Growth had its challenges. Four years earlier, it was a do-ocracy called SF BARF that consisted of Sonja and a few friends showing up at public meetings. Housing was just a fun way to rabble‐rouse

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initiative, was predictably crushed, losing by a margin of two to one and barely winning a majority in San Francisco, where everyone assumed it would do well. Michael Weinstein had already vowed to pay for another rent control initiative soon. Over at what was becoming Matt Haney’s victory party, David

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success of Christianity being in its many sects. Sonja talked about how people can only really control themselves and her belief that life is a “do-ocracy.” Finally, she ended: “If you have a group in your city that you think is too extremely YIMBY, lucky for you, they’ve created

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the verge of becoming the first major city in America to eliminate single-family zoning, and shortly after Oregon would become the first state to do the same thing. Housing would also make its way into the 2020 presidential race, with several Democratic candidates explicitly calling for zoning reforms. Back

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my time away detract from it. And it was good advice, because the housing story is far from over, and there’s always more to do. NOTES ON SOURCES A note on fact‐checking: An independent fact‐checker contacted, whenever possible, the sources interviewed by the writer, sought the opinions

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Hoodline, May 31, 2015, http://hoodline.com/2015/05/affordable-housing-activists-take-their-battle-to-supervisor-s-home. “threat of displacement”: Michael Hankinson, “When Do Renters Behave Like Homeowners? High Rent, Price Anxiety, and NIMBYism,” American Political Science Review 112, no. 3 (2018): 473–93. just begun surging: Joe Garofoli

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Washington, George, 8 water, 69–70, 189 Watts, 77–78, 191, 192 Weinstein, Michael, 207–9, 224 Welch, Calvin, 121–22 West Adams, 191 “When Do Renters Behave Like Homeowners? High Rent, Price Anxiety, and NIMBYism” (Hankinson), 126 Wicks, Buffy, 218–19, 225, 226 Wiener, Scott, 117–32, 134–43, 185

The Debian Administrator's Handbook, Debian Wheezy From Discovery to Mastery

by Raphaal Hertzog and Roland Mas  · 24 Dec 2013  · 678pp  · 159,840 words

to put yourself on the line and be ready to take the job on your shoulders. This peculiar form of meritocracy — which we sometimes call do-ocracy — is very empowering for contributors. Anyone with enough skills, time, and motivation can have a real impact on the direction the project is taking.

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since Debian includes most common free software. However, the distribution brings many enhancements, which is why we chose to primarily describe the “Debian way” of doing things. It is interesting to follow the Debian recommendations, but it is even better to understand their rationale. Therefore, we won't restrict ourselves to

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examples makes it easy to find them even in a new package). TOOL: presents a relevant tool or service; IN PRACTICE: theory and practice do not always match; these sidebars contain advice resulting from our experience. They can also give detailed and concrete examples; other more or less frequent sidebars

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are many more Debian-related associations whose goal is to promote Debian: Debian France, Debian-UK, Debian-ES, debian.ch, and others around the world. Do not hesitate to join your local association and support the project! → http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Auditor/Organizations → http://france.debian.net/ → http://wiki

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establishes a semblance of democracy, the daily reality is quite different: Debian naturally follows the free software rules of the do-ocracy: the one who does things gets to decide how to do them. A lot of time can be wasted debating the respective merits of various ways to approach a problem;

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by appointment, preferring volunteers who have already effectively contributed and proved their competence. This method is practical, because the most of the work these teams do is public, therefore, accessible to any interested developer. This is why Debian is often described as a “meritocracy”. CULTURE Meritocracy, the reign of knowledge

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which is, itself, assessed by observation of past actions by one or more others within the project (Stefano Zacchiroli, the previous project leader, speaks of “do-ocracy”, meaning “power to those who get things done”). Their simple existence proves a certain level of competence; their achievements generally being free software, with available

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user discussion mailing list, <debian-user@lists.debian.org> (Chapter 7, Solving Problems and Finding Relevant Information discusses this in greater detail). Not only do users help themselves (and others) on technical issues that directly affect them, but they also discuss the best ways to contribute to the Debian project

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informal source of information can also be found on Planet Debian, which aggregates articles posted by Debian contributors on their respective blogs. While the contents do not deal exclusively with Debian development, they provide a view into what is happening in the community and what its members are up to. →

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an implicit assumption that all machines can be trusted, and inadequate configuration of a single computer will often perturb the whole network. As a result, do not connect your machine to a network without first agreeing with its administrator on the appropriate settings (for example, the IP address, netmask, and

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equally applicable for other user passwords, but the consequences of a compromised account are less drastic for users without administrative rights. If inspiration is lacking, do not hesitate to use password generators, such as pwgen (in the package of the same name). 4.2.11. Creating the First User Debian

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partition while the swap partition isn't encrypted. To create an encrypted partition, you must first assign an available partition for this purpose. To do so, select a partition and indicate that it is to be used as a “physical volume for encryption”. After partitioning the disk containing the

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detects the operating systems that are already installed on the computer, and automatically adds corresponding entries in the boot menu, but not all installation programs do this. In particular, if you install (or reinstall) Windows thereafter, the bootloader will be erased. Debian will still be on the hard drive, but

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utility, but it is perfectly reasonable to install one without the others. You should always install the “recommended” packages, unless you know exactly why you do not need them. Conversely, it is not necessary to install “suggested” packages unless you know why you need them. The Enhances field also describes

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meta-packages from virtual packages. The former are real packages (including real .deb files), whose only purpose is to express dependencies. Virtual packages, however, do not exist physically; they are only a means of identifying real packages based on common, logical criteria (service provided, compatibility with a standard program or

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system — while in fact it most likely is satisfied. Unaware of this, the package system chooses the least risky option, assuming that the versions do not match. GOING FURTHER Virtual package versions Although today virtual packages can't have versions, this will not necessarily always be the case. Indeed, apt

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to re-instate the relevant modifications (previously identified with diff). GOING FURTHER Avoiding the configuration file questions dpkg handles configuration file updates, but, while doing so, regularly interrupts its work to ask for input from the administrator. This makes it less than enjoyable for those who wish to run updates

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). # apt-get -o DPkg::options::="--force-confdef" -o DPkg::options::="--force-confold" dist-upgrade These options can be stored directly in apt's configuration. To do so, simply write the following line in the /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/local file: DPkg::options { "--force-confdef"; "--force-confold"; } Including this option

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only accept to install the package if its architecture matches the host's architecture as returned by dpkg --print-architecture. This restriction ensures that users do not end up with binaries compiled for an incorrect architecture. Everything would be perfect except that (some) computers can run binaries for multiple architectures,

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repository” which contains all packages but is seldom updated (about once every 2 months for a “point release”). The other repositories are partial (they do not contain all packages) and can host updates (packages with newer version) that APT might install. The following sections will explain the purpose and the

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former sections are always included in this repository, but there is more too, because package maintainers also have the opportunity to fix important bugs that do not deserve an immediate release. Anyone can use this repository to test those updates before their official publication. The extract below uses the wheezy-

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release of Debian is available. Even though this repository provides newer versions of packages, APT will not install them unless you give explicit instructions to do so (or unless you have already done so with a former version of the given backport): $ sudo apt-get install package/wheezy-backports $

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is more than lost when the computer calculates the new versions of these files (starting with the older versions and applying the downloaded differences). To do that, you can use the configuration parameter Acquire::Pdiffs and set it to false. apt-get will generally select the most recent version number

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long for the faster paced versions of Debian. When updates are available, apticron automatically downloads them. It does not install them — the administrator will still do it — but having the packages already downloaded and available locally (in APT's cache) makes the job faster. Administrators in charge of several computers

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APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists This option allows you to specify the frequency (in days) at which the package lists are refreshed. apticron users can do without this variable, since apticron already does this task. APT::Periodic::Download-Upgradeable-Packages Again, this option indicates a frequency (in days), this time

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/etc/default/locale The /etc/environment file provides the login, gdm, or even ssh programs with the correct environment variables to be created. These applications do not create these variables directly, but rather via a PAM (pam_env.so) module. PAM (Pluggable Authentication Module) is a modular library centralizing the

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the networks to which the user has already connected, and automatically switches to the best available network when the current connection drops. In order to do this, the program is structured in two parts: a daemon running as root handles activation and configuration of network interfaces and a user interface

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different order), correct them manually and run grub-install again. Partitions also have a specific name in GRUB. When you use “classical” partitions in MS-DOS format, the first partition on the first disk is labeled, (hd0,msdos1), the second (hd0,msdos2), etc. GRUB 2 configuration is stored in /boot

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Mac OSX, Hurd). 8.8.4. For Macintosh Computers (PowerPC): Configuring Yaboot Yaboot is the bootloader used by old Macintosh computers using PowerPC processors. They do not boot like PCs, but rely on a “bootstrap” partition, from which the BIOS (or OpenFirmware) executes the loader, and on which the ybin program

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and autumn). 8.9.2. Time Synchronization Time synchronization, which may seem superfluous on a computer, is very important on a network. Since users do not have permissions allowing them to modify the date and time, it is important for this information to be precise to prevent confusion. Furthermore, having

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other graphical desktop environments. Others have to be mounted manually by the user. Likewise, they must be unmounted (removed from the file tree). Normal users do not usually have permission to execute the mount and umount commands. The administrator can, however, authorize these operations (independently for each mount point) by

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Each packet contains, in addition to its payload data, a number of details required for its proper routing. BACK TO BASICS TCP/UDP Many programs do not handle the individual packets themselves, even though the data they transmit does travel over IP; they often use TCP (Transmission Control Protocol). TCP

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argument, this command lists all open connections; this list can be very verbose since it includes many Unix-domain sockets (widely used by daemons) which do not involve the network at all (for example, dbus communication, X11 traffic, and communications between virtual filesystems and the desktop). Common invocations therefore use

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unknown_hostname The first permit_mynetworks directive allows all machines on the local network to introduce themselves freely. This is important, because some email programs do not respect this part of the SMTP protocol adequately enough, and they can introduce themselves with nonsensical names. The reject_invalid_hostname rule rejects

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means that client authentication is not required; as a consequence, this operating mode is known as “anonymous FTP”. To be perfectly correct, the clients do authenticate with the anonymous username; the password is often, by convention, the user's email address, but the server ignores it. Many FTP servers are

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yes" and "no"; the default is "no". NEED_SVCGSSD= # Options for rpc.svcgssd. RPCSVCGSSDOPTS= Example 11.23. The /etc/default/nfs-common file # If you do not set values for the NEED_ options, they will be attempted # autodetected; this should be sufficient for most people. Valid alternatives # for the NEED_ options

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this service. DNS domain name: “falcot.com”. Organization name: “Falcot Corp”. An administrative passwords needs to be typed in. Database backend to use: “HDB”. Do you want the database to be removed when slapd is purged? No. No point in risking losing the database in case of a mistake. Move

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exists, # the init script will not start or restart slapd (but stop will still # work). Use this for temporarily disabling startup of slapd (when doing # maintenance, for example, or through a configuration management system) # when you don't want to edit a configuration file. SLAPD_SENTINEL_FILE=/etc/ldap/

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/dev/md1: [...] State : clean [...] TIP RAID, disks and partitions As illustrated by our example, RAID devices can be constructed out of disk partitions, and do not require full disks. A few remarks are in order. First, mdadm notices that the physical elements have different sizes; since this implies that some

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to run a different kernel in a container (whether a different Linux version or a different operating system altogether). NOTE LXC isolation limits LXC containers do not provide the level of isolation achieved by heavier emulators or virtualizers. In particular: the Wheezy standard kernel does not allow limiting the amount

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Debconf with a centralized database Preseeding allows to provide a set of answers to Debconf questions at installation time, but these answers are static and do not evolve as time passes. Since already-installed machines may need upgrading, and new answers may become required, the /etc/debconf.conf configuration file

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particular, note that Nagios already monitors some parameters of the machine where it runs. However, some interactive features such as adding comments to a host do not work. These features are disabled in the default configuration for Nagios, which is very restrictive for security reasons. As documented in /usr/share/

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Proprietary drivers Some video card makers (most notably nVidia) refuse to publish the hardware specifications that would be required to implement good free drivers. They do, however, provide proprietary drivers that allow using their hardware. This policy is nefarious, because even when the provided driver exists, it is usually not

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to best take advantage of the integration efforts led by each project. BACK TO BASICS Window manager True to the Unix tradition of doing one thing only but doing it well, the window manager displays the “decorations” around the windows belonging to the currently running applications, which includes frames and the

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Linux's LSM (Linux Security Modules) interface. In practice, the kernel queries SELinux before each system call to know whether the process is authorized to do the given operation. SELinux uses a set of rules — collectively known as a policy — to authorize or forbid operations. Those rules are difficult to

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. This feature forbids programs to automatically switch roles. Such changes can only happen if they are explicitly allowed in the SELinux policy. Obviously the rights do not apply to all objects (files, directories, sockets, devices, etc.). They can vary from object to object. To achieve this, each object is associated

The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation

by Jono Bacon  · 1 Aug 2009  · 394pp  · 110,352 words

documentation) that helps forward that shared interest. As an example, the Ubuntu community has a shared interest in building a Free Software operating system. To do this there are many smaller groups who perform translations, produce packages, write documentation, test software, advocate Ubuntu, and much more. These are the teams

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dream of. Figure 2-6. Build a strong environment, and you will have a strong team. Environment plays a huge role in everything that we do. Every element of our environment affects our perspectives, emotions, and expectations. Consider a conventional environment such as a neighborhood. Many environmental attributes can affect perception

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definition, groups of people, and those people have different personalities, habits, opinions, and approaches. These nuances can sometimes complicate how we communicate. People can and do get frustrated with one another, have mismatched expectations, engage in unclear and tense discussions, and indulge in other agitating agendas. Not only that, but people

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with people, not with abstractions like “profitability,” or with Latinate nouns like “utilization” and “implementation,” or with inert constructions in which nobody can be visualized doing something: “pre-feasibility studies are in the paperwork stage.” Zinsser is a staunch advocate of clear writing. He believes the enemy of great writing is

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so strongly earlier in this book. Great processes blend into the background, functioning as required and as expected. Great processes let people get on with doing real, human, interesting things. Bad processes serve as nothing more than a dartboard for your contributors to throw their frustration at. Great processes are our

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but who wants to read paragraphs and paragraphs of text? The documentation behind a process should be as close as possible to a cooking recipe: do this…do that…get this result. The emphasis here is on quick, clear, straight-to-the-point directions. Processes are fundamentally a collection of steps with

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steps for prospective community members to up-skill themselves to contribute effectively. In our two broad challenges earlier, I also highlighted the challenge of how do we help give them the confidence to participate? This challenge is less about providing documentation resources and more about giving people the motivational support and

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should encourage your community to write blog entries and articles that highlight great work and thank people. This is particularly important for community leaders to do. Communities are social groupings and inspirational leaders thanking and highlighting great work is incredibly motivating. In Ubuntu we have tackled this approach by encouraging a

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growing collection of Firefox add-ons is available. These small bundles of functionality, basically small pieces of software, integrate tightly into the browser and can do anything from block ads to allow web developers to dynamically adjust the layout of web pages. Traditionally, installing software has been possible using a variety

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Eventually Jokosher outgrew Python-Hosting and settled on Launchpad. Software As a Service The Jokosher example raises an important question when it comes to integration. Do you want to run the toolchain facilities yourself or use an existing online system? Integration has always been a challenge in IT, and subsequently many

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identify the requirements and pick something as soon as viably possible. The sooner you get your tools up and running and get people focused on doing useful work, the better. Technical Considerations Most of this chapter has focused on best practices for assessing optimal workflow for a project, staying detached

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This includes the toolkit (Gtk), C compiler (gcc), debugger (gdb), GUI designer (glade), and more. Although most open source projects use free tools, many projects do use proprietary tools. Some years back I spoke at a Microsoft DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper! Day in the United Kingdom. As an open source guy, I was expecting

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to further their own communities. Second to fibbing about your community, disparaging another community for your own benefit is about the worst thing you can do. It makes you and your community appear petty and indignant. Unfortunately, particularly in online communities, this happens more often than not. As members of

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Chapter 6 we discussed tools such as Twitter and Facebook as excellent methods of sharing experiences. Encourage your members to use these facilities as they do their work. Word of mouth Encourage your members to strike up conversations about your community in every possible scenario. Glorify the most insane and ridiculous

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three and explore their cultures. Blogs Weblogs (typically known as blogs) started out life as online diaries. In them people would share what they were doing, what they were thinking, and what interested them. When blogging started, there were few blogs, and most were devoted to deeply technical topics. Alan

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presentation accepted for an event, the real work begins. Unfortunately, many speakers at events get their acceptance email for a presentation submission and then never do anything to promote and encourage people to actually attend their session. At many events there are multiple presentations going on simultaneously. You not only want

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of the company. I can break this into two broad areas: Platform maturity We needed to make the platform easier to use, create more documentation, do a better job of disseminating news, encourage developers to write more applications, grow the awareness of those applications, and communicate required improvements back to the

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I manage projects and coordinate work among a group of people, including both paid team members and volunteer community members. Using burndown charts So how do these burndown charts work? Well, fortunately, they are dead simple to understand. Let’s assume you have identified your projects in your strategic plan,

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Second, you want to communicate the progress of this work effectively to onlookers (and, if relevant, to management at your company). Burndown charts help you do this. Figure 9-1 shows an example chart. Figure 9-1. Burndown charts are an effective tool for visualizing progress. The burndown chart is essentially

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primary classifications of the primary contributors to your community. Divide these by the types of value they bring, primarily in terms of different skills. How do they participate? For each type of contributor that you just wrote down, also note how each interacts with your community to make those contributions. These

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helped forward these worthy achievements. When the system works, beautiful things can happen. orm-interview-snippet: The Community Case Book The Drupal community uses a do-ocracy model, meaning people work on what they want to work on, instead of being told what to work on. Decisions are usually made through consensus

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Instead of ensuring clean drinking water, community governance ensures transparency in our deadlines. Instead of readily available health care, we strive for robust resources to do our work. Instead of building that freeway, we build effective and open communication processes. The issues may differ, but the primary function of representing and

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think of many presidents who merely took office and started legislating. Obama primarily inspired people with the promise of a brighter future, and you should do the same for your own community. However, there is another important and more focused responsibility that your governance bodies should shoot for: inspiring your members

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gets noticed. In fact, the most qualified community members hardly ever put themselves forward for a governing council, because they are too wrapped up in doing their work for the community. Fortunately, governments found long ago an effective compromise between pure representative elections and top-down selection: a nomination process. Pull

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concept of membership is something that varies tremendously across different communities. For some communities, membership is merely taking an interest in what active members are doing, whereas other communities have a more formalized style of membership that requires some kind of approval process. In the Ubuntu community anyone is welcome to

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a contributor has provided a reliable level of contribution. This role doesn’t depend on the type of contribution: people can become members if they do packaging, development, translations, documentation, advocacy, or whatever else is recognized to be of value. Developer For those who need upload access to our primary

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anyone involved. A conflict situation is a mishmash of different emotions from the different parties: anger, frustration, annoyance, self-reflection, embarrassment, and more. You should do your best to lighten the atmosphere. Being positive breaks down into several stances. First, you should be positive about the ability to find a solution

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still maintain a strong sense of objectivity around the information that you receive. Always Maintain Privacy When soliciting opinions about a conflict issue, you should do your best to obscure the identities of those from whom you solicit private opinions. When you have solicited your evidence, input, and general feedback on

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hotels want you to reserve a block of the hotel for the discounted rate. This is risky if this is your first conference. Whatever you do, do not put down an unaffordable deposit to reserve the rooms with the expectation that people will come. It is too risky. Document your hotels Put

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schedule primarily within your internal community communication channels, such as mailing lists and chat channels, and on your website. You may also want to consider doing some external publicity to encourage new contributors. Preparing for a session Before you kick off your tutorial sessions, it is recommended that you ask your

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has been ablaze with chatter over where community management should fit into an organization. Is marketing or engineering an apt destination for the reporting line? Do we expect our community managers and representatives to report to the director of marketing or the chief technical officer? More specifically, when you bring a

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foundations of collaboration in open source communities and should be able to strategically structure and execute objectives that enable your community on the ground to do great work. You should ensure that your community manager has a close connection to your technical leaders, but also a close connection with your

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Presentation skills Many community managers get out on the conference circuit and perform presentations about their work. You should check whether they are happy to do this. You should also research whether they are actually any good at presenting: sometimes no presentation is better than a horribly delivered presentation. As such

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specific parts of the organization, or people who are working on specific projects that involve the community. Community feedback When your community manager joins you, do your best to ensure that she is able to get feedback from the community to key members of your organization. Community managers are always seen

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painful, and people will fight that tooth and nail. It’s how we’re wired up: we all get comfy with our way of doing something, and doing things another way is just irritating and inefficient. So we’ve had issues over tools and code flow—back with the original tarballs and

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it farther and advocates it to others? Sharing, giving credit where due, valuing the common good, using technology to encourage such, not persecuting people who do those very natural things—things that one might recognize as “the Creative Commons ethos”—all precede Creative Commons. They’re essentially human. Creative Commons created

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ethos—more of that is happening, but slowly, and not under an umbrella brand. Creative Commons is now a well-established organization and community. How do you keep your community passionate about Creative Commons and Free Culture? Regarding the Creative Commons affiliate community (copyright and other experts mentioned earlier), carefully and

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community. The development of tools to support communities is still an untapped opportunity. Today social media seems to largely involve the exchange of messages. How do you think social media can evolve to further empower collaborative community beyond that of exchanging messages? If you consider Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ to be

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an engaged community, and is scalable for our needs. You have a team working on these goals. How did you grow the team and what do they do? I have grown my team in order to serve our different developer communities. Currently we have one community champion per service/business unit. The

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key results. We lead the effort to design and launch new community features in partnership with product management, engineering, and other cross-functional stakeholders. How do you do this work? We coordinate content creation through writing or facilitating blog posts, articles, newsletters, communication materials, and material for social media channels. In addition

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their feedback is incorporated into current and future road maps. We drive building, planning, and executing engagement programs to grow community acquisition and interaction. We do this by creating, managing, and growing the organization’s presence through blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other strategically relevant online properties. Our community champions

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We utilize user measurement tools to provide reports on metrics, and continually seek ways in which to improve on those metrics through new initiatives. How do you break down these different types of work? Our overall community team consists of several teams: the evangelist group that educates developers on our products

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creators have responded strongly as well: we have productive, interesting conversations with developers and small studios every day. One of the most rewarding parts of doing bundles is seeing developers rewarded for taking a risk, following through with their vision, and developing a game independently. Mark Bussler, Classic Game Room Veteran

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way around. What makes the Drupal Association special is that it has no influence over the technical direction of Drupal. The Drupal community uses a do-ocracy model, meaning people work on what they want to work on, instead of being told what to work on. Decisions are usually made through consensus

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using videos, Videos, Videos ByteMark Hosting, Sponsorship, Understanding Your Workflow, Setting expectations C CafePress, Selling campaigns, Campaigns and awareness, Running a Campaign, The buildup can do culture, Avoiding bikeshedding capital, social, The Art of Community (see social capital) Carmony, Kevin, Blog wars Castro, Jorge, Planning catering for events, Catering, Catering,

Habeas Data: Privacy vs. The Rise of Surveillance Tech

by Cyrus Farivar  · 7 May 2018  · 397pp  · 110,222 words

over the last half century: Where is the line between appropriate government action when it comes to the surveillance of its citizens? How much privacy do individuals have against the government’s use of surveillance technologies, ranging from simple microphones, to wiretaps, to thermal imagers, to cell-site simulators, to

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and was last updated in Germany in 2003. One of Germany’s most fundamental data protection principles describes practically the opposite of how we typically do things in America: “The collection, processing and use of personal data shall be admissible only if permitted or prescribed by this Act or any other

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After a few beats, he told Tribe: “Let me think about this. Actually, it’s conceivable.” As Tribe explained years later, his “idea had to do with actually recognizing that something is a search when [there are] justifiable intrusions of privacy needn’t mean that it would automatically be impermissible. It

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immediately felt on both a local and national level: the LAPD quickly issued a notice to all personnel clarifying what officers could and could not do with respect to physical surveillance. At a federal level, however, during the Johnson administration, months before Katz had been considered at the Supreme Court,

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eavesdropping…is so thoroughly confused that no policeman, except in States that forbid both practices totally, can be sure about what he is allowed to do.” Congress largely incorporated much of the commission’s recommendations, and passed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968. The law also included

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, a Sacramento federal judge ruled in 2016. More recently, a federal judge in Seattle ruled in 2016 that users of the online anonymity tool Tor do not have a “reasonable expectation of privacy in their IP [Internet Protocol] addresses while using the Tor network.” Therefore, a man who the government

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some ways, it was a legal case that everyone could understand. After all, most people have an opinion about terrorism and what the government should do about it. Moreover, 77 percent of Americans now own a smartphone. Most people feel their privacy being invaded more viscerally when the government wants access

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in the last chapter—does not govern the use of pen registers; what the law bans is narrowly defined “interception,” and pen registers do not “ ‘intercept’ because they do not acquire the ‘contents’ of communications.” This distinction sounds confusing, but translates neatly—if regrettably—into our own time. What happened is

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doesn’t require a showing of probable cause. In other words, pen registers are allowed with fewer restrictions than a warrant would require. “These devices do not hear sound,” Justice Byron White wrote in the majority opinion. “They disclose only the telephone numbers that have been dialed—a means of establishing

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Court’s order, ATX must fundamentally restructure its business and change the manner in which it conducts business,” Bennee Jones, ATX’s lawyer wrote. “Courts do not have unfettered discretion to order assistance of private companies.” Eventually, the order was appealed up to the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in

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this program had ballooned to over $38 million.) In 2010, the FBI started pushing more formally, along with other federal agencies, to get Congress to do something—essentially a CALEA for the Internet. That is, a new legal framework that would adjudicate FBI surveillance, while providing funds, training, and initiative for

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of ‘Going Dark’ because they are increasingly unable to access, intercept, collect, and process wire or electronic communications information when they are lawfully authorized to do so,” he said. “This serious intercept capability gap often undercuts state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies’ efforts to investigate criminal activity such as organized

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to place themselves beyond the law.” The following month, Attorney General Eric Holder expressed similar concerns. “It is fully possible to permit law enforcement to do its job while still adequately protecting personal privacy,” Holder said during an October 2014 speech before the Global Alliance Against Child Sexual Abuse Online conference

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have ordered the unlocking of an iPhone under this authority…Additionally, Apple has routinely complied with such orders.” “This court should issue the order because doing so would enable agents to comply with this Court’s warrant commanding that the iPhone be examined for evidence identified by the warrant,” he continued

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entirely new operating system to undermine our security features as the government wants,” he sad. “But it’s something we believe is too dangerous to do.” * * * While all of this was going on, there was another important ruling by one of the judges that comprised the Magistrates’ Revolt. On February

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surveillance, among other tactics. The president quickly rescinded his approval, but that didn’t stop the intelligence agencies from continuing what they had already been doing. One surveillance case that preceded Nixon, but was ultimately championed by his attorney general, involved the wiretapping of dissidents. In September 1968, just over

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infringed a “legitimate expectation of privacy” that petitioner held. Yet a pen register differs significantly from the listening device employed in Katz, for pen registers do not acquire the contents of communications. In other words, the justices still viewed metadata and content as distinct, with differing legal protections. The decision then

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phone, petitioner voluntarily conveyed numerical information to the telephone company and ‘exposed’ that information to its equipment in the ordinary course of business. In so doing, petitioner assumed the risk that the company would reveal to police the numbers he dialed.” Decades later this logic carried over to the NSA’s

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through the websites that they interact with, what they search for, what they buy, who they correspond with on social media, and, increasingly, where they do it from. After all, Internet Protocol addresses are geographic, and mobile devices contain GPS and location data that can easily be obtained by the company

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a mass collection of phone numbers, or license plates, or anything else, there was simply a physical and financial limit to what law enforcement could do: they were forced to expend resources on only the most important targets. Kerr also notes that under his preferred definition of the third-party doctrine

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activity and the government has no reason to believe that you’re engaged in unlawful activity, the police should not be monitoring what you’re doing. It’s none of the government’s business.” LPR collection is undoubtedly useful: there are numerous stories, often touted by the agencies and equipment

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to be more effective in detecting crime, it simply has no constitutional foundation. We have never equated police efficiency with unconstitutionality, and we decline to do so now.” When interviewed about the result in 2017, Frey, who is now in private practice, said that the court reached the right decision. “

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with Baltimore police officials, defending the program. “We believe we contribute significantly to the safety and support of the citizens in Baltimore,” he said. “We do have the legal analysis that covers the program. We are no different than any other law enforcement program. There are four Supreme Court precedents.” But

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efficiency with unconstitutionality,” Knotts, 460 U.S. at 284, and we fear that acceptance of the Smith Memorandum’s analysis would come perilously close to doing so. As such, federal investigators went ahead with using the FLIR. “But this was for all intents and purposes, we thought, a very routine

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of technology to conduct observations more sensitive than [in] an individual’s home,” attorneys for the Office of the Solicitor General responded. “But thermal imagers do not literally or figuratively penetrate the home and reveal private activities within. Unlike a hypothetical sophisticated X-ray device or microphone that could perceive activity

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beeper or pen register made easier to capture,” he wrote. “These cases permit the use of technology that makes police work more efficient, but which do no more than what the human senses could have done. Neither case addresses whether invisible radiation is knowingly exposed, nor authorizes surveillance of infrared radiation

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part of his journalism that focuses on criminal justice issues: he likes to listen to appellate oral arguments on his smartphone while folding laundry or doing other household chores. Heath read the opinion and decided to take a closer look at this almost discarded section of the appellate ruling. After reporting

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per se unreasonable. In a 7–2 decision, the Supreme Court found Weinberg’s arguments persuasive, and ruled in Chadwick’s favor, citing Katz. We do not agree that the Warrant Clause protects only dwellings and other specifically designated locales. As we have noted before, the Fourth Amendment “protects people, not

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unreasonable government intrusions into their legitimate expectations of privacy. If the officers wanted to search the footlocker, particularly when there was no urgent need to do so, they could have taken the time to seek a warrant. However, they chose not to. Upon learning of what investigators had done in

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Based Tracking Prolonged surveillance reveals types of information not revealed by short-term surveillance, such as what a person does repeatedly, what he does not do, and what he does ensemble. These types of information can each reveal more about a person than does any individual trip viewed in isolation. Repeated

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its parts. “Prolonged surveillance reveals types of information not revealed by short-term surveillance, such as what a person does repeatedly, what he does not do, and what he does ensemble,” the judges wrote. These types of information can each reveal more about a person than does any individual trip viewed

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communications technologies, perhaps it’s better to understand the Fourth Amendment in terms of power, and more specifically, limiting what the government is able to do. After all, it is the government, and not Google, that has the monopoly on violence and incarceration. Read as a whole, the Bill of

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the slowness of the legal system. In May 2012, he handwrote a highly unorthodox filing: “MOTION Requesting Court to Order Defendant’s Private Investigator to Do His Job or In the Alternative, MOTION to Dismiss the Case With Prejudice.” (The filing didn’t amount to much.) In February, the Electronic Privacy

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and text messages were being intercepted—content and metadata alike. The goal was to clearly illustrate the power of stingrays and to goad Congress into doing something about it. But no meaningful legislation happened. Soghoian, meanwhile, kept at it as his doctoral program wound down. His August 2012 dissertation, titled “

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against Rigmaiden, as it was unclear from the Arizona case (where the prosecution against Rigmaiden was unfolding) what the order specifically authorized the government to do. “What on Earth was this technology?” she said. “It seemed that there would be all kinds of novel and troubling issues. What sort of

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, so he invited Soghoian and Owsley. “I’ve been told to ‘just trust us,’ but I think if law enforcement is saying they’re doing nothing wrong, they should welcome oversight,” McMillin said during the hearing. Sheriff Michael Bouchard denied that his agency’s stingrays were being used on innocent

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The seeds had been planted nationwide, and would soon bear fruit. Meanwhile, an enterprising reporter based in Tacoma, Washington, did what other good journalists were doing: looking at how stingrays were being used in their own backyards. However, Kate Martin took it one step further: she was able to speak to

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Tribune on August 26, 2014. “I would certainly personally have some concerns about just sweeping up information from non-involved and innocent parties—and to do it with a whole neighborhood? That’s concerning.” The local police chief, Don Ramsdell, through a spokeswoman, declined to speak with the paper, citing

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even begin the process of obtaining new snooping gear. The agencies are not required to immediately notify the board in exigent circumstances, but they must do so within 90 days. Agencies must also submit a usage policy to the county government and, notably, an annual surveillance report, which should describe

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conclusion than the California Supreme Court, Fisher thought, perhaps the time was right to bring a challenge. So, he did what any good lawyer would do: he searched on Westlaw, a commercial legal database, for pending cases in California that applied the Diaz standard. Fisher found three such cases, including Riley

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phones, including an iPhone 6S (“Phone B”). The messages that the government wanted were the iMessages between Voigt and Victor, which, as the government explained, “do not appear in telephone service provider records as anything other than generic data usage. Therefore, the only practical way of determining whether iMessages were sent

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to send a link to Mo and trick him into clicking it, which would surreptitiously install software on his computer, akin to what malevolent hackers do. It would collect various details, including Mo’s operating system, IP address, media access control (MAC) address, time zone, and more. The judge signed

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upon him the motto of Sudoroom and other hacker-spaces like it: it’s an anarchist collective, yes, but it’s also a do-ocracy. If you want something done, do it. Hofer decided to take him up on the offer. Amazingly, it worked. Within weeks, Hofer, who had no political connections whatsoever

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document/​p10/​a354463. Katz, it turned out: Ibid. Available at: https://www.documentcloud.org/​documents/​3523334-34715-Transcripts.html#document/​p38/​a354466. He’d been doing it: Ibid. Available at: https://www.documentcloud.org/​documents/​3523334-34715-Transcripts.html#document/​p214/​a354475. After establishing a pattern: Ibid. Available at: https://www

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New York Telephone Co., 434 U.S. 159 (1977). https://www.documentcloud.org/​documents/​3727203-76-835-US-NewYorkTelephoneCo.html#document/​p2/​a396623. “These devices do not hear sound”: United States v. New York Telephone Co., 434 U.S. 159 (1977). Available at: https://www.law.cornell.edu/​supremecourt/​text/​434

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Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, BR 13-109. Available at: https://www.documentcloud.org/​documents/​3819997-br13-09-Primary-Order-1.html#document/​p9/​a356679. “I do not believe that I am the one”: Author’s interview with Stephen Sachs, March 6, 2017. Cardin was briefly a prosecutor: Dan Rodricks, “In

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-e-mail/​. The ECPA draws a distinction: Kerr, “A User’s Guide to the Stored Communications Act.” In 1991, Senator Patrick Leahy: M. Betts, “Do Laws Protect Wireless Nets?,” Computerworld, 1991. Available at: https://books.google.com/​books?id=_djw_FNRO4cC&pg=PA47&lpg=PA47&dq=leahy+ecpa+task+force

Cybersecurity: What Everyone Needs to Know

by P. W. Singer and Allan Friedman  · 3 Jan 2014  · 587pp  · 117,894 words

The Crimes of Tomorrow, Today: What Is Cybercrime? Shady RATs and Cyberspies: What Is Cyber Espionage? How Afraid Should We Be of Cyberterrorism? So How Do Terrorists Actually Use the Web? What about Cyber Counterterrorism? Security Risk or Human Right? Foreign Policy and the Internet Focus: What Is Tor and Why

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broader implications of cybersecurity beyond cyberspace, the “Why does it matter?” questions. And then there were questions on the potential responses, the “What we can do?” questions. The following sections follow this basic structure. And with the questions laid out, then came the task of answering them. This book is the

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prevent its own citizens from accessing what it decided was offensive content, ordered Pakistan Telecom to block access to the video-sharing website YouTube. To do so, Pakistan Telecom falsely informed its customers’ computers that the most direct route to YouTube was through Pakistan Telecom and then prevented Pakistani users from

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a much greater cost to the attacker to pull off. After authentication is authorization. Now that a system knows who you are, what can you do? In classic computer security, authorization was about giving access to network files, but in our increasingly connected world, gaining authorization can open the doors to

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with each victim. By contrast, automated attacks can have much lower profit margins. The good news is that there are only three things you can do to a computer: steal its data, misuse credentials, and hijack resources. Unfortunately, our dependence on information systems means that a skilled actor could wreak

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a lot of damage by doing any one of those. Stolen data can reveal the strategic plans of a country or undermine the competitiveness of an entire industry. Stolen credentials can

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of tools. Malicious software, or “malware,” is a prepackaged exploitation of a vulnerability. There is often a “payload” of instructions detailing what the system should do after it has been compromised. Some types of malware contain instructions for reproduction, in order to spread the attack. “Worms” spread themselves automatically over the

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of Defense, had been warning them about in a simultaneous series of speeches, testimony, and interviews with the mainstream media. Essentially, what people too often do when discussing “cyberattacks” is bundle together a variety of like and unlike activities, simply because they involve Internet-related technology. The parallel would be treating

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posting of private information can inspire or provide cover for more nefarious, even violent actions. Thus, hactivism faces the same constant question as traditional activism: Do the ends justify the new cyber means? Focus: Who Is Anonymous? Aaron Barr made a terrible mistake. On February 5, 2011, the CEO of

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is important done.” With no single leader or central control authority, the group visualizes itself not as a democracy or a bureaucracy, but as a “do-ocracy.” Members communicate via various forums and Internet Relay Chat (IRC) networks to debate potential causes to support and identify targets and actions to carry out

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turning to cyber espionage to maintain its expansion. “They’ve identified innovation as crucial to future economic growth—but they’re not sure they can do it,” says Jim Lewis, an expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The easiest way to innovate is to plagiarize.” Accusers cite

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been echoed even more sharply around the world following the disclosure of certain NSA surveillance practices in 2013. Such episodes highlight a key tension: How do we balance the need for security with the importance of privacy and free expression? Often couched in the language of human rights, the term “Internet

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war, even cyber-style, will still remain a waste of resources and efforts better spent elsewhere. Focus: What Is the US Military Approach to Cyberwar? Do you know what “9ec4c12949a4f31474f299058ce2b22a” means? If so, the US military may have a job for you. The answer is actually a wonderful summary of where

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DOD networks.” Within four years, the new roles and strategy pushed well beyond that. As one CYBERCOM official put it, “We need the capabilities to do things offensively in cyber … everybody acknowledges that, but how we specifically employ that in an operational context is classified.” Or, as a former National Security

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Chief Scientist for computer science at the National Academies and one of the leading thinkers in the field of cybersecurity. As he has explained, to do a proper threat assessment, one essentially evaluates three basic factors: “The feasibility of adversaries being able to identify and exploit your vulnerabilities, the effect

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that would happen if they were able to take advantage of these vulnerabilities, and, finally, the likelihood that they will, in fact, be willing to do so.” Threat assessments are notoriously hard. There are usually layers upon layers of uncertainty, not just in evaluating your own vulnerabilities but also gauging the

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profit interests. Indeed, cybersecurity research firms’ incentives to hoard information parallel the incentives of drug companies, which, while not happy to see diseases break out, do prefer to be the one with the patent on the cure. As one study explained, the cyber CDC equivalent’s “functions might include threat and

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the old governments would stay in control of it. There is a notion that the Internet is a place without boundaries, where governments do not matter and therefore do not belong. John Barlow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation perhaps captured this sentiment best in his “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” “

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vastly more time, effort, and money addressing generic problems like botnets, spam, and low-level worms that hit all users of the Internet than they do on the APTs that hold the potential for far greater harm. These efforts are also valuable simply for their convening power. Discussions of seemingly intractable

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each government. It allows leaders to understand not just what the other side is thinking but also what their own agencies and communities might be doing and the potential consequences. This is something that most senior policymakers around the world are not sufficiently focused on at present. In the cyber realm

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mole with governments, even in the face of determined foes and international cooperation. Perhaps the WikiLeaks case best illustrates what governments can and can’t do. As we saw in Part II, American politicians reacted with horror to the documents released by the transparency website. Vice President Joe Biden labeled WikiLeaks

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security initiatives. Furthermore, the distribution layer of the power grid is not covered by either entity, creating a situation where two agencies simultaneously have and do not have the ability to set security standards. Absent a uniform strategy, the dominant approach has been for each regulatory agency to look after its

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DARPA have begun to tackle more serious aspects of supply chain risk, such as verifying that the astoundingly complex integrated circuits that drive modern computers do not have malicious components baked in. The government can also play an important role in better organizing around its power of research, where it is

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’t personally accept credit card payments to conduct commerce. While these firms’ business model is built on offering their users ease and flexibility, they still do have an interest in avoiding bad actors that might damage their networks’ reputation. For this reason, they often work with “acquiring banks” that process

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coordination is via security standards, where the government plays a central role in helping the public and private sectors understand what they need to be doing to secure themselves. Specifically, it brings into the process expertise that lies outside the marketplace. Even if private firms and smaller organizations fully appreciate

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the need to secure themselves, there is not abundant, trusted information on how to do so. They must deal with various vendors that eagerly offer their own products as the silver bullet solutions. Instead, government can be a lynchpin in

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of incident response Ryan McGeehan said, “We’re very well prepared now and I attribute that to the drill.” Build Cybersecurity Incentives: Why Should I Do What You Want? “If the partnership doesn’t make tangible and demonstrable progress, other initiatives are going to take their place.” This is what DHS

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financial industry is not as concerned with removing the websites that recruit money mules. The reason is that unlike the phishing sites, the mule networks do not have the banks’ individual brand names on them. In other situations, when there are too many players involved at different steps, the market

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countered that it was exactly this record of lax enforcement that had led to poor compliance. A consultant summarized the response: “HHS really isn’t doing anything, so why should I worry?” The question is one of accountability. Every organization has priorities that are viewed as more important than securing their

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rule.” That is the actual meaning of “rigorous enforcement,” which hospitals took notice of and began to change their practices. Find the IT Crowd: How Do We Solve the Cyber People Problem? Richard “Dickie” George served at the National Security Agency for over three decades in roles that ranged from cryptology

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a complete idiot. Two, that security wasn’t important.” Accepting that there are risks and threats doesn’t mean there is nothing that we can do. Rather, it emphasizes the second fundamental attitude change, recognizing the need to educate ourselves and then protect ourselves. In many ways, this education is

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smart and responsible user should be thinking about. Or, as one retired army officer responded when asked what was the most important thing people could do for cybersecurity, “Stop being so damned stupid on computers.” Access and Passwords: Update passwords regularly and always use “strong” passwords that are both lengthy

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internet-war. “policy in the smoky backrooms” Cyber Terrain Conference, Spy Museum, Washington, DC, May 18, 2011. HOW DID YOU WRITE THE BOOK AND WHAT DO YOU HOPE TO ACCOMPLISH? the broader world is all the more informed Daniel E. Geer, Jr., “How Government Can Access Innovative Technology,” in America’s

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Internet Engineering Task Force, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, July 13–17, 1992, http://ietf.org/proceedings/prior29/IETF24.pdf. ON THE INTERNET, HOW DO THEY KNOW WHETHER YOU ARE A DOG? IDENTITY AND AUTHENTICATION cute, bear-shaped candy Tsutomu Matsumoto, Hiroyuki Matsumoto, Koji Yamada, et al., “Impact of Artificial

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Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, New York, April 9, 2009, http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=79349. WHAT DO WE MEAN BY “SECURITY” ANYWAY? the presence of an adversary Institute for Security and Open Methodologies, The Open Source Security Testing Methodology Manual: Contemporary Security

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Hosenball, “In Cyberspy vs. Cyberspy, China Has the Edge.” “phone home” phase Ibid. thermostat and printer “Resisting Chaos,” Strategic News Service, February 4, 2013. HOW DO WE KEEP THE BAD GUYS OUT? THE BASICS OF COMPUTER DEFENSE 110 million different species Pat Calhoun, “The Next Cyber War Is Already in Progress

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Digital Cold War?” “banner of security” Internet Governance Project, “Threat Analysis of the WCIT Part 4: The ITU and Cybersecurity.” “GRAFT” THE RULE OF LAW: DO WE NEED A CYBERSPACE TREATY? “floating on the water” The World War I Document Archive, “The Hague Rules of Air Warfare,” http://wwi.lib.byu

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, “The Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative,” March 2, 2010, http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/cybersecurity.pdf. APPROACH IT AS A PUBLIC-PRIVATE PROBLEM: HOW DO WE BETTER COORDINATE DEFENSE? “cyber-criminal gangs” Brian Krebs, “Major Source of Online Scams and Spams Knocked Offline,” Security Fix (blog), Washington Post, November 11

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/id,2351617/. Ryan McGeehan said Goodin, “At Facebook, Zero-Day Exploits, Backdoor Code, Bring War Games Drill to Life.” BUILD CYBERSECURITY INCENTIVES: WHY SHOULD I DO WHAT YOU WANT? “tangible and demonstrable progress” Jonathan Krim, “‘We Want to See Results,’ Official Says at Summit,” Washington Post, December 4, 2003, http://

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10, no. 1 (2011): pp. 17–25, http://www.benedelman.org/publications/advsel-trust-draft.pdf. opt-in model Eric J. Johnson and Daniel Goldstein, “Do Defaults Save Lives,” Science 302, no. 5649 (November 2003): pp. 1338–1339, http://www.sciencemag.org/content/302/5649/1338.short. “extensive mitigation costs” United

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, September 18, 2012, http://www.fiercehealthit.com/story/boston-teaching-hospital-fined-15m-ephi-data-breach/2012-09-18#ixzz2OC67Xiwh. FIND THE IT CROWD: HOW DO WE SOLVE THE CYBER PEOPLE PROBLEM? “the same resumes” Ellen Nakashima, “Federal Agencies, Private Firms Fiercely Compete in Hiring Cyber Experts,” Washington Post, November

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Aviation Week & Space Technology 185, no. 18 (May 23, 2011). Lynn Dungle Ibid. 6-minute intervals Ibid. professional hacker websites Ibid. reach the top Ibid. DO YOUR PART: HOW CAN I PROTECT MYSELF (AND THE INTERNET)? “123456” Mat Honan, “Kill the Password: Why a String of Characters Can’t Protect Us

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Longer Vaporware: The Internet of Things Is Finally Talking,” Wired, December 6, 2012, http://www.wired.com/opinion/2012/12/20-12-st_thompson/. WHAT DO I REALLY NEED TO KNOW IN THE END? Donald Rumsfeld Charles M. Blow, “Knowns, Unknowns, and Unknowables,” New York Times, September 26, 2012, http://

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located around the world that serve as hubs of cybersecurity technical expertise, collaboration, and security information dissemination. Many governments have their own national CERTs, as do an increasing number of industrial sectors and large organizations. computer network operations (CNO): The military concept of utilizing computers to “destroy, deny, degrade, disrupt, [and

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, disrupt, and/or compromise other computers and networks. A packaged exploitation of vulnerability, there is often a “payload” of instructions detailing what the system should do after it has been compromised. metadata: Data about data itself. Information about digital files or actions, such as dates, times, entities involved and other descriptive

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return regular service. red-team: To examine and/or simulate an attack on oneself, in order to identify and close vulnerabilities before an adversary can do so. Often performed by “white hat” hackers. RickRolling: The Internet meme of tricking someone into watching a horribly addictive music video by 1980s singer

Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism

by Robin Chase  · 14 May 2015  · 330pp  · 91,805 words

require significant scale and resources), and the “Peers” deliver on their individual strengths (localization, specialization, customization). When Incs and peers focus only on what they do best, each handling what is difficult, annoying, or just plain impossible for the other, the resulting collaboration is compelling and sometimes miraculous. In a world

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transformation of our economy and will also provide an answer to the conundrum of disappearing jobs, escalating income inequality, and devastating resource scarcity. What we do now will have profound and lasting effects on our future. We are at the end of the old fossil-fuel-saturated, consumption-based industrial economy

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facilitate collaboration by leveraging expertise, assets, and resources outside their sphere of control. The result is a very efficient, and often more humane, way of doing things. On one side of the collaboration, we have industrial strengths: companies, governments, and institutions (the “Inc”) that apply significant resources, talent, and money

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using optical character recognition (OCR). This is a problem. When the CAPTCHAs are constructed using words tagged by OCR programs as unreadable, we smart humans do what computers can’t: We easily decode them! Tests have shown that reCAPTCHA text images are deciphered and transcribed with 99.1 percent accuracy, a

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renters clearly found that the hassle and uncertainty of dealing directly with Nick outweighed the benefits (nothing personal, Nick). What Nick and others couldn’t do, platform-based companies like Zipcar could. It takes a company, like Zipcar, to build robust platforms that make it simple for peers to participate and

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all three ways. FOSS aggregates engineers and their work. Coders volunteer their efforts and work on thousands of projects around the world. Many of them do the work on their own time, leveraging the excess capacity of this worldwide workforce of programmers and engineers. Many projects have teams of coders, each

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entrepreneurs: underestimating the time required to complete a project, going too far beyond his actual skill set, taking on more work than he could actually do in a given time period, and getting into ill-conceived partnerships. He has also learned a lot: how to build solid, trusting relationships based

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you are, what school you went to (or didn’t), or where you’ve worked. All that matters is what you can do; online innovation communities are the ultimate ‘do-ocracies.’ ” How we uncover our personal strengths is transformed. Gretchen’s parents weighed in on her early career options. Many people don’t

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allows Peers Inc companies to engage in customization, localization, and specialization at a much lower cost than would be possible for a company trying to do it without the peers. The skills, knowledge, and precise expertise found among peers give big companies immediate access to local partners, because the peers

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and their idle cars to create a service that offers rides seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. Lyft does what companies can do best: It performs criminal and driving background checks on the drivers, provides insurance, negotiates with regulators, markets the service to customers, and ensures quality

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photograph it, write a description, and then market it to her social networks, all before earning a rental. Now think about how many peers are doing this same work for free. Suddenly we see that the combined peer investment into these platform companies can be quite substantial. This is cooperative capitalism

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alone. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman describes the two modes of thought that we all engage in. “Thinking fast” is what we usually do. He argues that humans are great at fast pattern recognition, recognizing subtle local cues and context, and adjusting immediately to take these into account. Conversely

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and simple as possible. Like all basic infrastructure, our electric utilities are platforms. They’ve done all the hard work we as individuals couldn’t do (sourcing coal and building power plants, delivering on economies of scale). Switching out this simple and convenient supply system to renewables is not trivial. The

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new to this professional-grade peer production thing. Individuals are much more likely than companies to overpromise, underdeliver, miss deadlines, not follow through, and generally do shabby work. This is why eBay, one of the Peers Inc pioneers, realized it had to introduce ratings and commentaries. And my guess is that

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influence, and constructive working-together in which all parties contribute what they are in the best position to contribute. The kernel hackers, as peers, do what they do best, while IBM, as an Inc, does what it does best. The logic of this is AND, not OR.”18 Linux’s entire authority

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are constantly striving to keep drivers as happy as possible. On peer to peer platforms, “supply” is an ephemeral thing. Providers have options, and we do not have the coercive power of traditional employers. Instead, we survive by providing the most attractive platform and most rewarding experience for our community. This

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.26 And eBay lost a multibillion-dollar marketplace because it didn’t care enough to support peer creators. Not all platforms tend toward monopoly. Some do; some don’t. Platforms that are open, minimalistic, and decentralized—open APIs, protocols, simple rules—leave users so unconstrained that there is no possible

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companies would build value by keeping their best ideas to themselves. In the collaborative economy, and particularly with the Peers Inc framework, everything you can do to make your peers grow and succeed only adds to your own value. The success of platform and peers is totally intertwined. Best practices can

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comes from the individuals or small companies themselves. Anyone can create a Twitter or Facebook account. Anyone can recommend code changes on Drupal. Some platforms do offer some well-defined constraints (Zipcar requires a clean driving record without any moving violations in the last three years, for example). Regulators who seek

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maximize the potential for participation and therefore deliver maximum innovation and maximum economic output. Government platforms should be based on van Schewick’s four factors. Doing otherwise will directly reduce the utility of the platform, the innovation that follows from it, and the resulting economic activity. In 2010 I was invited

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society, and IT governance. It showed me clearly what happens when we overregulate. Regulations (platform structure, laws, specifications) are designed to increase collective benefit but do so at the expense of individual freedom. For example, a speed limit is a regulation designed to enhance public safety. If a speed limit is

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likes to paint the unlicensed vehicles and their uncertified drivers as unsafe. But if we look more objectively, we find three other mechanisms that are doing the task. • First, regulations targeted at protecting individuals already exist and come into play. In many states, every car is required to pass a

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two. • Second, the platforms have established their own quality and safety standards in response to consumer demand. In the United States, Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar do a real-time background driving check on their drivers, excluding those with bad records (just as Zipcar does), and run criminal background checks as well

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only companies could afford. It made sense to favor this kind of productivity. Poor countries that still have a large informal economy strive to do the same in their central business districts, ridding their cities and economy of this uncontrollable blight and pushing the informal economy to the edges and

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of knowledge. The ultimate in power sharing is to apply Ostrom’s principles, giving peers the power to establish their own rules. Platforms that do right by their peers will naturally institute these rules, since they know that peer participation is voluntary and they need to treat them well. EIGHT

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our institutions back? Legacy. People occupying “C suites”—the CEOs, CFOs, and COOs—have a vested interest (and a lot of assets invested) in doing things the old way, since the highest margins typically come from milking the same old cash cows … at least until a competitor kills them. Institutions

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work: Opening assets up delivers more value and more innovation than keeping them under lockdown. New ways to address bad actors—reputation and trust systems—do change behavior and minimize negative contributions, as they did for eBay sellers, Airbnb hosts, and Uber drivers, who become more conscientious and professional in

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. Competencies must be exploited, wherever they might be. People working in her stores have expertise, but there are times when customers know more than they do. So, said Laury, “we want them to work together, growing the market, growing the number of people to facilitate sharing, interaction, learning.” In retail,

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change happening today, rigidity, protectionism, and outdated rules serve neither regulators, the regulated, nor the public well. Underlying all these claims why companies can’t do something is the question of how companies can be nimble at scale. This is what legacy companies should be thinking about constantly. Nimbleness is the

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span of companies on the S&P 500. Many people have written about the need for big companies to reinvent themselves and the difficulty of doing so, perhaps most prominently Clay Christensen (The Innovator’s Dilemma) and Dick Foster (Creative Destruction). We can think about the music industry, which was

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but act as marketplaces for genuinely creative people to find audiences for their work—the same job that record companies and movie studios started out doing. But the Peers Inc organizational structure, as enabled by technology, does result in a certain inevitability of outcome. The platforms will exist, and they

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telecommunications company that had been sitting on a technology improvement that would not only dramatically reduce the company’s costs and improve customer service but do so by reducing the company’s workforce by 40,000 people. Self-driving vehicles, which are coming much faster than people realize, will take

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undermine their intentions. Ultimately, those who finance platform building will control it. The Peers Inc framework thrives when peers are motivated to contribute. Platforms that do not adequately reward peers, value their contributions, and invest in their innovative potential will fail in the long term. Yet capitalism—with private investors interested

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alternatives, which were privately financed and closely held. The FOSS example holds important clues about the way forward. Timothy Lee, who has spent twenty years doing quality assurance on open-source software, considers the private sector’s inability to influence Linux as a positive development. Even companies whose salaried employees are

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reward system that is adopted and applied by a decentralized group is more challenging and therefore more impressive. Can we allow for nuanced circumstances? How do we deal with arguments? Innovators are now repurposing the block-chain methodology for a much wider range of activities and providing rewards dynamically based on

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inconsequential. All of these efforts are made available to the peers through the platform for participation. The Peers (people, local NGOs, and local companies) do what they do best: specialize, customize, localize, innovate, and interact with their own social networks. But what is now represented by a sharp, clean, static line

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over to the individual side?”25 The millions of individuals contributing to, building, and governing the FOSS communities without the help of companies or governments do show what is possible right now with little direct involvement by either government or private capital. For the most part, FOSS is powered by communities

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of capitalism distribute wealth more fairly. I don’t know how to ensure that governments err toward empowering people instead of empowering corporations. But I do know that Peers Inc platforms change the power balance and gain more value with each additional participant. I know that public goods and currencies can

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for change. In the corporate world, the huge consumer products multinational Unilever is an example of how the biggest companies are changing the way they do business to address sustainability. On any given day, more than 2 billion consumers in over 190 countries will use a Unilever product. With a

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access to its assets, including ultimately the vast reach of its marketing and distribution chains, to individuals and small companies who couldn’t dream of doing this alone. These platform collaborations are primarily focused on solving consumer-side problems that the internal workings of Unilever could never solve alone. In the

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350.org orchestrating the global press, including images of the events displayed in Times Square, something difficult or impossible for any of those communities to do by themselves. In 2010, the organizing platform for participation was the 10/10/10 Global Work Party (7,000 events in 188 countries). December

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simple, clear way for ordinary people to vote with their dollars. The Grommet’s platform does for makers what is nigh impossible for them to do as individuals: instantaneously create competencies in the functions big consumer-products companies have taken years to build. As Jules Pieri, The Grommet’s founder,

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it: “We help them navigate the tricky waters of pricing their product, shaping its messages and reaching influential consumers, media outlets and retailers. What we do in one day would literally take them years to achieve and many of these companies would not survive without our community’s jumpstart.”23 Launched

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workers without collective bargaining power, benefits, or safety nets. He saw that platforms can easily become monopolies. Consumers would have no choices. Peers would do the work, while the platform owners got all the money and retained all the control—same as it ever was, but perhaps even worse, since

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world many things we would expect to become monopolies because of increasing returns at scale—from dating sites through to car rental itself—never actually do. They remain diverse because people want different things, and because of this, platforms continue to evolve. The key point of this book is to

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en/Pages/insight-capitalizing-intergenerational-shift-wealth-capital-markets-summary.aspx. 10. Adrianne Jeffries, “If You Back a Kickstarter Project That Sells for $2 Billion, Do You Deserve to Get Rich?” TheVerge.com, March 28, 2014, www.theverge.com/2014/3/28/5557120/what-if-oculus-rift-kickstarter-backers-had-gotten

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, April 29, 2014, http://radioopensource.org/capital-in-10-graphs. 28. Elise Gould, “Why America’s Workers Need Faster Wage Growth—and What We Can Do About It,” Economic Policy Institute, August 27, 2014. 29. Evan Osnos, “Embrace the Irony,” New Yorker, October 13, 2014. CHAPTER 10: ADDRESSING OUR BIGGEST

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy

by Nathan Schneider  · 10 Sep 2018  · 326pp  · 91,559 words

over production and consumption in the hands of the people most involved in them. Those people would choose what to produce, how to do it, and what to do with the profits. The commonwealth, and the gradual, evolutionary process of getting there, offered an antidote to the authoritarian tendencies then ascending

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’re to take on existential market externalities such as poverty and climate change, we need companies capable of seeing the world in the way people do. Just as cooperatives co-created the industrial world, they are at work on what comes next. They’re vying among other candidate regimes, from

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-op that reserves a board seat for the Earth itself.21 Rather than merely serving their members and their members’ surroundings, these cooperators want to do good in the world beyond. They secure B Corp certifications, based on metrics of social impact, to prove it. They share common property in

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were really up to. Those possibly lunatic ancient hermits kept going around asking each other, in every way they could think of, “What are we doing here?” Monastic rules, like company bylaws, establish a discipline. They take raw, human material and provide a form into which we can proceed and

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posters made in meetings heady with excitement and hope. They were schedules, sets of principles, slogans to remember, lists of things to do. A maxim for the Edgeryders’ doctrine of do-ocracy, for instance: “Who does the work calls the shots.” These relics remained on the floor for hours, apparently provoking insufficient motivation

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shared sacrifice • There can be savings in transaction and contracting costs through co-ownership among clients15 These competitive advantages come with costs of their own. Doing business this way can present barriers to obtaining capital and more demanding forms of governance. A give-and-take between costs and benefits has steered

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influenced Arizmendi, did Mathews zero in on the concept of formation. Mondragon, he realized, is a monument not only to a particular way of doing business but to a vision for forming the souls who partake in it. Before the first Mondragon cooperative opened in 1956, Arizmendi started a secondary

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to existing technologies.6 Rather than industrial production and distribution—now outsourced to other lands—the apps offer postindustrial matching algorithms. But networked connections can do more than endlessly disrupt us. Behind so many disruptive tech companies lies an innovation that started with collaboration. Before there was Airbnb, travelers stayed

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uprising that brought down the regime of Hosni Mubarak. Car sharing, crowdfunding, social networks—these are things that people previously turned to co-ops to do. The collaborative possibilities of the internet are cooperative possibilities, too. The trouble is, as finance goes on becoming an ever-larger portion of the economy

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communities they serve. But not all have. The new equitable pioneers don’t tend to salivate at the thought of disruption the way startup bros do. Disruption sounds great to investors whose money lets them hover above the economic fray. But when you’re accountable to fellow members, to others

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sharing economy they were supposed to be building would bend toward justice. This sharing was not the kind of sharing that co-ops had been doing for generations. Cooperative models were alluded to occasionally. But for the moment, challenging corporate control with shared ownership and shared governance wasn’t really

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precarious, uncertain work is nothing new, although it may be shifting from marginal to ubiquitous.14 As destabilizing tremors spread with each subsequent disruption, so do the contrivances among those determined to take back control, or at least to take more control over their lives than they could have had before

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its independent workers and small companies. Enspiralites pass jobs around to help stabilize the ups and downs of freelancing, as Vial started the network to do, but now they also fund one another’s business experiments and assist one another if things go sour. They hold retreats twice a year.

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less on the Robin Hood strategy of taking corporate contracts to pay for volunteer time; instead, they’re creating their own jobs and companies with do-gooding built in. Enspiral-affiliated ventures, along with Loomio, have included ActionStation, an online organizing tool; Scoop, an alternative-news source; and Chalkle, an

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friends to write letters, got me to write letters, invited council members over for visits, and sometimes rested—all the stuff you’re supposed to do in a good, local democracy. The opposition formed the Boulder Neighborhood Alliance, led by homeowners intent on preserving their town more or less as-

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. We accumulate it in order to have an education, to make a home, to pay for medical necessities. Servicing debts can prevent us from doing work we believe in, compelling us into better-paying livelihoods that might compromise our values. Our lenders’ identities seem as obscure as those of ancient

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is both an architect of Salish Sea Cooperative Finance and an investor-member in it. “We also get to network with younger people who are doing fascinating things to help our society.” In the process, says borrower-member Erika Lundahl (accumulated student debt: more than $16,000), “the people with

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the eyeholes of a deep-sea diver. The grates covered fans that cooled its array of application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs—advanced chips that do little else but churn through the complex cryptographic math. In return for their calculations, miners earn payouts of new bitcoins from the network, plus transaction

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reach of a 50 percent market share—making it possible for them to endanger the whole system by falsifying transactions. What prevented them from actually doing so, apparently, was that it would reduce confidence in the value of the bitcoins they invest so much to mine. They also started preventing

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What if, rather than just indicating on Facebook that you plan to participate in a protest, you joined a group of people contractually bound to do so? Could smart contracts bring back solidarity? It was a statement of digital possibilities but also, intentionally or not, a testament to what the

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s balance ventures too far from zero in either direction and stays there. Because interest is nonexistent, having lots of ecos sitting around won’t do any good. Creditworthiness in the system comes not from accumulation but from use, from achieving a balance between contribution and consumption. The CIC’s

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too restrictive, he left for France, where he’d be farther from the Spanish police and less recognizable in public. With not much else to do, he began learning all he could about cryptocurrencies. Friends of his had already been building Bitcoin-related software. Calafou had been a center for

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networks without really knowing how they work. We’re transparent about every detail of our lives with them, while they’re private about what they do with it. Community-based software operates on a different logic. Because nobody owns it, it’s harder to become fabulously wealthy from keeping secrets.

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the allegedly neutral, blank-slate name platforms. These platforms are multi-sided markets that connect people—to rent spare rooms, to share news, to do jobs—reaping fees from our transactions and artificial intelligence from the data of our use. They are finding their way into ever more areas of

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that Uber came out of a particular kind of ecosystem in Silicon Valley, of accelerators and investors and Burning Man camps and tech schools. To do things cooperatively, we’d need to undertake the patient work of building another kind of ecosystem. Scholz began forming a Platform Cooperativism Consortium to wrangle

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obtains members’ data through a browser plug-in, then sells it off in transparent ways and reinvests the proceeds in microloan programs abroad. Farmers are doing something similar. The vast reams of data that modern farm machines churn out are of growing interest to investor-backed companies. The Growers Agricultural Data

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worker-governed crowdsourcing, and a group of my students at the University of Colorado designed a student-run gig co-op. Through cooperation, universities can do business, education, and public service all at once. Platform co-ops have found other patrons as well. The labor union SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West

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leading the blind. Consider, for instance, the founder of one very promising startup, with extensive personal and professional knowledge of her target market, plus the do-or-die attitude that’s nearly prerequisite for bringing something new and excellent into the world. Nothing should be able to stop her, but starting

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There need to be other ways. Co-ops were the original crowdfunding. They were how people got together and financed a business to do things nobody else would do for them. Online crowdfunding borrows this idea, but platforms such as Kickstarter and GoFundMe subtract the co-ownership and mutual accountability of their

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enable companies to remain “steward-owned” and purpose-oriented—rather than forever seeking an exit that turns the company into a commodity. In order to do that, its young founders have created a model much like an old cooperative bank, a network of mutually supporting enterprises. On a local scale,

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creating websites and mobile apps for what were once offline services, but they’re not generating meaningful alternatives in the connective economy of platforms. Rarely do they take advantage of open-source software or the worker-owned software companies that are becoming widespread. They prefer to play catch-up with the

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is getting easier. And platform co-ops need not be breathlessly radical at every turn; even if they mostly work the way other tech companies do, if their ownership and accountability point to participants more than to capital, that’s radical in itself. Platform cooperativism’s early advocates have tended

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model depends not on virality and click-bait, unlike most customer-facing publications, but on trustworthiness. It does what many news organizations claim to do but can’t quite accomplish—insulating news-gathering from news-selling. We have new media fixtures now. When I was starting out as a reporter

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for sale. Prospective buyers as various as Verizon, Google, Salesforce, Microsoft, and Disney circled overhead. By the measure of Wall Street, the company wasn’t doing well. The user-base wasn’t growing quickly enough. The $14 billion-or-so valuation wasn’t enough to satisfy investors’ monopolistic expectations, especially not

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for financing solar power and efficiency improvements. “Our goal is to build a social movement,” says founder Jake Schlachter. A movement will take some doing. According to a study by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, nearly three-fourths of co-ops see voter turnout of less than 10 percent

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might turn to this strategy again. We might, as Warbasse hoped, govern through cooperation. In the 1930s, farmers who needed electricity bypassed corporate providers to do it for themselves; today, the health-care impasse might require similar treatment. When Aleta Kazadi took to the streets of Denver to collect petition signatures

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action on the crumbling wastewater system. Funds needed to be raised for repairs; perhaps afterward, the money could be used to seed cooperative businesses for doing the necessary work. Lumumba used the political capital he’d won in the election to pass, by referendum, a 1 percent sales tax increase.

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sanitation workers. “Black power,” “black liberation,” “black lives”—these betray demands more comprehensive than either headlines or mythic hindsight allow. And they always had to do with economics. In the mid 1960s, black power entered the movement lexicon while Stokely Carmichael was living among landowning co-op members in Lowndes County

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specialize in heavy-duty environmental services. The story of his success is one of breaking through Mississippi’s white old-boy network, and to do that his politics have become mainly reducible to his business interests. He is a former chairman of the chamber of commerce and serves on the

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—one with less ideological freight than the partisans of MXGM. “I had to have relationships with politicians,” Garrett told me. “If you’re not doing business with the government, you’re not in mainstream America.” Garrett became a Lumumba supporter only when it became clear who was going to win

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that FLOK was a “sideways hack”—of the country, maybe even of the global economy. “It’s taking advantage of a historic opportunity to do something innovative and transformative in Ecuador.” He saw a chance to set the conditions for a commonwealth. FLOK bore the style and contradictions of Ecuador

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government programs as you fund redistribution,” he told me—mothball public housing, food assistance, Medicaid, and the rest—and replace them with a single check. Do away, also, with debates and decisions about common priorities; let the market of cash-equipped consumers vote among competing corporations with their purchases. This kind

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getting snatched away again, they knew they had to be owners. The evidence, anyway, doesn’t fully agree that the wonders of automation are doing away with jobs on their own. Productivity growth has been sluggish by historical standards in the United States, and a decade after the 2008 crash

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a given widget, over the “enablers,” who answer phones, sweep floors, craft contracts, and the like.23 This kind of doctrinal fixation doesn’t do much to anticipate automated or offshore production, rising demand for service work, and the disguised labor of online platforms. It also inclines us to neglect

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among the company’s dozens of international subsidiaries, the Italian worker-owners don’t bother promulgating cooperative values or possibilities in any way. (“We do not intend to do it,” confirms one executive.) And this is one of the real co-ops—a dues-paying, upstanding Legacoop member. There are also tens

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and Barriers to Their Creation,” in Sharing Ownership, Profits, and Decision-Making in the 21st Century, ed. Douglas Kruse (Emerald Group Publishing, 2013); Pérotin, What Do We Really Know. Resilience: Johnston Birchall, Resilience in a Downturn: The Power of Financial Cooperatives (International Labour Organization, 2013); Clifford Rosenthal, Credit Unions, Community Development

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and Job Flows,” Journal of Comparative Economics 44, no. 2 (May 2016). Cost savings: Hansmann, The Ownership of Enterprise; Hueth, “Missing Markets”; Pérotin, What Do We Really Know. 16. Quoted from an epigraph in Holyoake, The History of Cooperation, 312 and 355–356; Curl, For All the People, pt. I

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Paper no. 441 (2014). 22. Community Purchasing Alliance, 2016 Annual Report (February 2017). I delivered the keynote address at that meeting and was compensated for doing so. 23. E.g., Richard D. Wolff, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism (Haymarket, 2012); for an application of Wolff’s framework, see

Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Story of Anonymous

by Gabriella Coleman  · 4 Nov 2014  · 457pp  · 126,996 words

or by ordering hundreds of pizzas, taxis, and even SWAT teams to a target’s residence. Whatever the technique, trolls like to say they do what they do for the lulz—a spirited but often malevolent brand of humor etymologically derived from lol. One early Anonymous trolling raid—legendary to this day

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with faint excitement, the prospect of detailing a troll typology. Just as my anthropological ancestors might minutely categorize tribes, skulls, and axes, perhaps I could do the same with trolls and their horrible exploits, playing, all the while, with my discipline’s historical penchant for irrelevant and sometimes racist categorization. Quickly

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from identifying themselves, and most post under the name “Anonymous,” as in the example above. Technically, 4chan keeps logs of IP addresses and doesn’t do anything to keep visitors from being identified. Unless users cloak their IP addresses before connecting, the site’s founder, owner, and system administrator —Chris

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has been less common in recent years), and incessant taunting and vitriol of other users (such as egging on individuals with suicidal ideation to “just do it” and become “an hero”). It must be noted, however, that there is also an outpouring of compassionate and empathetic advice, especially for those

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itself and brings order out of chaos,”3 is deeply offensive to hackers whose only demand on technology is that it should, at minimum, actually do something—a task they leave not to some transcendent discovery of truth but, instead, to their personal ingenuity in discovering solutions to technical problems,

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control, some Anons are more active and influential than others—at least for limited periods. Anonymous abides by a particular strain of what geeks call “do-ocracy,” with motivated individuals (or those with free time) extending its networked architecture by contributing time, labor, and attention to an existing enterprise or by

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first published in India on September 5, 2010, and then spread through the more globalized boutique technology press a week later. It had nothing to do with ACTA, but concerned, instead, something strikingly similar to privateering, a once-common wartime naval practice, before it was outlawed in 1856. For a

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groundless threats of copyright infringement proceedings.”19 Lord Lucas, who had proposed the amendment, had particularly harsh words for ACS:Law: “We must also do something about the quantum of damages that is being sought. In a civil procedure on a technical matter, it amounts to blackmail.”20 The emails

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are becoming frustrated with the way laws are being constantly re-written to kill our creative culture in the name of preserving profitability, its methods do more harm than good to the global effort. By continuing Operation: Payback attacks, you will hamper those who promote copyright reform and curtailment of

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civil liberties and abominations of censorship such as COICA, ACTA, and the DEAct, are good and just things to enforce upon the populace. They do this whilst selectively enforcing their own laws when it comes to “official” organizations that take actions such as running a mass racketeering operation (knowingly suing

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thousands of individuals for infringement on bad evidence) or DDoSing sites that are contrary to their interests (AiPlex). We do not recognize their “authority” due to this rank hypocrisy. Finally, we recognize and respect the work of Pirate Parties and wish them luck. We

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like most social movements, remains open to chance, even chaos. The difference is that Anonymous is perhaps just a touch more open to mutation. Nowhere do we see this demonstrated more vividly than at the beginning of December 2010, when a whimsical decision ended a period of inactivity on AnonOps, flinging

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for over a year, surpassing WikiLeaks as the primary hacker-activist hub of the Internet. But, before we describe this whimsical decision, we would do well to keep in mind its infamous outcome: AnonOps’ support of WikiLeaks via a massive DDoS campaign in the aftermath of the whistleblowing organization’s

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the foreign intelligence watch list—nor had it been found guilty of anything by any court of law—these companies, without any legal obligation to do what the government asked of them, went ahead anyways. Anonymous was outraged. Two weeks later, AnonOps became ground zero for the single largest digital

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and opportunistic move—and almost immediately, consensus started to favor jumping into the fray. But there were calls for due process. If they wanted to do it right, they first needed to rev up their propaganda machine. And even as some were swayed towards DDoSing PayPal, the growing anger (particularly

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’s total freedom of information then there isn’t an end. […] m: theres nothing wrong with technological protest. other than we struggle to organize. do any damage. hardly any of us are propper hackers. P: synchronized twitter and facebook postings, jolly rogers wherever you can on the internet, and then

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publicity, speech, and debate, having the goal of directly halting activity or impacting and inconveniencing the targeted party.28 Of course, all of these arguments do not necessarily justify DDoS in all situations. Rather, they more thoroughly demonstrates its pretzel-logic and ethical relationality. Internet scholar Ethan Zuckerman and his coauthors

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composition of Anonymous itself. Time and again I witnessed participants acting with political conviction, and it is likely that for some of them they were doing so for the first time through the actions Anonymous enabled. This becomes entirely lost if we understand Anonymous through the gross fetish of stereotypes.

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of corporate infiltration as follows: “The corporate capacity for espionage has skyrocketed in recent years … These current and former government employees, and current government contractors, do their spying against nonprofits with little regulation or oversight, and apparently with near impunity.”12 HBGary’s specialized services, which offered “sophisticated” spy operations, was

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financial plan of its own, a Robin Hood–esque blackmail proposal: Sabu: penny. we will not target hbgary.com. its done. what you can do is motivate your investment from hbgaryfederal over to bradley mannings defense fund. and distance yourselves from aaron barnetts’[sic] research Agamemnon: Penny… we are under

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fire in ways you do not understand. Not just the feds… right wing ‘freedom’ fighters trying to take us down… infiltrators have hurt us… Aarons research contains personal information

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courteous eleven-minute exchange (Brown recorded the conversation and subsequently uploaded it online). There was some uncertainty regarding just what it was HBGary intended to do with the data. Barr, whose voice bore no trace of sourness, fear, or even anger, confidently introduced himself: “I am a federal contractor working

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Sabu: yes greg. k: greg we got everything Agamemnon: Greg, I’m curious to know if you understand what we are about? Do you understand why we do what we do? “We got everything.” Had this play been staged, Greg Hoglund would have, at this point, embarked on a soliloquy bemoaning his fate

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out of Colorado Springs. Welcome aboard! —Greg Hoglund CEO, HBGary, Inc. Hoglund then changes tack, appealing to Anonymous’ supposed sense of self-preservation: greg: do you guys realize that attacking a U.S. company and stealing private data is something you have never done before? greg: no, I think you

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the equality of all. —You seem to imply that you are special and important such that the principles mentioned below, anonymity and equality of all, do not apply to you. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- *Your dedication isn’t under discussion. You most certainly are one of Anons most important friends. I just want to

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hacking converts single-purposed devices back to the preferable state of a general-purpose computer. Although a single-purpose device is useful for people who do not want to deal with configuring or managing a more general computer, many technologists see this confinement as an arbitrary abridgment of their fundamental

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products work. You have victimized your own customers merely for possessing and sharing information, and continue to target those who seek this information. In doing so you have violated the privacy of thousands of innocent people who only sought the free distribution of information. Your suppression of this information is

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responsible for the ongoing problems. But while there were a few scattered claims of responsibility, Anonymous eventually and unambiguously insisted, “For once we did not do it.” With no official word from Sony, rumor and innuendo swirled, feeding the perception that Anonymous was responsible. After weeks of silence, on April

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up Sabu: hahaha Sabu: think of a cool name guys Sabu: quick tflow: Lulz4u Security? Sabu was impatient: Sabu: well Sabu: why dont we just do this under the anonleaks banner Sabu: ? tflow: because […] pwnsauce: I like LulzLeaks and Lulz4u Security Others objected, again, making a distinction between ethical and

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? Falcon: LulzLeaks! lol: no hacking and dumping data is ethical xD pwnsauce: we have the LulzLeaks twatter xD Falcon: here’s what we should do: Falcon:—upload DB Falcon:—dump on LulzLeaks Falcon:—retweet from official Fox News twitters After proposing a few other possible names, like “Ninjasec,” they settled

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of this nature is common to craftspeople—doctors, professors, academics, journalists, and furniture makers. It is simple: the fine art of haughtiness pushes one to do better. However (and for reasons that still mostly elude me), when compared to other activities that might also be considered “hacking,” security specialists take elitism

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software solutions that cannot be configured to address the unique risk profiles of an institution), products that cannot replace a dedicated team that can potentially do the work of real security. But the initial desire for security itself remains a low priority for many firms, even well-funded ones. One

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and white labels that had come to distinguish malicious hackers from more benevolent ones. “Grey hat” hackers are not above acting illegally, but typically they do so only to identify, and publicize, vulnerabilities. L0pht became so successful that in May 1998, seven of its members were invited to testify (in

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l33t hacker), the cat (because if it is related to the Internet, there must be felines), the music (hacking to music is always preferable to doing the deed in silence), manifestos (free expression, dammit!), and law breaking (because rules, fuck them). LulzSec embodied the pleasure of hacking and subversion like

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federal prison between 2006 and 2008. He had digitally infiltrated a right-wing organization called “Protest Warriors,” whose tag line is “Fighting the Left, Doing it Right”; he pilfered credit card information from their site’s database. Since he never used the credit card information, he was only charged for

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question about keeping things separate sharpie: people think this irc is a fucking church knitting group OpNoPro: Please understand the situation sharpie: yeah sharpie: I do sharpie: a lot more than you OpNoPro: There are many portions to the IRC *CrappyTIres looks for the knitting group OpNoPro: Take it easy

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wide scale reporting make this distinction. A destructive minority is getting a majority of the press, while those of us who toil in the shadow doing good work for people at home and abroad go unthanked.23 This statement captures Anonymous’ commitment to difference, plurality, and dissension—similar in form

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that he was no longer involved in Anonymous, focusing his energy on “ProjectPM,” a team wiki dedicated to documenting the inner-workings of private contractors doing security work for the government. Later, Brown would assume the moniker of Anonymous again—to take on the Mexican drug cartels. (This was possibly

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at three young women. As the liquid engulfed their faces and stung their eyes, they crumpled to the ground, pleading, “No! Why are you doing that?!”9 Bologna answered by sauntering away. Onlookers filmed the entire incident and the video went viral. Anonymous retaliated by swiftly doxing the officer—uploading

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leaking some cops emails. ;) biella: deeply as opposed to surface illegal Anon: we have a table of illegal categories […] ***Anon checks the cheatsheet biella: Anon, do you?? biella: lolll ***Anon thinks ‘fuck we r screwed’ quinn: is this like a mandatory minimums kind of chart? quinn: heheh Anon: hahaa biella:

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brought by the authorities rather than online vigilantes. The Anons behind #OpJustice4Rehtaeh respected this wish by making clear in a subsequent statement that We do not approve of vigilante justice as the media claims. That would mean we approve of violent actions against these rapists at the hands of an

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Mr. Monsegur’s cooperation and its around-the-clock nature was particularly helpful to the government … That personal characteristic of turning on a dime to doing good, not evil, is the most important factor in this sentencing.” Preska’s lenient sentence not-so-subtly relayed the following to future informants:

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prison?”29 asked Your Anonymous News. “Preska is an absolute disgrace to the concept of justice,” offered Firefly during an interview. These laments could do nothing to alter Hammond’s situation— but many Anons derived some measure of comfort when, only days later, both Motherboard and Daily Dot published accounts

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me to stop drinking the Kool-Aid; his trenchant critiques of emergent power structures made it easier for me to intuit them and, in so doing, apprehend the many strains of internal critique existent in Anonymous. blackplans, a consistent presence spanning different eras and scenes, was boundlessly erudite and witty

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22/meet-the-man-behind-wwp-the-web-home-of-anonymous. 14. Online interview with author. 15. Anonymous, “What the Dicks Is Marblecake and What Do They Do?” Why We Protest, July 23, 2008, last accessed July 4, 2014, available at http://whyweprotest.net/community/threads/what-the- dicks-is-marblecake-and

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-what-do-they-do.16012/page-13. 16. Paolo Gerbaudo, Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism (London: Pluto Press, 2012). 17. Jo Freeman, “The Tyranny

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14. David Kravets, “Wired Exclusive: I Was a Hacker for the MPAA,” abcnews.go.com, Oct. 22, 2007. 15. Enigmax, “Anti-Piracy Outfit Threatens to DoS Uncooperative Torrent Sites,” torrentfreak.com, Sept. 5, 2010. 16. Enigmax, “4chan DDoS Takes Down MPAA and Anti-Piracy Websites,” torrentfreak.com, Sept. 18, 2010. 17

Ellul, Jacques-The Technological Society-Vintage Books (1964)

by Unknown  · 7 Jun 2012

: “Are the facts analyzed here false?” “Is the analysis inaccurate?” “Are the conclusions unwarranted?" “Are there substantial gaps and omis­ sions?” It will not do for him to challenge factual analysis on the basis of his own ethical or metaphysical presuppositions. The reader deserves and has my assurance that I

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of us limits himself to leading a trivial existence in a technological civilization, with greater adaptation and increasing success as his sole objectives; if we do not even consider the possibility of making a stand against these determinants, then everything will happen as I have described it, and the determinants

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as, for example, in atomic re­ search). And very often it is some simple technical modification which allows further scientific progress. When the technical means do not exist, science does not advance. Michael Faraday was aware of the most recent discoveries concern­ ing the constitution of matter, but was unable to

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idealism. Techniques considered as methods of operation present certain common characteristics and certain general tendencies, but we cannot devote ourselves exclusively to them. To do this would lead to a more specialized study than I have in mind. The technical phenomenon is much more complex than any synthesis of char

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evolutionary curve as ma­ terial technique. There is not a progression of discoveries built one upon the other; rather, discoveries remain side by side and do not affect one another. There is another factor in the regression of magical techniques: the problem of evidence. In material techniques, choice is relatively 

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in the W est The West was officially Christian until the fourteenth century; there­ after, Christianity became controversial and was breached by other influences. What do w e find, from a technical standpoint, in the so-called Christian era, the period from the fourth to the fourteenth centuries, the “ sociological

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than the period whichhad preceded them. Printing, the nautical compass, gunpowder (also copied from the East), all date from the fifteenth century. It would not do to minimize the importance of these inventions. For Norbert Wiener, they “constitute the locus of an industrial revolution which pre­ ceded the principal industrial revolution

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matters completely unconnected with the subject of the book. Purely personal reflection and private experience form the foun­ dations of these books; in no sense do they represent an effort at common inquiry, reciprocal control, or search for the best method, all of which are indispensable for technique. The plan

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These scientific discoveries represent necessary conditions— but not imperatives. It is evident that applications are impossible without principles, but, once principles have been established, applications do not neces­ sarily follow. Applications may be made out of simple curiosity, as among the Creeks or among the makers of automatons in the eighteenth

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as support and foundation for the structure the nine­ teenth century was to build; it represented what Charles Moraz6 in his Essai sur la civilisation dO ccident calk “collective incuba­ tion,” This incubation, consisting of millions of accumulated ex­ periments, was the preparation for the moment of formulation, of expression.

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­ acteristics of technique to determine whether there has really been a change. But what characteristics shall we examine? Not the in­ trinsic ones; these do not change. If we consider intrinsic charac­ teristics, the first position is right. The mental operation by means of which Archimedes constructed certain engines of

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it has followed almost of necessity certain other discoveries. Human intervention in this succession appears only as an incidental cause, and no one man can do this by himself. But anyone who is sufficiently up-to-date technically can make a valid discovery which rationally follows its predecessors and rationally heralds

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greater and the expression of human autonomy proportionately feebler. Human beings are, indeed, always necessary. But literally anyone The Technological Society (9 3 can do the job, provided he is trained to it. Henceforth, men will be able to act only in virtue of their commonest and lowest nature, and

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what they possess of superiority and individ­ uality. The qualities which technique requires for its advance are precisely those characteristics of a technical order which do not represent individual intelligence. And here we enter into another area, the nature of the technician. In this decisive evolution, the human being does

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the basis of the evidence, that the technical phenomenon presents, every­ where and essentially, the same characteristics. It is useless to look for differentiations. They do exist, but only secondarily. The common features of the technical phenomenon are so sharply * The French word is tmictti or InxScabiliti. I have adopted “

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to what Mumford has called the paleotechnical period. During this period the instruments of the power mentality developed. It became apparent that mechanical improvements alone do not suffice to yield socially valuable results. This was clearly a period of transition in which inventions had not yet com­ pletely overthrown the

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life for military or industrial service. Technique can leave nothing untouched in a civilization. Everything is its concern. It will be objected: "If these transformations do take place, tech­ nique alone is not responsible. Many other factors have contrib­ uted; for example, the intellectual superiority of the white race, the

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that there will not be sufficient new possibilities of investment. There is only one way to ensure limit­ less possibilities. These possibilities have nothing to do with spon­ taneous human needs, but involve technical discovery and applica­ tion, which create new products to replace the old, and also stimu­ late

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can no longer be owned by a single per­ son and economic activity is beyond the range of individual possi­ bilities. But technical progress cannot do without the concentration of capital. An economy based on individual enterprise is not con­ ceivable, barring an extraordinary technical regression. The neces­ sary concentration

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The Technological Society (163 the creation of this technique are taking shape; and soon they will be perfected. The Economic Techniques of Observation. I do not intend to describe these instrumentalities; I am concerned here solely with exhibiting them as an ensemble. The principal instruments which have been developed are

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veritable law of economics; planning is in­ separably bound up with coercion. The individual does not realize spontaneously what is most ef­ ficient. Nor do the workers conform spontaneously to Gilbreth’s “movements.” The following alternative presents itself. Either the plan is flexible but is not realized, as experience shows

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economy) are adopted on a wider and wider scale, irrespective of doctrines and intentions. The only reply is that plan­ ning permits us to do more quickly and mure completely whatever appears desirable. Planning in modern society is the technical method. It does not necessarily represent the best economic solu

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to effect total decentralization, including administrative, financial, and cultural decentralization. Total action, however, would be difficult to achieve; precise and adequate technical motives for it do not exist Furthermore, it would have to be implemented by authoritarian measures. The state would have to act to constrain the citizens with authoritarian 200

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give opinions on fabrication, procedures, and financial methods. None of these is negligible and I have no desire to minimize their impor­ tance. But they do not add up to economic democracy. Collective ownership of the means of production (from the point of view of nationalization, collectivization, or state socialism)

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methods have been discovered and elaborated which give the first soldier a belligerence equivalent to the patriotic ardor of the second. Democracy has nothing to do with the matter. Democracy did not enter either into the theorem ( conceded by the majority of economists) that full employment, which is neces­ sary

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technical progress occasioned by private capitalism. Such a slowdown would be regarded as intolerable, and could not last very long. The problem has nothing to do with debates about “nationaliza­ tion.” No more relevant is the allegation that the state frequently applies techniques with “less ability” than private enterprise, or

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result of private enterprise. This is only a corollary of what I have been saying— namely, that political moti- The Technological Society (251 vations do not dominate technical phenomena, but rather the re­ verse. The state is usually unable for doctrinal reasons to revolu­ tionize the techniques of public finance

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technical rise of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany under the sway of the politicians? T he orientation of both these regimes was technical. Why do the technicians complain? The answer is that the conflict is not between politicians and technicians but among technicians of different categories. In the dictatorships,

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administration. When the technician has completed his task, he indicates to the politicians the possible solutions and the probable consequences— and retires. Unfortunately, the Americans do not consider the inverse prob­ lem, which is, objectively speaking, becoming more important When the expert has effectively performed his task of pointing out The

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of 1949 against the authors of the plan. These tactical changes can all be explained on the basis of technical reasons of great precision; they do not repre- The Technological Society (261 sent arbitrary decisions of hard-pressed politicians. The growing influence of technicians was further emphasized in 1953 by

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instance, general interests (the only true objects of politics) no longer con­ trol technique; particular interests (which are much more efficient in checking technical action) do. Pure technique represents the general interests, the true politics, and is opposed to the politician who represents the corrupting element for private, and hence politically

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Spanish Fascism ought clearly to have been censured by the democracies in 1945, as was Italian Fascism. There were political, sentimental, and doctrinal reasons for doing so. But the military technicians proclaimed that this would be a disaster, and the economic technicians agreed. The United States and Great Britain let Franco

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but it ceases to be a barrier when tech­ nique, increasing geometrically, encounters the ancient raison d ’etat.3This last, which perhaps has nothing to do with the nature of the state, has nevertheless existed almost continuously through- ' out history. But the raison detat never possessed the means to express itself

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manpower and colonization. But this pre­ supposes a plan for immigration, subject moreover to international agreement. Immigration planning will be identical whether we have to do with a dictatorship or a democracy. It will require identical police, economic, and administrative mechanisms. Presentday democracies cannot escape these technical necessities. These examples help

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technical secrets or governmental or­ ganization and consequently can exert no influence at all on the state. The Technological Society (275 Friedmann, in order to do something constructive about this downgraded and overspecialized manpower, has put his hopes in the evolution of socialism, which, by giving man the feeling of socialist

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state acts to promote scientific research is not new; in die eighteenth century the state offered recompenses to inventors, and these recompenses had much to do with the discovery of cer­ tain navigational methods (compensating chronometer, mathemat­ ical tables, and so on). The state thereafter seemed to lose interest, but

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with the assurance that the counselors will say nothing to management. But the counselors never actually counsel anything. Their activities have nothing what­ ever to do with a positive cure of the soul, a mission which would suppose at least the possibility of profound changes, new orienta­ tions, and an awakening

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Unfortunately, the first-rate work of Pierre Naville concerning this technique has demonstrated that its claims are not in complete correspondence with technical reality. I do not wish to consider the first part of his argument, which is exclusively Marxist. There are no natural aptitudes, he states; therefore vocational guidance

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ing to Monnerot, propaganda technique “has for its object the production and cultivation among the masses of certain predisposi­ tions and a special facility for doing at a given moment whatever is strategically opportune. As political circumstances change, it is necessary at intervals to cultivate successive predispositions.” This The TechnologicalSociety (371

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act upon the human subconscious but to leave men the illusion of complete freedom. The objection will be raised, in another vein, that some countries do not exploit these propagandistic manipula­ tory devices; for example, the democracies in general and the United States in particular.8 But here certain distinctions

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, during wars, hot and cold) and only in cer­ tain areas. However, such restraint cannot be imputed to demo­ cratic scruples; these democracies simply do not yet feel the compel­ ling necessity to exploit propagandistic technique. As the present global struggle intensifies and world domination by one nation or another

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themselves to the greatest possible degree in the organization, so that they are no longer conscious of any cleavage between personality and tech­ nique, and do not therefore need an artificial paradise. In the case of the Russians, propaganda has cleverly absorbed and replaced amusement. The Russian citizen subjected to

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be expressed in Communist or Liberal phraseology, come back in the final analysis to this abstraction. All technicians, too. The technicians, in any case, do not have sufficient intellectual curiosity to ask themselves what their favorite abstraction really means or what the relation is between this abstraction and tech­ nique

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a com­ pletely spontaneous phenomenon, representing a normal stage in the evolution of technique. The technicians are not conscious of the mechanism and even sometimes do not approve of it. Some in­ tellectuals have a dim awareness of the fact of convergence and recognize, generally optimistically, that the technical movement

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their system whatever is new. The more languid social groups, such as Switzerland or France, which cannot or will not submit to technical acceleration, do not manifest these phenomena.’ A nation which has reached a pitch of perfection in its technical organization sometimes feels this perfection to be intolerable. Suqh

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; im plied b y standardization, 2 1 3 ; politicians and techn ician s in, 2 5 6 -7 ; im i­ ta ted b y dem ocracy, 288-9; tech n icized sport in, 383; w orld­ corporation, 1 1 3 , 15 4 , 1 5 5 , 170; 235; tech n ical

They Don't Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy

by Lawrence Lessig  · 5 Nov 2019  · 404pp  · 115,108 words

some form of ID law. The net effect of these laws is, they found, plainly partisan. The findings presented here strongly suggest that these laws do, in fact, have real consequences for the makeup of the voting population. . . . Strict voter ID laws appear to diminish the participation of Democrats and

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those on the left, while doing little to deter the vote of Republicans and those on the right. They produce a clear partisan distortion.28 The same consequence flows from new

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America—at all30—and no good evidence that having a voter ID requirement increases voter confidence.31 In practice, whatever these changes were meant to do, they have in fact simply eliminated the ability of thousands to vote. As the Brennan Center for Justice summarized the changes since Shelby County,

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I often disagree with. Yet understanding is not agreement. A representative democracy should ensure at the very least that every citizen counts equally. It can do that only if every citizen has an equal freedom to vote. Today, we have obviously and grotesquely failed in that commitment. In this way, today

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Democrats, one independent, two moderate Republicans, and one far-right Republican. Instead, after the districts were redrawn under Democratic Gov. Martin O’Malley, who admitted doing so to most effectively elect party members, the state is represented by six far-left Democrats, one moderate Democrat, and one far-right Republican. In

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dynamic of primaries. I say “may” to acknowledge that the point is contested among political scientists. Some believe there is such an effect.56 Others do not.57 According to the analysis of political scientists Michael Barber and Nolan McCarty, “polarization relates more to the difference in how Republicans and Democrats

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It too measures roll call votes and finds in those little evidence of an effect by money. But studies that reach beyond that dimension certainly do find an effect, a point that, bizarrely, political science still just ignores.65 Yet assuming Barber and McCarty are right—assuming that swing districts are

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has suffered greatly over the past two decades. Not that poorer people around the country did any better. But certainly, people who are wealthier did do better. Much better. This is something new. Until the middle of the 1970s, America was a middle-class nation. Growth benefited everyone, the middle

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class especially. The middle class lived with real promise, as parents could imagine their children doing better than they, and as families felt and were, over time, wealthier. All that has now changed. Since the middle of the 1970s, middle-class

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primaries to nominate candidates. They don’t, however, constitute grounds to reject the primaries as inconsistent with our democratic principles. Consider, however, three examples that do constitute grounds to reject a particular kind of tweedism. As I will argue, all of these examples share a common form. In all of them

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eight fundraisers. When Barack Obama ran for reelection twenty-eight years later, he attended 228 fundraisers!108 How does the leader of the free world do his job while attending 228 fundraisers? But, second, and more important, we cannot confuse the business model of fundraising for (at least populist) presidential candidates

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anywhere between 30 percent and 70 percent of his or her time raising money for his or her campaign from big funders primarily.109And what do we know about these funders? As law professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos put it, summarizing the research, “If there is one thing that political scientists have

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invisible. We all have a sense that the politicians’ focus is elsewhere. But focus is a hard thing to track. Who knows why they do what they do, really? All we can say for sure is they don’t seem to be attentive to what most Americans want. Yet when you account

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as a fundamental strategy. The primary beneficiary of such suppression is political, not economic. If it means Republicans win, then maybe that means the rich do better. But if the technique of suppressing the vote of your opponent were open and notorious, the beneficiaries would turn on local political control, and

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not the economic interests of the most wealthy. What these five differently distorting inequalities do together is not easy to predict. Along some vectors—tax cuts—they may be additive. But along a wide range of issues, they conflict. Tea

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to benefit incumbents. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is easy to capture. Under the Trump administration, it was obviously captured by FCC commissioners keen to do the telecoms’ bidding. Their demand was to continue to weaken competition among broadband providers. The consequence of weakened competition is always higher prices and lower

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exclude the most salient possible reason: “the historically anomalous scale of attention capture effected by television, together with the homogeneity of the stuff created to do the capturing”?28 This peak attention affected more than culture. Consider just one example that will suggest the more general pattern. On March 7, 1965

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’ preferences should be the chief determinant of policy-making.” In countries like the United States, “citizens’ policy preferences have a substantial impact on what governments do.” “Our point,” they write, “is that the public as a collective body is capable of holding sensible opinions and processing the information made available to

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divided public becomes a tool that the status quo can invoke to block changes that threaten the status quo. It becomes a reason to do nothing, because doing anything is, for some group, “antidemocratic.” This result is driven by an obvious dynamic. We watch what we want—individually. But what we want

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’t yet know even a fraction of what we would need to know to answer that question with any integrity. But we do know how not to do it. We do know what would not work. Consider just one example: Imagine a school of medicine that was established to train doctors. And imagine

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) enables his audience to live within their relatively comfortable worldview. He brings gifts to his audience that rewards them for their worldview. Sometimes he’ll do whatever it takes. In a segment about criticism of the Electoral College, for example, by the right’s favorite target du jour, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

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a very long time.”102 In 2018, the World Health Organization added video game disorder to its “International Classification of Diseases.”103 But Facebook could do something that gaming companies could not. It is here that things got really weird. The data architects discovered many potential techniques of what former Google

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and endless feeds eliminate cues to stop. Unpredictable, variable rewards stimulate behavioral addiction. Tagging, Like buttons, and notifications trigger social validation loops. As users, we do not stand a chance.”105 There was a race, as McNamee puts it, quoting Harris, “to the bottom of the brain stem” “to the low

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lefty’s causes. First, and to be clear: there is nothing obviously wrong with this sort of technology. Email companies do this. Political parties do this. Partisan newspapers do this. Whole television networks do this. The game of rallying one side or the other is the essence of politics. It is an activity that

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America. In one, the government focuses on governing. In the other, it focuses on democracy. Not surprisingly, governments like the first, in Khanna’s account, do more to deliver the services of government than governments like the second. Democracy is the chump in a world governed by smarter governments. We are

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against one person, one vote, but in favor of the framers’ original compromise with inequality. There are two difficulties with this alternative. Assuming that electors do not cast fractional ballots—giving, say, two-thirds of their vote to one candidate, and one-third to another—proportional allocation could put even fewer

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under section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment, could direct the states to select electors committed to casting fractional votes.34 Could Congress or a Court do that? The challenge here comes from the need to synthesize two parts of our constitutional tradition—one part that allocated the selection of electors to

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Greece to much of the history of Florentine Italy—of governments that were filled with people selected randomly. The Greeks invented a device that would do the random selection. Their commitment to sortition survived for more than two hundred years. A Venetian lottery system survived for more than five hundred years

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, set the mode of ratification for an amendment to be state conventions rather than state legislatures. The conventions were insulated from political consequence. They could do what the public thought was right, and not fear the punishment of a minority that held strongly opposed views. That’s the same function the

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parties in Marousi, Greece (the suburb of Athens that hosted the 2004 Olympics), used a deliberative poll to select its candidate for mayor. We could do the same, if not selecting the candidate, then at least advising the public about which candidate the civic jury would select. Certainly—and obviously—that

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a way that leaves us understanding differently, not just more facts, but more humanity. I should know not only why the others see as they do. I should know them. In describing a strategy to respond to the weakness in American democracy, Professor Kirby Goidel advises that journalists ditch the objectivity

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available evidence and expert judgment rather than focusing on the narrow “gotcha” journalism of fact-checking.42 That different form of journalism, Goidel argues, will “do more to engage and mobilize” than the practices we inherit from our parents. There is an important point here. We take it for granted that

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the data to evince how that strategy mattered. We don’t know yet whether it would matter, or whether it would matter enough. But we do know that our democracies are extremely vulnerable, given the incentives of “surveillance capitalism,” and of entities keen to twist democracy against the democrats. Democracies everywhere

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of selection. The city is filled with monitors: they’re called lobbyists, and since the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970 made practically everything our representatives do transparent, they’ve had an endless source of input to feed into their sanctioning machine.3 And lobbyists are not the only source of monitors

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campaigns. Greenback tweedism selects candidates based on their responsiveness to funders. Yet the funders are the most enabled monitors of what candidates as representatives actually do. The business model of representation driven by the way we fund campaigns today is a thus perfect hydraulic away from the selection model of representation

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Haddock (aka Granny D); it inspired NHRebellion.org, which rallies attention to reform during the presidential election cycle. All of these organizations (and many more) do the work of platform politics from the state first. CAPTURING CONGRESS When I write version 2.0 of this book, the Conclusion will no doubt

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a critical end: imagine thirteen states passed the following resolution: We, the Legislature of ______, exercising power granted to us under Article V of the Constitution, do hereby preemptively reject any amendment proposed by a convention that was not free to consider issues of representational integrity. The strategy here is clear, if

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won’t become part of our Constitution. The worst case then is that nothing happens. The best case is that we get a shot at doing something that will not otherwise happen: proposing amendments to our constitution that will ensure, finally, a constitution that protects the political equality of citizens.

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Consequences of Preference Falsification (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 118–27. 2.Cited in Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2016), 18. 3.See, e.g., David Van Reybrouck, Against Elections (New York, NY: Vintage, 2018

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University of Chicago Press, 2018). Other favorites include Benjamin I. Page and Martin Gilens, Democracy in America?: What Has Gone Wrong and What We Can Do about It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); Richard L. Hasen, Plutocrats United: Campaign Money, the Supreme Court, and the Distortion of American Elections (New

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Protection and the Wealth Primary,” Yale Law & Policy Review 11, no. 2 (1993): 273, available at link #76. Raskin and Bonifaz go further than I do, concluding the Equal Protection Clause requires reform of the campaign funding system. They develop that argument more fully in Jamin B. Raskin and John Bonifaz

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“The First Amendment in Cyberspace,” Yale Law Journal 104 (1995): 1757–1804, available at link #99, with Eugene Volokh, “Cheap Speech and What It Will Do,” Yale Law Journal 104 (1995): 1805–50, available at link #100. Rick Hasen gives a contemporary view of Volokh’s “remarkably prescient article” in “Cheap

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McNamee, Zucked (New York: Penguin Random House, 2019), 86. The classic textbook by Fogg is Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do (San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 2002). Its insights have been popularized by Nir Eyal in Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products (New York: Portfolio, 2016

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pull users and their surplus into the site and the risk of repelling them. This is a calculation of radical indifference that has nothing to do with assessing the truthfulness of content or respecting reciprocities with users.”) 118.Julia Angwin, Madeline Varner, and Ariana Tobin, “Facebook Enabled Advertisers to Reach ‘Jew

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Equal Suffrage Clause would preclude constitutional amendments imposing a supermajority requirement on any Senate legislation, such as tax increases); Burt Neuborne, “One-State/Two-Votes: Do Supermajority Senate Voting Rules Violate the Article V Guaranty of Equal State Suffrage,” Stanford Journal of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties 10 (2014), available at

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, 226, 283n17, 283n20 representativeness importance, 139, 221–230 representatives not needed, 68–69 “republic” as “representative,” 3–5 sortition vs. elections, 186–190 vetocracy (veto-ocracy), 63–66 See also knowledge; representative democracy democracy coupons (DC), 142–146, 151, 166–167, 296n6 Democracy R&D, [178n11], 307n11 Democracy When the People

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.’ Charting a new course that can revitalize our Republic will demand a reckoning with these deep-seated challenges. This book is a clarion call to do just that.” —Representative John P. Sarbanes “In classic Lessig fashion, this book connects one of society’s biggest challenges—the impact of technology on

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