All The Books I Read In 2021

Some notes and quotes from the books I have read this year:

• Putin’s People - The story of how Putin and a group of KGB men rose to power by going after the oligarchs who came to power after the fall of the Soviet Union and replacing them with their own people. Then they started funneling that money into the western countries to attempt to destabilize the West.

• Rapture - Nick Nurse’s journey to becoming an NBA championship winning coach.

• The Lac-Mégantic Rail Disaster

  • Regulator capture led to safety regulations being removed and industry policing itself. When this happens profit takes precedence over safety.
  • Experts had been warning since the 1990s that the railcars used to transport oil were unsafe.
  • Less regulation over transport by rail compared to pipelines led to more volatile crude oil being transported by rail.
  • They shifted to one person crews and didn’t change the safety recommendations and training programs to save costs.
  • “employees were not allowed to refuse overweight trains”
  • The day before, a locomotive engineer reported issues with the locomotive.
  • Proper braking was not applied, in part to avoid the delay from disengaging the system the next morning.
  • Unsafe DOT-111 cars were phased out after the accident, despite opposition from the Harper government. Transportation Safety Board chair pushed for it knowing it would likely mean she would not be re-appointed as chair.
  • Initial report on the accident had many contributing factors relating to the decision to allow one person trains. These were all removed in the final report due to a lack of true independence. “The Prime Minister’s Office’s hands were all over it.”
  • On the Safe and Accountable Rail Act introduced following the accident: “The Act’s main purpose, however, was to ensure that industry had enough insurance to cover future accidents, so government would be spared the tab.”
  • Criminal trial for the three low-level workers resulted in them being acquitted of criminal negligence.
  • “All criminal and civil actions have been settled behind closed doors without going to trial except the criminal charges against Harding and his fellow workers. The only people who testified were low-level company and government employees, and police investigators. No company executives; no senior government officials, especially those who made and approved the decision to allow Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway to operate its trains with single-person crews; no politicians responsible for transportation policy and overall regulatory and budgetary policy; no industry leaders - none of them were compelled to testify. As a vehicle to uncover the truth, the legal system failed miserably.”
  • No real changes to regulations since the accident so it is just a matter of time before it happens again.

• The Ku Klux Klan in Canada

  • Began after the release of the movie The Birth of a Nation
  • Different people came from the US and tried to get it started in Canada but in the early years it wasn’t very organized, in part because the organizers were mostly trying to profit off hate and racial violence.
  • Black people weren’t the only targets, basically all non-Protestants.
  • Moose Jaw was a central point for activity because it was where multiple rail lines intersected.
  • Not a lot of police investigation into the Klan compared to other hate groups. Much like today, people were worried too many police agreed with the racism of the Klan to report their activity to the police.
  • Klan played a role in the Saskatchewan provincial election in 1929, helping elect the Conservative candidate.
  • Things died down in the lead up to the second World War.
  • Rise of right-wing groups along with David Duke promoting the Klan in Canada revived the it in the 1970s.
  • Canadian Klan leadership members were involved in attempting to overthrow the government of Dominica.
  • The arrests that followed effectively ended an sort of national organization in Canada and from them it was more regional, especially in Quebec, and disorganized.
  • Internet gave rise to new recruitment methods and the Harper government removing the ability of individuals to seek redress against cyber hate helped give rise to more hate speech online.
  • A major area of recruitment was within the military.

• The Hype Machine

  • It is actually true that false information spreads faster than true information. “It took the truth approximately six times as long as falsehood to reach 1500 people and twenty times as long to travel ten reshares from the origin tweet in a retweet cascade. Falsehood spread significantly more broadly and was retweeted by more unique users than the truth at every cascade depth.”
  • The four factors that guide how social media affects us are money, code, norms and laws.
  • “But the Hype Machine delivers social information in incredibly rich detail and at an unprecedented scale. As it does so, it stimulates our brains in ways that we have evolved to crave, which keeps us coming back for more. When we consider who we are and how we are mentally wired, the meteoric rise of social media is, in some sense, unsurprising - like the inevitable consequence of tossing a lit match into a pool of gasoline.”
  • “when we see social media images with more likes, we zoom in and inspect them in greater detail. We pay more attention to online information when it is valued more highly by others.”
  • “when we think about our own photos, we perceive them in their social context - we think about how other people are thinking about them.”
  • “When we analyzed millions of people’s running behavior over many years, we found people’s social media connections and solidarity with their running peers over social media helped them stick with their running regimens and made their running habits resilient to disruption.”
  • “neural activation caused by persuasive social media messages predicts individual- and population-level behaviors, especially information-sharing behaviors, better than we (or other outside experts) can predict our own behavior.”
  • Measuring the effectiveness of online ads is hard and often done badly (people who click on ads rarely convert to sales and people who convert to sales rarely click on ads) and the effectiveness is often vastly overrated and spending continues because not very many people are incentivized to ask which ads aren’t working.
  • Better to focus on reach than frequency like P&G did when they cut their digital marketing budget by 200 million and got a rise in organic sales growth.
  • Five strategies for communication in a hypersocialized world: network targeting, referral marketing, social advertising, viral design and influencer marketing
  • Reflection problem - is change of behavior due to friends convincing friends to change their behavior or homophily (friends sharing the same interests)
  • Showing social cues on ads (ex. Friends A, B and C like this brand) has a bigger impact on goods that confer status.
  • “what keeps our attention is the opposite of shock value, and that’s authenticity. Local network effects are strongest for strong ties, not weak ties, because the long-term value provided by our close friends and family is greater then the short-term, attention-grabbing value of celebrity. This explains why microinfluencers generate more engagement than celebrity influencers.”
  • Means are meaningless. With mircortargeting we don’t care about the mean impact. Something could have no average effect but a large effect on a small group, and that is what counts. “Though the average effect of digital ads on vote choices may be small or nonexistent, if the right sub-groups are targeted and influenced in the right geographies - in the right states or voting districts - the potential to move elections remains real.”
  • The three pillars of the wisdom of the crowds - independence, diversity and equality are all undermined by the Hype Machine.
  • In a study that randomly assigned people human curated or algorithmic curated news algorithmic curation outperformed human curation in maximizing user engagement, caused a filter bubble and caused reading choices to narrow.
  • “The most recent experiments on the wisdom of the crowds show that this type of adaptive network can achieve crowd wisdom that outperforms independent groups and the best-performing individuals when it is provided with high-quality performance feedback. This means, under the right conditions, our increasing interdependence and hypersocialization can be assets for human civilization rather than liabilities.”
  • “Structural reform of social media - though a commitment to making data and social graphs portable, allowing consumers to take their data to competing companies the way we do in the telecommunications industry, and forward-looking merger oversight - offers a more comprehensive, long-term solution.”
  • “As we regulate privacy, we must not limit our ability to audit, study, and understand the Hype Machine.”
  • Research “safe harbors” for scientists to analyze sensitive data should be established. Similar things exist with sensitive medical data and census data that have limits on the types and amount of data that can be used and background checks are done on the people using the data. Social media companies should also be required to make data available for research into the most pressing issues of public interest.

• Because Internet

  • Weak ties introduce new forms of language, strong ties spread them. The internet makes language change faster because it makes it is easier to find weak ties.
  • Much like history is written by the winners, the “correct” grammar is set and passed down by the elite. Think how this impacts algorithmic spelling and grammar checks.
  • “In English, the association of words from African American English with coolness and their subsequent appropriation by non-African Americans is much older than the internet” … “Fittingly the internet has come up with a word for this: columbusing, or white people claiming to discover something that was already well established in another community”
  • Old Internet People - the first wave of people to go online. They mostly interacted with strangers because they were online before their friends were.
  • Full Internet People - came of age in the early days of the social internet (late 1990s and early 2000s). More interaction with their friends through AIM, MSN, ICQ. Picked up internet slang from their friends.
  • Semi Internet People - came online the same time as Full Internet People but less for social purposes and more for work or keeping up with the news
  • Pre Internet People - were around for the previous waves, just never really used the internet and have gradually found their way online.
  • Post Internet People - people who haven’t known a world without the social internet
  • Typing in all caps, expressive lengtheninggg, ~irony punctuation~, minimal punctuation and capitalization are all forms of expressing tone through typography and they have evolved over time (all caps wasn’t meant to convey yelling in the early days of computing)
  • Macro-level conversation norms change over time. What may have been a standard greeting 100 years ago would be weird now.
  • “The changeability of language is its strength: if children had to copy exactly how their parents spoke in order for language to be transmitted, language would be brittle and fragile. It would be losable, the way ancient techniques for art or architecture can be lost. But because we remake language at every generation, because we learn it from our peers, not just our elders, because we can make ourselves understood even though we all speak subtly different personal varieties, language is flexible and strong.”

• Policing Black Lives

  • Slavery in Canada is a subject that isn’t taught in schools and is under-researched. There is a lack of Black Studies departments in Canadian universities.
  • Structurally mandated Black impoverishment led to white hostility. Black people taking low wage jobs led to a race riot in Shelburne, Nova Scotia in 1784.
  • There were still segregated schools in Canada in the 1980s. In the 1800s schools for Black kids were intended to teach obedience and submission so they might better accept their role as menial labourers.
  • Immigration policy in the early 1900s was meant to make it easier for white people to be allowed entry to Canada. You could be denied entry based on being deemed unsuited to the climate of Canada. Medical examiners were paid a government bonus for turning away Black migrants. The Department of Immigration paid black American doctors to convince potential migrants that the Canadian climate was dangerous.
  • “The politicization of rape was far less about protecting white women than it was about justifying the oppression of Black men.” White women raped by white men often received little legal protection or public support.
  • “Prostitution laws were weaponized to arrest and imprison Black and Indigenous women, along with poor and working-class Irish women, who were, at the time, considered less ideal settlers than other white Europeans.”
  • “The devaluation of Black life has widely justified a worldwide and national devaluation of Black labour, which serves the interest of capital.”
  • “Multiculturalism has served a role similar to that of the Underground Railroad, allowing Canadian state officials and the general public to congratulate themselves on Canada’s comparative benevolence, while rendering invisible the acute economic and material deprivation currently facing many Black communities.”
  • “public associations between Blackness and crime can be traced back to runaway slave advertisements dating back to the seventeenth century, in which self-liberated Blacks were portrayed as thieves and criminals. All free and enslaved people were subject to the surveillance of a larger white community and law enforcement officials”
  • In 2014 it was reported that a police college in Montreal was teaching that Blacks were more likely to commit crimes of violence, theft and sexual assault.
  • Under Harper: “This era saw a significant investment in building and filling prisons, seemingly at any cost. Prison expansion was given fiscal priority at a time when the government enacted significant austerity measures: social investments were cut across nearly every sector besides prison and the military”
  • Drug prohibition, not drugs, is a larger public safety and health issue (2016 study by the Lancet and John Hopkins)
  • “The result of the drug war has not been the protection of society, but the extensive caging of Black communities.”
  • Black women are frequently left out in the discussion on issues around racial and gender oppression. Those are often centered around Black mean and white women.
  • Inaccurate reports about Somali refugees collecting upwards of $100k a year in fraudulent welfare claims played a major role in social panic around welfare fraud. This resulted in changes made to make it more difficult to qualify for welfare checks and an increase in surveillance of single Black mothers.
  • “Many people living in poverty and precarious housing are unable to store years of paperwork and identity documents. Yet, many offenses under the umbrella of welfare fraud require decades of paperwork to prove innocence”
  • “Because women can be accused of welfare fraud for not having a reported ‘spouse in the house,’ many women fear having a romantic partner stay overnight, and others become trapped in situations of domestic abuse and coercion by partners who threaten to report them and allege fraud.”
  • There is more investment in the surveillance and repression of welfare fraud offenses relative to the actual rate of offenses compared to things like white collar tax fraud.
  • “The harms created by an ideological rather than evidence-based approach to drug use in society continue to legitimate the vilification and dehumanization of Black women.” Same thing with sex workers.
  • “Child welfare agencies have, since their inception, further entrenched white supremacy by destroying, on a large scale, the familial and communal networks of Black and Indigenous people. They have helped to establish a system of widespread surveillance, punishment and criminalization of Black families more broadly.”
  • Black kids are not thought of as innocent youth the same way white kids are. This impacts how they are treated by teachers in school.
  • Referring to Black kids dropping out of school makes it seem like an individual problem. It should be referred to as pushed out because it is a systemic problem.
  • “Any legal reform, then, must be tied into concerted efforts toward seeing, naming and concertedly countering the demonization of Black life that permeates both state institutions and wider society.” Otherwise there will just be new justifications for racial control.

• Let them Eat Tweets

  • “Conservative Dilemma” - conservative politicians have to get and maintain enough voters while also doing what their elite backers want despite the tension between the two.
  • “Inevitably, conservative parties found they had to offer something else to voters. Outflanked by the left on economic issues, their survival depended on introducing or highlighting other social divisions.” These divisions tend to be racial, ethnic and religious.
  • Two risks associated with the embrace of strategies of cultural divisions. First is conservative parties may become vulnerable to capture by outside organizations (single-issue groups, churches, media outlets…) “These organizations can focus on building strong emotional bonds with citizens and tapping shared identities. Crucially, these organizations may feel much less need to moderate and equivocate. Unlike parties, they are not trying to gain the support of a majority”. Second is the diminishing commitment to democracy (“if playing by the rules is ineffective, bending or breaking those rules may become an appealing alternative”)
  • Historical example of successfully managing the conservative dilemma - Great Britain. Historical example of failing to manage the conservative dilemma - Germany.
  • “The rise of inequality and fall of unions are closely linked. Not only do unions raise worker pay. They are also one of the few organized interests that have consistently advocated on behalf of less affluent Americans.”
  • “Whether we look at the positions of elected representatives or the likelihood of policy changes, there seems to be little clear association between the opinions of nonaffluent Americans and what happens in Washington.”
  • Shift to plutocracy among Republican politicians happened in the time between father Bush and son Bush. The older Bush actually slightly increased taxes for the rich, something Republicans have been united in opposing ever since. Republican politicians have become sharply more conservative since the 1990s and there has been no comparable movement among Democrats. These ideological shifts among Republican politicians are in line with their super rich donors and not with their voters.
  • Organizing though outrage - Evangelicals, the NRA and right-wing media.
  • “A judicial philosophy that combines a retreat of the state on economics and the advancement of the state to protect and sometimes enforce the views of religious conservatives was the logical endpoint of the long effort to merge the agendas of the Christian right and the GOP’s plutocratic paymasters. Nominees needed enthusiastic backing from both social conservatives and the party’s plutocratic allies. A focus on the courts gave each side ample opportunity to pursue coveted yet unpopular policies in the venue least accountable to public opinion and the best able to accommodate both agendas simultaneously.”
  • “Between 1996 and 2016, references to religion in the GOP platform have increased five-fold.”
  • “As the GOP drew closer to the plutocrats in the 1990s, the NRA became a vital organization withing the new, more radical Republican coalition. Its fiercely anti-government posture reinforced the rhetoric of reactionary plutocrats, while its policy demands were entirely compatible. A feedback loop emerged: the NRA fed off of and reinforced a kind of apocalyptic partisanship, in which freedom was at stake every election and every day in between.”
  • “The false narratives boosted by right-wing media generally have two characteristics: they incite tribalism and they escalate a sense of threat… Right-wing audiences hear about a litany of horrors linked to the right’s enemies. Information that would cast doubt on these narratives is dismissed or goes unheard.”
  • “Yet, if Republican elites used the right-wing media, right-wing media also used the Republican elites. And as right-wing media grew more powerful, one of the great dangers associates with the Conservative Dilemma re-emerged. Outsourcing mobilization strengthens voter intensity, but it also weakens gatekeepers, shifts power toward extremists, and pulls power away from party leaders. Today, conservative outlets offer Republicans free airtime and fired-up voters; they also discipline and punish conservative politicians who fail their tests of purity.” This effectively makes it impossible for a moderate Republican to win an election.
  • The economically liberal, socially conservative voters are the up-for-grabs faction of voters. “What Republicans learned as they refined their strategies for reaching these voters is that the issues, whether economic or social, are much less powerful than identities… This fateful turn toward tribalism, with its reliance on racial animus and continual ratcheting up of fear, greatly expanded the opportunities to serve the plutocrats. Republican voters would stick with their team, even when their team was handing tax dollars to the rich, cutting programs they supported, or failing to respond to obvious opportunities to make their lives better.”
  • The three Rs of Republican base building: resentment, racialization and rigging.
  • The racialization of government spending is an example of the impact of racialization through coded language. “Republicans attacked government in order to win control of government. In the process, they devised a language of resentment that’s not so familiar it’s virtually impossible to banish from our minds - one in which public spending supports the idle and criminal (read: blacks), taxes are essentially theft from hardworking families (read: whites), and brokers oft his corrupt transfer are Washington politicians on the take (read: Democrats) who look down on ‘real America’”
  • “The Republican Party is ever more committed to the narrow and unpopular priorities of corporations and the superrich. It is ever more dependent on radical surrogate groups to mobilize voters its economic policies do not help. And among those voters, it is ever more reliant on a demographic group in relative decline: older whites without college degree living outside urban areas, particularly older white men.” This isn’t sustainable in the context of free and fair elections, which results in them rigging and exploiting weaknesses in democratic institutions to maintain power.
  • “Today, rather than protecting powerless minorities disadvantaged by the rules, the Supreme Court is more likely to be standing up for the powerful minorities who want to rig those rules to institutionalize permanent minority control.”
  • The case that the GOP’s aggressive government-bashing is bad for capitalism in the long run is getting stronger. “They encourage social plunder rather than social investment. They seek to subsidize the digging of coal while doing all that they can to sabotage the rise of clean energy. They rely on the votes of declining regions (without addressing their economic needs) and attack the nation’s most dynamic regions”
  • “Over the medium run, the goal must be to strengthen the middle class and build organizations that can put checks on economic elites.”

• Coders - A good overview of the history of programming, both the good things and the bad things.

• Billion Dollar Loser

• Culture Warlords

• Irresistible

• Fulfillment - As Amazon keeps growing the have nots keep losing more and more

• Loving Sports When They Don’t Love You Back: Dilemmas of the Modern Fan

• Calling Bullshit

• The Data Detective

  • Search your feelings - it’s easier to be fooled by something designed to get an emotional reaction. Don’t be rushed. They want you to hurry up and feel.
  • Ponder your personal experience - for a better understanding balance your own personal experience with the big picture stats. This can lead to the beginning of a deeper investigation
  • Avoid premature enumeration - understand the definitions of what is being counted before trying to draw conclusions from the numbers
  • Step back and enjoy the view - spend time looking for longer term, slower paced information rather than the latest breaking news
  • Get the backstory - dig into how research was done (mostly watching p-value hacking and survivorship bias)
  • Ask who is missing - until recently most medical experiments are only done with male subjects
  • Demand transparency when the computer says no - be skeptical of black box algorithms
  • Don’t take statistical bedrock for granted - accurate governemnt collected statistics are hugely undervalued and it is very important that these remain trusted sources
  • Remember that misinformation can be beautiful, too - nice looking visualiztions don’t always convey accurate information
  • Keep an open mind - don’t be stubborn. Be willing to change your mind when faced with new information.

• Slack

  • “Modern organizations are huge networks of interconnected work. The nodes of this network are you and your coworkers. The connections are pieces of work in progress that get passed from one person to another. As a practical matter it is impossible to keep everyone in the organization 100 percent busy unless we allow for some buffering at each employee’s desk. That means there is an inbox where work stacks up. With enough buffer at each dest, the work flow can now be organized to keep everyone busy all the time. A side effect of this optimally efficient scheme is that the net time for work to pass though the organization must necessarily increase. Think of it from the work’s point of view: The time it takes to move entirely through the network is increased by each pause it has to make in someone’s in-basket. If workers were available when the work arrived at their desks, there would be no wait and the total transit time would be reduced. But availablity implies at least some inefficiency, and that’s what our efficiency program has drummed out of the organization. Making efficient use of workers in the sense of removing all slack from their day has an attendant cost in responsiveness and results directly in slowing the organization down.”
  • Time cost of task switching slows down progress.
  • The need to appear busy can actually cause you to slow down. Rather than finishing all your tasks and waiting for further instruction, you slow down to keep the supply of waiting work stable. By not wanting to appear idle “hurry up really means slow down.”
  • Slack isn’t only time but also control.
  • “If people are too busy doing the work, they will never have the time to learn new ways to approach it”
  • For learning and training to happen you need a chance to do these new skills at a slower than expert rate.

• An Ugly Truth

• Work Won’t Love You Back

  • The history of a lot of these low paying, caring and emotional labor jobs traces back to them being unpaid women’s work, thus not really recognized as work.
  • “Teachers are less pay sensitive when compared to other workers, meaning they’re less likely to pack up and leave for a better-piad job, and indeed, they have accepted cut after cut.” They essentially face a pay penalty for caring. Love is supposed to be part of the compensation, but love is not compensation, it is work.
  • On retail jobs: “Such labor is deeply gendered: women are made responsible for other’s emotions off the clock, and that emotion management has become part of the job while punched in. Yet this distribution of emotional labor reflects the inequalities of the broader society. To manage your feelings in order to avoid imposing them on others is to place yourself in a subordinate position; to have to massage others’ feelings all day long is to get used to swallowing your own emotions and needs. Skill in thie field is a skill learned from a life without power; it should not be surprising, then, that such a skill is rarely seen as a skill by the powerful, whoc expect deference as their natural right.”
  • On the Walton family (Walmart) investing in charter schools: “After all, with widely accessible education, but service industries dominating the economy, what we get is educated workers doing service jobs, and so the Waltons and others like them aimed to make sure those workers believed in the system under which they worked.”
  • “Something like one in three retail workers is a part-timer. It is easier for such workers to emphasize the positive parts of their jobs and shrug off the negatives; if it is, in the words of one young worker, ’not my real job,’ but just a stopgap, there is less incentive for the workers to make demands…. But it is still important to remember that two-thirds of the retail workforce is in fact over the age of twenty-five, and trending older. There are a whole lof of people working retail who are, in fact, supporting others.”
  • “Retail remains overwhelmingly gendered and racialized. Young workers of color tend to wind up in fast-food jobs, while white teens find jobs in higher-end retail. Those are the jobs more likely to be concentrated in whiter, wealthier areas that are harder to reach by public transit. Thus young people, in particular, tend to get jobs not based on economic need but on access.”
  • “Some companies weed out workers who need a job by ensuring long wait times during the screening process, leaving them with workers driven less by economic necessity than by the desire for a specific position. Presumably, they’ll be more loyal.”
  • Emeryville, CA passed an ordinance that requires large retailers to give their employees their schedules at least two weeks in advance and required an extra hour of pay anytime that schedule changed. They also have to offer hours to existing employees before hiring new ones.
  • “The problems of today’s nonprofit sector are outgrowths of this necessary inequality: nonprofits exists to try to mitigate the worst effects of an unequal distribution of wealth and power, yet they are funded with the leftovers of the very exploitation the nonprofits may be trying to combat.” This also means the goals of the lower-level nonprofit workers can clash with the goals of the foundation heads.
  • Nonprofit funders want their money to go to programs not operations. This results in their workforce being understaffed, underpaid and overworked.
  • “It’s not an accident that the people most likely to get nonprofit funding look a lot like those most likely to get funding for a tech startup.” The grassroots rebellious types don’t get funding while the Harvard grad who took a poverty course does.
  • “Justified by the meritocratic myth that the best interns will get jobs, the internship actually drives down wages by introducing a new wage floor - free - into the system, allowing companies to substitute interns for entry-level workers. The interns replace the very employees they hope to be.”
  • “Women have always been the largest part of the contingent labor force. Part-time work itself was a gendered concept, designed for women like the shop clerks and retail workers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who supposedly took jobs to earn ‘pin money’ rather than because they needed a real job. As more women moved into the workforce, the conditions long expected to accompany ‘women’s work’ spread to more and more workers, and the internship is a key hinge point where these conditions enter workplaces that, formerly, were associated with a sheen of masculine prestige and privilege.”
  • “But perhaps it is understandable that policymakers have not been quick to act in interns’ best interests: after all, many of their offices still run on unpaid internships.”
  • In its early days programming was considered clerical work, and was dominated by women as a result. The hardware side was considered the “man’s work.” Male programmers shifted the image because they didn’t want to be seen as doing a women’s job. “Changing the gender profile of programming, …, also had the effect of boosting its class status. Rather than work learned by doing, programming was now the purview of ratified graduate programs at the few research universities able to afford computers of their own.”
  • “In the obsession with the individual genius, we miss the real story, assuming that works of brilliance are the result of singular minds rather than collaboration - a notion that just happens to mitigate the idea of organizing.”
  • The fetish for the tech innovator who dropped out of college is began as a form of hiring cheap workers. If you got into MIT, but dropped out, you cost less to hire without the degree.

• Big-Box Swindle

  • “This book argues that, to a scandalous degree, big-box retailers are a product of public policy, not simply consumer choice. Driven by an erroneous conviction that chain retailers boost employment and expand the economy, elected officials have actively fostered and underwritten their proliferation. It began in the late 1950s with massive tax breaks that fueled the explosion of shopping malls, and accelerated dramatically in the 1990s as cities began funneling billions of dollars in subsidies to big retailers. … The favoritism does not end there. Many states have provisions in their tax codes that enable chains, but not independent retailers, to skirt paying income taxes.”
  • “Retail employment actually fell in counties that added Wal-Mart stores, according to a national study. Still the myth that new big-box stores and shopping centers expand jop opportunities persists, in part because the gains - the two hundred people donning orange aprons at Home Depot - are more visible, while the losses are scattered across many businesses and may take months to fully materialize.”
  • “This book contends the economic structure that mega-retailers are propagating represents a modern variation of the old European colonial system, which was designed not to build economically viable and self-reliant communities, but to extract their wealth and resources.”
  • “Local owners are both financially and personally vested in their communities and, as a result, their business decisions reflect a broader range of concerns than simply maximizing the bottom line. Their face-to-face relationships with employees and customers and their own personal connections to the places where they do business influence how they operate and the choices they make about such things as whether, for example, to support a tax increase that would reduce profit but improve the local schools their children attend. This complex set of motivations differs from the narrow range of factors that drive stockholders and distant boards of directors and produces valuable community benefits.”
  • Many policy decisions and tax benefits led to the rise of chain stores. Indirect ones like massive road construction projects and federal mortgage guarantees favouring new homes in the suburbs. Direct ones like accelerating and front-loading the depreciation timetable for new commercial construction projects. “Developers put up new shopping center, took big deductions allowed in the first few years, and then sold the property, moving on to build other, often bigger, retail properties.”
  • “What these stores are actually designed for, what they foster, is a big once-a-week shopping trip. Hauling a week’s worth of groceries and other goods home on a bicycle is not an option, and so the car becomes essential to shopping. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle: once the car enters the picture, the difficulty of parking downtown or along dense neighborhood streets further erodes the convenience and appeal of locally owned stores. As these businesses begin to decline and close, people have a harder time finding what they need within the neighborhood, and so begin to rely ever more on the superstores.”
  • Big box stores are better suited to withstand down times. Two tactics they can use to exploit this are flooding the market with more retail space than the local customers can support and having cheaper prices when they first open to get it in people’s heads that they are the cheaper option. They can raise prices later, sometimes after they have already killed the smaller stores, and it will largely go unnoticed that they have lower prices.
  • “What poor families are saving at the big-box till is no match for what they have given up in income. Nor are the tax benefits any less of a mirage; these sprawling stores place a major burden on roads and other public infrastructure and many of their employees must rely on public assistance to get by.”
  • “It may table a few years for the fallout from a new superstore to fully materialize, but ultimately the number of jobs created is offset by at least an equal number of job losses at other stores. The reason is fairly simple: retail development does not represent real growth. It does not generate new economic activity. Opening a Target superstore will not increase the amount of milk people drink or how many rolls of paper towels they use in a year. … Building new stores does not expand the pie it only reapportions it. Corporate retailers know this, of course. Although city officials often assume that chains pick locations based on data that show an area has unmet demand, in fact they more often choose sites because they believe they can steal market share from nearby businesses.”
  • “A superstore does not even need to appeal to a majority of a local competitors’ customers; all it has to do is skim enough sales to push the independent into the red and then wait it out.”
  • “Most local retailers buy many goods and services locally: they bank and local banks, advertise in local newspapers, carry goods produced by local firms, and hire a range of professionals, from accountants to Web designers.” This ripple effect goes away when the big chains take over. “Wealth flows only in one direction: out.”
  • “The megastores what the work done, but they do not want employees to have any degree of self-confidence or sense of their own worth, which only leads to costly problems, like demands for wage increases, independent thinking, and union-organizing drives.”
  • On blaming “bad apple” managers for breaking labour laws to keep costs down: “It is hard to believe that Wal-Mart, which controls the thermostats and lights of all its US Stores from Bentonville, does not know that thousands of its employees are working off the clock.” Giving managers a budget that is below what is actually needed to run the store, and giving them bonuses for meeting these budgets, ensures employees will be cheated.
  • “After workers at a superstore in Quebec succeeded in forming a union in 2004, Wal-Mart announced that it would close the store, laying off all two hundred employees. Just to be sure its message was heard, Wal-Mart enclosed a copy of a press release with every Canadian employee’s paycheck.”
  • “Local owners do not have to answer to the stock market; they can and do have motivations beyond the bottom line.”
  • “Extracting every penny possible from workers boosts profits, but the practice comes with a huge hidden cost to taxpayers. Unable to meet even basic expenses, many employees of chain retailers and restaurants rely heavily on public-assistance programs.”
  • “One frequently overlooked cost is the effect big-box stores have on existing property values. Nearby homes may lose value due to the added traffic and noise, but more significant are the effects on commercial properties. As downtowns and older shopping centers lose sales, they also decline in value and ultimately produce less tax revenue…. These dead downtowns and derelict strip males - thousands of which now litter the country - also represent a tremendous waste of public investment in the form of roads, water lines, utilities, and the like that are sitting idle or underutilized while taxpayers build still more infrastructure to serve the new big-box complexes.”
  • “Many land use experts blame sprawl for much of the rise in the cost of local government.” Local downtown business are efficient users of public infrastructure.
  • Big box stores also significantly increase police costs because they have strict policies that mandate prosecuting bad checks and shoplifting violations to the fullest extent of the law and due to the increase in police calls, more need to be hired. “A stolen item with a price tag of three dollars can end up costing the city hours of police time in responding to the call, filling out paperwork, and appearing in court.”
  • A study out of Penn State found that counties that gained Wal-Mart stores over a span of more than a decade fared worse in terms of family poverty rates than those that did not. The poor are the biggest losers of big-box expansion.
  • “Wal-Mart’s genius, what boosted it to the top of the industry and made it a revolutionary force in retailing, is that it developed the most sophisticated distribution system in the world - a marvel of modern technology capable of moving more goods around the planet with more precision on efficiency than ever before. Its methods have since been widely imitated by other chains. But these extensive distribution networks are efficient only to the degree that one ignores their huge cost to the environment and human health. The long supply lines behind every superstore, category killer, and fast-food outlet rely on combusting vast quantities of fossil fuels, the effects and costs of which are borne, not by the chains, but by society.”
  • These buildings are hard to fill with anything other than another big chain, but usually they want to build their own building from scratch instead of taking over an existing building. Cities are left dealing with the costs of vacant stores long after the big chains move on to a newer, bigger store nearby. The runoff from new roads and large parking lots contaminates local water supply.
  • There isn’t really evidence that big box stores actually offer cheaper prices than local independent stores. It’s largely marketing, offering cheaper prices when they first open and raising them later, pricing strategies(offer cheaper prices for common items, offer a cheap price for the cheapest lawnmower but markup all other lawnmowers, etc.) and people not actually shopping around to compare prices that leads people to believe they do. Also if you pay 25% less for an item but it lasts half as long it isn’t actually cheaper.
  • “Contrary to their rhetoric, mega-retailers have dramatically reduced consumer choice. The pressure they place on manufacturers to lower costs has sharply curtailed investment in product research and development. Centralized buying by a handful of gatekeepers has further narrowed the range of products that reach consumers, a fact camouflaged by the apparent abundance on big-box shelves. In a consumer environment largely defined by the way corporate retailers operate, the added value provided by independent businesses - many of which possess a degree of expertise and passion for what they sell unmatched by the chains - is commonly overlooked.”
  • “The reigning assumption is that mega-retailers have attained their market dominance solely because of consumer choices. But corporate chains have been aided and abetted in no small part by public policy. Federal, state and local policies have created an uneven playing field. It began in the late 1950s with accelerated depreciation, which fueled the expansion of shopping malls, and picked up in the 1980s and 1990s, as policymakers funneled billions of dollars in development subsidies to big retail chains, opening tax loopholes that gave large retailers a decided edge over local competitors, and failed to adequately police abuses of market power. The favoritism has been driven in part by the political power of the chains and the retail development industry, and by the persistent myth that big-box stores boost employment and tax revenue. But it also flows from a double standard pervasive among policymakers, who insist that small businesses be subject to the rigors of the free market, while granting their biggest competitors a leg up in the name of the public good.”
  • “The logic behind these giveaways is that the new stores will generate enough new tax revenue to more than cover the cost of the subsidy. … But such cost-benefit calculations only work if one ignores the full range of costs, notably lost sales and property tax revenue from local business districts, as well as competing shopping centers. Just two years after one of its anchors closed in response to competing big-box stores, a Rhode Island strip mall’s assessed value fell from $36 million to $20 million.”
  • Many of these programs were designed to revitalize older neighborhoods because rebuilding their was more expensive than building on the outskirts of town. The laws around these have loosened to the point where now the majority are being used for new developments, not rebuilding older places. “The way it works is that a city establishes a TIF (tax increment financing) district and issues bonds to cover part of the cost of redeveloping the site. The city then uses the bonds to pay for site improvements or, in some cases, gives money directly to the developer. Once the site is redeveloped and the property’s asses value rises, all of the new tax revenue generated by the site is diverted from the public coffers and used instead to pay off the bonds. … TIF essentially allows tax-exempt, low-interest public capital to be used for private development, and further subsidize that development with future tax dollars.”
  • An analysis of thirty-six TIF districts in Chicago found that more than 80% of the new revenue generated their would have been created anyways.
  • “Subsidizing chain retailers deals a double blow to independent businesses. Not only are independents rarely given any sort of public funding but, as taxpayers, they end up shouldering the cost of financing the expansion of their biggest competitors.”
  • The Geoffrey Loophole, named after Geoffrey the Giraffe, the mascot of Toys “R” Us. “The way it works is that a chain sets up a subsidiary in Delaware or Michigan, two states that do not tax profits earned from trademarks and other intangible corporate assets, or in Nevada, which does not tax any corporate income. It then assigns ownership of its name and other trademark slogans to this shell company.” Stores then pay these subsidiaries hefty fees to use the name and phrases and these payments get deducted as business expenses. Cost of setting these up is virtually nothing for a large company but too expensive for an independent business.
  • Shift to interpret antitrust laws only through the lens of delivering the lowest possible prices has greatly helped big chains.
  • Predatory pricing schemes are rarely tried in court. Proving intent on predatory pricing isn’t enough, you must also prove “the defendant prices goods below actual cost for a sustained period of time and had a dangerous probability of driving competitors out of business and recouping the losses through future profits gained” This is because of the influence of the Chicago school of economics who concluded that predatory pricing did not make bottom-line sense and was therefore very unlikely to occur. Current evidence contradicts this logic.
  • Some communities have started passing laws that require detailed impact analysis for new stores over a certain square footage.
  • Four keys for keeping big-box retail projects away:
    • Citizen coalition. Should be as broad a set of people as possible so it can connect with more people.
    • A land-use attorney. This shows city officials you are serious. It’s also helpful to have other experts who can understand and debunk the rosy scenarios developers present.
    • Fund raising. Try to get them from local merchants.
    • Visibility. You will be at a fund raising disadvantage, so high visibility events to get the message out are key. Lawn signs, letters to the editor, radio ads, t-shirts.
  • Big retailers try to keep new developments as quiet as possible for as long as possible and often act as if a project is going ahead even when it hasn’t been approved yet.
  • Local independents have started getting together and forming coalitions to lower distribution costs.
  • Community owned co-ops have also been a strategy to keep independents in business.

• Mayors Gone Bad

• Raw Deal How the “Uber Economy” and Runaway Capitalism Are Screwing American Workers

  • “The ‘share the crumbs’ economy has turned out to be a giant loophole that allows more businesses to dumb their regular (W-2) employees and hire a lot more freelancers and independent contractors (1099 workers), cutting their labor costs by 30 percent. No amount of ‘sharing’ rhetoric can wipe away the troubling aspects of the freelance society in which the share-the-crumbs economy is operating. Whatever the merits of its origins, the sharing economy has become a highly capitalized, Silicon Valley-hatched scheme to shift risk from company to workers and ensure that investors can reap huge profits and lower fixed costs by stripping away worker protections and middle-class wages, ignoring government regulations and avoiding taxes. All done under the mantra of innovation and progress.”
  • Some possible solutions include profit sharing, expanding social safety nets, better child care offerings and tax deductions for freelancers.

• Super Thinking

• Wilful Blindness, How a Network of narcos, tycoons and CCP agents infiltrated the West - Details on how Chinese drug traffickers launder their money through casinos and real estate in Vancouver and their connections with the United Front.

• Uncanny Valley: A Memoir

• Automation and the Future of Work - Argues that the low demand for labour is not caused by increasing automation but by decelerating economic growth. Imagines a future that prioritizes people rather than technological progress.

• Eyes in the Sky: The Secret Rise of Gorgon Stare and How It Will Watch Us All - Details on the aerial surveillance cameras used for spying/tracking.

  • Origins were for finding people who planted improvised explosive devices (IEDs) post 9/11
  • It is not known whether it has actually been helpful at that. There has likely been a high civilian death count from the use of this technology.
  • Started being used by police departments, including Baltimore around the time Freddie Gray was murdered by police.
  • Not illegal and public isn’t notified of it being used by police to monitor entire cities. Legal because it is public space and multi-million dollar cameras are considered publicly accessible technology.
  • There are uses cases that actually benefit the public (ex. after a natural disaster to locate people who need to be rescued) but as the technology gets cheaper and more accessible that also means more and more people will be able to use it for reasons that don’t benefit society.
  • When it was new it required people to actually watch all the video but that is no longer the cases as image processing and recognition has gotten better.
  • “In a fully fused city, there may be nowhere to hide. An aerial camera may autonomously detect my U-turn and then track me to wherever I park. A license plate reader will check if I have outstanding violations in another state. Once I am on foot, the ground cameras pick up the slack. If I upload a photograph to Instagram from a street corner, my identity and the arrangement of pixels representing me in the imagery can be correlated, and my whole social media past will be laid bare to whomever considers me a subject of interest, or suspicion.”
  • It seems inevitable that technology made to use against criminals will eventually be used against minority groups and political dissenters. It could be used by Amazon to track employees to meetings to organize a union. It would be a stalkers dream. Do we really want to give the police of all people more surveillance power?
  • “Do we want to allow the government to record everything we do just in case it happens to be useful down the road?”
  • “The FBI would have used Vigilant Stare over the Selma-to-Montgomery March in 1965. Those conducting the surveillance would have been certain that they were serving the just cause of peace and security, but where would we be today if the watchers had had their way?”
  • More widespread use will lead to more encounters between police and citizens, and many of them will be because an innocent citizen U-turned in the wrong place or was misidentified by computer vision.
  • Imagine a white supremacist group hacking into the system and tracking Black Lives Matter protesters to their homes.
  • “This will lead agencies to more closely scrutinize all of the data they collect, as every piece of information, no matter how mundane, could become significant in light of another datum from a separate source. If carried to its extreme, this dogma would have just one logical conclusion: a world where everything is regarded as suspicious.”
  • It will lead to more fear from those who have nothing to fear. “I want to be able to buy a drink at a bogega without fearing that I may be implicated in a persistent counternarcotics operation. I want to be able to go to a political rally and not wonder whether some unsavory actor, somewhere, might be watching me from above.”
  • “What if such a system concluded, with a 71 percent confidence rate, that an armed assault was about to take place on the corner of Lewis and Van Buren? If the computer is right , you could prevent a terrible crime. But if they computer is really just detecting a group of children playing on the street you will be putting those kids in mortal danger by introducing them to a number of armed police officers who may be expecting a violent encounter”
  • Issue isn’t just that computers get things wrong, it’s that they get things wrong in strange ways.
  • Given that this technology already exists, we need to put rules in place on how it can be used. (ex. must be deleted permanently after x days, transparency on how it is used, could require a warrant to start tracking someone, audits of logs to see who/what/when tracking happened)

• The Tyranny of Merit

  • On the rise of populism: “At the heart of this failure is the way mainstream parties conceived and carried out the project of globalization over the past four decades. Two aspects of this project gave rise to the conditions that fuel populist protest. One is the technocratic way of conceiving the public good; the other is its meritocratic way ot defining winners and losers.”
  • “It is not difficult to see how the technocratic faith in markets set the stage for populist discontent. The market-driven version of globalization brought growing inequality. It also devalued national identities and allegiances.” No coincidence it all started in the 1980s with the rise of neoliberal thinking and deregulation.
  • “Meanwhile, the technocratic approach to governance treated public questions as matters of technical expertise beyond the reach of ordinary citizens. This narrowed the scope of democratic argument, hollowed out the terms of public discourse, and produced a growing sense of disempowerment.”
  • The embrace (of market thinking) by centre-left parties was most consequential because these had been the parties of the blue-collar and middle-class voters but they turned into parties for the professional classes. “Before they can hope to win back public support, these parties need to reconsider their market-oriented, technocratic approach to governing. They also need to rethink something subtler but no less consequential - the attitudes toward success and failure that have accompanied the growing inequality of recent decades. They need to ask why those who have not flourished in the new economy feel like the winners look down with disdain.”
  • The “you can make it if you try” rhetoric rings hollow in America now. If you are born to poor parents to tend to stay poor.
  • “Seventy percent of Americans believe the poor can make it out of poverty on their own, while only 35% of Europeans think so. This faith in mobility may explain why the US has a less-generous welfare state than most European countries.” The reality is that the countries with the highest mobility are those with greater equality. “The ability to rise depends less on the spur of poverty than on access to education, health care and other resources that equip people to succeed in the world.”
  • “Morally, it is unclear why the talented deserve the outsized rewards that market-driven societies lavish on the successful.”
  • “Meritocratic hubris reflects the tendency of winners to inhale too deeply of their success, to forget the luck and good fortune that helped them on their way. It is the smug conviction of those who land on top that they deserve their fate, and that those on the bottom deserve theirs, too.”
  • “Not only has technocratic merit failed as a mode of governance; it has also narrowed the civic project. Today, the common good is understood mainly in economic terms. It is less about cultivating solidarity or deepening the bonds of citizenship than about satisfying consumer preferences as measured by the gross domestic product.”
  • “Beyond hallowing the public discourse, the reign of technocratic merit has reconfigured the terms of social recognition in ways that elevate the prestige of the credentialed, professional classes and depreciate the contributions of most workers, eroding their social standing and esteem.”
  • “The collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall led many in the West to assume that history had vindicated their model of liberal democracy and free-market capitalism. Empowered by this assumption, they promoted a neoliberal version of globalization that included free-trade agreements, the deregulation of finance, and other measures to ease the flow of goods, capital and people across national boundaries. They confidently expected that the expansion of global markets would increase global interdependence, lessen the likelihood of war among nations, temper nationalist identities, and promote respect for human rights…. Things did not turn out this way. The globalization project would bring on a financial crisis in 2008 and, eight years later, a fierce political backlash. Nationalism and authoritarianism would not fade away but gain momentum around the world and come to threaten liberal institutions and norms within democratic societies.”
  • “The more we view ourselves as self-made and self-sufficient, the less likely we are to care for the fate of those less fortunate than ourselves. If my success is my own doing, their failure must be their fault. This logic makes meritocracy corrosive of commonality. Too strenuous a notion of personal responsibility for our fate makes it hard to imagine ourselves in other people’s shoes.”
  • “Since the 1980s debates about the welfare state have been less about solidarity than about the extent to which the disadvantaged are responsible for their misfortune.” “Limiting welfare eligibility to those who fall on hard times through bad luck rather than bad behavior is an example, an attempt to treat people according to their merits.”
  • “The tyranny of merit arises from more than the rhetoric of rising. It consists in a cluster of attitudes and circumstances that, taken together, have made meritocracy toxic. First, under conditions of rampant inequality and stalled mobility, reiterating the message that we are responsible for our fate and deserve what we get erodes solidarity and demoralizes those left behind by globalization. Second, insisting that a college degree is the primary route to a respectable job and a decent life creates a credentialist prejudice that undermines the dignity of work and demeans those who have not been to college; and third, insisting that social and political problems are best solved by highly educated, value-neutral experts is a technocratic conceit that corrupts democracy and disempowers ordinary citizens.”
  • “The credentialist prejudice is a symptom of meritocratic hubris. As meritocratic assumptions tightened their hold in recent decades, elites fell into the habit of looking down on those who did not rise. The constant call for working people to improve their condition by getting a college degree, however well intentioned, eventually valorizes credentialism and undermines social recognition and esteem for those who lack the credentials the system rewards.”
  • Credentialism is the last acceptable prejudice. “Elites dislike those with lesser education more than they dislike poor people or members of the working class, because they consider poverty and class status to be, at least in part, due to factors beyond one’s control. By contrast, they consider low educational achievement to represent a failure of individual effort.”
  • The credentialed few govern the uncredentialed many. Two-thirds of American adults don’t have a college degree but only a handful of them are members of Congress. “Governing well requires practical wisdom and civic virtue - an ability to deliberate about the common good and to pursue it effectively. But neither of those capacities is developed very well in most universities today…. The notion that the best and the brightest are better at governing than their less credentialed fellow citizens is a myth born of meritocratic hubris.” This has alienated working people from politics and has hurt left of centre parties the most.
  • “Building politics around the idea that a college degree is a condition of dignified work and social esteem has a corrosive effect on democratic life. It devalues the contributions of those without a diploma, fuels prejudice against less-educated members of society, effectively excludes most working people from representative government, and provides political backlash” Viewing policies as smart vs dumb is especially problematic and it leads to having more experts and elites (ie “smart” people) make decisions.
  • “Obama believed that the primary source of democratic disagreement is that ordinary citizens lacked sufficient information.” “In making his case for health care reform the spoke less about the moral argument for universal coverage than about the need ’to bend the cost curve’, by which he meant reducing the rising cost of health care expenditures.”
  • Prime example of why Obama was wrong is that college educated Republicans are more likely to not believe in global warming.
  • “American higher education is like an elevator in a building that most people enter on the top floor.”
  • The value placed on education means education is the sorting machine. The pressure wealthy parents put on young kids to keep grades up and get into elite colleges is causing a rise in stress and mental health issues. “Among those who land on top, it induces anxiety, a debilitating perfectionism, and a meritocratic hubris that struggles to conceal a fragile self-esteem. Among those it leaves behind, it imposes a demoralizing, even humiliating sense of failure.”
  • “Civic education can flourish in community colleges, job training sites, and union halls as well as on ivy-strewn campuses. There is no reason to suppose that aspiring nurses and plumbers are less suited to the art of democratic argument than aspiring management consultants.”
  • “By valorizing the ‘brains’ it takes to score well on college admission tests, the sorting machine disparages those without meritocratic credentials. It tells them that the work they do, less valued by the market than the well-paid professionals, is a lesser contribution to the common good, and so less worthy of social recognition and esteem.”
  • “It falls to politics to reconcile our identities as consumers and producers. But the globalization project sought to maximize economic growth, and hence the welfare of consumers, with little regard for the effect of outsourcing, immigration, and financialization on the well-being of producers. The elites who presided over globalization not only failed to address the inequality it generated; they also failed to appreciate its corrosive effect on the dignity of work.” Any policy change to help must address this to be successful. Need to view common good not only though the lense of maximizing consumer welfare but also through the lense of civic conception, which includes our role as producers.
  • Ideas focused on the dignity of work to help:
    • Rather than push for corporate tax cuts and the embrace of free markets, focus on policies that allow workers to find jobs that pay well enough to support families and strong communities. It could be done via wage subsidies for low-income workers.
    • Change tax laws to discourage speculation (how much of finance is speculation that is of no value to the real economy?) and honor productive labor.

• Breaking Things at Work - A summary of the history of workers who have protested capitalist takeovers of the production process that would weaken their bargaining power. Argues that how these “Luddites” have been viewed is wrong - they aren’t bitter and anti-technology. Modern day examples are the people opposing full automation of Amazon warehouses, the people opposing more algorithmic involvement in deciding criminal justice sentencing and those who oppose mass surveillance.

  • “Scientific management was, then, less a science of efficiency and more a political program for reshaping the worker as a pliant subject… This revolution had its own philosophy… that human beings were inherently lazy, that labor was machine-like, and that people’s aspirations could ultimately be boiled down to acquisition of good.”
  • “Consumer labor in self-checkouts is an example of how rather than abolishing work, automation merely proliferates it. By isolating tasks and redistributing them to others expected to do it for free, digital technologies contribute to overwork. Writer Craig Lambert uses the term ‘shadow work’ to describe this common experience with digital systems. The term derives from Ivan Illich, who used it to describe the devalued be necessary activities often performed by women, from housework to shopping to commuting. For Lambert, digital technology also intensifies shadow work in the waged positions away, remaining workers often feel the brunt of new tasks. He describes the ‘job-description creep’ facilitated by new software packages. Where administrative staff may have once kept track of bureaucratic matters such as employees calling off work, now ‘absence management’ software requires workers to handle it themselves. ‘I am not sure why it has become my responsibility to do date entry for any time away from the office’, a software developer tells Lambert. ‘Frankly, I have enough to do writing code, Why am I doing HRs job?’”
  • “Letting Walmart or Amazon swallow the globe not only entrenches exploitative models of production and distribution it channels resources to reactionary billionaires who use their wealth to further undermine the relative position of workers by funding conservative causes like tax cuts, school privatization, and opposition to gay marriage. Letting technology take its course will not lead to egalitarian outcomes, but authoritarian ones, as the ultra-wealthy expend their resources on shielding themselves from any accountability to the rest of us: postapocalyptic bunkers, militarized yachts, private islands, and even escapes to outer space.”
  • “Luddism rejects production for production’s sake: it is critical of efficiency as an end goal, as there are other values at stake in work.”

• The Midrange Theory - A must read for anyone interested in basketball

• The Reality Bubble

  • “Throughout this book there has been one recurrent theme: in the twenty-first century, you’ll find cameras everywhere except where our food comes from, where our energy comes from, and where our waste goes. These are the three blind spots of our human life-support system. And the system works to protect itself, which is why you’ll find that it deliberately blinds us.”

• To Save Everything, Click Here

  • “Open-data schemes are born in a world torn apart by numerous political struggles; it’s not surprising, then, that the warring factions find ways to exploit such schemes to their own advantage. Building data sets and hoping that they will be used for good purposes in no longer enough. The data sets enter a world inhabited by real people, who have many competing concerns and aspirations. Solutionist schemes that have no way to understand and act upon those concerns and aspirations are unlikely to deliver on their sweet promises.” Example: Maps that visualize crime statistics. Since higher crime rates mean lower housing prices people may stop reporting crimes to keep property values up.
  • “To import the mentality of the consumer - even of the activist consumer - into the realm of politics is to make politics so disappointing that few will tolerate it at all. Most public institutions should not be held to the same standards as their private counterparts simply because their mission is to provide goods and services that markers cannot or should not provide. This work is often challenging enough, even without the constant reminders about their suboptimal performance by peeved consumers”
  • “Technocratic thinking views pluralism as an enemy, not an ally - or, in geeks’ own parlance, it’s a bug, not a feature. As two scholars of technocracy observe, its fundamental assumption ‘is that disagreements occur not because people are bound to differ but because they are misinformed.’ The paradox is that, while technocracy itself is an ideology, most technocrats try their best to distance themselves from any insinuation that they might be driven by anything other than pragmatism and the pursuit of efficiency.”
  • On big tech companies are running experiments and considering themselves scientists: “But science, of course, does have a moral code, which would be apparent to anyone who’s ever tried to conduct experiments involving humans. Many such experiments would need to be approved by various human subject panels and institutional research boards. Scientists don’t just spontaneously try things; they are forced to think through the social and political consequences of their work, often well before entering the lab. What institutional research board would approve of Google’s quixotic plan to send a fleet of vehicles to record private data floating through WiFi networks or the launch of Google Buzz, the company’s disastrous stab at social networking, which ended up compromising the privacy of many of its users?”
  • “Without subjecting these faster, cheaper, and more efficient filters to the close ethical scrutiny they deserve, we risk committing one of the many fallacies of solutionism and celebrating improvements related to less important problems while completely neglecting more burning, but less obvious issues.”
  • “We tend to forget that most innovations and inventions have no consequences - and those that do usually require significant repairs and maintenance to keep working. Moreover, we tend to dismiss the important role that older technologies play once newer, faster, and shinier alternatives are introduced.”
  • “Since innovation is seen as having only positive effects, few are prepared to examine its unintended consequences; as such, most innovations are presumed to be self-evidently good. A study by a team of Scandinavian researchers that aimed to review all academic articles about innovation published since the 1960s found that of all the studies under examination - thousands of them - only twenty-six articles addressed the negative or undesirable consequences of innovation.”
  • “Given enough data and the right algorithms, all of us are bound to look suspicious. What happens, then, when Facebook turns us - before we have committed any crimes - over to the police? Will we, like characters in a Kafka novel, struggle to understand what our crime really is and spend the rest of our lives clearing our names? Will Facebook perhaps also offer us a way to pay a fee to have out reputations restored? What if its algorithms are wrong?”
  • “Laws that are enforced by appealing to our moral or prudential registers leave just enough space for friction; friction breeds tension, tension creates conflict, and conflict produces change. In contrast, when laws are enforced through the technological register, there’s little space for friction and tension - and quite likely for change.”
  • “When some members of society choose to self-track and self-disclose - and presumably those who do self-disclose have little to fear from disclosure - it becomes much harder, it not outright impossible, for everyone(including those who’d rather keep their data to themselves) not to self-disclose.” ie. people are suspicious of anyone not on social media.
  • On being willing to share personal health information with insurance companies and employers: “The danger here is quite obvious: if you are well and well-off, self-monitoring will only make things better for you. If you are none of those things, the personal prospectus could make your life much more difficult, with higher insurance premiums, fewer discounts, and limited employment prospects.”
  • On tracking everything as a crime prevention strategy: “Perhaps, if we universalize everything, we’ll end up with morally deficient citizens who won’t do the right thing unless the technological infrastructure explicitly robs them of the opportunity to do the wrong thing.”
  • “If, after extensive deliberation, we cannot find a rationale, then perhaps we shouldn’t be pursuing that activity in the first place. The worst instances of gamification, however, leave no space for deliberation and put many social and political processes on a kind of autopilot, where citizens engage in them not because it is the right thing to do but because it gives them the best combination of badges.”
  • “A scheme that wants to get children to help senior citizens by awarding them badges and game points is likely to produce very different children than a scheme that appeals to their civic duty, even if both schemes yield the same results… Constructing a world preoccupied only with the most efficient outcomes - rather than the processes through which those outcomes are achieved - is not likely to make them aware of the depth of human passion, dignity, and respect. We don’t earn our dignity by collecting badges; we do it by behaving in a dignified manner, often in situations in which we have other options. Tinker with this spiritual pasture, and those options might go away - along with the very possibility of dignity.”
  • “The goal of their interventions - in both products and policies - should be not just to provide answers but also to make it easier to pose new questions. If technological fixes are inevitable, and if some forms of solutionism cannot be avoided, let us at least make sure that this solutionism is of the self-reflexive, perhaps even neurotic, kid. Only through radical self-doubt can solutionism transcend its inherent limitations.”
  • “Once we realize that for the last hundred years or so virtually every generation has felt like it was on the edge of a technological revolution - be it the telegraph age, the radio age, the plastic age, the nuclear age, or the television age - maintaining the myth that our own period is unique and exceptional will hopefully become much harder.”

• Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

• Evicted

• The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

  • “One thing is very clear: if, knowing what we know today about the brain’s plasticity, you were set out to invent a medium that would rewire our mental circuits as quickly and thoroughly as possible, you would probably end up designing something that looks and works a lot like the Internet. It’s not just that we tend to use the Net regularly, even obsessively. It’s that the Net delivers precisely the kind of sensory and cognitive stimuli - repetitive, intensive, interactive, addictive - that have been shown to result in strong and rapid alterations in brain circuits and functions.”
  • “But the extensive activity in the brains of surfers also points to why deep reading and other acts of sustained concentration become so difficult online. The need to evaluate links and make related navigational choices, while also processing a multiplicity of fleeting sensory stimuli, requires constant mental coordination and decision making, distracting the brain from the work of interpreting text or other information. Whenever we, as readers, come upon a link, we have to pause, for at least a split second, to allow our prefrontal cortex to evaluate weather or not we should click on it. The redirection of our mental resources, from reading words to making judgments, may be imperceptible to us - our brains are quick - but it’s been shown to impede comprehension and retention, particularly when it’s repeated frequently. As the executive functions of the prefrontal cortex kick in, our brains become not only exercised but overtaxed.”
  • “Experiments indicate that s we reach the limits of our working memory, it becomes harder to distinguish relevant information from irrelevant information, signal from noise. We become mindless consumers of data.”
  • “The mental functions that are losing the ‘survival of the busiest’ brain cell battle are those that support calm, linear thought - the ones we use in traversing a lengthy narrative of an involved argument, the ones we draw on when we reflect on our experiences or contemplate an outward or inward phenomenon. The winners are those functions that help us speedily locate, categorize, and asses disparate bits of information in a variety of forms, that let us maintain our mental bearings while being bombarded by stimuli.”
  • “We don’t constrain our mental powers when we store new long term memories. We strengthen them. With each expansion of our memory comes an enlargement of our intelligence. The Web provides a convenient and compelling supplement to personal memory, but when we start using the Web as a substitute for personal memory, bypassing the inner processes of consolidation, we risk emptying our minds of their riches.” People worried the calculator would do this but the calculator actually relieved the pressure on our working memory opening short-term memory for more abstract reasoning. The Internet places more pressure on our working memory. So the process of memory store doesn’t even get started.
  • “Our brains become adept at forgetting, inept at remembering. Our growing dependance of the Web’s information stores may in fact be the product of a self-perpetuating, self-amplifying loop. As our use of the Web makes it harder for us to lock information into our biological memory, we’re forced to rely more and more on the Net’s capacious and easily searchable artificial memory, even if it makes us shallower thinkers.”
  • In an experiment that had people solve a complex logic puzzle in which one group had helpful software to guide them and other group had unhelpful software to guide them: “The more that people depended on explicit guidance from software programs, the less engaged they were in the task and the less they ended up learning. The findings indicate, van Nimwegen concluded, that as we ’externalize’ problem solving and other cognitive chores to our computers, we reduce our brain’s ability ’to build stable knowledge structures’ - schemas, in other words that can later be applied in new situations.”
  • A study analyzing citations in over 34 million scholarly articles from 1945 to 2005 found that “as journals moved online, scholars actually cited fewer articles than they had before. And as old issues of printed journals were digitized and uploaded to the Web, scholars cited more recent articles with increasing frequency. A broadening of available information led, as Evans described it, to a ’narrowing of science and scholarship’.” Search engines amplify certain articles.

• You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It’s Making the World a Weirder Place

• The Corona Crash

See also

• What I Read or Listened to This Week
• What I Read or Listened to This Week
• What I Read or Listened to This Week
• What I Read or Listened to This Week
• What I Read or Listened to This Week