#say cyber again

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Revenge of the Linkdumps

Next Saturday (May 20), I’ll be at the GAITHERSBURG Book Festival with my novel Red Team Blues; then on May 22, I’m keynoting Public Knowledge’s Emerging Tech conference in DC.

On May 23, I’ll be in TORONTO for a book launch that’s part of WEPFest, a benefit for the West End Phoenix, onstage with Dave Bidini (The Rheostatics), Ron Diebert (Citizen Lab) and the whistleblower Dr Nancy Olivieri.

If you’ve followed my work for a long time, you’ve watched me transition from a “linkblogger” who posts 5–15 short hits every day to an “essay-blogger” who posts 5–7 long articles/week. I’m loving the new mode of working, but returning to linkblogging is also intensely, unexpectedly gratifying:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/02/wunderkammer/#jubillee

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/13/four-bar-linkage/#linkspittle

[Image ID XKCD #2775: Siphon. Man: ‘Wow, it’s true — the water doesn’t flow up the tube anymore.’ Woman: ‘Honestly, it’s weird that it ever did. Why did we ever think it was normal?’ Caption: ‘Physics news: the 2023 update to the universe finally fixed the ‘siphon’ bug.’]

My last foray into linkblogging was so great — and my backlog of links is already so large — that I’m doing another one.

Link the first: “Siphon,” XKCD’s delightful, whimsical “physics-how-the-fuck-does-it-work” one-shot (visit the link, the tooltip is great):

https://xkcd.com/2775/

[Image ID: A Dutch safety poster by Herman Heyenbrock, warning about the hazards of careless table-saw use, featuring a hand with two amputated fingers.]

Next is “Hoogspanning,” 50 Watts’s collection of vintage Dutch workplace safety posters, which exhibit that admirable Dutch frankness to a degree that one could mistake for parody, but they’re 100% real, and amazing:

https://50watts.com/Hoogspanning-More-Dutch-Safety-Posters

They’re ganked from Geheugenvannederland (“Memory of the Netherlands”):

https://geheugenvannederland.nl/

While some come from the 1970s, others date back to the 1920s and are likely public domain. I’ve salted several away in my stock art folder for use in future collages.

All right, now that the fun stuff is out of the way, let’s get down to some crunch tech-policy. To ease us in, I’ve got a game for you to play: “Moderator Mayhem,” the latest edu-game from Techdirt:

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/05/11/moderator-mayhem-a-mobile-game-to-see-how-well-you-can-handle-content-moderation/

Moderator Mayhem started life as a card-game that Mike Masnick used to teach policy wonks about the real-world issues with content moderation. You play a mod who has to evaluate content moderation flags from users while a timer ticks down. As you race to evaluate users’ posts for policy compliance, you’re continuously interrupted. Sometimes, it’s “helpful” suggestions from the company’s AI that wants you to look at the posts it flagged. Sometimes, it’s your boss who wants you to do a trendy “visioning” exercise or warning you about a “sensitivity.” Often, it’s angry ref-working from users who want you to re-consider your calls.

The card-game version is legendary but required a lot of organization to play, and the web version (which is better in a mobile browser, thanks to a swipe-left/right mechanic) is something you can pick up in seconds. This isn’t merely highly recommended; I think that one could legitimately refuse to discuss content moderation policies and critiques with anyone who hasn’t played it;

https://moderatormayhem.engine.is/

Or maybe that’s too harsh. After all, tech policy is a game that everyone can play — and more importantly, it’s a game everyone should play. The contours of tech regulation and implementation touch rub up against nearly every aspect of our lives, and part of the reason it’s such a mess is that the field has been gatekept to shit, turned into a three-way fight between technologists, policy wonks and economists.

Without other voices in the debate, we’re doomed to end up with solutions that satisfy the rarified needs and views of those three groups, a situation that is likely to dissatisfy everyone else.

However. However. The problem is that our technology is nowhere near advanced enough to be indistinguishable from magic (RIP, Sir Arthur). There’s plenty of things everyone wishes tech could do, but it can’t, and wanting it badly isnlt enough. Merely shouting “nerd harder!” at technologists won’t actually get you what you want. And while I’m rattling off cliches: a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Which brings me to Ashton Kutcher. Yes, that Ashton Kutcher. No, really. Kutcher has taken up the admirable, essential cause of fighting Child Sex Abuse Material (CSAM, which is better known as child pornography) online. This is a very, very important and noble cause, and it deserves all our support.

But there’s a problem, which is that Kutcher’s technical foundations are poor, and he has not improved them. Instead, he cites technologies that he has a demonstrably poor grasp upon to call for policies that turn out to be both ineffective at fighting exploitation and to inflict catastrophic collateral damage on vulnerable internet users.

Take sex trafficking. Kutcher and his organization, Thorn, were key to securing the passage of SESTA/FOSTA, a law that was supposed to fight online trafficking by making platforms jointly liable when they were used to facilitate trafficking:

https://www.engadget.com/2019-05-31-sex-lies-and-surveillance-fosta-privacy.html

At the time, Kutcher argued that deputizing platforms to understand and remove which user posts were part of a sex crime in progress would not inflict collateral damage. Somehow, if the platforms just nerded hard enough, they’d be able to remove sex trafficking posts without kicking off all consensual sex-workers.

Five years later, the verdict is in, and Kutcher was wrong. Sex workers have been deplatformed nearly everywhere, including from the places where workers traded “bad date” lists of abusive customers, which kept them safe from sexual violence, up to and including the risk of death. Street prostitution is way up, making the lives of sex workers far more dangerous, which has led to a resurgence of the odious institution of pimping, a “trade” that was on its way to vanishing altogether thanks to the power of the internet to let sex workers organize among themselves for protection:

https://aidsunited.org/fosta-sesta-and-its-impact-on-sex-workers/

On top of all that, SESTA/FOSTA has made it much harder for cops to hunt down and bust actual sex-traffickers, by forcing an activity that could once be found with a search-engine into underground forums that can’t be easily monitored:

https://www.techdirt.com/2018/07/09/more-police-admitting-that-fosta-sesta-has-made-it-much-more-difficult-to-catch-pimps-traffickers/

Wanting it badly isn’t enough. Technology is not indistinguishable from magic.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Kutcher, it seems, has learned nothing from SESTA/FOSTA. Now he’s campaigning to ban working cryptography, in the name of ending the spread of CSAM. In March, Kutcher addressed the EU over the “Chat Control” proposal, which, broadly speaking, is a ban on end-to-end encrypter messaging (E2EE):

https://www.brusselstimes.com/417985/ashton-kutcher-spotted-in-the-european-parliament-promoting-childrens-rights

Now, banning E2EE would be a catastrophe. Not only is E2EE necessary to protect people from griefers, stalkers, corporate snoops, mafiosi, etc, but E2EE is the only thing standing between the world’s dictators and total surveillance of every digital communication. Even tiny flaws in E2EE can have grave human rights concerns. For example, a subtle bug in Whatsapp was used by NSO Group to create a cyberweapon called Pegasus that the Saudi royals used to lure Jamal Khashoggi to his grisly murder:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/18/nso-spyware-used-to-target-family-of-jamal-khashoggi-leaked-data-shows-saudis-pegasus

Because the collateral damage from an E2EE ban would be so far-ranging (beyond harms to sex workers, whose safety is routinely disregarded by policy-makers), people like Kutcher can’t propose an outright ban on E2EE. Instead, they have to offer some explanation for how the privacy, safety and human rights benefits of E2EE can be respected even as encryption is broken to hunt for CSAM.

Kutcher’s answer is something called “fully homomorphic encryption” (FHE) which is a theoretical — and enormously cool — way to allow for computing work to be done on encrypted data without decrypting it. When and if FHE are ready for primetime, it will be a revolution in our ability to securely collaborate with one another.

But FHE is nowhere near the state where it could do what Kutcher claims. It just isn’t, and once again, wanting it badly is not enough. Writing on his blog, the eminent cryptographer Matt Green delivers a master-class in what FHE is, what it could do, and what it can’t do (yet):

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2023/05/11/on-ashton-kutcher-and-secure-multi-party-computation/

As it happens, Green also gave testimony to the EU, but he doesn’t confine his public advocacy work to august parliamentarians. Green wants all of us to understand cryptography (“I think cryptography is amazing and I want everyone talking about it all the time”). Rather than barking “stay in your lane” at the likes of Kutcher, Green has produced an outstanding, easily grasped explanation of FHE and the closely related concept of multi-party communication (MPC).

This is important work, and it exemplifies the difference between simplifying and being simplistic. Good science communicators do the former. Bad science communicators do the latter.

While Kutcher is presumably being simplistic because he lacks the technical depth to understand what he doesn’t understand, technically skilled people are perfectly capable of being simplistic, when it suits their economic, political or ideological goals.

One such person is Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called “father of AI,” who resigned from Google last week, citing the existential risks of “runaway AI” becoming superintelligent and turning on its human inventors. Hinton joins a group of powerful, wealthy people who have made a lot of noise about the existential risk of AI, while saying little or nothing about the ongoing risks of AI to people with disabilities, poor people, prisoners, workers, and other groups who are already being abused by automated decision-making and oversight systems.

Hinton’s nonsense is superbly stripped bare by Meredith Whittaker, the former Google worker organizer turned president of Signal, in a Fast Company interview with Wilfred Chan:

https://www.fastcompany.com/90892235/researcher-meredith-whittaker-says-ais-biggest-risk-isnt-consciousness-its-the-corporations-that-control-them

The whole thing is incredible, but there’s a few sections I want to call to your attention here, quoting Whittaker verbatim, because she expresses herself so beautifully (sci-comms done right is a joy to behold):

I think it’s stunning that someone would say that the harms [from AI] that are happening now — which are felt most acutely by people who have been historically minoritized: Black people, women, disabled people, precarious workers, et cetera — that those harms aren’t existential.

What I hear in that is, “Those aren’t existential to me. I have millions of dollars, I am invested in many, many AI startups, and none of this affects my existence. But what could affect my existence is if a sci-fi fantasy came to life and AI were actually super intelligent, and suddenly men like me would not be the most powerful entities in the world, and that would affect my business.”

I think we need to dig into what is happening here, which is that, when faced with a system that presents itself as a listening, eager interlocutor that’s hearing us and responding to us, that we seem to fall into a kind of trance in relation to these systems, and almost counterfactually engage in some kind of wish fulfillment: thinking that they’re human, and there’s someone there listening to us. It’s like when you’re a kid, and you’re telling ghost stories, something with a lot of emotional weight, and suddenly everybody is terrified and reacting to it. And it becomes hard to disbelieve.

Whittaker sets such a high bar for tech criticism. I had her clarity in mind in 2021, when I collaborated with EFF’s Bennett Cyphers on “Privacy Without Monopoly,” our white-paper addressing the claim that we need giant tech platforms to protect us from the privacy invasions of smaller “rogue” operators:

https://www.eff.org/wp/interoperability-and-privacy

This is a claim that is most often raised in relation to Apple and its App Store model, which is claimed to be a bulwark against commercial surveillance. That claim has some validity: after all, when Apple added a one-click surveillance opt-out to Ios, its mobile OS. 96% of users clicked the “don’t spy on me” button. Those clicks cost Facebook $10b in just the following year. You love to see it.

But Apple is a gamekeeper-turned-poacher. Even as it was blocking Facebook’s surveillance, it was conducting its own, nearly identical, horrifyingly intrusive surveillance of every Ios user, for the same purpose as Facebook (ad targeting) and lying about it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Bennett and I couldn’t have asked for a better example of the point we make in “Privacy Without Monopoly”: the thing that stops companies from spying on you isn’t their moral character, it’s the threat of competition and/or regulation. If you can modify your device in ways that cost its manufacturer money (say, by installing an alternative app store), then the manufacturer has to earn your business every day.

That might actually make them better — and if it doesn’t, you can switch. The right way to make sure the stuff you install on your devices respects your privacy is by passing privacy laws — not by hoping that Tim Apple decides you deserve a private life.

Bennett and I followed up “Privacy Without Monopoly” with an appendix that focused on a territory where there is a privacy law: the EU, whose (patchily enforced) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the kind of privacy law that we call for in the original paper. In that appendix, we addressed the issues of GDPR enforcement:

https://www.eff.org/wp/interoperability-and-privacy#gdpr

More importantly, we addressed the claim that the GDPR crushed competition, by making it harder for smaller (and even sleazier) ad-tech platforms to compete with Google and Facebook. It’s true, but that’s OK: we want competition to see who can respect technology users’ rights — not competition to see who can violate those rights most efficiently:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/06/gdpr-privacy-and-monopoly

Around the time Bennett and I published the EU appendix to our paper, I was contacted by the Indian Journal of Law and Technology to see whether I could write something on similar lines, focused on the situation in India. Well, it took two years, but we’ve finally published it: “Securing Privacy Without Monopoly In India: Juxtaposing Interoperability With Indian Data Protection”:

https://www.ijlt.in/post/securing-privacy-without-monopoly-in-india-juxtaposing-interoperability-with-indian-data-protection

The Indian case for interop incorporates the US and EU case, but with some fascinating wrinkles. First, there are the broad benefits of allowing technology adaptation by people who are often left out of the frame when tools and systems are designed. As the saying goes, “nothing about us without us” — the users of technology know more about their needs than any designer can hope to understand. That’s doubly true when designers are wealthy geeks in Silicon Valley and the users are poor people in the global south.

India, of course, has its own highly advanced domestic tech sector, who could be a source of extensive expertise in adapting technologies from US and other offshore tech giants for local needs. India also has a complex and highly contested privacy regime, which is in extreme flux between high court decisions, regulatory interventions, and legislation, both passed and pending.

Finally, there’s India’s long tradition of ingenious technological adaptations, locally called jugaad, roughly equivalent to the English “mend and make do.” While every culture has its own way of celebrating clever hacks, this kind of ingenuity is elevated to an art form in the global south: think of jua kali (Swahili), gambiarra (Brazilian Portuguese) and bricolage (France and its former colonies).

It took a long time to get this out, but I’m really happy with it, and I’m extremely grateful to my brilliant and hardworking research assistants from National Law School of India University: Dhruv Jain, Kshitij Goyal and Sarthak Wadhwa.

I don’t claim that any of the incarnations of the “Privacy Without Monopoly” paper rise to the clarity of the works of Green or Whittaker, but that’s okay, because I have another arrow in my quiver: fiction. For more than 20 years, I’ve written science fiction that tries to make legible and urgent the often dry and abstract concepts I address in my nonfiction.

One issue I’ve been grappling with for literally decades is the implications of “trusted computing,” a security model that uses a second, secure computer, embedded in your device, to observe and report on what your main computer is doing. There are lots of implications for this, both horrifying and amazing.

For example, having a second computer inside your device that watches it is a theoretically unbeatable way of catching malicious software, resolving the conundrum of malware: if you think your computer is infected and can’t be trusted, then how can you trust the antivirus software running on that computer.

Back in 2016, Andrew “bunnie” Huang and Edward Snowden released the “Introspection Engine,” a separate computer that you could install in an Iphone, which would tell you whether it was infected with spyware:

https://www.tjoe.org/pub/direct-radio-introspection/release/2

But while there are some really interesting positive applications for this kind of software, the negative ones — unbeatable DRM and tamper-proof bossware — are genuinely horrifying. My novella “Unauthorized Bread” digs into this, putting blood and sinew into an otherwise dry abstract and skeletal argument:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

Then there are applications that are somewhere in between, like “remote attestation” (when the secure computer signs a computer-readable description of what your computer is doing so that you can prove things about your computer and its operation to people who don’t trust you, but do trust that secure computer).

Remote attestation is the McGuffin of Red Team Blues, my latest novel, a crime-thriller about a cryptocurrency heist. The novel opens with the keys to a secure enclave — the gadget that signs the attestations in remote attestation — going missing.

When Matt Green reviewed Red Team Blues (his first book review!), he singled this out as a technically rigorous and significant plot point, because secure enclaves are designed so that they can’t be updated (if you can update an enclave, then you can update it with malicious software):

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2023/04/24/book-review-red-team-blues/

This means that bugs in secure enclaves can last forever. Worse, if the keys for a secure enclave ever leak, then there’s no way to update all the secure enclaves out there in the world — millions or billions of them — to fix it.

Well, it’s happened.

The keys for the secure enclaves in Micro-Star International (AKA MSI) computers, a massive manufacturer of work and gaming PCs — have leaked and shown up on the “extortion portal” of a notorious crime gang:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/05/leak-of-msi-uefi-signing-keys-stokes-concerns-of-doomsday-supply-chain-attack/

As a security expert quoted by Ars Technica explains, this is a “doomsday scenario.” That’s more or less how it plays in my novel. The big difference between the MSI leak and the hack in my book is that the MSI keys were just sitting on a server, connected to the internet, which wasn’t well-secured.

In Red Team Blues, I went to enormous lengths to imagine a fiendishly complex, incredibly secure scheme for hosting these keys, and then dreamt up a way that the bad guys could defeat it. I toyed with the idea of having the keys leak due to rank incompetence, but I decided that would be an “idiot plot” (“a plot that only works if the characters are idiots”). Turns out, idiot plots may make for bad fiction, but they’re happening around us all the time.

In my real life, I cross a lot of disciplinary boundaries — law, politics, economics, human rights, security, technology. I’m not the world’s leading expert in any of these domains, but I am well-enough informed about each that I’m able to find interesting ways that they fit together in a manner that is relatively rare, and is also (I think) useful.

I admit to sometimes feeling insecure about this — being “one inch deep and ten miles wide” has its virtues, but there’s no avoiding that, say, I know less about the law than a real lawyer, and less about computer science than a real computer scientist.

That insecurity is partly why I’m so honored when I get to talk to experts across multiple disciplines. 2023 was a very good year for this, thanks to University College London. Back in Feb, I was invited to speak as part of UCL Institute of Brand and Innovation Law’s annual series on technology law:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/laws/events/2023/feb/recording-chokepoint-capitalism-can-it-be-defeated

And next month, I’m giving UCL Computer Science’s annual Peter Kirstein lecture:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/peter-kirstein-lecture-2023-featuring-cory-doctorow-registration-539205788027

Getting to speak to both the law school and the computer science school within a space of months is hugely gratifying, a real vindication of my theory that the virtues of my breadth make up for the shortcomings in my depth.

I’m getting a similar thrill from the domain experts who’ve been reviewing Red Team Blues. This week, Maria Farrell posted her Crooked Timber review, “When crypto meant cryptography”:

https://crookedtimber.org/2023/05/11/when-crypto-meant-cryptography/

Farrell is a brilliant technology critic. Her work on “prodigal tech bros” is essential:

https://conversationalist.org/2020/03/05/the-prodigal-techbro/

So her review means a lot to me in general, but I was overwhelmed to read her describe how Red Team Blues taught her to “read again for joy” after long covid “completely scrambled [her] brain.”

That meant a lot personally, but her review is even more gratifying when it gets into craft questions, like when she praises the descriptions as “so interesting and sociologically textured.” I love her description of the book as “Dickensian”: “it shoots up and down the snakes and ladders of San Francisco’s gamified dystopia of income inequality, one moment whizzing up the ear-poppingly fast elevator to a billionaire’s hardened fortress, the next sleeping under a bridge in a homeless encampment.”

And then, this kicker: “it’s a gorgeous rejection of the idea that long-form fiction is about individual subjectivity and the interior life. It’s about people as pinballs. They don’t just reveal things about the other objects they hit; their constant action and reaction reveals the walls that hold them all in.”

Likewise, I was thrilled with Peter Watts’s review on his “No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons” blog::

https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=10578%22%3Ehttps://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=10578

Peter is a brilliant sf writer and worldbuilder, an accomplished scientist, and one of the world’s most accomplished ranters. He’s had more amazing ideas than I’ve had hot breakfasts:

https://locusmag.com/2018/05/cory-doctorow-the-engagement-maximization-presidency/

His review says some very nice and flattering things about me and my previous work, which is always great to read, especially for anyone with a chronic case of impostor syndrome. But what really mattered was the way he framed how I write villains: “The villains of Cory’s books aren’t really people; they’re systems. They wear punchable Human faces but those tend to be avatars, mere sock-puppets operated by the institutions that comprise the real baddies.”

One could read that as a critique, but coming from Peter, it’s praise — and it’s praise that gets to the heart of my worldview, which is that our biggest problems are systemic, not individual. The problem of corporate greed isn’t just that CEOs are monsters who don’t care who they hurt — it’s that our system is designed to let them get away with it. Worse, system design is such that the CEOs who aren’t monsters are generally clobbered by the ones who are.

So much of our outlook is grounded in the moral failings or virtues of individuals. Tim Apple will keep our data safe, so we should each individually decide to reward him by buying his phones. If Tim Apple betrays us, we should “vote with our wallets” by buying something else. If you care about the climate, you should just stop driving. If there’s no public transit, well, then maybe you should, uh, dig a subway?

[Image ID: Matt Bors’s classic Mr Gotcha panel, in which a medieval peasant says ‘We should improve society somewhat,’ and Mr Gotcha replies, ‘Yet you participate in society. Curious! I am very smart.’]

This is the mindset Matt Bors skewers so expertly with his iconic Mr Gotcha character: “Yet you participate in society. Curious! I am very smart”:

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

(Which reminds me, I am halfway through Bors’s unbelievably, fantastically, screamingly awesome graphic novel “Justice Warriors,” which turns the neoliberal caveat-emptor/personal-responsibility brain-worm into the basis for possibly the greatest superhero comic of all time:)

https://www.mattbors.com/books

Watts finishes his review with:

I’ve never fully come to terms with the general decency of Cory’s characters. Doctorow the activist lives in the trenches, fighting those who make their billions trading the details of our private lives, telling us that they own what we’ve bought, surveilling us for the greater good and even greater profits. He’s spent more time facing off against the world’s powerful assholes than I ever will. He knows how ruthless they are. He knows, first-hand, how much of the world is clenched in their fists. By rights, his stories should make mine look like Broadway musicals.

And yet, Doctorow the Author is — hopeful. The little guys win against overwhelming odds. Dystopias are held at bay. Even the bad guys, in defeat, are less likely to scorch the earth than simply resign with a show of grudging respect for a worthy opponent.

I often get asked by readers — especially readers of Pluralistic, which is heavy on awful scandals and corruption — how I keep going. Watts has the answer:

Maybe it’s a fundamental difference in outlook. I’ve always regarded humans as self-glorified mammals, fighting endless and ineffective rearguard against their own brain stems; Cory seems to see us as more influenced by the angels of our better natures. Or maybe — maybe it’s not just his plots that are meant to be instructional. Maybe he’s deliberately showing us how we could behave as a species, in the same way he shows us how to fuck with DRM or foil face-recognition tech. Maybe it’s not that he subscribes to some Pollyanna vision of what we are; maybe he’s showing us what we could be.

Got it in one, Peter.

And…

It’s also about what happens if we don’t get better.

Writing on his “Economics From the Top Down” blog, Blair Fix — a heterodox economist and sharp critic of oligarchy — publishes a Red Team Blues review that nails the “or else” in my books, and does it with graphs:

https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2023/05/13/red-team-blues-cory-doctorows-anti-finance-thriller/

Fix surfaces the latent point in my work that inequality is destabilizing — that spectacular violence is downstream of making a society that has nothing to offer for the majority of us. As Marty Hench, the 67 year old forensic accountant protagonist of Red Team Blues says,

Finance crime is a necessary component of violent crime. Even the most devoted sadist needs a business model, or he will have to get a real job.

[Image ID: A chart labeled, ‘With more plutocracy comes more murder. As countries become more unequal (horizontal axis), their murder rates go up (vertical axis).’]

Fix agrees, and shows us that murders go up with inequality.

https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2023/05/13/red-team-blues-cory-doctorows-anti-finance-thriller/#sources-and-methods

Which is why, while the average private eye is a kind of “cop who gets to bend the rules of policing”; Hench is “a kind of uber IRS agent who gets to work in ‘sneaky ways that aren’t available to the taxman.’”

[Image ID: A chart labeled, ‘Was the US prison state the inspiration for cyberpunk? The term ‘cyberpunk’ (which describes a genre of dystopian science fiction) became popular in tandem with mass incarceration in the US. It’s probably not a coincidence.’]

This observation segues into a fascinating, data-informed look at the way that science fiction reflects our fears and aspirations about wider social phenomenon — for example, the popularity of the word “cyberpunk” closely tracks rising incarceration rates.

https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2023/05/13/red-team-blues-cory-doctorows-anti-finance-thriller/#sources-and-methods

(It’s not a coincidence that the next Marty Hench book, “The Bezzle,” is about prisons and prison-tech; it’s out in Feb 2024:)

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

I’m out on tour with Red Team Blues right now, with upcoming stops in the DC area, Toronto, the UK, and then Berlin:

https://craphound.com/novels/redteamblues/2023/04/26/the-red-team-blues-tour-burbank-sf-pdx-berkeley-yvr-edmonton-gaithersburg-dc-toronto-hay-oxford-nottingham-manchester-london-edinburgh-london-berlin/

I’ve just added another Berlin stop, on June 8, at Otherland, Berlin’s amazing sf/f bookstore:

https://twitter.com/otherlandberlin/status/1657082021011701761

I hope you’ll come along! I’ve been meeting a lot of people on this tour who confess that while they’ve read my blogs and essays for years, they’ve never picked up one of my books. If you’re one of those readers, let me assure you, it is not too late!

As you’ve read above, my fiction is very much a continuation of my nonfiction by other means — but it’s also the place where I bring my hope as well as my dismay and anger. I’m told it makes for a very good combination.

If you’re still wavering, maybe this will sway you: the blogging and essays are either free or very low-paid, and they’re heavily subsidized by my fiction. If you enjoy my nonfiction, buying my novels is the best way to say thank you and to ensure a continuing supply of both.

But novels are by no means a dreary duty — fiction is a delight, and after a couple decades at it, I’ve come to grudgingly concede — impostor syndrome notwithstanding — that I’m pretty good at it.

I hope you’ll agree.

Image: Robert Miller (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/12463666@N03/52721565937

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Toronto, DC, Gaithersburg, Oxford, Hay, Manchester, Nottingham, London, and Berlin!

[Image ID: A kitchen junk-drawer, full of junk.]

[milimeters-morales]

[chaterbox1237]

Hades/giratina/death isn’t the devil it’s the 7th grade math book.

[puppys-rhythm-heaven]

i'm surprised i still haven't listened to big shot more than either of these-

[cyberrsystemm]

Dear enjoyers of Steddie, fans of Stranger Things time travel fix-it AUs and those in the Stranger Things fandom with brainrot for the Steve Harrington Has Powers tag on Ao3:

I have posted a fanfic you might enjoy

Behold my masterpiece, YIPPEE

[cyber-streak-2]

So, I finally made a decision from last night. My name will be Anubis :) So, besides Cyber, anyone can call me Anubis.

[cybermeep]

studying for the science fiction exam (going down wikipedia rabbit holes)

[lordiavolo22]

PLEASE I AM BEGGING YOU TO LEARN YEARS.

[gatitamyers-archive]

hehe

I might post the refs tomorrow which have like my basic and overall hcs and other info but I can’t help myself I got excited xDd so I just wanna say that in the future, rasp tea do get married.

I want to say maybe around their late twenties or early thirties

[quietzap]

.

[heich0e]

I'm supposed to take a break from Tumblr but how can I when u post selfies like i 'm in love with u Liv I'm being dragged back onto this hell app 🥺

leEYyyyYYYYy you made me genuinely blush u can't DO THIS to me

[thoughtvoid]

At least schedule more than one person the day after major sales and not just the day of (if that), you stupid sadists. Or, y'know. More than just two people for the entire day, trying to fill the pit you're providing excavators for.

[thatorangedrank]

Genuinely struggling at work these days.

[cyberrsystemm]

Some art I did of a moment during chapter one of my shapeshifter!Mumbo fic I'm writing! :> (Excerpt of that moment below image)

As for the story, when I put it up on Ao3 it will probably be slightly different because I keep going through what I've already written and editing it lol, but regardless, here it is:

From chapter one (fic name is undecided as of now):

Impulse hesitated for a moment before nodding back, a reassuring smile underneath his beard. “Well, I need to go help Gem with something. Take care of yourself, now,” he said, taking a few steps backwards in the direction Gem’s voice had come from earlier. “Go and see Xisuma!” With that, he waved goodbye (after shifting the shulker box back to one hand), turned around and started walking over to Gem.

Mumbo dropped his hand from where he’d raised it to wave goodbye in return. In an attempt to distract himself from the pain that was building up once again, he started thinking about the shulker box that Impulse had been holding. He wondered what was in it. Gem had gotten Impulse to help her with the redstone for some farms before, right?

Maybe she’s getting his help with redstone again, he thought. Maybe I should do some redstone, was his second idea. If he could get absorbed enough in doing redstone and the mechanics of all the different components, maybe getting through the day would be a little more bearable.

I’ll ask Xisuma when he’s available to talk, he decided, and then do redstone in the meantime.

With that decided, Mumbo reached for his communicator absentmindedly as his mind drifted to thinking about what redstone project he should do. He looked down while he fumbled trying to turn on the screen, only to let out a startled yelp and drop the communicator as his hands flew to grip at his face.

He quickly followed the communicator to the ground, landing harshly on his knees. When he bent over to see his reflection in the screen, he was met with his entire right eye being as red as a redstone block, with the sudden change starting to slowly try and spread across his face. Mumbo clumsily reached for his eye, the tips of his fingers meeting the transforming skin. He then realised that the red was crawling up his fingers into his hands as well.

His breathing started to become panicked as he held his hands up in-front of his face. Upon examining it, he realised that the shade of red wasn’t just the colour of redstone - it was redstone. He didn’t know if it was just his skin undergoing the change or if the entirety of his body was becoming solid redstone, but either way, he was turning into redstone.

As though that wasn’t bad enough, right then his body decided to have another spike of pain. The rest of Mumbo’s body met the ground as he attempted to breathe through it, squeezing his eyes shut while the pain mingled with the panic and made his existence a living hell.

Just as quickly as it began, however, the agonising pain suddenly faded away, turning back into an ache that was slightly less intense than it was a minute ago.

Mumbo opened his eyes again. His focus drifted back to his hands, only to find that even more of his skin was shifting into redstone. It had reached his palms and was starting to creep up his wrists. The skin almost looked like it was bubbling where it was changing, which was more than a little disturbing. He could feel it as well.

He fumbled to pick up his communicator again, looking to see if the redstone on his face had also spread as much as on his hands. It had, and his face was steadily heading towards half of it being redstone. As he watched it happen, Mumbo realised that the more his body changed, the less intense the pain got. While he still very much felt wrong, as his body continued to shift its form, the pain that had gradually intensified over the past 10 days had begun to slowly melt away into a dull ache that was much more bearable.

Mumbo couldn’t process all this. The sudden massive change in how his body was feeling was huge on its own, but he was still reeling from the massive spike in pain that had just happened, and now however one would describe the sensation of parts of your body literally being made of redstone - it was a little too much to handle. That wasn’t even taking into account the psychological side of things.

Nevermind, Mumbo thought, somehow sounding weak even inside his head. I think I’ll go and see Xisuma right now, thanks.

[8siangemini]

Everything I Do Is For You (Miles Morales!Earth 42 x Reader!Spiderwoman)

Summary: You are SpiderWoman on Earth 42 and Miles is still the Prowler. The Prowler has a mission to kill Spider-Woman due to the high bounty on your head. For months now he has been tracking you down and has focused so much on tracking you down that he does not realize you are right under his nose. One evening when you followed the Prowler back to his hideout you find something you wish you never saw.

Word Count: 2,282

Author’s Note: Based on how Earth 42 looks and based off of the Prowler’s mask I am going the make SpiderWoman a little more cyber-ish. Hope y’all enjoy :)

“Fucking A” You say underneath your breath as you look at yourself in your full body mirror you had in your mirror.

You had an interaction with the Prowler earlier tonight and the beating he gave you took a number on you. Bruises on your arms, parts of your suit torn up, scratches and cuts on your face, and worse your backpack and gauntlets were fucked up. Your backpack was initially a project for your engineering class that Miles had helped you with that slowly became a weapon you used while fighting. The backpack was compact yet was able to hold yourself up by large metal spider legs. Your gauntlets were like claws but had the same function to spew out webs.

But due to the Prowler multiple legs on your backpack were broken and he had punctured a couple holes into your gauntlets with his own claw. That was until you were able to crush his claw while his hand was still in it. Your fight ended when you finally retreated before he could total your backpack. But luckily you are going to finally be able to find him.

“You think you won this fight Prowler?” You ask yourself.

You go to your desk that had multiple monitors on it and took off your gauntlets. You typed some things into your computer and pulled up a map and in the middle of the map was a moving red dot. You smile to yourself as you lean back in your seat and look at the dot like it was the proudest thing you had accomplished.

“Lucky for me, you ‘n I kept doing at each other’s gauntlets that you did not even notice the tracking device I embedded into your claw when I crushed your hand.” You chuckle to yourself, waiting for the red dot to stop to figure out where the Prowler hides out.

After a couple of minutes of movement the dot stays still. You smile to yourself and zoom out of the dot to figure out where the location is. You grab your mask again and pull it over your face and jump out of your window with just your webslingers, no backpack and no gauntlets.

You make it to the location and the only room that was still active with the lights still on was the one on the very top. You shoot your webs up at the railing and quietly and stealthily you land on the metal railing without making a sound. You peak inside through the windows and see the room was lit with a purple color. Gym equipment running across the window closest to you and at the end of the room there was a large connect web with a large map and multiple pictures of you.

You began getting scared. Looking on the web you begin seeing more and more accurate information laying on the board. Your age, the places you recently been, possible schools you go to, possible places where you would go as a civilian, and your nightly patrol routes. But the picture on the top of the board was what scared you the most. A printed out bounty poster of you. $900,000 on your head.

Just then two figures come into the room. The room was very dark but you tried your best to figure out who the figures were. Luckily the two stand under one of the brightest light sources in the room. Your heart dropped at the uncovered person, tall and slender, Uncle Aaron. Miles’ Uncle, in the same room as the Prowler. They were discussing something, like they were partners. They showed no threat to one another but you could still not believe what you were seeing, there was no way. Why would he be doing this sort of business? Then in front of him stood a slightly shorter figure, he was in the mask, the Prowler.

You carefully open the window quietly to try and hear what they may say. The Prowler’s claw was off laying on the table his actual hand was bandaged up with blood staining the gauges. Just then his mask begins to move, begins to open up. You stare with eyes wide open to make sure you see who the Prowler is. Your heart begins racing, eager to find out who the Prowler is.

Then your heart drops, breaks. As the mask disappeared two braids fell down, you knew those two braids. The mask completely disappears and there he stood, Miles, with furrowed brows. Your Miles, your boyfriend, but also your nemesis.

“You’re gonna have to take a few days off with that hand like that.” Uncle Aaron says as he helps Miles take off his jacket and shirt, leaving him shirtless.

“Yeah I know. What do I tell (Y/n)?” Miles asked which pirked your ears up. Miles exams his hand and you begin to feel guilty that you were the one to hurt your boyfriend so badly.

“Just say you cut your hand or some’.” Uncle Aaron quickly says. “You haven’t told her right?” He asks strictly and Miles just shakes his head.

Miles kept on looking down at his hand with his eyebrows furrowing and his eyes glaring down.

“I’m gonna get her, for sure. The next time I see her, I’m gonna get her.” Miles says with determination. His voice was laced with venom and determination, it shook fear throughout your whole body right down to your core.

“You sure as hell better. With that money,” Uncle Aaron says as he points at the bounty poster at the very top of the web. “You, your mama, and your girl could live in luxury. So you better get her the next time you see her or else the cops are gonna get suspious.”

Was he going to use the money for all of us? Is this where the money comes from whenever he gifts you one of your many pieces of jewlery or the multiple pairs of matching Jordan’s you two have? This was the reason why he never picks up your calls late at night whenever you wanted to call him while you were on patrol. This was the reason why whenever you came by his place to make sure he was safe after your nightly patrol he was never there. He was also patrolling too. He had a night life full of violence, violence you should have prevented as Spider-Woman. But in the end you had to admit it was him, the Prowler, that kept causing the violence and fear in Brooklyn.

Uncle Aaron goes to the claw and picks it up and begins to examine the damage you brought upon it. His eyebrows furrow but soon his eyes widened at the slightest bit, he found it. He plucks out a small red device crammed into the mess of the claw and looks at Miles. He holds out the small device to Miles with a pissed off expression, knowing full well on what it is.

“Miles!” Uncle Aaron yells. “Do you know what this is?” Miles just shrugs. “A tracking device Miles! A tracking device!”

Just then you shoot my webs at the top of the window and use your momentum to break through the window, landing in the center of the room. You place your hands on your hips as you turn your head back and forth to crack your neck.

“Let’s try this one more time, Prowler.” You say.

You begin webbing up Uncle Aaron down to his knees and you quickly knock him out cold with a punch to the jaw and his body falling limp to the ground with a loud thud. You web both of Miles’ shoulders and use your momentum to kick him in the jaw. For a couple of hits you kept on doing the same thing, using your momentum to kick him in various of areas until he finally caught your foot with his good hand. He yanked you down and pinned you down with his two knees digging into your two thighs, causing enough pressure to create bruises. His good hand tried to hold both of yours but you were able to keep on escaping for at least one of your hands to throw a punch at him.

You did not care that you were punching the shit out of your boyfriend, he wanted to kill you for a price. He wanted to kill you for money. The person you love the most wants to kill you. He also kept secrets and kept on telling lies to you. Yeah, you were doing the same thing but he was doing it because it was a violent and dark job. All of your glamorous and luxiorous gifts he gave you, you were know questioning if the bought those with the money from these dirty jobs. It made you sick to your stomach.

“You’ve been lying to me Miles!” You yelled at him as he kept trying to pin you down. His eyes widened at the slightest bit.

“How do you know my name?” He asks as he manages to finally pin you down properly.

“What? You wanna kill me? Kill the girl that bandaged you up when you were all bloody without asking any question?” You yelled as tears began to fall through your mask. Miles expression started to somewhat soften. “You gonna kill the girl that was there for you when your dad died?”

Miles slowly starts to reach his bad hand carefully towards the edge of your mask. Your breath started to quicken as his hand started touching your masked face.

“I thought you said that you would burn the world down just for your girl?” You say meekly as tears still start beading from your eyes.

“(Y/n)?” Miles asks and carefully takes off your mask.

Face sweating and bleeding and eyes full of tears. Miles stared at you with his eyes wide and mouth agape.

“Kill me Miles.” You whispered.

“What?” Miles questioned.

“Kill me!” You yelled. “If you want the money so bad then just kill me now!”

Miles looked so broken, so betrayed. He could not believe you kept a secret like this hidden from him. He slowly let go of his wrists.

“Yeah,” You started. “Doesn’t feel good does it? Knowing your amor has been keeping a secret from you for so long? Imagine how I felt about you just a couple of minutes ago when I found out you were the Prowler. Imagine how I feel knowing I was the one that hurt you.” You say with a voice full of pain but Miles stays quiet for awhile.

“Miles say something!” You demand.

“I wanted to do this job for you.” Miles whispers. You look at him confused.

“What?” You ask.

“I wanted to do this job so that I could plan our anniversary.” Miles begins to explain. It was true, your guys’ anniversary was now only less than a month away. “I wanted to plan a nice dinner with you, get you nice things, and give you money for your engineering projects you want to carry out.”

Now everythings just washed over you and all you could feel now was guilt and regret. You regretted the fact that you beat the shit out of Miles, you were mad at yourself that you were the reason he wanted to kill someone, just so he could get you some nice things.

“I-I am so sorry Miles.” You begin to apologize.

“Why are apologizing ma? I should be apologizing for getting you roped into this.” Miles chuckle and you could not help but laugh a little. He began to get up off of you and offered his good hand to help you up.

“For not telling you about,” You start as you wave your body over your tattered suit. “This.”

“Then I’m sorry for not telling you about,” Miles says as he begins to sit on the couch and spread out his arms to jesture to the apartment. “this.” You laugh a little as you scan the room.

“Prowler huh?” You say through a laugh as Miles smirks a little while he slouches into this couch a little, spreading his legs and adjusting his pants.

“Spider-woman huh?” He says with a cocky smirk.

You smirk back and bend down to give him a deep kiss. He places his good hand on your hip as his tongue roams your mouth. You pull away a little bit and go back to standing up with your arms crossed as you scan his body.

“I gotta admit,” He leans forwards and places his hand on your hip and draws you in to stand inbetween his legs. “Tu te ves hermosa mami.” (You look beautiful, Mami) which causes you to smirk and chuckle.

“Then I’ll have to admit,” You place your hands on his bare toned shoulders as you lean down and peck his lips. “I dig you in the suit.”

You two stay like that for awhile as you rub his neck and he squeezes your hip every now and then. An idea comes into your head.

“Why don’t we make a deal?” You ask him.

“What is it, mami?” He asks you which causes your stomach to flip.

“If you stop messing with me as Spider-Woman I’ll make sure you won’t get caught by the cops.” You proposed and Miles raised an eyebrow in interest. “I have connections and have a little,” You raise your hand up away from Miles’ neck and your hand begins to emit yellow electric sparks and glitches. “advantage when it comes to hacking.”

Miles looks up at you with a smirk and he guides your hips down to lower you to his level.

“You have a deal, mami.”