#tuyul apps

[mostlysignssomeportents]

When the app tries to make you robo-scab

When we talk about the abusive nature of gig work, there’s some obvious targets, like algorithmic wage discrimination, where two workers are paid different rates for the same job, in order to trick occasional gig-workers to give up their other sources of income and become entirely dependent on the app:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

Then there’s the opacity — imagine if your boss refused to tell you how much you’ll get paid for a job until after you’ve completed it, claimed that this was done in order to “protect privacy” — and then threatened anyone who helped you figure out the true wage on offer:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#boss-app

Opacity is wage theft’s handmaiden: every gig worker producing content for a social media algorithm is subject to having their reach — and hence their pay — cut based on the unaccountable, inscrutable decisions of a content moderation system:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

Making content for an algorithm is like having a boss that docks every paycheck because you broke rules that you are not allowed to know, because if you knew the rules, you’d figure out how to cheat without your boss catching you. Content moderation is the last place where security through obscurity is considered good practice:

https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-infosec-307f87004563

When workers seize the means of computation, amazing things happen. In Indonesia, gig workers create and trade tuyul apps that let them unilaterally modify the way that their bosses’ systems see them — everything from GPS spoofing to accessibility mods:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek

So the tech and labor story isn’t wholly grim: there are lots of ways that tech can enhance labor struggles, letting workers collaborate and coordinate. Without digital systems, we wouldn’t have the Hot Strike Summer:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/02/not-what-it-does/#who-it-does-it-to

As the historic writer/actor strike shows us, the resurgent labor movement and the senescent forces of crapulent capitalism are locked in a death-struggle over not just what digital tools do, but who they do it for and who they do it to:

https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/

When it comes to the epic fight over who technology acts for and against, we need a diversity of tactics, backstopped by tech operated by and for its users — and by laws that protect workers and the public. That dynamic is in sharp focus in UNITE Here Local 11’s strike against Orange County’s Laguna Cliffs Marriott Resort & Spa.

The UNITE Here strike turns on the usual issues like a living wage (hotel staff are paid so little they have to rent rooming-house beds by the shift, paying for the right to sleep in a room for a few hours at a time, without any permanent accommodation). They’re also seeking health-care and pensions, so they can be healthy at work and retire after long service. Finally, they’re seeking their employer’s support for LA’s Responsible Hotels Ordinance, which would levy a tax on hotel rooms to help pay for hotel workers’ housing costs (a hotel worker who can’t afford a bed is the equivalent of a fast food worker who has to apply for food stamps):

https://www.unitehere11.org/responsible-hotels-ordinance/

But the Marriott — which is owned by the University of California and managed by Aimbridge Hospitality — has refused to bargain, walking out negotiations.

But the employer didn’t walk out over wages, benefits or support for a housing subsidy. They walked out when workers demanded that the scabs that the company was trying to hire to break the strike be given full time, union jobs.

These aren’t just any scabs, either. They’re predominantly Black workers who rely on the $700m Instawork app for gigs. These workers are being dispatched to cross the picket line without any warning that they’re being contracted as strikebreakers. When workers refuse the cross the picket and join the strike, Instawork cancels all their shifts and permanently blocks them from new jobs.

This is a new, technologically supercharged form of illegal strikebreaking. It’s one thing for a single boss to punish a worker who refuses to scab, but Instawork acts as a plausible-deniability filter for all the major employers in the region. Like the landlord apps that allow landlords to illegally fix rents by coordinating hikes, Instawork lets bosses illegally collude to rig wages by coordinating a blocklist of workers who refuse to scab:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/10/company-that-makes-rent-setting-software-for-landlords-sued-for-collusion/?comments=1

The racial dimension is really important here: the Marriott has a longstanding de facto policy of refusing to hire Black workers, and whenever they are confronted with this, they insist that there are no qualified Black workers in the labor pool. But as soon as the predominantly Latino workforce struck, Marriott discovered a vast Black workforce that it could coerce into scabbing, in collusion with Instawork.

Now, all of this isn’t just sleazy, it’s illegal, a violation of Section 7 of the NLRB Act. Historically, that wouldn’t have mattered, because a string of presidents, R and D, have appointed useless do-nothing ghouls to run the NLRB. But the Biden admin, pushed by the party’s left wing, made a string of historic, excellent appointments, including NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, who has set her sights on punishing gig work companies for flouting labor law:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/10/see-you-in-the-funny-papers/#bidens-legacy

UNITE HERE 11 has brought a case to the NLRB, charging the Instawork, the UC system, Marriott, and Aimbridge with violating labor law by blackmailing gig workers into crossing the picket line. The union is also asking the NLRB to punish the companies for failing to protect workers from violent retaliation from the wealthy hotel guests who have punched them and screamed epithets at them. The hotel has refused to identify these thug guests so that the workers they assaulted can swear out complaints against them.

Writing about the strike for Jacobin, Alex N Press tells the story of Thomas Bradley, a Black worker who was struck off all Instawork shifts for refusing to cross the picket line and joining it instead:

https://jacobin.com/2023/07/southern-california-hotel-workers-strike-automated-management-unite-here

Bradley’s case is exhibit A in the UNITE HERE 11 case before the NLRB. He has a degree in culinary arts, but racial discrimination in the industry has kept him stuck in gig and temp jobs ever since he graduated, nearly a quarter century ago. Bradley lived out of his car, but that was repossessed while he slept in a hotel room that UNITE HERE 11 fundraised for him, leaving him homeless and bereft of all his worldly possessions.

With UNITE HERE 11’s help, Bradley’s secured a job at the downtown LA Westin Bonaventure Hotel & Suites, a hotel that has bargained with the workers. Bradley is using his newfound secure position to campaign among other Instawork workers to convince them not to cross picket lines. In these group chats, Jacobin saw workers worrying “that joining the strike would jeopardize their standing on the app.”

Today (July 30) at 1530h, I’m appearing on a panel at Midsummer Scream in Long Beach, CA, to discuss the wonderful, award-winning “Ghost Post” Haunted Mansion project I worked on for Disney Imagineering.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/30/computer-says-scab/#instawork

[Image ID: An old photo of strikers before a struck factory, with tear-gas plumes rising above them. The image has been modified to add a Marriott sign to the factory, and the menacing red eye of HAL9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey' to the sky over the factory. The workers have been colorized to a yellow-green shade and the factory has been colorized to a sepia tone.]

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[worklabournewsresearch]

The Gig Workers Fighting Back Against the Algorithms

Hao, K. & Freischlad, N. (2022, April 21). The gig workers fighting back against the algorithms. MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/21/1050381/the-gig-workers-fighting-back-against-the-algorithms

Karen Hao and Nadine Freischlad write: “It began with drivers converging on little hacks to make their daily work a bit easier. As more and more peers confronted the same frustrations, they spread their tricks through the networks like any other piece of information. Over time, those tricks matured into ... ‘everyday resistance’—tactics that helped drivers, absent any institutional support, to regain control in tiny, cumulative ways. Kejo [a driver for Indonesian company Gojek] prefers a strategy known as ‘account therapy,’ a way to coax Gojek’s algorithm when it isn’t supplying enough of the desired orders. ... Having observed that the Gojek app learns drivers’ preferences by keeping track of which jobs they accept, he began repeatedly rejecting food orders and accepting only passenger rides. After he persisted through a week of days without any work, the system finally ‘got it,’ he says. Other drivers who are skilled in deciphering the mysteries of the algorithm offer paid ‘therapy services’ to those who are struggling. A therapist will take over a client’s phone for a week and slowly coax the account back to health before returning it to its owner.”

“Then there are more sophisticated hacks. The more tech-savvy in the driver communities have developed an entire ecosystem of unauthorized apps that help drivers tweak and tune their accounts ... Some are relatively trivial, built simply to eliminate a reliance on Gojek’s engineering team: they enlarge the text on the app’s user interface to improve its readability, or help drivers accept jobs automatically, a feature Gojek has by now incorporated. But the most popular, with more than half a million downloads, spoof a phone’s GPS. They can give the illusion that a driver who is resting is still working. This can avoid penalties for sick time or help quickly graduate an account to higher levels with more earning potential. Such apps can also give drivers access to places with high customer demand without requiring them to muscle into crowded spaces.”

“All of these apps are known as tuyul, after a mythological creature in Indonesian folklore that steals money on behalf of its owner (though sometimes at a great price). If Gojek catches a driver using a tuyul, it suspends the account. This has led to an app war ... developers build increasingly complex features to hide from Gojek’s detection systems as Gojek develops increasingly complex trackers to find them. As driver networks have grown and accumulated political capital, they’ve also sought to agitate for broader reforms. They use social media to protest undesirable app updates or push for feature requests. Gojek now sends representatives to base camps to seek feedback and buy-in from drivers about forthcoming changes.”

Additional Information

Qadri, R. (2021). Platform Workers as Infrastructures of Global Technologies. MIT Dialogues. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3466162

Scholz, T. & Schneider, N. (2016). Ours to hack and to own: The rise of platform cooperativism, a new vision for the future of work and a fairer internet. New York: OR Books. https://librarysearch.library.utoronto.ca/permalink/01UTORONTO_INST/14bjeso/alma991105999242506196

Soriano, C.R.R. & Cabañes, J.V.A. (2020). Entrepreneurial Solidarities: Social Media Collectives and Filipino Digital Platform Workers. Social Media + Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120926484 Open Access

Addabbo, T, et al. (2021). The Collective Dimensions of Employment Relations : Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Workers’ Voices and Changing Workplace Patterns. Springer International Publishing AG. https://librarysearch.library.utoronto.ca/permalink/01UTORONTO_INST/14bjeso/alma991107040350806196

Panimbang, F. (2021). Solidarity across boundaries: a new practice of collectivity among workers in the app-based transport sector in Indonesia. Globalizations 18(8). https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2021.1884789  UTL Link: https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1080/14747731.2021.1884789

Yu, Z., Treré, E. & Bonini, T. (2022). The emergence of algorithmic solidarity: Unveiling mutual aid practices and resistance among Chinese delivery workers. Media International Australia. https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878X221074793 Open Access

Tassinari, A. & Maccarrone, V. (2020). Riders on the Storm: Workplace Solidarity among Gig Economy Couriers in Italy and the UK. Work, Employment, and Society 34(1), 35-54. https://doi.org/10.1177/0950017019862954 UTL Link: https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1177/0950017019862954

Photo Source:  (2022). The gig workers fighting back against the algorithms [Photograph]. MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/21/1050381/the-gig-workers-fighting-back-against-the-algorithms

[shirlleycoyle]

Delivery Drivers Are Using Grey Market Apps to Make Their Jobs Suck Less

The McDonald’s on Jalan Salemba Raya, Jakarta’s crowded main thoroughfare, is a magnet for food delivery orders. On any given day, a dozen or so app-based delivery drivers—locally called ojol—wait in the parking lot. Inch by inch, they try to move as close as they can to the center of the lot, desperate to have the matching algorithms recognize their proximity and assign them an order. 

But even more drivers are there virtually, using GPS-spoofing apps to position themselves right in the center of the McDonald's lot while they physically wait under nearby shelters. Using these unofficial apps, known as tuyul, drivers can set their GPS pins at the optimal location they would like orders from, without having to physically drive there.      

In Jakarta, these kinds of unauthorized apps are a common tool-of-the-trade among app drivers working for Gojek, a $10 billion delivery and transport "super app" that is the Indonesian equivalent of Postmates, Apple Pay, Venmo, and Uber. Though Indonesia is by far its biggest market, Gojek operates in more than 200 cities in Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam, and Thailand.

“These are people in need who have to hold on to their jobs on difficult streets," one driver told Motherboard, explaining why drivers resort to using these apps. "They are not doing this for fun but because they have no other option.” 

Like many drivers interviewed, the driver asked not to be identified, fearing loss of work and retaliation by Gojek (The experiences ojol drivers have had with Gojek were collected both as part of my dissertation research at MIT and then later, for this story.)

Over the last six years, a burgeoning underground market for unauthorized, third-party Gojek apps has emerged. Named after a child-like spirit in Indonesian folklore that helps his human master earn money by stealing, each tuyul app responds to specific needs of drivers to help make their jobs less miserable. 

For instance, when older drivers complained they could not read important details of a matched order because the text was too small, a homebrewed application came into the market which magnified the destination, fare and distance of each order offered. This feature eventually spun out into apps that allowed "automatic bidding": each order would be accepted as it was offered, removing the hassle of looking at the phone. To give drivers more control over the orders offered and to avoid rejection-associated penalties, some apps allowed drivers to set filters for order characteristics—setting the maximum distance and minimum pay, for example. 

The GPS-spoofing apps remain the most popular type of tuyul apps, with some having more than 500,000 downloads on the Google Play app store. 

A crowd of Gojek delivery drivers wait for orders on their motorbikes. Photo by Rida Qadri

After Gojek's app was launched in 2015, many drivers needed help with small technical glitches and app malfunctions. Drivers who were more tech-savvy started helping other drivers with technical support. Eventually, these drivers began being known as "IT Jalanan"—or "IT of the Road"—creating a form of localized tech support that was easier to access than Gojek’s own tech support. 

“We don’t have to go to the [Gojek] office and only for a small fee we get help wherever," one ojol driver told Motherboard. Eventually, small tech support tasks like factory resets, reboots, and GPS fixes led to a variety of unofficial apps for varying driver needs. Another driver noted the ease with which IT Jalanan fixes problems and innovates: "Even though it's illegal, the IT of the streets is very agile and smart—it makes our lives easier," the driver said.

These apps can be downloaded in various places. Some app developers have listed them on Google Play. Others have websites where drivers can download the application file directly, and a much larger proportion are sold directly through driver groups on WhatsApp and Telegram. There are two options for payment: a single payment with no "post-sale care," or a monthly membership fee which gives the driver access to an online group for technical support and updates. 

Extensive manuals are shared on how to prepare an Android phone for the unofficial apps. Instructions include how to gain root access on phones, clearing the device's cache, and downloading a host of other applications which prevent detection by Gojek's system. If help is needed with any of these technical requirements, drivers can ask other technically-savvy drivers or get support from the developer. 

While Gojek has constantly tried to ban tuyul, drivers who use the apps argue tuyul helps them do their jobs better, and are better designed to help them tackle the problems they regularly face as drivers. 

Screenshots of unauthorized apps used by Gojek delivery drivers, which allow them to spoof GPS location and filter orders.

Take the GPS-spoofing apps. In a crowded city like Jakarta, the platform’s decision to match drivers based on spatial proximity erroneously assumes that drivers can simply show up and wait in high demand areas. “We can’t wait outside malls, we can’t wait in parking lots, we can’t wait on [the] side of the roads, then how do we get orders?” another driver told Motherboard. 

By prioritizing proximity in matching drivers with orders, the algorithms push drivers to get closer to hotspots of demand. When that's not physically possible, it forces drivers to use clever hacks around this problem. Another driver who spoke to Motherboard often waits outside major train stations in Jakarta, and said that jostling for space with hundreds of commuters, taxi drivers, and street vendors doesn’t make for a pleasant experience for anyone. “Sometimes there are so many ojol drivers outside the train station that their queues take up the whole road," the driver said. "That is unfair to us and the public, preventing cars from passing."

Spending hours sitting on a stationary bike in parking lots is also uncomfortable, particularly in Jakarta’s climate, where rain is never far away. Therefore, many drivers argue that allowing them to bid for orders without needing to be in a precise location helps everyone. 

Helpful as they may be, the unauthorized apps open up drivers to a host of risks. For one, there is no way for drivers to verify whether the services they pay for will actually work, and there's no telling when Gojek will ban the use of an app they purchased. Since tuyul developers can earn millions of rupiah ($1 is roughly 14,500 rupiah), it is in their interest to hype up their products and charge high membership fees. 

Drivers have also used GPS-spoofing apps to create fraudulent orders, called "opik" (a play on the phrase "order fictive"). By creating a fake digital GPS trace, they can indicate to the platform that they completed an order without ever moving. Rings of drivers who have made millions of rupiah scamming Gojek’s system have been discovered and arrested in Jakarta.

Gojek has implemented a zero tolerance policy in response to the GPS-spoofing apps, and the company even runs campaigns to discourage drivers from using them. Drivers have been warned that anyone detected to be using tuyul apps will be suspended permanently. Gojek's security system has also improved over time, finding new ways to detect the use of unauthorized apps and rooted phones. 

Gojek could not be reached for comment on this story.

But while tuyul apps have become harder to download and use, drivers' lived experiences and the conditions which pushed them to download the apps in the first place have not changed. Some drivers would like to put an end to this cat-and-mouse game, and have Gojek recognize that the adversarial relationship doesn't benefit the company or ojol drivers. One of these groups is Gojek on Twitter (GOT), a prominent driver community aiming to make sure “drivers are not slaves of the algorithm.” GOT are like the influencers of the driver world; its founders have collectively amassed more than 50,000 followers on Twitter.  Though they disagree that tuyul are only used to cheat the system, GOT founders understand the double bind drivers face when using tuyul: they reduce hurdles drivers face in their jobs, but their use risks suspension while also giving an unfair advantage to drivers who are willing to bend the rules. GOT does not advise drivers to use tuyul apps, but understands why people would want to. 

A founding member of GOT, who uses the online pseudonym Liam, proposes a system that could be a win-win. Gojek could officially allow drivers to place their GPS spot in areas within a 1-kilometer radius of their actual position. He argues that on a motorbike it would only take a minute or two to arrive at the order location from such a short distance away. Gojek could then ensure that drivers don’t place their GPS position any further than this radius, which would cut down on fake orders. Drivers would also be able to indicate that they actually want to accept orders from that area, a much stronger signal than just physical presence. 

But for this system to work, Liam says, customers would need to change their expectations away from instant gratification. “The customer attitude [is] now, now, now," Liam told Motherboard. "If a driver is two minutes late, they blow up.”

Despite Gojek's adversarial relationship with tuyul, the company has benefited by adopting some of the features originally created by unauthorized apps. For instance, the "automatic bidding" app drivers had developed was introduced into the official Gojek app through a new feature called "autobid." Gojek also briefly introduced the ability for drivers to filter orders, but according to drivers removed the feature when too many drivers started filtering for specific types of orders. While Gojek adopting driver-developed app features shows its responsiveness to driver needs, it also comes with the fear of drivers losing agency over how and how long they can use the features.   

The experiences of Indonesia's ojol drivers are not unique. Across the world, app-based workers are precariously employed via algorithmic systems that give them little control over their daily work, forcing them to constantly fight for agency with tricks and hacks. In that sense, tuyul app developers are responding to segments of the driver population that Gojek either does not reach out to, or hears about too late. 

In other words, they are doing the same thing that causes startups to be hailed as innovative disruptors. After all, Gojek, too, was once just a startup, accused of cheating the system while claiming to make the jobs of motorbike drivers easier and more efficient—why is it any different when drivers try to do the same?

Delivery Drivers Are Using Grey Market Apps to Make Their Jobs Suck Less syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[kijanmonirmolo]

Mustika Kodam Bunian Seksi ada didalam tempat mustika ini kodam cantik, seksi, hot dan mampu memuaskan hasrat anda dialam mimpi, serta dapat membantu anda lancar dalam rejeki,Mustika Kodam Bunian Seksi ini ki janmo dapatkan dari hasil penarikan alam di gunung galunggung. siap dimaharkan bagi yang suka dengan kodam wanita cantik

Manfaat

Mustika Kodam Bunian Seksi

Adalah Sebagai Berikut :

KHODAM BISA DIAJAK UNTUK BERHUBUNGAN BADAN LEWAT ALAM MIMPI

MAMPU MEMUASKAN HASRAT SEKS ANDA DI ALAM MIMPI

KHODAM AKAN MEMBANTU APAPUN YANG HAJAT DILAKUKAN OLEH SANG PEMILIK

MEMILIKI KEMAMPUAN SPIRITUAL TERUTAMA DALAM HAL DETEKSI GAIB / MAKHLUK GAIB

SEBAGAI SARANA MENGELUARKAN KEKUATAN TERPENDAM DALAM DIRI PADA SAAT TERTENTU

MEMBUAT ANDA MENETRALISIR GANGGUAN GHOIB

MENGAKTIFKAN DAYA KEKUATAN BATIN

MENGHABISI GANGGUAN-GANGGUAN MAKHLUK HALUS, TUYUL, BABI NGEPET

MEMBUAT ANDA MEMILIKI KEMAMPUAN SEMBUHKAN KERASUKAN, JIN DAN PELET

SARANA UNTUK MEMBANGKITKAN ENERGI GENDAM/AJIAN UNTUK MEMPENGARUHI ORANG LAIN

MEMBANGKITKAN AJI KOMARA YANG MAMPU MEMBAKAR DAN MELEBURKAN JIN GOLONGAN SAKTI

PENGAKTIFAN CAKRA DIRI DAN MENAMBAH KEPEKAAN MATA BATIN

KESUKSESAN DALAM BIDANG USAHA ATAUPUN JASA

MEMBUAT ANDA LEBIH KUAT SECARA BATINIAH DENGAN TUJUAN TERHINDAR DARI BERBAGAI MASALAH GAIB KHODAM PENDAMPING AMPUH

KHODAM PEREWANGAN GANAS YANG BISA DIPERINTAH

MELIPATGANDAKAN ILMU TENAGA DALAM

MENUNDUKAN MUSUH

MENGIRIM SERANGAN JARAK JAUH KEPADA LAWAN

MUDAH DALAM MEMERINTAH ORANG

WIBAWA TINGKAT TINGGI

DITAKUTI OLEH BANYAK ORANG

bagi anda yang berminat dengan layanan spiritual dari ki janmo nirmolo ini anda bisa menghubungi

admin ki janmo nirmolo

.dapatkan biaya atau mahar yang sangat terjangkau bagi anda yang memang golongan menengah ke bawah. Jasa dari ki janmo nirmolo sangat terjangkau dan mudah sekali untuk anda dapatkan karena tidak memerlukan syarat yang aneh-aneh.

Cara Penyatuan dan Penyelarasan

mulailah penyatuan dan penyelarasan mustika ini pada saat malam hari sebelum tidur. oleskan minyak non alkohol di mustika ini secara menyeluruh, lakukan semedi selama kurang lebih 10 menit sambil berdoa menurut kepercayaan anda dan sebutkan hajad dan keinginan anda di dalam hati selama meditasi, setelah selesai tidurlah dan taruhlah mustika di bawah bantal tidur anda. paginya ambil mustika dari bawah bantal anda dan masukan kedalam sebuah gelas berisikan air putih, lalu campurkan air putih yang sudah anda celupkan mustika tadi di air mandi anda dan buatlah untuk mandi besar atau mandi keramas. setelah mandi besar atau mandi keramas maka penyatuan dan penyelarasan selesai. biasanya efek dari penyatuan ini akan terasa pusing, getaran, panas, dingin, pegal, dan merasakan hal yang tidak biasa dari sebelumnya maka hal tersebut adalah hal yang wajar yang biasa dirasakan ketika ada penyatuan energi dan penyelarasan, tidak usah khawatir efek tersebut akan hilang dengan sendirinya.penyatuan mustika ini cukup dilakukan satu kali saja seterusnya tinggal melakukan perawatan secukupnya dan semampunya.

Cara Penggunaan  

Untuk cara penggunaannya sangatlah mudah. Setelah anda memaharnya, secara otomatis energi yang ada dalam benda tersebut langsung menyatu kepada pemiliknya. sebab sebelum kita kirimkan ke tempat anda, sudah kami ritualkan secara khusus melalui data diri anda. tapi ada tatacara yang lebih detail didalam sarana tersebut secara tetulis.

Cara Perawatan

perawatan mustika ini berfungsi untuk memaksimalkan tuah alaminya serta meningkatkan energi alaminya. perawatan bisa dilakukan semampunya saja, semakin rutin maka semakin bagus untuk tuah dan energi alamnya. untuk cara perawatan mustika ini cukup dengan mengoleskan minyak non alkohol di hari weton anda. bisa dilakukan setiap hari weton atau sebulan sekali setiap hari seton, 3 bulan sekali setiap hari weton atau satu tahun sekali setiap hari weton. perawatan tidak berlaku wajib namun lebih baiknya dilakukan dan dirawat, karena setiap kita merawat suatu benda maka benda juga akan memberikan manfaat yang lebih kepada kita.

Adakah Pantangan

bertuah ini tidak ada pantangan yang memberatkan pemiliknya. mengenai pantangan menggunakan benda mistik tergantung pula asal benda tersebut. tapi anda tak perlu khawatir, benda bertuah ditempat

ki janmo nirmolo

sangat aman dan bebas pantangan.

Cara Mendapatkan  

Adapun cara untuk mendapatkan benda tersebut yakni dengan menghubungi kontak yang tertera pada website ini.

barangmistikanekabertuah

adalah situs resmi yang menyediakan sarana spiritual terlengkap di Indonesia.

Cara Pemesanan

Bagi anda yang tertarik dan minat dengan sarana spiritual ataupun jasa kami, silahkan kirimkan biodata (Nama lengkap, Tempat Tinggal Sekarang, Tanggal Kelahiran,dan No.hp). Selanjutnya anda tinggal menghubungi nomor dibawah ini

APAPUN YANG ANDA CARI, INSYA ALLAH ADA DISINIADA PERTANYAAN?? CHAT KAMI VIA WHATSAPP, TINGGAL KLIK GAMBAR APP WHATSAPP YANG BERWARNA HIJAU DI HANDPHONE ANDA.Kontak Website  Ki Janmo NirmoloEmail :barangmistikanekabertuah@gmail.comKi Janmo Nirmolo :+6289672294870

[jembercoret-blog]

Bissmillah! :D

Hae rek, wahdoh...iki tumblr anyarku loh rek. Wes suwe krungu apps iki tapi gak sempet2 seng kate nggawe dan njempok. Sepurane lek aku boso jowoan ya rek. Gak popo kan? Yo engko tak mix mix karo bahasa Indonesia wes,supoyo lebih enjoy wae gae seng ndak paham boso jowo.

Dadi,ngene rek. Aku sek durung eruh keajaibane tumblr iki opo,lek twitter aku wes tuwuk. Instagram sampek bosen2. Nah..seng iki sektas nyobak. Embuh iki akhire yo'opo.

Aku pingin nyobak apps iki sebagai ajang memperluas pertemanan. Because of what? Yaaa..karna pertemanan adalah satu2nya cara kita untuk bergaul,sebagai makhluk sosial. Kon gak duwe konco? Yo guduk menungso. Jin ae duwe konco, Jun? Tuyul ae loh duwe sahabat, Mbak Yul. Mosok koen gak duwe? Kalah dong karo Ucil.

Nah... Selamat mengikut tumblr e jembercoret ya rek. Semoga koen bahagia. Amin.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Tech workers and gig workers need each other

Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.

We're living in the enshittocene, in which the forces of enshittification are turning everything from our cars to our streaming services to our dishwashers into thoroughly enshittifified piles of shit. Call it the Great Enshittening:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

How did we arrive at this juncture? Is it the end of the zero rate interest policy? Was it that the companies that formerly made useful things that we valued underwent a change in leadership that drove them to make things worse? Is Mercury in retrograde?

None of the above. There have been many junctures in which investors demanded higher returns from firms but were not able to force them to dramatically worsen their products. Moreover, the leaders now presiding over the rapid unscheduled disassembly of once-useful products are the same people who oversaw their golden age. As to Mercury? Well, I'm a Cancer, and as everyone knows, Cancers don't believe in astrology.

The Great Enshittening isn't precipitated by a change in how greedy and callous corporate leaders are. Rather, the change is in what those greedy, callous corporate leaders can get away with.

Capitalists hate capitalism. For a corporate executive, the fact that you have to make good things, please your customers, pay your workers, and beat the competition are all bugs, not features. The best business is one in which people simply pay you money without your having to do anything or worry that someday they'll stop. UBI for the investor class, in other words.

Douglas Rushkoff calls this "going meta." Don't sell things, provide a platform where people sell things. Don't provide a platform, invest in the platform. Don't invest in the platform, buy options on the platform. Don't buy options, buy derivatives of options.

A more precise analysis comes from economist Yanis Varoufakis, who calls this technofeudalism. Varoufakis draws our attention to the distinction between profits and rents. Profit is the income a capitalist receives from mobilizing workers to do something productive and then skimming off the surplus created by their labor.

By contrast, rent is income a feudalist derives from simply owning something that a capitalist or a worker needs in order to be productive. The entrepreneur who opens a coffee shop earns profits by creaming off the surplus value created by the baristas. The rentier who owns the building the coffee shop rents gets money simply for owning the building.

The coffee shop owner can never rest. At any moment, another coffee shop can open down the street and lure away their customers and their baristas. When that happens, the coffee shop goes bust and the owner is ruined. But not the landlord! After the coffee shop goes bust, the landlord's asset is more valuable – an empty storefront just down the street from the hottest coffee shop in town.

Capitalists hate capitalism. Faced with a choice of retaining their workers by paying them a fair wage and treating them well, or by saddling them with noncompetes that make it impossible to work for anyone else in the same field, and obligations to repay tens of thousands of dollars for "training" if they quit, bosses will take the latter every time. Go meta, baby.

Same for competition. Faced with the choice of competing to win the most customers with the best products, or merging so that customers have nowhere else to go, even the bitterest of rivals find it remarkably easy to intermarry until our corporations landscape is so interbred the dominant firms all have Habsburg jaws. Think: Facebook-Instagram. Disney-Fox. Microsoft-Activision:

https://locusmag.com/2021/07/cory-doctorow-tech-monopolies-and-the-insufficient-necessity-of-interoperability/

Enshittification has complex underlying dynamics and a reliable procession of stages, but the effect is quite straightforward: things are enshittified when they become worse for the people who use them and the suppliers who makes them, but nevertheless, the users keep using and the suppliers keep supplying.

There are four forces that stand in the way of enshittification, and as each of these forces grows weaker, enshittification proliferates.

The first and most important of these constraints is competition. Capitalists claim to love competition because it keeps firms sharp: they must constantly find ways to improve products and cut costs or be swept away by a superior alternative. There's a degree of truth here, but that's not the whole story.

For one thing, competition can "improve" things that we would rather see abolished. Critics of the GDPR, the EU's landmark privacy law, often point to the devastation that enforcing privacy law had on the European ad-tech industry, driving small firms out of business. But these firms were the most egregious privacy offenders, because they had the least to lose, lacking the dominant position of US-based Big Tech surveillance companies.

Having the least to lose, they were the most reckless with their privacy invasions – but they were also the least equipped to pay expensive enablers from giant corporate law firms to hold off European enforcers, and so they were obliterated. The resulting lack of competition is fine, as far as privacy goes: we don't want competition in the field of "who is most efficient at violating our human rights":

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/04/fighting-floc-and-fighting-monopoly-are-fully-compatible

But there's another benefit to competition: disorganization. A sector with hundreds of medium-sized, competing companies is a squabbling mob, incapable of agreeing on the site for an annual meeting. An industry dominated by a handful of firms is a cartel, handily capable of presenting a unified front to policy makers, and their commercial coziness provides them with vast war-chests they can use to suborn governments and capture their regulators:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

Competition is the first constraint. When there's competition, corporate managers fear that you will respond to enshittification by defecting to a rival, costing them money. They don't care about your satisfaction, but they do care about your money, and competition hitches their ability to satisfy you to their ability to get paid by you.

Competition has been circling the drain for 40 years, as the "consumer welfare" theory of antitrust, hatched by Reagan's court sorcerers at the University of Chicago School of Economics, took hold. This theory insists that monopolies are evidence of "efficiency" – if everyone shops at one store, that's evidence that it's the best store, not evidence that they're cheating.

For 40 years, we've allowed companies to violate antitrust law by merging with major competitors, acquiring fledgling rivals, and using investor cash to sell below cost so that no one else can enter the market. This has produced the inbred industrial hulks of today, with five or fewer firms dominating everything from eyeglasses to banking, sea freight to professional wrestling:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

The endless and continuous weakening of competition has emboldened corporate enshittifiers, who operate on the logic of Lily Tomlin in her role as an AT&T spokeswoman: "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company":

https://vimeo.com/355556831

But the drawdown of competition has also enabled regulatory capture, by converting cutthroat adversaries to kissing cousins. These companies have convinced their regulators not to enforce privacy, consumer protection or labor laws, provided that the gross violations of these laws are accomplished via apps.

This is where tech exceptionalism is warranted: while the bosses that run these companies aren't any nobler – or more wicked – than the Robber Barons of yore, they are equipped with a digital back-end for their businesses that let them change the rules of the game from moment to moment.

Think of labor law: as Veena Dubal writes, gig-work companies practice algorithmic wage discrimination, turning your paycheck into a slot machine that pays out more when you are more selective about which jobs you take, and which then docks your pay by tiny increments as you become less discriminating about answering the app's call:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

This is a plain violation of labor law, but the fiction that gig workers are contractors, combined with the opacity and speed of the wage discrimination back-end, lets the companies get away with it.

But the monsters who hatched this scam are no worse than their forebears, nor are they any smarter. Any black-hearted coal-boss memorialized in a Tennessee Ernie Ford song would have gladly practiced algorithmic wage discrimination – but there just weren't enough green-eyeshade accountants in the back office to change the payout from second to second.

I call this "twiddling" – turning the knobs on the back end to continuously adjust the business logic that the firm operates on:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

Twiddling is everywhere, and it is only possible because "it's not a crime if we use an app" has been accepted by (captured) regulators. Think of Amazon's "pricing paradox," where deceptive search results – which Amazon makes $38b/year on – allow the company to offer lower prices, but charge higher ones:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

The first constraint on enshittification is competition – the fear that you'll lose money when a disgusted customer take their business elsewhere. The second constraint is regulation – the fear that a regulator's punishment will eat up all the expected gains from an enshittificatory move, or even exceed those gains, leading to a net loss.

But the less competition there is in a sector, the easier it is for the remaining companies to capture their regulators. Say goodbye to that second constraint.

But there's another constraint – another one that's unique to technology, and genuinely exceptional. That's self-help. Digital technology is infinitely flexible, which is why managers can twiddle the business logic and change the rules on a dime.

But it's a double-edged sword. Users can twiddle back. The universal nature of digital products means it's always technically possible to disenshittify the enshittified products in your world. Mercedes wants to charge you rent on your accelerator pedal via a monthly subscription? Just mod the car by toggling the "subscription paid" bit and get the accelerator for free:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

HP tricks you into installing a "security update" that sneakily disables your printer's ability to recognize and use third-party ink? Just roll back the operating system and you won't be forced to spend $10,000/gallon to print out your boarding passes and shopping lists:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Self-help – AKA "adversarial interoperability" – isn't just a way to override the greedy choices of corporate sadists. It's a way to hold those sadists in check. It's a constraint.

Imagine a boardroom where someone says, "I calculate that if we make our ads 25% more invasive and obnoxious, we can eke out 2% more in ad-revenue." If you think of a business as a transhuman colony organism that exists to maximize shareholder value, this is a no-brainer.

But now consider the rejoinder: "If we make our ads 25% more obnoxious, then 50% of our users will be motivated to type, 'how do I block ads?' into a search engine. When that happens, we don't merely lose out on the expected 2% of additional revenue – our income from those users falls to zero, forever."

Self-help is the third constraint on enshittification. But when competition fails, and regulatory capture ensues, companies don't just gain the ability to flout the law – they get to wield the law, too.

Tech firms have cultivated a thicket of laws, rules and regulations that make self-help measures very illegal. This thicket is better known as "IP," a term that is best understood as meaning "any policy that lets me control the conduct of my competitors, my customers and my critics":

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

To put an ad-blocker in an app, you have to reverse-engineer it. To do that, you'll have to decrypt and decompile it. That step is a felony under Section 1201 of the DMCA, carrying a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine. Beyond that, ad-blocking an app would give rise to liability under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (a law inspired by the movie Wargames!), under "tortious interference" claims, under trademark, copyright and patent.

More than 50% of web users have installed an ad-blocker:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

But zero percent of app users have installed an ad-blocker, because they don't exist, because you'd go to prison if you made one. An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it.

This is why self-help, the third constraint, no longer applies. When a corporate sadist says, "let's make ads 25% more obnoxious to get 2% more revenue," no one says, "if we do that, our users will all install blockers." Instead, the response is, "let's make ads 100% more obnoxious and get an 8% revenue boost!"

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/16/23763227/uber-video-advertising-ads-taxi-food-delivery-apps

Which brings me to the final constraint: workers.

Tech workers have historically enjoyed enormous bargaining power, thanks to a dire shortage of qualified personnel. While this allowed tech workers to command high salaries and cushy benefits, it also led many workers to conceive of themselves as entrepreneurs-in-waiting and not workers at all.

This made tech workers very exploitable: their bosses could sell them on the idea that they were doing something heroic, which warranted "extremely hardcore" expectations – working 16 hour days, sleeping under your desk, sacrificing your health, your family and your personal life to meet deadlines and ship products ("Real artists ship" – S. Jobs).

But the flip side of this appeal to heroism is that it only worked to the extent that it convinced workers to genuinely care about the things they made. When you miss you mother's funeral and pass on having kids in order to meet deadline and ship a product, the prospect of making that product worse is unthinkable.

Confronted by the moral injury of enshittifying a product you care about, and harming the users you see yourself as representing, many tech workers balked at the prospect. Because tech workers were scarce – and because there were plenty of employment prospects for workers who quit – they could actually prevent their bosses from making their products worse:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

But those days are behind us, too. Mass tech worker layoffs have gutted tech workers' confidence. When Google lays off 12,000 tech workers just months after a stock buyback that would have paid their wages for the next 27 years, they deliver two benefits to their shareholders. It's not just the short-term gains from the financial engineering – there's the long-term gain of gutting worker power and stripping away the final impediment to enshittification:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/

No matter how strong an individual tech worker's bargaining power was, it was always brittle. Long before googlers were being laid off in five-digit cohorts, they were working in an environment where harassment and predation were just part of the job. The 20,000+ googlers who walked off the job in 2018 were an important step towards replacing the system where each tech worker's power was limited to their moment-to-moment importance to their bosses' plans with a new system based on a collective identity.

Only through collective action and solidarity – unions – could tech workers hope to truly resist all the moral injuries of their bosses enshittification imperatives. No surprise then, that tech unions are on the rise:

https://abookapart.com/products/you-deserve-a-tech-union

But what is a little surprising – and very heartening! – is what happens when techies start to self-identify as workers: they come to understand that they share common cause with the other workers at the bottom of the tech stack. Think of Amazon's tech workers walking out in solidarity with Amazon's warehouse workers:

https://gizmodo.com/tech-workers-speak-out-in-support-of-amazon-warehouse-s-1842839301

Superficially, the bottom rank of the tech industry is as different from the tech workers at the top as you can imagine. Tech workers are formally employed, with stock options, health care and theme-park "campuses" with gyms and gourmet cafeterias.

The gig workers who pack, drive, deliver and support tech products aren't even employees – they're misclassified as contractors. They don't get free massages – they get AI bosses that monitor their eyeballs and dock their paychecks for peeing:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

Gig workers desperately need unions, but they also derive extraordinary benefits from self-help measures. When an app is your boss, another app can make all the difference to your working conditions. Take Para, an app that fights algorithmic wage discrimination by allowing gig workers to collectively and automatically refuse any job where the pay is below a certain threshold, forcing the algorithm to pay everyone more:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/tech-rights-are-workers-rights-doordash-edition

Para is fighting a grim legal and technical battle against companies like Doordash, whose margins depend on atomized workers with atomized apps, prohibited from countertwiddling. This is a surprisingly effective tactic: in Indonesia, gig workers co-ops create suites of "tuyul" apps that modify the behavior of their bosses' apps', unilaterally securing concessions that they lack the bargaining power to secure by other means:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek

Tuyul apps and other forms of countertwiddling aren't a substitute for unionization, they're an adjunct to it. The union negotiator whose rank-and-file are able to modify the apps that monitor and control their working conditions operates from a position of strength. "Please give my members more bathroom breaks" is a lot weaker than, "If you want my members to stop hacking their apps so they can piss when they need to, you're going to have to give them official bathroom breaks."

This is where solidarity between the high-paid tech workers at the keyboard and low-paid tech workers on the delivery bikes comes in. Together, they can wring more concessions from their bosses, sure. But unionized coders can give their unionized delivery riders the apps they need to countertwiddle and increase the bargaining leverage of all the workers in the union. And when unionized coders' bosses force them to put enshittifying anti-features in the apps they care about, unionized front-line workers can run counter-apps that disenshittify them.

Other sectors are already working through versions of this. The ouster of the old corrupt leadership of the Teamsters ushered in a new, radical era that produced historic wage and working condition gains for drivers and the abolition of the two-tier contract system that eventually destroys any union that tries it.

That change in leadership was possible because the Teamsters organized the Harvard Grad Students, and those Harvard kids memorized the union rulebook. At the historic conference where the old guard was abolished, it was teamwork between the union rank-and-file and the rules-lawyers from Harvard that turned the proceedings around:

https://theintercept.com/2023/04/07/deconstructed-union-dhl-teamsters-uaw/

We are deep into the enshittocene and it is terribly demoralizing. But by understanding the constraints that kept enshittification at bay, we can rebuild them, and shore them up. Labor organizing among all kinds of tech workers isn't just a way to get a better deal for those workers – it's key to the disenshittification of all our lives.

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

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/2024/01/13/solidarity-forever/#tech-unions

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Reverse engineers bust sleazy gig work platform

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/2024/11/23/hack-the-class-war/#robo-boss

A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE

THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION

Supposedly, these lines were included in a 1979 internal presentation at IBM; screenshots of them routinely go viral:

https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/1385565737167724545?lang=en

The reason for their newfound popularity is obvious: the rise and rise of algorithmic management tools, in which your boss is an app. That IBM slide is right: turning an app into your boss allows your actual boss to create an "accountability sink" in which there is no obvious way to blame a human or even a company for your maltreatment:

https://profilebooks.com/work/the-unaccountability-machine/

App-based management-by-bossware treats the bug identified by the unknown author of that IBM slide into a feature. When an app is your boss, it can force you to scab:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/30/computer-says-scab/#instawork

Or it can steal your wages:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

But tech giveth and tech taketh away. Digital technology is infinitely flexible: the program that spies on you can be defeated by another program that defeats spying. Every time your algorithmic boss hacks you, you can hack your boss back:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/02/not-what-it-does/#who-it-does-it-to

Technologists and labor organizers need one another. Even the most precarious and abused workers can team up with hackers to disenshittify their robo-bosses:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek

For every abuse technology brings to the workplace, there is a liberating use of technology that workers unleash by seizing the means of computation:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/13/solidarity-forever/#tech-unions

One tech-savvy group on the cutting edge of dismantling the Torment Nexus is Algorithms Exposed, a tiny, scrappy group of EU hacker/academics who recruit volunteers to reverse engineer and modify the algorithms that rule our lives as workers and as customers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

Algorithms Exposed have an admirable supply of seemingly boundless energy. Every time I check in with them, I learn that they've spun out yet another special-purpose subgroup. Today, I learned about Reversing Works, a hacking team that reverse engineers gig work apps, revealing corporate wrongdoing that leads to multimillion euro fines for especially sleazy companies.

One such company is Foodinho, an Italian subsidiary of the Spanish food delivery company Glovo. Foodinho/Glovo has been in the crosshairs of Italian labor enforcers since before the pandemic, racking up millions in fines – first for failing to file the proper privacy paperwork disclosing the nature of the data processing in the app that Foodinho riders use to book jobs. Then, after the Italian data commission investigated Foodinho, the company attracted new, much larger fines for its out-of-control surveillance conduct.

As all of this was underway, Reversing Works was conducting its own research into Glovo/Foodinho's app, running it on a simulated Android handset inside a PC so they could peer into app's data collection and processing. They discovered a nightmarish world of pervasive, illegal worker surveillance, and published their findings a year ago in November, 2023:

https://www.etui.org/sites/default/files/2023-10/Exercising%20workers%20rights%20in%20algorithmic%20management%20systems_Lessons%20learned%20from%20the%20Glovo-Foodinho%20digital%20labour%20platform%20case_2023.pdf

That report reveals all kinds of extremely illegal behavior. Glovo/Foodinho makes its riders' data accessible across national borders, so Glovo managers outside of Italy can access fine-grained surveillance information and sensitive personal information – a major data protection no-no.

Worse, Glovo's app embeds trackers from a huge number of other tech platforms (for chat, analytics, and more), making it impossible for the company to account for all the ways that its riders' data is collected – again, a requirement under Italian and EU data protection law.

All this data collection continues even when riders have clocked out for the day – its as though your boss followed you home after quitting time and spied on you.

The research also revealed evidence of a secretive worker scoring system that ranked workers based on undisclosed criteria and reserved the best jobs for workers with high scores. This kind of thing is pervasive in algorithmic management, from gig work to Youtube and Tiktok, where performers' videos are routinely suppressed because they crossed some undisclosed line. When an app is your boss, your every paycheck is docked because you violated a policy you're not allowed to know about, because if you knew why your boss was giving you shitty jobs, or refusing to show the video you spent thousands of dollars making to the subscribers who asked to see it, then maybe you could figure out how to keep your boss from detecting your rulebreaking next time.

All this data-collection and processing is bad enough, but what makes it all a thousand times worse is Glovo's data retention policy – they're storing this data on their workers for four years after the worker leaves their employ. That means that mountains of sensitive, potentially ruinous data on gig workers is just lying around, waiting to be stolen by the next hacker that breaks into the company's servers.

Reversing Works's report made quite a splash. A year after its publication, the Italian data protection agency fined Glovo another 5 million euros and ordered them to cut this shit out:

https://reversing.works/posts/2024/11/press-release-reversing.works-investigation-exposes-glovos-data-privacy-violations-marking-a-milestone-for-worker-rights-and-technology-accountability/

As the report points out, Italy is extremely well set up to defend workers' rights from this kind of bossware abuse. Not only do Italian enforcers have all the privacy tools created by the GDPR, the EU's flagship privacy regulation – they also have the benefit of Italy's 1970 Workers' Statute. The Workers Statute is a visionary piece of legislation that protects workers from automated management practices. Combined with later privacy regulation, it gave Italy's data regulators sweeping powers to defend Italian workers, like Glovo's riders.

Italy is also a leader in recognizing gig workers as de facto employees, despite the tissue-thin pretense that adding an app to your employment means that you aren't entitled to any labor protections. In the case of Glovo, the fine-grained surveillance and reputation scoring were deemed proof that Glovo was employer to its riders.

Reversing Works' report is a fascinating read, especially the sections detailing how the researchers recruited a Glovo rider who allowed them to log in to Glovo's platform on their account.

As Reversing Works points out, this bottom-up approach – where apps are subjected to technical analysis – has real potential for labor organizations seeking to protect workers. Their report established multiple grounds on which a union could seek to hold an abusive employer to account.

But this bottom-up approach also holds out the potential for developing direct-action tools that let workers flex their power, by modifying apps, or coordinating their actions to wring concessions out of their bosses.

After all, the whole reason for the gig economy is to slash wage-bills, by transforming workers into contractors, and by eliminating managers in favor of algorithms. This leaves companies extremely vulnerable, because when workers come together to exercise power, their employer can't rely on middle managers to pressure workers, deal with irate customers, or step in to fill the gap themselves:

https://projects.itforchange.net/state-of-big-tech/changing-dynamics-of-labor-and-capital/

Only by seizing the means of computation, workers and organized labor can turn the tables on bossware – both by directly altering the conditions of their employment, and by producing the evidence and tools that regulators can use to force employers to make those alterations permanent.

Image: EFF (modified) https://www.eff.org/files/issues/eu-flag-11_1.png

CC BY 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Gig apps trap reverse centaurs in Skinner boxes

Enshittification is the process by which digital platforms devour themselves: first they dangle goodies in front of end users. Once users are locked in, the goodies are taken away and dangled before business customers who supply goods to the users. Once those business customers are stuck on the platform, the goodies are clawed away and showered on the platform’s shareholders:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

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/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

Enshittification isn’t just another way of saying “fraud” or “price gouging” or “wage theft.” Enshittification is intrinsically digital, because moving all those goodies around requires the flexibility that only comes with a digital businesses. Jeff Bezos, grocer, can’t rapidly change the price of eggs at Whole Foods without an army of kids with pricing guns on roller-skates. Jeff Bezos, grocer, can change the price of eggs on Amazon Fresh just by twiddling a knob on the service’s back-end.

Twiddling is the key to enshittification: rapidly adjusting prices, conditions and offers. As with any shell game, the quickness of the hand deceives the eye. Tech monopolists aren’t smarter than the Gilded Age sociopaths who monopolized rail or coal — they use the same tricks as those monsters of history, but they do them faster and with computers:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

If Rockefeller wanted to crush a freight company, he couldn’t just click a mouse and lay down a pipeline that ran on the same route, and then click another mouse to make it go away when he was done. When Bezos wants to bankrupt Diapers.com — a company that refused to sell itself to Amazon — he just moved a slider so that diapers on Amazon were being sold below cost. Amazon lost $100m over three months, diapers.com went bankrupt, and every investor learned that competing with Amazon was a losing bet:

https://slate.com/technology/2013/10/amazon-book-how-jeff-bezos-went-thermonuclear-on-diapers-com.html

That’s the power of twiddling — but twiddling cuts both ways. The same flexibility that digital businesses enjoy is hypothetically available to workers and users. The airlines pioneered twiddling ticket prices, and that naturally gave rise to countertwiddling, in the form of comparison shopping sites that scraped the airlines’ sites to predict when tickets would be cheapest:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/27/knob-jockeys/#bros-be-twiddlin

The airlines — like all abusive businesses — refused to tolerate this. They were allowed to touch their knobs as much as they wanted — indeed, they couldn’t stop touching those knobs — but when we tried to twiddle back, that was “felony contempt of business model,” and the airlines sued:

https://www.cnbc.com/2014/12/30/airline-sues-man-for-founding-a-cheap-flights-website.html

And sued:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/business/southwest-airlines-lawsuit-prices.html

Platforms don’t just hate it when end-users twiddle back — if anything they are even more aggressive when their business-users dare to twiddle. Take Para, an app that Doordash drivers used to get a peek at the wages offered for jobs before they accepted them — something that Doordash hid from its workers. Doordash ruthlessly attacked Para, saying that by letting drivers know how much they’d earn before they did the work, Para was violating the law:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/tech-rights-are-workers-rights-doordash-edition

Which law? Well, take your pick. The modern meaning of “IP” is “any law that lets me use the law to control my competitors, competition or customers.” Platforms use a mix of anticircumvention law, patent, copyright, contract, cybersecurity and other legal systems to weave together a thicket of rules that allow them to shut down rivals for their Felony Contempt of Business Model:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

Enshittification relies on unlimited twiddling (by platforms), and a general prohibition on countertwiddling (by platform users). Enshittification is a form of fishing, in which bait is dangled before different groups of users and then nimbly withdrawn when they lunge for it. Twiddling puts the suppleness into the enshittifier’s fishing-rod, and a ban on countertwiddling weighs down platform users so they’re always a bit too slow to catch the bait.

Nowhere do we see twiddling’s impact more than in the “gig economy,” where workers are misclassified as independent contractors and put to work for an app that scripts their every move to the finest degree. When an app is your boss, you work for an employer who docks your pay for violating rules that you aren’t allowed to know — and where your attempts to learn those rules are constantly frustrated by the endless back-end twiddling that changes the rules faster than you can learn them.

As with every question of technology, the issue isn’t twiddling per se — it’s who does the twiddling and who gets twiddled. A worker armed with digital tools can play gig work employers off each other and force them to bid up the price of their labor; they can form co-ops with other workers that auto-refuse jobs that don’t pay enough, and use digital tools to organize to shift power from bosses to workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/02/not-what-it-does/#who-it-does-it-to

Take “reverse centaurs.” In AI research, a “centaur” is a human assisted by a machine that does more than either could do on their own. For example, a chess master and a chess program can play a better game together than either could play separately. A reverse centaur is a machine assisted by a human, where the machine is in charge and the human is a meat-puppet.

Think of Amazon warehouse workers wearing haptic location-aware wristbands that buzz at them continuously dictating where their hands must be; or Amazon drivers whose eye-movements are continuously tracked in order to penalize drivers who look in the “wrong” direction:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/17/reverse-centaur/#reverse-centaur

The difference between a centaur and a reverse centaur is the difference between a machine that makes your life better and a machine that makes your life worse so that your boss gets richer. Reverse centaurism is the 21st Century’s answer to Taylorism, the pseudoscience that saw white-coated “experts” subject workers to humiliating choreography down to the smallest movement of your fingertip:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust

While reverse centaurism was born in warehouses and other company-owned facilities, gig work let it make the leap into workers’ homes and cars. The 21st century has seen a return to the cottage industry — a form of production that once saw workers labor far from their bosses and thus beyond their control — but shriven of the autonomy and dignity that working from home once afforded:

https://doctorow.medium.com/gig-work-is-the-opposite-of-steampunk-463e2730ef0d

The rise and rise of bossware — which allows for remote surveillance of workers in their homes and cars — has turned “work from home” into “live at work.” Reverse centaurs can now be chickenized — a term from labor economics that describes how poultry farmers, who sell their birds to one of three vast poultry processors who have divided up the country like the Pope dividing up the “New World,” are uniquely exploited:

https://onezero.medium.com/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs-b2e8d5cda826

A chickenized reverse centaur has it rough: they must pay for the machines they use to make money for their bosses, they must obey the orders of the app that controls their work, and they are denied any of the protections that a traditional worker might enjoy, even as they are prohibited from deploying digital self-help measures that let them twiddle back to bargain for a better wage.

All of this sets the stage for a phenomenon called algorithmic wage discrimination, in which two workers doing the same job under the same conditions will see radically different payouts for that work. These payouts are continuously tweaked in the background by an algorithm that tries to predict the minimum sum a worker will accept to remain available without payment, to ensure sufficient workers to pick up jobs as they arise.

This phenomenon — and proposed policy and labor solutions to it — is expertly analyzed in “On Algorithmic Wage Discrimination,” a superb paper by UC Law San Franciscos Veena Dubal:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4331080

Dubal uses empirical data and enthnographic accounts from Uber drivers and other gig workers to explain how endless, self-directed twiddling allows gig companies pay workers less and pay themselves more. As @brianmerchant@mastodon.social explains in his LA Times article on Dubal’s research, the goal of the payment algorithm is to guess how often a given driver needs to receive fair compensation in order to keep them driving when the payments are unfair:

https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2023-04-11/algorithmic-wage-discrimination

The algorithm combines nonconsensual dossiers compiled on individual drivers with population-scale data to seek an equilibrium between keeping drivers waiting, unpaid, for a job; and how much a driver needs to be paid for an individual job, in order to keep that driver from clocking out and doing something else. @ Here’s how that works. Sergio Avedian, a writer for The Rideshare Guy, ran an experiment with two brothers who both drove for Uber; one drove a Tesla and drove intermittently, the other brother rented a hybrid sedan and drove frequently. Sitting side-by-side with the brothers, Avedian showed how the brother with the Tesla was offered more for every trip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UADTiL3S67I

Uber wants to lure intermittent drivers into becoming frequent drivers. Uber doesn’t pay for an oversupply of drivers, because it only pays drivers when they have a passenger in the car. Having drivers on call — but idle — is a way for Uber to shift the cost of maintaining a capacity cushion to its workers.

What’s more, what Uber charges customers is not based on how much it pays its workers. As Uber’s head of product explained: Uber uses “machine-learning techniques to estimate how much groups of customers are willing to shell out for a ride. Uber calculates riders’ propensity for paying a higher price for a particular route at a certain time of day. For instance, someone traveling from a wealthy neighborhood to another tony spot might be asked to pay more than another person heading to a poorer part of town, even if demand, traffic and distance are the same.”

https://qz.com/990131/uber-is-practicing-price-discrimination-economists-say-that-might-not-be-a-bad-thing/

Uber has historically described its business a pure supply-and-demand matching system, where a rush of demand for rides triggers surge pricing, which lures out drivers, which takes care of the demand. That’s not how it works today, and it’s unclear if it ever worked that way. Today, a driver who consults the rider version of the Uber app before accepting a job — to compare how much the rider is paying to how much they stand to earn — is booted off the app and denied further journeys.

Surging, instead, has become just another way to twiddle drivers. One of Dubal’s subjects, Derrick, describes how Uber uses fake surges to lure drivers to airports: “You go to the airport, once the lot get kind of full, then the surge go away.” Other drivers describe how they use groupchats to call out fake surges: “I’m in the Marina. It’s dead. Fake surge.”

That’s pure twiddling. Twiddling turns gamification into gamblification, where your labor buys you a spin on a roulette wheel in a rigged casino. As a driver called Melissa, who had doubled down on her availability to earn a $100 bonus awarded for clocking a certain number of rides, told Dubal, “When you get close to the bonus, the rides start trickling in more slowly…. And it makes sense. It’s really the type of shit that they can do when it’s okay to have a surplus labor force that is just sitting there that they don’t have to pay for.”

Wherever you find reverse-centaurs, you get this kind of gamblification, where the rules are twiddled continuously to make sure that the house always wins. As a contract driver Amazon reverse centaur told Lauren Gurley for Motherboard, “Amazon uses these cameras allegedly to make sure they have a safer driving workforce, but they’re actually using them not to pay delivery companies”:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/88npjv/amazons-ai-cameras-are-punishing-drivers-for-mistakes-they-didnt-make

Algorithmic wage discrimination is the robot overlord of our nightmares: its job is to relentlessly quest for vulnerabilities and exploit them. Drivers divide themselves into “ants” (drivers who take every job) and “pickers” (drivers who cherry-pick high-paying jobs). The algorithm’s job is ensuring that pickers get the plum assignments, not the ants, in the hopes of converting those pickers to app-dependent ants.

In my work on enshittification, I call this the “giant teddy bear” gambit. At every county fair, you’ll always spot some poor jerk carrying around a giant teddy-bear they “won” on the midway. But they didn’t win it — not by getting three balls in the peach-basket. Rather, the carny running the rigged game either chose not to operate the “scissor” that kicks balls out of the basket. Or, if the game is “honest” (that is, merely impossible to win, rather than gimmicked), the operator will make a too-good-to-refuse offer: “Get one ball in and I’ll give you this keychain. Win two keychains and I’ll let you trade them for this giant teddy bear.”

Carnies aren’t in the business of giving away giant teddy bears — rather, the gambit is an investment. Giving a mark a giant teddy bear to carry around the midway all day acts as a convincer, luring other marks to try to land three balls in the basket and win their own teddy bear.

In the same way, platforms like Uber distribute giant teddy bears to pickers, as a way of keeping the ants scurrying from job to job, and as a way of convincing the pickers to give up whatever work allows them to discriminate among Uber’s offers and hold out for the plum deals, whereupon then can be transmogrified into ants themselves.

Dubal describes the experience of Adil, a Syrian refugee who drives for Uber in the Bay Area. His colleagues are pickers, and showed him screenshots of how much they earned. Determined to get a share of that money, Adil became a model ant, driving two hours to San Francisco, driving three days straight, napping in his car, spending only one day per week with his family. The algorithm noticed that Adil needed the work, so it paid him less.

Adil responded the way the system predicted he would, by driving even more: “My friends they make it, so I keep going, maybe I can figure it out. It’s unsecure, and I don’t know how people they do it. I don’t know how I am doing it, but I have to. I mean, I don’t find another option. In a minute, if I find something else, oh man, I will be out immediately. I am a very patient person, that’s why I can continue.”

Another driver, Diego, told Dubal about how the winners of the giant teddy bears fell into the trap of thinking that they were “good at the app”: “Any time there’s some big shot getting high pay outs, they always shame everyone else and say you don’t know how to use the app. I think there’s secret PR campaigns going on that gives targeted payouts to select workers, and they just think it’s all them.”

That’s the power of twiddling: by hoarding all the flexibility offered by digital tools, the management at platforms can become centaurs, able to string along thousands of workers, while the workers are reverse-centaurs, puppeteered by the apps.

As the example of Adil shows, the algorithm doesn’t need to be very sophisticated in order to figure out which workers it can underpay. The system automates the kind of racial and gender discrimination that is formally illegal, but which is masked by the smokescreen of digitization. An employer who systematically paid women less than men, or Black people less than white people, would be liable to criminal and civil sanctions. But if an algorithm simply notices that people who have fewer job prospects drive more and will thus accept lower wages, that’s just “optimization,” not racism or sexism.

This is the key to understanding the AI hype bubble: when ghouls from multinational banks predict 13 trillion dollar markets for “AI,” what they mean is that digital tools will speed up the twiddling and other wage-suppression techniques to transfer $13T in value from workers and consumers to shareholders.

The American business lobby is relentlessly focused on the goal of reducing wages. That’s the force behind “free trade,” “right to work,” and other codewords for “paying workers less,” including “gig work.” Tech workers long saw themselves as above this fray, immune to labor exploitation because they worked for a noble profession that took care of its own.

But the epidemic of mass tech-worker layoffs, following on the heels of massive stock buybacks, has demonstrated that tech bosses are just like any other boss: willing to pay as little as they can get away with, and no more. Tech bosses are so comfortable with their market dominance and the lock-in of their customers that they are happy to turn out hundreds of thousands of skilled workers, convinced that the twiddling systems they’ve built are the kinds of self-licking ice-cream cones that are so simple even a manager can use them — no morlocks required.

The tech worker layoffs are best understood as an all-out war on tech worker morale, because that morale is the source of tech workers’ confidence and thus their demands for a larger share of the value generated by their labor. The current tech layoff template is very different from previous tech layoffs: today’s layoffs are taking place over a period of months, long after they are announced, and laid off tech worker is likely to be offered a months of paid post-layoff work, rather than severance. This means that tech workplaces are now haunted by the walking dead, workers who have been laid off but need to come into the office for months, even as the threat of layoffs looms over the heads of the workers who remain. As an old friend, recently laid off from Microsoft after decades of service, wrote to me, this is “a new arrow in the quiver of bringing tech workers to heel and ensuring that we’re properly thankful for the jobs we have (had?).”

Dubal is interested in more than analysis, she’s interested in action. She looks at the tactics already deployed by gig workers, who have not taken all this abuse lying down. Workers in the UK and EU organized through Worker Info Exchange and the App Drivers and Couriers Union have used the GDPR (the EU’s privacy law) to demand “algorithmic transparency,” as well as access to their data. In California, drivers hope to use similar provisions in the CCPA (a state privacy law) to do the same.

These efforts have borne fruit. When Cornell economists, led by Louis Hyman, published research (paid for by Uber) claiming that Uber drivers earned an average of $23/hour, it was data from these efforts that revealed the true average Uber driver’s wage was $9.74. Subsequent research in California found that Uber drivers’ wage fell to $6.22/hour after the passage of Prop 22, a worker misclassification law that gig companies spent $225m to pass, only to have the law struck down because of a careless drafting error:

https://www.latimes.com/california/newsletter/2021-08-23/proposition-22-lyft-uber-decision-essential-california

But Dubal is skeptical that data-coops and transparency will achieve transformative change and build real worker power. Knowing how the algorithm works is useful, but it doesn’t mean you can do anything about it, not least because the platform owners can keep touching their knobs, twiddling the payout schedule on their rigged slot-machines.

Data co-ops start from the proposition that “data extraction is an inevitable form of labor for which workers should be remunerated.” It makes on-the-job surveillance acceptable, provided that workers are compensated for the spying. But co-ops aren’t unions, and they don’t have the power to bargain for a fair price for that data, and coops themselves lack the vast resources — “to store, clean, and understand” — data.

Co-ops are also badly situated to understand the true value of the data that is extracted from their members: “Workers cannot know whether the data collected will, at the population level, violate the civil rights of others or amplifies their own social oppression.”

Instead, Dubal wants an outright, nonwaivable prohibition on algorithmic wage discrimination. Just make it illegal. If firms cannot use gambling mechanisms to control worker behavior through variable pay systems, they will have to find ways to maintain flexible workforces while paying their workforce predictable wages under an employment model. If a firm cannot manage wages through digitally-determined variable pay systems, then the firm is less likely to employ algorithmic management.”

In other words, rather than using market mechanisms too constrain platform twiddling, Dubal just wants to make certain kinds of twiddling illegal. This is a growing trend in legal scholarship. For example, the economist Ramsi Woodcock has proposed a ban on surge pricing as a per se violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act:

https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-105-issue-4/the-efficient-queue-and-the-case-against-dynamic-pricing

Similarly, Dubal proposes that algorithmic wage discrimination violates another antitrust law: the Robinson-Patman Act, which “bans sellers from charging competing buyers different prices for the same commodity. Robinson-Patman enforcement was effectively halted under Reagan, kicking off a host of pathologies, like the rise of Walmart:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/27/walmarts-jackals/#cheater-sizes

I really liked Dubal’s legal reasoning and argument, and to it I would add a call to reinvigorate countertwiddling: reforming laws that get in the way of workers who want to reverse-engineer, spoof, and control the apps that currently control them. Adversarial interoperability (AKA competitive compatibility or comcom) is key tool for building worker power in an era of digital Taylorism:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

To see how that works, look to other jursidictions where workers have leapfrogged their European and American cousins, such as Indonesia, where gig workers and toolsmiths collaborate to make a whole suite of “tuyul apps,” which let them override the apps that gig companies expect them to use.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek

For example, ride-hailing companies won’t assign a train-station pickup to a driver unless they’re circling the station — which is incredibly dangerous during the congested moments after a train arrives. A tuyul app lets a driver park nearby and then spoof their phone’s GPS fix to the ridehailing company so that they appear to be right out front of the station.

In an ideal world, those workers would have a union, and be able to dictate the app’s functionality to their bosses. But workers shouldn’t have to wait for an ideal world: they don’t just need jam tomorrow — they need jam today. Tuyul apps, and apps like Para, which allow workers to extract more money under better working conditions, are a prelude to unionization and employer regulation, not a substitute for it.

Employers will not give workers one iota more power than they have to. Just look at the asymmetry between the regulation of union employees versus union busters. Under US law, employees of a union need to account for every single hour they work, every mile they drive, every location they visit, in public filings. Meanwhile, the union-busting industry — far larger and richer than unions — operate under a cloak of total secrecy, Workers aren’t even told which union busters their employers have hired — let alone get an accounting of how those union busters spend money, or how many of them are working undercover, pretending to be workers in order to sabotage the union.

Twiddling will only get an employer so far. Twiddling — like all “AI” — is based on analyzing the past to predict the future. The heuristics an algorithm creates to lure workers into their cars can’t account for rapid changes in the wider world, which is why companies who relied on “AI” scheduling apps (for example, to prevent their employees from logging enough hours to be entitled to benefits) were caught flatfooted by the Great Resignation.

Workers suddenly found themselves with bargaining power thanks to the departure of millions of workers — a mix of early retirees and workers who were killed or permanently disabled by covid — and they used that shortage to demand a larger share of the fruits of their labor. The outraged howls of the capital class at this development were telling: these companies are operated by the kinds of “capitalists” that MLK once identified, who want “socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor.”

https://twitter.com/KaseyKlimes/status/821836823022354432/

There's only 5 days left in the Kickstarter campaign for the audiobook of my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called Red Team Blues. Amazon's Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they're DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.

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[mostlysignssomeportents]

How tech changed global labor struggles for better and worse

The original sin of both tech boosterism and tech criticism is to focus unduly on what a given technology does, without regard to who it does it to and who it does it for. When it comes to technology’s effect on our daily lives, the social arrangements matter much more than the feature-sets.

This is the premise behind my idea of the “shitty technology adoption curve”: if you want to do something horrible to people with technology, you must first inflict it on people without social power and then work your way slowly up the privilege gradient, smoothing the tech’s rough edges by sanding them against the human bodies of people who can’t fight back.

Thus we see the rise of all disciplinary technology, especially bossware, which started off monitoring forced prison labor, then blue-collar workers, then pink collar workers (like the largely female, largely Black work-from-home customer service reps who work for Arise):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/22/paperback-writer/#toothless

The pandemic saw the spread of bossware to affluent, “high-skilled” white-collar workers, from doctors to teachers to IT workers, as the idea of being monitored continuously in your own home, from camera to keystrokes, was normalized by the lockdown:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

And yet, what matters about bossware isn’t what it does — a keylogger that you control is just called “undo” — but who it does it to. When gig workers “seize the means of reproduction” and hack the apps that boss them around, they can turn the tables. That’s what’s happening in Indonesia, where Tuyul apps are produced by worker co-ops and small software vendors to give drivers direct control over their working conditions:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek

This is true disruption, where tech isn’t just used for regulatory arbitrage (as when gig-work apps are used to avoid labor laws by misclassifying workers as contractors):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/21/contra-nihilismum/#the-street-finds-its-own-use-for-things

That’s what makes Rida Qadri’s research so exciting: the premise that if workers can hack their employers back, bossware can become laborware:

https://www.wired.com/story/disruption-mobility-platforms-politics/

In the USA, companies like Para are creating apps that sit on top of the gig work dispatch apps, monitoring all the offers from all the different apps and auto-declining offers that are too low, forcing the algorithm to bid up the labor share of the companies’ income:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/tech-rights-are-workers-rights-doordash-edition

Writing for IT for Change’s outstanding inaugural “State of Big Tech” issue, the Vidhi Centre For Legal Policy’s Jai Vipra presents “Changing Dynamics of Labor and Capital,” a deep, essential look at the way that tech affects labor struggles around the world:

https://projects.itforchange.net/state-of-big-tech/changing-dynamics-of-labor-and-capital/

Vipra’s report is fascinating not just for the eye-watering new ways that capital uses tech to inflict pain on labor, but for the ingenious, effective mechanisms that workers use tech to answer power with countervailing power.

For example, when workers delivering for the Swiggy app were unable to get the company to respond to the ways that the app was driving them into unsustainable and dangerous working schedules, they staged a “log-out strike” and collectively withheld their labor from the app, triggering a crisis that management couldn’t ignore.

Likewise, drivers for Ola began mass-cancelling rides to protest the company’s policy of not showing drivers their destinations and pay until they accepted a job — the resulting chaos forced the company to let drivers see all the details of an offer of work before accepting it.

These direct actions are driven in part by the platforms’ relentless pursuit of a reduced wage-bill, which sees them laying off swathes of back-office workers who once stepped in to mediate between gig workers and their algorithmic managers. When you can’t get anyone on the phone or a livechat to complain that your app wants you to drive off a pier and into the deep blue sea, collective digital power swings into action.

The Shitty Tech Adoption Curve means that we find the tactics of gig drivers working their way up the privilege gradient to white-collar workers, and sure enough, in Mar 2021, Goldman Sachs bankers coordinated a threat of mass resignation over the bossware monitoring them in their homes 24/7, complaining of 105 hour (!!) work-weeks:

https://www.thejakartapost.com/life/2021/03/28/goldman-sachs-overwork-accusation-hits-nerve-as-pandemic-blurs-work-life-line-.html

But ad-hoc coordination has its limits. Spinning up a new organizing group to counter each new bossware fuckery exacts a terrible price from already overstretched, precarious workers. That’s where unions come in. On the face of it, unionizing gig workers presents an insurmountable challenge: they are atomized, geographically dispersed and lack even a break room.

But tech taketh away and it giveth back. When Uber Eats bait-and-switched drivers into signing up in 2016 and then slashed their wages, organizers connected with other workers by placing small food orders with Uber Eats and then had organizing conversations with the drivers who delivered the orders:

https://www.ft.com/content/88fdc58e-754f-11e6-b60a-de4532d5ea35

Bosses push back. They’ve convinced gutless labor regulators to ban the use of work email addresses for union organizing; they send infiltrators to monitor private Facebook conversations, they plant spyware on phones and laptops to crack open Whatsapp group-chats. Location-aware ID badges let bosses follow workers around and target potential union organizers for retaliatory firings.

The same monitoring tools let bosses nickel-and-dime their workers, clocking them off while they’re “unproductive” (peeing, driving to pick up their next passenger or delivery, or only paying retail workers while a customer is in the shop).

It’s a mixed bag: in China, independent workers’ rights centers work almost exclusively through social media, “for both direct consultations and mass dissemination of information, and this use is contributing to the organizing of labor as well.”

And ironically, monopoly helps labor organizers: the rollup plays that have seen most CloudKitchens gathered into the hands of a few firms means that their workers are more likely to be physically proximate and able to organize labor resistance to their monopolist bosses.

A common labor complaint in the age of digitalization is that their bosses monitor and discipline them for their off-hours activities: think of Deutsche Welle and the AP firing journalists who used their personal social media accounts to express support for Palestinians’ struggle for justice.

Bossware vendors boast that they can monitor workers’ personal online activity “to help them stay focused” — something 72% of workers object to. It’s easy to see how this can become a focus of labor activism, especially as employers announce that they will fire any worker who refuses to supply a full list of their social media accounts for monitoring:

https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/all-things-work/pages/watching-the-workers.aspx

The next level of personal surveillance comes from “voluntary” health monitoring in which employees are required to wear Fitbits or other biometric tracking tools, or face increases to their health care premiums and other penalties. This is bad enough, but these biometric companies are choice acquisition targets for the biggest surveillance companies in the world, which means that you might one day wake up and find out that the data from your employer-mandated tracking cuff is now in Google’s hands:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/google-fitbit-merger-would-cement-googles-data-empire

Neoliberalism got us into this mess, and tech was its willing accomplice. But Vipra makes a good case that tech can “increase the negotiating power of labor over capital.” For Vipra, this starts with access to data: in India, “analog” workers have the legal right to know their employers’ profit margins, which is key for collective bargaining. But digital workers don’t have this right:

https://medium.com/tech-people/new-labour-codes-explained-48a4679d4a29

Giving gig workers the right to their own performance data would help those workers secure competitive bids for their labor — denying workers access to this data is anti-competitive:

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/09/workplace-data-rights-regulation/

This same data can be used to make the case for regulation and unionization: when it’s your word against your boss’s, it might be hard to interest public officials in protecting your working conditions. But when the data shows that gig workers are putting in 12–18 hour days without overtime, the case is harder to ignore:

https://www.justjobsnetwork.org/wp-content/pubs/reports/transformations_in_technology_report.pdf

Modern employers collect vast amount of data about their workers, but share almost none of it. Again, the important thing isn’t what the tech is doing, but who it’s doing it for and who it’s doing it to.

Vipra also singles out the one-sided nature of the platforms’ use of payment technologies. Modern payment systems mean that gig work platforms collect their customers’ money in near-realtime, but despite this, gig companies are the most delay-prone employers, paying workers after totally unjustifiable delays that give bosses free cash flow and force workers into precarity.

https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/08/former-head-of-mint-raises-4-5m-for-lean/

After this critique, Vipra proposes “a substantive agenda for labor” in five areas: algorithmic regulation, data sharing, remote work rights, financial rights, and “emancipatory automation.”

Algorithmic regulation: Algorithms should have “a minimum level of explainability”; “minimum performance levels” (error rates, transparency, etc); and “human involvement in decision making” must be mandatory (so you can get prompt and effective redress when the algorithm misfires).

Data sharing: Don’t just “data minimize” — “reorient it towards goals that are worker- and society-friendly.” Collect and share data on labor safety, and mandate that companies “collect, analyze, and share big data to protect workers’ rights.”

Remote work rights: The right to disconnect from work; the right to be paid for work equipment, including chairs, internet access, etc (I would add here, the right to have those devices configured to block employer monitoring).

Financial rights: The state should mandate financial interoperability and use account aggregators and open banking to “minimize[] the information asymmetry in favor of people for whom information is collateral.” Force platforms to disclose the commissions, fees, incentives, etc they offer to workers. Provide source-code for these systems to regulators.

Emancipatory automation: “Automation should mean less drudgery and fewer working hours overall.” This is what I’m getting at when I call for technologists to become full-stack Luddites:

https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/

Overall, Vipra presents a bracing, challenging view of the way that tech can serve both labor and capital, depending on how it is configured and used. I don’t agree with everything she says (the privacy section in data rights could use its own article of equal depth and critical analysis), but reading this made the hair on the back on my neck stand up (in a good way).

This is more or less what I had in mind back in 2009 when I was writing For the Win, about how multiplayer games could serve as organizing platforms for an international labor vanguard (the Industrial Workers of the World Wide Web, or Webblies):

https://craphound.com/category/ftw/

[Image ID: An altered version of J.C. Leyendecker's Labor Day 1946 cover illustration for Hearst's 'American Weekly' magazine. The original features a muscular worker in dungarees sitting atop a banner-draped globe, holding a sledgehammer. In this version, his head has been replaced with a faceless hacker-in-a-hoodie, and his sledgehammer has been filled with Matrix code-waterfall characters. Leyendecker's signature has been replaced with an IWW graphic depicting workers with upraised fists all joining together to form a gigantic fist.]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How Goldman Sachs's "tax-loss harvesting" lets the ultra-rich rake in billions tax-free

Tomorrow (Apr 25) I’ll be in San Diego for the launch of my new novel, Red Team Blues, at 7PM at Mysterious Galaxy Books, hosted by Sarah Gailey. Please come and say hi!

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With the IRS Files, Propublica ripped away the veil of performative complexity disguising the scams that the ultra-rich use to amass billions and billions (and billions and billions) of dollars, paying next to no tax, or even no tax at all. Each scam is its own little shell game, a set of semantic and accounting tricks used to gussy up otherwise banal rip-offs.

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/2023/04/24/tax-loss-harvesting/#mego

The finance sector has a cute name for this kind of complexity: MEGO, which stands for "my eyes glaze over." If you're trying to rip off a mark, you just pad out the prospectus, make it so thick they decide there must be something good in there, the same way that any pile of shit that's sufficiently large must have a pony under it...somewhere.

Propublica's writers haven't merely confirmed just how little America's oligarchs pay in tax - they've also de-MEGO-ized each of these scams, like the way that Peter Thiel used the Roth IRA - a tax-shelter for middle-class earners to help save a few thousand dollars for retirement - to make $5 billion without paying one cent in tax:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/26/wax-rothful/#thiels-gambit

One of my favorite IRS Files reports described how Steve Ballmer - the billionaire ex-CEO of Microsoft - laundered vast fortunes into a state of tax-free grace by creating hundreds of millions in "losses" from his basketball team, the LA Clippers. Ballmer paid 12% tax on the $656 million he took out of the Clippers - while the players whose labor generated that fortune paid 30-40% on their earnings:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#economic-substance-doctrine

That was Propublica's first Ballmer story, back in the summer of 2021. But they ran a followup last February that I missed (it came out while I was on a book tour in Australia), and it's wild: a tale of "loss harvesting," a form of fuckery involving Goldman Sachs that's depraved even by their own standards:

https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-files-taxes-wash-sales-goldman-sachs

Loss farming is a scam that was invented in the 1920s, whereupon it was promptly banned by Congress. But Goldman and other plutocrat Renfields have come up with tiny modern variations on this century-old con that the IRS is either unable or unwilling to address.

Here's how it works. Say you've got a stock portfolio where some of the stocks have gone up and others have gone down. You want to sell the high stocks and hang onto the low ones until they bounce back. But if you sell those stocks that have gone up, you have to "realize" the profit from them and pay 20% capital gains tax on them (capital gains tax is the tax you pay on money you get from owning things; it's much lower than income tax - the tax you pay for doing things).

But you pay tax on your net capital gains - the profits you've made minus the losses you've suffered. What if you sold those loser stocks at the same time? If you made a million on the good stocks and lost a million on the bad ones, your net income is zero - and so is your tax bill.

The problem is that selling stocks when they've gone down is a surefire way to go broke. Every investing book starts with this advice: you will be tempted to hold onto your stocks that are going up, because they might continue to go up. You'll be tempted to sell your stocks that are going down, because they may continue to go down. But if you do that, you'll only sell the stocks that have lost money, and never sell the stocks that have made money, and so you will lose everything.

Back when the pandemic started, your shares in movie theater chains were in the toilet, while your stock in tech companies shot through the roof. If you sold the tech stocks then and held onto your movie stocks and sold them now, you'd have cleaned up - today, tech stocks are down and movie theater stocks are up. But if you sold the cinema shares when they bottomed out, and held onto your tech stocks when they were peaking, you'd be busted today.

So selling your loser stocks to offset the gains from your winners is a bad idea. That's where loss-farming comes in: what if you sold your tech stocks at their peak, and sold your bottomed-out cinema stocks at the same time, but then bought the cinema stocks again, right away? That way you'd have the "loss" from selling the cinema stocks, but you'd still have the stocks.

That's called "wash trading," and Congress promptly banned it. If you've heard of wash-trading, it's probably something you picked up during the NFT bubble, which was a cesspit of illegal wash-trading. Remember all those eye-popping NFT sales? It was just grifters with multiple wallets, buying NFTs from themselves, making it seem like there was this huge, white-hot market for monkey JPEGs. Wash-trading.

Turns out that crypto really did democratize finance...fraud.

Wash-trading has been illegal for a century, but brokerages have invented modern variations on the theme that are legal-ish, and the most lucrative versions of these scams are only available to billionaires, through companies like Goldman Sachs.

There are a bunch of these variations, but they all boil down to this: there are lots of ways to sell an asset and buy it again, while making it look like you bought a different asset. Like, say you're invested in Chinese tech companies through an exchange-traded fund (ETF) that bundles together "all the Top Chinese tech stocks."

Maybe you bought this fund through Vanguard, the giant brokerage. Now, say Chinese stocks are way down, because the Chinese government is doing these waves of lockdowns on the factory cities. If you could sell those Chinese stocks now, you'd get a massive loss, enough to wipe out all the profits from all your good stocks.

But of course, China's going to figure out the lockdown situation eventually, so you don't want to actually get rid of those stocks right now, especially since they're worth so much less than you paid for them. So right after you sell your Vanguard Chinese tech ETF shares, you buy the same amount of Schwab's Chinese tech-stock ETF.

An ETF of "leading Chinese tech companies" is going to have basically the same companies' stock in it, no matter whether it's sold by Vanguard, State Street or Schwab. But as far as the IRS is concerned, this isn't a wash-trade, because you sold a thing called "Vanguard ETF" and bought a thing called "Schwab ETF" and these are different things (even if the main difference is the name on the wrapper, and not what's inside).

There's other ways to do this. For example, lots of companies have different "classes" of stock. Under Armour sells both Class A (voting) and Class C (nonvoting) stocks. Though voting stock is worth a little more than nonvoting stock, they both rise and fall together - if the Class A shares are up 10%, so are the Class C shares. So you can dump your Under Armour Class A's, buy Under Armour Class C's and own essentially the same amount of Under Armour stock - but as far as the IRS is concerned, you just sold your interest in one company and bought an interest in a different company, and you can take a big loss and write down your profits from other stock trades.

The IRS does prohibit wash-trading, but only in the narrowest sense. Brokerages are obliged to report trades in which a customer buys and sells exactly the same security, with the same unique ID (the CUSIP number), within 60 days. Beyond that, IRS guidance is extraordinarily wishy-washy, calling on filers to "consider all the facts and circumstances" of their transactions. Sure, that'll work.

Propublica found zero instances of the IRS targeting any of these trades, ever, for enforcement. That's especially true of the most egregious version of loss-harvesting, a special version that only the ultra-rich can take advantage of, called "direct indexing." You might know about "index funds," where a brokerage sells a single fund that tracks a broad index of stocks - for example, you can buy an S&P 500 index that goes up and down with the total value of the top 500 stocks in America.

Direct indexing is something that giant banks like Goldman Sachs offer to their very richest clients. The brokerage buys a mix of stocks that are likely to track the whole index, and puts those shares directly into the client's account. Rather than owning shares in a fund that owns the stocks, you own the stocks directly. That means that when you want to harvest some losses, you can sell just a few of the stocks in the index, rather than your shares in the whole fund.

Here's how that works. In 2017, the US index was up 20%; global indexes were up even more. Steve Ballmer made a bundle. But Goldman Sachs, acting on Ballmer's behalf, sold s few of the stocks in the portfolio and harvested a $100,000,000 loss, that Ballmer could use to trick the IRS into treating his massive profits as though he'd made very little taxable income.

Goldman uses a whole range of tricks to keep billionaires like Ballmer in a lower tax-bracket than the janitors who clean the floors after his team's games. They not only buy and sell different classes of stock in companies like Discovery and Fox; they also buy and sell the same company's stock in different countries. For example, they sold Ballmer's shares in Shell in one country, and then immediately bought the same amount of shares in another country. The IRS doesn't treat this as a wash-trade, despite the fact that the shares have the same value, and, indeed, companies like Shell routinely merge their overseas and domestic shares with no change in valuation.

Thanks to Goldman's ruses - and the IRS's willingness to accept them - Ballmer's wealth has swollen to grotesque proportions. He generated $579 million in losses from 2014-18, and as a result, got to keep at least $138m that he'd have otherwise had to pay to the IRS.

Goldman's not the only one in on this game: Iconiq Captial - a firm that also offers marriage partner scouting for its richest clients - has $13.2 billion under management on behalf of just 337 people. Among those high-rollers: Mark Zuckerberg, whose $88m in gains from Iconiq investments were offset by $34m in imaginary losses that the company manufactured with wash-trades.

In theory, the simplest form of wash-trading - selling your Vanguard China fund and buying a Schwab China fund - is available to any investor. Leaving aside the fact that the top 1% of Americans own most of the stock, this is still a deceptive proposition. This kind of wash-trading only benefits investors who hold their shares outside of a sheltered retirement account, which is a vanishing minority indeed.

Instead, the primary beneficiaries of this activity are the usual suspects: convicted monopolists like Ballmer, or useless scions of wealthy families, like the kids of Walmart founder Sam Walton, who emerged into this world through very lucky orifices and are thus effectively exempt from the need to work or pay tax for life.

Jim Walton is Sam Walton's youngest orifice-lottery-winner. Young Jim saw a $10 billion increase in his wealth from 2014-18, making him the tenth richest person in America. Thanks to wash-trading, he declared only $111 million of that $10 billion on his taxes, and paid $0.00 in tax on that $10 billion gains.

One way that the rich are especially well-situated to exploit loss-harvesting is in converting short-term gains - which are taxed at 40% - into long-term gains, which are taxed at 20%. For people who make a lot of money buying and selling shares as pure speculation, flipping them in less than a year, wash-trading can create the appearance of long-term holdings. Analyzing their trove of leaked IRS files, Propublica showed that Americans who report over $10 million in income almost never report short-term gains. Instead, two-thirds of the richest Americans report short-term losses.

One fascinating wrinkle is that rich people may not even know this is going on. Whatsapp co-founder Brian Acton, managed to "lose" $2.9 million  when he sold $17 million in shares - the same day he bought $17 million in shares in nearly the same companies from another brokerage. Then, a few months later, he reversed those transactions, selling his new fund and buying the old one and harvesting another $600,000 in losses.

When Propublica asked Acton about this, he told them he was "not really aware of any events like that...Broadly my wealth is managed by a wealth management firm and they manage all the day to day transactions."

This is completely believable and consistent with the extraordinarily frank account of how elite money-management works that Abigail Disney described in 2021, where the ultra-rich are insulated from the scams, tricks and wheezes that lawyers and accountants dream up to keep their fortunes steadily mounting with no action needed on their part:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/19/dynastic-wealth/#caste

Could the IRS block this kind of wash-trading? Yes, but they'd need action from Congress. The most effective way to do this would be to force shareholders to "mark to market" the value of their holdings, taxing them each year on the fluctuations in their portfolio.

Propublica notes that this is incredibly unlikely to happen, though. As an alternative, Congress could change the rule that blocks investors from claiming losses when they buy and sell "substantially identical" shares with a rule that applies to "substantially similar" stocks. This proposal comes from Columbia Law's David Schizer, who says the law "ought to be updated to reflect how people invest today instead of how they invested 100 years ago."

But for any of that to have an effect, the IRS would have to change its auditing and enforcement practices, which currently see low-income earners (who can't afford fancy tax-lawyers who'll tie up the IRS for months or years) being disproportionately targeted, while America's super-rich, ultra-rich, and stupid-rich are allowed to submit the most hilariously, obviously fictional returns and get away with it.

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Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in San Diego, Burbank, Mountain View, Berkeley, San Francisco, Portland, Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, DC, Gaithersburg, Oxford, Hay, Manchester, Nottingham, London, and Berlin!

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[Image ID: A dilapidated shack. A sign reading 'Internal Revenue Service Building' stands next to it. From its eaves depends another sign, reading 'Internal Revenue Service' and bearing the IRS logo. From the window of the shack beams the grinning face of billionaire Steve Ballmer. Behind the shack is a DC avenue terminating in the Capitol Dome.]

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Image: Matthew Bisanz (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NYC_IRS_office_by_Matthew_Bisanz.JPG

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

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Ted Eytan (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2021.02.07_DC_Street,_Washington,_DC_USA_038_13205-Edit_%2850920473547%29.jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

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Bart Everson (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/editor/1287341637

Eric Garcetti (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Steve_Ballmer_2014.jpg

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

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The people's disruption

“Innovation” is in very bad odor these days. “Disruption” is even more disreputable. But as tech and the global south researcher Rida Qadri writes in Wired, “innovation” isn’t limited to inventing unregulated banks and calling them “fintech” and “disruption” is more than just misclassifying employees as contractors.

https://www.wired.com/story/disruption-mobility-platforms-politics/

Qadri studies workers who are seizing the means of computation, reverse-engineering and repurposing the apps that are meant to keep them in bondage and figuring out how to set themselves free. Her research on gig drivers in Jakarta is essential reading:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek

Indonesian drivers have banded together to build clubhouses that serve as break-rooms, union halls, tech workshops and scooter maintenance depots. These centers are the birthplace of “tuyul” apps, which allow workers to resist algorithmic “optimization” and adapt their working conditions to improve their pay and safety.

In her Wired piece, Qadri gives examples of other “tech workers” — that is, low-waged, casualized workers who are dispatched and managed by apps — who use technology to take back control, from “farmers who strike against a smart city plan” to riders who band together to get back their stolen scooters.

This is mutual aid, with code. It is every bit as innovative and disruptive as Uber or Amazon, but because it is done by workers, rather than to workers, it is not recognized as such. Indeed, when workers modify the apps that script their movements, they’re called “criminals,” not “innovators.”

Take Doordash’s smear campaign against Para, an app that let delivery drivers find out how much a job paid before they took it (Doordash hides compensation from drivers in hopes of tricking them into taking unprofitable runs):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/tech-rights-are-workers-rights-doordash-edition

Doordash called Para a criminal app, baselessly accused it of identity theft, and insisted that drivers had no right to know how much they were going to get paid before they committed to a job.

But as Para shows, seizing the means of computation is an important strategy for workers seeking a better life. The tactics of Adversarial Interoperability (AKA Competitive Compatibility or Comcom) can transfer power from Goliaths to Davids:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

But the soi-disant disruptors of the business world will not tolerate being disrupted themselves. Uber is content to skirt labor, safety and transportation policy, but would scream bloody murder if drivers and riders hacked the app to make it obsolete:

https://locusmag.com/2019/01/cory-doctorow-disruption-for-thee-but-not-for-me/

Image: Hugh D’Andrade/EFF (modified) https://www.eff.org/about/staff/hugh-dandrade

Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/

[mostlysignssomeportents]

America's 400 top earners pay less tax than you

Last June, Propublica announced that it was in possession of leaked IRS files detailing the tax affairs of America’s richest people, and that the IRS Files showed that taxes are — as Leona Helmsley famously quipped — for the little people:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/15/guillotines-and-taxes/#carried-interest

The initial reporting described how, for example, private equity raiders were able to debt-finance acquisitions of productive businesses, run them into the ground, pocket hundreds of millions of dollars, and avoid tax as they sprinted away from the wreckage.

A key scam that enables this looting is the “carried interest” loophole, which most normies assume has something to do with not paying tax on the interest you earn from a loan or something. That’s a reasonable assumption, but it’s dead wrong. “Carried interest” is a doctrine invented to make things fairer for 16th century sea-captains, and it has nothing to do with interest on loans.

How does a scam like that persist in the tax code for 500 years? Well, one thing the IRS Files showed is that lobbying for tax-breaks is an incredibly productive investment. Trump’s “big, beautiful tax-cut” underwent a flurry of last-minute revisions that carved out the tax-evasion strategies of individual billionaires and their dynastic offspring.

These can be directly linked to campaign contributions to the GOP lawmakers who introduced them. Like Senator Ron Johnson, who threatened to block the tax cuts unless it was amended to favor three of his major campaign donors: Dick and Liz Uihlein (owners of Uline), and Diane Hendricks (roofing heiress), who gave $20m to Johnson’s campaign and reaped $215m in the first year of the cuts (they’re still getting hundreds of millions on that investment).

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/11/the-canada-variant/#shitty-man-of-history-theory

You may have noticed the presence of an heiress among the Senator Johnson’s owners: dynastic wealth plays an enormous role in shaping the US tax code and its policies. The American myth of the meritocracy has been extended to people whose “merit” consists of emerging from an extremely lucky orifice.

Dynastic fortunes are normally shrouded in secrecy. But thanks to honorable heirs, like Abigail Disney, we are starting to learn more about the dirty business of “family offices” and the ways they ensure that no matter how feckless and idiotic an heir may be, they will continue to be able to influence the lives of millions of people who work for living:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/19/dynastic-wealth/#caste

The tax code is a gnarly hairball of carve-outs and special programs, many of them designed to benefit middle-class earners, like the ROTH IRA. The ultra rich have turned these into piggy-banks they can stuff with hundreds of millions in tax-free loot. Peter Theil’s ROTH is worth $5 billion.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/26/wax-rothful/#thiels-gambit

And REITs — which are supposed to benefit mom-and-pop landlords who rent out an apartment in their retirement — have been transformed into a vehicle for offshore oligarchs to acquire hotels, smash their unions, and siphon off money needed for the local tax coffers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/01/reit-modernization-act/#reit-makes-might

Now, all work and no play make Steve a dull oligarch. The ultra-rich have figured out how to turn their hobbies and follies into tax-free money-pits, like Steve Ballmer’s beloved LA Clippers. He evaded tax on $140m by buying the team — while his athletes (whose labor provides him with a handsome income) pay 30–40% income tax:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#economic-substance-doctrine

“Find a tax-sheltered hobby you love and you’ll never work a day.” That’s the principle behind the hundreds of millions in tax-evasion practiced by the horsey set ($189m for tobacco billionaire Brad Kelley, $173m for soup heiress Charlotte Weber, $138m for hedge-fund looter Seth Klarman).

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/08/required-ish-reading/#hobby-lobby-ists

But if you just haven’t found your passion yet, you can still trouser hundreds of millions, through the simple and effective tactic of cheating on your taxes.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/20/la-hougue/#complexity

Don’t worry, the IRS has slashed its budget for auditing wealthy people and focuses its firepower on families with annual incomes of $35k and under:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-13/democrats-ask-irs-why-tax-audits-for-poor-have-doubled

The IRS Leaks are a couple of years out of date now, and it’s hard to know exactly how much worse it’s gotten. One bellwether is the amount of debt assumed by the ultra-wealthy — when plutes borrow, it’s not like you or I going into debt, rather, it’s part of a “buy-borrow-die” strategy through which unrealized, tax-free capital gains are used as collateral for cheap-as-dirt loans. The super-rich are levered up to their hairlines:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/03/fitzgerald-was-an-optimist/#debt

Meanwhile, President Biden has proposed a billionaire wealth tax, designed to get around the various tax-evasion strategies used by American oligarchs. Unsurprisingly, the wealthy are fighting back, insisting that they do pay tax, and lots of it:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2022/04/11/billionaire-tax-biden-unrealized-gains-assets/9503953002

Today, Propublica’s Paul Kiel, Ash Ngu, Jesse Eisinger and Jeff Ernsthausen offer a reality check on those claims, with an in-depth analysis of America’s 400 top earners:

https://projects.propublica.org/americas-highest-incomes-and-taxes-revealed/

The team start by observing that your effective rate of income tax does climb as your income does, but once you reach $29m, it plateaus — and then, it goes down, as extreme wealth unlocks access to tax evasion strategies that are beyond the reach of the merely rich.

The main way that the super-rich avoid tax is by arranging their payouts so they come as capital gains and not salaries, which are taxed at 20% rather than the 37% top rate for income derived from doing stuff, rather than owning stuff. Note that the 20% rate is only for long-term capital gains, and that means that nominally flippers who buy and sell assets quickly can’t get it — but have no fear, private equity barons can pretend to be 16th century sea-captains and avail themselves of the carried interest loophole.

The US tax code has had special treatment for capital gains for about a century, but GW Bush’s tax cuts in 2003 supercharged these breaks for the owning class. America’s richest 400 people save an average of $1.9b/year thanks to ole GW.

The American tax-code is especially kind to people who emerge from lucky orifices. If you’re in the DeVos or Walton family, tax giveaways are the key to your ability to shower candidates, PACs and think-tanks with money. 11 Walton orifice-emergers pocket $371m/year thanks to preferential treatment for dynastic fortunes.

But the real winners are tech billionaires, those rapacious, mediocre monopolists who have denuded the internet into five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four. Their “charitable contributions” of stock (which can simply be donations to their own family foundations) let them deduct the full value of the stock without any capital gains tax.

The top 400 American earners make at least $110m/year. That’s 2,750 times the average American annual wage. The richest 11 US earners make more than $1b/year. A typical American would have to work for 25,000 years to make that much.

During those 25,000 years, you’ll pay more of your income as tax than billionaires. While they nominally pay a higher rate than you, you’re paying a much larger share of your income into Social Security and Medicare, goosing your tax rate over theirs.

Now all of this is a little misleading. The rich are actually richer than this analysis suggests. As the authors describe, “the richest avoid income when they can.” By using the buy-borrow-die method, the wealthy actually pay a true tax rate of 3.4%.

That number shrinks even further when you consider America’s top 15 earners who are singled out by name in a companion feature:

https://www.propublica.org/article/americas-top-15-earners-and-what-they-reveal-about-the-us-tax-system

Despite what you may have guessed, there are no celebs on that list. Even LeBron James and Taylor Swift don’t approach the fortunes of the tech billionaires, hedge fund looters, and profession orifice-emergers atop the steep slopes of the American wealth-pyramid.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Indonesia's gig work tech resistance

Gojek is a $10B Indonesian “super app” that combines “Postmates, Apple Pay, Venmo, and Uber” serviced by an army of ojol — drivers — who are subjected to all the high-handed algorithmic horrors that gig workers everywhere suffer through.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kvpng/delivery-drivers-are-using-grey-market-apps-to-make-their-jobs-suck-less

But Indonesian ojol aren’t helpless before their apps; a legion of toolsmiths produce, share, sell and support “tuyul apps” named for “a child-like spirit in Indonesian folklore that helps his human master earn money by stealing,” which modify the Gojek app.

As part of her MIT PhD, Rida Qadri studied Gojek, ojol and tuyul apps, and her account of the grey-market Gojek ecosystem for Motherboard is riveting.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kvpng/delivery-drivers-are-using-grey-market-apps-to-make-their-jobs-suck-less

Tuyul apps are wildly innovative and diverse, from tools to magnify text so older ojol drivers who can read the tiny default app’s text, to filters that allow drivers and riders to preview jobs, avoiding the algorithmic penalty for turning down a job after accepting it.

Indeed, many tuyul apps are tools that permit workers to resist their algorithmic employer’s “optimizations,” which inevitably “optimize” the work so as much value as possible is transferred from the workers to their bosses.

Take GPS-spoofing. Gojek’s corporate overlords have decreed that drivers have to be close to a pickup to be eligible to get the job. On its face, this sounds reasonable, but in practice, it creates massive jams around train stations where unsheltered riders wait in the rain.

Gojek created a situation that has clogged the roads around stations, creating traffic hazards and introducing delays into deliveries. Riders are on site and better equipped to decide how to do their job than a distant, unaccountable product manager.

Riders use GPS spoofers to trick the app into thinking they’re onsite when really they’re waiting at a sensible distance.

Tuyul app creators are drivers with tech knowhow, who fell into the work as part of mutual aid networks.

Over time, this has matured into IT Jalanan -”IT of the Road” — a full-service, somewhat ad-hoc tech support network of IT specialists who build, service and use apps that make gig workers’ lives better.

They have extensive documentation for users on how to root their phones and side-load the third party apps. Apps are sold and supported through Whatsapp and other platforms, along with service and support packages.

Crucially, the support for tuyul apps is much better than the support Gojek offers to gig workers when they struggle with the bugs in its app — making downloading a third-party mod a faster and better experience than trying to get Gojek to fix its shit.

Not all tuyul apps are benign. Some are scams that rip off drivers, other are scams that help drivers rip off Gojek. Gojek On Twitter, a driver community organized against being made “a slave of the algorithm,” has a mixed position on tuyul apps.

One of GOT’s founders has proposed that the GPS spoofing be integrated into Gojek’s official app, allowing users to place their pin within 1km of their actual location.

All of this is a powerful lesson in the importance of Adversarial Interoperability (AKA Competitive Compatibility/comcom), the practice of modifying an existing technology against the wishes (or without permission) of its maker.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

Comcom allows the users of technology to override its designers’ choices based on their local, up-to-the-minute knowledge of their circumstances, like overriding your car’s mandatory software update when you’re trying to escape a wildfire.

https://locusmag.com/2021/07/cory-doctorow-tech-monopolies-and-the-insufficient-necessity-of-interoperability/

The point of interop isn’t “competition” or even “efficiency” — it’s technological self-determination, the right to decide how you live your life. This does lead to competitiveness and autonomous workers are more efficient than drones, but that’s not the point.

Companies like Gojek lump all mods into the same basket — mods that let drivers do their job better and mods that enable fraud. From Gojek’s perspective, anything that frustrates their shareholders is bad news —it’s all “felony contempt of business model.”

That’s why laws, not corporate decree, should determine what kind of interoperability we permit and which ones we don’t. Our current laws (in the US, Sec 1201 of DMCA, CFAA, etc) simply say, “If the manufacturer says no, it’s not allowed.”

https://gizmodo.com/in-2030-you-wont-own-any-gadgets-1847176540

We can — and should — draft laws that prevent fraud and require practices that don’t endanger others, while legalizing modifying our technology in ways that are socially beneficial and help workers and other users exercise technological self-determination.

Letting users modify their own technology makes life better for everyone. John Deere — archnemesis of users’ right to mod — “invented” modern tractors through engineers observing farmers’ mods to their Deeres and putting the ideas into production.

https://securityledger.com/2019/03/opinion-my-grandfathers-john-deere-would-support-our-right-to-repair/

Meanwhile, Gbwhatsapp and its constellation of primarily African Whatsapp mods are more popular on the continent than Facebook Messenger. There are many Whatsapp mods, used for different kinds of users Africa’s varied regions, nations and cities.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/african-whatsapp-modders-are-masters-worldwide-adversarial-interoperability

Facebook rails against Gbwhatsapp the same way that Gojek rails against tuyul apps, pointing to the scams and harms from the mods that are created by crooks. But just like Gojek, FB lumps the mods that empower users in with the mods that harm them.

There are ways that interoperability can go wrong, but dominant corporations can’t be trusted with the decision about which mods are okay and which ones aren’t — they are terminally compromised by their own self-interest.

The rules for modding — privacy protections, anti-fraud protection and more — should come from democratically accountable legislatures, not the secret machinations of corporate boardrooms.

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

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

#20yrsago RIP, Gene Kan https://memex.craphound.com/2002/07/08/rip-gene-kan/

#15yrsago William Gibson explains why science fiction is about the present https://web.archive.org/web/20070709013503/http://www.collegecrier.com/interviews/int-0040.asp

#10yrsago Peter “Brokep” Sunde, railroaded into Swedish prison by Big Content https://falkvinge.net/2012/07/06/aftermath-of-the-pirate-bay-trial-peter-sundes-plea-in-his-own-words/

#10yrsago Handmade Japanese steampunk watches https://web.archive.org/web/20070711114356/https://www.eager-beavers.net/suekichi2/products/shouhin_guide.cgi?temp=TMP0

#10yrsago DRM guru claims new BluRay won’t be cracked for 10 years https://www.avsforum.com/threads/bd-unbreakable-for-10-years-says-richard-doherty-of-envisioneering-group.871371/#post-10965043

#5yrsago Corbyn’s Labour surges to an 8-point lead over the Tories https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/jeremy-corbyn-s-labour-takes-eightpoint-poll-lead-over-conservatives-a3582056.html

#5yrsago GOP lawmakers snap up surging health insurance stocks as they gut Obamacare https://theintercept.com/2017/07/06/republican-lawmakers-buy-health-insurance-stocks-as-repeal-effort-moves-forward/

#1yrago Owning a sports-team is a plute’s get-out-of-tax-free card https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#economic-substance-doctrine

#1yrago Indonesia’s gig work tech resistance https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek

[delcat177]

All of this sets the stage for a phenomenon called algorithmic wage discrimination, in which two workers doing the same job under the same conditions will see radically different payouts for that work. These payouts are continuously tweaked in the background by an algorithm that tries to predict the minimum sum a worker will accept to remain available without payment, to ensure sufficient workers to pick up jobs as they arise.

No really you should read this essay

Gig apps trap reverse centaurs in Skinner boxes

Enshittification is the process by which digital platforms devour themselves: first they dangle goodies in front of end users. Once users are locked in, the goodies are taken away and dangled before business customers who supply goods to the users. Once those business customers are stuck on the platform, the goodies are clawed away and showered on the platform’s shareholders:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

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/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

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