Notices by Cory Doctorow's linkblog (pluralistic@mamot.fr)

Sometime in 2001, I walked into a Radio Shack on San Francisco's Market Street and asked for a Cuecat: a handheld barcode scanner that looked a bit like a cat and a bit like a sex toy. The clerk handed one over to me and I left, feeling a little giddy. I didn't have to pay a cent.

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The presenter was a well-known bullshitter and people were skeptical at the time, but my imagination was fired. I sat down at my keyboard and wrote "Anda's Game," a story about "gold farmers" who form an in-game, transnational trade-union under their bosses' noses:

https://www.salon.com/2004/11/15/andas_game/

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"Anda's Game" was a surprise hit. It got reprinted in the year's Best American Short Stories, won a bunch of awards, and Jen Wang and Firstsecond turned it into the NYT bestselling graphic novel "In Real Life":

https://firstsecondbooks.com/books/new-book-in-real-life-by-cory-doctorow-and-jen-wang/

Then, in 2010, I adapted the story into *For the Win*, a YA novel about gold farming and global trade unions (led by the Industrial Workers of the World Wide Web, AKA IWWW, AKA Webblies):

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

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There's an old cyberpunk writers' joke that "cyberpunk is a warning, not a suggestion." Alas, my parable-like stories about how digital technology enables the creation of new, high-tech sweatshops that arbitrage weak labor protections in the global south to worsen working conditions everywhere embodied the punchline to that cyberpunk joke. Over and over, these stories became touchstones for all kinds of global, digital labor exploitation and global, digital labor solidarity.

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But sometimes, the stories don't merely analogize to describe current situations - they end up *very* on-the-nose. Nowhere is that more true than with the blockchain-based, play-to-earn, NFT-infected gaming world, whose standard-bearer is the scandal-haunted Axie Infinity.

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This week, my mentions have been full of "Don't create the Torment Nexus" jokes referencing Neirin Gray Desai's outstanding *Rest of World* story on the rise and implosion of the "play-to-earn" Minecraft/blockchain game Critterz:

https://restofworld.org/2022/minecraft-nft-ban-critterz/

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Critterz was yet another one of those blockchain games, but they made a fatal mistake: they built their virtual sweatshop on Minecraft, whose parent company, Mojang (a subsidiary of Microsoft), banned NFT integration, stating: "blockchain technologies are not permitted to be integrated inside our Minecraft client and server applications nor may they be utilized to create NFTs associated with any in-game content, including worlds, skins, personal items, or other mods."

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Very quickly, the in-game money issued by Critterz tanked, and players - both the poor people who actually played the game, and the rich people who bought the treasures they earned from them - ran for the exits.

Even without Minecraft's ban on NFTs, play-to-earn is in serious trouble. As the sector seeks a new lifeline, some *wild* ideas are emerging, straight out of the Torment Nexus.

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There's another tech joke, that "AI" stands for "Absent Indians" - the gag being that the "AIs" you interact with in the world are actually low-waged Indian workers pretending to be bots.

Once again - and I honestly can't believe I have to say this - that joke is a warning, not a suggestion.

--

Image:
Jen Wang (modified)
Critterz (modified)

eof/

For example, Desai talked to Mikhai Kossar, who consults on NFT games. Kossar proposed that the future of play-to-earn might be poor people pretending to be non-player characters to give richness to the in-game experience of wealthy people. They could "just populate the world, maybe do a random job or just walk back and forth, fishing, telling stories, a shopkeeper, anything is really possible."

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@jackwilliambell Head characters at Disney World are unionized.

In 2004, my wife came home from the Game Developers Conference with a wild story. A presenter there claimed that he had set up a sweatshop on the US/Mexican border where he paid low-wage workers to do repetitive tasks in Everquest to amass virtual gold, which was sold on Ebay to lazier, richer players

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I'm not a bot and I routinely reply to people.

Right to Repair is a no-brainer. You - not corps - should have the right to decide whom you trust to fix your stuff, even (especially) when it's "smart" and an unscrupulous repair could create unquantifiable "cyber-risk."

And yet...*dozens* of state R2R bills were defeated in 2018, thanks to an unholy coalition of Big Ag, Big Tech, and consumer electronics monopolists like Wahl. That supervillain gang reassembled to fight and kill still more bills in 2020/1.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/26/nixing-the-fix/#r2r

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It's part of the long trend in which all levels of government make policy based on what serves the interests of the rich and powerful, not the people they serve.

2014's "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens" (Cambirdge University Pree) quantifies this phenomenon:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B#authors-details

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"Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence."

Right to Repair advocates never lost hope. May's "Nixing the Fix" report from the FTC establishes a factual record in support of the right to repair across many sectors, but especially agricultural equipment.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/07/pro-act-class-war/#we-fixit

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Big Ag is a particularly odious repair troll, and John Deere is its standard-bearer. The company has been trying to felonize farmers' repairing their own tractors since at least 2015:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150428173001/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/how-digital-rights-management-keeps-value-in-hands-of-the-manufacturer/article24130876/

They told the US Copyright Office that farmers don't own their tractors - because tractor firmware is copyrighted, it is licensed, not sold, and farmers must abide by the company's license terms.

https://www.wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john-deere/

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At the same time, Deere started pushing the insulting story that farmers are yokels, too stupid to fix their tractors. This despite Deere's long history of turning farmers' modifications of their equipment into money-making features in new tractors.

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

Farmers have been fixing their own gear literally since the dawn of civilization, hacking their own plows.

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Every farm has a workshop, because when you're at the end of a country road and there's a hailstorm coming, you need to bring in the crops, not wait for a repair tech.

Deere's arguments that independent repair will expose America's food supply to cyber-risk are equally hollow, because Deere has some of the *worst* cybersecurity of *any* industry - winning the infosec race to the bottom.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#deere-john

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Despite Deere's lobbying, patronizing and FUD, the right to repair has - finally - triumphed.

Today, the Biden administration announced an executive order directing the Department of Ag and the FTC to develop R2R rules for agricultural equipment!

https://www.vice.com/en/article/epn5mk/biden-to-sign-executive-order-granting-farmers-right-to-repair-protections

The fight's not over yet. The devil is in the details, those rules the FTC and Ag develop.

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