Notices by Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr), page 2

I've also put more energy into metadata, including alt text for those illos. Good metadata isn't just a matter of accessibility, it's also key to avoiding getting slaughtered by predatory "copyleft trolls."

https://doctorow.medium.com/an-open-letter-to-pixsy-ceo-kain-jones-who-keeps-sending-me-legal-threats-5dfc54558f2c

One thing I *haven't* added is any kind of measurement tools. Neither the pluralistic.net website, nor its RSS feed, nor my newsletter, gather any statistics.

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I have no idea how many people are reading any of these, nor which articles "perform" better. The metric I focus on is feedback: what readers say and write about the pieces I write. I'm far more interested in the thick, qualitative accounts of the impact of my work than the dubious quantitative residue that remains when you use a stats package to incinerate the waste product of your readership:

https://locusmag.com/2021/05/cory-doctorow-qualia/

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It describes how, over time, the coziness and connection of a friend-list populated by people you genuinely like becomes an exhausting morass of people you don't really like, but can't kick off the list, and how you are almost certainly oblivious to the fact that you're someone *else*'s exhausting not-really-a-friend.

Back in 2007, I thought we'd soon be free of the scourge of Facebook. I was wrong.

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Facebook used a mix of tactics to extend its shelf-life and increase its influence, and its network effect advantage let it grow, and grow, and grow.

Facebook owes its longevity in part to its anticompetitive conduct. By 2012, young users were fleeing Facebook, which was being colonized by their parents and teachers. They flocked to Instagram, so Facebook just *bought* Instagram, ensuring that its disgruntled users could not escape its grasp.

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Having captured Instagram, Facebook ruthlessly strangled potential competitors. It tricked millions of users into installing a fake battery monitor called Onavo, which spied on their mobile usage, giving Facebook the strategic intelligence it needed to keep rivals like Snap at bay:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3247362

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But there's a hard corollary: systems driven by network effects *lose* value when users leave. Your blender doesn't get better when someone else gets a blender of their own, but it also doesn't get worse when someone else throws theirs away.

Social networks are prone to sudden collapses, in part because of the double-edged sword of network effects - but also because of the intrinsic dynamics of social networking.

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Social networks insist that we articulate our relations to one another, pinning down the way we feel about the people in our lives.

The problem here is that the most important part of our relationships are hard to pin down. The opposite of "love" isn't "hate" - it's *indifference*. It's surprisingly common to feel a mixture of emotions towards the people who matter the most in your life. Pinning down an emotion that fluctuates from moment to moment is difficult.

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Actually, it's worse than difficult. It's *anti*-social. Your partner or your bestie knows when you're pissed off at them, but that doesn't mean you should create a world-readable sign that says "I hate this person (right now)." That's a recipe for *staying* mad.

And those are the easy cases. Because at least the people who love and who love you care about your happiness.

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There's a whole universe of people - like your boss, or a creepy co-worker - who seem to sincerely think they're your pal, even though you *loathe* them. When those people friend you, you have to friend them back.

This dynamic is so common that I wrote an article about in 2007, entitled, "How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook."

https://www.informationweek.com/it-life/how-your-creepy-ex-co-workers-will-kill-facebook

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I hated Facebook from the start and couldn't wait for it to die. That was a reasonable thing to expect. After all, I'd watched social networks from Sixdegrees on crash and burn as the network effects that drove their growth also drove their precipitous collapse.

A system enjoys "network effects" if it increases in value as it adds users. Social networks are all about these effects: you join Facebook because your friends are there, and once you join, others sign up because *you* are there.

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In *Electrify*, the MacArthur prizewinning engineer Saul Griffith offers a detailed, optimistic and urgent roadmap for a climate-respecting energy transition that we can actually accomplish in 10-15 years.

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McKay describes the upper and lower bounds of the Earth's estimated carbon budget - how much CO2 we can emit. Then he looks at the energy budget for a variety of human activities - buildings, transport, food, and so on - decomposing each into a variety of subcategories. Then he looks at the maximum theoretical renewable energy generation available to us, by category - how many solar photons strike the Earth every day? That's your absolute solar limit.

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There are a lot of popular science books out there, but the world really needs more popular *engineering* books - books that set out the technical parameters of our problems and the various proposed solutions, sorting the likely from the plausible to the foolish, and laying out a practical range of plans to accomplish the best of them.

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The latest, last year's "Food and Climate Change Without the Hot Air," is an excellent continuation of MacKay's legacy:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/06/methane-diet/#3kg-per-day

Griffith's popular engineering book is also part of MacKay's legacy (in case there's any doubt, Griffith namechecks him). Electrify is far more concrete and granular than MacKay's book, focusing on the US context to understand what is possible, what is necessary, and what stands in the way.

Then he gives you the knobs and dials to play with these figures - this kind of activity, plus this kind of renewable, requires this much raw material and space, and presents the following advantages and disadvantages.

The remarkable thing about MacKay's book is that it becomes abundantly clear that while an energy transition is a lot of work, it's eminently possible. MacKay's book spawned a whole line of "Without the Hot Air" titles from UIT Cambridge.

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Griffith starts with some very good news: the US's energy budget has been wildly overstated. About *half* of the energy that the US consumes is actually the energy we need to dig, process, transport, store and use fossil fuels. Renewables have these costs, too, but nothing near the costs of using fossil fuels. An all-electric nation is about twice as efficient as a fossil fuel nation. That means that the problem of electrifying America is only half as hard as we've been told it was.

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And while Kropotkin's ideas have inspired generations of biologists AND activists, the social Darwinists have only grown in influence, providing pseudoscientific cover for greed, oppression and immorality.

The folks at PM Press have just published a stunning, illustrated new edition of MUTUAL AID, illustrated by N.O. Bonzo whose neo-Arts-and-Crafts marginalia and full-page spreads are gorgeous and thrilling

https://www.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1185

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Originally intended as a series of (never delivered) lectures for William Morris's Socialist League, the book was an assault on "moral philosophers" who used Darwin's work and "survival of the fittest" to justify class oppression at home and imperial slaughter abroad.

Painstaking researched and beautifully argued, MUTUAL AID reveals the scientific fraud of "social Darwinism," and its claims that hierarchy and exploitation are evolutionary inevitabilities baked into our very nature.

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Peter Kropotkin was a Russian aristocrat who renounced his titles, became a scientist and anarchist, and wrote many significant works, but none so important as MUTUAL AID, his 1902 treatise on the role of cooperation in evolutionary biology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_Aid:_A_Factor_of_Evolution

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If you took a drink every time an economist used "network effects" to explain why Big Tech is so big, you'd get very, very drunk.

To be fair to economists, network effects *are* important to the Big Tech story.

A system is said to have network effects if it gets better when more people use it. That certainly describes Facebook - you join FB because of the friends that are already there, and then someone else joins because you're there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

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