#or they don’t have it and live lavishly and rely on everyone else to fund their lifestyle

[mostlysignssomeportents]

SAMBA versus SMB: Adversarial interoperability is judo for network effects

Before there was Big Tech, there was "adversarial interoperability": when someone decides to compete with a dominant company by creating a product or service that "interoperates" (works with) its offerings.

In tech, "network effects" can be a powerful force to maintain market dominance: if everyone is using Facebook, then your Facebook replacement doesn't just have to be better than Facebook, it has to be so much better than Facebook that it's worth using, even though all the people you want to talk to are still on Facebook. That's a tall order.

Adversarial interoperability is judo for network effects, using incumbents' dominance against them. To see how that works, let's look at a historical example of adversarial interoperability role in helping to unseat a monopolist's dominance.

The first skirmishes of the PC wars were fought with incompatible file formats and even data-storage formats: Apple users couldn't open files made by Microsoft users, and vice-versa. Even when file formats were (more or less) harmonized, there was still the problems of storage media: the SCSI drive you plugged into your Mac needed a special add-on and flaky driver software to work on your Windows machine; the ZIP cartridge you formatted for your PC wouldn't play nice with Macs.

But as office networking spread, the battle moved to a new front: networking compatibility. AppleTalk, Apple's proprietary protocol for connecting up Macs and networked devices like printers, pretty much Just Worked, providing you were using a Mac. If you were using a Windows PC, you had to install special, buggy, unreliable software.

And for Apple users hoping to fit in at Windows shops, the problems were even worse: Windows machines used the SMB protocol for file-sharing and printers, and Microsoft's support for MacOS was patchy at best, nonexistent at worst, and costly besides. Businesses sorted themselves into Mac-only and PC-only silos, and if a Mac shop needed a PC (for the accounting software, say), it was often cheaper and easier just to get the accountant their own printer and backup tape-drive, rather than try to get that PC to talk to the network. Likewise, all PC-shops with a single graphic designer on a Mac—that person would often live offline, disconnected from the office network, tethered to their own printer, with their own stack of Mac-formatted ZIP cartridges or CD-ROMs.

All that started to change in 1993: that was the year that an Australian PhD candidate named Andrew Tridgell licensed his SAMBA package as free/open source software and exposed it to the wide community of developers looking to connect their non-Microsoft computers—Unix and GNU/Linux servers, MacOS workstations—to the dominant Microsoft LANs.

SAMBA was created by using a "packet sniffer" to ingest raw SMB packets as they traversed a local network; these intercepted packets gave Tridgell the insight he needed to reverse-engineer Microsoft's proprietary networking protocol. Tridgell prioritized compatibility with LAN Manager, a proprietary Network Operating System that enterprise networks made heavy use of. If SAMBA could be made to work in LAN Manager networks, then you could connect a Mac to a PC network—or vice-versa—and add some Unix servers and use a mix of SAMBA and SMB to get them all to play nice with one another.

The timing of Tridgell's invention was crucial: in 1993, Microsoft had just weathered the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust investigation of its monopoly tactics, squeaking through thanks to a 2-2 deadlock among the commissioners, and was facing down a monopoly investigation by the Department of Justice.

The growth of local-area networks greatly accelerated Microsoft's dominance. It's one thing to dominate the desktop, another entirely to leverage that dominance so that no one else can make an operating system that connects to networks that include computers running that dominant system. Network administrators of the day were ready to throw in the towel and go all-Microsoft for everything from design workstations to servers.

SAMBA changed all that. What's more, as Microsoft updated SMB, SAMBA matched them, relying on a growing cadre of software authors who relied on SAMBA to keep their own networks running.

The emergence of SAMBA in the period when Microsoft's dominance was at its peak, the same year that the US government tried and failed to address that dominance, was one of the most salutary bits of timing in computing history, carving out a new niche for Microsoft's operating system rivals that gave them space to breathe and grow. It's certainly possible that without SAMBA, Microsoft could have leveraged its operating system, LAN and application dominance to crush all rivals.

So What Happened?

We don't see a lot of SAMBA-style stories anymore, despite increased concentration of various sectors of the tech market and a world crying out for adversarial interoperability judo throws.

Indeed, investors seem to have lost their appetite for funding companies that might disrupt the spectacularly profitable Internet monopolists of 2019, ceding them those margins and deeming their territory to be a "kill zone."

VCs have not lost their appetite for making money, and toolsmiths have not lost the urge to puncture the supposedly airtight bubbles around the Big Tech incumbents, so why is it so hard to find a modern David with the stomach to face off against 2019's Goliaths?

To find the answer, look to the law. As monopolists have conquered more and more of the digital realm, they have invested some of those supernormal profits in law and policy that lets them fend off adversarial interoperators.

One legal weapon is "Terms of Service": both Facebook and Blizzard have secured judgments giving their fine print the force of law, and now tech giants use clickthrough agreements that amount to, "By clicking here, you promise that you won't try to adversarially interoperate with us."

A modern SAMBA project would have to contend with this liability, and Microsoft would argue that anyone who took the step of installing SMB had already agreed that they wouldn't try to reverse-engineer it to make a compatible product.

Then there's "anti-circumvention," a feature of 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Under Section 1201 of the DMCA, bypassing a "copyright access control" can put you in both criminal and civil jeopardy, regardless of whether there's any copyright infringement. DMCA 1201 was originally used to stop companies from making region-free DVD players or modding game consoles to play unofficial games (neither of which is a copyright violation!).

But today, DMCA 1201 is used to control competitors, critics, and customers. Any device with software in it contains a "copyrighted work," so manufacturers need only set up an "access control" and they can exert legal control over all kinds of uses of the product.

Their customers can only use the product in ways that don't involve bypassing the "access control," and that can be used to force you to buy only one brand of ink or use apps from only one app store.

Their critics—security researchers auditing their cybersecurity—can't publish proof-of-concept to back up their claims about vulnerabilities in the systems.

And competitors can't bypass access controls to make compatible products: third party app stores, compatible inks, or a feature-for-feature duplicate of a dominant company's networking protocol.

Someone attempting to replicate the SAMBA creation feat in 2019 would likely come up against an access control that needed to be bypassed in order to peer inside the protocol's encrypted outer layer in order to create a feature-compatible tool to use in competing products.

Another thing that's changed (for the worse) since 1993 is the proliferation of software patents. Software patenting went into high gear around 1994 and consistently gained speed until 2014, when Alice v. CLS Bank put the brakes on (today, Alice is under threat). After decades of low-quality patents issuing from the US Patent and Trademark Office, there are so many trivial, obvious and overlapping software patents in play that anyone trying to make a SAMBA-like product would run a real risk of being threatened with expensive litigation for patent infringement.

This thicket of legal anti-adversarial-interoperability dangers has been a driver of market concentration, and the beneficiaries of market concentration have also spent lavishly to expand and strengthen the thicket. It's gotten so bad that even some "open standards organizations" have standardized easy-to-use ways of legally prohibiting adversarial interoperability, locking in the dominance of the largest browser vendors.

The idea that wildly profitable businesses would be viewed as unassailable threats by investors and entrepreneurs (rather than as irresistible targets) tells you everything you need to know about the state of competition today. As we look to cut the Big Tech giants down to size, let's not forget that tech once thronged with Davids eager to do battle with Goliaths, and that this throng would be ours to command again, if only we would re-arm it.

(Crossposted from EFF Deeplinks)

https://boingboing.net/2019/07/18/kill-zones-r-us.html

[ineedrelationshipadvice]

Quick question: is 20F and 30M too big of an age gap? What sort of complications could we run into? What are some red flags to look out for when I date him? Does he have too much power over me due to his age, experience, etc.? Thanks so much

1) There is nothing wrong with this age-gap. You are an adult. Nobody is allowed to tell you what is and is not acceptable in terms of age-gap as long as both partners are legal, consenting adults.

2) Red flags are complicated, so I’ll dedicate a whole section to them here, running down each of the ones that anyone should look for in an age-gap relationship. 

Using power against you! This needs to come first. You already said later in your message that you are fully aware that there is a power imbalance in age-gap relationships, and it’s super important to be aware of that before you enter one! The biggest issue with any relationship like this is when the person with power, usually the older one, uses that power to get what they want. So that means the following characteristics will sound kinda like I’m repeating myself. 

But this one is special. Because not all people are assholes. But assholes will always exploit their power. So looking out for someone who is conscious of the power over you, and tries to use that to their advantage, is very important early on. It always depends on the power. Maybe they exploit your feelings for them, maybe they exploit their financial stability, maybe they exploit their sexual experience. It doesn’t matter WHAT they’re exploiting. As soon as they begin demanding things, and not offering alternatives or “not allowing” things that don’t fit into your plans, this is the most major red flag, and you need to get out of such a relationship immediately, because that is basically hanging off the cliff with you only landing in abuse. 

Financial stability. Particularly for young adults, this is the biggest thing people are exploited on early. The fact of the matter is that someone who is older generally has more money, and that money can be used in a lot of ways that can string someone around. They’ll spend it lavishly, only to hold it over their head and insist you do things for them. They’ll use their money as a way to make you feel like you’re in debt. “I bought you that really expensive purse, so you should probably give me a really nasty night of sex” - or - “Look, babe, I wasn’t really cheating with that girl. Here, let me buy you whatever you want and I’ll make it better.” 

Strong financial stability can result in complex scenarios. It may mean they have more access to transportation, which means that they get to decide how your life is lived if you rely on them. Or it could mean you they begin “expecting” gifts in return, and since their funds are basically limitless, then so must your “gifts” be. To eliminate this, don’t accept big ticket items from them as gifts too often, and remind them consistently from the beginning that you value trust and honesty, and that money can’t buy your happiness. Reject expensive gifts if they’re too lavish for you, and apologize. They can prove they care about you if they date you long-term. 

Intelligence vs naivety. This isn’t to say that all younger people are stupid, and all older people are smart. What this means is, often, older people generally have more mental capacity than younger people. They have lived a lot longer than younger people, meaning their continued experiences have taught them how to do things in a more intelligent and efficient way. And if you, with your lack of experience, have never encountered these things, you can be taken off-guard very easy. 

You see this most in pedophilic behaviour, where older people “groom” their victims. They act nice, and as non-threatening “friends,” before quickly making things sexual, and then using their perceived “niceness” as a tool to trick their victims into not revealing the truth. This sort of behaviour is still common in consenting adults though. “You know, you haven’t had nearly as much sex as I have. But it’s okay, I can teach you. But most girls don’t say no to this. You should do what I say.” 

You see how fast it can change by reading that sentence. It may not seem like a logical choice at first, but someone who is smarter than you can make it seem that way. I know I’m way more strategic now that I’m a little older. Where I was more brash in my teen years, now I can’t view the calculus of a situation, which allows me to pull the puppet strings. It’s that smarter, more calculating way that can easily be used for evil by someone who has no morals, and if you feel like someone is pulling your puppet strings, that’s a huge red flag. 

Emotional security. Again, everyone is different, and there are plenty of immature adults. But the fact of the matter is, the older you are, the less emotional you tend to be. This is because the prefrontal cortex (the logic centre of your brain) generally stops developing around 24-ish years old. Because that’s still forming as a teen, you tend to make stupid decisions. Your brain changes from LEAP BEFORE YOU LOOK, to LOOK BEFORE YOU LEAP. Whereas in your youth you’d be like “LET’S SEND A NUDE TO THIS GUY ON THE INTERNET IT’LL BE FINE” will have you thinking, “Dude, I don’t know this guy, he’ll probably sell my nude if I give it to him right now.” 

Because of this, if you’re the younger party in an age-gap relationship, there are a lot of things someone who is more emotionally secure can do to mess with you. They can use their logic as a bludgeon. “You just don’t understand because of your age. I’m older, please try to listen to me,” even if the thing they’re saying isn’t a good thing. “It’s okay, you’re still learning. I can teach you!” even if the thing they’re teaching is or could lead to abuse. “You’re very smart, teach me what you know,” even though they know they are already are smarter, and are trying to lure you into a place of trust. 

All of this stuff is natural, and it becomes totally normal as you get older. Now that I’m older, I’ve learned a lot more about psychology and human communication than I knew as a teen. This allows me to communicate as I do on this blog! You’ll note that if you reread some of the things you say, I deliberately haven’t ever spoken about YOU until now; I’ve deliberately left things vague, because I know this information has value beyond you, and I want to treat both you and all those other people with respect. So I speak very calmly, rationally, and treat you (and everyone else) as equals. That’s all well and good, but bad people are not well and good. If someone without morals has these same skills, they could use them as a tool to get you to do as they please. Imagine if I hit on every chick who sent me a message. “You don’t have to worry about your shitty boyfriend, because guys like me exist. PS, let’s chat. You clearly know I’m a good guy after how much I helped you HINT HINT WINK WINK.” It’s scummy, but it’s a thing that happens ALL THE TIME when people realize they have power. 

The whole thing with these red flags that are listed is that they are just that. They are concerns, but only if they are used AGAINST YOU. People may have money, but may not use it in a negative way against you; people may have more experience, but they may not exploit you with that experience; people may be in control of themselves, but also may not do anything with that emotional strength. But the thing is, SOME PEOPLE WILL EXPLOIT YOU, and you need to be VERY careful and not end up like one of those people. Although this situation deals with younger people than the ages given, take a look at the first few minutes of this Youtuber sex scandal that happens. You can watch an abuser in action, working his game, trying to use his “power” to convince people to do what he wants, because he knows he can. This is what casual abuse looks like. 

3) Does he have too much power? Well again, we’ve now seen some red flags that could be exploited here. Whether he has too much power or not really depends on him as a person, and what he does with that power. What should you do if you decide to enter into this relationship then? 

Firstly, don’t make big commitments. Take things slow. Let him PROVE he’s legit. Look out for those red flags over several dates. Don’t feel obliged to have sex before you’re ready, or accept gifts you don’t want or need. Don’t rush to a relationship, don’t rush to get physical. Especially don’t consider like long-term relationships, marriage, or moving in with him. TAKE THINGS VERY SLOW. Good people take the time to prove they’re for real by making you an equal, not simply pretending you’re equal. 

Secondly, ask early what his expectations are. Does he just want sex? Does he want a relationship? Does he want something in between? Or something more? Or something less? Ask him, and see if it aligns with your needs. If they do or don’t it’s up to you, but it can help you plan a trajectory for this relationship, and if your trajectory doesn’t match up to what he’s trying to make happen in real life, let that inform your decision. 

Finally, BE PREPARED. If someone does use their power to manipulate you, it won’t feel “bad” at first. You’ll try to apologize for them, or you’ll try to excuse the behaviour. This is natural, because we don’t want to say that the bad people in our life are bad people; we want to defend people we emotionally care about, and assume the best of people we think are good. Understand that you will do this unconsciously, and instead, consciously be aware that not all people are good people, and if this person does things that upset you, BACK OFF AND GET AWAY. 

[neptunecreek]

SAMBA versus SMB: Adversarial Interoperability is Judo for Network Effects

Before there was Big Tech, there was "adversarial interoperability": when someone decides to compete with a dominant company by creating a product or service that "interoperates" (works with) its offerings.

In tech, "network effects" can be a powerful force to maintain market dominance: if everyone is using Facebook, then your Facebook replacement doesn't just have to be better than Facebook, it has to be so much better than Facebook that it's worth using, even though all the people you want to talk to are still on Facebook. That's a tall order.

Adversarial interoperability is judo for network effects, using incumbents' dominance against them. To see how that works, let's look at a historical example of adversarial interoperability role in helping to unseat a monopolist's dominance.

The first skirmishes of the PC wars were fought with incompatible file formats and even data-storage formats: Apple users couldn't open files made by Microsoft users, and vice-versa. Even when file formats were (more or less) harmonized, there was still the problems of storage media: the SCSI drive you plugged into your Mac needed a special add-on and flaky driver software to work on your Windows machine; the ZIP cartridge you formatted for your PC wouldn't play nice with Macs.

But as office networking spread, the battle moved to a new front: networking compatibility. AppleTalk, Apple's proprietary protocol for connecting up Macs and networked devices like printers, pretty much Just Worked, providing you were using a Mac. If you were using a Windows PC, you had to install special, buggy, unreliable software.

And for Apple users hoping to fit in at Windows shops, the problems were even worse: Windows machines used the SMB protocol for file-sharing and printers, and Microsoft's support for MacOS was patchy at best, nonexistent at worst, and costly besides. Businesses sorted themselves into Mac-only and PC-only silos, and if a Mac shop needed a PC (for the accounting software, say), it was often cheaper and easier just to get the accountant their own printer and backup tape-drive, rather than try to get that PC to talk to the network. Likewise, all PC-shops with a single graphic designer on a Mac—that person would often live offline, disconnected from the office network, tethered to their own printer, with their own stack of Mac-formatted ZIP cartridges or CD-ROMs.

All that started to change in 1993: that was the year that an Australian PhD candidate named Andrew Tridgell licensed his SAMBA package as free/open source software and exposed it to the wide community of developers looking to connect their non-Microsoft computers—Unix and GNU/Linux servers, MacOS workstations—to the dominant Microsoft LANs.

SAMBA was created by using a "packet sniffer" to ingest raw SMB packets as they traversed a local network; these intercepted packets gave Tridgell the insight he needed to reverse-engineer Microsoft's proprietary networking protocol. Tridgell prioritized compatibility with LAN Manager, a proprietary Network Operating System that enterprise networks made heavy use of. If SAMBA could be made to work in LAN Manager networks, then you could connect a Mac to a PC network—or vice-versa—and add some Unix servers and use a mix of SAMBA and SMB to get them all to play nice with one another.

The timing of Tridgell's invention was crucial: in 1993, Microsoft had just weathered the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust investigation of its monopoly tactics, squeaking through thanks to a 2-2 deadlock among the commissioners, and was facing down a monopoly investigation by the Department of Justice.

The growth of local-area networks greatly accelerated Microsoft's dominance. It's one thing to dominate the desktop, another entirely to leverage that dominance so that no one else can make an operating system that connects to networks that include computers running that dominant system. Network administrators of the day were ready to throw in the towel and go all-Microsoft for everything from design workstations to servers.

SAMBA changed all that. What's more, as Microsoft updated SMB, SAMBA matched them, relying on a growing cadre of software authors who relied on SAMBA to keep their own networks running.

The emergence of SAMBA in the period when Microsoft's dominance was at its peak, the same year that the US government tried and failed to address that dominance, was one of the most salutary bits of timing in computing history, carving out a new niche for Microsoft's operating system rivals that gave them space to breathe and grow. It's certainly possible that without SAMBA, Microsoft could have leveraged its operating system, LAN and application dominance to crush all rivals.

So What Happened?

We don't see a lot of SAMBA-style stories anymore, despite increased concentration of various sectors of the tech market and a world crying out for adversarial interoperability judo throws.

Indeed, investors seem to have lost their appetite for funding companies that might disrupt the spectacularly profitable Internet monopolists of 2019, ceding them those margins and deeming their territory to be a "kill zone."

VCs have not lost their appetite for making money, and toolsmiths have not lost the urge to puncture the supposedly airtight bubbles around the Big Tech incumbents, so why is it so hard to find a modern David with the stomach to face off against 2019's Goliaths?

To find the answer, look to the law. As monopolists have conquered more and more of the digital realm, they have invested some of those supernormal profits in law and policy that lets them fend off adversarial interoperators.

One legal weapon is "Terms of Service": both Facebook and Blizzard have secured judgments giving their fine print the force of law, and now tech giants use clickthrough agreements that amount to, "By clicking here, you promise that you won't try to adversarially interoperate with us."

A modern SAMBA project would have to contend with this liability, and Microsoft would argue that anyone who took the step of installing SMB had already agreed that they wouldn't try to reverse-engineer it to make a compatible product.

Then there's "anti-circumvention," a feature of 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Under Section 1201 of the DMCA, bypassing a "copyright access control" can put you in both criminal and civil jeopardy, regardless of whether there's any copyright infringement. DMCA 1201 was originally used to stop companies from making region-free DVD players or modding game consoles to play unofficial games (neither of which is a copyright violation!).

But today, DMCA 1201 is used to control competitors, critics, and customers. Any device with software in it contains a "copyrighted work," so manufacturers need only set up an "access control" and they can exert legal control over all kinds of uses of the product.

Their customers can only use the product in ways that don't involve bypassing the "access control," and that can be used to force you to buy only one brand of ink or use apps from only one app store.

Their critics—security researchers auditing their cybersecurity—can't publish proof-of-concept to back up their claims about vulnerabilities in the systems.

And competitors can't bypass access controls to make compatible products: third party app stores, compatible inks, or a feature-for-feature duplicate of a dominant company's networking protocol.

Someone attempting to replicate the SAMBA creation feat in 2019 would likely come up against an access control that needed to be bypassed in order to peer inside the protocol's encrypted outer layer in order to create a feature-compatible tool to use in competing products.

Another thing that's changed (for the worse) since 1993 is the proliferation of software patents. Software patenting went into high gear around 1994 and consistently gained speed until 2014, when Alice v. CLS Bank put the brakes on (today, Alice is under threat). After decades of low-quality patents issuing from the US Patent and Trademark Office, there are so many trivial, obvious and overlapping software patents in play that anyone trying to make a SAMBA-like product would run a real risk of being threatened with expensive litigation for patent infringement.

This thicket of legal anti-adversarial-interoperability dangers has been a driver of market concentration, and the beneficiaries of market concentration have also spent lavishly to expand and strengthen the thicket. It's gotten so bad that even some "open standards organizations" have standardized easy-to-use ways of legally prohibiting adversarial interoperability, locking in the dominance of the largest browser vendors.

The idea that wildly profitable businesses would be viewed as unassailable threats by investors and entrepreneurs (rather than as irresistible targets) tells you everything you need to know about the state of competition today. As we look to cut the Big Tech giants down to size, let's not forget that tech once thronged with Davids eager to do battle with Goliaths, and that this throng would be ours to command again, if only we would re-arm it.

from Deeplinks https://ift.tt/2XWVBQt

#Deeplinks

[mostlysignssomeportents]

What's wrong with blaming "information" for political chaos

David Perell's 13,000 word essay, "What the Hell is Going On?" presents a reassuring -- and contrarian -- view on how our current dysfunction in politics, media, and business has come to pass, drawing on orthodox economic theories about "information asymmetry" in a way that makes the whole thing seem like a kind of adjustment period between a middling old world and a fine new one.

I think Perell is wrong. His theory omits the most salient, obvious explanation for what's going on (the creation of an oligarchy that has diminished the efficacy of public institutions and introduced widespread corruption in every domain), in favor of rationalizations that let the wealthy and their enablers off the hook, converting a corrupt system with nameable human actors who have benefited from it and who spend lavishly to perpetuate it into a systemic problem that emerges from a historical moment in which everyone is blameless, prisoners of fate and history.

Perell's theory goes a little like this: once we had incomplete information and so we had to rely on rules of thumb to navigate the world. We trusted brands because we couldn't access realtime customer reviews to tell us whether a product was any good. We trusted universities because we couldn't access libraries and communities that let us train ourselves. We trusted political parties because the news media pushed a narrative that made it hard to find out when the parties were corrupt or ineffectual.

All of this is true, as is Perell's conclusion. The internet produced better access to information, which has made everything decohere. We can choose to buy craft beer instead of beer from the giant conglomerates and the net helps us figure out which beer will be good. We can teach ourselves without accruing massive debts. We can shop for news sources that tailor to our interests and step outside the overton window.

But that's as far as he goes, and that's where he goes wrong. Because inequality and the internet grew up together (Ronald Reagan was elected the year the Apple ][+ hit the market), and any account of the past 40 years has to examine both together.

The French economist Thomas Piketty presents a compelling case that in the late 1970s, global wealth concentration reached a tipping point thanks to the slow but inevitable recovery of fortunes lost in the World Wars; at that moment, the richest people in the world finally had amassed enough capital to start spending in earnest to buy political outcomes that would make them even richer.

40 years later, we live in a world of rampant monopolization, a political consensus totally at odds with popular views, and an epistemological crisis born of the combination of the deliberate sowing of doubt over scientific consensuses ("some experts don't believe in vaccines"), captured regulators ("of course FDA says vaccines are safe, they're in the pocket of big pharma") and decades of abuse from concentrated industries whose size and wealth confer immunity to consequences for bad actions ("why should we trust pharma after all the bad shit they've done?").

Add to this the precarity of a disappearing middle class and the end of upward social mobility, and many of Perell's outcomes can be explained or recast without making it all about increased access to information.

For example, people take on crushing debts to send their kids to university because social mobility has all but ended and they worry that without a degree, their kids will slide down the economic ladder. The universities build massive stadiums and other fripperies to lure in the super-rich whose overt and covert bribery are the source of personal wealth for the swelling ranks of high-paid administrators. They don't pay faculty enough to live on because desperate poor people have taken on so much debt to send so many poor kids to university that they have a buyer's market for adjuncts.

Political "polarization" is not the result of increased information, rather, it is a mirage brought on by the fact that the vast majority of people favor policies that politicians refuse to deliver; any politician who tries is branded as an out-of-touch radical, while the "serious grownups" continue to insist that America (alone among the world's developed states) can't afford universal health care, decent public education, net neutrality, etc.

Politicians like Trump can mobilize huge amounts of votes by welding together a coalition of the super-rich (who want tax cuts and don't care about anything else), racists, and people who are genuinely disaffected and worried about downward mobility by saying (truthfully) that "the system is rigged" (while omitting the fact that it was rigged in his favor and he intends to rig it further in office).

And while "micro brands" are on the rise, a shocking number of them are owned by the same handful of companies (whose shares, in turn, are largely owned by the same minuscule class of investors and handful of giant funds). Thanks to lax antitrust enforcement, this is not an age in which the rentiers are being euthanized: it's one in which the rentiers have bought up every conceivable place you might shop, leaving you with no possible way to avoid enriching them.

The internet has foundationally altered our information asymmetries, but it will not cause inequality and the corruption that creates it to wither away. Any critique of political and economic chaos that fails to take account of corruption and fails to place the blame on those who have benefited from it is worse than incomplete: it's a dangerous counsel of complacency.

https://boingboing.net/2019/03/18/oligarchs-r-us-3.html