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Covert Cobbling is an idea from sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom. It appears to be a suite of strategies for reverse engineering engines of information asymmetry. This is basically what Josie and I would like to see accomplished with what we call pubwan. I have my thought leader, Frank Pasquale, to thank for bringing this concept to my attention via a retweet. Once upon a time, I formulated a list of defining attributes for pubwan, which seemed appropriate at the time. For example, I specified that by definition, pubwan would have to be non-profit. That is because I believed (and still believe) that profit models based on information are inherently asymmetric, which would instantly defeat the purpose of implementing pubwan in the first place. Another attribute I felt was appropriate at the time was lawfulness:

In fact, pubwan should draw its sources, methods and its proposed strategies from all manner of “openist” movements. Such movements include “open systems,” “open content,” “open source” and others. Obviously, this should not be generalized to “open <fill in the blank>.” It can’t be emphasized enough that pubwan is not “open season” on any organization, practice, person or philosophy. Not all features of all openist movements are appropriate for pubwan. For example, some public licenses prohibit use of the licensed information or technology for specified uses, examples including commercial, military, classified and non-educational uses. Others allow commercial use but allow free use only by noncommercial users. Pubwan is free. Free means you don’t have to pay. Free also means there are no strings attached. Note that it is the use of pubwan resources, not their preparation, which is unrestricted by pubwan. “Pubwan activities” are subject to all kinds of self-imposed constraints, which we have already discussed in some detail. By “pubwan activities,” we mean any volunteer efforts aimed at developing or improving pubwan, its technologies, its content, the organization of its content, its accessibility, inclusivity, ethical standards, technical standards, efficacy, data integrity, integrity in general, openness, sources, methods, etc., etc., etc. Lori believes that the Cypherpunks Anti-License is generally compatible with pubwan principles. Lori doesn’t know enough about legal issues to judge the appropriateness of any statement of copyleft to any set of objectives, but she likes the general tone of the CPL. This appreciation is of course tempered by the assertion that pubwan isn’t “anti” anything. Pubwan might benefit from a licensing and copylefting protocol of its own. On the other hand, the world at large might not benefit from yet another variant on the concept of public domain.

Since that time, I’ve re-considered whether lawfulness is a viable option for a pubwan movement, for various reasons. Mainly, because applied information asymmetry has become so high-stakes, and the difference in information gathering and leveraging capabilities between the public (as in public-spirited) and proprietary spheres has become so enormous, that illicit, and even covert, countermeasures may be a necessary evil in service to the greater good of reversing the degeneration of our society into a privately managed panopticon.

As of this writing, a Google search on the quoted phrase “covert cobbling” yielded only three results, one of which appears to be non-relevant and the other two are on Twitter. A search of Covert Cobbling on Twitter appears to reveal tweets only from attendees at some conference hashtagged #4s2017. According to Colin Shunryu Garvey, Covert Cobbling is necessary methodological innovation for opening blackboxes in the 21st century. Opening informational black boxes is the specific reason I came up with the idea of #pubwan. According to Sarah Myers West: “[Dr. McMillan-Cottom] calls for covert cobbling: disciplined methodological attacks on the black box, chosen to counter limitations of an individual method.” This suggests an all-hands-on-deck sense of urgency, as well as an eclectic approach to methodology, also very much what I have in mind for pubwan. Dan Hirschman: “Covert part is old/classic, cobbling is the new part – need to combine covert qual work with cobbling from every other method,” and “So, what’s the solution? “Covert cobbling”- real and legal secrecy means you need to do covert data collection.” This adds up to a pretty vague picture, so it’s quite possible that my take on covert cobbling is wrong. If so, my apologies to persons involved.

In addition to a commitment to lawfulness, the original formulation for pubwan called for non-secrecy. I’m wondering whether to move that goalpost. I deeply cherish the idea of a true transparent society in which transparency is omnidirectional; not the sort of unilateral transparency implicit in an informational power ratchet such as the pair of mirror shades on a cop or the one way mirror in the primate research lab. But informationally speaking, we are living in very dark times. The foes of transparency and public informational empowerment know who they are. They know what they’re doing and how they’re doing it. They make maximal use of both intellectual property and trade secrecy when it comes to maintaining their one-way information valves. To put it bluntly, this is war. Perhaps instead of a collegial brainstorm of ideas for making the information landscape more navigable by the public, what will be needed is an underground resistance, operating at least partially in secret, always worried about infiltrators from both commerce and state, perhaps resorting to black-hat hacks. While I’m a little squeamish about that, I consider it a lesser evil than using monetization/capital-raising to launch pubwan from idea to implementation.

Back (say in the 1970s) when libertarianism was understood as “left on social issues, right on economic issues” libertarianism was, if anything, an antidote to tendencies such as alt-right and other forms of nationalism.

Somewhere along the way, libertarianism became the philosophy of “private sector good, public sector bad.” Has this affected the libertarian position on, say, queer rights? Perhaps in a time when the main threat to queer rights was the police, it was obvious to queers and libertarians alike that they were natural allies. If the main concern is employment discrimination, libertarians start framing things in terms of “freedom of association.” Since their concept of liberty is “negative liberty,” what they actually mean by “freedom of association” is “freedom from association.” That’s fair enough, as I see it, since libertarians are hobgoblins for consistency. But I don’t consider them my allies. If someone simultaneously believes that “the world doesn’t owe you a living” and “the world doesn’t owe you a job,” they are a social darwinist. When the “socially liberal” part of libertarianism consists of nothing more than opposition to literal persecution by the state of minority or other groups, while the “economically conservative” portion consists of nothing less than a demand for an unmixed economy completely cleansed of a civilian public sector (in the case of the night watchman STATISTS, or any public sector in the case of the “ancaps”), then we have a particular form of libertarianism whose platform basically translates to “it’s better to be strong than to be weak.” Does that make it a potential on-ramp to brown-faction nationalism? How could it not?

This. (h/t Jack Saturday)

A good starting point is the simple reality that most of what we all receive as “income” far, far exceeds what anyone can claim as the result of the “work” they actually do in the here and now. Once this fully documented reality is understood, the moral case for a basic income for all becomes very different from conventional understandings. The starting point is recognition that most “income” is, in fact, a gift of the past.

It’s obviously the case that an hour of labor results in far more economic production than in the past. It’s always seemed fairly obvious to me that this has more to do with the level of technology than with the level of worker productivity. It’s always puzzled me that most people seem to have some other explanation. Populism at its best wants workers to get a larger share of the GDP than they’re getting, so they argue that today’s workers are more productive than yesterday’s workers and therefore deserve more income. Like me, they see something fundamentally wrong about the fact that almost all of the gains accrue to the top level of the social-economic food chain, but their framing of the issue in terms of a more productive generation of workers always seemed weak to me. I want the left to be bringing strong, highly defensible arguments to the table. The dark side of populism, nationalism (particularly non-underdog nationalism), notes that first world workers of today are involved in a larger magnitude of economic production, not only compared to their counterparts from the past, but to their counterparts from developing nations. The hired guns singing for their supper at the pro-market think tanks want to neutralize populism; at least the positive kind, so they argue that the productivity gains are due to more productive capital rather than more productive labor. They even ápply their skill at sophistry to coming up with demeaning concepts such as “zero marginal productivity (ZMP) workers.” Gar Alperowitz’ claim that “…most of what we all receive as “income” far, far exceeds what anyone can claim as the result of the “work” they actually do in the here and now…” raises the possibility that the real source of income is neither the marginal product of labor nor that of capital. Defeating marginalist theory would go a long way toward restoring the long-lost dignity of labor.

A nice bonus about the idea that income in the present is a gift from the past (if true) is that it could contribute to neutralizing the strain of pro-austerity ideology known as deficit hawkery. The deficit hawks complain that measures to make life in the present less austere or precarious (which they refer to by the insulting term “entitlements”) are the moral equivalent of stealing resources from future generations. Alperowitz’ hypothesis would suggest that most of the valuable resources available to future generations will consist of advancing knowledge, some of which is advancing even as we speak. Without a doubt at least some of this knowledge is being advanced by poor-as-churchmice adjuncts or maybe even in a few cases unpaid enthusiast programmers and other technical hobbyists who might be similar in some ways to me.

One thing that would make me very enthusiastic would be a solid mathematical model that demonstrates that “wealth creation” (utility creation? social welfare creation?) is more characteristic of the processes like discovering, tinkering, learning and expositing what one learns, than of processes like earning profits, or even working. It would be neat if there were a think tank for that.

It says in the always-recommended Freedom to Tinker blog that

The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is proposing a requirement that every car should broadcast a cleartext message specifying its exact position, speed, and heading ten times per second. In comments filed in April, during the 90-day comment period, we (specifically, Leo Reyzin, Anna Lysyanskaya, Vitaly Shmatikov, Adam Smith, together with the CDT via Joseph Lorenzo Hall and Joseph Jerome) argued that this requirement will result in a significant loss to privacy. Others have aptly argued that the proposed system also has serious security challenges and cannot prevent potentially deadly malicious broadcasts, and that it will be outdated before it is deployed. In this post I focus on privacy, though I think security problems and resulting safety risks are also important to consider.

I actually like this proposal. I’m post privacy, in the sense of being someone who has concluded that privacy is a technological impossibility and therefore a lost cause. The requirement for cleartext is something I see as a feature rather than a bug. What peeves me off royally, far more than the amount of data I’m shoveling to the data brokers with “my” devices, is that there isn’t a legible copy of that data stream for my own use, in self discovery, or what was meant by “quantified self” in a more innocent time, before that term (along with “sharing economy”) got brutally co-opted. My casus belli these days, rather than privacy (or even transparency, which unfortunately has become a weasel word) is information asymmetry, more precisely, the amelioration and preferably neutralization of it. I’m personally more comfortable (actually, less uncomfortable) with data about me being accessible to the world at large than available to paying clients under the understanding that it’s proprietary data. Plus I like the idea of the world of traffic analysis being opened to open source/open data/pubwan types and not just purveyors of “secret sauce” solutions to emerging industries like semi-autonomous vehicles, optimization of logistics, etc.

Don’t get me wrong, I do see a downside to this. Most importantly, the security concerns. Many people place some value on the largely empty phrase “privacy policy” because it promises that access to personal data will be vetted, so supposedly it will be aggressively kept out of the hands of cybercriminals. If it’s put into the hands of narrowcasters and precision-target marketers, well, at least they’re not criminals, and as they say, TANSTAAFL. Also, even my post-privacy self would like some trips to be discreet. I’m thinking I can live with plaintext geotelemetry being either allowed or required, if a hard off switch is provided. But since the “selling point” of this is helping “emergency services,” we can be pretty sure that’s one feature which will be disallowed. Honestly, just the stated reasons are reason enough for a NO vote from me. But I do sorely wish there were a place in the world for an internet of nonproprietary things, that communicate with the world at large, and generate data that somehow manages to be actionable without being monetized. I know, I know, information wants to be valuable. (Sigh)

Kevin Collier: This Is How Many Stingray Devices Exist in Trump’s America

Surely there must be at least the theoretical possibility of a warchalking technique capable of differentiating spoofs from legit transponders. Are there still people who apply hacker ethic to solving technical problems, though? It seems we’re living in very careerist times, in which activities that aren’t monetized are activities that simply don’t take place.

There’s workplace accommodations for disabilities, but making extroversion (“excellent communication skills”) no longer a prerequisite for employability (in virtually any occupation) would be pulling the thread that unravels the whole fabric of capitalist society. That’s my pet hypothesis, anyway.

I don’t have anything against extroverts. I’m just sick of extroversion being the ticket of admission, even to the occupations people think of as nerdy. It’s like Lake Wobegon. All the children are above average, and all the employed adults have excellent communication skills. Sounds like a broken society to me.

I think the HR-sphere gets it about portfolios of skills, but currently in a way where a portfolio that doesn’t include communication skills is basically unmarketable regardless of what things it does have. Any skill adds value to a skills portfolio, but communication is the one “make or break” skill.

Gail Tverberg:

Unfortunately, Adam Smith was right; there is an invisible hand guiding the economy.

Mike Konczal:

Those that would trade decommodification and worker power for basic income deserve neither.

Stephanie:

Choice is a fuzzy concept.

TheAncientGeekAKA1Z:

The obsession with IQ is one of the great irrationalites of the rationalsphere.

Rick Falkvinge:

The way governments want to tap all money flows in order to fund itself is not entirely unlike how the surveillance agencies want to tap all information flows in order to have an information advantage.

Heather Marsh:

Society without science, and without an effective way to integrate epistemic communities, will always be a society dissociated and easily controlled.

Eureka Springs:

A couple generations is probably not long enough to learn how to shake off puritanical, neoliberal shackles. And if we allow the old company store to take a big/jig revenue stream for far far more than they are worth… like banks, credit cards, payday loansters, prison profiteers, cable and telcos and pharma, insurance, etc do today… then we are just plain stupid indeed.

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