My latest @locusmag column is "The Swivel-Eyed Loons Have A Point," about all the ways that I agree with the Right's paranoid fringe, whom I mostly *disagree* with:
https://locusmag.com/2023/05/commentary-cory-doctorow-the-swivel-eyed-loons-have-a-point/
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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/2023/05/03/paranoid-style/#eat-bugs
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The impetus for the article was a widely reported, bizarre protest against the plan to create a #15MinuteCity in Oxford, England. A 15-minute city is a city where planning strives to ensure that you can walk or bicycle to all the things you need - shopping, leisure, school, work, healthcare - within 15 minutes. It's been the source of unhinged conspiracy theories from the far-right fever swamp, on both sides of the Atlantic.
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The protest in Oxford was especially bizarre since it's already basically a 15-minute city - not only is it a college town (most college towns are 15-minute cities), it's a *medieval* college town, and olde timey people laid out their cities for the convenience of pedestrians (for obvious reasons).
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The protesters had a raft of objections to the plans, including a complex system for limiting cars' access to the center of town. This plan rationed vehicular access to the narrow, clogged, medieval roads in town, allowing each resident a few trips through town every week but otherwise requiring them to use transit, or take the ring road that detoured around the city center.
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On the one hand, *something* has to be done. Oxford can't support the vehicle traffic it experiences today, and the amount of traffic is climbing. On the other hand, the protesters worried that the automatic license plate recognition (#ALPR) system would just be the start, and that the British state would eventually use its ubiquitous network of traffic cameras as a system of totalitarian control.
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And - as the title of the article has it - the swivel-eyed loons have a point. The UK is a snooper's paradise. What guns are to America, CCTVs are to Britain. The country pioneered the use of ubiquitous "security" cameras, even as successive governments passed laws to suspend habeas corpus, criminalize literary works that "glorify" terrorism, created a nationwide system of curfews, and impose bizarre #ASBO orders for "anti-social behavior."
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There's nothing wrong with asking questions about how a grid of ubiquitous surveillance cameras can be abused, especially not in England - indeed, these are questions that should have been asked many years ago.
The protesters didn't just worry about movement restrictions and surveillance - they also claimed that these controls would be used on everyday people, while elites were exempted from these measures. Again, the swivel-eyed loons have a point.
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The UK has a longstanding culture of impunity for its wealthy and powerful people.
Think of #MargaretThatcher's behind-the-scenes maneuvers to keep her top civil servant #PeterHayman from being outed and prosecuted for his sex-crimes against children:
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/feb/02/thatcher-peter-hayman-named-paedophile-archives
Or how #KingCharles was able to secretly rewrite and block legislation before it was presented to Parliament, in order to feather his own nest:
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The protesters claimed that we were steaming towards #ClimateLockdowns in which everyday people would have their movements severely limited, while the Great and Good did as they pleased. While there's no reason to believe that "climate lockdowns" are a thing, Britain's long history of creating severe rules for everyday people and then turning a blind eye to elite rulebreaking is undeniable.
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After all, it was #DominicCummings, architect of the #covid lockdowns, who violated his own rules, drove 275 miles to see his family, then took a detour to visit a scenic castle, and finally insulted every Briton's intelligence by concocting a story that this was all necessary to confirm that his eyesight was in good working order (no, really).
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#Cumgate was bad enough, but it turns out that Cummings' boss, then-PM #BorisJohnson, threw a series of boozy, illegal parties in his official residence, lied about them - including lying to Parliament. All this while people were banned from visiting dying relatives or attending their funerals.
When the swivel-eyed loons say that measures taken to address climate change will restrict them, but not the rich and powerful, they have a point.
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Covid is real. The swivel-eyed loons say it was made up or exaggerated, and in any rate, it was a pretext to impose restrictive and extractive policies on everyday people. Covid is real, but that doesn't mean there wasn't a pretext, too.
For example, covid let our bosses declare our homes to be branch offices of their commercial premises, and then use #bossware to spy on us and control us in our own homes, turning "work from home" into "live at work":
https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware
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Covid let monopolistic grocers and consumer packaged goods manufacturers hike prices way beyond anything justified by supply-chain shocks and blame it on #inflation:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/11/price-over-volume/#pepsi-pricing-power
The oil companies got in on the #excuseflation act, too:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/15/sanctions-financing/#soak-the-rich
The energy sector was *especially* shameless in the UK, more than doubling the price of fuel:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/articles/costoflivinginsights/energy
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There is nothing inconsistent about claims that "covid is real" and also that "covid was a pretext to gouge, control and harm everyday people."
Swivel-eyed loons are very worried about #vaccines. They say that vaccines are the product of a ruthless, uncaring, murdering #pharma sector that is so concentrated that it can easily capture its regulators, who allow it to kill with impunity.
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Now, I believe in vaccines and have had five jabs - but the swivel-eyed loons have a point here, too. The pharma sector *does* put profits ahead of safety, and its regulators *do* allow the sector to run rampant.
For example, about a decade ago, I went to a specialist - a Harley Street quack - for my chronic pain. The doctor, a very eminent private MD, told me that I should go on daily opioids, for the rest of my life.
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When I asked whether that was safe, he assured me it was, that addiction concerns were vastly overblown, and that new research had completely overturned the received wisdom. He told me that regulators all over the world had reconsidered their guidance, and approved new, powerful pain drugs, and that I should have no concerns.
Reader, I had concerns. So I "did my own research."
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I concluded that a powerful family of secretive, reclusive billionaires - the #Sacklers - were recklessly pushing pain meds in ways they knew would likely lead to addiction and death. I concluded that this family was growing unbelievably wealthy doing this, and threatening the press into silence to prevent anyone from writing about it (years later, I would be threatened by the Sacklers' lawyers for doing so).
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I concluded that the regulators who were supposed to guard me from this kind of predation were so cozy with the opioid barons that they were letting them do as they pleased.
In other words, I became an opioid denier.
The covid vaccines underwent a lot of scrutiny from a variety of experts, including independent experts that can't be credibly connected to the pharma giants.
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There is a wealth of data about them - these medications have been administered to more people, in a shorter timespan, under very transparent conditions, than any other pharma product I can think of.
But despite this, the core claims - that pharma companies can't be trusted to choose safety over profits, and that regulators defer to pharma companies in ways that risk the lives of the public they are meant to protect - are undeniable. The swivel-eyed loons have a point.
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Another concern I share with the protesters: the "post-ownership" society. While I'm extremely excited about the idea of public goods, I'm terrified about the rise of a rentier economy.
What's the difference? Well, say that small household tools were public goods. Today my neighbors and I all own genuinely terrible, cheaply made drills that sit in drawers all year except for the 1-2 times that someone needs to make a hole in the wall.
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But what if our library system bought the highest-quality imaginable drills, designed to be repairable, and to gracefully decompose back into the material stream when they were finally used up? What if these drills were location-aware, and gathered usage telemetry to allow for continuous improvement? I'd love that world. There's even a name for it: #LibrarySocialism, coined by the @srslywrong podcast:
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Cory Doctorow
Gil Friend, sustainability OG