
Cory Doctorow: Persuasion, Adaptation, and the Arms Race for Your Attention - af16090
https://locusmag.com/2018/01/cory-doctorow-persuasion-adaptation-and-the-arms-race-for-your-attention/
======
freedomben
Always interested in what Cory Doctorow has to say. While this particular blog
post isn't about DRM, his work is benefiting everyone (except those who would
rather enrich themselves at the expense of humanity). It's probably bigger
than you think. I highly recommend reading up on what Cory has to say on DRM
and the war on general purpose computing. It may change your mind.

[http://www.zdnet.com/article/cory-doctorow-says-fight-
agains...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/cory-doctorow-says-fight-against-drm-
laws-more-important-than-blogging/)

[https://www.eff.org/press/releases/cory-doctorow-rejoins-
eff...](https://www.eff.org/press/releases/cory-doctorow-rejoins-eff-
eradicate-drm-everywhere)

Also watch the various youtube videos of his talks, like this one:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbYXBJOFgeI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbYXBJOFgeI)

~~~
dahart
> Always interested in what Cory Doctorow has to say

I used to be, then I met him in person. I loved reading his stuff on
BoingBoing. I caught him at a book signing at Siggraph in Vancouver one year.
I bought his book, and waited in line, excited to talk to him. I asked him
what I thought was an interesting question about the difference between print
and digital copyrights, and how the laws should change for digital.

He was an absolute and utter jerk to me. He took one look at my badge that
said "Disney" and started hurling sarcastic insults at me about my employer
and suggesting my character was tarnished for working for them. I managed to
ask my question and he blew it off completely as a non issue and acted like it
was a stupid question. I said "thanks" and started walking away, and he called
after me saying "tell those thieves at Disney I said hi." I don't care if he's
interesting or right anymore. I still mildly wanted to read his book, but I
haven't been able to. When I see it or read about him, the memory of that
moment comes back to me. I wish I could go back to liking his writing and not
having met him.

~~~
Retric
My sister works for Disney and I am polite about, but I still place Disney on
the same tier as Backwater(Academi) in terms of evil.

If you are an Animator I get it they treat you well and it's a small industry.
However, objectively they cause an immense amount of direct and indirect harm.

~~~
dahart
My feelings about Cory aren't because he insulted Disney, I already knew how
he felt about Disney. My feelings are personal. He insulted me without knowing
_anything_ about me. He _assumed_ that I was colluding rather than working to
fix anything from the inside. He was rude to me personally before I said a
word to him. He insulted me while I was holding a copy of his book that I had
just paid for, while I was spending my own time waiting in line to get the
chance to talk to him. How ungrateful and unprofessional can someone get?

He is selling his writing. I do wonder how hard he'd stick to his copyright
guns if nobody ever paid him for his ideas, and everybody copied them instead.

I have all my own reasons to not trust Disney, BTW, above and beyond their
historical copyright violations or whatever. They shut down our research group
on a whim during a management turnover because they couldn't see in Excel
whether it was profitable. They closed the game studio I was working at on
very little notice after making a billion dollars on the product we created,
after years of overtime. I had left already and was unaffected, but a couple
hundred people were suddenly trying to figure out how to feed their families.

That said, they also paid me relatively well, and I fed my family and worked
on some fun projects. My family and extended family and friends all enjoyed
free trips to Disneyland. As a parent, I do appreciate being able to trust
Disney content around my kids.

Given that they are a global economic engine that supports millions of people,
I can have my beefs, but it's hard to say that it's all bad. "Evil" is a black
and white narrative that, ironically, is the kind of thinking that Disney has
encouraged. These companies are made of people, almost all of whom are good
and just trying to get by.

All large corporations are doing things that are not in the public interest.
Calling out specific ones and claiming they're much worse than others is to
misunderstand our economic system. Capitalism is the root cause of the immense
amount of direct and indrect harm, at the same time it's the cause of an
immense amount of wealth and economic stability.

In any case, even if some companies are bad, it's lame to be rude to strangers
face to face.

~~~
Retric
> trust Disney content around my kids.

Ehh, I really don't trust their content and consider it actively harmful see
my other comment.

> fix anything from the inside

I have wondered about this, there are some really dark themes around
cannibalism in the lion king just under the surface. Most animals talk, we
still eat them. But, I think the whitewashing is still rather pervasive
relative to the source material.

> "Evil" is a black and white narrative

'evil scale' is a useful shorthand for harm outside of simply outcomes aka an
earthquake is harmful but not evil. However, simply referring to it as a
continuum means it's not simply a black and white scale.

------
hugo0384729109
A bit odd to open an article about an arms race for my attention and see an ad
for a book (A whirlwind out-of-this-galaxy adventure! #1 New York Times best
selling author...) in the menu that takes up the top half of the page, and
then only the title of the article and no actual text before scrolling (mobile
safari)... and then a donate now box also came up over 80% of the screen. Also
a nice touch to have all the social media widgets connected so my attention
can be weaponized while I read about my attention being weaponized.

~~~
superkuh
There's no better time than now (Meltdown/Spectre) to switch to whitelist only
JS (NoScript works). The menu/ads completely fail to display but the text is
just fine.

~~~
Splines
I've done the same thing, but I wonder how much I am really protecting myself.
I need to whitelist sites that I use to get them to work (HN, for example),
but that doesn't stop HN from attacking me.

I suppose it raises the bar, but how soon until I whitelist a site that
attacks me?

~~~
superkuh
You don't need to whitelist HN. It works fine without it. It just involves
reloads. Also, it really helps to only ever temporarily whitelist so exposure
is minimized and you learn what you can get by with.

------
whatshisface
> _" Not everyone has this reaction, of course: people in the fifth or sixth
> sigma of slot-machine susceptibility go out and[...]"_

Every time a new one of these mental attacks gets invented, a new five-sigma
cohort falls off the "normal life" wagon. How many times can this happen
before expansive hordes of people who have had their priorities destroyed
start a new social crisis?

~~~
gozur88
I wonder if that's really a problem or if it's the same group people getting
manipulated over and over.

~~~
dm319
I guess it depends when people get afflicted. If you spend your adult life all
day playing a slot-machines or a dopamine-enriching computer game, you are
unlikely to be starting a family anytime soon, and so it won't be your
children who go on to be the afflicted population in the next generation.

If you had children, they might be more aware of the dangers of these
attentional assaults, and actually more resistant to it.

------
titzer
Cory is a great writer and gives an entertaining history of attention-grabbing
in advertising and games. His main point is that we are continually able to
adapt to escalating intrusions that attention grabbers throw at us.

However, overall I disagree that we are adapting fast enough. Not only is the
escalation so rapid that most cannot adapt, the cultural shift in what is an
acceptable level of intrusion is like boiling us frogs alive.

On the Web, it is absolutely acceptable nowadays to have a fullpage
interstitial or a whole-page darkening nag box on a news article. And to block
adblockers. Wat. A newspaper or the web of just 5 years ago would never have
considered this acceptable.

This makes me worry about the future, especially augmented reality. Don't you
want ads right ON YOUR FACE!? It's OK. You'll adapt!

~~~
wu-ikkyu
>This makes me worry about the future, especially augmented reality. Don't you
want ads right ON YOUR FACE!? It's OK. You'll adapt!

I have a dream that augmented reality will one day enable you to visually
block virtually every advertisement and billboard in meatspace, by covering
them up with an image to your liking such as a forest

~~~
hopefullypoetic
At the risk of being censured for a frivolous, redditlike comment by a new
account, I am reminded of a snippet of doggerel by Ogden Nash, and compelled
to share it:

    
    
      I think that I shall never see
      A billboard lovely as a tree
      Indeed, unless the billboards fall
      I'll never see a tree at all

------
PeterStuer
Sadly the collateral damages in our attention habituation seems to be our
empathy and social lives.

~~~
Const-me
And maybe even mental health.

I recently saw research that links social network usage with depression, e.g.
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2016/04/30/study-l...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2016/04/30/study-
links-heavy-facebook-and-social-media-usage-to-depression/)

------
bmj
I would highly recommend reading Matthew Crawford's _The World Outside Your
Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction_.

([https://www.bookdepository.com/World-Beyond-Your-Head-
Matthe...](https://www.bookdepository.com/World-Beyond-Your-Head-Matthew-B-
Crawford/9780374292980))

------
TeMPOraL
I'm not sure if I agree with the tone of his conclusion - don't worry, that we
always evolve defenses. _It doesn 't matter_ we evolve defenses. They're
always in lock-step with new attack vectors. Which means the only thing that
changes is _the players_. Yesterday it was Zynga and Upworthy, today it's
Cambridge Analytica, tomorrow it will be something else. Bad new for
individual attackers, yes, but it's also bad news for all of us too - because
we don't know and can't predict what the next attack will be and where will it
come from.

Basically, the defense can't outpace offense, and we're doomed to forever be
pwnd by manipulative people.

~~~
Bartweiss
> _Basically, the defense can 't outpace offense, and we're doomed to forever
> be pwnd by manipulative people._

This might be a decent summary of where we are now, but I don't think it's
inherent to the problem. To stretch a metaphor, antibodies to viruses are
reactive, but white blood cells are proactive against new diseases.

I run a stack of privacy and attention defenses on my browser. Sometimes new
attacks come out and I lose ground, as with browser fingerprinting. But
sometimes new attacks come out and run aground on the protections I already
have - the various cryptocurrency mining scripts, for instance, were all
stopped because I disabled Javascript for unrelated reasons.

Blocking the intrusion of the day is a Red Queen situation, agreed. But it's
possible to make the game asymmetric, to raise the cost of future attacks and
so do better with each round of the pattern.

------
coldtea
> _As we all know, time travelers have to be very careful when they visit the
> past, because their evolved immune systems allow them to harbor pathogens
> that the olde timey people are defenseless against._

Actually it goes both ways. Evolution doesn't have an arrow, and a because
their evolved immune systems allow them to harbor pathogen that the 10.000B.C
people had evolved to defend against might be lethal in the 22nd century.

------
Eupolemos
> "There may be a rump of voters who’ll remain susceptible to Mercerism and
> its persuasion tactics,"

Having just read "Do Androids Dream Of Electrical Sheep", I see what you did
there Cory.

------
mar77i
That reminds me: Cory will always have my attention because, as with Ron Paul,
I will take literally anything from an xkcd cartoon stick figure.

