Does the author of Little Brother love Big Brother?

Probably not. Still, the Cory Doctorow calling for “restoring the enforcement program of the federal government” (“The Second-Best Time to Slay Amazon is Now,” The New York Times, September 29) seems to have forgotten what he learned … and taught.

Little Brother is one of Doctorow’s sci-fi novels, but its grassroots uprising against the Department of Homeland Security was modeled after, and unashamedly presented as a role model for, real-life pushback to the post-9/11 surveillance state. Its introduction includes nonfictional denunciations of the NSA and TSA. Yet Doctorow entrusts the DOJ to fight the threat of two-day shipping rather than terrorism.

Doctorow does concede that Amazon profits from “vast sums in subsidies from state and local governments,” though the prolific documenter of intellectual property abuse misses the chance to highlight its indirect subsidy. Apple paid to license Amazon’s “1-Click” checkout patent, sparing iTunes customers a redundant second mouse mash, after Barnes & Noble not doing so for its website got them sued.

Doctorow sees cyberspace, unmoored from “constraints of empires grounded in physical goods,” as ripe for canny cornering. A decade ago, Times contributor Adam Davidson failed to foresee the rise of streaming services that avoided “the cost of digging up roads and sidewalks and hiring a fleet of technicians to draw wire” in building alternatives to cable television.

The remainder of Doctorow’s account of Amazon’s rise stresses sheer monetary muscle, using “seemingly bottomless coffers” to “extinguish any upstart that dared to compete with it,” aided by Ronald Reagan’s replacement of a “suspicion of corporate power” with deregulation of the Progressive Era’s antitrust regime.

In fact, as historian Gabriel Kolko explained in The Triumph of Conservatism, “the major demands of politically oriented big businessmen” were what “gave progressivism its essential character.” Doctorow calls for Joe Biden to reverse the “decline since the Carter administration” of trust-busting. Reagan actually halted the steps towards rolling back regulations that entrenched incumbent industries spearheaded by the previous president and assisted by Biden in Congress. Even the most over-the-top pro-finance pop culture of Reagan’s terms, like the cinematic comedies Trading Places and The Secret of My Succe$s, championed the leeway for nimble outsiders to outpace the old-money establishment.

The Doctorow who writes that “sellers became increasingly reliant on Amazon to display and deliver their goods” over the first decades of the 2000s is the same one who garners publicity, and sales, by providing free downloads of books such as Little Brother.

On the consumer side, Amazon’s “captive base of readers” has an open door. Prime’s bountiful buffet of services may seem unbeatable, but I let my subscription lapse when it just didn’t offer enough for the price, and the time required to navigate its disorganized offerings, that couldn’t be obtained elsewhere. Removing the ability to play album tracks in order was the last straw.

The federal government Doctorow champions as the opponent of Amazon’s “calcified edifice of expensively purchased pro-monopoly precedent” is a far more extensive, and costly, monopolist.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “The Exit from Amazon is a Double-Click Away” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, October 4, 2023
2. “The Exit from Amazon is a Double-Click Away” by Thomas L. Knapp [sic], The Newton Kansan, October 6, 2023

In June, Florida’s legislature passed (and governor Ron DeSantis signed) a bill transferring control of Gainesville Regional Utilities from the city’s government to the  state’s. In late September, a judge rejected the city’s lawsuit to prevent the takeover.

While that sounds like a localized controversy, it offers national implications and important lessons. We’ve seen similar situations play out in other locales.

When my family moved to the Gainesville area a decade ago, friends who already lived here warned us: “Don’t rent in town, and even  outside of town make sure you’re not in GRU’s coverage area.”

Households in that coverage area fork over a great deal more every month to keep their lights on than households in other Florida cities — and WAY more than households in areas served by rural electric cooperatives.

Anecdotally, a couple of years ago I compared electric bills with an acquaintance. That acquaintance was paying GRU about twice as much to electrify a small single-person household as I was paying Clay Electric (an REC) to light up a medium five-person household.

Over the years I’ve kept an eye on GRU’s arguments for its ever-increasing prices. Here’s their two-step:

First: We can stop raising rates if we just annex more customers! Economies of scale will fix the problem!  The more kilowatt-hours we’re selling, the cheaper each kilowatt-hour becomes!

Then: We must raise rates again! We just annexed a bunch of new customers! New lines and new power generation facilities cost money!

Rinse, repeat.

Why can’t GRU deliver electricity at least as cheaply and efficiently to a compact urban area as Clay does to a much larger rural area where distances between customers are often measured in miles rather than meters?

Well, Clay is owned by its members/customers, while GRU is “owned” by politicians who use it as three things: A cash cow for the city, a kid’s chemistry set for experimenting with novel power generation methods (including a $1.2 billion “biomass” experiment), and an excuse to bring surrounding areas under their control.

While it’s true that rural electric cooperatives were, like municipal utilities, created by governments, not all “non-profits” are created equal. RECs answer directly to their customers. Municipal utilities answer to politicians who use them as … well, tax collectors.

But the answer to the bigger problem, I think, isn’t so much a matter of RECs versus municipal utilities versus “private” utilities, but in competition on both price and service.

Even if we concede (I don’t) that power LINES are “natural monopolies,” these days all those lines are tied together in sprawling “grids.” There’s no good reason why we shouldn’t each be able to choose our electricity provider, with providers serving particular areas splitting line maintenance costs. That’s been done in, for example, Texas.

I’d love to see us get away from “grids” and to far more localized (ideally, single-household via e.g. rooftop solar) power generation and delivery. But until we can do that, freeing hostages from utility monopolies should rank near the top of our energy priorities.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

I’m neither a fan nor a supporter of Vivek Ramaswamy, one of the also-rans who’s made it to the “debate” phase of auditions for the vice-presidency or a cabinet slot in a notional second Donald Trump administration. For the most part, neither his ideas nor his presentation impress me. But his demeanor has a way of usefully baiting the other candidates into showing us who they really are.

The big reveal at the second “debate” — scare quotes because these events aren’t really debates, they’re just illegally large advertising donations that the Federal Election Commission turns a blind eye to — came from former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who’s been having a moment as just maybe, possibly, an eensy teensy bit, more likely than Florida governor Ron DeSantis to notch a distant second place to Trump in the GOP presidential primaries.

“TikTok,” Haley informed America by way of scolding Ramaswamy for setting up a campaign account on it, “is one of the most dangerous social media apps that we could have. … 150 million people are on TikTok. That means they can get your contacts, they can get your financial information, they can get your emails, they can get text messages, they can get all of these things. … You are now wanting kids to go and get on this social media that’s dangerous for all of us.”

In the middle of all this, Haley let loose with what was, I suppose, intended as the zinger: “Every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber.”

Every time Haley speaks, she sounds a little bit dumber, but I doubt that’s Ramaswamy’s fault.

Nor is it Ramaswamy’s fault that she comes off as unhinged on the level of Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper, the fictional character who engineers a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union for “corrupting” his “precious bodily fluids” in the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove.

Is it possible that the Chinese regime gains access to American users’ data via TikTok? Of course it is. We already know that the US regime gains access to the data of Americans, and foreigners, via their use of apps and platforms domiciled in the US. We know this because American hero Edward Snowden told us all about it nearly a decade ago.

Interestingly, Vivek Ramaswamy has pledged to “pardon” Snowden — currently exiled to Russia — for his non-crimes, one of his few truly attractive promises. Haley hasn’t.

It’s possible that Haley’s shrill and bellicose presentation is for real. Or maybe it’s just an act, a woman going over the top to prove that she’d be just as cluelessly belligerent in the Oval Office as any man.

Either way, voters shouldn’t allow her within 100 miles of the nuclear “football.”

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY