Opt Out October

At last, an alliterative monthly theme worth following! Welcome to the EFF's Opt Out October, with a sequence of tips "to trim down the amount of data that's collected about you or available online, throwing sand in the gears of corporate surveillance."

If you haven't thought about opting out of data collection, please follow the link and read about it.

There is one facets of the internet that big, data-collecting corporations only selectively understand. When it is time to judge whether they are a monopoly, even Facebook frames its total addressable market as "all human interaction", in order to claim that it is not a monopoly. The flip side is competition: if you make your website heinous enough, if you make your data-collection unpleasant and your interface obscures my access to resources, then I can just leave. I can get off the internet. I can go to the library. I can go outside. I can interact with people who are physically near me, mediated only by the real world, without the middle-man of any technology between us.

We can all go outside and impede surveillance cameras in the real world!

This post's theme word is withsay (v tr), "to contradict, deny, oppose, or refuse." We can collectively withsay corporate manufactured consent to data collection, probably via opt-outs and new legal rules.

Stringers

 Chris Panatier's novel Stringers is a sci-fi novel with a protagonist who does not want to be a protagonist. It is written in a wry, modern tone that makes poop jokes and online references, and provides cover for Ben (the utterly normal person protagonist) to hide behind his feelings and avoid closely scrutinizing the world around him.

Have you ever wanted a protagonist who avoided scientific knowledge and thinking, even though he inexplicably has the ability to recall a lot of (true!) science facts? This is your guy. He and his stoner friend Patton get abducted by aliens and are gradually revealed to be unwitting participants in a huge, galaxy-spanning, civilization-obliterating scheme. Are they committing a heist? or the object of one? How many times can the book zoom out to a broader perspective, showing us how insignificant the views of a couple nobodies from Earth are? Or how consequential, given the actual reality of living in a universe where interstellar travel is possible (but not for human civilization, yet), faster-than-light travel is impossible (but there are ways to sneak around this barrier), and some aliens don't experience consciousness, memory, or existence in the same way as everyone else?

The sarcastic tone becomes self-reflective a few times --- for example, one of the antagonist/teammates who keeps finding a way to sneak into being crucial so that they don't get left behind, says in a rush of trying to depress everyone else (p 242-243):

"You know, there is an odd sensibility among some species --- one that you seem to share with humans for instance --- to see every person's story as an arc or a circle where, for some reason, they grow as life grinds them down, become wise and forgive. As if adversity is some kind of fertilizer for thesoul. It's like this fiction they put in their television shows --- now those are sick --- a million different angles an the theme that suffering si redemptive. Would you believe that some of them actually worship that idea?  Perverse, in my opinion. Yet there is a bias to only tell those stories, I think. People love a redemption story and so those are the ones we hear. ... I believe the opposite outcome is far more prevalent. Suffering begets suffering. ... Don't let happy myths about trial and redemption cloud the reality of the way things are. The Universe is life and death. Everything else is a nudge in one direction or the other. In the end, we only have ourselves."

I'd group this with John Dies at the End and If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe. A fine whirl through a sci-fi adventure, fun in the moment, but I probably won't reread it and I decided to pass it along to a friend to read next.

This post's theme word is viscid (adj), "sticky, glutinous, slimy." The final sequences take place in a drug-addled state of viscid hallicinations and horrors.