2025-01-12»
spam, activism and mechabillionaires»I didn’t have a great time when I started at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It was my first office job in the US (I think I’d got an SSN barely weeks beforehand) and there was a lot to culturally absorb. My predecessors as EFF’s sole activist were Cory and Ren Bucholz; big shoes to fill. Joining an institution you know and respect is, for me at least, a challenge: you have to use your own awe at them letting you in to up your game, but also quickly rub the shine off everything, so you can grow to see your workplace as full of humans instead of demi-gods who will always be smarter and better than you.
The point I finally found my feet at EFF was a campaign I co-ran at EFF in 2006 to stop AOL and Yahoo from adopting a new email technology, primarily promoted by a new start-up called GoodMail. GoodMail had an anti-spam tech which they called “Certified Email”. The deal was that you would buy little tokens from GoodMail, and by inserting them in your outgoing mail, you would demonstrate to whoever received them that you weren’t just a zero-cost spammer, because GoodMail would charge money and also do some basic KYC on you. Sort of a “proof-of-payment/reputation” scheme.
AOL and Yahoo had made deals with GoodMail whereby if you saw that you’d spent a GoodMail token on an email to their customers, you’d skip their spam filters. The precise nature of the AOL/Yahoo-GoodMail deal was unclear. DId the token let you bypass all the spam filters? Was it even possible to be filtered if you had a token but broke some of AOL/Yahoo’s other rules? Would AOL/Yahoo tighten up their other resource-intensive, technologically complex spam-filters now that there was a guaranteed fixed-cost for them method they could redirect people to use? Did AOL/Yahoo have a profit-share, which would mean they were actively rewarded for getting people to pay to go over the filter?
It was a strange mix of a quite subtle (and tentative) economic and policy arguments about principal-agent problems, free speech, ISP monopolies, and even proto-net neutrality — with an incredibly direct and emotional hook for anyone who used email for political or fundraising purposes. We’d originally been flagged about the issue by MoveOn.org, then the major online movement org for the Democratic left, but they were quickly joined by apolitical charities and grassroots groups from the right, too. All of them depended on email for timely fund-raising and activism, and all of them had struggled with email delivery. The idea that they were now going to be (to their ears) pressured to pay private third-parties to deliver messages to their members, to go over their already-malfunctioning spam filters seemed outrageous, even a bit sinister. What would happen if they didn’t pay? What would happen if their political opponents paid, but they did not?
I was, personally, very unsure of the pros and cons of GoodMail. We debated them a lot, in detail, at EFF. It was an intellectually demanding ride. Everyone at EFF at that time was familiar not just with making policy decisions, but with having to dig entirely new thought-derricks in unexplored oilfields of sticky, dark, internet policy weirdness.
In the end, we decided that while we didn’t think pay-to-play emails were something that should be illegal, it was definitely something we should make people aware of, so that spamfilters didn’t get any worse or captured if it was just silently accepted. So I got together with MoveOn’s activists, and started the usual gears of press releases, petitions, and politicking.
Holy cow. Up until then, by definition, I’d been dealing with (then) obscure points of nonpartisan tech policymaking that EFF-supportin’ nerds cared about : keeping encryption legal, stopping surveillance, good copyright policy, not throwing hackers and technologists in jail over misunderstandings or malignity, and so on. This was all pre-SOPA, pre-net neutrality, pre-Snowden. In these domains, we would at best get a few thousand people writing to Congress, and maybe meetings with a handful lawmakers or tech executives. Or we’d co-ordinate to get some tool built that would just make our position inarguable or simply make the problem go away (q.v. Deep Crack, Switzerland, then later Privacy Badger, Let’s Encrypt). Or go to the courts, which was EFF’s primary lever for change.
The GoodMail issue was relevant, however, to a much bigger constituency. And that constituency included almost every significant online activist group. Within days of launching our campaign, we were joined by hundreds of orgs, big and small, right and left. The ACLU, Gun Owners of America, cancer patient resource networks, churches, party activists. I must have used the terms “strange bedfellows” hundreds of times when talking to the press.
I was also thrown in with the A-League professional activists. I was a good activist for a geek, but these people were at another level. Adam Green, Tim Karr, Eli Pariser, Becky Bonds. I had to run to keep up, and I learned a lot: about what worked, what didn’t — and what worked well but I personally never wanted to do again. I had to up my game but also keep my head.
There’s certainly a blog post to be written about the internal culture and incentives of activists, and maybe one day I’ll write it, but this is more about my immediate thoughts as I realised the scale and skill of the (primarily) online progressive movement, even in those early days.
A lot has been written about the influence of billionaires in US and global politics — mostly from the left, but also a surprising amount from the right. To say the obvious, one feature of what makes billionaires effective is that (and may it break my decentralist heart to say it) is that they are centralized loci of co-ordination and control. A single rich person marshalling large resources is a time-old way of getting what that person wants done, whatever that thing is. Is Musk competent to build electric cars and rocket-ships? I mean, whether he did that through marketing or luck or a narrow set of skills or lying or scientific knowledge, those were his set of aims, and they happened. There are a gazillion other billionaires who have not been able to achieve some of their aims even with all that money, but I think whatever political theories you espouse, the idea that billionaires have more potential autonomy than the average Joe seems undeniably true. And the answer to why is mostly, uncontroversially — well, they have more money.
But collectively, non-billionaires also have money. I think it’s reasonable to say that the percentage of people in the world who have an egalitarian, public-goods supporting, broadly progressive model of social improvement has to be at least 30%-60% of the total population. And while many millions of those people have very little cash to give — if they do, they would be willing to donate some of it to that cause. Just overseeing a glimpse at the GoodMail campaign showed the breadth of the left-leaning activist community and its fundraising clout. Individual causes always fight to have enough money and influence to achieve anything. But the progressive movement — or any grassroots-supported major political tendency — has collectively an amazing amount of global aggregate resources at hand.
(How many averagely-salaried progressives does it take to make a single billionaire? OpenAI’s o1 thinks it’s in the hundreds-to-thousands range. I think that’s much too low — it’s presumed that a billionaire has discretionary spending of about $50 million a year, which seems low, especially given that a billionaire can marshal influence and resources way beyond the literal dollar amount of spare cash.)
Of course, it’s not just the money that billionaires have. Collectively, actors who might be described as broadly opposed to billionaires may have the money to tackle the rich. What they lack is the ability to co-ordinate as effectively as a billionaire can co-ordinate with, well, themselves.
Some version of this in progressive or Marxist terms is what is described as “class loyalty”. The grumbling point is that the rich have more of that than the poor. But that’s not a moral failing of the working class — that’s a distributed collective action problem.
If you take the idea of democracy seriously, or perhaps even of just the necessity of public goods seriously, the vast majority of political problems are collective action problems.
Which, to me, makes them also tooling problems. The reason every online activist organization in the 2000s convened to stop Certified Email was because email was a new coordinating tool that gave them access to resources, labor and coordinating capacity that was latent before then, but never usable.
Much of this coordination was in pursuit of seizing control of the levers of power — but that was for the sake of access more coordination tools. Activists lobby governments because governments can execute on the changes they want. That’s often necessarily a zero-sum game.
And the more we can coordinate together, the less we need to coordinate against others. This lies at the heart of mutual aid and much of state-formation. Fundraising within your neighborhood mostly doesn’t put you at odds with other neighborhoods, and that sum total can be applied to the problem at hand. States and other large-scale organizing systems emerge as much to minimize co-ordination problems within those states as to arm and defend against external actors.
We didn’t win the GoodMail “battle”, by the way — Yahoo and AOL both deployed the tool, despite our best efforts. But in the end, their technology didn’t succeed in the market. I think my colleagues on the activist side would like to think that our campaign made a difference in discrediting it. I hope to chat with the GoodMail folks one day and see whether they think that was the case. I remember talking to a friend in the anti-spam world after the whole affair, and that he’d felt the whole fight was a misallocation of resources by EFF and other groups — that GoodMail was a bad idea from the start, and was doomed to failure or minor obscurity in the marketplace rather than becoming a major threat.
It’s hard to know what tools will succeed, and what their negative externalities are. But the tools make an outsized difference. Bitcoin was partly inspired by a Goodmail-style anti-spam technique called hashcash. A huge chunk of political funding is now coordinated through tools that were built around those early web email mailing-lists.
With better co-ordination tools and understanding, there’s a possibility of building collective mecha-billionaires that can function under the direction of progressive or other mass groups, and democratize the co-ordinating abilities of real billionaires, and possibly some of their externalities also: positive and negative.