https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/facebook-data-breach-540-million-users-privacy.html
over at The Guardian ... Alison Flood has a piece on plagiarism, book stuffing and clickfarms as the rotten element in the self-publishing industry.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/mar/28/plagiarism-book-stuffing-clickfarms-the-rotten-side-of-self-publishing
Nora Roberts is one of the world’s most popular authors. She’s written more than 200 novels, tackled topics from romance to murder and sold more than 500m books around the world. And now she’s really, really angry.
Roberts is one of dozens of authors who discovered last month that their work had been allegedly plagiarised by a Brazilian romance novelist called Cristiane Serruya. “Leisurely, he began to loosen her hair, working his fingers through it until it pooled over her shoulders. ‘I’ve wanted to do that since the first time I saw you. It’s hair to get lost in,’” runs Roberts’ novel Untamed. Serruya’s Forevermore has it that: “Leisurely, he began to loosen her hair, working his fingers through it until it pooled over her shoulders and cascaded down over her back. ‘I’ve wanted to do that since the first time I saw you.’”
Serruya’s alleged plagiarism was first exposed by US author Courtney Milan, who found passages from her book The Duchess War in Serruya’s novel Royal Love. After Milan went public – and after dozens of other examples of plagiarism were highlighted by authors and readers – Serruya pulled her books from sale, blaming the overlaps on a ghostwriter she said she’d hired from freelance marketplace Fiverr.
A former law professor, Milan was a dreadful choice to lift from – as was Roberts, who has never been sanguine about plagiarism, taking her fellow novelist and former friend Janet Dailey to court in 1997. But Serruya is just one example of the dark side of the stack-em-high, sell-em-cheap, flood-the-market culture which has come to dominate self-publishing – particularly in the lucrative romance genre and on Kindle Unlimited, an Amazon service which gives readers access to more than 1m books for £7.99 a month, many of which are self-published and unvetted for plagiarism.
I’m getting one hell of an education on the sick, greedy, opportunistic culture that games Amazon’s absurdly weak system. And everything I learn enrages me,” Roberts wrote on her blog last month. She pointed to what the industry calls “black hat teams”: anonymous authors who hire ghostwriters for a pittance, to churn out cheap novels en masse which are published under a pseudonym to “smother out competition” – and, in some cases, copying lines or entire scenes to get the job done. A regular author could never keep up.
For romance readers, Kindle Unlimited (KU) has been a godsend. These readers can race through at least a book a day, gulping down stories about unexpected pregnancies, arrogant millionaires and bad boys in need of taming. KU means they can read to their hearts’ content, while the writers can make a lot of money. Authors who self-publish through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) Select programme have their books automatically enrolled in KU. Every time a reader opens a KU book, the author is paid from a communal pot of money – one which less scrupulous writers have looked to game from the start.
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In its advice to Kindle authors, Amazon says that “you are responsible for ensuring that no tactics used to promote your book manipulate the Kindle publishing service”, and that any manipulation “may” result in “termination of your account and loss of royalties”. But as Gaughran points out, the scammers just keep making money. He doesn’t feel Amazon is doing enough.
“When the scamming first started your annoyance is with the scammers, but when it’s still going five years later your annoyance starts to transfer to the people who are supposed to be policing the streets,” he says. “When they moved to this model in 2014 we were worried about scammers, and Amazon said don’t worry, we have robust systems in place to prevent fraud, and it was all bullshit.”
“Part of the reason must be that it hurts authors much more than Amazon. They might see it as only affecting 0.2% of books or whatever, but the top scammers are making over $100,000 a month – money that comes from the author fund, not Amazon’s end. These people gaming the system will roll a huge chunk of that back into advertising too, which either brings readers to the website, or goes directly back into Amazon’s pocket via Amazon Ads.”
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There's quite a bit more in the article but that's a sampler.
The Atlantic featured an interview with an author who has written about domestic workers in the U.S. This interview reminded me of some writing Hanna Rosin did years ago but first ... :
There's quite a bit more in the article but that's a sampler.
The Atlantic featured an interview with an author who has written about domestic workers in the U.S. This interview reminded me of some writing Hanna Rosin did years ago but first ... :
As more and more women have entered the workforce, they have naturally spent less time at home. Still, homes demand work, from cooking and cleaning to taking care of children. A majority of American children have two parents working outside the home, and nearly half of all married couples both work. In the U.S. and many other countries, there is no clear answer to who will take care of the housework.
That “second shift” of housework falls disproportionately on women. In the U.S. for example, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, half of women report doing housework like cleaning or laundry each day, compared with just 19 percent of men. American women also spend twice as much time caring for children as men do.
To mitigate this second shift for working parents, some families with financial means hire domestic workers, more than 80 percent of whom are women. Around the world, women who can afford it are freed to pursue their career by other women who care for their children, cook their food, and clean their home.
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As Hanna Rosin put it years ago, the patriarchy is not necessarily the same thing to rich women who can afford to hire other women to do their housework as it is to those who are doing the housework.
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“Let’s call it what it is: THE PATRIARCHY.” This was a comment from a young woman at an event I was moderating on Anne-Marie Slaughter’s 2012 Atlantic article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” Though Slaughter and I have many points of agreement, we tend to draw a different crowd, or mood. Women come to hear her when they feel like they’ve hit a wall, and need to commiserate. They want to vent about their frustrations, not hear how they’ve prevailed.
“Can you say that word? PATRIARCHY?” This woman was not gunning for a laugh; she was dead serious, and pretty angry. She looked to be 30 or so, and from the way she spoke seemed well-educated—the type of woman I portray in the book as benefiting from the new era of female dominance, when women are better prepared for the current economy and have more independence to choose their life path.
As the woman spoke, I started to think of my own Slaughter moment, when, after the birth of my first child, I decided to work four days a week, a capitulation that sank me into a terrible depression. (If only Sheryl Sandberg had been around then to tell me to “Lean in!”) I tried to figure out who, in the series of events that led up to that decision, had played the role of the patriarch. My husband? He couldn’t care less how many days I work. My employer? Relatively benevolent and supportive— willing to let me work four days or five, willing to let me leave early. I suppose the patriarchy was lurking somewhere in my subconscious, tricking me into believing that it was more my duty to stay home with our new baby than my husband’s. But I didn’t see it as a “duty.” I wanted to stay home with her, and I also wanted to work like a fiend. It was complicated and confusing, a combination of my personal choices, the realities of a deadline-driven newsroom, and the lack of a broader infrastructure to support working parents—certainly too complicated to pin on a single enemy.
I said some version of this out loud from the stage, partly because I was looking for sympathy, and partly because I wanted to convey that the “patriarchy” was not a fixed monolith we could never get around but something shifting and changing and open to analysis. But that confessional approach only brought more ire. “Lucky for you that you have the luxury to agonize about your choices,” the young woman said. “What about the woman who picks up your trash after you leave at 5?”
This is when I knew I was dealing with some irrational attachment to the concept of unfair. For my book I’d interviewed plenty of women who might find themselves picking up the trash, likely as a second job after a full day of school or another job, or both, because their husbands—or, more likely, the fathers of their children—were out of work. My young interrogator might be annoyed to learn that many of those women who pick up the trash yearn to bring back at least some aspects of the patriarchy. They generally appreciate their new economic independence and feel pride at holding their families together, at working and studying and doing things on their own, but sometimes they long to have a man around who would pay the bills and take care of them and make a life for them in which they could work less. And they want the men in their lives to be happy. It’s elite feminists like my questioner and me who cling to the dreaded patriarchy just as he is walking out of our lives. [emphasis added]
A few months after my book came out, sociologist Stephanie Coontz published an editorial in the New York Times that was headlined “The Myth of Male Decline,” which summarized many of the responses to my book in order to support her argument that the end of men was nowhere in sight. Many of the points made by Coontz and other members of what Liza Mundy, author of The Richer Sex, calls the academic “Fempire” are true, in a selective sort of way that elides other truths. I notice they often choose the statistics that make women look the most beleaguered.
For example, one figure that both Mundy and I cite in our books, and that has provoked much angry dissent, is how many wives earn more money than their husbands. We all agree that the proportion of female breadwinners leapt from only 4 percent in 1970 to nearly 30 percent in 2010. Coontz, however, discounts this gain by arguing that when we look at all married couples, not just dual-earner couples, the numbers look much weaker because some wives don’t work at all. This is a fair point. But if we are going to add on extra data samples, then I offer another, more relevant one: the growing number of single mothers. The United States is undergoing an explosion not of full-time stay-at-home mothers but of single mothers who are often, for better or worse, the main breadwinners for their families by default. We recently passed the threshold, for example, at which more than half of all births to mothers under 30 were to single mothers. I’m not sure this counts as feminist progress, but it does count as a profound shift in the traditional power dynamics of the American family.
Coontz also makes the broader point that women, even college-educated women, continue to flock to less prestigious jobs. She points out that woman are even more concentrated now than they were before in the professions of legal secretary or “managers of medicine and health occupations.” We can call the pattern of women’s jobs by its old, disparaging name, “gender segregation,” and insist on seeing it as a choice that is imposed on them. But we can also see it through a new paradigm—as Coontz in her own work has so successfully encouraged us to do vis-à-vis marriage—that acknowledges women as agents making intelligent decisions about what jobs are available in this economy. Maybe women are choosing health occupations because the health care field is booming, not because they are blindly walking—or being led—into a female ghetto.
What surprised me most about Coontz’s piece was not its content but the collective sigh of relief it seemed to generate. “Marry me, Stephanie Coontz,” tweeted the immensely talented and successful journalist Irin Carmon. “Stephanie Coontz is a national treasure and I wish her work were required reading for everyone in the world,” blogged Jill Filipovic, a lawyer and writer on Feministe, who went on to explain how all this “women are dominating … stuff” is not quite true. The women who seemed to be reveling in Coontz’s insistence that reports of the end of men (and the rise of women) have been greatly exaggerated were by and large young and ambitious, and as far as I could tell hadn’t been held back all that much in their careers by “the patriarchy.” Many of them are in positions of influence, widely published and widely read; if they sniff out misogyny, I have no doubt they will gleefully skewer the responsible sexist in one of many available online outlets, and get results. These are exactly the types of woman I portray in the book as benefiting from the new age of female dominance. Why should they feel reassured to be told that men are still on top, that the old order had not been shaken?
The 2012 elections inspired a similar reactionary response in some quarters. A record number of women were elected to Congress, and women were critical to Obama’s re-election, particularly single women.* And yet soon after the election, the New York Times published as its lead op-ed a study by two academics showing that women would not truly reach parity or be in a position to pass women-friendly policies until they controlled half of all congressional seats. This seems true enough, if a little obvious. But it entirely missed the revolutionary shift the moment marked. There was a group marginalized in the election: white men. They voted en masse for Mitt Romney, and lost.
This bean counting and monitoring—an outdated compulsion to keep your guard up, because sexism lurks everywhere—has found new life online, where feminist websites (including our own) and the Twitter police are always on the lookout for the next slight.
Sometimes the critical eye is useful, such as this week when outrage over sexist and racists tweets got Business Insider exec Pax Dickinson pushed out. (Though this is not a sign of THE PATRIARCHY—this is relatively easy victory.) Sometimes it’s just petty, like when Jennifer Weiner recently complained about a critic calling her “strident.” As a form of blogging or tweeting, pointing fingers is endlessly satisfying. But as a form of political expression, it’s pretty hollow and out of tune with reality.
and a later piece ...
and a later piece ...
So that women affluent enough to make their livings as writers, Rosin has pointed out, may find it useful to write about the patriarchy because they have the privilege of doing so--it doesn't mean there are no imbalances so much as that, as Rosin put it, when it's your job to see those imbalances it can blind you to the privileges that come with being able to publish about them. The domestic workers who help the sorts of writers who can write for, say, Slate, aren't outliers. There are some pieces out there on the net about how a good deal of the arts scenes rely on financially uncompensated volunteers. A blunter way to put this is to say there's enough exploited labor in the arts and educational scenes in the West that they ... may not be entirely ideally suited to complain about these dynamics in other contexts and industries.
Back to Atlantic
Back to Atlantic
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In a new book, Women’s Work: A Reckoning With Work and Home, the journalist Megan Stack examines this dynamic from the inside, telling the story of her own employment of domestic workers, who took care of her children and home while she wrote a novel.
Anna Waters: Millions of households around the world employ domestic workers to help with child care, cleaning, and cooking. Having a nanny to help with your young children has become fairly normal among financially privileged families, particularly ones with working mothers. What was it about this dynamic that made you think twice, and want to examine it in this book?
Megan Stack: I moved pretty thoughtlessly into having a woman come into my home and work full-time. But very quickly, I started to experience things that surprised me. The emotional components of trust, love, and jealousy, the attempt to turn a household into a job site, and the way that intersects with power imbalances of money and race … I hadn’t anticipated it. The more I adjusted to being a mother, the more uncomfortable I was, because I was looking at my nanny and thinking, She’s a mother, too. Who’s taking care of her baby?
It opened up uncomfortable questions that I hadn’t addressed when deciding to hire her, and that I didn’t feel like the culture broadly had addressed, either. There’s been this global swell of domestic labor as an unregulated and poorly understood job sector, so these relationships exist on a global scale, but are basically unfolding in private. I wanted to make them public.
Waters: The book is a really personal reckoning with how you have benefited from other women’s labor, but as you say, this is much bigger than individual private households. How much of the responsibility for this dynamic do you place on individuals, and how much on larger economic or systemic factors?
Stack: It’s hard, because as women, it’s important for us to say that the work we do is important. That’s how the world moves forward. And realistically, when I looked at my options to keep working and become a mother, there wasn’t any other option. My husband was going to keep his staff job with the salary and health insurance, and I was going to do writing projects that didn’t have those things. Like many women, I was surprised and overwhelmed by how much work came with the baby, and I didn’t see any way to keep working without hiring outside help.
For many women, on both sides, this is the best option. For many migrant women, this is one of the few jobs where they can earn a decent salary and pay for education for their children. So I don’t think I can blame individuals for participating in the domestic-worker economy, because it’s really the best option for so many people. But we all deserve better options.
Waters: What do you think some of those better options might look like?
Stack: I haven’t come up with a great answer. If I had, I would’ve written that book. Extending employment protections to domestic workers is a noble and serious first step. But honestly, that’s like fixing the leaks on a ship that we maybe shouldn’t even be on.
Domestic labor is a model for the advancement and equality of upper-class women, but it depends upon a permanent underclass of impoverished women. I’m not interested in a program for some women to advance on the backs of others.
Waters: This memoir is about being a woman harnessing women’s labor, but it’s also about being a white person harnessing the labor of nonwhite people. What role does race play in the question of offloading domestic work?
Stack: Race is a huge aspect of this. I think 100 percent of the reason domestic work is so poorly regulated is because it affects this trifecta of demographics that political decision makers don’t care about: women, poor people, and people of color. There’s this subconscious social consensus that things happening to people in those demographics just aren’t as important.
I did want to focus this book on the gender aspect, because this dynamic is more universally about women than it is about race. There are Chinese families employing Chinese domestic workers and Indian families employing Indian domestic workers. In those stories, race isn’t as clear-cut an issue as gender or class.
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Waters: You also write that this lack of acknowledgment goes both ways. In the book, one of your cooks in India said that her family and friends have no idea she’s hired help, and she conceals that.
Stack: That was the thing that surprised me the most from when I interviewed my own domestic workers about their experiences. These women come down to Delhi from rural villages, and don’t tell their families about their work. They pretend they work in call centers. There’s a real stigma and sense of shame around doing domestic work. Our nanny in Beijing would get up at her house every morning, dress up in a secretarial outfit for her commute, get to our house, and change into cutoffs and a T-shirt. When she left, she’d put her secretarial outfit back on just to cross the city by bus.
I started looking at the Facebook pages of a lot of domestic workers, and noticed that a lot of them went to great effort to disguise their work on Facebook. If the family was going to a resort for the day to go swimming, the nanny would find a moment to get someone to take a picture of her posing and she’d post that on Facebook. It was very much framed as, I’m paying for this for myself; this is part of my lifestyle. There’s so much fronting and ambivalence with domestic work on both sides, I think because everyone feels a little uncomfortable about participating in it, whether you’re an employer or employee.
Waters: What kinds of conversations did you and your husband have as you were writing this book? Like your domestic workers, he was a major character in the memoir, and I’m curious how he felt about the book and his role in it.
Stack: When I set out to write the book, I didn’t anticipate the role he would come to play in it. But I wanted to be very authentic about the totality of the experience. When I finished the first draft, I gave it to him to read, and I was very nervous. I wasn’t going to sabotage my marriage for this book, and if he wasn’t comfortable with it, I’d drop it.
But my husband is a really amazing person. After he read it, he said that parts of it made him cringe, but it was all true. Not many people would be strong enough to sign off on this from their spouse.
...and that's the links for the weekend post for this particular weekend.
