Image description: An empty brown beer bottle with a label reading CYBER PUNK. Its logo is a split-in-two Terminator-style metal skull with a cluster of hops inside of it. It was photographed in the flat of Bruce Sterling and Jasmina Tesanovic in Turin, Italy. Parts of the flat are visible in the background.
--- (Originally published earlier today on mamot.fr) - Click the Fedi-Link to visit.
I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by #WilWheaton! Pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback:
eof/
You can follow these posts as a daily blog at pluralistic.net: no ads, trackers, or data-collection!
Here's today's edition:
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You can also get a fulltext RSS feed, licensed CC BY 4.0:
14/
Recent appearances:
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The Lost Cause (The Writer's Voice)
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What the Future will Bring (#HomelessRomantic)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_Vq8qW2A8I -
Talking "The Lost Cause" with Warren Mosler (#MMTPodcast)
13/
Upcoming appearances:
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Enshittification: The Rise and Fall of Big Tech (#CrashCourseEconomics)
https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_YsKONp5zRgeF6SVuIOb6hQ#/registration -
Books & Books (#CoralGables, #Florida), Jan 22
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Marshall McLuhan Lecture 2024 (#Berlin), Jan 29
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The Lost Cause at Otherland (#Berlin), Jan 30
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My ebooks and audiobooks (from Tor Books, Head of Zeus, McSweeneys, Beacon, Verso and others) are for sale all over the net, but I sell 'em too, and when you buy 'em from me, I earn twice as much and you get books with no DRM and no license "agreements."
11/
My latest novel is "The Lost Cause," a solarpunk novel of radical hope in the climate emergency, from Tor Books (US)/Head of Zeus (UK):
Signed, personalized copies available from Dark Delicacies:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/
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My latest nonfiction book is "The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation" from Verso Books:
Signed copies available from Book Soup:
Both are national bestsellers!
10/
Yesterday's threads: American education has all the downsides of standardization, none of the upsides; and more!
9/
#5yrsago Now EVERYBODY hates the new EU #CopyrightDirective
#1yrago #CareInflation: The inflation no one wants to talk about
#1yrago #EleanorJanega's "Once and Future Sex": The true, weird, horny history of medieval gender and sex
8/
#5yrsago An archive of Freedom, #PaulRobeson and Louis Burnham’s radical Harlem newspaper
#5yrsago Unsealed court documents reveal that Facebook knew kids were being tricked into spending thousands of dollars on their parents’ credit cards
#5yrsago Why charter schools are the flashpoint for the LA #TeachersStrike
7/
#10yrsago Scoring Obama’s NSA reforms (spoiler: it’s not good)
#15yrsago Mr Chicken: the genius who paints London’s fried-chicken signs
#10yrsago Congress requires publicly funded research to be publicly available
#10yrsago Android malware uses accelerometer readings to figure out if it was running on a real phone or in emulation
6/
#15yrsago Veeps: Profiles in Insignificance, a look at the bumbling, murdering, drunken idiots (and others) who’ve served as vice-president of the USA
#10yrsago #TimWu on FCC’s #NetNeutrality disaster
#10yrsago Random #NSA program generator, with denials
#10yrsago Parfaitzilla: the dessert that ate Japan
5/
Hey look at this
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The coming storm
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Retrocomputer miniatures
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#GoogleSearch Really Has Gotten Worse, Researchers Find
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The super-rich got that way through monopolies: A report in honor of Davos.
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Catch me in #Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM:
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I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by #WilWheaton! Pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback:
2/
Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: The super-rich got that way through monopolies; and more!
Archived at: <https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/17/monopolies-produce-billionaires/>
#Pluralistic
1/
I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by #WilWheaton! Pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback:
eof/
Balzac wrote, "Behind every great fortune there is a crime." Chances are, the rapsheet includes an antitrust violation. Getting rid of monopolies won't get rid of all the billionaires, but it'll certainly get rid of a hell of a lot of them.
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Even more exciting are the moves in the #GlobalSouth. In South Africa, "competition law contains some of the most progressive ideas of all":
It actively seeks to create greater economic participation, particularly for ‘historically disadvantaged persons’ as part of its public interest considerations in merger decisions.
21/
(Khan's winning like crazy. Just last month she killed four megamergers:)
The EU and UK are taking actions that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. Canada is finally set to get a real competition law, with the Trudeau government promising to add an "abuse of dominance" rule to Canada's antitrust system.
20/
The past three years saw more regulatory action on corporate mergers, price-gouging, predatory pricing, labor abuses and other evils of monopoly than we got in the past 40 years.
The business press - cheerleaders for monopoly - keep running editorials claiming that enforcers like #LinaKhan are getting nothing done. Sure, #WSJ, Khan's getting nothing done - that's why you ran 80 editorial about her:
19/
When people talk about the billionaires' climate impact, they o focus on the carbon footprints of mansions and private jets, but the true environmental cost of the ultra rich comes from the anti-renewables, pro-emissions lobbying they buy with their monopoly winnings.
The good news is that the tide is turning on monopolies. A coalition of "businesses, workers, farmers, consumers and other civil society groups" have created a "remarkably successful anti-monopoly movement."
18/
Just in time for #Davos, here's 'Taken, not earned: How monopolists drive the world’s power and wealth divide," a report from a coalition of international tax justice and anti-corporate activist groups:
<https://www.balancedeconomy.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Davos-Taken-not-Earned-full-Report-2024-FINAL.pdf>
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
<https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/17/monopolies-produce-billionaires/#inequality-corruption-climate-poverty-sweatshops>
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Tom the Dancing Bug – Chagrin Falls: "Diner Journalism" <https://boingboing.net/2024/01/17/tom-the-dancing-bug-chagrin-falls-diner-journalism.html>
#MediaCriticism #IowaCaucuses #Maga
Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: American education has all the downsides of standardization, none of the upsides; Hey look at this; and more!
Archived at: <https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/16/flexibility-in-the-margins/>
#Pluralistic
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We moved to America in 2015, in time for my kid to start third grade. Now she's a year away from graduating high school (!) and I've had a front-row seat for the US K-12 system in a district rated as one of the best in the country. There were ups and downs, but high school has been a monster.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
<https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/16/flexibility-in-the-margins/#a-commons>
1/
Happy birthday to @flickrfdn@glammr.us - the biggest, best archive of no-restriction, public domain photos on the web, with over 100 participating institutions, including the #LibraryOfCongress!
<https://www.flickr.com/commons>
1/3
I'm trying to recall an #MLK quote, something like, "Even if I can't make you stop feeling racist feelings, we can change things so you can't act on them towards me and that's sufficient"
I'm sure I'm mangling it, but that's the general sense. Anyone recall it?
Is there a Firefox plugin that redirects Mastodon links from other instances to your own instance automatically, so that you can boost and reply without entering your domain?
IJWTS that I'm indecently proud of today's shoop, illustrating how the dam-bursting flood of botshit in our common waters is the result of scammers convincing people they'll get rich as AI spammers.
Catch me in #Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM:
<https://www.booksandbooks.com/event/in-person-an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/>
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I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by #WilWheaton! Pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback:
<http://thebezzle.org>
2/
Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Sympathy for the spammer; and more!
Archived at: <https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/>
#Pluralistic
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In any scam, any con, any hustle, the big winners are the people who supply the scammers - not the scammers themselves. The kids selling dope on the corner are making less than minimum wage, while the respectable crime-bosses who own the labs clean up. Desperate "retail investors" who buy shitcoins from Superbowl ads get skinned, while the MBA bros who issue the coins make millions (in real dollars, not crypto).
1/
Have Doonesbury fans out there gotten the Dbury@50 digital collection to work on GNU/Linux? I'm thinking of buying it, but want to be sure I can rip it to my laptop.
Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Tech workers and gig workers need each other; and more!
Archived at: <https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/13/solidarity-forever/>
#Pluralistic
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We're living in the #enshittocene, in which the forces of enshittification are turning everything from our cars to our streaming services to our dishwashers into thoroughly enshittifified piles of shit. Call it the Great Enshittening:
<https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain>
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
<https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/13/solidarity-forever/#tech-unions>
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Cult member says what?
<https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones>
#Apple #QT
Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: The Cult of Mac; and more!
Archived at: <https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/>
#Pluralistic
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Apple's most valuable intangible asset isn't its patents or copyrights - it's an army of people who believe that using products from a $2.89 trillion multinational makes them members of an oppressed religious minority whose identity is coterminal with the interests of Apple's shareholders.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
<https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones>
1/
Cory Doctorow @mamot.fr By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.
Archived at pluralistic.net
I post long threads. If you don't like these in your timeline but want to read them, I suggest unfollowing me here and subscribing to my RSS, or my newsletter, or any of my various long-form feeds. Links at https://pluralistic.net.
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