Cory Doctorow NONCONSENSUAL BLUE TICK Profile picture
Sep 12, 2020 22 tweets 5 min read Read on X
Don't let the sweater-vests and the (dilettantish) "education reform" work fool you: Bill Gates made his fortune through sheer robber-baronry, presiding over a vicious monopolist that shattered the law in its greedy quest for billions and permanent, global dominance.

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Microsoft's illegal conduct was so blatant, persistent and obviously wicked that it prompted serious enforcement action from the DoJ's antitrust division, which Reagan neutered and which every president since has whittled down even further.

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The most notorious moment in that last-of-its-kind enforcement action was the multi-day, video-recorded deposition of Bill Gates himself, in which he conducted himself so badly that the video went analog-viral, airing on newscasts and being passed hand-to-hand on VHS.

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Today on @arstechnica, @dangoodin001 revisits that momentous week in 1998 when Gates covered himself in everlasting shame and gave us a peek behind the curtain at the private persona of a swaggering monopolist.

arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20…

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Goodin's piece was occasioned by Microsoft's intervention in the Epic-v-Apple affair, in which a Microsoft exec decried Apple's abuse of its "complete monopoly over the distribution of apps … to coerce app developers into using Apple’s payment platform."

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Gates's deposition is a reminder of how far Microsoft's position changed between 1998 and now. As Goodin writes, Gates's plan for the deposition was to obstruct, paint the DoJ as technically incompetent, and to "deny even the most basic of premises in the government’s case."

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This was a brutally stupid plan. It failed SO BADLY. Government lawyer would ask Gates questions like "What non-Microsoft browsers were you concerned about in January of 1996" and Gates would claim not to know what "concerned" means.

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It was the Fat Tony defense: "What's a truck? What's a murder?"

It was so stupid and blatant that people in the gallery started laughing aloud at Gates's obstruction (after all, part of his defense was that he was a genius whose mind could not be understood by mere govvies).

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The deposition really revealed Gates's expectation that he would be deferred to and even worshipped in the manner that his absolute authoritarian rule over Microsoft had accustomed him to.

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As Ken Auletta noted, Gates had never had to sit for a job interview or suffer other routine indignities.

Goodin: "he had little or no experience tolerating—let alone encountering—dissent, criticism, or challenges to his authority."

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But even with a better strategy, Gates would have still been in trouble, because he put a bewildering array of radioactively illegal conduct in writing, and the DoJ had it all in black and white:

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* A conspiracy to force Intuit to bundle Internet Explorer and break compatibility with Netscape

* A conspiracy to modify Windows so Netscape-rendered content would appear "degraded"

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* A conspiracy to make an incompatible version of Java that only ran on Windows, with the goal of "wresting control of Java away from Sun"

* A conspiracy to get Apple to break compatibility with Netscape, tying Microsoft Office improvement to Apple's sabotage of Netscape

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With all this evidence, the fact that Microsoft escaped serious sanction tells you just how degraded antitrust law has become (it's gotten weaker and worse since). But just as telling is the impact that antitrust enforcement had on Microsoft's conduct.

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It's undeniable that the reason web companies like Google survived the 2010s is that Microsoft had lost its nerve, after years of traumatic DoJ investigation and litigation.

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Gates admitted this last year, saying the reason Microsoft didn't bid for Android was they were "distracted" by the antitrust action:

pluralistic.net/2020/05/16/lab…

But that action had ended YEARS before Android. When Gates says he was "distracted," he means he was terrified.

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And as @superwuster pointed out, it probably made them a better company. Monoplism makes companies act like mafias, stupid and lazy, with an emphasis on abusive commercial practice rather than technical or organizational excellence.

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When AT&T was broken up in 82, corporatists cried that America was sacrificing its "national champion" just as Japan was eroding America's technical dominance, and without AT&T's monopoly power, America's tech industry was done.

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Instead, breaking up AT&T opened the space for THE ENTIRE INTERNET, and a generation-long American dominance of a system that has become a planetary nervous system, a source of prolonged American dominance and trillions in GDP.

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In other words: Fat Tony is a shitty businessman.

People express dismay at that 2016 photo of Trump with tech's leaders around a Trump Tower boardroom table, aghast that these people who run our tech world were willing to meet with a racist bully.

techcrunch.com/2016/12/14/don…

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Fair enough.

But even more alarming is something rarely commented upon:

THE ENTIRE TECH INDUSTRY FITS AROUND A SINGLE TABLE.

That should make you furious and terrified - and glad that we are finally seeing a stirring of America's old trustbusting traditions.

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Reagan may have maimed antitrust.

Bush I, Clinton, GWB, Obama and Trump may have brutalized it.

But it is not dead. And it's slowly, relentlessly, getting back on its feet.

eof/

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More from @doctorow

Sep 8
This was the plan: America would stop making things and instead make *recipes*, the "IP" that could be sent to other countries to turn into actual *stuff*.

1/ An organ grinder with a monkey. The organ grinder's head has been replaced with a Gilded Age caricature of a sneering millionaire. The monkey's head has been replaced with the head of a miserable child coal miner. The background is a blurred, halftoned view of a vast square in Beijing with a giant official building in the background, and a Chinese flag on a flagpole. On the organ is a blurred portrait of John Philip Sousa.
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:

pluralistic.net/2025/09/08/pro…

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This would happen in distant lands without the pesky environmental and labor rules that forced businesses accept reduced profits because they weren't allowed to maim their workers and poison the land, air and water.

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Read 77 tweets
Sep 6
Trump's doing a lot of oligarch shit, and while some of it very visible and obvious, other moves, like throwing the door open to "stock buybacks" are technical and obscure.

1/ An old-timey carny barker, waving a cane and shouting. He is standing in front of a vintage photo of the NYSE trading floor.
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:

pluralistic.net/2025/09/06/com…

2/
But it's worth paying attention to this, because this form of stock swindle stands to make billionaires a lot richer (and thus more powerful).

3/
Read 48 tweets
Aug 20
Forget surveillance capitalism - let's talk about *surveillance infantalism*: the drive by the wealthy to spy on you in order to pursue the toddler's goals of getting everything they want from the people around them, without any reciprocal obligations.

1/ Mark Zuckerberg's Metaverse avatar's head atop the body of a figure from a earth 20th century editorial cartoon; the figure wears a suit, holds a long fork, and stares into the eyepiece of a microscope. The microscope is attached to a sinister scientific apparatus. The microscope is trained on a tiny human figure, limned in red, who shouts through a megaphone back up into the microscope's lens. The background is a 1980s NASA oil painting of the red, rocky surface of Venus.
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:

pluralistic.net/2025/08/20/bil…

2/
After the Snowden revelations, I started to wonder about something fundamental: why spy at all?



3/theguardian.com/technology/201…
Read 40 tweets
Aug 18
When Elon Musk disagrees with someone, he calls them an "NPC" (non-player character). In video-games, an NPC is a machine-puppeted sprite that engages in predictable movements (e.g. Pac-Man ghosts) and utters some scripted (or AI-generated) dialog:



1/ futurism.com/elon-musk-inte…Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse avatar, perched on a legless nude Ken doll body; its eyes are psychedelic pinwheels. Behind the figure is a group shot of child laborer miners from the 1910s, glitched out, blue tinted, and covered with scan lines. The background is a psychedelic swirl of moody colors. They stand atop a filthy checkerboard floor that stretches off to infinity.
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:

pluralistic.net/2025/08/18/see…

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Seeing people as automata is probably a side-effect of sitting in the command-center of a big online service, in which you primarily interact with users as statistical aggregates in an analytics dashboard.

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Read 30 tweets
Aug 16
When LLM users describe their experience with their chatbots, the results are so divergent that it can sound like they're describing two completely different products.

1/ A vintage photo of two men in front of a slot machine. The men's heads have been replaced by the heads of hooded figures wearing Guy Fawkes mask. The image is sepia toned: the only color is the pay-line of the slot-machine, which is showing three glaring red eyes of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' The slot machine has a sign over the rotor-window that displays the Openai logo and wordmark.   Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg  CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en  --  Frank Schwichtenberg (modified...
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:

pluralistic.net/2025/08/16/jac…

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Previously, I've hypothesized that this is because there are two distinct groups of *users*: "centaurs" (people who are assisted by a machine - in this case, people who get to decide when, whether and how to integrate an LLM into their work)...

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Read 27 tweets
Aug 13
It's not just that Texas DA Gocha Ramirez charged a woman with murder for having an abortion (not t allowed even in Texas). It's that Ramirez paid for his mistress's abortion, after he impregnated her while having an affair with her *and* her sister:



1/ archive.is/20250812192203…A red, angry mushroom cloud. Sitting atop it, surrounded by blue skies and fluffy clouds, is a smirking business-suited man reclining in an armchair. He wears a MAGA hat and reads a magazine turned to a page showing Donald Trump's face.
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:

pluralistic.net/2025/08/13/the…

2/
This is perfect Magaism, as captured by Wilhoit's Law:

> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.



3/crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/lib…
Read 52 tweets

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