Cory Doctorow NONCONSENSUAL BLUE TICK Profile picture
Oct 1, 2020 13 tweets 6 min read Read on X
The surest recipe for despair is to fall prey to the fallacy of #CapitalistRealism: the idea that "it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism."

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When the world is on fire, sickened, flooding, and on the brink of out-of-control violence and you literally can't imagine any of that changing, it feels like you should just give up.

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This is the point of capitalist realism: to make us believe, as Margaret Thatcher liked to say, that "there is no alternative." It's not just a counsel of despair - it's also a statement in opposition to science fiction's core tenet, that alternatives can always be imagined.

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Back in 2019, @NaomiAKlein, @mollycrabapple and @AOC collaborated on a stellar short video set in the years AFTER a successful #GND transition: "A Message From the Future," narrating back to how we got to a place where we no longer feared the future.

memex.craphound.com/2019/04/17/a-m…

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Today, Klein has dropped part two in the series: The Years of Repair, once again featuring Crabapple's stop-motion watercolor animations, cocreated with #BLM cofounder @opalayo and @avilewis.

theintercept.com/2020/10/01/nao…

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Years of Repair gets closer to our own timeline, describing the transition from our current capitalist crises of disease, incarceration and climate emergencies to a more just world, one devoted to healing and building rather than looting and extracting.

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It's hard to overstate what a tonic this is: breaking free of Capitalist Realism and letting your imagination visit a place where, as a species, we recover the best of our practices, the mutual aid and stewardship that built the world in spite of greed and oppression.

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Since Dec 4, I've been writing my own post-GND novel, "The Lost Cause," about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias funded by offshore plutes, and visiting that world every day has kept me sane through the plague months.

twitter.com/search?q=from%…

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The idea that we might someday have a generation - the first in more than a century! - that does not fear the future is dizzying to contemplate.

You can read the prologue here, btw:

patreon.com/posts/new-deca…

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For years, Kim Stanley Robinson has written a series of audacious novels about a post-climate-emergency humanity, starting with 2012's "2312," set 300 years in the future. Since then, he's come closer and closer to the present day.

memex.craphound.com/2012/10/30/kim…

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Novels like Aurora:

memex.craphound.com/2015/11/02/kim…

and New York 2140:

memex.craphound.com/wp-admin/admin…

act as a kind of future-history rangefinding.

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Robinson is landing an ever-closer series of volleys that start in the the unknowably distant future, then walk back to the present day, reverse-engineering a path from Capitalist Realism to a utopian leap.

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Klein's Messages from the Future are taking a similar path, and the closer they get to our dark moment, the realer (and hence, brighter) the future they paint becomes.

#TheFirstDaysOfABetterNation

eof/

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More from @doctorow

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…

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



3/theguardian.com/technology/201…
Read 40 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…

2/
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
Jul 30
Delta's announced new surveillance pricing: they're feeding an AI your nonconsensually harvested personal info that data-brokers and credit bureaux hold to predict the maximum you're willing to pay, and then price their tickets accordingly:



1/ fortune.com/2025/07/16/del…Hieronymus Bosch's 'The Conjurer,' which depicts a sleight-of-hand artist doing a cup-and-balls routine for a group of amazed yokels. It has been altered. The head of the conjurer has been replaced with the hostile red eye of HAL 9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' He wears a Delta Airlines logo over his breast. The table on which the cup-and-balls game is playing out sports a crashed jet in Delta livery, smoke rising from the wreckage.   Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg  CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
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/2025/07/30/eff…

2/
Data-brokers sell all kinds of data, from the "legitimate" info about everywhere your car's been, to everywhere place the Bluetooth radios on your phone and headphones has been, to everything you've bought, to every sit you've visited and every search you've performed.

3/
Read 61 tweets
Jul 22
Ever notice how many right wing influencers are on the grift?

1/ A carny barker at a podium, gesticulating with a MAGA cap. He wears a Klan hood, and his podium features products from Nu-skin, Amway and Herbalife. Behind him is an oil-painted scene of a steamship with a Trump Tower logo, at a pier in flames.
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/2025/07/22/all…

2/
Like Alex Jones - that guy is basically Gwyneth Paltrow for conservative bros, selling the same "wellness" crap to a male audience (and not for nothing, Paltrow's victims are reliable boosters for RFK Jr's MAHA movement):



3/theweek.com/speedreads/709…
Read 66 tweets
Jul 3
As fascism burns across America, it's important to remember that Trump and his policies are *not popular*.

1/ A kneeling figure, shackled hand-and-foot with ball-and-chains at his ankles. His face is that of a turn-of-the-century newsie, grinning broadly under a torn cloth cap. Behind him is a heavily halftoned neon HELP WANTED sign, askew over a indistinct black hellscape ganked from the third panel of Boschs's 'Garden of Earthly Delights.'
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/2025/07/03/sta…

2/
Sure, the racism and cruelty excites a minority of (very broken) people, but every component of the Trump agenda is *extremely* unpopular with the American people, from tax cuts for billionaires to kidnapping our neighbors and shipping them to concentration camps.

3/
Read 42 tweets

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