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Cory Doctorow #BLM

9 Oct, 22 tweets, 17 min read

Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: MK-Ultra and the brainwashing grift; Machine Democrats; Mattis Dover's spectacular animations; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2020/10/09/bos…

#Pluralistic

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https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1314576883061669890

MK-Ultra and the brainwashing grift: Mind control rays are always bullshit.

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1314576883061669890

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1314589768341094400

Machine Democrats: Trump-voting ex-Dems are part of a great realignment.

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1314589768341094400

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1314598441343881216

Mattis Dover's spectacular animations: Monochrom GIFs for the win.

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1314598441343881216

#10yrsago Student finds GPS bug on car, uploads photo, FBI demands to have their warrantless bug back wired.com/2010/10/fbi-tr…

#10yrsago THE UNIDENTIFIED: dystopian YA about education transformed into a giant, heavily sponsored game memex.craphound.com/2010/10/08/the…

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#10yrsago HOWTO bake porridge in a pumpkin web.archive.org/web/2010101101…

#5yrsago Prisoners’ debate team trounces national champs from Harvard theguardian.com/education/2015…

#5yrsago T-shirt: Bugs and Gossamer as Han and Chewy neatoshop.com/product/Scound…

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#5yrsago It’s been ten years since Sony Music infected the world with its rootkit fsfe.org/activities/drm…

#5yrsago Court tells millionaire yoga troll Bikram Choudhury that poses can’t be copyrighted cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opin…

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#1yrago The cloud vs humanity: Adobe terminates every software license in Venezuela, keeps Venezuelans’ money helpx.adobe.com/la/x-productkb…

#1yrago Podcast: Why do people believe the Earth is flat? ia801006.us.archive.org/35/items/Cory_…

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https://twitter.com/MarietjeSchaake/status/1180166896294887424

#1yrago Facebook’s 2016 election billboards: Buy all your elections with us!

https://twitter.com/MarietjeSchaake/status/1180166896294887424

#1yrago How the “Varsity Blues” admissions scam punished deserving, hard working kids so that mediocre kids of the super-rich could prosper propublica.org/article/an-uns…

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https://twitter.com/2600/status/1181423565389942786

#1yrago After an injunction against Pacifica radio, New York’s WBAI is back on the air

https://twitter.com/2600/status/1181423565389942786

#1yrago Checkm8: an “unstoppable” Iphone jailbreaking crack arstechnica.com/information-te…

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#1yrago Supreme Court greenlights lawsuit over Amazon’s wage-theft from warehouse workers reuters.com/article/us-usa…

#1yrago For the first time ever, taxes on the 400 richest Americans were lower than taxes on everyone else nytimes.com/interactive/20…

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https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1314257902954184704

Yesterday's threads: Good Intentions, Bad Inventions; Visualizing the Gartner Hype Cycle; and more!

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1314257902954184704

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I have a (free) new book out! "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism" is an anti-monopolist critique of Big Tech that connects the rise of conspiratorial thinking to the rise of tech monopolies and proposes a way to deal with both:

onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy…

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My next book is ATTACK SURFACE, sequel to Little Brother and Homeland: it's a technothriller about a surveillance techie who goes home and learns the weapons she helped build are used against the racial justice movement founded by her best friend.

read.macmillan.com/promo/attacksu…

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@torbooks

My ebooks and audiobooks (from @torbooks, @HoZ_Books, @mcsweeneys, 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."

craphound.com/shop/

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Upcoming talks:

* Wired Nextfest Italia, Oct 10, nextfest2020-milano.wired.it/speaker/cory-d…

* The Attack Surface Lectures: 8 nights of bookstore events in which I and a massive group of knowledgeable experts discourse on my latest novel's themes, Oct 13-22 read.macmillan.com/torforge/cory-…

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Recent appearances:

* Off the Hook/Hacker Radio
download.2600.com/mediadownload/…

* Library Leaders Forum: Ways to Better Serve the Public
blog.archive.org/2020/10/08/lib…

* The Internet Is Broken, and ISPs Are to Blame (Gizmodo System Reboot)
gizmodo.com/the-internet-i…

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My first picture book just came out! It's called Poesy the Monster Slayer and it's an epic tale of bedtime-refusal, toy-hacking and monster-hunting, illustrated by Matt Rockefeller. It's the monster book I dreamt of reading to my own daughter.

pluralistic.net/2020/07/14/poe…

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You can also follow these posts as a daily blog at pluralistic.net: no ads, trackers, or data-collection!

Here's today's edition: pluralistic.net/2020/10/09/bos…

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If you prefer a newsletter, subscribe to the plura-list, which is also ad- and tracker-free, and is utterly unadorned save a single daily emoji. Today's is "🪐". Suggestions solicited for future emojis!

Subscribe here: pluralistic.net/plura-list

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Are you trying to wean yourself off Big Tech? Follow these threads on the #fediverse at @pluralistic@mamot.fr.

Here's today's edition: mamot.fr/@pluralistic/1…

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Today's top sources: Naked Capitalism (nakedcapitalism.com), Waxy (waxy.org).

eof/

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More from @doctorow

Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

11 Oct

@tuckerian

The third Little Brother book, ATTACK SURFACE, came out in the UK on Oct 1 (it'll be published in the US/Canada on Oct 13 - that's TUESDAY!). In honour of the launch, I sat down for an interview with @tuckerian, @ObserverUK's science and tech editor.

theguardian.com/media/2020/oct…

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It's a really good interview: Tucker got right into the issues of technological optimism and pessimism, letting me talk about how these balance: the belief that tech can be a force for liberation, the terror of how it can be force for oppression.

2/

This is really the core of the Little Brother books (and my activism).

Attack Surface is about a techie who spent her career building oppressive tech and has to confront her moral legacy when the cyberweapons she built for use overseas are turned on her friends in the US.

3/

Read 23 tweets

Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

11 Oct

Peter De Yager owns the Foreign Candy Company in Hull, Iowa. He's a die-hard Republican, having donated more than $30,000 to GOP PACs and campaigns since 2019. And on July 26, he stole a Biden yard-sign from a private home in Monarch Cove.

1/

@DickinsonCoNews

De Yager initially pleaded not guilty to fifth-degree theft and trespassing, but eventually pleaded guilty on Sept 21 and paid $365 in fines.

De Yager's charges were published in the Sept 2 edition of the @DickinsonCoNews.

2/

Shortly after the Sept 2 paper hit the stands, De Yager went on a crime-spree, visiting a series of retailers who carried the paper and stealing their entire stock of the the paper, hitting newspaper vending boxes as well.

dickinsoncountynews.com/story/2839758.…

3/

Read 9 tweets

Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

11 Oct

The right has long held that homelessness is a symptom - of a lack of self-control, a lack of foresight, of addiction, mental illness, etc - and therefore the solution to it is training, incarceration, rehab, or rigid discipline.

None of this stuff worked.

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For more than a decade, there's been a more pragmatic approach to homelessness: giving people homes. The housing first movement has repeatedly shown that the best way to make homeless people not homeless is to give. them. a. home.

endhomelessness.org/resource/housi…

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After all, if you are struggling with addiction, mental illness, etc, or if you eed structure in your life, the chaos of not having a home only makes this a thousand times worse.

(Oh, and giving homeless people homes is MUCH cheaper than treating homelessness as a crime)

3/

Read 27 tweets

Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

11 Oct

Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement has been routed by China's brutal, authoritarian government. The #612strike movement went into high gear on Jun 12, 2019 and endless months, the protesters embodied indomitable spirit, technological shrewdness, and creative exuberance.

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For many of us supporting the protests from abroad, the most iconic images weren't the street-battles or the masks, but rather, the incredible visual art of the movement, which saw the city plastered with #BeWater posters:

archive.org/details/HongKo…

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@HongKongHermit

Today, those poster-walls are erased, with only their ghosts lingering: painted over rectangles, scraps of glue and wheatpaste. They speak loudly. As @HongKongHermit says in their thread of images, "I can still hear you."