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Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

5 Nov

HP never stopped innovating. From its origins in the 1930s as a leading electronics manufacturer to its role in the birth of PCs and performance servers, it has always demonstrated incredible ingenuity.

Today, that ingenuity is deployed in service of evil ink-based fuckery.

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The printer-ink business model has always been a form of commercial sadism in which you are expected to put giant manufacturers' interests ahead of your own with no expectation of any sort of reciprocity.

eff.org/deeplinks/2020…

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After all, when your profits depend on charging more for ink than vintage Veuve-Clicquot, you need to get up to some serious shenanigans to get your customers to drain their bank accounts to fill their printers.

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Read 20 tweets

Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

5 Nov

52 Horror Films by Women

41/52: The Love Witch (2016) dir. Anna Biller
wilwheaton.tumblr.com/post/633973287…

Read 5 tweets

Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

5 Nov

Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Ant, Uber, and the true nature of money; Scarfolk & Environs; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2020/11/05/got…

#Pluralistic

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Baycon 2020 - where I was scheduled to be guest of honor - has reconstituted as a series of online panels; mine's this Saturday:

How do we survive Social Engineering?
baycon.org/baycon-2021-zo…

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https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1324391639628959745

Ant, Uber, and the true nature of money: Money vs finance.

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1324391639628959745

Read 21 tweets

Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

5 Nov

@Scarfolk

One of the great delights of this decade is @Scarfolk, @richard_littler's long-running art-project about a English horror-town trapped in an endless, looping Thatcherite decade, whose artifacts are pitch-perfect comments on our own daily lives.

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The period Littler focuses on - the dawn of neoliberalism - is a turning point in our collective timeline, the ascendant moment of selfishness, the elevation of sociopathy to a virtue, the moment in which corporate personhood was elevated at the expense of human personhood.

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As such, the parallels he is able to draw are incredible, savage and brilliant, augmented by his biting prose and his superb draftsmanship and outstanding design.

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Read 7 tweets

Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

5 Nov

The US election news has largely overshadowed a seismic moment in global finance: Ant, a fintech company that spun out of Alibaba/Alipay, was scheduled to have the world's largest IPO, topping even Aramco, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund.

Then Chinese regulators canceled it.

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@yvessmith

As @yvessmith writes in her excellent @nakedcapitalism breakdown, the consensus narrative on this is capricious Chinese regulators changed their minds and jerked the rug out from under Ali's billionaire owner Jack Ma.

The reality is a lot chewier.

nakedcapitalism.com/2020/11/china-…

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To understand it, you need to understand the difference between the Chinese and American "money story." In the US, there is widespread, unquestioning faith in the fairytale that money predates the state and is separate from it.

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Read 55 tweets