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Cory Doctorow #BLM

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26 Nov

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Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

25 Nov

Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Tech in SF; Office 365 spies on employees for bosses; A state-owned Amazon; Random Penguin to buy Simon & Schuster; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the…

#Pluralistic

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On Monday, Nov 30, I'm giving a talk based on my short book "HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM" as part of McGill University's Beaverbrook Lectures; it's a counterpoint to a lecture delivered by Shoshanna Zuboff last Monday. It's free to attend:

mcgill.ca/maxbellschool/…

2/

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1331616789109772290

Tech in SF: Annalee Newitz and Ken Liu in the final Attack Surface Lecture.

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1331616789109772290

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Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

25 Nov

Publishing is dominated by just five giant players: Penguin Random House, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, Harpercollins and Macmillan.

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Within that five-company oligarchy, one company stands out as a true monopolist: Penguin Random House, the megafirm created when Random House's owner, Bertelsmann, executed a merger-to-monopoly by buying Penguin in 2013.

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Now, Penguin is about to effect another monopolistic merger, by acquiring Simon & Schuster from Viacom, which bought the company in 1994. The acquisition was always a bad fit: it was driven by a desire to create a vertical monopoly.

3/

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Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

25 Nov

POSTCARDS FROM NIGHT CITY wilwheaton.tumblr.com/post/635780171…

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Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

25 Nov

In most of the world, the lockdown has destroyed small businesses while increasing the profits of Big Tech intermediaries like Amazon, who control access to customers on one side, and access to merchants on the other.

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The government of Argentina is trying to avert this fate. Their postal service is launching a "state-owned Amazon" called Correo Compras, which will offer low-cost ecommerce listings to businesses, and do fulfilment through postal workers.

correocompras.com.ar

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Correo Compras competes directly with Mercadolibre, a latinamerican ecommerce titan with a well-deserved reputation for squeezing suppliers and workers - its deliveries are made by precarious gig economy drivers.

opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/…

3/

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Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

25 Nov

The Shitty Tech Adoption Curve describes the process by which oppressive technology is normalized and distributed through all levels of society. The more privilege someone has, the harder it is to coerce them to use dehumanizing tech, so it starts with marginalized people.

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Asylum seekers, prisoners and overseas sweatshop workers get the first version. Its roughest edges are sanded off against their tenderest places, and once it's been normalized a little, we inflict it on students, mental patients, and blue collar workers.

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Lather, rinse, repeat: before long, everyone's been ropted in. If your meals were observed by a remote-monitored CCTV 20 years ago, it was because you were in a supermax prison. Today, it's because you bought a home video surveillance system from Google/Apple/Amazon.

3/

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