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Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

8 Jan

@nkjemisin

Macarthur fellow and Hugo-award-winner @nkjemisin's 2019 book "The City We Became" is both a fantastic contemporary fantasy novel and a scorching commentary on the infantile nature of the racist dogma of HP Lovecraft and his ilk.

hachettebookgroup.com/titles/n-k-jem…

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It's a quest novel about a group of New Yorkers who awaken one day to discover that they are mystical avatars of the city, which has awakened and been reborn as a kind of powerful colony organism.

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There's an avatar for each of the five boroughs, plus a "primary" who represents the city as a whole. As with all births, this one is somewhat traumatic - but NYC's birth is uniquely fraught.

First, the five boroughs must find one another and connect with the primary.

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Read 18 tweets

Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

8 Jan

@PavelAnni

Well this is pretty terrific: @PavelAnni was so taken with my 2020 novel ATTACK SURFACE (the third Little Brother novel) that he's created "Mashapedia," a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the real world technologies in the tale.

pavelanni.github.io/attack-surface…

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Pavel is both comprehensive and comprehensible, with short definitions and links for the mundane (MIT Media Lab, EL wire, PGP) to the exotic (binary transparency, reverse shells, adversarial preturbation).

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When I was an adolescent, my friend group traded secret knowledge as a kind of social currency - tricks for getting free payphone calls, or doubling the capacity of a floppy disc, or calling the White House switchboard.

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Read 9 tweets

Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

8 Jan

Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Competition is Killing Us; Predatory lender seeks national bank charter; Militarizing cops was a failure; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2021/01/08/com…

#Pluralistic

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https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1347337250774736897

Competition is Killing Us: Consumer harm considered harmful.

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1347337250774736897

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1347586200480071681

Predatory lender seeks national bank charter: Oportun led America in suing latinx borrowers during the pandemic.

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1347586200480071681

Read 18 tweets

Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

8 Jan

In 1997, the Clinton administration created the "1033" program, whereby the Pentagon gave away its "surplus" equipment to local law enforcement agencies, leading to the nationwide militarization of America's cops.

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In the decades since, 1033 became a $5B industry: beltway bandits lobby their pals in the DoD to place massive orders for weapons and materiel which are immediately declared "surplus" and transfered to undertrained cops nationwide.

cnbc.com/2020/07/09/why…

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Opponents of this program hypothesized that it would obey Checkhov's Law: "A machine-gun in the police armory in Act One will go off by Act Three. And then again, and again, and again."

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Read 16 tweets

Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

8 Jan

@oportun

"Partner with us today to build a better tomorrow" - that's the slogan for @oportun, a predatory lender that sued more poor latinx people during the pandemic than any other.

propublica.org/article/the-lo…

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The company sued longtime customers who'd spent years in a debt-trap of endless payments and refinancing, customers who lost their jobs and missed some of those payments.

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It was just an escalation of business-as-usual for a company that has sued 30 customers a day, every day since May 2016. The company filed 10,000 lawsuits in the first five months of the pandemic. They are among the nation's most litigious lenders.

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Read 8 tweets

Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

8 Jan

@matthewstoller

2020 was a shitty year for most things, but it was a banner year for books about fighting monopolies, and for the fight itself.

It started (in Dec '19) with @matthewstoller's GOLIATH, a massive, comprehensive history of monopolies in America.

simonandschuster.com/books/Goliath/…

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@ZephyrTeachout

Then came books like @ZephyrTeachout's BREAK 'EM UP, a political thriller that zeroes in on the role monopolies play in today's brutal and terrifying emergencies, from covid to climate:

pluralistic.net/2020/07/29/bre…

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@Sally_Hubbard

MONOPOLIES SUCK is @Sally_Hubbard's action-oriented book on monopolies, drawing on her work with the @openmarkets Institute, laying out a practical program you can follow to help create structural changes and end monopolism:

pluralistic.net/2020/10/27/pea…

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