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Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

11 Jan

@GreatDismal

In 2003's Pattern Recognition, @GreatDismal discusses the role of "apophenia" - finding patterns where none exist - in paranoid thinking. We are a pattern-matching animal, prone to seeing faces in clouds and hearing speech in static.

mindjack.com/books/gibsonpr…

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Apophenia is omnipresent and weird. It's why 5G conspiracy theorists started circulating a guitar-pedal circuit diagram as a leaked 5G cancer-microchip design (the diagram has a segment labeled "5G frequency").

guitarworld.com/news/conspirac…

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@energydots1

But this kind of hilarious idiocy doesn't occur in a vacuum. It's got a business model. Companies like Devon's @energydots1 prey on people who've been sucked in by their own apophenic misfirings to sell them "Smartdots" - stickers to protect them from "radiation."

3/

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Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

11 Jan

After the 9/11 attacks, airlines and public buildings adopted a flurry of "security" measures, like taking away pen-knives from fliers or requiring visitors to office buildings to be photographed or present a driver's license.

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Bruce Schneier's seminal 2003 "Beyond Fear" called these measures: #securitytheater.

Schneier pointed out that these measures would be easy to circumvent, and were thus providing only the comforting appearance of security - not security itself.

memex.craphound.com/2003/08/21/bey…

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Security theater is worse than nothing. Security theater gives people the false impression that their risks have been mitigated, when actually things are just as dangerous.

After al, if you know that danger exists, you can take some steps to mitigate or avoid it.

3/

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Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

11 Jan

Eartha Kitt for British Pathé, 1960 gameraboy1.tumblr.com/post/640011837…

Read 6 tweets

Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

10 Jan

Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Busting myths about the Night of the Short Fingers; Impeachment and realignment; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2021/01/10/rea…

#Pluralistic

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https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1348341699777478657

Busting myths about the Night of the Short Fingers: Jillian C York's "ongoing list."

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1348341699777478657

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1348348882242060288

Impeachment and realignment: What the Dems should do to shatter the GOP.

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1348348882242060288

Read 16 tweets

Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

10 Jan

If you've ever argued with a racist Facebook uncle over Thanksgiving dinner, you probably had the fact that the Democrats supported slavery and the Republicans ended it thrown in your face. It's totally true.

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What's also true is that the parties underwent a series of "realignments" where their politics were profoundly transformed.

These realignments are a regular feature of two (and even three) party systems.

The thing is, there are more than two ways to think about politics.

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Each of the parties is best thought of as coalitions - often fragile ones. The Democrats were a mix of southern racists ("Dixiecrats") and northeastern trade unionists. The Civil Rights Act turned Dixiecrats into Republicans ("We have lost the south for a generation" -LBJ).

3/

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Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

10 Jan

The Night of the Short Fingers saw many of the US's largest tech companies blocking Trump and trumpist platforms like Parler, provoking a storm of punditry about What It All Means for the tech companies to have taken this content moderation step.

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@jilliancyork

The best expert I know on the subject is @jilliancyork, my @EFF colleague. She's published "an ongoing list" of "everything pundits are getting wrong about this current moment in content moderation."

You should read it.

jilliancyork.com/2021/01/10/eve…

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Here's some highlights:

“Deplatforming Trump sets a precedent."

York: "The only 'precedent' set here is that this is indeed the first time a sitting US president has been deplatformed by a tech company."

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