#1yrago More than 800 Russian academic articles retracted after “bombshell” report reveals plagiarism and other misconduct sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/r…
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Yesterday's threads: Competition is Killing Us; Predatory lender seeks national bank charter; Militarizing cops was a failure; and more!
My latest novel is Attack Surface, a sequel to my bestselling Little Brother books. @washingtonpost called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance."
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:
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."
My first picture book is 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.
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!
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.
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").
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."
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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.
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.
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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).
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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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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."