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Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

21 Feb

Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: K-shaped recovery vs wealth taxes; Facebook vs Australia; The Paltrow-Industrial Complex; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2021/02/21/pal…

#Pluralistic

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Tomorrow, I'm delivering a keynote address for the NISO Plus conference, "The day of the comet: what trustbusting means for digital manipulation."

nisoplus21.sched.com/event/fMlc/key…

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https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1363498926167363587

K-shaped recovery vs wealth taxes: Evita's spectre is haunting Argentina.

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1363498926167363587

Read 22 tweets

Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

21 Feb

I don't know about you, but I've been worried about Gwyneth Paltrow. We've had the plague for a year and the Paltrow-Industrial Complex hadn't shown up with any kind of wellness grift!

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@BethMarieMole

Finally, we can breathe easy. As @BethMarieMole writes in @arstechnica, Paltrow has finally entered the covid profiteering racket, and she's going BIG, with a blog entry detailing the many ways you can shop your way out of long covid.

arstechnica.com/science/2021/0…

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Paltrow's post describes how she suffered covid "early on" and then heroically overcame long covid with chiropractic, a "plant-based" diet that's also fish-based (go fig), $102 worth of vitamins and supplements, and $60 "detox" powder.

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Read 8 tweets

Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

21 Feb

There's an old Irish joke whose punchline goes, "If you want to get there, I wouldn't start from here." That's basically how I feel about the so-called Australian "link tax" and Facebook's retaliation.

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Let's start with the fact that it's not a link tax - it's a form of arbitrated collective bargaining that's meant to correct an imbalance in negotiating power created by monopolization.

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The problem that the system is supposed to ameliorate is that the ad-tech platforms cheat. They lie about the reach of their ads. They lie about the performance of their ads. They rig markets so they can price-gouge. They collude to rig prices.

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

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Read 39 tweets

Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

21 Feb

The K-shaped recovery - where the rich got richer and the poor got poorer - wasn't inevitable. It is the outcome of hard lobbying by the investor class to turn on floods of money to the rich, while starving the poor of money, rent-relief and debt-relief.

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This has enabled wealthy people to increase their fortunes through asset inflation (STONKS) and financial engineering (buybacks, tax refunds, and bonuses) and cash-transfers (personal LLCs taking in vast PPP loans).

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It also drove poor people into unsafe working conditions as the only alternative to homelessness and starvation, which let the rich keep their businesses open and supplied a pool of "essential worker" labor to deliver food and even serve in-person diners.

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Read 14 tweets