This is the last Pluralistic installment until mar 15; I'm taking a stay-at-home vacation/email sabbatical. I won't be reading messages from close of business on Friday, Feb 26 until 9AM Pac on Mar 15. Emails/DMs, etc that come in between now and then will be deleted unread.
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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."
My book "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism" is a critique of Big Tech connecting conspiratorial thinking to the rise of tech monopolies and proposing a way to deal with both is available in paperback!
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."
* Technology, Self-Determination, and the Future of the Future (CERIAS)
* Talking "Permanent Record Young Readers' Edition" with @Snowden
* Talking "Agency" with William Gibson
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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!
When all you have is market orthodoxy, everything looks like a market failure. Take privacy: giant, rapacious corporations have instrumented the digital and physical worlds to spy on us all the time, so some people think they should pay us for our data.
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There's a pretty rich theoretical history explaining why this "data dividend" is a stupid idea. First of all, private information isn't very property-like. And not just because it shares all the problems of digital works (infinitely, instantaneously copyable at zero cost).
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Private information makes for bad "property" because it is "owned" by multiple, overlapping parties who generally disagree about when and who to share it with. When you and I have a conversation, we both own the fact that the conversation took place.
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When you and your friends put your fingers on the ouija board planchette and it starts moving around, there's a chance your friends are just yanking your chain - but just as possible is that your friends are experiencing the ideomotor response.
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That's when your unconscious mind directs your muscles without your conscious knowledge. The movement of the planchette doesn't tell you what's going on in the spirit world, but it does tell you something about the internal weather of your friend's psyche, fears and hopes.
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Our narratives are social-scale planchettes, directed by mass ideomotor response. When a fake news story takes hold, it reveals a true fact: namely, the shared, internal models of how the world really works.
One of the worst barriers to preserving the planet in a state suitable for human habitation is the Energy Charter Treaty, an obscure 1994 treaty with 50+ signatories that allows energy companies to sue governments over environmental protection laws.
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The ECT has just been invoked by the German polluter @RWE_AG, which is suing the Dutch government for €1.4b over a law that bans coal plants by 2030.
All told, the EU faces AT LEAST €345b in ECT liability over its climate plans. In reality, the total could be much higher, because the ECT provides for damages equal to the value of physical plant and ALL PROJECTED FUTURE PROFITS from those plants.
A year ago, covid was a mystery. We didn't know how it spread, we didn't know who it infected, we didn't know how to treat it. All we knew was that it was spreading fast and the early epicenters were slaughterhouses.
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It's been a year, and now we know a lot more. One thing we know, for example, is that even though virus particles can linger for a long time on surfaces, you're not likely to catch the virus from these "fomites."
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Simple handwashing of the sort we should have all practised all along will do the trick. You don't need to sterilize your groceries or leave your parcels to sit on your doorstep for three days. Just wash your hands!