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30 Mar, 20 tweets, 14 min read
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: How to donate to John Varley; Minimum wage vs Wall Street bonuses; America needs a high-fiber broadband diet; Als Sysadmins die Erde beherrschten; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2021/03/30/fig…

#Pluralistic

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Tonight, I'm helping futurist Brian David Johnson launch his new book, "Future You" at an event hosted by Powell's Books:

zoom.us/webinar/regist…

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How to donate to John Varley: Paypal versus science fiction.



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Minimum wage vs Wall Street bonuses: The fight for $44.



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America needs a high-fiber broadband diet: AT&T to rural America: "Drop dead (slowly)."



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Als Sysadmins die Erde beherrschten: My "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth," auf Deutsch.



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#5yrsago How DRM would kill the next Netflix (and how the W3C could save it) eff.org/deeplinks/2016…

#5yrsago Judge says Citibank’s law-school loan isn’t “student debt” and can be discharged in bankruptcy abcnews.go.com/Business/judge…

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#5yrsago Up to half of the Americans killed by police have a disability theguardian.com/society/2016/m…

#5yrsago Playable records laser-etched in cheese, eggplant and ham matthewherbert.com/edible-sound-d…

#1yrago Digital rights are human rights pluralistic.net/2020/03/30/med…

8/
#1yrago Lax antitrust killed ventilator stockpiles pluralistic.net/2020/03/30/med…

#1yrago Private equity firms scooping up pandemic bargains pluralistic.net/2020/03/30/med…

9/
Yesterday's threads: Monopoly so fragile; Noble Lies; Big Salmon's aquaturf; Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results; and more!



10/
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."

Get signed books from @darkdel: darkdel.com/store/p1840/Av…

11/
My book "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism" is a critique of Big Tech connecting conspiratorial thinking to the rise of tech monopolies (proposing a way to deal with both) is now out in paperback:

onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy…

Signed copies here:
darkdel.com/store/p2024/Av…

12/
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."

craphound.com/shop/

13/
Upcoming appearances:

* Launch for Brian David Johnson's Future You, Mar 30, zoom.us/webinar/regist…

* All the Teachable Things I Know About Writing, Apr 13, changinghands.com/event/april202…

* Interop: Self-Determination vs Dystopia (FITC), Apr 19-21, fitc.ca/presentation/i…

14/
Recent appearances:

* Right to Repair, Monopolies, and Solarpunk


* The surveillance state, digital monopolies, and why we should be worried (Podsongs)
anchor.fm/podsongs/episo…

* Conspiracy Theories (Utopian Horizons):
soundcloud.com/utopianhorizon…

15/
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.

pluralistic.net/2020/07/14/poe…

16/
You can also follow these posts as a daily blog at pluralistic.net: no ads, trackers, or data-collection!

Here's today's edition: pluralistic.net/2021/03/30/fig…

17/
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!

Subscribe here: pluralistic.net/plura-list

18/
Are you trying to wean yourself off Big Tech? Follow these threads on the #fediverse at @pluralistic@mamot.fr.

Here's today's edition: mamot.fr/@pluralistic/1…

19/
Today's top sources: Late Stage Capitalism (reddit.com/r/LateStageCap….

eof/

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More from @doctorow

Cory Doctorow Profile picture
31 Mar
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: AT&T will lay off thousands more; Cuba is a vaccine powerhouse; Sacklers to use Purdue bankruptcy to escape justice; AI has a GIGO problem; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2021/03/31/vac…

#Pluralistic

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AT&T will lay off thousands more: After promising that Trump's $20B tax-break would create jobs.



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Cuba is a vaccine powerhouse: A vaccine for the Global South.



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Read 22 tweets
Cory Doctorow Profile picture
31 Mar
The computer science maxim "garbage in, garbage out," (#GIGO) dates back at least as far as 1957. It's an iron law of computing: no matter how powerful your data-processing system is, if you feed it low-quality data, you'll get low-quality conclusions.

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And of course, machine learning (AKA "AI") (ugh) does not repeal GIGO. Far from it. ML systems that operate on garbage data produce garbage predictive models, which produce garbage conclusions at vast scale, coated with a veneer of algorithmic objectivity facewash.

2/
The scale and credibility of ML-derived GIGO presents huge risks to our society in domains as varied as the credit system, criminal justice, hiring, education - even whether your kids will be taken away by Child Protective Services.

3/
Read 10 tweets
Cory Doctorow Profile picture
31 Mar
The opioid epidemic is a corporate murder spree that killed more Americans than the Vietnam war, and its deaths carry on, accelerating during the pandemic. The enrichment to its principal architects outstrips the Rockefeller fortune, and they stand to retain that wealth.

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The Sacklers owned Purdue Pharma, whose Oxycontin was ground zero of the epidemic. Purdue pushed deliberate lies about the safety of its product and aggressively marketed through doctors and distributors, under the direction of the family patriarch Richard Sackler.

2/
The Sacklers were determined to come through the crisis both rich and well-loved. They laundered the family reputation with gifts to arts institutions that saw their names on galleries and museums around the world. That was the carrot.

3/
Read 19 tweets
Cory Doctorow Profile picture
31 Mar
When Oxford University began work on its covid vaccine, it promised that the resulting work would be patent-free, with an active tech-transfer assistance program so that developing nations could manufacture their own supplies.

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That promise was broken. The Gates Foundation pushed the racist lie that poor people can't make safe vaccines - despite world-leading production facilities in the Global South - and convinced the university to sell exclusive rights to Astrazeneca.

khn.org/news/rather-th…

2/
Astrazeneca got the vaccine rights without having to make any promises not to gouge poor countries for access to the vaccine. Of course they didn't. Gates's ideology is that markets channel greed to positive ends, a sentiment echoed by Boris Johnson:

reuters.com/article/us-hea…

3/
Read 18 tweets
Cory Doctorow Profile picture
31 Mar
AT&T shareholders should be very, very grateful to Trump. Not only did he wave through their idiotic mergers with Time Warner and Directv, his FCC chair @AjitPai killed Net Neutrality and then he gave them an *$80 BILLION* tax break.

vice.com/en/article/nep…

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At the time, AT&T execs promised that this would be good for America: they'd invest more in telcoms infrastructure, replacing their last-millennium copper wires AND they'd create jobs. You will not be surprised to learn that neither of these things happened.

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By 2019, AT&T had cut 23,000 jobs (they'd promised to CREATE 7,000 jobs) and had slashed capital expenditures by a billion dollars.

Don't worry, though: they increased executive compensation substantially over that same period.

arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20…

3/
Read 4 tweets
Cory Doctorow Profile picture
30 Mar
When the lockdown started, I got a ton of messages from readers who were thinking of my 2005 story "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth," set in a sealed data-center where network admins struggle to keep global comms going in the midst of a global biowar.

craphound.com/overclocked/Co…

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I revisited the story then, recording a special reading of it on my podcast, where I recounted the circumstances of writing it, in the midst of the London 7/7 bombings, which hit my usual morning bus and my wife's usual morning train:

pluralistic.net/2020/03/14/mas…

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It was indeed timely, and as the new edition spread around the world, I started hearing from IT workers who were living out a real-world version of the tale:

pluralistic.net/2020/04/09/all…

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Read 5 tweets

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