Yesterday's threads: The PRO Act and worker misclassification; $50k fellowships for critical technologists; The FTC's (kick-ass) Right to Repair report; 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."
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:
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're a @Medium subscriber, you can read these - as well as previews of upcoming magazine columns and early exclusives on doctorow.medium.com.
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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!
Here's a weird consequence of our shift from capitalism (where riches come from profits) to feudalism (where riches come from rents): increasingly, your rights to your property (physical stuff you own) are trumped by corporations' metaphorical "intellectual property" claims.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on , my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
That's a lot to unpack! Let's start with a quick primer on profits and rents. Capitalists invest money in buying equipment, then they pay workers *wages* to use that equipment to produce goods and services.
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Three companies control the market for school lunch payments. They take as much as 60 cents out of every dollar poor kids' parents put into the system to the tune of $100m/year. They're literally stealing poor kids' lunch money.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on , my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
When I took my kid to New Zealand with me on a book-tour, I was delighted to learn that grocery stores had special aisles where all the kids'-eye-level candy had been removed, to minimize nagging. What a great idea!
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on , my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
The telegraph and the telephone have a special place in the history and future of competition and Big Tech. After all, they were the original tech monopolists. Every discussion of tech and monopoly takes place in their shadow.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on , my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Back in 2010, @SuperWuster published *The Master Switch*, his bestselling, wildly influential history of "The Bell System" and the struggle to de-monopolize America from its first telecoms barons:
Like you, I've heard a *lot* about Project 2025, Heritage Foundation's roadmap for Trump, should he win the presidency. Given the Heritage Foundation's centrality to the American authoritarian project, it's about as awful and frightening as you might expect.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on , my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
In 2017, Equifax suffered the worst breach in history, leaking the deep, nonconsensual dossiers it had compiled on 148m Americans, 15m Britons and 19k Canadians, to form an immortal, undeletable reservoir of kompromat and readymade identity-theft:
Equifax knew the breach was coming. It wasn't just their top execs liquidating their stock in Equifax before the announcement of the breach - it was also that they ignored *years* of increasingly urgent warnings from IT staff about the problems with their server security.
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