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12 May, 19 tweets, 15 min read
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Crooked Timber's Ministry for the Future Seminar; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2021/05/12/sem…

#Pluralistic

1/
I'm doing two live events today, May 12:

* Interoperability and Alternative Social Media, a panel for the Knight Center's Reimagine the Internet event
knightcolumbia.org/events/reimagi…

* Book launch for Aminder Dhaliwal's Cyclopedia Exotica
crowdcast.io/e/udbva8py/reg…

2/
Crooked Timber's Ministry for the Future Seminar: It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.



3/
#20yrsago RIP, Douglas Adams news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/1…

#10yrsago Napier’s Bones: math and mysticism make for great international adventure memex.craphound.com/2011/05/12/nap…

#10yrsago China’s shonky Disneyland-a-like park closed thedisneyblog.com/2011/05/13/fak…

4/
#5yrsago Open letter to from EFF to members of the W3C Advisory Committee eff.org/deeplinks/2016…

#5yrsago Reading With Pictures: awesome, classroom-ready comics for math, social studies, science and language arts memex.craphound.com/2016/05/12/rea…

5/
#5yrsago Anal fisting site breached: 100K passwords, usernames, email addresses and IPs extracted vice.com/en/article/qkj…

#5yrsago Chinese state-backed corporations beat US lawsuits with sovereign immunity reuters.com/article/us-chi…

7/
#5yrsago German publishers owe writers €100M in misappropriated royalties uebermedien.de/4444/schoener-…

#5yrsago Gallery show of forks stolen from rich people, sealed to preserve crumbs & saliva theguardian.com/artanddesign/2…

8/
#1yrago Plane ticket refunds (without airline cooperation) pluralistic.net/2020/05/12/evi…

#1yrago The right's theories about human behavior are bankrupt pluralistic.net/2020/05/12/evi…

9/
Yesterday's threads: Cyclopedia Exotica; Let's eat all the cicadas; 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/

10/
Upcoming appearances:

* Interoperability and Alternative Social Media, Reimagine the Internet, May 12, knightcolumbia.org/events/reimagi…

* Book launch for Aminder Dhaliwal's Cyclopedia Exotica (Indigo), May 12, crowdcast.io/e/udbva8py/reg…

11/
Recent appearances:

* Mohanraj and Rosenbaum Are Humans
open.spotify.com/episode/01dGJO…

* Can Antitrust Laws Destroy Surveillance Capitalism? (Majority Report)


* In conversation with John Scalzi at the Gaithersburg Book Festival


12/
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…

13/
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/2021/05/12/sem…

14/
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.

15/
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

16/
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…

eof/

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More from @doctorow

Cory Doctorow Profile picture
14 May
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: A weapon of mass financial destruction; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2021/05/14/bil…

#Pluralistic

1/ Image
Next Weds (5/19), I'm doing a talk called "Seize the Means of Computation," at the Ryerson Centre for Free Expression:

cfe.ryerson.ca/events/how-des…

And on Thu (5/20), I'm doing a keynote called "Privacy Without Monopoly," for the Northsec conference:

nsec.io/speaker/cory-d…

2/
A weapon of mass financial destruction: Your pension is funding the destruction of the real economy...and itself.



3/
Read 18 tweets
Cory Doctorow Profile picture
14 May
Some things are hard to understand because they're complicated.

Some things are complicated so they'll be hard to understand.

The harder you look at the finance industry, the more evident it becomes that the complexity is deliberate, a means of baffling with bullshit.

1/ A US $100 bill in which Ben...
(If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:)

pluralistic.net/2021/05/14/bil…
Private equity is one of those baffling and mysterious phenomena that only gets worse with scrutiny: how is it possible that a handful of companies are able to borrow vast sums to buy up and then destroy successful businesses? Can that really be their business-model?

2/
Read 34 tweets
Cory Doctorow Profile picture
13 May
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: The Democratic establishment; Uber (Ch)eats; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2021/05/13/ube…

#Pluralistic

1/ Image
On May 19, I'm doing a talk called "Seize the Means of Computation," at the Ryerson Centre for Free Expression:

cfe.ryerson.ca/events/how-des…

And on May 20, I'm doing a keynote called "Privacy Without Monopoly," for the Northsec conference:

nsec.io/speaker/cory-d…

2/
The Democratic establishment: Rahm Emanuel is why we can't have nice things.



3/ Image
Read 20 tweets
Cory Doctorow Profile picture
13 May
Uber is not a business in the traditional sense. It's a "bezzle" ("the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it").

1/ Image: Vectors Point, PK (...
The only reason Uber was able to attain growth was because investors gave it billions to lose. First, it was the Saudi Royals, hoping to spend their way to a transportation monopoly.

pluralistic.net/2020/05/19/lar…

2/
When that didn't work, the company's investors suckered the public into taking their shares off their hands in an IPO premised on two things:

I. Self-driving cars

II. All buses and subways IN THE WORLD being scrapped and replaced with Ubers.

pluralistic.net/2021/02/19/tex…

3/
Read 14 tweets
Cory Doctorow Profile picture
13 May
Sometimes, a casual conversation turns out to be prophetic and stays with you for decades to come. In 2006, I had lunch at the LA World Science Fiction Convention with @EricFlint when the subject of Barack Obama came up. I admitted that his incredible rhetoric gave me hope.

1/ A vision of Hell from Hiero...
Flint - a union organizer from Chicago - quickly disabused me. Obama, he said, was a Chicago Machine Democrat, and that meant he was a cynical horse-trader whose version of "democracy" was for insiders to do deals in back-rooms, without accountability or transparency.

2/
Those words stayed with me through the Obama years, as Obama literally shut off the server that grassroots organizers used to coordinate the campaign that got him elected and told us all to shut up and go away so he could strike deals with the GOP to get stuff done.

3/
Read 18 tweets
Cory Doctorow Profile picture
12 May
Kim Stanley Robinson's 2020 novel "The Ministry for the Future," is a fierce imaginative work. Robinson doesn't just depict a future beyond the climate emergency and capitalism itself, he depicts the specific, wrenching transition that takes us there.

orbitbooks.net/orbit-excerpts…

1/
(If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:)

pluralistic.net/2021/05/12/sem…

2/
As I wrote in my review, the (variously attributed) maxim "It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism," isn't quite right. Imagining postcapitalism is an easy lift, but imagining the path to that world is VERY hard.

pluralistic.net/2020/12/03/min…

3/
Read 31 tweets

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