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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When you think about tax-havens, you probably think about Caribbean "treasure islands," the ex-colonies whose erstwhile conquerors set them up as dependent financial secrecy jurisdictions whose economies were doomed to be stunted forever.
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But in truth, the most harmful tax-havens are "onshore-offshore," notorious jurisdictions like Delaware, Nevada and Wyoming, or, in the EU, Malta, Luxembourg, Cyprus and the Netherlands.
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The Dutch are among the most enthusiastic hosts to financial crimes. That's how Uber cheats on its taxes: it has 50 Dutch shell companies that it launders its money through.
"Binding arbitration waivers" started out as a way for giant companies going into business with one another to avoid costly litigation by agreeing in advance to have a private arbitrator hear their disputes.
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But Federalist Society judges, led by Antonin Scalia, spent a decade dismantling protections that ensured that binding arbitration was only used between equals, and not forced upon workers and consumers.
The result was a massive wealth-transfer to corporations, who could defraud and maim with impunity, safe in the knowledge that their victims had signed away their right to sue, especially through class action.
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New Yorkers have a new ridehailing alternative to Uber: @TheDriversCoop is a driver-owned, app-based ride-hailing service that pays drivers more, charges riders less, and pays out any profits to driver-owners as periodic dividends.
#PlatformCooperativism is a powerful antidote to app-based gig work: a way to provide customers with the convenience that made app-based services so popular while putting workers in control of their days, schedules and working conditions.
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It's particularly buoying to see a platform co-op challenge Uber, a company that started as a way to funnel Saudi royals' billions into a bid to dismantle public transit and worker protections in a single fell swoop.
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The starting gun on Big Tech trustbusting was fired in 2017, when @linamkhan, then a law student (now an FTC trustbuster!) published "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox," a law-review article showing how Amazon formed a monopoly without legal trouble.
The key was a Reagan-era shift in antitrust policy, based on the theories of the Nixonite criminal Robert Bork. Bork held that the only time we should fight monopolies is when they inflicted "consumer welfare" harms, by driving up prices.
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That meant that monopolies that made prices go DOWN - by abusing their workers and suppliers, rather than their customers - were safe from antitrust enforcement. Borkism was hugely popular with wealthy people, who bankrolled its global expansion.
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