Inside: Meet the new generation of pro-abortion activists; Anti-vaxers cool the mark; Drone delivery crashes; Facebook escalates war on accountability; and more!
Yesterday's threads: Vaccine refusal and health insurance; Congress has allocated enough money to end the eviction crisis; Utilities governed like empires; 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 @MCRockefeller. It's the monster book I dreamt of reading to my own daughter.
My latest Medium column is "Managing aggregate demand," part three of a series on themepark design, queing theory, immersive entertainment, and load-balancing.
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 the GOP trifecta assumes power in just a few months, they will pass laws, and those laws will be terrible, and they will cast long, long shadows.
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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 pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
This is the story of how another far-right conservative government used its bulletproof majority to pass a wildly unpopular law that continues to stymie progress to this day.
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Science fiction isn't collection of tropes, nor is it a literary style, nor is it a marketing category. It can *encompass* all of these, but what sf really is, is an *outlook*.
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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 pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
At the core of sf is an approach to technology (and, sometimes, science): sf treats technology as a kind of crux that the rest of the tale revolves around.
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"Switching costs" are one of the great underappreciated evils in our world: the more it costs you to change from one product or service to another, the worse the vendor, provider, or service you're using today can treat you without risking your business.
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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 pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Businesses set out to keep switching costs as high as possible. Literally. Mark Zuckerberg's capos send him memos chortling about how Facebook's new photos feature will punish anyone who leaves for a rival service with the loss of all their family photos.
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I think it behooves us to be skeptical of stories about AI driving people to believe wrong things and commit ugly actions. Not that I like the AI slop that is filling up our social media, but when we look at the ways that AI is harming us, slop is pretty low on the list.
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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 pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
The real AI harms come from the actual things that AI companies sell AI to do. There's the AI gun-detector gadgets that the credulous Mayor Eric Adams put in NYC subways, which led to 2,749 invasive searches and turned up *zero* guns:
Two decades ago, I was part of a group of nerds who got really interested in how each other managed to do what we did. The effort was kicked off by @mala, who called it "Lifehacking" and I played a small role in getting that term popularized:
If you'd like an essay-formatted 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:
While we were all devoted to sharing tips and tricks from our own lives, many of us converged on an outside expert, David Allen, and his bestselling book "Getting Things Done" (GTD, to those in the know):
A paradox: in 1970, most Americans found it relatively easy to afford a house, and the average US house cost 5.9x the average US income. In 2024, Americans find it nearly impossible to afford a house, and the average American house costs...5.9x the average American income.
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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 pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Feels like a puzzler, right? Can it really be true that the average American house is as affordable to the average American earner as it was in 1970?
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