Inside: Copyleft lawsuit against Vizio will allow anyone to defend the commons; The monopoly strategy behind the Google/Microsoft mobile patent wars; and more!
Copyleft lawsuit against Vizio will allow anyone to defend the commons: Software Freedom Conservancy realizes the dream of "Community-Oriented GPL Enforcement."
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.
18/
My latest @Medium column is "Against the great forces of history," What @AdaPalmer’s University of Chicago Papal election LARP can teach us about our own future
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!
It's hard to talk about the Epstein class without thinking about "The Economy" (in the sense of a mystical, free-floating entity whose health or sickness determines the outcomes for all of us, whom we must make sacrifices to if we are to prosper).
1/
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:
As nebulous as "The Economy" is as an entity, there's an economic priesthood that claims it can measure and even alter the course of the economy using complex mathematics. We probably won't ever understand their methods, but we can at least follow an indicator or two.
3/
The best summary of Trump's trade "philosophy" comes from Trashfuture's November Kelly, who said that Trump is flipping over the table in a poker game that's rigged in his favor because he resents having to pretend to play the game at all.
1/
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:
Ireland is a tax haven. In the 1970s and 1980s, life in the civil-war wracked country was hard - between poverty, scarce employment and civil unrest, the country hemorrhaged its best and brightest. As the saying went, "Ireland's top export is the Irish."
1/
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:
Code is a liability (not an asset). Tech bosses don't understand this. They think AI is great because it produces 10,000 times more code than a programmer, but that just means it's producing 10,000 times more liabilities.
1/
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:
We are about to get a "post-American internet," because we are entering a post-American *era* and a post-American *world*. Some of that is Trump's doing, and some of that is down to his predecessors.
1/
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:
Look, I'm not trying to say that new technologies *never* raise gnarly new legal questions. But what I *am* saying is that a lot of the time, the "new legal challenges" raised by technology are somewhere between 95-100% bullshit.
1/
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:
It's ginned up by none-too-bright tech bros and their investors, and then swallowed by regulators and lawmakers who are either so credulous they'd lose a game of peek-a-boo, or (likely) in on the scam.
3/