#10yrsago New Zealand Prime Minister sends police to raid major news outlets over covert recording of negotiations with far-right party rnz.co.nz/news/election-… 7/
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."
* Alternative recommender systems in the DSA: How to protect free expression, create competition and empower users all at once (@Article19org), Nov 18 zoom.us/webinar/regist… 14/
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.
If you prefer a newsletter, subscribe to the plura-list, (ad-/tracker-free, and utterly unadorned save a single emoji). Today's is "🤯". Suggestions solicited for future emojis! Thanks to Michael Downey for today's!
Harvard is a very, very selective school. Only 3.43% of applicants get in. But that's not the whole story. Writing in @theguardian, Tayo Bero says that 43% of the white student body was admitted on criteria other than merit.
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:
Those 43% are ALDCs: athletes, legacies, dean's interest list (children of major donors) or children (of Harvard faculty). Three quarters of ALDCs do not have the grades to be admitted to Harvard on their own merit. 3/
Back in 2014, a pair of political scientists published a study of 1,779 US "policy issues" over 20 years, concluding that elected officials make policy to benefit the richest ten percent of the country to the exclusion of the needs of everyone else.
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:
This was true irrespective of whether there was mass pressure from citizen groups. In the USA, politicians make sure that richest ten percent get whatever they want and do nothing for the rest of us. 3/
It's obviously grotesque to pick a "worst thing" about the #Astroworld catastrophe that killed ten people (including a young child), but it's pretty easy to pick a "most enraging thing" about the disaster - how foreseeable and preventable it was. 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:
The kind of crowd-crush that killed and maimed those Astroworld attendees happens all the time. There was another stampede *at the Astrodome, two weeks previous*, at a Playboi Carti show.