Uber is (still) 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"). And every bezzle - *every* bezzle - ends. 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:
Any time a government starts to make noises about regulating Amazon Marketplace to end its predatory and negligent management towards third-party sellers, the company trots out all kinds of apologists who claim that "Amazon is great for small businesses." 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:
But the daily reality for users of Amazon's platform is very different. They must somehow cope with automated account suspensions and terminations that can only be appealed to barely-supervised bots. 3/
.@greatdismal and @eileen_gunn have been pals since the early days; it was Gunn - then a Microsoft exec - who hosted Gisbon - then a penniless writer - in Seattle and brought him to the hacker bars where he eavesdropped on what he calls "the poetics of tech subculture." 1/
It's been nearly 40 years since Gibson's seminal *Neuromancer* was published, and today on @tordotcom, Gunn writes at length about the meaning of that earthshaking book then and now, and what it says about Gibson as a writer and thinker.
She reminds us that reading *Neuromancer* today is a very different experience than it was when she read the manuscript prior to publication. Gibson's coinages - notably "cyberspace" - are now all around us, so they disappear rather than leaping off the page. 3/