Cory Doctorow NONCONSENSUAL BLUE TICK Profile picture
Feb 24, 2022 25 tweets 23 min read Read on X
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Mass arbitration attack could bring Intuit to its knees; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2022/02/24/ube…

#Pluralistic 1/ Image
Today (Feb 24), I'm on a panel for @fightfortheftr and @amnesty called "#Web3 for Activists: What Could Go Right, What Could Go Wrong":

amnestyusa-org.zoom.us/webinar/regist… 2/
Mass arbitration attack could bring Intuit to its knees: Justice for the millions ripped off by Turbotax's "Free File" fraud.

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#20yrsago Judith Merril's memoirs, at last web.archive.org/web/2002060312…

#20yrsago I’m a Googlebot! I will not kill you ftrain.com/robot_exclusio…

#20yrsago RIP, Chuck Jones cnn.com/2002/SHOWBIZ/T…

#20yrsago A bad fall while installing a WiFi antenna people.well.com/user/doctorow/… 4/ Image
#15yrsago Best muscle-rub ever memex.craphound.com/2007/02/24/bes…

#5yrsago Techdirt is being sued by the “I invented email” guy and needs your money techdirt.com/articles/20170…

#5yrsago So It Is: a Cuban-inspired album from the astounding Preservation Hall Jazz Band memex.craphound.com/2017/02/24/so-… 5/ Image
#5yrsago The automated, invisible revert-wars of Wikipedia’s bot ecosystem journals.plos.org/plosone/articl…

#5yrsago Putinology considered harmful: the many legends we tell ourselves about Vladimir Putin theguardian.com/world/2017/feb… 6/ Image
#5yrsago Pope to greedheads: better to be an atheist than the kind of Catholic who screws the poor reuters.com/article/us-pop…

#5yrsago Customs officials refuse to allow passengers to debark a domestic flight unless they show ID vice.com/en/article/434… 7/ Image
#5yrsago In which Laurie Penny comprehensively proves that she has Yiannopoulos’s number psmag.com/news/on-the-mi…

#5yrsago Lawsuit forces DoJ to admit that Obama administration sneakily killed transparency bill freedom.press/news/new-docum… 8/ Image
#5yrsago After a century of resisting monopolies, Democrats became the party of finance capitalism and it cost them the election theatlantic.com/business/archi…

#5yrsago Found at a thrift shop: the last record of a doomed Apple DRM effort from 1979 drive.google.com/file/d/0B9vexS… 9/ Image
#1yrago Court rejects TSA qualified immunity: Government genital massages can be video-recorded pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb…

#1yrago The Mauritanian: Hitler painted roses and GWB does portraiture pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb… 10/ Image
#1yrago EVs as distributed storage grid: Go green, buy a bigger truck pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb…

#1yrago Bossware and the shitty tech adoption curve: White collar workers, your blue collar comrades tried to warn you pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb… 11/ Image
#1yrago German covid coinages: Schadenfreude fur CoronaFußgruß pluralistic.net/2021/02/23/acc…

#1yrago Malcolm X's true killers: NYPD deathbed confessions confirms "conspiracy theory" pluralistic.net/2021/02/23/acc… 12/ Image
#1yrago Private equity's nursing home killing spree: Pre- and post-covid pluralistic.net/2021/02/23/acc… 13/ Image
Tuesday's threads: Podcasting Part III of "The Internet Heist"; China hamstrings its Big Tech; and more!

14/ Image:  Leslie Illingworth/...
My latest book is Attack Surface, a sequel to my bestselling Little Brother books, now in paperback, wherever books are sold.

Signed copies at @DarkDel:

darkdel.com/store/p1840/Co… 15/
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:

onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy…

Signed copies here:
darkdel.com/store/p2024/Av… 16/ Image
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."

craphound.com/shop/ 17/ Image
Upcoming appearances:

* Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical SF, 1950 to 1985 (@CityLightsBooks), Feb 27
citylights.com/events/dangero…

* Emerging Technologies For the Enterprise, Apr 19-20
2022.phillyemergingtech.com 18/ Image
Recent appearances:

* The Policy Implications of Web3 (@StanfordCyber)


* Big Tech & Surveillance Capitalism (@shaunattwood):


* Bringing Back Luddites (@OhNoPodcast)
ohnopodcast.com/investigations… 19/ Image
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.

pluralistic.net/2020/07/14/poe… 20/ Image
You can also follow these posts as a daily blog at pluralistic.net: no ads, trackers, or data-collection!

Here's today's edition: pluralistic.net/2022/02/24/ube… 21/
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. 22/
My latest @Medium column is: "We Should Not Endure a King: Antitrust is a political cause, not an economic one"

doctorow.medium.com/we-should-not-… 23/
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!

Subscribe here: pluralistic.net/plura-list 24/
Are you trying to wean yourself off Big Tech? Follow these threads on the #fediverse at @pluralistic@mamot.fr.

Here's today's edition: mamot.fr/@pluralistic/1… 25/

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Keep Current with Cory Doctorow NONCONSENSUAL BLUE TICK

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More from @doctorow

Sep 8
This was the plan: America would stop making things and instead make *recipes*, the "IP" that could be sent to other countries to turn into actual *stuff*.

1/ An organ grinder with a monkey. The organ grinder's head has been replaced with a Gilded Age caricature of a sneering millionaire. The monkey's head has been replaced with the head of a miserable child coal miner. The background is a blurred, halftoned view of a vast square in Beijing with a giant official building in the background, and a Chinese flag on a flagpole. On the organ is a blurred portrait of John Philip Sousa.
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:

pluralistic.net/2025/09/08/pro…

2/
This would happen in distant lands without the pesky environmental and labor rules that forced businesses accept reduced profits because they weren't allowed to maim their workers and poison the land, air and water.

3/
Read 77 tweets
Sep 6
Trump's doing a lot of oligarch shit, and while some of it very visible and obvious, other moves, like throwing the door open to "stock buybacks" are technical and obscure.

1/ An old-timey carny barker, waving a cane and shouting. He is standing in front of a vintage photo of the NYSE trading floor.
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:

pluralistic.net/2025/09/06/com…

2/
But it's worth paying attention to this, because this form of stock swindle stands to make billionaires a lot richer (and thus more powerful).

3/
Read 48 tweets
Aug 20
Forget surveillance capitalism - let's talk about *surveillance infantalism*: the drive by the wealthy to spy on you in order to pursue the toddler's goals of getting everything they want from the people around them, without any reciprocal obligations.

1/ Mark Zuckerberg's Metaverse avatar's head atop the body of a figure from a earth 20th century editorial cartoon; the figure wears a suit, holds a long fork, and stares into the eyepiece of a microscope. The microscope is attached to a sinister scientific apparatus. The microscope is trained on a tiny human figure, limned in red, who shouts through a megaphone back up into the microscope's lens. The background is a 1980s NASA oil painting of the red, rocky surface of Venus.
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:

pluralistic.net/2025/08/20/bil…

2/
After the Snowden revelations, I started to wonder about something fundamental: why spy at all?



3/theguardian.com/technology/201…
Read 40 tweets
Aug 18
When Elon Musk disagrees with someone, he calls them an "NPC" (non-player character). In video-games, an NPC is a machine-puppeted sprite that engages in predictable movements (e.g. Pac-Man ghosts) and utters some scripted (or AI-generated) dialog:



1/ futurism.com/elon-musk-inte…Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse avatar, perched on a legless nude Ken doll body; its eyes are psychedelic pinwheels. Behind the figure is a group shot of child laborer miners from the 1910s, glitched out, blue tinted, and covered with scan lines. The background is a psychedelic swirl of moody colors. They stand atop a filthy checkerboard floor that stretches off to infinity.
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:

pluralistic.net/2025/08/18/see…

2/
Seeing people as automata is probably a side-effect of sitting in the command-center of a big online service, in which you primarily interact with users as statistical aggregates in an analytics dashboard.

3/
Read 30 tweets
Aug 16
When LLM users describe their experience with their chatbots, the results are so divergent that it can sound like they're describing two completely different products.

1/ A vintage photo of two men in front of a slot machine. The men's heads have been replaced by the heads of hooded figures wearing Guy Fawkes mask. The image is sepia toned: the only color is the pay-line of the slot-machine, which is showing three glaring red eyes of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' The slot machine has a sign over the rotor-window that displays the Openai logo and wordmark.   Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg  CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en  --  Frank Schwichtenberg (modified...
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:

pluralistic.net/2025/08/16/jac…

2/
Previously, I've hypothesized that this is because there are two distinct groups of *users*: "centaurs" (people who are assisted by a machine - in this case, people who get to decide when, whether and how to integrate an LLM into their work)...

3/
Read 27 tweets
Aug 13
It's not just that Texas DA Gocha Ramirez charged a woman with murder for having an abortion (not t allowed even in Texas). It's that Ramirez paid for his mistress's abortion, after he impregnated her while having an affair with her *and* her sister:



1/ archive.is/20250812192203…A red, angry mushroom cloud. Sitting atop it, surrounded by blue skies and fluffy clouds, is a smirking business-suited man reclining in an armchair. He wears a MAGA hat and reads a magazine turned to a page showing Donald Trump's face.
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:

pluralistic.net/2025/08/13/the…

2/
This is perfect Magaism, as captured by Wilhoit's Law:

> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.



3/crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/lib…
Read 52 tweets

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