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

May 27
On a recent This Machine Kills episode, guest Hagen Blix described the ultimate form of "AI therapy" with a "human in the loop":



1/ soundcloud.com/thismachinekil…A magnified image of the inside of an automated backup tape library, with gleaming racks of silver tape drives receding into the distance. In the foreground is a pile of dirt being shoveled by three figures in prisoner's stripes. Two of the figures' heads have been replaced with cliche hacker-in-hoodie heads, from which shine yellow, inverted Amazon 'smile' logos, such that the smile is a frown. The remaining figure's head has been replaced with a horse's head. Behind the figure is an impatiently posed man in a sharp business suit, frowning at his watch. His head has been replaced with the ...
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/2025/05/27/ran…

2/
> One actual therapist is just having ten chat GPT windows open where they just like have five seconds to interrupt the chatGPT. They have to scan them all and see if it says something really inappropriate. That's your job, to stop it.

3/
Read 98 tweets
May 21
My latest *Locus Magazine* column is "Strange Bedfellows and Long Knives," about the secret engine of sweeping political upheavals (like Trumpism) and their inherent fragility:



1/ locusmag.com/2025/05/commen…A Renaissance oil-painting of the assassination of Julius Caesar, modified to give Caesar Trump's hair and turn his skin orange, to make the knives glow, and to emboss a Heritage Foundation logo on the wall behind the scene.
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/2025/05/21/et-…

2/
Stories about major change usually focus on a *group*, but groups rarely achieve big, ambitious goals. Think about all the goal-oriented groups in your orbit, with missions like alleviating hunger, or beautifying your neighborhood, or changing the health-care system.

3/
Read 40 tweets
May 14
Something's very different in tech. Once upon a time, every bad choice by tech companies - taking away features, locking out mods or plugins, nerfing the API - was countered, nearly instantaneously, by someone writing a program that overrode that choice.

1/ A 19th century engraving of fiendishly complex machine composed of thousands of interlocking gears and frames (originally an image of a printing press, but modified so that it's just all gears and things), colored dark blue. It bears Woody Guthrie's guitar sticker, 'This machine KILLS fascists. To one side of it stands an image of Ned Ludd, taken from an infamous 19th century Luddite handbill, waving troops into battle. King Ludd's head has been replaced with a hacker's hoodie, the face within lost in shadow.
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/2025/05/14/pre…

2/
Bad clients would be muscled aside by third-party clients. Locked bootloaders would be hacked and replaced. Code that confirmed you were using OEM parts, consumables or adapters would be found and nuked from orbit.

3/
Read 51 tweets
May 13
"Understood: Who Broke the Internet?" is my new podcast for CBC about the enshittogenic policy decisions that gave rise to enshittification. Episode two just dropped: "ctrl-ctrl-ctrl":



1/ cbc.ca/listen/cbc-pod…The logo for 'Who Broke the Internet' - a shattered hard-drive with the CBC logomark.
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/2025/05/13/ctr…

2/
The thesis of the show is straightforward: the internet wasn't killed by ideological failings like "greed," nor by economic concepts like "network effects," nor by some cyclic force of history that drives towards "re-intermediation."

3/
Read 49 tweets
May 2
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

NOTE: I DID NOT BUY A BLUE TICK. IT WAS NONCONSENSUALLY ADDED TO MY ACCOUNT.

Inside: AI and the fatfinger economy; and more!

Archived at:

#Pluralistic

1/ pluralistic.net/2025/05/02/kpi…A leg-hold trap whose trigger disc has been replaced with the hostile, glaring eye of HAL 9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' A giant man's finger enters the frame from one corner, aimed at the trigger.  Image: Pogrebnoj-Alexandroff (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Index_finger_%3D_to_attention.JPG  CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en  --  Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg  CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel *Picks and Shovels*.

Catch me in NEW ZEALAND at UNITY BOOKS in WELLINGTON TODAY (May 3, 3PM):

unitybooks.co.nz/news-and-event…

More tour dates (PDX, Pittsburgh, London, Manchester) here:

martinhench.com

2/ Image
AI and the fatfinger economy: Every slip of the finger in money in the bank.



3/  Image: Pogrebnoj-Alexandroff (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Index_finger_%3D_to_attention.JPG  CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en  --  Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg  CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
Read 24 tweets
Apr 24
Patrick "patio11" McKenzie is a fantastic explainer, the kind of person who breaks topics down in ways that stay with you, and creep into your understanding of other subjects, too. Take his 2022 essay, "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero":



1/ bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optima…A rainforest in Chiapas, green and intergrown.
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/2025/04/24/her…

2/
It's a very well-argued piece, and here's the nut of it:

> The marginal return of permitting fraud against you is plausibly greater than zero, and therefore, you should welcome greater than zero fraud.

3/
Read 55 tweets

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