#5yrsago After a century of resisting monopolies, Democrats became the party of finance capitalism and it cost them the election theatlantic.com/business/archi…
#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/
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 @mcrockefeller. It's the monster book I dreamt of reading to my own daughter.
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!
Ever hear of #BindingArbitration? That's a clause in a contract that says that you aren't allowed to sue the company you're doing business with, even if they cheat, maim or kill you. 1/
It was invented to let giant companies of equal size and power agree in advance not to spend billions and decades in court to resolve contractual disputes. 2/
Then, Federalist Society judges led by Antonin Scalia cleared the way for arbitration to be crammed down everyday folks' throats by powerful businesses. 3/
The Chinese state is continuing its crackdown on its Big Tech giants, banning the use of machine learning to set per-customer prices, control search results, or filter content. 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:
This week on my podcast, I read the final part of "The Internet Heist," my @Medium series on the copyright wars' early days, when the entertainment and tech giants tried to leverage the digital TV transition into a veto over every part of our lives.
In Part I, I described the bizarre #BroadcastFlag project, where Hollywood studios and Intel colluded with a corrupt congressman (later @phrma's top lobbyist) to ban any digital product unless it had DRM and blocked free/open source software:
In Part II, I recount the failure of the Broadcast Flag (killed by a unanimous Second Circuit decision), and how the studios pivoted to "plugging the #AnalogHole": mandatory kill-switches for recorders to block recording of copyrighted works: