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Cory Doctorow NONCONSENSUAL BLUE TICK Profile picture
@doctorow
Mar 14, 2022 • 23 tweets • 19 min read • Read on X
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Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Surprise billing's death-spiral may suck in untold patients; Podcasting "Vertically Challenged"; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2022/03/14/unh…

#Pluralistic 1/ Image: Michael Pregel (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.o
Surprise billing's death-spiral may suck in untold patients: The best time to kill Envision Healthcare was before it started (the second best time is now).

2/ Image: Michael Pregel (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.
Podcasting "Vertically Challenged": We need to investigate the companies Big Tech DOESN'T buy.

3/ Image: Anthony Quintano (modified) https://commons.wikimedi
#20yrsago Saving entertainment from itself web.archive.org/web/2002032512…

#15yrsago Walgreens marks up generics by 975% Walgreens marks up generics by 975% freakonomics.com/2007/03/if-cra…

#15yrsago Viacom: privacy-hating hypocrites freedom-to-tinker.com/2007/03/14/via… 4/
#15yrsago EFF reveals plot to hobble European television web.archive.org/web/2007031517…

#10yrsago Lawblawg commemorates My Cousin Vinny abnormaluse.com/2012/03/20th-a…

#10yrsago Former NYT CEO paid $23.7M exit package; company netted $3M over the past 4 years bloomberg.com/news/articles/… 5/
#10yrsago Lockdown London: how the Olympics will turn London into (more of) a police state theguardian.com/sport/2012/mar…

#10yrsago What is a game? raphkoster.com/2012/03/13/x-i… 6/
#10yrsago Copyright troll stripped of copyrights, which are to be sold to pay off its victims arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20…

#5yrsago Mormon church uses bogus copyright claims in attempt to censor Mormonleaks archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id… 7/
#5yrsago Games and other online communities are societies, owed a duty of care by their owners vimeo.com/208372546

#5yrsago Fearing border harassment, Girl Guides of Canada cancel all trips to Trump’s America theguardian.com/world/2017/mar… 8/
#5yrsago Woman Texas politician proposes rectal exams, fines, mandatory literature and masturbation ban for men dallasnews.com/news/politics/…

#5yrsago Just add Guinness: the strange world of prefab “Irish pubs” eater.com/2017/3/7/14839… 9/
#5yrsago America has spent more rebuilding Afghanistan than it spent rebuilding Europe under the Marshall Plan nytimes.com/2017/03/13/opi… 10/
Saturday's threads: A systemic (not individual) approach to content moderation; and more!

11/ Image: 陳韋邑 (modified) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
Hey look at this

* Rental crisis: Canada's losing affordable housing @cbcfifth (2022)

* @99piorg on fiber, internet deserts, meshnets, digital redlining 99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-fu…

* Road to table: WY's roadkill claiming app abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/wire… 12/
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… 13/
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… 14/
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/ 15/
Upcoming appearances:

* Competition & Regulation in Disrupted Times (@News_CRA/Brussels), Mar 31
cra-brusselsconference.com

* Emerging Technologies For the Enterprise, Apr 19-20
2022.phillyemergingtech.com 16/
Recent appearances:

* Dangerous Visions: False Dawns and Wandergrounds - Dystopia, Then and Now


* Safety Orange (@TWIT)
twit.tv/shows/this-wee…

* Seize the Means of Computation (Boston Computation Club)
17/
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… 18/
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/2022/03/14/unh… 19/
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. 20/
My latest @Medium column is: "The Byzantine Premium: The contradiction at the heart of Bitcoin advocacy":

doctorow.medium.com/the-byzantine-… 21/
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 22/
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… 23/

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More from @doctorow

Cory Doctorow NONCONSENSUAL BLUE TICK Profile picture
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
Cory Doctorow NONCONSENSUAL BLUE TICK Profile picture
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
Cory Doctorow NONCONSENSUAL BLUE TICK Profile picture
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
Cory Doctorow NONCONSENSUAL BLUE TICK Profile picture
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
Cory Doctorow NONCONSENSUAL BLUE TICK Profile picture
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
Cory Doctorow NONCONSENSUAL BLUE TICK Profile picture
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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