#5yrago Photographs from the archives of the Stasi, East Germany’s legendary, paranoid secret police wired.com/2017/05/adrian… 9/
#5yrsago The 2020 Census is headed for a “train wreck” thanks to Trump’s mismanagementhttps://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/04/trumps-threat-to-the-2020-census-000404/
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!
I'm not planning a thread/newsletter/blogpost for today, but for complicated workflow reasons I just teed up tomorrow's "This day in history" segment with a trawl through my archives, and tomorrow's such a fucking amazing day that I decided to do a preview.
Thread!
Today's the 20th anniversary of the Napster shut-down. I mentioned this to my wife. She said, "Yes, we're old now."
Instructions for rolling your own tampons, from @tnielsenhayden. 20 years old, more relevant than ever in the face of continuing sales/luxury taxes on menstrual products.
@post_humanista@davidgerard@yvessmith I think you've mistaken sovereign currency issuance by central banks and their fiscal agents for unbacked paper. USD is backed by the fact that ~300m ppl owe a tax liability that can only be settled in USD.
@post_humanista@davidgerard@yvessmith This is the same source of value that coin money had from its earliest days: emperors provisioned their armies by paying them in coin that conquered farmers had to remit to pay their taxes, which prompted farmers to trade useful food for otherwise useless coins.
@post_humanista@davidgerard@yvessmith The thing that distinguishes wildcat dollars from USD isn't reserve assets, it's the fact that substantial, nondiscretionary liabilities can only be settled using the latter, while the former is part of an optional game that you can play or not, and you can quit at any time.
If your eyes glaze over every time someone tries to explain the Luna/Terra stablecoin collapse, here's a very concise summary. foreignpolicy.com/2022/05/12/cry…
From "The Cryptocurrency Crash Is Replaying 2008 as Absurdly as Possible" by @davidgerard
Remember, some things are hard to understand because they're complicated, and some things are complicated so they will be hard to understand.
Incidentally, the differing headlines @ForeignPolicy uses for search engines and people on this are an indictment of SEO as a homogenizing, energy-sapping gravity well that sucks in good prose and rips it apart at the molecular level, leaving behind undifferentiated gas-clouds.