Cory Doctorow NONCONSENSUAL BLUE TICK Profile picture
Jun 23, 2022 23 tweets 22 min read Read on X
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Daycare apps are insecure surveillance dumpster-fires; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2022/06/23/pee…

#Pluralistic 1/ A Black baby playing with alphabet blocks; the blocks have c
Sponsor me for the @ClarionUCSD Write-A-Thon! I'm writing 10,000 words on my prison-tech thriller "Some Men Rob You With a Fountain Pen" and raising scholarship money for the Clarion SF/F workshop, which I graduated from in 1992.

clarionwriteathon.com/members/profil… 2/
Daycare apps are insecure surveillance dumpster-fires: Apps are like software, only worse.

3/ Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wik
Hey look at this

* The Jovian Duck: LaMDA and the Mirror Test rifters.com/crawl/?p=10269

* Taking the 6th edition of Car Wars for a test drive boingboing.net/2022/06/21/tak…

* Agnes Giberne's The Story of the Sun, Moon, and Stars (1898) publicdomainreview.org/collection/sto… 4/
#15yrsago Open Source Consortium to regulators: Stop the BBC’s DRM! web.archive.org/web/2007021006…

#15yrsago Broadcast Treaty wounded and dying! web.archive.org/web/2007062610…

#15yrsago Podcasting @BruceS's "Hacker Crackdown" craphound.com/news/2007/06/2… 5/
#10yrsago St Colin and the Dragon: great torn paper kids’ comic memex.craphound.com/2012/06/22/st-…

#10yrsago EFF joins the defense in Charles Carreon v. The Whole Goddamned Internet eff.org/press/releases…

#10yrsago @BruceS interviewed about the New Aesthetic web.archive.org/web/2012062607… 6/
#10yrsago Top US drug cop can’t tell the difference between marijuana and heroin web.archive.org/web/2012062413…

#10yrsago Science fiction in Africa bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00…

#5yrsago A Chinese vitamin MLM cult is replacing healthcare for poor Ugandans web.archive.org/web/2020092511… 7/
#5yrsago For the first time, Jeremy Corbyn overtakes Theresa May in UK polls independent.co.uk/news/uk/politi…

#5yrsago US Copyright Office recommends sweeping, welcome changes to America’s DRM laws vice.com/en/article/d3z… 8/
#5yrsago Crowdfunding a pro-vaccination bus to follow the anti-vaxxer bus gofundme.com/f/craigs-prova…

#5yrsago Canada: Trump shows us what happens when “good” politicians demand surveillance powers cbc.ca/2017/what-happ… 9/
#5yrsago A DRM-locked, $400 tea-brewing machine from the Internet of Shit timeline gizmodo.com/a-400-smart-te…

#5yrsago John Oliver dared a coal exec to sue him, and now he’s being sued washingtonpost.com/news/morning-m… 10/
#5yrsago Tumblr is now owned by a phone company, so it’s stopped fighting for Network Neutrality theverge.com/2017/6/21/1581…

#5yrsago A history of artist Anish Kapoor and his assholic mission to own the color black wired.com/story/vantabla… 11/
#1yrago Peloton bricks its treadmills pluralistic.net/2021/06/22/vap…

#1yrago Juul's junk science pluralistic.net/2021/06/22/vap…

#1yrago Improving the #ACCESSAct: Six ways to make the most important tech law of the legislative season even better pluralistic.net/2021/06/22/vap… 12/
Monday's threads: The sex industry isn't technophilic; Schroedinger's streaming service just died; and more!

13/ Image: Come As You Are Co-operative https://commons.wikimedi
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… 14/
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… 15/
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/ 16/
Upcoming appearances:

* A New @HOPEconf (NYC), Jul 24
hope.net 17/
Recent appearances:

* Supp-Lie Demand (Bad Faith podcast with @briebriejoy):
patreon.com/posts/67550669

* The Sci-Fi Feedback Loop: Mapping Fiction’s Influence on Real-World Tech
csi.asu.edu/calendar/event…

* Privacy is the New Celebrity
buzzsprout.com/1806101/106430… 18/
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… 19/
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/2022/06/23/pee… 20/
If you're a @Medium subscriber, you can read these essays - as well as previews of upcoming magazine columns and early exclusives on doctorow.medium.com.

My latest column is "Reasonable Agreements: On the Crapification of Literary Contracts"

doctorow.medium.com/reasonable-agr… 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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Keep Current with Cory Doctorow NONCONSENSUAL BLUE TICK

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More from @doctorow

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
Apr 22
Astrophysicist Adam Becker knows a bit about science and tech - enough to show, in his book *More Everything Forever* that claims tech bros make about space colonies, mind uploading, and other skiffy subjects are nonsense dressed up as prediction:



1/ hachettebookgroup.com/titles/adam-be…The Basic Books cover for Adam Becker's 'More Everything Faster.'
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/2025/04/22/vin…

2/
Becker investigates the personalities, the ideologies, the coalitions, the histories, and crucially, the *grifts* behind various science fictional pursuits.

3/
Read 24 tweets
Apr 21
Have you heard that tariffs are going to drive prices up? Me too. There's a good reason we're hearing a lot of talk about tariffs prices: tariffs are a tax that is ultimately paid by consumers.

1/
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/2025/04/21/tru…

2/
Trump plans to raise $6t in tariffs, making them the largest tax increase in US history:



But that $6t is just for starters.

3/ohiocapitaljournal.com/2025/04/03/as-…
Read 42 tweets

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