I'm Kickstarting a DRM-free audiobook of Chokepoint Capitalism, the book @rgibli and I wrote about how tech- and entertainment monopolies rip off artists, and how to unrig those terrible labor markets:
#1yrago The secrets of hospital bills: What do you call a "market" where no one chooses the services or knows the prices? pluralistic.net/2021/08/23/don… 11/
#1yrago What kind of emergency is our emergency?: Kim Stanley Robinson on the structure of feeling of this perilous moment pluralistic.net/2021/08/23/don…
#1yrago Podcasting "Disneyland at a stroll": Winding up my series on "amusement parks, crowd control, and load-balancing" (for now) pluralistic.net/2021/08/23/don… 13/
Yesterday's threads: Google falsely told the police that a father was a molesting his son; and more!
Correction: I misstated a technical detail in this story; Mark didn’t email his photo to his doctor; rather, he took the photo with his phone and the image was automatically synched to his Google Photos account, triggering a scan. 15/
My latest book is Attack Surface, a sequel to my bestselling Little Brother books, now in paperback, wherever books are sold.
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'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 Medium column is "What is Chokepoint Capitalism?"
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 Kickstarting a DRM-free audiobook of Chokepoint Capitalism, the book @rgibli and I wrote about how tech- and entertainment monopolies rip off artists, and how to unrig those terrible labor markets:
There's a *lot* of competition for the title of "Most On-The-Nose Symbol of Late Stage Capitalism," but I think there's a strong case for awarding the crown to #VaccineApartheid - the decision to deny covid vaccines to billions of poor people in the Global South. 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:
Here's how that went down: poor countries were arm-twisted into signing up to WTO on pain of being shut out of global trade (former colonies were forcibly converted to export crop economies that relied on rich-world countries for seed/agtech, so opting out wouldn't work). 3/