Cory Doctorow NONCONSENSUAL BLUE TICK Profile picture
Oct 3, 2022 31 tweets 31 min read Read on X
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: An antitrust murder whodunnit; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2022/10/03/pow…

#Pluralistic 1/ A modified version of a Soviet propaganda cartoon called 'Ca
Tomorrow (Oct 4), I'm appearing remotely in a @BKCHarvard seminar about "Chokepoint Capitalism," the book Rebecca Giblin and I just published about monopoly and unfairness in creative labor markets.

cyber.harvard.edu/events/chokepo… 2/
An antitrust murder whodunnit: I accuse Judge Bork with the Powell Memo in the smoke-filled room.

3/
Hey look at this

* Disability Inclusion Fund RFP docs.google.com/document/d/1RB…

* RIP, Chandler Davis: political prisoner, sf writer, mathematician caseazatmiftakhov.org/2022/09/28/cha…

* The seer and the seen: Surveying Palantir’s surveillance platform tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10… 4/
#20yrsago Why is it so hard to get a cab in San Francisco? web.archive.org/web/2002100304…

#20yrsago Notes from OSXCon’s DRM and Digital Hub panel web.archive.org/web/2002101823…

#20yrsago Sidekick, your mobile blogging pal web.archive.org/web/2002101712… 5/
#15yrsago RIAA: Our anti-fan lawsuits are costing us millions arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20…

#15yrsago Can “girl games” transcend shopping, fashion and babies? wonderlandblog.com/wonderland/200…

#15yrsago Charlie Stross’s Halting State: Heist novel about an MMORPG memex.craphound.com/2007/10/02/cha… 6/
#15yrsago The Future of Ignoring Things https://web.archive.org/web/20071011000250/https://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=479&doc_id=134703&

#10yrsago Congress: The DHS’s “fusion centers” full of bad intelligence, lies, and imaginary buildings nytimes.com/2012/10/03/us/… 7/
#10yrsago A Wrinkle in Time, worthy graphic novel adaptation memex.craphound.com/2012/10/03/a-w…

#10yrsago Costumes that integrate wheelchairs buzzfeed.com/babymantis/20-…

#10yrsago Japan competes with Panama to pass the world’s worst copyright law torrentfreak.com/anti-downloadi… 8/
#10yrsago The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There memex.craphound.com/2012/10/02/the…

#5yrsago The same Equifax exec who greenlit suspicious stock-sales was also in charge of cybersecurity consumerist.com/2017/10/02/the… 9/
#5yrsago Thanks to the EU, the UK’s privacy law may solve the mystery of Facebook and the last US election theguardian.com/technology/201…

#5yrsago Latest Federal Reserve figures show widening wealth inequality, and it’s much worse if you’re not white jacobin.com/2017/10/wealth… 10/
#5yrsago Spanish tech activists publish a “how-to guide for preserving fundamental rights on the Internet” xnet-x.net/en/how-to-guid…

#5yrsago @TimOReilly explains how self-driving cars will bankrupt Uber 11/
#5yrsago Taser says its weapons don’t kill people, so Reuters built a massive database of 1000+ Taser deaths reuters.com/investigates/s…

#5yrsago The London Underground thinks it can sell travelers’ attention and wifi data for £322m news.sky.com/story/tfl-may-… 12/
#5yrsago Yahoo revises number of hacked accounts from 500,000,000 to 3,000,000,000 arstechnica.com/information-te…

#5yrsago Trump’s ICE snitch-line is full of people secretly trying to deport their in-laws splinternews.com/this-is-what-i… 13/
#5yrsago Bluetooth sex toys are trivial to compromise just by walking around neighborhoods arstechnica.com/information-te…

#5yrsago /r/TheDonald on the Vegas shooting, before and after they learned it was a rich old white man reddit.com/r/sadcringe/co… 14/
#5yrsago Equifax: we missed 2.5 million people when we counted the size of our breach marketwatch.com/story/equifax-…

#5yrsago Trump’s pick for EPA pollution czar says kids are less sensitive to pollution than adults theintercept.com/2017/10/03/epa… 15/
#5yrsago Either we don’t live in a simulation, or computing works differently outside the Matrix web.archive.org/web/2017100216…

#5yrsago San Juan mayor barred from speaking on Trump’s Puerto Rico relief conference call independent.co.uk/news/world/ame… 16/
#5yrsago Supreme Court will rule on whether immigrants have constitutional rights abovethelaw.com/2017/10/does-t…

#5yrsago @greatdismal’s Archangel: a graphic story of the unfolding jackpot apocalypse memex.craphound.com/2017/10/03/wil… 17/
#1yrago How the IMF loan-sharks the global south pluralistic.net/2021/10/02/deb… 18/
Saturday's threads: How Palantir will steal the NHS; and more!

19/
My latest book is Chokepoint Capitalism (with @rgibli), nonfiction about monopoly and fairness in creative labor markets.

chokepointcapitalism.com

Signed copies available from @BookSoup:

booksoup.com/book/978080700… 20/
My latest novel 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… 21/
My ebooks and audiobooks (from @torbooks, @HoZ_Books, @mcsweeneys, @beaconPressBks et al) 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/ 22/
Upcoming appearances:

* Chokepoint Capitalism event, @BooksandBooks (Miami), 10/12
booksandbooks.com/event/in-perso…

* Reboot Conference, @JoinLincoln (Miami), 10/13
eventbrite.com/e/reboot-2022-…

* @LibraryJournal Day of Dialog (Zoom), 10/20
libraryjournal.com/event/library-… 23/
Upcoming appearances (cont'd):

* Surviving Apocalyptic Economics, with @Rushkoff and @rgibli, Ottawa @Writersfest, 10/24
writersfestival.org/events/fall-20…

* @WEDF_forum, 10/26-28
worldethicaldataforum.org/registration

* Arthur C Clarke Award (DC), 11/16
mailchi.mp/2e2b8a01e992/s… 24/
Recent appearances:

* Eastern Blocks (@TWIT)
twit.tv/shows/this-wee…

* Triangulation: Chokepoint Capitalism
twit.tv/shows/twit-eve…

* Cultural Capture by Chokepoint Capitalism (@MachineKillsPod)
soundcloud.com/thismachinekil… 25/
Happy #SpookySeason! My picture book "Poesy the Monster Slayer" is the perfect read for your little monsters: it's an epic tale of bedtime-refusal, toy-hacking and monster-hunting, illustrated by @McRockefeller.

pluralistic.net/2020/07/14/poe… 26/
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/2022/10/03/pow… 27/
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 "The True Genius of Tech Leaders"

doctorow.medium.com/the-true-geniu… 28/
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 29/
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… 30/
Today's top sources: Linda Holliday. 31/

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More from @doctorow

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
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
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
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
Jul 30
Delta's announced new surveillance pricing: they're feeding an AI your nonconsensually harvested personal info that data-brokers and credit bureaux hold to predict the maximum you're willing to pay, and then price their tickets accordingly:



1/ fortune.com/2025/07/16/del…Hieronymus Bosch's 'The Conjurer,' which depicts a sleight-of-hand artist doing a cup-and-balls routine for a group of amazed yokels. It has been altered. The head of the conjurer has been replaced with the hostile red eye of HAL 9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' He wears a Delta Airlines logo over his breast. The table on which the cup-and-balls game is playing out sports a crashed jet in Delta livery, smoke rising from the wreckage.   Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg  CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
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/2025/07/30/eff…

2/
Data-brokers sell all kinds of data, from the "legitimate" info about everywhere your car's been, to everywhere place the Bluetooth radios on your phone and headphones has been, to everything you've bought, to every sit you've visited and every search you've performed.

3/
Read 61 tweets
Jul 22
Ever notice how many right wing influencers are on the grift?

1/ A carny barker at a podium, gesticulating with a MAGA cap. He wears a Klan hood, and his podium features products from Nu-skin, Amway and Herbalife. Behind him is an oil-painted scene of a steamship with a Trump Tower logo, at a pier in flames.
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/2025/07/22/all…

2/
Like Alex Jones - that guy is basically Gwyneth Paltrow for conservative bros, selling the same "wellness" crap to a male audience (and not for nothing, Paltrow's victims are reliable boosters for RFK Jr's MAHA movement):



3/theweek.com/speedreads/709…
Read 66 tweets

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