Hey #DC! There's a *very special* invite-only book party for "Chokepoint Capitalism" tonight (Nov 17) and while it's not a public event, there's a limited number of spaces I can distribute on a first come/first serve basis. If you'd like to come, email doctorow@craphound.com! 2/
#5yrsago The 0.2% of Americans exempted by the GOP estate-tax plan (including the Trump cabinet) have never paid tax on their millions and never will nytimes.com/2017/11/16/bus… 11/
#5yrsago Pentagon mass surveillance slurped up the world’s social media traffic; then they dumped it on a publicly accessible Amazon cloud server upguard.com/breaches/cloud… 13/
#5yrsago Web analytics companies offer “replay sessions” that let corporations watch every click and keystroke for individual users wired.com/story/the-dark… 14/
#5yrsago Trump’s top economic advisor asks CEOs to raise hands if they’re going to use tax cuts to invest, boggled by no one raising hands washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2… 15/
#5yrsago Hackers can freeze the camera that lets you know whether your “Amazon Key” equipped door is locked and who is using it wired.com/story/amazon-k… 17/
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."
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My latest Medium column is "They Want to Kill Libraries"
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When the GOP trifecta assumes power in just a few months, they will pass laws, and those laws will be terrible, and they will cast long, long shadows.
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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:
This is the story of how another far-right conservative government used its bulletproof majority to pass a wildly unpopular law that continues to stymie progress to this day.
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Science fiction isn't collection of tropes, nor is it a literary style, nor is it a marketing category. It can *encompass* all of these, but what sf really is, is an *outlook*.
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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:
At the core of sf is an approach to technology (and, sometimes, science): sf treats technology as a kind of crux that the rest of the tale revolves around.
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"Switching costs" are one of the great underappreciated evils in our world: the more it costs you to change from one product or service to another, the worse the vendor, provider, or service you're using today can treat you without risking your business.
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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:
Businesses set out to keep switching costs as high as possible. Literally. Mark Zuckerberg's capos send him memos chortling about how Facebook's new photos feature will punish anyone who leaves for a rival service with the loss of all their family photos.
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I think it behooves us to be skeptical of stories about AI driving people to believe wrong things and commit ugly actions. Not that I like the AI slop that is filling up our social media, but when we look at the ways that AI is harming us, slop is pretty low on the list.
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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:
The real AI harms come from the actual things that AI companies sell AI to do. There's the AI gun-detector gadgets that the credulous Mayor Eric Adams put in NYC subways, which led to 2,749 invasive searches and turned up *zero* guns:
Two decades ago, I was part of a group of nerds who got really interested in how each other managed to do what we did. The effort was kicked off by @mala, who called it "Lifehacking" and I played a small role in getting that term popularized:
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:
While we were all devoted to sharing tips and tricks from our own lives, many of us converged on an outside expert, David Allen, and his bestselling book "Getting Things Done" (GTD, to those in the know):
A paradox: in 1970, most Americans found it relatively easy to afford a house, and the average US house cost 5.9x the average US income. In 2024, Americans find it nearly impossible to afford a house, and the average American house costs...5.9x the average American income.
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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:
Feels like a puzzler, right? Can it really be true that the average American house is as affordable to the average American earner as it was in 1970?
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