Cory Doctorow NONCONSENSUAL BLUE TICK Profile picture
Nov 22, 2022 33 tweets 26 min read Read on X
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Tax prep services send sensitive financial info to Facebook; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2022/11/22/fre…

#Pluralistic 1/ An H&R Block storefront; the 'o' in Block has been replaced
Today (11/22), I'm hosting a @CalBookClub event with Kim Stanley Robinson where we'll be discussing his 1998 novel "The Gold Coast":

altaonline.com/california-boo… 2/
My publisher @TorBooks and @Goodreads are drawing for a giveaway of advance copies of my next novel, "Red Team Blues," a Silicon Valley forensic accounting thriller about a cryptocurrency heist - If you're in the US or Canada, enter here to win a copy:

goodreads.com/giveaway/show/… 3/
Tax prep services send sensitive financial info to Facebook: And they didn't even know they were doing it.

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

* Greg Bear (1951-2022) file770.com/greg-bear-1951…

* Global Voices seeks an editor to lead our Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa coverage globalvoices.org/2022/11/21/glo…

* Tumblr to add support for ActivityPub techcrunch.com/2022/11/21/tum… (h/t Slashdot) 5/
#20yrsago Dumbass plan to redesign internet shored up by crooked, lying consultants nytimes.com/2002/11/22/wor…

#10yrsago Texas student suspended for refusing RFID tracker wired.com/2012/11/studen… 6/
#10yrsago Finnish police confiscate 9-y-o’s laptop after she downloads a song from the Pirate Bay dublimat.blogspot.com/2012/11/9-year…

#10yrsago Hacker steals entire nation’s identity loweringthebar.net/2012/11/if-you… 7/
#10yrsago Fact-checking US patent-boss’s defense of his job arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20…

#10yrsago Counterfeiters counterfeit anti-counterfeiting notice memex.craphound.com/2012/11/22/cou… 8/
#10yrsago Spacehawk: the complete collection of Basil Wolverton’s space crusader memex.craphound.com/2012/11/22/spa…

#5yrsago Connected sex-toy allows for code-injection attacks on a robot you wrap around your genitals 9/
#5yrsago Why we should cheer the DoJ’s lawsuit to block the AT&T/Time-Warner merger wired.com/story/why-the-… 10/
#5yrsago For more than half a century, the sugar industry has used Big Tobacco tactics to suppress sugar/cancer link and to confuse the science journals.plos.org/plosbiology/ar… 11/
#5yrsago Cops chase innocent shoplifting suspect into stranger’s house, then storm it with 50-person SWAT team and blow up every room except one thefreethoughtproject.com/cop-watch/fift… 12/
#5yrsago Trump’s top economic advisor couldn’t bear to listen to the president bloviate so he pretended he had a bad connection and hung up cnn.com/videos/politic… 13/
#5yrsago Trump found someone even worse than Tom Price to regulate Health and Human Services: an insulin profiteer medium.com/@caitlynmcclur… 14/
#5yrsago “Less lethal” is a deceptive term to describe the weapons that routinely kill and maim peaceful protesters opendemocracy.net/en/homer-vente… 15/
#5yrsago States suspend your driver’s license over inability to pay court fines, costing you your job and any ability to repay vice.com/en/article/59y… 16/
#5yrsago Behold! The astonishing mental gymnastics of TSA apologists explaining why rich people don’t need to be screened memex.craphound.com/2017/11/22/beh… 17/
#5yrsago Uber admits it breached 57,000,000 accounts, then bribed the hackers to cover it up, now they’re paying a top ex-NSA lawyer to teach them transparency bloomberg.com/news/articles/… 18/
#1yrago Private ambulances want a ban on firefighters rescuing babies pluralistic.net/2021/11/22/amr… 19/
Yesterday's threads: Universities secretly sold their students to online casinos; and more!

20/
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… 21/
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… 22/
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/ 23/
Upcoming appearances:

* Kim Stanley Robinson's Gold Coast (@CalBookClub), Nov 22
altaonline.com/california-boo…

* Conversation with @Superwuster, #Informed22/@knightfdn (Miami), 11/30:
informed22.interkinnect.com 24/
Upcoming appearances (cont'd):

* Library Learning Experience/@ALALibrary (New Orleans), 1/27-30
2023.alaliblearnx.org/cory-doctorow

* @Aus_Digital Copyright Forum (Canberra), 2/17:
digital.org.au/2022/11/08/doc… 25/
Upcoming appearances (cont'd):

* Antitrust, Regulation and the Political Economy (Brussels), Mar 2:
brusselsconference.com/registration 26/
Recent appearances:

* @bizwithoutbs
open.spotify.com/episode/04GWer…

* @teamhumanshow interview
teamhuman.fm/episodes/229-c…

* How big tech traps consumers and shafts creators (@IrishTimes)
shows.acast.com/inside-politic… 27/
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/2022/11/22/fre… 28/
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. 29/
My latest @Medium column is "Anything That Can’t Go On Forever Will Eventually Stop: Ticketmaster and Ideas Lying Around"

doctorow.medium.com/anything-that-… 30/
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 31/
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… 32/
Today's top sources: @Slashdot (slashdot.org). 33/

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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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