This Weds (Nov 30), @superwuster and I are appearing in conversation to discuss monopoly and creative labor markets at the @knightfdn's #Informed22 conference in #Miami:
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:
#5yrago Roy Moore is still in the running because “values voters” would support Satan himself if he was anti-abortion and homophobic fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-v… 18/
#5yrsago Citing Trump, Philippines dictator declares himself to be a “fascist” and vows to persecute peaceful left-wing opposition groups telesurenglish.net/analysis/-Dute…
#5yrsago Rightscorp finished Sept 2017 with $3,147 in the bank, warns investors it will likely have to shut down without more cash torrentfreak.com/rightscorp-rev… 21/
#5yrsago A generation after American “libertarians” helped with mass disappearances, torture and murder of left-wing activists, Frente Amplio surge in Chilean elections bloomberg.com/news/articles/… 23/
#5yrsago Investigators claim that Oxbridge and other top UK universities are operating a massive, illegal surveillance dragnet aimed at students/alumni and their friends and families qz.com/1133808/univer… 24/
#5yrsago For the next year, TV, newspapers, and the web will run massive ads from tobacco companies admitting that their products kill people, that they were engineered to be addictive, and that they covered this up abc.net.au/news/2017-11-2… 25/
#5yrsago One of the net’s most important freedom canaries died the day the W3C greenlit web-wide DRM; what can we learn from the fight? eff.org/deeplinks/2017… 26/
#5yrsago Trump appointed a loan-shark fixer as an assistant Attorney General, who then wrote a controversial memo justifying the neutering of the consumer finance watchdog theintercept.com/2017/11/27/whi… 27/
#5yrsago Comcast spams social media with Net Neutrality promises, hopes you won’t notice that they used to promise a LOT more arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20… 28/
#5yrsago Religious fanatics go to the Supreme Court for the First Amendment right to trick women into bearing unwanted children theintercept.com/2017/11/27/the… 29/
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."
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. 41/
My latest @Medium column is "Poe vs. Property: A detective story of shifting rationalizations"
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The telegraph and the telephone have a special place in the history and future of competition and Big Tech. After all, they were the original tech monopolists. Every discussion of tech and monopoly takes place in their shadow.
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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 , my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Back in 2010, @SuperWuster published *The Master Switch*, his bestselling, wildly influential history of "The Bell System" and the struggle to de-monopolize America from its first telecoms barons:
Like you, I've heard a *lot* about Project 2025, Heritage Foundation's roadmap for Trump, should he win the presidency. Given the Heritage Foundation's centrality to the American authoritarian project, it's about as awful and frightening as you might expect.
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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 , my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
In 2017, Equifax suffered the worst breach in history, leaking the deep, nonconsensual dossiers it had compiled on 148m Americans, 15m Britons and 19k Canadians, to form an immortal, undeletable reservoir of kompromat and readymade identity-theft:
Equifax knew the breach was coming. It wasn't just their top execs liquidating their stock in Equifax before the announcement of the breach - it was also that they ignored *years* of increasingly urgent warnings from IT staff about the problems with their server security.
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We're living through one of those moments when millions of people become suddenly and overwhelmingly interested in fair use, one of the subtlest and worst-understood aspects of copyright law. It's not a subject you can master by skimming a Wikipedia article!
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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 , my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
I've been talking fair use with laypeople for decades. I've met so many people with the unshakable, serene confidence of the *truly* wrong, like those who think fair use means you can always take x words from a book, or y seconds from a song, and no more.
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EVs won't save the planet. Ultimately, the material bill for billions of individual vehicles and the unavoidable geometry of more cars-more traffic-more roads-greater distances-more cars dictate that the future of our cities and planet requires public transit - *lots* of it.
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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 , my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
But no matter how much public transit we install, there's always going to be *some* personal vehicles on the road, and not just bikes, ebikes and scooters.
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