Cory Doctorow NONCONSENSUAL BLUE TICK Profile picture
Dec 7, 2022 24 tweets 22 min read Read on X
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: EU to Facebook, 'Drop Dead'; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2022/12/07/luc…

#Pluralistic 1/ A theater proscenium. Over the proscenium, in script, are th
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/… 2/
EU to Facebook, 'Drop Dead': Ringing down the curtain on the consent theater.

3/ Image: Anthony Quintano (modified) https://commons.wikimedia
Hey look at this

* The rise of the video game union polygon.com/23485977/video…

* Chinese Students Invent Coat That Makes People Invisible to AI Cameras vice.com/en/article/88q…

* Author of Minecraft's "End Poem" gives it to the public domain theeggandtherock.substack.com/p/i-wrote-a-st… 4/
#20yrsago @EFF comments on the Broadcast Flag web.archive.org/web/2003030817…

#20yrsago Will compulsory licenses save P2P? personal.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/know… levy.pdf

#20yrsago SUVs are not healthy for children and other living things web.archive.org/web/2002121916… 5/
#10yrsago Canadian Conservative govt guts protections for 99+% of waterways, spare handful of lakes with high-cost cottages web.archive.org/web/2012120923…

#10yrsago GOP fires author of copyright reform paper arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20… 6/
#10yrsago Meet the new Nintendo DRM, same as the old Nintendo DRM (but stupider) arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/12…

#10yrsago Citigroup leads finance world in bullshit-generating capacity theatlantic.com/business/archi… 7/
#5yrsago Russian Orthodox Patriarch announces church-government inquiry to prove that the Tsar was killed in 1917 as part of a Jewish ritual johnhelmer.net/torquemada-mak… 8/
#5yrsago Investigation into emergency rooms shows that for-profit hospitals engage in billions in price-gouging vox.com/health-care/20… 9/
#5yrsago @SenSanders, vindicated: Senior Democrats say the GOP’s tax-plan has started a class war, and they’re going to fight back on those terms mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-… 10/
#5yrsago The father of the most hostile piece of street furniture in world history explains why he thinks he’s right to make life harder for homeless people and socializing kids cnn.com/style/article/… 11/
#5yrsago Understanding attorney-client privilege with Donald Trump Jr and Ken “Popehat” White popehat.com/2017/12/07/law… 12/
#5yrsago A free sf anthology about space travel, inequality, equity and public policy: Kim Stanley Robinson, Madeline Ashby, Eileen Gunn, Ramez Naam, Steven Barnes, Karl Schroeder and more! csi.asu.edu/books/vvev/ 13/
#1yrago A lexicon of euphemisms for "corporate crime" pluralistic.net/2021/12/07/sol…

#1yrago IP lawyers weaponize trade secrecy to stall vaccine waivers pluralistic.net/2021/12/07/sol… 14/
Yesterday's threads: Raising money for Locus Magazine; and more!

15/
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… 16/
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… 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."

craphound.com/shop/ 18/
Upcoming appearances:

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

* Chokepoint Capitalism: Can It Be Defeated? (@UCLLaws), 2/1
ucl.ac.uk/laws/events/20…

* @Aus_Digital Copyright Forum (Canberra), 2/17:
digital.org.au/2022/11/08/doc… 19/
Upcoming appearances (cont'd):

* Antitrust, Regulation and the Political Economy (Brussels), 3/2:
brusselsconference.com/registration 20/
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/2022/12/07/luc… 22/
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 "Yes, It’s Censorship: Stop picking that nit, it’ll never heal."

doctorow.medium.com/yes-its-censor… 23/
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… 24/

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Keep Current with Cory Doctorow NONCONSENSUAL BLUE TICK

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More from @doctorow

Sep 8
This was the plan: America would stop making things and instead make *recipes*, the "IP" that could be sent to other countries to turn into actual *stuff*.

1/ An organ grinder with a monkey. The organ grinder's head has been replaced with a Gilded Age caricature of a sneering millionaire. The monkey's head has been replaced with the head of a miserable child coal miner. The background is a blurred, halftoned view of a vast square in Beijing with a giant official building in the background, and a Chinese flag on a flagpole. On the organ is a blurred portrait of John Philip Sousa.
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/2025/09/08/pro…

2/
This would happen in distant lands without the pesky environmental and labor rules that forced businesses accept reduced profits because they weren't allowed to maim their workers and poison the land, air and water.

3/
Read 77 tweets
Sep 6
Trump's doing a lot of oligarch shit, and while some of it very visible and obvious, other moves, like throwing the door open to "stock buybacks" are technical and obscure.

1/ An old-timey carny barker, waving a cane and shouting. He is standing in front of a vintage photo of the NYSE trading floor.
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/2025/09/06/com…

2/
But it's worth paying attention to this, because this form of stock swindle stands to make billionaires a lot richer (and thus more powerful).

3/
Read 48 tweets
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

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