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:
#5yrsago Mirai’s creators plead guilty, reveal that they created a DDoS superweapon to get a competitive edge in the Minecraft server industry wired.com/story/mirai-bo… 7/
#5yrsago Climate change has created massive blooms of ecologically disruptive jellyfish, but luckily they’re delicious vice.com/en/article/wjz…
#5yrsago Group behind voter ID, stand your ground, ag-gag, private prison, anti-muni-wifi, and killing Obamacare now planning rules for jailing pipeline protesters desmog.com/2017/12/11/ale… 9/
#5yrsago 12 Michigan cops, looking for a 40-year-old white woman, draw guns on 11 year old black girl and put her in cuffs web.archive.org/web/2017121222… 10/
#5yrsago Journalists receive forged lawsuit docs hoaxing a nonexistent sexual harassment suit against Chuck Schumer axios.com/2017/12/16/sch… 11/
Yesterday's threads: Orphaned neurological implants; and more!
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.
My latest Medium column is "Plato Would Ban Ad-Blockers: He was a dick."
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Conspiratorialism is downstream of the trauma of institutional failures.
Insitutional failures are downstream of regulatory capture.
Regulatory capture is downstream of monopolization.
Monopolization is downstream of the failure to enforce antitrust law.
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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:
Start with conspiratorialism and trauma. I am staunchly pro-vaccine. I have had so many covid jabs that I glow in the dark and can get impeccable 5g reception at the bottom of a coal-mine.
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*.
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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 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.
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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.
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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:
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.
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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:
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:
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:
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.
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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.
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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:
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)...
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