There's 3 days left in the @Kickstarter for the audiobook of my upcoming anti-finance finance thriller about #SiliconValley scams, *Red Team Blues*. #Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they're #DRM free. Crowdfunding makes them possible!
#5yrsago UK police train machine-learning model using Experian data that stereotypes people based on garden size, first names, and postal codes techdirt.com/2018/04/13/uk-…
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.
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My latest @Medium column is "How To Make a Child-Safe TikTok: Have you tried not spying on kids?"
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!
Are you trying to wean yourself off Big Tech? You can read my work elsewhere, but it is now a #TwitterCrime to tell you how. Please visit my site, pluralistic.net, for links to find me on less-unhinged places (I can only imagine that my days here are numbered).
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Many of us have left the big social media platforms; far more of us *wish* we could leave them; and even those of us who've escaped from Facebook/Insta and Twitter still spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to get the people we care about off of them, too.
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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:
It's lazy and easy to think that our friends who are stuck on legacy platforms run by Zuckerberg and Musk lack the self-discipline to wean themselves off of these services.
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We're less than a month into 2025 and I'm already overwhelmed by my backlog of links! Herewith, then, is my 25th linkdump post, a grab-bag of artful transitions between miscellaneous subjects. Here's the previous 24:
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:
Last week's big tech event was the Supreme Court giving the go-ahead for Congress to ban Tiktok, because somehow the First Amendment allows the US government to shut down a speech forum if they don't like the content of its messages.
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Five years ago, Trump touted his "big, beautiful" replacement for NAFTA, the "free trade agreement" between the US, Mexico and Canada. Trump's NAFTA-2 was called the USMCA (US-Mexico-Canada Agreement) and it was pretty similar to NAFTA, to be honest.
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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:
That tells you a couple things: first, NAFTA was, broadly speaking a good thing for Trump and the ultra-wealthy donors who backed him (and got far richer as a result). That's why he kept it intact.
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During the Napster wars, the record labels *seriously* pissed off millions of internet users when they sued over 19,000 music fans, mostly kids, but also grannies, old people, and dead people.
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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:
It's hard to overstate how badly the labels behaved. Like, there was the Swarthmore student who was the maintainer of a free/open source search engine that indexed files available in public sharepoints on the LAN.
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The social function of the economics profession is to explain, over and over again, that your boss is actually right and that you don't really want the things you want, and you're secretly happy to be abused by the system.
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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:
My next novel is *Picks and Shovels*, out next month. It's tells the origin story of Martin Hench, my hard-charging, scambusting, high-tech forensic accountant, in a 1980s battle over the soul of a PC company:
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:
I'm currently running a Kickstarter to pre-sell the book in every format: hardcover, DRM-free ebook, and an independently produced, fabulous DRM-free audiobook read by Wil Wheaton, who just *nailed* the delivery: