Cory Doctorow NONCONSENSUAL BLUE TICK Profile picture
Apr 24, 2023 40 tweets 53 min read Read on X
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: How Goldman Sachs's "tax-loss harvesting" lets the ultra-rich rake in billions tax-free; Happy Independent Bookstore Day; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2023/04/24/tax…

#Pluralistic

1/   Image: Matthew Bisanz (mo...
Tomorrow (Apr 25) I'll be in #SanDiego for the launch of my new novel, *Red Team Blues*, at 7PM at @MystGalaxyBooks, hosted by @_SarahGailey. Please come and say hi!

mystgalaxy.com/event/42523Doc…

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How Goldman Sachs's "tax-loss harvesting" lets the ultra-rich rake in billions tax-free: "Generating a tax loss without a substantial change in the investment."



3/  Image: Matthew Bisanz (mod...
Happy Independent Bookstore Day! It lasts a week!



4/  Image: Liam Quinn https://...
Hey look at this

* Scams, conspiracies, and surprising theories on why we fall victim to them cbc.ca/radio/ideas/sc…

* Escape Speed xkcd.com/2765/

* 'Let's Get It On' ... in court npr.org/2023/04/20/117… (h/t @thepublicdomain)

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#20yrsago “Daddy, Are We There Yet?” @alankay’s talk at ETCON craphound.com/kayetcon2003

#20yrsago A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy: @cshirky’s talk at ETCON 2003 craphound.com/shirkyetcon200…

#20yrsago Journalism 3.1b2, @dangillmor's talk at ETCON craphound.com/gillmoretcon20…

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#20yrsago Notes from @megnut’s “Edges of the Writable Web” talk at ETCON craphound.com/megetcon2003.t…

#20yrsago @stewart Butterfield: “Game Context as a Testing Ground for Social Software.” craphound.com/stewartetcon20…

#20yrsago #MovableType launches #TypePad web.archive.org/web/2003060316…

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#20yrsago @hrheingold’s “Technology Innovation and Collective Action” at ETCON craphound.com/hlretcon2003.t…

#20yrsago Eric Blossom and Matt Ettus’s talk on #GNURadio at ETCON craphound.com/gnuradioetcon2…

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#20yrsago Notes from Wireless Routing and Multi-Hop Architectures at ETCON craphound.com/meshetcon2003.…

#15yrsago Anti-teen noise-weapon comes to the USA web.archive.org/web/2008042923…

#15yrsago @emi: backing up music files online is illegal consumerist.com/2008/04/22/emi…

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#10yrsago Early American tombstone euphemisms for death vastpublicindifference.com/2008/08/101-wa…

#20yrsago Cisco’s routers designed for governmental eavesdropping web.archive.org/web/2003080819…

#20yrsago #Chandler goes 0.1 web.archive.org/web/2003060320…

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#20yrsago Notes from “Legal Issues and Emerging Technology” craphound.com/fvletcon2003.t…

#20yrsago Patents in Emerging Tech craphound.com/etconpatents.t…

#20yrsago @bunniestudios’s tutorial on #HardwareHacking craphound.com/bunnieetcon200…

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#15yrsago #TSA screener who smuggled a gun into the airport is still on the job web.archive.org/web/2008042819…

#15yrsago Sleazy proposed new #DungeonsAndDragons license seeks to poison open gaming systems web.archive.org/web/2008050600…

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#15yrsago MSN Music customers lose *all* their music the next time they buy a new PC arstechnica.com/information-te…

#15yrsago Middlesbrough cops, goons and clerks grab and detain photographer for shooting on a public street memex.craphound.com/2008/04/22/mid…

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#15yrsago Disneyland bans pictures in its parking lots disneylandcompendium.blogspot.com/2008/04/photo-…

#10yrsago Fox sends fraudulent takedown notices for my novel Homeland memex.craphound.com/2013/04/22/fox…

#10yrsago @GreatDismal tries the Google Glass flickr.com/photos/1800joe…

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#10yrsago Then-and-now photos of Disney Parks from early days and today imagineeringdisney.com/thenandnow/201…

#10yrsago Finnish websites go dark tomorrow to call for copyright reform web.archive.org/web/2013060100…

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#10yrsago #ChinaMieville’s turn-it-to-11 high weirdness reboot of “Dial H” memex.craphound.com/2013/04/23/chi…

#10yrsago Man has eaten at 6,297 Chinese restaurants in the USA and Canada latimes.com/local/la-me-ch…

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#10yrsago Prof says he’ll grade students on a curve, so they organize a boycott of the exams and all get As insidehighered.com/news/2013/02/1…

#5yrsago Cops shoot man, then interrupt his funeral to press his corpse’s finger to his Iphone tampabay.com/news/publicsaf…

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#5yrsago The problem isn’t that Facebook is creepy, it’s that it’s creepy AND HUGE wired.com/story/competit…

#5yrsago It’s 2018, and Google just proposed an instant messaging tool with no encryption bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/go…

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#5yrsago ISO rejects the @nsa’s #IoT crypto standard, believing it to be backdoored web.archive.org/web/2018042413…

#5yrsago Colorado Senate Republicans introduce legislation to fire, imprison striking teachers denver7.com/lifestyle/educ…

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#5yrsago The used cars that Europe sends to Nigeria are filled with illegal, toxic e-waste collections.unu.edu/eserv/UNU:6349…

#5yrsago The @BBC finally admits that #MI5 secretly vetted its employees, an open secret for generations bbc.com/news/stories-4…

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#1yrago Don't believe Obama's Big Tech #CritiHype pluralistic.net/2022/04/22/mes…

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Friday's threads: How workers get trapped by "bondage fees"; Red Team Blues Chapter One, part five; and more!



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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…

23/
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…

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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/

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Upcoming appearances:

* Red Team Blues at @MystGalaxyBooks (#SanDiego), 4/25
mystgalaxy.com/event/42523Doc…

* Red Team Blues at @DarkDel (#Burbank), 4/26
darkdel.com/store/p2873/We…

* Red Team Blues at @SFPublicLibrary with @Annaleen (#SanFrancisco), 4/30
sfpl.org/events/2023/04…

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Upcoming appearances (cont'd):

* Red Team Blues at @Powell's with @waxy (#PDX/Cedar Hills Crossing), 5/2
powells.com/book/red-team-…

* Red Team Blues at @BooksIncStores with @mkapor (#MountainView), 5/5
booksinc.net/event/cory-doc…

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Upcoming appearances (cont'd):

* Red Team Blues event with @TimHarford (#Oxford), 5/29
eventbrite.co.uk/e/cory-doctoro…

* Red Team Blues event with @christreilly (#Nottingham), 5/30
waterstones.com/events/an-even…

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Upcoming appearances (cont'd):

* Red Team Blues event with @cubicgarden (#Manchester), 5/31
waterstones.com/events/in-conv…

* @uclcs Peter Kirstein Lecture, 6/1 (#London):
eventbrite.co.uk/e/peter-kirste…

* @CymeraF, 6/3 (#Edinburgh)
cymerafestival.co.uk/cymera23-event…

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Upcoming appearances (cont'd):

* Red Team Blues with @Marthalanefox at the @bl, 6/5 (#London):
bl.uk/events/an-even…

* @republica keynote, 6/7 (#Berlin)
re-publica.com/de/news/rp23-k…

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Recent appearances:

* Slingshot
thesling.org/video/slingsho…

* @iftf Future Now
soundcloud.com/institute-for-…

* Examining capitalism's chokepoints (@changelog)
changelog.com/podcast/535

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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/2023/04/24/tax…

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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 "A Collective Bargain: Workplace democracy is a training ground for true national democracy"

doctorow.medium.com/a-collective-b…

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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: mail.flarn.com/mailman/listin…

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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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Today's top sources: @nelson's Weblog (somebits.com/weblog/).

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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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