Cory Doctorow NONCONSENSUAL BLUE TICK Profile picture
May 1, 2023 34 tweets 43 min read Read on X
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: When you hear "fintech," think "unlicensed bank"; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2023/05/01/usu…

#Pluralistic

1/ A stately, columnated bank ...
Tomorrow (May 2) at 7PM, I'll be at the Cedar Hills Crossing (#PDX) @Powells with @waxy:

powells.com/book/red-team-…

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When you hear "fintech," think "unlicensed bank": "...with a computer."



3/  Image: Andre Carrotflower ...
Hey look at this

* Fuck the Monarchy antipope.org/charlie/blog-s…

* Punctuation Personified (1824) publicdomainreview.org/collection/pun…

* Cory Doctorow's Red Team Blues: a refreshingly hopeful finance thriller about cryptocurrency boingboing.net/2023/04/27/cor…

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#20yrsago Corporate lobbyists get US into treaties that ban #DMCA reform web.archive.org/web/2003123103…

#15yrsago Musicians tricked into appearing in anti-piracy propaganda movie theage.com.au/technology/mus…

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#15yrsago HOWTO keep your laptop from being searched at the border (it’s hard) eff.org/deeplinks/2008…

#15yrsago EFF and security experts to Congress: We need hearings on Customs #LaptopSeizures and snooping eff.org/press/archives…

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#10yrsago @mozilla to #FinSpy: stop disguising your “lawful interception” spyware as Firefox wired.com/2013/04/finfis…

#10yrsago @EFF challenges bogus #3DPrinting patents eff.org/deeplinks/2013…

#10yrsago How Congress flies bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

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#10yrsago Necessary Evil – a triumphant end to the Milkweed Triptych where Nazi X-Men fight English warlocks memex.craphound.com/2013/04/30/nec…

#10yrsago What’s big, corrupt, terrifying and worse than #ACTA? #TPP. Here we go again! memex.craphound.com/2013/04/30/wha…

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#10yrsago Teaching TCP/IP headers with #legos righteousit.wordpress.com/2010/06/27/pra…

#10yrsago Future Tense: @nealstephenson and @superwuster talk future, sf and tech slate.com/articles/podca…

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#10yrsago #SOPA’s daddy is now in charge of government science funding, and he hates peer-review science.org/content/articl…

#5yrsago @hopelarson’s “All Summer Long,” lively YA graphic novel about tween friendships, rock and roll, and being yourself memex.craphound.com/2018/05/01/hop…

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#5yrsago Speaking in my professional capacity as a dystopian science fiction writer… memex.craphound.com/2018/05/01/spe…

#5yrsago It’s back! British Conservative politicians’ habitual “go ahead, kick me in the balls, I can take it” pose theguardian.com/politics/2018/…

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#5yrsago McDonald’s workers across the UK are striking theguardian.com/business/2018/…

#5yrsago #GeorgeMason economics department admits it sold hiring control to anonymous, super-rich donors crookedtimber.org/2018/05/01/the…

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#5yrsago Thousands of prominent AI researchers tell Nature they won’t have anything to do with its new paywalled journal openaccess.engineering.oregonstate.edu

#5yrsago Parliament to Zuck: show up or else theverge.com/2018/5/1/17306…

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#5yrsago Right wing snowflakes moaning about #MichelleWolf’s hilarious White House Press Corps monologue show us real “PC” currentaffairs.org/2018/04/what-b…`

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#5yrsago The UK is finally cracking down on its Russian money-laundry, but hasn’t hired people to do the job heraldscotland.com/news/16192718.…

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#5yrsago The UK’s surveillance regulator changed names and dropped its domain, which is now squatted by a premature ejaculation scammer vice.com/en/article/ywx…

#5yrsago In just 7 months, the US #PublicDomain will get its first infusion since 1998 theatlantic.com/technology/arc…

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#5yrsago Debullshitifying Microsoft’s smear campaign against the recycler it helped send to prison techcrunch.com/2018/04/27/mic…

#5yrsago A #LaTeX mod to draw coffee cup rings on your technical papers legacy.hanno-rein.de/hanno-rein.de/…

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#5yrsago For $4k/year, Moscow cyber-arms-dealer Gleg will sell you 25 0-day bugs for attacking hospitals vice.com/en/article/j5a…

#1yrago Disney's writer #WageTheft, a year on pluralistic.net/2022/04/30/dis…

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Saturday's threads: The seductive, science fictional power of spreadsheets; and more!



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My latest novel is Red Team Blues, available wherever books are sold!

Signed copies at @DarkDel:

darkdel.com/store/p2873/We…

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My latest nonfiction 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…

21/
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 @Powells 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:

* The Next Chapter/CBC
cbc.ca/player/play/21…

* @mediadeathcult


* Slingshot
thesling.org/video/slingsho…

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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/2023/05/01/usu…

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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.

My latest Medium column is "Weak Institutions: It's not a fair fight"

doctorow.medium.com/weak-instituti…

32/
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…

33/
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).

eof/

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More from @doctorow

May 27
On a recent This Machine Kills episode, guest Hagen Blix described the ultimate form of "AI therapy" with a "human in the loop":



1/ soundcloud.com/thismachinekil…A magnified image of the inside of an automated backup tape library, with gleaming racks of silver tape drives receding into the distance. In the foreground is a pile of dirt being shoveled by three figures in prisoner's stripes. Two of the figures' heads have been replaced with cliche hacker-in-hoodie heads, from which shine yellow, inverted Amazon 'smile' logos, such that the smile is a frown. The remaining figure's head has been replaced with a horse's head. Behind the figure is an impatiently posed man in a sharp business suit, frowning at his watch. His head has been replaced with the ...
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/2025/05/27/ran…

2/
> One actual therapist is just having ten chat GPT windows open where they just like have five seconds to interrupt the chatGPT. They have to scan them all and see if it says something really inappropriate. That's your job, to stop it.

3/
Read 98 tweets
May 21
My latest *Locus Magazine* column is "Strange Bedfellows and Long Knives," about the secret engine of sweeping political upheavals (like Trumpism) and their inherent fragility:



1/ locusmag.com/2025/05/commen…A Renaissance oil-painting of the assassination of Julius Caesar, modified to give Caesar Trump's hair and turn his skin orange, to make the knives glow, and to emboss a Heritage Foundation logo on the wall behind the scene.
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/2025/05/21/et-…

2/
Stories about major change usually focus on a *group*, but groups rarely achieve big, ambitious goals. Think about all the goal-oriented groups in your orbit, with missions like alleviating hunger, or beautifying your neighborhood, or changing the health-care system.

3/
Read 40 tweets
May 14
Something's very different in tech. Once upon a time, every bad choice by tech companies - taking away features, locking out mods or plugins, nerfing the API - was countered, nearly instantaneously, by someone writing a program that overrode that choice.

1/ A 19th century engraving of fiendishly complex machine composed of thousands of interlocking gears and frames (originally an image of a printing press, but modified so that it's just all gears and things), colored dark blue. It bears Woody Guthrie's guitar sticker, 'This machine KILLS fascists. To one side of it stands an image of Ned Ludd, taken from an infamous 19th century Luddite handbill, waving troops into battle. King Ludd's head has been replaced with a hacker's hoodie, the face within lost in shadow.
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/2025/05/14/pre…

2/
Bad clients would be muscled aside by third-party clients. Locked bootloaders would be hacked and replaced. Code that confirmed you were using OEM parts, consumables or adapters would be found and nuked from orbit.

3/
Read 51 tweets
May 13
"Understood: Who Broke the Internet?" is my new podcast for CBC about the enshittogenic policy decisions that gave rise to enshittification. Episode two just dropped: "ctrl-ctrl-ctrl":



1/ cbc.ca/listen/cbc-pod…The logo for 'Who Broke the Internet' - a shattered hard-drive with the CBC logomark.
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/2025/05/13/ctr…

2/
The thesis of the show is straightforward: the internet wasn't killed by ideological failings like "greed," nor by economic concepts like "network effects," nor by some cyclic force of history that drives towards "re-intermediation."

3/
Read 49 tweets
May 2
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

NOTE: I DID NOT BUY A BLUE TICK. IT WAS NONCONSENSUALLY ADDED TO MY ACCOUNT.

Inside: AI and the fatfinger economy; and more!

Archived at:

#Pluralistic

1/ pluralistic.net/2025/05/02/kpi…A leg-hold trap whose trigger disc has been replaced with the hostile, glaring eye of HAL 9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' A giant man's finger enters the frame from one corner, aimed at the trigger.  Image: Pogrebnoj-Alexandroff (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Index_finger_%3D_to_attention.JPG  CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en  --  Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg  CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel *Picks and Shovels*.

Catch me in NEW ZEALAND at UNITY BOOKS in WELLINGTON TODAY (May 3, 3PM):

unitybooks.co.nz/news-and-event…

More tour dates (PDX, Pittsburgh, London, Manchester) here:

martinhench.com

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AI and the fatfinger economy: Every slip of the finger in money in the bank.



3/  Image: Pogrebnoj-Alexandroff (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Index_finger_%3D_to_attention.JPG  CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en  --  Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg  CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
Read 24 tweets
Apr 24
Patrick "patio11" McKenzie is a fantastic explainer, the kind of person who breaks topics down in ways that stay with you, and creep into your understanding of other subjects, too. Take his 2022 essay, "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero":



1/ bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optima…A rainforest in Chiapas, green and intergrown.
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/2025/04/24/her…

2/
It's a very well-argued piece, and here's the nut of it:

> The marginal return of permitting fraud against you is plausibly greater than zero, and therefore, you should welcome greater than zero fraud.

3/
Read 55 tweets

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