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…

20/
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…

31/
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

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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