Cory Doctorow NONCONSENSUAL BLUE TICK Profile picture
Jun 2, 2023 36 tweets 35 min read Read on X
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: The long, bloody lineage of private equity's looting; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plu…

#Pluralistic

1/ An overgrown graveyard, ren...
Tomorrow (3/6) at 1:30PM, I'm in #Edinburgh for @CymeraF on a panel with Nina Allen and @iannmcdonald:

cymerafestival.co.uk/cymera23-event…

Mon 5/6 at 7:15PM, I'm at the #BritishLibrary with my book *Red Team Blues* for an event hosted by @Marthalanefox:

bl.uk/events/an-even…

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CORRECTION: The 5/29 edition of Pluralistic quoted $20k Rebyota; this was the rumored pre-release price; the actual average wholesale price is $10.8k. Thanks to Benjamin Jolley for catching this error, and to Stephen Skolnick for getting to the bottom of it.

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The long, bloody lineage of private equity's looting: Or, if you prefer, "plundering."



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Hey look at this

* Eating Disorder Helpline Kills Chatbot Over Horribly Wrong Advice gizmodo.com/ai-chatbot-eat…

* No Such Thing As a Smart Fascist catvalente.substack.com/p/theres-no-su…

* Netflix execs want $166m in extra pay; writers strike seeks $68m from Netflix deadline.com/2023/05/wga-ne…

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#20yrsago Theme park of the chariots of the Gods web.archive.org/web/2006020704…

#20yrsago How is an #IRC channel like a Caribbean street-corner? web.archive.org/web/2003060512…

#20yrsago Can #Mozilla live without Netscape? salon.com/2003/06/02/unh…

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#20yrsago FCC loosens media concentration, screws America nytimes.com/2003/06/02/bus…

#20yrsago Kids spend six years recreating Raiders of the Lost Ark legacy.aintitcool.com/node/15348

#15yrsago Canada’s DMCA: a guide to the likely talking points michaelgeist.ca/2008/06/unoffi…

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#15yrsago Canadian DMCA will take $500/download from your kids’ college fund web.archive.org/web/2008060401…

#10yrsago Northern Ireland builds a Potemkin Village for the G8 irishtimes.com/news/recession…

#10yrsago Usury in the UK theguardian.com/money/2013/may…

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#10yrsago Linda Stone on attention, computers, and education theatlantic.com/national/archi…

#10yrsago Gezi protester kicking away teargas cannister occupygezipics.tumblr.com/post/519128907…

#10yrsago How markets allow people to violate their moral codes web.archive.org/web/2013060715…

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#5yrsago Youtubers with millions of followers are dropping out, citing stress and burnout from algorithm kremlinology polygon.com/2018/6/1/17413…

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#5yrsago Leaked document shows Trump officials planning to force Americans to spend $311m-$11.8b/year to keep unprofitable coal and nuclear energy plants from shutting bloomberg.com/news/articles/… wall

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#5yrsago Citing bad publicity and internal dissent, Google announces it won’t renew contract to supply AI for US military drones gizmodo.com/google-plans-n…

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#5yrsago Tax-funded charter schools textbooks deny evolution, teach human-dinosaur cohabitation, endorse slavery and indigenous genocide orlandosentinel.com/2018/06/01/pri…

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#5yrsago Amid wage stagnation, corporate leaders declare the end of annual raises triggered by increased profitability axios.com/2018/05/27/bro…

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#5yrsago Former Tory chancellor takes over newspaper, sells “money-can’t buy” coverage to Uber, Google and others web.archive.org/web/2018071500…

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#5yrsago Stanford prof Niall Ferguson conspired with campus Republicans to do oppo research on students who opposed invited eugenicist speaker stanforddaily.com/2018/05/31/ema…

#5yrsago Southwest wouldn’t let mixed-race family fly until mom “proved” parenthood washingtonpost.com/news/dr-gridlo…

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#5yrsago Congresswoman Diane Black [R-TN] blames school shootings on “pornography” huffpost.com/entry/diane-bl…

#5yrsago My science fiction story about EFF’s proposed jailbreaking exemption eff.org/deeplinks/2018…

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#5yrsago Tell your parents: Trump is lying to them about Medicare pbs.org/newshour/econo…

#5yrsago Leaked memos reveal the deep divisions within Google over Pentagon contract nytimes.com/2018/05/30/tec…

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#5yrsago Governments all over the world buy spy products that let them track and eavesdrop on global cellphones, especially US phones washingtonpost.com/business/techn…

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#5yrsago Amazon bars Australians from shopping on its non-Aussie sites to put pressure on the government to rescind tax rule smh.com.au/business/compa…

#5yrsago Telegram: ever since Russia’s blocking demand, Apple has prevented us from updating our app theverge.com/2018/5/31/1741…

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#5yrsago Elon’s Basilisk: why exploitative, egomaniacal rich dudes think AI will destroy humanity documentjournal.com/2018/04/the-ex…

#5yrsago Uganda enacts unenforceable, ridiculous anti-“gossip” internet tax theverge.com/2018/5/31/1741…

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#5yrsago Count your bees with a Raspberry Pi and machine learning matpalm.com/blog/counting_…

#5yrsago No, seriously, THIS is the mission patch for Google’s drone warfare AI contract with the Pentagon jwz.org/blog/2018/05/h…

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#5yrsago Sweden’s notorious copyright troll said they’d sue, but if you ignore them, they just go away torrentfreak.com/legal-blackmai…

#1yrago How John Deere leverages repair-blocking into gag orders pluralistic.net/2022/05/31/dea…

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#1yrago House sales are cratering but inventory is soaring pluralistic.net/2022/06/02/res…

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Wednesday's threads: To save the news, ban surveillance ads; and more!



26/ Image: EFF https://www.eff....
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…

28/
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:

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

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

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Upcoming appearances (cont'd):

* @rightscon, "#Interoperability: from buzzword to a map of solutions," Jun 6 (#CostaRica):
rightscon.org/program/

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

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Upcoming appearances (cont'd)

* @otherlandberlin event for Red Team Blues, 6/8, 8PM (#Berlin)
otherland-berlin.de/de/event-detai…

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Recent appearances:

* How To Save News Media From Our Tech Overlords (@CANADALAND)
canadaland.com/podcast/888-ho…

* Most AI is not artificial or intelligent (with @jamesbridle)


* @machinekillspod
soundcloud.com/thismachinekil…

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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/2023/06/02/plu…

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If you're a @Medium subscriber, you can read these essays - and previews of upcoming columns and exclusives on doctorow.medium.com.

My latest Medium column is "Ideas Lying Around: Milton Friedman was a monster, but he wasn't wrong about this"

doctorow.medium.com/ideas-lying-ar…

35/
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…

36/
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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