Cory Doctorow NONCONSENSUAL BLUE TICK's Threads

Apr 11 • 80 tweets • 16 min read

It's been more than a decade in the making, but Facebook - or, if you prefer, Meta - is going on trial for antitrust violations, with the highest possible stakes and the worst possible evidence (for Facebook).

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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:

pluralistic.net/2025/04/11/it-…

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Apr 10 • 66 tweets • 13 min read

It's hard to remember now, but for more than three years under Biden, it was possible to read the headlines and feel your government was taking big, decisive action to tame the corporate behemoths that rip you off, maim you on the job, and undermine our democracy.

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Apr 2 • 78 tweets • 13 min read

It's not that the Republicans and the Democrats are the same...obviously. But for decades - since Clinton - the Dems have sided with neoliberal economics, just like their Republican counterparts.

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Mar 31 • 66 tweets • 13 min read

Trumpism is a mixture of grievance, surveillance, and pettiness: "I will never forgive your mockery, I have records of you doing it, and I will punish you and everyone who associates with you for it."

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Mar 25 • 36 tweets • 7 min read

A law professor friend tells me that LLMs have completely transformed the way she relates to grad students and postdocs - for the worse. And no, it's not that they're cheating on their homework or using LLMs to write briefs full of hallucinated cases.

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Mar 22 • 50 tweets • 11 min read

I have an excellent excuse for this week's linkdump: I'm in Germany, but I'm supposed to be in LA, and I'm not, because London Heathrow shut down due to a power-station fire.

1/ mystgalaxy.com/32425Doctorow

Mar 19 • 26 tweets • 6 min read

Paula Le Dieu is one of the smartest, most committed archivists I know. Many years ago, she shared a neat analogy with me about the paywalling of public archives.

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Mar 18 • 26 tweets • 7 min read

AI can't do your job, but an AI salesman (Elon Musk) can convince your boss (the USA) to fire you and replace you (a federal worker) with a chatbot that can't do your job:

1/ pcmag.com/news/amid-job-…

Mar 15 • 48 tweets • 11 min read

Even by Amazon standards, this is extraordinarily sleazy: starting March 28, each Amazon Echo device will cease processing audio on-device and instead upload all the audio it captures to Amazon's cloud for processing.

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Mar 13 • 71 tweets • 14 min read

My theory of the "shitty technology adoption curve" holds that you can predict the future impact of abusive technologies on you by observing the way these are deployed against people who have less social power than you:

1/ pluralistic.net/2023/06/11/the…

Mar 12 • 58 tweets • 11 min read

Let me tell you how I became a proud science denier, and how it saved my life.

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Mar 10 • 53 tweets • 10 min read

Inflation has many complex causes and dynamics, but this much should be obvious: when prices go up, and the *profits* go up, the price rise - the "inflation" is in part the result of greed - it's greedflation.

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Mar 5 • 50 tweets • 11 min read

You guys, I don't want to bum you out or anything, but I think there's a good chance than some self-described capitalists *aren't really into capitalism*.

Sorry.

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Mar 3 • 56 tweets • 10 min read

I get a special pleasure from citing Milton Friedman. I like to imagine that as I do, he groans around the red-hot spit protruding from his jaws, prompting howls of laughter from the demons who pelt him with molten faeces for all eternity.

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Feb 20 • 41 tweets • 8 min read

The commercial surveillance industry is almost totally unregulated. Data brokers, ad-tech, and everyone in between - they harvest, store, analyze, sell and rent every intimate, sensitive, potentially compromising fact about your life.

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Feb 18 • 62 tweets • 12 min read

In 2013, Thomas Piketty had an unexpected bestseller (a 750 page economics book translated from French!) *Capital in the 21st Century*.

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Feb 17 • 36 tweets • 8 min read

Theory-free inference is a hell of a drug. For years, Big Data advocates - the larval form of today's AI weirdos - have insisted that if you have enough data, you can infer causal relationships between complex phenomena without ever having to understand how x causes y.

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Feb 12 • 39 tweets • 9 min read

Remember the Tiktok ban? I know, it was ten million years ago (in Musk years, anyway), so it may have slipped your mind, but let me remind you: Congress passed a law saying Tiktok was banned. Trump said he wouldn't enforce the law. The end.

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Feb 11 • 29 tweets • 8 min read

Let me tell you about the most wasteful US federal government spending I know about. It's a humdinger. You and everyone you know are mired in it for weeks, or perhaps months, every year.

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Feb 5 • 29 tweets • 19 min read

Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

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

Inside: MLMs are the mirror-world version of community organizing; and more!

Archived at:

#Pluralistic

1/ pluralistic.net/2025/02/04/pow…

This week, Barnes and Noble are offering a 25% discount on pre-order of my next novel, *Picks and Shovels* (use code PREORDERS):

2/ barnesandnoble.com/w/picks-and-sh…

Jan 27 • 56 tweets • 12 min read

If Elon Musk wants to cut $2t from the US federal budget, there's a pretty straightforward way to get there - just eliminate all the beltway bandits who overcharge Uncle Sucker for everything from pharma to roads to (of course) rockets, and make the rich pay their taxes.

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