Author/activist/journalist. New novel: THE BEZZLE, a Martin Hench thriller about hi-tech fraud and the Shitty Tech Adoption Curve https://t.co/4ZExCQHv6q
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Mar 14 • 28 tweets • 8 min read
A key requirement for being a science fiction writer without losing your mind is the ability to distinguish between science fiction (futuristic thought experiments) and *predictions*. SF writers who lack this trait come to fancy themselves fortune-tellers who SEE! THE! FUTURE!
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Bruce Schneier coined the term "feudal security" to describe Big Tech's offer: "move into my fortress - lock yourself into my technology - and I will keep you safe from all the marauders roaming the land":
1/ pluralistic.net/2023/02/05/bat…
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A characteristically brilliant @kashhill story for @NYTimes reveals a characteristically terrible fact of modern life: your car secretly records telemetry and sells it to data-brokers, who sell it to insurers, who use it to gouge you on premiums:
1/ nytimes.com/2024/03/11/tec…
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Capitalism's Big Lie in four words: "There is no alternative." Looters use this lie for cover, insisting that they're hard-nosed grownups living in the reality of human nature, incentives, and facts (which don't care about your feelings).
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When hydrocarbon barons torch the Earth with fossil fuels, they call *us* dreamers. They insist that there's a hard-nosed reality - humanity needs energy - and they're the ones who live in it while we're in a fairyland running on sunshine and virtuous thoughts.
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For the pro-monopoly crowd that absolutely dominated antitrust law from the Carter administration until 2020, Amazon presents a genuinely puzzling paradox: the company's monopoly power was *never* supposed to emerge, and if it did, it should have crumbled immediately.
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As someone who writes a lot of fiction about corporate crime, I naturally end up spending a lot of time being *angry* about corporate crime. It's pretty goddamned enraging.
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You can barely turn around these days without being warned of the risks of AI disinformation in coming elections. But as a recent episode of @MachineKillsPod reminds us, these are *hypothetical* risks, and there's no shortage of *real* AI harms:
1/ soundcloud.com/thismachinekil…
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You know "horseshoe theory," right? "The left and theright, rather than being at opposite and opposing ends of a linear continuum of politics, closely resemble each other, analogous to the way that the opposite ends of a horseshoe are close together":
1/ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe…
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Vice died the way it lived: being suckered in by smarter predators, even as it trained its own predatory instincts on those more credulous than its own supremely gullible leadership. RIP, we hardly knew ye.
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A funny thing happened on the way to the enshittocene: Google - which astonished the world when it reinvented search, blowing Altavista and Yahoo out of the water with a search tool that seemed *magic* - suddenly turned into a pile of shit.
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Capitalism is a vibes-based system. Sure, we all know about Keynes's "Animal Spirits" that see "bulls" and "bears" vying to set the market's future, but beyond that, there's just a hell of a lot of *narrative*.
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I was on a book tour the day my editor called me and told me, "From now on, your middle name is 'Cory.'"
"That's weird. Why?"
"Because from now on, your first name is '*New York Times* Bestselling Author.'"
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Here's how the shitty technology adoption curve works: when you want to roll out a new, abusive technology, look for a group of vulnerable people whose complaints are roundly ignored and subject them to your bad idea. Sand the rough edges off on their bodies and lives.
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There's this great line in *Sneakers*, where Dan Aykroyd, a conspiracy-addled hacker/conman, feverishly tells Sydney Poitier (ex-CIA spook) about a meeting Eisenhower/aliens meeting where Ike said, "look, give us your technology, and we'll give you all the cow lips you want."
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More specifically, I was tricked by a phone-phisher pretending to be my bank, and he convinced me to hand over my credit-card number, then did $8,000+ worth of fraud with it before I figured out what happened. And *then* he tried to do it again, a week later!
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The brains behind Trump's stolen #SupremeCourt have detailed plans: they didn't just scheme to pack the court with judges who weren't qualified for - or entitled to - a SCOTUS life-tenure, they also set up a series of cases for that radical court to hear.
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Living in the age of AI hype makes demands on all of us to come up with smartypants prognostications about how AI is about to change everything forever, and wow, it's pretty amazing, huh?
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Last night, I gave the annual #MarshallMcLuhan lecture at @transmediale #Berlin. The event was sold out and while there's a video that'll be posted soon, they couldn't get a streaming setup installed in the Canadian embassy, where the talk was held:
1/ transmediale.de/en/2024/event/…
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Rooftop solar is the future, but it's also a scam. It didn't have to be, but America decided that the best way to roll out distributed, resilient, clean and renewable energy was to let Wall Street run the show.
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One of the weirdest aspect of #EndStageCapitalism is #auditing's collapse, lynchpin of investing. Auditors - independent pros who sign off on a company's finances - are the only way investors can be sure they're not handing their money over to failing firms run by crooks.
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