Cory Doctorow NONCONSENSUAL BLUE TICK's Threads

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.

1/

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/2025/03/19/sel…

2/

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.

1/

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.

1/

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.

1/

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.

1/

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.

1/

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.

1/

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*.

1/

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.

1/

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.

1/

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.

1/

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.

1/

Jan 25 • 34 tweets • 7 min read

The core regulatory proposition of the tech industry is "it's not a crime if we do it with an app." It's not an unlicensed taxi if we do it with an app. It's not an illegal hotel room if we do it with an app.

1/

Jan 24 • 49 tweets • 10 min read

"Boss politics" are a feature of corrupt societies. When a society is dominated by self-dealing, corrupt institutions, strongman leaders can seize control by appealing to the public's fury and desperation.

1/

Jan 22 • 50 tweets • 11 min read

Turns out Donald Trump isn't the only world leader with a tech billionaire "first buddy" who gets to serve as an unaccountable, self-interested de facto business regulator. UK PM Kier Starmer has just handed the keys to the British economy over to Jeff Bezos.

1/

Jan 20 • 93 tweets • 15 min read

Many of us have left the big social media platforms; far more of us *wish* we could leave them; and even those of us who've escaped from Facebook/Insta and Twitter still spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to get the people we care about off of them, too.

1/

Jan 18 • 101 tweets • 19 min read

We're less than a month into 2025 and I'm already overwhelmed by my backlog of links! Herewith, then, is my 25th linkdump post, a grab-bag of artful transitions between miscellaneous subjects. Here's the previous 24:

1/ pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

Jan 15 • 57 tweets • 9 min read

Five years ago, Trump touted his "big, beautiful" replacement for NAFTA, the "free trade agreement" between the US, Mexico and Canada. Trump's NAFTA-2 was called the USMCA (US-Mexico-Canada Agreement) and it was pretty similar to NAFTA, to be honest.

1/

Share this page!

Enter URL or ID to Unroll