Blurblogs
Global
Popular
Log in
cjheinz's blurblog
1791 stories
·
5 followers

Pluralistic: Rosemary Kirstein's "The Steerswoman" (04 May 2024) by Cory Doctorow
Saturday May 4th, 2024 at 10:00 AM

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
1 Comment


Today's links


Rosemary Kirstein's cover for her novel 'The Steerswoman.'

Rosemary Kirstein's "The Steerswoman" (permalink)

For decades, scammy "book doctors" and vanity presses spun a tale about how Big Publishing was too conservative and risk-averse for really really adventurous books, and the only way to get your visionary work published was to pay them to fill your garage with badly printed books that you'd spend the rest of your life trying to get other people to read:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/04/self-publishing/

Like all successful grifts, this one worked because it wasn't entirely untrue. No, mainstream publishing isn't filled with corporate gatekeepers who relish the idea of keeping your brilliance from reaching its audience.

But.

But editors sometimes make bad calls. They reject books because of quirks of taste, or fleeting inattentiveness, or personal bias. In a healthy publishing industry – one with dozens of equal-sized presses, all commanding roughly comparable market-share, good books would never slip through the cracks. One publisher's misstep would be another's opportunity.

But after decades of mergers, the population of major publishers has dwindled to a mere Big Five (it was almost four, but the DOJ blocked Penguin Random House's acquisition of Simon & Schuster):

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-block-penguin-random-house-s-acquisition-rival-publisher-simon

This means that some good books definitely can't find a home in Big Publishing. If you miss with five editors, you can exhaust all your chances with the Big Five.

There's a second tier of great publishers, from data-driven juggernauts like Sourcebooks to boutique presses like Verso and Beacon Press, who publish wonderful books and are very good to their authors (I've published with four of the Big Five and half a dozen of the smaller publishers).

But even with these we-try-harder boutique publishers in the mix, there's a lot of space for amazing books that just don't fit with a "trad" publisher's program. These books are often labors of love by their creators, and that love is reciprocated by their readers. You can have my unbelievably gigantic Little Nemo in Slumberland collection when you pry my cold, dead fingers off of it:

https://memex.craphound.com/2006/09/25/gigantic-little-nemo-book-does-justice-to-the-loveliest-comic-ever/

And don't even think of asking to borrow my copy of Jack Womack's Flying Saucers are Real!:

https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/03/flying-saucers-are-real-anthology-of-the-lost-saucer-craze/

I will forever cherish my Crad Kilodney chapbooks:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/19/crad-kilodney-was-an-outlier/#intermediation

Then there's last year's surprise smash hit, Shift Happens, a two-volume, 750-page slipcased book recounting the history of the keyboard. I own one. It's fantastic:

https://glennf.medium.com/how-we-crowdfunded-750-000-for-a-giant-book-about-keyboard-history-c30e24c4022e

Then there's the whole world of indie Kindle books pitched at incredibly voracious communities of readers, especially the very long tail of very niche sub-sub-genres radiating off the woefully imprecise category of "paranormal romance." These books are landing at precisely the right spot for their readers, despite some genuinely weird behind-the-scenes feuds between their writers:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/16/17566276/cockygate-amazon-kindle-unlimited-algorithm-self-published-romance-novel-cabal

But as Sturgeon's Law has it: "90% of everything is shit." Having read slush – the pile of unsolicited manuscripts sent to publishers – I can tell you that a vast number of books get rejected from trad publishers because they aren't good books. I say this without intending any disparagement towards their authors and the creative impulses that drive them. But a publisher's job isn't merely to be good to writers – it's to serve readers, by introducing them to works they are apt to enjoy.

The vast majority of books that publishers pass on are not books that you will want to read, so it follows that the vast majority of self-published work that is offered on self-serve platforms like Kindle or pitched by hopeful writers at street fairs and book festivals is just not very good.

But sometimes you find someone's independent book and it's brilliant, and you get the double thrill of falling in love with a book and of fishing a glittering needle out of an unimaginably gigantic haystack.

(If you want to read an author who beautifully expresses the wonder of finding an obscure, self-published book that's full of unsuspected brilliance, try Daniel Pinkwater, whose Alan Mendelsohn, The Boy From Mars is eleven kinds of brilliant, but is also a marvelous tale of the wonders of weird used book stores with titles like KLONG! You Are a Pickle!):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Mendelsohn,_the_Boy_from_Mars

I also write books, and I am, in fact, presently in the midst of a long book-tour for my novel The Bezzle. Last month, I did an event in Cambridge, Mass with Randall "XKCD" Munroe that went great. We had a full house, and even after the venue caught fire (really!), everyone followed us across the street to another building, up five flights of stairs, and into another auditorium where we wrapped up the gig:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulnlSRbH80Y

Afterwards, our hosts from Harvard Berkman-Klein took us to a campus pizza joint/tiki bar for dinner and drinks, and we had a great chat about a great many things. Naturally, we talked about books we loved, and Randall said, "Hey, have you ever read Rosemary Kirstein's Steerswoman novels?"

(I hadn't.)

"They're incredible. All these different people kept recommending them to me, and they kept telling me that I would love them, but they wouldn't tell me what they were about because there's this huge riddle in them that's super fun to figure out for yourself:"

https://www.rosemarykirstein.com/the-books/

"The books were published in the eighties by Del Ray, and the cover of the first one had a huge spoiler on it. But the author got the rights back and she's self-published it" (WARNING: the following link has a HUGE SPOILER!):

https://www.rosemarykirstein.com/2010/12/the-difference/

"I got it and it was pretty rough-looking, but the book was so good. I can't tell you what it was about, but I think you'll really like it!"

How could I resist a pitch like that? So I ordered a copy:

https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-steerswoman-rosemary-kirstein/7900759

Holy moly is this a good novel! And yeah, there's a super interesting puzzle in it that I won't even hint at, except to say that even the book's genre is a riddle that you'll have enormous great fun solving.

Randall wasn't kidding about the book's package. The type looks to be default Microsoft fonts, the spine is printed slightly off-register, the typesetting has lots of gonks, and it's just got that semi-disposable feel of a print-on-demand title.

Without Randall's recommendation, I never would have even read this book closely enough to notice the glowing cover endorsement from Jo Walton, nor the fact that it was included in Damien Broderick and Paul Di Filippo's "101 Best Science Fiction Novels 1985-2010."

But I finished reading the first volume just a few minutes ago and I instantly ordered the next three in the series (it's planned for seven volumes, and the author says she plans on finishing it – I can't wait).

This book is such an unexpected marvel, a stunner of a novel filled with brilliant world-building, deft characterizations, a hard-driving plot and a bunch of great surprises. The fact that such a remarkable tale comes in such an unremarkable package makes it even more of a treasure, like a geode: unremarkable on the outside, a glittering blaze within.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

This day in history (permalink)

#20yrsago Disney buries Moore’s new movie to save its tax-breaks https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/05/us/disney-is-blocking-distribution-of-film-that-criticizes-bush.html

#15yrsago Woman accuses cop neighbor of forging “Come get all my stuff for free” ad on Craigslist https://web.archive.org/web/20090507065346/https://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/city/arlington/stories/DN-craigslistcop_02met.ART.State.Edition2.4a690aa.html

#10yrsago How to Talk to Your Children About Mass Surveillance https://locusmag.com/2014/05/cory-doctorow-how-to-talk-to-your-children-about-mass-surveillance/

#10yrsago Straczynski: “The New Aristocracy” https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=760992300602302&id=139652459402959

#1yrago Ostromizing democracy https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/04/analytical-democratic-theory/#epistocratic-delusions

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, holding a mic.

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, holding a mic.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025

  • Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025

  • Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM

  • Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM

Latest podcast: Precaratize Bosses https://craphound.com/news/2024/04/28/precaratize-bosses/

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

Read the whole story
cjheinz
3 days ago
reply
I bought the eBook of The Steerswoman on Kobo for $2.99.
Share this story
Delete

Should Billionaires Exist? Do billionaires have a right to...
Wednesday May 1st, 2024 at 10:39 PM

Robert Reich
1 Comment


Should Billionaires Exist? 

Do billionaires have a right to exist?

America has driven more than 650 species to extinction. And it should do the same to billionaires.

Why? Because there are only five ways to become one, and they’re all bad for free-market capitalism:

1. Exploit a Monopoly.

Jamie Dimon is worth $2 billion today… but not because he succeeded in the “free market.” In 2008, the government bailed out his bank JPMorgan and other giant Wall Street banks, keeping them off the endangered species list.

This government “insurance policy” scored these struggling Mom-and-Pop megabanks an estimated $34 billion a year.

But doesn’t entrepreneur Jeff Bezos deserve his billions for building Amazon?

No, because he also built a monopoly that’s been charged by the federal government and 17 states for inflating prices, overcharging sellers, and stifling competition like a predator in the wild.

With better anti-monopoly enforcement, Bezos would be worth closer to his fair-market value.

2. Exploit Inside Information

Steven A. Cohen, worth roughly $20 billion headed a hedge fund charged by the Justice Department with insider trading “on a scale without known precedent.” Another innovator!

Taming insider trading would level the investing field between the C Suite and Main Street.

3.  Buy Off Politicians

That’s a great way to become a billionaire! The Koch family and Koch Industries saved roughly $1 billion a year from the Trump tax cut they and allies spent $20 million lobbying for. What a return on investment!

If we had tougher lobbying laws, political corruption would go extinct.

4. Defraud Investors

Adam Neumann conned investors out of hundreds of millions for WeWork, an office-sharing startup. WeWork didn’t make a nickel of profit, but Neumann still funded his extravagant lifestyle, including a $60 million private jet. Not exactly “sharing.”

Elizabeth Holmes was convicted of fraud for her blood-testing company, Theranos. So was Sam Bankman-Fried of crypto-exchange FTX. Remember a supposed billionaire named Donald Trump? He was also found to have committed fraud.

Presumably, if we had tougher anti-fraud laws, more would be caught and there’d be fewer billionaires to preserve.

5. Get Money From Rich Relatives

About 60 percent of all wealth in America today is inherited.

That’s because loopholes in U.S. tax law —lobbied for by the wealthy — allow rich families to avoid taxes on assets they inherit. And the estate tax has been so defanged that fewer than 0.2 percent of estates have paid it in recent years.

Tax reform would disrupt the circle of life for the rich, stopping them from automatically becoming billionaires at their birth, or someone else’s death.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not arguing against big rewards for entrepreneurs and inventors. But do today’s entrepreneurs really need billions of dollars? Couldn’t they survive on a measly hundred million?

Because they’re now using those billions to erode American institutions. They spent fortunes bringing Supreme Court justices with them into the wild.They treated news organizations and social media platforms like prey, and they turned their relationships with politicians into patronage troughs.

This has created an America where fewer than ever can become millionaires (or even thousandaires) through hard work and actual innovation.

If capitalism were working properly, billionaires would have gone the way of the dodo.

Read the whole story
cjheinz
6 days ago
reply
Hmmm ...
Share this story
Delete

The New Usury: The Ability-to-Repay Revolution in Consumer Finance by Adam Levitin
Tuesday April 30th, 2024 at 8:17 PM

Credit Slips
1 Comment

I have a new article out in the George Washington Law Review, entitled The New Usury: The Ability-to-Repay Revolution in Consumer Finance. The abstract is below:

American consumer credit regulation is in the midst of a doctrinal revolution. Usury laws, for centuries the mainstay of consumer credit regulation, have been repealed, preempted, or otherwise undermined. At the same time, changes in the structure of the consumer credit marketplace have weakened the traditional alignment of lender and borrower interests. As a result, lenders cannot be relied upon to avoid making excessively risky loans out of their own self-interest.

Two new doctrinal approaches have emerged piecemeal to fill the regulatory gap created by the erosion of usury laws and lenders’ self-interested restraint: a revived unconscionability doctrine and ability-to-repay requirements. Some courts have held loan contracts unconscionable based on excessive price terms, even if the loan does not violate the applicable usury law. Separately, for many types of credit products, lenders are now required to evaluate the borrower’s repayment capacity and to lend only within such capacity. The nature of these ability-to-repay requirements varies considerably, however, by product and jurisdiction. This Article terms these doctrinal developments collectively as the “New Usury.”

The New Usury represents a shift from traditional usury law’s bright-line rules to fuzzier standards like unconscionability and ability-to-repay. Although there are benefits to this approach, it has developed in a fragmented and haphazard manner. Drawing on the lessons from the New Usury, this Article calls for a more comprehensive and coherent approach to consumer credit price regulation through a federal ability-to-repay requirement for all consumer credit products coupled with product-specific regulatory safe harbors, a combination that offers the best balance of functional consumer protection and business certainty.

 

Read the whole story
cjheinz
7 days ago
reply
Our 1st home mortgage in Louisville in 1975 was capped at 8.5% because it was under $20,000 & the local usury law kicked in.
In 1981, we moved to Lexington & our $100,000 mortgage was at 14%, the worst we ever had.
Share this story
Delete

Dark Forests, Moving Castles by Erica Heinz
Wednesday April 17th, 2024 at 1:05 PM

Think in 4D
1 Share

If you’re interested in the current state and potential futures of online culture, I think you’ll really like this new collection of essays from Metalabel: The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet.

Share

The setup is charming: an initial essay on “dark forests” from Yancey Strickler in 2017 inspired a response on the “cozy web” by Venkatesh Rao, which inspired an illustration by Maggie Appleton, and so on.

This metaphor of a dark forest (inspired by Cixin Liu’s idea in The Three-Body Problem) — a non-indexed, non-optimized online gathering space where people have opted out of the unsafe and exploitative nature of the “clear net” — crystalized the detached, disillusioned feeling I’ve had toward the current SEO-optimized, corporate state of the web.

I also loved Arthur Roing Baer and GVN908’s experiments with the idea of a “moving castle” (of course inspired by the Ghibli film) — mini-communities that are collective, modular, portable, and interoperable. This put an interesting focus on technical protocol as a key element in community design.

And Yancey’s closing essay on the post-individual state. We do contain multitudes.

The collection also provides a great list of groups or people to follow for related ideas:

And the book itself is a lovely piece of print design.

The first edition sold out in a few days, they just released a second edition. https://darkforest.metalabel.com/dfa2

There’s also a panel with a bunch of the authors today at 3pm ET
https://lu.ma/ewrso61x

I will definitely revisit this book so I thought I would share.

PS, thanks to everyone who came here from my CreativeMornings FieldTrip! I’m glad the ideas resonated and please feel free to reach out with any afterthoughts :)

Think in 4D is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Read the whole story
cjheinz
20 days ago
reply
Share this story
Delete

How Do You Say ‘Danger’ in Sperm Whale Clicks? by Michaela Haas
Friday April 12th, 2024 at 10:30 AM

Reasons to be Cheerful
1 Comment and 2 Shares

This is part one of a two-part series. Part two will be published on Monday, April 15.

Sperm whales don’t sing melodious, moaning whale songs like their humpback cousins. The biggest predator on the planet communicates in clicks, called codas. Some compare the sounds to popping popcorn or frying bacon in a pan. For CUNY biologist David Gruber, it resembles “morse code or techno music.” 

Gruber, the founding president of Project CETI, the Cetacean Translation Initiative, often listens for hours in his New York office to the sperm whale chats his team has recorded in the Eastern Caribbean.

Sperm whale birth seen from above in the Eastern Caribbean.
Project CETI records sperm whale codas around the Eastern Caribbean island of Dominica. Courtesy of Project CETI

CETI focuses on sperm whales for several reasons. One reason is that it can build on the audio recordings that whale biologist Shane Gero has already been collecting for 15 years with the Dominica Sperm Whale Project. Gero was able to show that sperm whale families have different dialects, much like British and American English. “Another reason is that the sperm whale has been vilified as a killer, Moby Dick as a leviathan,” Gruber says. “Meanwhile it could be one of the most intelligent, sophisticated communicators on the planet.”

While the humpback whales sing their soprano songs primarily for mating, sperm whales are communicating to socialize and exchange information. CETI has already discovered that the communication patterns are complex. “Their codas are clicks, they are like ones and zeros, which is very good for cryptographers,” Gruber explains. “The combination of advanced machine learning and bioacoustics is slated to be the next microscope or telescope in terms of our ability to really listen more deeply and understand life at a new level.”

CETI’s team operates a giant whale-recording platform from a 40-foot sailboat off the coast of Dominica, a volcanic island in the Caribbean with a stable sperm whale population. Both by tagging the whales and installing whale listening stations with microphones dangling deep down into the ocean on floating buoys, CETI is recording several terabytes of data every month. The scientists are creating a three-dimensional interactive map of the whales within a 20-kilometer radius, combining sounds with data such as the whales’ heart rates. 

The post How Do You Say ‘Danger’ in Sperm Whale Clicks? appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.

Read the whole story
cjheinz
25 days ago
reply
Wow, whale speech!
Share this story
Delete

Pluralistic: The unexpected upside of multinational monopoly capitalism (10 Apr 2024) by Cory Doctorow
Wednesday April 10th, 2024 at 9:06 PM

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
1 Comment and 2 Shares


Today's links


Abraham Bosse's 17th century etching of David with a defeated Goliath. In the original, David marvels at his sling while standing astride the giant head of Goliath, which has been severed and sports a notable forehead-dent. The image has been modified, replacing the rock in David's sling with the Earth, and adding a monocle and top-hat to Goliath's severed head.

The unexpected upside of global monopoly capitalism (permalink)

Here's a silver lining to global monopoly capitalism: it means we're all fighting the same enemy, who is using the same tactics everywhere. The same coordination tools that allow corporations to extend their tendrils to every corner of the Earth allows regulators and labor organizers to coordinate their resistance.

That's a lesson Mercedes is learning. In 2023, Germany's Supply Chain Act went into effect, which bans large corporations with a German presence from using child labor, violating health and safety standards, and (critically) interfering with union organizers:

https://www.bafa.de/EN/Supply_Chain_Act/Overview/overview_node.html

Across the ocean, in the USA, Mercedes has a preference for building its cars in the American South, the so-called "right to work" states where US labor law is routinely flouted and unions are thin on the ground. As The American Prospect's Harold Meyerson writes, the only non-union Mercedes factories in the world are in the US:

https://prospect.org/labor/2024-04-08-american-workers-german-law-uaw-unions/

But American workers – especially southern workers – are on an organizing tear, unionizing their workplaces at a rate not seen in generations. Their unprecedented success is down to their commitment, solidarity and shrewd tactics – all buoyed by a refreshingly pro-worker NLRB, who have workers' backs in ways also not seen since the Carter administration:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/14/prop-22-never-again/#norms-code-laws-markets

Workers at Mercedes' factory in Vance, Alabama are trying to join the UAW, and Mercedes is playing dirty, using the tried-and-true union-busting tactics that have held workplace democracy at bay for decades. The UAW has lodged a complaint with the NLRB, naturally:

https://www.commondreams.org/news/alabama-mercedes-benz

But the UAW has also filed a complaint with BAFA, the German regulator in charge of the Supply Chain Act, seeking penalties against Mercedes-Benz Group AG:

https://uaw.org/uaw-files-charges-in-germany-against-mercedes-benz-companys-anti-union-campaign-against-u-s-autoworkers-violates-new-german-law-on-global-supply-chain-practices/

That's a huge deal, because the German Supply Chain Act goes hard. If Mercedes is convicted of union-busting in Alabama, its German parent-company faces a fine of 2% of its global total revenue, and will no longer be eligible to sell products to the German government. Chomp.

Now, the German Supply Chain Act is new, and this is the first petition filed by a non-German union with BAFA, so it's not a slam dunk. But supermajorities of Mercedes workers at the Alabama factory have signed UAW cards, and the election is going to happen in May or June. And the UAW – under new leadership, thanks to a revolution that overthrew the corrupt old guard – has its sights set on all the auto-makers in the American south.

As Meyerson writes, the south is America's onshore offshore, a regulatory haven where corporations pay minimal or no tax and are free to abuse their workers, pollute, and corrupt local governments with a free hand (no wonder American industry is flocking to these states). Meyerson: "The economic impact of unionizing the South, in other words, could almost be placed in the same category as reshoring work that had gone to China."

The German Supply Chain Act was passed with the help of Germany's powerful labor unions, in an act of solidarity with workers employed by German companies all over the world. This is that unexpected benefit to globalism: the fact that Mercedes has extrusions into both the American and German political spheres means that both American and German workers can collaborate to bring it to heel.

The same is true for antitrust regulators. The multinational corporations that are in regulators' crosshairs in the US, the EU, the UK, Australia, Japan, South Korea and beyond use the same playbook in every country. That's doubly true of Big Tech companies, who literally run the same code – embodying the same illegal practices – on servers in every country.

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority has led the pack on convening summits where antitrust enforcers from all over the world gather to compare notes and collaborate on enforcement strategies:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cma-data-technology-and-analytics-conference-2022-registration-308678625077

And the CMA's Digital Markets Unit – which boasts the the largest tech staff of any competition regulator in the world – produces detailed market studies that turn out to be roadmaps for other territories' enforces to follow – like this mobile market study:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/63f61bc0d3bf7f62e8c34a02/Mobile_Ecosystems_Final_Report_amended_2.pdf

Which was extensively referenced in the EU during the planning of the Digital Markets Act, and in the US Congress for similar legislation:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/2710

It also helped enforcers in Japan:

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/Japan-to-crack-down-on-Apple-and-Google-app-store-monopolies

And South Korea:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/skorea-considers-505-mln-fine-against-google-apple-over-app-market-practices-2023-10-06/

Just as Mercedes workers in Germany and the USA share a common enemy, allowing for coordinated action that takes advantage of vulnerable flanks wherever they are found, anti-monopoly enforcers are sharing notes, evidence, and tactics to strike at multinationals that are bigger than most countries – but not when those countries combine.

This is an unexpected upside to global monopolies: when we all share a common enemy, we've got endless opportunities for coordinated offenses and devastating pincer maneuvers.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

This day in history (permalink)

#20yrsago Promising anti-obesity pill https://web.archive.org/web/20040419011611/http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/apr2004/tc2004048_9548_tc122.htm

#20yrsago NDP leader Jack Layton endorses P2P https://memex.craphound.com/2004/04/09/canadas-ndp-leader-endorses-p2p/

#20yrsago EFF on Gmail https://web.archive.org/web/20040420195950/https://blogs.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/001375.php#001375

#15yrsago Cold dead hand of Frank Herbert reaches up from grave, stabs Dune Second Life megafans in the back https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2009/04/enforcers-of-dune.html

#15yrsago French government nukes crazy Internet law in open revolt against Sarkozy https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/apr/09/france-illegal-downloads-state-surveillance

#10yrsago NSA spies on human rights groups, including those in the USA https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/08/snowden-council-of-europe-testimony/

#10yrsago Prosecutors wage war on judges who insist on fairness https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/03/07/judge-says-prosecutors-should-follow-the-law-prosecutors-revolt/

#10yrsago LAPD officers sabotage their own voice-recorders: nothing to hide, nothing to fear? https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/04/lapd-officers-monkey-wrenched-cop-monitoring-gear-in-patrol-cars/

#5yrsago Today, Michigan regulators vote on conservative education “reform” plan to purge the word “democracy” from curriculum https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/michigan-conservatives-vie-to-cut-democracy-from-classroom.html

#5yrsago The Chinafication of the internet continues as the UK proposes blocking any service that hosts “illegal” or “harmful” material https://memex.craphound.com/2019/04/09/the-chinafication-of-the-internet-continues-as-the-uk-proposes-blocking-any-service-that-hosts-illegal-or-harmful-material/

#5yrsago How to Do Nothing: Jenny Odell’s case for resisting “The Attention Economy” https://memex.craphound.com/2019/04/09/how-to-do-nothing-jenny-odells-case-for-resisting-the-attention-economy/

#1yrsago How To Make a Child-Safe TikTok https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/09/how-to-make-a-child-safe-tiktok/

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, holding a mic.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025

  • Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025

  • Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM

  • Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM

Latest podcast: Subprime gadgets https://craphound.com/news/2024/03/31/subprime-gadgets/

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

Read the whole story
cjheinz
27 days ago
reply
Hooray, truly good news!
Share this story
Delete
Next Page of Stories