Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Good ideas are popular; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/07/the-people-no/
1/
Discussion
Loading...
@pluralistic@mamot.fr
> By not hanging together, the rich let us hang them separately.
delicious
Hey, German-speakers! Through a very weird set of circumstances, I ended up owning the rights to the German audiobook of my bestselling 2022 cryptocurrency heist technothriller Red Team Blues and now I'm selling DRM-free audio and ebooks, along with the paperback (all in German and English) on a Kickstarter that runs until August 11:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-auf-deutsche-drm-freie
2/
Good ideas are popular: But they're impolitic.
https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/114988212993089651
https://x.com/doctorow/status/1953481516094304386
3/
Hey look at this
* It’s not just Figma https://economicpopulist.substack.com/p/its-not-just-figma
* These GOP Lawmakers Referred Constituents to the CFPB for Help. Then They Voted to Gut the Agency https://www.propublica.org/article/cfpb-budget-cuts-gop-darrell-issa-john-cornyn
* The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/
* AI Is A Money Trap https://www.wheresyoured.at/ai-is-a-money-trap/
* Precarious Employment in Precarious Futures https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/precarious-employment-in-precarious-futures/
4/
@pluralistic
The #LLM Mentalist article is excellent! Reminded me of another great article I read a while ago about how #QAnon was using game theory to induce fervent belief in the accuracy of predictions.
I've seen a few articles already about the tragic consequences for vulnerable psyches who believed a Chatbot 'really understood them'
https://medium.com/curiouserinstitute/a-game-designers-analysis-of-qanon-580972548be5
#20yrsago Charlie Stross, Hugo winner https://web.archive.org/web/20050810024249/http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2005/08/07/#hugo-thing
#10yrsago Veiny, slick silicone ovipositors https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkfFZnK5W9s
#10yrsago A treadmill for Slinky toys, for your infinite Slinky-torturing pleasure https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dinVcBEDhQ
#10yrsago The Princess and the Pony, from Kate “Hark a Vagrant” Beaton https://memex.craphound.com/2015/08/07/the-princess-and-the-pony-from-kate-hark-a-vagrant-beaton/
#5yrsago Free the law https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/08/turkeys-for-christmas-party/#recap
#5yrsago Google bans anticompetitive vocabularies https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/08/turkeys-for-christmas-party/#newspeak
5/
#5yrsago Peter Thiel was right https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/08/turkeys-for-christmas-party/#christmas-voting-turkeys
#1yrago The Google antitrust remedy should extinguish surveillance, not democratize it https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/#extinguish-v-improve
6/
Yesterday's threads: Which jobs can be replaced with AI? and more!
https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/114982315617245566
7/
~7 more replies (not shown)
My latest novel is "Picks and Shovels," a historical technothriller set in the Weird Era of the PC, about Ponzi schemes, techbros, and the dawn of enshittification:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels
--
My next nonfiction book is "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," out from MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux on October 7:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
8/
My ebooks and audiobooks (from Tor Books, Head of Zeus, McSweeneys, Beacon, Verso and others) 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."
9/
Upcoming appearances:
* #Ithaca: AD White keynote (Cornell), Sep 12
https://deanoffaculty.cornell.edu/events/keynote-cory-doctorow-professor-at-large/
* #DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8
https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825
* #SanFrancisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20
https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25
* #NewOrleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
http://www.contraflowscifi.org/
* #Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469
10/
bonfire.cafe
A space for Bonfire maintainers and contributors to communicate
Automatic federation enabled