The remix culture of the early 2000s left an indelible impression on me, an enduring delight in the power of whimsy, juxtaposition, virtuosity and ingenuity - and the ability of strangers all over the world to collaborate without any explicit coordination.

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Surveillance companies assure us that they employ safeguards to ensure that their customers aren't abusing their products to engage in unlawful or unethical surveillance. And yet, inevitably, these companies abuse their tools THEMSELVES.

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It's almost as though being the kind of person who dreams of achieving incredible wealthy by spying on people makes you kind of an asshole.

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Like the people at @VerkadaHQ, "a fast-growing Silicon Valley surveillance startup" whose male employees used its own products to sexually harass their female colleagues and received the barest wrist-slaps for

Male Verkada employees maintained a private Slack channel where executives posted photos of female employees - captured with the company's own surveillance tools - and made sexually explicit remarks about them.

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When this came to light, the company's founder and CEO Filip Kaliszan called an all-hands meeting, expressed disappointment in the harassers, and told them that they could either quit...or lose some stock options. They chose the latter and remain employed there to this day.

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When it's railroading time, you get railroads.

When the railroads turn into the personal satrapies of rail-barons, you get trustbusters.

A couple decades ago, it was online service time. We had the users, the telcoms systems, the computers, the modems, so we got platforms.

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We had that, but we lacked something important: effective antimonopoly enforcement. Lax merger laws allowed companies with access to capital markets to buy out or neutralize all their competitors, so we got monopolies.

Right on schedule, we're getting digital trustbusters.

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Now, some people aren't technically sophisticated, but they do understand a lot about competition law. That's how you get meat-and-taters antitrust proposals like @amyklobuchar's #CALERA, which address the structural problems with antitrust

Klobuchar's bill is hugely important. The reason we have monopolies is that we stopped enforcing anti-monopoly law 40 years ago. Monopoly isn't a tech problem, it's everywhere from sneakers to glass bottles to pro wrestling to candy to

Klobuchar's CALERA doesn't just seek to apply antitrust law to tech - it also explicitly restores the pre-Reagan basis for fighting monopolies: we fight monopolies because they concentrate power and corrupt our politics. All monopolies are guilty unless proven otherwise.

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If you think "It's not censorship unless the government does it," I want to change your mind.

It's absolutely true that the First Amendment only prohibits government action to suppress speech based on its content, but the First Amendment is not the last word on censorship.

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Here are some kinds of private speech-suppression that I think most of us can agree are censorship: when the John Birch Society burned mountains of rock records and novels - or when Tipper Gore's PMRC pressured record stores to drop punk, metal and rap albums.

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Or the Comics Code Authority, which signed up all comics publishers and retailers to block comics if they contained anything unfit for small children, which stunted American comics for generations while their European counterparts created entire sophisticated genres.

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Or MPAA ratings, in which a secret group of censors (falsely described as frequently rotated, randomly selected parents - really they're long-serving studio insiders) decides whether movies get NC-17 ratings and thus be blocked from nearly every screen in the country.

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(You can learn more about this from Kirby Dick's unmissable doc, "This Film Is Not Yet Rated," which documents both how the MPAA misleads the public about ratings, and uses them to block LGBTQ

When you hear the phrase "free market," you probably think of "a market that is free from regulation" but that's the opposite of the phrase's original meaning!

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Adam Smith used the term to describe a market that was free from "economic rents" - money earned by owning things, rather than doing things. Smith recognized that markets attract parasites - "rentiers" - who seek to drain wealth by "investing" rather than building and doing.

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Which meant that, in the absence of muscular state intervention, markets would become less and less free - more and more dependent on the whims of rentiers who used money to breed money by creating toll-barriers between parts of the productive economy.

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For Smith, markets were only free if they were regulated. But that's the opposite of the way that we talk about free markets today. Today, a free market is a market where you are free to collect rents - passive income from owning things, at the expense of people doing things.

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This is true in so many metaphorical ways, but it's especially true when we're talking about actual rent - actual homes that people need to survive and produce, whose primary role today is to serve as an asset class to be maximized, not a basic human right.

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Ring - Amazon's surveillance doorbell division - has 4,000 "partnerships" with US police ("public safety") orgs. The company has lied about how these work for years, but the basic deal is that they give cops free stuff to buzz-market their products.

https://t.co/716iaXUXWR

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Ring tells its customers that they get to choose whether to share the footage from their street-facing cameras with cops, but that's a lie, too. If you say no, the cops still get to look through your

That's why cops debase themselves to serve as buzz-marketers for Ring - in exchange, they get an off-the-books, free-to-use, warrantless, city-scale, video surveillance grid.

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It's an investment that pays off. Back in July, @EFF documented how the @SFPD was able to commandeer 200 Ring cameras to produce surveillance data on #BLM

And in a new blockbuster report, EFF's @maassive and @mguariglia document how @LAPDHQ did the same thing, fraudulently using "unusual occurance" protocols to gain access to last summer's BLM

Welcome to the end of year Brendan thread. I am going to post every Brendan I have in my phone (253). They're literally just going to appear in the order I saved them. Unfortunately I've no idea who the vast majority of them were made by so I can't attribute credit. Let's begin.

The one and only original. I do know who made this because I asked her (@katastrophising) to do it for an article. Lol.

Another classic.

Brainworms, this was for another article.

Moody shot.

Happy #WorldEggDay everyone! Let's share a few egg facts to celebrate.

Did you know... a chicken's earlobes can predict what colour egg they will lay?

Fake chicken eggs are a problem in China. Manufactured false eggs made from resin, coagulent and starch in a counterfeit shell are being sold as real by fraudsters. #WorldEggDay

In 1806 con artist Mary Bateman scratched the words "Christ is coming" on numerous eggs before inserting then back up a chicken. She then charged people to see the 'miracle eggs' being laid. #WorldEggDay

The world record for eating hard boiled eggs is 65 swallowed in 6 mins 40 secs by Sonya Thomas. She could have eaten more but they ran out of eggs. #WorldEggDay

And finally... Canadian scientists concluded in 2008 that the egg did indeed come before the chicken: dinosaurs were laying them long before they evolved into birds.

Every day's a school day... #WorldEggDay

Mariah Carey albums as 👁👄👁

Emotions

MTV Unplugged

Music Box

Merry Christmas

Tonight I'm going to share a special
#ChristmasStory with you. It's based on the story our mamas tell us so that we aren't afraid and bark at Santy Claws. My canine friend Moe & a human named Jodie inspired me to create this as a holiday gift for my Twitter friends.

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Please follow along and be patient with me.

Our Story is called:
Moe Knows: A Christmas Tail.

Moe Knows loneliness. 

He was an adorable puppy. Some kind of bully breed mix born just before Christmas. When he was just a little tyke he was bought by a man wanting something
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that would grow into a big guard dog. So Moe was taken from his mama & siblings and went to his new home. His first night there he spent alone in a garage with only a thin blanket between him and the floor. Moe cried all night. 

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Moe knows cold.

He spent his days chained in a yard and his nights in the garage. Being a mischievous pup, Moe eventually found things in the garage to play with & chew on. This made the man very angry & Moe was no longer allowed to sleep in the garage. He stayed chained

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outdoors and huddled under an old truck in the yard to keep out of the wind & keep dry.

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SWEEEEEET DIGS by Ripstababyyy
Thread of pics.
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