Cory Doctorow #BLM's Threads

Publishing works on long schedules, which means that long-planned books can be overtaken by events...like covid.

2020 was tough for those of us with books in trail, especially nonfiction. But for a few lucky writers, covid imparted a terrible salience to their books.

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One such writer is @TimHarford, host of @BBCRadio4's @bbcmoreorless, which is hands-down the greatest statistical literacy program in the world, using the numbers in each week's headlines to impart statistical lessons and render the news in perspective.

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Harford's latest book is THE DATA DETECTIVE (published as HOW TO MAKE THE WORLD ADD UP in the UK), which should really have been entitled HOW TO TRUTH WITH

You've likely heard of Darrell Huff's 1954 classic HOW TO LIE WITH STATISTICS, a classic, accessible guide to statistical malpractice in service to pushing an agenda. What I didn't know (until I heard Harford discourse on it) was that Huff himself had an ulterior motive.

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Huff was a shill for the tobacco industry, which, in 1954, was deliberately muddying the waters about the link between cancer and smoking. Huff's book isn't just a guide to statistical malpractice - it's a broadside against cancer

Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

US law enforcement has literal centuries of shameful history of infiltrating and spying on politically disfavored activist groups, from trade unionists to suffragists to abolitionists to civil rights advocates to antiwar advocates.

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Long before #cointelpro, federal agencies were intercepting communications and embedding as provocateurs in radical political movements, often with the help of mercenary "contractors" like the @pinkerton_agent. The digital age only ramped up this public-private surveillance.

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The #NoDAPL protests were infiltrated and surveilled by beltway bandits who billed the US taxpayer handsomely for the

2020's #BLM uprising was subjected to the full array of military and national intelligence surveillance: drones, IMSI catchers, mass interception, infiltrators, wiretaps, "reverse warrants" to recover location data from Big Tech monopolists and

And yet, federal and local agencies were seemingly totally unprepared for a mob of thousands of armed terrorists who stormed the capitol, disrupted the transition of presidential power, and threatened the lives of US legislators as well as the integrity of state documents.

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Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

Today we have three major record labels, the meanest, most voracious gobblers-up of the competition, companies that clawed their way to global dominance through absolute ruthlessness, particularly to the musicians who did the work that brought in the money.

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For example: the Beatles earned $0.01/record.

Split four ways.

But 15% of that was creamed off by the label to account for "promotional copies" that they later admitted they sold at full price without giving the Beatles their ONE PENNY of royalties.

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When Napster and other digital distribution platforms appeared, many musicians were angry about them, but many were hopeful: was this - finally - a way to be free of the labels?

It was!

For a while.

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The subsequent record industry lawsuits combined with runaway mergers and acquisitions in BOTH tech (5 giants) AND entertainment (4 studios, 4ish publishers, 3 labels) killed the dream of a pluralistic, fair alternative to the content oligarchy.

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This was confirmed when Youtube launched its music service in the early part of the past decade. After hammering out a deal with the Big Four (now three) labels, YT told all the independent artists and labels that this would be their deal too - or they could leave Youtube.

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Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

When I think about our historical, profound shifts in attitude and discourse, the model I apply is "peak indifference."

Say you have real, existential problem. More often than not, these are systemic problems, and those are the hardest problems.

https://t.co/US1YbwIikM

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Not just because systemic problems involve collective action (you can't recycle your way out of climate change), but because the cause-and-effect relationships of systemic problems can't be easily known, so it's hard to know what you need to do to avert the problem.

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Systemic problems pose a third difficulty: they enrich small minorities, and those minorities can exploit causal ambiguity to deliberately sow doubt.

To make that more concrete: think about cancer-tobacco denial.

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Not everyone who smokes gets cancer. When it does give you cancer, the tumor comes years after the puff that damages your genes. There's lots of social pressure to smoke, and getting your friends to quit is even harder than quitting yourself.

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And on top of all of it, the tobacco industry made tons of money from giving us cancer, and they could use some of that to fund doubt-merchants who deliberately worsened the difficulty in linking smoking and

Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

Have you seen the stories about how Trump administration officials and staffers for Ted Cruz are finding that no one in the private sector will hire them because they are forever tainted by their former bosses' disgraceful behavior?

They're bullshit.

https://t.co/XvYDPpR9yd

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The Swamped site from @twittlesis is a crowdsourced list of Trump's ugliest swamp-gators and the employers who put them in positions of power and authority despite their complicity with a fascist would-be

On @TheProspect, @alex_sammon provides highlights of the swamp-to-industry pipeline.

Unsurprisingly, babykiller companies LOVE Trump's gators. Jim Mattis? Board member for General Dynamics. Andrea Thompson? Northrop Grumman. HR McMaster? Zoom.

Rick Perry is back at Energy Transfer Partners, parleying his government service into a plum role in energetically rendering the planet unfit for human habitation.

Ryan Zinke's in fintech.

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As punishment for his multitude of sins as the president's personal attorney, Donald McGahn has been sentenced to the Wearing of the White Shoes, threatening people on behalf of the clients of corporate law powerhouse Jones Day.

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Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

When we say that "an algorithm is biased" we usually mean, "biased people made an algorithm." This explains why so much machine learning prediction turns into phrenology.

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Researchers with phrenological delusions ask machines to find statistical correlates of personalities or emotions, and machines dutifully provides them. It's high-stakes, machine-human collaborative apophenia, detecting patterns where none

Regrettably, this junk science gets published in respected journals. In 2017, @nature published a study by Stanford's Michal Kosinski claiming that machine learning could detect the facial correlates of homosexuality, creating an alleged AI gaydar.

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Unsurprisingly, Kosinski's study spectacularly failed to replicate. But as is so often the case, the blockbuster finding gets all the press, the careful replication work that calls it into doubt is roundly

Kosinski hasn't given up on AI phrenology. His lab's latest paper (published by Nature...again!) claims that he can detect political affiliation from social media

Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

Macarthur fellow and Hugo-award-winner @nkjemisin's 2019 book "The City We Became" is both a fantastic contemporary fantasy novel and a scorching commentary on the infantile nature of the racist dogma of HP Lovecraft and his

It's a quest novel about a group of New Yorkers who awaken one day to discover that they are mystical avatars of the city, which has awakened and been reborn as a kind of powerful colony organism.

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There's an avatar for each of the five boroughs, plus a "primary" who represents the city as a whole. As with all births, this one is somewhat traumatic - but NYC's birth is uniquely fraught.

First, the five boroughs must find one another and connect with the primary.

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But they must do all this while under sustained assault from a mystical, transdimensional, Lovecraftian horror, a great adversary to all of our Earth's living cities - but an adversary that had been believed to be powerless against cities after their births.

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The enemy manifests as a Karen, a white woman clad all in white, dogwhistling racist tropes, summoning police, weaponizing vast fortunes to evict its enemies or distort their culture. It is attended by harbingers - human beings infected with fluttering white tentacles.

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Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Amazon warehouse union gets tech solidarity; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/KYnbqjE9Ws

#Pluralistic

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Amazon warehouse union gets tech solidarity: #DoItWithRealPower

https://t.co/cby43y3aaU

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While many Amazon warehouse workers in Europe have unionized, its brutalized, underpaid, routinely maimed US workforce remains tragically unorganized, thanks to the US's weak labor laws that make forming a union far harder than at any time since the Gilded Age.

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— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) January 19, 2021

#15yrsago Mysterious birthday ritual at Poe’s graveside disrupted by rubberneckers https://t.co/16m4DbuG1h

#15yrsago Nutjob offers $100 bounty to UCLA students who wiretap lefty profs https://t.co/47JtauT8Vy

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#5yrsago Transreal Cyberpunk! Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling’s book of annotated, seminal cyberpunk fiction https://t.co/MTANIei5nB

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#5yrsago The Democratic Party’s SOPA-loving, Snowden-hating, Hillary-partisan power-broker has her first-ever primary challenger https://t.co/olMdn1u9Ey

#5yrsago Griefer hacks baby monitor, terrifies toddler with spooky voices https://t.co/m5VspAuXXa

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Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

In 2019, @propublica and @postandcourier ran blockbuster investigations into SC's magistrate judges: inexperienced political appointees with no training who held South Carolinians' lives in their hands - and who use the bench to extract bribes, deal in overt racism and worse.

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The first revealed that SC's magistrates got less training than its barbers, and their appointments, though subject to reapproval, were practically speaking lifelong and irrevocable, regardless of misconduct, bumbling, or actual criminal

The qualifications process is bizarre. SC magistrates need to pass a one-hour exam, but they can (and do) re-take it many times without penalty. That test includes questions like "Which of the following numbers is larger?" And magistrates fail that test. Repeatedly.

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Magistrates are so ill-qualified that the rare, decent appointee can end up repeatedly breaking the law without knowing it, as construction worker (and local GOP chairman) Arthur Bryngelson did, leading to him resigning in horror and reporting himself for breaches.

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Not all of the unqualified magistrates have Bryngelson's moral fiber: BBQ chef/magistrate Clemon Stocker got his relative Willie Earl Reese released on bail after he pistol-whipped a man. Reese murdered his wife five days later.

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Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

Captain America II: Death Too Soon (1979) https://t.co/S89X94JBZ7

Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: DC's security theater panned; Weaponing and monetizing apophenia; Awful voting-machine demands silence; Someone Comes to Town Part 27; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/CUFiNYTvuH

#Pluralistic

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DC's security theater panned: The curtain-call's gonna be BRUTAL.

https://t.co/7FO2EVuLin

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After the 9/11 attacks, airlines and public buildings adopted a flurry of "security" measures, like taking away pen-knives from fliers or requiring visitors to office buildings to be photographed or present a driver's license.

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— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) January 11, 2021

Weaponing and monetizing apophenia: 5G conspiracies have a business-model.

https://t.co/UYj54qjPrn

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In 2003's Pattern Recognition, @greatdismal discusses the role of "apophenia" - finding patterns where none exist - in paranoid thinking. We are a pattern-matching animal, prone to seeing faces in clouds and hearing speech in static.https://t.co/lKHfKbvzLN

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— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) January 11, 2021

Awful voting-machine demands silence: ES&S; piggybacks censorship on Dominion's grievances.

https://t.co/8VQsjC5hHQ

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One of the great ironies of the "stop the steal" conspiratorial fraud and its focus on Dominion's voting machines is that voting machines are, in fact, flaming garbage.

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— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) January 11, 2021

Someone Comes to Town Part 27: My latest podcast installment.

https://t.co/YGWxhe6VxQ

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This week on my podcast: part 27 of my serialized reading of "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town," my 2006 novel that Gene Wolfe called "a glorious book unlike any book you\u2019ve ever read." It's my last podcast of 2020!https://t.co/AfW9wyix9A

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— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) January 11, 2021

Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Competition is Killing Us; Predatory lender seeks national bank charter; Militarizing cops was a failure; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/mFat1Fsadn

#Pluralistic

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Competition is Killing Us: Consumer harm considered harmful.

https://t.co/oJTENrDhFD

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2020 was a shitty year for most things, but it was a banner year for books about fighting monopolies, and for the fight itself.

It started (in Dec '19) with @matthewstoller's GOLIATH, a massive, comprehensive history of monopolies in America.https://t.co/qzY5dPnKRg

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— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) January 8, 2021

Predatory lender seeks national bank charter: Oportun led America in suing latinx borrowers during the pandemic.

https://t.co/FPK6NTwFjj

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"Partner with us today to build a better tomorrow" - that's the slogan for @oportun, a predatory lender that sued more poor latinx people during the pandemic than any other.https://t.co/ULX8hBCO5a

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— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) January 8, 2021

Militarizing cops was a failure: Water still wet.

https://t.co/OACizKzNru

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In 1997, the Clinton administration created the "1033" program, whereby the Pentagon gave away its "surplus" equipment to local law enforcement agencies, leading to the nationwide militarization of America's cops.

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— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) January 8, 2021

#15yrsago Hollywood’s Canadian MP claims she’s no dirtier than the rest https://t.co/iOEH3n3sON

#15yrsago John McDaid’s brilliant sf story Keyboard Practice free online https://t.co/ciVbtorYiV

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Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

Today's threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Twitter's Project Blue Sky; Brazil's world-beating data breach; Evictions and utility cutoffs are covid comorbidities; "North Korea" targets infosec researchers; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/eCzogk14kg

#Pluralistic

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Join me this Thursday for the launch of the print edition of my 2020 book HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM!

https://t.co/8Op6IEocPB

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Twitter's Project Blue Sky: Fix the internet, not the platforms.

https://t.co/KoZNABMJrE

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It's been more than a year since @jack announced Project Blue Sky, inspired by @mmasnick's "Protocols, Not Platforms," paper - a critical work explaining how walled gardens can be transformed into open protocols.https://t.co/1yDSNJehRP

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— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) January 26, 2021

Brazil's world-beating data breach: More than 100% of the population doxed.

https://t.co/6tcbcX2gQ6

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Brazil's public health agency has suffered what is arguably the worst data-exposure in world history, losing 243m+ records in a country of 211m people (the excess represents dead peoples' records).https://t.co/VsQUtIEnC7

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— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) January 26, 2021

Evictions and utility cutoffs are covid comorbidities: 143,000 covid deaths due to economic precarity.

https://t.co/pZM80W5DuR

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"Public health" isn't just about vaccinations, clinics and urgent care: it's a holistic discipline that encompasses all the contributors to health outcomes, which include things like housing, employment, transportation, pollution and more.

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— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) January 26, 2021

Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

Today's threads (a thread).

Inside: My Fellow Americans; Digital manorialism vs neofeudalism; SC GOP moots modest improvements to "magistrate judges"; Pavilions replacing union workers with "gig workers"; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/X4sEk5g09z

#Pluralistic

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My Fellow Americans: Audio, text and commentary for every president's inaugural address.

https://t.co/LR7wvnV8i0

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My Fellow Americans is Yuvraj Sing's open licensed (CC0) /name your price book tracing the histories of US presidential inaugural addresses; it reproduces each address along with a scholarly essay exploring its context.https://t.co/xbfkZNleKS

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— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) January 4, 2021

Digital manorialism vs neofeudalism: Tech companies as warlords with walled gardens.

https://t.co/uQ9rDCA8i3

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These warlords - Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft - all have the best cybermercenaries money can buy stationed at their gates and on their parapets, and they will defend you against anyone the warlord declares to be your enemy.

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— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) January 4, 2021

South Carolina GOP moots modest improvements to "magistrate judges": Lewis Carroll was an optimist.

https://t.co/1AQpZYwhOj

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In 2019, @propublica and @postandcourier ran blockbuster investigations into SC's magistrate judges: inexperienced political appointees with no training who held South Carolinians' lives in their hands - and who use the bench to extract bribes, deal in overt racism and worse.

1/ pic.twitter.com/61opolmPqD
— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) January 5, 2021

Pavilions replacing union workers with "gig workers": Prop 22's other shoe drops.

https://t.co/hlX0A0S96c

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#Prop22 was the most expensive ballot initiative in history: "gig economy" companies firehosed $200m over voters, outspending 48/50 state legislative races on a single question.

That question: can employers misclassify workers as contractors and escape legal obligations?

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— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) January 5, 2021

Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: 20 years a blogger; Will Biden bust trusts?; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/8eRWqssqXf

#Pluralistic

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20 years a blogger: Reflections on a lifetime of reflecting.

https://t.co/XyvbPirvhE

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It's been twenty years, to the day, since I published my first blog-post.

I'm a blogger.

Blogging - publicly breaking down the things that seem significant, then synthesizing them in longer pieces - is the defining activity of my days. https://t.co/lksXhU6HKM

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— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) January 13, 2021

Will Biden bust trusts?: Obama's third term would be a disaster for antitrust.

https://t.co/FMc798VhI0

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Despite the massive triumphs of the world's largest corporations and most rapacious billionaires during the covid crisis, neoliberalism is in ideological retreat: more people are more critical of the idea that "free markets" can solve big problems than at any time in my life.

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— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) January 13, 2021

#10yrsago Disney World’s awful Tiki Room catches fire https://t.co/exhhsaAnzD;

#10yrsago Disney World’s awful Tiki Room catches fire https://t.co/6t7jy4xIRt

#10yrsago Interview with hacker anthropologist Biella Coleman https://t.co/uf1wSr4X4L

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#5yrsago Income inequality makes the 1% sad, too https://t.co/DYzjE2uRFz

#1yrago The bubbles in VR, cryptocurrency and machine learning are all part of the parallel computing bubble https://t.co/qWZmB7u1sD

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Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Pelosi kicks Katie Porter off the Finance Committee; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/zf4VwiHi1P

#Pluralistic

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Pelosi kicks Katie Porter off the Finance Committee: Paging Upton Sinclair, Mr Sinclair to the white courtesy phone.

https://t.co/dZSiJ1xFry

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The Democrats are at least two parties. The progressive wing of the party (which is by no means unified) and the finance wing of the party, which is also the party leadership.

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— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) January 16, 2021

#20yrsago Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s formal excommunication https://t.co/7YzBVPa9pr

#15yrsago New discussion draft of GNU General Public License is released https://t.co/s75A4o6n6G

#15yrsago Firefly fans trying to raise enough $ to produce a new season

#15yrsago King Foundation uses copyright to suppress “I Have a Dream” speech https://t.co/PeYSLzHkuq

#5yrsago Worried about Chinese spies, the FBI freaked out about Epcot Center https://t.co/yzSSdYBikn

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#1yrago Court case lays bare KPMG’s crimes: poaching employees from its own regulators and making them steal government secrets https://t.co/JdLATfUqF2

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Authors Cory Doctorow #BLM