This week on my podcast, the seventh and final part of my serialized reading of my 2020 One Zero book HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM, a book arguing that monopoly — not AI-based brainwashing — is the real way that tech controls our behavior.

https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59

The book is available in paperback:

https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907

and DRM-free ebook :

https://sowl.co/bm2F7c

and my local bookseller, Dark Delicacies, has signed stock that I’ll drop by and personalize for you!

https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html

Here’s the podcast episode:

https://craphound.com/nonficbooks/destroy/2021/05/17/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-part-07/

And here’s part one:

https://craphound.com/nonficbooks/destroy/2021/04/05/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-part-01/

And part two:

https://craphound.com/nonficbooks/destroy/2021/04/12/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-part-02/…

Reviving pre-enclosure glory.

I met Danny O’Brien on 9/11/01, at a surreal dinner we pressed on with despite (or really, because of) the intense terror of the day. He was wearing a t-shirt from NTK, his seminal digital newsletter, bearing its slogan: “THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE’RE STEALING IT BACK”

Online culture has its roots in a strange swirl of hobbyists, the military, corporate misfits fooling around with their employers’ vast computer labs and students and academics dabbling in the early digital world.

It was no garden of Eden. There was plenty of fighting and plenty of difference, but…

John Steinbeck diagnosed an important American pathology in 1966 when he called the US a nation of “temporarily embarrassed capitalists” — people who see themselves as the wealthy-in-waiting and therefore fight policies that reduce the power that comes from wealth.

It’s a restatement of Engels’ idea of “false consciousness,” and it’s the result of a deliberate strategy on the part of wealthy people — many of whom believe that they were literally genetically destined to be wealthy — to convince the rest of us that “anyone can succeed.”

Part of the false consciousness program is the money story that goes…

#20yrsago Excellent history of weblogs http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html

#20yrsago Having “sex” in your surname gets you into trouble with profanity filters http://bissex.net/paul/profanity.gif

#10yrsago Scalzi’s Fuzzy Nation: a masterful, likable reboot of one of the great sf classics https://memex.craphound.com/2011/05/16/scalzis-fuzzy-nation-a-masterful-likable-reboot-of-one-of-the-great-sf-classics/

#10yrsago Piracy sends “Go the Fuck to Sleep” to #1 on Amazon https://www.baycitizen.org/go-the-f-to-sleep-the-case-of-the-viral-pdf/

#5yrsago Lumberjanes: ground-breaking, wonderful, hilarious comic about adventurous girls https://memex.craphound.com/2016/05/16/lumberjanes-ground-breaking-wonderful-hilarious-comic-about-adventurous-girls/

#5yrsago The Intercept begins publishing Snowden docs https://theintercept.com/snowden-sidtoday/

#1yrago Google faces antitrust blitz https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/16/labor-investors/#big-goog

Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist, and blogger. He has a podcast, a newsletter, a Twitter feed, a Mastodon feed, and a Tumblr feed…

A key idea from sf is “all laws are local, and no law knows how local it is.” Prisoners of our own time and place, it’s hard not to feel like we’re living in the only possible world, is if everything around us is inevitable and natural — and any change is “unnatural.”

But anyone who’s ever dabbled in multi-agent modeling (sims where “individuals” each have their own goals and aversions) knows there are lots of stable configurations that a big, complex system can fall into, and re-rerunning the same sim produces wildly different outcomes.

14 months ago, we hit…

#20yrsago Vegas outcall services phreak each others’ phoneshttps://www.securityfocus.com/news/205

#15yrsago Gmail downgraded, no longer cracks PDFs https://web.archive.org/web/20060603055956/https://akira.arts.kuleuven.ac.be/andreas/blog/archives/2006/05/gmail-cripples-drmed-pdf-files-view-as-html-functionality.html

#10yrsago Walter Jon Williams uses pirate ebooks to rescue his backlist http://www.walterjonwilliams.net/2011/05/crowdsource-please/

#5yrsago Algorithmic cruelty: when Gmail adds your harasser to your speed-dial https://lizdenys.com/journal/articles/inboxs-accidentally-abusive-algorithm.html

#1yrago Tear gas ice-cream https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/15/out-here-everything-hurts/#612strike

#1yrago Whistleblower warns of massive mortgage fraud https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/15/out-here-everything-hurts/#cmbs

#1yrago A people’s vaccine https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/15/out-here-everything-hurts/#accesstomedicine

#1yrago Google’s GDPR reckoning https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/15/out-here-everything-hurts/#noyb…

Last week, the Biden administration broke with decades of US policy when it supported a patent waiver on covid vaccines. It was the first time in generations that the US Trade Rep acted on behalf of the people, rather than corporate greed.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/10/comrade-ustr/#vaccine-diplomacy

Taking steps to make vaccines universally and immediately available isn’t just the right thing to do — vaccine apartheid is slow-motion genocide — it’s also the smart thing to do. Billions of unvaccinated people present quadrillions of chances for the virus to mutate.

Don’t listen to the unscientific claims that viruses “tend to become less virulent” over…

When the Great Financial Crisis hit, suddenly there was a lot of talk about the Savings & Loan crises of the 1980s and 90s. I was barely a larvum then, and all I knew about S&Ls I learned from half-understood dialog in comics like Dykes to Watch Out For and Bloom County.

As the GFC shattered the lives of millions, I turned to books like Michael W. Hudson’s THE MONSTER to understand what was going on, and learned that the very same criminals who masterminded the S&L crisis were behind the GFC gigafraud:

https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/07/the-monster-the-fraud-and-depraved-indifference-that-caused-the-subprime-meltdown/

Hudson’s work forever changed my views…