Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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In January, I published an article describing how a company called Pixsy sent me repeated legal threats in a bid to get me to pay $600 for a Creative Commons image I’d used. Pixsy falsely claimed that I had violated the Creative Commons license by failing to correctly attribute it to its creator, the photographer Nenad Stojkovic. After I challenged them on this, they apologized and withdrew the threats, but refused to answer any of my questions about how this happened or how their business operates (Stojkovic also failed to answer multiple messages seeking clarification).
Continue reading "An Open Letter to Pixsy CEO Kain Jones, Who Keeps Sending Me Legal Threats"
The world of crypto is full of scams, grifts, and absolutely foreseeable flops. The underlying ideology of crypto — the much-vaunted “system design” — starts from the principle that systems are most stable when they appeal to each participant’s self-interest, rather than their solidarity, generosity or empathy. This is an extension of the “greed is good” / ”there’s no such thing as society” ideology of the Thatcher-Reagan revolution. It’s an ideology grounded in empirically false propositions about how people actually behave in markets.
In a recent interview, Yanis Varoufakis describes his experience running an economy in God-mode when he was chief economist of Valve, overseeing game economies with “access to the full data set in real time,” lured by the prospect of “playing ‘god; i.e. being able to do with these digital economies things that no economist can do in the ‘real’ world, e.g. alter rules, prices, and quantities to see what happens.”