Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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Three of my short stories that got it right…kinda.
I am on record on the subject of science fiction writers predicting the future: we do not. Thank goodness we don’t predict the future! If the future were predictable, then nothing any of us did would matter, because the same future would arrive, just the same. The unpredictability of the future is due to human agency, something the best science fiction writers understand to their bones. Fatalism is for corpses.
Back when we were inventing blogging, most posts did not have illustration, which was good for me, since I can’t draw so much as a stick figure, and there was precious little in the way of public domain or otherwise freely reusable stock art.
Continue reading "Pluralistic: An end-of-year retrospective (24 Dec 2022)"
Continue reading "Pluralistic: What the fediverse (does/n't) solve (23 Dec 2022)"
Continue reading "Pluralistic: 2023's public domain is a banger (20 Dec 2022)"
Continue reading "Pluralistic: Better failure for social media (19 Dec 2022)"
“Oh come, now, you don’t mean to let on that you like it?”
The brush continued to move.
“Like it? Well, I don’t see why I oughtn’t to like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?”
That put the thing in a new light. Ben stopped nibbling his apple. Tom swept his brush daintily back and forth — stepped back to note the effect — added a touch here and there — criticised the effect again — Ben watching every move and getting more and more interested, more and more absorbed. Presently he said:
“Say, Tom, let me whitewash a little.”
– Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
In 2003, a 19-year-old Harvard undergrad named Mark Zuckerberg had an idea: he’d create a website for Harvard students to nonconsensually rate the fuckability of their classmates. He called it Facemash.
Later that year, Zuckerberg changed the name of the site to The Facebook, and, in 2005, the site was renamed, simply, “Facebook.”
Continue reading "Pluralistic: The antitrust Twilight Zone (16 Dec 2022)"