Pluralistic: 23 Oct 2022 The Persuaders (how minds really change)


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How to Fix Cars* By Breaking “Felony Contempt of Business Model”

(*Also Wheeelchairs, Tractors, iPhones, Toasters and Printers)

A hackeneyed “hacker in a hoodie” image; in place of a face is a BMW steering wheel. Behind the figure is a three-tier stack of crushed cars.

On the origin of anti-features

They’re called “anti-features”: artificial limitations built onto the products we buy. These are limitations no customer asked for — and indeed, they’re limitations customers would pay to remove — if only they could.

The first anti-features were “DRM” (Digital Rights Management), like the “region-locks” on DVD players that stopped you from using a player you bought in one country to play back a disc you bought somewhere else.

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Pluralistic: 21 Oct 2022 Backdooring a summarizerbot to shape opinion


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Pluralistic: 20 Oct 2022 It was all downhill after the Cuecat


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Pluralistic: 18 Oct 2022 Being good at your job is praxis


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Pluralistic: 17 Oct 2022 A giant grocery merger will send "inflation" through the roof


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Unspeakable

Big-Tech-as-cop vs. abolishing Big Tech

An abstract background; in the foreground are a collection of speech balloons of various sizes and shapes, each filled with the “Matrix Waterfall” graphic; in the center at the bottom of the frame are the “Three Wise Monkeys,” their faces replaced by the menacing, staring red eye of HAL9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Cryteria, CC BY 3.0 (modified)/Japanexperterna.se, CC BY 2.0, modified; EnEdC, CC BY-SA 3.0, modified

Since late 2000, EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) has made steady progress, and now, despite US Big Tech companies’ illegal lobbying, it has become a law.

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Pluralistic: 16 Oct 2022 RIP, Roger Wood, genius assemblage sculptor


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Pluralistic: 15 Oct 2022 How lawyers became sadists


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Pluralistic: 14 Oct 2022 Medieval Times invents a modern union-busting tactic; Billionaire dilletantes vs good Democrats


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