Author: Cory Doctorow

Pluralistic: Google's enshittification memos (03 Oct 2023)


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Pluralistic: Kickstarting the audiobook of The Lost Cause, my novel of environmental hope (02 Oct 2023)


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How the Writers Guild sunk AI’s ship

No one’s gonna buy enterprise AI licenses if they can’t fire their workers.

A wrecked, listing, rusting tanker whose side is emblazoned with the menacing red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey.’ In the foreground, a woman dressed in a natty 1930s skirt-suit holds a WGA picket sign that reads, ‘I asked ChatGPT to write a sign and it SUCKED.’”
Cryteria/CC BY 3.0 (modified)

After a grinding, 148-day strike, the Writers Guild of America ran the table, conceding virtually nothing and winning virtually everything.

The most consequential outcome will be data on streaming viewership. For the studios, these numbers are state secrets, revealed on a need-to-know, burn-before-reading basis, even within the studios themselves.

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Pluralistic: The internet is not a (link)dump truck (30 Sept 2023)


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Pluralistic: The surveillance advertising to financial fraud pipeline (29 Sept 2023)


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Pluralistic: Yanis Varoufakis's "Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism?" (28 Sep 2023)


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Pluralistic: Intuit: "Our fraud fights racism" (27 Sept 2023)


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Pluralistic: Brian Merchant's "Blood In the Machine" (26 Sep 2023)

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Pluralistic: Podcasting "How To Think About Scraping" (25 Sept 2023)


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Joe Biden is headed to a UAW picket-line in Detroit

“I want to do it, now make me do it.”

A vintage photo of strikers in front of a factory. The image has been altered to insert a 'Dank Brandon' image of Joe Biden with red laser eyes, a UAW pin on his lapel. He looms over the strikers, who have been altered to carry UAW ON STRIKE signs. A General Motors sign has been inserted onto the factory. A sunrise emerges over the factory building. Image: Fabio Basagni https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sahara_desert_sunrise.jpg CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Fabio Basagni/CC BY-SA 4.0 (modified)

Joe Biden will join striking workers on a UAW picket-line in Detroit on Tuesday.

No sitting president in US history has ever walked a picket line with strikers.

This is a big deal.

It’s great.

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