Pluralistic: The Cory Doctorow Humble Bundle (03 Mar 2024)


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Pluralistic: How a billionaire's mediocre pump-and-dump "book" became a "bestseller" (15 Feb 2024)


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Pluralistic: The CHIPS Act treats the symptoms, but not the causes (07 Feb 2024)


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Pluralistic: Francis Spufford's "Cahokia Jazz" (04 Dec 2023)


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Pluralistic: The enshittification of garage-door openers reveals a vast and deadly rot (09 Nov 2023)


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Pluralistic: Deb Chachra's "How Infrastructure Works" (17 Oct 2023)


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Monopolizing turds


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Pluralistic: John Deere's repair fake-out; Good riddance to the Open Gaming License (12 Jan 2023)


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The End of the Road to Serfdom

Party’s Over, Pleb.

For most of the modern era, most people in the rich world have been poor, just like their parents and their children. Social mobility was more dream than reality. Most people were born to serve, as were their children.

The ruling minority liked to imagine that the human oxen laboring in their fields and the women who cleaned their homes and cooked their meals were happy with their lot, and professed shock and horror whenever these hereditary servers sought out ways to improve their station — whether that was by joining the industrial revolution or striking out for a colonized land and the promise of stolen estates and downtrodden servants of their own.

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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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