Pluralistic: Elizabeth Warren on weaponized budget models (04 Apr 2023)


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Pluralistic: The problem with economic models (03 Apr 2023)


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Commafuckers Versus The Commons

Copyleft Trolls Are the Serpents in Our Garden of Ethical Sharing.

William Blake — The Temptation and Fall of Eve (Illustration to Milton’s “Paradise Lost”) — the snake has been recolored a vivid green and limned in shadow; the fruit has been colored a vivid pink.

pilkunnussija (Finnish)

pilkun (“of a comma”) +‎ nussija (“fucker”) (wiktionary.com)

As I processed yesterday’s news about Flickr updating its policies to prevent “copyleft trolls” from using its service to snare unsuspecting internet users and hit them for hundreds or thousands of dollars in “copyright settlement” fees, I began reflecting on why this phenomenon makes me so furious.

I’ve been blogging for more than 20 years. I’ve been an activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation for more than 20 years, too. I’ve also been a Creative Commons user for more than 20 years. And I’ve been a novelist for more than 20 years.
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Pluralistic: Flickr to copyleft trolls: drop dead (01 Apr 2023)


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Pluralistic: We should ban TikTok('s surveillance) (30 Mar 2023)


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Pluralistic: Naomi Novik's Scholomance trilogy (29 Mar 2023)


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Pluralistic: What comes after neoliberalism? (28 Mar 2023)


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Pluralistic: Rural towns and poor urban neighborhoods are being devoured by dollar stores (27 Mar 2023)


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Silicon Valley Noir

Red Team Blues and the Role of Bitterness in Technothrillers.

A section of a high-resolution image of a secure coprocessor; superimposed over it is the graphic from the cover of the Tor Books edition of Red Team Blues, which features a male figure sprinting out of a stylized keyhole.
Pauli Rautakorpi/CC BY 3.0 (modified)

My next novel is Red Team Blues, an anti-finance finance thriller starring Martin Hench, a high-tech forensic accountant who’s spent 40 years busting Silicon Valley grifters large and small.

At 67, Marty’s seen it all, and while he is full of compassion for the victims of the scams he unwinds, his overwhelming feeling is bitterness. As he says in the opening pages of the book, after landing a job that will change his life:

Truth be told, I also didn’t want to contemplate the possibility that, at the age of sixty-­seven, the new work might stop coming in. Silicon Valley hates old people, but that was okay, because I hated Silicon Valley. Professionally, that is.

Red Team Blues is the first volume in the Martin Hench series, a series that runs in reverse chronological order. The next book, The Bezzle (Feb. 2024) is set in the mid-2010s, while the third, Picks and Shovels (Jan. 2025) is Marty’s origin story, starting in the early 1980s when Marty drops out of MIT and comes west to San Francisco in the first heroic years of the PC revolution.
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Pluralistic: The Golden Rule (them what has the gold makes the rules) (25 Mar 2023)


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