Upcoming appearances (cont'd):

* Seizing the Means of Computation (Edinburgh Futures Institute), Oct 25

https://efi.ed.ac.uk/event/seizing-the-means-of-computation-with-cory-doctorow/

* The Internet Con at the nostr:npub1xrj3t052eyqclk39m85tvffsge35zr3kedkmsf8l6dheq8zrt8rs589q43 (virtual), Oct 31

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/book-talk-the-internet-con-tickets-730939137637

16/

Upcoming appearances:

* #TheInternetCon at #MoonPalaceBooks (#Minneapolis), Oct 15

https://moonpalacebooks.com/events/30127

* 26th #ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing keynote (#Minneapolis), Oct 16

https://cscw.acm.org/2023/index.php/keynotes/

* 41st annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities (#Charleston, WV), Oct 19

https://festivallcharleston.com/venue/university-of-charleston/

* #TaylorBooks (#Charleston, WV), Oct 20, 12h-14h

http://www.taylorbooks.com/

15/

My ebooks and audiobooks (from Tor Books, Head of Zeus, McSweeneys, Beacon, Verso and others) are for sale all over the net, but I sell 'em too, and when you buy 'em from me, I earn twice as much and you get books with no DRM and no license "agreements."

https://craphound.com/shop/

14/

My latest nonfiction book is "The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation" from Verso Books:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

Signed copies available from Book Soup:

https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245

--

My latest novel is Red Team Blues, available wherever books are sold!

Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US):

https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2873/Wed%2C_Apr_26th_6pm%3A_Red_Team_Blues%3A_A_Martin_Hench_Novel_HB.html#/

and Forbidden Planet (UK):

https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/

13/

My ebooks and audiobooks (from Tor Books, Head of Zeus, McSweeneys, Beacon, Verso and others) are for sale all over the net, but I sell 'em too, and when you buy 'em from me, I earn twice as much and you get books with no DRM and no license "agreements."

https://craphound.com/shop/

10/

My latest nonfiction book is "The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation" from Verso Books:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

Signed copies available from Book Soup:

https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245

--

My latest novel is Red Team Blues, available wherever books are sold!

Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US):

https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2873/Wed%2C_Apr_26th_6pm%3A_Red_Team_Blues%3A_A_Martin_Hench_Novel_HB.html#/

and Forbidden Planet (UK):

https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/

9/

nostr:npub1gvvk95hyxxtl7hwqn9dfl2m73ruafllg53k8u02mj74gcwhuzm2sq28tng Yup.

#AIHype completely misunderstands the point of #ScienceFiction

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship-236575979d5c?sk=28d4f52322040150651fea37a303b342

#Inevitabilism #ThereIsNoAlternative #Luddites

No matter how horny your boss is for replacing you with an #AI, a #union will cool his ardor

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship-236575979d5c?sk=28d4f52322040150651fea37a303b342

#HotLaborSummer #EternalLaborSeptember #JenniferAbruzzo #Cemex #ThrivePetCare

Google's rationale for this is darkly hilarious: if the public is allowed to know what's happening in its trial, this will be converted into "clickbait," which is to say, "The public is interested in this case, and if they are informed of the evidence against us, that information will be spread widely because it is so interesting":

https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/secrecy-is-systemic

Thankfully, this secrecy is struggling to survive the public outrage it prompted.

13/

in "contactless" delivery, in on-demand workforces - the goal is to turn humans *into* machines.

There is blood in the machine, Merchant tells us, whether its humans being torn apart *by* a machine, or humans being transformed into machines.

Brian and I are having a joint book-launch tomorrow night (Sept 27) at #ChevaliersBooks in #LosAngeles for my new book *The Internet Con* and his new book, *Blood in the Machine*:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-internet-con-by-cory-doctorow-blood-in-the-machine-by-brian-merchant-tickets-696349940417

eof/

The point isn't just to reduce the wage-bill for a finished good - it's to reduce the "friction" of having to care about others and take their needs into account.

Luddites are not - and have never been - anti-technology. Rather, they are pro-human, and see production as a means to an end: broadly shared prosperity. The automation project says it's about replacing humans with machines, but over and over again - in machine learning,

37/

Then, as now, a worker was hired by the day, not by the year, and might find themselves with no work the next day, depending on the whim of a factory owner or an algorithm.

As Merchant writes: robots aren't coming for your job; *bosses* are. The dream of a "dark factory," a "fully automated" Tesla production line, is the dream of a boss who doesn't have to answer to workers, who can press a button and manifest their will, without negotiating with mere workers.

36/

The company embarked on a program of visibly support right to repair, while working behind the scenes to sabotage it.

Last year, Apple announced a repair program. It was *hilarious*. If you wanted to swap your phone's battery, all you had to do was let Apple put a $1200 hold on your credit card, and then wait while the company shipped you 80 pounds' worth of specialized tools, packed in two special Pelican cases:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/22/apples-cement-overshoes/

20/

But Apple's opposition to repair eventually became a problem for the company. It's bad optics, and both Apple customers and Apple employees are volubly displeased with the company's ecocidal conduct. But of course, Apple's *management* and *shareholders* hate repair and want to block it as much as possible.

But Apple knows how to Think Differently. It came up with a way to eat its cake and have it, too.

19/

Of course, *Apple* is a *huge* fan of VIN-locking. In phones, #VIN-locking is usually called #serializing or #PartsPairing, but it's the same thing: a tiny subassembly gets its own microcontroller whose sole purpose is to prevent independent repair technicians from fixing your gadget. Parts-pairing lets Apple block repairs even when the technician uses new, Apple parts - but it also lets Apple block refurb parts and third party parts.

17/

The saving grace was an anonymous, former Medtronic repair tech, who built pirate boxes to generate unlock codes, using any housing they could lay hands on to use as a case: guitar pedals, clock radios, etc. This tech shipped these gadgets around the world, observing strict anonymity, because #Article6 of the #EUCD *also* bans circumvention:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/10/flintstone-delano-roosevelt/#medtronic-again

16/

Welcome to Act III.

Today, it costs about a quarter to add a #SystemOnAChip to even the tiniest parts. These SOCs can run DRM. Here's how that DRM works: when you put a new part in a device, the SOC and the device's main controller communicate with one another.

10/

In 1998, DMCA 1201 was mostly used to prevent you from de-regionalizing your DVD player to watch discs that had been released overseas but not in your own country.

But as we warned back then, computers were only going to get smaller and cheaper, and eventually, it would only cost manufacturers pennies to wrap their products - or even subassemblies in their products - in DRM. Congress was putting a gun on the mantelpiece in Act I, and it was bound to go off in Act III.

9/

That's all very abstract, but here's what it means: if a manufacturer sticks some #DigitalRightsManagement (#DRM) in its device, then anything you want to do that involves removing that DRM is now illegal - even if the thing itself is perfectly legal.

When Congress passed this stupid law in 1998, it had a very limited blast radius. Computers were still pretty expensive and DRM use was limited to a few narrow categories.

8/