Cory Doctorow 
This is a wild and hopeful story: grad students at Northeastern successfully pushed back against invasive digital surveillance in their workplace, through solidarity, fearlessness, and the bright light of publicity. It’s a tale of hand-to-hand, victorious combat with the “shitty … Read more
The sex industry has pioneered every new communications tool since the printing press: in my own lifetime, I’ve watched it take the lead in VCRs, desktop publishing, BBSes, digital text, digital images, digital videos, live streaming services, cryptocurrency, and VR. … Read more
In the simplistic account of what many call “surveillance capitalism,” the original sin was swapping our attention for free content, summed up in the pithy phrase, “If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.” That’s a comforting frame … Read more
The DMCA was signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1998. It has a weird history. Its inception came from Bruce Lehmann, Microsoft’s chief copyright enforcer, whom Clinton tapped to serve as his Copyright Czar. This was back in the … Read more
The Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery has just published my editorial, “Competitive Compatibility: Let’s Fix the Internet, Not the Tech Giants,” explaining how interoperability was once an engine for competition and user empowerment – and how that ended. … Read more
This month marks the publication of “The Actual Star,” a new, wildly ambitious, wildly successful novel by Monica Byrne, spanning 3,000 years of history from the ancient Maya to a distant future. https://www.harpervoyagerbooks.com/book/9780063002913/the-actual-star/ The tale braids three moments: the collapse … Read more
When people call the US Supreme Court “corporate-friendly,” it’s often hard to know what that means in concrete terms. But here’s an example of what it means when the highest court in the land is in the tank for big … Read more
Capitalism is weird. Almost without exception, people who invest in businesses do so without personally inspecting the business, overlooking its processes, seeing its bank statements, meeting its managers and going on the road with its sales-force. Whether you’re managing a … Read more