Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “Cory Doctorow”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Pluralistic: Nurses whose shitty boss is a shitty app (17 Dec 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow'
- kudos:I don’t think I’ve ever been more angry about the gig economy than when reading this post. link to “Pluralistic: Nurses whose shitty boss is a shitty app (17 Dec 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Pluralistic: Social media needs (dumpster) fire exits (14 Dec 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow'
- kudos:Some more reflection by Doctorow on Bluesky and Mastodon. link to “Pluralistic: Social media needs (dumpster) fire exits (14 Dec 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Pluralistic: Predicting the present (09 Dec 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow'
- kudos:Like anyone who’s read Cory Doctorow’s Radicalized (now free to read here, and you should go read it), I’ve thought a lot recently about its central conceit of an online message board where people stiffed by insurance radicalize each other into gruesome acts of violence. The story is hard to read: It’s vicious in its implied critique of U.S. healthcare companies, but the people being radicalized are also ugly in their response to those companies’ callousness.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Pluralistic: Battery rationality (06 Dec 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow'
- kudos:Some interesting reflections (and reasons to up one’s baseline existential terror) in here. link to “Pluralistic: Battery rationality (06 Dec 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow”
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, by Douglas Rushkoff
- kudos:Cory Doctorow’s review of Naomi Alderman’s The Future mentioned this book, so after wrapping up the former, I decided to start the latter. It’s not what I expected—Doctorow’s comments suggested the whole thing might be about billionaire survivalist bunkers—but in a good way! It turns out that it’s a broader take on a broader attitude behind survivalist bunkers and the way that attitude manifests in other ways. I had a hard time deciding on a rating for this.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Spill, by Cory Doctorow
- kudos:I listened to the first parts of this as Doctorow was reading it on his podcast; the spacing out between chunks was distracting me and making it hard to follow, so I ultimately bought an epub (harder to download than it should have been) and restarted the story. Then, I took a two-day break near the end of the book—all of this to say that I wonder if I would have liked it even more if I’d read straight through.
John Hamer on Star Trek and the afterlife
- kudos:Leandro Palacios from the Beyond the Walls ministry out of the Toronto Community of Christ congregation gave me a heads up yesterday that they would be using a clip from the most recent sermon I gave for them as part of today’s service. I forgot about this until well after the service, but I visited the recording later in the afternoon to see what clip they’d used and to see what else I could catch from the service.
books I want to reread after this particular Election Day
- kudos:Walkaway, by Cory Doctorow, because it’s a story of radical hope in the face of bleak reality The Bezzle, by Cory Doctorow, because I’m going to need to keep up my frustration with self-enriching amoral tech bros The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States, by Jeffrey Lewis, because it compellingly portrays the danger of entrusting nuclear weapons in the hands of any president but especially one who is particularly petty and impulsive The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth, because it so compellingly describes the soft edges and semi-plausible deniability that American fascism would inevitably be draped in Superman Smashes the Klan, by Gene Luen Yang, because it’s unapologetically pro-immigrant and anti-racism (and implicitly argues that churches should be, too) Practical Anarchism: A Guide for Daily Life, by Scott Branson, because it advocates for solving problems of care and support on our own when it’s clear that the government won’t do it for us The Kingdom of God is Within You, by Leo Tolstoy, because it argues for loyalty to all of humanity over loyalty to any country the March trilogy, by John Lewis, because reading it the first time made me realize that I might well have been a “surely it’s not that bad” bystander during the Civil Rights movement, and I refuse to be that guy over the next four years There are, of course, a number of books that I want to read for the first time in response to last night, and I probably need to prioritize those for a number of reasons.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Pluralistic: Bluesky and enshittification (02 Nov 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow'
- kudos:I appreciate these thoughts from Doctorow. I understand the excitement around Bluesky, I’m happy to follow people there, and I will likely lean into it more as a POSSE vector. That said, I still don’t know that it’s what I want the future of social media to look like. link to “Pluralistic: Bluesky and enshittification (02 Nov 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow”
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️🖤🖤🖤 for Eastern Standard Tribe, by Cory Doctorow
- kudos:I had some driving to do this weekend, so I tore through the audiobook of this at 2x speed. I may be a but harsh on it with my rating, but I just didn’t really love it? It’s well written and interesting but didn’t cohere enough for me. I wonder if reading it 20 years ago when it first came out might have changed my views. Some of it might have seemed more prescient, and some of its attitudes less problematic.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Pluralistic: You should be using an RSS reader (16 Oct 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow'
- kudos:RSS forever! I love RSS, I love Cory Doctorow, and I love this post. link to “Pluralistic: You should be using an RSS reader (16 Oct 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow”
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Vigilant, by Cory Doctorow
- kudos:Cory Doctorow taking on Proctorio by proxy is such a delight. This story on how dumb proctoring software is, how it could be beat technically, and how it needs to be beat politically ought to be required reading for everyone in ed tech. It also has compelling characters, enough food porn to remind you who the author is, some fun technical asides (learned a lot about WannaCry!), and is just fun.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Biggest Sting Operation Ever, by Joseph Cox
- kudos:This is the story of when the FBI ran an encrypted phone company marketed to criminals. Working with Australian Federal Police and European partners, they had a glimpse into gangsters’ and drug dealers’ conversations for years before they wrapped it up with a series of worldwide arrests. It’s a wild story that sounds like fiction but happens to be true. In fact, that’s Cory Doctorow’s blurb on the back—his recommendation on his blog is what got me to check this out.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Glass Houses, by Madeline Ashby
- kudos:I put this book on hold at the library after Cory Doctorow recommended it on his blog. It became available at the same time as two other Doctorow-recommended books that I’m now trying to rush through before other holds take them away from me. This is a book about the great excesses of tech bros and the many tiny excesses of the people using their tech in slightly off ways. It’s about misogyny, both subtle and severe, and (in the background) how scary climate change, American politics, and the Internet of Things are.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Pluralistic: Thinking the unthinkable (19 Sep 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow'
- kudos:Compelling metaphor. link to “Pluralistic: Thinking the unthinkable (19 Sep 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow”
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️🖤🖤🖤 for After the Downfall, by Harry Turtledove
- kudos:This story has an interesting premise—a Nazi officer is plucked from a falling Berlin into a fantasy world where he learns a lesson about all peoples being people—but both fails to deliver and muddles its efforts. I like didactic fiction fine (it’s the reason I love Cory Doctorow so much), but the intended lesson of this story is clear from the beginning, and it’s never really obvious whether or why the main character undergoes any personal development.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Attack Surface, by Cory Doctorow
- kudos:This is hands-down the best book in the Little Brother series and may even be my favorite Doctorow book? It’s hard to beat Walkaway, but this book is so perfectly written for our time (and such a perfect self-critique of earlier books in the series) that I’m not sure I’ll ever get tired of it.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'KY prisoners hack state-issued computer tablets to digitally create $1M. How’d they do it?'
- kudos:Prisoners got punished for taking advantage of a hilarious exploit in an app for transferring money from their commissary accounts to a private company’s media store, but no one at that private company is being held accountable for unironically describing prisons as a “growth industry.” This sounds like something Doctorow would have made up for The Bezzle, and it’s kind of amazing that I’m reading it in the news instead.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'KY inmates and their families spend millions on for-profit computer tablets'
- kudos:The state and a private company are splitting millions of dollars that they earn from charging a literally captive audience to use tablets. This is straight out of Cory Doctorow’s The Bezzle, and I hate it so, so much. link to “KY inmates and their families spend millions on for-profit computer tablets”
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back, by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow
- kudos:This is another one of those books that’s hard to review—in part because it wasn’t always easy to get through. I’ve owned it for a while and tried to get through the ebook a couple of times, but it wasn’t until checking out the audiobook before some long drives this weekend that I finally made it through. The book is wonky, and while that’s a good thing, I confess that I didn’t follow all the details in either the laying out of the problem or the articulation of the solutions.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Pluralistic: Apple vs the “free market” (15 Aug 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow'
- kudos:I’ve only skimmed this, but I’m posting it as a reminder to myself that everything I said about Disney yesterday also applies to Apple, and that I need to find ways of extracting myself from their ecosystem, as hard as it may be. link to “Pluralistic: Apple vs the “free market” (15 Aug 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow”
trying to remember that Disney sucks (even if I like a lot of their IP)
- kudos:When I was slowly making my way through David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything last month, I was having trouble processing all of the ideas in the ambitious, dense book, so I was surprised when one idea sounded familiar: schismogenesis. A few years ago, Cory Doctorow wrote an essay using schismogenesis as a theme. Here’s Doctorow’s explanation of the concept from the original book, and the beginning of his thesis in the post:
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Homeland, by Cory Doctorow
- kudos:Over a year ago, I listened to Little Brother, with the intent of revisiting this whole series. Homeland is my least favorite of the three, though, and so I stalled out pretty quickly and put it off until now. The book is better than I remembered it being, with some good themes and interesting plot developments. It does a good job of exploring WikiLeaks-style activism as something complex and not easily resolved, but it still comes down on the side of protest, activism, and pushback in a way that I find inspiring.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for Youth Group, by Jordan Morris and Bowen McCurdy
- kudos:This is a goofy but fun book about demon hunters from a 1990s evangelical church. It came highly recommended by Cory Doctorow, which is why I checked it out from my local library even though I wasn’t sure it would be my thing. I enjoyed reading it, but I don’t think it was my thing after all. I followed enough of the 1990s gags and enjoyed enough of the story to have a good time.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for The Masque of the Red Death, by Cory Doctorow
- kudos:This is also a darker novella, and reading a post-apocalyptic story that touches on death and disease stresses me out. More than the last time I read it, though, I get what Doctorow is going for with this story. It’s a critique of survivalist go-it-on-your-own mentalities with optimism that even in the worst of times, humans can come together and help each other out—if they’re willing to try. I don’t like reading the story, but I appreciate the message.
text for today's 'Sheep and Goats' sermon
- kudos:Earlier today, I had the pleasure of providing the sermon for the Toronto Community of Christ congregation’s Beyond the Walls online ministry. Like when I preached last summer, the congregation is working its way through the parables associated with a particular gospel (Luke last year, Matthew this year), and I preached on the parable of the Sheep and the Goats. The parable’s reference to visiting prisoners—combined with having recently read Cory Doctorow’s The Bezzle—made me think about a decade(ish)-old memory that I hadn’t thought of for a long time.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Radicalized, by Cory Doctorow
- kudos:This is much darker than the last two Doctorow novellas I read: It involves domestic terrorists taking their revenge on the insurance companies that screwed them over. I know I haven’t read this since first reading this collection in 2019, because it’s almost too dark for me. It’s better than I remembered it being, though, and while I am not in a hurry to reread it any time soon, I appreciate why Doctorow went dark on this one.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Model Minority, by Cory Doctorow
- kudos:This is one of the most interesting riffs on Superman and Batman I’ve ever read (though, of course, their serial numbers are carefully filed off). It’s a fascinating exploration of race, prejudice, technology, and police excess. I can’t remember if I’ve read this any time except the first, but it’s one I need to read again and again.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Unauthorized Bread, by Cory Doctorow
- kudos:This is one novella in Doctorow’s “Radicalized” collection, so I guess I could wait until I read all four and review them together, but I’d rather do four separate reviews. This story is so, so good. It’s an excellent anti-DRM screed and a compelling example of the social harms that can be done by technology to marginalized groups. Reading this back in 2019 is what got me (back) into Doctorow’s fiction, because it’s a perfect example of what he does best.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for In Real Life, by Cory Doctorow and Jen Wang
- kudos:Once you read enough Cory Doctorow, you start to pick up on the story elements that he reuses and recycles, and that’s pretty obvious here. Not only is this a graphic novel adaptation of a short story, but it’s very close to the premise of For the Win, too. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though! In fact, I really like this comic. The plot is interesting, and the art is AMAZING.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for The Terraformers, by Annalee Newitz
- kudos:I heard this book reviewed on The Incomparable, and it sounded up my alley despite mixed reviews on the podcast, so I gave it a try! This feels like a Cory Doctorow book in all the right ways: It has super weird ideas in it, and it’s sometimes more about worldbuilding and a pretty clear “moral of the story” than specific plot beats or characterization. The morals of the story are good ones, though, and having a viewpoint character who’s a sentient train is right up my alley.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Party Discipline, by Cory Doctorow
- kudos:This tiny little book is a great addition to the worldbuilding of Walkaway, and I love it for that.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Pluralistic: An end to the climate emergency is in our grasp (12 Jun 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow'
- kudos:I’ve been thinking recently that I need to reread Doctorow’s The Lost Cause (about beating back the climate catastrophe), so this blog post was welcome. Doctorow’s hopefulness—all while rejecting naïve optimism—is what I needed to read this morning. link to “Pluralistic: An end to the climate emergency is in our grasp (12 Jun 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow”
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Pirate Cinema, by Cory Doctorow
- kudos:After my last read was such a guilty pleasure (still not sure if I’ll bring myself to read the next Honor Harrington or if it’s just not worth it), I decided I needed some Doctorow so I could read something fun and meaningful. This isn’t my favorite of Doctorow’s, but it’s good! The more I read of his, the more I see the cross-cutting themes, the elements that get recycled from book to book, the earlier versions of plots that I’ve read in his more recent stuff.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Wanna Make Big Tech Monopolies Even Worse? Kill Section 230'
- kudos:I got skeptical of Section 230 for a while, but folks like Doctorow and Mike Masnick have brought me back around. link to “Wanna Make Big Tech Monopolies Even Worse? Kill Section 230”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Pluralistic: You were promised a jetpack by liars (17 May 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow'
- kudos:Compelling essay about vain hopes for the future. link to “Pluralistic: You were promised a jetpack by liars (17 May 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow”