Some very interesting perspective on fair use and asking permission.

I just got rotated off my grad program’s data science class, where I spent a week on the importance of theory, etc. If I were still teaching it, I’d add in this gem of a paragraph on surveillance pricing:

It’s “theory-free.” You don’t have to discover why a group is willing to pay more under a given set of circumstances, you merely have to observe and weaponize this fact. You don’t have to know why one group of purchasers consistently accept higher prices between 6AM and 8AM – you can just automatically jack up prices on them without knowing or caring that you’re gouging parents of young children who are re-ordering essential supplies while trying to get their kids to school in the morning.

I want to disagree with some of what Doctorow says here, but that’s precisely why I am bookmarking it. I want to make sure that my opposition to generative AI is principled rather than reactionary, and his defense of certain uses of it is something I need to keep in mind.

Wow, was this good! I picked it up because I was struggling with a sermon on the parable that gives the book its name, but even if I didn’t end up taking much from the book for my sermon, it really made an impression.

It’s evocative, and it does an amazing job of describing a hopeful apocalypse. I can see how other media I like—Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway or the indie TTRPG Why We Fight—owe something to this book.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about Jacques Ellul’s image/word dichotomy as more broadly applicable than to media—as applicable to the whole technical phenomenon that he criticizes. That is, by virtue of its seeming objectivity, the technical phenomenon enjoys trust that is not warranted when one digs into the details and sees the fuzziness and subjectivities and artifice that prop the whole thing up. Doctorow’s critique here seems firmly in that vein.

This piece hits hard.

I definitely don’t agree with everything in here, but it made me think in productive ways, and that’s important.

Doctorow has some helpful perspectives here.

I’m being hard on this book, so I want to emphasize that: I think it’s important, I pre-ordered it and have been looking forward to read it for a long time, there are parts of it that I deeply enjoyed, and it is likely to get cited in a couple of papers I’m working on.

That said, while I think there are a lot of good ideas and bits in here, it feels more like a collection of ideas than a cohesive book. I think a stronger throughline and more aggressive structure would have made it even better. I know it started off as essays/blog posts, and I think the individual components are great, but I’m not sure it’s more than the sum of its parts.

I’ve felt for a long time that “what if AI gets sentient and does irreparable harm” is 100% the wrong way of framing things, and Doctorow knocks that argument out of the park here.

Doctorow has been arguing for a post-American internet/tech industry for a while, but this passage really landed for me:

If Trump wants to steal Greenland, he doesn’t need tanks or missiles. He can just tell Microsoft and Oracle to brick the entire Danish state and all of its key firms, blocking their access to their email archives, files, databases, and other key administrative tools. If Denmark still holds out, Trump can brick all their tractors, smart speakers, and phones. If Denmark still won’t give up Greenland, Trump could blackhole all Danish IP addresses for the world’s majority of transoceanic fiber. At the click of a mouse, Trump could shut down the world’s supply of Lego, Ozempic, and delicious, lethally strong black licorice.

Cory Doctorow’s end of year recap of books he reviewed always puts a few titles on my list, and this was one of them. The history of energy is not inherently the most interesting topic ever, but once I got past the fact that I was reading in translation (which only bugs me with French, since I can read that pretty well) and trying to figure out how the translation was done (worried about AI, to be honest), I really enjoyed this book.

Loved this book as much as I did the first time around. It reads like Walkaway mixed with Braiding Sweetgrass, with a bit of The Disposessed for good measure. It’s bonkers but delightful, and I’m glad that I own a copy now.

My brain is fuzzy enough this morning that I read this as a Bible verse: The book of Linux, chapter 6, verse 19. Now wondering what that would read and whether I’d add it to my personal canon (which already includes Doctorow’s pro-open-source “Walkaway”).

I have largely abstained from the “AI misses the point of writing” discourse, but Cory knocks it out of the park here.

Cory Doctorow has a bit he returns to in a lot of his writing about how tech billionaires aren’t geniuses, just power-hungry people who got lucky, and now I will always wonder if he got it from this movie. I’m a huge fan of Cory’s, but Rian Johnson’s having Daniel Craig rant about how dumb Edward Norton’s tech billionaire character is in this movie is perfection.

Also, super good cameo appearance by The Verge.

Today, on the last day of class, a student shared some of their ongoing efforts to mess with local Flock cameras and develop makeup patterns to defeat facial recognition. It was like realizing I’d had a Cory Doctorow character in class all semester, and it brought me joy and hope.

Cory Doctorow recently reviewed a newer book from Lubchansky, which I’d love to read. I can’t easily get a copy, though, so I checked this one out again from the library. It is bonkers and beautiful, and there should be more comics like it.

Current mood: Going through Cory Doctorow’s year-end book review summary and reserving more titles from my local library than I have time to read.

Some real cathartic rage in here.

Over the weekend, I decided to plunge back into following a bunch of social accounts on Mastodon and Bluesky that I had previously removed from Reeder to avoid information overwhelm. Sensitive to the possibility that information overwhelm would come back with all of these new follows, I tried using Reeder’s filter feature to do something I’d never thought about before: organizing feeds by genre instead of by content.

That is, I’ve previously used folders in Reeder (and plenty of other RSS apps) to organize feeds into the different subjects that I’m interested in and then catching up on feeds one subject at a time. However, this time, I used Reeder’s filters to organize by feed type—or genre. That is, I have all true RSS feeds accessible through one filter and all social feeds accessible through another. The idea here is that I’m more interested in at least reviewing all of the true RSS feeds (blogs, news sites, etc.), but with social, I’ll be more willing to hit Reeder’s “go to top” button and skip over a bunch of posts that I missed overnight or during a busy day.

I’ve been meaning to reread this for a while, and I’m glad I finally got to it. It’s fifteen years old now and feels it sometimes (not necessarily in a bad way), but it’s a fun read.

I appreciate Doctorow’s use of MMOs as a metaphor for economics, and even if I’m not economically savvy enough to follow all the details or evaluate their accuracy, it’s a lot of fun to read about “Great Recession, but a heist carried out by unionized workers.”

Good interview, and yet another thing reminding me that I need to read my copy of the book!

Finally got this book, so I guess I need to read it now.

Fun profile on Doctorow; I’m excited for my preorder of his book to arrive this week!(?). Gift link.