Prison tablets are such an exploitative use of technology. It’s a clear example of using technological development to oppress ratger than liberate. I highly recommend Cory Doctorow’s The Bezzle for its (fictional) riffs on prison tech.

I like bookshop.org and I’m glad they’re selling ebooks—it’s a much better option than Amazon or Apple. Yet, so long as DRM is still the default, there’s still a problem, and you still don’t own what you buy from them.

I have mixed feelings about the digital library app hoopla—which offers access to ebooks, electronic comics, and other media that my library doesn’t necessarily carry in physical format—but it’s so dang useful that I keep using it despite some hesitations (see this post for some recent complaints). Tonight, though, as I tried to wrap up the introduction to the English translation of Jacques Ellul’s Théologie et technique (which I ought to just buy in French-language physical format, since its publishing house offers 5€ shipping to the U.S.), I noticed something that really made me mad.

This is a friendly reminder that DRM sucks and that corporations have perverted the digital technologies that should make things easier for libraries and their patrons into ways to squeeze more money out of us while giving us less control.

Look, I like Steam, but it’s still a sucky business model, like so many others today,

Compelling metaphor.

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. I love this story, and I assign an excerpt from it to my students in one class every time I teach it.

Cory Doctorow is one of my favorite authors, and I’ve also (mostly) appreciated the work of Humble Bundle over the past decade. When I learned this weekend that there’s an ongoing bundle of Doctorow’s fiction, I was ecstatic. The only thing that I was disappointed about is that I’ve already bought so many of these titles… however, that still wasn’t enough to stop me from buying all 18 items (it helps that while I own many of these already, most of the ones I own are in formats rather than epub, so now I’m a multimodal owner). As a plus, this bundle benefits the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a great organization that Doctorow has done a lot of work for.

I feel like I say this whenever I talk about Doctorow, but I love that his fiction reads like an op-ed. While waiting for this book to come out, I’ve been slowly reading his co-authored book Chokepoint Capitalism, and I feel like The Bezzle is all his (and Rebecca’s) critiques about large and greedy companies wrapped up in a fun, action-driven narrative.

Here’s the thing about me: I’m an academic, and I respect facts, reason, and citations. However, when those are the basis of an argument, I sometimes also struggle with feeling like I need to be better read and know all the angles before I can get on board with the argument. A narrative, on the other hand, sucks me in and convinces me. I ended this book feeling angry about prisons, DRM, and unscrupulous corporations and their executives—I’m on board with the argument. That the story was exciting and fun to follow was only a plus.

It’s a long interview, so I didn’t read the whole thing, but what I did read made me want to read this book even more. I have a copy, I just need to open it up.

I am very near the end of Wil Wheaton’s updated/annotated memoir Still Just a Geek, which I bought over the summer on a short family trip. I have lots of thoughts—most of them positive—about the memoir and may write a bit more about it once I finally finish. For now, though, since I wrote last week complaining about companies like Apple and ClassDojo restricting hardware and software to support their bottom line at the expense of users, I was struck by a short passage Wheaton included making a case for general purpose computing:

A week ago today, my MacBook Pro suddenly stopped being able to communicate with its SSD. I’m not entirely sure what happened, but I spent most of my Tuesday afternoon wiping everything from the drive and reinstalling macOS so that I could get back to work. While I haven’t kept a physical backup for a couple of years (I accidentally fried mine when moving back into my campus office in Fall 2020), I have all of my most important documents scattered between three cloud services, so this wasn’t too painful of a process.

Doctorow convinced me years ago that Audible was terrible, but here, he showed me just how bad they are.

This is why I’m trying to buy more physical copies of things—or at least DRM-free stuff. I have lots of regrets about the size of my Kindle library, for example.

Grumpy about DRM today. So much content I’ve purchased but am forever beholden to Amazon to access.

The artwork on the “cover” of a Kindle book has been updated since the last time I read it. It’s a relatively minor change but reminds me that you never truly own an e-book you buy from Amazon (and why I now try to buy hardcopy).

Reading Cory Doctorow’s “radicalized,” and it’s great so far. Funny how a story like “Unauthorized Bread” can make me angry in a way that reading news stories and blog posts on the same subject just can’t compete with.