I’m Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by #WilWheaton! Pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover. There’s also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback:

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You can follow these posts as a daily blog at pluralistic.net: no ads, trackers, or data-collection!

Here’s today’s edition:

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Recent appearances:

• The Lost Cause (The Writer’s Voice)

• What the Future will Bring (#HomelessRomantic)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_Vq8qW2A8I

• Talking “The Lost Cause” with Warren Mosler (#MMTPodcast)

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Upcoming appearances:

• Enshittification: The Rise and Fall of Big Tech (#CrashCourseEconomics)
  https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_YsKONp5zRgeF6SVuIOb6hQ#/registration

• Books & Books (#CoralGables, #Florida), Jan 22

• Marshall McLuhan Lecture 2024 (#Berlin), Jan 29

• The Lost Cause at Otherland (#Berlin), Jan 30

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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.”

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My latest novel is “The Lost Cause,” a solarpunk novel of radical hope in the climate emergency, from Tor Books (US)/Head of Zeus (UK):

Signed, personalized copies available from Dark Delicacies:

https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/

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

Signed copies available from Book Soup:

Both are national bestsellers!

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Yesterday’s threads: American education has all the downsides of standardization, none of the upsides; and more!

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#5yrsago Now EVERYBODY hates the new EU #CopyrightDirective

#1yrago #CareInflation: The inflation no one wants to talk about

#1yrago #EleanorJanega’s “Once and Future Sex”: The true, weird, horny history of medieval gender and sex

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#5yrsago An archive of Freedom, #PaulRobeson and Louis Burnham’s radical Harlem newspaper

#5yrsago Unsealed court documents reveal that Facebook knew kids were being tricked into spending thousands of dollars on their parents’ credit cards

#5yrsago Why charter schools are the flashpoint for the LA #TeachersStrike

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#10yrsago Scoring Obama’s NSA reforms (spoiler: it’s not good)

#15yrsago Mr Chicken: the genius who paints London’s fried-chicken signs

#10yrsago Congress requires publicly funded research to be publicly available

#10yrsago Android malware uses accelerometer readings to figure out if it was running on a real phone or in emulation

6/

#15yrsago Veeps: Profiles in Insignificance, a look at the bumbling, murdering, drunken idiots (and others) who’ve served as vice-president of the USA

#10yrsago #TimWu on FCC’s #NetNeutrality disaster

#10yrsago Random #NSA program generator, with denials

#10yrsago Parfaitzilla: the dessert that ate Japan

5/

Hey look at this

• The coming storm

• Retrocomputer miniatures

• #GoogleSearch Really Has Gotten Worse, Researchers Find

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The super-rich got that way through monopolies: A report in honor of Davos.

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Catch me in #Miami! I’ll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM:

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I’m Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by #WilWheaton! Pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover. There’s also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback:

2/

I’m Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by #WilWheaton! Pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover. There’s also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback:

eof/

Balzac wrote, “Behind every great fortune there is a crime.” Chances are, the rapsheet includes an antitrust violation. Getting rid of monopolies won’t get rid of all the billionaires, but it’ll certainly get rid of a hell of a lot of them.

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Even more exciting are the moves in the #GlobalSouth. In South Africa, “competition law contains some of the most progressive ideas of all”:

It actively seeks to create greater economic participation, particularly for ‘historically disadvantaged persons’ as part of its public interest considerations in merger decisions.

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(Khan’s winning like crazy. Just last month she killed four megamergers:)

The EU and UK are taking actions that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. Canada is finally set to get a real competition law, with the Trudeau government promising to add an “abuse of dominance” rule to Canada’s antitrust system.

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The past three years saw more regulatory action on corporate mergers, price-gouging, predatory pricing, labor abuses and other evils of monopoly than we got in the past 40 years.

The business press - cheerleaders for monopoly - keep running editorials claiming that enforcers like #LinaKhan are getting nothing done. Sure, #WSJ, Khan’s getting nothing done - that’s why you ran 80 editorial about her:

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When people talk about the billionaires’ climate impact, they o focus on the carbon footprints of mansions and private jets, but the true environmental cost of the ultra rich comes from the anti-renewables, pro-emissions lobbying they buy with their monopoly winnings.

The good news is that the tide is turning on monopolies. A coalition of “businesses, workers, farmers, consumers and other civil society groups” have created a “remarkably successful anti-monopoly movement.”

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