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Manuel

@Mediosordo.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
5 followers 2 following 84 posts

No listen the ask ALT 🔝 Portada del Gentleman de los Afghan Whigs, con la cara de un niño en primer plano y una niña detrás recostada en una cama […] 🌉 bridged from mastodon.social/@Mediosordo on the fediverse by fed.brid.gy

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Manuel @mediosordo.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14h
Si fuese creyente, diría que parece el día de la Creación. #SilentSunday #Lanzarote
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Leave X - Protect Democracy @leavex.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2026
It would be great if some of these 150 citizens raised a fundamental question: why are our democratically elected institutions so dependent on communication platforms controlled by unelected tech billionaires? Who controls the infrastructure of political communication also holds considerable […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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George Monbiot @georgemonbiot.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Some people here don't seem to have understood the purpose of a political party. It's not the same as a protest movement. It is a vehicle designed to get into government, to change legislation and make a material difference to the lives of people at home and abroad.
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Manuel @mediosordo.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/09/2026
RE: mastodon.social/@verge/117202983989… Madre mía, te lees el artículo y es imposible no sentir escalofríos. Estamos rodeados de escoria humana.
mastodon.social
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George Monbiot @georgemonbiot.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
This is what the billionaire press and many politicians were campaigning so hard to destroy. Their freedom to drive took precedence over our children's freedom to thrive. www.theguardian.com/environment/...
theguardian.com
Ulez led to better lung size and function among London children, study finds
Researchers find capacity stunted by pollution restored after introduction of ultra-low emission zone
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Manuel @mediosordo.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/08/2026
Si quieres leer un artículo que te convenza que muy pronto todo saltará por los aires, este de Cory Doctorow @pluralistic es una muy buena opción. pluralistic.net/2026/08/11/tragedy-…
pluralistic.net
Pluralistic: Surveillance vs guillotines (11 Aug 2026)
Today's links Surveillance vs guillotines: Someone's gonna fleece these rubes, why not me? Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: DeCSS; Warhol Worm; Camgirls x Amazon wishlists; 2021 State of Tech (in 2001); RIAA v grieving family; Stasi disguises. Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Surveillance vs guillotines (permalink) In the summer of 2013, two esoteric, technical, incredibly important texts were published within weeks of one another: the first is the Snowden leaks, which revealed a system of global, pervasive digital surveillance; the second was Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, a book about the economic inevitability (and political instability) of oligarchy: https://memex.craphound.com/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-the-21st-century/ If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog: https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/11/tragedy-of-the-commoners/#piketty-snowden In 2013, it wasn't immediately apparent how these two works connected with one another, but in the years since, I've grown increasingly convinced that Snowden and Piketty can only be properly understood as describing two aspects of the same phenomenon. Piketty's landmark volume was grounded in a detailed analysis of 300 years' (!) worth of global capital flows, painstakingly compiled by a large team of grad students from a massive set of heterogeneous records. The book's conclusion is the statement that "returns to capital exceed the rate of growth over the long term" (abbreviated as "r > g"). This may sound innocuous, but it is explosive. If r > g, then the most wealth will inevitably accumulate in the hands of people who start with the most wealth, irrespective of whether they do anything productive with that money. This means that the alleged heroes of the market system – the entrepreneurs who found and manage the firms that increase public prosperity – are doomed to play second fiddle to the mere plumbers of money, people who "contribute" by accumulating. The starkest example of this in Capital 21C is Piketty's contrast between L'Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt (then the richest woman in the world) and Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft (then the most successful corporation in the world). Piketty compares the growth in the fortunes of Bettencourt and Gates over two periods: first, the period between Microsoft's founding and Gates' retirement as CEO; and second, the period after Gates's retirement from his executive role, when he became a mere investor, no longer an entrepreneur. During that first period, in which Gates was founding and running the most successful corporation in the world, he accumulated less wealth than did Liliane Bettencourt, who did precisely nothing of value over that period. Bettencourt didn't even manage her investments – that was all handled by some very clever financial planners, lawyers and accountants. In other words: for Bettencourt, doing nothing at all produced more wealth as founding the most successful corporation in the world did for Gates. Bettencourt, a person who owned things, did better than Gates, a person who did things. And then Gates retired. He stopped doing things and started owning things. He became an investor, whereupon he out-earned both Bettencourt and Gates-the-entrepreneur. Again, the market system allocated fewer rewards to the most successful person in the doing things business than it allocated to that same person once he quit that job and got into the owning things business. Piketty shows that this holds true across markets and nations and eras: all other things being equal, the market system produces a class of hereditary aristocrats who command the world's capital and direct its deployment, despite never having done anything. The market's most lavish rewards do not go to its most productive participants, but rather, to those participants who have the good fortune to emerge from the luckiest of orifices. Worse: winning the orifice lottery in no way qualifies you to direct the capital you've inherited. Liliane Bettencourt had no revolutionary new business ideas, invented no miraculous new materials or processes, produced no brilliant art. She merely accumulated, thanks to the professional services of skilled technicians whose job description includes hiring their own successors to ensure that another generation of winners of the Bettencourt orifice lottery could continue to accumulate, commanding more capital and power in society. Perhaps if these orifice winners were content to allow their bloodless Renfields to allocate their capital while consuming bonbons and attending yacht parties, this could yield a stable politics. But inevitably, people who win the orifice lottery observe that they come from a long line of wealthy people, a line that will continue with their own descendants, and conclude that they have some kind of special, heritable virtue – magic blood – that the system has recognized with their great fortunes and the power those fortunes confer. That's when things get dangerous: when aristocrats grow bored with their leisure and mobilize their inherited capital to change the way the rest of us live. Billionaire dilettantes are weapons of mass destruction, and their special projects have a wide blast radius and inflict a lot of collateral damage. Take Bill Gates: his ideological projects have been a catastrophe. A patent maximalist, he funded the lobbyists who successfully blocked South Africa from producing its own AIDS drugs under an IP waiver program, and then deployed them again to stop the Global South from making their own covid vaccines: https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#gates-foundation Closer to home, Gates's hatred of public institutions led him to allocate millions to dismantling public schools and replacing them with charter schools, particularly for poor and racialized kids, with disastrous results: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/09/autocrats-of-trade-2/#witness-the-firepower-of-this-fully-armed-and-operational-battle-station And of course, Gates supported and empowered Jeffrey Epstein and his rape island: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#Connection_with_Jeffrey_Epstein Capital's tendency to accumulate in the hands of the already wealthy (r > g) means that these aristocrats end up setting an ever-larger proportion of our societal agenda, despite their manifest unfitness to govern and their absence of any kind of democratic legitimacy. Piketty argues that inequality is inherently politically destabilizing. A society ruled over by fools and monsters who were not voted into power and can't be voted out of power is a doomed society. Eventually – the French Revolution, the World Wars – these societies grow so unstable that they collapse altogether. This is where Piketty and Snowden converge. When the Snowden leaks broke, there was a lot of talk about the mechanics and the legality of the NSA's global digital surveillance, but precious little consideration was given to the reason for all this surveillance. In 2013, the idea that this spying was about "security" was so obvious as to be self-evident. The questions at the time were whether spying could produce security. We weren't asking why things were so insecure. In retrospect, the answer is to be found in Piketty. Piketty's Capital includes a long, impassioned plea to both lawmakers and aristocrats to consider redistributive policies (like a wealth tax) as the most affordable way to achieve political stability. Fundamentally, Piketty argues that the cheapest way to stop people from building a guillotine on your lawn is to build hospitals and schools; this is cheaper than paying for guards and prisons to lock up would-be guillotine builders. Today's AI debates swirl around the question of whether AI can truly make us more productive – that is, if chatbots will allow one person to do the work of two, or three, or four – or 100. But when it comes to surveillance, the digital revolution unquestionably produced a massive productivity dividend. Consider the spying apparatus of the former East Germany ("the GDR") widely considered the most surveilled society in human history. When the Berlin Wall collapsed, there were about 16m people in the country. Of those East Germans, about 90,000 worked directly for the Stasi (the secret police), aided by another 100-200,000 paid informants: https://www.dw.com/en/east-germany-spy-agency-stasi-surveillance/ Call it 200,000 people to spy on 16m. In other words, it took one spy to watch 80 of their neighbors. Contrast this with NSA spying: they accumulated detailed surveillance dossiers on about 6 billion internet users using a staff of no more than 5 million spooks (in 2013, about 5 million Americans were eligible for security clearance). If every single person with security clearance in the USA was working on the NSA's surveillance program, that would mean that by 2013, computers had made it possible for a spy to keep tabs on more than a thousand people. Orders of magnitude improvements in a mere generation! This is the kind of productivity lift that economists dream of when they fantasize about the dividends from automation. But why? Why spy? East Germany spied on its people because the system was so unjust and cruel that its beneficiaries understood that their neighbors were forever on the brink of rising up against them. East Germany's leaders were right about that – but if anything, they didn't put enough people onto the spying project. We can tell, because the Berlin Wall fell in 1989! Of course, the GDR was already paying more than 1.2% of its population to spy on everyone else. It's likely that East Germany's leaders believed that their society simply lacked the fiscal space to hire more spies, even if short-staffing the Stasi risked societal collapse. Now, if Piketty is right, East Germany's leaders could have solved this problem by giving people fewer reasons to want to overthrow the state. They could have taken their hands out of the cookie jar, could have instituted democratic reforms – they could have made a bid for democratic legitimacy and public material comfort. But that would have come at the leaders' own power and wealth, and, lacking the stomach for this sacrifice, they lost everything. Enter the NSA: the digitization of human civilization has drastically reduced the cost of surveillance, and – again, per Piketty – this vastly increases the amount of inequality the world can sustain before the illegitimacy, incompetence and cruelty of rule by the neoaristocratic winners of the orifice lottery brings the whole thing crashing down. The Trump years are proof of this. We've reached a high-water mark for rule by illegitimate billionaire dilettantes. The second Trump admin began with DOGE's Bonfire of the Stupidities, where Musk cultists dismantled vast swathes of the American administrative state. Musk didn't just attack foreign aid – though the fact that the world's richest man murdered hundreds of thousands of the world's poorest children for the lulz isn't merely cruel, but also massively destabilizing in a way that will shake the world's politics for generations – but also domestic institutions. It was a DOGE cultist who fed the part of the NIH that tracks cyclosporin outbreaks into the wood-chipper: https://truthout.org/articles/disease-researchers-blame-doge-cuts-for-spiraling-cyclospora-outbreak/ Today, tens of thousands of Americans are experiencing the literal enshittification of the American state, and this isn't just a human tragedy (though it is), it's also an economic tragedy, with massive knock-on effects for the businesses that rely on those sickened Americans and for the agricultural sector whose outputs are now being shunned by millions. Whether it's letting Bill Gates decide how your schools will work or letting Elon Musk decide how your public health system runs, the result is political chaos and a societal nudge away from the rule of law and towards guillotines. Which brings me back to Snowden. The Snowden revelations did spur a global conversation about digital surveillance, with the result that the majority of the world's digital traffic is encrypted today. That's not nothing. But the American state found new ways to conduct mass-scale, global surveillance, often by collaborating directly with tech giants. Billionaires like Peter Thiel capitalized on Big Tech's conflicted feelings about openly participating in surveillance by founding Palantir, with the express mission of murdering the political opponents of oligarchy: https://www.thecanary.co/trending/2026/01/07/palantir-kill-communists/ Over the past decade, the steady march of digital technology, dominated by a cartel of giant global firms who collude with the US government's system of political repression in exchange for tax breaks, antitrust forbearance and fat federal contracts has yielded more mass surveillance productivity gains than the previous 25 years: https://apnews.com/article/trump-inauguration-tech-billionaires-zuckerberg-musk-wealth-0896bfc3f50d941d62cebc3074267ecd The Trump administration is the most unpopular in more than a century. Trump has stolen more money in office than any president in history. Trump presides over spiraling greedflation and collapsing buying power. The Trump administration has also presided over a titanic increase in state-aligned, privatized surveillance. The Trump years are the Flock years: https://newrepublic.com/article/206992/flock-safety-cameras-alpr-deflock-resistance-nationwide The Trump years are the Palantir years: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/technology/trump-palantir-data-americans.html The Trump years are the facial recognition years: https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/ice-face-recognition Trump's authoritarianism is a function of his misrule, and his misrule is enabled by his authoritarianism. The more he steals, the more he destroys with wars of choice, and incoherent tariff policies, and official pronouncements linking autism and vaccinations, the more he needs spy cameras, internet surveillance, vehicle tracking, and facial recognition. Every time Trump talks about a third term in office, or canceling elections, or suppressing the vote, he creates demand for mass surveillance to catch and imprison the people this drives into the streets. The more mass surveillance there is, the safer it is for him to commit unpopular, corrupt acts. It's the world's worst self-licking ice-cream cone. It's not just Trump, of course. Trump is the vanguard of a movement of orifice lottery winners whose delight in stealing, cheating, maiming and despoiling gives rise to political instability and requires them to divert some of their yacht money to mercenaries: https://theintercept.com/2026/06/25/police-luigi-mangione-wealthy-ceos-threat/ Take AI: the Trump years are also the AI years. This is the time in which a wildly unpopular technology is being shoved into every part of every app we rely on: https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/02/kpis-off/#principal-agentic-ai-problem It's an era where corporate bosses can't stop gloating about how many jobs they're planning to destroy and how many paycuts they plan on imposing on the surviving workers: https://www.axios.com/2025/05/28/ai-jobs-white-collar-unemployment-anthropic AI can't do your job, but an AI salesman can reliably convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job: https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete And – most visibly – it's an era in which people's cities and towns are being despoiled by data centers they don't want, by local governments operating in the most extreme secrecy, who silence and even arrest citizens who demand a democratically legitimate process for deciding whether they will have to give up their power and water and land and peace: https://www.404media.co/city-that-arrested-person-for-clapping-at-data-center-meeting-moves-to-virtual-townhalls-for-public-safety/ An economist would tell you that there's an equilibrium being sought here: between the cost of bribing a town council to ram through data center approvals, the cost of building a more modest and palatable data center, and the cost of mollifying public critics. The cost of bribing towns to foist a data center on the townsfolk is low, because there are lots of towns that fit the bill, so data center barons can shop around. But as data center protests grow larger and better organized (oligarchy is destabilizing), the cost of dealing with public opposition is mounting. Which is why the Trump administration is teaming up with its preferred tech and military contractors to engage in detailed surveillance of data center and AI critics: https://prospect.org/2026/08/10/private-intelligence-firms-selling-dossiers-on-ai-data-center-critics/ These corporate spooks aren't just spying on data center critics: they've got a whole portfolio of oligarchy-stabilizing surveillance services, targeting "antifa," immigrants' rights and anti-ICE groups. They're joined by hardware vendors who offer corporations, the wealthy, and enclaves where both are to be found on literal robocops, the ultimate in cheap guard labor (alas, the robots suck): https://www.404media.co/the-roboguard-revolution-is-short-circuiting/ Trump and his orifice-winning army are caught in the same trap as the leaders of the GDR. Every gain in guard-labor efficiency creates the space for more of them to stick more of their hands even further into the cookie jar. Every time they do, American society grows more unstable, demanding more guard labor. As we saw in Minneapolis, guard labor – be it mass surveillance, robocops or ICE chuds – is itself destabilizing. Police states make the people who live in them want to overthrow the state, requiring yet more cops, creating more partisans for tearing the whole thing down. In theory, the orifice class could decide to stop stealing, cheating and maiming. The problem is that for every plute who realizes that the cheapest way to keep the guillotines off his lawn is to play fair, there are three more who lack the executive function to stop cheating. That means that you might as well keep on cheating, since the instability – and the guard labor bills – are coming no matter what. In the tale of the "Tragedy of the Commons," a common pasture is grazed to dust by shepherds who each understand that if they don't graze their flock until everything is gone, some other shepherd will do so. The original "Tragedy of the Commons" paper was a racist hoax perpetrated by an academic fraud who wanted to make the case for the expulsion of black and Brown people from America and their mass extermination abroad: https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/01/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-how-ecofascism-was-smuggled-into-mainstream-thought/ In reality, commons need not be tragic and many of our most important resources have been managed as commons for hundreds of years: https://archive.org/details/governing-the-commons/page/4/mode/2up But when it comes to the commons that is "a stable society," the orifice class is caught in an inescapable tragedy, certain of the knowledge that if they don't cheat us, the next American aristo will. Thus the demand for guard labor continues to mount…as does the demand for guillotines. Hey look at this (permalink) If You Get in a Car Crash, the Risk Is Growing Your Insurance Won’t Pay https://archive.is/7t58c#selection-2140.1-2140.2 Zack Polanski Promotes Radical Plan to Break Up Britain’s ‘Billionaire Media’ https://bylinetimes.com/2026/08/10/zack-polanski-promotes-radical-plan-to-break-up-britains-billionaire-media/ Subaru Socialists and the Great Disappointed https://www.newyorker.com/news/fault-lines/subaru-socialists-and-the-great-disappointed Not your imagination: from backpacks to food, consumer goods are getting worse https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/10/consumed-consumer-goods-quality?CMP=GTUS_email LAST CALL FOR HOPE 26 TICKETS https://www.2600.com/content/last-call-hope-26-tickets Object permanence (permalink) #25yrsago Wonderfully thorough backgrounder on DeCSS https://web.archive.org/web/20010816194008/https://lemuria.org/decss/hal2001.html #25yrsago Warhol Worm https://web.archive.org/web/20010814171036/http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~nweaver/warhol.html #25yrsago Camgirls use Amazon wishlists for payouts https://web.archive.org/web/20010821234935/http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/08/13/cam_girls/index.html #25yrsago State of the tech industry 2021 https://web.archive.org/web/20011216222920/http://latimes.com/technology/la-000064605aug09.story #25yrsago List of scenes cut from Looney Tunes reissues https://web.archive.org/web/20011214095249/http://www.toonzone.net/looney/ltcuts/ #20yrsago Strategy behind using liquids to threaten planes https://web.archive.org/web/20060813001626/https://wondermark.com/d/220.html #20yrsago RIAA to grieving family: We depose your children in 60 days https://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/2006/08/riaa-wants-to-depose-dead-defendants.html #15yrsago Stasi spywear: the inept art of commie disguise https://web.archive.org/web/20120000000000*/http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,777716,00.html #15yrsago 1968: when Britain’s Daily Mirror tried to overthrow Parliament https://www.bbc.co.uk/webarchive/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2Fblogs%2Fadamcurtis%2F2011%2F07%2Fevery_day_is_like_sunday.html #15yrsago My panel with Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf and Al Gore at Mexico City’s Campus Party https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXPZnpsN4-s #15yrsago Doctor tried to "cure homosexuality" by tasping gay man while he had sex with a female sex-worker https://web.archive.org/web/20111004080028/https://blog.ketyov.com/2011/08/self-stimulating-brain-for-heterosexual.html #10yrsago How a digital-only smartphone opens the door to DRM (and how to close the door) https://memex.craphound.com/2016/08/12/how-a-digital-only-smartphone-opens-the-door-to-drm-and-how-to-close-the-door/ #10yrsago Forget Skynet: AI is already making things terrible for people who aren’t rich white dudes https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/opinion/sunday/artificial-intelligences-white-guy-problem.html #10yrsago How self-driving cars could make everything worse, and what to do about it https://web.archive.org/web/20170918192128/https://www.wired.com/2016/08/self-driving-cars-will-improve-our-cities-if-they-dont-ruin-them/ #10yrsago The Tor Project’s social contract: we will not backdoor Tor https://blog.torproject.org/tor-social-contract/ #10yrsago Cash grants to people with unexpected bills successfully prevents homelessness https://www.science.org/content/article/bit-cash-can-keep-someone-streets-2-years-or-more Upcoming appearances (permalink) Virtual: EFFecting Change: Who the Machine Serves, Aug 12 https://www.eff.org/event/effecting-change-who-machine-serves Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17 https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24 https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/program/ Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25 https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8 https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/ London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9 https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ Recent appearances (permalink) Speculative Fiction for Social Change (Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff) https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/cool-people-who-did-cool-stuff/08cbb840-a6ae-013a-d8aa-0acc26574db2/part-one-cory-doctorow-on-speculative-fiction-for-social-change/15ad467c-0832-44c9-91ea-59defd783dba AI, automation and enshittification (Telecoms.com) https://www.telecoms.com/ai/the-telecoms-com-podcast-ai-automation-and-enshittification The AI Enshittification Bubble (Hidden Forces) https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/the-ai-enshittification-bubble-cory-doctorow/ F@#$ the AI Overlords (On The Media) https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/articles/f-the-ai-overlords Why AI Won't Replace Workers, But Will Crash The Economy (Smart Cookies) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRRmUuxJolY Latest books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 507 (3619 total). "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X
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Manuel @mediosordo.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/08/2026
RE: mastodon.social/@dangillmor/1170794… Ai, ai, ai, como nos la cuelan con la AI.
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Manuel @mediosordo.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/08/2026
RE: mastodon.social/@SeanCasten/1170656… No hay guión de Hollywood que refleje a los supervillanos cerca del nivel de corrupción y maquiavelismo que rodea a los Trump. Es alucinante.
mastodon.social
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George Monbiot @georgemonbiot.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
Neoliberalism in a nutshell. UEFA on FIFA's proposal: “The moment external investors acquire ownership interests ... football changes forever. Commercial return becomes a permanent obligation. ... Every decision is no longer driven by what best serves the game, but by what best serves shareholders.”
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Manuel @mediosordo.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/06/2026
Ojalá tener en España un programa de musica en directo la mitad de bueno que el de #JoolsHolland. Hace que las bandas mediocres suenen de puta madre, y que las bandas buenas lo peten tanto que lo primero que haces tras verlo es mirar su agenda de conciertos para ver si hay alguno que pille medio […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Manuel @mediosordo.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/06/2026
Por poco no hay letras en el abecedario para clasificar todos los grupos que hay este año en el mundial. Que locura, por dios.
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Manuel @mediosordo.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/06/2026
RE: ec.social-network.europa.eu/@digita… Ojalá ver este tipo de cuentas oficiales de organismos públicos en #España
ec.social-network.europa.eu
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Manuel @mediosordo.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/05/2026
Busco un Luigi para el compositor de Baby Shark. Es para un amigo. #CosasDePadres
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Manuel @mediosordo.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/05/2026
RE: mastodon.social/@JMarkOckerbloom/11… La Wikipedia no, por favor...
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Manuel @mediosordo.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/05/2026
RE: mastodon.social/@randahl/1165402903… That is the way
mastodon.social
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Manuel @mediosordo.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/03/2026
Yo no sé vosotros, pero estoy deseando que cambie la hora. Llegan las 10 de la noche y cuesta mantener los ojos abiertos.
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Stefano Marinelli @bsd.cafe · 21/01/2026
They say AI isn’t profitable. That’s not true. Twice just this past week, I’ve been contacted and paid to fix problems caused by developers who relied on AI to configure servers. #AI
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Manuel @mediosordo.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/01/2026
La izquierda siendo la izquierda. #Fedidrama
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Jenny Cohn @jennycohn.bsky.social · 04/01/2026
What do Venezuela, Greenland, Honduras, Nigeria, and “Freedom Cities” have in common? The “network state” cabal—which includes Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, & Joe Lonsdale—has been circling them like vultures. Thread. ⬇️
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Manuel @mediosordo.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 01/01/2026
Propósito de año nuevo: cumplir por fin el propósito del 2025: cambiar el tono del móvil.
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Manuel @mediosordo.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/12/2025
Juro que parece que fue el otro día que intenté (sin éxito) durante algo más de una semana elaborar una lista de mis canciones favoritas del año. Del 2024. Los años pasan como páginas de un libro. Duran un suspiro. Y no va a mejor.
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George Monbiot @georgemonbiot.bsky.social · 15/12/2025
Because the issue of population change is so widely misunderstood, here's a short thread which seeks to lay it out simply. It explains why there is almost nothing anyone can do to change the global population trajectory, both as numbers rise, then as they fall. 🧵1/13
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Manuel @mediosordo.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/12/2025
Subo al coche. Suena una canción de rock en la radio. Un sonido muy americano. Se me hace familiar. Me gusta, le hago un Shazam. Mientras escanea me digo "joder, suenan a los Afghan Whigs". Son los Afghan Whigs. Uno de los 3 o 4 grupos más importantes de mi vida. Y lo han vuelto a hacer. Piel de […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Mastodon @mastodon.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/12/2025
Today we are calling on institutions around the world to take control of their #DigitalSovereignty, including their social accounts. Governments should communicate directly with their citizens on open platforms, not through the mouthpiece of a corporation […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Manuel @mediosordo.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/11/2025
Preguntarle a Google a que hora sale el sol en #Lanzarote y que te responda su IA sugiriendo que contemple el acontecimiento desde dos lugares emblemáticos de la isla. Uno mira para el Norte y otro para el Oeste. Y pretenden que dejemos nuestra salud en manos de esta basura? #AISlop
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Manuel @mediosordo.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/11/2025
RE: infosec.exchange/@RedwoodSec/115521… Ni un guión de una peli de miedo acojona tanto como esto...
infosec.exchange
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George Monbiot @georgemonbiot.bsky.social · 07/11/2025
1. This is a thread on freedom, and how easy it is to lose. Over the past 2,000 years in Europe, there have been few periods and places of freedom. For much of the time we lived under highly oppressive tyrannies of various kinds, whether small or grand, local or imperial, secular or religious.🧵
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Manuel @mediosordo.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/10/2025
Joder, si es que en nada ya empiezan a salir las listas de mejores discos del año. No tengo duda que el #2025 va camino de ser el año más corto de la historia.
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Manuel @mediosordo.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/10/2025
RE: mastodon.social/@LaHistorietaMusica… Sin duda uno de los cinco discos más importantes de mi vida, y por supuesto uno de los más escuchados. Más de 35 años después, me sigue emocionando como el primer día.
mastodon.social
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Manuel @mediosordo.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/10/2025
RE: mastodon.social/@sundogplanets/1153… Si es que no podemos ser más gilipollas...
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Manuel @mediosordo.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/10/2025
Las marcas de coches alemanas se han pasado los últimos 10 años haciendo lo posible para que el mercado de EVs no crezca. Ahora van a hacer lo posible para retrasar el 2035 hasta el infinito. #descarbonizacion #EV #VE […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Manuel @mediosordo.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/10/2025
El resumen de prensa diario vía email del NYT, incluye hoy una selección de "preguntas al corresponsal" de la Casablanca. Hay una cuya respuesta me ha llamado la atención: "Over your career reporting on presidents, have you noticed a change in the personalities you’ve dealt with? From an […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Manuel @mediosordo.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/10/2025
Hoy me llegó mi nueva guitarra y he ido a dos conciertos. Creo que puede considerarse un muy buen día. #Lanzarote
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Manuel @mediosordo.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/09/2025
En el momento que pase esto será cuando el PP empiece a decir #genocidio social.elpais.com/pihoi4 #Gaza
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Prof. Sam Lawler @sundogplanets.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/09/2025
It is WILD that we now live in a time where my job as an astrophysics professor has gone from "learn cool things about space" to "try to get someone to hold billionaires accountable for dropping shit on us from orbit"
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Manuel @mediosordo.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/09/2025
Asusta ver que estamos rodeados de fascistas. Esto es hoy en el Reino Unido, pero tal y como vamos no nos falta nada para estar a este nivel. #doomerism #doomerismo www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/se…
theguardian.com
Trump declines to call for unity after Charlie Kirk killing in stunning move
President tells Fox News ‘the radicals on the left are the problem’ and refuses to seek common way forward
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Marta @teclista.hortensia.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/09/2025
Creo que tenéis todes que ver esto. all-you-can-suck-up-buffet.com
all-you-can-suck-up-buffet.com
Big Tech Dinner
Choose your tech bro and battle it out in this epic tug-of-war game!
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Manuel @mediosordo.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/09/2025
Escoger la fecha de tus vacaciones visitando a la suegra polaca para que coincida con un concierto de #Mogwai en Varsovia y que estos cancelen en la misma mañana del concierto porque unos drones rusos cruzaron la frontera el día anterior suena a guión de película mala de sobremesa, no? #fuck […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Popehat @kenwhite.bsky.social · 10/09/2025
Political violence disproportionately hurts people with less power, not people with more power. Political violence will disproportionately hurt people of color and women and LGBTQ people. It’s not fair, but that’s the way it works. Celebrating political violence means at best indifference to that.
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Manuel @mediosordo.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 01/09/2025
Parecía que había llegado el apocalipsis con la compra de #bandcamp por parte de Songtradr y el despido de la mitad de la plantilla, pero la verdad es que esto de #BandcampClubs pinta muy bien y ofrece un pequeño rayo de esperanza de que tras casi 20 años la plataforma no se vaya a la mierda […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Manuel @mediosordo.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/08/2025
Desde hace meses suelo hacer dormir a mi pequeña mientras vemos el concierto #KEXP del día. Es un win-win, ella se queda dormida y yo disfruto del único momento del día en el que puedo escuchar música prestando atención. Suele funcionar, y si en alguna ocasión la música no le acaba de encajar […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Manuel @mediosordo.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/08/2025
Pues a pesar del reducido programa de la edición de este año del Festival de Música Visual de #Lanzarote, encantado de que se traigan a la iraní Shida Shahabi a tocar en el Auditorio de Los Jameos del Agua. Pinta de que va a ser realmente especial […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Manuel @mediosordo.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/08/2025
Tras casi tres años en Mastodon, esta parece una buena mañana para publicar mi #presentación: Manuel, adicto a la música y a los conciertos, pero emigrado a las antípodas de la música en directo desde el 98. Preocupado por los derroteros por los que desvaría este mundo, y de los recortes en […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Manuel @mediosordo.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 31/07/2025
Mirando de comprar un portátil Dell con Linux preinstalado. Encuentro uno que me gusta. 350€ más la versión con Ubuntu que la versión con Windows. #enshittification #mierdificación #enmierdamiento
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Manuel @mediosordo.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/06/2025
Pues me estreno con el #viernesdetemazo para recomendar la nueva canción de Mark William Lewis. Cantautor londinense con una voz que recuerda a ratos a la del cantante de Tindersticks, pero con un magnetismo del que es difícil escapar. El tema me encanta, y llevo pegado a él durante las ultimas […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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tomate 🍅 @jascha.ohai.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/05/2025
I was asked by a 20 year younger friend how my internet was back then. I needed a moment but then I told her the story of an IRC channel and how we made the day for a young girl who happened to be on our IRC channel. Because this is what my internet was like back then and I wish sometimes it […]
ohai.social
Original post on ohai.social
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