My next book is The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation: it’s a Big Tech disassembly manual that explains how to disenshittify the web and bring back the old good internet. The hardcover comes from Verso on Sept 5, but the audiobook comes from me — because Amazon refuses to sell my audio:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-internet-con-how-to-seize-the-means-of-computation
Amazon owns Audible, the monopoly audiobook platform that controls >90% of the audio market. They require mandatory DRM for every book sold, locking those books forever to Amazon’s monopoly platform. If you break up with Amazon, you have to throw away your entire audiobook library.
That’s a hell of a lot of leverage to hand to any company, let alone a rapacious monopoly that ran a program targeting small publishers called “Project Gazelle,” where execs were ordered to attack indie publishers “the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle”:
https://www.businessinsider.com/sadistic-amazon-treated-book-sellers-the-way-a-cheetah-would-pursue-a-sickly-gazelle-2013-10
Keep reading
Uni's magical Mario Galaxy adventure..
Yesterday = the International Day of Solidarity with Antifascist Prisoners.
We're declaring today the International Day of Keeping Antifascists From Becoming Prisoners.
Since 2014, The International Anti-Fascist Defence Fundhas provided over $200,000USD in emergency legal support to more than 700 anti-fascists in 25 countries, keeping them out of prison by ensuring they have competent legal teams backing them when they need it.
But we can't do it without your help. Click here to help us keep antifascists free.
Hey y'all. Here's something for you.
using religion is the opium of the people to argue for free experimentation and recreational use of religions
If you see this you’re legally obligated to reblog and tag with the book you’re currently reading
I undooted my heart of this post so I could redoot it for this add-on
Jokes on you Verizon, we’re anticap and we fucking hate you.
Byyyye Tumblr, by TERFs, by Fascists
(I’ll see anyone who cares on Mastodon and Pillowfort, etc. Username something along the lines of Lemming, workingonit, theresstuffoutside. Message me if yoy care, I’ll leave my blog up until the 16th)
A former staff engineer, who recently left Tumblr and asked to remain anonymous for professional reasons, tells Vox that the NSFW ban was “in the works for about six months as an official project,” adding that it was given additional resources and named “Project X” in September, shortly before it was announced to the rest of the company at an all-hands meeting. “[The NSFW ban] was going to happen anyway,” the former engineer told me. “Verizon pushed it out the door after the child pornography thing and made the deadline sooner,” but the real problem was always that Verizon couldn’t sell ads next to porn.
Porn on Tumblr is something Verizon needs to wipe out if it’s going to make any money off what it thinks is actually valuable about the platform — enormous fandom and social justice communities that, just before the Verizon acquisition, Khalaf was insisting the staff figure out how to better monetize.
On that note-
Two former Tumblr employees said they were alarmed when Khalaf chose Black Lives Matter as an example of a community that the company should focus on converting into Yahoo media consumers. One told The Verge, “Simon explicitly said that Black Lives Matter was an opportunity to [make] a ton of money.”
Honestly, I feel this. The anticonsumptionist, sassy bitch Grinch played by JC was my sexual awakening.
Did you know there’s an outtake from the 2000 Grinch movie where Jim Carrey leans in real close to Jeffrey Tambor’s face and then rips off Tambor’s prosthetic nose with his teeth