Cory DoctorowToday's threads (a thread)
Inside: Cindy Cohn's "Privacy's Defender"; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/09/bernstein/
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Cindy Cohn's "Privacy's Defender": The history of digital rights, from the very beginning to this very moment.
https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/116374372641473548
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Hey look at this
* Who Is L.A.’s Hero Posting Up These Anti-ICE Parking Signs? https://lataco.com/anti-ice-parking-signs
* Data Center Tech Lobbyists Fearmonger in Attempt to Retroactively Roll Back Right to Repair Law https://www.404media.co/data-center-tech-lobbyists-fearmonger-in-attempt-to-retroactively-roll-back-right-to-repair-law/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter
* Live Tax-Free and Die https://prospect.org/2026/04/08/apr-2026-magazine-live-tax-free-and-die/
* Men Are Buying Hacking Tools to Use Against Their Wives and Friends https://www.wired.com/story/men-are-buying-hacking-tools-to-use-against-their-wives-and-friends/
* How Trump Took the U.S. to War With Iran https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/us/politics/trump-iran-war.html
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#15yrsago Advanced office-supply sculpture: paperclip dodecahedron https://web.archive.org/web/20171122055732/https://makezine.com/2011/04/07/paperclip-snub-dodecahedron/
#15yrsago World Bank: gold farming (etc) paid poor countries $3B in 2009 https://web.archive.org/web/20110410134037/http://www.infodev.org/en/Publication.1056.html
#15yrsago Class war comics: Scrap Iron Man versus international capital https://web.archive.org/web/20110410215907/https://www.chinamieville.net/post/4406165249/rejected-pitch
#15yrsago Colombian Justice Minister ramming through extremist copyright legislation without public consultation https://web.archive.org/web/20110707053554/http://karisma.org.co/?p=667
#15yrsago Glenn Beck’s brain https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/glenn-beck-fox-news-brain-chart/
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#10yrsago Why 40 years of official nutritional guidelines prescribed a low-fat diet that promoted heart disease https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/07/the-sugar-conspiracy-robert-lustig-john-yudkin
#10yrsago Fearing the Pirate Party, Iceland’s government scrambles to avoid elections https://web.archive.org/web/20160407183022/https://theintercept.com/2016/04/07/icelands-government-tries-cling-protesters-pirates-gates/
#10yrsago The price of stealing an identity is crashing, with no bottom in sight https://qz.com/656459/its-never-been-cheaper-to-steal-someones-digital-identity-on-the-internet
#10yrsago Bernie Sanders can only win if nonvoters turn out at the polls, and they almost never do https://web.archive.org/web/20160408145116/https://www.vox.com/2016/4/6/11373862/bernie-sanders-voter-lists
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#10yrsago To understand the link between corporations and Hillary Clinton, look at philosophy, not history https://web.archive.org/web/20160406223353/https://www.thenation.com/article/the-problem-with-hillary-clinton-isnt-just-her-corporate-cash-its-her-corporate-worldview/
#10yrsago The US Government’s domestic spy-planes take weekends and holidays off https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/spies-in-the-skies
#10yrsago A perfect storm of broken business and busted FLOSS backdoors everything, so who needs the NSA? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwcl17Q0bpk
#5yrsago Door Dashers organize app-defeating solidarity https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/07/cruelty-by-design/#declinenow
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#5yrsago Leaked NYPD "goon squad" manual https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/07/cruelty-by-design/#blam-blam-blam
#1yrago Tariffs and monopolies https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/07/it-matters-how-you-slice-it/#too-big-to-care
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My latest novel is "Picks and Shovels," a historical technothriller set in the Weird Era of the PC, about Ponzi schemes, techbros, and the dawn of enshittification:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels
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My latest nonfiction book is the internationally bestselling "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," from MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
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My ebooks and audiobooks (from FSGxMCD, 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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Upcoming appearances:
* #Montreal: Bronfman Lecture (McGill), Apr 10
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disrupter-tickets-1982706623885
* #Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, Apr 10
https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/4863920260410
* #Toronto: DemocracyXchange, Apr 16
https://www.democracyxchange.org/news/cory-doctorow-to-open-dxc26-on-april-16
* #SanFrancisco: 2026 Berkeley Spring Forum on M&A and the Boardroom, Apr 23
https://www.theberkeleyforum.com/#agenda
* #London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25
https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691
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Upcoming appearances (cont'd):
* #NYC: Enshittification at Commonweal Ventures, Apr 29
https://luma.com/ssgfvqz8
* #NYC: Techidemic with Sarah Jeong, Tochi Onyibuchi and Alia Dastagir (PEN World Voices), Apr 30
https://worldvoices.pen.org/event/techidemic/
* #Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow
* #Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html
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Upcoming appearances (cont'd):
* #HayOnWye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2
* SXSW #London, Jun 2
https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901
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Recent appearances:
* The internet is getting worse (CBC The National)
https://youtu.be/dCVUCdg3Uqc?si=FMcA0EI_Mi13Lw-P
* Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today)
https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech
* Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU
* Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech)
https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074
* The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah)
https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doctorow-matthew-potolsky/
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I'm also on Bluesky. Read today's thread there at:
https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net/post/3mj2nrqggz22e
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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) (@doctorow.pluralistic.net)
I've known EFF executive director Cindy Cohn for 27 years. I met her when I needed cyberlaw advice for a startup I'd helped found. We got along so well that I quit the startup and went to work at EFF. Now, Cindy's memoir, *Privacy's Defender*, is on the shelves: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262051248/privacys-defender/ 1/