But plenty of the things that Big Tech gets up to are about the narrative of growth. That’s why Big Tech has pumped every tech bubble of this stupid decade: metaverse, cryptocurrency, AI. These technologies have each been at the forefront of Big Tech marketing and investor communications, but not solely because they represented a market opportunity. Rather, they represented a more-or-less plausible explanation for how these companies that were on the wrong side of the law of large numbers could continue to double in size, without breeding billions of new customers to sign up for their services.
I emailed with him a few times, and he always answered. I was working on a sermon about science fiction and used an excerpt from an article he’d written as a reading in the service.
Extremely supportive and thoughtful, in my opinion. A real hoopy frood!
The interviewer at the event I attended, Matt Stoller, kind of off-handedly asked Cory, “how did you learn to write?” And Cory shared a truly amazing origin story of meeting Judith Merrill at a school trip to a library in Ontario as a nine year old and entering her writers’ group and then continuing for his entire remaining junior high and high school career and eventually getting his first story published in a sci-fi magazine that was founded by a couple people who’d been “bullied into” starting the mag by…you guessed it, Judith Merrill.
He was so obviously appreciative of the impact Miller had on the entire field. It’s not surprising at all that he is passing it forward to this day. But still so cool to hear about your experience with him!
cough; it wasn’t just “a library in Ontario”, it was the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy, whose founding patron was Merril. It’s one of the largest spec fic collections in the world.
The problem isn’t disruption itself, but rather, the establishment of undisruptable, legally protected monopolies whose crybaby billionaire CEOs never have to face the same treatment they meted out to the incumbents who were on the scene when they were starting out.
When an industry is heavily concentrated, when it is a cartel that controls key chokepoints that restrict access to key markets, then rising prices don’t trigger discounts from rival companies, because rival companies simply can’t get any market oxygen. And when a shock – covid, bird flu, etc – strikes, cartels can hike prices way over their higher costs, and point the finger of blame at the shock. This is a special subspecies of greedflation called “excuseflation”
[Fuckface] won office in part by insisting that America’s institutions were not fit for purpose. He wasn’t lying about that (for a change). The thing he was lying about was his desire to fix them. [Von Clownstick] doesn’t want honest refs – he wants no refs. To defeat [Clown]ism, we need to stop pretending that our institutions are just fine – we need to confront their failings head on and articulate a plan to fix them, rather than claiming “America was already great”:
The Echo is an internet-connected device that treats its owner as an adversary and is designed to facilitate over-the-air updates by the manufacturer that are adverse to the interests of the owner. Giving a manufacturer the power to downgrade a device after you’ve bought it, in a way you can’t roll back or defend against is an invitation to run the playbook of the Darth Vader MBA, in which the manufacturer replies to your outraged squawks with “I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further”
But how can this be legal? You bought an Echo and explicitly went into its settings to disable remote monitoring of the sounds in your home, and now Amazon – without your permission, against your express wishes – is going to start sending recordings from inside your house to its offices.
In taking on the libel-industrial complex – a network of shadowy, thin-skinned, wealthy litigation funders; crank academics; buck-chasing lawyer lickspittle sociopaths; and the most corrupt Supreme Court justice on the bench today – Enrich is wading into dangerous territory. After all, he’s reporting on people who’ve made it their life’s mission to financially destroy anyone who has the temerity to report on their misdeeds.
The concept is valid, it’s just the implementation that is the problem. This seems approachable as a DIY project. With a few more iterations on something like this
I bet something could be created that is relatively easy to use, inexpensive, and privacy-respecting.
Building something on top of Meshtastic or similar could be interesting, but would be less straightforward due to bandwidth limitations and the relative scarcity of LoRaWAN as compared to the Internet.
But still so cool to hear about your experience with him!
