Brutkey

Cory Doctorow
@pluralistic@mamot.fr

Long thread/13

It also explains how candidates like Zohran Mamdani were able to clobber the political establishment simply by a) telling people that he would do popular things; and b) convincing them that he meant it.

Suppressing popular preferences in (nominal) democracies isn't easy. It requires absolute unity of the ruling classes. Whenever the faintest crack appears in capital's unity, good policies gush out of it.

13/

Cory Doctorow
@pluralistic@mamot.fr

That's what's happened with antitrust this decade, where the divisions between billionaire rentiers like Apple/Google and the millionaire capitalists who want to escape their 30% app tax has allowed a rush of effective antitrust enforcement to sweep the world, to the detriment of both:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/28/mamdani/#trustbusting

14/

Cory Doctorow
@pluralistic@mamot.fr

By not hanging together, the rich let us hang them separately. And since there is no honor among thieves - since the rich want nothing more to eat one anothers' lunches - there is disunity aplenty for us to exploit. We just have to remember that we are the (very large) majority and act like it.

15/

Cory Doctorow
@pluralistic@mamot.fr

Hey, German-speakers! Through a very weird set of circumstances, I ended up owning the rights to the German audiobook of my bestselling 2022 cryptocurrency heist technothriller Red Team Blues and now I'm selling DRM-free audio and ebooks, along with the paperback (all in German and English) on a Kickstarter that runs until August 11:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-auf-deutsche-drm-freie

16/

Cory Doctorow
@pluralistic@mamot.fr

Image:
Japanexperterna.se (modified)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/japanexperterna/15251188384/

CC BY-SA 2.0:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

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