Remember the Global War on Terror? I know, it's been a minute. But there was a time when we were all meant to take terrorism - *real* terrorism, the knocking-down-buildings kind, not the being-mean-to-Teslas kind - seriously.
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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:
pluralistic.net/2025/03/27/use…
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Cory Doctorow
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Back in the early oughts, I remember picking up a copy of the *Financial Times* in an airport lounge and flipping through it, and coming across an "advice to corporate management" column in which the question was, "Should I take out terrorism insurance for my business?"
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Cory Doctorow
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The columnist's answer: "The actual risk to your business of a terrorism-related disruption rounds to zero. However: a) your shareholders don't understand this, an b) your insurance company does. That means that you can buy a very large amount of terrorism insurance for a very small amount of money, making this a cheap price to pay to mollify your easily frightened investors."
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Cory Doctorow
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I never forgot that little piece of writing. It was a powerful reminder that successful large-scale enterprises must attend to the world as it is, not as ideology dictates that it should be.
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Cory Doctorow
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This was - and is - a deeply heterodox position among the ideological defenders of capitalism, who continue to uphold Milton Friedman's maxim that:
> Truly important and significant hypotheses will be found to have "assumptions" that are wildly inaccurate descriptive representations of reality, and, in general, the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions (in this sense)
pluralistic.net/2025/02/17/cal…
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Pluralistic: Business school professors trained an AI to judge workers’ personalities based on their faces (17 Feb 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
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These ideologues - who often cross over from boardrooms to governments - are with the Bush official who dismissed a journalist as a being in the "reality-based community":
> When we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
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Cory Doctorow
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But ultimately, *someone* has to make investments and plans that take accord of the world as it is, the adversaries they face, the real and material emergencies unfolding around them. When the Pentagon announces that henceforth the climate emergency will take a prime place in its threat assessments and budgets, that's not "the military going woke" - it's the military joining the reality-based community:
defensenews.com/opinion/commen…
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The Pentagon has to include climate risk in all of its plans and budgets
Sherri Goodman (Defense News)Cory Doctorow
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This explains the radical shear between the *Wall Street Journal*'s editorial page - in which you'll learn that governments can't solve *any* problems and markets solve *all* problems (including the problem of governments) - and the news reporting within, in which the critical role of the state in regulating and fueling markets is acknowledged.
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Cory Doctorow
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The tension between the right's ideologues in boardrooms and governments and the operational people in charge of keeping the machines running has only escalated since the War on Terror days. There's an important sense in which leftists - as materialists - are playing the same game as these operational managers of capitalism.
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Cory Doctorow
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Take Thomas Piketty, the socialist economist whose blockbuster 2013 book *Capital in the 21st Century* argued that rising inequality threatened capitalism itself:
memex.craphound.com/2014/06/24…
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Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century – Cory Doctorow's MEMEX
memex.craphound.comCory Doctorow
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By analyzing three centuries' worth of capital flows, Piketty showed that when inequality reached a certain tipping point, the result was societal upheaval that continued until so much capital had been destroyed that inequality was reduced (because everyone had been pauperized).
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Cory Doctorow
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Piketty appealed to capitalism's technocrats to institute redistributive programs. His point was that building hospitals and schools was ultimately cheaper than paying for the guard-labor you'd need to keep people from building guillotines outside the gates of your walled estate.
The rise and rise of surveillance tech, and its successors, such as lethal drones and offshore gulags, can be seen as a tacit acknowledgment of Piketty's thesis.
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Cory Doctorow
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By lowering the cost of guard labor, it might possible to stabilize a society with higher levels of inequality, by identifying and neutralizing the people who are radicalized by the system's unfairness before you get an outbreak of guillotines:
pluralistic.net/2020/08/13/bet…
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Pluralistic: 13 Aug 2020 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
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But reality is stubborn. Capitalism's defenders can insist that society will continue to function while wages stagnate and greedflation stokes the cost of living crisis, but ultimately, the military can't afford to have a fighting force that's in hock to payday lender usurers who are tormenting their families with arm-breaker collection calls:
nakedcapitalism.com/2025/03/pa…
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Payday Loan Apps Cost New Yorkers $500 Million Plus, New Study Estimates | naked capitalism
Yves Smith (naked capitalism)Cory Doctorow
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As Stein's Law - a bedrock of finance - has it, "anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." The ideologues of capitalism can insist that Luigi Mangione is a monster and an aberration, an armed freeloader who wants something for nothing. But privately, their own security forces are telling them otherwise.
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Cory Doctorow
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Writing for *The American Prospect*, Daniel Boguslaw reports on a leaked intelligence dossier from the Connecticut regional intelligence center - a "fusion center" created as part of the War on Terror - wherein we learn that the American people sees Mangione as a modern Robin Hood:
prospect.org/justice/2025-03-2…
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Exclusive: Intelligence Dossier Compares Luigi Mangione to ‘Robin Hood’
Daniel Boguslaw (The American Prospect)Cory Doctorow
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> Many view Thompson as a symbolic representation of both as reports of insurance companies denying life sustaining medication coverage circulate online. It is not an unfair comparison to equate the current reaction toward Mangione to the reactions to Robin Hood, citizens may see Mangione’s alleged actions as an attack against a system designed to work against them.
drive.google.com/file/d/1hM3IZ…
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CT intelligence center report.pdf
Google DocsCory Doctorow
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The Connecticut fusion center isn't the only part of capitalism's operational wing that's taking notice of this. Today, Ken Klippenstein reports on an FBI threat assessment about the "heightened threat to CEOs":
kenklippenstein.com/p/fbi-beco…
The report comes from the FBI's counter-terrorism wing, which (Klippenstein notes) is in the business of rooting out "pre-crime" - identifying people who haven't committed a crime and neutralizing them.
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FBI Becomes Rent-A-Cops for CEOs
Ken KlippensteinCory Doctorow
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As Klippenstein writes, Trump AG Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel have both vowed to treat anti-Tesla protests as acts of terror.
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Cory Doctorow
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That's the view from the top, but back on the front lines of the Connecticut fusion center, things are more reality-based:
> [The public] may view the ensuing manhunt and subsequent arrest of Mangione as NYPD, and largely policing as a whole, as a tool that is willing to expend massive resources to protect the wealthy, while the average citizen is left to their own means for personal security.
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Cory Doctorow
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Any good investor knows that anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. The only question is: will that halt is a controlled braking action, or a collision with reality's brick wall?
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Cory Doctorow
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I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel *Picks and Shovels*.
Catch me in #CHICAGO with PETER SAGAL on Apr 2:
exileinbookville.com/events/44…
And in #BLOOMINGTON on Apr 4:
morgensternbooks.com/event/202…
More tour dates here:
martinhench.com
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Authors on Tap: Cory Doctorow and Peter Sagal
exileinbookville.comCory Doctorow
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Image:
Lee Haywood (modified)
flickr.com/photos/leehaywood/4…
CC BY-SA 2.0
creativecommons.org/licenses/b…
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Robin Hood's back
FlickrTim Kukulski
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SpudHead (bad quotes guy) (unfunny)
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow
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