Cory Doctorow

You should be able to leave a social media network and go to another one and continue to receive the messages people send to you and reply to them the same way you can leave one phone carrier and go to the other.

And there's a lot of technical details about what that standard looks like and how you avoid embedding parochial interests of incumbents and so on.

I don't think they're insurmountable.

And I think that the tradeoffs are more than worth it.

So my first pick is Sarah Wynne Williams' book, Careless People.

And it's a great example of the Streisand effect, that when a company tries to suppress something, it brings it interest.

So Wynne Williams, she was a minor diplomat in the New Zealand diplomatic corps.

She became quite interested in how Facebook could be a player geopolitically.

She started to sort of nudge them to give her a job as like an international governmental relations person.

No one was very interested in it, but she just sort of kept at it until she got her dream job.

And then the dream turned into a nightmare.

My second choice is a book by Bridget Reid.

It's a book called Little Bosses Everywhere.

And it's an argument that the American pyramid scheme is kind of the...

It's the center of our current rot.

And everywhere you look in the MAGA movement, you find people who have been predated upon by the kinds of scams that are characteristic of this and who've adopted the kind of toxic positivity that comes with it.

It is an incredibly illuminating, beautifully researched book.

And then the final book is a kid's book by my favorite kid's book author ever, this guy called Daniel Pinkwater.

And last year, he had a book out from Tachyon Press called Jules, Penny, and the Rooster.

And recapping the plot of this book would take 10 minutes because it is so gonzo and weird.