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CartotasticWAYNE'S 2025 BOOKS: BOOK 5Picks and Shovels by Cory Doctorow (<a href="https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@pluralistic</a>)Huzzah! A new Martin Hench book! I was a proud backer of Cory Doctorow's Kickstarter to publish this work without the anti-consumer and anti-writer practises of the usual purveyor of the written word: our old frenemy Amazon. I chose the epub version (which I read using Calibre on my Android phone), and the only reason I didn't buy a physical copy is that I'd like to get all the Hench novels in paperback, and this book isn't in that format yet.Anyway, Picks and Shovels takes Martin Hench wayback to the late 80s, when computers had to be programmed without monitors (the horror), when mobile phones were something seen only on Star Trek, and when Martin - sorry, Marty - is a boo-boo baby proto-accountant feeling his way into the big bad world of finance by way of the silicon highway introduced by personal computing.It's an origin story both for Hench and Silicon Valley, and a great read. With a company whose founders read like the opening to a bad joke (a rabbi, a priest and a Mormon elder) and a rival company locked in a battle for dominance, Picks and Shovels shows us that consumer capture, enshittification, and hostile design has always been around, even when computers were beige and bulky.As with all of Cory's works, you read and you learn and you have fun, all at the same time. He has a way of distilling some bigbrain ideas into smaller morsels for the rest of us to understand, and be entertaining at the same time. I smashed this book in a few days as it was eminently readable, and I just wanted to see what happened!You don't have to read the first two Hench books (Red Team Blue and The Bezzle) to enjoy this one, but you really should anyway as they're all neat and Cory is the kind of writer that we should all be supporting in these uncertain pre-technofeudal times.<a href="https://aus.social/tags/books" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#books</a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/bookreview" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#bookreview</a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/bookreview2025" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#bookreview2025</a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/enshittification" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#enshittification</a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/doctorow" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#doctorow</a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/fiction" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#fiction</a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/crime" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#crime</a>

CartotasticDoppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi KleinSo I'll start by saying what this book isn't. It isn't the story of a woman who had her identity cloned and went on a wild ride through the dark web trying to discover the identity of the person that stole her persona. That's what I thought this book was. I'm not sure how I arrived at that misconception, but it didn't take long for me to work out I was egregiously self-misinformed.What it is: a story of a woman (Naomi Klein, you may have heard of her feminist ecoleftist works) who finds herself frequently mistaken for another Naomi: Naomi Wolf, whose viewpoints rapidly diverge from those of Naomi #1. This mistaken identity, exacerbated by the social madness that ensued during COVID, forms the spine of the book, which examines the mirror world that exists between left and right politics. The diagonalism that has emerged in recent years, seeing strange bedfellows like fascists and wellness cultists, is another strong theme, and one that I found the most fascinating.It's a powerful work. Flawed in some ways - I found myself disagreeing at times and finding some sections particularly self-absorbed - but it is in many ways a memoir, so some allowances need to be made. Klein works through a handful of major topics, presenting her own personal experiences as well as the emerging and changing battlegrounds between authoritarians and progressives. Doppelganger is well worth a read for anyone who cares about the threats to democracy de jour.<a href="https://aus.social/tags/books" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#books</a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/Bookstadon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Bookstadon</a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/bookreview" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#bookreview</a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/bookreview2025" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#bookreview2025</a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/nonfiction" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#nonfiction</a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/politics" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#politics</a>

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