Lost Topics #2: Modern Spellbooks

[The Fundamentalist]

This reminds me of a short story by Cory Doctorow (you know him as the crazy copyleft guy) in which the enlightened Chinese government left out "phonebooks" for Americans, the USA being even more 1984-ish in the story.  The "phonebooks" contained "recipes", basically typed-out pieces of code that allowed circumvention of various fascist devices.  It does seem a lot like a spellbook.

Things like "23 things to do while you're bored" and the thing about making everybody's day a little weirder from Intermittens seem like spellbooks too, but memetic.  Like a list of psychic attack spells.  And then you leave them out...

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

This reminds me of a short story by Cory Doctorow (you know him as the crazy copyleft guy) in which the enlightened Chinese government left out "phonebooks" for Americans, the USA being even more 1984-ish in the story.  The "phonebooks" contained "recipes", basically typed-out pieces of code that allowed circumvention of various fascist devices.  It does seem a lot like a spellbook.

Things like "23 things to do while you're bored" and the thing about making everybody's day a little weirder from Intermittens seem like spellbooks too, but memetic.  Like a list of psychic attack spells.  And then you leave them out...

The crazy copyleft guy, and that one guy who writes ALL THOSE AWESOME FUCKING NOVELS.

C'mon.

But I like the bit about modern spellbooks.

[Bu🤠ns]

This reminds me of a short story by Cory Doctorow (you know him as the crazy copyleft guy) in which the enlightened Chinese government left out "phonebooks" for Americans, the USA being even more 1984-ish in the story.  The "phonebooks" contained "recipes", basically typed-out pieces of code that allowed circumvention of various fascist devices.  It does seem a lot like a spellbook.

Things like "23 things to do while you're bored" and the thing about making everybody's day a little weirder from Intermittens seem like spellbooks too, but memetic.  Like a list of psychic attack spells.  And then you leave them out...

I don't know if there's a difference.

ETA: I love tfy,s publications for that very reason.  They provoke a nice change in consciousness especially out of blue for some folks like the 23 things to do, pamphlets.