Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow (RSS/Atom feed) 6 months ago

Pluralistic: Your Meta AI prompts are in a live, public feed (19 Jun 2025) Today's links Your Meta AI prompts are in a live, public feed: Zuck thinks we've all forgotten about Beacon. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: 2015, 2020 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Your Meta AI prompts are in a live, public feed (permalink) Back in 2006, AOL tried something incredibly bold and even more incredibly stupid: they dumped a data-set of 20,000,000 "anonymized" search queries from 650,000 users (yes, AOL had a search engine – there used to be lots of search engines!):

The AOL dump was a catastrophe. In an eyeblink, many of the users in the dataset were de-anonymized. The dump revealed personal, intimate and compromising facts about the lives of AOL search users. The AOL dump is notable for many reasons, not least because it jumpstarted the academic and technical discourse about the limits of "de-identifying" datasets by stripping out personally identifying information prior to releasing them for use by business partners, researchers, or the general public. It turns out that de-identification is fucking hard. Just a couple of datapoints associated with an "anonymous" identifier can be sufficent to de-anonymize the user in question: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1508081113 But firms stubbornly refuse to learn this lesson. They would love it if they could "safely" sell the data they suck up from our everyday activities, so they declare that they can safely do so, and sell giant data-sets, and then bam, the next thing you know, a federal judge's porn-browsing habits are published for all the world to see:

the Guardian

'Anonymous' browsing data can be easily exposed, researchers reveal | Data and computer security | The Guardian

A journalist and a data scientist secured data from three million users easily by creating a fake marketing company, and were able to de-anonymise ...

Indeed, it appears that there may be no way to truly de-identify a data-set: https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/understanding-the-maths-is-crucial-for-protecting-privacy Which is a serious bummer, given the potential insights to be gleaned from, say, population-scale health records:

Your Data Were ‘Anonymized’? These Scientists Can Still Identify You (Published 2019)

Computer scientists have developed an algorithm that can pick out almost any American in databases supposedly stripped of personal information.

It's clear that de-identification is not fit for purpose when it comes to these data-sets: 📄.pdf But that doesn't mean there's no safe way to data-mine large data-sets. "Trusted research environments" (TREs) can allow researchers to run queries against multiple sensitive databases without ever seeing a copy of the data, and good procedural vetting as to the research questions processed by TREs can protect the privacy of the people in the data:

Pluralistic: 01 Oct 2022 How Palantir will steal the NHS – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

But companies are perennially willing to trade your privacy for a glitzy new product launch. Amazingly, the people who run these companies and design their products seem to have no clue as to how their users use those products. Take Strava, a fitness app that dumped maps of where its users went for runs and revealed a bunch of secret military bases:

Gizmodo

Fitness App's 'Anonymized' Data Dump Accidentally Reveals Military Bases Around the World

People around the world use the app Strava on their smartphones and Fitbits to track how far they run. But researchers have discovered that an

Or Venmo, which, by default, lets anyone see what payments you've sent and received (researchers have a field day just filtering the Venmo firehose for emojis associated with drug buys like "pills" and "little trees"):

This Is a Reminder That You’re Probably Oversharing on Venmo (Published 2023)

The mobile wallet service is a cautionary tale of how apps born at least a decade ago may be exposing more information than you would like.

Then there was the time that Etsy decided that it would publish a feed of everything you bought, never once considering that maybe the users buying gigantic handmade dildos shaped like lovecraftian tentacles might not want to advertise their purchase history:

Ars Technica

Etsy users irked after buyers, purchases exposed to the world

Etsy—a site where crafters and artists sell their goods—has found itself at …

But the most persistent, egregious and consequential sinner here is Facebook (naturally). In 2007, Facebook opted its 20,000,000 users into a new system called "Beacon" that published a public feed of every page you looked at on sites that partnered with Facebook:

Facebook Beacon - Wikipedia

Facebook didn't just publish this – they also lied about it. Then they admitted it and promised to stop, but that was also a lie. They ended up paying $9.5m to settle a lawsuit brought by some of their users, and created a "Digital Trust Foundation" which they funded with another $6.5m. Mark Zuckerberg published a solemn apology and promised that he'd learned his lesson. Apparently, Zuck is a slow learner. Depending on which "submit" button you click, Meta's AI chatbot publishes a feed of all the prompts you feed it:

TechCrunch

The Meta AI app is a privacy disaster | TechCrunch

Meta does not indicate to users what their privacy settings are as they post, or where they are even posting to. So, if you log into Meta AI with I...

Users are clearly hitting this button without understanding that this means that their intimate, compromising queries are being published in a public feed. Techcrunch's Amanda Silberling trawled the feed and found: "An audio recording of a man in a Southern accent asking, 'Hey, Meta, why do some farts stink more than other farts?'" "people ask[ing] for help with tax evasion" "[whether family members would be arrested for their proximity to white-collar crimes" "how to write a character reference letter for an employee facing legal troubles, with that person’s first and last name included." While the security researcher Rachel Tobac found "people’s home addresses and sensitive court details, among other private information":

X (formerly Twitter)

Rachel Tobac (@RachelTobac) on X

If a user’s expectations about how a tool functions don’t match reality, you’ve got yourself a huge user experience and security problem. Hu...

There's no warning about the privacy settings for your AI prompts, and if you use Meta's AI to log in to Meta services like Instagram, it publishes your Instagram search queries as well, including "big booty women." As Silberling writes, the only saving grace here is that almost no one is using Meta's AI app. The company has only racked up a paltry 6.5m downloads, across its ~3 billion users, after spending tens of billions of dollars developing the app and its underlying technology. The AI bubble is overdue for a pop:

Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At

Desperate Times, Desperate Measures

Next year is going to be big. Well, I personally don't think it'll be big, but if you ask the AI industry, here's the things that will happen by th...

When it does, it will leave behind some kind of residue – cheaper, spin-out, standalone models that will perform many useful functions:

Locus Online

Cory Doctorow: What Kind of Bubble is AI?

Of course AI is a bubble. It has all the hallmarks of a classic tech bubble. Pick up a rental car at SFO and drive in either direction on the 101 �...

Those standalone models were released as toys by the companies pumping tens of billions into the unsustainable "foundation models," who bet that – despite the worst unit economics of any technology in living memory – these tools would someday become economically viable, capturing a winner-take-all market with trillions of upside. That bet remains a longshot, but the littler "toy" models are beating everyone's expectations by wide margins, with no end in sight: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00259-0 I can easily believe that one enduring use-case for chatbots is as a kind of enhanced diary-cum-therapist. Journalling is a well-regarded therapeutic tactic:

Charlie Health

CBT Journaling | Charlie Health

CBT journaling is a method for addressing negative thought patterns that can help with anxiety, depression, and more. Get started with CBT journali...

And the invention of chatbots was instantly followed by ardent fans who found that the benefits of writing out their thoughts were magnified by even primitive responses:

ELIZA effect - Wikipedia

Which shouldn't surprise us. After all, divination tools, from the I Ching to tarot to Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies deck have been with us for thousands of years: even random responses can make us better thinkers:

Oblique Strategies - Wikipedia

I make daily, extensive use of my own weird form of random divination:

Divination – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

The use of chatbots as therapists is not without its risks. Chatbots can – and do – lead vulnerable people into extensive, dangerous, delusional, life-destroying ratholes:

AI-Fueled Spiritual Delusions Are Destroying Human Relationships

Marriages and families are falling apart as people are sucked into fantasy worlds of spiritual prophecy by AI tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT

But that's a (disturbing and tragic) minority. A journal that responds to your thoughts with bland, probing prompts would doubtless help many people with their own private reflections. The keyword here, though, is private. Zuckerberg's insatiable, all-annihilating drive to expose our private activities as an attention-harvesting spectacle is poisoning the well, and he's far from alone. The entire AI chatbot sector is so surveillance-crazed that anyone who uses an AI chatbot as a therapist needs their head examined:

Pluralistic: Anyone who trusts an AI therapist needs their head examined (01 Apr 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

AI bosses are the latest and worst offenders in a long and bloody lineage of privacy-hating tech bros. No one should ever, ever, ever trust them with any private or sensitive information. Take Sam Altman, a man whose products routinely barf up the most ghastly privacy invasions imaginable, a completely foreseeable consequence of his totally indiscriminate scraping for training data. Altman has proposed that conversations with chatbots should be protected with a new kind of "privilege" akin to attorney-client privilege and related forms, such as doctor-patient and confessor-penitent privilege: https://venturebeat.com/ai/sam-altman-calls-for-ai-privilege-as-openai-clarifies-court-order-to-retain-temporary-and-deleted-chatgpt-sessions/ I'm all for adding new privacy protections for the things we key or speak into information-retrieval services of all types. But Altman is (deliberately) omitting a key aspect of all forms of privilege: they immediately vanish the instant a third party is brought into the conversation. The things you tell your lawyer are priviiliged, unless you discuss them with anyone else, in which case, the privilege disappears. And of course, all of Altman's products harvest all of our information. Altman is the untrusted third party in every conversation everyone has with one of his chatbots. He is the eternal Carol, forever eavesdropping on Alice and Bob:

Alice and Bob - Wikipedia

Altman isn't proposing that chatbots acquire a privilege, in other words – he's proposing that he should acquire this privilege. That he (and he alone) should be able to mine your queries for new training data and other surveillance bounties. This is like when Zuckerberg directed his lawyers to destroy NYU's "Ad Observer" project, which scraped Facebook to track the spread of paid political misinformation. Zuckerberg denied that this was being done to evade accountability, insisting (with a miraculously straight face) that it was in service to protecting Facebook users' (nonexistent) privacy:

Pluralistic: 05 Aug 2021 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

We get it, Sam and Zuck – you love privacy. We just wish you'd share. (Image: Japanexperterna.se, CC BY-SA 2.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) Connectivity is a Lifeline, Not a Luxury: Telecom Blackouts in Gaza Threaten Lives and Digital Rights

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Connectivity is a Lifeline, Not a Luxury: Telecom Blackouts in Gaza Threaten Lives and Digital Rights

For the third time since October 2023, Gaza has faced a near-total telecommunications blackout—plunging over 2 million residents into digital dar...

Creative Commons 4.0 has arrived on Flickr!

Flickr Blog

Creative Commons 4.0 has arrived on Flickr!

Creative Commons 4.0 has landed on Flickr! It’s one small step for us, but one giant leap for sharing, collaborating, and attribution around the ...

LA Law Enforcement Agencies Rioted So Hard They Ended Up Shooting Each Other

Techdirt

LA Law Enforcement Agencies Rioted So Hard They Ended Up Shooting Each Other

While Donald Trump was trying (and failing) to cheer himself up with a self-congratulatory birthday parade — I mean, just look at this sad bo...

“The Clandestina,” a fantasy novel by Jasmina Tesanovic

Medium

“The Clandestina,” a fantasy novel by Jasmina Tesanovic — Part One

THE CLANDESTINA

Kagi for Libraries

Kagi for Libraries - Kagi Search

Better search results with no ads. Welcome to Kagi (pronounced kah-gee), a paid search engine that gives power back to the user.

Object permanence (permalink) #10yrsago What’s in the Pope’s barn-storming environmental message?

WIRED

The Pope's Memo on Climate Change Is a Mind-Blower

In a new encyclical, Francis lays out Earth’s problem with an increasingly messed-up climate.

#5yrsago Microsoft criticizes Apple's monopolism

Pluralistic: 19 Jun 2020 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

#5yrsago Austerity in disrepute

Pluralistic: 19 Jun 2020 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

#5yrsago Avia, c'est mort

Pluralistic: 19 Jun 2020 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

#5yrsago Trump's covid "test-tubes" are contaminated miniature soda bottles

Pluralistic: 19 Jun 2020 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

#5yrsago Trump wants to dismantle the OTF

Pluralistic: 19 Jun 2020 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Upcoming appearances (permalink) PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22

Teardown 2025 | Crowd Supply

PDX: Picks and Shovels with bunnie Huang at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20

Author Signing with Cory Doctorow & Andrew "Bunnie" Huang

Join us for an in-store event, Author Signing with Cory Doctorow & Andrew "Bunnie" Huang, on Friday, June 20, 2025.

Tualatin Public Library, Jun 22: https://www.tualatinoregon.gov/library/author-talk-cory-doctorow London: How To Academy with Riley Quinn, Jul 1

How To Academy

1st July | Cory Doctorow – the Fight Against the Big Tech Oligarchy

Blogger, author, and activist Cory Doctorow is the most provocative, original, and widely admired thinker on the politics of Big Tech in the world ...

Manchester: Picks and Shovels at Blackwell's Bookshop, Jul 2

Eventbrite

An Evening With Cory Doctorow

The author will discuss his latest novel, Picks And Shovels, and the 'enshittification' of our modern digital age

Manchester: Co-operatives UK Co-op Congress keynote, Jul 4 https://www.uk.coop/events-and-training/events-calendar/co-op-congress-2025-book-your-place Virtual: ORG at 20: in conversation with Maria Farrell, Jul 16

Open Rights Group

ORG at 20: Cory Doctorow in conversation with Maria Farrell

As well as being a renowned author, activist and journalist, Cory Doctorow was a founding member of Open Rights Group!

DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8

Politics and Prose Bookstore

Cory Doctorow — Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do about It - with Rohit Chopra — at The Wharf

New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025

CONtraflow XI

San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20

Passage - Your event. Your fans. Your mobile box office.

Booksmith presents: Cory Doctorow with Jenny Odell / Enshittification | Passage - Your event. Your fans. Your mobile box office.

ADVANCED TICKETS HAVE CLOSED. THERE WILL BE STANDING ROOM SPACE AT THE DOOR ON THE NIGHT OF THE EVENT FOR $15. PLEASE BRING YOUR ID (21+) AND ARRIV...

Recent appearances (permalink) FediForum Keynote Science Fiction is EXPOSING Scams and AI Dystopia (Bad Faith) The Rideshare Guy Latest books (permalink) Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (

Macmillan Publishers

Picks and Shovels

New York Times bestselling author Cory Doctorow returns to the world of Red Team Blues to bring us the origin story of Martin Hench and the most po...

). The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (

The Internet Con | Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

). Signed copies at Book Soup (

IndieCommerce

The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation

A USA TODAY BESTSELLERWinner of the 2024 Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity"An essential read for anyone tha...

). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books

The Red Team Blues tour: Burbank, SF, PDX, Berkeley, YVR, Calgary, Gaithersburg, DC, Toronto, Hay, Oxford, Nottingham, Manchester, London, Edinburgh, Berlin | Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK):

Red Team Blues (Signed Edition Hardcover) by Cory Doctorow published by Head of Zeus @ ForbiddenPlanet.com - UK and Worldwide Cult Entertainment Megastore

. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution.

Medium

How to Destroy ‘Surveillance Capitalism’

Surveillance capitalism is just capitalism — with surveillance. Here’s how to beat it.

) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden:

Macmillan Publishers

Little Brother & Homeland

Cory Doctorow’s two New York Times-bestselling novels of youthful rebellion against the torture-and-surveillance state – now available in a sof...

; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here:

Macmillan Publishers

Poesy the Monster Slayer

New York Times bestselling author Cory Doctorow and illustrator Matt Rockefeller present a sweetly scary picture book about a girl whose monster-ca...

. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books (permalink) Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025

Macmillan Publishers

Enshittification

Enshittification: It’s not just you—the internet sucks now. It’s been enshittified. That was no accident, and it’s not gonna fix itself. He...

Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud) A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

Deed - Attribution 4.0 International - Creative Commons

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

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Mamot - Le Mastodon de La Quadrature du Net

Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr)

96.1K Posts, 960 Following, 72.1K Followers · By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow@mamot.fr. Archived at pluralistic.net I p...

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

Medium

Cory Doctorow – Medium

Read writing from Cory Doctorow on Medium. Writer, blogger, activist. Blog: https://pluralistic.net; Mailing list: https://pluralistic.net/plura-li...

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

X (formerly Twitter)

Cory Doctorow NONCONSENSUAL BLUE TICK (@doctorow) on X

New book: ENSHITTIFICATION https://t.co/xKBuEgsT31 @pluralistic@mamot.fr

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

Tumblr

pluralistic

Posts on mostlysignssomeportents tagged as pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

Pluralistic: Your Meta AI prompts are in a live, public feed (19 Jun 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow (RSS/Atom feed) 6 months ago

Pluralistic: The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice (18 Jun 2025) Today's links The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice: Anarchists, cryptids and haints (oh my). Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: 2010, 2015, 2020, 2024 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice (permalink) Margaret Killjoy writes fantasy stories of relentless tension, boundless wonder, thrilling adventure…and completely radical, unflinching anarchist politics. Her 2024 YA novel "The Sapling Cage" is a queer coming-of-age epic that motors with all the narrative energy of a genderbent Conan epic:

Pluralistic: Margaret Killjoy’s “The Sapling Cage” (24 Sep 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Today, Strangers In a Tangled Wilderness Press publishes The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice, a collection of three linked short stories set in Killjoy's celebrated Danielle Cain series, which Alan Moore called "ideal reading for a post-truth world":

Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness

The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice — Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness

This listing is for a paperback copy of The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice. The novella is about 97 pages with a 5”×8” trim. The Ebook ver...

Danielle Cain is a freight-train-hopping, anarcho-queer hero whose adventures are shared by solidaristic crews of spellcasting, cryptid-battling crustypunk freaks and street-fighters. In Immortal Choir, the action opens with Danielle and a motley band around a campfire in a dark Idaho woods, surrounded by the night-screams of some distant demonic presence. It's Samhain, and the veil between the realm of the living and the dead is as thin as it gets. Bad things are stalking the night. To save themselves, they must court their own dead, welcoming them to their circle. They pile a camp-plate high with food for the dead to eat, build the fire up, and begin the tell the stories of their dead comrades, summoning them as a defense against the monstrous forces that stalk the All Saints night. This is the setup for the three linked short stories that make up this short book. This is a great setup: a group of endangered comrades, huddled together against the darkness without, telling tales to buoy up their bravery. It's the framing device that makes The Decameron an enduring classic after 800 years and counting. In Killjoy's hands, it sings. The first story is "The Troll King's Court," a ghost story about a Norwegian troll cult that came to America in a failed Manhattan-Adjacent Project to create a mystical superweapon with which to win WWII. It's ultimately a story about how the competent people who have their shit together in our lives are just as broken as the rest of us, and about the many ways that release, fulfillment and actualization can take place. It's spooky as fuck. The middle story is "The Fairies of the Spring," which summons up the old, mean roots of the Fair Folk, the cruelty behind their beauty and merry laughter. Pratchett did one of these (Lords and Ladies), and so have many others – but no one's done it where the resistance comes from a motley band of queer punk club-owners in a rural town, who team up with local shitkickers to hunt the elves and banish them to their realm. The final tale is "The Battle of Miami," a story about a streetfighting anti-globalist battle. It's a tale of Black Bloc tactics and true queer love, that lights up with joy. Killjoy's really onto something with this series. She's tapping into the deep roots of fantasy – maybe the socialist parables woven into William Morris's stories. She's also connecting with the roots of urban fantasy (I was delighted to see a reference to Terri Windling's superb, absolutely amazing Borderland series). These three tales stand alone, so there's no need to read the previous volumes before diving into this one. But you should read the other two, because they're great: The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion (2017):