Glenn Fleishman is singlehandedly keeping me interested in Kickstarter. Just this week he has set up another campaign: the proposed book title is “That One Matt Bors Comic” and it is a book about a meme which was supposedly viral but I don’t remember seeing until two days ago. Still, the concept is interesting and I would like to learn more.
And just as I finished backing Fleishman’s, I noticed that Cory Doctorow also a campaign. It is for The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, a book based on a similarly-named essay about “reverse centaurs” — people whose job it is to augment AI instead the other way around — i.e., potentially, all of us proles. Yes, even doctors. Particularly doctors.
Note that the anti-enshittification (anti-platform?) crusader Doctorow used Kickstarter. The company is indeed a “public benefit corporation” of around 60 employees and an interesting history of unionization. A dissenting opinion from senior staff that forming a union would be “misappropriation of unions for use by privileged workers” is a delightful example of cognitive dissonance in people who tell themselves that they are good but also want to run a successful business.