Apple’s most valuable intangible asset isn’t its patents or copyrights - it’s an army of people who believe that using products from a $2.89 trillion multinational makes them members of an oppressed religious minority whose identity is coterminal with the interests of Apple’s shareholders.

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If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones

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  • Cory Doctorow@mamot.frOP
    1·
    8 months ago

    @[email protected] Three reasons:

    1. To make the text copy-pasteable without losing the links, even if the clipboard fails to pick up metadata; and

    2. To offer readers whose apps or clients rewrite URLs with analytics loops (e.g. Twitter’s t.co) - the URLs can be copied and pasted into your location bar; and

    3. To expose the semantics of the URL so that readers have an idea of where they’re going before they click.