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 Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist and journalist

His latest book is ATTACK SURFACE, a standalone adult sequel to LITTLE BROTHER. He is also the author HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM, nonfiction about conspiracies and monopolies; and of RADICALIZED and WALKAWAY, science fiction for adults, a YA graphic novel called IN REAL LIFE; and young adult novels like HOMELAND, PIRATE CINEMA and LITTLE BROTHER. His first picture book was POESY THE MONSTER SLAYER (Aug 2020). He maintains a daily blog at Pluralistic.net. He works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is a MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate, is a Visiting Professor of Computer Science at Open University, a Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of North Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in Los Angeles.
Liens : - « Détruire le capitalisme de surveillance » 68 p. pdf, trad. Framalang, gratuit. - How to destroy surveillance capitalism Online version.

Publié le 18.04.2026 à 15:00

Pluralistic: Georgia's voting technology blunder (18 Apr 2026)


Today's links


A hand dropping a ballot in a box; the box is a complicated, many-geared machine. On its faceplate is an 'I voted' sticker that has been modified to read 'I voted?'

Georgia's voting technology blunder (permalink)

Nearly 25 years ago, in the aftermath of Bush v Gore, I got involved in a bunch of ugly tech policy fights over voting machines. The hanging chad debacle in Florida prompted Congress to appropriate funds for states to purchase new touchscreen voting machines based on a robust, open standard. The problem was, those machines didn't exist.

The voting machine industry in those days was already very consolidated (it's far more consolidated today). They went shopping for a standards body that would publish a spec for a "standard" voting machine that could soak up those federal dollars in time for the 2004 election. The only taker was the IEEE, who unwisely offered to serve as host for this impossible rush job.

Once the voting machine reps were around a table at IEEE – largely sheltered from antitrust scrutiny thanks to the broad latitude enjoyed by firms engaged in standardization, which is otherwise uncomfortably close to collusion – they admitted what everyone already knew: there was zero chance they were going to develop a new standard in time for the election.

Instead, they decided they were going to publish a "descriptive standard." Rather than designing a new standard, they'd write down the specs of their own products – the same products that were considered so defective they needed to be replaced before the election – and call that the standard.

That was my first encounter with this issue as an activist. I had just started at EFF and a lot of our supporters were IEEE members, who were appalled to see their professional association being used to launder this incredibly politically salient, technically incoherent scam. We got a ton of IEEE members to write to the board, who shut down the standards committee and kicked the voting machine companies to the curb.

The voting machine companies weren't done, though. Diebold – one of the leaders in the cartel – knew that its voting machines were defective. They'd crash, lose their vote-counts and malfunction in other ways that were equally damaging to election integrity.

This was an alarming piece of news, but perhaps just as alarming is the way it came to light. A Diebold employee described this situation in a memo that was subsequently hacked and dumped by parties unknown. That memo, along with the accompanying tranche of extremely alarming revelations about Diebold's voting machine division, was the subject of one of the first mass-censorship copyright campaigns in internet history.

Diebold didn't dispute the veracity of these damning revelations: rather, it claimed that since the memos detailing its gross democracy-endangering misconduct had been prepared by an employee, that they were therefore works-made-for-hire whose copyright was held by Diebold, and thus anyone who reproduced the memo was infringing on the company's copyright.

Under Section 512 of the then-new Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Diebold was empowered to send "takedown notices" to the web hosting providers whose users had posted the memos, and if the web hosts didn't remove the content "expeditiously," they would be jointly liable for any eventual copyright damages, which are statutorily set at $150,000 per infringement.

Every web host folded. No one wanted to take the risk of tens of millions of dollars in statutory damages.

(Incidentally: anyone who tells you that "online safety" requires us to make online platforms liable for their users' speech needs to explain how this wouldn't empower every crooked company whose dirty laundry had ended up online wouldn't just do what Diebold did. It's not technically insanity to do the same thing over again in expectation of a different outcome, but it is awfully stupid and reckless.)

That might have been the end of things, except for the kids at Swarthmore, a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. Two students, Nelson Pavlosky and Luke Smith, were outraged by Diebold and they had accounts on Swarthmore's webserver. So they uploaded thousands of copies of the leaked memos, but linked to just one of them from a page about the leak. As soon as that copy was deleted by Swarthmore's webmasters in response to a DMCA takedown from Diebold, the students updated the link to point to another copy. And another. And another.

That's where EFF got involved. We repped the Online Policy Group, whose page linking to the Swarthmore resources was taken down by a Diebold notice. We won. The memos became a matter of public record. The Swarthmore kids started a nationwide network called "Students for Free Culture." It was pretty danged cool.

That wasn't the end of the Diebold story, though. Diebold was and is a very diversified conglomerate that made a lot of tabulating machines: ATMs, cash-registers, medical monitoring devices…and voting machines. Every one of these machines produced a paper-tape of its tabulations as an audit trail that could be used to reconstruct its calculations if it crashed…except the voting machines. The voting machines that kept crashing, and whose crashes presented a serious risk to the legitimacy of US elections in the wake of the worst electoral crisis in the country's history.

Diebold's stated reason for this was that adding a paper tape was haaaard (even though all its other machines had paper audit tapes). Not only was this a very unconvincing excuse, it was downright alarming in light of the promise of Walden O’Dell (Diebold CEO and prominent Bush fundraiser) to help "Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president":

https://fairvote.org/diebold-partisanship-and-public-interest-elections/

Now, to be clear, I don't think that O'Dell was going to steal the election for Bush (that's the Supreme Court's job). Rather, he was just a loudmouth asshole CEO who supported the (up to that point) worst president in American history, and who also made garbage products that were not fit for purpose.

In the decades since, voting machines have been the subject of lots of scrutiny by the information security community, because they suck. Time after time, the most sphincter-puckering defects in widely used machines have come to light:

https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2006/05/11/report-claims-very-serious-diebold-voting-machine-flaws/

The hits just kept on coming:

https://web.archive.org/web/20061007120655/http://openvotingfoundation.org/tiki-index.php?page_ref_id=1

At Defcon, the amazing Matt Green has presided over the Voting Village, where it's an annual tradition for hackers to probe voting machines. This exercise has produced a string of terrifying revelations that precisely described how these machines suck:

https://www.votingvillage.org/cfp

Pretty much everyone I knew thought that voting machines were garbage technology…right up to the moment that the My Pillow guy, Tucker Carlson, and a whole menagerie of conspiratorial Trumpland mutants started peddling a bizarre story about how Hugo Chavez colluded with the Canadian voting machine company Dominion Voting Systems (who bought Diebold's voting machine business when they finally dumped the division) to rig the 2020 election for Joe Biden. They told so many outlandish lies about this that Fox ended up paying Dominion $787.5 million to settle the case:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_Voting_Systems#Dominion_Voting_Systems_v._Fox_News_Network

That's when something very weird happened. A bunch of people who had been skeptical of voting machines since the Brooks Brothers Riot suddenly became history's most ardent defenders of those same garbage voting machines. The cartel of voting machine companies – who had a long track record of using bullshit legal threats to silence their (mostly progressive) critics – were drafted into The Resistance(TM), and anyone who thought voting machines were trash was dismissed as a crazy person who has been totally mypillowpilled:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210203113531/https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/02/03/voting-machines-election-steal-conspiracy-flaws/

There's a name for this: it's called "schismogenesis": when one group of people define themselves in opposition to someone else. If the other team does X, then your team has to oppose X, even if you all liked X until a couple minutes ago:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/

This schismogenic reversal persists to this very day. Every time Trump promotes another election denier to his cabinet, a federal agency, or a judgeship, the idea that voting machines are garbage becomes more Stop the Steal-coded, even though voting machines are, objectively, garbage.

Which is bad. It's bad because we are going into another election season where the stakes are – incredibly – even higher than Bush v Gore, and electoral authorities and state legislatures are making the world's most unforced errors in their voting machine procurement decisions, and if you've conditioned yourself to reflexively dismiss voting machine criticisms as conspiratorial nonsense, then you are part of the problem.

Just because some voting machine criticism is conspiratorial nonsense, it doesn't follow that voting machines are good, nor does it follow that every voting machine critic is a swivel-eyed loon or ratfucking Roger Stone protege.

Take, for example, Princeton's Andrew Appel, a computer scientist who's been publishing well-informed, well-documented warnings about defects in voting machines for years and years. Appel's latest is an alarming note about Georgia's new plan to "tabulate" ballots using OCR software:

https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2026/04/10/ballot-tabulation-by-uploading-scanned-images-for-ocr-is-quite-insecure/

The Georgia legislature has wisely banned the use of QR codes on the paper ballots generated by touchscreen voting machines. We have, at long last, progressed to the point where we use "ballot marking devices" (BMDs) that produce a paper record that can be hand-counted. The problem is that voters barely ever glance at these paper ballots before dropping them in the box to make sure the choices they made on the touchscreen are correctly reflected on the ballot – only 7% of voters carefully inspect their ballots!

This problem is greatly exacerbated if these ballot papers are tabulated by a machine that reads a QR code or barcode, rather than interpreting the human-readable information on the ballot. People are even less likely to pull out their phones and scan the QR code to ensure it matches the words on the paper. That means that a BMD could output different choices in the QR code than it prints in the human-readable part – and the Dominion BMD machines they use in Georgia run outdated software that's super-hackable:

https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2026/02/24/georgia-still-using-tragicomically-insecure-voting-system/

So Georgia's state leg passed Senate Bill 189, which establishes that "The text portion of the paper ballot marked and printed by the electronic ballot marker indicating the elector’s selection shall constitute the official ballot and shall constitute the official vote for purposes of vote tabulation." In other words, you can't count by scanning QR codes, you have to actually interpret the human-readable text on these ballots.

These machines still suck, to be clear (the fact that they don't suck for the mypillovian reasons that Tucker Carlson believes doesn't mean they're good) – but thanks to SB189, they are way less dangerous to democracy than they might be.

But not if Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger gets his way. Raffensperger is another guy who was drafted into The Resistance(TM) after he refused to commit election fraud for Trump, but he's also not good. He can still be terrible in other ways – and he is.

Raffensperger has announced his plan to circumvent the Georgia legislature by using Dominion ICX touchscreens to produce ballots with QR codes, which will then be tabulated in Dominion ICP scanners – but then he's going to "verify" the tabulation by running those same ballots through optical character recognition (OCR) software.

As Appel points out, this is the same stupid plan that Raffensperger tried in 2024, where he called the OCR step an "audit" of the QR tabulation. Back then, he grabbed 200dpi "ballot image files" from the Dominion BMDs and ran them through OCR software run by a company called Enhanced Voting. Appel sums up the fundamental incoherence of this approach.

First, the BMDs are super-hackable, so we don't trust them to print the same info in the QR code as they print in the human-readable text (which no one looks at anyway). If we don't trust them to print accurate info in the QR code, then why would we trust them to accurately generate that 200dpi QR code that's generated for the audit? As Appel writes, "it would be fairly easy for an unsophisticated attacker to alter ballot-image files–just replace the ballots they don’t like with copies of the ones they do like."

Then there's the step where these files are zipped up and transferred to the outside vendor for the audit – a step that Raffensperger has not explained. And even if the files make it to the outside contractor safely, that contractor could "change the inputs (ballot images) or outputs (tabulations)."

So this is very bad. Voting machines suck. Raffensperger sucks.

And here's the stupidest part: as Appel explains, there is a much more secure way to do this, and it's very cheap:

Just use their existing Dominion ICP (polling-place) scanners to count preprinted, hand-marked optical-scan "bubble ballots" that the voter has marked with a pen.

This is what other states are doing. As Appel writes, "This doesn’t even require a software upgrade of any kind. Although it would be a fine idea to install a software upgrade that addresses known security vulnerabilities in the ICX and ICP, the ICP can count hand-marked ballots with or without the upgrade."

This is a purely unforced error, in other words. As such, it's part of a series of shitty vote-tech choices that politicians and officials have been making since Bush v Gore. Truly, we live in the stupidest timeline.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago GW Bush’s iPod contains “illegal” (according to RIAA) music https://memex.craphound.com/2006/04/16/gw-bushs-ipod-contains-illegal-according-to-riaa-music/

#20yrsago Fan fiction community for McDonald’s breakfast sandwiches https://web.archive.org/web/20120112221730/https://mcgriddlefanfic.livejournal.com/profile/

#10yrsago High tech/high debt: the feudal future of technology makes us all into lesser lessors https://web.archive.org/web/20160415150308/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/rental-company-control/478365/

#10yrsago Three pieces of statistical “bullshit” about the UK EU referendum https://timharford.com/2016/04/three-pieces-of-brexit-bullshit/

#10yrsago Southwest Air kicks Muslim woman off plane for switching seats https://web.archive.org/web/20160416041342/http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/muslim-woman-kicked-off-plane-as-flight-attendant-said-she-did-not-feel-comfortable-with-the-a6986661.html

#10yrsago China’s Internet censors order ban on video of toddler threatening brutal cops https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2016/04/minitrue-4/

#10yrsago Tiny South Pacific island to lose free/universal Internet lifeline https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/pacific/299017/niue-to-get-better-internet-service-at-a-cost

#10yrsago The Everything Box: demonological comedy from Richard “Sandman Slim” Kadrey https://memex.craphound.com/2016/04/16/the-everything-box-demonological-comedy-from-richard-sandman-slim-kadrey/

#5yrsago People's Choice Communications https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/16/where-it-hurts/#charter-hires-scabs

#5yrsago "Anti-voter-suppression" companies are lobbying to kill HR1 https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/16/where-it-hurts/#tissue-thin

#5yrsago $100m deli made $35k in 2019/20 https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/16/where-it-hurts/#hometown

#5yrsago Mass-action lawsuit against Facebook https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/16/where-it-hurts/#sue-facebook

#1yrago Trump fought the law and Trump won https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/16/weaponized-admin-incompetence/#kill-all-the-lawyers

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • 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.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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:

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https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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https://doctorow.medium.com/

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"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

Publié le 17.04.2026 à 12:30

Pluralistic: Tiktokification shall set us free (17 Apr 2026)


Today's links


Dore's illustration of Moses coming off the mountain with the Ten Commandments; it has been modified. It has been hand tinted. Moses' head has been replaced with Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse avatar's head. The Tiktok logo appears in the bottom left corner of the stone tablets.

Tiktokification shall set us free (permalink)

Mark Zuckerberg has a problem with your friends: they're the reason you signed up to use his platform, but they stubbornly refuse to organize your socialization to "maximize engagement." Every time you and your friends wrap up a social interaction and log off, Zuckerberg loses revenue.

After all, by definition, you and your friends have a lot of shared context. You probably feel mostly the same way about most things. You probably mostly consume the same kind of media. You probably mostly consume the same kinds of news. You and your friends make each other's lives better in lots of ways, but typically not by surprising one another. On a typical day, no friend of yours is going to absolutely floor you with a novel thought or finding that sparks hours of furious conversation and argumentation.

And speaking of argumentation: you and your friends probably don't argue that much – I mean, sure, you'll have "friendly disagreements" (again, by definition), but if there's a friend who sparks furious, frustrating, irresistible feuds that drag on and on, chances are that person won't be your friend anymore.

Facebook experienced sustained, meteoric growth by letting people connect with their friends, but Zuckerberg quickly came to understand that his path to revenue maximization ran through nonconsensually cramming strangers' posts into your eyeballs, in the hopes that you would lose yourself in long, pointless arguments.

But that, too, hit a limit. Most of us don't like having our limbic systems tormented by strangers. As anyone who is sick to the back teeth of just hearing the word "Trump" can attest, living in a trollocracy is exhausting.

Enter Tiktok. Tiktok found a way to connect you to strangers who don't make you angry. By offering performers money if they produced media that you "engaged" with, Tiktok offloaded the work of convincing you to conduct your online activities in a way that maximized opportunities to show you an ad onto an army of global theater kids who would spend every hour that god sent trying to figure out how to keep you looking at Tiktok.

This was hugely successful – so successful, in fact, that Tiktok was able to cheat, overriding its own algorithmic guesses about which of its billion cable-access television channels you'd stare at the longest with a "heating tool" that lets the company trick some of those theater kids into thinking that Tiktok was actually more suited to them than other platforms:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

For zuckermuskian social media bosses, Tiktok became an object of fierce envy. Here was the ultimate Tom Sawyer robo-fence-painter, a self-licking ice-cream cone that motivated people to convince each other to make money for you. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter took a hard pivot away from showing you the things that the people you loved had to say, in favor of showing you short videos of people whose parents didn't give them enough affection in their childhood, desperately shoving lemons up their noses in a bid to win your approval (and a revshare split with the platforms).

It worked. Sorta. Thing is, some of those "content creators" are actually very good, and none of them appreciate being jerked around. They quite rightly see their reason for being on the platforms as improving their own lives, not the bottom line of the platforms' owners and executives. They may be more "engaging" than your friends, but they're also a lot mouthier and feel entitled to a say in how the platform operates.

What's a billionaire solipsist to do? Obviously, the answer is "AI creators." An "AI creator" is like a "creator" in that it works to maximize your engagement with the platform – and thus the number of ads that can be crammed into your face-holes – but, unlike a "creator," it makes no demands upon the platform and exists solely to serve the platform's shareholders and executives. It's the perfect realization of the solipsist fantasy of a world without people:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-wheel/#billionaire-solipsism

But there's a problem with this plan: your friends are not a liability for a platform. Your friends are the platforms' single most important asset. Your friends are why the platforms are so "sticky." The platforms don't "hack your dopamine loops" – they just take your friends hostage, and even though you love your friends, they are a monumental pain in the ass, and if you can't even agree on what board-game you're going to play this weekend, how are you going to agree when it's time to leave Facebook, and where to go next?

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/08/watch-the-surpluses/#exogenous-shocks

So long as you love your friends more than you hate Zuckerberg or Musk, you will remain stuck to their platforms. The platform bosses know this, and they inflict pain on you that is titrated to be just below the threshold where you hate the platforms more than you love your friends.

But as much as the platform bosses rely on your love of your friends, they still view your friends as liabilities, thanks to those friends' unreasonable insistence on structuring their relationship with you to maximize their own satisfaction, rather than how much time you spend looking at ads. So the platforms are deliberately disconnecting you from your friends by minimizing the fraction of your feed that is given over to posts from people you follow, and replacing those friends with a succession of ever-more fungible posters: trolls, creators, and chatbots.

The key word here is fungible. A feed composed of things posted by people you have a personal connection to is non-fungible: it cannot be swapped for a feed of things posted by strangers. Your friends fulfill a very specific purpose in your life that strangers – even extremely cool strangers – cannot match.

On the other hand: one feed of algorithmically selected, entertaining amateur dramatics is broadly equivalent to any other feed of algorithmically selected amateur dramatics. That goes double for feeds whose performers are "multi-homing" on more than one platform – whether you see the extremely charming and interesting Vlog Brothers in a Youtube feed, a Tiktok feed or an Insta feed makes no difference (to you – but it matters a lot to the platform bosses). That goes quintuple for feeds composed of AI slop, which is literally the most interchangeable video that modern science is capable of producing.

All of which is to say: the platforms are deliberately feeding their most important commercial assets into a shredder, in a fit of pique over your friends' unwillingness to act like chatbots. Every day and in every way, the platforms are making it easier to leave them for some rival's service, chasing the billionaire solipsist's dream of a world without people:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/17/live-by-the-swordlive-by-the-sword/#unfriending-tom

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Leon Trotsky, B2B visionary https://web.archive.org/web/20020211212222/http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1935/1935-ame.htm

#20yrsago What would a BBC “public service game” look like? https://web.archive.org/web/20060417123908/http://crystaltips.typepad.com/wonderland/2006/04/on_public_servi.html

#15yrsago New Zealand’s 3-strikes rule can go into effect in September https://legislation.govt.nz/bill/government/2010/119/en/latest/#DLM3331800

#15yrsago Lawsuit: DRM spied on me, gathered my personal info, sent it to copyright enforcers who called me with $150,000 legal threat https://www.techdirt.com/2011/04/14/drm-accused-sending-personal-info-to-help-with-licensing-shakedown/

#10yrsago Edward Snowden provides vocals on a beautiful new Jean-Michel Jarre composition https://web.archive.org/web/20190415045927/https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/edward-snowdens-new-job-electronic-music-vocalist-184650/

#10yrsago Uber and Lyft don’t cover their cost of capital and rely on desperate workers https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-market-fairy-will-not-solve-the-problems-of-uber-and-lyft/?

#10yrsago Treescrapers are bullshit https://99percentinvisible.org/article/renderings-vs-reality-rise-tree-covered-skyscrapers/

#10yrsago Before and After Mexico: a Bruce Sterling story about the eco-pocalypse https://bruces.medium.com/before-and-after-mexico-f3371c346c8a#.33e9poqnx

#10yrsago Barack Obama: Taking money from 1 percenters compromised my politics https://web.archive.org/web/20160415201709/https://theintercept.com/2016/04/15/barack-obama-never-said-money-wasnt-corrupting-in-fact-he-said-the-opposite/

#1yrago Tesla accused of hacking odometers to weasel out of warranty repairs https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/15/musklemons/#more-like-edison-amirite

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • 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.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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:

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"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

Publié le 16.04.2026 à 13:09

Pluralistic: A Pascal's Wager for AI Doomers (16 Apr 2026)


Today's links


A killer 1940s robot zapping two large domes with eye-lasers; trapped under the domes are two children, taken from 1910s photos of child laborers; one, a little girl in a straw hat, is holding two heavy buckets. The other, a newsie with a shoulder bag, is picking his nose. The background is the collapsing pillars seen in Dore's engraving of The Death of Solomon.

A Pascal's Wager for AI Doomers (permalink)

Lest anyone accuse me of bargaining in bad faith here, let me start with this admission: I don't think AI is intelligent; nor do I think that the current (admittedly impressive) statistical techniques will lead to intelligence. I think worrying about what we'll do if AI becomes intelligent is at best a distraction and at worst a cynical marketing ploy:

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-full-employment/

Now, that said: among some of the "AI doomers," I recognize kindred spirits. I, too, worry about technologies controlled by corporations that have grown so powerful that they defy regulation. I worry about how those technologies are used against us, and about how the corporations that make them are fusing with authoritarian states to create a totalitarian nightmare. I worry that technology is used to spy on and immiserate workers.

I just don't think we need AI to do those things. I think we should already be worried about those things.

Last week, I had a version of this discussion in front of several hundred people at the Bronfman Lecture in Montreal, where I appeared with Astra Taylor and Yoshua Bengio (co-winner of the Turing Prize for his work creating the "deep learning" techniques powering today's AI surge), on a panel moderated by CBC Ideas host Nahlah Ayed:

https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disrupter-tickets-1982706623885

It's safe to say that Bengio and I mostly disagree about AI. He's running an initiative called "Lawzero," whose goal is to create an international AI consortium that produces AI as a "digital public good" that is designed to be open, auditable, transparent and safe:

http://lawzero.org

Bengio said he'd started Lawzero because he was convinced that AI was going to get a lot more powerful, and, in the absence of some public-spirited version of AI, we would be subject to all kinds of manipulation and surveillance, and that the resulting chaos would present a civilizational risk.

Now, as I've stated (and as I said onstage) I am not worried about any of this. I am worried about AI, though. I'm worried a fast-talking AI salesman will convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job (the salesman will be pushing on an open door, since if there's one thing bosses hate, it's paying workers).

I'm worried that the seven companies that comprise 35% of the S&P 500 are headed for bankruptcy, as soon as someone makes them stop passing around the same $100b IOU while pretending it's in all their bank accounts at once. I'm worried that when that happens, the chatbots that badly do the jobs of the people who were fired because of the AI salesman will go away, and nothing and no one will do those jobs. I'm worried that the chaos caused by vaporizing a third of the stock market will lead to austerity and thence to fascism:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/13/always-great/#our-nhs

I worry that the workers who did those jobs will be scattered to the four winds, retrained or "discouraged" or retired, and that the priceless process knowledge they developed over generations will be wiped out and we will have to rebuild it amidst the economic and political chaos of the burst AI bubble:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/08/process-knowledge-vs-bosses/#wash-dishes-cut-wood

In short, I worry that AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into our civilization's walls, and our descendants will be digging it out for generations:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/06/1000x-liability/#graceful-failure-modes

But Bengio disagrees. He's very smart, and very accomplished, and he's very certain that AI is about to become "superhuman" and do horrible things to us if we don't get a handle on it. Several times at our events, he insisted that the existence of this possibility made it wildly irresponsible not to take measures to mitigate this risk.

Though I didn't say so at the time, this struck me as an AI-inflected version of Pascal's wager:

A rational person should adopt a lifestyle consistent with the existence of God and should strive to believe in God… if God does not exist, the believer incurs only finite losses, potentially sacrificing certain pleasures and luxuries; if God does exist, the believer stands to gain immeasurably, as represented for example by an eternity in Heaven in Abrahamic tradition, while simultaneously avoiding boundless losses associated with an eternity in Hell.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager

Smarter people than me have been poking holes in Pascal's wager for more than 350 years. But when it comes to this modern Pascal's AI Wager, I have my own objection: how do you know when you've lost?

As of this moment, the human race has lit more than $1.4t on fire to immanentize this eschaton, and it remains stubbornly disimmanentized. How much more do we need to spend before we're certain that god isn't lurking in the word-guessing program? Sam Altman says it'll take another $2-3t – call it six months' worth of all US federal spending. If we do that and we still haven't met god, are we done? Can we call it a day?

Not according to Elon Musk. Musk says we need to deconstruct the solar system and build a Dyson sphere out of all the planets to completely encase the sun, so we can harvest every photon it emits to power our word-guessing programs:

https://www.pcmag.com/news/elons-next-big-swing-dyson-sphere-satellites-that-harness-the-suns-power

So let's say we do that and we still haven't met god – are we done? I don't see why we would be. After all, Musk's contention isn't that our sun emits one eschaton's worth of immanentizing particles. Musk just thinks that we need a lot of these sunbeams to coax god into our plane of existence. If one sun won't do it, perhaps two? Or two hundred? Or two thousand? Once we've committed the entire human species to this god-bothering project to the extent of putting two kilosuns into harness, wouldn't we be nuts to stop there? What if god is lurking in the two thousand and first sun? Making god out of algorithms is like spelling "banana" – easy to start, hard to stop.

But as Bengio and I got into it together on stage at the Montreal Centre, it occurred to me that maybe there was some common ground between us. After all, when someone starts talking about "humane technology" that respects our privacy and works for people rather than their bosses, my ears grow points. Throw in the phrase "international digital public goods" and you've got my undivided attention.

Because there's a sense in which Bengio and I are worried about exactly the same thing. I'm terrified that our planet has been colonized by artificial lifeforms that we constructed, but which have slipped our control. I'm terrified that these lifeforms corrupt our knowledge-creation process, making it impossible for us to know what's true and what isn't. I'm terrified that these lifeforms have conquered our apparatus of state – our legislatures, agencies and courts – and so that these public bodies work against the public and for our colonizing alien overlords.

The difference is, the artificial lifeforms that worry me aren't hypothetical – they're here today, amongst us, endangering the very survival of our species. These artificial lifeforms are called "limited liability corporations" and they are a concrete, imminent risk to the human race:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/15/artificial-lifeforms/#moral-consideration

What's more, challenging these artificial lifeforms will require us to build massive, "international, digital public goods": a post-American internet of free/open, auditable, transparent, enshittification-resistant platforms and firmware for every purpose and device currently in service:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

And even after we've built that massive, international, digital public good, we'll still face the challenge of migrating all of our systems and loved ones out of the enshitternet of defective, spying, controlling American tech exports:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/30/zucksauce/#gandersauce

Every moment that we remain stuck in the enshitternet is a moment of existential risk. At the click of a mouse, Trump could order John Deere to switch off all the tractors in your country:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

He doesn't need tanks to steal Greenland. He can just shut off Denmark's access to American platforms like Office365, iOS and Android and brick the whole damned country. It would be another Strait of Hormuz, but instead of oil and fertilizer, he'd control the flow of Lego, Ozempic and deliciously strong black licorice:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/29/post-american-canada/#ottawa

These aren't risks that could develop in the future. They're the risks we're confronted with today and frankly, they're fucking terrifying.

So here's my side-bet on Pascal's Wager. If you think we need to build "international digital public goods" to head off the future risk of a colonizing, remorseless, malevolent artificial lifeform, then let us agree that the prototype for that project is the "international digital public goods" we need right now to usher in the post-American internet and save ourselves from the colonizing, remorseless, malevolent artificial lifeforms that have already got their blood-funnels jammed down our throats.

Once we defeat those alien invaders, we may find that all the people who are trying to summon the evil god have lost the wherewithal to do so, and your crisis will have been averted. But if that's not the case and the evil god still looms on our horizon, then I will make it my business to help you mobilize the legions of skilled international digital public goods producers who are still flush from their victory over the limited liability corporation, and together, we will fight the evil god you swear is in our future.

I think that's a pretty solid offer.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Every pirate ebook on the internet https://web.archive.org/web/20010724030402/https://citizen513.cjb.net/

#20yrsago Retired generals diss Donald Rumsfeld https://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007432.html#007432

#20yrsago How to break HDCP https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2006/04/14/making-and-breaking-hdcp-handshakes/

#20yrsago How Sun’s “open DRM” dooms them and all they touch https://memex.craphound.com/2006/04/14/how-suns-open-drm-dooms-them-and-all-they-touch/

#20yrsago Benkler's "Wealth of Networks" http://www.congo-education.net/wealth-of-networks/

#15yrsago Scientific management’s unscientific grounding: the Management Myth https://web.archive.org/web/20120823212827/https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/06/the-management-myth/304883/

#15yrsago 216 “untranslatable” emotional words from non-English languages https://www.drtimlomas.com/lexicography/cm4mi/lexicography#!lexicography/cm4mi

#10yrsago New York public employees union will vote on pulling out of hedge funds https://web.archive.org/web/20160414230326/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-13/nyc-pension-weighs-liquidating-1-5-billion-hedge-fund-portfolio

#10yrsago Panama’s public prosecutor says he can’t find any evidence of Mossack-Fonseca’s lawbreaking https://web.archive.org/web/20160419165306/https://www.thejournal.ie/mossack-fonseca-prosecution-2714795-Apr2016/?utm_source=twitter_self

#10yrsago Bernie Sanders responds to CEOs of Verizon and GE: “I welcome their contempt” https://web.archive.org/web/20160415165051/https://www.businessinsider.com/bernie-sanders-verizon-contempt-2016-4

#10yrsago Let’s Encrypt is actually encrypting the whole Web https://www.wired.com/2016/04/scheme-encrypt-entire-web-actually-working/

#10yrsago City of San Francisco tells man he can’t live in wooden box in friend’s living room https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/13/san-francisco-new-home-rented-box-illegal?CMP=tmb_gu

#10yrsago How the UK’s biggest pharmacy chain went from family-run public service to debt-laden hedge-fund disaster https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/13/how-boots-went-rogue

#10yrsago Ohio newspaper chain owner says his papers don’t publish articles about LGBTQ people https://ideatrash.net/2016/04/the-owner-of-four-town-papers-in-ohio.html

#10yrsago How British journalists talk about people they’re not allowed to talk about https://web.archive.org/web/20160414152933/https://popbitch.com/home/2016/03/31/up-the-injunction/

#10yrsago Brussels terrorists kept their plans in an unencrypted folder called “TARGET” https://www.techdirt.com/2016/04/14/brussels-terrorist-laptop-included-details-planned-attack-unencrypted-folder-titled-target/

#10yrsago Ron Wyden vows to filibuster anti-cryptography bill https://www.techdirt.com/2016/04/14/burr-feinstein-officially-release-anti-encryption-bill-as-wyden-promises-to-filibuster-it/

#10yrsago Paramount wants to kill a fan-film by claiming copyright on the Klingon language https://torrentfreak.com/paramount-we-do-own-the-klingon-language-and-warships-160414/

#5yrsago Murder Offsets https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy

#5yrsago The FCC wants your broadband measurements https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#fly-my-pretties

#1yrago Machina economicus https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/14/timmy-share/#a-superior-moral-justification-for-selfishness

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • 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.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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.

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"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

Publié le 15.04.2026 à 09:06

Pluralistic: Rights for robots (15 Apr 2026)


Today's links

  • Rights for robots: Not everything deserves moral consideration.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: 7 years under the DMCA; NOLA mayoral candidate x New Orleans Square; Kettling is illegal; AOL won't deliver critical emails; Chris Ware x Charlie Brown; Mossack Fonseca raided; Corporate lobbying budget is greater than Senate and House; Corbyn overpays taxes; What IP means; Bill Gates v humanity; "Jackpot."
  • Upcoming appearances: Toronto, San Francisco, London, Berlin, NYC, Hay-on-Wye, London.
  • 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 famous photo of LBJ signing the Civil Rights Act. LBJ and the onlookers' heads have been replaced with the heads of 1950s pulp magazine robots.

Rights for robots (permalink)

The Rights of Nature movement uses a bold tactic to preserve our habitable Earth: it seeks to extend (pseudo) personhood to things like watersheds, forests and other ecosystems, as well as nonhuman species, in hopes of creating legal "standing" to ask the courts for protection:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights_of_nature

What do watersheds, forests and nonhuman species need protection from? That turns out to be a very interesting question, because the most common adversary in a Rights of Nature case is another pseudo-person: namely, a limited liability corporation.

These nonhuman "persons" have been a feature of our legal system since the late 19th century, when the Supreme Court found that the 14th Amendment's "Equal Protection" clause could be applied to a railroad. In the 150-some years since, corporate personhood has monotonically expanded, most notoriously through cases like Hobby Lobby, which gave a corporation the right to discriminate against women on the grounds that it shared its founders' religious opposition to abortion; and, of course, in Citizens United, which found that corporate personhood meant that corporations had a constitutional right to divert their profits to bribe politicians.

Theoretically, "corporate personhood" extends to all kinds of organizations, including trade unions – but in practice, corporate personhood primarily allows the ruling class to manufacture new "people" to serve as a botnet on their behalf. A union has free speech rights just like an employer, but the employer's property rights mean that it can exclude union organizers from its premises, and employer rights mean that corporations can force workers to sit through "captive audience" meetings where expensive consultants lie to them about how awful a union would be (the corporation's speech rights also mean that it's free to lie).

In my view, corporate personhood has been an unmitigated disaster. Creating "human rights" for these nonhuman entities led to the catastrophic degradation of the natural world, via the equally catastrophic degradation of our political processes.

In a strange way, corporate personhood has realized the danger that reactionary opponents of votes for women warned of. In the days of the suffrage movement, anti-feminists claimed that giving women the vote would simply lead to husbands getting two votes, since wives would simply vote the way their husbands told them to.

This libel never died out. Take the recent hard-fought UK by-election in Gorton and Denton (basically Manchester): this was the first test of the Green Party's electoral chances under its new leader, the brilliant and principled leftist Zack Polanski. The Green candidate was Hannah Spencer, a working-class plumber and plasterer who rejected the demonization of the region's Muslim voters, unlike her rivals from Labour (which has transformed itself into a right-wing party), Reform (a fascist party), and the Conservatives (an irrelevant and dying right party). During the race (and especially after Spencer romped to a massive victory) Spencer's rivals accused her of courting "family voters," by which they meant Muslim wives, who would vote the way their Islamist husbands ordered them to. Despite the facial absurdity of this claim – that the Islamist vote would go for the pro-trans party led by a gay Jew – it was widely repeated:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyxeqpzz2no

"Family voting" isn't a thing, but corporate personhood has conferred political rights on the ruling class, who get to manufacture corporate "people" at scale, each of which is guaranteed the same right to contribute to politicians and intervene in our politics as any human.

Contrast this with the Rights for Nature movement. Where corporate personhood leads to a society with less empathy for living things (up to and including humans), Rights for Nature creates a legal and social basis for more empathy. In her stunning novel A Half-Built Garden, Ruthanna Emrys paints a picture of a world in which the personhood of watersheds and animals become as much of a part of our worldview as corporate personhood is today:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/26/aislands/#dead-ringers

Scenes from A Half-Built Garden kept playing out in my mind last month while I attended the Bioneers conference in Berkeley, where they carried on their decades-long tradition of centering indigenous activists whose environmental campaigns were intimately bound up with the idea of personhood for the natural world and its inhabitants:

https://bioneers.org/

On the last morning, my daughter and I sat through a string of inspiring and uplifting presentations from indigenous-led groups that had used Rights of Nature to rally support for legal challenges that had forced those other nonhuman "persons" – limited liability corporations – to retreat from plans to raze, poison, or murder whole regions.

The final keynote speaker that morning was the writer Michael Pollan, who spoke about a looming polycrisis of AI, and I found myself groaning and squirming. Not him, too! Were we about to be held captive to yet another speaker convinced that AI was going to become conscious and turn us all into paperclips?

That seemed to be where he was leading, as he discussed the way that chatbots were designed to evince the empathic response we normally reserve for people – the same empathy that all the other speakers were seeking to inspire for nature. But then, he took an unexpected and welcome turn: Pollan compared extending personhood to chatbots to the disastrous decision to extend personhood to corporations, and urged us all to turn away from it.

This crystallized something that had niggled at me for years. For years, people I respect have used the Rights for Nature movement as an argument for extending empathy to software constructs. The more we practice empathy – and the more rights we afford to more entities – the better we get at it. Personhood for things that are not like us, the argument goes, makes our own personhood more secure, by honing a reflex toward empathy and respect for all things. This is the argument for saying thank you to Siri (and now to other chatbots):

https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/fpq/article/download/14294/12136

Siri – like so many of our obedient, subservient, sycophantic chatbots – impersonates a woman. If we get habituated to barking orders at a "woman" (or at our "assistants") then this will bleed out into our interactions with real women and real assistants. Extending moral consideration to Siri, though "she" is just a software construct, will condition our reflexes to treat everything with respect.

For years, I'd uncritically accepted that argument, but after hearing Pollan speak, I changed my mind. Rather than treating Siri with respect because it impersonates a woman, we should demand that Siri stop impersonating a woman. I don't thank my Unix shell when I pipe a command to grep and get the output that I'm looking for, and I don't thank my pocket-knife when it slices through the tape on a parcel. I can appreciate that these are well-made tools and value their thoughtful design, but that doesn't mean I have to respect them in the way that I would respect a person.

That way lies madness – the madness that leads us to ascribe personalities to corporations and declare some of them to be "immoral" and others to be "moral," which is always and forever a dead end:

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

In other words: there's an argument from the Rights of Nature movement that says that the more empathy we practice, the better off we are in all our interactions. But Pollan complicated that argument, by raising the example of corporate personhood. It turns out that extending personhood to constructed nonhuman entities like corporations reduces the amount of empathy we practice. Far from empowering labor unions, the creation of "human" rights for groups and organizations has given capital more rights over workers. A labor rights regime can defend workers – without empowering bosses and without creating new "persons."

The question is: is a chatbot more like a corporation (whose personhood corrodes our empathy) or more like a watershed (whose personhood strengthens our empathy)? But to ask that question is to answer it – a chatbot is definitely more like a corporation than it is like a watershed. What's more: in a very real, non-metaphorical way, giving rights to chatbots means taking away rights from nature, thanks to LLMs' energy-intesivity.

Empathy then, for the nonhuman world – but not for human constructs.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Canadian labels pull out of RIAA-fronted Canadian Recording Industry Ass. https://web.archive.org/web/20060414170111/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/component/option,com_content/task,view/id,1204/Itemid,85/nsub,/

#20yrsago EFF publishes “7 Years Under the DMCA” paper https://web.archive.org/web/20060415110951/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004555.php

#20yrsago Life of a writer as a Zork adventure https://web.archive.org/web/20060414115745/http://acephalous.typepad.com/acephalous/2006/04/disadventure.html

#20yrsago NOLA mayoral candidate uses photo of Disneyland New Orleans Square https://web.archive.org/web/20060414214356/https://www.wonkette.com/politics/new-orleans/not-quite-the-happiest-place-on-earth-166989.php

#20yrsago AOL won’t deliver emails that criticize AOL https://web.archive.org/web/20060408133439/https://www.eff.org/news/archives/2006_04.php#004556

#15yrsago UK court rules that kettling was illegal https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/apr/14/kettling-g20-protesters-police-illegal

#15yrsago If Chris Ware was Charlie Brown https://eatmorebikes.blogspot.com/2011/04/lil-chris-ware.html

#10yrsago Piracy dooms motion picture industry to yet another record-breaking box-office year https://torrentfreak.com/piracy-fails-to-prevent-box-office-record-160413/

#10yrsago Panama Papers: Mossack Fonseca law offices raided by Panama authorities https://www.reuters.com/article/us-panama-tax-raid-idUSKCN0XA020/

#10yrsago Panama Papers reveal offshore companies were bagmen for the world’s spies https://web.archive.org/web/20160426083004/https://www.yahoo.com/news/panama-papers-reveal-spies-used-mossak-fonseca-231833609.html

#10yrsago How corporate America’s lobbying budget surpassed the combined Senate and Congress budget https://web.archive.org/web/20150422010643/https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/04/how-corporate-lobbyists-conquered-american-democracy/390822/

#10yrsago URL shorteners are a short path to your computer’s hard drive https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.02734

#10yrsago UL has a new, opaque certification process for cybersecurity https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/04/underwriters-labs-refuses-to-share-new-iot-cybersecurity-standard/

#10yrsago Jeremy Corbyn overpays his taxes https://web.archive.org/web/20160413192208/https://www.politicshome.com/news/uk/political-parties/labour-party/news/73724/jeremy-corbyn-overstated-income-his-tax-return

#10yrsago Cassetteboy’s latest video is an amazing, danceable anti-Snoopers Charter mashup https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2fSXp6N-vs

#10yrsago Texas: prisoners whose families maintain their social media presence face 45 days in solitary https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/texas-prison-system-unveils-new-inmate-censorship-policy

#5yrsago Data-brokerages vs the world https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#axciom

#5yrsago What "IP" means https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#ip

#5yrsago Bill Gates will kill us all https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#gates-foundation

#5yrsago Jackpot https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#affluenza

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • 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.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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):

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"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

Publié le 14.04.2026 à 10:32

Pluralistic: In praise of (some) compartmentalization (14 Apr 2026)


Today's links


A male figure in an inner tube, floating down a river. The figure has been altered. He now has a zombie's head, and his skin has been tinted green, with large, suppurating sores oozing out of his skin.

In praise of (some) compartmentalization (permalink)

If there's one FAQ I get Q'ed most F'ly, it's this: "How do you get so much done?" The short answer is, "I write when I'm anxious (which is how I came to write nine books during lockdown)." The long answer is more complicated.

The first complication to understand is that I have lifelong, degenerating chronic pain that makes me hurt from the base of my skull to the soles of my feet – my whole posterior chain. On a good day, it hurts. On a bad day, it hurts so bad that it's all I can think about.

Unless…I work. If I can find my way into a creative project, the rest of the world just kind of fades back, including my physical body. Sometimes I can get there through entertainment, too – a really good book or movie, say, but more often I find myself squirming and needing to get up and stretch or use a theragun after a couple hours in a movie theater seat, even the kind that reclines. A good conversation can do it, too, and is better than a movie or a book. The challenge and engagement of an intense conversation – preferably one with a chewy, productive and interesting disagreement – can take me out of things.

There's a degree to which ignoring my body is the right thing to do. I've come to understand a lot of my pain as being a phantom, a pathological failure of my nervous system to terminate a pain signal after it fires. Instead of fading away, my pain messages bounce back and forth, getting amplified rather than attenuated, until all my nerves are screaming at me. Where pain has no physiological correlate – in other words, where the ache is just an ache, without a strain or a tear or a bruise – it makes sense to ignore it. It's actually healthy to ignore it, because paying attention to pain is one of the things that can amplify it (though not always).

But this only gets me so far, because some of my pain does have a physiological correlate. My biomechanics suck, thanks to congenital hip defects that screwed up the way I walked and sat and lay and moved for most of my life, until eventually my wonky hips wore out and I swapped 'em for a titanium set. By that point, it was too late, because I'd made a mess of my posterior chain, all the way from my skull to my feet, and years of diligent physio, swimming, yoga, occupational therapy and physiotherapy have barely made a dent. So when I sit or stand or lie down, I'm always straining something, and I really do need to get up and move around and stretch and whatnot, or sure as hell I will pay the price later. So if I get too distracted, then I start ignoring the pain I need to be paying attention to, and that's at least as bad as paying attention to the pain I should be ignoring.

Which brings me to anxiety. These are anxious times. I don't know anyone who feels good right now. Particularly this week, as the Strait of Epstein emergency gets progressively worse, and there's this January 2020 sense of the crisis on the horizon, hitting one country after another. Last week, Australia got its last shipment of fossil fuels. This week, restaurants in India are all shuttered because of gas rationing. People who understand these things better than I do tell me that even if Trump strokes out tonight and Hegseth overdoes the autoerotic asphyxiation, it'll be months, possibly years, before things get back to "normal" ("normal!").

Any time I think about this stuff for even a few minutes, I start to feel that covid-a-comin', early-2020 feeling, only it's worse this time around, because I literally couldn't imagine what covid would mean when it got here, and now I know.

When I start to feel those feelings, I can just sit down and start thinking with my fingers, working on a book or a blog-post. Or working on an illustration to go with one of these posts, which is the most delicious distraction, leaving me with just enough capacity to mull over the structure of the argument that will accompany it.

I can't do anything about the impending energy catastrophe, apart from being part of a network of mutual aid and political organizing, so it makes sense not to fixate on it. But there are things that upset me – problems my friends and loved ones are having – where there's such a thing as too much compartmentalization. It's one thing to lose myself in work until the heat of emotion cools so I can think rationally about an issue that's got me seeing red, and another to use work as a way to neglect a loved one who needs attention in the hope that the moment will pass before I have to do any difficult emotional labor.

Compartmentalization, in other words, but not too much compartmentalization. During the lockdown years, I transformed myself into a machine for turning Talking Heads bootlegs into science fiction novels and technology criticism, and that was better than spending that time boozing or scrolling or fighting – but in retrospect, there's probably more I could have done during those hard months to support the people around me. In my defense – in all our defenses – that was an unprecedented situation and we all did the best we could.

Creative work takes me away from my pain – both physical and emotional – because creative work takes me into a "flow" state. This useful word comes to us from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who coined the term in the 1960s while he was investigating a seeming paradox: how was it that we modern people had mastered so many of the useful arts and sciences, and yet we seemed no happier than the ancients? How could we make so much progress in so many fields, and so little progress in being happy?

In his fieldwork, Csikszentmihalyi found that people reported the most happiness while they were doing difficult things well – when your "body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile." He called this state "flow."

As Derek Thompson says, the word "flow" implies an effortlessness, but really, it's the effort – just enough, not too much – that defines flow-states. We aren't happiest in a frictionless world, but rather, in a world of "achievable challenges":

https://www.derekthompson.org/p/how-zombie-flow-took-over-culture

Thompson relates this to "the law of familiar surprises," an idea he developed in his book Hit Makers, which investigated why some media, ideas and people found fame, while others languished. A "familiar surprise" is something that's "familiar but not too familiar."

He thinks that the Hollywood mania for sequels and reboots is the result of media execs chasing "familiar surprises." I think there's something to this, but we shouldn't discount the effect that monopolization has on the media: as companies get larger and larger, they end up committing to larger and larger projects, and you just don't take the kinds of risks with a $500m movie that you can take with a $5m one. If you're spending $500m, you want to hedge that investment with as many safe bets as you can find – big name stars, successful IP, and familiar narrative structures. If the movie still tanks, at least no one will get fired for taking a big, bold risk.

Today, we're living in a world of extremely familiar, and progressively less surprising culture. AI slop is the epitome of familiarity, since by definition, AI tries to make a future that is similar to the past, because all it can do is extrapolate from previous data. That's a fundamentally conservative, uncreative way to think about the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/14/everybody-poops/#homeostatic-mechanism

The tracks the Spotify algorithm picks out of the catalog are going to be as similar to the ones you've played in the past as it can make them – and the royalty-free slop tracks that Spotify generates with AI or commissions from no-name artists will be even more insipidly unsurprising:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/12/streaming-doesnt-pay/#stunt-publishing

Thompson cites Shishi Wu's dissertation on "Passive Flow," a term she coined to describe how teens fall into social media scroll-trances:

https://scholarworks.umb.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2104&context=doctoral_dissertations

Wu says it's a mistake to attribute the regretted hours of scrolling to addiction or a failure of self-control. Rather, the user is falling into "passive flow," a condition arising from three factors:

I. Engagement without a clear goal;

II. A loss of self-awareness – of your body and your mental state;

III. Losing track of time.

I instantly recognize II. and III. – they're the hallmarks of the flow states that abstract me away from my own pain when I'm working. The big difference here is I. – I go to work with the clearest of goals, while "passive flow" is undirected (Thompson also cites psychologist Paul Bloom, who calls the scroll-trance "shitty flow." In shitty flow, you lose track of the world and its sensations – but in a way that you later regret.)

Thompson has his own name for this phenomenon of algorithmically induced, regret-inducing flow: he calls it "zombie flow." It's flow that "recapitulates the goal of flow while evacuating the purpose."

Zombie flow is "progress without pleasure" – it's frictionless, and so it gives us nothing except that sense of the world going away, and when it stops, the world is still there. The trick is to find a way of compartmentalizing that rewards attention with some kind of productive residue that you can look back on with pride and pleasure.

I wouldn't call myself a happy person. I don't think I know any happy people right now. But I'm an extremely hopeful person, because I can see so many ways that we can make things better (an admittedly very low bar), and I have mastered the trick of harnessing my unhappiness to the pursuit of things that might make the world better, and I'm gradually learning when to stop escaping the pain and confront it.

(Image: marsupium photography, CC BY-SA 2.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Pee-Wee Herman on his career https://web.archive.org/web/20010414033156/https://ew.com/ew/report/0,6115,105857~1~0~paulreubensreturnsto,00.html

#25yrsago Anxious hand-wringing about multitasking teens https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/12/technology/teenage-overload-or-digital-dexterity.html

#20yrsago Clever t-shirt typography spells “hate” – “love” in mirror-writing https://web.archive.org/web/20060413102804/https://accordionguy.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2006/4/12/1881414.html

#20yrsago New Mexico Lightning Field claims to have copyrighted dirt https://diaart.org/visit/visit-our-locations-sites/walter-de-maria-the-lightning-field#overview

#20yrsago Futuristic house made of spinach protein and soy-foam https://web.archive.org/web/20060413111650/http://bfi.org/node/828

#15yrsago New Zealand to sneak in Internet disconnection copyright law with Christchurch quake emergency legislation https://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/4882838/Law-to-fight-internet-piracy-rushed-through

#10yrsago Bake: An amazing space-themed Hubble cake https://www.sprinklebakes.com/2016/04/black-velvet-nebula-cake.html

#10yrsago Shanghai law uses credit scores to enforce filial piety https://www.caixinglobal.com/2016-04-11/shanghai-says-people-who-fail-to-visit-parents-will-have-credit-scores-lowered-101011746.html

#10yrsago Walmart heiress donated $378,400 to Hillary Clinton campaign and PACs https://web.archive.org/web/20160414155119/https://www.alternet.org/election-2016/alice-walton-donated-353400-clintons-victory-fund

#10yrsago Mass arrests at DC protest over money in politics https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/mass-arrests-of-protesters-in-demonstration-at-capitol-against-big-money/2016/04/11/96c13df0-0037-11e6-9d36-33d198ea26c5_story.html

#10yrsago Churchill got a doctor’s note requiring him to drink at least 8 doubles a day “for convalescence” https://web.archive.org/web/20130321054712/https://arttattler.com/archivewinstonchurchill.html

#5yrsago Big Tech's secret weapon is switching costs, not network effects https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/12/tear-down-that-wall/#zucks-iron-curtain

#5yrsago Fraud-resistant election-tech https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/12/tear-down-that-wall/#bmds

#1yrago Blue Cross of Louisiana doesn't give a shit about breast cancer https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/12/pre-authorization/#is-not-a-guarantee-of-payment

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • 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.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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:

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"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

Publié le 13.04.2026 à 07:29

Pluralistic: Austerity creates fascism (13 Apr 2026)


Today's links

  • Austerity creates fascism: We can't afford to not afford nice things.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: The Server of Amontillado; Flapper's Dictionary; Mastercard v rec.humor.funny; Philippines electoral data breach; A front page from the Trump presidency; Spike Lee x Bernie Sanders; France v password hashing; Algorithms as Central European folk-dances; Save Comcast; Lex Luthor v export controls; Zuckerberg in the dock.
  • Upcoming appearances: Toronto, San Francisco, London, Berlin, NYC, Hay-on-Wye, London.
  • 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.


A line of Nazis at the Nuremburg rally, throwing Nazi salutes. Their backs are to us. Facing them is a hand-tinted group of child laborers from the early 20th century, squinting suspiciously at them.

Austerity creates fascism (permalink)

I'm worried about AI psychosis. Specifically, I'm worried about the psychosis that makes our "capital allocators" spend $1.4T on the money-losingest technology in the history of the human race, in pursuit of a bizarre fantasy that if we teach the word-guessing program enough words, it will take all the jobs. That's some next-level underpants-gnomery:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/12/normal-technology/#bubble-exceptionalism

The thing that worries me about billionaires' AI psychosis isn't concern for their financial solvency. No, what I worry about is what happens when the seven companies that comprise a third of the S&P 500 stop trading the same $100b IOU around while pretending it's in all of their bank accounts at once and implode, vaporizing a third of the US stock market.

My concern about a massive collapse in the capital markets isn't that workers will suffer directly. Despite all the Wonderful Life rhetoric about your money being in Joe's house and the Kennedy house and Mrs Macklin's house, the reality is that the median US worker has $955 saved for retirement. You could nuke the whole financial system and not take a dime out of most workers' pockets:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/955-saved-for-retirement-millions-are-in-that-boat-150003868.html

No, the thing that has me terrified about AI is that when it craters and takes the economy with it, that we will respond the same way we have during every financial crisis of the 21st century: with austerity, and austerity breeds fascism.

There's a direct line from every K-shaped recovery to every strong-man who's currently sending masked gunmen into the streets. The Hungarian dictator Viktor Orban rose to power after people who'd been suckered into denominating their mortgages in Swiss francs lost their houses when the currency markets moved suddenly, because the swindlers who'd sold them those mortgages took the position that wanting to live somewhere automatically made you an expert in forex risk, so caveat fuckin' emptor, baby.

Back in America, Obama decided to bail out the banks and not the people. His treasury secretary Tim Geithner told him the banks were headed for a catastrophic crash and could only be saved if he "foamed the runways" with everyday Americans' mortgages. Millions of Americans lost their homes to foreclosure as banks, flush with public cash, threw them out of their homes and then flipped them to investment banks who became the country's worst slumlords:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/08/wall-street-landlords/#the-new-slumlords

Americans were understandably not entirely happy with this outcome. So when Hillary Clinton replied to Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" with "America is already great," her message was, "Vote for me if you think everything is great; vote for Trump if you think everything is fucked":

https://www.politico.com/blogs/2016-dem-primary-live-updates-and-results/2016/03/clinton-america-is-already-great-220078

"Austerity begets fascism" is one of those things that makes a lot of intuitive sense, but it turns out that there's a good empirical basis for believing it. In "Public Service Decline and Support for the Populist Right" four economists from the LSE and Bocconi provide an excellent look at the linkage between austerity and support for fascists:

https://catherinedevries.eu/NHS.pdf

Here's how they break it down. Political scientists have assembled a large, reproducible body of evidence to show that "public service provision is crucial to people’s perceptions of their quality of life and living standards." Good public services are the basis for "the social contract between rulers and the ruled" – pay your taxes and obey the laws, and in return, you will be well served.

When public services go wrong, people don't always know who to blame, but they definitely notice that something is going wrong, so when public services fail, people stop trusting the state, and that social contract starts to fray. They start to suspect that elites are lining their pockets rather than managing the system, and they "withdraw their support" for the system.

Fascists thrive in these conditions. Fascists come to power by mobilizing grievances. By choosing a scapegoat, fascists can create support from people who are justifiably furious that the services they rely on have collapsed. So when you can't get shelter, or health care, or elder care, or child care, or an education for your kids, you become a mark for a fascist grifter with a story about "undeserving migrants" who've taken the benefits that should rightly accrue to "deserving natives."

(This is grimly hilarious, given that the wizened, decrepit rich world is critically dependent on migrants as a source of healthy, working-age workers who pay massive amounts into the system while barely making use of it, many of whom plan on retiring to their home countries when they do reach the age where they're likely to extract a net loss to the benefits system.)

Enter the NHS, a beloved institution that is hailed as the pride of the nation by both the political left and the right. The majority of Britons use the NHS, with only 12-14% of the population "going private," so when the NHS declines, everybody notices (what's more, even people with private care use the NHS for many of their needs).

Britons love the NHS and they want the government to spend more on it. There's "a broad public consensus that the government is not going far enough when it comes to funding." That's because generations of cuts to the NHS have left it substantially hollowed out, with major parts of the service handed over to for-profit entities who overcharge and underserve.

The most tangible and immediate evidence of this slow-motion collapse comes when your local general practitioner ("family doctor" or "primary care physician" in Americanese) shuts down. The UK has lost 1,700 GP practices since 2013.

Reasoning that a GP closure would make people angry at the system, the economists behind the paper wanted to see what happened to people's political beliefs when their GP's office shut. They relied on the GP Patient Survey, a longitudinal study run by NHS England and Ipsos Mori. The survey polls a statistically significant random sample of patients from every GP practice in the NHS and then weights the results "to reflect the demographic characteristics of the local population according to UK Census estimates." It's good data.

The researchers cross-referenced this with various high-quality instruments that measured the political views of Britons, like the U Essex Understanding Society Panel, drawing on 13 years' worth of surveys from 2009-2022, gaining access to a protected version of the dataset with fine-grained geographic information about survey respondents, which allowed them to link responses to the "catchment areas" for specific GPs' office. They combined this data with the British Election Study panel, which has surveyed voters 29 times since 2014.

Most of the paper describes the careful work the researchers did to analyze, cross-reference and validate this data, but what interested me was the conclusion: that people who see a severe degradation in the quality of the services they rely on switch their political affiliation to one of Britain's fascist parties – UKIP, the Brexit Party, or Reform – parties that have called for ethnic cleansing in Britain.

This is what has me scared. We can see the looming economic crises in our near future. If it's not the AI crash that triggers the next wave of austerity, it'll be the oil crisis created by Trump's bungling in the Strait of Epstein. And of course, we could always get a twofer, because the Gulf States that were pouring hundreds of billions into AI data-centers now need every cent to rebuild the LNG shipping terminals and oil refineries that Iran blew up after Trump, Hegseth, and Netanyahu started murdering all the schoolgirls they could target. Once they nope out of the AI bubble, that could trigger the collapse.

This is a study about the NHS, but it's not just about the NHS. It's perfectly reasonable to assume that people react this way when they experience cuts to their road maintenance, their schools, their community centers, and any other service they rely on. Fascism – what Hannah Arendt called 'organized loneliness' – can only take root when people stop believing that their society will reward their lawfulness with an orderly and humane existence.

The crisis is coming, but whether we do austerity when it gets here is our choice. Everywhere we turn, political leaders are rejecting generations of failed austerity in favor of "sewer socialism" – the idea that you get people to trust their government by earning that trust. Zohran Mamdani is fixing 100,000 potholes in the first 100 days, despite the multi-billion dollar deficit that outgoing Mayor Eric Adams created by "running the city like a business":

https://prospect.org/2026/04/10/zohran-mamdani-getting-new-york-city-believe-in-government/

In Canada and the UK, party leaders like Avi Lewis (NDP) and Zack Polanski (Greens) are vowing to fight the coming crises by spending, not cutting. Compare that with UK fascist leader Nigel Farage, who says that if he's elected, he'll create a "paramilitary style" British ICE, building concentration camps for 24,000 migrants, with the hope of deporting 288,000 people per year:

https://www.thenerve.news/p/reform-deportation-operation-restoring-justice-data-surveillance-palantir-uk-labour

"Socialism or barbarism" isn't just a cliche – it's actually a choice on the ballot.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago The Server of Amontillado https://web.archive.org/web/20070112024841/http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20010409S0012

#25yrsago Mastercard threatens the moderator of rec.humor.funny https://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/01/Apr/mcrhf.html

#15yrsago Sweden exports sweatshops: Ikea’s first American factory https://web.archive.org/web/20190404035900/https://www.latimes.com/business/la-xpm-2011-apr-10-la-fi-ikea-union-20110410-story.html

#15yrsago Canada’s New Democratic Party promises national broadband and net neutrality https://web.archive.org/web/20110412064952/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5734/125/

#15yrsago Flapper’s dictionary: 1922 https://bookflaps.blogspot.com/2011/04/flappers-dictionary.html

#15yrsago Toronto’s Silver Snail to leave Queen Street West https://web.archive.org/web/20110409181737/http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/article/970520–the-silver-snail-comics-icon-sold-to-move

#15yrsago WI county clerk whose homemade voting software found 14K votes for Tea Party judge is an old hand at illegal campaigning https://web.archive.org/web/20110412121323/http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/elections/article_7e777016-62b2-11e0-9b74-001cc4c002e0.html

#15yrsago Canadian Tories’ campaign pledge: We will spy on the Internet https://web.archive.org/web/20110412125250/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5733/125/

#15yrsago France to require unhashed password storage https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-12983734

#15yrsago Central European folk-dancers illustrated sorting algorithms https://www.i-programmer.info/news/150-training-a-education/2255-sorting-algorithms-as-dances.html

#10yrsago Save Comcast! https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/save-comcast

#10yrsago Goldman Sachs will pay $5B for fraudulent sales of toxic debt, no one will go to jail https://web.archive.org/web/20160412155435/https://consumerist.com/2016/04/11/goldman-sachs-to-pay-5b-to-settle-charges-of-selling-troubled-mortgages-ahead-of-the-financial-crisis/

#10yrsago How could Lex Luthor beat the import controls on kryptonite? https://lawandthemultiverse.com/2016/04/11/batman-v-superman-and-import-licenses/

#10yrsago Congresscritters spend 4 hours/day on the phone, begging for money https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ylomy1Aw9Hk

#10yrsago Philippines electoral data breach much worse than initially reported, possibly worst ever https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/every-voter-in-philippines-exposed/

#10yrsago A cashless society as a tool for censorship and social control https://web.archive.org/web/20260311032317/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/cashless-society/477411/

#10yrsago Boston Globe previews a front page from the Trump presidency https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/2797782/Ideas-Trump-front-page.pdf

#10yrsago Spike Lee interviews Bernie Sanders: Vermont, Trump, Clinton, guns and Brooklyn https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/bernie-sanders-interviewed-by-spike-lee-thr-new-york-issue-880788/

#5yrsago Youtube blocks advertisers from targeting "Black Lives Matter" https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/10/brand-safety-rupture/#brand-safety

#5yrsago Google's short-lived data-advantage https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/11/halflife/#minatory-legend

#1yrago Zuckerberg in the dock https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/11/it-is-better-to-buy/#than-to-compete

#1yrago The most remarkable thing about antitrust (that no one talks about) https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/10/solidarity-forever-2/#oligarchism

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • 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.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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:

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"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

Publié le 11.04.2026 à 15:34

Pluralistic: Don't Be Evil (11 Apr 2026)


Today's links


A sci-fi pulp robot holding a grotesque inverted severed head of a beared man aloft, zapping it with rays from its eye-visor. Behind the robot is a scene of collapsing Roman pillars.

Don't Be Evil (permalink)

How I knew I was officially Old: I stopped being disoriented by the experience of meeting with grown-ass adults who wanted to thank me for the books of mine they'd read in their childhoods, which helped shape their lives. Instead of marveling that a book that felt to me like it was ten seconds old was a childhood favorite of this full-grown person, I was free to experience the intense gratification of knowing I'd helped this person find their way, and intense gratitude that they'd told me about it (including you, Sean – it was nice to meet you last night at Drawn and Quarterly in Montreal!).

Now that I am Old, I find myself dwelling on key junctures from my life. It's not nostalgia ("Nostalgia is a toxic impulse" – J. Hodgman) – rather, it's an attempt to figure out how I got here ("My god! What have I done?" – D. Byrne), and also, how the world got this way.

There's one incident I return to a lot, a moment that didn't feel momentous at the time, but which, on reflection, seems to have a lot to say about this moment – both for me, and for the world we live in.

Back in the late 1990s, I co-founded a dotcom company, Opencola. It was a "free/open, peer-to-peer search and recommendation system." The big idea was that we could combine early machine learning technology with Napster-style P2P file sharing and a web-crawler to help you find things that would interest you. The way it was gonna work was that you'd have a folder on your desktop and you could put things in it that you liked and the system would crawl other users' folders, and the open web, and copy things into your folder that it found that seemed related to the stuff you liked. You could refine the system's sensibilities by thumbs-up/thumbs-downing the suggestions, and it would refine its conception of your preferences over time. As with Napster and its successors, you could also talk to the people whose collections enriched your own, allowing you to connect with people who shared even your most esoteric interests.

Opencola didn't make it. Our VCs got greedy when Microsoft offered to buy us and tried to grab all the equity away from the founders. I quit and went to EFF, and my partners got very good jobs at Microsoft, and the company was bought for its tax-credits by Opentext, and that was that.

(Well, not quite – several of the programmers who worked on the project have rebooted it, which is very cool!)

https://opencola.io/

But back in the Opencola days, we three partners would have these regular meetings where we'd brainstorm ways that we could make money off of this extremely cool, but frankly very noncommercial idea. As with any good brainstorming session, there were "no bad ideas," so sometimes we would veer off into fanciful territory, or even very evil territory.

It's one of those evil ideas that I keep coming back to. Sometimes, during these money-making brainstorm sessions, we'd decompose the technology we were working on into its component parts to see if any subset of them might make money ("Be the first person to not do something no one has ever not done before" – B. Eno).

We had a (by contemporary standards, primitive) machine-learning system; we had a web crawler; and we had a keen sense of how the early web worked. In particular, we were really interested in a new, Linux-based search tool that used citation analysis – a close cousin to our own collaborative filter, harnessing latent clues about relevance implicit in the web's structure – to produce the best search results the web had ever seen. Like us, this company had no idea how to make money, so we were watching it very carefully. That company was called "Google."

That's where the evil part came in. We were pretty sure we could extract a list of the 100,000 most commonly searched terms from Google, and then we could use our web-crawler to capture the top 100 results for each. We could feed these to our Bayesian machine-learning tool to create statistical models of the semantic structure of these results, and then we could generate thousands of pages of word-salad for each of those keywords that matched those statistical models, along with interlinks that could trick Google's citation analysis model. Plaster those word-salad pages with ads, and voila – free cash flow!

Of course, we didn't do it. But even as we developed this idea, the room crackled with a kind of dark, excited dread. We weren't any smarter than many other rooms full of people who were engaged in exercises just like this one. The difference was, we loved the web. The idea of someone deliberately poisoning it this way churned our stomachs. The whole point of Opencola was to connect people with each other based on their shared interests. We loved Google and how it helped you find the people who wrote the web in ways that delighted and informed you. This kind of spam, aimed at wrecking Google's ability to help people make sense of the things we were all posting to the internet, was…grotesque.

I didn't know the term then, but what we were doing amounted to "red-teaming" – thinking through the ways that attackers could destroy something that we valued. Later, we tried "blue-teaming," trying to imagine how our tools might help us fight back if someone else got the same idea and went through with it.

I didn't know the term "blue-teaming" then, either. Once I learned these terms, they brought a lot of clarity to the world. Today, I have another term that I turn to when I am trying to rally other people who love the internet and want it to be good: "Tron-pilled." Tron "fought for the user." Lots of us technologists are Tron-pilled. Back in the early days, when it wasn't clear that there was ever going to be any money in this internet thing, being Tron-pilled was pretty much the only reason to get involved with it. Sure, there were a few monsters who fell into the early internet because it offered them a chance to torment strangers at a distance, but they were vastly outnumbered by the legion of Tron-pilled nerds who wanted to make the internet better because we wanted all our normie friends to have the same kind of good time we were having.

The point of this is that there were lots of people back then who had the capacity to imagine the kind of gross stuff that Zuckerberg, Musk, and innumerable other scammers, hustlers and creeps got up to on the web. The thing that distinguished these monsters wasn't their genius – it was their callousness. When we brainstormed ways to break the internet, we felt scared and were inspired to try to save it. When they brainstormed ways to break the internet, they created pitch-decks.

And still: the old web was good in so many ways for so long. The Tron-pilled amongst us held the line. When we build a new, good, post-American internet, we're going to need a multitude of Tron-pilled technologists, old and young, who build, maintain – and, above all, defend it.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Trotsky’s assassination – according to the FBI https://web.archive.org/web/20010413212536/http://foia.fbi.gov/trotsky.htm

#25yrsago Online headline-writing guidelines from Jakob Nielsen https://memex.craphound.com/2001/04/09/headline-writing-guidelines-from-legendary-usability/

#25yrsago Floppy-disk stained-glass windows https://web.archive.org/web/20010607052511/http://www.acme.com/jef/crafts/bathroom_windows.html

#15yrsago English school principal announces zero tolerance for mismatched socks https://nationalpost.com/news/u-k-school-cracks-down-on-bad-manners

#1yrago EFF's lawsuit against DOGE will go forward https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/09/cases-and-controversy/#brocolli-haired-brownshirts

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • 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.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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:

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"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

 

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