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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 09.09.2026 à 12:28

Pluralistic: Anti-vax/anti-trust (09 Sep 2026)


Today's links

  • Anti-vax/anti-trust: Remembering saves lives.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Disneyland prisoner; HOAs v xeriscaping; Copyright Office x regulatory capture; The women held a vote; Open licenses v uncopyrightable subjects; Largest prison strike in history; Largest strike in history; Fingerspitzengefühl; CDT v DRM; BNL v DRM; Sugar v logos; Knit a Princess Leia wig; RIP Gutenberg founder Michael Hart; Best bitters; HK refugees x Snowden; Wells Fargo's massive fraud; EU v links; Trump x noncompetes.
  • Upcoming appearances: London, Manchester, Budapest, Edmonton, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa.
  • 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 leaky drop ceiling with a large, dirty water stain.

Anti-vax/anti-trust (permalink)

As once-extinct diseases sweep through America, sickening, maiming and killing, the wild lunacy of anti-vax superstition grows ever more difficult to excuse.

Even the most uncomfortable vaccinations are nothing compared to the agony of the diseases they stave off. The worst I've ever felt after a jab was when I insisted – against doctor's orders – on getting the shingles, flu and covid jabs at the same time (I was about to leave on a complex trip where I'd be in a lot of enclosed spaces with a lot of different people, and I'd just had a cancer diagnosis and didn't want to get sick in case that foreclosed on my oncologist's therapeutic plans).

I felt like dogshit for about a day, and it didn't matter. Every time I felt like groaning and complaining, I thought about Rusty, my grandmother's wonderful boyfriend (they shacked up after my grandfather died, but didn't get married because she would have lost her widow's benefits). Rusty was the toughest guy I knew, an ex-bodybuilder who never showed any sign of discomfort, not even after his knee-replacements. The only time Rusty ever lost his composure in my presence was when he had shingles, when the agony reduced him to uncontrollable weeping. I knew that no matter how ooky all those vaccines made me feel, it was better than going through what Rusty had experienced. There was no way I'd handle it nearly so well as he did.

Rusty's shingles experience was the best case. He didn't end up with years of crippling nerve pain. He didn't lose his sight or hearing, didn't experience brain damage, didn't die of encephalitis. Fuck yeah I'll get a shingles vax.

As many people have observed, the problem with vaccines is that they work too well. The incredible, astounding, profound wonders of vaccines led many people to think of measles as a rash, the flu as a bad cold, mumps as a thing that makes you look like Brando playing Don Corleone. Vaccines worked so well to eliminate a terror that stalked the land and stole people's lives and loved ones and little children, an achy arm or an infinitesimal chance of a few days of feeling like shit seemed worse by comparison.

Now that we've turned our backs on this miracle, now that vaccination is in retreat and long-forgotten diseases are taking our babies, millions of people are still insisting that vaccines are a hoax.

That's infuriating and frustrating, but it's understandable. The cause-and-effect relationship between herd immunity and disease elimination is complex, and it plays out over a long timescale. It's notoriously hard to reason well about phenomena whose causal relationships are attenuated and multifactorial.

It's one thing to learn to hit a ball by swinging at it and watching where it goes – it's another altogether to swing blindfolded, go home, and then, eight years later, have someone tell you where the ball ended up. No one would start smoking if the first puff caused you to break out in visible tumors.

The attenuated, complex relationship between smoking and cancer creates a space where death merchants could instill profitable doubt and the more our institutions fail us, the easier it is to spread that doubt.

After all, nearly all of us lack the technical expertise to sort through the claims and counterclaims of tobacco lobbyists and public health authorities. To a large extent, we have to trust the process: trust it to be a well-administered truth-seeking exercise that does its best to find the correct answer to complex, technical questions. When the state is manifestly bad at doing its job, we still have to answer these complex, technical questions, but (lacking both the expertise to draw an informed conclusion and a reliable process by which expert disagreements can be settled), we're left helpless to do so. It's enough to drive you to despair:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/25/black-boxes/#when-you-know-you-know

This is an essay about anti-trust.

135 years ago, monopolists were such a destructive force – ruining workers' lives; corrupting politicians; pauperizing, swindling and poisoning their customers – that we created the first anti-monopoly laws:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

It took a quarter of a century to really start putting those laws into effect, but we eventually dismantled the robber barons' vast, destructive machines:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/20/if-you-wanted-to-get-there/#i-wouldnt-start-from-here

The World Wars helped: two consecutive orgies of capital destruction left oligarchs' treasuries so bare that we were finally able to realize some of our most utopian dreams of mutual aid and care, and all around the world, we won labor rights, state pensions, public medicine, all the wonders of the era the French call "Les Trente Glorieuses" (the 30 glorious years):

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

But because antitrust worked, we forgot how corrosive monopolies were. When the neoliberal economists of the Reagan/Thatcher era told us that we were missing out on the "efficiencies" of vast corporations, we blundered into their trap, letting them define the debate, so that instead of talking about how monopolies could clobber workers, customers and governments, we talked about whether monopolies might reduce prices. Sure, a monopoly can reduce prices – but as soon as it eliminates its competitors and captures its government, it's going to raise those prices, safe in the knowledge that a company that's too big to fail is too big to jail:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/14/the-price-is-wright/#enforcement-priorities

The dismantling of anti-monopoly law and the growth of the monopolies happened gradually, and then all at once. The decision to kill antitrust enforcement took place a half-century ago, but it was only in the past few years that the relationship of monopoly to our political, environmental and social dysfunction has entered our politics. The causal relationship between pro-monopoly policies and the harms of monopoly is even more complex and attenuated than the causal relationship between anti-vax and kids dying from measles in Texas.

Monopolies are especially hard on policymaking. Large, concentrated industries find it easier to arrive at a common lobbying position. They are aslosh in cash, thanks to their ability to cooperate (rather than eroding one another's margins through "wasteful competition") (h/t P. Thiel):

https://mastersofscale.com/peter-thiel-escape-the-competition/

To live in an age of monopolies is to live in an age of regulatory capture, in which your government routinely fails you in terrible ways to benefit elites and insiders. When that happens, it's easy to conclude that government is incapable of regulating, and to insist that we might as well do away with the state altogether. This is a self-reinforcing belief, because the weaker the state is, the more monopolists can steal from you:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

It's easy to understand how someone who lived through the murder of an addicted loved one at the hands of the billionaire Sacklers, who were abetted by their putative regulators and got to keep billions of dollars even after they declared "bankruptcy" might conclude that they can't trust pharmaceutical companies' or their regulators when they swear vaccines are safe and effective:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/18/lets-make-a-deal/#art-of-the-deal

In the same way, once you've forgotten that we decided to let monopolists run amok, despite regulatory capture that would obviously follow as a consequence, you might well conclude that governments are part of the problem, and therefore can't be the solution. We forget that things used to be better, and we forget how things were made better, and we forget how they got worse.

Like vaccines, antitrust worked too well. By the time Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan decided to welcome "efficient" monopolies, it had been so long since the world had been brought to the brink of ruin by oligarchs that it was easy to sell the pain of "lost efficiency" as worse than the distant horrors of the Gilded Age.

As the old joke goes, "When it don't rain the roof don't leak; when it's raining, I can't hardly fix it." We got rid of antitrust because it had been so long since oligarchs ran the world, we forgot how bad they'd made everything. Now that oligarchs are driving civilization off a cliff, we can't imagine fighting these seemingly omnipotent monsters.

We can fix this, just as our not-so-distant ancestors did when they tamed their robber barons. It won't be easy. It starts with remembering.

(Image: Atomicdragon136, CC BY 3.0, 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 Garry Trudeau gets hoaxed http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1530220.stm

#25yrsago Publishers v radical librarians https://web.archive.org/web/20010713171001/http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-201-6545588-0.html

#20yrsago Podcasters act now to stop anti-podcasting UN treaty! https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.eff.org/IP/WIPO/broadcasting_treaty/podcasting.php

#20yrsago Why CDT’s report on DRM falls short of the mark https://craphound.com/cdtdrmresponse.txt

#20yrsago Barenaked Ladies guy on Universal’s DRM SpiralFrog service https://web.archive.org/web/20061110205411/http://www.bnlblog.com/entry.asp?dDate=8/30/2006

#20yrsago HOWTO Use sugar to sand away logos on your phone https://web.archive.org/web/20061006153939/http://www.instructables.com/id/EFHU5V6TKYERIE2SMP/?ALLSTEPS

#20yrsago HOWTO Knit a Princess Leia wig https://web.archive.org/web/20061020092941/https://bleuarts.blogspot.com/2006/09/free-pattern-leia-hat.html

#20yrsago Prisoner statue smuggled into Disneyland ride http://www.woostercollective.com/post/breaking-the-story-disneyland-doesnt-want-you-to-know

#15yrsago RIP, Project Gutenberg founder Michael Hart https://web.archive.org/web/20111008024157/http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20103356-264/e-book-pioneer-michael-hart-dies/

#10yrsago Supermaker John Edgar Park shares his bitters recipe https://makezine.com/projects/ultimate-bitters-recipe/

#10yrsago How Hong Kong’s vulnerable, reviled refugee community saved Edward Snowden https://srilankafoundation.org/newsfeed/how-snowden-escaped/

#10yrsago Leaked catalog from UK surveillance arms-dealer full of gadgets sold to US cops https://theintercept.com/2016/09/01/leaked-catalogue-reveals-a-vast-array-of-military-spy-gear-offered-to-u-s-police/

#10yrsago Wells Fargo fires 5,300 employees for opening 2M fake accounts in customers’ names https://web.archive.org/web/20160908200030/https://money.cnn.com/2016/09/08/investing/wells-fargo-created-phony-accounts-bank-fees/index.html

#10yrsago European court rules that making a link can be copyright infringement https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/09/european-copyright-ruling-ushers-new-dark-era-hyperlinks

#10yrsago Indian workers staged one of the largest strikes in human history and no one in the USA noticed https://theintercept.com/2016/09/06/indians-staged-one-of-the-largest-strikes-in-history-but-no-one-on-u-s-cable-news-covered-it/

#10yrsago Homeowners’ associations are not allowed to ban drought-tolerant landscaping https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-associations-landscaping-plans-20160831-snap-story.html

#10yrsago Blackballed by machine learning: how algorithms can destroy your chances of getting a job https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/sep/01/how-algorithms-rule-our-working-lives

#10yrsago The US Copyright Office is the poster child for regulatory capture https://web.archive.org/web/20160909001439/https://www.publicknowledge.org/assets/uploads/blog/Final_Captured_Systemic_Bias_at_the_US_Copyright_Office.pdf

#10yrsago The women held a vote, and you’re not allowed to talk to anyone ever again https://web.archive.org/web/20160908124630/http://ursulav.livejournal.com/1680540.html

#10yrsago Open licenses don’t work for uncopyrightable subjects: 3D printing edition https://michaelweinberg.org/post/150123246460/the-cost-of-a-successful-creative-commons-and-open/

#10yrsago Tomorrow: largest prison strike in US history https://thenib.com/inmates-are-planning-the-largest-prison-strike-in-us-history/

#10yrsago If DRM is so great, why won’t anyone warn you when you’re buying it? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/08/drm-product-labelling-ftc-electronic-frontier-foundation?CMP=share_btn_tw

#1yrago Fingerspitzengefühl https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/08/process-knowledge/#dance-monkey-dance

#1yrago Trump steals $400b from American workers https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/09/germanium-valley/#i-cant-quit-you

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 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, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 505 (13405 total).

  • "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. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • 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):

Pluralistic.net

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https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net

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https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Publié le 07.09.2026 à 07:29

Pluralistic: How corporate America built a better Roach Motel (07 Sep 2026)


Today's links


A fake Harvard Business Review cover, dated September-October 2026. It features a large Roach Motel under the headline 'THE NEW CUSTOMER RETENTION' with the subhead 'Why acquire customers when you can take hostages?'

How corporate America built a better Roach Motel (permalink)

"If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They'd sit in their studies and say to themselves, 'What would I do if I were a horse?'" -Ely Devons

Half a century ago, a group of lavishly financed economists from the University of Chicago (the "neoliberals") convinced governments all over the world to completely upend the way they treated monopolies. Up until then, the purpose of competition enforcement was to reduce corporate power, with the understanding that once a corporation became more powerful than the government, it would be impossible to force it to follow any rules:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

But for the "Chicago Boys," monopolies were evidence of efficiency. When you encounter a company in the wild that has acquired a commanding market share, your first assumption should be that it has taken over its sector by being better than anyone else – you should not assume that the company cheated its way to glory. After all, if a company with a large market share was cheating – say, if it was increasing its profit margins by reducing quality or jacking up prices – then smaller companies would rush into the market to poach its dissatisfied customers.

Thus, all competition enforcement was reduced to an empty syllogism: monopolies are the result of excellence and any less-than-excellent monopolist will have its advantage "competed away." Therefore, any monopolist you encounter in the wild is definitionally not a bad monopolist, otherwise it would already have disappeared.

To quote another economist joke:

Two economists are walking down the street when one notices a $20 bill on the sidewalk. "It's not a real $20 bill," the other declares. "If it were a real $20 bill, someone would have picked it up off the sidewalk already."

Half a century later, our entire economy is dominated by monopolies, duopolies and cartels, who boast of gigantic margins, whose products are palpably worsening at an accelerating clip, and yet there is no sign of the "new market entrants" who should be flooding into the market to "compete away" those amazing margins. It turns out that asking "What would I do if I were a horse?" does not yield a series of accurate predictions about horses.

Things have changed. Today, the University of Chicago's Stigler Center harbors a cluster of influential economists who largely or entirely repudiate the orthodoxy of the Chicago Boys. The Center hosts an annual, rather radical conference on antitrust; runs an excellent heterodox podcast (Capitalisn't); its house organ, Promarket.org, regularly hosts work that torches the received wisdom of High Chicago Neoclassicism; and the school's researchers publish papers that dare to actually "go and look at horses."

A recent horse-looking excursion has yielded some distressing, alarming, and thoroughly documented equine facts. In a new Stigler paper, "Rising Customer Durability, Falling Business Dynamism," UC's Li Azinovic-Yang, Ava E Speros and Christopher R Stewart and Stanford's John D Kepler report on some clever research into how a monopolist could raise prices, lower quality, anger its customers, and still dominate its market:

https://www.chicagobooth.edu/-/media/research/stigler/pdfs/workingpapers/387_customer.pdf

The researchers' hypothesis was that dominant businesses don't maintain their lead by making their customers happy, but by making it harder for those customers to leave. There's good reasons to suspect this. Between 2002 and 2024, the average "customer relationship" (how long a customer continues to purchase from a merchant) has risen from 7.5 years to 11.5 years, a 50% surge in "customer loyalty," far outstripping any measure of customer satisfaction over the same period. This is true across all the largest sectors of the economy: "manufacturing, information, professional services, financial services, and wholesale trade."

How to explain the falling divorce rate between customers and businesses? That's where the researchers got very clever. They realized that when a company seeks permission to acquire another business, it must publish truthful and comprehensive information about how the merger is expected to increase the profits of the new combination. These disclosures are validated by external auditors, boards of directors, and/or audit committees. There are legal repercussions for falsifying them or making material omissions to them, and they are matters of public record.

Crucially, these disclosures must include the business's plans to retain its customers, and its plans to increase the profits from those customers. That's where the researchers struck gold. They amassed a novel data-set of 9,500 acquisitions that disclosed over $1t worth of "customer relationship-related intangibles," more than 20% of all the assets that changed hands.

They supplemented this data by mining earnings calls (also subject to strict penalties for omissions and falsehoods), finding CEOs boasting about "practices that may impede switching or increase customers’ dependence on the firm." Executives bragged about their "contractual restrictions, bundling and ecosystem lock-in, and switching costs."

You can get a sense of these in a short accompanying article by the study's co-author Christopher Stewart:

https://www.promarket.org/2026/09/04/american-companies-expect-their-customers-to-stay-much-longer-that-may-be-making-the-economy-less-competitive/

The article recounts how Sirius XM's execs celebrated the news that an appeals court had struck down the FTC's "Click to Cancel" rule, which required companies to make it as easy to resign from a subscription service as it was to sign up for it. Click to Cancel is a response to increasingly sleazy, increasingly pervasive tactics that make it all but impossible to stop being someone's customer. Trump's FTC walked away from defending the rule, which let the court kill it:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/12/greased-slide/#greased-pole

After Click to Cancel died, Sirius XM's C-suite got on a call with their shareholders to project "better outcome(s) as a result of not having that in place." Sirius believed that a rule that made it easy for customers to resign from their monthly subscriptions would hurt its business. Put another way: Sirius believes that its profits come in part from the fact that dissatisfied customers can't figure out how to cancel their service.

Then there's the online insurance company eHealth, whose execs crowed about a new "innovation" that forced senior patients to painstakingly enter a long list of their medications and doctors, but did not give them any way to export that data. The lengthy investment of time in getting set up on eHealth would stop customers from leaving, because they wouldn't want "to repeat all of that information over the phone."

This is also a feature of business-to-business relationships. In 2019, US Silica's execs described how they had launched a program to become embedded in their customers' supply chains, because that "really locks in the business," making it "much more difficult for customers to switch and go to someone else."

That's the first half of the story: an empirical account of how the business world switched from "acquiring customers" to taking hostages.

But the second half of the paper is even more interesting: an empirical investigation into the effects of this customer lock-in. For starters, increased customer retention is "associated with higher gross profit margins": that is, the companies whose customers can't leave squeeze those customers for more profit. What's more, once a company has its customers locked in, it starts to capture a larger share of all the profits in its entire sector: these hostage-takers become so profitable that their profits dwarf the profits of their competitors.

The paper also solves the mystery of the missing market entrants that the neoclassical horse-ponderers insisted would be conjured up to compete away an abusive monopolist's margins. The more locked in the customers of a monopolist are, the fewer companies try to enter that market. This makes sense: who would invest in a new business in a market where none of its potential customers can switch to its new business?

This is the opposite of what the horse-ponderers have insisted upon for 50 years. The more lock-in a company attains, the more profitable it becomes, and the less it has to worry about new competitors coming after those incredible margins. This is obvious to everyone, except the monopolist-funded "social scientists" and the governments they captured.

This is bad news, and not just for those locked-in customers. New businesses are the source of new jobs, and, yup, it turns out that sectors dominated by firms with high lock-in create fewer jobs. Of course, as workers chase fewer jobs, bosses are able to suppress their wages by forcing workers to bid against one another. Once again, the study finds that the sectors with the most lock-in also see declining wages in addition to declining jobs.

These are not the horse-ponderers' "efficient" monopolists. Once a company has its customers locked in, it innovates less – as measured by the number of patents a company is awarded, and by how often those patents are cited in other patents (this second measure helps distinguish companies that file mountains of bullshit patents from companies that actually invent useful things). Naturally, R&D spending also declines in companies with more lock-in.

All of this is entirely compatible with the theory of enshittification. Once a company knows its customers can't leave, it can switch from treating them well to abusing them in order to extract money from them. The same goes for companies whose workers can't leave – because they're bound by noncompete clauses, or because their employer has bought out all their rivals:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/platforms-decay-lets-put-users-first

It's like the old Lily Tomlin sketches on SNL and Laugh-In, where she played Ernestine the telephone operator narrating satirical ads for AT&T. Those sketches would end with her obviously true catch-phrase: "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHgUN_95UAw

Decades later, Tomlin's phone company joke is a perfect distillation of modern management philosophy. As a famous NBER working paper showed, when a family business is handed over to a professional manager with an MBA, the company doesn't become more profitable overall; it just finds ways to pay its workers less:

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29874/w29874.pdf

That's why Tim Wu named this "the age of extraction." "Growth" no longer means "making something new that people want" – now it means "finding ways to take a larger share of the pie, even if that makes the pie smaller overall":

https://www.wired.com/story/tim-wu-age-of-extraction/

This is something we can all feel. We experience it in our daily lives, through "shrinkflation" and "junk fees" and a million other gross and petty scams. But it's rare that we actually catch executives explicitly admitting that their job is to find ways to take you hostage and squeeze you.

Historically, those revelations have come from extraordinary circumstances, like when Frontier (the worst ISP in America) went bankrupt and we learned that the company had 1.6 million customers who had no access to competing broadband connections. Frontier carried these hostages on their balance sheet as a special, highly valued asset, since they could be charged more for slower, less reliable service:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/frontiers-bankruptcy-reveals-cynical-choice-deny-profitable-fiber-millions

In assembling this novel, high-quality data-set, the researchers on this paper have performed an important service, capturing a vast number of sworn confessions of highly paid enshittifiers, and then showing how their hostage-taking wrecked competition, prices, wages, jobs and innovation.

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 Three-hole punch debut, April 1940 https://web.archive.org/web/20061119140057/https://blog.modernmechanix.com/2006/09/06/three-hole-paper-punch-debut/

#20yrsago New Zealand redefines open source as “code you can’t modify” https://memex.craphound.com/2006/09/07/nobel-prize-sperm-bank-human-tragicomedy-about-eugenics/

#20yrsago MSFT quicker to patch DRM than security vulnerabilities https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/09/microsoft_and_f.html

#20yrsago Wikipedia’s dumbest arguments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars

#10yrsago Why the Pirate Party could end up running Iceland https://web.archive.org/web/20211024071400/https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2016/09/how-internet-pirates-became-political-force-iceland

#10yrsago Sampling bias: how a machine-learning beauty contest awarded nearly all prizes to whites https://web.archive.org/web/20160906154712/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/why-an-ai-judged-beauty-contest-picked-nearly-all-white-winners

#10yrago Warner Bros flags its own website as a piracy portal in copyright takedowns https://torrentfreak.com/warner-bros-flags-website-piracy-portal-160904/

#10yrsago The privacy wars have been a disaster and they’re about to get a LOT worse https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorowthe-privacy-wars-are-about-to-get-a-whole-lot-worse/

#10yrsago Weapons of Math Destruction: invisible, ubiquitous algorithms are ruining millions of lives https://memex.craphound.com/2016/09/06/weapons-of-math-destruction-invisible-ubiquitous-algorithms-are-ruining-millions-of-lives/

#10yrsago Pro-democracy reformers win big in Hong Kong’s elections https://globalvoices.org/2016/09/06/hong-kong-voters-elect-pro-democracy-legislators-to-defend-the-citys-autonomy-from-china/

#1yrago Stock buybacks are stock swindles https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/06/computer-says-huh/#invisible-handcuffs

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 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, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 574 (7730 total).

  • "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. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • 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):

Pluralistic.net

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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 05.09.2026 à 10:04

Pluralistic: Google skates (05 Sep 2026)


Today's links

  • Google skates: Another federal judge loses a game of peek-a-boo.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Memory-hacking ads; "Dzur"; NZ Ministry of DRM; Canadians v looking at the internet; Advice for self-publishers; Advice for writers; Why Wikipedia works.
  • Upcoming appearances: Dąbrowa Górnicza, Warsaw, Brighton, London, Budapest, Edmonton, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa.
  • 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 woodcut engraving of a courtroom scene in which the divorcee has thrown herself into the arms of one of the lawyers and they are about to kiss. The image has been altered: the heads of the judge, the court clerk and both lawyers have been replaced by green Android 'droid' mascots in judicial powdered wigs. The judge's bench sports a pixelated, 1998-era 'I'm feeling lucky' Google button.

Google skates (permalink)

Rome wasn't overthrown in a day. Oligarchies are stubborn, and by the time they've established and entrenched themselves, they have resources, power blocs and even mercenaries they can deploy to repel would-be dethroners.

The USA got its first antimonopoly law, the Sherman Act, in 1890, but it took 22 years before that law could be used to crush John D Rockefeller's corrupt, sprawling empire. Senator John Sherman promoted his law as a way of preventing monopolies from emerging, warning the Senate that they would struggle to overthrow the "autocrats of trade" that monopolies created:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

The Senate passed his law and Harrison signed it, but then successive administrations left the Sherman Act to gather dust on a shelf as Rockefeller went on a spree, accumulating the kind of power that made him a true "autocrat of trade," so powerful that he and the US government were practically evenly matched.

Allowing Rockefeller to create, expand and consolidate his monopoly power was a terrible tactical blunder, giving him decades in which he was able to loot America and its trading partners, pauperizing ordinary people and smashing anyone who got in his way. No one was willing to admit that Rockefeller was a threat to democracy and prosperity until he had amassed all that power, and once he had all that power, it took heroic effort to break him.

The Rockefeller story is like the punchline of that joke: "When it doesn't rain, the roof don't leak; and when it's raining, it's too wet to fix it." Alternatively, there's my other favorite punchline: "If you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here."

The Rockefeller blunder wasn't a one-off. The Apple ][+ hit the shelves the same year Reagan hit the campaign trail, and the tech industry's rise occurred simultaneously with the dismantling of competition law enforcement. Tech companies were the first "post-antitrust" industry, and it wasn't until these companies became palpable, terrifying, undeniable, existential civilizational risks that we remembered that we had all these laws on the books that were designed to curb excessive corporate power.

Under Biden, a group of generationally talented, visionary trustbusters were given access to those dormant enforcement powers: Lina Khan at the FTC; Rohit Chopra at the CFPB, Tim Wu in the White House, and Jonathan Kantor at the DOJ Antitrust Division. Together with a staff of canny and skilled lawyers and economists, these people scored incredible victories against Big Tech. During the Biden years, Google lost three federal antitrust cases. Three!

But if we wanted to get there, we wouldn't start from here. After a series of stinging defeats in the US and abroad, after watching the EU, the UK, Japan, Singapore and South Korea make common cause with Biden's enforcers, Big Tech threw everything it had into Trump, who promised them a system of regulatory forbearance in exchange for low-cost bribery, backstopped by a xenophobic, belligerent geopolitics that would rain down punishments on any country that dared to regulate or tax Big Tech:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62553ywn77o

And then the other shoe dropped: the federal judges who convicted Google of operating an illegal monopoly handed down their "remedy" decisions. In an antitrust case, the "remedy" phase is like sentencing – the stage of the legal proceeding where the judge decides what punishment the company should face for breaking the law.

The first of these remedies came out a year ago, in September 2025. Judge Amit Mehta had presided over Google's "search" case, where we learned that Google had deliberately made search worse so that you'd have to search more than once in order to get your answer, which would allow the company the chance to show you more ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Google was able to do this because it had cornered the market on search. The company had spent years paying a $20b annual bribe to Apple to stay out of the search market, and they'd bought the default search placement for every operating system, browser and carrier. If you encountered a search box in the wild, it was almost certainly wired into Google's servers. They knew that there was approximately zero chance that you'd ever stumble upon another search engine, which meant they could make their own search as shitty as they wanted and keep your business.

Confronted with these proven findings, Mehta decided that Google's punishment should be…nothing. They wouldn't be forced to delete the personal data they'd taken from billions of people. They wouldn't be forced to spin off Chrome or Android – two of the key tools Google uses to keep people from discovering other search engines. They wouldn't even be forced to halt the $20b annual bribe to Apple – the judge fretted that without that $20b annual bribe, Apple wouldn't be able to pay researchers to come up with cool new iPhone features (never mind that Apple spends all that money – and more – on stock buybacks, a recently illegal form of stock manipulation):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/03/unpunishing-process/#fucking-shit-goddammit-fuck

Then, a year later, another federal judge – Leonie Brinkema, who presided over the Google "ad-tech" case – decided that Google's penalty for monopolizing the ad market should also be…nothing:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/us-court-rules-google-will-not-have-to-sell-ad-exchange-after-losing-antitrust-case/

Oh, maybe not exactly nothing. We don't actually know the full extent of Judge Brinkema's "remedy," because it's sealed for two weeks. What we do know is that Google will not be forced to take the most obvious, effective and necessary step to prevent it from abusing its monopoly: Google will not be forced to sell off part of its ad-tech stack.

Let me unpack that for you, because unless you're an ad-tech weirdo, chances are you have no idea how any of this works and don't think it affects you. But the reality is that this is costing you money. It's one of the dirtiest, most profitable scams in the entire tech economy, which is saying something, because that is an economy that is made of scams:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/04/cheating-at-fraud/#absentee-rentier

Unlike older ads, which were targeted based on content (say, an ad for a hotel might run next to a newspaper article about a beachside town) modern ads are built on surveillance. Companies like Google amass vast, nonconsensual dossiers on the personal characteristics and behavior of billions of people, supplemented with information purchased from the unregulated data-broker sector.

When you visit a website, the site fires off a piece of software called "sell-side agent" to message a server called an "ad exchange" in order to announce your visit, soliciting bids for the right to show you an ad: "I am about to serve a web-page to a 18-34 year old man-child from New York's outer boroughs, who owns an Xbox and has been recently searching for information about gonorrhea: who wants to cram some ads into this guy's eyeballs?"

That ad-exchange server is haunted by "demand-side agents" – these are pieces of software fired off by advertisers that monitor all these advertising opportunities announced on the ad exchange and bid for the right to show you an ad. The highest bidder gets to show you an ad, and the fee is remitted to the exchange, which takes a cut and passes the remainder on to the sell-side platform, which also takes a cut and gives the balance to the website publisher.

So the ad-tech stack has three main components: the "sell-side platform" (SSP), which lets web publishers announce auctions for the right to advertise to their visitors; the "demand-side platform" (DSP) that lets advertisers bid to show those visitors ads; and the "ad exchange" – the marketplace where the sell-side and demand-side agents meet to collect bids, finalize the sale, and exchange ads for money.

When this all started, there were lots of companies in all three roles. Publishers and advertisers had their choice of SSPs, DSPs and exchanges, and all three types of middleman competed to offer the best deals to advertisers and publishers.

Then, Google and Facebook started buying up the leading DSPs, SSPs and exchanges. They used contracts and technical countermeasures to force anyone who used any part of their "stack" to use them for all parts of the transaction. The CEOs of Google and Facebook personally colluded to rig the market, dividing it up between them so that publishers would get less, advertisers would pay more, and Googbook would pocket the difference. The codename for this conspiracy was "Jedi Blue":

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

Jedi Blue was just the icing on the cake. The reality is they didn't need the conspiracy: once Google was selling services to advertisers and publishers on an exchange that Google owned, they created an entire universe of ways to rip off both advertisers and publishers. Now consider that Google is also an advertiser and also a web publisher, and the opportunities to cheat are just wild.

The numbers tell the story. Before Googbook captured 80% of the display advertising business, the total share of the advertising industry's revenues that went to "intermediaries" (middlemen like ad agencies, ad buyers, etc) was about 15%. Today, that number is 51%. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been moved out of publishers' and advertisers' bank accounts and onto Google and Facebook's balance sheets.

This isn't hard to understand. Google runs an ad business that locks in buyers and sellers on a marketplace Google owns and controls, where it also competes with those buyers and sellers. Buying or selling an ad through Google is like going to court to get a divorce, only to discover that you and your soon-to-be-ex- are both represented by the same lawyer, who promptly ascends the bench and dons a judge's wig, and then spends the whole trial trying to match with both of you on Tinder, and who concludes the trial by banging their gavel and announcing that they've decided that the family house will be awarded to…the judge!

The most absurd part of this whole farce is the lawyers who defend it on behalf of companies like Google. If a Google lawyer ever showed up to defend the company in a trial where the judge was working for the plaintiff, they would scream blue murder and refuse to proceed until the judge was removed from the case. But when Google operates a business where it presides over transactions where it has nothing but conflicts of interest, these same lawyers argue that Google would never cheat a seller or a buyer.

The fucking absurdity of this arrangement is so obvious that a bill to force a halt to it was co-sponsored…by Elizabeth Warren and Ted Cruz:

https://gizmodo.com/google-facebook-america-act-ads-break-up-cruz-warren-1850287725

Why would Warren and Cruz care about this? Because the hundreds of billions that have been moved from publishers and advertisers to Google and Facebook are hundreds of billions of dollars that are no longer paying for news and entertainment production, and they're hundreds of billions of dollars that businesses have to recoup by raising prices on you to pay their advertising bills.

Google (and, apparently, Judge Leonie Brinkema) dispute this. They say that "larger forces" have "changed the dynamic" that "restructured the industry." But, I mean, come on! This is a situation where hundreds of billions of dollars are divided up by a thrice convicted monopolist who is mysteriously hundreds of billions of dollars richer, while the other parties to the transaction are mysteriously hundreds of billions of dollars poorer. Anyone who can't draw the obvious causal inference from these facts has so little object permanence that they would lose a fucking game of peek-a-boo.

This is so goddamned demoralizing. For a couple years there, it really looked like the tide was turning. Then Judges Brinkema and Mehta came along to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

The only thing that's keeping me going is object permanence. I know my history. I know it took decades from the passage of the Sherman Act until the defeat of John D Rockefeller. Our forebears brought down Rockefeller because they didn't give up, despite setbacks as bad as this one, and worse. Stein's Law of finance holds that "anything that can't go on forever eventually stops," and MLK told us that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." This can't go on forever, and despite Dr King's phrasing, I know he understood that the arc doesn't just "bend" – it is bent – by people like us, hauling on it with all our might.

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 Advertisers claim they can hack your childhood memories https://web.archive.org/web/20010921022846/http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/science/story.jsp?story=92386

#25yrsago Wind-up cellphone charger https://web.archive.org/web/20011031122531/http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,2-2001310179,00.html

#20yrsago Steven Brust’s Dzur: witty and exciting heroic fantasy https://memex.craphound.com/2006/09/05/steven-brusts-dzur-witty-and-exciting-heroic-fantasy/

#20yrsago America to US gov’t: kill the Broadcast Treaty! http://www.cptech.org/ip/wipo/bt/jointletter5sep06usptoforum.pdf

#20yrsago New Zealand wants a Ministry of DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20070108042834/http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/NZ_draws_line_on_DRM_and_trusted_computing/0,130061733,339270846,00.htm

#20yrsago Is it legal to look at the Web in Canada? https://web.archive.org/web/20061010120919/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/1411/135/

#15yrsago Advice for self-publishers: why should anyone care about your book? https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-why-should-anyone-care/

#5yrsago A letter to a discouraged young writer https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/05/why-bother/

#1yrago Why Wikipedia works https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/05/be-the-first-person/#to-not-do-something-that-no-one-else-has-ever-thought-of-not-doing-before

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 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, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Saturday's words: 504 (12397 total).

  • "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. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • 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):

Pluralistic.net

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https://mamot.fr/@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 04.09.2026 à 11:41

Pluralistic: Amazon achieves enshittification inception (04 Sep 2026)


Today's links


Hieronymus Bosch's 'The Conjuror,' a painting depicting a medieval con artist playing a shell game for an audience of astonished peasant rubes. The image has been altered: the conman now has Jeff Bezos's grinning head, and the mouths of all the peasants have been replaced with inverted Amazon 'Smile' logos, so they are now frowning.

Amazon achieves enshittification inception (permalink)

Amazon's own balance sheet presents the most compelling evidence that we are stuck in the Enshittocene, the era in which everything is turning into a pile of shit, because the worst ideas of the worst people now make the most money.

Amazon is a many-tentacled monster, with several prominent lines of business wrapped around the world. There's its logistics and fulfillment business, which is so successful (at the expense of its workers' labor rights, bodies and bathroom breaks) that it is more than fully subsidized by Amazon's platform sellers, the independent merchants who depend on Amazon to sell and deliver their goods.

This means that it costs Amazon itself nothing to get the merchandise it sells to your door: more than 100% of the cost of operating the fulfillment side of Amazon is covered by the fees it extracts from its independent sellers (who compete with Amazon in many instances, and for whom delivery is a cost center, not a source of profit).

Then there's AWS, Amazon's cloud business. This is another extraordinary success story: every company needs servers, and that's especially true of an e-commerce company like Amazon. By building more servers than it needs, Amazon transformed its own data infrastructure from a cost center into another profit center. Amazon's customers – many of whom are also its competitors – pay Amazon so much to rent space on its servers that Amazon gets its own (prodigious) computing for free, and realizes a profit on top of that.

Taken on their own, these two facts constitute an extraordinary business story: one of the largest corporations in the history of the world has converted its two largest cost centers into profit centers, and those profits are substantially generated by extracting payments from the company's own competitors!

Amazon's logistics and cloud computing are extraordinary, but they are eclipsed by the company's most profitable line of business, which is payola.

"Payola" is a word that old people like me just barely have context for and for anyone under fifty the word is likely a mystery, so a brief explanation is in order.

"Payola" comes from a massive 1950s scandal over bribes that record labels paid to radio DJs and station managers to play their music. Radio stations were given the use of a scarce and precious resource – exclusive control over slices of the only electromagnetic spectrum in the universe – and were expected to program material that the American public would find enjoyable, edifying and educational. In this system, radio stations were expected to make shrewd guesses about the music the public would enjoy the most, and play that.

Because the selection process for the music that DJs played on the American public's spectrum was completely opaque, and because those selections could make fortunes for record labels, the system was ripe for corruption. Labels slipped literal envelopes full of cash and drugs ("payola") into the hands of DJs, station managers and owners, bribing them to turn songs into "hits" by cramming them into Americans' ears. The biggest predictor of a radio hit wasn't whether people liked the song so much that the stations rushed to play it, but rather, how much the labels were willing to spend in bribes to get their song played:

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

This was a bad system all around. The American public got worse music. Musicians' own royalties were eroded by the label accountants' practice of charging off bribes to "promotions" they deducted from artists' royalty statements. Radio stations sucked. Labels bid away each other's margins, depriving themselves of operating capital to find and record new music and starving them of free cash flow to pay to musicians, employees and shareholders. As with every instance of corruption, this was a system of concentrated gains and diffuse losses, which is why it continued for so long (decades!) and got so bad before anyone took action to end it.

Amazon's payola isn't about radio play – it's about search. When you search Amazon, the top results do not represent Amazon's best guess about what product will best match your query: rather, Amazon auctions off those top results to its platform sellers. Amazon's search results reflect who paid the biggest bribe, not who has the best product.

To pay for those bribes, platform sellers have to raise prices. Amazon helps them do this, by imposing a "most favored nation" clause on its sellers that requires them to sell on Amazon at a price that matches or beats the price charged everywhere else (Target, Walmart, a mom-n-pop, or the factory store):

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/25/most-favored-nation/#price-fixing

Thus, Amazon imposes an economy-wide tax on nearly every product you buy. Amazon's junk fees average 51-60% of the purchase price of the things you buy there, and because Amazon has captured a supermajority of the richest 10% of Americans (who have almost all pre-paid for a year's shipping through Prime), every seller must sell on Amazon, or forego any hope of selling to most of the country's most prolific shoppers.

Any seller who signs up for Amazon is agreeing to turn over the majority of their sales income to Amazon, and any seller who raises prices to recoup those sums, must raise prices everywhere, at every retail outlet in the country.

AI has made Amazon much better at enforcing Most Favored Nation terms, because AI is actually pretty good at parsing competitors' websites and finding instances of discounting, which Amazon instantaneously punishes by relegating the sellers' product listings to page umpty-billion of Amazon's search results.

There are plenty of junk fees that go into Amazon's 51-60% rake. A large slice comes from fees Amazon charges for access to its (very profitable) logistics system. Failure to use Amazon's fulfillment system also relegates your listings to the dregs of Amazon search results, so sellers pay a massive premium to have their parcels delivered by Amazon, to the exclusion of cheaper alternatives that are just as fast and reliable. That's why Amazon fulfillment is so profitable!

While the Amazon tax is extracted through several types of junk fee, the most profitable junk fee of them all is Amazon's search payola. In fact, search payola is the most profitable business that Amazon operates, full stop.

Payola accounts for more of Amazon's profits than anything else the company does. It's more profitable than all the things Amazon sells directly. It's more profitable than AWS, Amazon's industry-leading cloud service.

Amazon has created a system where the most sales go to the companies that pay the highest bribes, and those companies pass the cost of those bribes onto their customers. The first item on a typical Amazon search results page is 29% more expensive than the best match for your search. The top row is 25% more expensive. The best result is usually on the second screen, somewhere around the 17th position:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/03/subprime-attention-rent-crisis/#euthanize-rentiers

Amazon actively helps its biggest bribers close the sale. Amazon has lots of "comparison shopping" systems built into the service, but one comparison tool is conspicuous by its absence: an "apples to apples" tool that lets you compare unit prices. Amazon's most prolific bribe-payers package their goods in weird quantities, selling everything from batteries to t-shirts to shampoo in larger or smaller quantities than their competitors. Sorting your search results by price doesn't actually tell you who's got the cheapest price per item, because the company with the cheapest AA batteries might be selling a smaller quantity of batteries at a higher price per battery.

Per-unit pricing is standard in retail. Indeed, if you go into a(n Amazon-owned) Whole Foods, you'll find per-unit pricing on the shelf tags, telling you how much the product costs per ounce or fluid ounce. Amazon clearly understands why shoppers would want to compare unit pricing, but offering a per-unit sort option to its search would make the bribery racket a lot less effective, because searchers could just sort by unit price and find the best bargain.

Let me remind you: payola is Amazon's single largest source of profits. When I was researching Enshittification, Amazon's take from payola was in the mid-$30 billion. A year later, when I did tour stops with Tim Wu (who was promoting his excellent book The Age of Extraction), I learned that this number had climbed to more than $50 billion. This year, it's on track to top $80 billion.

Amazon calls this bribery system an "advertising" product, but it's not "advertising" in the sense of the ads that Amazon's platform sellers might have once placed in the local newspaper. It's payola, more akin to the practice of packaged goods companies buying end-caps and whole shelves in the grocery store (a practice that is, in its own way, every bit as corrosive, though no grocery store has Amazon's economy-wide chokehold).

But there is a way in which this payola can be compared to advertising: it competes with advertising. Back in the old days, before a series of K-shaped recoveries created a vast chasm between America's haves and have-nots; before Amazon captured the majority of well-off American households with Prime; people shopped in lots of places, and in those days, companies advertised in publications, not on Amazon. Websites, newspapers, and newspaper websites made billions from those ads. Amazon's payola scheme (along with Google, Facebook and other tech monopolists) have captured almost all of that money.

As Tim Wu points out, the money Amazon makes from payola exceeds the advertising revenue received by all the newspapers in the world by 300%. Alongside that number and its implication for the news media, Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post and turning its editorial page into a sewer of shitty Ayn Rand fanfic barely registers.

This is pure enshittification. Of all the ingenious, innovative ways that Amazon came up with to make money, the most successful is a scam that makes everything you buy more expensive even as it reduces the profits of the companies you're buying from. It's another example of corruption: a system of concentrated gains and diffuse losses – and once again, it's the most profitable thing Amazon does.

And then…Amazon made it worse.

You know how people like to say, "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product?" It's bullshit. The "advertisers" who bribe Amazon for top search placement are the customers here, they're "paying for the product," and they are getting reamed. I don't just mean they're getting screwed by being forced to shell out payola – I mean that Amazon is cheating them on that payola!

Remember: Amazon doesn't just sell search placement; they auction it. Every time you run an Amazon search, the company conducts a special kind of auction called a "sealed-bid second-price auction" (SBSPA):

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

Under an SBSPA, bidders secretly tell the auctioneer the very highest price they're willing to pay. The auctioneer then charges the highest bidder a price equal to the second-highest bid, plus one cent.

This may seem unnecessarily complicated, but it's actually a clever solution to one of the major problems with traditional, "open call" auctions (where bidders call out the prices they're willing to pay until one bid emerges victorious). Say you're at an open call auction where the top bid is $10. You can call out $11, and then the other person will call out $12, and so on and so on. It's tedious and time-consuming. That's bad enough when you're at an estate auction that's unloading hundreds of items, but it's untenable for an eyeblink auction meant to determine search results that the user expects to get in an instant.

In physical auctions the top bidder often clobbers other bidders with a big increase – going from $10 to $50, say. This can end the auction quickly, but it means that the high bidder often overpays for their purchase.

In an SBSPA, every bidder enters their highest price, but none of the other bidders know what that price is. This encourages everyone to name their true highest price, but it protects the top bidder in the instance in which they are willing to pay a much higher price than anyone else.

Say you're that person who raises the bidding from $10 to $50 – you have no way of knowing whether the other bidders would have dropped out at $15 or at $45. If you were the only person who was willing to pay more than $15 for the item, you've just vastly overpaid (by $34.99). But in an SBSPA, you name your true price, but you only pay the price you would have paid if you'd gone through the tedious, expensive, time-consuming process of an open call auction.

Amazon's search auctions are SBSPAs. A merchant tells Amazon the maximum they're willing to pay to be at the top of the search results for a given query, but they pay a price equal to the second-highest bid, plus one cent. This lets auctions run so quickly that they can be used as the basis for ordering a search results page.

That's how it's supposed to work, anyway. The FTC and 22 states just filed a suit against Amazon because Amazon was cheating on its own SBSPA process:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2026/08/ftc-states-sue-amazon-over-secret-ad-surcharge-scheme

Over the past 7 years, Amazon has been secretly charging the winning bidder an amount equal to their own sealed bid, not the amount that the next-highest bidder was willing to pay (plus a penny):

https://gizmodo.com/ftc-sues-amazon-for-allegedly-duping-advertisers-2000805199

According to the suit, Amazon did this 80% of the time. That is tens of billions of dollars Amazon extracted from platform sellers, who passed those costs onto you, and onto every other retailer in the country (thanks to AI-enforced Most Favored Nation policies).

Amazon's defense is that this is all a big misunderstanding. Platform sellers just didn't understand how a SBSPA worked. Amazon has a special kind of SBSPA where they could unilaterally and secretly charge the winning bidder the maximum price they'd pledged, if, in Amazon's judgment, the closing price for the auction was below "the true market value of the ad placement":

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/09/ftc-alleges-amazon-illegally-made-20-billion-by-rigging-billions-of-ad-auctions/

This is darkly hilarious. The whole point of an auction is to determine "true market value." That's why neoclassical economists worship auctions as the world's best form of "price discovery" and why economics Nobels are awarded for "auction design":

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

The definition of "true market value" is "the closing price in an auction." Amazon claiming that it secretly jacked people because the auction generated a price that was "below the true market value" of an ad tells you that the whole business is a sham. The point of Amazon's payola scheme is only and ever a way to parasitically extract the maximum amount a platform seller is willing to part with, and by running a fake SBSPA, Amazon was able to trick its customers into revealing those maximum prices.

Cheating on a bribery scheme is a mood. This isn't just enshittification, it's enshittification inception. Amazon managed to enshittify their own enshittification!

This case was brought by Trump's FTC, which means that Amazon can get out of it by paying a chud podcaster to tweet at the president and he'll order them to drop it, just like he did with Ticketmaster:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/13/khanservatives/#kid-rock-eats-shit

But – just as with Ticketmaster – the feds aren't the only parties to the suit. With 22 AGs ("Aspiring Governors") on the suit, there's a chance this will go to trial. We might even learn the identity of the inventor of this enshittification-squared gambit, a veritable Louis Pasteur of enshittification. Assuming that person doesn't go to prison, the Sveriges riksbanks pris i ekonomisk vetenskap till Alfred Nobels minne can give that sloshing, ambulatory pile of hot liquid garbage a Nobel Prize in Economics.

(Image: Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 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 Electrolite relaunches https://web.archive.org/web/20010927195348/http://www.panix.com/~pnh/electrolite.html

#25yrsago How to play Mafia https://web.archive.org/web/20011113011546/http://www.stud.ntnu.no/studorg/mafia/

#20yrsago How Wikipedia entries get written http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia

#5yrsago Proctorio's awful reviews disappear down the memory hole https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/04/hypervigilance/#radical-transparency

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 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, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 513 (11893 total).

  • "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. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • 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 03.09.2026 à 10:45

Pluralistic: Preparing for a post-Trump internet (03 Sep 2026)


Today's links


A nuclear mushroom cloud wearing a giant Trump wig. A decaying American flag fills the sky behind it.

Preparing for a post-Trump internet (permalink)

What if post-Trump America is even worse?

I know, it's tempting to think of Trump as a cause, rather than an effect – as an aberration who dragged America into fascism. Trump is exceptional, but the thing that makes him exceptional isn't his corruption, recklessness or cruelty. What makes Trump exceptional is his ability to cajole, intimidate and flatter America's most corrupt, reckless and cruel people into a coalition.

These people hate each other. Nick Fuentes drifts off to sleep every night furiously fantasizing about turning Stephen Miller into a lampshade. Laura Loomer just got ICE to intervene in a Twitter feud by having a guy she dislikes violently arrested, shackled at wrist and ankle, perp-walked, and then shuffled from location to location so that he couldn't meet with his lawyer before being deported:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/08/milo-yiannopoulos-deportation-trump-maga-laura-loomer-benny-johnson-raheem-kassmm/

They steal like crazy, get each other locked up, and gorge themselves on mind-altering supplements and peptides they buy from random podcast chuds. They are fantastically paranoid, marinated in conspiracy theories, and perennially high on their own supply: all that bullshit about "great replacement," "China is making America hate data centers" and "antifa is a terrorist organization"? A lot of them genuinely believe it. It's not just ghost stories they made up to scare cognitively compromised tube-feeding Fox News addicted rubes. Trumpland is full of actual, functioning adults in positions of real power who periodically go into the bathroom, turn off the lights, hold a flashlight under their chins and scare themselves silly by saying "Aaaaaaaaaantiiii-faaaaaaaaaa" into the mirror.

Donald Trump did not conjure these people out of thin air. They've been lurking in America since its earliest days. They worship authoritarian criminals:

https://abc30.com/post/roger-stones-tattoo-of-nixon-goes-viral/5107047

January 6 wasn't the first presidency they tried to steal, it's just the first one they got punished for:

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

They commit brazen crimes in office that could land them in prison for the rest of their lives, and therefore can't afford to lose power, ever:

https://www.propublica.org/series/supreme-court-scotus

Trump didn't invent these creeps, he just emboldened them. If Reaganomics was capitalism with the gloves off, then Trumpismo is Reaganism with the mask off:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/aug/16/reaganland-review-rick-perlstein-jimmy-carter-ronald-reagan

So what happens when Trump strokes out while watching Kid Rock wrestle a Hulk Hogan impersonator in a televised barbed-wire cage match on the White House lawn that one of Trump's cronies has exclusive pay-per-view rights to? I mean, it's possible that the Democratic leadership will step up and insist on some form of regular order in the succession to Vance, but come on. These are the tiny "Down with this sort of thing" ping-pong paddle people:

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/ping-pong-paddles-to-a-gun-fight/

More likely is that Vance – a weak, unimportant charisma-vacuum who is loathed by all of Trump's factions – will end up presiding over a far more chaotic period in American governance than anything that happened under Trump. That could mean ICE leaders ordering mass graves dug in the centers of America's largest cities, drunken generals invading random countries, podcasters declaring "The Purge" with brackets sponsored by Kalshi.

This isn't the first time in living memory that this has happened. In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed, virtually overnight, and the fragile threads that bound its feuding, corrupt regional bosses all snapped, leaving behind nuclear-tipped mafia states. This was a chaotic and frightening time for the people whose governments had simply winked out of existence – but it was also terrifying for the rest of the world, who scrambled to secure those nukes before they could end up in the hands of "non-state actors":

https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/what-happened-soviet-superpowers-nuclear-arsenal-clues-nuclear-security-summit

The Soviet Union had some deeply dysfunctional leadership politics to be sure, but at least the people involved were beholden to various power blocs who had an interest in keeping things going. As the geopolitics wonks say, "they were playing an iterated game," where some losses had to be tolerated so that the losers could try to win the next time around.

But there are plenty of people who weren't (and aren't) playing iterated games – people who are even more unhinged, more reckless, more short-termist than the maniacs who filled the world with nuclear weapons. These people don't necessarily care if civilization or even the human race persists if they can't get their way. The thought of them running around with these "weapons of mass destruction" ratcheted up the half-century of stark nuclear terror that had preceded the USSR's collapse to new heights.

Which brings me to the post-Trump internet. Trump isn't the first president to figure out that the internet could be weaponized for geopolitical ends. As the Snowden disclosures showed, there has been a longstanding bipartisan consensus that the internet is a great tool for American surveillance, conducted against friend and foe alike.

But Trump is the first president to openly, directly recruit American tech companies to simply brick foreign officials who displease him, starting with the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, who lost his Office 365 and Outlook accounts in retaliation for swearing out a genocide warrant for Netanyahu:

https://www.justiceinfo.net/en/156691-how-sanctions-can-weaponize-us-tech-against-the-icc.html

And then Microsoft obliged Trump again, attacking the Brazilian judge who sentenced Jair Bolsonaro to prison over his unsuccessful coup.

America's tech giants have fully, irrevocably fused with Trump. They donated to his campaign. Their CEOs each paid $1m out of their own pockets to sit behind him on the inauguration dais. Google provides location data for Trump's racist pogroms. Microsoft provides the administrative tools to carry them out. Oracle provides the databases. Apple blocks apps that warn its customers when they're about to be snatched:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/06/rogue-capitalism/#orphaned-syrian-refugees-need-not-apply

In exchange, Trump got Canada and the UK to ditch their plans to levy a 3% tax on American tech giants; he got the EU to gut its privacy laws; he sanctioned EU officials who tried to regulate social media; and he's told the tech companies to go through EU officials' private messages, looking for anti-Big Tech partisans whom he will ban from ever entering the USA:

https://judiciary.house.gov/media/in-the-news/us-committee-demands-big-tech-share-private-comms-eu-officials

Big Tech has proved that its only principles are not paying taxes, invading your privacy, and not being broken up by antitrust enforcers:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/us-court-rules-google-will-not-have-to-sell-ad-exchange-after-losing-antitrust-case/

Tech companies will do anything for any leader who can guarantee those outcomes. There's no capitulation too petty and stupid for Big Tech:

https://people.com/apple-maps-joins-google-approving-trump-lake-america-change-12074262

America no longer has allies or trading partners. America has rivals and enemies. Trump's coalition wants him to steal Iran, steal Venezuela, steal Cuba, steal Alberta, steal Canada, steal Greenland. They want him to help Israel steal Palestine and Lebanon. And as Trump considers this program of imperial conquest, he has started to tinker with one of the most devastating geopolitical weapons the world has ever seen: tech shutdowns.

If Trump wants Greenland, he can just order Microsoft to switch off Office 365 for the country and every ministry and significant firm will be shuttered in an instant, along with many households:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/04/digital-subjugation/#greenlands-next

He can order Apple and Google to shut off all of Denmark's phones. He can order John Deere to shut off all their tractors:

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

(One thing we don't need to worry about is Trump ordering OpenAI and Anthropic to switch off all of Europe's chatbots – sure, he could do that, but if he did, nothing important would break:)

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/18/their-trillions-our-billions/#eyes-on-the-prize

As weapons of mass destruction go, nukes are pretty stupid. The big ones destroy the territory you're trying to conquer and leave behind an uninhabitable radioactive wasteland. They send clouds of nuclear fallout swirling around the globe, potentially killing you or your allies. 80 years into the Nuclear Age, the best anyone's come up with is a neutron bomb, which only kinda renders territory uninhabitable while still killing everyone with massive radiation blasts.

Compared to nukes, tech shutdowns are amazing. Thanks to Big Tech, America – and only America – can brick almost any country on earth, shutting down its administration, agriculture and industry without firing a single shot. The only thing that prevented this from happening was an American elite bloc that was playing an iterated game and saw more benefit from sharing in Big Tech profits as they looted and spied on the world, as opposed to grabbing territory while scaring the world into breaking all land-speed records to ditch American tech and pursue meaningful digital sovereignty.

Trump's chuds and freaks are not bound by these constraints. They're perfectly happy to do Gunboat Diplomacy 2.0: Cloud Diplomacy, where everything from your smartphones to your payroll records can be seized at the click of a mouse, and your country had better fall in line. And Trump is a sick, frail old man, who is not long for this world. When he goes, all bets are off: America will be at the mercy of warring factions who will deploy the coercion and bribery that turned Big Tech into Trump's geopolitical weapon in order to achieve their own purposes – which might well be even stupider, crueler and more unhinged than Trump's.

There's only one way out of this mess: the rapid disassembly of the American internet and the rapid creation of a post-American internet, one built on open, auditable, sovereign digital public goods, internationally built and maintained:

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

In its own way, the creation of this post-American internet is as urgent and as global as was the creation of the covid vaccines. But whenever I speak to powerful people about this, they ask the same question: "What if this makes Trump mad?"

This represents a grave failure to take this crisis seriously. Trump doesn't need to be "mad" to attack your country. Trump attacked Canada over its wildfires, accusing Canada of polluting America's air:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/us-complaints-trump-widlfire-smoke-9.7274466

But even if Trump never gets mad at you, that's no guarantee of safety. Trump is not long for this world, and his death or incapacity is no guarantee of the restoration of a "normal" America. And even if America finds its way to "normal" after Trump, that's no guarantee that it will stay normal. The armed, organized maniacs who have seized power in America and who are cheering him on as he rampages all over the world, kidnapping leaders and dropping bombs on schoolchildren are not going to dig a hole, crawl inside it, and pull the dirt down on top of themselves.

But let's say that we find ourselves in the best of worlds, where American fascism is comprehensively defeated and the country embarks on a years-long program of denazification:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/10/miller-in-the-dock/#denazification

Even in that amazing future, the world should still race to build a post-American internet. The world should have built that internet after the Snowden revelations. That ghastly failure created the Trumpian internet. If the post-Trump internet isn't a post-American internet, then it'll only be a matter of time until the next crisis comes along, and the coming years will give Big Tech even more chances to worm its tendrils into the world's governments, firms and households, making that crisis be even harder to survive. The best time to act was 13 years ago, after Snowden. The second best time is now.

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 Barnum & Bailey hired an ex-CIA spook to destroy a critical journalist https://web.archive.org/web/20010913192931/http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2001/08/30/circus/print.html

#20yrsago Wired article about Wikipedia is on a editable wiki https://web.archive.org/web/20060901030941/http://www.socialtext.net/wired/index.cgi

#20yrsago Singapore will have nationwide WiFi by 2007 https://web.archive.org/web/20060901191656/http://news.com.com/2100-1039_3-6110189.html

#5yrsago Twitter Arguments https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/29/twitter-arguments/

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 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, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 574 (7730 total).

  • "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. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • 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 02.09.2026 à 12:19

Pluralistic: Unpermissioned research (02 Sep 2026)


Today's links


A car's frosted-over back windscreen, being scraped by a person's hand holding an ice-scraper. The person has scraped a Canadian maple leaf into the windscreen. In the background we see the capitol dome and a depressed caricature of Uncle Sam holding a sign reading 'I am busted.'

Unpermissioned research (permalink)

After half a century of neoliberalism, we are all drenched in capitalism's established religion, the worship of property rights. We are so marinated in property worship that even capitalism's critics frame their critiques in "property talk," to the exclusion of other, more important rights, like human rights, labor rights and privacy rights.

To do this is to surrender before the battle even starts. Critics lose when they allow oligarchs and their apologists to choose a battlefield where they have a nearly unbeatable advantage.

Take privacy: privacy is a human right, not a property right. Human rights aren't for sale. You can't sell yourself into slavery, you can't sell your kidneys to make the rent. If privacy is a property right – one that can be traded away – then Facebook's industrial-scale privacy invasions are actually fine, since you "traded" your privacy to Mark Zuckerberg in exchange for the privilege of talking to your friends.

Some self-styled critics of tech monopolists say that the answer to Facebook's privacy invasions is to force the company to pay for your privacy with cash, rather than services:

https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-andrew-yangs-plan-to-pay-you-for-your-data-doesnt-add-up/

This is ideological capture in its purest form: the "data dividend" that Facebook would owe you under this system amounts to a few dollars per year. For wealthy people, the sums would be trivial, while working people, who've been on the downward leg of every K-shaped recovery for a quarter century, who've maxed out their credit cards and re-mortgaged their homes and drive Uber on the weekends to make rent, would have to subject themselves to ongoing surveillance.

That surveillance is already used to determine the highest price those working people will pay – companies like Plexure inform fast food places when you've just gotten paid so they can tack an extra dollar onto your breakfast burrito in the app:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/30/something-must-be-done/#there-ive-done-something

Being forced to sell your privacy doesn't just raise the prices you pay, it also lowers the wages you earn. The same people who can't afford this "pay or privacy" system have their private data used to calculate the lowest wage they'll accept for each ride on those weekend Uber shifts:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point

In other words: not being able to afford privacy will result in you having even less disposable income, which will mean that you'll have to sell even more of your privacy. Lather, rinse, repeat.

But even the wealthy people who can afford to forego the pittances Facebook and others offer in exchange for their private information will find privacy elusive. That's because private information isn't a "rival good" – a thing only one person can own at a time. The fact that your mother is your mother "belongs" to both you and her, as well as your grandparents, your father, your siblings and your kids. The fact that you don't sell your family tree to a tech company won't stop all those other people from selling it on – as anyone whose foolish relations handed their genome over to 23andme can attest:

https://www.npr.org/2025/03/24/nx-s1-5338622/23andme-bankruptcy-genetic-data-privacy

In the property religion, the way you can tell if something is valuable is if it has a high price. Property cultists insist that the problem with privacy is that our privacy is being sold too cheaply. They're wrong: private information isn't "mispriced" – it shouldn't be priced.

Human beings are the most valuable things in our world and they are literally priceless. Murder isn't "theft of life." Rape isn't "theft of sex." While insurers and civil courts have ways of calculating the "price" of an injury or violation, great care has been taken over the centuries to ensure that this does not turn human beings into commodities. You can't buy a "murder offset" that lets you kill people provided you pay into a fund that saves a human somewhere else:

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

Human beings are too valuable to be priced. We have an entire, sui generis way of balancing the conflicting interests of human rights. My daughter and wife have rights over me, I have rights over them, and when those rights come into conflict – say, if my daughter believes I can no longer care for myself and wants to put me in a care home – the process for resolving that conflict isn't an auction:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/feb/21/intellectual.property

Your kids aren't your property. In fact, all the most important relationships in your life are non-market. Doctors have patients, not customers. Any time a doctor calls you a "customer" they are demoting you. A doctor doesn't sell you health. You have rights as a patient that far exceed the rights accruing to a mere customer. Same goes for other professions: Teachers have pupils, librarians have patrons, lawyers have clients. "Customer" is a demotion from all of these.

As every "user agreement" you've ever clicked through demonstrates, Big Tech loves to have everything defined in property terms – and so does all big business.

Take the fight over scraping for AI. You might think that this is a fight over the economic rights of creative workers – certainly, my fellow creative workers treat it as such. But because this debate is being framed in terms of property rights, rather than labor rights, this is a fight that workers are set up to lose.

The tell here is how the media companies – who have been eroding the wages of creative workers for decades as they consolidated into a curdled, inbred oligopoly – describe the AI companies' scraping: as an unlicensed taking. Mitch Glazier, the $1.4m/year CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America issues press releases decrying AI training for image generators without negotiating a license fee first:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/03/its-a-trap-2/#inheres-at-the-moment-of-fixation

Who's Mitch Glazier? Oh, just a former Congressional staffer who was drummed out of the Capitol Building after he snuck a clause into must-pass legislation that would have transferred hundreds of millions of dollars from musicians to record labels, who was then immediately hired as the CEO of the record industry's largest lobbying group:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/12/tpps-attack-artists-termination-rights

Mitch Glazier – and the businesses he represents – aren't opposed to AI replacing artists. They're opposed to AI replacing media companies. Remember the Hollywood writers' strike? The proposal to replace screenwriters with chatbots didn't come from OpenAI, it came from Disney, Warner, Universal and other companies who claim that AI training is "theft."

If AI training is "theft," then it can be cured by making a purchase, something that the AI companies can easily afford, thanks to the hundreds of billions of dollars they have been given by the world's richest investors, who are the high priests and cardinals of the property religion.

The Hollywood writers are the only workers in the world who have successfully beaten back the use of AI in their workplace, and they didn't do it by making recourse to property rights. The Writers Guild is a union and it enjoys a weak form of "sectoral bargaining" (where all the workers in a field bargain with all the businesses at once) called "multi-employer bargaining":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/

The Hollywood writers' strike was an unqualified victory for the writers, who defended their labor rights to co-determination when it came to the use of new tools on their jobsite. Under the terms of their hard-fought contract, screenwriters don't have to use AI, but they can if they want. For example, writers on a long-running sitcom might train an AI with every script in the series' history, so they can ask a chatbot continuity questions as they beat out a new season of the show. But they don't have to do this if they don't want to, and even if they do, neither their wages nor their headcount can be reduced.

The media companies insist that scraping is a copyright violation, that it's "theft." As a matter of law, this is far from obvious or settled: the process of making transient copies of many works, performing mathematical analysis on them, and then publishing that analysis as software is not obviously a copyright violation, and anyone who claims otherwise doesn't understand copyright:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

Worse: by demoting a labor rights issue to a mere property rights issue, AI critics are setting workers up to fail. Say the issue with AI training really is mere copyright. If that's so, the media companies who want nothing better than to pauperize creative workers can amend their standard contracts so that any worker who does business with them must irrevocably transfer their "AI training rights" to the company.

Then, that company will absolutely, 100% license those rights to an AI company to create a model designed to replace that worker. The company will get paid for the training, and the resulting model will come with "guardrails" to stop other media companies from using proprietary data to compete with it.

This is the story of the past 50 years of copyright expansion: every new copyright we've created "to help artists" was scooped up by their bosses, who grew more powerful and were able to demand more concessions from those artists, who were therefore poorer and thus needed more copyrights to help them (lather, rinse, repeat):

https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/18/enron-corpus/#sign-here

If creative workers' AI fight is merely a copyright fight, then that fight can only determine whether media companies or tech companies will get the biggest portion when those workers are devoured by corporations. Only a labor rights fight can take creative workers off the menu altogether.

Treating AI training as "theft" creates harms whose blast radius extends well beyond creative workers' livelihoods. Scraping is a hugely beneficial activity. If scraping – taking a vast corpus of copyrighted works without permission – is theft, then every search engine is a crime, unless it can afford to license "search indexing rights" from every site on the internet.

There's exactly one company that could pull that off: Google, a rapacious tech monopolist that is – not coincidentally – one of the leaders of the movement to beggar every creative worker. We will not improve the world, the internet, or creative workers' lives by ensuring that the last search engine anyone ever creates is Google.

Remember our earlier discussion of how privacy violations are weaponized to make poor people even poorer, by depressing their wages and raising prices based on inferences about their economic desperation? Our best weapon for fighting this practice is scraping, because that's how we catch corporations changing prices and wages based on surveillance data:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

Scraping is how we produce evidence of the changes that powerful people are making to the world around us. Do you want to know whether Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk are downranking content critical of Trump and Big Tech and pumping racist and conspiratorial posts into the resulting void? You'd better hope you can scrape the feeds they cram into billions of people's eyeballs. Same goes for keeping track of genocide apologists, data-center astroturfers and ICE cheerleaders who've flooded Tiktok ever since Trump stole it and handed it over to his creepy billionaire pal Larry Ellison.

Making copies of that stuff isn't theft. It's not a copyright violation. Not even if you do it to billions of works. Not even if it's bad for the companies whose feeds you're capturing. Not even if it's bad for the dark money groups who funded the content.

Sure, if you do this carelessly or recklessly, you can end up violating someone's labor rights, or privacy rights, or human rights. And because those frameworks aren't based on the sanctity of property rights, they can be used to protect these important rights without giving corporate America the right to have you fined or arrested for documenting their takeover of the America.

The people who keep track of this stuff are worried about being fined or arrested. Ethan Zuckerman, one of America's foundational internet scholars, has just accepted Canadian government funding to move his lab from UMass to McGill in Montreal:

https://ethanzuckerman.com/2026/08/27/my-personal-contribution-to-the-us-canada-trade-war/

Zuckerman studies platform power: "using data to answer hard questions about social media, search engines and AI tools." He leads a team that is documenting exactly, precisely how tech companies collude with authoritarians to spy on us, manipulate us, and control us. And his methodology is something called "unpermissioned research," which is what academics call scraping:

https://www.techpolicy.press/ai-companies-threaten-independent-social-media-research/

"Unpermissioned research" seeks to circumvent limits that platforms establish specifically to stop outsiders from learning how they operate. When you're doing unpermissioned research, you try to get around rate limits, query throttles, and other measures that platforms use to block others from mapping their extent and documenting their conduct.

"Unpermissioned research" isn't a free-for-all. Universities have ethical rules designed to protect the privacy rights and other human rights of research subjects, and because these aren't property rights, they can be balanced against the socially beneficial outcomes of research. Universities can get this wrong, of course, but when they do, it's not theft. It's a human rights violation, a privacy violation, a labor violation.

If you want to know how AI companies are trying to destroy creators' livelihoods, you have to scrape the AI companies. You can't ask companies for permission to gather information that might be used to destroy them – they'll just say no. If taking information off the internet without permission is "theft," then gathering information by scraping AI companies is also theft.

Sometimes a tech company will set up a "research portal" that supposedly obviates the need to scrape by putting all the relevant information in one convenient place. That's what Facebook did in the wake of the 2016 election, when it was widely condemned for publishing paid political disinformation. But Facebook's official research portal omitted vast amounts of paid political disinformation, something we only know because NYU set up a scraping project called Ad Observer that documented the discrepancy:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/06/get-you-coming-and-going/#potemkin-research-program

Facebook used legal threats to kill Ad Observer, and then…they killed their official research portal, too:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/15/three-wise-zucks-in-a-trenchcoat/#inconvenient-truth

Zuckerman is one of dozens of leading US academics who are relocating their labs and teams to Canadian universities, citing fear of political interference from the Trump regime:

https://vancouver.citynews.ca/2026/08/27/canada-recruits-dozens-of-foreign-scientists-researchers-poaching-many-from-u-s/

The Canadian government has committed $504m to the project. Some of that research will help Canada develop new green energy, and some of it will help Canada make important medical breakthroughs. But Zuckerman's research has a special place in the portfolio of Canadian research projects, because – thanks to scraping – it is a leading source of information about how Trump's tech companies are waging war on the American people and the world.

Scraping isn't theft of data, just like murder isn't theft of life. Scraping can be harmful, and we can create laws and social regimes and ways of talking about those harms that don't give authoritarian governments and vast multinational corporations the right to decide who can document and analyze their conduct.

Take Wikipedia: the project exists solely to organize and disseminate information, for free, to everyone in the world. Wikipedia is among the most important parts of the internet, and one of the most positive developments of the 21st century. The entire project is licensed under a generous Creative Commons license that encourages unlimited commercial re-use of its contents. Even if you think scraping copyrighted works is theft, scraping Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 works is unquestionably not theft.

But Wikipedia is being hammered by AI scrapers, which are operating so aggressively that they threaten the project's ability to keep its servers online. Wikipedia has an AI problem, but that AI problem isn't "theft" – it's denial of service, the aggressive act of intentionally or recklessly flooding a server with so much traffic that it crashes.

If you've been lured into a cultlike worship of property rights, this seems like a contradiction. But once you relegate the relatively unimportant matter of property rights to its correct station, you can see – and reason about – the universe of rights that are far more important than mere property.

All it takes is realizing that there are far worse things you can do with information than "stealing" it.

(Image: Bearas, CC BY-SA 4.0, 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 NYT says ebooks don't exist, fails to mention thriving ebook pirate scene https://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/28/business/forecasts-of-an-e-book-era-were-it-seems-premature.html

#25yrsago Parking tickets waived in exchange for written apologies https://web.archive.org/web/20010826013513/http://www.thesmokinggun.com/doc_o_day/lewiston1.shtml

#20yrsago "I, Row-Boat" https://web.archive.org/web/20060000000000*/http://www.flurb.net/1/doctorow.htm

#20yrsago Filipino students use SMS to organize mass demonstrations https://web.archive.org/web/20060902160514/http://blog.wired.com/sterling/index.blog%3Fentry_id%3D1545927

#20yrsago Spam pump-and-dumps work http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5284618.stm

#25yrsago Leaked: Handspring's next PalmOS device https://web.archive.org/web/20020824213501/http://www.palmstation.com/view_article.asp?article=4614

#15yrsago “Stalwart Workers”: neglected backbone of the firm https://web.archive.org/web/20110920155246/http://blogs.hbr.org/hbsfaculty/2011/08/stop-ignoring-the-stalwart-wor.html

#5yrsago Facebook's war on switching costs https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/28/talking-hard-work-blues/#hostage-takers

#5yrsago The "work ethic" is a dirty trick we play on ourselves https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/28/talking-hard-work-blues/#work-will-set-you-free

#1yrago The capitalism of fools https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/28/strew-deal/#neither-fish-nor-fowla

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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Recent appearances (permalink)


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Latest books (permalink)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "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, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

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


Colophon (permalink)

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Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 527 (10843 total).

  • "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. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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ISSN: 3066-764X

Publié le 26.08.2026 à 05:21

Pluralistic: The age of disinvention (25 Aug 2026)


Today's links


A 1960s family living room in which a mom, dad and two kids are mesmerized by a cabinet-style TV. The image has been altered. The TV has an early 1990s VCR atop it. The TV screen is displaying a cross-sectioned human head with brains and spine on display. A huge fist has materialized in the room, with bloody spiked knuckle-dusters, smashing into the VCR. The oil painting over the sofa has been replaced with a pulp image of a male head, its cranium removed and replaced by a dome. Inside the dome is a red eight-segment VCR clock, displaying 12:00. The background in the painting is a tangle of cassette tape. The whole image's colors have been boosted, giving it an overexposed look.

The age of disinvention (permalink)

They disinvented the VCR. You might think that the reason we don't have VCRs anymore is because VCRs were supplanted by DVDs, PVRs and streaming, but that's not the case. They had it in for the VCR from the very start, and they never stopped trying to kill it. Eventually, they succeeded.

The VCR was one of the fastest-adopted technologies in the history of the world, and it was disruptive. The fact that you could record shows to watch later, skip the ads, build a library of your favorites, even loan your tapes around – it drove the studios and broadcasters nuts. The VCR hit the market under a cloud of litigation, and the lawsuits went all the way up to the Supreme Court, culminating with 1984's Betamax decision, whose key precept is that a new technology doesn't violate copyright law if it can "sustain a substantial, non-infringing use":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc.

As important as the VCR was as a device – creating the home video market, which begat DVDs, then streaming – the Betamax decision is even more important.

You see, copyright is a "fact-intensive" doctrine, which means that determining whether a use is or isn't a copyright violation can be a complex and expensive process of gathering facts, weighing conflicting expert views to arrive at a judgment. If the rule was that new technologies couldn't be introduced unless you could prove that they would never infringe copyright, we wouldn't have any digital technology. Indeed, most technologies would be illegal under that standard. You can infringe copyright with VCRs, photocopiers, hard drives, tape recorders, scanners, computers, phones… Hell, you can infringe copyright with an X-ray machine, a saxophone or a pair of ballet slippers!

There's clearly ways you can use a VCR to infringe copyright: for example, you can record a TV show to a tape, then sell that tape to someone else. There's also ways you can use a VCR that clearly do not infringe copyright: you can lug a camcorder around your kid's birthday party, pester the kids by recording them, then watch the footage later in your living room. Then there's an infinite universe of ways to use a VCR that might infringe copyright, depending on the specifics: recording the Super Bowl while you're at work, then inviting your workmates over to watch it after your shift ends; creating a library of kids' shows for the day-care you run out of your living room; making a highlight reel of your favorite politician's campaign speeches. Anyone who says, "Oh every judge would always call that legal‡ under every circumstance" is admitting they don't understand how copyright works.

‡ Or illegal.

This is a feature, not a bug. Copyright is a fact-intensive doctrine because it is a flexible doctrine. Since the printing press, new ways of mechanically reproducing and transmitting information have appeared at an accelerating pace, and judges are asked to figure out the rules for these new technologies long before legislatures come to grips with them and pass special, tech-specific laws.

Copyright's future-proofing lies in this flexibility, which the Supremes (correctly) recognized in 1984 with the Betamax decision. By ruling that any technology that had "non-infringing uses" was presumptively legal to create and market, the Supremes laid the legal foundation for all the digital tools that followed since.

Crucially, Betamax ensured that last year's tech lottery winners wouldn't get to prevent next year's winners from emerging. This year's admirals are always last year's pirates, and they insist that what they did to their predecessors was progress, while anyone who tries to do the same thing to them is a thief. The sheet music composers condemned the record player, recording artists decried the radio, broadcasters sued over cable and cable operators sued over VCRs. This never stopped: Sony – the company that invented the Betamax and defended it all the way to the Supreme Court – went on to sue Napster!

There's nothing inherently virtuous about "innovation." It's perfectly possible to "innovate" new ways to spy on people and rip them off. But if you're trying to launch a new product in a category that already has clear winners, the best way to convince people to take a chance on you is by making a valuable and useful product.

"Disruptors" are best when they move value from existing companies to those companies' customers. The first TV remotes let people change the channel when an ad came on, making their TV better at broadcasters' expense. The broadcasters had to struggle to adapt, which is fine. They're not charities, after all: they're in business to make money for themselves, and they're only going to give you as much value as they have to.

Competitors fight enshittification: any time a company that you do business with takes something away from you, a competitor can win your business by giving it back. If Youtube doubles the number of ads they expect you to watch – "charging" a higher attentional "price" – an ad-blocking competitor can bargain back on your behalf, allowing you to counteroffer with "how about if I just don't watch any ads?"

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

Inside every company, there are fair, honest people, and there are greedy, shitty people. Companies that face competitors are more likely to listen to the workers who want to give customers a fair shake. But if a company has no competitors, those good people can no longer say, "This is a losing strategy because it will open the door to competitors who will make us poorer." Without competitors, the argument against enshittification becomes, "I would feel bad about myself if we did that." This argument always loses to the bad guys, whose argument is, "We will all get richer if we do this."

That's why Google enshittified search: they had no competitors, so the worst ideas of the worst people at Google could be shown to make the most money, and so Google deliberately made its search results worse:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Of course, companies can also face consequences from the government, but the fewer competitors a company has, the easier it is for that company to capture its regulators:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

Competition makes companies weaker, giving the public and democratic institutions more power. Competition makes the public richer at the expense of corporate shareholders, who have less money to spend on the project of subverting democracy.

That's the VCR story all over. The VCR shook up a sclerotic, stagnant TV and film industry, created the home video market, and opened up new distribution channels that allowed all kinds of new creative workers to reach new audiences, either directly or through a fiercely competitive new constellation of distributors who fought each other to offer them the best possible deal.

The media companies who were forced to adapt to the VCR never forgave it for forcing them to develop new, multi-billion dollar businesses without permission. As a Hollywood executive once put it to me, his goal was "a polite marketplace" where no one ever rudely forced him to disgorge more value to viewers and performers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/02/the-internet-heist-part-i/

The executives who made billions after losing their bid to ban the VCR wanted to ensure that no one would ever be so "impolite" as to force them to make billions of dollars against their will ever again. They partnered with electronics firms to ensure that the VCR's successor technologies would only have those features that they approved.

That's why DVD players are not DVD recorders: the consortium that developed the DVD embedded "hook IP" in the technology. "Hook IP" is a term of art: it means any trademark, copyright or patent that is incorporated into a technology so that anyone who wants to implement that technology must license the hook IP; under the terms of those licenses, doing anything that disrupts the business plans of the consortium is banned.

The DVD consortium's hook IP had all kinds of bizarre licensing terms, like "region coding" – a requirement for DVD players to register the country in which they were sold and to check whether the DVDs you tried to play were from a compatible country. If not, the license terms required the DVD player to refuse to play your discs.

Region coding is an "anti-feature," a technology developed at great expense for which there is no market. Sure, some DVD player owners who had never shopped abroad for a DVD didn't care about region coding. But for customers who bought a disc on vacation, or moved from one country to another: region coding was terrible.

So there were customers who didn't care about region coding, and customers who hated region coding, but there were zero DVD player owners who wanted region coding. No DVD manufacturer could advertise that their products come with region coding. If there were two equivalent DVD players in the market, identical except that one had region coding and the other didn't, the "region-free" player would win. Region-coding is an anti-feature.

Anti-features aren't the only deliberate defects we find in DVD players. The consortium's hook IP licenses didn't just require anti-features, they also banned useful features…including recording. Long after the price of read/write optical drives plummeted to pocket-change, there was still no such thing as a home DVD recorder that would let you stick a spindle full of discs next to the TV and use them to record all your favorite shows.

Shortly after the DVD player emerged, Congress created the most powerful hook IP of all: "anti-circumvention law." Under anti-circumvention law, it's a literal crime – a felony – to modify or reimplement a technology without permission from the manufacturer. In 1998, Bill Clinton signed America's landmark anticircumvention law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, section 1201 of which establishes a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for "bypassing an access control":

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/14/sole-and-despotic/#world-turned-upside-down

After DMCA 1201, all a manufacturer had to do was add an "access control" (like a password or an encryption key) to their device, and modifying that device in any way could land you in prison. As microchips plummeted in price, all kinds of devices and services acquired these "access controls," so that it became a crime to refill an ink cartridge, fix a tractor, or connect your insulin pump to your glucose monitor. Congress never passed a law criminalizing this conduct: rather, they gave companies the ability to write their own criminal code. Simply by adding an access control to a device, they could felonize any conduct that displeased them.

Every video format and distribution system that succeeded the VCR shipped with an access control: DVDs, Blu-ray and HD DVD, satellite and digital cable, and, of course, streaming video. This is how they disinvented the VCR. Once every video had an access control, it had "hook IP" that could be used to control all technologies that were capable of receiving, storing, or playing back that video.

Remember Tivo? The first digital "personal video recorders" were true successors to the VCR. They could record any broadcast or cable program, store it forever and fast forward through the ads. They were all "feature" and nary an "anti-feature" in sight. That's because they only worked with analog cable (which, being analog, didn't have "access controls" that qualified them for DMCA 1201 consideration) and broadcast signals (sent over the public airwaves on the condition that they not be scrambled).

Digital cable disinvented the Tivo. Every post-VCR digital video signal came with hook IP, and so the Tivos (and other PVRs) had to get permission before they could store and play back modern videos. To get that permission, PVR makers had to agree to a whole suite of anti-features, such as a "broadcast flag" that told it which shows you could and could not record. Even if you did record a show, PVR makers also supported more flags, such as an "expiry date" flag that forced your recorder to delete your shows after a set period, a "no skip" flag that blocked you from fast-forwarding through ads, and "geofence" flags that stopped you from playing back your stored videos based on which country you found yourself in.

Today, if you have a PVR, you probably rent it from your cable provider (who can use DMCA 1201 to block other PVRs from working with your cable provider). It's probably slow, with a confusing user interface, and it only records an ever-dwindling subset of the shows your cable company transmits. Notwithstanding that it's a genuinely shitty piece of technology, it's still awful that you can't buy it – the fact that you have to rent that crapgadget month after month means that you're paying for it several times over.

But at least cable signals have PVRs. For the majority of video we interact with, there's no PVR – not even a shitty, broken one. You can't record your Netflix videos, your HBO Max videos, your Disney Plus videos or your Prime videos. Recording a video off a streaming service has the same copyright status as recording a show off your analog cable had in 1984 when the Supreme Court handed down the Betamax decision, but because there's an "access control" on video streams, it's nevertheless a felony to make a VCR for a streaming service.

You know how streaming companies play all kinds of bullshit games, like dropping videos from their catalog? Even worse: the Amazon Prime scam where Christmas cartoons are all included in your "free" streaming tier from March-October, but cost $3.99 to watch from November to February. All of these ills can be cured with the VCR, a technology that was first marketed in 1971, a technology we have disinvented. If you could record those shows with a device that took orders from you, a device without anti-features, Amazon would derive no benefit playing these grinchy little games. If they played those games anyway, you could beat them.

It's not just VCRs. Anti-circumvention law led to the enshittification of everything from tractors to ventilators, phones to smart speakers, thermostats to games consoles, all of which are bristling with hook IP that lets their manufacturers decide what you can do with your own property.

All of this is extremely relevant at this moment, thanks to Trump's tariffs. For more than a quarter century, the US Trade Representative has arm-twisted every American trading partner into enacting an anti-circumvention law like DMCA 1201. All over the world, governments promised to lock up entrepreneurs and technologists if they dared to disenshittify America's defective tech exports. In exchange, these governments were promised free trade with the USA: tariff-free access to American consumers.

That's where Trump comes in. From the moment his "Liberation Day" tariffs landed, any country that upheld its anti-circumvention laws was sacrificing its national competitiveness, resiliency and integrity in exchange for nothing. Trump reneged on America's obligations to its trading partners, just like he reneged on every deal he's ever made:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/22/table-flipper/#graveyard-of-indispensable-nations

The good news is, this means we can have VCRs again! All it will take is for one (or more) countries to decide to lift its one-sided restrictions on making technologies "capable of sustaining a substantial non-infringing use" and wait for one (or more) entrepreneurs to figure out that reintroducing the VCR is a winner, just like it was in the 1970s, when the VCR was the fastest-adopted technology in the history of the world.

It's not just VCRs, of course. For a generation, entire product categories have been suppressed, all over the world. There is a whole CES (good) worth of products that are truly innovative (good) waiting to be brought to market.

The last time there was this much low-hanging fruit on offer was after WWII, where six years' worth of bombings, austerity and neglect provided endless opportunities to repair, rebuild and replace the worn, crumbling built environment, vehicle fleet and personal belongings of people all over the world.

After a quarter-century of innovation prohibition, there are dozens of lucrative, easily perfected technologies just waiting to be made: the dongle that jailbreaks your phone or console and installs a third-party app store, the dongle that flashes your printer so it takes generic ink; the dongle that lets your mechanic install generic parts in your car and lets farmers fix their tractors. Our whole digital world has been wrapped in chains by rent-extracting monopolists who gloried in their power to use hook IP to deprive you of the right to use your property in ways you see fit, writing private laws that made it a crime to displease them.

A generation of allowing companies to shift value from their customers and suppliers to themselves has made them richer, us poorer, and everything more expensive. They've accumulated vast wealth at our expense. Their margins are our opportunity.

The VCR was a great idea 55 years ago. 55 years later, it's an idea whose time has come – again.

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 Metacrap https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm

#15yrsago Slashdot’s CmdrTaco steps down https://meta.slashdot.org/story/11/08/25/1245200/Rob-CmdrTaco-Malda-Resigns-From-Slashdot

#15yrsago Chalk memorial for Jack Layton in front of Toronto’s New City Hall https://www.flickr.com/photos/lewolf011/6076393292/

#15yrsago Coordinated multinational ATM fraud nets $13M in one night https://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/08/coordinated-atm-heist-nets-thieves-13m/

#5yrsago Vaccinate workers at (almost) any price https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/26/chained-to-the-mast/#vaccine-leave-hesitancy

#1yrago By all means, tread on those people https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/26/sole-and-despotic-dominion/#then-they-came-for-me

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 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, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 544 (9802 total).

  • "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. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • 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.

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