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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 03.11.2026 à 15:19

Pluralistic: Separable (03 Nov 2026)


Today's links

  • Separable: AI makes us deal with paintings without painters, words without writers and mathematics without mathematicians.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Haircase; There's no copyright policy; Sole and despotic dominion; Trump x fraud; Brexit requires an act of Parliament; Official Air Travel Replacement Knives; UK hospitals v malware.
  • Upcoming appearances: Kilkenny, Courtenay, Vancouver, Folkestone, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Montreal.
  • 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 red-tinted black-and-white photo of a 1930s classroom whose chalkboard is covered with calculus work. The teacher and students have all been replaced with pulp sf magazine robots.

Separable (permalink)

Long before the Turing Test, there was the touring Edison Test: from 1915 to 1925, the scoundrel Thomas Edison put on a traveling show for his phonograph machine, touring venues around the USA. Edison set live performers and an Edison phonograph playing behind closed curtains that would be periodically pulled aside to reveal that the music the audience had taken to be live performance was actually a record player:

https://www.tomedison.org/blog/edisons-tone-tests

Now, if you've ever heard an Edison phonograph, this might seem like yet another tale in which old-timey people are revealed to be credulous yokels. You would never mistake one of those scratchy, hissing recordings for a live performance:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96gIIFmEjY4

And indeed you wouldn't, but not because the phonograph predates the evolution of the human brain's anti-credulity lobe. The reason old-timey people couldn't tell the difference between a phonograph and a live performance was that before the phonograph, every live performance had a performer.

The two were inseparable, and so when you encountered the sound of a musical performance, your brain would insist that there must be a performer as well. This is a well-understood principle in swindles, magic tricks and literature. It's the basis of Douglas Adams' towel gambit:

For some reason, if a strag discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, washcloth, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet-weather gear, space suit etc, etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have "lost."

All persons heretofore encountered in possession of a towel had all that other stuff, so the mere presence of a towel evokes an overwhelming intuition that all that other stuff must be nearby.

Like every conjuring trick and every swindle, this cognitive illusion swiftly regresses to the mean. After a few exposures to phonographs, the manifest differences between live performance and recordings become impossible to miss, and you stop making that mistake.

If one thing always signifies the presence of another – if a towel always implies a backpack full of supplies or if a performance always implies a performer – there's no reason for you to entrain the neurological patterns needed to detect the performance without the performer. This doesn't mean that it's hard to develop the capacity to make this distinction, just that the ability to detect a phenomenon always post-dates your encounter with that phenomenon.

You've no doubt guessed by now that this is an analogy about AI. The implication of this ability to learn to discern differences after you encounter them (but not before) implies that a chatbot might pass the Turing Test at its introduction, but then come to fail the test after we've all had the experience with it that lets us tune our perceptions to spot the differences, which then become as unmissable as the needle hiss on a phonographic reproduction of a concert pianist.

This is an experience many of us have already had. Prior to chatbot-generated prose, we'd never had experience with writing that didn't have a writer. Prior to image-gen output, we'd never had experience with paintings that didn't have painters. At first, the output from these models was remarkable, and often indistinguishable from human-generated words and images. Even knowing that these works were extruded by an algorithm, it was hard to shake the conviction that they were the product of human creativity. These works were "eerie," in the sense that Mark Fisher uses, "the seeming of intent without an intender":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand

Just like the strag inferring the existence of "toothbrush, washcloth, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet-weather gear, space suit etc, etc," we automatically imputed to these works both a creator and a creative impulse. We supposed that their words and brushstrokes represented aesthetic and technical choices emanating from human creators who meant something by them (or at least were so satisfied by the accident of their appearance on the page that they left them stand). These creators were figments of our imagination. No one is home inside the AI. The intentionality we imputed to these works was the actual "AI hallucination":

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/21/sunsetting/#oh-mr-sun-sun-mr-golden-sun-please-shine-down-on-me

Just as important as the emergence of these hallucinations is their disappearance. For many of us, chatbots that used to pass the Turing Test now flunk it. The chatbots haven't gotten worse at impersonating humans, we've just gotten better at spotting the difference between a human and a bot, just as we got better at hearing the difference between a phonograph and a pianist.

Writing without a writer and paintings without a painter are new phenomena, and learning to separate the formerly inseparable is the first step in our societal metabolization of these novelties. Recordings of musical performance have a place in our world, and so do performers.

This separation process is currently underway in many disciplines, thanks to the extraordinary capital available to AI companies. These companies are incinerating that capital in a series of extremely flash demos that are intended to ensure that the supply of bales of $100 bills that they feed to their money furnaces ("data centers") never stops.

Lately, AI companies have made headlines with a series of mathematical accomplishments that left mathematicians in an uproar and non-mathematicians in a muddle. Obviously, while mathematicians are qualified to assess these accomplishments, the rest of us are not. Beyond simple arithmetic, most of us don't do a lot of math on a regular basis, and even those of us who have to deploy a little geometry or stats typically don't engage with math at a theoretical level.

To make things worse, math – like physics – is a crank-magnet. These highly abstract, closed systems rely on introspection to advance the field, and some of those advances have been contributed by untrained laity, so it can be hard to know if your amazing idea about physics or mathematics represents an outsider's breakthrough or an amateurish cul-de-sac.

Every mathematician and physicist I know receives a steady stream of breathless, over-the-transom "proofs" that solve some long-standing problem in the field, and none of these experts in my orbit has ever found a breakthrough in this material. It's a rare expert who will even respond to these unsolicited manuscripts. That's not their job. As Teresa Nielsen Hayden says, "You are not responsible for the things you do in other people's dreams."

Unfortunately, this is a situation that is perfectly suited to AI. If you've introspected your way into a mathematical "breakthrough" that no mathematician will discuss with you, you can avail yourself of any number of chatbots who will assure you that you've broken exciting new theoretical ground, and these chatbots will even act as "research collaborators," contributing more slop-physics or slop-math to your conclusions.

Again, as far as I know, no one has actually made a breakthrough this way, and the major impact on the field from giving chatbots to excitable outsiders has been to make the unsolicited manuscripts much longer, with the veneer of professionalism that means an expert might have to give them a second or even third glance to realize that they're nonsense.

But some working mathematicians have found chatbots to be extremely useful "collaborators." The most prominent of these is Terrence Tao, a Macarthur-winning mathematician who has excited many mathematicians and lay-people alike by publishing his chat-logs and the resulting mathematical work:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/28/hitl-ers/#ai-ai-oh

One way to understand Tao is as a "centaur," the automation theory term for a worker who is assisted by a machine. For all that Tao describes Chatgpt as his collaborator, it's clear from reading the chat-logs that it's Tao who drives the research agenda. He sets the questions and the direction of the answers. Chatgpt doesn't give him orders – it's the other way around.

But for every problem Tao and Chatgpt solve together there are several mathematical problems that are being solved by chatbots without that kind of human collaboration. In particular, Openai has released a tsunami of "solutions" to longstanding mathematical problems, including some that carry large cash bounties and others that were posed by legends of the field, like Erdos.

This is mathematics without a mathematician, and – as with all the other separations cleft by the AI companies – it's proving difficult to metabolize. Back in September, Fenner Stanley Tanswell published an opinion piece for the Mathematical Intelligencer entitled "The Enshittification of Mathematics" that tried to do just that:

https://rdcu.be/5uYGc2uo454a

Tanswell distinguishes between mathematics as a discipline practiced by mathematicians and the proofs and theorems that those mathematicians produce. He makes the point that when a mathematician finds the answer to some longstanding mathematical puzzle, they do so by creating "scaffolding" that bridges the new insight with the existing commons of mathematical understanding. The thing that makes a "solution" so exciting isn't that a problem has been solved – it's that the method for solving that problem prompts a cascading reconsideration of many other areas of mathematics, prompting shifts to large areas of the discipline.

This point is made even more forcefully by Giordano Scarciotti, a complex systems researcher at Imperial College London and science communicator who vlogs under the Youtube handle "Prof Gio." Scarciotti's most successful video to date is "You Truly Don't Understand What Just Happened to Mathematics," published last month:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqiDqJMxg6o

"You Truly Don't Understand…" makes a similar point to Tanswell's, using a thought experiment in which we wake up one day and discover an American flag on the surface of Mars. Without knowing how that flag got to Mars, the mere fact of its existence doesn't help us get any closer to an actual Mars mission.

The output of mathematical models is a series of faits accomplis, often accomplished through brute-force, or sometimes through opaque methods that lack the "scaffolding" that bridges these outcomes into the broader field of mathematics. Scarciotti cites Euler's work on the longstanding "Seven Bridges of Königsberg" problem, which asked whether it was possible to go on a walking tour of Königsberg such that you crossed each of the city's seven bridges only once:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Bridges_of_K%C3%B6nigsberg

The point of that problem (and Euler's solution to it) wasn't to produce a set of Mapquest directions for a walking tour of Königsberg. In solving the Seven Bridges problem, Euler invented graph theory, an important area of mathematics that is routinely used today for many important applications, including computer networking. You can thank graph theory for helping to route the packets that brought these very words to you.

So far, we've figured out how to get a model to either rule out the possibility of taking that each-bridge-only-once walk or to give us the route map. What this computer-generated "mathematics" is not doing is advancing the field.

Tanswell points out that a world in which chatbots "solve" these problems is one where the role of mathematicians is reduced to being reverse centaurs, assistants to the machine whose job is to clean up after the chatbot's research agenda. But there's nothing about knowing that there's no route map for a seven-bridge walking tour that makes it easier to invent graph theory, and a mathematician might spend years working on the computer's "answer" to that problem only to conclude that the computer's solution didn't add any theoretical insight to the field.

In other words, in a world where mathematicians and mathematics are inseparable, every solution to a longstanding problem heralds an accompanying theoretical insight. Once we separate mathematics from mathematicians, we start to get solutions without insights. These are a lot less interesting than the kinds of solutions that mathematicians come up with.

This is a distinction the AI companies really don't want us to dwell on. We're meant to marvel at these very expensively derived solutions and conclude that the AI companies can be forgiven for spending $1T this year, even if they only grossed $50B in return.

But (as Scarciotti notes), there are real-world consequences in our failure to grasp this distinction: if we convince early-career mathematicians and promising mathematics students that the world no longer needs mathematicians because "the AI can do their jobs," then we will choke off the supply of future mathematicians who we'll either need to work in a Terrence Tao-like, centaurish relationship with chatbots (good), or even to serve as reverse centaurs, marking the chatbots' homework to see if there are any theoretical insights to be found in it (bad).

This is one of the underappreciated consequences of AI mania. AI bosses are particularly interested in convincing us that AI can do the job of skilled professionals in fields where there is a chronic undersupply of experts, like radiology. A chatbot that helps a (centaur) radiologist by suggesting that they double-check some of their results might indeed save lives. But a chatbot that produces thousands of radiology reports for a single (reverse centaur) radiologist to approve at a velocity that precludes careful scrutiny is going to kill people.

Centaur radiology requires more radiologists, not fewer. A centaur radiologist processes fewer X-rays (because sometimes the chatbot tells them to double-check a diagnosis) than an unassisted radiologist. LLM-assisted radiology improves quality, not quantity.

That's not what AI companies are selling. An AI company can't turn a profit by raising the cost of radiology (even if that improves the quality of radiological analyses). So the firehose of announcements from AI companies is always about putting radiologists out on the breadline – not about needing more radiologists, who will get a new radiology tool that helps them work better, if a little more slowly.

The pronouncements of AI companies aren't just marketing hype, they're attempts at self-fulfilling prophecy. If you convince all the would-be radiologists that the profession is about to be vaporized by chatbots, those people will not study radiology, and then we will need to retask the dwindling supply of human radiologists to marking the chatbots' homework and hoping that they don't kill too many people by missing the chatbots' mistakes.

That's the catastrophic outcome that both Scarciotti and Tanswell warn us of: if we convince people that we're heading into a world of mathematics without mathematicians, that's exactly what we'll get, because no one will try to become a mathematician. But because mathematics without mathematicians is a set of guide maps for crossing Königsberg's bridges (but not graph theory), then mathematics without mathematicians is also mathematics without mathematics.

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 EFF fights another DMCA abuser https://web.archive.org/web/20061104133502/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004973.php

#15yrsago Staircase covered in a cascade of synthetic human hair https://web.archive.org/web/20111030014202/http://www.jessicawohl.com/hairy-stairs

#15yrsago Entertainment industry incredibly profitable, healthy: but demands special pirate-hunting laws anyway https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/11/piracy-problems-us-copyright-industries-show-terrific-health/

#15yrsago There is no copyright policy, only Internet policy; there is no Internet policy, only policy https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-its-time-to-stop-talking-about-copyright/

#10yrsago Sole and Despotic Dominion: how a 20th century copyright law is abolishing property for humans (but not corporations) https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-sole-and-despotic-dominion/

#10yrsago Police in Quebec are spying on journalists and Snowden calls that “a threat to democracy” https://web.archive.org/web/20161104150400/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/edward-snowden-quebec-police-journalists-spying-surveillance

#10yrsago Donald Trump weaponized fine-print to make it impossible to sue Wall Street for fraud https://www.ibtimes.com/political-capital/how-donald-trump-used-fine-print-make-it-harder-sue-wall-street-fraud-2440890

#10yrsago High Court tells UK government that Brexit requires a vote in Parliament https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-37857785

#10yrsago Artist celebrates Patriot Act’s anniversary by handing out “Official Air Travel Replacement Knives” to arriving SFO passengers https://hyperallergic.com/on-anniversary-of-the-patriot-act-artist-passes-out-pocket-knives-at-the-airport/

#10yrsago A journalist finally uncovers the root of Trump supporters’ anger https://www.theawl.com/2016/11/i-talked-to-some-trump-voters-too/#.z9k84oxsg

#10yrsago A fake HP printer that’s actual an office-camouflaged cellular eavesdropping device https://www.wired.com/2016/11/evil-office-printer-hijacks-cellphone-connection/

#10yrsago UK hospitals shut down by malware, advise patients to go somewhere else for the duration https://www.zdnet.com/article/computer-virus-attack-forces-hospitals-to-cancel-operations-shut-down-systems/

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: 512 (31870 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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https://doctorow.medium.com/

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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 02.11.2026 à 09:20

Pluralistic: Autodoxing (02 Nov 2026)


Today's links

  • Autodoxing: The road to hell is paved with badly thought-through tech policy.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Shakespeare programming language; DeCSS is "pure speech"; Blue Coat sold surveillance tools to Syrian secret police; "Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions"; Cable prices rose at double the rate of inflation for 20 years; Supercuts; Antivax x Trump.
  • Upcoming appearances: Kilkenny, Courtenay, Vancouver, Folkestone, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Montreal.
  • 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.


An engraving of a high-ceilinged Edwardian bathroom; it has been altered so that all the fixtures are leaking, flooding the floor. Peering up from the flooded water are various robot-heads.

Autodoxing (permalink)

After 25 years of fighting for human rights amid the wreckage of bad tech policy, I'm here to tell you that the road to hell is paved with badly thought-through tech policy.

The most galling thing about this wreckage is that it was both foreseeable and foreseen. Back when Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy was telling the world "Privacy is dead, get over it," digital rights advocates were saying, "Not only are digital tools pretty dang good at helping you protect your privacy, but a society-wide abolition of privacy sets us up for infinite harms long into the future":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/31/losing-the-crypto-wars/#surveillance-monopolism

It wasn't just business leaders who hated privacy, it was also our political classes. Bill Clinton tried to put a backdoor into every microchip (no, really):

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

The NSA managed to enact a total prohibition on civilian access to working encryption, on the grounds that we're all safer if our spooks can spy on "bad guys" even if that means that every creep, petty crook, corporate or state-sponsored spy, and mafia can spy on us:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/09/bernstein-2/#win-some-lose-some

Even after that ban was overturned, governments encouraged the private sector to spy on us without limit, precaution or permission. Those private-sector troves of intimate, compromising data about every person alive constitute a warrantless, off-the-books surveillance system that cops, spies and government agencies can tap at will:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/13/petards-r-us/#nobus

To protect these surveillance capabilities, private firms and governments colluded to pass "anticircumvention" laws that make it illegal to reverse engineer our devices and apps to add privacy blockers to them, with the effect that every device we own and every app we use spies on us constantly:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/12/market-failure/#car-wars

At the same time, states either failed to pass new privacy laws (as in the USA, where federal consumer privacy law was last updated in 1988), or passed privacy laws that went unenforced (as in the EU, where "pretending to be Irish" allows US tech giants to flout EU privacy law):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

Our surveillance free-for-all world is objectively very bad. Over and over, companies and agencies who have been permitted to nonconsensually harvest and retain our data demonstrate that they are not capable of keeping that data safe, and no matter how badly they fuck up, nothing changes. It's been nearly a decade since Equifax doxed 148 million Americans and not only is the company still in business, they've been permitted to buy up and absorb more commercial surveillance firms.

US regulators let Equifax buy Teletrack in 2021. Canadian regulators let them buy the Food Industry Credit Bureau in 2023. The same year, Brazilian regulators let Equifax buy Boa Vista Serviços. This all despite the fact that Equifax blamed its breach on shitty security practices after a string of mergers that led to it haphazardly combining databases from newly acquired surveillance companies.

Data isn't the new oil. Data is the new oily rag: profitable only if you can warehouse it in vast quantities under unsafe conditions and have society pick up the bill for every conflagration:

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-zucks-empire-of-oily-rags/

Equifax is a serial reoffender, but rather than getting the corporate death-penalty, they've been made to pay coins-down-the-back-of-the-sofa fines that amount to a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the costs they imposed on society by amassing these vast, flaming storehouses of oily rags.

Why wouldn't Equifax reoffend? Our policymakers keep demanding less privacy, not more, and their indifference to the consequences is (almost) comical.

Take Malcolm Turnbull, the former Australian Prime Minister who uttered what remains, without a doubt, the single stupidest thing anyone anywhere has ever said about tech policy. Like many of his peers before, during, and since his reign, Turnbull had been trying to outlaw working encryption, insisting that every device have a Bill Clinton-esque back-door for the purpose of spying on "bad guys." When told that the laws of mathematics dictated that any measure that let Australia's cops spy on "bad guys" would also let bad guys spy on Australians, Turnbull replied, "The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia":

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2140747-laws-of-mathematics-dont-apply-here-says-australian-pm/

We could laugh Turnbull off…if he was an outlier. But while Turnbull had the world's stupidest rejoinder to the scientifically irrefutable fact that banning encryption will let bad guys hack everything, he was hardly alone in wanting to ban encryption. Banning encryption is current policy in Canada:

https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2026/10/08/canadas-bill-c-22-threatens-encryption-users-privacy-and-the-security-of-digital-economies/

It's also current policy in the UK:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/05/theyre-still-trying-to-ban-cryptography/

And in the EU:

https://fightchatcontrol.eu/

The difference between Malcolm Turnbull and, say, Canadian PM Mark Carney is that Turnbull was stupid enough to try to defend his ban on encryption, while Carney simply shakes his head at his critics' naivete and continues to press forward with his catastrophic proposal to welcome every cybercriminal in the world to hack every morsel of Canadian data.

When it comes to bad privacy policy, our political classes aren't content to rest on their laurels: hardly a week goes by without news of a new way to encourage (or even require) the private sector to recklessly collect and retain our data, despite the dead certainty that this data will eventually end up breaching and getting plastered all over the internet.

Take "age verification" laws. There's no such thing as "age verification" – there's just spying on everyone, all the time, creating (even more) records of all of our internet activities:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/19/shes-dead-of-course/#consensus-hallucination

Every promise of "privacy preserving" age verification is bullshit:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/14/bellovin/#wont-someone-think-of-the-cryptographers

If you think kids are experiencing internet harms today, just wait until we expose them to the harms of having even more of their data harvested, stored, breached, and weaponized against them:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/23/destroy-the-village/#to-save-it

If you want to protect kids from algorithmic manipulation and targeting by bad actors, what about banning spying on kids so no one can target them?

https://made-not-found-by-danah-boyd.ghost.io/no-one-paid-me-to-disagree-with-jonathan-haidt-it-was-teenagers-who-taught-me-that-he-was-wrong/

Now, at this point, you might be thinking, "How can we know who the kids are so we know who not to spy on?" You can't. In order to not spy on kids, you'd just have to not spy on anyone:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/09/how-to-make-a-child-safe-tiktok/

"Don't spy on anyone" is the kind of thing that has a reasonable chance of enhancing online privacy. But in the time-honored tradition of "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas," governments keep finding ways to make digital privacy worse, for example, by procuring Flock cameras for every lamp-post:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/09/high-crime-lmao-how-cops-are-treating-mass-surveillance-joke

And then there's UK Labour: after the success of a pilot program for an incredibly effective and safe privacy-preserving way of analyzing the country's health records for research processes, they commissioned the Goldacre Report to evaluate the possibility of making this permanent:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/08/the-fire-of-orodruin/#are-we-the-baddies

After that report was completed and had a chance to be metabolized by policymakers, Labour acted upon it…by throwing it out and handing all of the country's health data to Palantir, a serial mishandler of data and violator of privacy:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/30/legal-objections-palantir-nhs-platform-handling-data

Here's the scariest thing about bad privacy policy: it has a long fuse. The harms of commercial and private-sector digital surveillance can occur years or even decades after the decision to permit it.

There's a straight line from the post-9/11 decision to encourage public agencies to gather, merge and warehouse data on every person in America, and the ability of ICE ethnic cleansing squads to break down people's doors and drag them off to concentration camps; just as there's a straight line from the decision to do nothing about the breach of every Social Security Number and the later theft of all Social Security data by adolescent DOGE criminals:

https://www.pcmag.com/news/is-your-ssn-in-the-national-public-data-breach-heres-how-to-find-out

But despite how obvious these connections are, the fact that they're separated by a lot of time and space provides our policymakers with cover for making terrible decisions with foreseeably terrible outcomes. As a society, we lack object permanence, the ability to connect acts in the past with present-day phenomena.

When the press reports on a "Black October" of catastrophic, AI-fueled data breaches and hack attacks, they don't mention a generation of policymakers' indifference and hostility to information security:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/12/god-in-the-box/#llms-are-fake

Policymakers benefit from politics' eternal now, in which disasters simply befall us, without any history or precedent or cause. Remember the One Big Beautiful Bill? Its architects designed it to wreak its worst harms after the midterms, with Medicaid work rules and food aid restrictions starting in December, and cuts to affordable housing and rural hospitals phasing in through the year:

https://www.tumblr.com/mostlysignssomeportents/832146932089700352

Black October is going to give way to Black November, Black December, Black 2027, and the Black 2030s – a string of cybersecurity catastrophes that will befall us until policymakers decide that keeping us safe is more important than making it easy for them to attack their chosen "bad guys."

Here's a preview of Black November: there's a new strain of the Volta infostealer malware that uses AI tools to dox you even as it hacks you:

https://www.wired.com/story/kernel-panic-volta-autodoxer-ai-infostealer-malware/

How that works: your computer gets hacked and your data gets stolen, then it gets merged with breach data from Ticketmaster, Disney, AT&T and other companies that have recklessly compiled vast troves of data on all of us, stored it insecurely, and leaked it onto the internet where it will live forever.

Volta's makers prompt their LLM "to act like an intelligence analyst and produce structured citation-backed assessment of the victim." This lets the criminals prioritize their victims based on the expected return from exploiting them. It augments this dossier by combing through your Gmail as well as your Doordash and Uber Eats profiles. This merged data makes it much easier for criminals to call you up or email you (or have a chatbot call you up or email you) and trick you into giving up even more data:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/05/cyber-dunning-kruger/#swiss-cheese-security

Volta seems especially interested in younger internet users, targeting "Discord, Telegram, Steam, and Roblox sessions." Of course, once our "age verification" services breach vast, eternally persistent, detailed troves of data on young internet users, this kind of AI-supercharged malware will be able to target kids with much greater fidelity and efficacy.

AI capabilities have made infostealers much worse, but the reason for that new potency lies in how AI capabilities are supercharged by breach data that is the foreseeable and foreseen consequence of generations of hostility to privacy on the part of policymakers and corporations who responded to the incentives policymakers created.

We are living in the age of oily rags. For decades we fucked around with letting the private sector warehouse our data and weaken our security so that public sector agencies could plunder our data and our computers at will. Now, we keep finding out that everything is on fire.

It's going to take a long time to fix this, but we can do it. We can build more secure systems. We can make it much more of a legal ball-ache for companies to gather our data in the first place, and we can legalize and promote the creation of privacy blockers for browsers, phones, computers, cars, thermostats and smart speakers. We can enact corporate death-penalties for breaches to reflect the true societal cost of warehousing our data. We can ban Flock cameras and tear down the post-9/11 "fusion centers" that neatly package up our data for use by DOGE fascists and ICE thugs. We can ban our spy agencies from hoarding defects in widely used software, and instead require them to divulge these bugs so vendors can fix them:

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

And before we do any of that, we can just stop making it worse by ending the campaigns to require companies to spy on us and deliberately introduce security defects into their products.

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 NY Post blames pagans from Indianapolis for spam malware https://web.archive.org/web/20011103073038/http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/33077.htm

#25yrsago The Shakespeare Programming Language https://web.archive.org/web/20011207071324/http://shakespearelang.sourceforge.net/report/shakespeare/

#25yrsago Appeals court: DeCSS is "pure speech" https://web.archive.org/web/20011102003502/https://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,48075,00.html

#20yrsago Apple drops Trusted Computing https://web.archive.org/web/20070106150844/https://www.osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter10/tpm/

#20yrsago Microsoft threatens China pull-out over jailed bloggers http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6102180.stm

#15yrsago Righthaven copyright troll’s victims send in US marshals to seize its assets https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/11/us-marshals-turned-loose-to-collect-6372080-from-righthaven/

#15yrsago Supercuts: rapid-cut videos that collect repetition https://web.archive.org/web/20111103190737/http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/11/supercut/

#15yrsago Study: why parents help their underage kids pretend to be 13 in order to use Internet sites https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3850/3075

#15yrsago Blue Coat “deep packet inspection” tools used by Syrian secret police and other repressive regimes https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/10/blue-coat-acknowledges-syrian-government-use-its-products

#15yrsago Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions: awesomely dangerous pranks from the age of fraternal lodges https://memex.craphound.com/2011/11/01/extraordinary-catalog-of-peculiar-inventions-awesomely-dangerous-pranks-from-the-age-of-fraternal-lodges/

#10yrsago Cable prices have risen at more than double the rate of inflation for 20 years https://cordcutting.com/news/cable-prices-have-risen-faster-than-inflation-for-each-of-the-past-20-years/

#10yrsago Typical English village mystified by its cult status among Chinese tourists https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-37820663

#10yrsago Nebraska’s billionaire governor couldn’t preserve the death penalty through the law, so now he’s buying a ballot initiative https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/11/ricketts-nebraska-death-penalty/

#10yrsago Anti-vaxx conspiracy leaders back Donald Trump, claim it’s mutual https://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2016/11/02/donald-trump-and-disgraced-antivaccine-scientist-andrew-wakefield-best-buds-forever

#10yrsago New, fast-spreading IoT botnet hybridizes two less-effective strains to achieve quick dominance https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/new-iot-botnet-that-borrows-from-notorious-mirai-infects-3500-devices/

#1yrago There's one thing EVERY government can do to shrink Big Tech https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/01/redistribution-vs-predistribution/#elbows-up-eurostack

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.

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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 31.10.2026 à 16:15

Pluralistic: Formalities (31 Oct 2026)


Today's links

  • Formalities: When it comes to AI, the Copyright Office is restoring copyright to its proper status, as something you have to work to get.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: GWB x martial law; Li'l Sparky; Dueling Starbuckses; Microsoft buys Skype (does fuckery); Bieber v SOPA; SOPA is the worst; Snowden x rule of law; "Laserwriter II"; Russia v DST; Class war funnies; Minnesota's miracle; Icelandic women v sexism; Image analogies; Aussie DMCA ratfucked; "Authorised Domain"; Sales tax is regressive; Prince Charles's secret veto; Wells Fargo blackballed workers for refusing to crime; Poe read by Vincent Price and Basil Rathbone; Put it back!; The internet was made for privacy.
  • Upcoming appearances: Kilkenny, Courtenay, Vancouver, Folkestone, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Montreal.
  • 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 humanoid robot with blue skin pocked with transparent patches that show circuit boards beneath. Its eyes are yellow copyright symbols. It is admiring its reflection in a mirror supported by a gold robot. The reflection of the robot has red x's in its eyes instead of copyright symbols.

Formalities (permalink)

It's not often that I find myself on the same side as the US Copyright Office. In fact, I think this is the first time in 25 years that I've found myself cheering on the office's official actions as good for art and good for free expression, taking the side of creative workers over our bosses.

The source of our miraculous accord: the US Copyright Office's position on AI. The CO has taken the (entirely correct) position that copyright law exists to incentivize human acts of creative expression, which means that only works of human authorship are eligible for copyright.

This isn't a controversial position within legal circles. But for media executives, this is shocking; absurd, even. This gap between the industrial and the legal understanding of copyright comes from a fundamental difference over the evocatively named legal doctrine of "sweat of the brow."

"Sweat of the brow" is fundamental to a correct legal understanding of copyright. Copyright rewards and protects creativity but it does not protect hard work. You can labor for ten years over a phone book listing the numbers of every person in a town and (as a collection of uncopyrightable facts) it will receive no protection at all. Zero. Zilch. Anyone can copy and sell that phone book:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc._v._Rural_Telephone_Service_Co.

Copyright law doesn't care if you slaved over that collection of facts, if you missed sleep and your kids' little league games to realize your grand vision. Copyright law doesn't care if you plowed every cent into it, remortgaging your home and cashing in your (already resentful) kids' college funds.

But: if you dash off a haiku in ten seconds while sitting on the toilet, shove it into your pocket and forget about it, and then your (still resentful) kids discover that crumpled haiku after your (highly suspicious) death, your kids will be able to claim a full 70 years' worth of copyright over that forgotten triviality (the term of copyright for works of human authorship is life plus 70 years).

This is the uncontroversial and universally accepted legal understanding of copyright: all the copyright in the world for creative acts, no copyright at all for mere acts of labor. The "sweat of the brow" has nothing to do with a work's eligibility for copyright.

But no media boss believes this. For media bosses, copyright is a pseudo-property† right, designed and operated to protect their bottom line. The point of copyright isn't to incentivize creativity, but rather investment.

† Or not-so-pseudo

There's obviously a relationship between creative acts and acts of investment, but it's possible to create without investment (see: your haiku) and it's possible to invest without creativity (see: your phone book).

And once again, the creativity that copyright protects is human creativity. This is a lesson that David Slater learned the hard way. Slater is a professional wildlife photographer and amateur monkey-trainer who combined his interests by teaching Celebes crested macaque monkeys to take selfies. But when Slater published a monkey's selfie others copied and distributed the image without his permission, on the (entirely legally correct) basis that monkeys are not humans, and that means that works created by monkeys don't get a copyright. This was also the Copyright Office's position, and the position of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals:

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

This is the basis for the US Copyright Office's repeated decision to refuse to extend copyright to AI-generated works. An algorithm is even less human than a monkey, so if you can't get copyright over a monkey selfie, you definitely can't copyright your chatbot's slop. The US Copyright Office has successfully defended this position in multiple courts, triumphing over plaintiffs who were so persistent that they even got the Supreme Court to weigh in on the issue (the Supremes decided the case didn't warrant their attention):

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

AI slop isn't copyrightable, but there can be copyrightable elements in an AI-generated image. The most obvious element is the prompt. So long as your prompt contains some quantum of creativity (e.g. "Make me a beautiful flower whose loveliness is reminiscent of a newborn baby", but not "make me a beautiful flower"), that prompt is copyrightable. That means you can use copyright to challenge others' rights to present the same prompt to a chatbot. But while the prompt can be copyrighted, the image it gives rise to isn't. So you can spend a month iteratively refining your prompt, consuming all your town's water along with 200,000 gallons of diesel and that prompt will be yours for your life plus 70 years, but the image it generates is in the public domain, and anyone can copy it, sell it or give it away.

There are other ways that copyright can find its way into AI-generated material. You can make creative edits to it: if you output a slop novel and rewrite various sentences (providing those rewrites involve some creativity and not just mechanical corrections or word substitutions), then the edited sentences become copyrighted works, even though all the rest of the text remains uncopyrightable.

You can also get a "thin" copyright through selection. If you get your chatbot to output many images based on your prompt and choose your favorite, your selection can confer a tiny bit of copyright over that creative act of selection, but it will be harder to defend than even the other (attenuated and highly specific) forms of copyright.

Now, perhaps you've spotted an administrative problem lurking in this turn of events. How can someone else know what part of a work is AI-generated (and thus in the public domain) and which parts are human-edited/contributed (and thus copyrighted)? Just as importantly, how can you prove which parts of your work are not AI-generated and thus eligible for copyright protection.

This gets especially gnarly when you're dealing with complex media. In an animation, an AI might do the rigging and movement for a human-created sprite. The sprite is copyrightable, but its movements aren't. That would mean that I could remap your sprite's movements onto a different sprite without infringing your copyright. Or say the sprite and its movements are human created (and thus copyrighted), but the backgrounds are procedurally generated? I could take those backgrounds and put new animations overtop of them.

The simplest, most reliable way to ensure the works you invest in are fully and entirely eligible for copyright is to just use humans for the whole project. Declare a "no-AI policy," and hire human artists to produce the works you hope to sell. Monitor their activity to ensure they're not using AI. Keep good records.

Now, as much as I like the idea that we've arrived at a copyright law that insists that a company can only get exclusive rights to its products by paying human artists to make them from end-to-end, I don't think that's likely to be the way it shakes out, but that doesn't mean that this is a wash for artists.

The reality is that copyright claims are always "fact-intensive inquiries" that are expensive to litigate and difficult to adjudicate. It's completely normal for copyright lawsuits to turn on documentary evidence gleaned from fragmentary records. This is simply intrinsic to copyright, because copyright is a doctrine that requires judges to assess whether things are "creative" and "original" as though these were freestanding categories that everyone could agree upon.

Of course, the rules of copyright can make this harder or easier. One way in which the rules make deciding copyright cases much, much harder is copyright's broad prohibition on "formalities" ("formalities" is how copyright wonks refer to "red tape" or "paperwork"). For nearly all of American history, copyright ran on a key formality: deposit, registration and notice.

To secure a copyright for a new work, an artist (or their employer) had to send a copy of that work to the Library of Congress (deposit), along with paperwork detailing the claim of authorship (who made this, what parts of it did they make) (registration) and they had to display a copyright notice that told you who held the copyright to every work that was registered (notice). Both the filing and the notice required careful attention and precision, and screwing either one up could result in your losing your copyright. It's an open secret among copyright scholars that Walt Disney screwed this up with the first Mickey cartoons, meaning they've been in the public domain since their release:

https://web.archive.org/web/20080725055415/http:/homepages.law.asu.edu/~dkarjala/opposingcopyrightextension/publicdomain/HedenkampFreeMickeyMouseVaSp&E(2003).htm

This system of copyright formalities meant that you could always tell whether a work was copyrighted, you could always find out who claimed the copyright over it, and which parts of the work were claimed under copyright and under what basis. What's more, formalities created the Library of Congress, since the LoC acted as America's "copyright deposit" library, holding deposit copies of every work that had ever been issued a US copyright.

The US system of formalities was descended from the English system, in which the Stationers' Guild used a copyright registry to establish who had the rights to which books. But there were competing copyright systems, notably the "continental" system that was codified through the Berne Convention, a copyright treaty drafted by Victor Hugo (yes, that Victor Hugo).

Among other things, the Berne Convention abolished formalities. Much of the world adopted Berne, but the US held out until 1976. With the 1976 Copyright Act, Congress brought the US into compliance with Berne, abolishing formalities in the USA. As a compromise, the 1976 Act requires US authors to register their copyrights in order to obtain "statutory damages" (up to $150,000 per work). That's a pretty good incentive, but even with that incentive, the vast majority – far in excess of 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999% – of all copyrighted works are not registered with the Copyright Office. They are born copyrighted from the moment they are "fixed in a tangible medium" until 70 years after their authors die. But without registration, you can't know when that copyright clock started ticking because you have no way to verify who the author of the work is. This not only makes it incredibly difficult to establish the copyright status of nearly every copyrighted work, but it also means that in nearly every case, you can't readily determine who you should approach if you want to pay them for a copyright license.

Abolishing formalities has created a universe of orphan works: everything from napkin doodles to kindergartners' finger paintings to message board posts. Within that universe is a kind of gaseous cloud that, if condensed, would come out to an infinitesimal planetoid, representing the entirety of commercial works whose authors give a damn about their copyright status. It's a bad, bad system.

This system doesn't do away with the need to keep careful records: like I said, copyright disputes usually require the close examination of documentary evidence. What formality abolition accomplished was the destruction of the regular system of record-keeping: rather than having a standard, universally agreed-upon way to determine the status and resolve disputes about a copyrighted work, now we have the scattershot, incoherent system that makes copyright disputes far more likely (because no one knows who to approach for copyright licenses) and far more difficult to resolve (because there's no registry of copyrighted works).

Which brings me back to the question of AI and copyright. If a firm uses some AI in its work, it's going to need to document that very carefully. Firms that don't keep very close track of the elements of their products that come from AI will have a far harder time defending their commercial interests.

Basically, we're about to recreate formalities, but managed by the private sector. To the extent that companies use AI in their work, they are going to have to track every pixel and every word and every note that is output by an AI system, and which parts were added or edited by humans after creation.

That means that companies that want to protect their commercial interests aren't just going to get more protection based on how much work they get humans to do; they're also going to have to treat copyright's government-enforceable monopoly over expressive speech with the gravitas it deserves: not something you get automatically, but something you have to do real administrative work for.

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 Slushpiles v anthrax https://memex.craphound.com/2001/10/29/some-publishers-have-instituted-new/

#25yrsago Image analogies https://mrl.cs.nyu.edu/projects/image-analogies/

#25yrsago Cleaning the Fucking Kitchen for Dummies https://web.archive.org/web/20011007082222/https://www.fridgemagnet.org.uk/kitchen.html

#20yrsago Last minute changes snuck into Aussie DMCA https://web.archive.org/web/20061104133320/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004975.php

#20yrsago Creative Commons 3.0 license drafts published https://creativecommons.org/2006/10/30/version30revisedlicensedrafts/

#20yrsago Bush legalizes martial law https://politics.slashdot.org/story/06/10/28/1934208/bush-signs-bill-enabling-martial-law

#20yrsago No blogging allowed at “consumer generated media” conference https://web.archive.org/web/20061108055635/http://gregverdino.typepad.com/greg_verdinos_blog/2006/10/social_media_fi.html

#20yrsago Li'l Sparky: miniature 9V electric chair https://www.flickr.com/photos/84221353@N00/281833134/in/pool-make/

#20yrsago New Starbucks stores to open across the street from each other https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2006/oct/29/starbucks-buzzes-along-with-expansion/

#15yrsago HOWTO defend yourself against tear-gas https://web.archive.org/web/20111030230740/http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/5Fe8Ye/motherjones.com/mojo/2011/10/ows-flier-defending-against-tear-gas

#15yrsago How to make a computer that doesn’t lock out GNU/Linux https://web.archive.org/web/20120113141447/https://www.linuxfoundation.org/sites/main/files/lf_uefi_secure_boot_open_platforms.pdf

#15yrsago Microsoft buys Skype, attacks reverse engineer with bogus takedown notices and florid language https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTAwNzI

#15yrsago Justin Bieber: senator who sponsored anti-streaming bill should be “locked up — put away in cuffs” https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/10/justin-bieber-streaming-bill-author-should-be-locked-up/

#15yrsago SOPA in depth: the worst-ever copyright proposal in US legislative history? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/10/sopa-hollywood-finally-gets-chance-break-internet

#15yrsago Fresh German police-malware uncovered; everything the police said in defense to date revealed as lies https://www.ccc.de/en/updates/2011/analysiert-aktueller-staatstrojaner

#15yrsago Russia dumps daylight savings https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-15512177

#15yrsago Class War funnies: 1935 Daily Worker comics https://philnel.com/2011/02/02/hoff_teeth/

#15yrsago Christian groups: we will bodily protect Occupy London from St Paul’s https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/oct/29/christians-defend-occupy-london-protest

#15yrsago Dean of St Paul’s resigns over plan to evict OccupyLondon https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/oct/31/dean-st-pauls-resigns-occupy

#15yrsago The future of the living room: Authorised Domain https://dn711102.ca.archive.org/0/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_215/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_215_Authorised_Domain.mp3

#15yrsago Sales tax is still regressive, gravity still sucks, and George Osborne is still a delusional ideologue https://www.bbc.com/news/business-15519727

#15yrsago Prince Charles exercises a secret veto over a wide swath of UK legislation https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/oct/30/prince-charles-offered-veto-legislation

#15yrsago London cops recording movements & association with mobile tracking device: “blanket & indiscriminate” https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/oct/30/metropolitan-police-mobile-phone-surveillance

#10yrsago The Shadow Brokers dump more intel from the NSA’s elite Equation Group https://medium.com/@shadowbrokerss/message-5-trick-or-treat-e43f946f93e6#.x2c36nsfq

#10yrsago Wells Fargo blackballed employees who refused to commit fraud, forcing them out of the industry forever https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/10/28/499805238/episode-732-bad-form-wells-fargo

#10yrsago Listen: free recordings of Edgar Allen Poe stories, read by Vincent Price and Basil Rathbone https://open.spotify.com/album/6xDmRcD6sgsGbDvBRpyH5H?play=true&utm_source=open.spotify.com&utm_medium=open

#10yrsago How Minnesota’s governor performed an economic miracle by raising tax on the rich and increasing minimum wage https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mark-dayton-minnesota-economy_b_6737786

#10yrsago Icelandic women walk off the job 14% early to protest 14% pay-gap https://www.teenvogue.com/story/women-iceland-protest-gender-wage-gap

#10yrsago Snowden to journalists: your best defense is legal limits on spying, not cryptography https://medium.com/global-editors-network/e-snowden-against-surveillance-journalists-engagement-more-efficient-than-encryption-dbfbacdf9463#.jd6u431fo

#10yrsago After North Carolina Republicans banned cities selling internet, a town decided to give it away instead https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/10/city-isp-makes-broadband-free-because-state-law-prohibits-selling-access/

#5yrsago LaserWriter II https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/29/norwegian-potato-flour-enchiladas/#r2r

#5yrsago Now, Put It Back! https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/31/now-put-it-back/

#1yrago The internet was made for privacy https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/31/losing-the-crypto-wars/#surveillance-monopolism

#1yrago When AI prophecy fails https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/29/worker-frightening-machines/#robots-stole-your-jerb-kinda

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: 504 (31359 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 28.10.2026 à 11:54

Pluralistic: Agents vs ecommerce (28 Oct 2026)


Today's links


A blasted, dark, cratered moonscape, dominated by an overturned shopping cart, which is being swarmed with killer robots from pulp magazines.

Agents vs ecommerce (permalink)

The first widely read piece of tech criticism I ever wrote was "Metacrap: Putting the torch to the seven strawmen of the meta-utopia," a response to the underlying philosophy of the "Semantic Web" that I published in 2001:

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

The piece holds up surprisingly well today (if I do say so myself), and not just for its criticism of the ontological incoherence of "web semantics." The most relevant concept I develop in that piece is a criticism of any plan that starts with "first, everyone else in the world just needs to set aside their needs and advantages in favor of my priorities, and then my plan will work."

This is especially relevant today in the context of "agentic AI." When this idea was first mooted, the big idea was that you could instruct a chatbot to venture out onto the public, unstructured web and it would do your bidding, for example, finding all the flights that fit your criteria and comparing prices for all of them, picking the best one and booking it for you.

This idea quickly foundered. Each step in that process was too complex and specialized for a single chatbot; so the notion quickly gave way to "swarms" of specialized chatbots – one to search the web and identify likely travel websites; one to search those websites; one to evaluate flights against your criteria, one to handle the transaction, and so on.

Through specialization, these bots could be made far more accurate, but at a price: both the literal price of all the extra computation that goes into powering a "swarm" versus a single process, and the reliability price that arises from complexity. That's because error rates are additive: combine two bots with low failure rates into a single system and that system will have a higher failure rate than any of its components. This compounding error rate only increases as you add more and more bots, so every time you add a new specialized bot to decrease the error rate in its area of specialization, you increase the overall error rate of the system by adding more complexity to it.

Despite this, companies pressed on ahead with "agentic," without any regard to the realities or consequences. For example, Microsoft has repeatedly announced that it will modify Windows to eliminate all forms of PC-side privacy and confidentiality, sending a continuous stream of screenshots to Microsoft's cloud servers so that your Microsoft "agent" can access your private data on Microsoft's cloud:

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

But the real fix for "agentic" is for everyone in the world to rearrange their affairs to the benefit of AI agents. This is the same demand that the Semantic Web people made in the early oughts, and it has the same problems. The Semantic Web people operated on the assumption that there were freestanding, objectively correct ways of describing things and that everyone who put information on the web would eventually come to see that adopting these correct semantics was to everyone's advantage.

In reality, these semantic differences are the expression of real, serious, unresolvable philosophical, technical, moral and political arguments. The reason that some media outlets won't describe trans women as women isn't because they lack an appreciation of objectively correct semantic classifications – it's because they're bigots. That's the same reason "race realists" insist that there is a biological category called "race," that exists despite everything computational genomics has proved:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/16/combat-wheelchairs/#race-realism

In my book The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, I predicted that a similar dynamic would play out when it came to agentic AI and websites. The reason websites are so inhospitable to bots is that ecommerce sites don't want to be legible to automated tools:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

Ecommerce websites deploy a wide range of sleazy tactics to raise prices, including surveillance pricing:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/07/gouged/#aeropain

They use market power to rig whole categories, forcing prices up:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/15/enshittipedia/

Multiple law-enforcers, Republic and Democrat, state and federal, have sued companies for "drip pricing" and "junk fees" that make it impossible to know what the actual price is until you've spent a long-ass time going through the purchase process:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/07/drip-drip-drip/#drip-off

Surveillance pricing, drip pricing, junk fees, price fixing and "most favored nation" deals are the source of all the growth in profitability by the economy's largest, most important firms. These tactics require opacity and are antithetical to the kinds of automated comparison-shopping that agentic peddlers promise:

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

These tactics are facially illegal and despite this, they are widely practiced. Cheating is so profitable that it's cheaper for firms to buy off regulators and pay fines than it is for them to stop criming. The fantasy that these same companies would welcome agentic shopping bots with open arms is just as implausible as the idea that if we feed enough words to the word-guessing program, it will wake up and become a "super intelligence":

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/18/surprise/#wow-signal

What's more, the AI companies know this. Google's big plan to make AI profitable is to sell merchants the power to combine its surveillance data with its AI tools to price-gouge shoppers:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/21/cod-marxism/#wannamaker-slain

And right on time, ecommerce websites are mass-blocking AI agents:

https://gizmodo.com/online-shopping-platforms-turn-against-third-party-ai-agents-2000831298

They're doing it in part because AI agents allow shoppers to cheat (for example, by renewing a "temporary" hold on a used item to block other buyers indefinitely), but also because they don't want automation tools on their platforms at all. These tools are a frontal assault on all the most exciting (and sleaziest) ways to make money in the waning hours of end-stage capitalism. Far from welcoming bots, ecommerce sites were always going to block them.

It's easy to come up with amazing applications for technology if you're allowed to assume that you can get everyone else in the world to set aside their priorities and their interests in favor of yours. But unless someone has a plan to do that, we shouldn't take them seriously.

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 Hack your Aibo https://web.archive.org/web/20010516005338/http://aibohack.com/

#20yrsago History of calculator watches https://watchismo.blogspot.com/2006/10/calculating-history-of-led-calculator.html

#15yrsago How Occupy has shifted the national debate https://www.salon.com/2011/10/27/the_victory_ows_has_already_won/

#15yrsago UK public reimbursed Margaret Thatcher was reimbursed for more than £500K in personal expenses https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2011/oct/28/margaret-thatcher-expenses-claim

#15yrsago Depression the Hyperbole and a Half way https://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2011/10/adventures-in-depression.html

#15yrsago Philippines president Duterte says God threatened to crash his plane if he didn’t stop swearing https://www.khaosodenglish.com/news/international/2016/10/28/duterte-says-god-told-stop-cursing/

#15yrsago Public safety codes are now free online for all https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/28/public-safety-codes-are-now-free-online-for-all/

#10yrsago Dr Seuss estate has crushed a kickstarter for a Seuss/Trek mashup https://web.archive.org/web/20170425161011/https://www.popehat.com/2016/10/26/popehat-signal-help-defend-a-seuss-trek-parody-under-fair-use/

#10yrsago Undercover with a prepper militia that patrols the border to fight “drug cartels” https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/undercover-border-militia-immigration-bauer/

#10yrsago The “Blacks for Trump” guy used to be in a murder cult https://web.archive.org/web/20161027133828/https://fusion.net/story/362459/blacks-for-trump-michael-the-black-man-yahweh-cult/

#5yrsago Europe's trustbusters lose the plot https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/28/clintons-ghost/#filternet

#5yrsago All of science gets a general index https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/28/clintons-ghost/#cornucopia-concordance

#5yrsago The new DRM-breaking exemptions just dropped https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/28/clintons-ghost/#felony-contempt-of-business-model

#1yrago Raymond Biesinger's "9 Times My Work Has Been Ripped Off" https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/28/productive-seething/#fuck-you-pay-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: 518 (30331 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

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection):

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

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

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 27.10.2026 à 10:08

Pluralistic: History is something you do (27 Oct 2026)


Today's links


A closeup of a roulette wheel at rest. The ball has been replaced with the planet Earth. A flying fist is jetting through the air at it and is about to knock it.

History is something you do (permalink)

Prediction is hard. Especially about the future. That Yogi Berra gem proves that you don't have to be a science fiction writer to get irritated with people insisting that you must know what's going to happen tomorrow, but (as a sf writer), I can tell you that this is one of our main occupational hazards.

Obviously, this is a self-inflicted injury. Our genre is full of big names who self-mythologized as scientific Nostradamuses. From the "future history" bar-charts in Heinlein's books (I was once on a panel with Robert Silverberg where he referred to RAH as "Robert A Timeline") to the McGuffin of Asimov's Foundation series: a "scientific" discipline that could predict the trajectory of human civilization for millennia into the future.

But me, I find the prospect of predicting the future incredibly dismal – even offensive. A predictable future is set in stone, immune to human agency. A predictable future runs on rails, and we're the prisoners of history, tied to the tracks.

For me, the most exciting thing about sf is the idea that the future is contingent. Sf is a long, sharp pin that can prick inevitabilism's bubble: that assertion by tech-bros and policymakers alike that the future is out of our hands and must be accommodated, not shaped. Inevitabilism is a form of vulgar Thatcherism, the assertion that "there is no alternative."

If The Market won't deliver an energy transition, and it leaves us to boil in our own skins, drown in the rising seas, and roast in wildfires, then tough shit humanity, there is no alternative. If there's a tech company eavesdropping on all of our communications technologies and following us as we move through digital and physical space (and turning the juiciest tidbits over to ICE), that's not the tech company's fault: there is no alternative. If some broadly useful statistical tools are delivered in the most climate-destroying, economy-wrecking, job-killing, quality-vaporizing way possible, that's just How It Is. It's not Sam Altman or Dario Amodei's fault: there is no alternative.

Science fiction can do more than imagine how "General AI" might change society: sf can imagine a society that doesn't make the fanciful leap from a word-guessing sentence-extruder to a machine god. Sf can imagine a world that debuts "AI" as a joint supercomputing project between the IPCC and Sandia National Labs whose primary purpose is to improve the fidelity of climate models, and whose spinoffs are modest but interesting open source tools that people run on regular computers with normal energy footprints.

Considered as a predictive literature, sf is a colossal failure. If our books are to be taken as roadmaps to an inevitable future, we have all flunked out of cartography school. More than 99.9% of these maps describe a territory that never emerged. All claims of sf's predictive value are just survivor bias, feats of Texas marksmanship in which we fire a shotgun into the side of a barn and then draw a target around the place where the holes cluster.

What's more likely: that sf is 99.9% fake fortune-tellers and 0.1% seers and soothsayers; or that the "predictions that came true" in sf are just the inevitable bullseyes that you'd score if you threw enough darts?

Prediction is a weak and helpless activity, the obsession of people who don't think they can change anything. It's the superstitious dread that gives rise to astrology. Far better to be a Luddite who asserts that there is more than one way to introduce a technology to a society. To be a Luddite is to insist that humans are in charge of humanity, not the iron laws of economics, not the great forces of history, not the uncaring and illusory constellations. At its best, sf is a proudly Luddite literature:

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/

The insistence that we can change things is an active posture. It's an activist posture. At its radical best, sf is activist, because it engages with more than what the machine does, insisting on changing who the machine does it for and who the machine does it to.

Which is why I find demands to offer predictions for the future so irritating. People who think that sf writers can predict the future have the field's role exactly backwards. My intention isn't to demoralize you into tying yourself to history's tracks – I'm here to show you how to grab the wheel and steer off the rails altogether.

The reason this seems so implausible is that the "there is no alternative" people have convinced us that all change is the result of individuals. To change the world, you must fashion yourself into one of history's mediocre Great Men, a Musk or Zuck. Our oligarchs are the avatars of the Great Forces of History. They have seen the predictable, inevitable future and have been allocated trillions by the capital markets to ensure that we arrive there on time, running straight down those shining rails, no matter how many people are tied to the tracks.

Another motif of Thatcherism (and hence inevitabilism) is that "there is no such thing as society," which means that all change is the result of individuals, which means that only Great Men can hope to change anything. If there is no such thing as society, then it follows that there's no such thing as mass movements, there's no such thing as trade unions, and there's no such thing as revolutions.

If there's no such thing as society, then eruptions of students and workers in the streets must be nothing more than mob violence – it can't possibly be a political eruption. If you're an inevitabilist then Occupy was nothing more than millions of individual "virtue signallers" and #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter were the individual follies of innumerable "social justice warriors."

As an activist, I'm not interested in predicting the future, I'm interested in changing it. When I speak about "the post-American internet" that we could create by exploiting the policy space that has been opened by Trump's incontinent belligerence, my intention is to get you to help build it, not to get you to prepare yourself for that inevitable outcome:

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

Obviously, some aspects of our future are locked in. The climate violence our political and business elites inflicted on the world locked in rising seas, extreme weather, habitat-loss driven zoonotic plagues and massive refugee crises. Those are inevitable. What's entirely up to us is what we do about them.

Do we create full employment for every person who will live for the next 300 years, relocating our coastal cities inland, treating the sick, retrofitting our infrastructure, and accommodating our neighbors who are driven out of their homes? Or do we let the stupidest, worst people among us lead us into the ecofascism of border walls, drone warfare, and exterminationism? That's our choice.

We've had generations of being told to "vote with our wallets" instead of organizing in political, labor and social movements. Voting with your wallet doesn't work (billionaires' wallets are thicker than yours, they win those votes), and if you lose enough of those wallet elections, it's easy to fall into the despair of believing that the future is inevitable:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/13/consumption-choices/#marginal-benefits

I think this is why "prediction markets" have caught on so ferociously. While prediction markets are sold as a way for people to "inject information" into markets, they are actually a rigged system that transfers money from everyday "investors" to insiders:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/24/degenerated-gambling/#oracle-capture

Prediction markets are the perfect pastime for history's prisoners. If you fancy yourself a plaything of the gods whose future is already written, then prediction markets are a way for you and your fellow prisoners to bet on what torments will come next. And of course oligarchs love prediction markets, because they're the ones who can rig the odds, say, by placing a bet on a war and then leading the country to that war.

They are the gods, the only ones who get to make history, so a market for bets on what history will do next is a way to enrich history's avatars at the expense of history's victims.

In science fiction, we often meet powerful aliens who tell us "resistance is futile" as they conquer our world and set about exterminating us. But if resistance was truly futile, no one would have to say it.

When they tell us "there is no alternative," what they mean is "stop trying to think of alternatives." To imagine radically is to move beyond the helplessness of prediction: a radical imagination dares to insist that history is what we make, not what happens to us.

(Image: Ralf Roletschek, CC BY-SA 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)

#15yrsago Canon of St Paul’s resigns over plans to evict Occupy London https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/27/giles-fraser-st-pauls-profile

#15yrsago Orange County city council unanimous: Occupy tents are a form of speech https://web.archive.org/web/20111029021151/http://www.occupy-oc.org/tears-stream-as-city-council-unanimously-agrees-occupy-tents-are-a-form-of-speech/

#15yrsago Edible Venn diagram: the piagram https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/g8nxo/i_realize_its_a_bit_late_for_pi_day_but_heres_my/

#15yrsago SOPA: US House of Reps copyright bill proposes national censorship, attacks on hosting services, Twitter, YouTube https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/10/disastrous-ip-legislation-back-–-and-it’s-worse-ever

#15yrsago Google rejects JWZ’s 2-step plan to end the nym wars https://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/10/google-nymwars-redux/

#15yrsago Toronto mayor confronted by comedy interviewer calls 911, reportedly shouts “You bitches! Don’t you fucking know? I’m Rob fucking Ford, the mayor of this city! https://www.joeydevilla.com/2011/10/27/im-rob-fucking-ford-or-the-mayor-the-ambush-and-the-911-call/

#15yrsago Canadian Tory MP: Don’t worry about violating our stupid new copyright law, because we probably won’t catch you if you do https://web.archive.org/web/20111029155739/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6089/125/

#10yrsago UK MPs realise that age filtering won’t work so now they just want to block all porn in the UK https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/now-we-want-censorship-the-digital-economy-bill-is-running-out-of-control/

#10yrsago Samsung abuses copyright to censor satirical exploding phone Grand Theft Auto mod https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/10/samsung-sets-its-reputation-fire-bogus-dmca-takedown-notices

#10yrsago EU lies and the British tabloids who told them https://web.archive.org/web/20160626051921/https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2016/06/daily-chart-15

#10yrsago The Pirate Party are poised to form Iceland’s government in Saturday’s election https://qz.com/817784/icelands-pirate-party-looks-likely-to-take-the-countrys-general-election-on-oct-29

#5yrsago Hospital rings up $2755 upcharge by sending pregnant woman to ER https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/27/crossing-a-line/#zero-fucks-given

#1yrago Shake Shack wants you to shit yourself to death https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/27/shit-shack/#binding-arbitration

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: 530 (29813 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

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection):

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

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

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 26.10.2026 à 16:47

Pluralistic: Sovereign citizens, but for news (26 Oct 2026)


Today's links

  • Sovereign citizens, but for news: By reading the LA Times, you agree…
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Patenting tax dodges; 6-word sf; Newscorp shareholders v Murdoch; Ancient German ophthalmology cult; Trolley problem is stupid; Trump's influence peddling to Chinese millionaire; Al Franken v binding arbitration; Yoga pants spite parade; Dems' secret Congressional committee; RIAA v your PC; "Going Under"; "Machine Man"; Aging goths; "Everfair"; Kremlin will destabilize Ukraine; FCC fronts for Big Cable; Straight Outta Vagina; Remixed TED Talk about remixing; Authoritarian debt.
  • Upcoming appearances: Vienna, Kilkenny, Courtenay, Vancouver, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Montreal.
  • Recent appearances: Where I've been.
  • Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Colophon: All the rest.


The original Art Deco LA Times building. Draped over it is a fringed naval flag. Superimposed over the building is the text of the LAT's outrageous dickover 'consent' dialog.

Sovereign citizens, but for news (permalink)

When it comes to terrible practices by website operators, it takes a lot to shock me. I literally wrote the book on the subject. But last night, I encountered a piece of genuinely appalling fuckery and I can't get it out of my head, because it's such a perfect storm of outrageous conduct and institutional decay.

It happened when I followed a link to an LA Times article. Having lived in LA three times (and having been an Angeleno for a decade and counting this time around) I generally have warm feelings for the Times. The Times's Festival of Books is a great event that I speak at most years, and I'm broadly happy to have a daily newspaper covering my city.

That said, the Times has been chipping away at my goodwill for the past decade. First, there's the personal: after a Festival of Books appearance some years ago, the books editor approached me and asked if I'd contribute regular book reviews to the paper. I said yes, and then immediately my editor got laid off, reportedly so they could avoid giving him benefits that would come with seniority.

I wrote several reviews for a new editor, though the paper never sent me a contract for any of them – or a payment! Many months (and published reviews) later, an editor I'd never had contact with at the paper got in touch to get the paperwork squared away, and the Times sent me a contract with broad, one-sided language that I would never sign onto.

Given that they'd already published my work, there wasn't much they could do to make me sign the contract, so, after quite a lot of wrangling, I eventually got the offensive clauses removed and got paid (but I never got invited to write another review for them).

To be honest, this is par for the course. The last time the New York Times asked me to write for them, they refused to remove some similar clauses from their contract (something they'd done previously), and the contracts person just ghosted me after a couple of volleys.

A similar thing happened with the Washington Post the last time I wrote for them, except they (like the LAT) published the work and then sent me a one-sided, manifestly unfair contract that I refused to sign. Given they'd already published the op-ed there wasn't anything they could do about it, so eventually I got a better contract and a payment (and again, that was the last time the Post asked me to write for them).

Basically, there's an epidemic of bad legal terms sweeping the American media industry, and while the LA Times isn't the worst offender (at least they didn't ask me to assign any related patents, trademarks and copyrights to fictional characters, as Conde Nast does!), they're not what you'd call "writer-friendly" in their contracting terms.

But again, that's hardly unique. If I disqualified news outlets because they tried to shift liability to, and grab rights from, their writers, I'd be left with damned few media outlets.

But on the editorial side, the Times has a bunch of billionaire-shaped red flags. The paper's owner is the Trump-allied, severely AI-pilled biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, whose editorial interference in the Times is comparable to Bezos's interference in the Post. Like Bezos, Soon-Shiong killed the paper's endorsement for Kamala Harris:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/26/us/los-angeles-times-endorsement-soon-shiong.html

And I have my suspicions that Soon-Shiong might have been behind the layoff that killed Brian Merchant's beat as the country's first technology critic, from which perch Merchant published some acerbic, well-reasoned criticism of tech billionaires and AI:

https://talkingbiznews.com/media-news/ex-la-times-tech-columnist-merchant-joining-ai-now-institute/

Again, that's not disqualifying. If I boycotted every newspaper owned by a reprehensible billionaire, I'd have to turn my back on e.g. the NYT with its morbidly wealthy, union-busting owners:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/new-york-times-illegally-busted-union-campaign-national-labor-relations-board-alleges/

But unlike the NYT, the LA Times has followed the playbook of Alden Capital papers (like the Chicago Tribune), shipping a skinnier paper with less original reporting at a higher price (which is why I canceled my subscription):

https://archive.is/hOhpu

But even that isn't disqualifying. Like the Tribune, the LAT still employs dedicated, talented reporters who do excellent work, which is how I came to be following a link to a recent article yesterday…and how I came to find myself confronted by an enshittificatory gambit that shocked even me.

Here's what got me: when I visited the Times, I got a dickover that blocked all the content on the page until I clicked "Continue," and the text of that dickover is a breathtaking piece of enshittified legal fuckery:

By continuing, you agree to our Terms of Service, which include arbitration and a class action waiver, and our Privacy Policy. You agree that we and our third-party vendors may collect and use your information, including through cookies, pixels and similar technologies, for the purposes set forth in our Privacy Policy such as personalizing your experience and ads.

This is wildly illegal and incredibly immoral. The paper claims that by simply reading an article, you agree that you can never, ever sue them for virtually any reason, and that you have consented to effectively unlimited surveillance and commercial exploitation of your private data.

It's hard to overstate how dangerous this kind of binding arbitration waiver is, but to give one example: Disney makes people who sign up for free trials of Disney Plus "consent" to one of these waivers. When a woman was killed by a Disney World restaurant that lied about the allergens in its food, the company told a judge that her grieving widower couldn't sue them because he'd waived that right by signing up for a trial of D+:

https://lawreview.missouri.edu/infinite-arbitration-how-one-click-can-take-you-out-of-court-forever/

The company later backed off for that one specific case, but subsequently doubled down on binding arbitration. By putting an arbitration clause in its terms, the LAT could head off my right to sue them if they stiffed me on those reviews I wrote for them, Brian Merchant's right to sue them for wrongful termination, and your right to sue them if you get run over by a newspaper delivery van.

Then there's the privacy clause: the LAT is a California paper, and in California, we have the CCPA, a reasonably good privacy law. Under the CCPA, privacy waivers have to be explicit, informed and can be withdrawn at any time. What's more, the CCPA has broad prohibitions against "dark patterns" that this dickover almost certainly violates:

https://cppa.ca.gov/announcements/2024/20240904.html

In theory, there's a way to avoid all of this: you could just use the "Kill Sticky" bookmarklet or an adblock filter to block or dismiss the dickover without ever clicking "continue":

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/21/dickovers/#block-element

But this is an industrial strength dickover; it uses advanced tricks to block existing dickover killers, likely a combination of shadow DOM and an "important" scroll-lock in the html.

Like I say, this shocks the conscience. Under this standard, the Times's reporters could find themselves bound to legal "agreements" with the companies they investigate online that could interfere with their reporting. Just as bad is how these illegal measures mislead the Times's readership on two of the most important consumer issues facing Californians (and all internet users) today.

As Jargoggles points out, this is the corporate version of the bizarre nonsense that Sovereign Citizens gabble at cops when they get pulled over for driving with a special "sheriff's license plate," and at judges to insist that they lack jurisdiction due to the tassels on the courtroom flag:

https://kolektiva.social/@jargoggles/117503729678727400

A newspaper's job is to inform its readership, not mislead it.

The very idea that everyone who reads a single article on a newspaper's website "consents" to an 8,865-word privacy policy (that would take 53-67 minutes to read according to Firefox's "Reader Mode" estimate) is a bad joke:

https://www.latimes.com/privacy-policy

The joke gets even worse when you add in the 7,103-word Terms of Service (estimated read: 41-50 minutes):

https://www.latimes.com/terms-of-service

So what can you do? Well, you can use this uBlock filter that blocks the dickover without setting the LAT's "consent" cookie to "1":

latimes.com##+js(trusted-set, window.ctUser, { "loggedIn": true, "ready": true, "subStatus": "1" })

https://infosec.exchange/@deFractal/117505049281552873

If you're a Californian, you can file a complaint with the California Privacy Protection Agency:

https://cppa.ca.gov/webapplications/complaint

As Don Marti points out, businesses dealing with Californians are legally required to acknowledge and honor the Global Privacy Control signal from your browser:

https://federate.social/@dmarti/117504985464483210

Here's an ambitious countermove. Buried in that 7,103-word terms of service is this gem: you can opt out of the binding arbitration within 30 days of "agreeing" to it by sending an email to termsofservice@latimes.com with the subject line "MANDATORY ARBITRATION AND CLASS ACTION WAIVER OPT-OUT". Someone could build a browser mod that automatically sends that email to the company whenever you land on an latimes.com page. You could even include my all-purpose email footer:

By reading this email, 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.

All of this is fun to contemplate, but it's hardly enough. It should be illegal for a company to knowingly offer unenforceable contracting terms, especially in its non-negotiable, boilerplate contracts. It's already illegal for California companies to put noncompete clauses in their contracts. In other words, noncompetes aren't just unenforceable in California, they're illegal, and we should extend that prohibition (with sanctions for noncompliant firms and their general counsels) to privacy and arbitration:

https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bonta-issues-consumer-alert-reminding-california-workers-their

Because the LAT isn't the only news outlet that's engaged in this kind of illegal, immoral, conscience-shocking, dickover-delivered enshittification. It's also SOP at Bloomberg:

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:kaagvvv22ki4ccsymevrpfxk/bafkreia4yxewg2chpwgki3ftzq7fnl7s454efx5oev6h6siqlsnenrjpe4

These gambits are infectious, and they're spreading. Time to bend the curve.

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 RIAA denies asking for criminal immunity for hacking your computer https://memex.craphound.com/2001/10/26/remember-when-the-riaa-tried/

#20yrsago Big Mac pumpkin https://web.archive.org/web/20061031170037/http://bitsandpieces1.blogspot.com/2006/10/big-mac-pumpkin.html

#20yrsago Going Under: moving kids’ novel https://memex.craphound.com/2006/10/26/going-under-moving-kids-novel/

#20yrsago Accountants patent tax-dodges https://web.archive.org/web/20061029080957/http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/10/19/business/norris20.php

#20yrsago 6-word sf stories https://web.archive.org/web/20061109183215/https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/sixwords.html

#15yrsago Using machine translation techniques to attack ciphers reveals secrets of ancient German ophthalmology cult https://web.archive.org/web/20111025035607/http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/people/copiale-11.pdf

#15yrsago The Homeland Directive: taut technothriller for the paranoid era https://memex.craphound.com/2011/10/25/the-homeland-directive-taut-technothriller-for-the-paranoid-era/

#15yrsago NewsCorp shareholders revolt against Murdoch family https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/may/08/rupert-murdoch-news-corporation

#15yrsago One-percenter: why I support Occupy https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2011/10/21/1028500/community/A-Voice-From-the-1/

#15yrsago Debunking the OccupyLondon “empty tents” story https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/oct/25/occupy-london-part-time-protest

#15yrsago Machine Man: a discomfiting novel about the antihuman side of transhumanism https://memex.craphound.com/2011/10/26/machine-man-a-discomfiting-novel-about-the-antihuman-side-of-transhumanism/

#15yrsago Goths age gracefully https://www.theguardian.com/education/2011/oct/24/goth-culture-research

#10yrsago Everfair: a diverse, ambitious steampunk novel of Fabian socialists and American Black Zionists in Belgian Congo https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/26/everfair-a-diverse-ambitious-steampunk-novel-of-fabian-socialists-and-american-black-zionists-in-belgian-congo/

#10yrsago Leaked Kremlin memos reveal plan to destabilize Ukraine https://globalvoices.org/2016/10/25/hackers-publish-kremlin-aides-e-mails-allege-plan-to-destabilize-ukraine/

#10yrsago When the FCC asked about unlocking set-top boxes, the Copyright Office ran to the MPAA https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/10/newly-released-documents-show-hollywood-influenced-copyright-offices-comments-set

#10yrsago Pussy Riot’s “Straight Outta Vagina”: sacrelicious Russian feminist pop anthem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bp-KeVBNz0A

#10yrsago TED talk about remixes and appropriating made by remixing and appropriating TED talks about remixing and appropriating https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLlbzI5HURM

#10yrsago Warner Bros angry that someone other than the MPAA is running an illegal internal movie server https://torrentfreak.com/warner-bros-claims-agency-ran-its-own-pirate-movie-site-161025/

#10yrsago AT&T developed a “product” for spying on all its customers and made millions selling it to warrantless cops https://web.archive.org/web/20170504105645/https://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/10/25/at-t-is-spying-on-americans-for-profit

#10yrsago Lawsuit: mayor’s social media blocklists are public records https://www.techdirt.com/2016/10/24/pinac-director-sues-miami-beach-mayor-over-refusal-to-release-social-media-blocklists/

#10yrsago EFF asks court to let American sue Ethiopia for hacking his computer and rounding up his friends https://www.eff.org/press/releases/american-illegally-wiretapped-home-ethiopian-government-deserves-his-day-court-eff

#10yrsago Donald Trump’s super PAC promised a Chinese millionaire access, influence in exchange for a secret $2 million donation https://web.archive.org/web/20161024192242/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/24/exclusive-investigation-donald-trump-faces-foreign-donor-fundrai/

#10yrsago Al Franken and FCC commissioner Clyburn want limits on forced arbitration https://time.com/4541176/al-franken-arbitration-clauses/?iid=sr-link1

#10yrsago Mercedes’ weird “Trolley Problem” announcement continues stupid debate about self-driving cars https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/25/mercedes-weird-trolley-problem-announcement-continues-dumb-debate-about-self-driving-cars/

#10yrsago When Californians vote on legal weed, they’ll also vote on wiping millions of arrest records https://web.archive.org/web/20161027161505/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/california-to-vote-on-wiping-old-weed-arrests

#10yrsago Dickhead’s anti-yoga-pants letter to the editor sparks yoga-pants-parade https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37751422

#10yrsago RIP science fiction great Sheri Tepper https://locusmag.com/2016/10/sheri-s-tepper-1929-2016/

#5yrsago The Dems' most secret Congressional committee https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/25/people-do-stuff/#personnel-are-policy

#5yrsago Maxing out our global credit-card with authoritarian debt https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/26/inequality-and-guard-labor/#just-watch-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: 547 (29282 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.

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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 23.10.2026 à 22:44

Pluralistic: Critique and writing (23 Oct 2026)


Today's links

  • Critique and writing: The most important part of a writing workshop is trying to fix other people's stories.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: USPS nukes the mail; Enron Explorer; "Scored"; UAE's international hacker legion; NZ provides hacking tools to torturers; Truecrypt insecure; The Traitorous Eight.
  • Upcoming appearances: Vancouver, Ottawa, Vienna, Kilkenny, Courtenay, Vancouver, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Montreal.
  • 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 vast field of complicated machinery composed of many-times-overlaid 19th century printing presses. Caught in these gears are several figures who are all writing - a bearded Greek in a loincloth, a severe doge, a grande dame, a lady upon her settee, a recording angel, two drunken clerks at a table, a tormented poet in a wig. Invading the scene is a many-tentacled pulp robot.

Critique and writing (permalink)

Through my own writing life, nothing has done more to improve my writing than diligent participation in peer-based workshops; that's where a group of writers, all at about the same stage in their artistic development, gather to read one another's work and offer feedback specifically aimed at improving each other's stories.

This is a deceptively simple exercise, and the reasons it works so well are quite counter-intuitive. The most obvious benefit is the way that a workshop encourages you to write at all. When you're at the start of your writing career, you are almost totally reliant upon your own internal self-discipline to keep producing.

Acquiring that self-discipline is infinitely valuable, but it's also incredibly hard. Being part of a group of writers who expect you to regularly turn in new work adds a very useful bit of external motivation that augments your still nascent self-discipline. Knowing you have to turn in a story for the group by Friday can get you in gear when you feel discouraged or blocked.

Before you're getting published regularly (or at all), your critiquing circle might be the only source of validation you get for your work, so the knowledge that you're in for that validation if you get that story in on time is a great motivator. But this is where the counter-intuitive part comes in: as great as it feels to be the center of your peers' attention and to get close feedback on the work you sweated over, that's not the real value you get from a writing workshop, at least not at the start of your career.

Your peers' critiques can help you fix weaknesses in your story, and even teach you a little about how to avoid those weaknesses in future work. You might get feedback that turns an unpublishable story into a published one. But the point of a writing workshop isn't merely to make your stories better – it's to make you better at writing stories.

That's where critiquing other writers' stories comes in. The process of reading and re-reading someone else's imperfect work and devoting real mental energy to figuring out what's not working in it and how to fix it is how you develop the creative instincts that allow you to automatically and unconsciously avoid pitfalls and make breakthroughs in your own work.

Even if none of the feedback you offer is ever incorporated into the story you're critiquing, the act of preparing and delivering that critique is the most reliable fast-track to becoming a better writer yourself. There's something very valuable in the combination of thinking critically, being exposed to other workshop members' ideas about the story under discussion, and working with source material that you can look at with more objectivity because it didn't come out of your own head.

I bring all this up because I've now heard from a few beginning writers who tell me that they're finding LLMs to be good editorial feedback generators. They value the editorial suggestions they get from a chatbot after they finish their work, and use it to help them with a new draft. Without commenting on whether I think LLM feedback is editorially useful (I certainly wouldn't ever ask a chatbot for that kind of feedback), I want to point out that when it comes to improving your writing, getting editorial notes on your work is distinctly inferior to offering criticism of other writers' work.

The reality is that when you're starting out as a writer, the vast majority of work you produce will be artistically unsalvageable. The much-vaunted "million words of crap" you write on the way to becoming a publishable writer are about learning to marry technique to artistic vision and to sharpen both. Getting editorial feedback that helps you shore up the weakest spots in a story that is ultimately never published and constitutes a learning exercise has value, but it has far less value than applying the things you've learned from making and fixing those mistakes to your next story.

With vanishingly few exceptions, a commercially and artistically successful writer isn't someone who writes one great story or novel: a writing career is defined by a body of work, which means that you have to do more than rewrite. You have to write the next thing, and the next thing, and the next.

Having an editor-on-demand of highly variable (and often dubious) quality might help you improve your writing, but it's no substitute for participating in a peer workshop. The idea that an LLM might be able to stand in for a workshop is grounded in the fallacy that the point of a workshop is to have people tell you how to fix your story, rather than analyzing other people's writing in order to develop your own critical skills.

Look: it's a cliche to say "every writer is different," but I really believe that every writer is different, and that's down to the legibility of the writing process to other writers. If you're a painter or sculptor or other visual artist, you've likely spent many hours in a studio with many other practitioners while all of you work from the same life model or still life. If you're a musician, you've almost certainly played music with other musicians. If you're a dancer, you've definitely danced with other dancers.

But writers get precious little exposure to other writers' process. At best we might look at each other's drafts. A musician can listen to every note another musician produces while riffing or composing a new work or interpreting a work. Writers don't get to watch words emerge from each other's fingertips. Being observed that closely while you write would be ghastly and paralyzingly invasive.

I've taught a lot of writers over the years and I've had many discussions with my peers about their writing process, and I'm here to tell you that pretty much every writer finds every other writer's process baffling. We each of us invent an idiosyncratic process for ourselves that will never fully work for anyone else.

So if you value editorial feedback from a chatbot (ideally, a local one running on your computer and not one of the "foundation models" that are torching the planet and elevating the worst people on earth to positions of political, technical and commercial prominence), that's fine, you do you.

But even if that's the case, I still want you to know that whatever you're getting out of the chatbot is fundamentally different, and (I believe) much less useful than participating in a peer workshop.

That's what I wanted to say today, but I predict that an appreciable number of readers are about to email me to ask how these "peer workshops" work. There's a ton of variability in how these are conducted, but the basic shape of them is that in advance of each session, one or more writers submits a finished work to the other writers, who then read through the manuscript at least twice, making notes that include both minor copyedits and broader, thematic notes. They may write a brief editorial response as well, ranging from a paragraph to a couple of pages.

Then the workshop convenes. Each writer briefly expresses their views about the story under consideration, focusing on those thematic and structural notes on what worked and didn't work in the story, with suggestions for improving the latter. You don't need to point out every typo – they're noted on the manuscript. Critiquers don't need to repeat one another. If another workshop member says the thing you were planning to say, you can just say "Ditto what so-and-so said about whatever." If you have nothing to add when your turn comes about, it's fine to pass.

Those are pretty much universal characteristics of a peer workshop. Here are some variations that I am dogmatically committed to, but which other workshoppers might disagree with:

  • Every writer should submit regularly to the workshop. There is a serious risk that attending a workshop can become a substitute for actually writing. It is no kindness to your workshopmates to let them stay in the circle if it leads them to stop writing.

  • The subject of each session must not speak during the critiques, except to answer direct questions that are not related to the writing itself (e.g., "I couldn't figure out what word this was supposed to be – can you clarify?"). The subject can speak after all the other writers have spoken.

  • Each person in the critiquing circle speaks once, in turn, without being interrupted. No cross-talk allowed. It is useful to set a time-limit for critiques.

  • No partial manuscripts. It's not really possible to critique a story unless you have the complete tale. Novels can be workshopped as three chapters and an outline.

  • Stories should be distributed in advance and read in advance. Don't have writers read their work aloud for critique, as this can lead to critiquing the delivery rather than the material.

  • Critique the story, not the writer. It's fine to be offended by something in the story, but not OK to accuse your workshopmates of being bad people for having offended you.

  • Discourage resubmission of revised stories. Workshopping produces sharply diminishing returns. If you really want feedback on a rewrite, approach people individually and ask if they'll read the new draft.

Any group of three or more writers can start a workshop. You'll need to locate writers who are at about the same stage in their artistic and professional lives as you, and find a physical place (or a videoconference service) where you can meet. Library meeting rooms are a favorite, and so is rotating between workshop members' homes. Set a regular schedule – weekly, fortnightly, monthly, possibly quarterly – and stick to it.

If you write genre fiction and you are interested in attending a peer workshop that also has an instructor to guide the sessions, lecture, set exercises, etc, I can recommend the three workshops I've taught:

  • Clarion (UC San Diego, six weeks):

https://clarion.ucsd.edu/ (I'm also a 1992 Clarion grad)

  • Clarion West (Seattle, six weeks):

https://www.clarionwest.org/

  • Viable Paradise (Martha's Vineyard, one week):

https://viableparadise.com/

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 UK anti-terror laws could bankrupt ISPs https://web.archive.org/web/20011118143634/http://www.vnunet.com/News/1126338

#25yrsago What's an "iPod?" https://web.archive.org/web/20011024015856/http://www.apple.com/ipod/

#25yrsago Bible, Koran or Mein Kampf? https://web.archive.org/web/20011109123124/http://www.salon.com/people/feature/2001/10/24/book_quiz/index.html

#25yrsago Tongan court jester scam costs king millions https://web.archive.org/web/20011224034152/http://pidp.eastwestcenter.org/pireport/2001/October/10-23-01.htm

#25yrsago USPS irradiating the mail to fight anthrax attacks https://web.archive.org/web/20011109100316/http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991468

#20yrsago Enron Explorer mines Enron’s emails https://web.archive.org/web/20061106204850/http://enron.trampolinesystems.com/

#20yrsago Investigative journal: “Fair use is not applicable” https://archive.blogs.harvard.edu/shlep/2006/10/23/whaddayaknow-about-fair-use-and-copyright/

#20yrsago Warners stiffs African amputee film extras on prosthetics promise https://web.archive.org/web/20061105004400/http://www.nypost.com/seven/10232006/gossip/pagesix/pagesix.htm

#20yrsago Former FCC Chairman shills against Net Neutrality https://web.archive.org/web/20061028043416/http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/003577.shtml

#15yrsago Plotting advice for fiction writers http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/013243.html

#15yrsago DARPA wants vampire satellites to harvest parts from dead sats prior to decommissioning https://web.archive.org/web/20111022223128/http://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Releases/2011/10/20.aspx

#15yrsago Understanding the hyperrich through the lens of tomorrow’s history http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/10/a-cultural-experiment.html

#15yrsago Scored: pulse-pounding/thought-provoking YA novel about surveillance https://memex.craphound.com/2011/10/24/scored-pulse-pounding-thought-provoking-ya-novel-about-surveillance/

#10yrsago UAE surveillance contractor is recruiting an army of foreign hackers to break into its citizens’ devices https://web.archive.org/web/20161024141138/https://theintercept.com/2016/10/24/darkmatter-united-arab-emirates-spies-for-hire/

#10yrsago Publicly-funded NZ company sold mass surveillance tech to torturers and GCHQ https://web.archive.org/web/20161023101410/https://theintercept.com/2016/10/23/endace-mass-surveillance-gchq-governments/

#10yrsago RIP, Tom Hayden: Yippie, radical, politician, author https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-37749127

#10yrsago Audit reveals significant vulnerabilities in Truecrypt and its successors https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2016/10/18/veracrypt-security-audit/

#5yrsago Cyber-mercenaries helped Saudis hack an NYT reporter https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/24/breaking-the-news/#kingdom

#5yrsago The Traitorous Eight and the Battle of Germanium Valley https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/24/the-traitorous-eight-and-the-battle-of-germanium-valley/

#1yrago Checking in on the state of Amazon's chickenized reverse-centaurs https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/23/traveling-salesman-solution/#pee-bottles

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

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)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 550 (28730 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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