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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 28.04.2026 à 07:57

Pluralistic: Vicky Osterweil's "The Extended Universe" (28 Apr 2026)


Today's links


The Haymarket Books cover for Vicky Osterweil's 'The Extended Universe.'

Vicky Osterweil's "The Extended Universe" (permalink)

Vicky Osterweil's The Extended Universe: How Disney Killed the Movies and Took Over the World makes the kind of long, polemical, startling and illuminating argument that defines great cultural criticism; it's the sort of book that encapsulates the reasons I read criticism in the first place:

https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2525-the-extended-universe

My first brush with this kind of criticism came more than two decades ago, when I read John Kessel's now-classic "Creating the Innocent Killer," a critique of Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, a book I had read and enjoyed enough to re-read several times:

https://johnjosephkessel.wixsite.com/kessel-website/creating-the-innocent-killer

Kessel's argument is that Card used Ender's Game to smuggle in some very ugly ideas, wrapped in a story that was compelling, even exhilarating. In Ender's Game, we meet Andrew "Ender" Wiggin, a small, physically weak boy possessed of a prodigious intellect and a great deal of sensitivity and empathy. Ender is tormented by an escalating series of aggressors, whom he retaliates against with overwhelming force, first to the point of lethality and then all the way to literal genocide. And here's where Card makes his move: Ender's sensitivity and empathy and intellect tell him that he must respond this way, because he can tell that his aggressors will not back off from their intention to harm him; and because Ender is so small and weak, he has to use whatever tactic his brilliant mind can devise, and if that tactic results in the death penalty for mere bullying, well, that's the bully's fault, not Ender's. Indeed, in dying at Ender's hands, these bullies re-victimize Ender, because Ender is a gentle, smart, wise, weak person, and these inescapable murders that he is goaded into committing are a stain on his soul that he can never wash away.

Before reading "Creating the Innocent Killer," I confess I didn't really understand what criticism was for. Like many people, I conflated "criticism" with "reviews," thinking of critical works as a species of inconveniently difficult-to-digest essays that might help me figure out which books to read and which movies to see.

Kessel's magnificent essay changed all that, and not in spite of the fact that Kessel had pointed out some very important problems with a book that I loved, but because of that fact. In helping me understand the ugliness hidden within something whose beauty and virtues I saw very clearly, Kessel taught me more about myself – about where my aesthetics and my values overlapped, and where they diverged. It was literally life-changing.

Like Kessel, Osterweil's 'Extended Universe' deals with media that I have a great deal of affection for – the products of the Walt Disney Company. Though I'm primarily interested in theme parks – I love a big, ambitious built environment of any description and Disney pursues these with a seriousness that few others can touch – the Disney films (and the films of the studios Disney purchased, like Marvel and Lucasfilm) are obviously intimately bound up in those theme park designs.

Osterweil has her own ambivalent affection for these movies. Like so many of us, she's been raised on them, and they've shaped how she sees the world and its stories. But – like me – Osterweil is deeply suspicious of capitalism, American imperialism, and the notion of "intellectual property," and she uses reviews of a dozen Disney films to make the case that Walt Disney and the studio he founded with his brother are standards-bearers for these odious forces, and not just in the overt ways that might immediately spring to mind, but also in subtle ways that can be teased out of a close reading of the films.

In so doing, Osterweil also makes a sharp and well-argued case that intellectual property, colonialism and racial oppression are all facets of the same drive, the drive of people who fancy themselves born to rule to dominate others, which requires that those others also be dehumanized and their work denigrated. When Walt Disney insisted that his be the only name associated with "his" movies, he was playing out the same logic that underpinned his virulent opposition to labor unions and his participation in American imperialism in Latin America.

As with Kessel, Osterweil's argument is full of surprises and illuminations that are especially vivid for those of us who have great affection for these works. As her chapter on Black Panther shows, this contradiction need not go unresolved. There is plenty of scope for fans to seize the reins of the narrative (and as her chapter on the reactionary backlash to the later Star Wars movies shows, it's not just the forces of progress and anti-racism who can pull off this move).

Like the very best criticism, Osterweil's book is more than a way to deepen your understanding of the material she dissects – it's a way to deepen your understanding of the world that produced it, and to deepen your understanding of yourself.

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 Frank Zappa’s anti-censorship letter https://www.flickr.com/photos/mudshark/117551768/in/set-72057594090059726/

#15yrsago Chemistry kit with no chemicals https://web.archive.org/web/20110427212354/http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/04/chemistry-set-boasts-no-chemicals.html

#15yrsago Russian corruption: crooked officials steal multi-billion-dollar company, $230M tax refund, then murder campaigning lawyer https://web.archive.org/web/20110426045152/http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/20/russia_s_crime_of_the_century?

#15yrsago Golden-age short-change cons https://web.archive.org/web/20110429014539/https://blog.modernmechanix.com/2011/04/26/tricks-of-short-change-artists/

#10yrsago Campaigners search Londoners’ phones to help them understand the Snoopers Charter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szN7DlmMLYg

#10yrsago Mitsubishi’s dieselgate: cheating since 1991 https://web.archive.org/web/20160427145038/https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/mitsubishi-cheated-fuel-economy-tests-since-1991/#ftag=CAD590a51e

#10yrsago Bellwether: Connie Willis’s classic, hilarious novel about the science of trendiness https://memex.craphound.com/2016/04/26/bellwether-connie-williss-classic-hilarious-novel-about-the-science-of-trendiness/

#5yrsago The Big U https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/26/moolah-boolah/#poison-ivies

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

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

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 27.04.2026 à 10:39

Pluralistic: The enshittification multiverse (27 Apr 2026)


Today's links

  • The enshittification multiverse: It's a useful analogy.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Every complex ecosystem has parasites; Prison for "attempted infringement"; When We Were Robots in Egypt; Golfing in The Blitz; Copyright vs privacy (NZ edn); GOP support for pedophile Hastert; EFF's music license; RIP Jane Jacobs; California is fanfic; DMCA v medical implants; "Burglar's Guide to the City"; Flaming river; Fantasy accounting.
  • Upcoming appearances: Berlin, NYC, Barcelona, Hay-on-Wye, London, NYC.
  • 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.


Space, awash in nebulae; a receding line of vast Enshittification poop emojis curves away to infinity, each mouth covered in a grawlix-scrawled black bar.

The enshittification multiverse (permalink)

It's official: you have my consent and enthusiastic blessing to apply "enshittification" to things that aren't digital platforms! Semantic drift is good, actually:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/#this-toilet-has-no-central-nervous-system

With that out of the way, let's talk about how enshittification can be usefully applied to gambits that worsen something in order to shift value from the users of that thing to the person doing the worsening.

Here's the crux: in life, there are many zero-sum situations in which others' pain is your profit. The most basic example of this is profit margins: as your profit margin climbs, so do the prices paid by others. The more money a customer gives you for whatever you're selling, the less money that customer has to spend on other things they want.

This is the fatal flaw in the economist's justification for surveillance pricing (when the price you're quoted is based on surveillance data about the urgency of your needs and your ability to pay): a seller who commands higher prices from a buyer deprives other sellers of that buyer's money.

The airline that knows you can't miss a funeral and also knows how much purchasing power is available on your credit card can charge you every cent you can afford – but that means that the coffee shop owner who normally sells you a latte in the morning will lose out on your business for months while you dig yourself out of that hole.

Tim Wu has a good example of this: imagine a world in which electricity utilities were unregulated and got to charge "market rates" for their products. Prior to the current wave of cheap, efficient solar, electrical power was a "natural monopoly." In nearly every circumstance, a given person would end up with just one source of power, and life without power was nearly unimaginable. In that situation, the power company's "rational" decision would be to charge you everything you could afford for the least electricity you could survive on: enough to keep your fridge and a few lights on. That means that you would be deprived of the value of, say, a clock radio and a coffee-maker, and the manufacturers of the clock radio and the coffee-maker would likewise suffer the loss of your business.

So the "monopoly" part is key to this story. The more alternatives you have, the harder it is to squeeze you on prices. Airport concessionaires can charge $12 for a Coke on the "clean" side of a TSA checkpoint because realistically you can't leave the airport and get a Coke elsewhere – and if you do, you can't bring it through the checkpoint.

Any source of lock-in becomes an invitation to shift value away from your customers and suppliers to yourself. High "switching costs" are always a precondition for enshittification – otherwise the people you're trying to enshittify will simply take their business elsewhere:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

That's why market concentration is so central to the enshittification story: when the number of competitors in a sector dwindles to a cartel (or a duopoly or a monopoly) companies find it easy to fix prices so there's no point in shopping around, and they can capture their regulators and harness the power of the state to block other companies from entering the market with a better deal:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/05/small-government/

Now that we understand the role that switching costs, regulatory capture, and market concentration play in enshittification, let's put them together to propose a framework for applying enshittification to things other than digital platforms:

Enshittification happens when someone sets out to reduce your choices, and then uses that lock-in to make things worse for you in order to make things better for themself.

Note that this definition requires a degree of intent. Enshittification isn't just bargaining hard when you find yourself in a position of strength. It's what happens when you set out to systematically weaken other people's bargaining position in anticipation of a future opportunity to fuck them over in order to improve your own situation.

So if the business lobby bribes Republican state legislators to pass "right to work" laws that make it nearly impossible for workers to unionize, and then the businesses involved worsen their workers' pay and conditions, we can call that enshittification. If they can bind workers to noncompete "agreements" that make it illegal for the cashier at Wendy's to get $0.25/h more at the McDonald's, that's even more enshittifying:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/10/zero-sum-zero-hours/#that-sounds-like-a-you-problem

Or if shitty men lobby to end anti-discrimination laws (making it much harder for a single woman to survive on her paycheck) and to end no-fault divorce (to make it much harder for a woman to leave the husband she marries to survive in a world where it's legal to discriminate against her in the workplace), in anticipation of being able to be a shitty husband without losing their wives, they are enshittifying marriage (applying this to the effort to kill the concept of "marital rape" is left as an exercise for the reader).

This can also be applied to politics. Restrictions on immigration and out-migration are both preludes to state enshittification, since a population that can't leave for another state will, on average, put up with more abuse from their political classes without leaving. Tying your work visa to your employer is very enshittification-friendly:

https://prospect.org/2026/04/22/north-carolina-farm-stole-h-2a-visa-workers-passports-lawsuit-trump-immigration/

One of the questions I get most frequently is "what about AI and enshittification?" This is a complicated question! Obviously, AI is very enshittification-prone: as "black boxes" that do not produce reliable, deterministic outputs, AI products have a lot of intrinsic cover for their enshittifying behavior.

If you ask a chatbot to recommend a product and it steers you toward an inferior option that generates a higher commission for the company, who can say whether that was the chatbot cheating, or if it was it a "hallucination?" Likewise, if you ask a chatbot to solve your problem and it does so in an inefficient way that burns a zillion tokens (which you have to pay for), is that the chatbot malfunctioning, or is that price-gouging?

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/16/jackpot/#salience-bias

Beyond this, AI is very useful for plain old enshittification. Surveillance pricing – changing prices or wages based on the other person's desperation and ability to pay – is something AI is very good at:

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

And AI companies can enshittify their products in all the traditional ways: after a customer integrates AI in their lives and businesses in ways that are hard to escape, the AI company can raise prices, insert ads, and route queries to cheaper models that cost less to run and produce worse outputs.

But here's where there's a critical difference between enshittifying AI and enshittifying a profitable tech business like app stores or search engines. AI is the money-losingest project the human race has ever attempted. At $1.4 trillion and counting, the AI companies and their "frontier models" are so deep in the red that I can't see any way that any of these firms will survive:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/16/pascals-wager/#doomer-challenge

So, on the one hand, as these companies find themselves ever-more cash-strapped, they will be severely tempted to enshittify their products. But on the other hand, if these companies are doomed no matter what they do, then the enshittification will take care of itself when they go bankrupt.

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 Jakob Nielsen on reputation managers https://www.nngroup.com/articles/reputation-managers-are-happening/

#25yrsago EFF's sharing friendly music license https://web.archive.org/web/20010429045301/https://www.eff.org/IP/Open_licenses/20010421_eff_oal_pr.html

#25yrsago Speedle: what links are forwarded most online? https://web.archive.org/web/20010401084047/http://www.speedle.com/

#20yrsago RIP Jane Jacobs, urban activist https://web.archive.org/web/20061009063708/http://www.canada.com/topics/news/story.html?id=fe1de18f-6b6e-473d-b0cb-0cc422dcf661&k=25935

#20yrsago Why fan fiction is so important https://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007464.html#007464

#20yrsago California got its name from fanfic https://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007464.html#122035

#20yrsago DMCA revision proposal will jail Americans for “attempting” infringment https://web.archive.org/web/20060502093524/https://ipaction.org/blog/2006/04/bill-hollywood-cartels-dont-want-you_24.html

#20yrsago Vista’s endless parade of warnings won’t create security https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/04/microsoft_vista.html

#15yrsago Passover poem about robots: “When We Were Robots in Egypt” https://reactormag.com/when-we-were-robots-in-egypt/

#15yrsago Naipaul’s rules for beginning writers https://web.archive.org/web/20110508152004/http://www.indiauncut.com/iublog/article/vs-naipauls-advice-to-writers-rules-for-beginners/

#15yrsago Rules for golfing during the blitz https://directorblue.blogspot.com/2011/04/stiff-upper-lip.html

#15yrsago New Zealand’s rammed-through copyright law includes mass warrantless surveillance and publication of accused’s browsing habits https://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/4922854/Copyright-change-about-more-than-idle-threats

#15yrsago State Dept adding intrusive, semi-impossible questionnaire for US passport applications https://web.archive.org/web/20110427025422/https://www.consumertraveler.com/today/state-dept-wants-to-make-it-harder-to-get-a-passport/

#10yrsago A Burglar’s Guide to the City: burglary as architectural criticism https://memex.craphound.com/2016/04/25/a-burglars-guide-to-the-city-burglary-as-architectural-criticism/

#10yrsago EFF to FDA: the DMCA turns medical implants into time-bombs https://www.eff.org/files/2016/04/22/electronic_frontier_foundation_comments_cybersecurity_in_medical_devices_.pdf

#10yrsago James Clapper: Snowden accelerated cryptography adoption by 7 years https://web.archive.org/web/20160425161451/https://theintercept.com/2016/04/25/spy-chief-complains-that-edward-snowden-sped-up-spread-of-encryption-by-7-years/

#10yrsago Australian MP sets river on fire https://web.archive.org/web/20170518083229/https://www.yahoo.com/news/australian-politician-sets-river-fire-protest-fracking-064640159.html

#10yrsago Fantasy accounting: how the biggest companies in America turn real losses into paper profits https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/business/fantasy-math-is-helping-companies-spin-losses-into-profits.html

#10yrsago Leading Republicans send letters in support of Dennis Hastert, pedophile https://www.chicagotribune.com/2016/04/22/more-than-40-letters-in-support-of-hastert-made-public-before-sentencing/

#5yrsago Guess who's doing a usury in Iowa https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/24/peloton-usury/#going-nowhere-fast

#1yrago Every complex ecosystem has parasites https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/24/hermit-kingdom/#simpler-times

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

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

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 25.04.2026 à 13:17

Pluralistic: Ada Palmer's "Inventing the Renaissance" (25 Apr 2026)


Today's links


The U Chicago Press cover for Ada Palmer's 'Inventing the Renaissance.'

Ada Palmer's "Inventing the Renaissance" (permalink)

Ada Palmer may just be the most bewilderingly talented person I know: a genius sf writer, incredible librettist and singer, wildly innovative educator, and a leading historian of the Renaissance, and last year, she published her magnum opus, Inventing the Renaissance, a stunning book about so much more than history:

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo246135916.html

All of my friends seem to be writing their magnum opuses these days! When (modern) historian Rick Perlstein and I did an event last year for my Enshittification tour, he told me he'd just finished his 1,000 page (ish? I may be misremembering slightly) history of the American conservative movement. And I recently had dinner with China Mieville, who told me he'd just turned in the manuscript for a novel he'd been trying to figure out how to write all his life.

I can't wait to read these books! And I couldn't wait to read Inventing the Renaissance, and I would have been much quicker off the mark but for the exigencies of book tours and books due and so on – but I've been reading it for the past two months or so, and I think I've pitched it about a hundred times to strangers and friends as I savored it, because it's just that good.

Inventing the Renaissance isn't a work of history, it's a work of "historiography" – the study of how histories get written and rewritten. Palmer's point here isn't to make us merely understand the Renaissance – she wants us to understand how the idea of a Renaissance, a rebirth out of a "dark age" into a "golden age" – has been used, abused, created and demolished, for centuries and centuries, including during the centuries when the Renaissance was actually underway.

Palmer teaches Renaissance history at the University of Chicago, where she is legendary for a unique annual pedagogical exercise in which she leads her students through a weeks-long live-action role-playing game that re-enacts the election of the Medicis' Pope. Every student is given a detailed biography of their character's position, goals, proclivities and history, and for weeks, the students scheme, ally, betray and assassinate each other. At the climax, the students take over the university's faux-Gothic cathedral, dressed in Renaissance drag (Palmer has a Google alert for theater companies that are selling off their costumes, and her tiny office at the university overflows with racks of cardinals' robes and other period garb), and they invest a Pope:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/17/against-the-great-forces-of-history/

This exercise is nothing short of genius, and the students who experience it often report that it is life-changing. That's because the final candidates are never quite the same, nor are the cardinals who cast votes for the winner. And yet, there are certain bedrocks that never shift, including the fact that Italy is always invaded by some of the factions involved in the election, though which cities burn also changes.

The point of this exercise is to expose the students to the power and limits of both "great historical forces" and the human agency that every one of us has within the envelope defined by those forces. Palmer wants her students to get a bone-deep understanding that while every moment has great forces bearing down on it, that the people of each moment have an enormous amount of leeway to channel the floodwaters that history will unleash. From the servant who bears a message from one great power to another, up to those great powers themselves, each person guides the course of history, even if they can't halt some of its outcomes.

Though Palmer unpacks this exercise and its meaning and results in the final part of her magnum opus, this message about forces and people is really the key to her historiography. She develops these themes in the most charming, accessible manner imaginable, weaving her own journey into history with her accounts of how different eras consciously created and deployed the idea of "the Renaissance" and how these ideas were bolstered, undermined, or ultimately demolished by new evidence. You could not ask for a better account of why there is not, and can never be, a single, canonical "history" of an era or a moment. There will always be multiple histories, overlapping each other, warring with one another, supplanting each other, or being revived as "lost" histories that reveal a truth that "they" have buried.

This is such an ambitious book, and the ambition pays off in so many ways. Take the book's structure: there's a long middle section in which Palmer describes how more than a dozen figures from the Renaissance experienced their era, with many overlapping events and timelines. Palmer's sensitive, beautifully researched and written accounts of the lives of these figures – highborn and lowly, sinister and virtuous – highlights the contradictions of this centuries-long "moment" we call "the Renaissance" and shows us how those contradictions can't ever be resolved, only acknowledged and understood.

This is Palmer the novelist, blending seamlessly with Palmer the historian. Palmer is a close literary – and personal – ally of the equally brilliant sf/fantasy writer Jo Walton, whose work has mined classical and Renaissance history to great effect since she and Palmer struck up their friendship. First, there were Walton's "Philosopher Kings" books, a three-book long thought experiment in which every person of every era who ever dreamed of living in Plato's Republic is brought through time and space to the doomed volcanic island that will someday give rise to the story of Atlantis, to try out Plato's ideal society for real:

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/01/13/jo-waltons-the-just-city/

Then there was Lent, Walton's story of the fanatical reformer Savonarola, who is forced to re-live his life over and over, with breaks in hell where he is tormented by his failure:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190516170659/https://www.latimes.com/books/la-ca-jc-review-jo-walton-lent-20190516-story.html

And this June, she'll bring out Everybody's Perfect, a novel that uses Palmer's trick of telling a story from many viewpoint characters, each of whom perceives the events so differently that their versions can't really be reconciled, except by understanding that there is no one history and there cannot be one history. There are only the histories, ever changing. The omnipotent third person narrator is a lie. I don't know if Palmer got this idea from Walton, or if Walton was inspired by Palmer, but it is a wonderful living example of how intellectual and creative movements (like those that are attributed to the Renaissance) feed one another.

One of Palmer's areas of specialty is free speech and censorship. Along with Adrian Johns, we co-taught a grad seminar called "Censorship, Information Control, and Information Revolutions from Printing Press to Internet" that connected Ada's work to the current battles over online speech:

https://neubauercollegium.uchicago.edu/research/censorship-information-control-and-information-revolutions-from-printing-press-to-internet

Palmer wants us to understand that the majority of censorship is self-censorship – that the Inquisition could only intervene in a tiny minority of cases of prohibited thought and word, and they had to rely on key people – printers, for example – anticipating the Inquisitors' tastes and limiting their speech without an Inquisitorial edict (if this seems relevant to the Trump administration's "war on woke," then you're clearly paying attention):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/22/self-censorship/#hugos

Those correspondences between the deep historical record and our current moment make Inventing the Renaissance extremely important and timely – a book hundreds of years in the making, and bang up to date.

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 Gloating NYT editorial about the dotcom crash https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/23/opinion/editorial-observer-after-the-fall-the-new-economy-goes-retro.html

#20yrsago RIAA sues family that doesn’t own a PC https://www.techshout.com/riaa-sues-local-family-without-computer-for-illegal-music-file-sharing/

#15yrsago Righthaven copyright troll loses domain https://web.archive.org/web/20110425035158/http://www.domainnamenews.com/legal-issues/righthavencom-invalid-whois/9232

#15yrsago Steampunk Venetian mask https://bob-basset.livejournal.com/160226.html

#5yrsago John Deere's dismal infosec https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#deere-john

#5yrsago Foxconn's Wisconsin death-rattle https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#monorail

#5yrsago Laundering torturers' reputations with copyfraud https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#dark-ops

#1yrago Sarah Wynn-Williams's 'Careless People' https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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

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https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Publié le 24.04.2026 à 14:50

Pluralistic: A free, open visual identity for enshittification (24 Apr 2026)


Today's links


The poop emoji from the cover of the US edition of 'Enshittification,' with a grawlix-scrawled black bar over its mouth. In the background is a blue tinted, rotated detail of the emoji's eyes and mouth.

A free, open visual identity for enshittification (permalink)

To my surprise, my life's work has turned out to be a long series of attempts to get people to engage with the abstract, distant issues of tech policy before it's too late. This is hard, because people naturally devote their attention to things that are concrete and immediate (for very good reasons!).

For nearly 25 years, I've worked with my comrades at the Electronic Frontier Foundation to raise the salience of these abstract, technical ideas. I've come up with metaphors, parables, framing devices, narratives, and then…a dirty little word: enshittification. It turned out that this word, and the minor license to vulgarity it confers, was the secret to unleashing a tide of interest in these issues, to my immense surprise and gratification.

But I don't confine my efforts to coming up with words to engage people on these matters. For several years now, I have been developing myself as a collagist, combining public domain images with Creative Commons-licensed materials to create several collages every week that aim to illustrate these abstract, technical issues in an engaging, visual way:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/albums/72177720316719208

The US cover for Enshittification

This got a lot easier with the 2025 publication of my international bestseller Enshittification, and not just because a lot of people read that book. It was also because the US edition, from MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux had a gorgeous cover:

https://mpd-biblio-covers.imgix.net/9780374619329.jpg

That cover featured a (literally and figuratively) iconic variation of the "pile of poo" emoji, with angry eyebrows and a grawlix-scrawled black censor's bar over its mouth. It was designed by the brilliant Devin Washburn of No Ideas studio:

https://www.noideas.website/

A male figure in heavy canvas protective clothes, boots and gauntlets, reclining in the wheel-well of a locomotive, reading a book. The figure's head has been replaced with the poop emoji from the cover of the US edition of 'Enshittification,' whose mouth is covered with a black, grawlix-scrawled bar. The figure is reading a book, from which emanates a halo of golden light.

Devin's poop emoji became my go-to visual shorthand for illustrating stories about enshittification, an instantly recognizable way to identify my subject matter:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/54957634601/in/album-72177720316719208

The staring red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey. In the center is the poop emoji from the cover of the US edition of 'Enshittification,' with angry eyebrows and a black, grawlix-scrawled bar over its mouth. The poop emoji's eyes have also been replaced with the HAL eye.

I remixed it over and over:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/54962122121/in/album-72177720316719208

The Earth from space. Squatting over North America, casting a long shadow and ringed by a red, spiky halo, is the poop emoji from the cover of the US edition of 'Enshittification,' with a grawlix-scrawled black bar over its mouth, wearing a Trump wig. Leaching through the starscape is a 'code waterfall' effect as seen in the credits of the Wachowskis' 'Matrix' movies.

And over:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/54992219613/in/album-72177720316719208

I liked it so much I ordered a couple hundred enamel pins and a couple thousand vinyl stickers featuring the design, and handed them out for free to people I met on my 33-city book tour. Everywhere I went – and every time a video went out showing me wearing the pin – I was inundated with requests to buy this stuff. But my pins and stickers weren't merch (stuff you could buy) – they were swag (stuff I gave away). I had no interest in getting into the merch business!

But you folks kept asking, and also, I really loved that design, so I offered Devin a cash buyout for the rights to his enshittification poop emoji and then I released it under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license that lets you use it any way you want, including for commercial products, provided you attribute it and link back to the original:

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

And I made sure that my EFF comrades had first crack at this design, and they've made merch of it. You can get a $5 sticker:

https://shop.eff.org/products/enshittification-sticker

Or a $10 pin:

https://shop.eff.org/products/enshittification-pin

With all proceeds going to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the most profound and powerful disenshittifying force on the planet Earth!

My xeriscaped lawn, featuring an Enshittification poop emoji lawn flag as well as several cacti and some rusty dinosaur sculptures.

But because this is CC licensed, you can make your own merch and swag! I made this great print-on-demand lawn flag my for front garden so I could let my enshittification flag fly:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/55025045602/

My goal here is to create a free, open, remixable visual language for talking about platform decay, not owned by me or anyone, a part of the commons. Use it to illustrate anything you want, especially if you want to analogize enshittification to other phenomena, like politics or other non-digital phenomena. Semantic drift is good, actually!

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/#this-toilet-has-no-central-nervous-system

You can get the high-rez of Devin's enshittification poop emoji from the internet's three most important repositories of Creative Commons licensed work.

There's a copy on Wikimedia Commons:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Enshittification_poop_emoji_logo.png

And on Flickr:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/55225631563/

And of course on the Internet Archive, along with a PSD that includes an ink-density adjustment layer:

https://archive.org/details/enshittification-poop-emoji-logo

I've supported Creative Commons literally since the very beginning. I worked with Larry Lessig, Aaron Swartz, Matt Haughey and Lisa Rein on the launch of the original licenses in 2002/3, and my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom was the first book released under a CC license:

https://craphound.com/down/download/

Creative Commons is one of the most amazing feats of stunt-lawyering ever attempted, and it has been an unmitigated success, with tens of billions of works licensed CC, including all of Wikipedia. Like EFF, CC is a charitable nonprofit that depends on individual donors to keep its work going. The org turned 25 this year (along with my career as a novelist), and they've launched a giant fundraiser to carry their work forward.

As my contribution to the fundraiser, I've provided them with 375 signed, numbered copies of Canny Valley, my (otherwise) not-for-sale, extremely limited edition book of my collages, with an intro by Bruce Sterling. The book was designed by type legend John D Berry and printed at Pasadena's Typeworks, a century-old, family-owned print shop, on 100lb Mohawk paper, with a PVC binding that will last for generations:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/10/canny-valley/

CC tells me there's still some copies of Canny Valley left in the fundraiser. If you're intrigued by my collaging and want to own this very strange and beautiful little artifact, here's where to go:

https://mailchi.mp/creativecommons/were-turning-25-book-giveaway

And if you want to try your own hand at collaging – or making merch (or swag!) – help yourself to Devin's wondrous piece of poo and go to town.

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 Court throws out RIAA attempt to sue little girl https://web.archive.org/web/20060422232323/https://p2pnet.net/story/8603

#15yrsago Android secretly stores location data too — though less of it, and with less detail https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/04/android-phones-keep-location-cache-too-but-its-harder-to-access/

#15yrsago Portal turret Easter egg https://www.flickr.com/photos/57617475@N00/5638462322/

#15yrsago Michael Chabon’s introduction to The Phantom Tollbooth 50th anniversary edition https://web.archive.org/web/20110424055621/http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/apr/21/michael-chabon-phantom-tollbooth-wonder-words/

#10yrsago UK spy agencies store sensitive data on millions of innocent people, with no safeguards from abuse https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/04/uk-secret-police-surveillance-bulk-personal-datasets/

#10yrsago Zombie company Atari wants exclusive right to make haunted house games https://www.techdirt.com/2016/04/21/ex-game-maker-atari-to-argue-to-us-pto-that-only-it-can-make-haunted-house-games/

#10yrsago Hackers take $81 million from Bangladesh’s central bank by pwning its $10 second-hand routers https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36110421

#10yrsago Forget the one percent, it’s the 0.1% who run the show https://web.archive.org/web/20160416022112/https://www.alternet.org/economy/1-really-problem

#10yrsago The quest for the well-labeled inn https://memex.craphound.com/2016/04/22/the-quest-for-the-well-labeled-inn/

#5yrsago EFF sues Proctorio over copyfraud https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/22/ihor-kolomoisky/#copyfraud

#5yrsago Fighting FLoC is compatible with fighting monopoly https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/22/ihor-kolomoisky/#not-that-competition

#5yrsago Moxie hacks Cellebrite https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/22/ihor-kolomoisky/#petard

#5yrsago Banks made bank on covid overdraft charges https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/22/ihor-kolomoisky/#usurers

#5yrsago The awesome destructive power of a billionaire https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/22/ihor-kolomoisky/#force-multiplier

#1yrago More Everything Forever https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/22/vinges-bastards/#cyberpunk-is-a-warning-not-a-suggestion

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

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

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 23.04.2026 à 14:25

Pluralistic: The (other) problem with automatic conversion of free software to proprietary software (23 Apr 2026)


Today's links


The surface of Mars. In the foreground are a gnu and a giant pump-magazine killer robot whose head is being piloted by Tux the penguin. At their feet lies a dead robot, its head smashed in.

The (other) problem with automatic conversion of free software to proprietary software (permalink)

Here's an interesting stunt: a project called Malus.sh will take your money, and in exchange, it will ingest any free/open source code you want, refactor that code using an LLM, and spit out a "clean room" version that is freed from all the obligations imposed by the original project's software license:

https://www.404media.co/this-ai-tool-rips-off-open-source-software-without-violating-copyright/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter

Malus was co-created by Mike Nolan, who "researches the political economy of open source software and currently works for the United Nations." Nolan told 404 Media's Emanuel Maiberg that he shipped Malus as a real, live-fire business that will exchange money for an AI service that destroys the commons as a way to alert the free software movement to a serious danger.

As Maiberg writes, Malus relies on a legal precedent set in 1982, in which IBM brought a copyright suit against a small upstart called Columbia Data Products for reverse-engineering an IBM software product. IBM's argument was that Columbia must have copied its code – the copyrightable part of a work of software – in order to reimplement the functionality of that code. Functions aren't copyrightable: copyright protects creative expressions, not the ideas that inspire those expressions. The idea of a computer program that performs a certain algorithm is not copyrightable, but the code that turns that idea into a computer program is copyrightable.

Columbia's successful defense against IBM involved using a "clean room" in which two isolated teams collaborated on the reimplementation. The first team examined the IBM program and wrote a specification for another program that would replicate its functionality. The second team received the specification and turned it into a computer program. The first team did handle IBM software, but they did not create a new work of software. The second team did create a new work of software, but they never handled any IBM code.

This is the model for Malus: it pairs two LLMs, the first of which analyzes a free software program and prepares a specification for a program that performs the identical function. The second program receives that specification and writes a new program.

The Malus FAQ performs a "be as evil as possible" explanation for the purpose of this exercise:

Our proprietary AI robots independently recreate any open source project from scratch. The result? Legally distinct code with corporate-friendly licensing. No attribution. No copyleft. No problems.

This business about "attribution" and "copyleft" is a reference to the terms imposed by some free software licenses. The purpose of free software is to create a commons of user-inspectable, user-modifiable software that anyone can use, improve, and distribute. To achieve this, many free software licenses impose obligations on the people who distribute their code: you are allowed to take the code, improve the code, give it away or sell it, but you have to let other people do the same.

Typically, you have to inform people when there's free software in a package you've distributed (attribution) and supply them with the "source code" (the part that humans read and write, which is then "compiled" into code that a computer can use) on demand, so they can make their own changes. This system of requiring other people to share the things they make out of the code you share with them is sometimes called "copyleft," because it uses copyright, which is normally a system for restricting re-use to require people not to restrict that use.

Companies love to use free software, but they don't like to share free software. Companies like Vizio raid the commons for software that is collectively created and maintained, then simply refuse to live up to their end of the bargain, violating the license terms and (incorrectly) assuming no one will sue them:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/20/vizio-vs-the-world/#dumbcast

Malus's promise, then, is that you can pay them to create fully functional reimplementations of any free/open source software package that your company can treat as proprietary, without any obligations to the commons. You won't even have to attribute the original software project that you knocked off!

This is the risk that Nolan and his partner are trying to awaken the free/open source community to: that our commons is about to be raided by selfish monsters who serve as gut-flora for the immortal colony organisms we call "limited liability corporations," who will steal everything we've built and destroy the social contract we live by.

This is a real problem, but not because of AI. We already have this situation, and it's really bad. Most of the foundational free software projects were created under older licenses that did not contemplate cloud computing and software as a service. The "copyleft" obligations of these licenses are triggered by the distribution of the software – that is, when I send you a copy of the code.

But cloud services don't have to send you the code: when you run Adobe Creative Cloud or Google Docs, the most important code is all resident on corporate servers, and never sent to you, which means that you are not entitled to a copy of the new software that has been built atop of our commons. In other words, big companies have "software freedom" (the freedom to use, modify and improve software) and we've got "open source" (the impoverished right to look at the versions of these packages that are sitting on services like Github – itself a division of Microsoft):

https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/libreplanet-2018-keynote

Then there's "tivoization," a tactic for stealing from the commons that wasn't quite invented by Tivo, though they were one of its most notorious abusers. Tivoization happens when you distribute free software as part of a hardware device, then use "digital locks" (sometimes called "technical protection measures") to prevent the owner of this device from running a modified version of the code. With tivoization, I can sell you a device running free software and I can comply with the license by giving you the code, but if you change the code and try to get the device to run it, it will refuse. What's more, "anti-circumention" laws like Section 1201 of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act make it a felony to tamper with these digital locks, so it becomes a crime to use modified software on your own device:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/16/whittle-a-webserver/#mere-ornaments

There's no question that the tech industry would devour the free software commons if they were allowed to, and the AI threat that Nolan raises with Malus seems alarming, but while there's something to worry about there, I think the risk is being substantially overstated.

That's because copyleft licenses – and indeed, all software licenses – are copyright licenses, and software written by AI is not eligible for a copyright, because nothing made by AI is eligible for copyright:

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

Copyright is awarded solely to works of human authorship. This fact has been repeatedly affirmed by the US Copyright Office, which has fought appeals of this principle all the way to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case. That's because the principle that copyright is strictly reserved for human creativity isn't remotely controversial in legal circles. This is just how copyright works.

Which means that the "be evil" version of Malus's business model has a fatal flaw. While the code that Malus produces is indeed "legally distinct" with "no attribution" and "no copyleft," it's not true that there are "no problems." That's because Malus's code doesn't have "corporate-friendly licensing." Far from it: Malus's code has no licensing, because it is born in the public domain and cannot be copyrighted.

In other words, if you're a corporation hoping to use Malus to knock off a free software project so that you can adapt it and distribute it without having to make your modifications available, Malus's code will not suit your needs. If you give me code that Malus produced, you can't stop me from doing anything I want with it. I can sell it. I can give it away. I can make a competing product that reproduces all of your code and sell it at a 99% discount. There's nothing you can do to stop me, any more than you could stop me from giving away the text of a Shakespeare play you sold me. You can't stick a license agreement or terms of service between me and the product that binds me to pretend that your public domain software is copyrighted – that's also not allowed under copyright.

Does that mean that Malus is a meaningless stunt? No, because this automated reimplementation does create some risks to our software commons. A troll who doesn't care about selling software could clone every popular free software project and make public domain versions that would be confusing and maybe demoralizing. Combining these clean-room reimplementations with cloud software or tivoization could create hybrid forms of commons-enclosure that are more virulent than the current strains.

But reimplementation itself is not a risk to free software. Reimplementation is the bedrock of free software. GNU/Linux itself is a reimplementation of AT&T Unix. Free software authors re-implement each other's code all the time, often because they think the license the original code was released under sucks. Literally the coolest free software thing I've seen in the past 12 months included a reimplementation of Raspberry Pi's PIO module to escape from its bullshit patent encumbrances:

https://youtu.be/BbWWGkyIBGM?si=vO5zLH3OG5JLW7OP&t=2253

Reimplementation is good, actually. And honestly, if corporations are foolish enough to reimplement their code using an LLM, and in so doing, create a vast new commons of public domain software, well, that's not exactly the freesoftwarepocalypse, is it?

(Image: Muhammad Mahdi Karim, GNU FDL; modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago PimpMySnack: homemade, gigantic versions of snack food https://web.archive.org/web/20060421034050/http://www.pimpmysnack.com/gallery.php

#20yrsago Thieves discover abandoned Soviet missile silo full of cash https://web.archive.org/web/20060411021047/http://www.mosnews.com/news/2006/03/07/moneyfound.shtml

#15yrsago Victorian house’s facade converted to a folding garage-door https://web.archive.org/web/20110423213819/https://www.blog.beausoleil-architects.com/2011/03/architectural-magic.html

#15yrsago Xerox’s first successful copier burst into flame so often it came with a fire-extinguisher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_914

#15yrsago MPAA: “democratizing culture is not in our interest” https://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-democratizing-culture-is-not-in-our-interest-110420/

#15yrsago Mail Rail: London’s long-lost underground postal railroad https://web.archive.org/web/20110805130854/http://www.silentuk.com/?p=2792

#10yrsago Kindle Unlimited is being flooded with 3,000-page garbage books that suck money out of the system https://web.archive.org/web/20160421055052/https://consumerist.com/2016/04/20/amazon-unintentionally-paying-scammers-to-hand-you-1000-pages-of-crap-you-dont-read/

#10yrsago America’s wealth gap has created an ever-increasing longevity gap https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/21/the-death-gap/

#10yrsago Why is Congress so clueless about tech? Because they fired all their experts 20 years ago https://www.wired.com/2016/04/office-technology-assessment-congress-clueless-tech-killed-tutor/

#10yrsago Why Internet voting is a terrible idea, explained in small words anyone can understand https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abQCqIbBBeM

#10yrsago VW offers to buy back 500K demon-haunted diesels https://www.reuters.com/article/us-volkswagen-emissions-usa-idUSKCN0XH2CX/?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews

#10yrsago Printer ink wars may make private property the exclusive domain of corporations https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/eff-asks-supreme-court-overturn-dangerous-ruling-allowing-patent-owners-undermine

#5yrsago Some thoughts on GWB's call for truth in politics https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/21/re-identification/#seriously-fuck-that-guy

#5yrsago What's wrong with EU's trustbusters https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/21/re-identification/#eu-antitrust

#5yrsago Hawley and Taylor Greene faked their donor-surge https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/21/re-identification/#jan-6-fraud

#5yrsago The Observatory of Anonymity https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/21/re-identification/#pseudonymity

#1yrago Trump's FTC opens the floodgates for tariff profiteering https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/21/trumpflation/#andrew-ferguson

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Publié le 22.04.2026 à 17:24

Pluralistic: It's not a crime if we do it (to nurses) with an app (22 Apr 2026)


Today's links


A 1950s killer robot with eye lasers; it has collected four bell jars in which float the heads of disembodied nurses. It is zapping one jar with its lasers. In the background is a golgotha, taken from a Dore Old Testament engraving.

It's not a crime if we do it (to nurses) with an app (permalink)

If I could abolish one piece of received wisdom about tech policy, it would be this: "Tech moves at the speed of innovation and regulation moves at the speed of government, so regulation will always lag behind tech."

(If I could abolish two pieces of received wisdom about tech policy, the other one would be "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product." Decent treatment is not a customer reward program, and "voting with your wallet" only works if you're a billionaire whose wallet is thicker than all the other wallets put together.)

To be clear, there are times when tech enables new forms of conduct that don't fit neatly into the existing policy framework. For example, we apply copyright to anyone who makes or handles a copy of a creative work, and that used to be a pretty good proxy for "someone in the supply chain of the media industry."

The problem is that computers work by making dozens and dozens of copies every time you click your mouse, and we all use computers for everything, and clicking a mouse doesn't make you part of the entertainment business. The fact that we've had hyperinflation in "making and handling copies" but continued to apply an esoteric industrial framework to pretty much everything everyone does all the time is a huge problem that desperately needs fixing:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/the-internets-original-sin/

Copyright notwithstanding, tech generally does not outrun our capacity to regulate it. Rather, tech bosses come up with incredibly flimsy reasons why their business doesn't fit into the existing regulatory framework, and policymakers accept these ridiculous excuses so readily that one can only assume they're in on the racket.

Take "fintech," all those neobanks and the cryptocurrency junk and shitcoins and stablecoins and NFTs and so on that a group of pump-and-dumpers, money launderers and stock swindlers have pushed for more than a decade now. As Trashfuture's Riley Quinn says, "Whenever you hear 'fintech,' you should think 'unregulated bank.'" It's not hard to apply existing regulations to these companies: they fall under banking law, usury law, securities law and gambling law.

There's no (good) reason not to apply these legal frameworks to the crypto industry – but there are plenty of bad reasons not to. The most obvious reason not to apply those regulations is that you are on the same side as the pump-and-dumpers, money launderers and stock swindlers. The reason we struggle to regulate fintech is that we just don't want to.

Then there's Uber, which claimed that it wasn't a taxi company, it was a "transportation network company," which meant that none of the regulations we apply to taxis should apply to Uber. To call this a transparent ruse is to do great violence to the good, hardworking transparent ruses putting in the hard yards to run honest scams. "Uber isn't a taxi company, it's a transportation network company" is about as plausible as those t-shirts that read "It's not a bald spot, it's a solar-panel for a sex-machine."

Emboldened by the success of the "transportation network company" wheeze, Uber launched Uber Eats, claiming that it wasn't a "food delivery company" but rather a "delivery network company." This set up the template for a remorseless tide of new sex-machine solar-panels that have pushed Uber's system of wage-theft and worker misclassification into an expanding constellation of labor categories.

From fintech to price-fixing to gig-work, the entire industry runs on the very stupid proposition that "it's not a crime if we do it with an app":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/25/potatotrac/#carbo-loading

One of the worst of these sex-machine solar-panels is to be found in nursing, where a cluster of heavily capitalized apps that nurses must rely on to get shifts insist that they aren't "healthcare staffing agencies," rather, they are "healthcare worker platforms" that should be exempted from the regulations that we started applying to the former after a string of calamities and disasters.

This phenomenon is detailed in eye-watering detail in "Uber For Nursing," a must-read new report by Katie J Wells, Maya Pinto, and Funda Ustek Spilda for the AI Now Institute:

https://ainowinstitute.org/publications/uber-for-nursing

If "Uber for nursing" rings a bell, you might be thinking of "Uber for Nursing: How an AI-Powered Gig Model Is Threatening Health Care," an earlier report that Wells and Spilda wrote for the Roosevelt Institute in late 2024:

https://rooseveltinstitute.org/publications/uber-for-nursing/

The Roosevelt Institute report contained many eye-popping findings, most notably that at least some of the leading national nursing gig-work platforms were using data-brokers to find out how much debt nurses were carrying, and offered lower wages to the nurses with the most debt, on the grounds that the most economically desperate nurses will accept the lowest pay:

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

The new report describes how, in the absence of a muscular policy response, these nursing gig-work companies have raised fantastic sums of money, some of which they have diverted to regulatory capture projects in a bid to states to recognize their solar-panel sex-machines, with great success. These companies haven't merely refined their lobbying game, either – as a sphincter-puckering appendix detailing the experience of nurses with these apps shows, they have also made great strides in immiserating nurses and transferring their earning power to gig platforms and the hospitals that rely on them.

This degradation of the work experience is characteristic of the new world of AI-powered jobs. AI isn't taking workers' jobs, but it is enshittifying them, with degrading, neurosis-inducing surveillance and high-handed discipline:

https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/what-does-it-mean-to-work-under-algorithmic-eyes

Algorithmic oversight is a terror for any worker, but it's particularly bad when applied to healthcare workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/05/any-metric-becomes-a-target/#hca

But gig-work companies remain laser-focused on healthcare workers, likely because that is one of the only growing professions left in America. They're trying to screw over healthcare workers for the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks: "That's where the money is." The implication here is that the 15% of the American workforce that is employed in the healthcare industry is on the front lines of the battle against gig-work and algorithmic management.

Like parasites that attack the sick and weak, gig-work and algorithmic management come first for industries that are already bad for workers and the people they serve, making things much worse while insisting that they're just trying to apply a cool digital fix to a broken analog system. That, too, was Uber's playbook: attacking the medallion taxi system as corrupt and sclerotic – while replacing it with a system that's corrupt, extractive and dynamic, able to evade all attempts to improve things for drivers and riders (such as drivers' unions).

That's what's happened with healthcare staffing agencies. These have long been a fixture in healthcare, partly because there was always a large cohort of skilled healthcare professionals who valued the flexibility of short term contracts (for example, "travel nurses") and partly because hospitals love hiring contractors who aren't part of their workers' unions.

Staffing agencies weren't good. A string of scandals led to waves of regulations in states like Colorado, Minnesota and New York that required agencies to "register annually, disclose shareholders and executive officers, certify worker credentials, report to state authorities on the number of workers employed, document service rates charged to facilities, and list average wages paid to workers by job category." These regulations also banned staffing agencies from locking up workers with noncompete agreements and ripping them off with finder's fees.

Rather than strengthening these protections, gig nursing platforms avoid them. Where staffing agencies secure multi-week contracts for travel nurses, gig platforms typically assign workers to single-day shifts. Where staffing agencies let nurses bargain for their scheduling needs, gig platforms present take-it-or-leave-it offers and no opportunities to speak to a human when things go wrong. And where staffing agencies evaluated the workers on their roster based on employer feedback, the gig platforms install apps that continuously surveil and evaluate workers, downranking them and cutting their hours and pay based on algorithmic judgments that are never explained and cannot be appealed.

Platforms match nurses with shifts, claiming to regulators that they're little more than a "job-notice board." But when they pitch hospitals, they tell a different story, about their ability to use algorithms to erode wages and blacklist workers who make trouble. Healthcare gig-work apps push workers to accept shifts that require more travel and pay less, at facilities they don't want to work at. Refusal to accept a shift can permanently compromise your ability to get future shifts, and/or lower the wage you're offered in future.

In addition to these poor working conditions and low wages, gig platforms have resurrected the prohibited practice of charging workers "finder's fees," by layering on junk fees that take money out of every paycheck. Staffing agencies aren't allowed to do this, but the gig-work platforms' "solar panel for a sex-machine" gambit transforms the finder's fee into a "platform fee" that somehow escapes regulators' grasp.

How is it that a regulator can't see that a "platform fee" is exactly equivalent to a "finder's fee?" This is not a case of technology outpacing regulation – it's a case of lawmakers colluding with profitable firms to evade regulation in order to steal from workers.

The platforms are aslosh in investor cash – Clipboard Health, Intelycare, and Shiftkey are all valued at more than $1b, and Shiftkey just completed a $300m private equity raise. This leaves them with lots of ready cash to spend on regulatory entrepreneurship. In Georgia, Clipboard lobbied "to exempt gig nursing platforms from state unemployment insurance and workers’ compensation laws." In Ohio, Shiftkey and Clipboard are pushing a bill "to classify gig nurses as independent contractors, exempting gig platforms from minimum wage and other worker protection laws." In Utah, Nursa is praising a bill that a state senator called "lightest-touch regulation." All in all, 17 states have nurse gig platform deregulation bills underway.

In 2022, the healthcare gig-work platforms tried to get a California ballot measure to carve nursing platforms out of all state labor laws. They withdrew it, but pursued an "under the radar" approach to get the same thing by seeking changes in administrative rules, rather than state laws. Lobbying for administrative law changes to exempt healthcare gig-work platforms from regulation is also underway in Missouri, Louisiana and Utah.

One bright light in all this comes from New York state, where a 2025 law "affirmatively recognizes gig nursing platforms as entities that must comply with the state’s healthcare staffing agency rules." The existence of this law proves that the crisis of gig-work healthcare platforms is not an example of tech racing ahead of regulation. If New York's state leg can figure out that a gig-work platform is just a staffing agency in app form, then other states can do so as well. If they don't figure that out, that's because they don't want to.

Sometime in this century, our political class and our financial class arrived at a consensus that Douglas Rushkoff describes as "go meta," in his 2022 book Survival of the Richest:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

The "go meta" ethos insists that the most important, smartest and most valuable move is always away from productive labor. Don't drive a cab: go meta and own a medallion that you rent to a cab driver. Don't own a medallion, go meta and start a gig-work ride-hailing company. Don't start a gig-work ride-hailing company, go meta and invest in a gig-work ride-hailing company. Don't invest in a gig-work ride-hailing company, go meta and buy options in a gig-work ride-hailing company – and so on and so on, into ever more abstracted forms of gambling and rent-collection.

The reorganization of the economy around parasitic middlemen and financial gamblers (but I repeat myself) is the real reason that we can't regulate tech. Once you've decided that the most important party to a transaction is the person who has the option on the share on the platform on the license that the worker who actually does the job requires, of course you're going to see a solar-panel for a sex-machine in every bald spot.

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 PKD ratted out other SF writers to the FBI https://web.archive.org/web/20010428121230/https://www.linguafranca.com/print/0105/cover.html

#15yrsago Weird Al snubbed by Lady Gaga, releases his parody without permission as fair use https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUxXKfQkswE

#15yrsago How do you compete with free? A taxonomy of reasons to pay for digital files https://www.theguardian.com/technology/gamesblog/2011/apr/20/digital-free-persuade-pay-cory-doctorow?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

#15yrsago iOS devices secretly log and retain record of every place you go, transfer to your PC and subsequent devices https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/apr/20/iphone-tracking-prompts-privacy-fears

#10yrsago Before 1988 Olympics, South Korea sent ‘vagrants’ to camps where rape and murder were routine https://web.archive.org/web/20160420234916/https://bigstory.ap.org/article/c22de3a565fe4e85a0508bbbd72c3c1b/ap-s-korea-covered-mass-abuse-killings-vagrants

#10yrsago Luxury overnight bus with sleeper cabins shuttles between LA and San Francisco https://www.inc.com/tess-townsend/sleepbus-gets-you-from-sf-to-la-for-50.html

#10yrsago Volkswagen’s internal Dieselgate probe stuck because the company used code-words for its cheat software https://web.archive.org/web/20160419095045/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-19/vw-cheating-code-words-said-to-complicate-emissions-probe

#10yrsago Chinese opsec funnies: your foreign boyfriend is a western spy! https://web.archive.org/web/20160420125125/https://www.chinalawtranslate.com/nsed/

#10yrsago UK Chancellor exempts families of “Politically Exposed Persons” from money laundering scrutiny https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/04/uks-osborne-exempts-members-of-parliament-other-politically-exposed-persons-from-money-laundering-oversight.html

#10yrsago Colorado school district wants to arm security staff with assault rifles https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2016/0419/Colorado-school-district-to-equip-security-workers-with-semiautomatic-rifles

#5yrsago McDonald's corporate wages war on ice-cream hackers https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war

#5yrsago Real penalties for covid evicters https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cfpb

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

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

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

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

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https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Publié le 21.04.2026 à 15:18

Pluralistic: Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff's "Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed" (21 Apr 2026)


Today's links


The Harpercollins cover for Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff's 'Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed.'

Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff's "Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed" (permalink)

Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff's Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed seeks to describe the ideology that gave rise to Elon Musk, the social forces that gave rise to that ideology, and the terrible future that ideology seeks to bring about:

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/muskism-quinn-slobodianben-tarnoff?variant=43838135402530

The book's starting point is that "Muskism" isn't merely the things Musk says, believes and does. It's the ideology that coalesces around him, from the people in his wake and the people he follows. Just as Henry Ford neither defined "Fordism" nor precisely practiced it, "Muskism" is centered on Elon Musk, but it's not Elon Musk's creation.

So what is Muskism? To answer this question, Slobodian and Tarnoff enumerate the factors and influences that produced Musk himself. There's apartheid, with its "rational" system of technocratic authoritarianism, which blended together a life of luxury and plenty (for white settlers), brutal surveillance and state violence (for the Black majority) and fascist control over speech (for everyone), combined with a meat-grinder draft that saw young men of Musk's age being called up to suppress liberation uprisings.

Peak apartheid coincided with peak personal computing, the moment where PCs (and then, modems) were getting cheaper and faster, propagating like mushrooms, offering a young Musk access to a broad world outside of the fascist bubble of South Africa, inspiring global ambitions in Musk.

Closer to home, there's Musk's family: his grandfather, a grandiose and vicious white supremacist who moved to South Africa from Canada because of his love for apartheid and racial hierarchy. There's Musk's father, a violent and abusive fool.

Muskism is also a new variant on techno-libertarianism. Traditional techno-libertarianism seeks to dismantle the state – or better yet, exit from the state, in the manner of an Ayn Rand hero. Techno-libertarianism is intimately bound up with settler colonialism, ever on the hunt for an "empty land" (terra nullius) that can be settled without committing the original sin of expropriation, the gravest offense in a religion organized around the total sanctity of private property:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/14/this-way-to-the-egress/#terra-nullius

Muskism doesn't seek to exit the state, it seeks to colonize and control it. Long before DOGE, Musk was playing the organs of the state to his own tune, securing massive contracts and subsidies for his solar and rocketry businesses, relying on the massive, deep-pocketed government to keep his businesses afloat.

Obviously (DOGE!), Muskism also seeks to dismantle the state, but only the parts of it that can be transferred to Musk's own private hands. Muskism is about big government…for Musk, but not for you. It embodies that important conservative value summarized in Wilhoit's Law:

There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288

This is Musk through and through – a man who demands the right to call innocent strangers "pedo guy" without legal consequence; and also wields the power of the state to shutter businesses that boycott his platform because of its shitty practices:

https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/courtside/elon-musk-sues-advertisers-who-boycott-x-under-anti-trust-laws/

Musk grew up on science fiction novels and weaves stfnal tropes through his offerings (for example, calling his chatbot "Grok"). There's no shortage of reactionary politics in science fiction, but Musk doesn't confine his sf-inspired cosmology to reactionary literature. He's famously very fond of the Wachowskis' "Matrix" movies, and leans heavily into the metaphor of the Matrix in explaining his interest in wiring people directly into computers, in characterizing opposing political beliefs as "mind viruses," and in calling his political enemies "NPCs":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/18/seeing-like-a-billionaire/#npcs

But Musk's relationship to this metaphor differs in a subtle and important way from the right's "Red Pill" rhetoric. Musk doesn't want to break out of the Matrix – he wants to control the Matrix. He wants to decide which opinions you're allowed to see and discuss (because "most people have weak firewalls for bad ideas"), he wants to beam ideas directly into your neural link, and he wants to abolish any form of workplace democracy, conquering the world with South African baasskap (boss-ism):

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

Throughout this slim volume, Slobodian and Tarnoff tease these strains of thought out of Musk's deeds and utterances, and in the systems that he has built or colonized through acquisition. The authors are offering more than a psychoanalysis, though – they're surfacing the material basis for Muskism, the benefits it delivers to its adherents, and the victories it has racked up.

They reveal the method in Musk's chaotic and bullying management style, and recount the times Musk has successfully shattered sclerotic processes to make real breakthroughs, especially in aerospace. You'd be hard pressed to read these passages and without feeling some grudging admiration.

Muskism gets stuff done…sometimes. At a cost. A high cost. Tarnoff and Slobodian count that cost, identify who pays it, and conjure up the world in which those costs continue to mount for all of us.

It's a chilling vision, a Torment Nexus dystopia run by someone who thinks cyberpunk was a suggestion, not a warning.

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 US, EU want to delay copyright treaty to help blind people for 3-5 years https://web.archive.org/web/20110423170607/http://keionline.org/node/1114

#15yrsago Is sugar a poison? https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sugar-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

#15yrsago More watch-part motorcycles https://ummaisoumenos.blogspot.com/2008/11/miniaturas-fantsticasbikesfeitas-de.html

#15yrsago Seeds: comic-book memoir of father’s cancer is moving, sweet https://memex.craphound.com/2011/04/19/seeds-comic-book-memoir-of-fathers-cancer-is-moving-sweet/

#10yrsago Something New: frank, comedic, romantic memoir of a wedding in comic form https://memex.craphound.com/2016/04/19/something-new-frank-comedic-romantic-memoir-of-a-wedding-in-comic-form/

#10yrsago Ben and Jerry arrested at Democracy Spring demonstration in DC https://web.archive.org/web/20160419173913/https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/co-founders-of-ben-and-jerrys-arrested-at-us-capitol/ar-BBrW5tb?li=BBnb7Kz

#10yrsago Competing construction companies stage a bulldozer fight in a busy street https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrtnIImGipg

#10yrsago Chicago Police Accountability Task Force Report: racism, corruption, and a “broken system” https://chicagopatf.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/PATF_Final_Report_4_13_16-1.pdf

#5yrsago Facebook's tonsils https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/19/tonsilitis/#mod-traum

#1yrago Against transparency https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/19/gotcha/#known-to-the-state-of-california-to-cause-cancer

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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

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