LePartisan.info À propos Podcasts Fil web
Flux grenoblois
Fr3 Alpes Fr.Bleu Isère Infos épinglées Agendas Ressources Assos Webcams
Écologie BLOGS Revues Médias
🖋 Cory DOCTOROW
Science fiction author, activist and journalist
Souscrire à ce FLUX

PLURALISTIC

▸ les 10 dernières parutions

02.05.2025 à 22:28

Pluralistic: AI and the fatfinger economy (02 May 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4115 mots)


Today's links


A leg-hold trap whose trigger disc has been replaced with the hostile, glaring eye of HAL 9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' A giant man's finger enters the frame from one corner, aimed at the trigger.

AI and the fatfinger economy (permalink)

Have you noticed that all the buttons you click most frequently to invoke routine, useful functions in your device have been moved, and their former place is now taken up by a curiously butthole-esque icon that summons an unwanted AI?

https://velvetshark.com/ai-company-logos-that-look-like-buttholes

These traps for the unwary aren't accidental, but neither are they placed there solely because tech companies think that if they can trick you into using their AI, you'll be so impressed that you'll become a regular user. To understand why you find yourself repeatedly fatfingering your way into an unwanted AI interaction – and why those interactions are so hard to exit – you have to understand something about both the macro- and microeconomics of high-growth tech companies.

Growth is a heady advantage for tech companies, and not because of an ideological commitment to "growth at all costs," but because companies with growth stocks enjoy substantial, material benefits. A growth stock trades at a higher "price to earnings ratio" ("P:E") than a "mature" stock. Because of this, there are a lot of actors in the economy who will accept shares in a growing company as though they were cash (indeed, some might prefer shares to cash). This means that a growing company can outbid their rivals when acquiring other companies and/or hiring key personnel, because they can bid with shares (which they get by typing zeroes into a spreadsheet), while their rivals need cash (which they can only get by selling things or borrowing money).

The problem is that all growth ends. Google has a 90% share of the search market. Google isn't going to appreciably increase the number of searchers, short of desperate gambits like raising a billion new humans to maturity and convincing them to become Google users (this is the strategy behind Google Classroom, of course). To continue posting growth, Google needs gimmicks. For example, in 2019, Google intentionally made Search less accurate so that users would have to run multiple queries (and see multiple rounds of ads) to find the answers to their questions:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Thanks to Google's monopoly, worsening search perversely resulted in increased earnings, and Wall Street rewarded Google by continuing to trade its stock with that prized high P:E. But for Google – and other tech giants – the most enduring and convincing growth stories comes from moving into adjacent lines of business, which is why we've lived through so many hype bubbles: metaverse, web3, cryptocurrency, and now, of course, AI.

For a company like Google, the promise of these bubbles is that it will be able to double or triple in size, by dominating an entirely new sector. With that promise comes peril: growth must eventually stop ("anything that can't go on forever eventually stops"). When that happens, the company's stock instantaneously goes from being a "growth stock" to being a "mature stock" which means that its P:E is way too high. Anyone holding growth stock knows that there will come a day when those stocks will transition, in an eyeblink, from being undervalued to being grossly overvalued, and that when that day comes, there will be a mass sell-off. If you're still holding the stock when that happens, you stand to lose bigtime:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/06/privacy-last/#exceptionally-american

So everyone holding a growth stock sleeps with one eye open and their fists poised over the "sell" button. Managers of growth companies know how jittery their investors are, and they do everything they can to keep the growth story alive, as a matter of life and death.

But mass sell-offs aren't just bad for the company – it's also very bad for the company's key employees, that is, anyone who's been given stock in addition to their salary. Those people's portfolios are extremely heavy on their employer's shares, and they stand to disproportionately lose in the event of a selloff. So they are personally motivated to keep the growth story alive.

That's where these growth-at-all-stakes maneuvers bent on capturing an adjacent sector come from. If you remember the Google Plus days, you'll remember that every Google service you interacted with had some important functionality ripped out of it and replaced with a G+-based service. To make sure that happened, Google's bosses decreed that the company's bonuses would be tied to the amount of G+ activity each division generated. In companies where bonuses can amount to 90% of your annual salary or more, this was a powerful motivator. It meant that every product team at Google was fully aligned on a project to cram G+ buttons into their product design. Whether or not these made sense for users, they always made sense for the product team, whose ability to take a fancy Christmas holiday, buy a new car, or pay their kids' private school tuition depended on getting you to use G+.

Once you understand how corporate growth stories are converted to "key performance indicators" that drive product design, many of the annoyances of digital services suddenly make a great deal of sense. You know how it's almost impossible to watch a show on a streaming video service without accidentally tapping a part of the screen that whisks you to a completely different video?

The reason you have to handle your phone like a photonegative while watching a movie – the reason every millimeter of screen real-estate has been boobytrapped with an icon that takes you somewhere else – is that streaming services believe that their customers are apt to leave when they feel like there's nothing new to watch. These bosses have made their product teams' bonuses dependent on successfully "recommending" a show you've never seen or expressed any interest in to you:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/15/the-fatfinger-economy/

Of course, bosses understand that their workers will be tempted to game this metric. They want to distinguish between "real" clicks that lead to interest in a new video, and fake fatfinger clicks that you instantaneously regret. The easiest way to distinguish between these two types of click is to measure how long you watch the new show before clicking away.

Of course, this is also entirely gameable: all the product manager has to do is take away the "back" button, so that an accidental click to a new video is extremely hard to cancel. The five seconds you spend figuring out how to get back to your show are enough to count as a successful recommendation, and the product team is that much closer to a luxury ski vacation next Christmas.

So this is why you keep invoking AI by accident, and why the AI that is so easy to invoke is so hard to dispel. Like a demon, a chatbot is much easier to summon than it is to rid yourself of.

Google is an especially grievous offender here. Familiar buttons in Gmail, Gdocs, and the Android message apps have been replaced with AI-summoning fatfinger traps. Android is filled with these pitfalls – for example, the bottom-of-screen swipe gesture used to switch between open apps now summons an AI, while ridding yourself of that AI takes multiple clicks.

This is an entirely material phenomenon. Google doesn't necessarily believe that you will ever want to use AI, but they must convince investors that their AI offerings are "getting traction." Google – like other tech companies – gets to invent metrics to prove this proposition, like "how many times did a user click on the AI button" and "how long did the user spend with the AI after clicking?" The fact that your entire "AI use" consisted of hunting for a way to get rid of the AI doesn't matter – at least, not for the purposes of maintaining Google's growth story.

Goodhart's Law holds that "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." For Google and other AI narrative-pushers, every measure is designed to be a target, a line that can be made to go up, as managers and product teams align to sell the company's growth story, lest we all sell off the company's shares.

(Image: Pogrebnoj-Alexandroff, CC BY-SA 3.0; Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

#10yrsago Encryption backdoors are like TSA luggage-locks for the Internet https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/01/encryption-wont-work-if-it-has-a-back-door-only-the-good-guys-have-keys-to-

#10yrsago Tell the Copyright Office not to criminalize using unapproved goop in a 3D printer https://makezine.com/article/digital-fabrication/3d-printing-workshop/really-3d-printer/

#10yrsago Stupid patent for the ages: “Changing order quantities” https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/stupid-patent-month-eclipse-ip-casts-shadow-over-innovation

#10yrsago Computer scientist/Congressman: crypto backdoors are “technologically stupid,” DA is “offensive” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YG0bUmuj4tg

#5yrsago Americans overwhelmingly support pandemic containment measures

#5yrsago How Big Ag destroyed our food supply's resilience https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/01/icann-can-and-did/#big-ag

#5yrsago San Francisco's legion of billionaires won't shell out for the city's covid fund https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/01/icann-can-and-did/#give2sf

#5yrsago "Financial literacy" will not make poor people better off https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/01/icann-can-and-did/#victim-blaming

#5yrsago Amazon and Trump officials neutered worker protection initiative https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/01/icann-can-and-did/#trumpazon

#5yrsago Frontier deliberately denied fiber to millions https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/01/icann-can-and-did/#fiber-now

#5yrsago .ORG has been snatched from the grasp of rapacious private equity billionaires https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/01/icann-can-and-did/#we-won

#1yrago Boeing's deliberately defective fleet of flying sky-wreckage https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/01/boeing-boeing/#mrsa

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)

  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

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

  • The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: Nimby and the D-Hoppers CONCLUSION https://craphound.com/stories/2025/04/13/nimby-and-the-d-hoppers-conclusion/

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

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

01.05.2025 à 22:42

Pluralistic: Apple faces criminal sanctions for defying App Store antitrust order (01 May 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4172 mots)


Today's links


A giant rotten apple behind sepia-toned prison bars. A worm descends from the prison's ceiling to perch on the apple. The scene is surmounted with Apple's 'Think Different.' wordmark.

Apple faces criminal sanctions for defying App Store antitrust order (permalink)

Epic, makers of the wildly popular Fortnite video-game, have waged a one-company war against the "app tax" – the 15-30% rake that the mobile duopoly of Apple/Google take out of every penny we spend inside of apps.

Epic's own digital practices are hardly spotless: just this year, the company was caught cheating players – many of them children – with deceptive practices and had to refund over $72m:

https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/refunds/fortnite-refunds

But in this fight, Epic is on the side of the angels. The 30% that Apple/Google sucks out of the mobile economy is a brutal tax, and not just on app makers. Patreon performers recently raised a stink when the company announced that it would be clawing back 30% of the money pledged by their supporters – that 30% surcharge is passed straight through to Apple/Google:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/12/24218629/patreon-membership-ios-30-percent-apple-tax

From independent news outlets to crafters selling their work out of small storefronts, all the way up to massive entertainment services like Disney Plus and Fortnite, the mobile cartel takes 30% out of every dollar, a racket they maintain with onerous rules that ban apps from using their own payment processors, or even from encouraging users to click a link that brings them to a web-based payment screen.

30% is a gigantic markup on payment processing. It's ten times the going rate for payments in the USA, already one of the most expensive places in the world to transfer money from one party to another. In the EU, payment processing typically runs 1%…or less.

But crafters, Patreon podcasters and small-town newspapers are in no position to fight Google and Apple. Instead, we get Epic, a multi-billion-dollar company that's gone to the mattresses to fight these multi-trillion-dollar companies. Personally, I dote on billionaire-on-trillionaire violence.

Epic was wildly successful. It mopped up the floor with Google, securing an especially punitive award from a judge who was furious that Google had destroyed evidence:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/12/im-feeling-lucky/#hugger-mugger

Epic also won against Apple, though not as thoroughly as it had with Google, because Apple had the commonsense not to get up to the kind of shenanigans that make federal judges very, very mad. In the Google case, the court found that Google had acted as a monopolist and ordered it to open up the payment system in Google Play, a direct blow to the Android app tax.

In the Apple case, the judge did not find that Apple had acted as a monopolist, but did rule that the App Store's payment processing racket violated the law, and ordered Apple to end its own app tax:

https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/30/epic-games-just-scored-a-major-win-against-apple/

That's where things get gnarly. Apple is addicted to corrupt sources of income – like the tens of billions it illegally receives every year in bribes from Google to make it the default search:

https://apnews.com/article/google-antitrust-search-engine-verdict-apple-319a61f20fb11510097845a30abaefd8

And it really, really loves the app tax. When the EU ordered Apple to allow third-party app stores (as a way of killing the app tax), the company cooked up a malicious compliance plan that was comically corrupt:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/06/spoil-the-bunch/#dma

So, the mere fact that a federal judge had ordered Apple to open up its app store to competing payment processors was not going convince Apple to actually do it. Instead, Apple cooked up a set of rules for third-party payment processing that would make it more costly to use someone else's payments, piling up a mountain of junk fees and using scare screens and other deceptive warnings to discourage users from making payments through a rival system:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/judge-rules-apple-executive-lied

That's the kind of thing that is apt to make a federal judge angry – and, as noted, angry federal judges can make life very hard for tech monopolists, a lesson Google learned when it destroyed key evidence in its Epic case. But Apple didn't just flout the court order – they lied about it to cover it up, and Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is furious. She held that Alex Roman, Apple's Vice-President of Finance, "outright lied under oath," and she has raised the possibility of criminal contempt penalties for Apple:

https://regmedia.co.uk/2025/05/01/pacer_epic_vs_apple_injunction_judgement.pdf

The judge further wrote:

This is an injunction, not a negotiation. There are no do-overs once a party willfully disregards a court order. Time is of the essence. The Court will not tolerate further delays. As previously ordered, Apple will not impede competition. The Court enjoins Apple from implementing its new anticompetitive acts to avoid compliance with the Injunction. Effective immediately Apple will no longer impede developers’ ability to communicate with users nor will they levy or impose a new commission on off-app purchases

In other words, any junk fees, any impediments to opening up third party payments, will be swiftly and harshly dealt with. As of right now developers can start to build third-party payments into their apps and Apple cannot block them. It's the end of the app tax, a source of about $100b/year for Apple:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/01/apple_epic_lies_possible_crime/

The world is on fire and everything is terrible, but we are also living through the most consequential season in the history of the war on corporate tech power. Google has been convicted three times of being a monopolist and is almost certainly going to have to sell off Chrome, most of its ad-tech stack, and possibly Android. Meta just put up a pathetic showing in an equally serious antitrust case that could see it forced to sell off Instagram and Whatsapp:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/11/it-is-better-to-buy/#than-to-compete

Countries around the world have passed big, sweeping, muscular antitrust laws specifically aimed at smashing corporate tech power, like the EU's Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act:

https://www.eff.org/pages/adoption-dsadma-notre-analyse

Most importantly, all of this is happening from the bottom up. There is no dark money campaign to fuck up the tech companies. The politicians and enforcers who are taking on Big Tech are being shoved from behind by billions of everyday people who are furious and refuse to take it any longer:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/10/solidarity-forever-2/#oligarchism

I am deeply grateful for the public servants who have championed this cause, but I also know that these people are the effect of our movement, not the cause. When Kier Starmer fires Britain's brilliant and effective top competition enforcer and replaces him with the former head of Amazon UK, that does nothing to tamp down the political outrage that Britons feel towards America's tech giants:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter

All over the world, countries that passed IP laws to protect US tech interests in exchange for tariff-free access to US markets are grappling with the end of free trade with America. This represents a generational opportunity to pass laws that enable local technologists to jailbreak US tech exports and liberate their people from the extractive practices of Big Tech forever:

https://archive.is/CiBIz

There is nothing harder to stop than an idea whose time has come to pass.

(Image: Alex Popovkin, Bahia, Brazil from Brazil, CC BY 2.0; Hubertl, CC BY-SA 4.0; modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Doonesbury on DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20050501170432/http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full_date=20050501

#15yrsago AT&T asks government to create national censorwall and system for disconnecting accused infringers https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/04/att-calls-for-us-3-strikes-tribunal-web-censorship/

#15yrsago Asimov’s opens to electronic submission https://web.archive.org/web/20050514080931/http://www.asimovs.com/info/guidelines.shtml

#10yrsago Lego store detains 11 year old customer, accuses his father of being an unfit parent https://www.freerangekids.com/lego-store-detains-boy-11-for-being-too-young-to-shop-alone/

#10yrsago Telescreen watch: Vizio adds spyware to its TVs https://web.archive.org/web/20150905093150/http://www.vizio.com/smartinteractivity

#5yrsago AMC: "We will never show another Universal movie" https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/30/day-and-date/#vertical-integration

#5yrsago Financial services workers dying for junk mail https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/30/day-and-date/#broadridge-financial-solutions

#5yrsago Swedish covid death rates soar above neighbors' https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/30/day-and-date/#tubers

#5yrsago Medicare for All (Congressjerks) https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/30/day-and-date/#m4a4c

#5yrsago Berlin in color, after the Reich's fall https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/30/day-and-date/#bouncing-rubble

#1yrago Live Nation/Ticketmaster is buying Congress https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/30/nix-fix-the-tix/#something-must-be-done-there-we-did-something

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)

  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

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

  • The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: Nimby and the D-Hoppers CONCLUSION https://craphound.com/stories/2025/04/13/nimby-and-the-d-hoppers-conclusion/

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

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

01.05.2025 à 02:58

Pluralistic: Republicans want to force students to pay off scam college loans (30 Apr 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4143 mots)


Today's links


A 1942 photo of two smiling university graduates (a young man and a young woman) in gown and mortarboards, standing before the steps of a columnated university building. Behind them is a dancing skeleton, also wearing a mortarboard, drumiming on a snare drum.

Republicans want to force students to pay off scam college loans (permalink)

House Republicans have a great plan to pay for Trump's tax-cuts for the rich: jacking up the cost of federal student loans, while eliminating protections for students who are scammed by fake universities:

https://prospect.org/education/2025-04-30-republicans-education-upper-class-privilege-student-loans/

Every GOP legislator and especially Congressional committee chairs are scrambling to find cuts that can offset Trump's plans to make his 2017 tax cuts permanent and then add more cuts on top of that. The failure of Doge to make any appreciable savings has left Trump high and dry, with unfunded tax cuts that will flunk even the most compliant, ass-kissing Congressional Budget Office analysis:

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/elon-musk-doge-savings-trump-rcna203051

Enter the House Education and Workforce Committee, whose Republican members have found a way to save $330b over the next decade, through the simple expedient of making working families choose between foregoing education for their kids, or burdening those kids with the brutal, crushing debts for the rest of their lives – debts that can't be discharged in bankruptcy, even if the student becomes totally, permanently disabled – not even if the "university" that charged them all that tuition is later shut down for running a scam.

Trump knows a lot about scams in higher ed, of course. His own ill-fated "Trump 'University,'" a fraudulent, non-accredited institution that stole millions of dollars from unsuspecting students:

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

Trump U isn't the only scam college out there, not by a damn sight. The Department of Education's "Borrower Defense to Repayment" system allows students who've been scammed by fraudulent institutions to have their debts canceled. That's the clause that the GOP members of the House Education and Workforce Committee plan to kill. This will not only leave fraud victims on the hook for a lifetime of debt – it will also make it easier for scam institutions to re-open and prey upon even more students. The Republicans' giveaway to scam universities kills the "gainful employment" rule that requires that universities prove that their grads can actually get work in the fields they graduate in.

The GOP plan will kill all subsidized undergrad loans, meaning that interest will be piled on student loans while students are still at school, so a grad with a four-year degree will also owe four years worth of compounded interest on their freshman year loans. Undergrad loans are capped at $50k, less than half the price of a degree at most state colleges. The GOP members say that the $50k cap covers the "median tuition" – meaning that it is lower than tuition at half the country's institutions.

GOP members have also called for changes to "income based repayment," with sharply rising payments that will shoot up every time a graduate's income crosses a line. Under this plan, a student grad $10k-$20k would have to pay 1% of their income to service their loans. For each $10k increase in graduate pay, repayment goes up by 1% – so if a grad earning $99.9k gets a raise to $100k, their repayments will shoot up from 9% of their annual income to 10%. That means a $100 raise could leave a graduate $850 poorer.

This proposal will roll back Biden-era changes to the interest charged to borrowers on income-based repayment. Under the new rules, interest will continue to compound on your loan even if you're earning peanuts, meaning that the poorest grads will have the highest lifetime interest charges and likely die with unpaid student loans that exceed the principle several times over (remember, the only debt that can be charged against your Social Security is student loans).

The Republican proposal also screws grads working through a Public Service Loan Forgiveness plan, which cancels your student debt after ten years of work in public service. The Republicans want to increase the payments due from grads during that decade of public service. Also, med-school grads would no longer receive credit towards PSLF debt cancellation for the years they spend in residencies, which will drain the supply of freshly minted doctors who staff community health clinics.

They also want to gut Pell grants, changing eligibility to limits grants to "full time" students (30+ hours/week of courses), which will strike hardest at the poorest students, who often attend school part time while working.

Raising the price of a good education and lowering protections against receiving a bad education is an attack on the very idea of education as a source of social mobility. After all, the students most likely to be trapped by a scam college are students from families without a lot of college grads, who lack the means of assessing educational quality.

During the New Deal, America created two parallel paths to social mobility: labor protections and subsidized home ownership. As with every American social initiative, the New Deal was undermined by racism, sexism and xenophobia, and excluded many of America's most disfavored minorities from its benefits. After WWII, two groups of Americans fought to change the New Deal. The wealthy fought to roll back its protections, while the rest of us fought to extend those benefits to Black people, indigenous people, Latino people, women, queers, and others who were left out from the start:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/26/horsehoe-crab/#substantive-disagreement

They made a lot of progress, but then came the Reagan revolution, which wiped out labor protections (including defined benefit pensions) and doubled down on home ownership as the only means of securing a comfortable and dignified life. Over the next quarter-century, this turned a lucky group of workers into real-estate millionaires, even as their wages stagnated and the cost of education and health care skyrocketed:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/

Housing prices also skyrocketed. Of course they did: the only way that owning a house could be an "investment" (as opposed to a way to fulfill the human need for shelter) is if the price of keeping a roof over your head went up. But owning an expensive house in a world of stagnant wages and rising health and education costs is a recipe for not owning a house anymore, because you'll have to liquidate that home to cover your bills or get your kids through school. This century hasn't just been a time in which housing grew more valuable (and thus more expensive) – it's been an era in which its easier than ever to be forced out of your home:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/06/the-end-of-the-road-to-serfdom/

Trading labor protection for real-estate speculation was always going to end badly for workers. The retreat of organized labor has paved the way for a rollback of all the post-war prosperity, allowing America's oligarchs to create a new Gilded Age where education is reserved for failsons of wealthy families, which is fine, because the rest of us won't need a degree to shine their shoes, clean their toilets, and screw the little screws in on iPhones:

https://www.theverge.com/news/644320/us-commerce-secretary-howard-lutnick-says-well-be-making-iphones-in-the-us

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Danny O’Brien goes to work at EFF! https://web.archive.org/web/20050507123924/https://www.oblomovka.com/entries/2005/04/29#1114782180

#15yrsago 1939 World’s Fair: the future’s cradle, in pictures https://web.archive.org/web/20100501170616/http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2010/04/gallery-1939-worlds-fair/

#10yrsago British austerity: a failed experiment abandoned by the rest of the world https://www.theguardian.com/business/ng-interactive/2015/apr/29/the-austerity-delusion

#10yrsago Translation: once they learn the truth, techies hate and fear us https://www.wired.com/2015/04/us-defense-secretary-snowden-caused-tensions-techies/

#10yrsago FBI’s crypto backdoor plans require them to win the war on general purpose computing http://webpolicy.org/2015/04/28/you-cant-backdoor-a-platform/

#10yrsago Anyone can open a Master Lock padlock in under two minutes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09UgmwtL12c

#10yrsago Couples counsellor who assigns Ikea furniture assembly calls Liatorp “The Divorcemaker” https://web.archive.org/web/20150430183654/https://laist.com/2015/04/28/santa_monica_therapist_uses_ikea_as.php

#10yrsago UK Tories forged letter of support in the Telegraph from “5,000 small businesses” https://sturdyblog.wordpress.com/2015/04/27/small-business-letter-to-the-telegraph-an-attempt-to-defraud-the-electorate/

#5yrsago How monopolism crashed the US food supply https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/29/banjo-nazis/#butchery

#5yrsago Legendary troubleshooting stories https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/29/banjo-nazis/#cuckoos-egg

#5yrsago Medical debt collection during the pandemic https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/29/banjo-nazis/#armbreakers

#5yrsago British Library releases 1.9m images https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/29/banjo-nazis/#it-belongs-in-a-museum

#5yrsago NSO Group employee used Pegasus cyberweapon to stalk a woman https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/29/banjo-nazis/#loveint

#5yrsago Founder of AI surveillance company was a Nazi who helped shoot up a synagogue https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/29/banjo-nazis/#damien-patton-nazi

#5yrsago Talking Radicalized with the CBC https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/29/banjo-nazis/#zuckervegans

#5yrsago Bayesian reasoning and covid-19 https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/29/banjo-nazis/#uncertainty

#5yrsago Cigna claims to be rolling in dough and on the verge of bankruptcy https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/29/banjo-nazis/#someones-lying

#1yrago Cigna's nopeinator https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/29/what-part-of-no/#dont-you-understand

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)

  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

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

  • The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: Nimby and the D-Hoppers CONCLUSION https://craphound.com/stories/2025/04/13/nimby-and-the-d-hoppers-conclusion/

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

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

29.04.2025 à 21:42

Pluralistic: Mike Lee and Jim Jordan want to kill the law that bans companies from cheating you (29 Apr 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3962 mots)


Today's links


Three men playing cards and having a drink. The men are dressed in long trousers and shirts. One man passes a card to another player with the card between his toes under the table, unbeknownst to the third player. The card-passer has Trump's hair and orange skin. The card-receiver wears a MAGA hat. The background is a heavily halftoned, desaturated, waving US flag.

Mike Lee and Jim Jordan want to kill the law that bans companies from cheating you (permalink)

House and Senate Republicans are on the verge of killing Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, one of the most potent anti-corruption laws on the US statute books:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/house-gop-proposes-eliminating-key

More than a century ago, Congress passed the FTCA, and they made a point of including a clause that granted the new independent agency broad authority to investigate and prohibit "unfair and deceptive methods of competition." As Matt Stoller writes, over the ensuing 100 years, the FTC has used Section 5 to go after "illegal commissions, firms spying on rivals, sabotage, messing around with patents or regulations."

But starting with the Reagan era, both Republican and Democratic presidents have appointed FTC chairs who were loath to invoke FTCA 5, shying away from the power and duty Congress had given them. This all changed with Biden's FTC chair Lina Khan, who revived the law, using it to punish companies for invading your privacy, blocking repair, locking workers in with noncompete clauses, and more:

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/P221202Section5PolicyStatement.pdf

FTCA has been repeatedly upheld by the Supreme Court, and Congress liked the way it worked so much that when they created the Department of Transport, they copy-pasted the language of FTCA into the DOT's enabling legislation. Pete Buttigieg, Biden's Transport secretary, refused to use this power, but when Khan's chief of staff moved over to Transport, it became a powerhouse regulator, fighting ripoffs and scams in aviation, rail and more:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

Neoclassical economists hate laws like Section 5. The entire basis of neoliberal economics is that the economy can be modeled – and thus controlled – using mathematics. This ideology requires that economists ignore all qualitative aspects of society. Notoriously, economic modeling treats power as irrelevant, because it can't be quantified and plugged into a model:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/03/all-models-are-wrong/#some-are-useful

This is a hell of a deal for the powerful. Ignoring power lets a rich person who buys a starving person's kidneys claim to be engaged in a "voluntary transaction." Ignoring power lets private equity funds claim that gouging you on emergency room care and ambulance rides is fine, because you "freely chose" to be rushed to their hospital while dying of a heart attack. If we can all agree that power doesn't matter, then we can do away with all workplace protections, from the minimum wage to worker safety. Take power out of the equation, and you can claim that any worker on starvation wages who loses an arm in a badly maintained machine "freely contracted" into that situation.

Oligarchs and their lickspittles have waged a generations-long war on the very concept of power, and this assault on Section 5 of the FTC Act is just the latest skirmish. You see, "unfair and deceptive" is a qualitative idea, one that requires consideration of power relationships.

The abolition of fairness as a concept is central to Trumpism. Notoriously, Trump has claimed that any time he successfully rips someone off, "That makes him smart":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/04/its-not-a-lie/#its-a-premature-truth

The Trump movement is full of extremely successful cheats and liars. There's VCs like Mark Andreesen, whose fund paid a $100m bribe to Kickstarter execs in exchange for a fake cryptocurrency launch, in a bid to lure more retail investors into the crypto bubble that Andreesen-Horowitz played a central role in:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/untold-story-kickstarter-crypto-hail-120000205.html

And of course, there's Elon Musk, who lies about his cars, his robots, his rockets, his AI, and everything else. No wonder Elon Musk wants to get rid of a law that bans "unfair and deceptive methods of competition."

The bid to kill Section 5 of the FTC Act is hidden deep in a budget reconciliation amendment introduced by Rep Jim Jordan (R-OH), which pastes in sloppy language drafted by Sen Mike Lee (R-UT). The mechanism by which this amendment will neuter Section 5 is eye-glazingly complex, though Stoller does his best to make it comprehensible.

Far more important than the method by which Section 5 of the FTC Act will be gutted is the consequence of doing so. Stripping the FTC of the power to chase unfair and deceptive conduct will fire a starting pistol for even more ripoffs and scams. Worse than that, the Jordan amendment will kill enforcement of existing consent decrees from companies that have been successfully prosecuted under Section 5, allowing them to restart the scams that attracted regulatory scrutiny.

The Trump administration has been touting antitrust as its "alternative to regulation," drawing an arbitrary line between "regulation" and "antitrust." Antitrust is absolutely regulation:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/antitrust-enforcement-not-regulation-doj-163251704.html

Indeed, antitrust is the most important regulation of all, because it's the regulation that keeps companies from getting so large and powerful that they can ignore all the other regulations. Without antitrust, companies become too big to fail, then too big to jail, then too big to care. The Trump admin will absolutely continue to do antitrust, but in the Trumpiest way possible – by attacking companies that offend Trump, rather than attacking companies that harm the public:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/12/the-enemy-of-your-enemy/#is-your-enemyis

This is gangsterism, the thing that comes after capitalism collapses into feudalism. In gangsterism, "fairness" and "power" have no place. All that's left is a kind of caveat emptor brainworm that insists that if you got scammed, you should have shopped more carefully. And if you got scammed at gunpoint, you just need to understand that the gun was held by the invisible hand, and it was pointed at you in an economically efficient manner.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Tell US govt not to steal tax-funded weather from the public https://web.archive.org/web/20050429182910/https://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-8-40-2452.jsp

#20yrsago Fairfax libraries waste tax-dollars on DRM https://www.his.com/~pshapiro/audiobook.html

#20yrsago Dirty tricks at WIPO https://web.archive.org/web/20050429182910/https://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-8-40-2452.jsp

#15yrsago Goodhart’s Law: Once you measure something, it changes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law

#15yrsago All of Gopherspace as a single download https://changelog.complete.org/archives/1466-download-a-piece-of-internet-history

#15yrsago Timeline of Facebook privacy policy: from reasonable (2005) to apocalyptic (2010) https://web.archive.org/web/20100501041847/http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline/

#15yrsago Top US psychiatric pharmaceuticals, 2009 edition https://web.archive.org/web/20100429082228/https://psychcentral.com/lib/2010/top-25-psychiatric-prescriptions-for-2009

#15yrsago Canadian record industry won’t say what it wants https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2010/04/cria-on-copyright-specifics/

#15yrsago Music industry spokesman loves child porn https://christianengstrom.wordpress.com/2010/04/27/ifpis-child-porn-strategy/

#15yrsago Mississippi school purges top student from yearbook for being lesbian https://www.jacksonfreepress.com/news/2010/apr/26/school-cuts-gay-student-photo-from-yearbook/

#10yrsago Lifting the lid on Scientology’s fatally woo version of rehab https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/apr/27/narconon-incident-reports/

#5yrsago "Essential" workers will strike across America for May Day https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/28/force-multiplier/#mayday

#5yrsago Citizen DJ https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/28/force-multiplier/#brianfoo

#5yrsago NYC will pedestrianize 40 miles of city streets https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/28/force-multiplier/#pandemic-urbanism

#5yrsago Foreclosure vultures hold illegal auctions on courthouse steps https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/28/force-multiplier/#first-against-the-wall

#5yrsago The law is free https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/28/force-multiplier/#go-carl-go

#5yrsago DRM and CHI https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/28/force-multiplier/#fraud

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)

  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

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

  • The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: Nimby and the D-Hoppers CONCLUSION https://craphound.com/stories/2025/04/13/nimby-and-the-d-hoppers-conclusion/

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

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

27.04.2025 à 23:37

Pluralistic: The enshittification of tech jobs (27 Apr 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (5465 mots)


Today's links


An altered version of J.C. Leyendecker's Labor Day 1946 cover illustration for Hearst's 'American Weekly' magazine. The original features a muscular worker in dungarees sitting atop a banner-draped globe, holding a sledgehammer. In this version, his head has been replaced with a faceless hacker-in-a-hoodie, and his sledgehammer has been filled with Matrix code-waterfall characters. Leyendecker's signature has been replaced with an IWW graphic depicting workers with upraised fists all joining together to form a gigantic fist.

The enshittification of tech jobs (permalink)

Tech workers are a weird choice for "princes of labor," but for decades they've enjoyed unparalleled labor power, expressed in high wages, lavish stock grants, and whimsical campuses with free laundry and dry-cleaning, gourmet cafeterias, and kombucha on tap:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhUtdgVZ7MY

All of this, despite the fact that tech union density is so low it can barely be charted. Tech workers' power didn't come from solidarity, it came from scarcity. When you're getting five new recruiter emails every day, you don't need a shop steward to tell your boss to go fuck themselves at the morning scrum. You can do it yourself, secure in the knowledge that there's a company across the road who'll give you a better job by lunchtime.

Tech bosses sucked up to their workers because tech workers are insanely productive. Even with sky-high salaries, every hour a tech worker puts in on the job translates into massive profits. Which created a conundrum for tech bosses: if tech workers produce incalculable value for the company every time they touch their keyboards, and if there aren't enough tech workers to go around, how do you get whichever tech workers you can hire to put in as many hours as possible?

The answer is a tactic that Fobazi Ettarh called "vocational awe":

https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/

"Vocational awe" describes the feeling that your work matters so much that you should accept all manner of tradeoffs and calamities to get the job done. Ettarh uses the term to describe the pathology of librarians, teachers, nurses and other underpaid, easily exploited workers in "caring professions." Tech workers are weird candidates for vocational awe, given how well-paid they are, but never let it be said that tech bosses don't know how to innovate – they successfully transposed an exploitation tactic from the most precarious professionals to the least precarious.

As farcical as all the engineer-pampering tech bosses got up to for the first couple decades of this century was, it certainly paid off. Tech workers stayed at the office for every hour that god sent, skipping their parents' funerals and their kids' graduations to ship on time. Snark all you like about empty platitudes like "organize the world's information and make it useful" or "bring the world closer together," but you can't argue with results: workers who could – and did – bargain for anything from their bosses…except a 40-hour work-week.

But for tech bosses, this vocational awe wheeze had a fatal flaw: if you convince your workforce that they are monk-warriors engaged in the holy labor of bringing forth a new, better technological age, they aren't going to be very happy when you order them to enshittify the products they ruined their lives to ship. "I fight for the user" has been lurking in the hindbrains of so many tech workers since the Tron years, somehow nestling comfortably alongside of the idea that "I don't need a union, I'm a temporarily embarrassed founder."

Tech bosses don't actually like workers. You can tell by the way they treat the workers they don't fear. Sure, Tim Cook's engineers get beer-fattened, chestnut finished and massaged like Kobe cows, but Cook's factory workers in China are so maltreated that Foxconn (the cutout Apple uses to run "iPhone City" where Apple's products are made) had to install suicide nets to reduce the amount of spatter from workers who would rather die than put in another hour at Tim Apple's funtime distraction rectangle factory:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-life-death-forbidden-city-longhua-suicide-apple-iphone-brian-merchant-one-device-extract

Jeff Bezos's engineers get soft-play areas, one imported Australian barista for each mini-kitchen, and the kind of Japanese toilet that doesn't just wash you after but also offers you a trim and dye-job, but Amazon delivery drivers are monitored by AIs that narc them out for driving with their mouths open (singing is prohibited in Uncle Jeff's delivery pods!) and have to piss in bottles; meanwhile, Amazon warehouse workers are injured at three times the rate of other warehouse workers.

This is how tech bosses would treat tech workers…if they could.

And now? They can.

Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Katherine Bindley describes the new labor dynamics at Big Tech:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/tech-workers-are-just-like-the-rest-of-us-miserable-at-work/ar-AA1DDKjh

It starts with Meta, who just announced a 5% across-the-board layoff – on the same day that it doubled executive bonuses. But it's not just the workers who get shown the door who suffer in this new tech reality – the workers on the job are having to do two or three jobs, for worse pay, and without all those lovely perks.

Take Google, where founder Sergey Brin just told his workers that they should be aiming for a "sweet spot" of 60 hours/week. Brin returned to Google to oversee its sweaty and desperate "pivot to AI," and like so many tech execs, he's been trumpeting the increased productivity that chatbots will deliver for coders. But a coder who picks up their fired colleagues' work load by pulling 60-hour work-weeks isn't "more productive," they're more exploited.

Amazon is another firm whose top exec, Andy Jassy, has boasted about the productivity gains of AI, but an Amazon Web Services manager who spoke to Bindley says that he's lost so many coders that he's now writing code for the first time in a decade.

Then there's a Meta recruiter who got fired and then immediately re-hired, but as a "short term employee" with no merit pay, stock grants, or promotions. She has to continuously reapply for her job, and has picked up the workload of several fired colleagues who weren't re-hired. Meta managers (the ones whose bonuses were just doubled) call this initiative "agility." Amazon is famous for spying on its warehouse workers and drivers – and now its tech staff report getting popups warning them that their keystrokes are being monitored and analyzed, and their screens are being recorded.

Bindley spoke to David Markley, an Amazon veteran turned executive coach, who attributed the worsening conditions (for example, managers being given 30 direct reports) to the "narrative" of AI. Not, you'll note, the actual reality of AI, but rather, the story that AI lets you "collapse the organization," slash headcount and salaries, and pauperize the (former) princes of labor.

The point of AI isn't to make workers more productive, it's to make them weaker when they bargain with their bosses. Another of Bindley's sources went through eight rounds of interviews with a company, received an offer, countered with a request for 12% more than the offer, and had the job withdrawn, because "the company didn’t want to move ahead anymore based on the way the compensation conversation had gone."

For decades, tech workers were able to flatter themselves that they were peers with their bosses – that "temporarily embarrassed founder" syndrome again. The Google founders and Zuck held regular "town hall" meetings where the rank-and-file engineers could ask impertinent questions. At Google, these have been replaced with "tightly scripted events." Zuckerberg has discontinued his participation in company-wide Q&As, because they are "no longer a good use of his time."

Companies are scaling back perks in both meaningful ways (Netflix hacking away at parental leave), and petty ones (Netflix and Google cutting back on free branded swag for workers). Google's hacked back its "fun budget" for offsite team-building activities and replacement laptops for workers needing faster machines (so much for prioritizing "increasing worker productivity").

Trump's new gangster capitalism pits immiserated blue collar workers against the "professional and managerial class," attacking universities and other institutions that promised social mobility to the children of working families. Trump had a point when he lionized factory work as a source of excellent wages and benefits for working people without degrees, but he conspicuously fails to mention that factory work was deadly, low-waged and miserable – until factory workers formed unions:

https://www.laborpolitics.com/p/unions-not-just-factories-will-make

Re-shoring industrial jobs to the USA is a perfectly reasonable goal. Between uncertain geopolitics, climate chaos, monopolization and the lurking spectre of the next pandemic, we should assume that supply-chains will be repeatedly and cataclysmicly shocked over the next century or more. And yes, re-shoring product could provide good jobs to working people – but only if they're unionized.

But Trump has gutted the National Labor Relations Board and stacked his administration with bloodsucking scabs like Elon Musk. Trump doesn't want to bring good jobs back to America – he wants to bring bad jobs back to America. He wants to reshore manufacturing jobs from territories with terrible wages, deadly labor conditions, and no environment controls by taking away Americans' wages, labor rights and environmental protections. He doesn't just want to bring home iPhone production, he wants to import the suicide nets of iPhone City, too.

Tech workers are workers, and they once held the line against enshittification, refusing to break the things they'd built for their bosses in meaningless all-nighters motivated by vocational awe. Long after tech bosses were able to buy all their competitors, capture their regulators, and expand IP law to neutralize the threat of innovative, interoperable products like alternative app stores, ad-blockers and jailbreaking kits, tech workers held the line.

There've been half a million US tech layoffs since 2023. Tech workers' scarcity-derived power has been vaporized. Tech workers can avoid the fate of the factory, warehouse and delivery workers their bosses literally work to death – but only by unionizing.

In other words, the workers in re-shored factories and tech workers need the same thing. They are class allies – and tech bosses are their class enemies. This is class war.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Architectures of Control: DRM in hardware https://web.archive.org/web/20050425184527/http://www.danlockton.co.uk/research/architectures.html

#20yrsago Insect photos in naturalistic http://macro-focus https://bugdreams.com

#20yrsago BBC: DRM makes music customers mad https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4474143.stm

#20yrsago Guckert was at the White House even when there were no press briefings https://web.archive.org/web/20050428034248/https://www.rawstory.com/exclusives/byrne/secret_service_gannon_424.htm

#20yrsago FBI warnings ruin CD art & art is the reason for buying CDs http://www.yarnivore.com/francis/archives/001102.html

#20yrsago US govt admits RFID passports are danger to Americans https://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/27/politics/bowing-to-critics-us-to-alter-design-of-electronic-passports.html

#15yrsago Considering cities as “dense meshes of active, communicating public objects” https://speedbird.wordpress.com/2010/04/24/frameworks-for-citizen-responsiveness-enhanced-toward-a-readwrite-urbanism/

#15yrsago Peter Watts won’t go to jail https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/26/peter-watts-wont-go-to-jail/

#15yrsago Canada’s Heritage Minister ready to bring back DMCA-style copyright, throwing out results of copyright consultation https://web.archive.org/web/20100428113301/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4979/135/

#15yrsago In praise of SFWA’s Grievance Committee https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/25/in-praise-of-sfwas-grievance-committee/

#15yrsago UK’s super-rich get even richer https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8642021.stm

#15yrsago Protect your copyrights, boycott DRM-locked platforms https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/devices/article/42869-can-you-survive-a-benevolent-dictatorship.html

#15yrsago Why I won’t buy an iPad, the podcast edition https://web.archive.org/web/20110114222040/https://podcasts.tvo.org/searchengine/audio/800832_48k.mp3

#15yrsago On Peter Watts’s sentencing hearing https://web.archive.org/web/20100429105210/http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=59215

#15yrsago The “fair use economy” is enormous, growing, and endangered by the relatively tiny entertainment industry https://web.archive.org/web/20110128152731/https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2010/04/fairuseeconomy.pdf

#15yrsago UK election: ask your candidates if they’ll repeal the Digital Economy Act https://web.archive.org/web/20100430090624/http://action.openrightsgroup.org/ea-campaign/clientcampaign.do?ea.client.id=1422&ea.campaign.id=6449

#10yrsago Town will cut off power to families of kids who commit vandalism https://web.archive.org/web/20150419053210/https://www.illinoishomepage.net/story/d/story/cutting-vandalism-off-at-the-source/26297/gSM2PYl6P0CRIttIu_95BQ

#10yrsago Portraits of e-waste pickers in Ghana https://www.wired.com/2015/04/kevin-mcelvaney-agbogbloshie/

#10yrsago In the 21st century, only corporations get to own property and we’re their tenants https://web.archive.org/web/20150428173001/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/how-digital-rights-management-keeps-value-in-hands-of-the-manufacturer/article24130876/

#10yrsago Obituary for an amazing history teacher https://web.archive.org/web/20150426235723/https://thescientificparent.org/teachers-be-like-robin-barker-james/

#10yrsago What the UK Greens actually believe about copyright http://tomchance.org/2015/04/24/making-copyright-work-for-creatives/

#10yrsago School bus driver bans little girl from reading https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-girl-told-to-stop-reading-book-by-school-bus-driver-1.3043652?cmp=rss

#10yrsago Variations on the Trolley Problem https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/lesser-known-trolley-problem-variations

#10yrsago Senators announce “Aaron Swartz Should Have Faced More Jail Time” bill https://www.techdirt.com/2015/04/23/senators-introduce-anti-aarons-law-to-increase-jail-terms-unauthorized-access-to-computers/

#10yrsago Kansas kid corrects anti-drug teacher, cops raid his house https://web.archive.org/web/20150423174017/http://benswann.com/exclusive-cops-raid-cannabis-oil-activist-because-her-son-discussed-medical-pot-facts-at-school/

#5yrsago Makers in a time of pandemic https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/25/send-pics/#makers

#5yrsago A deflationary pandemic https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/25/send-pics/#fiscal-dominance

#5yrsago The vernacular signage of the pandemic https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/25/send-pics/#frankfurt

#5yrsago California Adventure, Minecraft edition https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/24/slicey-boi/#minecraft

#5yrsago Security expert conned out of $10,000 https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/24/slicey-boi/#overconfidence

#5yrsago Facebook let advertisers target "pseudoscience" and "conspiracy" https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/24/slicey-boi/#upton-sinclair-disease

#5yrsago Amazon uses its sellers' data to figure out which products to clone https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/24/slicey-boi/#moral-hazard

#5yrsago US telcoms sector isn't doing better than Europe's https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/24/slicey-boi/#opportunists

#5yrsago Masks work https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/24/slicey-boi/#pewpew

#5yrsago US healthcare fails insured people too https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/24/slicey-boi/#m4a

#5yrsago "Inject disinfectant" vs both sides-ism https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/24/slicey-boi/#both-sides-ism

#5yrsago A labradoodle breeder is in charge of America's vaccines https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/24/slicey-boi/#labradoodles

#5yrsago Which guillotine is right for you https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/24/slicey-boi/#slicey-boi

#5yrsago Hospital cuts healthcare workers' pay, pays six-figure exec bonuses https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/27/in-this-together/#all-in-this-together

#5yrsago Pandemic proves ISP data-caps were always a pretense https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/27/in-this-together/#concast

#5yrsago Billionaires thriving on our pandemic losses https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/27/in-this-together/#socialized-losses

#5yrsago Podcasting Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/27/in-this-together/#alan-abel-andrew

#5yrsago Indie booksellers during the pandemic https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/27/in-this-together/#glimmers-of-hope

#1yrago The tax sharks are back and they're coming for your home https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/27/for-the-little-people/#alden-capital

#1yrago The specific process by which Google enshittified its search https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

#1yrago Antitrust is a labor issue https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/25/capri-v-tapestry/#aiming-at-dollars-not-men

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)

  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

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

  • The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Slashdot (https://slashdot.org).

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: Nimby and the D-Hoppers CONCLUSION https://craphound.com/stories/2025/04/13/nimby-and-the-d-hoppers-conclusion/

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

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

24.04.2025 à 13:56

Pluralistic: Every complex ecosystem has parasites (24 Apr 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4842 mots)


Today's links


A rainforest in Chiapas, green and intergrown.

Every complex ecosystem has parasites (permalink)

Patrick "patio11" McKenzie is a fantastic explainer, the kind of person who breaks topics down in ways that stay with you, and creep into your understanding of other subjects, too. Take his 2022 essay, "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero":

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fraud/

It's a very well-argued piece, and here's the nut of it:

The marginal return of permitting fraud against you is plausibly greater than zero, and therefore, you should welcome greater than zero fraud.

In other words, if you allow some fraud, you will also allow through a lot of non-fraudulent business that would otherwise trip your fraud meter. Or, put it another way, the only way to prevent all fraud is to chase away a large proportion of your customers, whose transactions are in some way abnormal or unexpected.

Another great explainer is Bruce Schneier, the security expert. In the wake of 9/11, lots of pundits (and senior government officials) ran around saying, "No price is too high to prevent another terrorist attack on our aviation system." Schneier had a foolproof way of shutting these fools up: "Fine, just ground all civilian aircraft, forever." Turns out, there is a price that's too high to pay for preventing air-terrorism.

Latent in these two statements is the idea that the most secure systems are simple, and while simplicity is a fine goal to strive for, we should always keep in mind the maxim attributed to Einstein, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." That is to say, some things are just complicated.

20 years ago, my friend Kathryn Myronuk and I were talking about the spam wars, which were raging at the time. The spam wars were caused by the complexity of email: as a protocol (rather than a product), email is heterogeneous. There are lots of different kinds of email servers and clients, and many different ways of creating and rendering an email. All this flexibility makes email really popular, and it also means that users have a wide variety of use-cases for it. As a result, identifying spam is really hard. There's no reliable automated way of telling whether an email is spam or not – you can't just block a given server, or anyone using a kind of server software, or email client. You can't choose words or phrases to block and only block spam.

Many solutions were proposed to this at the height of the spam wars, and they all sucked, because they all assumed that the way the proposer used email was somehow typical, thus we could safely build a system to block things that were very different from this "typical" use and not catch too many dolphins in our tuna nets:

https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

So Kathryn and I were talking about this, and she said, "Yeah, all complex ecosystems have parasites." I was thunderstruck. The phrase entered my head and never left. I even gave a major speech with that title later that year, at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference:

https://craphound.com/complexecosystems.txt

Truly, a certain degree of undesirable activity is the inevitable price you pay once you make something general purpose, generative, and open. Open systems – like the web, or email – succeed because they are so adaptable, which means that all kinds of different people with different needs find ways to make use of them. The undesirable activity in open systems is, well, undesirable, and it's valid and useful to try to minimize it. But minimization isn't the same as elimination. "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero," because "everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." Complexity is generative, but "all complex ecosystems have parasites."

America is a complex system. It has, for example, a Social Security apparatus that has to serve more than 65 million people. By definition, a cohort of 65 million people will experience 65 one-in-a-million outliers every day. Social Security has to accommodate 65 million variations on the (surprisingly complicated) concept of a "street address":

https://gist.github.com/almereyda/85fa289bfc668777fe3619298bbf0886

It will have to cope with 65 million variations on the absolutely, maddeningly complicated idea of a "name":

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/

In cybernetics, we say that a means of regulating a system must be capable of representing as many states as the system itself – that is, if you're building a control box for a thing with five functions, the box needs at least five different settings:

http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/REQVAR.html

So when we're talking about managing something as complicated as Social Security, we need to build a Social Security Administration that is just as complicated. Anything that complicated is gonna have parasites – once you make something capable of managing the glorious higgledy piggledy that is the human experience of names, dates of birth, and addresses, you will necessarily create exploitable failure modes that bad actors can use to steal Social Security. You can build good fraud detection systems (as the SSA has), and you can investigate fraud (as the SSA does), and you can keep this to a manageable number – in the case of the SSA, that number is well below one percent:

https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IF/PDF/IF12948/IF12948.2.pdf

But if you want to reduce Social Security fraud from "a fraction of one percent" to "zero percent," you can either expend a gigantic amount of money (far more than you're losing to fraud) to get a little closer to zero – or you can make Social Security far simpler. For example, you could simply declare that anyone whose life and work history can't fit in a simple database schema is not eligible for Social Security, kick tens of millions of people off the SSI rolls, and cause them to lose their homes and starve on the streets. This isn't merely cruel, it's also very, very expensive, since homelessness costs the system far more than Social Security. The optimum amount of fraud is non-zero.

Conservatives hate complexity. That's why the Trump administration banned all research grants for proposals that contained the word "systemic" (as a person with so-far-local cancer, I sure worry about what happens when and if my lymphoma become systemic). I once described the conservative yearning for "simpler times," as a desire to be a child again. After all, the thing that made your childhood "simpler" wasn't that the world was less complicated – it's that your parents managed that complexity and shielded you from it. There's always been partner abuse, divorce, gender minorities, mental illness, disability, racial discrimination, geopolitical crises, refugees, and class struggle. The only people who don't have to deal with this stuff are (lucky) children.

Complexity is an unavoidable attribute of all complicated processes. Evolution is complicated, so it produces complexity. It's convenient to think about a simplified model of genes in which individual genes produce specific traits, but it turns out genes all influence each other, are influenced in turn by epigenetics, and that developmental factors play a critical role in our outcomes. From eye-color to gender, evolution produces spectra, not binaries. It's ineluctably (and rather gloriously) complicated.

The conservative project to insist that things can be neatly categorized – animal or plant, man or woman, planet or comet – tries to take graceful bimodal curves and simplify them into a few simple straight lines – one or zero (except even the values of the miniature transistors on your computer's many chips are never at "one" or "zero" – they're "one-ish" and "mostly zero").

Like Social Security, fraud in the immigration system is a negligible rounding error. The US immigration system is a baroque, ramified, many-tendriled thing (I have the receipts from the immigration lawyers who helped me get a US visa, a green card, and citizenship to prove it). It is already so overweighted with pitfalls and traps for the unwary that a good immigration lawyer might send you to apply for a visa with 600 pages of documentation (the most I ever presented) just to make sure that every possible requirement is met:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/2242342898/in/photolist-zp6PxJ-4q9Aqs-2nVHTZK-2pFKHyf

After my decades of experience with the US immigration system, I am prepared to say that the system is now at a stage where it is experiencing sharply diminishing returns from its anti-fraud systems. The cost of administering all this complexity is high, and the marginal amount of fraud caught by any new hoop the system gins up for migrants to jump through will round to zero.

Which poses a problem for Trump and trumpists: having whipped up a national panic about out of control immigration and open borders, the only way to make the system better at catching the infinitesimal amount of fraud it currently endures is to make the rules simpler, through the blunt-force tactic of simply excluding people who should be allowed in the country. For example, you could ban college kids planning to spend the summer in the US on the grounds that they didn't book all their hotels in advance, because they're planning to go from city to city and wing it:

https://www.newsweek.com/germany-tourists-deported-hotel-maria-lepere-charlotte-pohl-hawaii-2062046

Or you could ban the only research scientist in the world who knows how to interpret the results of the most promising new cancer imaging technology because a border guard was confused about the frog embryos she was transporting (she's been locked up for two months now):

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/horrified-harvard-scientists-ice-arrest-leaves-cancer-researchers-scrambling/ar-AA1DlUt8

Of course, the US has long operated a policy of "anything that confuses a border guard is grounds for being refused entry" but the Trump administration has turned the odd, rare outrage into business-as-usual.

But they can lock up or turn away as many people as they want, and they still won't get the amount of fraud to zero. The US is a complicated place. People have complicated reasons for entering the USA – work, family reunion, leisure, research, study, and more. The only immigration system that doesn't leak a little at the seams is an immigration system that is so simple that it has no seams – a toy immigration system for a trivial country in which so little is going on that everything is going on.

The only garden without weeds is a monoculture under a dome. The only email system without spam is a closed system managed by one company that only allows a carefully vetted cluster of subscribers to communicate with one another. The only species with just two genders is one wherein members who fit somewhere else on the spectrum are banished or killed, a charnel process that never ends because there are always newborns that are outside of the first sigma of the two peaks in the bimodal distribution.

A living system – a real country – is complicated. It's a system, where people do things you'll never understand for perfectly good reasons (and vice versa). To accommodate all that complexity, we need complex systems, and all complex ecosystems have parasites. Yes, you can burn the rainforest to the ground and plant monocrops in straight rows, but then what you have is a farm, not a forest, vulnerable to pests and plagues and fire and flood. Complex systems have parasites, sure, but complex systems are resilient. The optimal level of fraud is never zero, because a system that has been simplified to the point where no fraud can take place within it is a system that is so trivial and brittle as to be useless.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago French court bans DRM for DVDs https://web.archive.org/web/20050424023258/https://www.01net.com/editorial/274752/droit/la-justice-interdit-de-proteger-les-dvd-contre-la-copie/

#20yrsago Why governments make stupid copyrights https://www.ft.com/content/39b697dc-b25e-11d9-bcc6-00000e2511c8

#20yrsago London Review of Books’s personals are really dirty and funny https://web.archive.org/web/20050426005000/http://www.lrb.co.uk/classified/index.php#PERSONALS

#20yrsago German crooner’s megaphone-style covers of modern rock https://www.palast-orchester.de/en

#15yrsago British Airways leaves stranded passengers all over world, jacks up prices on tickets home https://www.theguardian.com/news/blog/2010/apr/23/iceland-volcano-thousands-passengers-stranded

#15yrsago Google highlights fair use defense to YouTube takedowns https://publicpolicy.googleblog.com/2010/04/content-id-and-fair-use.html

#15yrsago Microsoft wins its $100M tax-break and amnesty from broke-ass Washington State https://web.archive.org/web/20100429061500/http://microsofttaxdodge.com/2010/04/microsoft-gets-nevada-royalty-tax-cut-and-tax-amnesty.html?all

#10yrsago Privilege: you’re probably not the one percent https://jacobin.com/2015/04/1-99-percent-class-inequality

#10yrsago Marissa Mayer makes 1,100 Yahooers jobless, calls it a “remix” https://web.archive.org/web/20150425183847/http://news.dice.com/2015/04/22/yahoo-called-its-layoffs-a-remix-dont-do-that/?CMPID=AF_SD_UP_JS_AV_OG_DNA_

#10yrsago Canadian Big Content spokesjerk says the public domain is against the public interest https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2015/04/canadian-recording-industry-works-entering-the-public-domain-are-not-in-the-public-interest/

#5yrsago Riot Baby https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/23/riot-baby/#Tochi-Onyebuchi

#5yrsago Mayor of Las Vegas says the "free market" will decide what's safe https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/23/riot-baby/#carolyn-goodman

#1yrago "Humans in the loop" must detect the hardest-to-spot errors, at superhuman speed https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

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)

  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

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

  • The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: Nimby and the D-Hoppers CONCLUSION https://craphound.com/stories/2025/04/13/nimby-and-the-d-hoppers-conclusion/

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

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

6 / 10
 Persos A à L
Mona CHOLLET
Anna COLIN-LEBEDEV
Julien DEVAUREIX
Cory DOCTOROW
EDUC.POP.FR
Marc ENDEWELD
Michel GOYA
Hubert GUILLAUD
Gérard FILOCHE
Alain GRANDJEAN
Hacking-Social
Samuel HAYAT
Dana HILLIOT
François HOUSTE
Tagrawla INEQQIQI
Infiltrés (les)
Clément JEANNEAU
Paul JORION
Michel LEPESANT
Frédéric LORDON
Blogs persos du Diplo
LePartisan.info
 
 Persos M à Z
Henri MALER
Christophe MASUTTI
Romain MIELCAREK
Richard MONVOISIN
Corinne MOREL-DARLEUX
Timothée PARRIQUE
Thomas PIKETTY
PLOUM
VisionsCarto
Yannis YOULOUNTAS
Michaël ZEMMOUR
 
  Numérique
Christophe DESCHAMPS
Louis DERRAC
Olivier ERTZSCHEID
Olivier EZRATY
Framablog
Francis PISANI
Pixel de Tracking
Irénée RÉGNAULD
Nicolas VIVANT
 
  Collectifs
Arguments
Bondy Blog
Dérivation
Dissidences
Mr Mondialisation
Palim Psao
Paris-Luttes.info
ROJAVA Info
 
  Créatifs / Art / Fiction
Nicole ESTEROLLE
Julien HERVIEUX
Alessandro PIGNOCCHI
XKCD
🌓