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🖋 Cory DOCTOROW
Science fiction author, activist and journalist

PLURALISTIC

▸ les 10 dernières parutions

01.07.2025 à 07:41

Pluralistic: How much (little) are the AI companies making? (30 Jun 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (8654 mots)


Today's links


A carny barker waving his top-hat and selling tickets from a roll; his head has been replaced with the hostile red eye of HAL9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' The background is a magnified, halftoned detail from a US$100 bill.

How much (little) are the AI companies making? (permalink)

If there's one area where tech has shown a consistent aptitude for innovation, it's in accounting tricks that make money-losing companies appear wildly profitable. And AI is the greatest innovator of all (when it comes to accounting gimmicks).

Since the dotcom era, tech companies have boasted about giving stuff away but "making it up in volume," inventing an ever-sweatier collection of shell-games that let them hide the business's true profit and loss.

The all-time world champeen of this kind of finance fraud is Masayoshi Son, the founder of Softbank, who acts as the bagman for the Saudi royals' personal investments. Remember last decade when the tech press was all abuzz about "unicorns" – startups that were worth $1b? That was Son: he would take a startup like Wework, declare its brand to be worth $1b, invest an infinitesimal fraction of $1b in the company based on that valuation (sometimes with a rube co-investor) and declare the valuation to be "market-based." A whole string of garbage companies achieved unicornhood by means of this unbelievably stupid trick:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/27/voluntary-carbon-market/#trust-me

Of course, every finance bro is familiar with Stein's Law: "anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." Sure, the Saudi royals could be tapped to piss away $31b on Uber, losing $0.41 on every dollar for 13 years, but eventually they're going to turn off the money spigot and attempt to flog their shares to retail and institutional suckers. To make that work, they have to invent new accounting tricks, like when Uber "sold" its failing overseas ride-hailing businesses to international rivals in exchange for stock, then declared that these companies' illiquid stock had skyrocketed in value, tipping Uber into the black:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/05/a-lousy-taxi/#a-giant-asterisk

Even companies that are actually profitable (in the sense of bringing in more revenue than it costs to keep the business's lights on) love to juice their stats, and the worst offenders are the Big Tech companies, who reap a vast commercial reward from creating the illusion that they are continuing to grow, even after they've dominated their sector.

Take Google: once the company attained a 90% global search market-share, there were no more immediate prospects for growth. I mean, sure, they could raise a billion new humans to maturity and train them to be Google customers (e.g., the business plan for Google Classroom), but that takes more than a decade, and Google needed growth right away. So the company hatched a plan to make search worse, so that its existing users would have to search multiple times to get the information they sought, and each additional search would give Google another chance to show you an ad:

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

But that was small potatoes. What Google – and the rest of the tech sector – needed was a massive growth story, a story about how their companies, worth trillions of dollars, could double or triple in size in the coming years. There's a kind of reflexive anti-capitalist critique that locates the drive to tell growth stories in ideology: "endless growth is the ideology of a tumor," right?

But spinning an endless growth story isn't merely ideological. It's a firmly materialistic undertaking. Companies that appear to be growing have market caps that are an order of magnitude larger than companies that are considered "mature" and at the end of their growth phase. For every dollar that Ford brings in, the market is willing to spend $8.60 on its stock. For every dollar Tesla brings in, the market is willing to spend $118 on its stock.

That means that when Tesla and Ford compete to buy something – like another company, or the labor of highly sought after technical specialists – Tesla has a nearly unbeatable advantage. Rather than raiding its precious cash reserves to fund its offer, Tesla can offer stock. Ford can only spend as many dollars as it brings in through sales, but Tesla can make more stock, on demand, simply by typing numbers into a spreadsheet.

So when Tesla bids against Ford, Ford has to use dollars, and Tesla can use shares. And even if the acquisition target – a key employee or a startup that's on the acquisitions market – wants dollars instead of shares, Tesla can stake its shares as collateral for loans at a rate that's 1,463% better than the rate Ford gets when it collateralizes a loan based on its own equity:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/07/rah-rah-rasputin/#credulous-dolts

In other words, if you can tell a convincing growth story, it's much easier to grow. The corollary, though, is that when a growth company stops growing, when it becomes "mature," it experiences a massive sell-off of its stock, as its share price plummets to a tenth or less of the old "growth" valuation. That's why the biggest tech companies in the world have spent the past decade – the decade after they monopolized their sectors and conquered the world – pumping a series of progressively stupider bubbles: metaverse, cryptocurrency, and now, AI.

Tech companies don't need these ventures to be successful – they just need them to seem to be plausibly successful for long enough to keep the share price high until the next growth story heaves over the horizon. So long as Mister Market thinks tech is a "growth" sector and not a "mature" sector, tech bosses will be able to continue to pay for things with stock rather than cash, and their own stockholdings will continue to be valued at sky-high rates.

That's why AI is being crammed into absofuckinglutely everything. It's why the button you used to tap to start a new chat summons up an AI that takes seven taps to banish again – it's so tech companies can tell Wall Street that people are "using AI" which means that their companies are still part of a growth industry and thus entitled to gigantic price-to-earnings ratios:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/02/kpis-off/#principal-agentic-ai-problem

The reality, of course, is that people hate AI. Telling people that your product is "AI enabled" makes them less likely to use it:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19368623.2024.2368040#d1e1096

People – who have had an infinitude of AI crammed down their throats – are already sick of AI. Policymakers and financiers – credulous dolts who fall for tech marketing hype every! fucking! time – are convinced that AI Is The Future. This presents a dilemma for tech companies, who research the hell out of how people actually use their products and thus must be extremely aware of how hated AI is, but whose leadership is desperate to show investors that they are about to experience explosive growth through the miracle of AI.

The reality is that AI is a very bad business. It has dogshit unit economics. Unlike all the successful tech of the 21st century, each generation of AI is more expensive to make, not cheaper. And unlike the most profitable tech services of this century, AI gets more costly to operate the more users it has.

You can be forgiven for not knowing this, though. As Ed Zitron points out in a long, excellent article about the credulity and impuissance of the tech press, the actual numbers suuuuuck:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/make-fun-of-them/

  • Microsoft

Spending: $80b in 2025

Projecting: $13b in 2025

Actually: $10b comes from Openai giving back compute credits Microsoft gave to Openai, bringing the true total to $3b.

  • Meta

Spending: $72b in 2025

Receiving: At most $600m in gross revenue from selling "smart" Raybans, which might not actually be loss-leaders, meaning it's possible that they're making less than $0.00.

  • Amazon

Spending: $100b in 2025

Projecting: $5b in revenue in 2025

  • Google

Spending: $75b in 2025

Projecting: They won't say, possibly zero.

As Zitron points out: this industry is projecting $327b in spending this year, with $18b in revenue and zero profits. For comparison: smart watches are a $32b/year industry.

Now, what about Openai? Well, they're one of Masoyoshi Son's special children, of a piece with Wework and Uber. Openai is projecting $12.7b in revenue this year, with losses of $14b. Add in a bunch of also-rans like Perplexity and Surge, and the revenue rises to $32.3b. But…if you chuck them in, you also get total expenditures of $370.8b.

These are by no means the only funny numbers in the AI industry. Take "Stargate," a data-center initiative with a price tag of $500b. Actual funds committed? $40b.

These are terrible numbers, but also, these are some genuinely impressive accounting gimmicks. They are certain to keep the bubble pumping for months or perhaps years, convincing gullible bosses to fire talented employees and replace them with bumbling chatbots that will linger for years or decades, the asbestos in the walls of our high-tech civilization.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Wil Wheaton’s Slashdot interview https://slashdot.org/story/05/06/27/0926218/wil-wheaton-strikes-back

#20yrsago Anti-DRM badges https://web.archive.org/web/20050701004506/http://nootropic.blogspot.com/2005/06/gallery-of-drm-related-antipixel.html

#15yrsago ACLU: America is riddled with politically motivated surveillance https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/Spyfiles_2_0.pdf

#15yrsago Toronto cops justify extreme G20 measures with display of LARPing props, weapons from unrelated busts https://web.archive.org/web/20100702002151/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/weapons-seized-in-g20-arrests-put-on-display/article1622761/

#15yrsago Copyright best practices for communications scholars https://web.archive.org/web/20100628005458/http://centerforsocialmedia.org/fair-use/related-materials/codes/code-best-practices-fair-use-scholarly-research-communication

#15yrsago G20 police used imaginary law to jail harass demonstrators and jailed protestors in dangerous and abusive “detention center” https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/29/g20-police-used-imaginary-law-to-jail-harass-demonstrators-and-jailed-protestors-in-dangerous-and-abusive-detention-center/

#15yrsago Canada repeating Britain’s dirty copyright legislation process https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jun/29/canada-copyright-digital-economy

#15yrsago London cops enforce imaginary law against brave, principled teenaged photographer https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/officers-claim-they-don-t-need-law-to-stop-photographer-taking-pictures-2012827.html

#15yrsago Globe and Mail journalist arrested and kettled at G20 Toronto https://web.archive.org/web/20100630110103/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/g8-g20/toronto/caught-in-the-storm-penned-in-at-queen-street/article1621255/

#15yrsago UK government hushed up internal analysis of anti-drug strategy to avoid ridicule https://transform-drugs.blogspot.com/2010/06/home-office-internal-document-reveals.html

#15yrsago My Twitter debate with Minister who introduced Canada’s DMCA https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/28/my-twitter-debate-with-minister-who-introduced-canadas-dmca/

#10yrsago Why I’m leaving London https://memex.craphound.com/2015/06/29/why-im-leaving-london/

#10yrsago Neal Stephenson on the story behind Seveneves http://www.bookotron.com/agony/audio/2015/2015-interviews/neal_stephenson-2015.mp3

#10yrsago Brian Wood’s Starve: get to your comic shop now! https://memex.craphound.com/2015/06/29/brian-woods-starve-get-to-your-comic-shop-now/

#10yrsago BBC’s list of pages de-indexed through Europe’s “right to be forgotten” https://www.bbc.co.uk/webarchive/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2Fblogs%2Finternet%2Fentries%2F1d765aa8-600b-4f32-b110-d02fbf7fd379

#5yrsago NYC housing lottery favors the least-needy https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#market-failure

#5yrsago Facebook and Trump collaborate on rule-rigging https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#fb-hearts-dt

#5yrsago How to break up Google https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#braygoog

#5yrsago Female Furies https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#apokolips-now

#5yrsago Bailouts should come with strings attached https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/28/kings-shilling/#tanstaafl

#1yrago The reason you can't buy a car is the same reason that your health insurer let hackers dox you https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/28/dealer-management-software/#antonin-scalia-stole-your-car

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:

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links


A carny barker waving his top-hat and selling tickets from a roll; his head has been replaced with the hostile red eye of HAL9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' The background is a magnified, halftoned detail from a US$100 bill.

How much (little) are the AI companies making? (permalink)

If there's one are where tech has shown a consistent aptitude for innovation, it's in accounting tricks that make money-losing companies appear wildly profitable. And AI is the greatest innovator of all (when it comes to accounting gimmicks).

Since the dotcom era, tech companies have boasted about giving stuff away but "making it up in volume," inventing an ever-sweatier collection of shell-games that let them hide the business's true profit and loss.

The all-time world champeen of this kind of finance fraud is Masayoshi Son, the founder of Softbank, who acts as the bagman for the Saudi royals' personal investments. Remember last decade when the tech press was all abuzz about "unicorns" – startups that were worth $1b? That was Son: he would take a startup like Wework, declare its brand to be worth $1b, invest an infinitesimal fraction of $1b in the company based on that valuation (sometimes with a rube co-investor) and declare the valuation to be "market-based." A whole string of garbage companies achieved unicornhood by means of this unbelievably stupid trick:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/27/voluntary-carbon-market/#trust-me

Of course, every finance bro is familiar with Stein's Law: "anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." Sure, the Saudi royals could be tapped to piss away $31b on Uber, losing $0.41 on every dollar for 13 years, but eventually they're going to turn off the money spigot and attempt to flog their shares to retail and institutional suckers. To make that work, they have to invent new accounting tricks, like when Uber "sold" its failing overseas ride-hailing businesses to international rivals in exchange for stock, then declared that these companies' illiquid stock had skyrocketed in value, tipping Uber into the black:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/05/a-lousy-taxi/#a-giant-asterisk

Even companies that are actually profitable (in the sense of bringing in more revenue than it costs to keep the business's lights on) love to juice their stats, and the worst offenders are the Big Tech companies, who reap a vast commercial reward from creating the illusion that they are continuing to grow, even after they've dominated their sector.

Take Google: once the company attained a 90% global search market-share, there were no more immediate prospects for growth. I mean, sure, they could raise a billion new humans to maturity and train them to be Google customers (e.g., the business plan for Google Classroom), but that takes more than a decade, and Google needed growth right away. So the company hatched a plan to make search worse, so that its existing users would have to search multiple times to get the information they sought, and each additional search would give Google another chance to show you an ad:

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

But that was small potatoes. What Google – and the rest of the tech sector – needed was a massive growth story, a story about how their companies, worth trillions of dollars, could double or triple in size in the coming years. There's a kind of reflexive anti-capitalist critique that locates the drive to tell growth stories in ideology: "endless growth is the ideology of a tumor," right?

But spinning an endless growth story isn't merely ideological. It's a firmly materialistic undertaking. Companies that appear to be growing have market caps that are an order of magnitude larger than companies that are consisdered "mature" and at the end of their growth phase. For every dollar that Ford brings in, the market is willing to spend $8.60 on its stock. For every dollar Tesla brings in, the market is willing to spend $118 on its stock.

That means that when Tesla and Ford compete to buy something – like another company, or the labor of highly sought after technical specialists – Tesla has a nearly unbeatable advantage. Rather than raiding its precious cash reserves to fund its offer, Tesla can offer stock. Tesla can only spend as many dollars as it brings in through sales, but Tesla can make more stock, on demand, simply by typing numbers into a spreadsheet.

So when Tesla bids against Ford, Ford has to use dollars, and Tesla can use shares. And even if the acquisition target – a key employee or a startup that's on the acquisitions market – wants dollars instead of shares, Tesla can stake its shares as collateral for loans at a rate that's 1,463% better than the rate Ford gets when it collateralizes a loan based on its own equity:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/07/rah-rah-rasputin/#credulous-dolts

In other words, if you can tell a convincing growth story, it's much easier to grow. The corollary, though, is that when a growth company stops growing, when it becomes "mature," it experiences a massive sell-off of its stock, as its share price plummets to a tenth or less of the old "growth" valuation. That's why the biggest tech companies in the world have spent the past decade – the decade after they monopolized their sectors and conquered the world – pumping a series of progressively stupider bubbles: metaverse, cryptocurrency, and now, AI.

Tech companies don't need these ventures to be successful – they just need them to seem to be plausibly successful for long enough to keep the share price high until the next growth story heaves over the horizon. So long as Mister Market thinks tech is a "growth" sector and not a "mature" sector, tech bosses will be able to continue to pay for things with stock rather than cash, and their own stockholdings will continue to be valued at sky-high rates.

That's why AI is being crammed into absofuckingloutely everything. it's why the button you used to tap to start a new chat summons up an AI that takes seven taps to banish again – it's so tech companies can tell Wall Street that people are "using AI" which means that their companies are still part of a growth industry and thus entitled to gigantic price-to-earnings ratios:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/02/kpis-off/#principal-agentic-ai-problem

The reality, of course, is that people hate AI. Telling people that your product is "AI enabled" makes less likely to use it:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19368623.2024.2368040#d1e1096

People – who have had an infinitude of AI crammed into down their throats – are already sick of AI. Policymakers and financiers – credulous dolts who fall for tech marketing hype every! fucking! time – are convinced that AI Is The Future. This presents a dilemma for tech companies, who research the hell out of how people actually use their products and thus must be extremely aware of how hated AI is, but whose leadership is desperate to show investors that they are about to experience explosive growth through the miracle of AI.

The reality is that AI is a very bad business. It has dogshit unit economics. Unlike all the successful tech of the 21st century, each generation of AI is more expensive to make, not cheaper. And unlike the most profitable tech services of this century, AI gets more costly to operate the more users it has.

You can be forgiven for not knowing this, though. As Ed Zitron points out in a long, excellent article about the credulity and impuissance of the tech press, the actual numbers suuuuuck:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/make-fun-of-them/

  • Microsoft

Spending: $80b in 2025

Projecting: $13b in 2025

Actually: $10b comes from Openai giving back compute credits Microsoft gave to Openai, bringing the true total to $3b.

  • Meta

Spending: $72b in 2025

Receiving: At most $600m in gross revenue from selling "smart" Raybans, which might not actually be loss-leaders, meaning it's possible that they're making less than $0.00.

  • Amazon

Spending: $100b in 2025

Projecting: $5b in revenue in 2025

  • Google

Spending: $75b in 2025

Projecting: They won't say, possibly zero.

As Zitron points out: this industry is projecting $327b in spending this year, with $18b in revenue and zero profits. For comparison: smart watches are a $32b/year industry.

Now, what about Openai? Well, they're one of Masoyoshi Son's special children, of a piece with Wework and Uber. Openai is projecting $12.7b in revenue this year, with losses of $14b. Add in a bunch of also-rans like Perplexity and Surge, and the revenue rises to $32.3b. But…if you chuck them in, you also get total exenditure of $370.8b.

These are by no means the only funny numbers in the AI industry. Take "Stargate," a data-center initiative with a price tag of $500b. Actual funds committed? $40b.

These are terrible numbers, but also, these are some genuinely impressive accounting gimmicks. They are certain to keep the bubble pumping for months or perhaps years, convincing gullible bosses to fire talented employees and replace them with bumbling chatbots that will linger for years or decades, the asbestos in the walls of our high-tech civilization.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Wil Wheaton’s Slashdot interview https://slashdot.org/story/05/06/27/0926218/wil-wheaton-strikes-back

#20yrsago Anti-DRM badges https://web.archive.org/web/20050701004506/http://nootropic.blogspot.com/2005/06/gallery-of-drm-related-antipixel.html

#15yrsago ACLU: America is riddled with politically motivated surveillance https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/Spyfiles_2_0.pdf

#15yrsago Toronto cops justify extreme G20 measures with display of LARPing props, weapons from unrelated busts https://web.archive.org/web/20100702002151/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/weapons-seized-in-g20-arrests-put-on-display/article1622761/

#15yrsago Copyright best practices for communications scholars https://web.archive.org/web/20100628005458/http://centerforsocialmedia.org/fair-use/related-materials/codes/code-best-practices-fair-use-scholarly-research-communication

#15yrsago G20 police used imaginary law to jail harass demonstrators and jailed protestors in dangerous and abusive “detention center” https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/29/g20-police-used-imaginary-law-to-jail-harass-demonstrators-and-jailed-protestors-in-dangerous-and-abusive-detention-center/

#15yrsago Canada repeating Britain’s dirty copyright legislation process https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jun/29/canada-copyright-digital-economy

#15yrsago London cops enforce imaginary law against brave, principled teenaged photographer https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/officers-claim-they-don-t-need-law-to-stop-photographer-taking-pictures-2012827.html

#15yrsago Globe and Mail journalist arrested and kettled at G20 Toronto https://web.archive.org/web/20100630110103/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/g8-g20/toronto/caught-in-the-storm-penned-in-at-queen-street/article1621255/

#15yrsago UK government hushed up internal analysis of anti-drug strategy to avoid ridicule https://transform-drugs.blogspot.com/2010/06/home-office-internal-document-reveals.html

#15yrsago My Twitter debate with Minister who introduced Canada’s DMCA https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/28/my-twitter-debate-with-minister-who-introduced-canadas-dmca/

#10yrsago Why I’m leaving London https://memex.craphound.com/2015/06/29/why-im-leaving-london/

#10yrsago Neal Stephenson on the story behind Seveneves http://www.bookotron.com/agony/audio/2015/2015-interviews/neal_stephenson-2015.mp3

#10yrsago Brian Wood’s Starve: get to your comic shop now! https://memex.craphound.com/2015/06/29/brian-woods-starve-get-to-your-comic-shop-now/

#10yrsago BBC’s list of pages de-indexed through Europe’s “right to be forgotten” https://www.bbc.co.uk/webarchive/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2Fblogs%2Finternet%2Fentries%2F1d765aa8-600b-4f32-b110-d02fbf7fd379

#5yrsago NYC housing lottery favors the least-needy https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#market-failure

#5yrsago Facebook and Trump collaborate on rule-rigging https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#fb-hearts-dt

#5yrsago How to break up Google https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#braygoog

#5yrsago Female Furies https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#apokolips-now

#5yrsago Bailouts should come with strings attached https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/28/kings-shilling/#tanstaafl

#1yrago The reason you can't buy a car is the same reason that your health insurer let hackers dox you https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/28/dealer-management-software/#antonin-scalia-stole-your-car

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:

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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28.06.2025 à 15:17

Pluralistic: Antitrust defies politics' law of gravity (28 Jun 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4052 mots)


Today's links


An inflatable pig balloon against a blue sky, bearing the Zohran for Mayor logo. The Chrysler Building sits to one side.

Antitrust defies politics' law of gravity (permalink)

In 2014, I read a political science paper that nearly convinced me to quit my lifelong career as an activist: "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens," published in Perspectives on Politics:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

The paper's authors are Martin Gilens, a UCLA professor of Public Policy; and Northwestern's Benjamin Page, a professor of Decision Making. Gilens and Page studied a representative sample of 1,779 policy issues, analyzing the effect that the preferences of different groups of people had on the outcome. They wanted to find out what drove policy: money, or popularity?

It's money. It's totally, utterly money. When billionaires want something, it literally doesn't matter how much the rest of us hate it, they're gonna get their way. When billionaires hate something, it doesn't matter how popular it is with the rest of us, we're not gonna get it. As Gilens and Page put it:

economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

I know the cynics out there are hollering "no duh" at their computers right now, but bear with me here. Gilens and Page's research shows that you and I have no voice in policy outcomes. Based on these findings, the only way we can change society is to try and woo oligarchs so they champion our cause. This reduces democracy to a competition to see who can pour the most honey into a plutocrat's ear. Mass mobilizations – millions of people in the streets – only matter to the extent that they bring a tear to a billionaire's eye.

This just shattered me. I've been haunted by it ever since. I've tried some tactical gambits based on this data, but honestly, I don't want to improve the world by swaying the ultra-rich. Mostly, I've spent the decade since I read the Gilens/Page paper working on mass mobilizations and mass opinion-influencing. I reasoned (or maybe rationalized) that while oligarchs were running the nation now, that was subject to change, and that was a change that I was sure wouldn't come from America's plutocrats committing mass class-suicide.

Then, something incredible happened. All this decade, a tide of antitrust vigor has swept the planet. The EU has passed big, muscular tech competition laws like the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, and has by God enforced them, and have patched the enforcement weaknesses in the GDPR. EU member-states – France, Germany, Spain – have passed their own big, ambitious national laws that go further than DSA/DMA. Even Ireland – a country that deliberately prostrated itself to US Big Tech – is getting in on the act, with the country's Social Media Czar railing against the "enshittification" of tech:

https://www.independent.ie/business/technology/chairman-of-irish-social-media-regulator-says-europe-should-not-be-seduced-by-mario-draghis-claims/a526530600.html

Not just the EU, of course. Australia and Canada have taken some big swings at Big Tech, and Canada is pressing ahead with its digital services tax of 3% for onshore earnings of tech companies with more than CAD20m in annual turnover, despite the fact that Trump has promised to end all trade talks with Canada in retaliation:

https://financialpost.com/technology/canadas-digital-services-tax-g7

Antitrust fever has swept both of the world's superpowers. Under Trump I, the DOJ and FTC brought key cases against Facebook and Google, and then Biden's antitrust enforcers went to town on all forms of monopoly, carrying on the Trump cases and reviving some of the law's most elegant weapons from a more civilized age, like the Robinson-Patman Act:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/01/ftc-sues-pepsico-rigging-soft-drink-competition

Admittedly, Trump's FTC and DOJ have carried on some of Biden's work, even as they've killed some of the Biden era's most important cases, and made a general Trumpian mockery of the idea that antitrust law is a tool for economic justice:

https://economicpopulist.substack.com/p/weekly-rewind-62725

Trump killing antitrust law is normal. That's what politics has been like for this whole century, and it's what politics is like in every other domain: billionaires get their way on climate, on labor, on whatever bullshit they get into their fool fucking heads:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2025/06/27/jeff-bezos-lauren-sanchez-married-wedding-venice/84349820007/

But it's a mistake to think that Trump killed antitrust enforcement in the USA out of a special conservative deference to millionaires and enthusiasm for corrosive and predatory monopolies. In the UK, four consecutive Conservative Prime Ministers presided over the best competition law enforcement in British history – and it was Labour's Keir Starmer who fired the head of the UK Competition and Markets Authority and replaced him with the ex-head of Amazon UK:

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

It is completely normal for both "progressive" and "conservative" parties to wield the entire apparatus of state to the benefit of powerful monopolists. The antitrust enforcement – in the US, the UK, the EU, Australia, Germany, France and Spain – are totally aberrant. And it's not just in these countries where political science's law of gravity reversed itself: there've been giant, brutal antitrust cases in Japan and South Korea, and China has passed aggressive tech antitrust laws that strike directly at the giant Chinese tech companies that Cold War 2.0 creeps insist are just branches of the Chinese Communist Party:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/07/backstabbed/#big-data-backstabbing

This is fucking wild.

This is water flowing uphill.

This is pigs flying.

This is hell freezing over.

There is no billionaire constituency for antimonopoly work. Oligarchs aren't funneling dark money to trustbuster orgs. Antimonopoly work strikes at the beating heart of the system that creates and sustains billionaires.

This is a political outcome that the people want, and that billionaires hate, and billionaires are losing.

How is this happening? Why is this happening? I don't know, exactly. I suspect that some of this is related to Stein's Law: "anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." Monopolists corrupt our political system, maim and impoverish workers, gouge their customers on enshittified, overpriced garbage. They are an existential threat to the survival of the human species.

The system is so broken and the mainstream of politics endlessly gaslights us, telling us that corrupt and degraded institutions are either just fine ("America Was Always Great" -H. Clinton) or need to be destroyed, rather than redeemed ("Delete CFPB" -E. Musk). People know that the system only caters to the whims of billionaires and tells the rest of us to eat shit. They hate the fucking system.

Over and over again, we've seen outbreaks of furious, joyous, uncompromising leftist activism: Occupy, Bernie 2016, Bernie 2020, George Floyd, the Women's March, No Kings, Climate Strikes, on and on. Over and over, liberal "centrists" have joined with the right to crush these movements.

Meanwhile, the right has only moved from strength to strength by offering a libidinal, furious promise of root-and-branch change. The only team that's promising radical change is the right. Parties like UK Labour and the Democrats offer austerity and genocide with slightly more polite aesthetics ("[If I'm elected], fundamentally nothing will change" -J. Biden).

I think that centrist suppression of the left has pushed 90 percent of the energy for major change into right wing nihilist movements, but the anti-corporate, anti-monopolist energy has not dissipated. It's formed a kind of invisible political wind that has filled the sails of these antimonopoly projects all over the world.

But anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. Zohran Mamdani just won the NYC Democratic mayoral primary election. That wasn't supposed to happen. The worst people on Earth showered the hereditary King of New York with so much money it was coming out of his fucking pores and he still ate shit. Guys who've got so much money they were able to get Columbia University to collude in shipping its students off to gulags for having the temerity to oppose genocide tried to do it to Mamdani and we kicked their teeth in.

The world is organized around the whims of billionaires, but it doesn't have to be. Most of us are not esoteric authoritarian freaks pining for a CEO of America who'll track us all using mandatory Fitbits and assign us jobs based on an AI's estimation of our cranial geometry. Those ideas are not popular. Now, it's true that this century has been defined by extremely unpopular ideas winning the day. But anything that can't go on eventually stops.

Sure, they smeared Jeremy Corbyn and replaced him with Austeritybot 3000, and Labour is collapsing as a result, and if an election were called today, Nigel Farage would sweep the board, assuming the PM's seat ahead of a Ba'ath Party style majority.

But on today's Trashfuture podcast, I learned about the leadership contest for the Green Party, in which genuinely progressive candidate, Zack Polanski, is running:

https://backzack.com/

Labour has walked away from voters. The Tories are in chaos. The Libdems permanently discredited themselves in the coalition government. The youthquake that buoyed up Corbyn was driven by a desperate hunger for change. The party grandees that purged Labour of everyone who wanted a better country have created a massive constituency that's up for grabs.

I'm desperate for change, too. I've joined the Greens, and I'll be voting for Polanski in the leadership race:

https://join.greenparty.org.uk/join-us/

(Image: Frank Vincentz, Petri Krohn, CC BY-SA 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Secret Congressional policy reports published https://web.archive.org/web/20050629020405/http://www.opencrs.com/

#20yrsago Brazil to US pharma co: slash AIDS drug prices or lose patent https://web.archive.org/web/20190918065156/https://www.ft.com/content/816699fe-e50a-11d9-95f3-00000e2511c8

#20yrsago Hilary Rosen: Killing Napster didn’t bring market control https://web.archive.org/web/20050629010724/http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/hilary-rosen/the-wisdom-of-the-court-_3259.html

#15yrsago Canadian cops’ history of agents provocateurs and the G20 https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/27/canadian-cops-history-of-agents-provocateurs-and-the-g20/

#15yrsago Stiglitz: spending cuts won’t cure recession https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/osborne-s-first-budget-it-s-wrong-wrong-wrong-2011501.html

#5yrsago Snowden on tech's Oppenheimers https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/27/belated-oppenheimers/#oppenheimers

#5yrsago Santa Cruz bans predictive policing https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/27/belated-oppenheimers/#banana-slugs

#1yrago Copyright takedowns are a cautionary tale that few are heeding https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/27/nuke-first/#ask-questions-never

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:

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

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27.06.2025 à 16:40

Pluralistic: Bill Griffith's 'Three Rocks' (27 Jun 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3406 mots)


Today's links


The Abrams' Books cover for Bill Griffith's 'Three Rocks.'

Bill Griffith's 'Three Rocks' (permalink)

What better format for a biography of Ernie Bushmiller, creator of the daily Nancy strip, than a graphic novel? And who better to write and draw it than Bill Griffith, creator of Zippy the Pinhead, a long-running and famously surreal daily strip?

https://store.abramsbooks.com/products/three-rocks

Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller, the Man Who Created Nancy is more than a biography, though. Griffith is carrying on the work of Scott McCloud, whose definitive Understanding Comics used the graphic novel form to explain the significance and method of sequential art, singling out Nancy for special praise:

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

For Griffith – and a legion of comics legends who worship Bushmiller – the story of Bushmiller's life and the story of Nancy and its groundbreaking methodology are inseparable. We watch as Bushmiller starts out as a teenaged dropout copy-boy in the bullpen at a giant news syndicate, running errands for the paper's publisher and, eventually, its cartoonists. Bushmiller burns to get into the funnies, and he's got a good head for gags, but his draftsmanship needs work. He secretly enrolls in a life-drawing class, which does him little good, but he applies himself and applies himself, and eventually is given his big break: taking over Fritzi Ritz, a daily cartoon serial about a sexy flapper.

Bushmiller's run on Fritzi Ritz outlasts flappers, and, as he struggles to keep the character relevant amidst changing times, he eventually hits on a "Cousin Oliver" gambit: adding in a sassy niece named Nancy:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CousinOliver

Cousin Oliverae are rarely successful, but Nancy turned out to be the exception that proved the rule. Nancy took over the strip, and "Aunt Fritzi" receded in importance, taking a backstage to Nancy and her pal Sluggo.

As Nancy came into her own, so did Bushmiller. Bushmiller combined an impeccable sense of the gag (he started with his punchline panel – "the snapper" – and worked backwards) with a visual style that he refined to something so pure and refined that it inspired generations of comics creators.

Bushmiller was the master of simplifying, and then simplifying more, and then simplifying even more. Visually, his characters and his furniture (especially the iconic "three rocks" of the title) are refined to something so iconic they're practically ideograms. While some accused Bushmiller of re-using a small set of drawings, Griffith makes the convincing case that Bushmiller perfected a small number of icons, and repeated them as motifs. Indeed, these characters are so perfect and finely tuned that when Griffith inserts Nancy, Sluggo and other characters from Bushmillerville into his graphic novel, he doesn't re-draw them – rather, Griffith carefully crops these characters out and collages them into his own panels. Every image of Nancy in this book was drawn by Ernie Bushmiller.

This pared-down, severely restricted graphic style provides the perfect toolkit for the Bushmiller gag, which, at its best, is profoundly surrealistic, often playing on the form of the comic itself (for example, when Nancy asks Sluggo to give her a push on a bicycle, Sluggo obliges by stepping out of the comic and tipping the final panel at 45 degrees, sending Nancy rolling "downhill"). These meta-humorous gags give rise to Griffith's key insight: that Nancy isn't a comic about what it's like to be a kid – it's a comic about what it's like to be a cartoon character.

This is such a good organizing principle for understanding Nancy's staying power and influence. Other cartoons like Peanuts are nominally about being a kid, but are actually about being a small adult. Nancy, meanwhile, shares a lineage with, say, Animaniacs and Bugs Bunny and Groucho Marx (who, we learn, wore out his welcome with Bushmiller and his wife by relentlessly hitting on the latter at celebrity dinners at the Brown Derby). It's no wonder that Scott McCloud, the prophet-explainer of sequential art, loves Nancy: she practically invented stepping outside the frame and making us think about how these pictures and words worked, and why, and she made us laugh the whole time.

Bushmiller had a unique mind. He was a workaholic, turning out a 7-day/week strip for decades, even as he shouldered a variety of side-projects and other strips. Once he started making money, he moved to the Connecticut suburbs where he could have a work-room big enough to accommodate four drafting boards, so he could work on four strips at once. He would sometimes get a year ahead of schedule with his publishers. It was only very late in his life that Bushmiller took on any kind of assistants, and even then, he obsessively supervised them, counting the spikes in every depiction of Nancy's hair to ensure that they fell within the regulation 69-107 spikes.

Despite his massive following among artists, hipsters and intellectuals, Bushmiller insisted that the secret to his success was in his devotion to simplicity and the universality it brought. Bushmiller's editorial process seems to have consisted almost entirely of his removing words, images and lines from his panels, paring them down further and further until they became, essentially, narrated pictograms – almost funny Ikea assembly instructions.

Griffith – a daily cartoonist workaholic who has been turning out Zippy strips since 1971 – bursts with admiration for Bushmiller, and this biography saves a lot of space for Bushmiller himself, with long sections given over to reproductions of some of Nancy's best outings. Griffith has had more than half a century to think about what makes surreal comic-strips tick, and, like McCloud, he pours these out on the page, but largely confines himself to illustrating his insights with Bushmiller strips and panels. The result is a heady volume: a great biography and a great book of literary criticism and comic arts theory.

Nancy is still around, written and drawn by the amazing Olivia Jaimes, whose first collection of new Nancy comics I called "incredibly, fantastically, impossibly great":

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/17/the-first-book-collecting-the-new-nancy-comic-is-incredibly-fantastically-impossibly-great/

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 Adventurer’s Club from Walt Disney World recreated in painstaking detail with Half-Life engine https://insidethemagic.net/2010/06/walt-disney-worlds-adventurers-club-virtually-recreated-for-fans-to-once-again-explore/

#15yrsago Texas GOP comes out against oral sex, the UN, and the Supreme Court https://web.archive.org/web/20100626003418/https://www.nydailynews.com/news/2010/06/22/2010-06-22_texas_gop_platform_criminalize_gay_marriage_and_ban_sodomy_outlaw_strip_clubs_an.html

#15yrsago Monkey-Pirate-Robot-Ninja-Zombie: Rock Paper Scissors 9.0 https://web.archive.org/web/20100625003931/http://markarayner.com/blog/archives/1613

#10yrsago Harry Reid tells BLM’s Burning Man squad to suck it up https://web.archive.org/web/20150628195105/http://hoh.rollcall.com/harry-reid-to-burning-man-rescue/

#10yrsago Supreme Court upholds marriage equality! https://www.theguardian.com/law/live/2015/jun/26/supreme-court-rules-same-sex-marriage

#10yrsago Wil Wheaton on depression https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6ACzT6PCDw

#10yrsago 2.5 million data points show: America’s ISPs suck, and AT&T sucks worst https://www.measurementlab.net/blog/interconnection_and_measurement_update/

#5yrsago Microcontent guidelines for 2020 https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/26/police-riots/#nielsen-98

#5yrsago "Violent protests" vs "violent police" https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/26/police-riots/#police-riot

#5yrsago Sympathy for the mask-shy https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/26/police-riots/#harm-reduction

#5yrsago Let's get rid of nursing homes https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/26/police-riots/#nursing-homes

#5yrsago Splash Mountain to purge Song of the South https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/26/police-riots/#minstrelsy

#5yrsago Copyright keeps police use-of-force training a secret https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/26/police-riots/#post-due

#1yrago Cleantech has an enshittification problem https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/26/unplanned-obsolescence/#better-micetraps

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:

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF

26.06.2025 à 19:25

Pluralistic: Surveillance is inequality's stabilizer (26 Jun 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (5240 mots)


Today's links


A set of antique brass scales. In one is the staring red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' In the other is a chibi guillotine character. In the foreground are the backs of a crowd of Victorian onlookers. The background is a tangled forest of Trump's hair.

Surveillance is inequality's stabilizer (permalink)

The "dictator's dilemma" pits a dictator's desire to create social stability by censoring public communications in order to prevent the spread of anti-regime messages with the dictator's need to know whether powerful elites are becoming restless and plotting a coup:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/26/dictators-dilemma/#garbage-in-garbage-out-garbage-back-in

Closely related to the dictator's dilemma is "authoritarian blindness," where an autocrat's censorship regime keeps them from finding out about important, socially destabilizing facts on the ground, like whether a corrupt local official is comporting themself so badly that the people are ready to take to the streets:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/24/pluralist-your-daily-link-dose-24-feb-2020/#thatswhatxisaid

The modern Chinese state has done more to skillfully navigate the twin hazards of the dictator's dilemma and authoritarian blindness than any other regime in history. Take Xi Jinping's 2012-2015 anticorruption purge, which helped him secure another ten year term as Party Secretary. Xi targeted legitimately corrupt officials in this sweeping purge, but – crucially – he only targeted corrupt officials in the power-base of his rivals for Party leader, while leaving corrupt officials in his own power base unscathed:

https://web.archive.org/web/20181222163946/https://peterlorentzen.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Lorentzen-Lu-Crackdown-Nov-2018-Posted-Version.pdf

How did Xi accomplish this feat? Through intense, fine-grained surveillance, another area in which modern China excels. Chinese online surveillance is often paired with censorship, both petty (banning Winnie the Pooh, whom Xi is often mocked for resembling) and substantial (getting Apple to modify Airdrop for every user in the world in order to prevent the spread of anti-regime messages before a key Party leadership contest).

But there are a lot of instances where China spies on its people but doesn't censor them, even if they are expressing dissatisfaction with the government. Chinese censors allow a surprising amount of complaint about official incompetence, overreach and corruption, but they completely suppress any calls for mobilization to address these complaints. You can be as angry as you want with the government online, but you can't call for protests to do something about it:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1251722

This makes perfect sense in the context of "authoritarian blindness": by allowing online complaint, an autocrat can locate the hot-spots where things are reaching a boiling-over point, and by blocking public manifestations, the autocrat can prevent the public from turning their failings into a flashpoint that endangers the autocracy.

In other words, autocrats can reserve to themselves the power to decide how to defuse public anger: they can suppress it, using surveillance data about the people who led the online debate about official failures to figure out who to intimidate, arrest, or disappear. Or they can address it through measures like firing corrupt local officials or funding local social programs (toxic waste cleanups, smokestack regulation, building schools and hospitals, etc) that make people feel better about their government.

Autocracy is an inherently unstable social situation. No society can deliver everything that everyone in it desires: if you tear down existing low-density housing and build apartment blocks to decrease a housing shortage, you'll delight people who are un- or under-housed, and you'll infuriate people who are happily housed under the status quo. In every society, there's always someone getting their way at the expense of someone else.

Obviously, widespread unhappiness is inherently socially destabilizing. After all, no society can police every action of every person. From littering to parking in disabled parking spots, from paying your taxes to washing your hands before serving food, a society relies primarily on people following the rules even though they face little to no risk of being punished for breaking them. The easiest way to get people to follow the rules is to foster a sense of the rules' legitimacy: people may not agree with or understand the rationale for a rule, but if they view the process by which the rule was decided on as a legitimate one, then they may follow it anyway.

This legitimacy is a source of social stability. Sure, your candidate might lose the election, or the government might enact a policy you hate, but if you think the election was fair and you believe that you can change the policy through democratic means, then you will be on the side of preserving the system, rather than overturning it.

A democracy's claim to legitimacy lies in its popular mandate: "Sure, I don't like this decision, but it was fairly made." By contrast, a dictator's legitimacy comes from their claims to wisdom: "Sure, I don't like this decision, but the Supreme Generalissimo is the smartest man in history, and he says it was the right call."

You can see how this is a brittle arrangement, even if the dictator is a skilled autocrat who makes generally great decisions: even a great decision is going to have winners and losers, and it might be hard to convince the losers that they keep losing because they deserve to lose. And that's the best outcome, where an autocrat is right. But what about when the autocrat is wrong? What about when the autocrat makes a bunch of decisions that make nearly everyone consistently worse off, either because the autocrat is a fool, or because they are greedy and are stealing everything that isn't nailed down?

Every society needs stabilizers, but autocracies need more stabilizers than democracies, because the story about why you, personally, are getting screwed is a lot less convincing in an autocracy ("The autocrat is right and you are wrong, suck it up") than it is in a democracy ("This was the fairest compromise possible, and if it wasn't, we need to elect someone new so it changes").

The Snowden revelations taught us that there is no distinction between commercial surveillance and government surveillance. Governments spy, sure, but the most effective way for governments to spy on us is by raiding the data troves assembled by technology companies (for one thing, these troves are assembled at our own expense – we foot the bill for this spying whenever we send money to a phone or tech company). The tech companies were willing participants in this process: the original Snowden leak, about the "PRISM" program, showed how tech companies made millions of dollars by siphoning off user data to the NSA on demand:

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

It was only later that we learned about another NSA program, "Upstream," through which the NSA was wiretapping the tech companies' data-centers, acquiring all of their user data, and then requesting the data that interested them through PRISM, as a form of "parallel construction," which is when an agency learns a fact through a secret system, and then uses a less-secret system to acquire the same fact, in order to maintain the secrecy of the first system:

https://www.eff.org/pages/upstream-prism

Upstream really pissed off the tech companies. After all, they'd been dutifully rolling over and handing out their users' data in violation of US law, risking their businesses to help the NSA do mass spying, and the NSA paid them back by secretly spying on the tech companies themselves! That's a hell of a way to say thank you to your co-conspirators. After Upstream, the tech companies finally started encrypting the links between their data-centers, which made Upstream-style collection infinitely harder:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/yahoo-will-encrypt-between-data-centers-use-ssl-for-all-sites/

But that hardly ended the mass surveillance private-public partnership. Congress continued to do nothing about privacy (the last federal consumer privacy law Congress gave Americans is 1988's Video Privacy Protection Act, which bans video store clerks from telling newspapers about the VHS cassettes you take home) (we used to be a country). That meant that tech companies could collect our data will-ye or nill-ye, and that data brokers could buy and sell that data without any oversight or limitation:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/20/privacy-first-second-third/#malvertising

There's many reasons that Congress failed to act on privacy. Obviously, they face immense pressure from lobbyists for the commercial surveillance industry – but they also face covert and powerful pressure from public safety agencies, cops, and spies, who rely on private sector data as a source of off-the-books, warrantless, ubiquitous surveillance.

Why does America need so much spying? Well, because America has always been imperfectly democratic, from its inception as a enslaving nation where millions of people were denied both the ballot and personhood; and as a patriarchal nation where half of the remaining people were also denied the franchise; and as a colonialist nation where an entire culture of people had been subject to genocide, land theft, and systematic oppression. This is an obviously unstable arrangement. Whether in chains, on a reservation, or under the thumb of a husband or father, there were plenty of Americans who had no reason to buy into the system, accept its legitimacy, or follow its rules. To keep the system intact, it wasn't enough to terrorize these populations – America's rulers had to know where to inflict terror, which is to say, where order was closest to collapsing.

Some of America's first spies were private sector union-busters, the Pinkerton agency, who served as a private spy army for bosses who wanted to find the leverage points in the worker uprisings that swept the country. The Pinkertons' pitch was that it was cheaper to pay them to figure out who the most important union leaders were and target them for violence, kidnapping, and killing than it was to give all your workers a raise.

This is an important aspect of the surveillance project. Spying is part of a broader class of activities called "guard labor" – anything you might pay someone to do that results in fewer guillotines being built on your lawn. Guard labor can be paying someone to build a wall around your estate or neighborhood. It can be paying security guards to patrol the wall. It can be paying for CCTV operators, or drone operators. It can be paying for surveillance, too.

Guard labor isn't free. The pitch for guard labor is that it is a cheaper way to get social stability than the alternative: building schools and hospitals, paying a living wage, lowering prices, etc. It follows that when you make guard labor cheaper, you can build fewer schools and hospitals, pay lower wages, and raise prices more, and buy more guard labor to counter the destabilizing effect of these policies, and still come out ahead.

American politics has been growing ever more unstable since the 1970s, when the oil crisis gave way to the Reagan revolution and its raft of pro-oligarch, anti-human policies. Since then, we've seen an unbroken trend to wage stagnation and widening inequality. As a new American oligarch class emerged, they gained near-total control over the levers of power. In a now-famous 2014 paper, political scientists reviewed 1,779 policy fights and found that the only time these cashed out in a way that reflected popular will is when elites favored them, too. When elites objected to something, it literally didn't matter how popular it was with everyone else, it just didn't happen:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

It's pretty hard to make the case that the system is legitimate when it only does things that rich people want, and never does things the vast majority of people want when these conflict with rich peoples' desires. Some of these outcomes are merely disgusting and immoral, like abetting genocide in Gaza, but more frequently, the policies elites favor are ones that make the rich richer: climate inaction, blocking Medicare for All, smashing unions, dismantling anti-corruption and campaign finance laws.

I don't think it's a coincidence that America's democracy has become significantly less democratic at the same time that mass surveillance has grown. Mass surveillance makes guard labor much cheaper, which means that the rich can make their lives better at all of our expense and still afford the amount of guard labor it takes to keep the guillotines at bay.

Cheap guard labor also allows the rich to strike devil's bargains that would otherwise be instantaneously destabilizing. For example, the second Trump election required an alliance between the tiny minority of ultra-rich with the much larger minority of virulent racists who were promised the realization of their psychotic fantasy of masked, armed goons snatching brown people off the streets and sending them to offshore slave labor camps. That alliance might be a good way to elect a president who'll dismantle anticorruption law and slash taxes, but it won't do you much good if the resulting ethnic cleansing terror provokes a popular uprising. But what if ICE can rely on Predator drones and cell-site simulators to track the identities of everyone who comes out to a protest:

https://www.wired.com/story/cbp-predator-drone-flights-la-protests/

What if ICE can buy off-the-shelf facial recognition tools and use them to identify people who are brave enough to step between snatch-squads and their neighbors?

https://www.404media.co/ice-is-using-a-new-facial-recognition-app-to-identify-people-leaked-emails-show/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter

Each advance in surveillance tech makes worse forms of oppression, misgovernance and corruption possible, by making it cheaper to counter the destabilizing effect of destroying the lives of the populace, through identifying the bravest, angriest, and most effective opposition figures so they can be targeted for harassment, violence, arrest, or kidnapping.

America's private sector surveillance industry has always served as a means of identifying and punishing people who fought for a better country. The first credit reporting bureau was the Retail Credit Company, which used a network of spies and paid informants to identify "race mixers," queers, union organizers and leftists so that banks could deny them credit, landlords could deny them housing, and employers could deny them jobs:

https://jacobin.com/2017/09/equifax-retail-credit-company-discrimination-loans/

Retail Credit continued to do this until 1975, when, finally, popular opinion turned against the company, so it changed its name…

…to Equifax.

Today, Equifax is joined by a whole industry of elite enforcers who use spying, legal harassments, mercenaries and troll armies to offset the socially destabilizing effects of the wealthy's misrule:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/launderers-enforcers-bagmen/#procurers

But despite centuries of American mass surveillance, America's oligarchs keep finding themselves in the midst of great existential crises. That's because guard labor – even surveillance-supercharged guard labor – is no substitute for policies that make the country better off. Oligarchs may want to tend the nation like a shepherd tends its flock, leaving enough lambs around to grow next year's wool. But they're all competing with one another, and they understand that the sheep they spare will like as not end up on a rival's dinner table. Under those circumstances, every oligarch ends up in a race to see who can turn us into lambchops first.

This is the dictator's dilemma, American style. The rich always overestimate how much social stability their guard labor has bought them, and they're easy marks for any creepy, malodorous troll with a barn full of machine-gun equipped drones:

https://twitter.com/postoctobrist/status/1909853731559973094

They accumulate mounting democratic debts, as destabilizing rage builds in the public, erupting in the Civil War, in the summer of 68, in the Battle of Seattle, in the Rodney King uprising, in the George Floyd protests, the Los Angeles rebellion. They think they can spy their way into a country where they have everything and we have nothing, and we like it (or at least, never dare complain about it).

They're wrong.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Adventurer’s Club from Walt Disney World recreated in painstaking detail with Half-Life engine https://insidethemagic.net/2010/06/walt-disney-worlds-adventurers-club-virtually-recreated-for-fans-to-once-again-explore/

#15yrsago Texas GOP comes out against oral sex, the UN, and the Supreme Court https://web.archive.org/web/20100626003418/https://www.nydailynews.com/news/2010/06/22/2010-06-22_texas_gop_platform_criminalize_gay_marriage_and_ban_sodomy_outlaw_strip_clubs_an.html

#15yrsago Monkey-Pirate-Robot-Ninja-Zombie: Rock Paper Scissors 9.0 https://web.archive.org/web/20100625003931/http://markarayner.com/blog/archives/1613

#10yrsago Harry Reid tells BLM’s Burning Man squad to suck it up https://web.archive.org/web/20150628195105/http://hoh.rollcall.com/harry-reid-to-burning-man-rescue/

#10yrsago Supreme Court upholds marriage equality! https://www.theguardian.com/law/live/2015/jun/26/supreme-court-rules-same-sex-marriage

#10yrsago Wil Wheaton on depression https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6ACzT6PCDw

#10yrsago 2.5 million data points show: America’s ISPs suck, and AT&T sucks worst https://www.measurementlab.net/blog/interconnection_and_measurement_update/

#5yrsago Microcontent guidelines for 2020 https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/26/police-riots/#nielsen-98

#5yrsago "Violent protests" vs "violent police" https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/26/police-riots/#police-riot

#5yrsago Sympathy for the mask-shy https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/26/police-riots/#harm-reduction

#5yrsago Let's get rid of nursing homes https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/26/police-riots/#nursing-homes

#5yrsago Splash Mountain to purge Song of the South https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/26/police-riots/#minstrelsy

#5yrsago Copyright keeps police use-of-force training a secret https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/26/police-riots/#post-due

#1yrago Cleantech has an enshittification problem https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/26/unplanned-obsolescence/#better-micetraps

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Upcoming books (permalink)

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


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25.06.2025 à 19:13

Pluralistic: What's a "public internet?" (25 Jun 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (5812 mots)


Today's links


The EU flag, with a cluster of blue-tinted fiber optics in its background.

What's a "public internet?" (permalink)

The "Eurostack" is a (long overdue) project to publicly fund a European "stack" of technology that is independent from American Big Tech (as well as other powers' technology that has less hold in Europe, such as Chinese and Russian tech):

https://www.euro-stack.info/

But "technological soveriegnty" is a slippery and easily abused concept. Policies like "national firewalls" and "data localization" (where data on a country's population need to be kept on onshore servers) can be a means to different ends. Data localization is important if you want to keep an American company from funneling every digital fact about everyone in your country to the NSA. But it's also a way to make sure that your secret police can lay hands on population-scale data about anyone they might want to kidnap and torture:

https://doctorow.medium.com/theyre-still-trying-to-ban-cryptography-33aa668dc602

At its worst, "technological sovereignty" is a path to a shattered internet with a million dysfunctional borders that serve as checkpoints where thuggish customs inspectors can stop you from availing yourself of privacy-preserving technology and prevent you from communicating with exiled dissidents and diasporas.

But at its best, "technological sovereignty" is a way to create world-girding technology that can act as an impartial substrate on which all manner of domestic and international activities can play out, from a group of friends organizing a games night, to scientists organizing a symposium, to international volunteer corps organizing aid after a flood.

In other words, "technological sovereignty" can be a way to create a public internet that the whole public controls – not just governments, but also people, individuals who can exercise their own technological self-determination, controlling crucial aspects of their own technology usage, like "who will see this thing I'm saying?" and "whose communications will I see, and which ones can I block?"

A "public internet" isn't the same thing as "an internet that is operated by your government," but you can't get a public internet without government involvement, including funding, regulation, oversight and direct contributions.

Here's an example of different ways that governments can involve themselves in the management of one part of the internet, and the different ways in which this will create more or less "public" internet services: fiber optic lines.

Fiber is the platinum standard for internet service delivery. Nothing else comes even close to it. A plastic tube under the road that is stuffed with fiber optic strands can deliver billions of times more data than copper wires or any form of wireless, including satellite constellations like Starlink:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/30/fight-for-44/#slowpokes

(Starlink is the most antifuturistic technology imaginable – a vision of a global internet that gets slower and less reliable as more people sign up for it. It makes the dotcom joke of "we lose money on every sale but make it up in volume" look positively bankable.)

The private sector cannot deliver fiber. There's no economical way for a private entity to secure the rights of way to tear up every street in every city, to run wires into every basement or roof, to put poles on every street corner. Same goes for getting the rights of way to string fiber between city limits across unincorporated county land, or across the long hauls that cross national and provincial or state borders.

Fiber itself is cheap like borscht – it's literally made out of sand – but clearing the thicket of property rights and political boundaries needed to get wire everywhere is a feat that can only be accomplished through government intervention.

Fiber's opponents rarely acknowledge this. They claim, instead, that the physical act of stringing wires through space is somehow transcendentally hard, despite the fact that we've been doing this with phone lines and power cables for more than a century, through the busiest, densest cities and across the loneliest stretches of farmland. Wiring up a country is not the lost art of a fallen civilization, like building pyramids without power-tools or embalming pharoahs. It's something that even the poorest counties in America can manage, bringing fiber across forbidding mountain passes on the back of a mule named "Ole Bub":

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-one-traffic-light-town-with-some-of-the-fastest-internet-in-the-us

When governments apply themselves to fiber provision, you get fiber. Don't take my word for it – ask Utah, a bastion of conservative, small-government orthodoxy, where 21 cities now have blazing fast 10gb internet service thanks to a public initiative called (appropriately enough) "Utopia":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/16/symmetrical-10gb-for-119/#utopia

So government has to be involved in fiber, but how should they involve themselves in it? One model – the worst one – is for the government to intervene on behalf of a single company, creating the rights of way for that company to lay fiber in the ground or string it from poles. The company then owns the network, even though the fiber and the poles were the cheapest part of the system, worth an unmeasurably infinitesimal fraction of the value of all those rights of way.

In the worst of the worst, the company that owns this network can do anything they want with its fiber. They can deny coverage to customers, or charge thousands of dollars to connect each new homes to the system. They can gouge on monthly costs, starve their customer service departments or replace them with mindless AI chatbots. They can skimp on maintenance and keep you waiting for days or weeks when your internet goes out. They can lard your bill with junk fees, or force you to accept pointless services like landlines and cable TV as a condition of getting the internet.

They can also play favorites with local businesses: maybe they give great service to every Domino's pizza place at knock-down rates, and make up for it by charging extra to independent pizza parlors that want to accept internet orders and stream big sports matches on the TV over the bar.

They can violate Net Neutrality, slowing down your connection to sites unless their owners agree to pay bribes for "premium carriage." They can censor your internet any way they see fit. Remember, corporations – unlike governments – are not bound by the First Amendment, which means that when a corporation is your ISP, they can censor anything they feel like:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/15/useful-idiotsuseful-idiots/#unrequited-love

Governments can improve on this situation by regulating a monopoly fiber company. They can require the company to assume a "universal service" mandate, meaning they must connect any home or business that wants it at a set rate. Governments can ban junk fees, set minimum standards for customer service and repair turnarounds, and demand neutral carriage. All of this can improve things, though its a lot of work to administer, and the city government may lack the resources and technical expertise to investigate every claim of corporate malfeasance, and to perform the technical analysis to evaluate corporate excuses for slow connections and bungled repairs.

That's the worst model: governments clear the way for a private monopolist to set up your internet, offering them a literally priceless subsidy in the form of rights of way, and then, maybe, try to keep them honest.

Here's the other extreme: the government puts in the fiber itself, running conduit under all the streets (either with its own crews or with contract crews) and threading a fiber optic through a wall of your choice, terminating it with a box you can plug your wifi router into. The government builds a data-center with all the necessary switches for providing service to you and your neighbors, and hires people to offer you internet service at a reasonable price and with reasonable service guarantees.

This is a pretty good model! Over 750 towns and cities – mostly conservative towns in red states – have this model, and they're almost the only people in America who consistently describe themselves as happy with their internet service:

https://ilsr.org/articles/municipal-broadband-skyrocket-as-alternative-to-private-models/

(They are joined in their satisfaction by a smattering of towns served by companies like Ting, who bought out local cable companies and used their rights of way to bring fiber to households.)

This is a model that works very well, but can fail very badly. Municipal governments can be pretty darned kooky, as five years of MAGA takeovers of school boards, library boards and town councils have shown, to say nothing of wildly corrupt big-city monsters like Eric Adams (ten quintillion congratulations to Zohran Mamdani!). If there's one thing I've learned from the brilliant No Gods No Mayors podcast, it's that mayors are the weirdest people alive:

https://www.patreon.com/collection/869728?view=condensed

Remember: Sarah Palin got her start in politics as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska. Do you want to have to rely on Sarah Palin for your internet service?

https://www.patreon.com/posts/119567308?collection=869728

How about Rob Ford? Do you want the crack mayor answering your tech support calls? I didn't think so:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/rob-ford-part-1-111985831

But that's OK! A public fiber network doesn't have to be one in which the government is your only choice for ISP. In addition to laying fiber and building a data-center and operating a municipal ISP, governments can also do something called "essential facilities sharing":

https://transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Common_Carrier/Orders/1999/fcc99238.pdf

Governments all over the world did this in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and some do it still. Under an essential facilities system, the big phone company (BT in the UK, Bell in Canada, AT&T and the Baby Bells in the USA) were required to rent space to their competitors in their data centers. Anyone who wants to set up an ISP can install their own switching gear at a telephone company central office and provide service to any business or household in the country.

If the government lays fiber in your town, they can both operate a municipal fiber ISP and allow anyone else to set up their own ISP, renting them shelf-space at the data-center. That means that the town college can offer internet to all its faculty and students (not just the ones who live in campus housing), and your co-op can offer internet service to its members. Small businesses can offer specialized internet, and so can informal groups of friends. So can big companies. In this model, everyone is guaranteed both the right to get internet access and the right to provide internet access. It's a great system, and it means that when Mayor Sarah Palin decides to cut off your internet, you don't need to sue the city – you can just sign up with someone else, over the same fiber lines.

That's where essential facilities sharing starts, but that's not where it needs to stop. When the government puts conduit (plastic tubes) in the ground for fiber, they can leave space for more fiber to fished through, and rent space in the conduit itself. That means that an ISP that wants to set up its own data center can run physically separate lines to its subscribers. It means that a university can do a point-to-point connection between a remote scientific instrument like a radio telescope and the campus data-center. A business can run its own lines between branch offices, and a movie studio can run dedicated lines from remote sound-stages to the edit suites at its main facility.

This is a truly public internet service – one where there is a publicly owned ISP, but also where public infrastructure allows for lots of different kinds of entities to provide internet access. It's insulated from the risks of getting your tech support from city hall, but it also allows good local governments to provide best-in-class service to everyone in town, something that local governments have a pretty great track record with.

The Eurostack project isn't necessarily about fiber, though. Right now, Europeans are thinking about technological sovereignty through the lens of software and services. That's fair enough, though it does require some rethinking of the global fiber system, which has been designed so that the US government can spy on and disconnect every other country in the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties

Just as with the example of fiber, there are a lot of ways the EU and member states could achieve "technological sovereignty." They could just procure data-centers, server software, and the operation of social media, cloud hosting, mobile OSes, office software, and other components of Europeans' digital lives from the private sector – sort of like asking a commercial operator to run your town's internet service.

The EU has pretty advanced procurement rules, designed to allow European governments to buy from the private sector while minimizing corruption and kickbacks. For example, there's a rule that the lowest priced bid that conforms to all standards needs to win the contract. This sounds good (and it is, in many cases) but it's how Newag keeps selling trains in Poland, even after they were caught boobytrapping their trains so they would immobilize themselves if the operator took them for independent maintanance:

https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-we-ve-not-been-trained-for-this-life-after-the-newag-drm-disclosure

The EU doesn't have to use public-private partnerships to build the Eurostack. They could do it all themselves. The EU and/or member states could operate public data centers. They could develop their own social media platforms, mobile OSes, and apps. They could be the equivalent of the municipal ISP that offers fast fiber to everyone in town.

As with public monopoly ISPs, this is a system that works well, but fails badly. If you think Elon Musk is a shitty social media boss, wait'll you see the content moderation policies of Viktor Orban – or Emmanuel Macron:

https://jacobin.com/2025/06/france-solidarity-urgence-palestine-repression

Publicly owned data centers could be great, but also, remember that EU governments have never given up on their project of killing working encryption so that their security services can spy on everyone. Austria's doing it right now!

https://www.yahoo.com/news/austrian-government-agrees-plan-allow-150831232.html

Ever since Snowden, EU governments have talked a good line about the importance of digital privacy. Remember Angela Merkel's high dudgeon about how her girlhood in the GDR gave her a special horror of NSA surveillance?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-24647268

Apparently, Merkel managed to get over her horror of mass surveillance and back total, unaccountable, continuous digital surveillance over all of Germany:

https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/06/24/germanys-new-surveillance-laws-raise-privacy-concerns

So there's good reasons to worry about having your data – and your apps – hosted in an EU cloud.

To create a European public internet, it's neither necessary nor desirable to have your digital life operated by the EU and its member states, nor by its private contractors. Instead, the EU could make Eurostack a provider of technological public goods.

For example, the EU could work to improve federated social media systems, like Mastodon and Bluesky. EU coders could contribute to the server and client software for both. They could participate in future versions of the standard. They could provide maintenance code in response to bug reports, and administer bug bounties. They could create tooling for server administrators, including moderation tools, both for Mastodon and for Bluesky, whose "composable moderation" system allows users to have the final say over their moderation choices. The EU could perform and/or fund labelling work to help with moderation.

The EU could also provide tooling to help server administrators stand up their own independent Mastodon and Bluesky servers. Bluesky needs a lot of work on this, still. Bluesky's CTO has got a critical piece of server infrastructure to run on a Raspberry Pi for a few euros per month:

https://justingarrison.com/blog/2024-12-02-run-a-bluesky-pds-from-home/

Previously, this required a whole data center and cost millions to operate, so this is great. But this now needs to be systematized, so that would-be Bluesky administrators can download a package and quickly replicate the feat.

Ultimately, the choice of Mastodon or Bluesky shouldn't matter all that much to Europeans. These standards can and should evolve to the point where everyone on Bluesky can talk to everyone on Mastodon and vice-versa, and where you can easily move your account from one server to another, or one service to another. The EU already oversees systems for account porting and roaming on mobile networks – they can contribute to the technical hurdles that need to be overcome to bring this to social media:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes

In addition to improving federated social media, the EU and its member states can and should host their own servers, both for their own official accounts and for public use. Giving the public a digital home is great, especially if anyone who chafes at the public system's rules can hop onto a server run by a co-op, a friend group, a small business or a giant corporation with just a couple clicks, without losing any of their data or connections.

This is essential facilities sharing for services. Combine it with public data centers and tooling for migrating servers from and to the public server to a private, or nonprofit, or co-op data-center, and you've got the equivalent of publicly available conduit, data-centers, and fiber.

In addition to providing code, services and hardware, the EU can continue to provide regulation to facilitate the public internet. They can expand the very limited interoperability mandates in the Digital Markets Act, forcing legacy social media companies like Meta and Twitter to stand up APIs so that when a European quits their service for new, federated media, they can stay in touch with the friends they left behind (think of it as Schengen for social media, with guaranteed free movement):

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

With the Digital Service Act, the EU has done a lot of work to protect Europeans from fraud, harassment and other online horribles. But a public internet also requires protections for service providers – safe harbors and carve outs that allow you to host your community's data and conversations without being dragged into controversies when your users get into flamewars with each other. If we make the people who run servers liable for their users' bad speech acts, then the only entities that will be able to afford the lawyers and compliance personnel will be giant American tech companies run by billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/04/kawaski-trawick/#230

A "public internet" isn't an internet that's run by the government: it's a system of publicly subsidized, publicly managed public goods that are designed to allow everyone to participate in both using and providing internet services. The Eurostack is a brilliant idea whose time arrived a decade ago. Digital sovereignty projects are among the most important responses to Trumpism, a necessary step to build an independent digital nervous system the rest of the world can use to treat the USA as damage and route around it. We can't afford to have "digital sovereignty" be "national firewalls 2.0" – we need a public internet, not 200+ national internets.

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 Tit of justice reinstated by Supreme Torturer Gonzales https://web.archive.org/web/20050910170445/http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-06-24-doj-statue_x.htm

#20yrsago What tomorrow’s Grokster Supreme Court ruling will mean https://web.archive.org/web/20050827114341/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/003742.php

#15yrsago Toronto’s secret ID law used to arrest G20 protestor https://web.archive.org/web/20100628022932/http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/torontog20summit/article/828372–man-arrested-and-left-in-wire-cage-under-new-g20-law

#10yrsago Why parents in Cincinnati camp out for 16 days to get a kindergarten spot https://medium.com/@hellogerard/waiting-for-kindergarten-62a14d4f1ce5

#10yrsago Stephen Harper ready to sign TPP and throw Tory rural base under the bus https://memex.craphound.com/2015/06/25/stephen-harper-ready-to-sign-tpp-and-throw-tory-rural-base-under-the-bus/

#10yrsago How the UK Prime Minister’s office gets around Freedom of Information requests https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/downing-st-accused-of-deliberate-attempts-to-avoid-freedom-of-information-requests-as-exstaff-reveal-automated-deletion-system-10325231.html

#10yrsago They’re tearing down the Adventurer’s Club https://memex.craphound.com/2015/06/25/theyre-tearing-down-the-adventurers-club/

#10yrsago David Byrne and St Vincent celebrate Color Guard with astounding Contemporary Color show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8jSWQtC_fA

#5yrsago 759 Trump atrocities https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/25/canada-reads/#m-o

#5yrsago How Big Tech distorts discourse https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/25/canada-reads/#oii

#1yrago Mirion Malle's "So Long Sad Love" https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/25/missing-step/#the-fog-of-love

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:

  • 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.

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24.06.2025 à 14:58

Pluralistic: Surveillance pricing lets corporations decide what your dollar is worth (24 Jun 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4459 mots)


Today's links


A busy 1950s grocery store. The scene has been altered: the massive, menacing, glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey' hovers over the store, shooting red beams into the cash register. The store -- but not the shoppers at its front -- is suffused with red light.

Surveillance pricing lets corporations decide what your dollar is worth (permalink)

Economists praise "price discrimination" as "efficient." That's when a company charges different customers different amounts based on inferences about their willingness to pay. But when a company sells you something for $2 that someone else can buy for $1, they're revaluing the dollars in your pocket at half the rate of the other guy's.

That's not how economists see it, of course. When a hotel sells you a room for $50 that someone else might get charged $500 for, that's efficient, provided that the hotelier is sure no $500 customers are likely to show up after you check in. The empty room makes them nothing, and $50 is more than nothing. There's a kind of metaphysics at work here, in which the room that is for sale at $500 is "a hotel room you book two weeks in advance and are sure will be waiting for you when you check in" while the $50 room is "a hotel room you can only get at the last minute, and if it's not available, you're sleeping in a chair at the Greyhound station."

But what if you show up at the hotel at 9pm and the hotelier can ask a credit bureau how much you can afford to pay for the room? What if they can find out that you're in chemotherapy, so you don't have the stamina to shop around for a cheaper room? What if they can tell that you have a 5AM flight and need to get to bed right now? What if they charge you more because they can see that your kids are exhausted and cranky and the hotel infers that you'll pay more to get the kids tucked into bed? What if they charge you more because there's a wildfire and there are plenty of other people who want the room?

The metaphysics of "room you booked two weeks ago" as a different product from "room you're trying to book right now" break down pretty quickly once you factor in the ability of sellers to figure out how desperate you are – or merely how distracted you are – and charge accordingly. "Surveillance pricing" is the practice of spying on you to figure out how much you're willing to spend – because you're wealthy, because you're desperate, because you're distracted, because it's payday – and charging you more:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again

For example, a McDonald's ventures portfolio company called Plexure offers drive-through restaurants the ability to raise the price of your regular order based on whether you've recently received your paycheck. They're just one of many "personalized pricing" companies that have attracted investor capital to figure out how to charge you more for the things you need, or merely for the small pleasures of life.

Personalized pricing (that is, "surveillance pricing") is part of the "pricing revolution" that is underway in the US and the world today. Another major element of this revolution are the "price clearinghouses" that charge firms within a sector to submit their prices to them, then "offer advice" on the optimum pricing. This advice – given to all the suppliers of a good or service – inevitably boils down to "everyone should raise their prices in unison." So long as everyone follows that advice, we poor suckers have nowhere else to go to get a better deal.

This is a pretty thin pretext. Price-fixing is illegal, after all. These companies pretend that when all the meat-packers in America send their pricing data to a "neutral" body like Agri-Stats, which then tells them all to jack up the price of meat, that this isn't a price-fixing conspiracy, since the actual conspiracy takes the form of strongly worded suggestions from an entity that isn't formally part of the industry:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy

Same goes for when all the landlords in town send their rental data to a company like Realpage, which then offers "advice" about the optimum price, along with stern warnings not to rent below that price: apparently that's not price-fixing either:

https://popular.info/p/feds-raid-corporate-landlord-escalating

It's not just sellers who engage in this kind of price-fixing – it's also buyers. Specifically buyers of labor, AKA "bosses." Take contract nursing, where a cartel of three staffing apps have displaced the many small regional staffing agencies that historically served the sector. These companies buy nurses' credit history from the unregulated, Wild West data-brokerage sector. They're checking to see whether a nurse who's looking for a shift has a lot of credit-card debt, especially delinquent debt, because these nurses are facing economic hardship and will accept a lower wage than their better-off compatriots:

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

This is surveillance pricing for buyers, and as with the sell-side pricing revolution, buyers also make use of a third party as an accountability sink (a term coined by Dan Davies): the apps that they use to buy nursing labor are a convenient way for hospitals to pretend that they're not engaged in price-fixing for labor.

Veena Dubal calls this "algorithmic wage discrimination." Algorithmic wage discrimination doesn't need to use third-party surveillance data: Uber, who invented the tactic, use their own in-house data as a way to make inferences about drivers' desperation and thus their willingness to accept a lower wage. Drivers who are less picky about which rides they accept are treated as more desperate, and offered lower wages than their pickier colleagues:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

But this gets much creepier and more powerful when combined with aggregated surveillance data. This is one of the real labor consequences of AI: not the hypothetical millions of people who will become technologically unemployed, numbers that AI bosses pull out of their asses and hand to dutiful stenographers in the tech press who help them extol the power of their products; but rather the millions of people whose wages are suppressed by algorithms that continuously recalculate how desperate a worker is apt to be and lower their wages accordingly.

This is as good a candidate for AI regulation as any, but it's also a very good reason to regulate data brokers, who operate with total impunity. Thankfully, Biden's Consumer Finance Protection Bureau passed a rule that made data brokers effectively illegal:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/10/getting-things-done/#deliverism

But then Trump got elected and his despicable minions killed that rule, giving data brokers carte blanche to spy on you and sell your data, effectively without restriction:

https://www.wired.com/story/cfpb-quietly-kills-rule-to-shield-americans-from-data-brokers/

(womp-womp)

Also, Biden's FTC was in the middle of an antitrust investigation into surveillance pricing on the eve of the election, a prelude to banning the practice in America:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/24/gouging-the-all-seeing-eye/#i-spy

But then Trump got elected and his despicable minions killed that investigation and instead created a snitch line where FTC employees could complain about colleagues who were "woke":

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/bedoya-statement-emergency-motion.pdf

(Womp.)

(Womp.)

Naomi Klein's Doppelganger proposes a "mirror world" that the fever-swamp right lives in – a world where concern for children takes the form of Pizzagate conspiracies, while ignoring the starving babies in Gaza and the kids whose parents are being kidnapped by ICE:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

The pricing revolution is a kind of mirror-world Marxism, grounded in "From each according to their ability to pay; to each according to their economic desperation":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/11/socialism-for-the-wealthy/#rugged-individualism-for-the-poor

A recent episode of the excellent Organized Money podcast featured an interview with Lee Hepner, an antitrust lawyer who is on the front lines of the pricing revolution (on the side of workers and buyers) (not bosses):

https://www.organizedmoney.fm/p/the-wild-world-of-surveillance-pricing

Hepner is the one who proposed the formulation that personalized pricing is a way for corporations to decide that your dollars are worth less than your neighbors' dollars – a form of economic discrimination that treats the poorest, most desperate, and most precarious among us as the people who should pay the most, because we are the people whose dollars are worth the least.

Now, this isn't always true. Earlier this month, Delta, United and American were caught charging more for single travelers than they charged pairs of groups:

https://thriftytraveler.com/news/airlines/airlines-charging-solo-travelers-higher-fares/

That's a way to charge business travelers extra – for valuing their dollars less than the dollars of families, not because business travelers are desperate, but because they are, on average, richer than holidaymakers (because their bosses are presumed to be buying their tickets). Sometimes, price discrimination really does charge richer people more to subsidize everyone else.

But here's the difference: when the news about the business-traveler's premium broke, its victims – powerful people with social capital and also regular capital – rose up in outrage, and the airlines reversed the policy:

https://thriftytraveler.com/news/airlines/delta-rethinks-higher-fares-solo-travelers/

If the airlines are still pursuing this kind of price discrimination, they'll do something sneakier, like buying our credit histories before showing us a price. This is something British Airways is already teeing up, by offering essentially zero reward miles to frequent travelers for partner airline tickets unless they're purchased from BA's own website:

https://onemileatatime.com/news/the-british-airways-club/

But BA operates in the UK, where most of the pre-Brexit, EU-based privacy regime is still intact, despite the best efforts of Keir Starmer to destroy it, something that neither Boris Johnson, nor Theresa May, nor Rishi Sunak, nor Liz Truss could manage:

https://www.openrightsgroup.org/press-releases/uk-privacy-erosion-sparks-eu-civil-society-call-to-review-adequacy-data-deal/

So for now, BA travelers might be safe from surveillance pricing, at least in the UK and EU. And that's the thing, America is pretty much cooked. It might be generations – centuries – before the USA emerges from its Trumpian decline and becomes a civilized democracy again. Americans have little hope of a future in which their government protects them from corporate predators, rather than serving them up on a toothpick, along with a little cocktail napkin.

The future of the fight against corporate power and oligarchy is something for the rest of the world to carry on, as the American hermit kingdom sinks into ever-deeper collapse:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/21/billionaires-eh/#galen-weston-is-a-rat

And as it happens, Canada's Competition Bureau, newly equipped with muscular enforcement powers thanks to a 2024 law, is seeking public comment on surveillance pricing and whether Canada should do something about it:

https://www.canada.ca/en/competition-bureau/news/2025/06/competition-bureau-seeks-feedback-on-algorithmic-pricing-and-competition.html

I'm writing comments for this one. If you're in Canada, or a Canadian abroad (like me), perhaps you could, too. If you're looking for an excellent Canadian perspective to crib from, check out this episode of The Globe and Mail's Lately podcast on the subject:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/podcasts/lately/article-the-end-of-the-fixed-price/

Just because America jumped off the Empire State Building, that's no reason for Canada to jump off the CN Tower, after all.

(Eh?)

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Notes from fight to turn WIPO into a humanitarian agency https://web.archive.org/web/20050903072827/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/003722.php

#20yrsago Software patents are bad for coders like literary patents would be for writers https://web.archive.org/web/20050622023635/http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/comment/story/0,12449,1510566,00.html

#20yrsago WIPO Development Agenda meeting docs photographed and posted https://web.archive.org/web/20051127092845/http://homes.eff.org/~renbucholz/wipo/

#20yrsago Dear Kansas: Why stop at “Intelligent Design?” What about Spaghetti Monsters? https://web.archive.org/web/20050626010148/http://www.venganza.org/

#15yrsago Blacksad: hardboiled detective fiction about anthropomorphic animals (no, really) https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/21/blacksad-hardboiled-detective-fiction-about-anthropomorphic-animals-no-really/

#15yrsago White House guts bill that would rein in CEO salaries; you can stop them http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/proxyreform

#15yrsago New Apple terms allow them to collect and share your “precise, real-time location” https://web.archive.org/web/20100622165913/https://consumerist.com/2010/06/privacy-change-apple-knows-your-phone-is-and-is-telling-people.html

#10yrsago Doctoral dissertation in graphic novel form https://spinweaveandcut.com/unflattening/

#10yrsago EU set to kill street photography https://medium.com/vantage/freedom-of-panorama-is-under-attack-6cc5353b4f65

#5yrsago The politicization of K-pop stans https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/21/stans/#kpop-stans

#5yrsago Yahoo is a deadbeat billionaire zombie https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/21/stans/#altaba

#1yrago Neither the devil you know nor the devil you don't https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/21/off-the-menu/#universally-loathed

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:

  • 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

PDF

23.06.2025 à 17:08

Pluralistic: The case for a Canadian wealth tax (23 Jun 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4076 mots)


Today's links


A gilt-roofed, gabled mansion with a hole chopped in its side. From within glitters a weath of gold coins. In the foreground stands a lumberjack, swinging an axe at the mansion. The background is a blown-up, half-toned late 20th century Canadian $50 bill.

The case for a Canadian wealth tax (permalink)

A major problem with letting billionaires decide how your country is run is that they will back whichever psycho promises the lowest taxes and least regulation, no matter how completely batshit and unfit that person is:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/nations-are-people

Billionaires have farcical, almost unimaginable resources. These let them take over whole political parties, even "left" parties, with the result that all real electoral options disappear. Voting for the other party gets you a different set of aesthetics, but the same existential threats to the human race and the planet:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/22/starmer-backs-us-strike-on-iran-and-calls-for-tehran-to-return-to-negotiations

After generations of increasingly oligarch-friendly policies and billionaire entryism into the Democratic Party, America may well be cooked, a total write-off for generations to come. The path to saving the world and our species arguably lies through strengthening other countries to resist American psychos and protect the planet from the consequences of their brainwormed leadership.

Writing for Jacobin, Alex Hemingway sets out a plan for imposing a wealth-tax on Canada's oligarchs, one that incorporates lessons from previous attempts at such a tax:

https://jacobin.com/2025/06/wealth-tax-canada-inequality-austerity/

Even on the left, the idea of a wealth-tax is controversial – not because leftists are sympathetic to billionaires, but because they are skeptical that a wealth tax can be carried out. It's a practical, not an ideological objection:

https://pileusmmt.libsyn.com/196-the-problem-with-wealth-taxes-with-steven-hail-part-1

After all, under capitalism, wealth always grows faster than the economy at large, meaning that over time, the rich will get steadily richer, and inequality will widen and widen:

https://memex.craphound.com/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-the-21st-century/

Ideally, we would counter the trend of wealth piling up into dynastic fortunes with continuous redistribution and predistribution: taxing capital gains at the same rate (or a higher rate) than income, so that income from labor isn't treated worse than income from ownership; steeply graded progressive taxes, with top rates of 70-99%, high inheritance taxes, and so on. We had a system like that, from the end of WWII (when the rich were poorer than they'd been in centuries, with their influence in tatters) until the Reagan era (when the rich had rebuilt their fortunes and were able to seize the reins of power). In the 45 years since the rise of the new oligarchy, we've lived through accelerating wealth accumulation, and as the rich got richer, they used their wealth to dismantle any barrier to creating new aristocratic dynasties.

So here we are, trapped in the new oligarchy. It's too late to rely on income taxes, not if we're going to euthanize enough rentiers to free out politics from their toxic influence and save the human race any of several foreseeable mass-extinction events. Making the ultra-rich poor again is going to require new tactics.

In Canada, the 1% owns 29% of the country's wealth. The 87 richest families in Canada control as much wealth as the bottom 12 million Canadians combined. This is better than the US (where the 1% own 35% of the country), but not by much:

https://www.policyalternatives.ca/wp-content/uploads/attachments/Born%20to%20Win.pdf

Can we make a wealth tax work? Here's Hemingway's program for making it work in Canada:

  • Make it apply to all kinds of wealth equally. No carve-outs for real-estate, which makes it very easy to shift wealth among asset-classes to duck the tax;

  • Aim it at the super-rich alone. Avoid even the upper middle-class, who lack the liquid assets to pay the tax and could get wrecked if they have to liquidate their holdings at the same time as everyone else, which will depress asset prices;

  • Use third-party assessments of asset values. Don't take billionaires' word for how much their assets are worth! Canada's got an advantage here, thanks to the Canada Revenue Agency's requirement for financial institutions to report their account holders' income, including capital gains. Canada's also recently created "beneficial owner" registries that record the true owners of assets;

  • Use lifestyle audits: anyone caught engaging in tax-evasion will face severe penalties, as will the enablers at financial services firms that help them.

One frequent objection to high taxes is that it encourages capital flight – rich people hopping to another territory to avoid taxation. That's a reasonable fear, given how pants-wettingly terrified the rich are of paying tax. Hemingway points out that a wealth tax is different from an income tax – income taxes are levied on the outcome of productive activities, while wealth taxes target accumulated wealth. High income taxes can starve a country of the capital it needs for a productive economy, but that's not the case with wealth taxes.

Hemingway points to the OECD's Common Reporting Standard, through which more than 100 countries have agreed to share financial information, which will help Canada catch billionaires as they funnel their wealth offshore. Meanwhile, if the rich try to move with their money, we can hit them with an exit tax, like the 40% that Elizabeth Warren has proposed.

It's an article of faith that the rich will move offshore at the first hint of a wealth tax, but the research shows that rich people often have reasons to stay that trump their taxophobia. The economic effect of rich people Going Galt is pretty darned small:

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/publications/workingpapers/2022/taxation_and_migration_by_the_super_rich/

The modern prophet of oligarchy and its origins is the French economist Thomas Piketty. In a recent Le Monde column, Piketty examines the failure of a French wealth tax proposal that would have shaved a modest 2% off the fortunes of the 1,800 French people with more than €100 million:

https://www.lemonde.fr/blog/piketty/2025/06/17/the-senate-beside-the-story/

The proposal passed the National Assembly, only to die in the Senate, an institution with a long history of pro-oligarchic activism (the Senate killed every French income tax passed by the Assembly from 1896-1914). The Assembly's wealth tax addressed the problem of tax exiles, levying the wealth tax for 5 years after an oligarch relocated. For Piketty, this didn't go far enough: he wants a pro-rated tax based on the number of years an oligarch spent in France in their lifetime: if you were educated and cared for at French expense from birth and went on to become a billionaire, then a modest share of your wealth would forever be owed to the country that made it possible. Piketty says that a wealth tax could be paid in shares instead of cash, with the stock going into a trust for workers, who would get board seats as well.

He points out that decarbonization is going to require large sacrifices from all of us, but that these will be impossible to demand with a straight face so long as the super-rich are paying taxes that are trivial relative to their assets and income.

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 Snapple floods Manhattan with 17.5 tons of frozen kiwi-strawberry slurry https://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006460.html#006460

#20yrsago Beloved Toronto singing cowboy/mayoral candidate Ben Kerr, RIP https://www.blogto.com/city/2005/06/ben_kerr_a_toronto_legend_passes_away/

#20yrsago Heinlein’s house https://web.archive.org/web/20050625235954/http://www.heinleinsociety.org/rah/history/bonnydoon1.html

#20yrsago Banned Nepali radio station transmits via megaphone https://reliefweb.int/report/nepal/banned-air-nepal-news-radio-hits-streets

#20yrsago Queen Liz: Sony remotes are too hard to use https://web.archive.org/web/20050815080728/http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?email&NewsID=11914

#15yrsago ASCAP raising money to fight Free Culture https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/23/ascap-raising-money-to-fight-free-culture/

#15yrsago Original Pac-Man sketches https://www.control-online.nl/2010/06/22/iwatani-toont-gamesgeschiedenis-in-meest-pure-vorm/

#15yrsago Viacom v Internet: round one to Internet https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/23/viacom-v-internet-round-one-to-internet/

#15yrsago A Canadian author’s perspective on “radical extremism” and copyright https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/23/a-canadian-authors-perspective-on-radical-extremism-and-copyright/

#15yrsago Gate guarded McMansion suburb in Walt Disney Worldhttps://insidethemagic.net/2010/06/disney-unveils-golden-oak-luxury-homes-offering-a-chance-to-live-in-the-walt-disney-world-resort/

#15yrsago Canadian Heritage Minister declares war on copyright reformers https://web.archive.org/web/20100626073040/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5138/125/

#15yrsago Bruce Sterling’s Shareable.net story about astroturfer gulag https://www.shareable.net/the-exterminators-want-ad/

#15yrsago Corruption: FCC’s closed-door meetings on open Internet https://web.archive.org/web/20100626222659/http://blog.broadband.gov/?entryId=518087

#15yrsago Canadian Heritage Minister smears DMCA opponents as “radical extremists” https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2010/06/moore-and-radical-extremists/

#15yrsago US IP Czar’s report sells out the American public to Big Content https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/22/us-ip-czars-report-sells-out-the-american-public-to-big-content/

#15yrsago I Love Paree: new sf story podcast https://craphound.com/news/2010/06/22/i-love-paree-part-1/

#10yrsago Australia’s own Immortan Joe turns off the water, I mean, Internet https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/06/australia-passes-controversial-anti-piracy-web-censorship-law/

#10yrsago GCHQ psychological operations squad targeted Britons for manipulation https://theintercept.com/2015/06/22/controversial-gchq-unit-domestic-law-enforcement-propaganda/

#10yrsago GCHQ hacking squad worried about getting sued for copyright violation https://theintercept.com/2015/06/22/gchq-reverse-engineering-warrants/

#10yrsago The Girl With the Parrot on Her Head https://memex.craphound.com/2015/06/22/the-girl-with-the-parrot-on-her-head/

#10yrsago FDA & FTC mull homeopathy’s future https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/homeopathic-industry-and-its-acolytes-make-poor-showing-before-fda/

#10yrsago Tie your shoes the Ukrainian way http://shnurovka.com/en/step-by-step-instructions-english/

#10yrsago Outstanding paper on the impact of ebook DRM on readers, writers, publishers and distributors https://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/Bittar_Ana_Carolina.pdf

#10yrsago You’ll falafel about this horrifying new pita-sized crypto-key-sniffing hack https://www.wired.com/2015/06/radio-bug-can-steal-laptop-crypto-keys-fits-inside-pita/

#5yrsago Against AI phrenology https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/23/cryptocidal-maniacs/#phrenology

#5yrsago Privacy in tracing tokens https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/23/cryptocidal-maniacs/#trace-together

#5yrsago Congress wants to read all your DMs https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/23/cryptocidal-maniacs/#crypto-wars

#5yrsago Blueleaks https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/23/cryptocidal-maniacs/#ddosecrets

#5yrsago Surveillance electoralism https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/23/cryptocidal-maniacs/#aaronsw

#5yrsago The real cyberwar is Goliath, slaughtering an army of Davids https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/22/jobs-guarantee/#selection-bias

#5yrsago The Case for a Job Guarantee https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/22/jobs-guarantee/#job-guarantee

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:

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

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21.06.2025 à 15:21

Pluralistic: Daniel de Visé's 'The Blues Brothers' (21 Jun 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4087 mots)


Today's links


The Grove Atlantic cover for Daniel de Visé's 'The Blues Brothers.'

Daniel de Visé's 'The Blues Brothers' (permalink)

I picked up Daniel de Visé's The Blues Brothers: An Epic Friendship, the Rise of Improv, and the Making of an American Film Classic at LA's Diesel Books; it was on the receiving table I sat next to as I signed books after a book-tour reading, and I snuck peeks at the back cover while I chatted with the long line of attendees:

https://danieldevise.com/product/the-blues-brothers-an-epic-friendship-the-rise-of-improv-and-the-making-of-an-american-film-classic

By the time the line was cleared, there was no question that I was going to buy this book, even though it wasn't formally for sale for a couple days (the bookstore staff were kind enough to make an exception for me, not least because I promised them that I wouldn't get a chance to read it for quite some time as I flitted from city to city on the rest of the tour).

Like many people of my generation, I grew up with The Blues Brothers. I taped the movie off of TV when I was about 14 and literally wore the tape out in the next four years, re-watching and re-re-watching the movies on that tape – Animal House, The Blues Brothers and Spinal Tap – so many times that I can still just about recite those movies verbatim, more than 30 years later.

The Blues Brothers is sunk so deep into my psyche that I don't know that I ever questioned why they were so embedded in my outlook. I don't know if I can even tell you when I first saw the movie. Certainly, my friend-group was very into the movie, and my best friend and I went as Jake and Elwood on multiple Hallowe'ens at the Rocky Horror Picture Show at Toronto's Roxy Theatre, until it became such a cliche for us that we felt the need to mix it up and dress up as zombie Jake and Elwood.

But beyond the movie, I was taken with the Blues Brothers' music. I didn't know much about blues, boogie woogie and other roots music before the Blues Brothers came into my life. The combination of the Blues Brothers movie and its sound-track sent me on a treasure hunt for music by the band, its musical guests, and the artists whose song they covered. By the time I was 20, I'd amassed a vast collection of used records, tapes and CDs featuring Cab Calloway, Ray Charles, John Lee Hooker, Aretha Franklin, Willy Mabon, The Chips, Floyd Dixon and more. Soon, I was leaping from one artist to others. I found an incredible Pop Staples/Steve Cropper/Albert King collaboration "Jammed Together":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Sarzs8VRSg

Within a few hops, I'd found my way to Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and thence to the immortal James Cotton:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kl4IcMlrJwM

I started skipping Rocky Horror to see the house band at Chicago's on Queen Street, and from there found my way to the weekend jams at Grossman's:

https://torontobluessociety.com/venue/grossmans-tavern-2/

It's not an overstatement to say that The Blues Brothers altered my life, changing the music I listened to and the way I understood the musical ancestry of everything that went into my ears. Indeed, the effects that The Blues Brothers had on my life are so pervasive that I effectively stopped noticing them. When I put on a Memphis Slim album, it doesn't occur to me that the reason that music is on my hard-drive has something to do with that worn-out VHS cassette in my parents' living room in the 1980s.

Standing there at the counter at Diesel Books for an hour, sneaking peeks at the back cover of de Visé's book, set me to considering exactly how this weird and remarkable phenomenon came to be. I knew a little, of course – my friends and I used to trade the information that Aykroyd came from a family of famous Ontario Tories the same way we would have gossiped had his father been a famous serial-killer. And no one could escape some of the more salacious details of Belushi's death, though I absorbed most of what I knew via one of the greatest short stories I've ever read, Bradley Denton's "Calvin Coolidge Home for Dead Comedians," about Belushi and Lenny Bruce leading a revolt in Comedian Hell:

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

So I bought a copy off the receiving table, straight out of the warehouse box, and I've finally gotten around to reading it, and holy moly is it fascinating! I confess that in the months since I brought the book home and stuck it on the TBR shelf, I'd mostly forgotten why I'd picked it up and had started to view it as a book full of production trivia, and when I picked it up this week, it was with an eye to skimming it quickly before putting it out at the curb in my Little Free Library. Instead, I found myself utterly engrossed in a brilliantly told, brilliantly researched tale that left me with a much deeper understanding of – and appreciation for – the cultural phenomenon that I was (and am) swept up in.

De Visé devotes the first third of the book to snappy, revealing biographies of Belushi and Aykroyd, who grew up in very different milieux, and were of very different temperaments, but who both found their way into comedy just as the tradition of Borscht Belt comics and variety shows were giving way to a younger, weirder kind of comedy, a mixture of Monty Python, National Lampoon and improv.

These biographical sketches are short, but they don't shy away from nuance – Belushi's parents, for example, are simultaneously painted as loving and also reckless and self-involved. De Visé gives the lion's share of attention to Belushi, but he doesn't stint on detail about Aykroyd, strongly implying that "Danny" is on the spectrum, with a deep collection of "special interests" and a deep discomfort with eye contact that accounts for habit of wearing sunglasses.

As the two men find their way into various pioneering comedy projects – Second City, National Lampoon radio shows – they start to inch towards Lorne Michaels, and thus to each other. As de Visé painstakingly traces the ups and downs of their comedy careers, he paints a vivid picture of the wild swings of talented, striving artists at the start of their careers. By the time we get to the SNL chapters, the show itself becomes the star, and its rocky early days strongly echo the struggles of the comedians we've followed to its stage.

The actual production story of The Blues Brothers movie doesn't start until more than halfway through the narrative. By that time, we've been set up with the way that filmmaking, comedy, popular culture, and politics have all changed to make The Blues Brothers movie a possibility. De Visé shows us how Belushi had won over a long list of household names in the entertainment industry, and how Aykroyd's meticulous, obsessive nature honed and directed Belushi's wild talent.

The actual production of, and reception to, The Blues Brothers movie arrives in the book as a kind of extended climax and denouement, and yes, there are tons of funny bits of production trivia and gossip in this section. From winning over the mayor of Chicago (who reversed a decades-long policy of all-but-total prohibitions on filming permits in the city) to dropping a Ford Pinto thousands of feet, to the garage where, every night, dozens of surplus police cars that had been crashed that day were refurbished and gotten into shape to be crashed again the next day.

And while all of this is going on, de Visé gives us a vivid portrayal of Belushi's spiraling addiction, the disease that is killing him right there, in front of everyone who loves him. That story carries over into the film's aftermath, as it is laboriously cut from more than three hours (it was originally intended to be shown with an intermission!) and released to hostile critics and an adoring public.

These are the final days of Belushi, something we all know and can see coming. But even as Belushi approaches his final days, we learn how The Blues Brothers movie had created a legacy. It was Aykroyd who got Belushi into the blues, and the schtick they did about wanting to preserve this music from a world that was set to bury it and forget it wasn't just for the movie.

Aykroyd and Belushi wanted to bring the music back. They couldn't stand that the likes of Cab Calloway, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles and James Brown were playing county fairs and half-full night clubs. They wanted the music to escape from history and live again. And they succeeded. In a "where are they now" coda straight out of the closing credits of Animal House, de Visé documents how the artists featured in the movie – and the musical traditions they represented – experienced a massive revival following the film's release, which the musicians themselves credit to the movie.

Which is where I came in, I suppose. That's how I got here, in this form, with a hard drive full of R&B, blues, country swing, jazz, boogie woogie and jump blues that vie with Talking Heads for play in my shuffle.

This isn't a book about a movie; it's a rich and engrossing tale of an extraordinary creative collaboration that found an unlikely foothold at just the right time and place. It's a sensitive, funny, and revealing account of Belushi, Aykroyd, and the comedians, impresarios and friends in their orbit. Even if you didn't wear out a VHS cassette and memorize the whole damned movie, you will find something surprising and delightful in these pages.

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 Canada’s DMCA introduced https://web.archive.org/web/20051027190726/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/home.php?blog_disp_vars=days&blog_date=20050620&day=20&month=06&year=2005&blog_arch=2&v=99

#20yrsago Dead online game resurrected by dumpster-diving its servers https://games.slashdot.org/story/05/06/21/0133233/classic-mmog-raised-from-the-dead-by-past-players

#15yrsago Mickey Mouse, amphetamine shill https://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/mickey_mouse_medicine_man/mickey_mouse_medicine_man.shtml

#15yrsago Economic reality versus ideology: spending cuts and recovery https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/18/opinion/18krugman.html

#10yrsago UK High Court’s insane ruling: ripping CDs is illegal again https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/06/european-copyright-madness-court-strikes-down-law-allowing-users-rip-their-own-cds

#10yrsago Schneier: China and Russia probably did get the Snowden leaks — by hacking the NSA https://www.wired.com/2015/06/course-china-russia-snowden-documents/

#10yrsago The snitch in your pocket: making sense of Stingrays https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/notetoself/episodes/stingray-conspiracy-theory-daniel-rigmaiden-radiolab

#5yrsago Juneteenth in the Internet Archive https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/20/everybody-knows/#juneteenth

#5yrsago "Longshot" NYPD surveillance transparency law passes https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/20/everybody-knows/#Quis-custodiet-ipsos-custodes

#5yrsago Everybody Knows https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/20/everybody-knows/#slicey-boi

#1yrago How to design a tech regulation https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/20/scalesplaining/#administratability

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

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20.06.2025 à 15:05

Pluralistic: Oregon bans the corporate practice of medicine (20 Jun 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3745 mots)


Today's links


A billionaire in a tuxedo with dollar-sign cufflinks, stands at a podium, yanking a lever shaped like a gilded dollar sign with one gloved hand. From the other hand, he contemptuously dangles a bloody corpse. His head has been replaced with the head of a doctor in a surgeon's blue cap, with red, glaring eyes. The background is the text of Oregon's new Corporate Practice of Medicine law, in blown-out, red type.

Oregon bans the corporate practice of medicine (permalink)

Private equity firms are the demon princes of the hellspace that is the imploding, life-destroying, plutocrat-generating American economy. Their favorite scam, the "leveraged buyout" is a mafia bustout dressed up in respectable clothes, and if you mourn a beloved, failed business, chances are that an LBO was the murder weapon, and PE was the killer:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/23/spineless/#invertebrates

(Despite simplistic explanations and bad-faith apologetics, a leveraged buyout is nothing like a mortgage – it is a sinister, complex, destructive form of financial fraud:)

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/05/rugged-individuals/#misleading-by-analogy

As bad as this is, it's ten quintillion times worse when applied to healthcare. When PE buys your hospital, people die. A lot of people:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/28/5000-bats/#charnel-house

PE doesn't even have to buy the whole hospital – for a long time, PE groups bought out anesthetist practices affilated with hospitals and pulled them out of the hospital's insurance affiliation. Unsuspecting patients who went in for routine surgical care at a hospital that was in-network for their insurer would get a rude awakening from their sedation: "surprise bills" running to tens or hundred of thousands of dollars. PE groups did the same thing with emergency rooms, so that people experiencing serious medical emergencies who had the presence of mind to insist upon being brought to an in-network ER nevertheless got hit with life-ruining surprise bills:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/14/unhealthy-finances/#steins-law

Donald Trump sometimes panders to anti-elitist elements in his base by threatening the private equity racket. For example, Trump has frequently railed against the "carried interest" tax loophole that allows PE bosses to pay half as much tax as you or I would on their vast takings. "Carried interest" is a tax law that gave 16th century sea-captains a break on their "interest" in the cargo they "carried." It is both weird and fantastically unjust that the richest, worst financiers in America are able to take advantage of this Moby Dick-ass-law:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/29/writers-must-be-paid/#carried-interest

But while Trump sometimes talks a good line about fighting private equity looters, he does not, has not, and will not lift a finger to them. He dares not. The carried interest tax scam is preserved in the Big Beautiful Bill, joined with many other giveaways to the least productive, most guillotineble looters America has produced:

https://www.pillsburylaw.com/en/news-and-insights/no-changes-carried-interest-big-beautiful-bill-so-far.html

Working people cannot rely on Trump's federal government and the Republican Congress to protect us from these vampires. But this is America: when the feds fail, that creates an opportunity for state legislators to step in and act. And that's what's just happened in Oregon, where the state legislature has passed sweeping, bipartisan legislation that bans corporations from owning or operating a medical practice in the state:

https://prospect.org/health/2025-06-13-united-health-care-oregon-corporate-medicine/

This is called the "corporate practice of medicine" (CPOM) and it's already banned. The American Medical Association has a longstanding, absolute prohibition on medical practices that are run by anyone except a doctor. Oregon has had a CPOM ban on the law-books since 1947. Private equity meets this prohibition with a very transparent ruse indeed: they get a "rent a doc," often out of state, to serve as the nominal owner of their practices, and the doctor takes orders from the PE firm, and hires the PE firm's outsource agencies to actually operate the clinic or hospital, absorbing the entirety of the practice's profits.

The Oregon bill closes this loophole, and not a minute too soon. Giant healthcare monopolists – most notably groups associated with Unitedhealth, the largest health corporation in America – have embarked on a statewide buying spree, buying and shutting down rural hospitals and clinics, and transforming the remaining facilities into understaffed charnel houses that hemorrhage doctors.

The bill took several tries to get through the legislature. As Oregon House Majority Leader Representative Ben Bowman told Matt Stoller and David Dayen on their Organized Money podcast, the statehouse was crawling with lobbyists hired by out of state private health-care firms who were worried about "contagion" if Oregon's bill passed and spread to other states:

https://www.organizedmoney.fm/p/how-oregon-is-ending-corporate-run

But the bill passed anyway, thanks to a combination of two factors. First, during the bill's legislative adventure, Unitedhealth's Optum bought out the Oregon Medical Group and made working conditions so terrible that dozens of doctors quit, leaving thousands of rural patients (from predominantly Republican districts) without medical care. Optum "fired" thousands of patients, including some who were undergoing cancer treatment, on the basis that they weren't profitable enough to care for:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/private-equity-unitedhealth-take

In the midst of all this, another Unitedhealth monopolist, Change Health, got hacked and virtually no one in America could get a prescription filled – worse, the hack exposed the health records of almost everyone in America, the largest health-related breach in US history:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/28/dealer-management-software/#antonin-scalia-stole-your-car

Then, as icing on the cake, Unitedhealth's Oregon operation screwed over multiple, cancer-fighting lawmakers who were serving in the state-house as the bill was under debate. Combine this with testimony from doctors who described how they were unable to practice medicine after leaving Unitedhealth's terrible facilities because they had been trapped with noncompete clauses in their contracts, nor could they warn other doctors away from falling prey to this trap because they were also bound by nondisparagement clauses.

The new bill, SB 951, passed out of the legislature and was signed by the governor earlier this month. It is now good law in Oregon, which means that corporations can't operate medical practices, and that medical personnel can't be subjected to noncompete clauses (fun fact: every noncompete clause is written by a lawyer, but the American Bar Association prohibits noncompetes for lawyers).

Now it's time for those out-of-state healthcare looters' worst fears to be realized. It's time for the contagion to spread to other states.

The US federal system is a big, gnarly mess, but by design, it leaves a lot of power in local hands. That's bad news when local power is being used to ban trans people from peeing, or to attack school librarians, or to ban masking. But it's good news when states and cities can use the American system to create sanctuary systems that welcome asylum seekers and treat them with dignity (which is why the American right, the standard bearer for "states' rights" when it came to school segregation and voter suppression, is now all-in on sending armed soldiers to terrorize their fellow Americans with assault rifles).

Another reason to like state and local politics: local Democrats often suck way less than the necrotic federal Dem establishment. Some of them are even good! In Philly, Mayor Cherelle Parker just signed the Protect Our Workers, Enforce Rights (POWER) Act, which protects 750,000 workers from wage theft:

https://prospect.org/labor/2025-06-18-how-philadelphia-secured-basic-rights-for-750-000-workers/

The POWER Act shifts the burden of proof for wage theft allegations from workers to their bosses and allows them to recover their stolen wages plus $2,000 in statutory damages per violation; it sets up a new fund (replenished with employer fines) that gives money to victims of retaliation, and it creates a public "bad boss" database of repeat offenders.

As Brock Hrehor writes for The American Prospect, the POWER Act was passed after Trump gutted the National Labor Relations Board and left it unable to protect American workers. The POWER Act tackles one of the most pernicious forms of crime in America: wage theft, which accounts for more losses than all property crime in America combined, with losses overwhelmingly borne by Black and brown workers, especially women. Wage theft is notoriously hard to police, thanks to fear of retaliation and the precarity of victims of this crime.

The POWER Act passed as a result of the combined efforts of unions (SEIU, AFL-CIO) and the Working Families Party. Along with the Oregon Corporate Practice of Medicine ban, it shows how local, grassroots activism can protect everyday, working people from even the worst corporate criminals, even in Donald Trump's America.

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)

#10yrsago What’s in the Pope’s barn-storming environmental message? https://www.wired.com/2015/06/popes-memo-climate-change-mind-blower/

#5yrsago Microsoft criticizes Apple's monopolism https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/19/art-of-the-deal/#honi-soit-qui-mal-y-pense

#5yrsago Austerity in disrepute https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/19/art-of-the-deal/#breadlines-r-us

#5yrsago Avia, c'est mort https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/19/art-of-the-deal/#avia

#5yrsago Trump's covid "test-tubes" are contaminated miniature soda bottles https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/19/art-of-the-deal/#art-of-the-deal

#5yrsago Trump wants to dismantle the OTF https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/19/art-of-the-deal/#save-otf

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

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19.06.2025 à 16:03

Pluralistic: Your Meta AI prompts are in a live, public feed (19 Jun 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4499 mots)


Today's links


A moody room with Shining-esque broadloom. In fhe foreground stands a giant figure the with the head of Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse avatar; its eyes have been replaced with the glaring red eyes of HAL 9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey' and has the logo for Meta AI on its lapel; it peers though a magnifying glass at a tiny figure standing on its vast palm. The tiny figure has a leg caught in a leg-hold trap and wears an expression of eye-rolling horror. In the background, gathered around a sofa and an armchair, is a ranked line of grinning businessmen, who are blue and flickering in the manner of a hologram display in Star Wars.

Your Meta AI prompts are in a live, public feed (permalink)

Back in 2006, AOL tried something incredibly bold and even more incredibly stupid: they dumped a data-set of 20,000,000 "anonymized" search queries from 650,000 users (yes, AOL had a search engine – there used to be lots of search engines!):

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

The AOL dump was a catastrophe. In an eyeblink, many of the users in the dataset were de-anonymized. The dump revealed personal, intimate and compromising facts about the lives of AOL search users. The AOL dump is notable for many reasons, not least because it jumpstarted the academic and technical discourse about the limits of "de-identifying" datasets by stripping out personally identifying information prior to releasing them for use by business partners, researchers, or the general public.

It turns out that de-identification is fucking hard. Just a couple of datapoints associated with an "anonymous" identifier can be sufficient to de-anonymize the user in question:

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1508081113

But firms stubbornly refuse to learn this lesson. They would love it if they could "safely" sell the data they suck up from our everyday activities, so they declare that they can safely do so, and sell giant data-sets, and then bam, the next thing you know, a federal judge's porn-browsing habits are published for all the world to see:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/01/data-browsing-habits-brokers

Indeed, it appears that there may be no way to truly de-identify a data-set:

https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/understanding-the-maths-is-crucial-for-protecting-privacy

Which is a serious bummer, given the potential insights to be gleaned from, say, population-scale health records:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/health/data-privacy-protection.html

It's clear that de-identification is not fit for purpose when it comes to these data-sets:

https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/precautionary.pdf

But that doesn't mean there's no safe way to data-mine large data-sets. "Trusted research environments" (TREs) can allow researchers to run queries against multiple sensitive databases without ever seeing a copy of the data, and good procedural vetting as to the research questions processed by TREs can protect the privacy of the people in the data:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/01/the-palantir-will-see-you-now/#public-private-partnership

But companies are perennially willing to trade your privacy for a glitzy new product launch. Amazingly, the people who run these companies and design their products seem to have no clue as to how their users use those products. Take Strava, a fitness app that dumped maps of where its users went for runs and revealed a bunch of secret military bases:

https://gizmodo.com/fitness-apps-anonymized-data-dump-accidentally-reveals-1822506098

Or Venmo, which, by default, let anyone see what payments you've sent and received (researchers have a field day just filtering the Venmo firehose for emojis associated with drug buys like "pills" and "little trees"):

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/09/technology/personaltech/venmo-privacy-oversharing.html

Then there was the time that Etsy decided that it would publish a feed of everything you bought, never once considering that maybe the users buying gigantic handmade dildos shaped like lovecraftian tentacles might not want to advertise their purchase history:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/03/etsy-users-irked-after-buyers-purchases-exposed-to-the-world/

But the most persistent, egregious and consequential sinner here is Facebook (naturally). In 2007, Facebook opted its 20,000,000 users into a new system called "Beacon" that published a public feed of every page you looked at on sites that partnered with Facebook:

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

Facebook didn't just publish this – they also lied about it. Then they admitted it and promised to stop, but that was also a lie. They ended up paying $9.5m to settle a lawsuit brought by some of their users, and created a "Digital Trust Foundation" which they funded with another $6.5m. Mark Zuckerberg published a solemn apology and promised that he'd learned his lesson.

Apparently, Zuck is a slow learner.

Depending on which "submit" button you click, Meta's AI chatbot publishes a feed of all the prompts you feed it:

https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/12/the-meta-ai-app-is-a-privacy-disaster/

Users are clearly hitting this button without understanding that this means that their intimate, compromising queries are being published in a public feed. Techcrunch's Amanda Silberling trawled the feed and found:

  • "An audio recording of a man in a Southern accent asking, 'Hey, Meta, why do some farts stink more than other farts?'"

  • "people ask[ing] for help with tax evasion"

  • "[whether] family members would be arrested for their proximity to white-collar crimes"

  • "how to write a character reference letter for an employee facing legal troubles, with that person’s first and last name included."

While the security researcher Rachel Tobac found "people’s home addresses and sensitive court details, among other private information":

https://twitter.com/racheltobac/status/1933006223109959820

There's no warning about the privacy settings for your AI prompts, and if you use Meta's AI to log in to Meta services like Instagram, it publishes your Instagram search queries as well, including "big booty women."

As Silberling writes, the only saving grace here is that almost no one is using Meta's AI app. The company has only racked up a paltry 6.5m downloads, across its ~3 billion users, after spending tens of billions of dollars developing the app and its underlying technology.

The AI bubble is overdue for a pop:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/measures/

When it does, it will leave behind some kind of residue – cheaper, spin-out, standalone models that will perform many useful functions:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Those standalone models were released as toys by the companies pumping tens of billions into the unsustainable "foundation models," who bet that – despite the worst unit economics of any technology in living memory – these tools would someday become economically viable, capturing a winner-take-all market with trillions of upside. That bet remains a longshot, but the littler "toy" models are beating everyone's expectations by wide margins, with no end in sight:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00259-0

I can easily believe that one enduring use-case for chatbots is as a kind of enhanced diary-cum-therapist. Journalling is a well-regarded therapeutic tactic:

https://www.charliehealth.com/post/cbt-journaling

And the invention of chatbots was instantly followed by ardent fans who found that the benefits of writing out their thoughts were magnified by even primitive responses:

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

Which shouldn't surprise us. After all, divination tools, from the I Ching to tarot to Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies deck have been with us for thousands of years: even random responses can make us better thinkers:

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

I make daily, extensive use of my own weird form of random divination:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/31/divination/

The use of chatbots as therapists is not without its risks. Chatbots can – and do – lead vulnerable people into extensive, dangerous, delusional, life-destroying ratholes:

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spiritual-delusions-destroying-human-relationships-1235330175/

But that's a (disturbing and tragic) minority. A journal that responds to your thoughts with bland, probing prompts would doubtless help many people with their own private reflections. The keyword here, though, is private. Zuckerberg's insatiable, all-annihilating drive to expose our private activities as an attention-harvesting spectacle is poisoning the well, and he's far from alone. The entire AI chatbot sector is so surveillance-crazed that anyone who uses an AI chatbot as a therapist needs their head examined:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/01/doctor-robo-blabbermouth/#fool-me-once-etc-etc

AI bosses are the latest and worst offenders in a long and bloody lineage of privacy-hating tech bros. No one should ever, ever, ever trust them with any private or sensitive information. Take Sam Altman, a man whose products routinely barf up the most ghastly privacy invasions imaginable, a completely foreseeable consequence of his totally indiscriminate scraping for training data.

Altman has proposed that conversations with chatbots should be protected with a new kind of "privilege" akin to attorney-client privilege and related forms, such as doctor-patient and confessor-penitent privilege:

https://venturebeat.com/ai/sam-altman-calls-for-ai-privilege-as-openai-clarifies-court-order-to-retain-temporary-and-deleted-chatgpt-sessions/

I'm all for adding new privacy protections for the things we key or speak into information-retrieval services of all types. But Altman is (deliberately) omitting a key aspect of all forms of privilege: they immediately vanish the instant a third party is brought into the conversation. The things you tell your lawyer are privileged, unless you discuss them with anyone else, in which case, the privilege disappears.

And of course, all of Altman's products harvest all of our information. Altman is the untrusted third party in every conversation everyone has with one of his chatbots. He is the eternal Carol, forever eavesdropping on Alice and Bob:

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

Altman isn't proposing that chatbots acquire a privilege, in other words – he's proposing that he should acquire this privilege. That he (and he alone) should be able to mine your queries for new training data and other surveillance bounties.

This is like when Zuckerberg directed his lawyers to destroy NYU's "Ad Observer" project, which scraped Facebook to track the spread of paid political misinformation. Zuckerberg denied that this was being done to evade accountability, insisting (with a miraculously straight face) that it was in service to protecting Facebook users' (nonexistent) privacy:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/05/comprehensive-sex-ed/#quis-custodiet-ipsos-zuck

We get it, Sam and Zuck – you love privacy.

We just wish you'd share.

(Image: Japanexperterna.se, CC BY-SA 2.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#10yrsago What’s in the Pope’s barn-storming environmental message? https://www.wired.com/2015/06/popes-memo-climate-change-mind-blower/

#5yrsago Microsoft criticizes Apple's monopolism https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/19/art-of-the-deal/#honi-soit-qui-mal-y-pense

#5yrsago Austerity in disrepute https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/19/art-of-the-deal/#breadlines-r-us

#5yrsago Avia, c'est mort https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/19/art-of-the-deal/#avia

#5yrsago Trump's covid "test-tubes" are contaminated miniature soda bottles https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/19/art-of-the-deal/#art-of-the-deal

#5yrsago Trump wants to dismantle the OTF https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/19/art-of-the-deal/#save-otf

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

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.

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