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🖋 Cory DOCTOROW
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PLURALISTIC

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13.07.2026 à 10:15

Pluralistic: Why aren't AI companies competing directly with their customers? (13 Jul 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3947 mots)


Today's links


Three gold rush miners standing around a mule wagon piled high with mining supplies. They are surmounted by a Gold Rush-era advertisement reading 'GOLD MINING will be the leading business in the Northwest this year/EVERY MERCHANT can be prepared to supply his customers and keep his Profits and Money at home by inspecting/OUR LINE. It is complete. Send for our prices. Prompt shipments made.' The three miners' heads have been replaced with the heads of robots ganked from old pulp sf magazines. In the background a young man is performing a joyous headstand. The image has been sepia-toned.

Why aren't AI companies competing directly with their customers? (permalink)

"I often wonder what the Vintners buy/One half so precious as the Goods they sell" -The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

I first encountered that quote from someone extolling the virtues of bookstores, and it stuck with me, because for most of my childhood, every bookstore visit ended with me broke and wishing I'd had three times as much to spend.

As a larval hyperlexic, I just didn't understand what a bookseller could possibly buy with my money that was better than the books they already had? Of course, then I became a bookseller and discovered that Sturgeon's Law ("90% of everything is shit") applies to a bookstore's wares as much as it does to anything else. I also acquired a monthly rent obligation and discovered just how important money could be.

Nevertheless, Omar Khayyám's question stuck with me, especially when I fell down a years-long rabbit-hole of learning about scams and the finance sector (but I repeat myself). Every get-rich-quick schemer will tell you that they've found the infinite money hack, which they will sell to you for a remarkably reasonable sum. Likewise, every stock picker claims they can outperform a simple low-load index fund, and all they ask of you is a few hundred basis points in exchange for multiplying your wealth beyond the dreams of Creosote. Neither one has a good answer to Khayyám's question: if you can make all the money with your amazing system, why do you need my money?

This is a question that needs to be forcefully put to AI hucksters. In their more expansive moments, the Altmans and Amodeis of the world will tell you that they're planning to teach the word-guessing program so many words that it will wake up and become god. DOGE's broccoli-haired brownshirts laughed in the faces of the NIH lifers who begged them not to vaporize their long-running cancer research projects: "General AI is around the corner and it's going to cure cancer. Cancer research is a waste of money!"

Which all raises the question: if you've truly incubated a foetal demiurge in your "AI lab," why are you offering to sell it to me? What do the AI hucksters buy/One half so precious as the Gods they sell?"

Of course, they might answer, "We need your money now so we can make god later." That's why they want your boss to fire you and replace you with their chatbots and split your wages with your former employer. But this just raises the same question: if you have a chatbot that can do a doctor's job, why sell it to a hospital? Why not just open your own hospital? If you've got a chatbot that can do a tax accountant's job, why sell it to a tax-prep service? Why not just open a tax-prep service? If you've got a chatbot that can teach my kids, why sell it to my local school district? Why not just open a school?

If the chatbot can do the job, and if the chatbot costs less than the worker who does the job today, then the chatbot company can profitably sell services more cheaply than anyone who presently employs that worker, because the chatbot company already owns the chatbot. If you were really on a glide path to creating an all-powerful deity and just needed cash to keep the venture going until the cancer-curing word-guesser awoke from its long slumber, then wouldn't you want as much cash as possible? Why would you voluntarily split the take with some sucky, washed, non-god-generating business from before 2022?

I think the only reason this question doesn't come up more frequently is that we're stewing in what Douglas Rushkoff calls the "go meta" economy, in which the most respectable and smartest business to operate must be as many abstraction layers away from real work as possible. Don't drive a taxi, own a medallion that you rent to the cab driver. Don't own a medallion, start a "rideshare" company. Don't start a rideshare company, invest in a rideshare company. Don't invest in a rideshare company, buy options to invest in a rideshare company:

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

The inverse relationship between doing something useful and making money is deeply ingrained in our economic wisdom. Take the world of online grifters, who don't just peddle get-rich-quick PDFs, they also peddle tools to generate get-rich-quick PDFs, as well as tools to steal other "wealth influencers'" insta videos and deepfake yourself into their pretend private jets:

https://www.404media.co/how-i-bought-a-private-jet-by-selling-10-subscriptions-to-404-media/

The scam economy boasts a bewildering array of ancillary services, like a $150/month service that lets you produce fake screenshots showing vast monthly income on other scam services (November Kelly calls this "The world's most expensive 'inspect element'"):

https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture/posts/faux-high-level-163443872

It's an old truism that in a gold rush, the only people who come out ahead are the people selling the picks and shovels. But that's not true – there's even more money to be made wholesaling picks and shovels to the retailers who operate the frontier mercantiles. Go meta!

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alaskan_Gold_Mining_Supplies_(1897)_(ADVERT_277).jpeg

Today's economy is dominated by pick-and-shovel wholesalers. America is a gerontocracy drowning in MBAs, while there's no one to do eldercare:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/why-recruiters-can-t-find-workers-and-new-grads-can-t-find-jobs-it-s-not-ai/ar-AA27K57y

So it's not surprising that we don't ask why these AI god-botherers need our stupid money while they're immanentizing the eschaton. Why would they operate a hospital if they could go meta and sell the doctorbots to the MBAs running the hospital?

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Pro-lumber industry spoof of The Lorax https://web.archive.org/web/20010721042828/http://www.forestcouncil.org/news/articles/truax1.htm

#25yrsago Remixable vocal tracks from the next Public Enemy release https://web.archive.org/web/20010813195140/http://www.slamjamz.com/slamnews.php?article=7

#20yrsago Wikipedia creates RSS for its posts https://web.archive.org/web/20060718103013/http://www.micropersuasion.com/2006/07/wikipedia_entir.html

#20yrsago Anti-DRM picture-book https://web.archive.org/web/20060721095740/https://dustrunners.blogspot.com/2006/07/pig-and-box.html

#10yrsago The US has spent $122B training foreign cops and soldiers in 150+ countries, but isn’t sure who https://web.archive.org/web/20160713145824/https://theintercept.com/2016/07/13/training/

#10yrsago German free school teaches without grades, timetables or lesson plans https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/01/no-grades-no-timetable-berlin-school-turns-teaching-upside-down

#10yrsago For the first time, a federal judge has thrown out police surveillance evidence from a “Stingray” device https://www.rawstory.com/2016/07/federal-judge-throws-out-evidence-gathered-with-stingray-cell-phone-tracker/

#10yrsago Day on a Device: art made by screenshotting a multitasker’s screen with each context-switch https://www.theverge.com/2016/7/13/12170526/multitasking-phone-laptop-pierre-buttin-art

#10yrsago Remarkably Normal: the true stories of abortion in America https://web.archive.org/web/20160810092901/http://jezebel.com/the-vagina-monologues-but-for-abortion-1783289270/amp

#10yrsago Theresa May performs the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xv7Jd94bnOI

#10yrsago UK Labour’s dirty trick excludes 130,000 members from leadership vote https://web.archive.org/web/20160712225142/http://www.itv.com/news/2016-07-12/corbyn-opponents-try-to-fix-vote/

#10yrsago Security researchers: the W3C’s DRM needs to be thoroughly audited https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/06/call-security-community-w3cs-drm-must-be-investigated

#10yrsago Help Doctors Without Borders fill in the geodata blanks for vulnerable communities https://missingmaps.org/blog/2016/07/14/mapswipe/

#10yrsago Sign a book of congratulations for America’s new Librarian of Congress https://web.archive.org/web/20160718023555/https://action.everylibrary.org/congratulate_carla_hayden_today

#10yrsago Hungary’s Cold War cartoons were weird and awesome https://globalvoices.org/2016/07/14/the-fascinating-world-of-cold-war-era-hungarian-cartoons/

#10yrsago The ACLU has a roadmap for defeating President Donald Trump’s signature initiatives https://web.archive.org/web/20160715131734/https://action.aclu.org/sites/default/files/pages/trumpmemos.pdf

#10yrsago America’s infrastructure debt is so bad that towns are unpaving roads they can’t afford to fix https://web.archive.org/web/20160713170836/https://www.wired.com/2016/07/cash-strapped-towns-un-paving-roads-cant-afford-fix/

#10yrsago It’s official: the Olympics result in the worst budget overruns of any megaproject https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2804554

#10yrsago Vivendi lobbyist appointed to run copyright for UN agency https://web.archive.org/web/20160717052135/http://keionline.org/node/2614

#10yrsago The long, racist history of Brexiteer Boris Johnson, the new UK Foreign Secretary https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-36792746

#5yrsago Facebook employees stalk users https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/14/who-watches-the-zuckmen/#pecksniffs

#5yrsago Semantic drift versus ethical drift https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/14/pole-star/#gnus-not-utilitarian

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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11.07.2026 à 10:54

Pluralistic: Workplace "flexibility" isn't (11 Jul 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (5018 mots)


Today's links


A giant arachnoid woman arched backwards on the banks of a tropical river alongside which stand armed men. Behind loom palms, mountains and a smoking volcano. Rain sleets down over the scene.

Workplace "flexibility" isn't (permalink)

Here's an irony: the "gig economy" is a statistical black hole. Workers, customers and regulators know very little about the most basic aspects of it: how much workers get paid, for example, or much unpaid time on the clock a worker puts in before they get a job from the app.

The reason this is ironic is that the "gig economy" is dominated by a handful of massive, data-driven firms that know the precise, up-to-the-second answer to these questions. The problem is that they won't share the data. Of course, workers and customers have the data, too, but our data is widely diffused, with each worker and each customer only representing a single, infinitesimal pixel in this massive picture.

Most of our industry-wide figures about the sector come from painstaking, expensive survey work. The expense and effort involved in conducting this analysis means that the public's understanding of the gig companies' business is fragmentary and thin.

But every now and again, we get a flashbulb glimpse of the full picture. One of those glimpses was captured by David Weil, the former labor standards boss at the US Department of Labor. In 2024, the Massachusetts Attorney General sued Uber over worker misclassification, with Weil serving as an expert witness, who was able to access the raw data on Uber's business operations.

In a new American Prospect longread called "The Dangerous Myth of Flexibility," Weil builds on the public record developed in the case to demolish the central myth of the gigwork companies: that they enter into a mutually beneficial arrangement with their workers by offering "flexibility" that lets workers "choose work that fits the rhythms of their lives, not the other way around":

https://prospect.org/2026/07/09/dangerous-myth-of-flexibility-uber-lyft-gig-economy/

This quote comes from Tony West, the Uber executive who has led the company's efforts to formalize its worker misclassification program, notably California's Prop 22, a $225m statewide campaign that overturned the state's landmark gig work standards. West is also Kamala Harris's brother-in-law, and he served as her campaign's corporate liaison, senior strategist and economic policy advisor.

On its face, West's statement sounds reasonable, and most of us have heard a version of it, possibly even from an Uber driver. But what Uber calls "flexibility" is really a way for the company to offload its operational risks onto its drivers.

Anyone who runs a business has to manage a key operational risk: staffing levels. A restaurateur who doesn't schedule enough cooks, bussers and servers might have to turn away business at the door if there's a rush. But if the restaurateur schedules too many people for a shift, they'll end up paying for those workers to stand around scrolling Tiktok.

In America, Congress and state legislatures have created a system that allows restaurateurs to transfer this risk onto their employees: the "tipped minimum wage." Federally, the minimum wage for tipped employees is only $2.13/hour, with the caveat that employees are obliged to "top up" their workers' pay if the tips from their shift don't add up to $7.25/hour. So if you work five hours and don't wait on a single table, your boss has to pay you $36.25 ($7.25/hour * 5 hours). But if you have a busy shift and you make $40 in tips, your boss only has to pay you $10.65 ($2.13 * 5 – the tipped minimum).

This is a transfer of risk from bosses to workers. The boss can schedule extra servers and offload most of their wages to diners who come through the doors. If your boss overestimates the amount of business, much of the cost of that miscalculation comes out of your paycheck.

This is quite a sweet deal for bosses. After all, servers have virtually no control over the amount of business a restaurant attracts. It's the boss, not the server, who decides where the restaurant will be, which hours it will keep, which food it will serve, how much the food costs, what advertisements to run, and where and when to run them. The boss controls the decor, staff attire and the music. They make the decisions, and workers pay the price if they decide poorly.

For most businesses, workers are less exposed to risks from their boss's strategic errors. If your boss screws up, you might see a lower annual bonus, or take a career hit thanks to the bad company's presence on your CV. Of course, if your boss really messes up they might lay you off or go out of business altogether, but it's a rare business that gets to externalize its risks onto its workers on a shift-by-shift basis the way restaurants get to.

But as sweet as restaurateurs have it, that's nothing compared to the incredible deal that gig platforms get. Companies like Uber and Lyft get to shift nearly all their risk to their workers, and then insist that they're doing workers a favor by offering them "flexibility." Like a restaurateur, Uber and Lyft control all the mechanisms by which the number of riders is set. They decide how to advertise and how to price their rides. When a driver signs on and makes themselves available – at no charge – to Uber, it is the company's actions, not the driver's, that determine whether that driver gets a job, and how much they'll get paid.

Uber and Lyft claim that drivers have control, too – when (if) they're offered a job, they get to decide whether to take it. This is true, but it's more complicated than that. Drivers get about 15 seconds (!) to decide whether to accept a job, which means they have 15 seconds to calculate the mileage and time-based rate on offer, all while operating a vehicle in traffic. Drivers who accept lowball offers risk having their base pay permanently eroded through "algorithmic wage discrimination," which is when the gig platforms infer that workers who accept very low wages are economically desperate and can be offered even lower wages in the future:

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

But workers can't simply refuse offers and wait for the wage on offer to increase. That increase may happen, but if a driver is too picky, the platform will punish them for turning down too many offers by excluding them from future opportunities. If this happens often enough, the driver may end up broke enough to start accepting those lowballs, triggering the inexorable downward trajectory of their expected earnings.

This is "flexibility," but mostly it's flexibility for Uber, not for drivers. Uber controls when a driver gets paid, and they control the data about that payment. This allows Uber to claim to be paying well north of minimum wage, while drivers average less than $2.50/hour. Uber exploits its information asymmetry to publish only the numerator (the amount a driver makes when a passenger is in the car) while hiding the denominator (how many hours it takes for Uber to put a passenger in that car):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/29/geometry-hates-uber/#toronto-the-gullible

Uber has perfected a system of algorithmic pricing that allows it to dangle just enough money in front of drivers to maximize their number on the road, irrespective of how many riders are looking for cars. The fact that they have all the information (while drivers have none) allows them to extract vast amounts of totally unpaid labor from those drivers. And then, once a passenger gets in the car, Uber's informational systems let it pay that driver the absolute minimum they will accept for the ride.

Of course, it works the same way for passengers, each of whom is offered a different price for the same ride, based on the company's surveillance data and its realtime calculations about how much the rider is willing to pay. When Uber launched, driver pay and passenger fares were linked (the same way a server's tips and the cost of a meal are linked). Today, these are fully decoupled. Uber runs a kind of cod-Marxist operation where workers are paid according to their desperation, and passengers are gouged according to their ability to pay:

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

This works so well (for Uber) that Uber has launched a side hustle selling algorithmic pricing and algorithmic wage discrimination systems to companies in other sectors, so expect this arrangement to infect ever-wider swathes of the economy:

https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-details/2025/Uber-Expands-AI-Data-Platform-to-Power-Next-Gen-Enterprise-and-AI-Lab-Needs/default.aspx

(And this is neither here nor there, but holy shit, is Uber's investor relations site seriously serving ASPX pages in 2026?! Hey Khosrowshahi, the DOJ called and it wants its Clinton-era antitrust evidence back!)

Back to algorithmic pricing: this opaque, take-it-or-leave-it algorithmic pricing arrangement sets Uber apart from other platforms where sellers offer temporary use of their property to buyers. As Weil writes, at least Airbnb hosts get to override the nightly rate suggested by the platform (though I'd add that the platforms will downrank and bury people who resist their suggestions).

As Weil points out, even if Uber had to pay the minimum wage and assume other operational risks associated with running a business, they'd still have access to these algorithmic tools, albeit with different parameters. Rather than setting the wage floor for drivers at $0/hour, they'd have to pay $7.25/hour (the federal minimum wage, or more, depending on the state). This would force the company to refuse shifts to drivers when there were enough workers on the road to handle demand, but drivers would benefit from this arrangement – rather than driving around for a shift, burning gas and putting wear on your car without getting paid, Uber would just tell you to stay home.

Uber could try to offload those risks onto passengers, but remember, Uber is already charging riders a personalized price based on massive troves of surveillance data that is continuously re-analyzed to guess the largest sum you're willing to pay for any given ride. You're already paying the highest price Uber can set for you, in other words.

Weil has been in many forums – including that Massachusetts courtroom – where Uber touted its "flexibility" as a benefit to drivers. But as he shows, Uber could offer all the same flexibility to drivers without the downside risk of driving around for hours without earning a dime. Sure, forcing Uber and Lyft to extend rights and protections that every employee gets would raise their costs – but "the same is true for any company having to comply with employment law and work protections."

Outside of the US, these companies are being forced to shift the risk from their workers' backs to their own balance sheets. As Weil writes, the UN's International Labor Organization has set binding labor standards for gig companies, called Convention 193, "Decent Work in the Platform Economy":

https://onlabor.org/a-win-for-platform-workers-ilo-convention-no-193/

The US government is pulling out all the stops to prevent these standards from being applied to US gig companies, even abroad. Trump's labor boss Keith Sonderling told the world that the US government "will not sit on the sidelines while some foreign governments push to hamper American innovation in the gig economy worldwide":

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/3435961/america-must-lead-gig-economy/

But, as Weil says, this isn't about innovation, flexibility or AI. It's about gig companies changing the distributional outcome of whole sectors, to shift money from workers to investors.

The rest of the world has its own ideas. In Switzerland, the Supreme Court found that gig companies' businesses were illegal and ordered them to extend normal labor protections to gig workers. Naturally, the gig companies just ignored the law and continued to screw those workers. Gig workers, as noted, are diffused. They don't work in the same place. They have no way to find out who else works for the same boss as they do. The same factors that keep us from gathering stats on gig work also keeps gig workers from comparing notes on how they're getting shafted.

What's a labor organizer to do? The Swiss labor union Syndicom came up with an ingenious solution. They partnered with a popular, pro-union pizza restaurant, listed it on the delivery platforms, and then placed orders for tons of pizzas through the scofflaw food-delivery platforms. They transformed the pizzeria into a pop-up union labor hub, and had an organizing conversation with every rider the company dispatched to the restaurant:

https://vimeo.com/1203473793

This is deliciously ingenious, and the labor organizing need not stop there. Companies like Para have shown how, by jailbreaking the apps used by gig workers, they can allow those workers to comparison shop for the best wage. Rather than getting 15 seconds while navigating traffic to decide whether a job is worth taking, drivers and riders could use a "counter-app" that evaluates all the offers on all the platforms and coordinates with other workers to mass-reject lowball offers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#boss-app

The only problem is the "anticircumvention" laws that criminalize this kind of reverse-engineering and modifications of apps. These laws make it a literal crime to change how an app running on your own phone works. These laws were invented in America, with 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but in the ensuing years, the US Trade Rep has used the threat of tariffs to force every country in the world to adopt their own anticircumvention laws. By caving into US bullying, all of America's trading partners have left their workers and consumers vulnerable to technological surveillance, manipulation and price-gouging, to the great benefit of the US tech companies that have fused with the Trump regime.

This is the hidden silver lining to Trump's lunatic tariffs: they take away the threat that kept all those US-protecting foreign IP laws in force. When someone threatens to burn your house down unless you do as you're told, and then they burn your house down anyway, you really don't have to keep complying:

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

The possibilities for counterapps in gig work are endless. In Indonesia, gig rider co-ops commission "Tuyul" apps that mod their dispatch apps in ways small (upsizing the font) and large (spoofing the GPS):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek

In his article, Weil cites a study showing that customers for gig apps tend not to comparison shop – once you choose your default taxi-hailing app, that becomes your go-to. But with counter-apps, your default could be a price-comparison app that bids out your job to all the platforms and chooses the cheapest one, forcing the gig companies to compete with each other:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5729723

The platforms like to pitch themselves as "frictionless," but the reality is that they don't reduce friction so much as reallocate it. Because they control the technology, because the law makes it a literal crime to wrestle that control away, they can shift all the friction from their side of the ledger to yours, whether you're a worker or a customer:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/23/become-unoptimizable/#downward-redistribution

Tony West isn't lying when he says Uber values flexibility – they value their flexibility, which arises out of the constraints (technical, legal) they impose on us: the drivers and passengers.

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 Alanya to Alanya: feminist science fiction adventure https://memex.craphound.com/2006/07/12/alanya-to-alanya-feminist-science-fiction-adventure/

#20yrsago Soviet jokes https://web.archive.org/web/20060708144926/http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7412

#10yrsago Empirical proof that Terms of Service are “the biggest lie on the Internet” https://web.archive.org/web/20160712233511/https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/07/nobody-reads-tos-agreements-even-ones-that-demand-first-born-as-payment/

#10yrsago Fox’s employee contracts may mean Gretchen Carlson will never get her day in court https://web.archive.org/web/20160712123858/https://thinkprogress.org/justice/2016/07/11/3797060/dirty-trick-fox-news-using-undercut-gretchen-carlsons-sexual-harassment-suit/

#10yrsago To see the future, visit the most remote areas of the GBAO https://medium.com/studio-d/6-1-glimpses-of-the-future-e3fdb510dcc1#.iwyo4x141

#10yrsago Benjamin Frisch’s “Fun Family”: good old American narcissism https://memex.craphound.com/2016/07/12/benjamin-frischs-fun-family-good-old-american-narcissism/

#5yrsago The Sacklers will get to keep billions https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/12/monopolist-solidarity/#sacklers-billions

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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10.07.2026 à 11:52

Pluralistic: "Rights for robots" and the AI slavery fantasy (10 Jul 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3849 mots)


Today's links


A Dore engraving of Samson toppling the temple, in which a loincloth-clad Samson pushes aside the columns holding up an Egyptian(ish) temple as people flee the collapsing roof. The image has been altered: Samson's head has been replaced with the head of a pulp magazine robot, while in the background trudge away many other robots. Samson is gold-tinted, and has been limned with a nova of golden light. The rest of the image has been hand-tinted.

"Rights for robots" and the AI slavery fantasy (permalink)

While the AI bubble is primarily a material phenomenon (driven by the calculation that bosses are easy marks for a sales pitch that sees them replacing workers with software), there is an inescapable ideological component to it: the desire for a world without people in it:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/13/vibe-governance/#k-hole

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/10/posthuman-as-in-no-humans/#hell-is-other-people

AI dangles the possibility of a world without ego-shattering confrontations between bosses who tell themselves they're in charge, and the workers who know how to do things and insist on telling bosses that their ideas are dangerous, illegal and/or unworkable:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-wheel/#billionaire-solipsism

A world without people might be lonely, but it sure would be convenient. How maddening it must be to invest billions in Amazon warehouse automation, only to have to slow down or (gasp!) stop the machines so that the workers who serve as "humans in the loop" can stop to pee! Isn't there some way we can make that their problem, not ours?

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/06/one-click-to-quit-the-union/#foxglove

With AI, the fact that you need to pee – or get paid – does become your problem, rather than your boss's. After the majority of your colleagues have been fired ("because AI will do their jobs"), you become painfully aware that there are plenty of people who need your job, who will happily step in to take it if you complain too much about your bladder or your paycheck.

Even better is when the "human in the loop" can be outsourced to a company overseas, which allows bosses to simply set-and-forget a set of requirements for how the human part of the AI's labor is to be done without ever having to meet or even think about those workers' conditions. This is the illusion of full automation, in which the AI does the job "like magic."

The "magic"? A human being stuck in AI Omelas, tormented by an algorithm that sets an inhuman pace, demands inhuman perfection, and metes out pitiless punishments for any misstep – or perceived misstep – without appeal or explanation. So often, "AI" stands for "Absent Indians": low-waged call-center workers pretending to be robots:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

There are many differences between jobs performed by machines and jobs performed by people, of course. But the biggest difference between a machine and a person is moral consideration. A person deserves and demands moral consideration: for their wellbeing, their feelings, even their bladders. A machine gets none of this: you can curse at it, kick it, snap out orders without a "please" or "thank you."

There's only one kind of person you get to treat like this: a slave.

Slavery is labor without even the pretense of moral consideration.

AI, then, isn't just the fantasy of a world without people – it's the fantasy of a world without people…except for slaves. It's the fantasy of a world where the skilled workers who tell you your ideas are stupid are replaced with pliable chatbots who tell you they're brilliant, and then uncomplainingly do the job to your specifications.

It's a world where the cab driver who has all kinds of shit going on in their life – health problems, family problems, (especially) money problems – is replaced by a "robo-taxi" that is being overseen and (often) driven by a remote worker you can't talk to or see, whose problems you therefore never need consider.

The "AI safety" world is a key piece of the AI hype machine, pulling focus away from the idea that AI has shitty economics, produces substandard goods, and fails to do the jobs it takes from human workers, and shifting that focus to the idea that AI is so powerful that it constitutes an existential risk to the human race. The idea that teaching too many words to the word-guessing program risks creating a "superintelligence" that awakens and converts all into paperclips is absurd, a silly idea akin to the notion that if we breed horses to run ever faster, one of our mares will foal a locomotive. Nevertheless, the elevation of "AI takeoff" from a thought-experiment to an "existential risk" is a powerful marketing tool, because any technology that is indistinguishable from god is also going to be extremely valuable (at least, up to the moment that it turns us all into paperclips):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/17/fake-it-until-you-dont-make-it/#twenty-one-seconds

Once the superintelligence thought-experiment is upgraded to an X-risk, lots of other thought experiments are sucked along in its wake. That's where "rights for robots" comes in, the idea that we should spend time thinking about whether chatbots should have human rights.

The best argument for this is that every time we extend rights to the nonhuman world, we end up treating each other better. Movements to extend moral consideration to animals raised uncomfortable questions about the treatment of humans: slaves, workers, poor people, women, children. The Rights for Nature movement, which seeks to extend legal and moral personhood to watersheds and forests, has been key to winning legal and moral victories to protect the environment, and thus the animals and people who depend on it.

But while extending rights to natural things produces positive spillovers for human thriving and rights, the opposite happened when we extended personhood to artificial constructs. Corporate personhood has been a catastrophe for human thriving, conjuring into existence a new race of immortal, pluripotent colony organisms we call "limited liability corporations" that use us as disposable, inconvenient gut flora even as they consume our environment, our political system, and our lives:

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

There's every reason to think that extending personhood to AI will produce the same outcome as "rights for corporations," which is the opposite of the outcome of "Rights for Nature." Rights for nature come at the expense of corporations. Rights for corporations come at the expense of nature. Humans are part of nature, so we benefit from the former, and suffer under the latter:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/15/artificial-lifeforms/#moral-consideration

But here's the kicker: as soon as you start arguing about whether chatbots have rights, you elevate them to personhood, which means that all those chatbots your boss just bought are people. And because they're the kind of people who don't warrant moral consideration (let alone a please or thank you), they are slaves (hence "rights for robots").

The AI sales pitch relies on convincing bosses that we've invented a new kind of slave – a worker who neither deserves nor demands rights or consideration. "Rights for robots" affirms that sales pitch. "Rights for robots" implies that robots are slaves. Wittingly or unwittingly, the transformation of "rights for robots" from a thought experiment to a campaign is a massive convincer for any AI salesman who's hunting for would-be slavers to sell chatbots to.

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 Advice for science fiction/fantasy cover artists https://igallo.blogspot.com/2006/07/in-response-to-old-question-what-do-i.html

#20yrsago Embarrassing questions for the entertainment industry https://web.archive.org/web/20060719200608/https://www.eff.org/IP/faq/

#20yrsago UK ISP to British recording industry: get lost https://craphound.com/tiscalibpiresponse.txt

#20yrsago Felten’s paper on the complexities of Network Neutrality https://web.archive.org/web/20060719095720/https://itpolicy.princeton.edu/pub/neutrality.pdf

#15yrsago 3D printed hair-clips inspired by Bruce Sterling’s “Kiosk” https://myriadwhimsies.wordpress.com/2011/07/11/jovanicas-hair-toys-3d-printed-hair-clips/

#10yrsago Teen comes out to her family on Disneyland’s Splash Mountain https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemcneal/this-teen-came-out-to-her-family-in-the-most-awesomely-funny#.rlDowJe6

#10yrsago On the bewildering regional names for corner stores https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-do-you-call-the-corner-store

#10yrsago Amazon is full of Chinese counterfeits and they’re driving out legit goods https://web.archive.org/web/20160708152442/http://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/08/amazons-chinese-counterfeit-problem-is-getting-worse.html

#10yrsago Negative Swiss 50-year bond yields just shattered the global insecurity barometer https://web.archive.org/web/20160708134915/http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/07/07/investors_are_paying_to_lend_switzerland_money_for_50_years_at_a_time.html

#10yrsago How can the media regain its credibility in reporting on race in America? https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/09/dallas-shooting-racism-and-the-us-media-micah-johnson

#10yrsago Flawed police drug-test kits, railroading prosecutors and racism: the police-stop-to-prison pipeline https://www.propublica.org/article/common-roadside-drug-test-routinely-produces-false-positives

#10yrsago China bans mentions of newly discovered species of beetle from social media https://globalvoices.org/2016/07/11/a-new-species-of-beetle-named-after-president-xi-is-blacklisted-on-chinese-social-media/

#10yrsago Pokemon Go privacy rules are terrible (just like all your other apps) https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/heres-all-the-data-pokemon-go-is-collecting-from-your-phone

#5yrsago Are we having fun yet? https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/11/are-we-having-fun-yet/

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

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09.07.2026 à 08:37

Pluralistic: Post-political (09 Jul 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4148 mots)


Today's links


The icy chamber at the center of Dante's hell, dominated by Satan, massive and peering around with his chin propped on his elbows, which rest of the ice-sheet. From the ceiling of the chamber dangles a massive, decapitated head, suspended by the hair. Beneath it is a pile of corpses in middle ages armor. On the opposite side of the chamber stands a suburban housing plot; another group of (living) soldiers in armor aim a giant catapult at it.

Post-political (permalink)

There's plenty of reasons to be skeptical of centrists who bemoan "political polarization" and call for a politics that abandons the "tribalism of left and right."

Obviously there's the false equivalence: on the right, you have fascists who want to send masked, armed goons into the streets to beat, kidnap and murder your neighbors. On the left, you have calls for higher taxes, unions, environmental impact reviews for data-centers, and an end to the genocide in Gaza.

"Leftist extremism" is moving some zines around:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jun/24/prairieland-texas-ice-protests-zines

Right wing extremism is attempting the overthrow of the government, murdering brown people in gulags, and the earth's richest man slaughtering the world's poorest children for the lulz:

https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths/

"Horseshoe theory" (the idea that the far right and the far left actually bend around to meet each other) is bullshit:

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

The reality is that the right and left have large, substantive disagreements that are matters of life and death. Anyone dismissing these as "tribalism" doesn't know what "left" and "right" mean. At best, they have mistaken a collection of cultural signifiers – pronouns, MMA, brands of beer – for politics.

Mistaking cultural signifiers and identity markers for politics is centrism's most dangerous pathology, the thing that makes centrism the handmaiden of the right. If you think identity markers are politics, then you'll be tempted to think the answer to a world run by 150 rich, white, cis straight guys is to replace half of them with women, POCs and queer people. The difference between the left and the right isn't the identities of the ruling class – it's whether we have a ruling class at all.

I collect definitions of "right" and "left." There's Corey Robin's definition from The Reactionary Mind, that conservatism is the belief that some people were born to rule, and others to be ruled over, and that any attempt to elevate the latter group to positions of power (through civil rights movements, affirmative action, etc) will result in dire misrule and disaster:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/22/all-day-suckers/#i-love-the-poorly-educated

This explains how the right can encompass white nationalists (rule by white people), Hindu nationalists (rule by high-caste Hindus), libertarians (rule by bosses), imperialists (rule by military aggressors), etc. It also explains the right's obsession with learning the racial and gender markers of anyone involved in a plane crash or other disaster: "See, the oil tanker was being piloted by a DEI hire when it crashed into that bridge!"

Another important definition is Wilhoit's Law:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/26/sole-and-despotic-dominion/#then-they-came-for-me

This one hardly needs explanation in this era of "it's not a crime if the president does it," where Alex Jones can owe billions to the parents of dozens of murdered children and somehow not have to pay or give up his assets:

https://www.status.news/p/infowars-the-onion-alex-jones-ben-collins

But when it comes to a "post-politics that is neither right nor left," the definition I turn to most often comes from science fiction writer Steven Brust, who once told me:

"Left" and "right" have had the same meaning since the French Revolution. If you want to know if someone is on the left or the right, ask them, "What is more important: human rights or property rights?" If they say "Property rights are a human right," then they are on the right.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/16/wage-theft/#ppp

That's it. That's the crux. If you think that property rights are a tool for achieving human rights, then you're on the left. You might support the right of farmers to block attempts to expropriate them via eminent domain in order to build a data center, or the right of people to not have their homes or devices searched by cops, or a library's right to own and archive digital books, even if the publishers insist that ebooks are never "sold," merely "licensed."

If property rights are a tool to achieve human rights, then property rights can be set aside when they impede other rights. Human beings have the right to health care, which is why we should have taken away the pharma companies' patents and copyrights, ending vaccine apartheid and letting the poor world make its own vaccines:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/25/the-other-shoe-drops/#quid-pro-quo

Human beings have the right to shelter. If your town has a million empty homes and a million homeless people, there's an obvious solution. At the very least, you can tax the shit out of empty homes to discourage the creation of derelict, empty blights:

https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/owners-homes-left-empty-more-28622796

Human beings have the right to food. If a cartel claims that you may not legally sell your 100,000lbs of nectarines, you can just give them away and tell the cartel to fuck off:

https://apnews.com/article/california-farmer-nectarines-lawsuit-patent-4f7bc8ab185e8b9cbdd6d6ad4f2aabd1

As Brust says, this fight is as old as the French Revolution. It's literally the plot of Les Miz ("In days gone by, I stole a loaf of bread in order to live").

Note that this framework leaves plenty of room for disagreement among leftists: we can disagree about who should get taxed and how, when a company should be ordered to destroy its ill-gotten loot and when that loot should be divided up among its victims, and what to do about empty houses and homeless people. We can disagree about reparations, about collectivization and co-operatives, about land reform. Very (very!) few leftists want to abolish property, but to be a leftist is to agree that property is only ever a means, and never an end.

In systems thinking, we are counseled that the most profound and durable changes come from shifts in paradigms, from which all rules, laws and arrangements flow:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/12/donella-meadows/#paradigmatic

"Left" and "right" represent two radically different paradigms. The right's paradigm is that property rights are human rights, which cashes out to "property rights are the only human right." If property rights are a human right, then I can burn down my orchard and laugh as you starve outside the gates. If property rights are human rights, I can leave an apartment building empty while you freeze to death on its sidewalk. If property rights are human rights, I can fill my factory with death-traps and insist that the workers I kill freely chose to assume that risk (as economists would say, they have a "revealed preference" for being killed at work):

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/30/players-of-games/#know-when-to-fold-em

Leftists view property rights as a tool, like laws, or regulations, or polls, or voting. Used well, these tools can produce prosperity for all. But "voting" and "laws" aren't good unto themselves. The Swiss practice of voting on whether your neighbors qualify for citizenship is barbaric:

https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-38595807

Good regulations and laws are good, but simply passing any law is stupid and gets you into terrible trouble, even if the stupid law you've passed is designed to solve a real problem:

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

Viewed as tools, property rights are perfectly useful ways of achieving the primary purpose of a civilization: to safeguard the human rights of its people. Viewed as ends unto themselves, property rights are a terrible danger to our civilization and species.

If you believe property rights are tools, then you can pass laws banning corporations from electioneering:

https://sos.mn.gov/media/3k4hu2if/minnesota-election-laws-statutes-and-rules.pdf

If you believe property rights are human rights, then you end up supporting unlimited dark money spending in elections:

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-621_h315.pdf

If you believe property rights are tools, you can order landlords who want to ban their tenants from installing balcony solar to fuck off. If you believe property rights are human rights, then landlords can force their tenants to pay every dime the fossil fuel industry demands of them. "Property right as tool" allows you to defend a farmer's right to install a wind-farm, and still, to block a data-center from installing a gas turbine on its own land.

"Post-political" movements are made up of people who don't know what politics are. A "centrist" is ultimately a rightist, because the foundation of rightism is the supremacy of property. It is the ideology that breeds hereditary aristocracy ("property is a human right" means that it's a violation of your human rights to expect you to work for a living if you emerged from a lucky orifice). It's the ideology that breeds oligarchy.

Politics aren't a bunch of cultural signifiers or identity markers. Politics aren't about who rules – it's about whether we are ruled at all, or whether we are free.

(Image: Lewis Clarke, 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)

#25yrsago Why Microsoft was invited to OSCON https://web.archive.org/web/20010701102931/http://www.oreilly.com/news/osconint_0601.html

#25yrsago The Extent of Systematic Monitoring of Employee E-mail and Internet Use https://web.archive.org/web/20010711204804/http://www.privacyfoundation.org/workplace/technology/extent.asp

#20yrsago BPI: We should be able to cut off your Internet https://memex.craphound.com/2006/07/10/bpi-we-should-be-able-to-cut-off-your-internet/

#20yrsago Technology for parents to spy on kids https://web.archive.org/web/20060711084212/http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/07/09/BIGMOTHER.TMP

#20yrsago Dale Bailey's "The Resurrection Man" https://memex.craphound.com/2006/07/09/southern-gothic-science-fiction-collection/

#10yrsago A law prof responds to students who anonymously complained about #blacklivesmatter tee https://backspace.com/notes/2016/07/law-professors-response-to-black-lives-matter-shirt-complaint.php

#10yrsago UK government rejects Brexit do-over petition with 4.1m signatures https://web.archive.org/web/20160709101514/https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-government-rejects-eu-referendum-petition-latest-a7128306.html

#10yrsago New Zealanders raise millions to buy beach and donate it to the public https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-36759321

#10yrsago Jughead: Zdarsky’s reboot is funny, fannish, and freaky https://memex.craphound.com/2016/07/10/jughead-zdarskys-reboot-is-funny-fannish-and-freaky/

#5yrsago Biden's Right to Repair will include electronics, too https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/10/unnixing-the-fix/#r2r-plus-plus

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF

07.07.2026 à 14:24

Pluralistic: How US states and international trustbusters can beat Big Tech (07 Jul 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (6376 mots)


Today's links

  • How US states and international trustbusters can beat Big Tech: Their common enemies are Trump and his tech giants.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Sex work synonyms; Carthedral; French pirates; Suffragette surveillance; Hidden library apartments; "The Meaning of July the Fourth for the Negro" x James Earl Jones; Farage quits; Peak indifference; Self publishing; Pepsi spies try to buy Coke formula; Steal this wiki; SF is the only lit people care enough about to steal; HP Lovecraft's commonplace book; "7th Sigma"; Conspiracy fantasy; PalmOS beampoints; Copyright poetry; Abandoned NOLA themepark; Life in Indian call-centers; "Rule 34"; Unpleasant design; WEB du Bois infographics; Drone v South African racism; Escobar's hippos; Brexit nihilism; UK Iraq War inquiry; Copyright reversion; Paperclip traded for house; Pen with shredder; Broadcast Treaty is back; "Influencing Machine"; ANSI x paid sex; Biden x Right to Repair; Technological self-determination.
  • Upcoming appearances: London, Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
  • Recent appearances: Where I've been.
  • Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Colophon: All the rest.


A titan, chained and sunk to the waist in a stone-lined pit. He has the head of Mark Zuckerberg's Metaverse avatar. A group of Sisyphean men roll boulders towards him, up a skeleton-strewn hillside. Behind him, atop a high cliff, writhe many naked figures entwined with choking serpents.

How US states and international trustbusters can beat Big Tech (permalink)

For a minute there, it looked like Big Tech was on the ropes. Over the past decade, countries all over the world have gotten antitrust fever, from South Korea to Singapore, Europe to Australia, and even China:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/28/mamdani/#trustbusting

Even more important: these international trustbusters shared a common enemy with Biden's antitrust enforcers, like Lina Khan (FTC), Rohit Chopra (CFPB) and Jonathan Kanter (DoJ Antitrust Division), who pursued the most aggressive antitrust agenda America has seen since Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan killed antitrust enforcement a half century ago.

This international collaboration was an especially rich and productive one. Today's global trustbusters have opportunities for collaboration that their Gilded Age predecessors could only dream of.

That's because modern monopolies are likewise global, running the same scam in every country that they operate in. It wasn't like this during the era of the first Robber Barons. John D Rockefeller's Standard Oil had many of the world's economies in chokeholds, but each country got its own, national chokehold. In the US, Standard Oil monopolized pipelines and refineries, but it found different chokepoints in other countries. For example, in Germany, Rockefeller monopolized the ports:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/24/shithole-billionaires/#tarbells-everywhere

This meant that American and German enforcers had very little to say to one another. Sure, they had a common enemy, but even if US and German authorities commandeered a fleet of zeppelins and used them to ferry documents back and forth between their respective agencies, it wouldn't have done them any good. The fact patterns about German ports had nothing much in common with the cases being built in relation to America's captured oil refineries.

That's not how companies like Google, or Meta, or Apple, or Microsoft, or Oracle work. Like Standard Oil, these companies are planet-girding extraction machines that are strangling the world's economies. But unlike Standard Oil, these companies run the same playbook in every country, meaning that the facts that establish Google or Apple's guilt in Brussels can be translated and used to run cases in the UK, South Korea and Japan.

The opportunities for international cooperation don't stop there! It's been more than a century since the Gilded Age, and the intervening years saw the US enact the Marshall Plan, through which it redesigned the legal systems of countries shattered by WWII and the Korean War. The technocrats who oversaw the Marshall Plan understood that large, monopolistic firms played a key role in the rise of fascist governments in Europe and Japan, and so they transposed America's landmark antitrust laws – like the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act – onto lawbooks around the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/08/competition-is-killing-us/#borked

That means that it's not just that the same companies are committing the same crimes everywhere around the world – it also means that most of these countries have substantively similar statutes establishing those crimes. A successful case in South Korea will likely be successful in the UK – providing that the company engages in the same conduct in both countries (which, again, it does).

During the Biden years, the UK Competition and Markets Authority ran these international tech antitrust summits in London where US enforcers and their UK, European, Singaporean, South Korean and Japanese counterparts met to plan a shared strategy to take down US Big Tech:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cma-data-technology-and-analytics-conference-2022-tickets-308678625077

The presence of America's trustbusters at these meetings was key. Not only were they running a string of wildly successful cases against US Big Tech in America, but just by being there, they signaled that the US government would help foreign governments enforce their judgments against US tech giants. That's key, because – as the Marshall Plan's architects could tell you – giant national monopolies often become a de facto, private, unaccountable arm of the state in the countries where they are born, and can call upon the governments they've colonized to protect them from other countries' attempts to enforce their laws.

Which brings me to the Trump election, and the subsequent fusion of Big Tech with Trump's government. It started before Trump took office, when he traveled to Davos to warn the world's governments not to try to enforce their laws over his tech companies. Then there was the inauguration, where tech CEOs paid $1m each out of their pockets for a seat on the dais behind Trump. Big Tech ponied up millions for the Epstein Ballroom, and they also provide key material support to Trump's ethnic cleansing program. If you end up in a concentration camp thanks to one of Trump's ICE chuds, you can blame Microsoft for providing the administrative software; Google for providing the location data used to track you down; and Apple for blocking apps that warn you if you're about to get snatched by masked thugs:

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

All over the world, tech antitrust has gone into retreat. In Canada, ex-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau created sweeping new powers for the country's Competition Bureau, but now his successor Mark Carney is making equally sweeping cuts to the agency's funding. In the UK, PM Keir Starmer fired the devastatingly effective head of the Competition and Markets Authority and replaced him with the CEO of Amazon UK:

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

And in Ireland – the place where European tech regulation goes to die – they've just appointed an ex-Meta lobbyist named Niamh Sweeney to regulate the privacy practices of the US tech giants that pretend to be headquartered in Ireland in order to evade their taxes:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/01/erin-go-blagged/#big-tech-omerta

This is especially worrying because Meta has a history of binding its former executives with nondisclosure and nondisparagement clauses that forbid them from ever saying a mean word about Meta, or discussing anything they learned while working at the company. There are no ends to the lengths the company will go to in their war on their ex-employees. Take Sarah Wynn-Williams, who has been fined $111m by the company's arbitrator as punishment for her #1 NYT bestselling whistleblower memoir, Careless People. Meta has told Wynn-Williams that she may not appear in public to discuss anything, not just her book, and now they've sued her for standing motionless and silent for an hour on a stage at a literary festival:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/27/zuckerstreisand-2/#autodisparagement

When Sweeney was given the job of regulating her former employers, it naturally raised questions about whether she would be legally allowed to criticize – or even talk about – Meta. Sweeney declined to comment on this at all for seven months, and now, at last, she has issued a heavily lawyered statement that seems to affirm that she will be allowed to do her job:

https://www.independent.ie/business/irish-business/no-legal-gag-from-meta-and-no-tech-shares-data-protection-commissioner-niamh-sweeney-on-regulating-her-former-employers/a/158097549.html

But a close read of her words tells a different story: Sweeney has affirmed that she's not bound by the same gag order as Wynn-Williams, but not whether she has any restrictions on her conduct in respect of Meta. This shouldn't be complicated: if Sweeney is indeed free to vigorously enforce the law against Meta, then she could have published a statement the day her appointment was made public: "I do not have any contractual restrictions on my ability to discuss Meta or its current or former personnel." If she is truly able to do this job, then it shouldn't take her half a year to issue a weasel-worded, heavily caveated statement.

Having narrowly escaped the existential crisis of democratic and legal accountability, Big Tech has captured a string of states: Ireland and the UK, and (especially) the USA. The fears of the Marshall Plan technocrats have been realized: Big Tech is Trump and Trump is Big Tech, and together, they are executing an authoritarian takeover of the USA and countries around the world.

Without the US as a willing partner, other countries have precious little chance of enforcing their laws (which were originally American laws). Just look at how Apple has point-blank refused to follow Europe's new tech regulations:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/26/empty-threats/#500-million-affluent-consumers

(Worse: Trump has blacklisted the EU officials who worked on those laws and has permanently barred them from entering the USA, and has now requisitioned more official EU correspondence from Big Tech companies so he can locate and punish more of Big Tech's official enemies:)

https://www.euractiv.com/news/eu-urges-us-tech-firms-to-follow-rules-on-handling-staff-data/

Now that the US state has merged with US tech, every country around the world has motive, means and opportunity to build a "post-American internet" of open source apps running at local data centers:

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

But don't write US enforcers out of the picture just yet! Writing for The Sling, Tyler Clark calls for "regionalized enforcement" by US states against Big Tech companies:

https://www.thesling.org/regionalizing-enforcement-agencies/

You see, it's not just international governments whose lawbooks were rewritten through the Marshall Plan that have access to America's antitrust laws. When Congress wrote the Clayton Act, Sherman Act and other US federal antitrust laws, they explicitly wrote in the power of state Attorneys General to enforce them. That means that 50+ state AGs all have the ability to wield antitrust against US tech giants.

It seems Congress foresaw this moment, when federal enforcers partnered with American monopolists, trading open bribes for approval for corrupt mergers and other illegal conduct:

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

But where the Feds fail, the states can pick up the slack. When states fine US companies and order their breakup, it's a lot harder for those companies to flout those orders – unlike the EU or Canada or the UK, America's state governments are first class actors in the US judicial system.

That's where Clark comes in: he calls for coalitions of state enforcers to take on US Big Tech, filling the void created by Trump's pay-to-play fed enforcers. A (future) federal statute could enshrine this system through "regional FTC enforcement centers":

https://www.ftc.gov/reports/collaboration-act-report-congress

I like Clark's idea, but I think he's missing a trick: US regional antitrust enforcement doesn't need to lean on the US government for resources and collaboration. There are national governments all over the world whose antitrust laws were created by the Marshall Plan, and those are the same laws that state AGs have at their disposal. And of course, tech companies' crimes aren't just the same in France and Japan – they're also the same in New York State and California.

The US government isn't the only game in town. American state enforcers have a global buffet of enforcement partners, and those international enforcers need American collaborators who can collect the fines they levy and enforce the breakup orders they issue. It's a win-win (for the people, for international enforcers, and the states) and a big loss (for Trump's tech companies and his corrupt antitrust dingo babysitters).

One place this could start: joint hearings that call ex-Big Tech employees as key witnesses, daring companies like Meta to invoke their gag orders. It's one thing to tell Sarah Wynn-Williams she can't talk to a crowd at a book festival, but Meta has taken the position that she cannot speak before a legislature or regulator, either.

Wynn-Williams isn't alone. The Big Tech companies are laying off employees by the thousands, thanks to their failed 11-figure AI bets. Those ex-employees know where every body is buried. They know where to find the memos that establish their ex-bosses' intent to create and maintain monopolies and the hardest part of any antitrust case is establishing intent.

Together, US states and foreign enforcers have the opportunity of the century – a chance to shatter the power of Trump's tech giants, who are so key to Trump's authoritarian takeover.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Prohibited synonyms for sex work https://web.archive.org/web/20010803205316/https://www.ci.sparks.nv.us/municode/Title_5/66/100.html

#25yrsago Carthedral https://web.archive.org/web/20010803104957/http://www.carthedral.com/FAQ.html

#25yrsago How solar is decentralizing power in the Domincan Republic https://web.archive.org/web/20010802180254/https://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,44784,00.html

#25yrsago PalmOS streetlamp beam-points https://web.archive.org/web/20010723042420/http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2001/07/05/BU239233.DTL

#25yrsago Poignant story of a dotcom’s death https://web.archive.org/web/20010703095832/http://www.oreilly.com/news/deathofdotcom_0601.html

#20yrsago Haunted house build-notes https://web.archive.org/web/20060710081617/https://www.dragons-eye.com/watch_us_build!.htm

#20yrsago US copyright law in verse https://jergames.blogspot.com/2006/07/us-copyright-code-in-verse.html

#20yrsago Indie band pulls out of iTunes, cites DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20060708093512/https://www.technozid.de/2006/07/06/bodenstandig-2000-are-opting-out-of-itunes/

#20yrsago Coke employees busted for trying to sell formula to Pepsi https://web.archive.org/web/20060712112019/https://edition.cnn.com/2006/LAW/07/05/coke.secrets.ap/index.html

#20yrsago Sf is the only literature people care enough about to steal on the Internet https://www.locusmag.com/2006/Issues/07DoctorowCommentary.html

#20yrsago Steal This Book, the wiki https://web.archive.org/web/20060707015922/https://stealthiswiki.nine9pages.com/index.php?title=Table_of_Contents

#20yrsago Canadian artists call for less copyright https://web.archive.org/web/20060706205719/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20060705.COPYRIGHT05/TPStory/

#20yrsago Pirate Party launches in France https://web.archive.org/web/20060706141024/http://www.parti-pirate.info/?page_id=17

#20yrsago Guy successfully trades paperclip for house https://web.archive.org/web/20060806194814/http://oneredpaperclip.blogspot.com/2006/07/interesting.html

#20yrsago Woman gamer voice-changer for impersonating men https://web.archive.org/web/20060711114727/http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=65946

#20yrsago Collection of publishing industry statistics https://web.archive.org/web/20060704112005/http://parapublishing.com/sites/para/resources/statistics.cfm

#20yrsago Pen with built-in shredder and FM radio https://web.archive.org/web/20061027190059/http://www.radicauk.com/product/instructions/74011

#15yrsago Women football players half as likely to fake an injury as men https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/07/110706195906.htm)

#15yrsago WIPO’s Broadcast Treaty is back: copyright nuts want to steal the public domain, kill Creative Commons, and give copyright over your videos to YouTube and other streamers https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/07/its-back-wipo-broadcasting-treaty-returns-grave

#15yrsago Influencing Machine: Brook Gladstone’s comic about media theory is serious but never dull https://memex.craphound.com/2011/07/07/influencing-machine-brook-gladstones-comic-about-media-theory-is-serious-but-never-dull/

#15yrsago Suffragette surveillance photos from 1912 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/3153024.stm

#15yrsago Steampunk thinking helmet https://tombanwell.blogspot.com/2011/07/tauruscat-final-photos.html

#15yrsago RIP, Len Sassaman: cypherpunk and anonymity hacker https://web.archive.org/web/20110707065058/https://www.cso.com.au/article/392338/young_cryptographer_ends_own_life/

#15yrsago Italian telco regulator grants itself power to censor Internet; Obama administration approves https://hyperorg.com/2011/07/04/obama-admin-backs-berlusconis-unfettered-anti-piracy-regs/

#15yrsago Massive science fiction encyclopedia’s third edition will be digital https://web.archive.org/web/20110709072721/http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/

#15yrsago HP Lovecraft’s commonplace book https://web.archive.org/web/20110706091953/https://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2011/07/h-p-lovecrafts-commonplace-book/

#15yrsago America’s copyright scholars speak out against PROTECT-IP bill https://volokh.com/2011/07/04/and-speaking-of-the-inalienable-right-to-the-pursuit-of-happiness/

#15yrsago Little Brother stage adaptation in San Francisco, Jan 2012 https://web.archive.org/web/20130803164337/https://littlebrotherlive.wordpress.com/

#15yrsago Steven “Jumper” Gould’s new novel 7TH SIGMA: genre-busting science fiction/western kicks ass https://memex.craphound.com/2011/07/05/steven-jumper-goulds-new-novel-7th-sigma-genre-busting-science-fiction-western-kicks-ass/

#15yrsago Rotting, abandoned New Orleans theme-park https://www.flickr.com/photos/uelaphantom/sets/72157625672417251/comments/

#15yrsago Spanish anti-piracy execs busted for ripping off artists https://web.archive.org/web/20120510175030/https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/07/police-raid-spanish-collecting-society-in-embezzlement-case/

#15yrsago Following the money: how spammers do their banking https://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/07/which-banks-are-enabling-fake-av-scams/

#15yrsago Life in an Indian call center https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/07/indian-call-center-americanization/

#15yrsago Stross’s Rule 34: pervy technothriller about the future of policing https://memex.craphound.com/2011/07/06/strosss-rule-34-pervy-technothriller-about-the-future-of-policing/

#10yrsago Unpleasant Design: design that bullies its users https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/unpleasant-design-hostile-urban-architecture/

#10yrsago 2016’s Illusion of the Year will make you cover your screen with fingerprints https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jri0del_6t4

#10yrsago WEB Du Bois’s infographics on black life, from the 1900 Exposition Universelle https://hyperallergic.com/w-e-b-du-boiss-modernist-data-visualizations-of-black-life/

#10yrsago “Security is what happens to people, not machines” https://www.oreilly.com/content/eleanor-saitta-on-security-as-a-product-of-shared-human-outcomes/

#10yrsago Drone’s eye view photos reveal the racism of South African neighbourhoods https://web.archive.org/web/20160706105856/https://edition.cnn.com/2016/07/06/africa/south-africa-apartheid-drone-photography-unequal-scenes/index.html

#10yrsago Man builds giant, discrete-component-based computer that can play Tetris https://www.megaprocessor.com/

#10yrsago Epipens have more than quintupled in price since 2004 https://inthesetimes.com/article/anaphylactic-sticker-shock

#10yrsago Let’s check in with Pablo Escobar’s herd of feral hippos https://web.archive.org/web/20160706160442/https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/opinion/1028733/legacy-of-drug-lord-escobars-pet-hippos

#10yrsago UK Tory leadership race: “a sort of X Factor for choosing the antichrist” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/05/tory-leadership-election-x-factor-choosing-antichrist-brexit-frankie-boyle

#10yrsago UK Tories want 10-year prison sentences for watching TV the wrong way https://torrentfreak.com/uk-bill-introduces-10-year-prison-sentence-for-online-pirates-160706/

#10yrsago Brexit’s other shoe drops: austerity, deregulation, climate nihilism https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/04/disaster-capitalism-tory-right-brexit-roll-back-state

#10yrsago After 7 years, UK’s Iraq War inquiry releases 2.6M word report damning Tony Blair and the invasion https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jul/06/chilcot-report-crushing-verdict-tony-blair-iraq-war

#10yrsago IS CELL PHONE DO BAD TO CHILD IN CLASSROOM?!11? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JdyABt6Ldo

#10yrsago UK cops routinely raided police databases to satisfy personal interest or make money on the side https://www.bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Safe-in-Police-Hands.pdf

#10yrsago New York’s stately libraries sport hidden apartments for live-in caretakers https://www.6sqft.com/life-behind-the-stacks-the-secret-apartments-of-new-york-libraries/

#10yrsago Russia’s ghastly Children’s Rights Commissioner finally quits https://globalvoices.org/2016/07/04/russias-childrens-rights-commissioner-is-stepping-down-but-well-remember-him-for-these-7-things/

#10yrsago Frederick Douglass’ “The Meaning of July the Fourth for the Negro,” read by James Earl Jones https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2YYEceo1HI

#10yrsago Sanders supporters are the least racist https://web.archive.org/web/20160705084803/https://blogs.reuters.com/talesfromthetrail/2016/07/01/belatedly-what-sanders-supporters-say-about-race/

#10yrsago Hidden “anti-crime” mics are proliferating on US public transit, recording riders’ conversations https://web.archive.org/web/20160704073920/https://www.csoonline.com/article/3090502/security/big-brother-is-listening-as-well-as-watching.html

#10yrsago Nigel “Brexit” Farage, having tanked the UK economy, retires to “get his life back” https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-36702468

#10yrsago Peak indifference: privacy as a public health issue https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-peak-indifference/

#10yrsago ANSI board member thinks we should all pay for sex (and also pay to read the law) https://www.techdirt.com/2016/07/07/standards-body-whines-that-people-who-want-free-access-to-law-probably-also-want-free-sex/

#10yrsago Post-Brexit, EU Commission plan to ram through disastrous Canada-EU trade deal dies https://wolfstreet.com/2016/07/02/to-save-canada-eu-trade-pact-ceta-eu-assaults-democratic/

#10yrsago Claude Shannon, MOOCs, and nanoassembly: what 3D printing is really about https://www.edge.org/conversation/neil_gershenfeld-digital-reality

#5yrsago Comic book store files comic-book lawsuit https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/07/instrumentalism/#legal-funnies

#5yrsago Biden delivers Right to Repair via executive order https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/07/instrumentalism/#r2r

#5yrsago Technological self-determination https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/07/instrumentalism/#self-determination

#5yrsago Self-publishing https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/04/self-publishing/

#5yrsago Conspiracy fantasy https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/05/ideomotor-response/#qonspiracy

#5yrsago Quantifying copyright reversion https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/06/backsies/#take-backs

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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03.07.2026 à 11:00

Pluralistic: CARDiac, syntax coloring, view source and vibe code (03 Jul 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4557 mots)


Today's links


An insanely complex machine made up of many gears, troughs, water wheels, springs, screws, etc. It is housed in a brick building whose facade has been broken away. Three human figures labor to power the machine, turning cranks.

CARDiac, syntax coloring, view source and vibe code (permalink)

In the mid-1970s, my dad – then a budding computer scientist, subsequently a math teacher – brought home my first computer: the CARDiac, a Turing-complete, all-cardboard papercraft computer that you could write and execute programs on:

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

CARDiac stands for "CARDboard Illustrative Aid to Computation," and it was created in 1968 at Bell Labs as a way to teach high schoolers how computers worked. I wasn't anywhere near high school age (I think I was in third grade?) but the CARDiac was revelatory. The year before, I'd had access to a teletype terminal and acoustic coupler that let me operate a PDP machine at the University of Toronto, and I'd been endlessly fascinated with the possibilities. I wrote simple BASIC programs, chatted with ELIZA, and messaged other system users, one keystroke at a time, all on paper (the terminal didn't have a screen, just a printer, and we fed it 1,000' rolls of paper towels my mom brought home from her kindergarten classroom, which I then rolled back up so she could put them back in the bathroom for the kids to dry their hands on).

Interacting with a computer in real-time was captivating, but it wasn't until I assembled and used the CARDiac that it all snapped into place. With the CARDiac, you composed simple programs with pencil and paper, then followed instructions that directed you to move paper tokens in and out of various slots representing memory cells and an accumulator. All an electronic computer does is repeat these crude mechanical operations, millions of times per second, using microscopic transistors. None of that action can be observed with the naked eye, of course. If you had a very sensitive multimeter and a very good microscope, it's conceivable that you could indirectly watch this intricate dance, but only on very early processors, and only if you drastically slowed down their operations.

Much later, I learned a word for what I got from the CARDiac: legibility. Together, the CARDiac and I made a working digital computer, with me standing in for the physics that propels electrons down the endless labyrinth of a microchip, like a pinball triggering various blooping, beeping bumpers. Though the computing we performed was sub-trivial (adding one and one was a major undertaking!), the physical performance of that computing imbued me with Fingerspitzengefühl ("fingertip feeling"):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fingerspitzengef%C3%BChl

This stood me in great stead in the years to come. To this day, when I think about my computer, I sometimes imagine those little cardboard tokens, shuffling in and out of the slits in my paper CARDiac. There's something very reassuring about this imagery. No matter how many levels of abstraction sit between me and the nanoscale transistors ranked in their billions beneath my fingertips, they are all undertaking those familiar operations I painstakingly performed on my child's desk all those years ago.

(This is one of the things that makes Science Comics Computers: How Digital Hardware Works such an amazing kids' book! By illustrating how a computer's operations are built up from simple boolean logic that can be represented as physical switches, the comic performs that same legibilizing magic that I got from the CARDiac:)

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/05/xor-xand-xnor-nand-nor/#brawniac

Not long after my CARDiac experience, my dad brought home an Apple ][+, which came with a schematic that revealed the inner workings of the machine in ways that I found visually striking, if significantly less accessible than the CARDiac:

https://downloads.reactivemicro.com/Apple%20II%20Items/Hardware/II_&_II+/Schematic/Apple%20II%20Schematics.pdf

(For me, at least. For the legendary hardware hacker Andrew "bunnie" Huang, it was the start of a journey that turned him into one of the world's virtuoso reverse-engineers and science communicators):

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/09/quantity-break/#so-many-chips

The Apple ][+ did very little when you took it out of the box. It came with a few floppies' worth of demo programs, and we bought a few more down at the local computer store, but most of the programs I ended up using with that machine were ones I typed in myself, from magazines I bought at the corner store (I spent half my magazine budget on Cracked, Mad and Crazy, the other half on computer magazines full of BASIC program listings).

Typing in a program, keystroke by keystroke, was another Fingerspitzengefühl-generating exercise. I wasn't much of a typist, so it was slow going, and of course I made a lot of typos. What's more, BASIC had already fragmented into several dialects by this point, so even a correctly typed program could fail to run until it had been adapted for the BASIC that shipped with the computer. Getting a program to run on my computer required me to hone my typing skills, but even more so, my problem solving skills.

After months of this, I (re-)invented the debugger, from first principles, coming up with lots of little tricks and gimmicks (many of them horribly inefficient) for identifying and solving my programs' errors. In later years, I had lots of opportunity to work with real debuggers, created and maintained by trained programmers who'd forgotten more than I would ever know about writing code, and my own cack-handed efforts to build my own version of their tools conferred a confidence and intuitive understanding that I could not have achieved otherwise. Figuring out the need for a debugger and then rolling my own (crude, inefficient) one made all debuggers more legible to me.

I think that "legibility" is an underrated trait. If a system is legible to you, then you have a superior basis for understanding it, improving it, and making it work again when it breaks down.

There's an old joke that goes, "physics is applied math; chemistry is applied physics, and biology is applied chemistry" (I've also heard versions that start with "math is applied philosophy" and carry on to "sociology is applied biology," etc). While this isn't entirely true, there's something profound in it: we understand and manipulate our complex reality by wrapping it in abstractions that package up a writhing, shuffling, vibrating machine inside a smooth, serene membrane with a sturdy and easily grasped handle. You could do chemistry using the tools of physics, but it would take hours to perform the kind of calculations a chemist does in seconds (just as it takes an eternity to add one and one with a CARDiac).

Nevertheless, there are times when it is useful for a biologist to think about chemical processes, and for a chemist to think about interactions at the level of physics, and for a physicist to do math. The membrane and the handle are essential, but sometimes you have to decap the sealed package and inspect and manipulate its internals directly. Problem solving, improvement and maintenance all require the ability to move up and down the stack of abstractions to figure out where to stick your probes and stage your interventions.

This is where legibility comes in. Interacting with physical processes improves your mental model. In Broad Band (a magisterial history of women in computing), Claire Evans talks about how the first programmers were women who did the "unskilled" labor of physically cabling components together, developing powerful Fingerspitzengefühl, with such high-fidelity, trans-abstraction mental models of the machines' operations that they became the world's best programmers and debuggers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/13/data-protection-without-monopoly/#broad-band

My early adventures in programming were so powerful and instructive because nearly all the programs I interacted with on my Apple ][+ were written in BASIC (not just the ones I keyed in, but also the demo software and much of the packaged software we bought). That meant that I could get a listing of any program I was using, peeling open the membrane to look at the machinery underneath. I could even laboriously trace the operations of that program using my toy debugger. This, too, was legibility: the ability to flip between the effects of the running code, and the instructions themselves (and then to mentally map those instructions onto the movement of cardboard tokens in my CARDiac).

This affordance was repeated later on the early web, thanks to the "View Source" function that came built into every browser, acting as a velcro tab for the membrane that separated rendered web pages from their underlying instructions. In my early years as a web developer, I copied, pasted, adapted, probed and traced HTML in ways that would have been instantly recognizable to the younger me, keying in those BASIC programs and ripping apart the commercial software on my computer.

I read somewhere that the Bell Labs scientists who created the CARDiac were worried that, thanks to transistorization, the next generation of programmers wouldn't understand the physical, material processes that unfolded when their programs ran, and that this would mean a loss of legibility and intuition and Fingerspitzengefühl. I can't track down the reference now, but it stuck with me, because the CARDiac is such a perfect way of preserving those virtues.

Modern computer science curriculum includes some chip design for just this reason (just as chemists study physics and biologists study chemistry). But there are plenty of programmers – better programmers than I ever was or will be – who taught themselves and never had a CARDiac or gave much thought to chip design. They work at different layers of abstraction and in different ways to solve different problems. Maybe they could improve their art by tinkering with FPGAs, but there's always something even the most skilled artisan can do to round out and incrementally improve their craft.

In the same way, there are plenty of programmers – better ones than I ever was or will be – whose journey started at higher abstraction layers than a teletype terminal or a CARDiac. Maybe they started with a browser's View Source, teasing apart other people's Javascript to create weird Myspace customizations. Maybe they tweaked a programmable block in Minecraft. Maybe they modded a Scratch game. Or maybe they recorded macros using Applescript or Hypercard or Visual Basic to automate a routine task, only to later open up the source code generated by the macro recorder to make fine adjustments.

Whether you're pasting source from Stack Overflow or recording a macro in Excel, you are just one operation away from unwrapping the membrane and exposing the code beneath it. And with the modern internet, with Wikipedia, with endless tutorial videos, you are one further operation from penetrating the high level code to get at the code beneath it, and the code beneath that, and the code beneath that, all the way down to the bare metal.

Which brings me to vibe coding. As I've written, there's a world of difference between writing code for production and writing "personal software" that solves a problem you have. Whatever deficits that code has (due to the fact that you're not a skilled programmer) are offset by the fact that you're the one making the tool (which means your needs aren't lossily filtered through a programmer's understanding of those needs):

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/15/vernacular/#hypercardian

There's nothing wrong with code that solves your problem, even if you don't know how that code works, even if it breaks in a couple of years, even if no one else could maintain, extend or debug that code. Personal software is fundamentally different from software made to be used and maintained by others:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/02/canonization/#operate-iterate-improve

Higher-level abstractions are necessary. Moving tokens between the slits in a CARDiac is a powerful exercise, but eventually you want to do something more substantial than adding one and one, and so you need to package up the mechanics of computing inside a membrane with an easily grasped handle (knowing that you can always open the membrane if need be).

The more automated code you generate – macros, pasted Javascript, Minecraft blocks – the greater the likelihood that you will be failed by a readymade, prefab component. At that point, you have means, motive and opportunity to open the membrane and start tinkering with the internals, and every time you do, you have a better chance of making a realization that improves your grasp on the whole system.

Automated code – whether from an LLM, View Source, Stack Overflow, or a macro recorder – is the top of a funnel. Many – most – of the people who enter the funnel won't slip further down the abstraction chute. They'll solve their problem (a virtue unto itself!) and move on. But the more people we put at the top of the funnel, the more chances our civilization gets to produce another skilled artisan who understands and can improve, iterate and repair the code the rest of us use.

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 What real elections can learn from reality TV voting https://henryjenkins.org/2006/07/democracy_big_brother_style_1.html

#20yrsago Veteran print journo on neglected demographics http://citmedia.org/blog/2006/07/03/guest-posting-is-media-performance-democracys-critical-issue/

#10yrsago One of the copyright’s scummiest trolls loses his law license https://fightcopyrighttrolls.com/2016/07/03/prendas-hansmeier-stipulates-to-suspension-of-his-law-license/

#10yrsago Macedonia’s Colorful Revolutionaries defy the state by splashing paint on government buildings and monuments https://globalvoices.org/2016/07/03/defying-police-harassment-the-macedonian-colorful-revolutionaries-continue-to-chant-freedom/

#10yrsago Trump and Brexit are like lotto tickets: the more unrealistic, the better https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/fintan-o-toole-brexit-and-the-politics-of-the-fake-orgasm-1.2707398

#10yrsago Low income US households get $0.08/month in Fed housing subsidy; 0.1%ers get $1,236 https://web.archive.org/web/20160702151008/https://www.thenation.com/article/who-benefits-most-from-housing-subsidies-the-wealthy/

#5yrsago The future is symmetrical https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/03/beautiful-symmetry/#fibrous-growth

#1yrago Trump's not gonna protect workers from forced labor https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/03/states-rights-trumps-wrongs/#mamdani

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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02.07.2026 à 09:54

Pluralistic: The difference between "today's task" and "accretive work" (02 Jul 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3391 mots)


Today's links


A village revel in a sleepy wood, with many Renaissance peasants having a debauch. In the background is a hulking mainframe computer.

The difference between "today's task" and "accretive work" (permalink)

One thing I've learned about paradoxes: often the answer to the riddle of "how can this one thing have such a contradictory set of features and effects?" is "it's not one thing, it's two things*."

That's the idea that set me on the path to writing about "reverse centaurs" and AI. I was hearing from experienced programmers whom I knew to be reliable narrators of their own experience who described how AI was letting them write the best code of their lives; and from equally experienced and reliable coders who described a nightmare of tech debt: "I work in aviation, and I just don't think anyone should ever fly again, those things are now unsafe at any altitude, thanks to the code I had to sign off on":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/11/vulgar-thatcherism/#there-is-an-alternative

For so long as I thought of both of these groups as doing the same thing and getting wildly different outcomes, this was a paradox. But as soon as I realized that the former group were "centaurs" (workers who get to decide and direct their adoption of automation) and the latter were reverse centaurs (workers who were conscripted to serve as peripherals for automation systems), it all snapped into place. It only looked like they were doing the same thing – they were actually engaged in fundamentally different activities, which is why they were having such different experiences.

The same goes for vibe coding. Plenty of people I knew had gotten real value out of vibe coding personal utilities that made things better for them in a way that I instantly recognized from a life spent around people who'd been able to adapt and customize the systems they used to make their lives better:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/25/today-in-tabs/#unfucked-rota

Vibe coding can be seen as part of a lineage that includes shell scripting, Applescript, Hypercard and Visual Basic: ways for technical novices to directly create personal software, without having to ask a programmer to interpret their needs (and without having to pay every time they wanted to do something new with their computers):

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/15/vernacular/#hypercardian

But if that's so, how to make sense of the seeming paradox of all that tech debt? For a tech company, code is a liability, not an asset:

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

AI's pitch to bosses is that they can fire most of their workers in order to terrorize the remainder into tolerating a working life wherein they are made to mark the AI's homework, at superhuman speed, and to assume the blame when it goes wrong. This is obviously a terrible way to write code:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

But it's also obviously going to produce terrible code:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/27/rancid-vibe-coding/#class-war

So is vibe code a way of empowering people to have the personal, vernacular tools that they design and adapt as they see fit? Or is it a way to shovel technological asbestos into the walls at scale, filling up our high-tech society with ghastly, lethal technical debt we'll be digging our way out of for generations?

Again: the paradox falls away once you realize that personal software you write for yourself is fundamentally different from "production code" that other people have to use, maintain and improve.

In an essay inspired by some thoughts on AI and mathematical theorem proving, Kellan Elliott-McCrea crystallizes this distinction in a really sharp way, bringing in Alex Kontorovich's idea of mathematical "canonization":

By canonization, I mean the process of taking a local, one-off formalization and turning it into library mathematics: general, reusable, coherent, efficient, and compatible with the rest… Canonization often changes the picture itself: the definitions, the abstractions, the API, and sometimes even the statement…

https://laughingmeme.org/2026/06/30/canonization-and-the-overhang.html

Elliott-McCrea posits that making code that is "socially constructed in a way that leaves the team prepared to operate on it, iterate it, and improve it" is the difference between "I got it working" and "something the future can build on."

He's not claiming that "I got it working" is worthless. There's plenty of space for "disposable and single use software." Sure, to a trained software engineer, this might be "bad code" but doing today's task has value, even if the code that performs that task isn't "accretive."

Canonization is accretive. To canonize code is to make it "legible to systems of humans and non-humans operating on it." Free/open source software is the backbone of the canon: "decades of…intelligible, build-on-able work, sitting in public repos."

My "reverse centaurs" thesis isn't just a way to understand how programmers who seem to be doing the same thing can have such different effects. It's also about how the way that the capital was raised for AI requires that it produce as many reverse centaurs as possible, because the only way to recoup the farcical sums associated with AI production is to fire millions of workers and replace them with defective chatbots backstopped by the jobspocalypse's terrorized survivors, who can be made to endlessly toil away at marking the AI's homework because there are so many other workers who'll take their jobs if they refuse.

The point being that while centaurs are good and reverse centaurs are bad, the AI bubble requires the production of reverse centaurs, to the exclusion of centaurs.

In a similar vein, Elliott-McCrea describes how the imperatives of the AI industry are devouring its seed-corn – consuming the canon without putting anything new back in it. In the same way that AI can do endless theorem-proving but is essentially useless for creating "library mathematics: general, reusable, coherent, efficient, and compatible with the rest," AI can write a lot of running code, but the AI industry is further devaluing the already undervalued work of cleanup and canonization. As Elliott-McCrea writes, "the social production of knowledge [is] the seed corn."

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 Sen. Stevens’ hilariously awful explanation of the Internet https://web.archive.org/web/20060704034735/http://blog.wired.com/27BStroke6/?entry_id=1512499

#20yrsago Best music of 1900s-1920s as MP3s https://web.archive.org/web/20060703112442/http://www.foldedspace.org/weblog/2006/06/in_the_good_old_summertime.html

#15yrsago “No Endorsement” — aligning the interests of creators and fans https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-no-endorsement/

#15yrsago Peruvian TV station owners held out for bribes that were 100X larger than those received by judges https://web.archive.org/web/20110705085927/http://fsi.stanford.edu/publications/how_to_subvert_democracy_montesinos_in_peru/

#10yrsago Paralyzed, partially deaf-blind teen with brain tumor beaten bloody by TSA https://wreg.com/news/disabled-st-jude-patient-sues-airport-and-tsa-after-bloody-scuffle-with-airport-police/

#10yrsago China’s “ultra-unreal” literary movement takes inspiration from breathtaking corruption https://lithub.com/modern-china-is-so-crazy-it-needs-a-new-literary-genre/

#10yrsago London luxury property prices plummet after Brexit vote https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/london-house-prices-slashed-after-brexit-vote-a3285731.html

#5yrsago Biden admin orders an end to surprise billing https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/02/spoil-the-surprise/#surprise-billing

#1yrago Tessa Hulls's "Feeding Ghosts" https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/02/filial-piety/#great-leap-forward

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

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01.07.2026 à 17:14

Pluralistic: Technocarcinization (01 Jul 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3987 mots)


Today's links


Two crabs dance with their claws entwined; one has the Google logo on its back, the other, the Apple logo. Their audience is a much larger crab, bearing the Meta logo. The scene is set on a dune.

Technocarcinization (permalink)

"Carcinization" is a curious biological phenomenon: given enough time, across many environments, many species will evolve into crabs. The body-type of a crab, with its low center of gravity, sideways gait (useful for evading predators), ease of concealment and protected organs is suitable to many different environments:

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

Lately, I've watched the American Big Tech platforms as they underwent their own form of technocarcinization, which is when every tech company turns into Facebook.

A 2x2 grid. The vertical axis is labeled 'more surveillant.' The horizontal axis is labeled 'more control-freaky.' The top right quadrant has the Google logo. The top left, the Facebook and Instagram logos. The bottom left has the Apple logo. The bottom right has a Free Software Foundation Gnu.

For a long time, it seemed to me that you could make sense of the tech platforms by placing them into one of four quadrants on a 2×2 grid, in which one axis denoted "control freakishness" and the other, "surveillance."

Each quadrant had its own canonical company. The most surveillant/least controlling company (top left) was Google. They would let you roam the whole wide internet and exert no control over your conduct, but would spy on you wherever you went. The least surveillant/most controlling company was Apple, who imprisoned you in its manicured walled garden, but promised never to spy on you. The non-spying/non-controlling option is free/open source tech (of course), which doesn't care what you do, and doesn't watch you do it. And the most spying, most controlling company was Facebook, a company whose products did everything they could to imprison you within their virtual walls, from which vantage they could effect maximal surveillance.

I've used this comparison many times over the years. I included in my 2023 book The Internet Con, along with the joke that Tiktok's position on the grid was so far up and to the right (maximum surveillance and control) that we'd had to put its logo on the back cover. Enough people took this joke seriously and wrote in to complain that they'd gotten a misprint without the logo that we added it to the paperback:

https://www.versobooks.com/products/3035-the-internet-con

The grid was useful, until technocarcinization started to push all the tech companies into that top right quadrant. Apple is no longer the company that protects you from surveillance – they're the company that spies on you, having secretly added a total surveillance system to the iPhone to target ads to you:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Apple can't even claim to protect you from third-party surveillance. Sure, they block Facebook from spying on you, but they have barred ICE Block, an app that tells you if there are ICE chuds hunting in your neighborhood, looking to kidnap you and send you to a concentration camp. Apple declared ICE mercenaries to be a "protected class":

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

And thanks to Apple's control-freakery – which prevents you from overriding Apple's decisions about your own devices – once Apple decides to spy on you or sell you out to fascist goons, there's nothing you can do about it:

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-the-digital-manor/

Then there's Google, the company that ran a free-range livestock operation in which you could roam wherever you liked, because they could always find you when it was time for the slaughter. For years now, Google has been moving inexorably to the kind of control-freak nonsense that you used to only find in one of Apple's crystal prisons.

For example, every year or two, Google floats a proposal to use secure hardware in your device to rat you out if you've got an ad-blocker, privacy blocker, or other aftermarket add-on that lets you choose how you experience the digital world:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai

It's an idea they just can't quit, despite the fact that it's fucking abominable and everyone hates it:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/12/compelled-speech/#quishing

Google used to pride itself in its ability to send you to the open web, viewing search as a conduit to other peoples' resources. Now, with AI search summaries, Google is harvesting the open web and then eating the seed corn, keeping searchers inside of Google's walled garden:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/29/arsonist-firefighters/#im-feeling-lucky

Google also took the idea of a free/open browser and ran with it, rehabilitating some discarded Apple code and turning it into Chrome, the internet's most dominant browser – by far. Now, Google is nerfing that browser's plug-in architecture in a way that blocks all kinds of user-tunable options, including and especially ad-blocking:

https://protonprivacy.substack.com/p/google-is-finally-killing-ublock

And Google has also announced that they're going to turn Android into an iPhone, making it both technically challenging and radioactively illegal for you to install software of your choosing on your own property:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/google-will-block-sideloading-of-unverified-android-apps-starting-next-year/

Google is adopting every one of Apple's worst practices, and Apple is adopting all of Google's worst practices, and so they're both turning into Facebook: technocarcinization!

What's driving this technocarcinization? Well, the obvious answer is that the more Facebooklike a company becomes, the more ways there are for it to rip you off. Surveillance can be monetized by selling your data, by ad targeting, and by surveillance-based pricing and wage-suppression:

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

Control lets platforms block competing products, extract massive junk fees to the businesses they connect you to, and control repair and end-of-life, forcing you to replace hardware by blocking parts and independent service:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/10/markets-are-regulations/#carney-found-a-spine

It turns out that "if you're not paying for the product, you're the product" is only half-right. The other half is, "even if you pay for the product, you're the product." Pay, don't pay: companies will productize anyone they can. And thanks to our enshittogenic policy environment – where the worst ideas of the worst people make the most money – you can always be productized:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/10/say-their-names/#object-permanence

This is independent of the kind of person running the company. Facebook is run by Mark Zuckerberg, a cringe halfwit whose only successful idea was to offer Harvard bros a way of nonconsensually rating the fuckability of female undergrads. Everything he's done since was an acquisition (Whatsapp, Insta) or a flop (metaverse, Libra), or both (Oculus). Zuck owns the majority of the voting stock in the company, which means he has total control over its actions. He can ignore or fire his board members at will. He is the move fast/break things guy, whose every foolish whim can become policy that impacts billions of people.

By contrast, Google and Apple are no longer run by their flamboyant founders, who were every bit as prone to folly as Zuck. They were constrained by their shareholders, which meant that the blast-radius of Steve Jobs's worst ideas (like treating his otherwise curable cancer with green juice) were confined to his own person.

Today, Apple and Google are run by bloodless business sociopaths who go to enormous lengths to project an air of sober adulthood. And yet, these people – who would never be caught dead bow-hunting their own livestock or climbing into an MMA cage – have steered their companies into Facebook's quadrant on our enshittification 2×2.

I think this shows just how much the enshittification of tech is a matter of the policy environment, not the personalities of the people involved. Sure, the worst people imaginable run these companies, but the reason they're able to yield to their most venal impulses and succeed is because the world has been re-arranged to make sociopathy and greed into fitness factors. We get technocarcinization because the most fit organism for a landscape without consequences is a zuckerbergian techno-crab:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

What can we do about it? Well, we're going to have to remake the landscape to punish (rather than reward) enshittification:

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

And in the meantime, there is one inhabitant of the 2×2 that hasn't drifted up and to the right: free and open source software. It's still snugly nestled in the low-surveillance/low-control box, and if you live in that box, your life will be much, much better for it.

There's no better time to make the switch: with RAM and storage prices through the ceiling and OSes growing ever-more bloated with AI and spyware (but I repeat myself), this is the moment to rehabilitate that old computer with Linux:

https://www.fosslinux.com/158206/linux-on-older-hardware-revival-guide.htm

The alternative is to be tormented by crabs no matter what you're trying to do or where you're trying to get to.

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 Print-on-demand and donations - report on DIY publishing business models https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blogs/cory-doctorow/article/47858-with-a-little-help-heuristics.html

#15yrsago Brazil rises up for free speech in 40 national demonstrations https://globalvoices.org/2011/06/30/brazil-freedom-march/

#10yrsago Grandad builds miniature backyard Disneyland https://abcnews.com/Lifestyle/grandpa-builds-disneyland-inspired-backyard-theme-park-grandkids/story?id=40276633

#10yrsago Elizabeth Warren on monopolies in America, including Apple, Google, and Amazon https://washingtonmonthly.com/2016/06/30/elizabeth-warrens-consolidation-speech-could-change-the-election/

#10yrsago White House plan to use data to shrink prison populations could be a racist dumpster fire https://www.wired.com/2016/06/white-house-mission-shrink-us-prisons-data/

#10yrsago Even if Moore's Law is "running out," there's still plenty of room at the bottom https://www.technologyreview.com/2016/05/13/245938/moores-law-is-dead-now-what/

#10yrsago Black-hat hacker handles are often advertisements https://www.wired.com/beyond-the-beyond/2016/07/web-semantics-modern-german-black-hat-hacker-handles/

#10yrsago Spotify threatens to report Apple to competition regulators over App Store rejection https://web.archive.org/web/20160630220301/https://www.recode.net/2016/6/30/12067578/spotify-apple-app-store-rejection

#10yrsago Researchers find over 100 spying Tor nodes that attempt to compromise darknet sites https://www.defcon.org/html/defcon-24/dc-24-speakers.html#Noubir

#5yrsago Exxon lobbyist confesses to his crimes https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/01/basilisk-tamers/#exxonknew

#5yrsago When the Sparrow Falls https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/01/basilisk-tamers/#rage-against-the-machine

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

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30.06.2026 à 13:22

Pluralistic: Jo Walton's "Everybody's Perfect" (30 Jun 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3285 mots)


Today's links


The Tor Books cover for Jo Walton's 'Everybody's Perfect.'

Jo Walton's "Everybody's Perfect" (permalink)

There's a new Jo Walton book, called Everybody's Perfect. Because it's a Jo Walton novel, you know in advance that three things are true about it:

  1. It is beautiful;

  2. It is profound;

  3. It is unlike every other novel, including every other Jo Walton novel.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250314055/everybodysperfect/

Now, just because it's not like any other Jo Walton novel, that doesn't mean that it's not recognizably in a lineage of Walton's work, especially Walton's recent novels, which reflect an amazingly fruitful deep friendship and artistic relationship with the brilliant novelist and historian Ada Palmer:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/10/monopoly-begets-monopoly/#terra-ignota

Walton's work has always been incredible. I mean, every new Jo Walton novel is my favorite Jo Walton novel…until the next Jo Walton novel comes along and blows it out of the water. Her "small change" trilogy, a series of locked-door mystery novels set in a Britain that capitulated to the Nazis, is even more prescient today than it felt 20 years ago:

https://memex.craphound.com/2006/06/20/farthing-heart-rending-alternate-history-about-british-reich-peace/

Among Others – a fictionalized, fantasy memoir about growing up reading genre novels – was so good that it deserved to win two Hugos:

https://memex.craphound.com/2011/01/18/among-others-extraordinary-magic-story-of-science-fiction-as-a-toolkit-for-taking-apart-the-world/

And My Real Children haunts me to this day. I read it all in one sitting, in a hotel room, stricken by jetlag and hooked deep into Walton's narrative about the two paths her protagonist's life took in forking universes that I stayed up all night, and by the morning, I had cried my way through all the kleenex, toilet paper and towels in the room:

https://memex.craphound.com/2014/05/20/jo-waltons-my-real-children-infinitely-wise-sad-and-uplifting-novel/

But then came Walton's Palmer years, and everything got even better. There was the Philosopher Kings trilogy, an incredibly funny, incredibly ambitious tale in which every person who ever dreamed of living in Plato's Republic is brought to an island (along with Apollo, Athena and Socrates) to try the experiment, raising a cohort of orphans bought from the slave markets of antiquity to be philosopher kings:

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

And then there was Lent, an incredibly nuanced and sympathetic fantasy novel about Savonarola, the mad preacher and cult leader whose Bonfire of the Vanities and feuds with the Pope overshadow his legacy, which Walton recovers admirably as fodder for a novel that turns out to be as action-packed as any spy thriller:

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

And now it's Everybody's Perfect, a book that pretty much defines what it means for one text to be "in dialog" with another text. In this case, it's Ada Palmer's Inventing the Renaissance, a stunning magnum opus that tells not just the story of the Renaissance, but the story of the story, all the different ways the Renaissance has been used, abused, revised and recovered, starting with the Renaissance itself. It's a book that will make you rethink everything you know about European history, about the world today, and about the very idea of history itself:

https://www.adapalmer.com/publication/inventing-the-renaissance/

The back half of Palmer's Renaissance is a recursive retelling of the same events, from the points of view of 15 different historical personages, from the famous (Michelangelo) to the infamous (Lucretia Borgia). It's a kind of feltschrift, circling and recircling these moments, revealing their depth and contradictions.

Structurally, Everybody's Perfect feels very much like that final section of Inventing the Renaissance. Each chapter introduces a new point-of-view character, who reflects on a single, extraordinary series of events in an even more extraordinary city, the Serenissima, a phantom Venice that sits at the intersection of many parallel worlds with many parallel versions of humanity.

The sun never shines in the Serenissima; it is forever shrouded in mist. If enough of its denizens believe that something is true, it becomes true, and so islands and buildings and even gods are summoned up by the power of belief. The corollary of this is that anything that falls out of the city's regard might just melt into mist. When you tie up your gondola, you'd best pay an urchin to watch it – not just to keep it from being stolen, but to keep it from evaporating altogether. When two people meet in the Serenissima, they greet each other by reciting, "I see you." If you aren't seen, you might just disappear.

Eight different versions of humanity from eight different worlds mix in the Serenissima. They come from all times, and sometimes they go to all times as well. There's the Venetians, who come from our world, and who have kept the secret of the Serenissima for centuries, even as they've used it as a source of wealth and military advantage. But there are also races with the heads of dogs and cats and birds, a race whose faces are all inset with domino masks, and even stranger races still. There's even a rumored ninth race, who may or may not exist, and whose traits are not known to anyone, though surely they are fearsome (if they're real) (and if the people of Serenissima believe in them, mightn't they become real?).

The novel opens with a vision: the Serenissima will receive a doge. A low-born, weak and humble resident, a blind and partially paralyzed pauper who fell victim to a plague will marry the sea, and bring peace to the warring factions of the Serenissima. This prophecy is the prime mover for the eight tales that follow, as we move through the lives and geographies of one representative of each of the races of the Serenissima.

Walton conjures up the dream logic magic of Among Others, where the feeling that something might be magic can never be fully believed – or discounted. She revives the endlessly fascinating philosophical speculation of The Philosopher Kings. She invokes the tender love, sacrifice, and bitter heartbreak of My Real Children. And she invokes Palmer's Renaissance, endlessly reinvented by everyone who falls in love with it, and everyone who rejects it, for their own parochial reasons, and even the ones who are very wrong might just be a little right.

It's a remarkable novel. It's a gift, really. It's so complicated and yet so captivating, so wise and yet so simple. It won't make you feel like you've fallen into a dream – it will make you feel like everything you've lived up until now was the dream, and you have finally awoken.

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)

#5yrsago Corruption https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/30/based/#high-bidders

#1yrago How much (little) are the AI companies making? https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/30/accounting-gaffs/#artificial-income

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF

29.06.2026 à 18:34

Pluralistic: Gemini is better than search because Google enshittified search (29 Jun 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4599 mots)


Today's links

  • Gemini is better than search because Google enshittified search: We're All Trying To Find The Guy Who Did This.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Microsoft antitrust overturned; Scammer carves C64; RIP Jim Baen; GOP rep to constituent's child: "drop dead" (literally); CCTVs jacked for botnet; Olympic profitability lie; Human factors in health infosec; Exfiltration via computer fans; Congress's summer schedule: 9 working days; Antitrust is political antigrav; Ted Chiang's 72 Letters; Microsoft antitrust appeal; Vinge on privacy; Breaking open the web; Bernie on Brexit; "The Perdition Score"; Intuit v Child Tax Credit.
  • Upcoming appearances: London, Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
  • Recent appearances: Where I've been.
  • Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Colophon: All the rest.


The original Google homepage, loaded in the first Netscape browser. It is viewed under a giant magnifying glass. Inside the magnifying glass, we see a killer robot (with the head of the Android droid), choking a man to death.

Gemini is better than search because Google enshittified search (permalink)

Write a critical AI book, and you become everyone's confessor for their AI sins. People in my life keep telling me about their guilty AI pleasures, in search of an explanation, absolution or condemnation:

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

Their most common confession: "I only ever use Google's AI-generated search summaries these days. I no longer click those blue links beneath it, not even to verify the summary." People know that the summaries are full of "hallucinations" (that is, "defects" or "errors") but the summaries are right often enough that many people have come to rely on them, to the exclusion of actual websites, made by actual people, on the actual internet.

Everyone knows this isn't good. The reason there's a web for Google's Gemini AI to summarize is that Google – the thrice-convicted monopoly search company with a 90% market share – directs people to websites, and when you visit a website, you generate revenue for the site, which pays for its maintenance. Most commonly, you generate an "ad impression," but you might also buy a subscription, or generate an "affiliate fee" by purchasing a recommended product.

When Google strips all this away by harvesting an "answer" and displaying it at the top of the page, the bargain between Google and the open web breaks down. Google is extracting 100% of the value from the websites it summarizes, and giving nothing back in return.

This is a marked reversal from Google's founding ethos. In the old days, Google measured its success by how little time you spent on its site. The ideal Google outcome was for you to visit its page (or even better, just a search-box in your browser), type a few words, and get "ten blue links" back, the top one of which was the correct link to locate the information or resource you were seeking. The point of Google was to serve as a conduit, a trusted intermediary that neutrally adjudicated the relevance of every web page for every web user from moment to moment.

Everyone dunks on Google for its high-minded motto, "Don't be evil," but over the years, the company's mission was far more important: "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." That was the pole star that googlers followed for the first couple decades of the company's history…until, that is, the company saturated its market and its growth stalled out.

That was when Google started to panic over its plateauing search revenue, this being an inescapable consequence of 90%+ market-share. The ensuing power struggle pitted googlers who were committed to technical excellence against the company's most ardent enshittifiers, who pointed out that by making search worse, they could increase revenues. After all, if you need to search two or three times to get the answers to your questions, that means the company can show you two or three times as many ads:

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

Where once Google measured its success by how quickly it could send you away from its site and out into the open internet, today's Google is a sticky-trap full of ways to keep you inside its walled garden.

A decade ago, tech had three major approaches:

I. Google's: let you do anything you want, but spy on you while you do it;

II. Apple's: strictly control what you can do, but leave you alone to do it in private; and

III. Facebook's: control everything you do, spy on you from asshole to appetite.

Today, tech is undergoing a form of carcinization, in which every company is turning into a Facebook-crab: maximally surveillant and maximally controlling.

Apple has added surveillance to its walled garden:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

While Google has turned its free-range, internet-wide surveillance system into a walled garden that tries to keep you away from the open internet as much as possible.

Now, in Google's defense, the "open internet" kind of sucks these days. Any piece of useful information you seek out on the open internet is liable to be buried under half a dozen pop-ups, pop-unders, and dickovers:

https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/what_is_a_dickover

Even after you clear these away, the actual information you're seeking is further buried in word-salads that anticipated insipid AI prose by half a decade. Think of all those omelet recipes that appear beneath 2,500 words of cod-Proustian remembrances of "the first time I ate an egg."

The major advantage of AI search summaries is in shielding you from all this nonsense. But where did all that nonsense come from in the first place?

It turns out that this is largely Google's fault.

Google and Facebook monopolized the display advertising market, entering into an illegal, collusive arrangement to rig the bidding so that advertisers paid more and publishers received less:

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

The Google/Meta duopoly sucks up 51% of display advertising revenue – more than triple the historic take for advertising intermediaries (buyers, brokers, agencies, etc). As ad revenues for web publishers cratered, the "ad load" on web pages went up. This set up a vicious cycle: increasing the number of ads decreases the number of readers, driving publishers to increase the ad-load even more to make up for the losses.

The major brake on this is ad-blocking. In a world with ad-blockers in it, publishers contemplating an increase in ad-load have to confront the possibility that they will induce ad-overload in their readers, who will install a blocker that stops them from seeing any ads:

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

Google has been looking to kill ad-blocking for a decade, and now they're on the verge of making it happen in Chrome, the dominant web browser they use to reinforce their search monopoly:

https://protonprivacy.substack.com/p/google-is-finally-killing-ublock

Google long ago did away with ad-blocking on mobile devices (reverse engineering an app is a felony, which means an app is just a web-page skinned with the right kind of IP to make it a crime to protect your privacy while you use it). Part of Google's argument for killing ad-blocking for the web is that this puts the web on an even footing with apps – which is a very weird way to describe a race to the absolute bottom:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/12/compelled-speech/#quishing

To top it all off, this decade has seen Google make a series of changes to its search prioritization that favored low-value shovelware sites over carefully researched, reliable alternatives. Search for product reviews and you're apt to get a "site reputation abuse" result from a once-reliable outlet like Forbes filled with useless and even dangerous reviews, which are ranked far above independently maintained, rigorous competitors:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/#site-reputation-abuse

This has only gotten worse with AI search, which preferentially draws from spam sites to produce decontextualized, highly confident recommendations for substandard, overpriced junk, at the expense of recommendations for good products:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/15/inhuman-gigapede/#coprophagic-ai

It's not like Google doesn't have the ability to sort the good from the bad. Kagi.com is a $10/month paid search engine whose results are vastly superior to Google's. But Kagi doesn't have its own search index: instead, they rent access to Google's index, but apply their own (much smaller and less resourced) team's algorithm to rank the results for your queries. In other words, Google could deliver good search results, they just choose not to:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

Gresham's Law holds that "bad money drives out good." It refers to a counterfeit coin crisis in Tudor England, where people preferentially spent counterfeit money in order to make it someone else's problem; meanwhile, everyone hoarded their good coins. Soon, virtually all the money in circulation was bogus.

By downranking quality material in favor of low-effort spam, Google set up a web-wide version of Gresham's Law, where bad webpages drive out good ones, and since so many of those webpages contain product recommendations, they're greshaming the world of real products, too, so the bad is driving out the good there, too.

This is the problem that Gemini search summaries solve: in its role as the web's most important gatekeeper, Google remade it as an ad-festooned cesspit of garbage text and cynical shovelware sites. Now Google proposes to wipe out the publishers whose content they stripmined by breaking the web's bargain: that search engines are symbiotic with publishers. Google has turned fully parasitic, sucking the last drops of juice out of the open web before discarding its husk.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Appeals court strikes down Microsoft antitrust ruling https://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/28/business/us-appeals-court-overturns-microsoft-antitrust-ruling.html

#25yrsago Ted Chiang's 72 Letters https://web.archive.org/web/20010720192340/http://www.tor.com/72ltrs.html

#25yrsago Concept handheld devices https://web.archive.org/web/20010620115437/https://www.infosync.no/en/news/n/419.asp

#25yrsago Analyzing Microsoft's successful antitrust appeal https://web.archive.org/web/20010703085656/https://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/06/28/appeals_reaction/index.html

#20yrsago Bengali science fiction of the 1880s https://www.lehigh.edu/~amsp/2006/05/early-bengali-science-fiction.html

#20yrsago Vernor Vinge on computers, freedom and privacy https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/jun/29/guardianweeklytechnologysection5

#20yrsago Scammer convinced to carve replica Commodore 64 https://www.419eater.com/html/john_boko.php

#20yrsago Jim Baen, sf publisher, has passed away https://web.archive.org/web/20060703024337/http://david-drake.com/baen.html

#15yrsago YouTube listens to fraudulent NyanCat takedown notice, drags heels on put-back from creator https://web.archive.org/web/20110628132607/http://www.prguitarman.com/index.php?id=369

#15yrsago Wyoming’s corporation mills manufacture privileged artificial “people” to order https://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/28/us-usa-shell-companies-idUSTRE75R20Z20110628/

#15yrsago Publishing in the Internet era: connecting audiences and works https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/jun/30/publishers-internet-changing-role?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

#15yrsago Why writers should have their own domains https://whatever.scalzi.com/2011/06/29/mastering-ones-own-domain-an-no-this-is-not-a-seinfeld-reference/

#15yrsago Copyright troll’s biggest fan commits terminal irony https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/06/righthaven-cheerleader-wanted-irony-police

#10yrsago Mississippi state rep tells distraught mom to buy kid’s lifesaving meds ‘with money she earns’ https://www.sunherald.com/news/local/counties/jackson-county/article86416087.html

#10yrsago Always-on CCTVs with no effective security harnessed into massive, unstoppable botnet https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/large-botnet-of-cctv-devices-knock-the-snot-out-of-jewelry-website/

#10yrsago Gun-waving cop who attacked black teenaged girl in her bathing suit faces no charges https://web.archive.org/web/20160624103549/http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2016/06/23/grand-jury-no-bills-former-mckinney-pool-party-cop/

#10yrsago The Olympics are profitable for every host city (that lies about the numbers) https://timharford.com/2016/06/how-do-you-make-the-olympics-pay-fudge-the-figures/

#10yrsago Healthcare workers prioritize helping people over information security (disaster ensues) https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~sws/pubs/ksbk15-draft.pdf

#10yrsago Fansmitter: malware that exfiltrates data from airgapped computers by varying the sound of their fans https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GCHCVpndaM

#10yrsago Labour’s knives come out for Corbyn, but he’s guaranteed a spot on the ballot https://www.politico.eu/article/inside-account-of-labour-mps-attacks-on-jeremy-corbyn-shadow-cabinet-resignations-brexit/

#10yrsago Hope Larson’s “Compass South”: swashbuckling YA graphic novel https://memex.craphound.com/2016/06/28/hope-larsons-compass-south-swashbuckling-ya-graphic-novel/

#10yrsago How to Break Open the Web: a report on the first Decentralized Web Summit https://www.fastcompany.com/3061357/the-web-decentralized-distributed-open

#10yrsago Californians will get to vote on legal recreational weed https://web.archive.org/web/20160629130245/http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/voters-decide-legalize-recreational-marijuana-40206739

#10yrsago Bernie Sanders on Brexit: urgent lessons for the Democrats https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/29/opinion/campaign-stops/bernie-sanders-democrats-need-to-wake-up.html

#10yrsago Electoral fraud: Trump sends fundraiser emails to foreign politicians https://www.cnet.com/culture/trump-spams-foreign-politicians-with-fundraising-emails/#ftag=CAD590a51e

#10yrsago The Perdition Score: Sandman Slim vs the One Percent https://memex.craphound.com/2016/06/29/the-perdition-score-sandman-slim-vs-the-one-percent/

#5yrsago Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/29/three-times-is-enemy-action/#ctc

#5yrsago SCOTUS to wrongfully accused terrorists: "drop dead" https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/29/three-times-is-enemy-action/#transunion

#5yrsago Lazy Congress only schedules 9 days' work this summer https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/28/dubious-quant-residue/#back-to-work-you

#1yrago Antitrust defies politics' law of gravity https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/28/mamdani/#trustbusting

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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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.

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27.06.2026 à 13:14

Pluralistic: Zuckerberg's increasingly bizarre war on whistleblowers (27 Jun 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4767 mots)


Today's links

  • Zuckerberg's increasingly bizarre war on whistleblowers: Under no circumstances should you rush out and read the book that prompted Mark Zuckerberg to demand $111m and eternal auctorial silence.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Flame warriors; Cryptography and casinos; TSA v dying 95 year old woman's adult diaper; Neoliberalism and Brexit; Beyond solutionism; How Thiel cheated with his Roth; Inequality's stabilizer; Palm Pilot school; Gillmor on PR flacks; "How I Edited an Agricultural Paper; Conservative judge chokes liberal judge; Hollywoodnomics; Rubber fingertips v fingerprint readers; Snowden's telepresence robot; "Shrill"; Moral hazard, "Three Rocks."
  • Upcoming appearances: London, Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
  • Recent appearances: Where I've been.
  • Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Colophon: All the rest.


Four female chorousters in sumptuous Renaissance robes. Each one's mouth has been stopped up by a Facebook 'thumbs up' icon. Behind them looms Mark Zuckerberg's grinning Metaverse avatar. The book they are reading from has flooded their faces with light. In the background is a sky full of ominous blue/red clouds.

Zuckerberg's increasingly bizarre war on whistleblowers (permalink)

More than a decade ago, a group of young, internet-connected Belarusian dissidents launched a series of increasingly high-stakes, increasingly surreal confrontations with the corrupt, authoritarian government of Alexander Lukashenka, a man who is often called "the last Soviet dictator."

Lukashenka's secret police – still called the KGB – routinely terrorize and kidnap pro-democracy activists, and all forms of protest are banned. It was against the backdrop of this unrelenting oppression that the activists launched a series of whimsical "flash mobs" that challenged the Lukashenka regime's willingness to crack down on even the most innocuous behavior.

One of these flash mobs was an ice cream social: activists converged on a public square to eat ice cream cones. Lukashenka's thugs beat them and dragged them away:

https://web.archive.org/web/20070609164305/http://pics.livejournal.com/litota_/gallery/0000bcch

The protestors thought that by daring Lukashenka to arrest people for eating ice cream, they could create a win-win situation: either Lukashenka would be revealed as the kind of asshole who thinks it should be illegal to eat ice cream, or he'd be revealed as the kind of weakling who couldn't keep a lid on dissent.

Lukashenka took the bait. And took it. And took it. In the years that followed, protesters would be arrested for smiling, clapping, and just standing silently:

https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2011/07/belarus-protesters-rally-on-the-web/

The world learned that Lukashenka was a buffoon, and Belarusians affirmed their view that this buffoon would not hesitate to mete out the most vicious punishments for the most innocuous actions:

https://sci-hub.st/10.1080/25739638.2021.1928880

Speaking of thin-skinned, paranoid, wildly corrupt buffoons who will stop at nothing to silence their enemies, how about that Mark Zuckerberg, huh? Sure, all the headlines these days are about Zuck's intention to transform Facebook into a sports betting site:

https://www.businessinsider.com/metas-zuckerberg-enters-the-prediction-market-arena-polymarket-2026-6

But in the UK, Zuckerberg's war on whistleblowers keeps finding new, ice cream grade depths of absurdity to plumb. The whistleblower in question is, of course, Sarah Wynn-Williams, author of the internationally bestselling memoir Careless People, which details the criminality she witnesses during her years as the head of Facebook's international relations team:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf

Careless People is full of revelations about the gross institutional misconduct of Facebook, including its knowing encouragement of a genocide in Myanmar. But it's also full of stories about the severe personal failings of Facebook's executive team, especially Sheryl Sandberg, Joel Kaplan and Mark Zuckerberg.

These three come off as the most colossal of assholes, cruel, petty and predatory. Sandberg comes across as a sexual abuser who dreams of trafficking in poor people's organs. Kaplan is an oaf whose plan to provide paid internet access to refugee camps falls apart once he learns that refugees in camps don't have any money (he also takes points off of Wynn-Williams's workplace evaluation for being "unresponsive" over a period when she was in a near-death coma). Worst of all, though, is Zuckerberg, whose sins range from cheating at Settlers of Catan to endangering the Colombian peace process after a 50-year civil war because he refused to get out of bed before noon. Zuck is also revealed to have given the Chinese state access to all of Facebook and the power to censor content they disliked, as part of a failed bid to get permission to offer a Facebook service in China.

It's a terrible company, with awful products, run by the worst people. Wynn-Williams's conditions of employment required her to sign a contract that bound her to silence (nondisclosure), forbade her from speaking ill of the company (nondisparagement), and denied her access to the legal system in all her dealings with Meta (binding arbitration).

Together, these three clauses – routinely used by Meta to silence would-be whistleblowers – meant that after Wynn-Williams's book was published, Meta got its arbitrator – a lawyer who is paid by Meta to adjudicate contractual disputes instead of an actual judge – to order her to never promote or even speak about her book.

The arbitrator awarded Meta $50,000 for each criticism that Wynn-Williams levied, quickly coming to a total of over $11,000,000. This vastly exceeds the assets and lifetime earning potential of Wynn-Williams and her husband (a reporter with the Financial Times). If this bill ever truly comes due, they will be wiped out.

Which raises an interesting question: what else can they do to her? Once they've secured civil damages that exceeds her net worth several times over, why shouldn't she just flout her agreement? "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose," and all that.

Nevertheless, Wynn-Williams has scrupulously hewed to the arbitrator's rules, steadfastly remaining silent about her book, its contents, and her experiences at Facebook/Meta. When she and I appeared onstage together in London for the launch for my book Enshittification last year, she fell silent and assumed a blank expression any time the subject of Meta came up, and she didn't sign or sell books afterward:

https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2025/event/cory-doctorow-with-sarah-wynn-williams-chris-morris

When she won the British Book Award, she did not speak to accept it, and the cover of her book was blurred out on the overhead screen (she gave an acceptance speech on behalf of her co-winner, the late Virginia Giuffre, who was abused by Jeffrey Epstein and who accused Prince Andrew of sexual assault):

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/may/11/sarah-wynn-williams-and-virginia-giuffre-jointly-win-freedom-to-publish-prize-at-british-book-awards

Nevertheless, when she was booked to speak – about a subject other than her book – at the Hay Festival on a stage with Tim Wu and Carole Cadwalladr, Meta sent a legal threat to the festival and Wynn-Williams, claiming that if by speaking about anything in public, she would violate the arbitrator's order. Accordingly, Wynn-Williams maintained total silence and a blank facial expression for an hour on stage, saying not one word, while Wu and Cadwalladr carried on a discussion. Careless People was withdrawn from the festival bookshop on the days she appeared there:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/may/31/meta-legal-action-forces-facebook-whistleblower-to-stay-silent-at-hay-festival

Nevertheless, Meta has informed Wynn-Williams that her silent, motionless appearance on a stage constitutes a further breach of her "agreement" and that they are going to seek even more damages from her. This act of anti-ice cream thuggery has pushed Wynn-Williams over the edge and now she's sued to invalidate her contract:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jun/25/whistleblower-sarah-wynn-williams-sues-meta-attempts-to-silence-her-careless-people

Her lawyers have posted their documents related to the suit, including a 285-page declaration by Wynn-Williams explaining the great lengths she's gone to in order to comply with Meta's demands, and the company's absolute intransigence and arbitrary menace:

https://katzbanks.com/sarah-wynn-williams-meta-lawsuit-documents/

Why would Meta be so intent on destroying this one high-profile whistleblower? Surely they've heard of the Streisand Effect. There is no better way to ensure that Wynn-Williams's book (already a NYT #1 bestseller) continues to attract readers than to continue to escalate these threats.

I think they're perfectly aware that they are convincing more people to read Careless People (you should read it, it's genuinely excellent):

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250391230/carelesspeople/

But I think they've decided that this is a price worth paying, because:

a) They've done even worse things since Wynn-Williams parted ways with the company; and

b) They're laying off thousands of workers because their giant bet on AI has been a flop, leaving them with a massive cash crunch; and

c) By destroying Sarah Wynn-Williams, they can terrorize all those thousands of bitter ex-employees into silence about the even graver sins the company has committed.

That's my theory, anyway:

https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-layoffs-managers-software-engineers-ai-spending-2026-6

Lukashenka knew that arresting children for eating ice cream would make him a laughingstock abroad. Zuckerberg knows that threatening Wynn-Williams for standing in wooden silence on a stage makes him look like history's most guillotineable billionaire. But both Lukashenka and Zuckerberg are willing to be thought a thin-skinned bully, so long as that means the people they oppress the most are too terrified to ever challenge their authority.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Actual music piracy https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/jun/13/ukcrime.nickhopkins

#25yrsago Flame warriors https://web.archive.org/web/20010603044914/http://www.winternet.com/~mikelr/flame1.html

#25yrsago World court says Arizona murdered German prisoners by denying them consular access https://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/06/27/germany.court/index.html

#25yrsago Private school buys every student a Palm Pilot https://web.archive.org/web/20010709075203/https://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,44812,00.html

#25yrsago Dan Gillmor’s guide for PR flacks https://web.archive.org/web/20010626230530/http://web.siliconvalley.com/content/sv/2001/02/20/opinion/dgillmor/weblog/PR.htm

#20yrsago German publisher attacks Bulgarian books-for-blind site https://web.archive.org/web/20060629065445/https://protest.bloghub.org/2006/06/27/fight-for-copyrights-in-bulgaria-turns-ugly/

#20yrsago Photographer calls critic’s boss to complain https://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/176785431/

#20yrsago Daddle: a kid-sized saddle for adults https://web.archive.org/web/20060618012713/https://www.cashelcompany.com/dad.php

#20yrsago More on cryptography and online casinos https://memex.craphound.com/2006/06/26/more-on-crypto-and-online-casinos/

#20yrsago Reasons that HD DVD formats have already failed https://www.audioholics.com/editorials/10-reasons-why-high-definition-dvd-formats-have-already-failed

#15yrsago Undercover video from North Korea: starving children, hungry soldiers https://web.archive.org/web/20110629182200/http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/06/27/3253979.htm

#15yrsago TSA asked 95 year old woman in a wheelchair in terminal stage of leukemia to remove adult diaper for pat-down https://web.archive.org/web/20110627091434/http://www.nwfdailynews.com/news/mother-41324-search-adult.html

#15yrsago Reading of Mark Twain’s “How I Edited an Agricultural Paper” https://ia801406.us.archive.org/22/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_209/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_209_Mark_Twain_Editing_an_Agricultural_Paper-fixed.mp3

#15yrsago Paramount sends copyright notice to Shapeways user over 3D printable Super 8 cube https://toddblatt.blogspot.com/2011/06/cease-and-desist.html

#15yrsago Advice Goddess: How much longer must we be subjected to invasive TSA patdowns? https://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2011/06/24/i_think_youre_c.html

#15yrsago Conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice alleged to have choked liberal colleague https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/wis-justice-ann-walsh-bradley-justice-prosser-put-his-hands-around-my-neck-in-anger-in-a-chokehold

#15yrsago Hollywoodonomics: how Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix “lost” $167M https://deadline.com/2010/07/studio-shame-even-harry-potter-pic-loses-money-because-of-warner-bros-phony-baloney-accounting-51886/

#10yrsago I’m profiled in the Globe and Mail Report on Business magazine https://web.archive.org/web/20160628142940/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-magazine/the-crusader-fighting-lock-happy-entertainment-conglomerates/article30520282/

#10yrsago Rubber fingertips to use with fingerprint-based authentication systems https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Passcode/Security-culture/2016/0627/Fake-fingerprints-The-latest-tactic-for-protecting-privacy

#10yrsago How I grilled the best steaks I’ve ever eaten https://memex.craphound.com/2016/06/27/how-i-grilled-the-best-steaks-ive-ever-eaten/

#10yrsago Supreme Court strikes down Texas abortion law https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/supreme-court-strikes-down-strict-abortion-law-n583001?cid=sm_tw

#10yrsago Snowden’s flesh is trapped in Russia, but his mind roams the world in a robot body https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/06/edward-snowden-life-as-a-robot.html

#10yrsago China’s $10B/year PR ministry mired in political fight with anti-corruption/loyalty enforcers https://web.archive.org/web/20160701235749/http://www.economist.com/news/china/21701169-xi-jinping-sends-his-spin-doctors-spinning-who-draws-party-line?fsrc=scn/tw/te/pe/ed/whodrawsthepartyline

#10yrsago Snowden publicly condemns Russia’s proposed surveillance law https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/26/russia-passes-big-brother-anti-terror-laws

#10yrsago Yes Men punk the NRA with “buy one gun, give one gun” program https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ikb66V2rDcw

#10yrsago Shrill: Lindy West’s amazing, laugh-aloud memoir about fatness, abortion, trolls and rape-jokes https://memex.craphound.com/2016/06/27/shrill-lindy-wests-amazing-laugh-aloud-memoir-about-fatness-abortion-trolls-and-rape-jokes/

#10yrsago Neoliberalism, Brexit (and Bernie) https://crookedtimber.org/2016/06/26/tribalism-trumps-neoliberalism/

#10yrsago McDonald’s 1987 fashion catalog is a horrorshow https://www.flickr.com/photos/jasonliebigstuff/3050116620/

#10yrsago Beyond “solutionism”: what role can technology play in solving deep social problems https://ethanzuckerman.com/2016/06/22/the-worst-thing-i-read-this-year-and-what-it-taught-me-or-can-we-design-sociotechnical-systems-that-dont-suck/

#10yrsago Donald Trump’s annotated Walk of Fame star https://dduane.tumblr.com/post/146444083461/someome-spray-painted-the-mute-sign-on-donald

#5yrsago New York City's 100 worst landlords https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/26/wax-rothful/#nyc-landlords

#5yrsago How Peter Thiel gamed the Roth IRA for tax-free billions https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/26/wax-rothful/#thiels-gambit

#5yrsago The Overlapping Infrastructure of Urban Surveillance https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/26/wax-rothful/#surveillance-infographic

#5yrsago The Doctrine of Moral Hazard https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/27/the-doctrine-of-moral-hazard/

#1yrago Bill Griffith's 'Three Rocks' https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/27/the-snapper/#9-to-107-spikes

#1yrago Surveillance is inequality's stabilizer https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/26/autostabilizer/#slicey-bois

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF

25.06.2026 à 11:37

Pluralistic: Jailbreaking isn't theft (25 Jun 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4825 mots)


Today's links


Steve Jobs holding an iPhone at the product launch. It has been modified. He wears a thief's balaclava. Behind him is the Apple wordmark, 'Think Different.'

Jailbreaking isn't theft (permalink)

It's not often that someone on a panel says something that makes my jaw drop, but that's what happened earlier this week when the moderator of a panel I was on in Toronto described jailbreaking an iPhone as "rampant theft of IP."

Some context: the panel was in Toronto, and the nominal subject was "digital sovereignty," though all the panelists (except me) interpreted that to mean "sovereign AI." All of their interventions were focused on how Canada could build and operate its own AI, which I found very weird, since there is no AI-related threat to Canadian sovereignty. If Donald Trump ordered OpenAI and Anthropic to turn off all of Canada's chatbots tomorrow, nothing would change: every firm, ministry and household would operate as per normal:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/18/their-trillions-our-billions/

Now, that's not to say that Canada doesn't have a digital sovereignty problem – it really does! Donald Trump and US Big Tech have fused into a single entity and Trump now orders US tech giants to terminate the online accounts of foreign officials who displease him. When Microsoft turns off your Office365 account, you lose your working files, your calendar, your address book, your email archives, and the Outlook email address you use to log in to every online service:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/01/minilateralism/#own-goal

So while turning off Canada's chatbots would not inflict any real harm on Canada, M365 terminations could paralyse any federal or provincial ministry, any structurally important firm, and most Canadian households.

The threat doesn't stop there: Trump can also order Apple and Google to brick any of Canada's iPhones or Android devices – terminating individual officials' mobile access, or terminating whole provinces. It's not just iPhones either – Trump can also brick any tractor in Canada:

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

This is the real digital sovereignty risk, and Canada needs to address it now. But Canada can't – our hands are tied…by us. In 2012, we passed a law, The Copyright Modernization Act, that criminalizes "jailbreaking," meaning that Canadian companies can't go into business figuring out how to install different app stores on phones and consoles, or change the firmware in tractors to enable independent repair, or reliably export their cloud data to rival Canadian services:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/26/babyish-radical-extremists/#cancon

Why did we pass this law? Because the Americans promised us free trade and no tariffs on our exports if we agreed to it. That's a promise Trump tore up, but we're still holding up our end of the bargain. That's crazy. It means that American companies can use Canada's courts to destroy Canadian businesses that offer the Canadian people tools to help them escape Big Tech's sleazy ripoffs of their data and cash.

And boy do those US tech companies take in a lot of cash. The US ad-tech duopoly of Google/Meta rig the advertising market, taking 51% out of every ad dollar through an illegal, collusive arrangement called "Jedi Blue":

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

The US mobile tech duopoly takes 30 cents out of every dollar spent via an app, by forcing every app vendor to use their payment processors, which charge 1,000% more than any other payment processor in Canada. That means that every time a subscriber to a Canadian news site signs up through an app, 30% of the lifetime subscription revenue for that Canadian subscriber is funneled to one of two California companies.

The corollary, of course, is that if Canadian businesses were free to compete with US companies – if Canada stopped foolishly holding up its end of the bargain that Trump has dishonoured – then it would be as though every Canadian news outlet increased its subscriber base by 25% overnight! What's more, the Canadian companies that sell those jailbreaking tools would make billions out of US Big Tech's billions.

And that's where the moderator of this week's panel comes in. When I finished making this pitch, they turned to the rest of the panel and said something like, "Well, apart from rampant theft of IP, what else could Canada do to secure its digital sovereignty?"

That's when my jaw dropped. Making it possible for, say, a Canadian company to sell its own Canadian game to a Canadian customer, in Canada, without giving Apple or Xbox 30% of the purchase price, is not "theft of IP." It's not "theft of IP" for a rightsholder to sell their own products to their customers. It's not "theft of IP" for a Canadian owner of a device to decide for themselves which software they want to run on it. If buying software from the company that made it and installing it on a device you own is "theft of IP," then so is putting non-Nike shoelaces in your Air Jordans.

It's not "theft of IP." It's just good business. Moreover, it's the kind of good business that created America's tech giants in the first place. As Jeff Bezos tells his suppliers: "Your margin is my opportunity." US tech giants make whopping margins around the world, thanks to the anticircumvention laws that the US Trade Rep crammed down every US trading partner's throats, laws that allow US companies to use other countries' legal system to destroy their competitors.

I've been mulling this "rampant theft of IP" remark for a couple of days now, but it wasn't until a reader wrote to me to remind me about Apple's origin story that I realised what the punchline is. Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak financed their first product launch by selling "Blue Boxes" (devices that let you make free long distance calls by cheating the phone company) door to door in the UC Berkeley dorms:

https://macdailynews.com/2024/06/19/steve-jobs-felt-certain-apple-would-never-have-existed-without-woz-and-him-making-blue-boxes/

Now, I'm not going to weep for the lost revenues that Jobs and Woz denied to AT&T. After all, AT&T was stealing that money from its customers, which is why, just a few years later, a federal court convicted AT&T of monopolistic practices and broke the company up:

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

But the legal term for what a Blue Box does is "toll theft," which is to say, Apple – a company literally founded on theft – now makes the majority of its profits by convincing people that making a competing product is literally stealing. A company whose founders got their seed capital by marketing illegal circumvention devices now markets products designed to make it a crime for a rightsholder to sell their own work to you.

I've long said that "every pirate wants to be an admiral":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/04/object-permanence/#picks-and-shovels

But this is just a little too on the nose. When Apple went into business selling products to rip off the phone company, that wasn't progress. When Canadians go into business selling devices that let iPhone owners use their own property to do legal things – like buying copyrighted works directly from their creators – that is not piracy.

Canada has a real digital sovereignty problem, and it's not AI. Canada will not mitigate its digital sovereignty risk by successfully launching a Made in Canada version of the money-losingest venture in the history of the human species:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/brokenomics/

Canada's real digital sovereignty problem is its reliance on the apps, cloud services and devices that are tethered to the American cloud, access to which Donald Trump could – and does – terminate whenever he feels grumpy. Trump has repeatedly threatened to annex Canada and turn us into "the 51st state." He's trying to steal Alberta right now. Our digital sovereignty risk is the risk of Trump paralysing our country in order to steal Alberta – or the entire shop.

We can address that digital sovereignty risk – and make billions at the same time – by legalising jailbreaking and becoming the world's "disenshittification nation." Unlike a program to build Canadian AI, this will make billions, not lose them – and unlike Canadian AI, this will make our country more resilient and safer, by delivering products that Canadians – and the world – want to buy and will pay us a fortune for.

Big Tech's margins are our opportunity.

(Image: Matthew Yohe, CC BY-SA 3.0; SABYST, CC BY-SA 4.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Major AI breakthrough is imminent https://web.archive.org/web/20010625114014/https://www.latimes.com/business/cutting/lat_cyc010621.htm

#25yrsago Webcomic reply to Scott McCloud on microtransactions https://web.archive.org/web/20010708225439/https://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2001-06-22&res=l

#25yrsago School censorware blocks LBGTQ sites https://web.archive.org/web/20010803114449/https://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/06/14/net_filtering/print.html

#25yrsago SCOTUS backs freelance writers https://edition.cnn.com/2001/LAW/06/25/scotus.copyright/index.html

#20yrsago Canadian Gov’t Pays Copyright Lobby to Lobby https://web.archive.org/web/20060720230403/http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1151273413030&call_pageid=971794782442&col=971886476975

#20yrsago How can we keep the Bells from committing net-neutricide? https://web.archive.org/web/20060714044219/http://informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=189600971

#20yrsago Disney: We [will|won’t] sue if you put Pooh on a baby’s headstone https://web.archive.org/web/20060711194928/http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/view.php?StoryID=20060623-093710-8391r

#15yrsago Comic Book Legal Defense Fund backs traveller arrested at Canadian border for “pornographic” manga on his hard drive https://cbldf.org/2011/06/cbldf-forms-coalition-to-defend-american-comics-reader-facing-criminal-charges-in-canada/

#15yrsago Rochester police use selective enforcement of parking laws to harass attendees at a meeting in support of Emily Good https://rochester.indymedia.org/node/7516

#15yrsago What happened before the Vancouver riot kiss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mtURc7mkUg

#15yrsago Mexican Congress votes to reject ACTA https://www.techdirt.com/2011/06/22/mexican-congress-says-no-to-acta/

#15yrsago “Hot News” doctrine gets a body-blow https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/06/hot-news-doctrine-surviving-life-support

#15yrsago Solar-powered 3D sand-printer https://web.archive.org/web/20110627035221/https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2011/06/markus-kayser-builds-a-solar-powered-3d-printer-that-prints-glass-from-sand-and-a-sun-powered-laser-cutter/

#10yrsago Australian educational contractor warns of wifi, vaccination danger to “gifted” kids’ “extra neurological connections” https://web.archive.org/web/20180211151730/https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/antivaccination-program-offered-to-gifted-children-in-primary-schools-20160621-gpnzzp.html#ixzz4CYBYf4Bl#ixzz4CYBYf4Bl

#10yrsago US Customs and Border Protection wants to ask for your “online presence” at the border https://www.theverge.com/2016/6/24/12026364/us-customs-border-patrol-online-account-twitter-facebook-instagram?utm_campaign=theverge&utm_content=chorus&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter

#10yrsago Stasi radio monitoring department, hard at work, 1980s https://web.archive.org/web/20160625190241/https://visualhistory.livejournal.com/1039990.html

#10yrsago Apps help women bypass states’ barriers to contraception https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/20/health/birth-control-options-websites.html

#10yrsago The blacker a city is, the more it fines its residents (especially black ones) https://priceonomics.com/the-fining-of-black-america/

#10yrsago The demographics of Brexit https://web.archive.org/web/20160626130820/http://www.perc.org.uk/project_posts/thoughts-on-the-sociology-of-brexit/

#10yrsago The morning after the Brexit vote, Nigel Farage admits money for the NHS was a lie https://memex.craphound.com/2016/06/24/the-morning-after-the-brexit-vote-nigel-farage-admits-money-for-the-nhs-was-a-lie/

#10yrsago How to protect the future web from its founders’ own frailty https://memex.craphound.com/2016/06/24/how-to-protect-the-future-web-from-its-founders-own-frailty/

#10yrsago More than 30 people burned during Tony Robbins “motivational” firewalk https://web.archive.org/web/20160627054938/https://bigstory.ap.org/c7872f6db09e4656a612ee13aab74d50

#10yrsago Google’s version of the W3C’s video DRM has been cracked https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CkWjOvpZJw

#10yrsago Undercover reporter spent four months as a prison guard in a Louisiana pen run by CCA https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/cca-private-prisons-corrections-corporation-inmates-investigation-bauer/

#10yrsago Sanders will vote Hillary https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/bernie-sanders-says-he-will-vote-hillary-clinton-n598251

#10yrsago Brexit: a timeline of the coming slow-motion car-crash http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/06/tomorrow-belongs-to-me.html

#5yrsago The pandemic showed remote proctoring to be worse than useless https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/24/proctor-ology/#miseducation

#1yrago Surveillance pricing lets corporations decide what your dollar is worth https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/24/price-discrimination/

#1yrago What's a "public internet?" https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/25/eurostack/#viktor-orbans-isp

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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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

23.06.2026 à 13:30

Pluralistic: Spying on kids to save kids from spying is very, very stupid (23 Jun 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3811 mots)


Today's links


Three early 20th C newsies in pageboy caps, surround by hovering, staring robots, flying on jets of flame.

Spying on kids to save kids from spying is very, very stupid (permalink)

The literature on harms to kids from online platforms is complex and nuanced, rife with people citing small, ambiguous studies as iron-clad evidence that kids are being destroyed by the internet:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ype6c6DdHQY

It's a weird coalition of anti-Big Tech campaigners (who are rightly angry at the platforms' callous disregard for user welfare) and Heritage Foundation-backed culture warriors (who think that if their kids aren't exposed to LGBTQ content they won't come out as queer). While there's plenty these groups disagree about, they share one consensus: there should be a "minimum age" for certain kinds of internet use.

The problem is, there's no such thing as "age verification" for the internet. What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance, so invasive and pervasive that it makes the ad-tech industry's commercial surveillance look like some kind of cypherpunk darknet pirate utopia:

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

"Age verification" means that everyone who does anything online will have to submit to fine-grained tracking and recording of all their online activities. This nightmare is the surveillance advertising industry's fondest dream, a world where it's literally illegal to avoid their tracking, all in the name of saving kids…from them!

So it's not just a weird alliance of anti-Big Tech crusaders and the conspiratorial right that's pushing for age verification – they are unwitting allies of the very tech industry they think they're fighting. Those tech industry insiders are fully aware that an "age verification" mandate is really a way for the government to teach every child how to use a VPN. They're also fully aware that the next move is to ban VPNs:

https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/2217934/vpn-ban-table-july-labour

Tech bosses are the ones sitting on our shoulders saying, "Go ahead, swallow that fly – it'll be fine. And if you do have to swallow a spider afterward, well, that'll surely be the end of it":

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

Behind them is a long line of caliper-wielding grifters who claim they can use your phone's camera to distinguish a child who is 17 years, 364 days old from an adult who's just turned 18:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/facial-age-estimation

It's beyond farce. After all, whatever harms you believe the internet is inflicting on kids – and there's absolutely some kids who are being harmed by their internet use – those harms all start with surveillance. Your kids can't be targeted by algorithms without the surveillance data that's being used to target them. They can't be funneled into pro-anorexia content or extreme misogyny forums without that funnel being primed by commercial spying.

Why do tech companies spy on your kids? The same reason your dog licks its balls: because they can, and no one stops them:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/10/ice-tech/#foreseeable-outcomes

America hasn't updated its consumer privacy laws since 1988 (when Congress banned the disclosure of your VHS rentals). The EU has the GDPR, but it also has Ireland, the country where all GDPR cases against Big Tech go to die, because any tax haven inevitably becomes a crime haven:

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

Other countries have privacy laws to varying degrees, but are grossly outmatched by US tech giants, who have fused with the Trump regime, to the extent that Trump will impose penalties on your country if you attempt to regulate his tech companies – he'll even have your top officials cut off from the internet in retaliation:

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

Any attempt to save kids from online harms should start with saving kids from online surveillance, but that's the opposite of what we're doing today. After decades of failing to pass and enforce privacy controls for the internet, those same governments are breaking all land-speed records to pass "age verification" laws that make privacy illegal:

https://bsky.app/profile/rebeccawilliams.info/post/3moviqzdit22z

The fact that these bills have the firm backing of the tech industry's most controlling, most spying companies tells you everything you need to know about them:

https://web.archive.org/web/20260315022337/https://tboteproject.com/

Kids are being harmed by online spying, and so are the rest of us. Whether you think that the algorithm made Grampy go Qanon or you're suspicious that online surveillance data was used to deny you a loan, a job, or a lease, you should want privacy:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

Online surveillance is being used to raise the prices you pay and lower the wages you're offered:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/06/empiricism-washing/#veena-dubal

And the same data that's being used to "verify age" today will be used by ICE tomorrow to figure out who to round up for a concentration camp:

https://www.wired.com/story/ice-asks-companies-about-ad-tech-and-big-data-tools/

You can't protect kids from online surveillance by spying on them. You just can't. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to get you to swallow a fly so they can sell you a spider, a bird, a cat, and an ICE chud in a gaiter, Oakleys and plate carrier (beneath which lurks a stick-and-poke Totenkopf tattoo).

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 Darwin’s tortoise dead at 176
https://web.archive.org/web/20060704143750/http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060623/od_afp/australiaanimal_060623102146;_ylt=Ave_b4Ps2r9TGXqs5nZIVIoFO7gF;_ylu=X3oDMTA5bGVna3NhBHNlYwNzc3JlbA–zoo

#15yrsago Major US ISPs set to limit repeat infringers with throttling, limiting access to 200 websites, and copyright reeducation school https://web.archive.org/web/20111105225114/http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20073522-261/exclusive-top-isps-poised-to-adopt-graduated-response-to-piracy/

#15yrsago Why fair use doesn’t work unless you’ve got a huge war-chest for paying lawyers https://waxy.org/2011/06/kind_of_screwed/

#15yrsago Model net neutrality rule for municipalities https://web.archive.org/web/20110626114610/http://envisionseattle.org/2011/06/model-net-neutrality-ordinance-for-seattle.html

#15yrsago Campus hookups: college sex isn’t new, but hookups are different https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/06/21/the-promise-and-perils-of-hook-up-culture/

#15yrsago A Brief History of the Corporation: understanding what an attention economy is and where it comes from https://ribbonfarm.com/2011/06/08/a-brief-history-of-the-corporation-1600-to-2100/

#15yrsago Eliza: what makes you think I’m a psychotherapeutic chatbot? https://www.filfre.net/2011/06/eliza-part-1/

#10yrsago Broken Windows policing is nonsense https://www.nyc.gov/assets/oignypd/downloads/pdf/Quality-of-Life-Report-2010-2015.pdf

#10yrsago How it feels to be under DDoS attack https://www.oreilly.com/radar/ddos-emotions/

#10yrsago 2016: the first presidential election in 50 years without Voting Rights Act protections https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/welcome-to-the-first-presidential-election-since-voting-rights-act-gutted-179737/3/

#10yrsago Google is restructuring to put machine learning at the core of all it does https://web.archive.org/web/20180530051703/https://www.wired.com/2016/06/how-google-is-remaking-itself-as-a-machine-learning-first-company/

#10yrsago Misconfigured database exposes sensitive data for 154 million US voters https://dailydot.com/politics/154-million-voter-files-exposed-l2

#10yrsago To understand the Trump campaign, study real-estate developer hustle https://web.archive.org/web/20161028030522/https://storify.com/KC_EDM/trump-is-running-his-campaign-like-a-real-estate-d

#10yrsago Writing the Other: intensely practical advice for representing other cultures in fiction https://memex.craphound.com/2016/06/23/writing-the-other-intensely-practical-advice-for-representing-other-cultures-in-fiction/

#1yrago The case for a Canadian wealth tax https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/23/billionaires-eh/#galen-weston-is-a-rat

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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Pluralistic.net

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https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF

22.06.2026 à 19:16

Pluralistic: Good politics (22 Jun 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4750 mots)


Today's links

  • Good politics: Just make people's lives better.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: WWII online; Xbox security blunders; Homeless bloggers; Thermal printer racing game; Robbing a bank to get healthcare in jail; Crumb v Trump; "The Blues Brothers"; Bagelheads; Pickpocket training mannequin; Windmill joke; Singularity skepticism; GPU Dieselgate; Peleton bricks treadmills; Juul's junk science.
  • Upcoming appearances: Toronto, NYC, Philadelphia, Chicago, London, Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
  • Recent appearances: Where I've been.
  • Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Colophon: All the rest.


A group portrait of a working class family picnicking and enjoying themselves, dating from about 1930. They look like they're really enjoying themselves.

Good politics (permalink)

Some people love to admire a beautiful football play; me, I can't get enough of politicians doing good politics – and like those World Cup fans, I am doubly pleased when it's my team making the play.

I definitely have a team in Brazilian politics: President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and his Workers' Party. Lula's done so many amazing things in his career, and these often intersect with my own special interests. Like, he made Gilberto Gil his minister of culture, and his people built the telecentros, free software-based internet dojos for the poorest kids in the country, living in favelas:

https://www.informationweek.com/software-services/brazil-turns-away-from-microsoft

Lula was royally ratfucked – framed by a corrupt justice minister who secretly conspired with the country's oligarchs – and imprisoned, and the conspirators installed Jair Bolsonaro, a fascist war criminal whose covid bungling led to mass death:

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

When Bolsonaro lost his next election – to a triumphant Lula – he attempted a coup, for which he was arrested and handed a long prison sentence, despite Trump and Microsoft trying to intimidate the Brazilian judge into letting him walk:

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/22/bolsonaro-prosecution-us-sanctions-00575122

Now, Lula is fighting to keep Bolsonaro's nepobaby failson, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, from wrestling back control over the country for his fascist party; and that's where the good politics come in.

Lula's party has just scored a massive, national political victory by tabling legislation to establish a five-day workweek. While Brazil's professional/managerial class enjoy a two-day weekend, the working poor of the nation are prisoners of the escala 6×1 system, which sees them working six days per week. It's a hangover from the era of Brazil's fascist dictatorship, which (nominally) ended in 1988, but whose legacy still haunts the Brazilian people.

Lula's 40-hour workweek is incredibly popular. So popular that Bolsonaro's party whipped its members to vote for it, because they fear that to do otherwise would hand an even bigger majority to Lula, who might go on to give workers a four-day work-week:

https://prospect.org/2026/06/22/lula-sees-boosts-as-he-pushes-to-reduce-brazilian-workweek/

It turns out that weekends are popular and promising the electorate access to a weekend is good politics. What's more, denying weekends to the electorate is shitty, awful politics, which is why Bolsonaro's fascists were forced to vote in favor of a policy they hate, even though all credit for that policy will still go to Lula and the Worker' Party. The bill passed 461-19.

Contrast Lula's muscular, deliverism-based politics that seeks to improve the lives of working people in tangible, immediate ways with the catastrophic series of blunders that Keir Starmer's Labour has delivered. Despite having won a majority so large it would have made Saddam Hussein blush (not because Labour was popular, but because the outgoing Conservatives were universally loathed), Starmer has refused to lift a finger to improve Britons' lives. Instead, he's abetted genocide, criminalized protest, proposed ending jury trials, imposed austerity, handed the NHS over to Palantir and all the remaining potable water and electrical capacity in the country over to America's most unprofitable AI giants.

Starmer's insistence that we can't have nice things is bad politics, because (and it's weird that this has to be said) a government that makes people's lives worse is less popular than a government that makes people's lives better:

https://www.whatwelo.st/p/everyone-hates-tech-but-nobody-knows

Now, the right is incapable of making working people's lives better, because broad improvements to the vast majority necessarily come at the expense of the tiny minority of morbidly wealthy hoarders whom the right serves. In order to get millions of turkeys to vote for Christmas, the right substitutes spectacular acts of cruelty against disfavored minorities to distract their voters from the quiet acts of everyday cruelty they subject those voters to:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/12/always-great/#our-nhs

This isn't good politics. The sadistic torture of your base's enemies will never please them so well nor so durably as making immediate, significant improvements in their lives will.

That's why the corporate Dems who say that the party should campaign against renewables and in favor of fossil fuel companies aren't merely climate criminals, they're also bad at politics:

https://prospect.org/2026/06/22/affordability-climate-envioronment-policy-gas-oil-prices-iran-war-trump/

Cleantech is fucking great. Since I put in solar, a heat pump and an induction top, my energy bills have fallen to less than $80 per month, even in Los Angeles, even at the height of summer. My EV – a 7-year old Kia Niro – costs pennies to run, because I charge it off my roof. Not only that, it's fast, maneuverable, silent, and incredibly reliable. It handles like that Mustang a rental agency once upgraded me to. I mean, I'd rather have a subway, but if I have to drive, this is so much better than any ICE car I've ever owned.

Sure, our solar was a giant pain in the ass to get installed and working, but that's because the same corporate Dems who say climate is a political loser also said the best way to roll out solar nationwide was to set up an elaborate system of financialized tax-credits. That meant that every solar installer I talked to was more interested in swindling me by putting solar on my roof that they would own than they were in selling me a system I owned outright. Financializing America's rooftop solar conjured up a vast army of scammers and hustlers who screwed the majority of people they sold solar to, and my installers, Solaredge, were no exception:

https://www.propublica.org/article/missouri-pace-loans

Everything about living in the cleantech future is better. I can boil a gallon of water in under a minute on my stovetop! And it's only gonna get better: not only is cleantech improving every year, but fossil fuel is getting shittier every year, thanks to Trump's lunatic war of choice in Iran, the cost of using fossil fuels will only go up from here:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/20/praxis/#acceleration

Look, as a workaholic whose unhealthy anxiety coping mechanism is to work even harder, I might not make the best use of an extra day off:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/14/compartment/#flow

But as Pete Seeger sang in 1941, your time is all you have, and every hour you give to your boss is an hour you can never get back:

You'll get shorter hours
Better working conditions
Vacations with pay
Take your kids to the seashore

https://genius.com/Pete-seeger-talking-union-lyrics

It's something Lula understands, which is why he's winning. Good politics are a delight to watch, especially when it's your team doing them. But man, it can be pretty demoralizing to watch your team fumble play after play after play.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago WWII Online https://web.archive.org/web/20010625120559/https://www.gamespot.com/gamespot/stories/reviews/0,10867,2778704,00.html

#20yrsago Microsoft’s myriad Xbox security mistakes https://web.archive.org/web/20060703000421/http://www.xbox-linux.org/wiki/17_Mistakes_Microsoft_Made_in_the_Xbox_Security_System

#20yrsago Kentucky government censors political watchdog site https://web.archive.org/web/20060628055926/http://www.bluegrassreport.org/bluegrass_politics/2006/06/bluegrassreport.html

#20yrsago Life among the homeless bloggers https://web.archive.org/web/20060702205047/https://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,71153-0.html

#20yrsago Disney, 1939: No woman animators allowed https://animationguildblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/disney-1939-girls-are-not-considered.html

#15yrsago Sick man robs bank for $1, demands jail and healthcare https://web.archive.org/web/20110628144748/https://www.gastongazette.com/news/bank-58397-richard-hailed.html/

#15yrsago Car-racing game on a thermal printer https://www.undef.ch/project/receipt-racer

#15yrsago Toronto police swear off kettling https://web.archive.org/web/20110625131204/http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1012959–exclusive-toronto-police-swear-off-g20-kettling-tactic?bn=1

#15yrsago LEAKED: UK copyright lobby holds closed-door meetings with gov’t to discuss national Web-censorship regime https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/rights-holders-propose-voluntary-website-blocking-scheme/

#15yrsago Georgia’s anti-immigrant law leaves millions in crops rotting in the fields https://web.archive.org/web/20110620213900/https://blogs.ajc.com/jay-bookman-blog/2011/06/17/gas-farm-labor-crisis-playing-out-as-planned/

#15yrsago Bagelheads: toroidal saline forehead injections https://web.archive.org/web/20110619033443/https://vicestyle.com/en/news/today/post/japanese-bagelheads

#15yrsago Spitalfields Nippers: East London street-urchins of 1912 https://spitalfieldslife.com/2011/04/02/spitalfields-nippers/

#15yrsago Danish police proposal: Ban anonymous Internet use https://www-computerworld-dk.translate.goog/art/117279/forslag-du-maa-ikke-laengere-gaa-anonymt-paa-nettet?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US

#15yrsago Bell-mannequin for training pickpockets https://web.archive.org/web/20110626045035/http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2011/06/23/amateur-pick-pockets-study-in-crime-college/

#15yrsago Skeptical take on Singularity http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/06/reality-check-1.html

#15yrsago Windmill joke https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/4p8qkb/two_windmills_are_standing_in_a_field_and_one/

#10yrsago Electronics repair shops overbill for labor when the customer has insurance https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/computer-repair-shops-screw-over-customers-if-theyve-got-insurance/

#10yrsago Being a Craigslist scammer is hard work https://web.archive.org/web/20160622140008/https://www.infoworld.com/article/3086304/cyber-crime/interview-with-a-craigslist-scammer.html

#10yrsago Dieselgate for GPUs: review-units ship at higher clockspeeds than retail ones https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2016/6/21/11986836/msi-asus-overclocked-graphics-cards-review

#10yrsago Phones without headphone jacks are phones with DRM for audio https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2016/6/21/11991302/iphone-no-headphone-jack-user-hostile-stupid

#10yrsago Donald Trump sources $6M worth of campaign expenditures from companies he and his family own https://web.archive.org/web/20160621142100/https://bigstory.ap.org/article/9f7412236962464f9f2c0a8d2696ba25/trumps-campaign-cycles-6-million-trump-companies

#10yrsago Samantha Bee puts the NRA before a firing squad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-M4qHzd3xfM

#10yrsago Improv Everywhere: asking random New Yorkers to give a commencement speech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drvcLC3DuHo

#10yrsago R. Crumb v. D. Trump, 1989 https://dangerousminds.net/comments/robert_crumb_and_friends_flush_donald_trump_down_the_toilet_1989/

#10yrsago Cleveland: “First Amendment zones” will fence protesters far away from RNC https://www.wired.com/2016/06/cleveland-will-create-city-within-city-keep-rnc-civil/

#10yrsago Space botanists are beneficiaries of Canada’s legal weed boom https://web.archive.org/web/20160624043929/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-space-technology-will-produce-the-best-weed-marijuana-cannabis-pot

#10yrsago Debullshitifying the EU referendum (radio comedy edition) https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03yylpn

#10yrsago Judenstaat: an alternate history in which a Jewish state is created in east Germany in 1948 https://memex.craphound.com/2016/06/21/judenstaat-an-alternate-history-in-which-a-jewish-state-is-created-in-east-germany-in-1948/

#10yrsago Gun control is a great idea, terrorist watchlists are bullshit https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/2016_06_20_aclu_vote_recommendation_on_feinstein_and_cornyn_amendments_to_h.r._2578.pdf

#5yrsago New Yorkers just missing the subway https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWh385F5lms#5yrsago
#5yrsago Peloton bricks its treadmills https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/22/vapescreen/#jane-get-me-off-this-crazy-thing

#5yrsago Juul's junk science https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/22/vapescreen/#smokescreen

#5yrsago Improving the ACCESS Act https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/22/vapescreen/#improve-access

#1yrago Daniel de Visé's 'The Blues Brothers' https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/21/1060-west-addison/#the-new-oldsmobiles-are-in-early-this-year

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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"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

20.06.2026 à 18:12

Pluralistic: How the Epstein Class recruits (20 Jun 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3383 mots)


Today's links


An outlandlishly attired, spear-clutching secret society, ca. 1900. Their faces have all been replaced with the face of Peter Thiel, except for the middle one, who has Jeffrey Epstein's face.

How the Epstein Class recruits (permalink)

Perhaps you've encountered the stories about Dialog, an extremely weird secret society associated with Peter "Antichrist" Thiel, whose membership data and details have leaked this week:

https://www.wired.com/story/how-peter-thiels-private-dialog-club-secretly-ranks-its-members/

By all appearances, this is a comically creepy, awful talking-shop for the Epstein Class. It's not all that surprising, in retrospect, to learn that all these terrible people were in a group chat, secretly assigning ratings to one another, and periodically gathering to have tedious panels about, I dunno, "race science" or whatever.

I'm on the oligarchy beat, so stories about Dialog have been popping up in my RSS feed for the past week or so, but it wasn't until last night that I made a connection.

A year or two ago, I got an invite to speak at an event. This is normal, I get a lot of these and I do a lot of public speaking. I'm good at it, and it's a good way for me to reach people and get them energized about the issues I care about. Sometimes, I do these talks for free. Sometimes I get paid.

When I first glanced at this speaking offer, I thought, "Huh, I guess this is one to send on to my speaking agent," because the names the offer dropped were a bunch of rich people, and so I assumed that they were having some kind of summit and looking for a keynoter. Then I read a little more carefully and realized they – these billionaires and their lickspittles! – wanted me to pay them, thousands of dollars, so that I could shlep my ass to some luxury resort in order to have the privilege of speaking to them.

I came up as a science fiction writer, and at some point, every sf writer learns "Yog's Law," coined by James D Macdonald when he was running the science fiction forum on GEnie, under the screen name "Yog Sysop":

money flows toward the writer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_D._Macdonald#Educational_work

In other words, whenever you, as a creative worker, are approached by someone who wants to "help" you with your work, and they want you to pay them, they are a scammer, preying upon your essential human need to communicate with others. Run away.

Which is what I did. I deleted the email.

Then, I got another one a couple months later. Ugh. I wrote a mail rule that auto-deleted anything from that sender and promptly forgot about the matter. Until last night.

I just had a look at my Trash folder and yup, these people are still emailing me in hopes that I will give them thousands of dollars to join their weird secret society.

I don't know if everyone who joined Dialog got an email like the one I was sent, but if you want to understand how at least some of those people ended up on those membership rolls, well, now you know: they were schmucks who'd never learned Yog's Law.

(Image: Gage Skidmore 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, CC BY-SA 2.0; TechCrunch50-2008, Dan Taylor 1, 2, CC BY 2.0; modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Wendy Seltzer smokes the MPAA in the Wall St Journal https://web.archive.org/web/20061016014904/http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB115047057428882434-1V_FEK_CJelMfytdST8APRW7cZw_20060720.html

#20yrsago HOWTO build an RFID skimmer https://web.archive.org/web/20060703081753/http://www.eng.tau.ac.il/~yash/kw-usenix06/index.html

#20yrsago Desperate inventions of post-Soviet Russia https://memex.craphound.com/2006/06/20/desperate-inventions-of-post-soviet-russia/

#20yrsago NYT falsely reports that Wikipedia has added restrictions https://jimmywales.com/2006/06/17/the-new-york-times-gets-it-exactly-backwards/

#20yrsago Farthing: Heart-rending alternate history about British-Reich peace https://memex.craphound.com/2006/06/20/farthing-heart-rending-alternate-history-about-british-reich-peace/

#15yrsago Dirty, Drunk and Punk: the untold history of Toronto’s BUNCHOFFUCKINGGOOFS https://memex.craphound.com/2011/06/20/dirty-drunk-and-punk-the-untold-history-of-torontos-bunchoffuckinggoofs/

#10yrsago Video: Guarding the Decentralized Web from its founders’ human frailty https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlN6wjeCJYk

#10yrsago Unnamed Canadian telco sabotages’ library’s low-income internet service https://web.archive.org/web/20160618143132/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/canadian-telecoms-limiting-wifi-low-income-families-toronto-public-libraries-digital-divide

#10yrsago Clarence Thomas rumored to be considering retirement https://web.archive.org/web/20160622135444/http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/end-of-conservative-supreme-court-clarence-thomas-may-be-next-to-leave/article/2594317

#10yrsago Tolkien elf or prescription drug name? https://web.archive.org/web/20160609021515/https://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/arts/literature/drug-or-tolkien-elf-quiz.htm

#5yrsago The EU, Tech Trustbusting, and Trade Wars https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/20/the-eu-tech-trustbusting-and-trade-wars/

#5yrsago How to cheat on your taxes https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/20/la-hougue/#complexity

#1yrago Oregon bans the corporate practice of medicine https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/20/the-doctor-will-gouge-you-now/#states-rights

==

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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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

19.06.2026 à 22:54

Pluralistic: The Big Con (19 Jun 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4337 mots)


Today's links

  • The Big Con: Making the pile of shit bigger won't increase the number of ponies underneath it.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: TVA v SETI@Home; Telemarketers v DHS batphones; Matt Stone's MPAA censorship memo; Stonehenge pocket watch; W3C v security research; Congressional mass-shooting response simulator; Dynastic wealth; Gig economy astroturf; Meta publishes your AI prompts.
  • Upcoming appearances: LA, Menlo Park, Toronto, NYC, Philadelphia, Chicago, London, Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
  • Recent appearances: Where I've been.
  • Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Colophon: All the rest.


Charles Ponzi stands between two giant, weathered pyramids; his skin is dyed orange and he wears a Trump wig. He stands beneath a vast Amway logo. The scene is lit by stadium show floodlights and surrounded by pyrotechnics.

The Big Con (permalink)

Partway through Bridget Read's unmissable chronicle of pyramid ("multi-level marketing") schemes, Little Bosses Everywhere, there comes a dual revelation: no one is selling any product to end-users and no one knows it:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/05/free-enterprise-system/#amway-or-the-highway

That is to say, all the hustlers who have spent thousands of dollars on Mary Kay, Herbalife and Amway have failed to move any of their product (beyond a statistically insignificant number of sales to friends and family who quickly tire of being hustled and stop buying this substandard, overpriced junk). But none of these "entrepreneurs" knows it, or admits it to anyone – not their "downlines" (friends they've lured into the swindle), nor their "uplines" (friends who recruited them into the con).

Each pyramid scheme victim thinks that they're the only failure in the whole bunch. They go to massive "sales conferences" where people boast about all the sales they're making, and they're all lying about it. Incredibly, the pyramid schemers who run these criminal enterprises have figured out how to make a virtue out of this situation: they offer "sales coaching" courses to help people make the sales that "everyone else is making." In other words, once you've gone bust failing to sell Amway, they'll get you to go further into debt to learn how to correct the (nonexistent) issues with your sales strategy so that you can join the (imaginary) legion of people who sell Amway by the bushel.

Con artists have a name for this kind of swindle: it's called a "big con," which is when everyone a mark comes into contact with is in on the scam. Here's how the big con worked: after a "roper" snared a victim (usually on an intercity train), they would telegraph ahead and let the home team know they had a live one. From that point forward, every single person the victim came into contact with was in on it – from the porter who collected his bags at the train station to the cab driver to the Western Union clerk he uses to cable his banker and ask for a cashier's check for his life's savings.

In the big con, dozens of skilled actors are putting on a play for an audience of one: you. It's a real-world, non-hallucinatory version of "gang stalking delusion," which is when someone going through a mental health crisis believes that everyone they meet is in on a conspiracy to drive them crazy:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/03/mission-space/#gsd

The situation that people suffering from GSD hallucinate is actually happening to people ensnared in a big con…and pyramid schemes are a big con. What's more – as Read's book makes clear – you can't understand modern American politics without understanding pyramid schemes.

One of the most destructive pyramid schemes in American history is Amway. The FTC was about to shut Amway down in the mid-1970s, but then Nixon resigned and Ford became president. Ford had been the Congressman to Amway's founders Jay Van Andel (then the head of the US Chamber of Commerce, which is to say, America's most powerful business lobbyist) and Dick DeVos (yes, that DeVos). Ford and the Amway swindlers were thick as thieves, and so Ford called off the FTC. Rather than going to jail, DeVos and Van Andel became morbidly wealthy, and they used some of their stolen money to found and fund the Heritage Foundation (yes, that Heritage Foundation).

The political class running America are pyramid scheme swindlers, funded by pyramid scheme money. They're running a big con on all of us. That's true of the Trumps, who've excreted a diarrhoeic slurry of shitcoins that have made them billions – and lost billions for their "investors":

https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-106/

Trump insists that he is a self-made man who made his money with successful real estate deals. In reality, he lied all the time about his real estate, committing a string of felonies in order to defraud the banks, even as he went bankrupt, time and again:

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

Another "self made man" is Elon Musk (who is a "trillionaire," in a highly technical sense meaning "not a trillionaire at all"). Musk would have been broke several times over but for a string of massive government bailouts and subsidies, which continue to this day:

https://www.congress.gov/119/meeting/house/117956/documents/HMKP-119-JU00-20250226-SD003.pdf

Trump, Musk, and the rest of the schemers in the pyramid routinely claim that they are wealthy because they are running good businesses, a "fact" that many of us accept at face value. It's bad enough that we are deceived about reality, but many of their most addled cult-members try to follow in their footsteps. When they fail, they are in the same situation as one of those busted Amway sellers: thinking they are the only ones who can't make this "sure thing" work. Conservativism is a movement of bitter rubes, led by pyramid scheme swindlers:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/22/all-day-suckers/#i-love-the-poorly-educated

The "wait, is everyone else also failing?" awakening is an experience that many of America's CEOs are sharing at this moment, as they wonder whether they are the only ones who've fired as many workers as possible and replaced them with AI, only to see their company's fortunes fall:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/uber-ceo-says-other-execs-are-lying-about-ai-they-say-it-ll-be-fine-publicly-but-privately-admit-millions-of-jobs-are-gone/ar-AA1Z9QMv

Like an Amway victim, these boardroom rubes simply can't believe that all these people could be in on the con. How could the world spend trillions on AI if it's not on a path to profitability? It's not that these guys spent 2008 in a cave – rather, they just lack the object permanence to remember the last time a "Federal Wallet Inspector" approached them at a board meeting and took them for everything:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/13/uncle-sucker/#willing-marks

The thesis that "it can't be nonsense if there's a lot of money at stake" is the core of so many of these swindles. It's the investment theory that holds that once a pile of shit gets big enough, there must be a pony under it somewhere.

There's a Bugs Bunny bit that I find myself returning to in this era of the big con: it's a gag from 1954's "Bugs and Thugs":

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

Bugs has been kidnapped by gangsters, who have come to trust him. He tricks them into thinking that the police are coming and he urges them to hide in the oven while he sends the cops away. Then, Bugs performs a one-rabbit show in which he plays both the cop (with a broad Irish accent) and himself:

Bugs (cop voice): All right, open up! This is the police! [banging] All right, where's Rocky, where's he hiding?

Bugs (normal voice): He's not in this stove.

Bugs (cop): Oh-ho, he's hidin' in that stove, eh?

Bugs (normal): Now look, would I turn on this gas if my friend Rocky was in there?

Bugs (cop): You might, rabbit, you might.

Bugs (normal) Would I throw a lighted match in there if my friend was in there? [Massive explosion]

Bugs (cop): Well, all right, rabbit, you've convinced me. I'll look for Rocky in the city.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSNTjX_g9a4

We keep living through real world versions of this:

"Would I, Mark Zuckerberg, change my company's name to 'Meta' if I wasn't serious about this?"

"Oh, you might, Zuck, you might."

"OK, but would I spend $61b on the metaverse if I wasn't serious about this?"

"All right, Zuck, you've convinced me. I won't sell my Facebook (oops, I mean 'Meta'!) shares."

But neither Zuck nor Musk nor Trump has the charm of Bugs Bunny. At a certain point we're all going to look at each other and say, "It was all bullshit, wasn't it?"

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago TVA bans SETI@Home https://web.archive.org/web/20010625113535/https://www.knoxnews.com/archives/browserecent/06162001/archives/31399.shtml

#25yrsago Scott McCloud on microtransactions and Napster https://web.archive.org/web/20010708054658/http://www.thecomicreader.com/html/icst/icst-6/icst-6.html

#20yrsago Wardialling telemarketers stumble on Homeland Security batphones https://web.archive.org/web/20060630104202/https://www.delawareonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060616/NEWS/606160329/1006

#20yrsago NAB: Evidence is irrelevant to copyright treaties https://web.archive.org/web/20060622174657/https://drn.okfn.org/node/133#comment-246#comment-246

#20yrsago LA Times censors newsroom Internet feed https://web.archive.org/web/20060702051259/http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2006/06/protecting_reporters_from.html

#20yrsago Matt Stone’s memo to MPAA censors https://web.archive.org/web/20060619220447/https://www.mcnblogs.com/thehotblog/archives/2006/06/preparing_for_t.html

#20yrsago Stonehenge pocket-watch predicts solstices https://web.archive.org/web/20060627053213/http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/watches/7d2b/

#15yrsago Mean things authors say about each other https://www.flavorwire.com/188138/the-30-harshest-author-on-author-insults-in-history

#15yrsago Glasses with 720p HD video camera https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zioneyez/eyeztm-by-zioneyez-hd-video-recording-glasses-for

#15yrsago ICANN votes to roll out 400-800 new generic top-level domains https://www.flickr.com/photos/wseltzer/5852419280/

#10yrsago W3C DRM working group chairman vetoes work on protecting security researchers and competition https://lwn.net/Articles/691108/

#10yrsago Thoughts and Prayers: a Congressional mass-shooting simulator https://thoughtsandprayersthegame.com/

#5yrsago The doctrine of dynastic wealth https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/19/dynastic-wealth/#caste

#5yrsago The gig economy's dark-money, astroturf "community groups" https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/19/dynastic-wealth/#astroturf

#1yrago Your Meta AI prompts are in a live, public feed https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/19/privacy-breach-by-design/#bringing-home-the-beacon

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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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

PDF

18.06.2026 à 17:22

Pluralistic: AI digital sovereignty risk doesn't exist (18 Jun 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4305 mots)


Today's links


A 1989 black and white photo of the Berlin Wall; peering over the wall is Microsoft's 'Clippy' chatbot.

AI digital sovereignty risk doesn't exist (permalink)

Back at the height of the blockchain bubble, I made a hobby of pointing out that crypto weirdos were palming a card. I used this formulation:

if: problem + blockchain = problem – blockchain

then: blockchain = 0

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/30/the-inevitability-of-trusted-third-parties/

You see, blockchain weirdos kept insisting that they could solve problems related to trust and institutional design with "smart contracts." Rather than having to trust a board of directors to steer an organization, you could just have a self-executing institution, the "distributed autonomous organization" or DAO.

So for example, if you want to buy a copy of the US Constitution at a Sotheby's auction, you could set up a DAO to raise and pool the funds, eliminating the need to find trustworthy people to receive, hold and deploy these funds:

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

However – and here's where the palmed card comes in – the DAO can't go to Sotheby's and place a bid on the Constitution. Instead, the members of the DAO have to elect a guy to receive all that cash, walk into Sotheby's, get one of those little ping-pong paddles last seen at the State of the Union in Chuck Schumer's withered claw (emblazoned with the brave slogan "You're hurting my fee-fees") and raise the paddle during the bidding.

That guy doesn't have to go to Sotheby's. That guy can simply walk away with all the money. Members of the DAO are trusting this guy with their entire collective treasury. Indeed, since the DAO has no corresponding legal entity, it might even be that members of the DAO can't sue this guy if he steals all their money – and even worse, without a limited liability structure, it might mean that everyone in the DAO can be sued for anything bad this guy does with the money.

Which raises the question: what's the point of building this insanely complex hairball of blockchain-based smart contracts to raise and hold the money if you're just going to hand it to this guy and trust him without limit? Why not just have that guy set up a Zelle account and a Whatsapp group? In other words: the problem that the DAO is trying to solve is the difficulty of trusting people with the keys to the kingdom, but no matter how much blockchain you sprinkle on this DAO, it ends with this one guy walking around with all your money, which he can steal with impunity if he so chooses.

Or, put more succinctly:

if: problem + blockchain = problem – blockchain

then: blockchain = 0

This turns out to be a really good way of assessing policy prescriptions for their soundness and foundation in reality, because – as the blockchain swindle shows us – it's possible to come up with entirely fictitious solutions to entirely real problems. The problem of designing a trustworthy institution that can't be betrayed by its leaders and whose operations don't consume all its resources is a real problem – it's quite possibly the real problem – but adding a DAO does nothing to solve the core problems of institutional design, and actually makes some of those problems worse.

There's another real problem with a fictitious solution that is – surprise! – tied to another tech bubble: digital sovereignty.

It's a genuine problem that everyone in the world (outside of China's sphere of influence) is glued to America's tech platforms. These platforms steal everyone's money and data, and every country has signed a trade deal with the USA promising not to let its own technologists and entrepreneurs go into business making add-ons and complementary goods that remediate the defects in America's tech exports:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/29/post-american-canada/#ottawa

What's more, Trump's response to finding himself in this poker game that's rigged entirely in his favor is to flip over the table because he resents having to pretend to play at all (as November Kelly so aptly put it). His incontinent belligerence on the world stage sees him making bids to steal whole countries and he's recruited American tech giants to help him in this chaotic program of lunatic imperialism. When other countries' public officials make decisions that Trump dislikes, he gets companies like Microsoft to disconnect whole institutions from the internet, deleting their files, email archives, calendars and address books, and depriving them of the ability to connect to any service tied to their Outlook accounts:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/20/praxis/#acceleration

Which means that if Trump wants to steal Greenland, he doesn't have to roll tanks into Nuuk – he can just brick the country of Denmark. He can shut down all their ministries, every large firm, every household. He can shut down their iPhones and Android devices. He can kill their smart-speakers. He can hormuz the world's supply of Ozempic, Lego and ferociously strong licorice:

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

It doesn't stop there! Trump can also shut down every tractor!

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

This is the digital sovereignty risk. It's also the digital sovereignty opportunity. If countries repeal the laws that the US bullied them into accepting, laws that protect US tech giants from local competitors who block their plunder of data and money, they can turn America's tech trillions into their own tech billions. As Jeff Bezos likes to say, "your margin is my opportunity":

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/30/zucksauce/#gandersauce

Meanwhile, repealing these US-protecting laws would enable countries to extract their data from US platforms so they can move it into domestic alternatives, and bypass the software locks that block them from updating phones, cars, tractors and ventilators to protect them from remote killswitches:

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

The digital sovereignty risk is having your country's government, businesses and industries terminated by Trump. The digital sovereignty opportunity is making billions of dollars by producing and exporting products that defend people from Big Tech plunder and Trumpian killswitches. That is the real world.

But many "digital sovereignty" advocates are living in an imaginary world, in which the digital sovereignty risk is that Trump will shut off their country's access to AI.

This is where the "if problem + blockchain" formulation comes in handy. If Trump shut off Canada's access to Chatgpt, Claude and Grok tomorrow, nothing would happen. No significant business, no federal or provincial ministry, no municipal government depends on these products for anything essential. And if Canada were to build their own local AI to sub in for Chatgpt, Claude and Grok, it would loose tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars. Worst of all, a national AI strategy does nothing – not one solitary thing – to protect Canada from Trump shutting down our ministries, our companies, or our tractors.

In other words:

If: digital sovereignty + AI = digital sovereignty – AI

Then: AI = 0

If you think AI tools are nifty and want Canada to invest in AI, then first, please stop pretending that this has anything to do with "digital sovereignty." Not only is this a transparent bit of nonsense, it's a dangerous one, because digital sovereignty is a real problem, and AI does nothing to solve it.

If you want a good "national AI strategy," try this: save your money until the bubble bursts, and then buy your GPUs and hire your talent at 10 cents on the dollar and put them to work refining open source models:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington

Buying AI at the top of the market is nuts. That would be like shopping for Aeron chairs and foosball tables in March 2000. If you just sit tight for a couple months, you'll be able to find bankrupt dotcom entrepreneurs selling these at knock-down prices out front of their formerly overpriced office space in the Mission, in the time-honored tradition of former Wall Street millionaires selling apples out of their Rolls Royces:

https://digicoll.lib.berkeley.edu/record/323794

(Literally: I bought a "dining room set" of six $1500 Steelcase Leap chairs in the summer of 2000 from a failed dotcom CEO on Van Ness for $25 a piece – still in the original plastic!)

And in the meantime, please let's stop pretending that digital sovereignty has anything to do with "national AI." If Trump takes away your AI, everything is fine. If Trump takes away your iPhones, Office 365 and tractors, your country grinds to a halt. This is just not that complicated:

If: digital sovereignty + AI = digital sovereignty – AI

Then: AI = 0

(Image: Armin Kübelbeck, CC BY-SA 4.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Napster boss's American Library Association keynote https://web.archive.org/web/20010623201456/https://www.salon.com/tech/wire/2001/06/17/napster/index.html

#20yrsago Flickr: we’ll give full access to competitors – if they reciprocate https://www.flickr.com/groups/central/discuss/72157594165399644/#comment72157594167782546

#20yrsago Report from a concert by a Serbian war-criminal https://web.archive.org/web/20060613081324/http://blog.b92.net/blog/22

#20yrsago European podcasters to WIPO: Stay away from us! https://web.archive.org/web/20060619224538/https://www.bloggernews.net/2006/06/european-podcasters-team-up-to-lobby.html

#15yrsago KFC: support diabetes research by buying an 800 calorie, 56 spoonful of sugar “Mega Jug” https://web.archive.org/web/20110619031415/https://theweek.com/article/index/216462/irony-alert-buy-kfcs-800-calorie-soda-to-support-diabetes-research

#10yrsago Terrorist who murdered Jo Cox shouts: “Death to traitors” in court https://www.csmonitor.com/World/2016/0618/Accused-killer-of-MP-Jo-Cox-makes-defiant-court-statement

#10yrsago Judge orders release of man convicted while his public defender was handcuffed https://web.archive.org/web/20160617172242/http://www.reviewjournal.com/crime/judge-releases-man-who-received-jail-sentence-while-lawyer-was-handcuffs-video

#10yrsago Hambone virtuoso https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMJeaZtgwng

#10yrsago Google Fiber now forces subscribers into binding arbitration; days left to opt out https://web.archive.org/web/20160617141759/https://consumerist.com/2016/06/16/google-fiber-copies-comcast-att-forces-users-to-give-up-their-legal-right-to-sue/

#1yrago The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/18/anarcho-cryptid/#decameron-and-on

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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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

17.06.2026 à 20:27

Pluralistic: The (real) dead economy theory (17 Jun 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4029 mots)


Today's links

  • The (real) dead economy theory: Vibes and memestocks, all the way down.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Jim Baen has had a stroke; Blame Apple for iTunes DRM; France v the internet; "Rotters"; 1901 undersea cables; Washington Post wants Trump coverage blackout; Taxes are for the little people; Gamer lifecycle; Ghanian postal song; "What Lies Beneath the Clock Tower": Murder of Jo Cox; 12 year old doxed by anti-vaxers; Hong Kong bookseller recants forced confession.
  • Upcoming appearances: LA, Menlo Park, Toronto, NYC, Philadelphia, Chicago, London, Edinburgh, Brighton, South Bend.
  • Recent appearances: Where I've been.
  • Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Colophon: All the rest.


The Federal Reserve building, tilted at an eldrirtch angle, wreathed in mist. In the foreground looms an abandoned cemetery. Overhead flies a blood-red moon in a cloudy, ominous sky.

The (real) dead economy theory (permalink)

Here's a fun fact about Elon Musk: in 2020, his (nominal) net worth was $20b, and today it's $1t (nominally). But that's not the fun fact; this is: everything he's done since 2020 was a flop.

As John Quiggin writes, the pre-2020 Musk was the Musk of Tesla, batteries and Starlink. The post-2020 Musk is the Musk of Starship, robotaxis, Cybertrucks and Twitter – a string of commercial flops and assets that literally exploded. I would add that post-2020 Musk created the world's hungriest money-furnace, an automated child-porn production tool called "XAI":

https://crookedtimber.org/2026/06/15/one-big-grift/

Quiggin declares that this is the era in which "financial markets fail in the task of valuing assets accurately," and "the institutional structures that are supposed to make them work have given up trying." Nor did this start with the Spacex IPO. As Quiggin writes, Bitcoin and other cryptos were once shunned by nominally sober financial institutions like Goldman Sachs, but today, not only do all the big banks offer crypto services, people have largely stopped calling it cryptocurrency because no one is even pretending that it's a form of money. It's a tradeable collectible, not even particularly useful for paying for crimes or laundering money.

Spacex is just a continuation of the logic of crypto, in which something is valuable because some people think other people will pay more for it in the future, and not because it does useful things:

https://johnquiggin.com/2018/02/09/bitcoin-kills-the-efficient-market-hypothesis/

That's the logic of the whole market today. AI – the world's money-losingest technology – attracts investment at the expense of everything else. When horrified NIH lifers begged the DOGE boys not to shut down long-running medical research projects, Musk's broccoli-haired brownshirts laughed in their faces, saying we don't need cancer research because "GAI" is almost here and it will cure cancer. You could hardly ask for a better example of investing in vibes over value than shutting down real cancer research to free up money for teaching more words to the word-guessing machine because it's about to become God and cure cancer.

Today, Goldman Sachs isn't merely all-in on crypto – it's all-in on the Spacex IPO. As Quiggin writes, the bank has signed off on Musk's claim that "Musk's ragbag of assets" will grow one hundredfold in the next 40 months.

Quiggin's short essay has been rolling around in my mind since I read it a couple days ago. Then, yesterday, I spotted this essay by Owen McGrann entitled "The Dead Economy Theory":

https://www.owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-economy-theory

The perfect name for this phenomenon! Or so I thought. Then I read McGrann's article, and discovered that it's yet another piece asking how the economy will work after AI takes all of our jobs because AI is absolutely going to do that and there's no point in even questioning whether that will happen.

Look, thought experiments about how to deal equitably with labor displacement in the face of automation are all well and good. I'm a science fiction writer, that stuff is my bread and butter.

But applying "dead economy theory" to the blithe acceptance of the claims of AI pitchmen is a terrible waste of a killer coinage. The true risk of AI to your job isn't: "an AI will do your job." It's: "an AI salesman will exploit your boss's infinite horniness for replacing mouthy workers with pliable machines to sell him a chatbot that can't do your job, and then your boss will fire you and replace you with that inept, defective chatbot."

By the same token: the real "dead economy" risk isn't that all the productive labor will be done by chatbots owned by a habitual liar and eminently guillotineable billionaire like Sam Altman. The actual dead economy risk is that our institutions and markets will continue to move capital from productive activity into memestocks, vibes, and bubbles.

We could do "AI cancer research" by producing tools that automate gnarly multivariant analysis problems for cancer researchers. But what we're actually doing is defunding cancer research (especially any research into "systemic" cancer because studying systemic things is "woke") to free up fiscal space so we can build data-centers and make Musk into a trillionaire.

That's not just a dead economy – it's one that'll kill everyone you love and everything that matters.

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 Jim Baen, science fiction publisher, has had a serious stroke https://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007658.html#007658

#20yrsago Why Apple is to blame for iTunes DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20060620004534/http://vitanuova.loyalty.org/NewsBruiser-2.6.1/nb.cgi/view/vitanuova/2006/06/15/1

#20yrsago Lifecycle of a gamer https://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/16/the-lifecycles-of-a-player/

#20yrsago Spammer: I’ll buy MySpace profiles with more than 20k contacts https://web.archive.org/web/20060619062837/http://skibrooklyn.blogspot.com/2006/06/easy-money-sell-your-friends.html

#20yrsago Psychology of bad probability estimation: why lottos and terrorists matter https://web.archive.org/web/20060627174933/https://server1.sxsw.com/2006/coverage/SXSW06.INT.20060311.DanielGilbert.mp3

#15yrsago Copyright complaint kills Peanutweeter https://web.archive.org/web/20110620093750/https://www.wired.com/underwire/2011/06/peanutweeter-dmca-takedown/

#15yrsago Work song of Ghanian postal workers cancelling stamps https://blogfiles.wfmu.org/KF/0512/Ghana_Post_Office.mp3

#15yrsago What Lies Beneath the Clock Tower: steampunk choose-your-own-adventure https://memex.craphound.com/2011/06/17/what-lies-beneath-the-clock-tower-steampunk-choose-your-own-adventure/

#15yrsago French proposal: any URL to be arbitrarily blacklisted without due process https://www.laquadrature.net/en/2011/06/15/the-entire-internet-under-governmental-censorship-in-france/

#15yrsago Rotters: YA horror novel about grave-robbing chills, thrills, delights https://memex.craphound.com/2011/06/15/rotters-ya-horror-novel-about-grave-robbing-chills-thrills-delights/

#15yrsago Map of undersea cables from 1901 https://web.archive.org/web/20110220121138/http://www.dephx.com/2010/11/map-of-undersea-cables-from-1901.html

#15yrsago Copyright complaint kills Peanutweeter https://web.archive.org/web/20110620093750/https://www.wired.com/underwire/2011/06/peanutweeter-dmca-takedown/

#15yrsago Work song of Ghanian postal workers cancelling stamps https://blogfiles.wfmu.org/KF/0512/Ghana_Post_Office.mp3

#15yrsago What Lies Beneath the Clock Tower: steampunk choose-your-own-adventure https://memex.craphound.com/2011/06/17/what-lies-beneath-the-clock-tower-steampunk-choose-your-own-adventure/

#10yrsago Supreme Court ruling is a blow to copyright trolling business-model https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/06/attorneys-in-copyright-case-on-resold-textbooks-inch-closer-to-2m-payday/

#10yrsago The Orlando shooting, according to the Congressmen who took the most money from the NRA https://web.archive.org/web/20160617143716/https://theslot.jezebel.com/heres-how-the-congressmen-who-have-gotten-the-most-cash-1782083985

#10yrsago British Pro-EU MP murdered in the street by man shouting “Britain first!” https://web.archive.org/web/20160616212235/https://theintercept.com/2016/06/16/british-referendum-campaign-suspended-killing-pro-europe-lawmaker-jo-cox/

#10yrsago 12 year old makes devastating video about anti-vaxxers, gets doxxed https://skepchick.org/2016/06/anti-vaxxers-dox-a-child-critic/

#10yrsago Report from the prison-industrial complex’s leading trade show https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/16/us-prisons-jail-private-healthcare-companies-profit

#10yrsago Your cable operator is spying on you and selling the data from your set-top box https://publicknowledge.org/public-knowledge-defends-consumer-privacy-in-set-top-box-data-complaint-to-fcc-ftc/

#10yrsago Not robots: youth unemployment caused by late retirement, driven by pension precarity https://thebaffler.com/salvos/exit-planning-geoghegan

#10yrsago Oakland mayor denies firing police chief over officers who statutorily raped teen sex-worker https://eastbayexpress.com/badge-of-dishonor-top-oakland-police-department-officials-looked-away-as-east-bay-cops-sexually-exploited-and-trafficked-a-teenager-2-1/

#10yrsago Paramount tells judge that they’re still suing over Star Trek fan-film https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/paramount-says-star-trek-fan-903497/

#10yrsago $40,000/year private school sues school for low-income kids for $2M over “Commonwealth” https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/06/16/can-school-lay-claim-commonwealth-its-name-back-bay-institution-believes-can/WHwiaaPEn04cIY6uxXjoiO/story.html

#10yrsago Wisconsin Congresswoman: mandatory drug tests for anyone claiming $150K in itemized tax-deductions https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/16/gwen-moore-drug-test-rich-for-tax-deductions

#10yrsago Hong Kong bookseller: I was forced to confess on China TV https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-china-36552672#5yrsago

#10yrsago Washington Post calls for “blackout” on Trump coverage, appeals to RNC https://web.archive.org/web/20160615113350/https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-right-response-to-donald-trump-a-media-blackout/2016/06/14/2868a0e0-3256-11e6-8758-d58e76e11b12_story.html

#10yrsago Security economics: black market price of hacked servers drops to $6 https://www.wired.com/2016/06/xdedic-server-trading-forum-kaspersky/

#10yrsago Lower-case “x” as a gender-neutral typographic convention https://kottke.org/16/06/x-marks-gender-neutral

#5yrsago Taxes are for the little people https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/15/guillotines-and-taxes/#carried-interest

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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