Today's links

• Better to beg forgiveness: Don't ring the doorbell at the house of no unless you absolutely must.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: RIP Poul Anderson; P2P at PC Forum; Waitress handed her own stolen ID by carded diner; PDX bans fixies; Digital Economy Bill was a stitch up; NZ copyright disconnection flowchart; Fry v Widdicombe on Catholic Church; Moxie Marlinspike profile; V&A bans sketching; Gernsback's intro to the first Amazing Stories; "Simplicity."
• Upcoming appearances: 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.

Better to beg forgiveness (permalink)

From its inception, I've loved Creative Commons. I hung out with Lisa Rein, Matt Haughey and Aaron Swartz while they coded up the first version of the site, and my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, was the first professionally published text ever released under a CC license, just weeks after CC itself launched:

https://creativecommons.org/

In those early days, CC licenses were primarily of interest to people who were steeped in copyright law, lore and litigation; so many of the early debates about these licenses turned on esoteric (but important!) questions about copyright; for example, how CC would interact with copyright's "limitations and exceptions."

You see, copyright has never meant the absolute right to control all uses of a work. Every system of copyright includes a set of "limitations and exceptions" for people making use of copyrighted works without permission, even if the copyright holder objects to that use. The best-known example of this is "fair use," a concept from American law.

Fair use is (potentially) extremely broad, but it's also extremely "fact-intensive" – that's the phrase lawyers use to describe the kind of legal question whose answer is almost always "it depends." Fair use might let you copy the entirety of a work, even for a commercial purpose. It might let you create new works based on existing works. It might let you do these things specifically to discourage people from buying the original. But…it depends.

If you know anything about fair use, it's probably something about a "four-step test" used to determine if a usage is fair. These four steps are just questions a judge might ask of someone who's been sued for copyright infringement, but who claims that they were making a fair use. The questions are:

I. What was the "nature and purpose" of your use? Were you doing something "transformative?" Were you criticizing the work? Were you using the work for educational purposes?

II. What was the nature of the work you used? Was it primarily factual (like a news article) or creative (like a short story)?

III. How much of the work did you take? Did you take more than you needed to transform the work, to accomplish your criticism, to teach someone?

IV. What impact did your use have on the original? Did the copyright holder lose money as a result of your use?

https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/

These questions are indeed enshrined in US copyright law, but (for better and for worse) you can't figure out if a use is "fair" just by asking these questions. Fair use is ultimately subject to "the rule of reason," a legal principle meaning that the law shouldn't result in obviously stupid restrictions. What's "obviously stupid?" Well, that's the tricky part – you'll have to convince a judge!

For example, the author of a book called The Wind Done Gone was sued for taking the characters, plot and setting of Gone With the Wind in order to tell the same story from the perspective of the enslaved Africans who were denied agency and moral consideration in the original. The court found for The Wind Done Gone:

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

Wind Done Gone took the "heart" of Gone With the Wind (III), but then again, Done Gone was highly transformative (I), Gone With was also a work of fiction, entitled to the highest level of protection (II). Even worse, the point of Done Gone was to point out the gross defects in Gone With (I) and thus directly undermine sales and licensing for the original (IV). Anyone who claims you can answer fair use controversies by running through the four factors as though they were a checklist really doesn't understand fair use:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/06/crypto-copyright-%f0%9f%a4%a1%f0%9f%92%a9/

But even after you've acquired an appreciation of the fact-intensive, nuanced flexibility of fair use, you still don't understand copyright's limitations and exceptions. Fair use is important, but there's also "first sale," the doctrine that says that after you buy something, you own it, and copyright can't be used to interfere with your traditional property rights. That's why you can buy and sell used books, paintings, records, and other copyrighted work, even if they are sold with fine print that says you're not allowed to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirtsaeng_v._John_Wiley_%26_Sons,_Inc.

When it comes to copyright's limitations and exceptions, "fair use" and "first sale" are the big ones, but just as important are the small ones – the really small ones. Like other laws, copyright is subject to the principle of "di minimis" (from a longer Latin phrase that translates as "the law does not concern itself with trifles"):

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

Technically, it may be trespassing to step on someone else's yard. But if your shoe brushes up against their lawn while you're walking on the sidewalk out front of their house, it's not trespassing. Or if it is trespassing, it's a di minimis trespass, too small to matter to the law. A lot of potential copyright violations – like taking a picture of a passage in a book and posting it to social media – are so small that we don't need to apply a fair use analysis to them. They're trifles, and "the law does not concern itself with trifles."

These limitations and exceptions all apply without permission from rightsholders. They apply even if they make rightsholders furious. They are your rights, as a member of the public, as a purchaser of a work, or just as someone who whistles a song that's stuck in your head.

And that's where the esoteric early Creative Commons copyright debate comes in. Creative Commons is a way to formally codify and convey permission to use copyrighted works. Without Creative Commons, it's really hard – and expensive – to provide legally reliable permission to someone else to use something you've created.

If I want to let you adapt one of my short stories for the stage, we should both probably hire copyright lawyers at several hundred dollars per hour to draft and review a contract setting out what my permission really means. Worse: even after we've paid the lawyers, neither of us will likely really understand the fine legal technicalities of the deal. We just have to take the lawyers' word for it that the complex jargon in the contract is sufficient for our purposes. Between the complexity and the expense, there are lots of potential creative collaborations that would cost so much to paper over that they're just not worth doing, even if they'd delight everyone involved.

Creative Commons cuts through this with its standardized licenses, which spell out in plain language which permissions are being granted. Even better, these licenses are international, translated into the language and laws of dozens of countries. That means that you can take a CC licensed short story from Japan, animate it using CC licensed 3D models from Italy, set it to a CC licensed soundtrack from Indonesia and release it in Ukraine, and the whole thing just works.

Those uses – turning a story into an animation, using a 3D model, syncing a soundtrack to a video – are all pretty ambitious uses, especially if you're going to make the final result indefinitely available to the general public. It makes sense to paper over these uses, and Creative Commons makes that legal work as simple as linking to your sources and their licenses in your final product.

But there are plenty of uses that don't need licenses – even ambitious ones. Remember Wind Done Gone? There are circumstances when you can adapt someone else's story without permission, relying instead on a limitation or exception to copyright. And of course, there are plenty of trivial uses – pasting a photo into your groupchat, say – that are di minimis and also don't need permission.

These copyright flexibilities are critical. Imagine if you could only criticize someone's work if they gave you permission to do so! From the founding of CC, copyfighters raised serious concerns that CC would teach people that they can only remix other people's work if they have a license, be it a CC license or the kind that you negotiate with a lawyer.

Today – 25 years later!- CC is an unqualified success. Without CC, we wouldn't have Wikipedia! You find CC licenses on Youtube, Flickr, Bandcamp, the Internet Archive, and in many of the most important scholarly and scientific journals in the world.

But, also, 25 years later, the world is even more convinced that you should always ask permission: "better safe than sorry." I don't know if CC contributed to this culture of timidity. More likely, it was bullying copyright trolls who terrorized people into a reflex of asking permission for everything, always.

As the creator of more than 30 books, hundreds of collages, and tens of thousands of essays and blog-posts, I am often on the receiving end of these permission requests.

For example, people often ask me if they can use my CC licensed works in ways that the associated licenses clearly permit. I'm sure the people who email me for permission to do things I've already granted them permission to do think they're being polite, but I really wish they'd stop. When someone asks me if they can make a use permitted by my CC licenses, I need to carefully parse through their use to make sure they're not asking for something more.

This is time-consuming work that often involves several volleys of email just to confirm that, no, they're just asking if they can do something I've already told them they can do. This is not a good use of anyone's time! By all means, drop me a note with a link to something you've remixed from my work. That's fun! It's a lot more fun than making me play detective in order to figure out if you're exceeding the license's permissions.

There are also a lot of requests that clearly amount to fair use and/or di minimis usage. You don't need to email me to get my permission to read a brief passage from one of my books on your Youtube video! You don't need my permission to quote one of my stories in an English exam! What's more, the world would be a lot shittier if you did, so let's not act as though that's reasonable behavior, lest we shift the (already far too restrictive) norms, which might even lead to a legal change.

Finally, there's the people who email me about their desire to make uses that are more (ahem) ambitious, but that no one could possibly find out about or get angry over…except for the fact that they emailed me to ask my permission.

You want to make a tiny bootleg edition of one of my novels for your anarchist book fair? That's totally a copyright infringement, it's super-illegal, and if my publisher found out about it, I'm sure they'd send you a sphincter-puckering legal letter telling you to knock it off (and maybe even demanding that you disgorge the seven dollars, three bottlecaps and eleven cool feathers you took in trade for those pirate books).

But my publisher won't ever find out about it – unless you email me asking for permission. I absolutely cannot give you permission to do this. I have a contract with my publisher promising that I will never authorize someone other than them to publish that book. Once you tell me about your intention to do this, I'm obliged to tell my publisher, so that they can tell you no in language that would strip paint off a barn.

Buying a classroom set of books, but you also want to paste chunks of one of my books into your educational institution's classroom intranet for use as a teaching aid? There's no way my publisher would ever find out you did that, and if they did, sure, you'd also get a blood-curdling legal letter. But dude, all my books are DRM-free. You could have just pasted the text into your CMS. In what universe is my publisher going to pay one of their lawyers to review, adjudicate and paper over your request to make a use that you're not proposing to pay them for?

Let's be clear: I'm not giving you permission to pirate my work. I already spend far too much of my time chasing down dickheads who sell competing editions of my books on Amazon and Audible. I'm sick to the back teeth of wrangling Ingram's takedown process to get rid of bootleg print editions of my books.

What I'm saying is, all of your interactions with copyrighted works need not involve the author and publisher. There is a whole universe of uses that might technically violate copyright, might technically not fit into di minimis, first sale or fair use – but these are also uses that no one would ever find out.

I get it. You may feel like you can't tell the difference between the kind of uses that no one would give a shit about; the uses that might attract a bone-chilling lawyer letter; and the uses that might land you in court. I'm sorry, but I can't help you figure that one out. I'm not a lawyer. Even if I was, I'm not your lawyer.

This is one of those areas where I break with my friend, the wonderful John Hodgman. On his indispensable podcast "Judge John Hodgman," he frequently admonishes people who are uncertain if they're overstepping a bound in a commercial establishment to ask an employee for permission. For example: should you fill up a water glass with soda water from a self-serve dispenser?

https://maximumfun.org/podcasts/judge-john-hodgman/

John says you should always ask the cashier. But I've worked jobs like that, and I can tell you that there were plenty of jobs where my boss felt very strongly that taking $0.0000001 worth of water and bubbles without paying for it was theft…and where I thought my boss was a dick for thinking that. If I pretended I didn't see you getting a glass of fizzy water, the worst that would happen is my boss would tell me to keep a closer eye on the customers lest they steal his precious CO2. But if you asked me whether you could fill your glass, and my boss caught me saying yes, I'd be fired.

There's a lot of normal, perfectly fine stuff that technically violates copyright that I can't give you permission to do, because I've signed a contract with my publisher. If you ask me, I'll have to ask my editor, who will say no, even though he thinks it's fine, too. If I push it, he'll have to ask the lawyers, who will almost certainly also say no, even if they think it's fine, because it doesn't make sense to spend hours papering over a legal agreement with someone who wants to sell seven copies of a book at an anarchist book-fair or upload a couple chapters of a book to a school's intranet.

Are there instances in which you might misjudge which category your use falls under and end up in court? I guess so. But if that's your concern, asking my permission does no good, because I'm just gonna tell you no.

Life is hard.

Read books.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• AOC Must Run For President https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/aoc-must-run-for-president

• Role confusion: one more reason we can’t trust LLMs https://designingsecuresoftware.com/writings/role-confusion/

• Ida Tarbell: The Journalist Who Took Down Rockefeller https://prospect.org/2026/07/31/ida-tarbell-journalist-who-took-down-rockefeller/

• Medusa Joins the Club https://longforgottenhauntedmansion.blogspot.com/2026/07/medusa-joins-club.html

• Hot Centrist Summer Was a Bust https://prospect.org/2026/07/31/democrats-donor-base-establishment-progressive-hot-centrist-summer-was-a-bust/

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago RIP, Poul Anderson https://www.locusmag.com/1997/Issues/04/Anderson.html

#25yrsago Talking P2P at PC Forum https://web.archive.org/web/20010820163912/https://www.edventure.com/pcforum/transcript.cfm?Counter=13

#25yrsago CD DRM cracked in 2 weeks https://web.archive.org/web/20010803144120/http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/weblog/view/wlg/533

#20yrsago Waitress cards drinker, is handed her own stolen ID https://web.archive.org/web/20060901042515/http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/9606436/detail.html

#20yrsago How POWs in a Nazi camp got a Disney insignia https://web.archive.org/web/20061209200825/https://blog.modernmechanix.com/2006/08/01/wwii-pows-get-a-disney-designed-logo/

#20yrsago Fixies illegal in Portland https://bikeportland.org/2006/07/28/judge-finds-fault-with-fixies-1727

#15yrsago Freedom of Information requests show that UK copyright consultation was a stitch-up; Internet disconnection rules are a foregone conclusion https://torrentfreak.com/digital-economy-act-a-foregone-conclusion-110731/

#15yrsago What Murdoch’s media empire did: the big picture https://web.archive.org/web/20110805111419/http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2011/07/27/what-rupert-murdoch-means-for-you-personally/

#15yrsago Flowchart shows the complexity of NZ Internet Disconnection copyright law https://web.archive.org/web/20111105044005/https://lawgeeknz.posterous.com/copyright-infringing-file-sharing-amendment-a

#15yrsago Married lesbian couple rescued 40 teenagers from drowning during Utøya shooting https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2011/07/married-lesbian-couple-saves-dozens-during-norway-shooting-rampage/

#15yrsago Stephen Fry debating Ann Widdecombe on the worth of the Catholic Church https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fN3zDtfivc

#10yrsago Jacksonville police pension fund blows $1.8M worth of tax-dollars fighting open records requests https://web.archive.org/web/20160804040211/http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2016-07-30/story/open-government-lawsuits-against-city-pension-fund-cost-taxpayers-more-2

#10yrsago A profile of Moxie Marlinspike: the seagoing anarchist cryptographer who brought private messaging to millions https://www.wired.com/2016/07/meet-moxie-marlinspike-anarchist-bringing-encryption-us/

#10yrsago Burying the past in glass coffins: Victoria & Albert museum bans sketching in temporary exhibitions https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/apr/22/va-museum-no-sketching-signs-draconian?CMP=share_btn_tw

#10yrsago Hugo Gernsback’s introduction to the first issue of Amazing Stories, 1926 https://brucesterling.tumblr.com/post/148297242233/a-new-magazine-announced-by-hugo-gernsback

#10yrsago Afterbrexit: Scotland trolls Theresa May by passing laws she has ridiculed https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/08/scotland-disses-theresa-may-by-reviving-anti-inequality-law-she-loathes.html

#5yrsago Managing aggregate demand https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/01/managing-aggregate-demand-part-iv/

#1yrago Mattie Lubchansky's 'Simplicity' https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/01/ecosexuality/#nyc-ast

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Virtual: EFFecting Change: Who the Machine Serves, Aug 12
  https://www.eff.org/event/effecting-change-who-machine-serves

• Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
  https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

• Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24
  https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/program/

• Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25
  https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
  https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/

• London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
  https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn

• South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
  https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Why AI Won't Replace Workers, But Will Crash The Economy (Smart Cookies)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRRmUuxJolY

• AI and the Enshittification Era (The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dAIJRjb-Bw

• AI is not inevitable (Betakit)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbiTVkq1WHo

• A Conversation with Lina Khan (Law and Economy Student Network)
  https://www.youtube.com/live/7Ak5LZllqwE

• Will AI ever come alive, and what happens if it does? (BBC News)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lzk4o3fPZZE

Latest 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/

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

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

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

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:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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

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

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links

• The stupidest imaginable excuses for surveillance pricing: Since 1850, San Francisco's Chamber of Commerce has been pissing in our mouths and calling it rain.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: RIP Wau Holland; Diebold voting machines suck; How to steal an RFID-locked car; Pirates are big spenders; You can't fight enshittification.
• Upcoming appearances: 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 stupidest imaginable excuses for surveillance pricing (permalink)

With "surveillance pricing," businesses have finally found something AI can do way, way, way better than people: price gouging.

As the name suggests, "surveillance pricing" is the practice of charging every customer a different price for every transaction, based on the massive surveillance dossiers that Big Tech companies and data-brokers have assembled on everyone in the world. Congress hasn't updated federal consumer privacy law since 1988 (when they passed a law banning the disclosure of VHS rentals), so pretty much any form of consumer surveillance is fair game.

This is where the AI comes in. One thing AI is indisputably great for is multivariate statistical analysis. You can feed an AI "behavioral data" (information about where you go, what you do, what you buy, who you talk to and what you say) about all of your customers and ask it to cluster them according to their shared traits. Then you can direct the AI to automatically run a series of small experiments to discover the maximum markup each group will stomach under which circumstances.

This works without you having to direct the AI to rip off certain groups of people – it will simply find the most vulnerable people and rip them off the most. If you're hiring in an industry that practices a lot of tacit racial discrimination, a system like this can figure out on its own that people of color typically accept lower wages because there are fewer employers bidding for their labor, and recommend lowball salary offers, all without you ever typing "please be racist" into your AI prompt.

This works so well that Google has announced that it is their plan for making a profit off of AI, after losing hundreds of billions of dollars on chatbots:

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

In the before times, marketers and demographers had to dream up demographic categories based on limited data and run focus groups to figure out how to maximize revenue from each market segment. Now an AI can segment the data to any degree you choose, and continuously, automatically experiment on each segment to find their weak spots.

It's "theory-free." You don't have to discover why a group is willing to pay more under a given set of circumstances, you merely have to observe and weaponize this fact. You don't have to know why one group of purchasers consistently accept higher prices between 6AM and 8AM – you can just automatically jack up prices on them without knowing or caring that you're gouging parents of young children who are re-ordering essential supplies while trying to get their kids to school in the morning.

I thought up that example. I don't know if it's really happening. But here's something that really is happening: ecommerce sites charge parents of newborns extra when they order thermometers in the middle of the night. I'm not saying that anyone ever sat down and said, "Parents with sick children will pay whatever we charge for a thermometer at 2AM." They didn't have to: this is the kind of thing an automated system can do without any human intervention:

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/p246202_surveillancepricing6bstudy_researchsummaries_redacted.pdf

The goal of surveillance pricing is to shift all the "consumer surplus" (the difference between the highest price you're willing to pay and the price you actually pay) to companies. It's a form of cod-Marxism where you are gouged according to your ability (to pay) and charged according to the desperation of your need:

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

The problems of surveillance pricing are well documented. Under Biden, the FTC did a landmark study on the practice, developing a rich factual record that documents the role surveillance pricing plays in the affordability crisis:

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

Companies are already using this technology to rip you off, and they're slavering for the chance to do more of it. Instacart was recently caught marking up some shoppers' items by as much as a third:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/11/nothing-personal/#instacartography

The problem is that as much as companies love this, shoppers hate it. Last summer, Delta announced that it was going to surveillance price every seat on every flight, only to face such a massive backlash that they had to make another announcement bemoaning the fact that we'd all misunderstood their (unambiguous and extremely damning) announcement and they were actually going to do no such thing:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/30/efficiency-washing/#medallion-clubbed

One thing the Mamdani campaign impressed upon every politician in the country is that people are pissed about affordability and they will support anyone who stands up for the public against AI-equipped price gougers. The problem of course is that those price gougers are highly organized and have deep treasuries (stuffed with money they stole from us). With surveillance pricing, politicians face a familiar conundrum: if they do the thing that's popular with voters, they'll enrage donors.

One way to cut this knot is to enact legislation that seems to address the problem, but stuff it with so many loopholes that it does nothing. This lets you declare yourself the people's champion without doing anything to protect them from the donors who prey on your voters. That's the approach they took in Maryland:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/30/something-must-be-done/#there-ive-done-something

But in California, they're actually doing something about surveillance pricing. AB-2564 is a smart, well-written bill that bans surveillance pricing. It contains an easily evaluated test for surveillance pricing and carves out legitimate reasons for offering different prices for the same purchase (for example, when it costs more to deliver the product or service):

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB2564

Now we're in for the hard yards of turning this bill into a law. That's where California's cities come in. When municipal governments pass resolutions supporting a state bill, it makes it much easier to get that bill through the state legislature (and conversely, without support from major cities, it's that much easier to kill the bill before it becomes law).

A few days ago, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors was on the verge of passing a resolution in support of AB-2564. Now, that vote is stalled, thanks to a letter sent by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, an organization that has been pissing in San Franciscans' faces and telling them it was raining since 1850:

https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/community/board-not-yet-ready-to-weigh-in-on-state-surveillance-pricing-ban/article_0ae4d143-cced-4988-abda-0b71bcbe524c.html

The Chamber's letter is – to use a technical term – flaming garbage. It raises the most spurious objections imaginable, claims about the bill's language that are belied by its plain, easily understood text. These objections are demolished in a letter the Electronic Frontier Foundation sent to the Supervisors:

https://www.eff.org/document/letter-sf-bos-re-surveillance

In the letter, EFF explains that claims that surveillance pricing will lower prices are overblown and not borne out by evidence. But more importantly – as EFF points out – privacy is a human right, and the idea that you should have to give up your privacy to get a fair price is just a fancy way of saying that privacy should be the exclusive preserve of people who can afford to pay more:

https://www.eff.org/wp/privacy-first-better-way-address-online-harms#Legislation

EFF's letter goes on to address the Chamber's objections. Far from creating uncertainty about which conduct the bill addresses, AB-2564 crisply defines surveillance pricing as:

a customized price for a good for a specific consumer or group of consumers based, in whole or in part, on personally identifiable information collected through electronic surveillance.

The Chamber raises other tired objections, falsely claiming that banning surveillance pricing will end common discounting strategies like offering seniors cheaper movie tickets, or giving cheaper rates to retain customers who call to cancel their service. EFF replies by pointing out that all the Chamber's concerns are covered by the three comprehensive carve-outs in the bill: the ability to charge higher rates when it costs more to service a given customer; offering discounts to retain customers who want to cancel their service; and finally, discounts for criteria anyone can meet (like an "early bird special"), for membership in a broadly defined group (like "seniors"), or for participation in a loyalty program.

The San Francisco Supervisors could have figured out at a glance that the Chamber was bullshitting them. All it takes is a cursory read of the statute. But now they don't even have to do that: EFF has painstakingly debullshittified the Chamber's FUD.

Surveillance pricing is grossly offensive. When a company charges me $0.50 for a product that it charges you $1 for, they're essentially saying that your dollars are worth half as much as mine are. Companies shouldn't be able to reach into your wallet or your bank account and chop your money in half:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/24/price-discrimination/#

No wonder AB-2564 has plenty of backers, from EFF to Consumers Union:

https://advocacy.consumerreports.org/press_release/california-state-assembly-passes-key-bill-to-prohibit-surveillance-pricing/

San Francisco's city government should be on that list of supporters.

(Image: Takkk, CC BY-SA 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Louis Brandeis: The Empiricist https://prospect.org/2026/07/30/aug-2026-louis-brandeis-the-empiricist/

• The Rent Is Higher Than You Think https://economicpopulist.substack.com/p/the-rent-is-higher-than-you-think

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago RIP, Wau Holland, founder of the legendary hacker clan, the Chaos Computer Club. https://web.archive.org/web/20010805192406/https://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,45728,00.html

#20yrsago Diebold voting machines can be beaten with a switch-flip https://web.archive.org/web/20061007120702/http://openvotingfoundation.org/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=1

#20yrsago How thieves steal RFID-enabled cars https://web.archive.org/web/20060812065423/https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.08/carkey_pr.html

#15yrsago Official London anti-terrorist publication says anarchists should be reported to local police https://web.archive.org/web/20110801233618/https://communitysafe.gov.uk/articles/5962-griffin-weekly-briefing-sheet-attached/attachments/801/download.pdf

#15yrsago French copyright enforcers: “Pirates are big spenders on legit content” https://www.techdirt.com/2011/07/28/another-day-another-study-that-says-pirates-are-best-customers-this-time-hadopi/

#15yrsago Perma-cookie wars continue: KISSMetrics sneaks cookies back onto your computer even if you turn off every cookie vector https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1898390

#1yrago You can't fight enshittification https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/31/unsatisfying-answers/#systemic-problems

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Virtual: EFFecting Change: Who the Machine Serves, Aug 12
  https://www.eff.org/event/effecting-change-who-machine-serves

• Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
  https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

• Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24
  https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/program/

• Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25
  https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
  https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/

• London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
  https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn

• South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
  https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

Recent appearances (permalink)

• AI and the Enshittification Era (The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dAIJRjb-Bw

• AI is not inevitable (Betakit)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbiTVkq1WHo

• A Conversation with Lina Khan (Law and Economy Student Network)
  https://www.youtube.com/live/7Ak5LZllqwE

• Will AI ever come alive, and what happens if it does? (BBC News)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lzk4o3fPZZE

• Waarom jij straks het hulpje van AI bent (VPRO)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOnvR2fs8CA

Latest 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/

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

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

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

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:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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

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

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links

• Enshittification and Reverse Centaurs go global: The good globalism.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Fonz thumps x Linux; CBC v DRM; Aussie mall v photos; English town x CCTVs; Pay no taxes x Big Tech; Games Workshop v gamers; Delta x surveillance pricing.
• Upcoming appearances: 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.

Enshittification and Reverse Centaurs go global (permalink)

It's safe to say that the past couple of years have been good ones for me publishing-wise, thanks to a string of international bestsellers, both novels (Picks and Shovels) and nonfiction (Enshittification, Reverse Centaur), as well as plenty of awards and accolades:

https://craphound.com/shop

Over the past two months, I've won the Locus Award (Enshittification), had a NYT bestseller (Reverse Centaur), gotten a word in the OED ("enshittification"), and had the number one bestselling nonfiction paperback in Canada for more than a month running (Reverse Centaur). I also turned 55 – and my radiologist told me I'm now cancer-free, so it's been a good summer all around.

These books have done especially well internationally because they deal with technopolitics, which means that my readers are disproportionately Internet People, and for historical reasons, these are folks who are more likely to speak English, even if they live outside of the Anglosphere.

This post is primarily for those readers, who often write to me to let me know how much they enjoyed the books, so much so that they'd like to share them with their less online, less English-conversant friends, and want to know whether there is a translation coming in their own language.

Good news! Both Reverse Centaur and Enshittification have many foreign editions that are either published or forthcoming in the next year or so. The foreign rights team at Farrar, Straus and Giroux were good enough to prepare a list of all these editions, which I'm about to reproduce below.

If your preferred language isn't on the list, I apologize. Translation deals are primarily "pull," not "push" – that is to say, a foreign publisher contacts my publisher and asks for the rights (though my publisher does market the rights and attends all the book fairs where these deals are often made).

The upshot here is that I am not really in a position to do more than has already been done to get an edition published in your preferred language or territory. If you happen to have a favorite local publisher, you could always ask them if they would like to get in touch with Farrar, Straus and Giroux foreign rights team to secure a license.

I also need to note here that these deals are generally with established publishers who have relationships with national booksellers and distributors (rather than enthusiastic individuals who want to produce a translation and see if they can get it read by other people in their country). The hard part of publishing isn't the translation, the typesetting, the book design or even the writing – the hard part is connecting a text with its readers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/04/self-publishing/

With that all said, here's the master list of editions of Enshittification and The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI:

• USA and Canada : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  Enshittification: hardcover, Oct 2025; paperback, Sep 2026
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

Reverse Centaur: paperback, Jun 2026
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

• UK and Commonwealth excluding Canada (Australia , New Zealand , India , South Africa , and beyond): Verso Books
  Enshittification: hardcover, Oct 2025; paperback, Sep 2026
  https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/3341-enshittification

Reverse Centaur: hardcover, Jun 2026
https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/3584-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai

• Brazil : Grupo Editorial Record
  Enshittification, early 2027

• France : Éditions Eyrolles
  Enshittification: Feb 2027

• Germany : Aufbau
  Enshittification: May 2026
  https://www.aufbau-verlage.de/blumenbar/enshittification/978-3-351-05143-3

• Hungary : Agave Konyvek
  Enshittification (as A Nagy Elszaródás/The Big Mess), Mar 2026
  https://agavekonyvek.hu/konyv/ismeretterjeszto-190/a-nagy-elszarodas-miert-romlott-el-hirtelen-minden-es-mit-tehetunk-ellene

Reverse Centaur (as A Nagy Összemolás/The Big Collapse), not yet scheduled

• Italy : Iperborea
  Enshittification, not yet scheduled

• Japan : Impress Corporation
  Enshittification, Jan 2027

• Poland : Wydawnictwo Otwarte
  Enshittification (as Gównowacenie), Aug 2026
  https://www.znak.com.pl/p/gownowacenie-jak-cyfrowi-giganci-zmieniaja-nasz-swiat-na-gorsze-cory-doctorow-488999?abpid=10388&abpcid=33&bb_coid=231428551&bbclid=cc5f0f24-aa55-4997-95ec-cefead709239

• Portugal : PRH Portugal
  Enshittification, not yet scheduled

• Quebec 󠁣󠁡󠁱󠁣󠁿: Éditions Québec Amérique
  Enshittification: Apr 2027

• Slovenia : Mladinska Knjiga
  Enshittification, not yet scheduled

• South Korea : Next Wave Media
  Enshittification, Jul 2026
  https://product.kyobobook.co.kr/detail/S000220350700

• Spain : Capitán Swing
  Enshittification (as Mierdificación), Mar 2026

Reverse Centaur, not yet scheduled

• Taiwan : Acropolis
  Enshittification, first quarter 2027

• Thailand : Salt Publishing
  Enshittification, Oct 2026

• Türkiye : Okuyanus
  Enshittification, Fall 2026

• Ukraine : Athena Publishing
  Enshittification, not yet scheduled

(These are the confirmed deals. There are lots of other deals in negotiation, especially for Reverse Centaur, which is only a month old.)

I hope some of you found this useful! If not (or if so!), don't worry, I'll be back with more essays in the days to come.

One final note for newsletter readers: I realize that I have violated my "one emoji per edition" rule with the flags above. Rest assured this will not be a regular thing.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• We used to be able to buy things in this country https://dannykatch.substack.com/p/we-used-to-be-able-to-buy-things

• How to Stop the Enshittification of America https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-how-to-stop-the

• Yes, Trump Will Attempt a Coup https://prospect.org/2026/07/28/trump-attempt-coup-january-6-election-republican-congress/

• Framework Laptop 13 Pro Review: The Best Modular Laptop Ever Made https://gizmodo.com/framework-laptop-13-pro-review-the-best-modular-laptop-ever-made-2000791804

• The $145 Billion Lie? Zuckerberg's Leaked Town Hall Audio Exposes Massive AI Failures After Mass Layoffs https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/zuckerbergs-leaked-audio-meta-ai-struggles-1807607

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Linux Thinkpads can be controlled by knocking on them https://web.archive.org/web/20060814065844/http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-knockage.html?ca=dgr-lnxw01Knock-Knock

#20yrsago Why the CBC doesn’t need DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20060820121451/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/component/option,com_content/task,view/id,1342/Itemid,85/nsub,/

#20yrsago Aussie mall defends its photons from terrorists https://web.archive.org/web/20060910224208/http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2006/07/29/1153816426869.html

#15yrsago Sleepy English town to be entirely surveilled in case criminals forget and drive through it on their way to crimeshttps://web.archive.org/web/20110731020858/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/news/8670642/Sleepy-market-town-surrounded-by-ring-of-car-cameras.html

#10yrsago Lessons from the DNC: Ronald Reagan, the Southern Strategy, and “abnormal politics”https://crookedtimber.org/2016/07/30/philadelphia-stories-from-reagan-to-trump-to-the-dnc/

#10yrsago How to pay no taxes at all! (if you’re Apple, Google or Facebook) https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/07/video-guide-to-legal-tax-evasion-with-an-apple-boycott.html

#5yrsago Games Workshop declares war on its customers https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/30/space-marines/#fairy-use-tale

#1yrago Delta's AI-based price-gouging https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/30/efficiency-washing/#medallion-clubbed

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Virtual: EFFecting Change: Who the Machine Serves, Aug 12
  https://www.eff.org/event/effecting-change-who-machine-serves

• Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
  https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

• Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24
  https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/program/

• Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25
  https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
  https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/

• London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
  https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn

• South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
  https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

Recent appearances (permalink)

• AI is not inevitable (Betakit)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbiTVkq1WHo

• A Conversation with Lina Khan (Law and Economy Student Network)
  https://www.youtube.com/live/7Ak5LZllqwE

• Will AI ever come alive, and what happens if it does? (BBC News)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lzk4o3fPZZE

• Waarom jij straks het hulpje van AI bent (VPRO)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOnvR2fs8CA

• Talk Tech Bock (Vera Linß)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PFjGvQoBgc

Latest 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/

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

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

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

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:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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

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

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links

• Discernment: How can you fact-check AI when you're asking it to teach you something you don't understand?
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: How to help with computers; Batman equation; Fuck and the law; NC's racist voting law; Pregancy app is full of spyware; Stiglitz v Apple's "tax fraud"; Accelerometer fingerprinting; Sacklers v bankruptcy; Boss-politics antitrust.
• Upcoming appearances: 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.

Discernment (permalink)

As far as I can tell, this dialog between MacArthur prize-winning mathematician Terrence Tao and Chatgpt about "the Jacobian conjecture counterexample" is very impressive:

https://chatgpt.com/share/6a5fdc7a-d6f8-83e8-bbea-8deb42cfed56

Now, the clause "as far as I can tell" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. I am reasonably math literate, up to first-year calculus and a lifetime spent around my father (a mathematician). However, I have never heard of "the Jacobian conjecture," and while I know what all the words in the first paragraph of the relevant Wikipedia entry mean, I can't parse any of the sentences they form:

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

In other words, I lack the discernment to evaluate the output of the chatbot that Tao exchanged theories with. If you showed me an equally opaque transcript of a "conversation" between a chatbot and a crank with AI psychosis whose math made no sense whatsoever, I couldn't make an a priori judgment about which one was a solid piece of mathematical theorizing and which one was a math-flavored word-salad.

As many skilled programmers can attest, chatbots can produce very useful output – but as even the most ardent AI-assisted coder will admit, chatbot-written code is also full of baffling, obvious errors (and subtle, hard-to-spot ones):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/04/bad-vibe-coding/#maximally-codelike-bugs

These errors (which the industry wants us to refer to as "hallucination" – a whimsical, obscuring, anthropomorphizing euphemism) are the reason that reliable AI use requires the discernment that comes from skill and expertise. I use a local chatbot to spellcheck these posts. Chatbots spot all kinds of typos that regular spellcheckers miss:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/19/now-we-are-six/#stock-buyback

There's a reactionary group of strangers who seek me out to tell me that I'm a bad person for doing this. These are pointless conversations, mostly because I can barely make out a word over the scraping sounds of all the goalpost-moving these scolding strangers engage in.

They start by insisting that I'm burning down the planet by running a low-CPU load piece of software on my own computer. After I explain that running a chatbot on my machine uses no more carbon than, say, applying a blur effect to an image in my image editor, they tell me I'm unwisely giving my private data to the AI companies. Then I show them the network logs that demonstrate that my local chatbot doesn't send or receive any network data.

Then they turn to the supposed cognitive effects of using a chatbot to find typos in an essay. I explain that I'm not asking an AI to write things for me or explain them to me – I'm asking it to point out where I've forgotten to put a period at the end of a paragraph, or fatfingered a word like "ever" as "every." I even send them the "before" and "after" of an essay after I've corrected some chatbot-identified typos in it:

https://craphound.com/before.txt

https://craphound.com/after.txt

This is when things get increasingly pointless. My interlocutors come up with farcical reasons why it's immoral or dangerous to use this LLM-based spellchecker. They say I'm using too much compute and that I could use a simpler piece of software to do the same thing (which is both untrue and silly – I also run a journaling filesystem on my computer that is vastly overpowered for editing a textfile – who cares?). Or they insist that the mere act of making copies of published works in order to count their elements and the relationships between them is a sin, despite the fact that this standard would kill search engines, the Internet Archive, and the Oxford English Dictionary:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

I mean, by all means let's hate the AI companies and work to end their disgusting campaign to pauperize creative workers, but let's not fall into the trap of siding with the media bosses who insist that the salvation of creative labor will arrive when Sam Altman pays David Zaslav for the right to cram the entire Warner catalog into Openai's chatbots:

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

Above all, my interlocutors continue to insist that my LLM-powered, local, open source chatbot spellchecker will make me a worse writer. It's a very strange insistence. My first word processor was a program listing published in a magazine I bought at a corner store and laboriously typed into my Apple ][+. In the 40+ years since, word processors have gotten lots of new features, many of which I thought were useful and many more that I found annoying. There were even some of these features that made the writers who used them worse at writing, in my (expert) judgment.

But from the very start, I knew that you couldn't just trust a spellchecker to correct your documents. I mean, I'm a science fiction writer. I started making up silly words decades before coining "enshittification." I've been telling spellcheckers to fuck off since I learned to type. If you aren't a good writer, spellcheckers are dangerous, and the more "advanced" the spellchecker is, the more dangerous it is.

A few of my collaborators insist that I use Office 365's AI-enabled version of Word to work on documents with them. It's maddening. I estimate the ratio of good suggestions to bad ones that M365 insists on shoving into my face at about 1:100. It's practically unusable – so much so that I often copy the block of text we're working on into a text editor, make my changes, then paste it back into the Word window.

If I were to accept even 10% of these suggestions, my work would be made significantly worse. Putting chatbots into Word pushed it from "annoying" into "enshittening." I certainly understand how relying on a chatbot to make edits to your work could make it worse.

That's where discernment comes in. I have written more than 30 books over the past 25 years. I have lots of experience defending my word choices, and not just against the mechanical judgments of a high-handed spellchecker, but also against overreaching copyeditors and paranoid publisher's lawyers. I know which words I want to write, and I know why I want to write them – and I know when a suggested fix is a good one and when it's wrong or stupid or just plain clunky. When it comes to writing, I have discernment.

That's not true when it comes to higher math. I would no more ask a chatbot to explain "the Jacobian conjecture counterexample" than I would tell my writing students to get a chatbot to suggest ways to fix their stories:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/07/delicious-pizza/#hold-the-gravel

I don't know nearly enough about math to ask a chatbot to explain it, or check my work, or even assemble a bibliography of human-authored works I should work my way through if I want to learn about it. If I wanted to understand "the Jacobian conjecture counterexample," I would set aside several days and work my way through that gnarly Wikipedia entry and its references and blue links to related concepts. If I really wanted to understand it, I'd enroll in a course at the Open University or Khan Academy.

All of this has been obvious to me since I first encountered LLM-powered bots. If you understand a subject really well – well enough to discern useful bot output from defective bot output – then bots can be useful. Sometimes very useful, mostly ordinarily useful. For example, I've been writing Pluralistic for about 6.5 years now. I've written 1,683 posts now (1,684 after I hit publish on this one), and the corpus is now getting large enough that I sometimes struggle to find a post I'm trying to reference, even with all my careful tagging and my extensive knowledge of WordPress's URL-line options for searching the database with tag and keyword combos.

I've been toying with the idea of exporting my whole corpus and shoveling it into a local chatbot, so that I can type, "Which post did I talk about the evils of showing people your chatbot output in?" and get a link to the correct essay:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/02/nonconsensual-slopping/#robowanking

(Don't follow this link! I will be referencing the essay it goes to shortly; I struggled to find it when I sat down to write today; I'd accidentally tagged it with "at" instead of "ai" and missed the typo when I published it.)

There are very few subjects I have more discernment over than "essays I have written." If I ask a chatbot to tell me which post I'm thinking of, I will instantly know which of its guesses are correct and which ones aren't. No one in the universe is better qualified than me to perform this task. No one ever will be.

Now, as it happens, I know exactly how badly a chatbot can screw up when it comes to my own work, because strangers insist on asking chatbots about me and then, for reasons I find baffling, they send me the output. Please don't show anyone your chatbot transcripts unless they ask to see them. It's embarrassing at best and annoying at worst:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/02/nonconsensual-slopping/#robowanking

(There's that reference I promised. You can follow the link now!)

Again, discernment is everything when it comes to getting useful work out of a chatbot. If you don't know anything about my work and you ask a chatbot to explain it to you, you will likely be badly misled. If you are familiar with my work and you ask a chatbot for the best examples where I explain a given subject, you may get a good answer, and if you get a bad one, you'll know it.

The centrality of discernment to productive AI usage is obvious, and that's why I find the insistence that AI can be used as a teaching assistant (or worse, a teacher) so baffling. By definition, a student isn't an expert on the subject they're studying. That's the whole point of studying – to acquire knowledge and thus discernment. Asking students to learn via chatbot explanations is both incoherent and dangerous.

Doubtless, there are ways that teachers might find chatbots useful, but for Christ's sake, don't use them to teach. There's plenty of ways teachers can use chatbots without asking students to learn from them.

Here's an example. My daughter graduated from a big, typical American high school a couple years ago, and I spent her high-school years getting progressively angrier about the bad compromises that her teachers were forced into.

Between "Common Core" and "Advanced Placement," the US system has been highly standardized. Teachers are under enormous pressure to teach specific aspects of specific subjects in a specific order, and students are told that their future life chances turn on their ability to pass high-stakes tests:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/16/flexibility-in-the-margins/#a-commons

This gives rise to many frustrations for teachers and students alike, but nothing got my dander up so much as my daughter's math teachers' testing practices. In all of my kid's higher math classes, teachers had a single, prized set of tests, and lived in fear of these escaping into the wild and turning into cheating aids. As a result, teachers collected students' math exams and quizzes and did not return them. Students sat exams, worked through the problems and got their grades – but were not allowed to take home their tests to see where they went wrong.

Look, I know I'm no mathematician, and I know I'm not a math teacher, but I know enough about pedagogy to know that this is crazy. This is like trying to get better at archery by loosing arrows at a target but not checking to see where they hit. It's bananas.

I also understand why the teachers felt they had to do it. Writing test questions that test for specific concepts in a specific order is a lot of work, and generating new tests for every class is the kind of task that would consume time better spent on lesson planning and meeting with students.

It's easy to imagine a teacher who creates prompts for each test question that cause a chatbot to emit a new test paper for each class, along with answer keys. These questions are easily validated by a skilled teacher, who definitionally has the discernment to know whether a test question fits the bill. I could even see vibe-coding a little app to spit these questions out – though again, I would want the teacher to work through the questions each time to make sure they were sound.

Both my parents are teachers. My brother is a teacher. I teach every now and again. Teachers do a lot of repetitive, unrewarding work. They also do a lot of difficult, creative, extremely important work. Good teachers have the discernment to sort good classroom materials from bad ones. They do that already, because just as you don't need an LLM to generate bad spellchecker suggestions, you also don't need an LLM to generate sub-par educational materials. There are plenty of "educational" publishers who'll do that all day long.

AI is a normal technology. That means there are times when it is useful and times when it is pointless or actively harmful. One rule of thumb for chatbots is that they can only provide useful information to experts who have the discernment to ignore the defective output that LLMs always emit. That means that the dream of chatbots as replacements for teachers is a nightmare.

Getting rid of teachers because we all have chatbots is like getting rid of doctors because we all have the plague.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• How Far Did Vannevar Bush Get on the Memex? https://brewster.kahle.org/2026/07/26/how-far-did-vannevar-bush-get-on-the-memex/

• Things with Feathers https://vimeo.com/1188522762/7efe874428?share=copy&fl=sv&fe=ci

• Neuromancer — Official Teaser https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g79GPZSQHBk

• Shop worker owned businesses online https://www.workerowned.info/marketplace

• Americans — including many Republicans — are losing faith in capitalism, polling shows https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/23/politics/republicans-capitalism-socialism-poll

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago How to help someone use a computer https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/how-to-help.html/

#20yrsago Arrested for taking a pic of a cop arresting someone else https://web.archive.org/web/20060813102257/http://www.nbc10.com/news/9574663/detail.html

#15yrsago Batman logo in equation form https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/j2qjc/do_you_like_batman_do_you_like_math_my_math/

#15yrsago Vindictive WalMart erroneously accuses couple of shoplifting, has husband deported, wife fired, costs them house and car https://web.archive.org/web/20111002102637/https://www.courthousenews.com/2011/07/26/38455.htm

#15yrsago House Committee passes bill requiring your ISP to spy on every click and keystroke you make online and retain for 12 months https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/07/house-committee-approves-bill-mandating-internet

#15yrsago Fuck and the law https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=896790&

#15yrsago Bill Nye explains to Fox News why lunar volcanoes don’t disprove anthropogenic global warming https://web.archive.org/web/20110924185725/https://www.mediamatters.org/mmtv/201107280007

#10yrsago North Carolina’s voter suppression law struck down as “racist” https://edition.cnn.com/2016/07/29/politics/north-carolina-voter-id/index.html

#10yrsago Pregnancy-tracking app was riddled with vulnerabilities, exposing extremely sensitive personal information https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics-computers/mobile-security-software/glow-pregnancy-app-exposed-women-to-privacy-threats-a1100919965/

#10yrsago “Tellin The World” 1972 voting PSA aimed at 18-25 y/o working-class voters https://archive.org/details/TellinTheWorld

#10yrsago Trump campaign frisks, then blocks ticketed Washington Post reporter at Pence rally https://web.archive.org/web/20160729170353/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/07/28/a-washington-post-reporter-was-banned-from-a-trump-pence-rally-yesterday-that-should-frighten-you/

#10yrsago Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz calls Apple’s tax strategy a “fraud” https://web.archive.org/web/20160731112543/http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-28/stiglitz-calls-apple-s-profit-reporting-in-ireland-a-fraud

#5yrsago Unauthorized cups https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/29/impunity-corrodes/#well-run-dry

#5yrsago Tracking you with accelerometer signatures https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/29/impunity-corrodes/#in-motion

#5yrsago Stories from Black women's customer service hell https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/29/impunity-corrodes/#arise-ye-prisoners

#5yrsago Bankruptcy and elite impunity https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/29/impunity-corrodes/#morally-bankrupt

#1yrago Boss-politics antitrust and the MAGA crackup https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/29/bondi-and-domination/#superjove

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Virtual: EFFecting Change: Who the Machine Serves, Aug 12
  https://www.eff.org/event/effecting-change-who-machine-serves

• Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
  https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

• Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24
  https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/program/

• Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25
  https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
  https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/

• London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
  https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn

• South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
  https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

Recent appearances (permalink)

• AI is not inevitable (Betakit)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbiTVkq1WHo

• A Conversation with Lina Khan (Law and Economy Student Network)
  https://www.youtube.com/live/7Ak5LZllqwE

• Will AI ever come alive, and what happens if it does? (BBC News)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lzk4o3fPZZE

• Waarom jij straks het hulpje van AI bent (VPRO)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOnvR2fs8CA

• Talk Tech Bock (Vera Linß)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PFjGvQoBgc

Latest 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/

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

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

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

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:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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

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

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links

• How the EU can punish Google (despite Trump): Grant me the courage to change the things I can.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Chilling Effects; Billy Bragg v Myspace; Glenn Beck calls murdered Norwegian children "Hitler Youth"; Photog sues Getty for $1b copyfraud; Best paid CEOs perform worst; Olympics v "Olympics"; Alberta tar sands v "hot lesbians"; IoT security apocalypse; 3 Little Pigs in pidgin; The nasty party; Copyright extortionist infringed fellow extortionist; Grandpa mobbed for photographing grandson in park; Ice Bucket Challenge didn't cure ALS; Twiddling enshittifies your brain.
• Upcoming appearances: 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.

How the EU can punish Google (despite Trump) (permalink)

The "Serenity Prayer" (Serenity to accept things I can't change/Courage to change the things I can/Wisdom to know the difference) is usually cited as pop psychology or addiction recovery advice, but I think there's a place for it in policymaking.

Take the EU's fight against US Big Tech. During the Biden years, the EU's tech policy matured into something serious and ambitious, culminating in the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and Digital Services Act (DSA), a pair of big, muscular policies that would curb Big Tech's most abusive conduct. The EU's ambition didn't occur in a vacuum: it was part of a global wave of antitrust fervor whose top agenda item was reining in tech:

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

In this fight, the EU had important partners all over the world. For example, South Korea and Japan used the facts uncovered through EU enforcement action against Google and Apple to pursue similar cases:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/10/an-injury-to-one/#is-an-injury-to-all

But the EU's most important partner in its fight against American Big Tech was America. Biden's trustbusters – Lina Khan, Rohit Chopra, Jonathan Kanter, Tim Wu, et al – were every bit as serious about Big Tech power as anyone in the EU. After all, the American public are always the first victims of any new tech scam, and America is the only country with a large, affluent population who lack modern, comprehensive consumer privacy protection, making Americans highly prized prey for tech companies:

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

With America and the EU on the same side of the tech fight, the world had a fighting chance. Tech knew this, which is why Big Tech backed Trump hard during the 2024 election and aggressively curried his favor after he won. From the tech barons who paid $1m each to sit behind Trump on the inaugural dais to the millions tech companies donated to Trump's Epstein Ballroom at the White House, tech has made it clear that it supports anything Trump wants to do, provided he shields Big Tech from any attempt to limit their ability to spy on and steal from Americans and the world.

Even before he took office, Trump made it clear how he would reward tech's loyalty: weeks before the inauguration, Trump went to Davos and threatened the EU with reprisals if they enforced the DSA or DMA against his tech companies:

https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/23/trumps-not-happy-with-how-eu-regulators-have-treated-us-tech-giants/

Trump wasted no time leaning on US trading partners on behalf of Big Tech. He bullied Canadian PM Mark Carney into dropping his plan to tax US tech companies. Big Tech uses a variety of tax-cheating gambits to evade taxation around the world, making it impossible for (tax-paying) domestic companies to compete:

https://www.canada.ca/en/department-finance/news/2025/06/canada-rescinds-digital-services-tax-to-advance-broader-trade-negotiations-with-the-united-states.html

Trump also got UK PM Keir Starmer to drop his plan to tax tech:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/01/starmer-offered-big-us-tech-firms-tax-cuts-in-return-for-lower-trump-tariffs

And he got the EU to roll back its plan to regulate AI:

https://fortune.com/2025/11/07/eu-ai-act-weaken-regulation-delay-big-tech-trump-government/

None of the governments that caved to Trump got anything in return. As I've written:

Give Trump everything he asks for and he'll demand more. Deny Trump anything and he'll demand more. Sign a contract with Trump and he'll break it. Send Trump an invoice and he'll stiff you. For Trump, "the art of the deal" can be summed up in one word: renege.

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/22/table-flipper/#graveyard-of-indispensable-nations

Case in point: after the EU surrendered to Trump on AI regulation, Trump announced that a on ban EU officials who had worked on the Digital Services Act from traveling to the USA:

https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2025/12/announcement-of-actions-to-combat-the-global-censorship-industrial-complex/

Then, after the EU made more concessions to Trump, he announced a ban on even more EU officials:

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-trump-administration-targets-europe-s-content-moderation-laws

Trump ordered his tech giants to dig through EU officials' private correspondence so he can figure out who to ban next:

https://www.politico.eu/article/us-congress-judiciary-committee-big-tech-private-communication-eu-officials/

Trump's tech companies got the memo. When the EU ordered Apple to follow the law, Apple told the EU to fuck off:

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

After all, Apple is a key partner in the Trump administration's mass deportations. Apple blocked an iPhone app that warns Apple customers if they're about to be kidnapped or murdered by ICE. Trump needs Apple, just as much as Apple needs Trump:

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

Despite this, the EU keeps trying to enforce its laws against Trump's companies. Last week, the Commission announced a $1b fine against Google for violating the Digital Services Act with conduct that cost Europeans many billions:

https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/commission-fines-google-eur890-million-breaches-digital-markets-act-2026-07-23_en

In other words, Google wasn't even being ordered to disgorge all the money it stole, just some of it. Remember, a fine is a price: the EU's fine here will only make this kind of cheating slightly less profitable.

Nevertheless, Trump responded immediately by threatening the EU with many billions more in tariffs if they continue to attempt to enforce the law against one of his companies:

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2026/07/24/trump-says-eu-to-pay-very-big-price-for-890-million-google-fine_6755804_4.html

Trump, the European Commission and Google all know this is about more than one $1b fine. The DSA and DMA both provide for steeply rising fines and other penalties for repeat offenders, and Google clearly has no plan to end its very profitable European crime-spree. Trump's threats aren't a bid to kill this enforcement – Trump wants to kill all enforcement.

Retaliatory tariffs aren't the only weapon Trump has at his disposal. If the EU (or any other country) levies a serious fine against Google, Apple, Oracle, Microsoft, or any of Trump's other tech companies, Trump can order US banks not to turn over those fines, even after the EU sends them a court order for the money. If a bank defies Trump, he can threaten to yank its charter. Or he could just run the same swindle he pulled on Tiktok: stealing the whole company and selling it to one of his buddies, who will run it the way Trump wants.

The reality is that without America's assistance, the EU has precious little hope of forcing American companies to do things they don't want to do. In terms of the Serenity Prayer, this is "a thing they cannot change."

The Serenity Prayer doesn't stop with "things you can't change." The next line seeks "the courage to change the things I can." The EU has no control over Google's conduct, but it has total control over its own conduct.

Specifically, the EU could get rid of the laws that ban European companies from modifying US tech exports. The EU adopted the Copyright Directive in 2001. Article 6 of the EUCD makes it a crime to reverse-engineer and modify a device without the manufacturer's permission. This law was adopted under pressure from the US Trade Representative, who threatened the EU with tariffs on its exports unless it adopted an "anticircumvention rule" that banned EU technologists from making products that let Europeans prevent US tech companies from stealing their money and data":

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

This law is still in force in the EU, despite the fact that Trump (predictably) reneged on the US side of the bargain, hitting the EU with massive tariffs and even threatening to steal part of Denmark.

Article 6 of the Copyright Directive is the reason European tech companies can't jailbreak America's apps, whether that's to get its government and corporate data off of US platforms:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/15/freedom-of-movement/#data-dieselgate

Or to modify American social media apps to respect EU privacy laws:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/30/zucksauce/#gandersauce

The EU can't control what Apple or Google do. But the EU can absolutely decide whether Trump's companies can use Europe's courts to destroy European companies that defend the privacy and economic integrity of the European people.

If the EU kills off Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, they can use European companies to bring Google and Apple's defective tech exports into compliance with European law. Unlike Trump's companies, those companies can be forced to pay their taxes and respect their users' privacy, labor and consumer rights.

That's the Serenity Prayer's "wisdom to know the difference."

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Nate Silver discovers the educated poor https://crookedtimber.org/2026/07/25/nate-silver-discovers-the-educated-poor/

• Imagine a World in Which Microsoft Sold Cars the Way It Sells Software https://www.thesling.org/imagine-a-world-in-which-microsoft-sold-cars-the-way-it-sells-software/

• Tesla swapped a solar owner’s lease contract for the Book of Enoch https://electrek.co/2026/07/23/tesla-solar-lease-contract-book-of-enoch/

• Canadian legislator reads out apparent LLM response in floor speech https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/canadian-legislator-reads-out-apparent-llm-response-in-floor-speech/

• The Resistance Liberal Lawyers Helping Trump Take Over the Media https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-resistance-liberal-lawyers-helping

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Chilling Effects https://web.archive.org/web/20010801172448/http://eon.law.harvard.edu/chill/

#25yrsago 13-year-old hacker's book deal: “The Unofficial Guide to Ethical Hacking" https://web.archive.org/web/20011102164905/http://www.vnunet.com/News/1124279

#20yrsago France’s new copyright law slaughters kills use and open source https://web.archive.org/web/20060812223624/http://soufron.typhon.net/spip.php?article150

#20yrsago Billy Bragg gets MySpace’s terms of service changed https://web.archive.org/web/20100809150257/http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=34570397&blogID=137856388&MyToken=626131d4-c695-42ba-867b-754b9e2bfeaa

#15yrsago Buy an Old West town in South Dakota for $0.8M https://web.archive.org/web/20110728012824/https://edition.cnn.com/2011/US/07/27/south.dakota.town.sale/index.html

#15yrsago Glenn Beck compares murdered Norway campers to “Hitler Youth” https://www.latimes.com/archives/blogs/top-of-the-ticket/story/2011-07-25/opinion-glenn-beck-hits-new-low-compares-norway-victims-to-hitler-youth

#15yrsago 3 Little Pigs rendered into Papua New Guinea pidgin https://www.abc.net.au/reslib/200709/r184705_686227.mp3

#15yrsago Why they call the Tories “the nasty party” https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/jul/28/tory-lib-dems-clash-on-policy

#15yrsago US ISP/copyright deal: a one-sided private law for corporations, without public interest https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/07/graduated-response-deal-what-if-users-had-been

#15yrsago Copyright extortionist ripped off his competitor’s threatening material https://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-lawyers-rip-off-work-from-competitor-110727/

#15yrsago Karl Schroeder: Science fiction versus structured study of the future, sf as aspiration https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/07/beyond-prediction.html

#15yrsago Norwegian PM refuses to let terrorist attacks drive his country to intolerance and paranoid “security” https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/28/world/europe/28norway.html?_r=1

#15yrsago Man with camera in park who fled angry parent sought by police (turns out he was taking pix of his grandson) https://web.archive.org/web/20110829052009/https://pixiq.com/article/man-photographing-grandkid-in-park-deemed-suspicious

#10yrsago Laurie Penny at the DNC: “Dissent will not be tolerated. Protest will not be permitted.” https://medium.com/welcome-to-the-scream-room/bad-moon-rising-8cd348df50e9#.9lhcixjn1

#10yrsago The Ice Bucket Challenge did not fund a breakthrough in ALS treatment https://web.archive.org/web/20160914225439/http://www.healthnewsreview.org/2016/07/ice-bucket-challenge-breakthrough-experts-pour-cold-water-superficial-reporting/

#10yrsago Silicon Valley banks offer tech giants’ new hires 100% mortgages on 24 hours’ notice https://web.archive.org/web/20160727095557/http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-27/zero-down-on-a-2-million-house-is-no-problem-in-silicon-valley

#10yrsago Patent fighters attack the crown jewels of three of America’s worst patent trolls https://web.archive.org/web/20160727191625/https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/07/patent-defense-group-seeks-to-knock-out-top-three-trolls-of-2015/

#10yrsago Censorship company drops bogus lawsuit against researchers who outed them https://citizenlab.ca/research-interest/

#10yrsago Photographer sues Getty Images for $1B because they’re charging for pix she donated to LoC https://hyperallergic.com/photographer-files-1-billion-suit-against-getty-for-licensing-her-public-domain-images/

#10yrsago First-ever Michelin star for street food awarded to Singaporean hawker stalls https://web.archive.org/web/20160723174014/http://uk.reuters.com/article/us-singapore-food-hawkers-michelin-star-idUKKCN1021XA

#10yrsago Highest-paid CEOs generate lowest shareholder returns https://www.msci.com/documents/10199/91a7f92b-d4ba-4d29-ae5f-8022f9bb944d

#10yrsago Olympics to companies: mentioning “Olympics” in social media is a trademark violation #https://web.archive.org/web/20160727075209/https://www.espn.com/olympics/story/_/id/17120510/united-states-olympic-committee-battle-athletes-companies-sponsor-not-olympics

#10yrsago Pro-tar-sands activists say dirty Canadian oil is better because “lesbians are hot” https://www.joeydevilla.com/2016/07/26/this-ill-advised-hot-lesbians-ad-promoting-canadian-vs-saudi-oil-is-real-and-not-a-parody-by-the-onion/

#5yrsago The infosec apocalypse is nigh https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/27/gas-on-the-fire/#a-safe-place-for-dangerous-ideas

#1yrago How twiddling enshittifies your brain https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/28/twiddlehazard/#outboard-brains-considered-harmful

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Virtual: EFFecting Change: Who the Machine Serves, Aug 12
  https://www.eff.org/event/effecting-change-who-machine-serves

• Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
  https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

• Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24
  https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/program/

• Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25
  https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
  https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/

• London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
  https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn

• South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
  https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

Recent appearances (permalink)

• A Conversation with Lina Khan (Law and Economy Student Network)
  https://www.youtube.com/live/7Ak5LZllqwE

• Will AI ever come alive, and what happens if it does? (BBC News)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lzk4o3fPZZE

• Waarom jij straks het hulpje van AI bent (VPRO)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOnvR2fs8CA

• Talk Tech Bock (Vera Linß)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PFjGvQoBgc

• How To Think About AI Before It’s Too Late (This Is Hell)
  https://thisishell.com/episodes/1919

Latest 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/

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

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

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

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:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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

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

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links

• Apple's robo-repo: Privatizing the risk premium, socializing its costs.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Printed batteries; Monopoly credit cards; Mapping airport power outlets; EMI loves pirates; Mexican indigenous phone co-op; Sewer cover textiles; Surge pricing v antitrust; Carbon offsets v forest fires; Charter schools as money laundries.
• Upcoming appearances: 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.

Apple's robo-repo (permalink)

It may strike you as weird, but lenders love to lend money to poor people who will have trouble paying back their loans. Obviously, lenders want to be repaid, and obviously the more money you have, the easier it is to settle your debts, but (paradoxically) that means that if you have a lot of money, you expect to pay less to borrow.

In other words: because poor people have a higher likelihood of defaulting, their loans come with higher interest rates and worse terms. Debt is steeply regressive: the less money you have, the more you're expected to pay. The industry term for this is the "risk premium": the riskier a loan is, the more it costs the borrower.

Lenders are always seeking the highest possible return on their loan-books, which makes that "risk premium" awfully tempting. Why loan $1m to Elon Musk at 0.5% interest when you can make 10,000 $100 payday loans to non-union Tesla workers on food stamps at 1,000% interest?

Obviously, the fly in the ointment here is the risk in "risk premium." The reason the risk premium exists is that poor borrowers have a harder time paying their loans. That can be good, up to a point: if you're Klarna and you're originating loans to people Chipotle lunches on the installment plan, you want your borrowers to miss several payments. Klarna loans are free if you pay them back on time, but if you miss a payment, you're hit with a huge penalty charge and sky-high interest (on top of the principal and the penalty). On a small purchase, penalties and interest can quickly add up to a triple-digit APR.

That's where Klarna makes its money: people who miss their burrito installment payments. However: if a Klarna borrower goes bankrupt before they've repaid the principal, Klarna loses money. A successful loan-book of unsecured burrito mortgages depends on the existence of many missed payments and few defaults.

"Financial innovation" is often just a project to decrease the risk in risky loans, but without decreasing the risk premium you get paid for issuing those loans. It's a way to eat your cake and have it too: even though you've reduced the likelihood that you'll have to write off your loan, you still charge the borrower as though that risk is unchanged. As with so many aspect of finance, "innovation in lending" is a way to shift value from the financial industry's customers to itself.

Remember the subprime crisis? The whole point of collateralized debt obligations and swaps was to offer loans to people with bad credit – even loans they obviously couldn't pay back – without incurring a default risk. Subprime mortgages supercharged the practice of loan origination and resale (where a bank offers you a loan and then sells that loan to someone else, so your default becomes their problem) by splitting the loans into pieces. These pieces were recombined according to complex mathematical formulas that supposedly "proved" that the default risk from poor borrowers had been "offset" by combining them with other borrowers' loans and wrapping them in opaque insurance contracts.

Those subprime mortgages came with cheap "teaser rates" – the interest rate you paid over the first couple years – but then the interest payments "ballooned" to farcical sums that borrowers had no hope of repaying. Those farcical sums were the risk premium. When financiers transmuted these high-risk 30-year mortgages into complex derivatives, they were effectively promising their customers a piece of that risk premium for 28 out of the 30 years that the mortgage ran for.

But it wasn't all financial engineering: subprime mortgage salesmen could also promise customers that they wouldn't lose everything even after a wave of borrower bankruptcies and defaults. That's because mortgages are secured: they are backed by deeds for the homes the borrowers own(ed). If a borrower goes bust, the lender can repossess their house or apartment and sell it to recover the loan amount.

Now, the finance sector did repossess a fuckton of houses after the crash. Foreclosure and eviction became official policy: Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told Obama that a wave of foreclosures was necessary to "foam the runways" for the banks, so Obama encouraged banks to foreclose on their loans, rather than restructuring them so that Americans could keep their homes:

https://wallstreetonparade.com/2012/08/how-treasury-secretary-geithner-foamed-the-runways-with-childrens-shattered-lives/

But even with these foreclosures, lenders and their customers lost hundreds of billions on the subprime crisis. That's because all that subprime lending pushed the price of houses up and up and up, so when the market collapsed, those mortgages were "underwater" – the money from selling the foreclosed homes didn't cover their outstanding loans.

Collateralization – backing loans with legally binding promises to surrender some asset if you default – is a way to reduce risk, but it can't eliminate it. Assets degrade: houses burn, cars get totaled, jewelry is stolen. Assets also devalue: a loan backed by bitcoin at $111,000 on the eve of Trump's election will be underwater today with bitcoin at $64,000. This devaluation can also occur when your house's value plummets because Elon Musk repeatedly bombs your neighborhood with flaming rocket debris, or when your Tesla's resale value collapses after Musk throws a string of Seig Heils on national television.

The point being that risk mitigation is never risk elimination, but markets have a hard time distinguishing between the two. Partly that's because of risk shifting. A lender who can "securitize" their loans (turn them into bonds and sell them off to investors) can insulate themselves from risk, because the people who buy the bonds are now carrying that risk.

So many of our crises come from the intersection of these two phenomena: the promise of reducing loan risks without losing the risk premium and the fact that risk reduction can fail suddenly (or be revealed as nothing more than risk-shifting). The first phenomenon creates vast credit bubbles, the second one pops them.

This leaves would-be usurers on an endless quest for new ways to lend money at a premium to poor people while reducing their own risk. You don't need technology to do this – all you need is a captive audience of broke people whom other lenders won't touch.

When the US government adopted the racist practice of "redlining" (denying government-backed loans to Black borrowers), they created a market for predatory pseudo-mortgages called "contract buying." Contract buying is like a mortgage, but without the equity: miss a payment and you get evicted, and you aren't entitled to any of the sale price of the house, even if it was 99.99% paid off when you got kicked out.

Lenders can tip the scales in their favor by making up arbitrary junk fees, and a smart lender waits until the house is almost paid off before whacking the borrower with a ton of these fees. The borrower misses a payment, the seller repossesses the house and sells it again:

https://ippsr.msu.edu/public-policy/michigan-wonk-blog/re-emergence-contract-buying-practice-rooted-mid-20th-century

Contract lending never went away. Wherever you find a desperate, disfavored group who are locked out of the credit system, you'll find scumbag contract lenders running this scam. Take long-haul truckers, among the most exploited workforce in America. Long before Uber made worker misclassification (treating an employee as an independent contractor) mainstream, the trucking industry was effectively indenturing truckers, exerting more control over their lives than a boss could ever impose on a waged worker, while disclaiming any employer-related responsibilities. Truckers don't get health insurance or sick leave – and they don't get paid if they have to sit at a port for 20 hours waiting to pick up a load.

But the exploitation of truckers doesn't stop with mere wage theft. Truckers also "contract buy" their trucks. Their bosses issue loans that let drivers buy their trucks on terms that allow the company to repo the truck after a single missed payment. And of course, bosses have total control over truckers' wages, so a canny boss can wait until a truck is nearly paid off and then stop the driver's wages, forcing them to miss a payment and lose their truck, which can be sold on to the next victim:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170616120011/https://www.usatoday.com/pages/interactives/news/rigged-forced-into-debt-worked-past-exhaustion-left-with-nothing/

Subprime auto-loans bring this same profitable arrangement to regular drivers who just need a car to commute, pick up groceries, and shuttle the kids to and from school. A subprime auto-loan often contains the "teaser" and "balloon" rates at the heart of the subprime mortgage bubble: for the first year or two, your car payments are affordable, but then they shoot up to a sum that you can't possibly pay. The lender then repossesses your car, zeroing out your equity, and sells it to another victim:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U2eDJnwz_s

But the subprime car industry puts a decidedly modern spin on the contract lending scam that has been used to profitably rob so many Black home borrowers and long-haul truckers. Subprime lending's risk-reduction relies on repossession. A subprime car lender doesn't just get rich by charging poor borrowers more money that rich borrowers for shittier, older cars. Subprime car dealers repeatedly "sell" that car to many, many poor people, on conditions that all but guarantee that the borrower will default on their loan and lose their car.

This is where tech comes in. Ubiquitous digital networks and computing make it much easier to repo a car. This started with the humble lo-jack, a simple tracker marketed as a way to locate lost or stolen cars. Subprime auto-lenders were early and aggressive lo-jack adopters, because you can't repo a car if you don't know where it is. Installing a lo-jack is much cheaper than paying repo men to drive around looking for the cars you want to claw back, which means that you can sell cars to people who represent worse credit risks, charging a higher risk premium, and still find the car when those high interest rates force your borrower into default.

The next wave of automotive usury-tech was a kind of systematic exploration of the entire space between a car that is repossessed and a car that isn't. Some subprime cars are fitted with an extra stereo system that can only be controlled by the lender over a wireless connection. Miss a payment and this secondary stereo turns itself on and starts playing earsplitting threats about what will happen to you if you don't pay up. The only way to turn it off is to make the payment. The next step is remote immobilization: miss too many payments (or violate a lease clause by crossing the county line) and your car just stops working:

https://archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/09/24/miss-a-payment-good-luck-moving-that-car/

But the apex of this usury-tech comes from (where else?) Tesla. Miss a Tesla payment and your car can do way more than just immobilize itself and tell the dealer where to get the car – it also unlock its doors, flash its lights, honk its horn, and back out of its parking space when the repo man arrives:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

The cheaper the repo, the riskier the loan can be; the riskier the loan, the higher the risk premium. Digital tech makes repo much cheaper, so wherever you find digital tech, you find digital arm-breakers coming up with ways to robo-repo the things you buy.

There's India's subprime phone lenders, who pre-install usury-tech on their phones. This is a tool that spies on the phone's owner, building a dossier of the owner's most frequently used apps. When the owner misses a payment, the phone starts disabling the user's favorite apps, working its way up the list to the most indispensable ones:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers

It's the digital version of the mob loan-shark who breaks a finger, then your hand, then your arm. The more graduated the threat matrix is, the more payments you can capture. A borrower with a broken finger can get to a pawn-broker to sell their wedding-ring; a borrower with two broken legs has a much harder time.

Digital arm-breakers aren't an epiphenomenon of digitization alone. Usury tech only works if the device's owner can't disable it. Remember: a computer is flexible. The only computer we know how to make is the "Turing-complete, universal von Neumann machine," defined as a device that can compute every valid program. If your phone is running a program that disables your apps, then you can install another program that disables that program. Same goes for your car's lo-jack; the stereo system emitting ear-splitting complaints about your car note; and the immobilizer hooked up to your ignition.

That's where the law comes in. In 1998, Bill Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it a felony to produce a tool that bypasses an "access control." That means that if a computer is designed to block you from modifying it, removing that block is a felony, punishable by five years in prison and a $500k fine. DMCA 1201 doesn't distinguish between modifications undertaken for a lawful purpose (changing your printer so it works with generic ink) and unlawful purpose (breaking the locks on a DVD so you can sell infringing copies). DMCA 1201 criminalizes anything the manufacturer dislikes. It's what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business model."

DMCA 1201 is the reason you can't neutralize the digital arm-breakers by deleting or blocking the usury-tech in your car, phone or other device:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

Here's where it gets interesting. Apologists for DMCA 1201 insist that the law is necessary, because it lets device makers lock malicious parties out of your devices. Apple leads the pack here: they use DMCA 1201 to block independent repair of their devices, insisting that this isn't done to extort high fees from you or to force you to throw away and replace last year's iPhone after you drop it. No, Apple does this to protect you – from unscrupulous repairers who might install malware on your phone:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/22/vin-locking/#thought-differently

And Apple says the reason it blocks you from installing apps without using its App Store is to protect you from malicious apps – not to control the app marketplace, where it makes $100b/year on payment processing junk-fees, siphoning off 30% of every dollar you spend in an app:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/01/its-not-the-crime/#its-the-coverup

Apple's greatest accomplishment isn't technological, it's psychological. Apple managed to convince millions of people that buying products from a multi-trillion dollar corporation with close ties to both Trump and Xi makes them members of an oppressed religious minority, and those members of the "cult of Mac" tie themselves into knots insisting that Apple would only ever use its powers for good:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones

But moral behavior doesn't consist solely of resisting the temptation to do bad things – to be truly moral, you must not put yourself in temptation's path in the first place. Morality isn't the strength to resist the siren's song – it's the humility to recognize your own weakness and tie yourself to the mast:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/11/foreseeable-consequences/#airdropped

By giving itself a veto over its customers' choices, Apple deliberately sailed into siren-infested waters, after first putting a gun on every mantelpiece it could find. Now the company is drowning in sin, while spraying gunfire in every direction.

Today, the company is getting into the leasing business. Having monopolized its markets and eliminated the possibility of growth by making and selling things, the company is becoming a lender. As a lender, Apple wants to maximize the risk premiums it can charge, while minimizing its actual risk. That's why the new version of iOS – the operating system for iPhones and iPads – comes with software that lets lenders brick your device if you miss a payment:

https://9to5mac.com/2026/07/21/ios-27-code-suggests-apple-could-restrict-leased-devices-after-missed-payments/

The code steals a trick from India's subprime phone lenders, giving Apple the ability to "restrict apps and services when payments are missed." It hooks into a "Partner Finance Lock," which allows Apple to sell devices to third-party userers who want to get into the subprime game, promising those customers all the imaginative flexibility a digital arm-breaker could dream of.

This was always the trajectory of Apple's decision to sell you a computer that takes orders from its manufacturer, rather than its owner. Apple didn't invent the subprime gadget. It also didn't invent the GUI, the MP3 player or the smartphone. Rather, Apple took those gadgets mainstream – just as it will do with subprime gadgets. Just in time for the affordability crisis, the oil shock, the climate shock, the AI collapse and the tariff shock, the age of the digital arm-breaker has well and truly arrived:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/29/boobytrap/#device-lock-controller

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Public opinion on abortion has shifted 4 years after Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade https://theconversation.com/public-opinion-on-abortion-has-shifted-4-years-after-dobbs-decision-overturned-roe-v-wade-285668

• Reading “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” https://www.not-so-obvious.net/reading-do-artifacts-have-politics/

• Google hit with $1 billion fine for breaking EU antitrust rules https://www.theverge.com/tech/943866/google-alphabet-eu-dma-fine-search-services-play-store-steering

• Why Paramount Should Be Worried https://prospect.org/2026/07/22/why-paramount-should-be-worried-warner-bros-merger-ellison/

• The Plain Language Guide to Digital Privacy https://shannonguides.com/dl/167c8da8a0ab/digital-privacy.pdf

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Shapeable printed batteries https://web.archive.org/web/20011102112023/https://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991069

#20yrsago Monopoly replaces play-money with fake credit-cards https://web.archive.org/web/20070220050926/http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,70131-1228653,00.html

#20yrsago HOWTO build a fax out of salmon tins https://web.archive.org/web/20060828010312/https://blog.modernmechanix.com/2006/07/25/build-a-rather-bad-salmon-can-fax-machine/

#20yrsago Power outlets in airports wiki https://web.archive.org/web/20060807061721/http://wiki.jeffsandquist.com/default.aspx/AirPower/AirPower

#20yrsago How iTunes is bad for the music industry and the public https://web.archive.org/web/20060813140818/http://informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=191000408

#15yrsago Ousted EMI boss: pirates are our best customers, suing is bad for business https://torrentfreak.com/former-google-cio-limewire-pirates-were-itunes-best-customers-110726/

#15yrsago Patent trolls and shakedowns: Intellectual Ventures and the “little guy” https://web.archive.org/web/20160810163346/https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/07/26/138576167/when-patents-attack

#10yrsago Textiles printed directly from sewer covers https://raubdruckerin.de/

#10yrsago Mexican indigenous groups form co-op phone company to serve 356 municipalities https://globalvoices.org/2016/07/26/so-long-phone-companies-mexicos-indigenous-groups-are-getting-their-own-telecoms/

#5yrsago Surge pricing violates antitrust law https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/26/aggregate-demand/#pure-transfer

#5yrsago Oregon's carbon offsets go up in smoke https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/26/aggregate-demand/#murder-offsets

#5yrsago Charter schools are money laundries https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/26/aggregate-demand/#ed-bezzle

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Virtual: EFFecting Change: Who the Machine Serves, Aug 12
  https://www.eff.org/event/effecting-change-who-machine-serves

• Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
  https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

• Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24
  https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/program/

• Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25
  https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
  https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/

• London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
  https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn

• South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
  https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Will AI ever come alive, and what happens if it does? (BBC News)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lzk4o3fPZZE

• Waarom jij straks het hulpje van AI bent (VPRO)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOnvR2fs8CA

• Talk Tech Bock (Vera Linß)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PFjGvQoBgc

• How To Think About AI Before It’s Too Late (This Is Hell)
  https://thisishell.com/episodes/1919

• AI Won't Replace You… But This Might (Deep Focus)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oorWq_m48AQ

Latest 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/

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

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

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

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:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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

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

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X