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PLURALISTIC

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15.10.2025 à 15:17

Pluralistic: Microsoft, Tear Down That Wall! (15 Oct 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (5510 mots)


Today's links


A 1989 black and white photo of the Berlin Wall; peering over the wall is Microsoft's 'Clippy' chatbot.

Microsoft, Tear Down That Wall! (permalink)

Even though he's the darkest of clouds, Trump has some deeply weird silver linings, formed out of a combination of his self-owning isolationism and blunt aggression.

In my quarter-century as a digital activist, I've had cause to work in more than 30 countries. Wherever I went, I'd meet with policymakers about the rules they should be thinking about in order to make their technology work better for their countries. Every single time, they'd agree politely with me, but insist that making any kind of tech-improving rules was impossible, because the US trade representative would kick their teeth in if they tried.

For all of this century, the USTR has been one of the greatest global impediments to a better world, hopping from country to country, demanding policies that would protect American tech firms from foreign competitors – especially the kind of competitor who would improve on American tech products by protecting users' privacy, consumer rights or labor rights while they used them.

The most glaring example of this are "anticircumvention laws." Under these laws, it's illegal to modify any technology that has any kind of anti-modification defenses. In other words, if the manufacturer draws a kind of virtual dotted line around part of the product's software and labels it, "Do not look inside this box," then it becomes illegal to do so, even if you're trying to do something that's otherwise legal.

That means that if your printer is designed to reject generic ink, you can't change the code that verifies the ink cartridge. There's no law that says, "You have to buy your ink from the same company that sold you your printer," but if HP adds any kind of anti-modification measure to its ink-checking code, then disabling that code becomes a serious crime.

Now, these laws are obviously an invitation to mischief. They are used to prevent independent repair of everything from tractors to cars to phones to games consoles to ventilators. They're used to stop you from blocking ads or surveillance on your phone or "smart" TV. They keep you locked into manufacturers' app stores, payment systems and other add-ons, which means that you are constantly being ripped off with junk fees, and you can't install the software of your choosing, including software that will help you avoid being kidnapped by masked thugs and sent to a secret torture prison:

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

The US passed the first of these laws in 1998, when Bill Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. As the ink was still drying on Clinton's signature, the US trade rep started racing around the world, demanding that America's trading partners adopt their own version of the law:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/13/ctrl-ctrl-ctrl/#free-dmitry

As these laws were adopted around the world, US tech giants were given carte blanche to extract more money and data from their global users. American users were getting ripped off too, of course (they were the first victims of Big Tech), but at least the US stock market reaped the benefit of Big Tech's incredibly lucrative scams. But for America's trading partners, anticircumvention was an entirely losing proposition: their people got ripped off for their data and their money, and their tech companies couldn't go into business selling products to disenshittify America's cash-and-data extraction machines.

So why did America's trading partners agree to anticircumvention law? Well, that was down to the tender ministrations of the US trade rep. Countries that didn't pass anticircumvention were threatened with US tariffs.

I used to occasionally guest-lecture at an international relations grad program at the Central European University in Budapest, and one summer, I had a student who had served as the information minister to a Central American country while the US was negotiating the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). This student described getting a phone call from their country's chief negotiator who said, "I know you told me not to budge on anticircumvention, but the USTR tells me that if we don't give them this, they will block our agricultural exports. I'm sorry." Country by country, the world fell into line.

When someone tells you, "You'd better do what I say or I'm going to burn your house down," and then they burn your house down, you'd be an absolute sucker if you kept up your part of the bargain.

I find it absolutely bizarre that the USTR spent decades racing around the world, getting every country on earth to sign up to "America First" policies by threatening them with tariffs, and then Trump actually imposed the tariffs anyway, which has opened up the space for every country to get rid of those America First policies.

Of course, that's not all Trump has done. He's also made it abundantly clear that he considers America's (former) allies to be geopolitical and economic competitors, and that US tech is one of the primary weapons he will use to wage war on the world. He got Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to cave on taxing Big Tech, which means that they'll be able to go on cheating on their taxes, while Canadian companies won't be able to, which means Canada's tech sector will never be able to compete:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd0vv2pe7ydo

Trump has also ordered the EU to scrap its new tech antitrust laws, the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, which aim to open up space for European competitors to US tech:

https://www.politico.eu/article/trumps-antitrust-agency-chief-blasts-eu-digital-rules-as-taxes-on-american-firms/

But more than that, Trump and US tech have teamed up to attack and deplatform public officials that Trump has beef with. Take Karim Khan, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in the Hague. Khan swore out a criminal complaint and arrest warrant for the génocidaire Benjamin Netanyahu, and Trump sanctioned Khan. Then, Microsoft cut off Khan's access to his account, nuking his email, calendar, address book and files:

https://apnews.com/article/icc-trump-sanctions-karim-khan-court-a4b4c02751ab84c09718b1b95cbd5db3

For officials all over the world, the message couldn't be clearer: Trump sees you as the enemy, and he will use American tech companies to cut you off at the knees if you don't roll over for him.

Enter the Eurostack. This is an initiative from the EU that seeks to fund and deploy open source equivalents to the platforms that the European public, its businesses and its governments are currently locked into:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/25/eurostack/#viktor-orbans-isp

Thus far, Eurostack's focus has been on building those Made-in-the-EU alternatives to the US tech stack, and on financing data-center rollout. But very shortly, Eurostack advocates are going to hit a wall.

Escaping from US Big Tech isn't merely a matter of having another service to move your data and interactions to. You also have to have a way to transition from the old, US service to the new Eurostack equivalent.

No government ministry, no business, no individual is going to manually copy-and-paste thousands (or millions) of documents out of Microsoft, Apple or Google's cloud into the Eurostack. No one is going to individually move all the edit histories, email chains, and file permissions over. These files and data-structures are essential to the people who created them, and they often contain sensitive information and compliance data that is illegal to delete.

Sure, the EU could try to order American Big Tech companies to create export tools so that Europeans can easily retrieve their data in formats that can be faithfully imported into Eurostack services, but we can already see how that will play out.

Last year's Digital Markets Act contains a modest set of "interoperability" requirements that require big US companies like Apple to open up their platforms to rival app stores and payment processors. Apple's monopoly over iPhone apps is a big deal – it lets the company structure the market for software in Europe, without any accountability or limits, and Apple extracts a 30% tax on every euro that changes hands via an iOS app. Globally, Apple makes more than $100b/year from this "app tax."

When the EU passed a law aimed at halting this racket, Apple lost its mind. First, they proposed a "solution" to this that was so onerous and tortured that it was a kind of sick joke:

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

Then they threatened to stop selling iPhones in the EU altogether:

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

Now, Apple has filed 18 legal challenges to any interoperability mandate under the DMA:

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/C/2025/5213/oj/eng

If this is how an American tech company responds to a small-potatoes order to give Europeans more choice over how they use their own devices and data, imagine what these US giants will do if the EU orders them to open up their platforms so people can leave altogether!

The only plausible path from US Big Tech to the Eurostack runs straight through anticircumvention. The EU needs to repeal Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, a law it passed at the behest of the US Trade Representative, to protect the rent-extraction tactics of American tech companies. We need to make it legal for European technologists to reverse-engineer the American tech platforms' websites and apps so that Europeans can get their data out of America's tech silos and into open, sovereign, privacy-respecting, consumer rights-preserving, worker-protecting Eurostack versions.

Building the Eurostack without thinking about migration tools is a recipe for disappointment. It's like building housing for East Germans…in West Berlin, without sparing a thought for how those East Germans are going to get to the new apartment blocks.

The good news is, there's no reason to keep Article 6 of the Copyright Directive on the books. The law has always been a wreck. It's one of the primary barriers to Right to Repair: companies now build devices with "access controls" on their parts. Even after you install a new part into a device, it won't start working until the manufacturer's representative unlocks it (for a hefty fee). Under anticircumvention laws like EUCD Article 6, it's illegal to bypass these locks.

What's more, the digital locks that EUCD 6 protects are almost all to be found in American products. Only a handful of EU manufacturers rely on these, and they use them in terrible ways. Volkswagen used the fact that it was illegal to reverse-engineer its engines to disguise the fact that it was cheating on its emissions tests, and the resulting "Dieselgate" scandal killed thousands of Europeans:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/09/18/dieselgate-kills-5000-europeans-per-year/

Newag, a Polish train manufacturer, boobytraps the trains they sell. When these trains sense that they have been taken to a competitor's train-yard for maintenance, they render themselves inoperable. Newag then charges thousands of euros to remotely "repair" their own sabotage. When this was revealed by a team of independent security researchers, Newag used claims under EUCD 6 in an attempt to intimidate them into silence:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-james-hill

Mercedes won't let you unlock your new car's full acceleration capability unless you pay them a monthly subscription fee, and any mechanic who tries to bypass this and give you your whole engine's capability violates EUCD 6. BMW won't let you use the feature that auto-dims your high-beams when there's oncoming traffic, and once again, that can't be fixed by another company because of EUCD 6:

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

Any business that relies on EUCD 6 is garbage and should be killed with fire. The global champions of this legal sabotage are all American, but the EU companies that copied their business models are also trash and the EU should be terminating them with extreme prejudice.

It's pretty remarkable that we've forgotten about the kind of reverse-engineering that EUCD 6 bans. This used to be totally normal. Providing tools to move data from one system to another – without permission from your old vendor – is a completely legitimate business.

The only reason we forgot that this stuff existed is that the US trade rep spent 25 years lobotomizing us all, threatening us with tariffs if we dared to do anything that disrupted American Big Tech. With those companies, it's always "disruption for thee, never for me."

In a few short months, Trump has sown the seeds of the destruction of one of the most world's pernicious "America First" systems. Now, it's in the EU's power to send it to a long-overdue grave.

"Mr Cook, Mr Nadella, Mr Ellison, Mr Pichai – tear down that wall!"

(Image: Armin Kübelbeck, CC BY-SA 4.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Japanese court: links to news stories can’t use headlines for link-text https://web.archive.org/web/20060309190419/http://www.ridingsun.com/posts/1129257907.shtml

#20yrsago Understanding broadband regulation https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=557330

#20yrsago Anti-game wacko designs ultra-violent video game to prove games are violent https://web.archive.org/web/20051030003500/http://gc.advancedmn.com/article.php?artid=5883

#20yrsago Gilberto Gil in the Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/music/2005/oct/14/brazil.popandrock

#15yrsago BoomCases: self-powered amps built into old suitcases https://theboomcase.wordpress.com/gallery/

#15yrsago The Singularity won’t be heaven: Annalee Newitz https://web.archive.org/web/20101016204801/http://io9.com/5661534/why-the-singularity-isnt-going-to-happen

#15yrsago Webcam spying school settles with students, pays $1.2M in fees and damages https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna39631890

#15yrsago Rucker and Sterling’s new story: “Goodnight Moon” on Tor.com https://web.archive.org/web/20101016231350/http://www.tor.com/stories/2010/10/good-night-moon

#15yrsago Wonderful Japanese pudding ad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sEI1AUFJKw

#15yrsago Anatomical illustrations from Japan’s Edo period https://pinktentacle.com/2010/10/anatomical-illustrations-from-edo-period-japan/

#15yrsago Travel author sues DHS to make it obey the law with its vast traveller databases https://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/001887.html

#15yrsago Kevin Kelly’s WHAT TECHNOLOGY WANTS: how technology changes us and vice-versa https://memex.craphound.com/2010/10/13/kevin-kellys-what-technology-wants-how-technology-changes-us-and-vice-versa/

#10yrsago TPP requires countries to destroy security-testing tools (and your laptop) https://web.archive.org/web/20151020122940/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/white-hat-hackers-would-have-their-devices-destroyed-under-the-tpp

#10yrsago How to make “Dracula’s dentures” cookie sandwiches https://www.the-girl-who-ate-everything.com/draculas-dentures-for-halloween/

#10yrsago Playboy (circulation 800k, down from 5.6m) drops nude images https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/13/business/media/nudes-are-old-news-at-playboy.html

#10yrsago Glitchlife: Gallery of public Blue Screens of Death, including a world-beater https://web.archive.org/web/20151013003105/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/public-blue-screens-of-death-remind-us-that-life-is-a-farce

#10yrsago Bernie Sanders is beating all of Obama’s important 2008 records https://web.archive.org/web/20151013123107/https://www.alternet.org/election-2016/remember-obamas-historic-2008-presidential-run-bernie-sanders-so-far-exceeding-it

#10yrsago How to teach gerrymandering and its many subtle, hard problems https://mitesp.tumblr.com/post/130793404248/how-i-teach-gerrymandering

#10yrsago Police end round-the-clock Assange detail at London’s Ecuadorian embassy https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/police-stop-24-7-monitoring-wikileaks-founder-julian-assange-ecuadorian-embassy-1523634

#10yrsago CIA black-site torture survivors sue shrinks who made $85M overseeing CIA torture program https://theintercept.com/2015/10/13/former-u-s-detainees-sue-psychologists-responsible-for-cia-torture-program/

#10yrsago SRSLY, they want to put DRM in JPEGs https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/theres-no-drm-jpeg-lets-keep-it-way

#10yrsago Fury Road as a vintage run-and-gun side-scroller https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsXWTcVvCwQ

#10yrsago Information leakage shows DEA blew millions on the secret phone trackers it won’t admit it bought https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/oct/14/dea-cell-phone-trackers/

#10yrsago No, poor kids don’t struggle in school because their parents have small vocabularies https://newrepublic.com/article/123093/rich-kids-better-poor-kids-school-its-not-word-gap

#10yrsgo Thrust/parry/counter: the history of Web authentication http://blog.slaks.net/2015-10-13/web-authentication-arms-race-a-tale-of-two-security-experts/

#5yrsago How to spreadsheet https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/14/final_ver2/#csv

#5yrsago Prop 22 is a scam https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/14/final_ver2/#prop-22

#5yrsago What happened in Florida https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/14/final_ver2/#bush-v-gore

#5yrsago Pandemic shock doctrine vs internet freedom https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/14/final_ver2/#freedom-house

#5yrsago Beyond Cyberpunk https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/13/hopeful-disasters/#technologist-wizards

#5yrsago SF as intuition pump https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/13/hopeful-disasters/#narratives

#1yrago Dirty words are politically potent https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/#this-toilet-has-no-central-nervous-system

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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13.10.2025 à 16:19

Pluralistic: How to fix the UK housing crisis (13 Oct 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (5184 mots)


Today's links


A sepia-tinted slum scene. In the foreground is a gleaming Cooper Mini in the livery of London estate agents Foxton's; one of the shanties behind it has a Foxton's 'SOLD' sign bolted to it. Over the whole scene rises an ethereal portrait of Margaret Thatcher, dating from her prime ministership.

How to fix the UK housing crisis (permalink)

Here's a surprising stat: from 1845-1960, UK house prices pretty much kept pace with inflation – a house you'd bought 20 years ago could only be sold for more-or-less what you paid for it (technically, houses rose about 0.25% ahead of consumer prices).

From 1960-1979, house prices started to nudge ahead of inflation, averaging gains that were 1.75% higher than consumer prices. But it wasn't until 1980 that the annual above-inflation price increase of houses grew to 3%. Steve Keen's "Remedies for Ridiculous House Prices" explains what happened to make housing so eye-wateringly expensive (and how to make it affordable again):

https://profstevekeen.substack.com/p/remedies-for-ridiculous-house-prices

Keen unpacks just how dramatic this change is: since the Thatcher years, house prices have doubled every 23 years. Before 1960, the house prices rose so slowly that they would have taken 280 years to double (which is to say, the fate of most houses was to turn to rubble, not to double).

So what did Thatcher do to make homes so eye-wateringly expensive? The high-level explanation is that the UK – like much of the world – transformed its housing stock: not a way provide the basic human right to shelter, but rather, an asset:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/14/euthanasia-of-the-rentier/#georgeism

Transforming a human necessity into an asset is a terrible idea. Governments work to increase the price of assets owned by actors in their economy. But increasing the price of housing only benefits the minority who own houses, while everyone else – everyone who needs a roof over their head – suffers. For a comparison, imagine if our governments instituted a policy of making some other necessity as expensive as possible, say, food or water. Transforming shelter into an asset class was always going to end badly.

Keen is an econ prof, and the point of this piece isn't merely to observe this remarkable shift in the economics of having a home, but also to trace the policy choices that led us to this moment, and to propose policies that could change things so that everyone can have a home.

So what did Margaret Thatcher do to destroy the chances of everyday Britons to have a home? Well, this is Margaret Thatcher, so if you guessed the answer was "deregulation," you'd be right. Prior to Thatcher's deregulation, home loans in the UK mostly originated with "building societies," a specialized lender whose operations are fundamentally different from the operations of a bank.

Here's the difference: when a building society makes a home loan, it withdraws money from a regular bank account at a regular bank, much like your savings account. In order for your building society to credit your mortgage account by £100k, there must be a corresponding decrease of £100k in its savings account (just like when you send £10 to a friend, you have £10 less and they have £10 more).

But that's not how it works when a bank originates a loan. Banks are "fiscal agents" for the UK's central bank, the Bank of England. That means that banks can create new money, simply by crediting one of its depositors' accounts. When a bank loans you £100k to buy a house, £100k in new money is created. Banks don't raid other depositors' accounts for your loan – they make new money, out of thin air.

So after the bank originates your loan, your account has £100k more in it, and the bank has an IOU from you for £100k, which sits on its books as an asset. In the moment the money is created, the bank makes £100k in new money for its balance-sheet.

Every time a bank issues a new mortgage loan, the money supply increases – more money is added to the economy. Thatcher deregulated mortgage lending, and after that, the majority of UK mortgages came from banks, not building societies. Every new mortgage increased the supply of money in circulation in the UK.

As Keen writes, this precipitated an "explosion" in house prices – and in household debt, which rose from 20% of GDP to 80% of GDP by the time of the Great Financial Crisis. Since Thatcher, house prices have risen by 350% more than consumer prices.

Thatcher's deregulation "set off a vicious cycle": the existence of more mortgage debt made house prices rise (when banks supply more bidding money to buyers, buyers bid higher sums). As housing prices went up, housing could be used as collateral for still more loans, which encouraged homeowners to stake their homes to borrow money in order to buy more homes to rent out. Because they have so much collateral (an overpriced home), they can borrow so much (from banks that can create money) that they are able to outbid people who don't have a home yet and just want to buy a home so they can live in it.

This is Keen's diagnosis, but the real question is, what do we do about it? The UK housing situation has been vapor-locked, because there's a powerful voting and donating bloc of homeowners who want to keep house prices high, both to maintain their personal net worth, and to avoid having their "chained mortgages" collapse when prices fall and they suddenly no longer have enough collateral and the banks demand repayment.

This is where Keen's proposal gets really interesting. In this installment, he proposes two policies that break the deadlock, offering a glide-path out of the housing crisis, rather than a crash.

The first of these policies is deflationary – it will lower prices. It's called the "PILL" ("Property Income Limited Leverage").

With the PILL, the most a bank could offer a housebuyer for a mortgage loan would be some multiple of the rental income from the property they're buying. Say that multiple is 10, and the home you're trying to buy would rent out at £50k/year: the largest mortgage you'd be allowed to take would be £500k (even if you're not buying a home to rent it out, you'd still be subject to this cap, since potential rental income is a large determinant of the price of a home).

Keen notes that UK rents are really high, but property prices are even higher – property prices (and mortgages) have risen faster than rents. The average London home price is about 25x the annual rent it generates, and London mortgages are about 20x the annual rent for the properties those mortgages cover.

The PILL would cap mortgage issuance at the current multiple (so in London, about 25x annual rent), but that number would be gradually reduced, a few points per year, until it reaches about 10x annual rent. This will have the effect of making homes a much less attractive asset-class for speculators, gradually driving "investors" out of the market, so that the majority of homebuyers would be people who were in the market for somewhere to live.

This will make houses cheaper over time, and the majority of Britons (who can't afford to buy a home) would like this. But house-rich Boomers would not, and for good reason: the austerity-starved UK state has slashed benefits for everyone, and older people rely on selling or borrowing against their homes as a way to remain sheltered, fed, and cared for as they age.

How do we win those Boomers over and stop them from scuttling affordable housing (again)? That's where the second proposal kicks in: AHA (the "Affordable Housing Authority"). This is a system for making homes more valuable, offsetting some of the reductions from the PILL, but without denying homes to people looking for somewhere to live.

The biggest barrier to buying a home isn't the price of the home – it's the price of the home and the price of the mortgage. Decades of mortgage interest vastly increase the total cost of a home, and the interest on a monthly mortgage can make the difference between an affordable home and one that makes you "house poor" (where the cost of your home eats up so much of your income that you struggle to pay for heating, groceries, transportation, etc).

Here's Keen's math: say you're a median UK household (£37k/year in disposable income) and you buy a median house (£270k) with a 10% deposit (what Americans call a "down-payment"), at 7% interest. Over a 25-year mortgage, your monthly payments will be £20.6k/year, more than half of your disposable income.

Not only is this more than you can afford – it's also so much that you just won't get a mortgage from a bank. They'll look at those numbers and decide that you can't afford to pay back this loan (they'd be right, too).

But what if we trim that interest rate to zero? At 0% interest, the annual payments for your mortgage go from £20.6/year to £9,300 per year – an easily affordable sum for the median household.

So the question is, why do we pay so much to the banks in interest? The Econ 101 answer is that banks take a risk when they loan out their depositors' funds, and they need a reward and incentive to take that risk. But banks don't lend out deposits: they create deposits. When you take out a £100k mortgage, the bank adds £100k to your account, without taking it from anywhere else. Banks are "fiscal agents" of the national bank, and they are permitted to create money this way – and then charge you rent (interest) on that money they can create for free.

Keen's AHA is a different kind of lender, a publicly owned one that creates money in exactly the same way as banks do, but without charging interest. The AHA is charged with offering loans solely to people trying to buy a home who have been priced out of the market. These loans will drive property prices up (by putting more buyers into the system), offsetting some of the price declines created by the PILL.

Other than the fact that AHA loans won't come with interest, these loans will work like regular mortgages: the borrower will pay them off every month, until they have paid back the entire principal. If they default on the mortgage, AHA can foreclose on the house and sell it off to get its money back. AHA always gets its money back and costs nothing – on balance – to operate.

Do interest free loans sound like a communist plot to you? Keen asks us to consider such noted socialist proponents for this ideas as Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, who railed against financing the Muscle Shoals hyrdroelectric plant with bank loans, instead insisting that the national bank should simply create the money to make those loans:

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1921/12/06/98768710.html?pageNumber=6

Here's Edison:

[Ford] thinks it’s stupid, and so do I, that for the loan of $30,000,000 of their own money the people of the United States should be compelled to pay $66,000,000—that is what it amounts to, with interest. People who will not turn a shovel of dirt nor contribute a pound of material will collect more money from the United States than will the people who supply the material and do the work. That is the terrible thing about interest.

As Keen points out, it's not merely that the banks that currently issue mortgages don't "turn a shovel of dirt or contribute a pound of material" – they simply will not issue a mortgage to a median buyer. The median buyer can't get a mortgage, so the system is rigged to make them pay someone else's mortgage through their monthly rents, every month until they die.

AHA cuts the banks "out of a market they won't even enter."

Now, it's true that current financial rules (foolishly) ban the Treasury from having a negative balance at the Central Bank. But we don't have to repeal those rules to make this work: the Treasury can offset AHA loans by offering bonds to private banks.

These two policies create "winners all round." New home buyers can afford a home. Banks get interest from AHA bonds to offset losses from limits on mortgage lending. Current home owners get a cushion to protect their net worth even as homes become more affordable.

The loser is the investment sector, the City boys who buy and sell mortgage debt. And you know, fuck those guys.

Keen finishes by teasing one more policy prescription that he thinks will tie this all together: the intriguingly named Modern Debt Jubilee, a way to "to reduce private debt, but in a way that doesn’t cause an economic collapse," which he says he'll cover in his next post. Can't wait!

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago TV on the Internet versus IPTV https://web.archive.org/web/20051013090228/http://gigaom.com/2005/10/11/iptv-versus-tv-over-ip/

#20yrsago Privacy and access-control in America’s theme-parks https://archive.epic.org/privacy/themepark/

#20yrsago Why hotel WiFi sucks https://web.archive.org/web/20090917145044/https://wifinetnews.com/archives/2005/10/ny_times_v_wall_st_journal_on_hotel_internet_fees.html

#20yrsago Vet’s obit: “send acerbic letters to Republicans” https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/chicagotribune/name/theodore-heller-obituary?id=2437473

#15yrsago Canon’s printer/photocopier blocks jobs based on keywords https://www.itnews.com.au/news/canon-blocks-copy-jobs-by-keyword-235047

#15yrsago Tom Waits and Preservation Hall Jazz Band release limited-edition 78RPM record and matching limited edition record-player http://www.tomwaits.com/news/article/108/Preservation_Hall_Jazz_Band_Tom_Waits_On_78_rpm_Vinyl/

#15yrsago Koster’s “Fundamentals of Game Design” https://www.raphkoster.com/2010/10/12/the-fundamentals-of-game-design/

#15yrsago Pratchett’s I Shall Wear Midnight, sentimental and fun book about a witch among enemies https://memex.craphound.com/2010/10/12/pratchetts-i-shall-wear-midnight-sentimental-and-fun-book-about-a-witch-among-enemies/

#15yrsago Depressing million-dollar London homes https://www.oobject.com/category/depressing-million-dollar-london-property/

#15yrsago Library of Congress: Copyright is killing sound archiving https://www.osnews.com/story/23888/us-library-of-congress-copyright-is-destroying-historic-audio/

#15yrsago Irish High Court strikes down “3 strikes” copyright rule https://web.archive.org/web/20101012083637/http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2010/1011/breaking32.html

#15yrsago Rise Again: would you rather be killed by zombies or Blackwater mercs? https://memex.craphound.com/2010/10/11/rise-again-would-you-rather-be-killed-by-zombies-or-blackwater-mercs/

#10yrsago Funny because it’s true: “Tories to build thousands of affordable second homes” https://www.thedailymash.co.uk/politics/politics-headlines/tories-to-build-thousands-of-affordable-second-homes-20151008102712

#10yrsago Facebook UK made £105M in 2014, paid £35M in bonuses, and will pay £4,327 in tax https://www.theguardian.com/global/2015/oct/11/facebook-paid-4327-corporation-tax-despite-35-million-staff-bonuses

#10yrsago Economics research considered unreplicable https://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/feds/2015/files/2015083pap.pdf

#10yrsago The hockey-stick from hell: US incarceration per 100,000 people, 1890-today https://www.vox.com/2015/10/11/9497161/incarceration-history

#10yrsago Read: Austin Grossman’s moving text-adventure story “The Fresh Prince of Gamma World” https://www.wired.com/2015/10/excerpt-fresh-prince-of-gamma-world/

#5yrsago The herd immunity conspiracy https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/12/redeeming-hackers/#herd-immunity

#5yrsago Attack Surface in Wired https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/12/redeeming-hackers/#origin-stories

#5yrsago Basic income works https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/11/means-testing-conundrum/#ubi-v-bi

#5yrsago Hong Kong's ghost protest posters https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/11/means-testing-conundrum/#seeing-ghosts

#1yrago Lina Khan's future is the future of the Democratic Party – and America https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/11/democracys-antitrust-paradox/#there-will-be-an-out-and-out-brawl

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

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11.10.2025 à 13:08

Pluralistic: The curious, intertwined history of climate and digital rights activism (11 Oct 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4508 mots)


Today's links


A field of utility scale solar. Behind the mountains on the horizon line loom two logos: the original EFF 'clenched fist and lightning bolt' logo and the first Earth Day logo. They are reflected in the solar panels. Behind them roils hellish red-shot smoke.

The curious, intertwined history of climate and digital rights activism (permalink)

I am an environmentalist, but I'm not a climate activist. I used to be – I even used to ring strangers' doorbells on behalf of Greenpeace. But a quarter of a century ago, I fell in with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and became a lifelong digital rights activist, and switched to cheering on environmental activists from the sidelines of their fight:

https://eff.org

Over the decades, there've been many moments where I've been struck by the parallels between climate activism and tech activism. In both cases, the foundational challenge is getting people to care about the looming catastrophic effects of bad policies. In both cases, those policies and their effects are highly abstract and technical, and are downstream of a huge, weird, cross-cutting set of contingencies and circumstances, which makes it hard for anyone to truly take their measure. You don't just have to master the technical issues – you have to get your arms around the economic, social and political issues, too. Bad tech policy and bad climate policy are both wicked problems, hard to define and even harder to solve.

Whether we're talking about tech or the climate, there is a surefire way to get people to care about these issues: simply do nothing, allow these problems to get worse, and worse still, until millions of peoples' lives have been ruined. Then, of course, people will care. If we do nothing about fire debt and rising temperatures, then everyone who lives in the urban-wildlife interface will lose their homes and possibly their lives to a wildfire. And if we do nothing about surveillance, manipulation and monopoly, then eventually everyone will find their pay slashed, their freedoms curtailed, their identities stolen, and their pockets picked by a tech monopolist or an opportunistic predator living off of the monopolist's weakened, vulnerable victims.

In some important sense, the job of an activist is to raise the salience and convey the urgency of these issues before those consequences are upon us. Both climate and tech activists use storytelling to do this, and I've written novels that are cautionary tales about what happens if we get climate wrong and if we get tech wrong, as well as novels that are meant to inspire hope for the kind of world we could have if we get them right.

Both climate and tech activists have to contend with bullshit neoliberal "solutions" that propose to solve the problem by deploying technologically outlandish policies. Tech activists have to fight with people who say we can solve the commercial surveillance problem by "getting consent" to spy on people. Environmental activists have to fight with people who say we can control emissions with garbage "carbon credits" that make Elon Musk into a centibillionaire by selling indulgences to SUV manufacturers that fill our roads and our skies with ever-mounting clouds of CO2 and carcinogenic exhaust:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#Rat

Both climate and tech activists have to show people that this crisis stems from systemic dysfunctions, not individual consumption choices. We have to get our supporters to stop focusing on agonizing about whether they should use a plastic straw or agonizing about whether they should quit Facebook, and focus instead on using politics to shatter the power of the giant, wildly profitable corporations that got us into this crisis. We need to smash oil companies like Chevron and Exxon, and we have to smash oily rag companies like Facebook and Google:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/05/zucks-oily-rags/#into-the-breach

Beyond these parallels, both climate and tech activism have some actual commonalities. The biggest barrier to getting good tech or climate policy is the power of the cartel that dominates each sector. Cartels aren't just contrivances for raising prices – they're even better at capturing their regulators. A hundred small and medium-sized companies are a hopeless rabble, unable to agree on anything – especially what they want from regulators. But five giant companies find it very easy to come to agreement, and they are aslosh in monopoly cash, which they can mobilize to get their way in policy forums:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

But there's another, more hopeful parallel between tech and climate: after decades of vapor lock, both have seen rapid global improvement. Solar is racing ahead of all expectations. Globally, we're getting more power from solar than we are from coal. Solar is cheaper than any form of fossil fuel. Solar gets better every day, and we're figuring out how to overcome some of the serious challenges to solar, like finding all the materials we'll need for a solar transition. It turns out that a lot of the challenges on that front boil down to the fact that recycling old cleantech uses up a lot of energy. But as solar gets cheaper and more efficient, we have a lot of energy, and we can take apart an old solar panel that ran at 20% efficiency and use its recovered materials to make two solar panels that each run at 40% efficiency:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/06/with-great-power/#comes-great-responsibility

Then there's tech. The past half-decade has seen more global action on tech regulation than the previous 40 years. Not all of it is good – plenty of it is as stupid as pinning your hopes on carbon capture or fusion reactors – but governments all over the world have got the bit in their teeth and they're champing at it:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/07/the-people-no-2/#water-flowing-uphill

For both climate and tech, Trump is turning out to be a (mixed) blessing in disguise. Sure, he's killing decarbonization in the US, but he's also alienating America's (former) allies so quickly and thoroughly that many countries are moving closer to China's orbit. Again, that's a mixed blessing, but one very positive impact of Trump's beliigerence is that it has lit a fire under the leaders of other (formerly) friendly countries, spurring big, ambitious programs to escape US-based tech companies:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/beauty-eh/#its-the-only-war-the-yankees-lost-except-for-vietnam-and-also-the-alamo-and-the-bay-of-ham

Back in the first Trump administration, tariffs on Chinese solar panels led Chinese manufacturers to flood countries in the global south with solar panels that were so cheap that whole regions solarized, virtually overnight. Pakistan – one of the countries suffering the most from a changing climate, and most at risk from future changes – is now a solar nation, so much so that its national power company is in danger of going bust because everyone's making their own electricity rather than buying it from the grid.

Meanwhile, Putin's invasion of Ukraine pushed Europe – all of it, but especially Germany – into a galloping solar transition of its own. Virtually every high rise in Germany is now dotted (or even covered) with cheap, easy to hang balcony solar panels. Europe is way ahead of its energy transition goals:

https://electrek.co/2025/09/30/solar-leads-eu-electricity-generation-as-renewables-hit-54-percent/

Putin's not the only dictator pushing Europe to enact rapid changes. In order to escape US Big Tech silos, Europe is building a "Eurostack" of open, transparent, made-in-the-EU applications and services that are meant to replace American tech platforms:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/25/eurostack/#viktor-orbans-isp

Another, unhappier commonality between tech and climate: it's not just that both are getting better faster than we'd thought possible, it's also that they're both getting worse faster than we'd feared.

On climate, virtually every bad thing that showed up in our models is breaking faster than we thought it would. The permafrost is melting faster and it's releasing more methane than we'd anticipated. The gulf stream and jet stream are both getting more screwy, more quickly than predicted. Sure, we're decarbonizing and solarizing faster than we thought we could – but the world is falling apart faster than we thought it would, too:

https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/something-extraordinary-just-happened

And I don't have to tell you what's happening with tech. Technofascism is ascendant. ICE is using our devices to round up our neighbors and send them to torture prisons. Trump is using our social media posts to hunt down "the radical left" as a prelude to mass purges. Seven AI companies are now a third of the S&P 500, and they're losing money even faster than they are emitting carbon, and the crash on the horizon is gonna make 2008 look like a walk in the park:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/econopocalypse/

What's more, tech and cleantech are merging. The enshittification that has turned every platform to shit can now turn every part of the cleantech stack into a pile of shit, too. If Apple can pull the ICEBlock app out of your phone, then a solar inverter company can also remotely shut down your solar array and leave you in the dark:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/06/america-with-chinese-characteristics/#orphaned-syrian-refugees-need-not-apply

For all of this century, I've been a tech activist, but it's turning out that being a tech activist has an awful lot in common with being a climate activist, and sometimes – as when we're fighting to keep EVs from being bricked by their manufacturers or to prevent rent-seeking with inverters – they're literally the same thing.

The great James Boyle has described the transformational power of the word "ecology." Without that word, there's no obvious connection between, say, the campaign to save the ozone layer and the campaign to save endangered owls. The fate of charismatic nocturnal avians is not readily understood as being of a piece with the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere. The word "ecology" makes the connection, and so transforms a thousand issues into a movement

I think something like that is happening again. There's a inchoate movement groping its way to understanding that it is a movement – that the problems of labor exploitation, fascism, climate degradation, surveillance, authoritarianism and genocide are all connected to each other by the fact that they are caused by extreme concentrations of wealth and power. Highly concentrated wealth and power is dangerous in and of itself, because even the most benign billionaire isn't infallible, and the stupid decisions of very rich people are far more consequential than the stupid decisions you or I make. Our mistakes make the people around us unhappy. Billionaires' mistakes – like their dilettantish obsession with "education reform" – can ruin a whole generation:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/26/aggregate-demand/#ed-bezzle

And of course, the kind of person who amasses billions is pretty much never a benign person. The story you have to tell yourself in order to become a billionaire makes you into a literal psychopath:

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

We don't have a word for this new anti-enshittification, anti-oligarch, anti-carbon baron movement yet, but perhaps that word might be "solidarity." Solidarity is the opposite of fascism. The solidarinet is the opposite of the enshitternet. Solidarity is what stops disasters from becoming catastrophes:

http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2017/07/cory-doctorow-be-the-first-one-to-not-do-something-that-no-one-else-has-ever-not-thought-of-doing-before/

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Music labels: DRM makes you into iTunes’ love-slave https://web.archive.org/web/20051013082542/http://www.affbrainwash.com/archives/020414.php

#20yrsago 20 suicidal Congressional Reps demand a Broadcast Flag https://web.archive.org/web/20051011041517/http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004047.php

#20yrsago Cross-stitched tracert output https://web.archive.org/web/20051013061129/http://infosthetics.com/archives/2005/10/stitched_tracert_dos_commands.html

#15yrsago UK government ready to abolish consumer protection agencies as “waste” https://web.archive.org/web/20101013075803/http://www.noshockdoctrine.iparl.com/lobby/50

#1yrago Cars bricked by bankrupt EV company will stay bricked https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/10/software-based-car/#based

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF

10.10.2025 à 14:05

Pluralistic: A disenshittification moment from the land of mass storage (10 Oct 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4051 mots)


Today's links


A massive goliath figure in a loincloth, holding a club and sitting on a boulder; his head has been replaced with the head of Benjamin Franklin taken from a US $100 bill. He is peering down at a Synology NAS box, festooned with Enshittification poop emojis, with angry eyebrows and black grawlix bars over their mouths.

A disenshittification moment from the land of mass storage (permalink)

Sometimes, you really can vote with your wallet. I know, I'm generally pretty down on this kind of thing, but sometimes, it works!

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/13/consumption-choices/#marginal-benefits

Here's the latest victory from the land of wallet-based elections: Synology, a leading maker of "network-attached storage" (NAS) devices, has done a quiet (but total) 180 on its enshittificatory policy of blocking third party hard drives from its products:

https://www.guru3d.com/story/synology-reverses-policy-banning-thirdparty-hdds-after-nas-sales-plummet/

Network-attached storage devices are basically boxy computers with a bunch of slots for hard-drives and one or more network cards so you can connect them to your wifi or wired network. You fill them with hard-drives and plug them in, and they show up on your network as a file-server: any device on the network can connect to them and access their files. They're great for things like libraries of music or videos, which can be streamed to your TV or smart speakers. They're essential for people who work with very large files – musicians, photographers, video and sound editors, etc. They're also great for home backups, a single storage system that everyone in your household can back up all their data to. The better ones also have some kind of "NAT traversal" that lets you connect to them from the road – just plug your NAS into your home broadband and you can access your files from anywhere in the world.

Synology doesn't just make NAS boxes, they also make hard-drives that go inside them. Earlier this year, Synology pushed an update to its devices that caused them to reject hard-drives manufactured by their rivals, including giants like Seagate. This was a blatant piece of rent-seeking, a page straight out of the inkjet printer playbook, where the company that made the box decided that this gave them the right to decide what you could put in the box.

When your printer updates itself to reject generic ink, there's an implied threat: anyone who disenshittifies this printer – by making another update that restores generic ink support – risks prosecution under "anti-circumvention" laws like Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. These are laws that ban reverse-engineering, even for lawful purposes, like restoring generic printer ink support:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

The same goes for Synology. Under a decent and sane system of tech regulation, Synology's move to take away support for the vast majority of hard drives ever manufactured would prompt some other manufacturer to leap into the market and restore that support, by making alternative software for Synology's products. That represents a huge potential risk to Synology – once you're running a rival's software on your Synology product, it's a short leap to buying your next product from the company that saved your ass.

But because that kind of reverse-engineering is banned, enshittifying companies like Synology don't have to worry about that kind of usurpation. They can enlist the justice system to destroy any company that tries to rescue us from their predatory behavior.

That leaves us with comparatively weak defenses against enshittification, like complaining in public, and/or buying someone else's products. These are much weaker than responses like "having a regulator fine Synology a zillion dollars for screwing us" or "having a rival company sell us a tool to disenshittify the product we already have."

Sometimes, though, those weaker measures really work. The hard drives that go in Synology's devices are fully standardized, and the data you store on them is far more valuable than the box you put them in. People in the market for a new NAS box can mix and match any hard drive with any NAS enclosure…except Synology's. That's a huge commercial disadvantage for Synology, and the fact that you can throw away your Synology box and keep your drives, and that any drive will work with any product except Synology, means that people really were able to vote with their wallets. After a catastrophic drop in sales, Synology pushed another software update that restored its support for every kind of drive.

Of course, no one should ever buy a Synology product again. They have shown us what they do when they have power over you and no one should ever give them any power over their economic future.

Remember, for enshittification to work, the company has to have locked in its users and/or business customers. Making things worse without some kind of lock-in simply precipitates a mass departure.

Contrast Synology' story with Chamberlain's. Chamberlain is a private equity-backed monopolist, a garage door-opener company that bought all the other garage door-opener companies, and then withdrew support for Homekit, a standardized way for apps to connect to home automation systems (like garage door-openers):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

When Chamberlain nuked Homekit support, they forced every owner of every Chamberlain garage door-opener (which is basically all garage door-openers) to switch to using Chamberlain's app to open and close their garages, and now every time you open your garage, you have to look at seven ads.

Where Synology customers found it easy to switch vendors, Chamberlain customers are pretty stuck. Partly, that's because Chamberlain owns all the competing brands, so they are all defective in the same way. But also, it's because garage door-openers have to be installed, generally by a professional, and switching openers is an expensive, logistically complex operation. Of course, Chamberlain's app – like all apps – is off-limits to rival companies that might reverse engineer it to block its apps, thanks to the anticircumvention law's prohibition on reverse-engineering closed systems. Chamberlain's openers are also closed systems, which prevents rivals from reverse-engineering them and restoring Homekit integration.

It's interesting to compare Synology to other companies that enshittified, only to face a humiliating climbdown and blood on the C-suite's walls. There was Unity, the giant game-development tool monopolist who decided to institute a "shared success" program where they'd put a tax on any game made with their product that did well. Interestingly, they didn't want a "shared failure" program where they'd help defray the losses of any unsuccessful game made with their product. This is like the company who sold a hammer to the carpenter who renovated your kitchen demanding a share of the proceeds when you sell your house. After a mass revolt – including an industry-wide, very public switch to Unity's competitors – the company fired its top managers and abandoned its rent-seeking efforts:

https://venturebeat.com/games/john-riccitiello-steps-down-as-ceo-of-unity-after-pricing-battle/

Then there's Sonos, who remotely, irreversibly downgraded every smart speaker they'd ever sold in a doomed bid to create a unified app for the speakers and a set of headphones they were hoping to launch. The headphones fizzled, users were furious, and the CEO was defenstrated (but the speakers still don't work):

https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/13/24342179/sonos-ceo-patrick-spence-resignation-reason-app

And earlier this year, HP, the world's most habitual and egregious enshittifier, climbed down from a breathtaking act of enshittification. The company announced that anyone calling for tech support would be put into a mandatory 15 minute hold, even if an operator was available to help out. The idea was to punish people for seeking help from a human, rather than making do with the much cheaper (and shittier) chatbot option.

People hated this and arose in towering fury, so intense that HP – world champion enshittifiers HP – backed down:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/22/ink-spattered-pitchforks/#racehorse-semen

If only every company could be punished for enshittifying this way. If only, say, Reddit had gotten a suitable beat-down after its shameful attacks on third-party apps:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Reddit_API_controversy

But Reddit is hard to leave. We might hate its asshole management, but we like each other, and so we hold each other hostage there because we can't agree on when to leave or where to go next.

Reddit enshittified, and so did Synology, and Synology's outraged (former) customers made them pay for it. It's one of those rare instances in which voting with your wallet actually works. Savor it.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/22/ink-spattered-pitchforks/#racehorse-semen

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Leaked (final?) TPP Intellectual Property chapter spells doom for free speech online https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/oct/09/wikileaks-releases-tpp-intellectual-property-rights-chapter

#15yrsago Douglas Coupland’s depressing next ten years https://web.archive.org/web/20101012190424/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/a-radical-pessimists-guide-to-the-next-10-years/article1750609/page1/

#10yrsago Canadian Tories funneled $8M in publicc money to US Republican Party’s NGO https://web.archive.org/web/20151010221542/http://www.acdi-cida.gc.ca/acdi-cida/contributions.nsf/Eng/33D228F6B286373D85257D420061CEB2#tphp

#10yrsago How a billionaire GOP rainmaker tried (and failed) to rewrite history by suing Mother Jones https://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/10/mother-jones-vandersloot-melaleuca-lawsuit/

#10yrsago Volkswagen CEO: Dieselgate caused by Lynndie England “rogue engineers”; execs blameless https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/volkswagen-pulls-2016-diesel-lineup-from-us-market/

#10yrsago Unicorn poop and squatty potties: the greatest viral ad in Internet history https://memex.craphound.com/2015/10/09/unicorn-poop-and-squatty-potties-the-greatest-viral-ad-in-internet-history/

#5yrsago Machine Democrats https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/09/boss-politics/#tammany-hall

#5yrsago MK-Ultra and the brainwashing grift https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/09/boss-politics/#brainwashed

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

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09.10.2025 à 13:25

Pluralistic: California bans algorithmic price-fixing (09 Oct 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3394 mots)


Today's links


A group of businessmen, sitting around a boardroom table. They are staring at the bear from the California flag, who is standing on the table, his eyes glowing red, and blood dripping from his muzzle and pooling on the table.

California bans algorithmic price-fixing (permalink)

As the Marxist pamphleteer Adam Smith wrote in his Leninist textbook The Wealth of Nations, "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."

For a commie, that Adam Smith sure had a fine grasp of the business mindset. Price-fixing conspiracies are as old as the lumber barons who gouged Noah, and they're illegal as hell.

But price-gougers gonna gouge, and for most of the past 40 years, regulators have been monumentally disinterested in protecting the public from these ripoffs. All our regulators asked of the price-gougers was that they come up with the thinnest, least-convincing comb-over and in return, these regulators would pretend not to notice the glaring bald-spot shining through.

The one weird trick that these guys have hit upon is to use industry-wide "pricing consultancies" – clearinghouses that pretend to offer individualized price advice to each seller in a market. In reality what these companies do is aggregate all the prices charged by every major seller in the market, then advise all of them to raise their prices in sync:

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

When we talk about "greedflation," we don't just mean one seller – a major grocery chain, say – raising prices because they know they've got a regional lock on their market. That happens, but far more pernicious is when all the sellers get together to raise the price of goods, via a brokerage that lets them pretend (unconvincingly) that they're just getting "price advice."

Take Agri-Stats, a conspiracy in plain sight that gathers in pricing from all the major meat processors and then tells them all to jack up the price of meat:

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

Then there's Realpage, a conspiracy that gathers rental prices from all the landlords in your town and "advises" them all to jack up prices. Landlords who don't obey this "advice" get kicked out of the conspiracy:

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

These "price consultancies" are the reason you can't afford a hamburger or your apartment anymore. During the Biden administration, the Federal Trade Commission was working towards a nationwide ban on this stuff:

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

Of course, after Trump took office, his FTC canceled all that work and instead set up a snitch line where FTC employees could report on each other for being "woke." And, you know, fair: making sure that no one who works for the federal government has a pronoun is far more important than making sure you can afford to eat dinner and sleep indoors.

But (as the saying goes) the states are the laboratories of democracy. State legislatures are (sometimes) stepping in to fill the voids where Trump has failed the American people. That's what's just happened in California, the world's fourth largest economy, where Governor Newsom has just signed AB325 into law, and banned these price consultancies:

https://legiscan.com/CA/text/AB325/id/3269757

Specifically, the law makes it "unlawful for a person to use or distribute a common pricing algorithm if the person coerces another person to set or adopt a recommended price or commercial term recommended by the common pricing algorithm for the same or similar products or services."

As Matt Stoller writes, this may seem like small potatoes, but it's actually a huge ideological victory, and marks a major new milestone in the long fight to slay the political ideology that welcomes oligarchy:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/how-to-overturn-an-oligarchy

Stoller recounts the history of this pro-oligarch movement, and describes how it began by rejecting earlier Supreme Court decisions that banned price coercion – like when a cartel forces its members to adopt higher prices. The Chicago School – the faction of economists who took over the world in the Reagan years – rejected any kind of politics that took account of the role that power played in the economy. They insisted that if workers accepted a starvation wage, it was because they had a "revealed preference" for going hungry – and not because they needed a union to force their bosses to pay them enough to live on.

The Chicago School replaced this kind of power-centric analysis with something they called "efficiency":

If you were coerced by a dominant supplier, but an economist showed there was no loss of output, then that was just vigorous competition. Gradually, the notion that the antitrust laws protect business from economic violence fell away. The result is an economy of coercion machines, from Amazon to pharmacy benefit managers to RealPage.

The mere existence of a law – in 2025, nearly half a century into the neoliberal era – that mentions "coercion" marks a profoud shift in ideology, a recovery of the idea that we are always under threat of "a conspiracy against the public…some contrivance to raise prices."

In a way, this just proves how right Trump is: the American way of life really is under threat from the radical Marxist ideology…of Adam Smith.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Student finds GPS bug on car, uploads photo, FBI demands to have their warrantless bug back https://web.archive.org/web/20101009211920/https://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/10/fbi-tracking-device/

#15yrsago THE UNIDENTIFIED: dystopian YA about education transformed into a giant, heavily sponsored game https://memex.craphound.com/2010/10/08/the-unidentified-dystopian-ya-about-education-transformed-into-a-giant-heavily-sponsored-game/

#10yrsago Court tells millionaire yoga troll Bikram Choudhury that poses can’t be copyrighted https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2015/10/08/13-55763.pdf

#10yrsago Jimmy Wales calls UK’s proposed crypto ban “moronic” https://web.archive.org/web/20151009011752/https://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/e-regulation/jimmy-wales-wikipedia-encryption-178365

#10yrsago Prisoners’ debate team trounces national champs from Harvard – Cory Doctorow's MEMEX https://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/oct/07/harvards-prestigious-debate-team-loses-to-new-york-prison-inmates

#5yrsago Good Intentions, Bad Inventions https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/08/hype-beast/#moral-panics

#1yrago Google's new phones can't stop phoning home https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/08/water-thats-not-wet/#pixelated

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF

07.10.2025 à 17:17

Pluralistic: They're just trying to earn a buck (07 Oct 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4936 mots)


Today's links


The Capitol building. In the foreground are two gigantic pigs - the size of elephants. They are being fed by a male figure whose head has been replaced with a shadowy hacker's hoodie. The background is a dark, blown up US$100 bill with Franklin's eyes gone black.

They're just trying to earn a buck (permalink)

Life as a prisoner of the neoliberal mind palace must suck: it's a world where every person who suffers under predatory business practices is a "consumer" who has "revealed a preference" for being screwed:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/07/water-thats-not-wet/

And the companies doing the screwing? They're blameless: they're just rationally pursuing profits, upholding the fiduciary duty dictated by "shareholder supremacy":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/18/falsifiability/#figleaves-not-rubrics

In this Hayek-pilled cosmology, businesses are prisoners of the profit imperative and can be forgiven for everything, and the public are "consumers" whose bad choices are to blame for all the world's woes. It's a worldview with no room in it for political agency and no theory of power:

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-qualia/

The problem, of course, is that power is real, and it sets the rules of this game. Even if you stipulate that it is management's duty to do whatever they can to make the largest profit for the company's owners, "whatever they can do" isn't a free-floating concept. It is inescapably tethered to the rules of the game set by politics (that is, power).

A company cannot charge infinity dollars and pay its workers zero dollars. In the former case, customers might reasonably take their business elsewhere. In the latter case, workers might sell their labor elsewhere.

But if companies can capture their regulators and hijack power to change the rules of the game in their favor, they can go a long way to achieving both goals. An airport concessionaire on the sanitary side of the TSA checkpoint can charge $14 for a bottle of filtered tap water because exiting the checkpoint to shop elsewhere is a multi-hour affair and you'll miss your flight.

Now, the government could intervene here. The federal, state and local regulators overseeing the airport could require price-parity with the prevailing rate in town for water. They could ban obvious scams like stocking weird-sized water (or water with weird characteristics) at the airport that have no in-town equivalents. They could fill the airport with filtered water refill stations.

On the other hand, if the merchant can convince the government to collude with it in rigging the game, they can remove all the water fountains from the airport, and switch the bathroom taps to a non-potable "environmentally responsible" water source.

Likewise, an employer that can bind their workers to noncompete "agreements" can make it so difficult to switch jobs that workers accept a lower wage out of fear that their employer will use the power of the state to ruin them if they take a better job elsewhere:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/09/germanium-valley/#i-cant-quit-you

Even better, if the employer makes workers sign a "training repayment agreement provision" (TRAP) clause, they can literally ask the government to fine workers thousands of dollars for quitting their jobs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/04/its-a-trap/#a-little-on-the-nose

When a firm rips you off or abuses you and gets away with it, that's not "fulfilling their fiduciary duty," it's cheating. They're either buying off the state that is supposed to protect you, or enlisting it to help them screw you. You don't need to make excuses for these fuckers. You can hate them and complain and warn other people. You can make them pariahs and shout mean things at them if you see them on the street.

Take Snapchat: the company has just done a bait-and-switch on its users, announcing that it will erase their saved photos and videos. Ironically, it calls these "memories," which means that it is threatening to erase its users' memories. Users who don't want their memories erased will have to pay stonking monthly fees:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g5ypl6nkzo

Now, if Snapchat had an API that let you migrate your photos to a rival platform – or if the law would permit a rival to make a scraper to accomplish this without their help – then the rate that Snapchat chose for its monthly fee would reflect a calculation on these lines, "This is how long it takes to click one link on a rival service and port my account to it, and this is how much I value my time at, so this is how much I will pay to avoid making that one click."

But because Snapchat decides how you use its service, it can set a much higher price, calculated thus: "Here is how long it would take me to download gigabytes of saved storage, figure out how the filesystem on my device works, verify these files, and upload them to a rival platform, and here's how much I value my time, so this is how much I will pay to avoid this enormous, tedious task."

They get to charge you more because they are fucking you over, and they are fucking you over so they can charge you more.

If you heard about Snapchat's memory tax and thought to yourself, "Oh, those fools who signed up for Snapchat thinking it would be free forever were rooked by the world's most transparent ruse and have no one to blame but themselves!" then you've been rooked. The price that Snapchat arrived at – and Snapchat users' ability to get a better price – are both determined by regulation that tilts in favor of corporations at the public expense. No one came down off a mountain with two stone tablets bearing Snapchat's rate card.

Nor is it your job or mine to figure out how Snapchat can keep its lights on. The question, "Well, how can Snapchat keep providing a free service if it doesn't charge certain users through the nose?" is no more those users' problem than, "How can Snapchat users preserve their memories if Snapchat charges them more than they can afford, every month, until they die?" is Snapchat's problem.

"How can Snapchat stay in business?" sounds like a Snapchat problem, not a you problem (unless you work there or own its stock). Snapchat isn't a charity. It's a venture-backed, for-profit entity listed on the NYSE and NASDAQ. In a just world, we'd say that the public has the right to advocacy and protection from the state that is accountable to it, and companies that make bad decisions about their business models can eat shit and be bought out of bankruptcy by smarter people who don't blow up their own balance sheets.

If you want to live in a better world, then shut up that nagging, neoliberalism-trained reflex that treats corporations as charitable enterprises and "consumers" as the secret legislators of the market and the ultimate authors of all its dysfunctions.

Even for their most ardent defenders, markets are supposed to "process aggregated demand signals" about the willingness of different parties to accept different offers. But if the only "demand signal" you can offer is a binary "take it or leave it," that's a very thin data set (and it gets thinner still when "leave it" requires a time machine so you can go back to before you started and warn yourself that the offer's going to be altered adversely in the future).

There are a range of ways to respond to a worsening offer from a merchant, well beyond "take it or leave it." You can complain. You can sue. You can picket. You can boycott. You can spraypaint "GREEDY PIGS" on the corporate headquarters. This is a rich set of informational inputs for the market indeed.

When it comes to digital services, you have even more opportunities to program the great market computer in the sky (all hail the infallible market computer!). For example, if a company makes the ads on its webpage too obnoxious and invasive, you can install an ad-blocker, a thing that 51% of all web users have done, making it the largest consumer boycott in human history:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

An ad-blocker enriches the take-it-or-leave it, thin data-set of internet usage patterns by allowing users to make a counter-offer: "How about nah?"

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

Of course, no one has ever installed an ad-blocker for an app, because that's a felony under Section 1201 of the DMCA. An app is just a web-page skinned in the right kind of IP to make it a crime to protect yourself while you use it. That's why companies – like Snapchat – are insatiably horny to get you to switch from using websites to using apps.

Ultimately, I just don't think neoliberal economists believe in what they're selling. They don't want a market of "demand-signals" that can be used to guide allocations. They just want to help the greediest, worst people on earth screw you as hard as they can, all day long.

And then blame you for it.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Lawmaker: I'll fight the Broadcast Flag https://web.archive.org/web/20071114231008/http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2005/10/07/surprise_your_reps_actually_listen_when_you_complain_about_the_broadcast_flag.php

#20yrsago Google launches a feedreader https://web.archive.org/web/20090210070551/http://www.google.com/intl/en/googlereader/tour.html

#20yrsago Soviet PCs http://www.homecomputer.de/pages/easteurope_ussr.html

#20yrsago Soviet pocket-calculators https://web.archive.org/web/20051013063203/https://rk86.com/frolov/calcolle.htm

#20yrsago Bill Gates shouts at Sony CEO that his crappy DRM is less crappy https://web.archive.org/web/20051013082800/http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/oct2005/tc2005106_9074_tc024.htm

#20yrsago Guy who was busted “for using lynx” found guilty https://web.archive.org/web/20051101013155/http://news.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020330,39226548,00.htm

#20yrsago It’s legal to break DRM in Australia, sez High Court https://www.smh.com.au/technology/court-allows-gamers-to-modify-consoles-20051006-gdm7bs.html

#15yrsago HOWTO make a Storm Trooper helmet out of a milk jug http://www.filthwizardry.com/2010/10/milk-jug-storm-trooper-helmet.html

#15yrsago Nigerian Sesame Street will feature HIV-positive muppet https://web.archive.org/web/20101006182715/https://edition.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/TV/10/06/sesame.street.nigeria/index.html

#15yrsago Norwegian musicians’ income goes up by 66% 1999-2009, while record sales decline by 50% https://appliedabstractions.com/2010/10/06/record-companies-lose-artists-gain/

#15yrsago USA caves on secret Internet treaty https://web.archive.org/web/20101007044555/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5352/125/

#15yrsago NM cops raid Montessori School greenhouse for pot, find tomatoes https://web.archive.org/web/20101008023326/https://www.santafenewmexican.com/localnews/pot-raid-at-school-turns-up-tomatoes/

#15yrsago Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From: multidisciplinary hymn to diversity, openness and creativity https://memex.craphound.com/2010/10/06/steven-johnsons-where-good-ideas-come-from-multidisciplinary-hymn-to-diversity-openness-and-creativity/

#10yrsago Kim Davis isn’t doing her job. Again. https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/oct/07/kim-davis-emails/

#10yrsago Howto make Zombie Mouth cupcakes https://www.instructables.com/Zombie-Mouth-Cupcake/#10yrsago

#10yrsago Algorithmic guilt: defendants must be able to inspect source code in forensic devices https://web.archive.org/web/20190421120433/https://slate.com/technology/2015/10/defendants-should-be-able-to-inspect-software-code-used-in-forensics.html

#10yrsago Make a booze flask hidden in a baby https://www.instructables.com/baby-flask/

#10yrsago NYPD steal black woman banker’s BMW, commit her when she asks for it back https://web.archive.org/web/20151002030408/https://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/shes-banker-owns-bmw-and-obama-follows-her-twitter-ny-cops-still-threw-innocent

#10yrsago How guards and prosecutors retaliate against solitary confinement prisoners who blow the whistle https://web.archive.org/web/20151006195426/https://www.vice.com/read/unauthorized-group-activity-0000772-v22n10

#10yrsago What the barcode on your discarded boarding-pass reveals https://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/10/whats-in-a-boarding-pass-barcode-a-lot/

#10yrsago Bankers’ “Vulnerability Index”: scoring employees’ desperation https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=521

#10yrsago NZ government leaks on TPP: copyright terms will go to life plus 70 years https://web.archive.org/web/20151007185923/https://www.beehive.govt.nz/sites/all/files/TPP-Q&A-Oct-2015.pdf

#10yrsago What’s the objectively optimal copyright term? https://timharford.com/2015/10/copyrights-and-wrongs/

#10yrsago Genocide, not genes: indigenous peoples’ genetic alcoholism is a racist myth https://www.theverge.com/2015/10/2/9428659/firewater-racist-myth-alcoholism-native-americans

#10yrsago Global coalition tells Facebook to kill its Real Names policy https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/global-coalition-facebook-authentic-names-are-authentically-dangerous-your-users

#10yrsago Primer explains the spying tech your local cops are using https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/law-enforcement-tech-civilian-oversight-primer

#10yrsago EU top court: NSA spying means US servers are not a fit home for Europeans’ data https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/europes-court-justice-nsa-surveilance

#5yrsago America's wild hog "pig bomb" https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/06/hybrid-vigor/#porcs

#5yrsago Maine's drunken, thieving, bumbling, child-porning public defenders https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/06/hybrid-vigor/#gideon-v-wainwright

#5yrsago Congress's Big Tech trustbusting smackdown https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/07/google-and-platos-cave/#break-em-up

#5yrsago Hackers can remotely lock IoT cock-cages https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/07/google-and-platos-cave/#power-play

#1yrago China hacked Verizon, AT&T and Lumen using the FBI's backdoor https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/07/foreseeable-outcomes/#calea

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

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

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

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

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

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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