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PLURALISTIC

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18.12.2025 à 15:40

Pluralistic: A perfect distillation of the social uselessness of finance (18 Dec 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3071 mots)


Today's links


The Earth from space. Standing astride it is the Wall Street 'Charging Bull.' The bull has glowing red eyes. It is haloed in a starbust of red radiating light.

A perfect distillation of the social uselessness of finance (permalink)

I'm about to sign off for the year – actually, I was ready to do it yesterday, but then I happened upon a brief piece of writing that was so perfect that I decided I'd do one more edition of Pluralistic for 2025.

The piece in question is John Lanchester's "For Every Winner A Loser," in the London Review of Books, in which Lanchester reviews two books about the finance sector: Gary Stevenson's The Trading Game and Rob Copeland's The Fund:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n17/john-lanchester/for-every-winner-a-loser

It's a long and fascinating piece and it's certainly left me wanting to read both books, but that's not what convinced me to do one more newsletter before going on break – rather, it was a brief passage in the essay's preamble, a passage that perfectly captures the total social uselessness of the finance sector as a whole.

Lanchester starts by stating that while we think of the role of the finance sector as "capital allocation" – that is, using investors' money to fund new businesses and expansions for existing business – that hasn't been important to finance for quite some time. Today, only 3% of bank activity consists of "lending to firms and individuals engaged in the production of goods and services."

The other 97% of finance is gambling. Here's how Stevenson breaks it down: say your farm grows mangoes. You need money before the mangoes are harvested, so you sell the future ownership of the harvest to a broker at $1/crate.

The broker immediately flips that interest in your harvest to a dealer who believes (on the basis of a rumor about bad weather) that mangoes will be scarce this year and is willing to pay $1.10/crate. Next, an international speculator (trading on the same rumor) buys the rights from the broker at $1.20/crate.

Now come the side bets: a "momentum trader" (who specializing in bets on market trends continuing) buys the rights to your crop for $1.30/crate. A contrarian trader (who bets against momentum traders) short-sells the momentum trader's bet at $1.20. More short sellers pile in and drive the price down to $1/crate.

Now, a new rumor circulates, about conditions being ripe for a bounteous mango harvest, so more short-sellers appear, and push the price to $0.90/crate. This tempts the original broker back in, and he buys your crop back at $1/crate.

That's when the harvest comes. You bring in the mangoes. They go to market, and fetch $1.10/crate.

This is finance – a welter of transactions, only one of which (selling your mangoes to people who eat them) involves the real economy. Everything else is "speculation on the movement of prices." The nine transactions that took place between your planting the crop and someone eating the mangoes are all zero sum – every trade has an evenly matched winner and loser, and when you sum them all up, they come out to zero. In other words, no value was created.

This is the finance sector. In a world where the real economy generates $105 trillion/year, the financial derivatives market adds up to $667 trillion/year. This is "the biggest business in the world" – and it's useless. It produces nothing. It adds no value.

If you work a job where you do something useful, you are on the losing side of this economy. All the real money is in this socially useless, no-value-creating, hypertrophied, metastasized finance sector. Every gain in finance is matched by a loss. It all amounts to – literally – nothing.

So that's what tempted me into one more blog post for the year – an absolutely perfect distillation of the uselessness of "the biggest business in the world," whose masters are the degenerate gamblers who buy and sell our politicians, set our policy, and control our lives. They're the ones enshittifying the internet, burning down the planet, and pushing Elon Musk towards trillionairedom.

It's their world, and we just live on it.

For now.

(Image: Sam Valadi, CC BY 2.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Star Wars droidflake https://twitpic.com/3guwfq

#15yrsago TSA misses enormous, loaded .40 calibre handgun in carry-on bag https://web.archive.org/web/20101217223617/https://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=news/local&id=7848683

#15yrsago Brazilian TV clown elected to high office, passes literacy test https://web.archive.org/web/20111217233812/https://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jmbXSjCjZBZ4z8VUcAZFCyY_n6dA?docId=CNG.b7f4655178d3435c9a54db2e30817efb.381

#15yrsago My Internet problem: an abundance of choice https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/dec/17/internet-problem-choice-self-publishing

#10yrsago LEAKED: The secret catalog American law enforcement orders cellphone-spying gear from https://theintercept.com/2015/12/16/a-secret-catalogue-of-government-gear-for-spying-on-your-cellphone/#10yrsago

#10yrsago Putin: Give Sepp Blatter the Nobel; Trump should be president https://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/dec/17/sepp-blatter-fifa-putin-nobel-peace-prize

#10yrsago Star Wars medical merch from Scarfolk, the horror-town stuck in the 1970s https://scarfolk.blogspot.com/2015/12/unreleased-star-wars-merchandise.html

#10yrsago Some countries learned from America’s copyright mistakes: TPP will undo that https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/12/how-tpp-perpetuates-mistakes-dmca

#10yrsago No evidence that San Bernardino shooters posted about jihad on Facebook https://web.archive.org/web/20151217003406/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/12/16/fbi-san-bernardino-attackers-didnt-show-public-support-for-jihad-on-social-media/

#10yrsago Exponential population growth and other unkillable science myths https://web.archive.org/web/20151217205215/http://www.nature.com/news/the-science-myths-that-will-not-die-1.19022

#10yrsago UK’s unaccountable crowdsourced blacklist to be crosslinked to facial recognition system https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/12/pre-crime-arrives-in-the-uk-better-make-sure-your-face-stays-off-the-crowdsourced-watch-list/

#1yrago Happy Public Domain Day 2025 to all who celebrate https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/17/dastar-dly-deeds/#roast-in-piss-sonny-bono

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, June 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: John Naughton (https://memex.naughtons.org/).

Currently writing:

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

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF

17.12.2025 à 18:01

Pluralistic: Happy Public Domain Day 2026! (17 Dec 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4353 mots)


Today's links


A collage of images representing creative works entering the public domain on Jan 1, 2026.

Happy Public Domain Day 2026! (permalink)

In 1998, Congress committed an act of mass cultural erasure, extending copyright by 20 years, including for existing works (including ones that were already in the public domain), and for 20 years, virtually nothing entered the US public domain.

But then, on January 1, 2019, the public domain reopened. A crop of works from 1923 entered the public domain, to great fanfare – though honestly, precious few of those works were still known (that's what happens when you lock up 50 year old works for 20 years, ensuring they don't circulate, or get reissued or reworked). Sure, I sang Yes, We Have No Bananas along with everyone else, but the most important aspect of the Grand Reopening of the Public Domain was the works that were to come:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2ryWm0bziE

The mid/late-1920s were extraordinarily fecund, culturally speaking. A surprising volume of creative work from that era remains in our consciousness, and so, every January 1, we have been treated to a fresh delivery of gifts from the past, works that are free and open and ours to claim and copy and use and remix.

No one chronicles this better than Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle, the dynamic duo of copyright scholars who run Duke's Center for the Public Domain. During the 20 year public domain drought, Jenkins and Boyle kept the flame of hope, publishing an annual roundup of all the works that would have entered the public domain, but for Congress's act of wanton cultural vandalism. But starting in 2019, these yearly reports were transformed – no longer are they laments for the past we're losing; today, they are celebrations of the past that's showering down around us.

2024 marked another turning point for the public domain: that was the year that the first Mickey Mouse cartoons entered the public domain:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/20/em-oh-you-ess-ee/#sexytimes

Does that mean that Mickey Mouse is in the public domain? Well, it's complicated. Really complicated. To a first approximation, the aspects of Mickey that were present in those early cartoons enterted the public domain that year, while other, later aspects of his character design (e.g. the big white gloves) wouldn't enter the public domain until later. But that's not the whole story, because not every aspect of character design is even copyrightable, so some later refinements to The Mouse were immediately public. This is such a chewy subject that Jenkins devoted a whole separate (and brilliant) article to it:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/15/mouse-liberation-front/#free-mickey

You see, Jenkins is a generationally brilliant legal communicator, much sought after for her commentary of these abstract matters. You may have heard her giving her characteristically charming, crisp and clear commentaries on NPR's Planet Money:

https://www.npr.org/2023/12/28/1197959250/the-indicator-from-planet-money-lets-get-it-on-in-court-12-28-2023

She and Boyle have produced some of the best copyright textbooks – from popular explainers to the definitive casebooks for classroom use – in circulation today, and they release these as free, shareable, open-access works:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/30/open-and-shut-casebook/#stop-confusing-the-issue-with-relevant-facts

Yesterday, Jenkins and Boyle published the 2026 edition of their Public Domain Day omnibus:

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2026/

There are some spectacular works that are being freed on January 1:

  • Dashiell Hammett's Maltese Falcon

  • Agatha Christie's Murder at the Vicarage (Miss Marple's debut)

  • The first four Nancy Drew books

  • The first Dick and Jane book

  • TS Eliot's Ash Wednesday

  • Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men

  • Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents (in German)

  • Somerset Maugham's Cakes and Ale

  • Bertrand Russell's The Conquest of Happiness

That's just a small selection from thousands of books.

Things are pretty amazing on the film side too: we're getting Academy Award winners like All Quiet on the Western Front, another Marx Brothers movie (Animal Crackers); the debut film appearance of two of the Three Stooges (Soup To Nuts); a Gary Cooper/Marlene Dietrich vehicle (Morocco); Garbo's first talkie (Anna Christie); John Wayne's big break (The Big Trail); a Hitchcock (Murder!); Jean Harlow's debut (Hell's Angels, directed by Howard Hughes); and so, so many more.

Then there's music. On the composition side, there's some great Gershwins (I Got Rhythm, I've Got a Crush on You, Embraceable You). There's Hoagy Carmichael's Georgia On My Mind. There's Dream a Little Dream of Me, Sunny Side of the Street, Livin' in the Sunlight, Lovin' in the Moonlight, Just a Gigolo; and a Sousa march, The Royal Welch Fusiliers.

There's also some banger recordings: Marian Anderson's Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen; Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong's St Louis Blues; Clarence Williams’ Blue Five's Everybody Loves My Baby (but My Baby Don't Love Nobody but Me); Louis Armstrong's If I Lose, Let me Lose; and (again) so many more!

On top of that, there's a bunch of 2D art, including a Mondrian, a Klee, and a ton more work from 1930, which means a lot of Deco, Constructivism, and Neoplasticism. As a collagist, I find this very exciting:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/03/cannier-valley/#bricoleur

As with previous editions, Jenkins and Boyle use this year's public domain report as a jumping-off point to explain some of the gnarlier aspects of copyright law. This year's casus belli is the bizarre copyright status of Betty Boop.

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2026/#boopanchor

On January 1, the first Betty Boop cartoon, Dizzy Dishes, will enter the public domain. But there are many aspects of Betty Boop that are already in the public domain, because the copyright on many later Boop cartoons was never renewed – until 1976, copyright holders were required to file some paperwork at fixed intervals to extend the copyright on their works. While the Fleischer studio (where Betty Boop was created) renewed the copyright on Dizzy Dishes, there were many other shorts that entered the public domain years ago.

That means that all the aspects of Betty Boop that were developed for Dizzy Dishes are about to enter the public domain. But also, all the aspects of Betty Boop from those non-renewed shorts are already in the public domain. But some of the remaining aspects of Betty Boop's character design – those developed in subsequent shorts that were also renewed – are also in the public domain, because they aren't copyrightable in the first place, because they're "generic," or "trivial," constitute "minuscule variations," or be so standard or indispensable that as to be a "scène à faire."

On top of that, there are aspects of the Betty Boop design that may be in copyright, but no one is sure who they belong to, because a lot of the paperwork establishing title to those copyrights vanished during the various times when the Fleischer studio and its archives changed hands.

But we're not done yet! Just because some later aspects of the Betty Boop character design are still in copyright, it doesn't follow that you aren't allowed to use them! US Copyright law has a broad set "limitations and exceptions," including fair use, and if your usage fits into one of these exceptions, you are allowed to reproduce, adapt, display and perform copyrighted works without permission from the copyright holder – even (especially) if the copyright holder objects.

And finally, on top of all of this, there's trademark, which is often lumped in with copyright as part of an incoherent, messy category we call "intellectual property." But trademark is absolutely unlike copyright in virtually every way. Unlike copyright, trademarks don't automatically expire. Trademarks remain in force for so long as they are used in commerce (which is why a group of cheeky ex-Twitter lawyers are trying to get the rights to the Twitter trademarks that Musk abandoned when he rebranded the company as "X"):

https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/16/x-updates-its-terms-files-countersuit-to-lay-claim-to-the-twitter-trademark-after-newcomers-challenge/

But also, trademark exists to prevent marketplace confusion, which means that you're allowed to use trademarks in ways that don't lead to consumers being misled about the origin of goods or services. Even the Supreme Court has (repeatedly) upheld the principle that trademark can't be used as a backdoor to extend copyright.

That's important, because the current Betty Boop license-holders have been sending out baseless legal threats claiming that their trademarks over Betty Boop mean that she's not going into the public domain. They're not the only ones, either! This is a routine, petty scam perpetrated by marketing companies that have scooped up the (usually confused and difficult-to-verify) title to cultural icons and then gone into business extracting rent from people and businesses who want to make new works with them. Scammers in this mold energetically send out bullshit legal threats on behalf of the estates of Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, and Herge, salting their threats with nonsense about different terms of copyright in the UK and elsewhere.

As Jenkins and Boyle point out, the thing that copyright expiration get us is clarity. When the heroic lawyer and Sherlockian Les Klinger succesfully wrestled the Sherlock Holmes rights out of the Doyle estate, he did us all a solid:

https://esl-bits.eu/ESL.English.Listening.Short.Stories/Rendition/01/default.html

But "wait until Les gets angry enough to spend five years in court" isn't a scalable solution to the scourge of copyfraud. It's only through the unambiguous expiry of copyright that we can all get clarity on which parts of our culture are free for all to use.

Now, that being said, copyright's limitations and exceptions are also hugely important, because there are plenty of beneficial uses that arise long before a work enters the public domain. To take just one example: for the past week, the song in top rotation on my music player has been the newly (officially) released Fatboy Slim track Satisfaction Skank, a mashup of Slim's giant hit Rockefeller Skank and the Rolling Stones' even bigger hit (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_c_V3oPCe-s

This track is one of Fatboy Slim's all-time crowd-pleasers, the song he would bust out during live shows to get everyone on the dance-floor. But for more than 20 years, the track has been exclusive to his live shows – despite multiple overtures, Fatboy Slim couldn't get the Rolling Stones to respond to his attempts to license Satisfaction for an official release.

That changed when – without explanation – the Rolling Stones reached out the Slim and offered to license the rights, even giving him access to the masters:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2dzre3z96go

This is a happy ending, but it's also a rarity. For every track like this – where the rightsholders decide to grant permission, even if it takes decades – there are thousands more that can't be officially released. This serves no one's interests – not musicians, not fans. The irony is that in the golden age of sampling, everyone operated from the presumption that sampling was fair use. High profile lawsuits and gunshy labels killed that presumption, and today, sampling remains a gigantic, ugly mess:

https://memex.craphound.com/2011/07/08/creative-license-how-the-hell-did-sampling-get-so-screwed-up-and-what-the-hell-do-we-do-about-it/

Which is all to say that the ongoing growth of the public domain, after its 20-year coma, is a most welcome experience – but if you think the public domain is great, wait'll you see what fair use can do for creativity!

(Image: Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle, CC BY 4.0)

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)

#20yrago Sony DRM Debacle Roundup Part V https://memex.craphound.com/2005/12/16/sony-drm-debacle-roundup-part-v/

#15yrsago Weird D&D advice-column questions https://comicsalliance.com/weird-dd-questions-dungeons-dragons/

#10yrsago America’s permanent, ubiquitous tent-cities https://placesjournal.org/article/tent-city-america/

#10yrsago The changing world of webcomics business models https://web.archive.org/web/20151218130702/http://shadowbinders.com/webcomics-changing-business-model-podcast/

#10yrsago Cop who demanded photo of sexting-accused teen’s penis commits suicide https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/12/cop-who-wanted-to-take-pic-of-erection-in-sexting-case-commits-suicide/

#10yrsago Saudi millionaire acquitted of raping teen in London, says he tripped and accidentally penetrated her https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/12052901/Ehsan-Abdulaziz-Saudi-millionaire-cleared-of-raping-teenager.html

#10yrsago Someone snuck skimmers into Safeway stores https://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/12/skimmers-found-at-some-calif-colo-safeways/

#10yrsago Philips promises new firmware to permit third-party lightbulbs https://web.archive.org/web/20151216182639/http://www.developers.meethue.com/content/friends-hue-program-update

#5yrsago Jan 1 is Public Domain Day for 1925 https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/16/fraught-superpowers/#public-domain-day

#5yrsago Landmark US financial transparency law https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/16/fraught-superpowers/#financial-secrecy

#5yrsago Chaos Communications Congress https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/16/fraught-superpowers/#rc3

#5yrsago Email sabbaticals https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/16/fraught-superpowers/#email-sabbatical

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, June 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. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF

16.12.2025 à 18:00

Pluralistic: America's collapsing consumption is the world's disenshittification opportunity (16 Dec 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (5818 mots)


Today's links


Uncle Sam staring into a funhouse mirror that has made him painfully thin. The reflection is wearing a Trump wig and has orange skin. He stands atop a map of the world that stretches to infinity. In the background is a shantytown with the TRUMP logomark rising in the sky over it.

America's collapsing consumption is the world's disenshittification opportunity (permalink)

We are about to get a "post-American internet," because we are entering a post-American era and a post-American world. Some of that is Trump's doing, and some of that is down to his predecessors.

When we think about the American century, we rightly focus on America's hard power – the invasions, military bases, arms exports, and CIA coups. But it's America's soft power that established and maintained true American dominance, the "weaponized interdependence" that Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman describe in their 2023 book The Underground Empire:

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

As Farrell and Newman lay out, America established itself as more than a global power – it is a global platform. If you want to buy things from another country, you use dollars, which you keep in an account at the US Federal Reserve, and which you exchange using the US-dominated SWIFT system. If you want to transmit data across a border, chances are you're use a fiber link that makes its first landfall on the USA, the global center of the world's hub-and-spoke telecoms system.

No one serious truly believed that these US systems were entirely trustworthy, but there was always an assumption that if the US were to instrumentalize (or, less charitably, weaponize) the dollar, or fiber, that they would do so subtly, selectively, and judiciously. Instead, we got the Snowden revelations that the US was using its position in the center of the world's fiber web to spy on pretty much every person in the world – lords and peasants, presidents and peons.

Instead, we got the US confiscating Argentina's foreign reserves to pay back American vulture capitalists who bought distressed Argentine bonds for pennies on the dollar and then got to raid a sovereign nation's treasury in order to recoup a loan they never issued. Instead we saw the SWIFT system mobilized to achieve tactical goals from the War on Terror and Russia-Ukraine sanctions.

These systems are now no longer trustworthy. It's as though the world's brakes have started to fail intermittently, but we are still obliged to drive down the road at 100mph, desperately casting about for some other way to control the system, and forced to rely on this critical, unreliable mechanism while we do:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/26/difficult-multipolarism/#eurostack

This process was well underway before Trump, but Trump's incontinent belligerence has only accelerated the process – made us keenly aware that a sudden stop might be in our immediate future, heightening the urgency of finding some alternative to America's faulty brakes. Through trade policy (tariffs) and rhetoric, Trump has called the question:

https://archive.is/WAMWI

One of the most urgent questions Trump has forced the world to confront is what we will do about America's control over the internet. By this, I mean both the abstract "governance" control (such as the fact that ICANN is a US corporation, subject to US government coercion), and the material fact that virtually every government, large corporation, small business and household keeps its data (files, email, records) in a US Big Tech silo (also subject to US government control).

When Trump and Microsoft colluded to shut down the International Criminal Court by killing its access to Outlook and Office365 (in retaliation for the ICC issuing an arrest warrant for the génocidaire Benjamin Netanyahu), the world took notice. Trump and Microsoft bricked the ICC, effectively shuttering its operations. If they could do that to the ICC, they could do it to any government agency, any nationally important corporation, any leader – anyone. It was an act of blatant cyberwarfare, no different from Russian hackers bricking Ukrainian power plants (except that Microsoft didn't have to hack Outlook, they own it).

The move put teeth into Trump's frequent reminders that America no longer has allies or trading partners – it only has rivals and adversaries. That has been the subtext – and overt message – of the Trump tariffs, ever since "liberation day" on April 2, 2025.

When Americans talk about the Trump tariffs, they focus on what these will do to the cost of living in the USA. When other countries discuss the tariffs, they focus on what this will do to their export markets, and whether their leaders will capitulate to America's absurd demands.

This makes sense: America is gripped by a brutal cost of living crisis, and contrary to Trump's assertions, this is not a Democratic hoax. We know this because (as The Onion points out), "Democrats would never run on a salient issue":

https://theonion.com/fact-checking-trump-on-affordability/

It also makes sense that Canadians and Britons would focus on this because Prime Ministers Carney and Starmer have caved on their plans to tax US Big Tech, ensuring that these companies will always have a cash-basis advantage over domestic rivals (Starmer also rolled over by promising to allow American pharma companies to gouge the NHS):

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/nhs-drug-prices-starmer-trump-tariffs-b2841490.html

But there's another, highly salient aspect to tariffs that is much neglected – one that is, ultimately, far more important than these short-run changes to other countries' plans to tax American tech giants. Namely: for decades, the US has used the threat of tariffs to force its trading partners into policies that keep their tech companies from competing with American tech giants.

The most important of these Big Tech-defending policy demands is something called "anticircumvention law." This is a law that bans changing how a product works without the manufacturer's permission: for example, modifying your printer so it can use generic ink, or modifying your car so it can be fixed by an independent repair depot, or modifying your phone or games console so it can use a third-party app store.

This ban on modification means that when a US tech giant uses its products to steal money and/or private information from the people in your country (that is, "enshittification"), no one is allowed to give your people the tools to escape these scams. Your domestic investors can't invest in your domestic technologists' startups, which cannot make the disenshittifying products that also cannot be exported globally, to anyone with an internet connection and a payment method.

It's a double whammy: your people are plundered, and your businesses are strangled. The whole world has been made poorer, to the tune of trillions of dollars, by this scam. And the only reason everyone puts up with it is that the US threatened them with tariffs if they didn't.

So now we have tariffs, and if someone threatens to burn your house down unless you follow orders, and then they burn it down anyway, you really don't have to keep following their orders.

This is a point I've been making in many forums lately, including, most recently, on a stage in Canada, where I made the case that rather than whacking Americans with retaliatory tariffs, Canada should legalize reverse-engineering and go into business directly attacking the highest margin lines of business of America's most profitable corporations, making everything in Canada cheaper and better, and turning America's trillions in Big Tech ripoffs into Canadian billions by selling these tools to everyone else in the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/28/disenshittification-nation/#post-american-internet

There's lots of reasons to like this plan. Not only is it a double reverse whammy – making everything cheaper and making billions for a new, globally important domestic tech sector – but it's also unambiguously within Canada's power to do. After all, it's very hard to get American tech giants to do things they don't want to do. Canada tried to do this with Facebook, and failed miserably:

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/understood-who-broke-the-internet-episode-4-transcript-1.7615096

The EU – a far more powerful entity than Canada – has been trying to get Apple to open up its App Store, and Apple has repeatedly told them to go fuck themselves:

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

Apple, being a truly innovative company, has come up with a whole lot of exciting new ways to tell the EU to fuck itself:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/16/apple_dma_complaint/

But anticircumvention law is something that every government has total, absolute control over. Maybe Canada can't order Apple, Google and Facebook to pay their taxes, but it can absolutely decide to stop giving these American companies access to Canada's courts to shut down Canadian competitors so that US companies can go on stealing data and money from the Canadian people:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/01/redistribution-vs-predistribution/#elbows-up-eurostack

Funnily enough, this case is so convincing that I've started to hear from Canadian Trump appeasers who insist that we must not repeal our anticircumvention laws because this would work too well. It would inflict too much pain on America's looting tech sector, and save Canadians too much money, and make too much money for Canadian tech businesses. If Canada becomes the world's first disenshittification nation (they say), we will make Trump too angry.

Apparently, these people think that Canada should confine its tariff response to measures that don't work, because anything effective would provoke Trump.

When I try to draw these critics out about what the downside of "provoking Trump" is, they moot the possibility that Trump would roll tanks across the Rainbow Bridge and down Lundy's Lane. This seems a remote possibility to me – and ultimately, they agree. The international response to Trump invading Canada because we made it easier for people (including Americans) to buy cheap printer ink would be…intense.

Next, they mumble something about tariffs. When I point out that the US is already imposing tariffs on Canadian exports, they say "well, it could be worse," and point to various moments when Trump has hiked the tariffs on Canada, e.g. because he was angry over being reminded that Ronald Reagan would have hated his guts:

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

But of course, the fact that Trump's tariffs yo-yo up and down depending on the progress of his white matter disease means that anyone trying to do forward planning for something they anticipate exporting to America should assume that there might be infinity tariffs the day they load up their shipping container.

But there's another way in which the threat of tariffs is ringing increasingly hollow: American consumption power is collapsing, because billionaires and looters have hoarded all the country's wealth, and no one can afford to buy things anymore.

America is in the grips of its third consecutive "K-shaped recovery":

https://prospect.org/2025/12/01/premiumization-plutonomy-middle-class-spending-gilded-age/

A K-shaped recovery is when the richest people get richer, but everyone else gets worse off. Working people in America have gotten steadily poorer since the 1970s, even as America's wealthiest have seen their net worth skyrocket.

The declining economic power of everyday Americans has multiple causes: stagnating wages, monopoly price-gouging, and the blistering increase in education, housing and medical debt. These all have the same underlying cause, of course: the capture of both political parties – and the courts and administrative agencies – by billionaires, who have neutered antitrust law, jacked up the price of health care and a college educaton, smashed unions, and cornered entire housing markets.

For decades, America's consumption power has been kept on life-support through consumer debt and second (or third, or fourth) mortgages. But America's monopoly credit card companies are every bit as capable of price-gouging as America's hospitals, colleges and landlords are, and Americans don't just carry more credit-card debt than their foreign counterparts, they also pay more to service that debt:

https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-visa-monopolizing-debit-markets

The point is that every dollar that goes into servicing a debt is a dollar that can't be used to buy something useful. A dollar spent on consumption has the potential to generate multiple, knock-on transactions, as the merchant spends your dollar on a coffee, and the coffee-shop owner spends it on a meal out, and the restaurateur spends it on a local printer who runs off a new set of menus. But a dollar that's shoveled into the debt markets is almost immediately transferred out of the real economy and into the speculative financial economy, landing in the pocket of a one-percenter who buys stocks or other assets with it.

The rich just don't buy enough stuff. There's a limit to how many Lambos, Picassos, and Sub-Zero fridges even the most guillotineable plute can usefully own.

Meanwhile, consumers keep having their consumption power siphoned off by debt-collectors and price-gougers, with Trump's help. The GOP just forced eight million student borrowers back into repayment:

https://prospect.org/2025/12/16/gop-forcing-eight-million-student-loan-borrowers-into-repayment/

They've killed a monopolization case against Pepsi and Walmart for colluding to rig grocery prices across the entire economy:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/secret-documents-show-pepsi-and-walmart

They've sanctioned the use of price-fixing algorithms to raise rent:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/an-odd-settlement-on-rent-fixing

As Tim Wu points out in his new book, The Age of Extraction, one consequence of allowing monopoly pricing is that it reduces spending power across the entire economy:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/691177/the-age-of-extraction-by-tim-wu/

Take electricity: you would probably pay your power bill even if it tripled. Sure, you'd find ways to conserve electricity and eliminate many discretionary power uses, but anyone who can pay for electricity will, if the alternative is no electricity. Electricity – like health, shelter, food, and education – is so essential that you'd forego a vacation, a new car, Christmas gifts, dinners out, a new winter coat, or a vet's visit for your cat if that was the only way to keep the lights on.

Trump's unshakable class solidarity with rent extractors, debt collectors and price gougers has significantly accelerated the collapse of the consumption power of Americans (AKA "the affordability crisis").

But it gets worse: Americans' consumption power isn't limited to the dollars they spend, it also includes the dollars that the government spends on their behalf, through programs like SNAP (food stamps) and Medicaid/Medicare. Those programs have been slashed to the bone and beyond by Trump, Musk, DOGE and the Republican majority in Congress and the Senate.

The reason that other countries took the threat of US tariffs so seriously – seriously enough to hamstring their own tech sector and render their own people defenseless against US tech – is that the US has historically bought a lot of stuff. For any export economy, the US was a critical market, a must-have.

But that has been waning for a generation, as the Lambo-and-Sub-Zero set hoarded more and more of the wealth and the rest of us were able to afford less and less. In less than a year, Trump has slashed the consumption power of an increasing share of the American public to levels approaching the era of WWII ration-books.

The remaining American economy is a collection of cheap gimmicks that are forever on the brink of falling apart. Most of the economy is propped up by building data-centers for AI that no one wants and that can't be powered thanks to Trump's attacks on renewables. The remainder consists of equal parts MLMs, Labubus, Lafufus, cryptocurrency speculation, and degenerate app-based gambling.

None of this is good. This is all fucking terrible. But I raise it here to point out that "Do as I say or Americans won't buy your stuff anymore" starts to ring hollow once most Americans can't afford to buy anything anymore.

America is running out of levers to pull in order to get the rest of the world to do its bidding. American fossil fuels are increasingly being outcompeted by an explosion of cheap, evergreen Chinese solar panels, inverters, batteries, and related technology:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/02/there-goes-the-sun/#carbon-shifting

And the US can't exactly threaten to withhold foreign aid to get leverage over other countries – US foreign aid has dropped to homeopathic levels:

https://www.factcheck.org/2025/02/sorting-out-the-facts-on-waste-and-abuse-at-usaid/

What's more, it's gonna be increasingly difficult for the US to roll tanks anywhere, even across the Rainbow Bridge, now that Pete Hegseth is purging the troops of anyone who can't afford Ozempic:

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2025/09/30/hegseth-blasts-fat-troops-in-rare-gathering-with-military-brass/

And Congress just gutted the US military's Right to Repair, meaning that the Pentagon will be forced to continue its proud tradition of shipping busted generators, vehicles and materiel back to the USA for repair:

https://federalnewsnetwork.com/congress/2025/12/congress-quietly-strips-right-to-repair-provisions-from-2026-ndaa-despite-wide-support/

Eventually, some foreign government is going to wake up to the fact that they can make billions by raiding the US tech giants that have been draining their economy, and, in so doing, defend themselves against Trump's cyberwar threat to order Microsoft (or Oracle, or Apple, or Google) to brick their key ministries and corporations. When they do, US Big Tech will squeal, the way they always do:

https://economicpopulist.substack.com/p/big-tech-zeal-to-weaponize-trade

But money talks and bullshit walks. There's a generation of shit-hot technologists who've been chased out of America by mask-wearing ICE goons who wanted to throw them in a gulag, and a massive cohort of investors looking for alpha who don't want to have to budget for a monthly $TRUMP coin spend in order to remain in business.

And when we do finally get a disenshittification nation, it will be great news for Americans. After all, everyday Americans either own no stock, or so little stock as to be indistinguishable from no stock. We don't benefit from US tech companies' ripoffs – we are the victims of those ripoffs. America is ground zero for every terrible scam and privacy invasion that a US tech giant can conceive of. No one needs the disenshittification tools that let us avoid surveillance, rent-seeking and extraction more than Americans. And once someone else goes into business selling them, we'll be able to buy them.

Buying digital tools that are delivered over the internet is a hell of a lot simpler than buying cheap medicine online and getting it shipped from a Canadian pharmacy.

For an America First guy, Trump is sure hell-bent on ending the American century.

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 PSP 2.01 firmware unlocked https://web.archive.org/web/20060115012844/https://psp3d.com/showthread.php?t=874

#20yrsago HOWTO make a DRM CD https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2005/12/15/make-your-own-copy-protected-cd-passive-protection/

#15yrsago DanKam: mobile app to correct color blindness https://web.archive.org/web/20101217043921/https://dankaminsky.com/2010/12/15/dankam/

#15yrsago UBS’s 43-page dress code requires tie-knots that match your facial morphology https://web.archive.org/web/20151115074222/https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704694004576019783931381042

#15yrsago UK demonstrator challenges legality of “kettling” protestors https://web.archive.org/web/20101219075643/https://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpress/article/ALeqM5hK97JtRIOOeKUxESqXRLSeUDBTJw?docId=B39208111292330372A000

#15yrsago Backyard MAS*H set replica https://imgur.com/a/mash-ztcon

#15yrsago Bottle-opener shaped like a prohibitionist https://web.archive.org/web/20101222062101/https://blog.modernmechanix.com/2010/12/15/booze-foe-image-opens-bottles/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ModernMechanix+(Modern+Mechanix)

#15yrsago Typewriter ribbon tins https://thedieline.com/vintage-packaging-typewriter-tins.html/

#10yrsago Sometimes, starting the Y-axis at zero is the BEST way to lie with statistics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14VYnFhBKcY

#10yrsago DEA ignored prosecutor’s warning about illegal wiretap warrants, now it’s losing big https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/12/09/illegal-dea-wiretap-riverside-money-laundering/77050442/

#10yrsago Lifelock anti-identity theft service helped man stalk his ex-wife https://www.azcentral.com/story/money/business/consumers/2015/11/23/lifelock-used-electronically-track-arizona-woman/75535470/

#10yrsago EFF and Human Rights Watch force DEA to destroy its mass surveillance database https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/12/victory-privacy-and-transparency-hrw-v-dea

#10yrsago Do Androids Dream of Electric Victim-Blamers? https://neverbeenmad.tumblr.com/post/134528463529/voight-kampff-empathy-test-2015-by-smlxist-and

#10yrsago Billionaire GOP superdonors aren’t getting what they paid for https://web.archive.org/web/20181119192737/https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2015/12/gop-billionaires-cant-seem-to-buy-this-election.html

#5yrsago EU competition rules have real teeth https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/15/iowa-vs-16-tons-of-bricks/#dsm

#5yrsago Asset forfeiture is just theft https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/15/iowa-vs-16-tons-of-bricks/#stand-and-delivery

#5yrsago Pornhub and payment processors https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/15/iowa-vs-16-tons-of-bricks/#chokepoints

#5yrsago Blockchain voting is bullshit https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/15/iowa-vs-16-tons-of-bricks/#sudoku-voting

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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Recent appearances (permalink)


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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, June 2026


Colophon (permalink)

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15.12.2025 à 17:10

Pluralistic: Break up bad companies; replace bad union bosses (15 Dec 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3794 mots)


Today's links


A picket line; the picketers are holding militant hand-lettered signs. Behind them, in a red halo, is a cigar-chomping boss figure.

Break up bad companies; replace bad union bosses (permalink)

Unions are not perfect. Indeed, it is possible to belong to a union that is bad for workers: either because it is weak, or corrupt, or captured (or some combination of the three).

Take the "two-tier contract." As unions lost ground – thanks to changes in labor law enforcement under a succession of both Republican and Democratic administrations – labor bosses hit on a suicidal strategy for contract negotiations. Rather than bargaining for a single contract that covered all the union's dues-paying members, these bosses negotiated contracts that guaranteed benefits for existing members, but did not extend these benefits to new members:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/25/strikesgiving/#shed-a-tier

A two-tier contract is one where all workers pay dues, but only the dwindling rump of older, more established workers get any protection or representation from their union. An ever-larger portion of the membership have to pay dues, but get nothing for them. You couldn't come up with a better way to destroy unions if you tried.

Thankfully, union workers figured out that the answer to this problem was firing their leaders and replacing them with militant, principled leaders who cared about workers, not just a subsection of their members. Radicals in big unions – like the UAW – teamed up with comrades from university grad students' unions to master the arcane rules that had been weaponized by corrupt bosses to prevent free and fair union elections. Together, they forced the first legitimate union elections in generations, and then the newly elected leaders ran historic strikes that won huge gains for workers (and killed off the two-tier contract):

https://theintercept.com/2023/04/07/deconstructed-union-dhl-teamsters-uaw/

Corrupt unions aren't the only life-destroying institutions that radicals have set their sights on this decade. Concentrated corporate power is the most dangerous force in the world today (indeed, it's large, powerful corporations that corrupted those unions). Antitrust activists, environmental activists, consumer rights activists, privacy activists and labor activists have stepped up the global war on big business all through this decade. From new antitrust laws to antitrust lawsuits to strikes to boycotts to mass protests and direct action, this decade has marked a turning point in the global consciousness about the danger of corporate power and the need to fight it.

But there's a big, important difference between bad corporations and bad unions: what we should do about them.

The answer to a powerful, corrupt corporation is to take action that strips it of its power: break the company up, whack it with fines, take away its corporate charter, strip its executives of their fortunes, even put them in prison. That's because corporations are foundationally undemocratic institutions, governed by "one share, one vote" (and the billionaires who benefit from corporate power are building a society that's "one dollar, one vote").

They fundamentally exist to consolidate power at the expense of workers, suppliers and customers, to extract wealth by imposing costs on the rest of us, from pollution to political corruption. When a corporation gets big enough to pose a risk to societal wellbeing, we need to smash that corporation, not reform it.

But the answer to a corrupt union is to fire the union bosses and replace them with better ones. The mission of a union is foundationally pro-democratic. A unionized workplace is a democratic workplace. As in any democracy, workplace democracies can be led by bad or incompetent people. But, as with any democracy, the way you fix this is by swapping out the bad leaders for good ones – not by abolishing democracy and replacing it with an atomized society in which it's every worker for themself, bargaining with a boss who will always win a one-on-one fight in the long run.

I raise this because a general strike is back on the table, likely for May Day 2028 (5/1/28):

https://labornotes.org/2025/12/maybe-general-strike-isnt-so-impossible-now

Unions are an important check against fascism. That's why fascists always start by attacking organized labor: solidarity is the opposite of fascism.

To have unions that are fit for purpose in this existential battle for the future of the nation – and, quite possibly, the human race – we desperately need better leaders. Like the union bosses who gave us the two-tier contract, many of our union leaders see their mission as narrowly serving their existing members, and not other workers – not even workers who might some day become their members.

To get a sense of how bad it's gotten, consider these five facts:

I. Public support for unions is at its highest level since the Carter administration;

II. More workers want to join unions than at any time in living memory;

III. Unions have larger cash reserves than at any time in history;

IV. Under Biden, the National Labor Relations Board was more friendly to unions than at any time in generations; and

V. During the Biden years, the number of unionized workers in America went down, not up.

That's because union bosses – sitting on a mountain of cash, surrounded by workers begging to be organized – decided that their priority was their existing members, and declined to spend more than a pittance of their cash reserves on organizing efforts.

This is suicidal – as self-destructive as the two-tier contract was. To pull off a general strike, we will need mass civil disobedience, and a willingness to ignore the Taft-Hartley Act's ban on solidarity strikes. Trump's NLRB isn't just hostile to workers – he's illegally fired so many of its commissioners that they can't even perform most of their functions. But a militant labor movement could turn that to its advantage, because militants know that when Trump fires the refs, you don't have to stop the game – you can throw out the rule book:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/29/which-side-are-you-on-2/#strike-three-yer-out

This is the historic opportunity and challenge before us – to occupy our unions, save our workplace democracies, and then save our national democracy itself.

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 Sony Artists offering home-burned CDs to replace spyware-infected discs https://web.archive.org/web/20060719082355/http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/8950981/copyprotection_troubles_grow

#20yrsago Pentagon bravely vigilant against sinister, threatening Quakers https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna10454316

#20yrsago Brooklyn camera-store crooks threaten activist’s life https://thomashawk.com/2005/12/brooklyn-photographer-don-wiss.html

#20yrsago Britannica averages 3 bugs per entry; Wikipedia averages 4 https://www.nature.com/articles/438900a

#20yrsago Diane Duane wonders if she should self-publish trilogy conclusion https://web.archive.org/web/20051215151654/https://outofambit.blogspot.com/archives/2005_12_01_outofambit_archive.html#113446948274092674

#20yrsago Table coverts to truncheon and shield http://www.jamesmcadam.co.uk/portfolio_html/sb_table.html

#20yrsago Royal Society members speak out for open access science publishing https://web.archive.org/web/20051210023301/https://www.frsopenletter.org/

#20yrsago TiVo upgrading company offers $25k for hacks to the new DirecTV PVR https://web.archive.org/web/20051215050848/https://www.wkblog.com/2005/12/weaknees_offers_up_to_25000_fo.html

#20yrsago Michigan HS students will need to take online course to graduate https://web.archive.org/web/20051215052603/https://www.chronicle.com/free/2005/12/2005121301t.htm

#15yrsago Hiaasen’s STAR ISLAND: blisteringly funny tale of sleazy popstars and paparazzi https://memex.craphound.com/2010/12/13/hiaasens-star-island-blisteringly-funny-tale-of-sleazy-popstars-and-paparazzi/

#15yrsago Dan Gillmor’s Mediactive: masterclass in 21st century journalism demands a net-native news-media https://memex.craphound.com/2010/12/13/dan-gillmors-mediactive-masterclass-in-21st-century-journalism-demands-a-net-native-news-media/

#15yrsago Council of Europe accuses Kosovo’s prime minister of organlegging https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/14/kosovo-prime-minister-llike-mafia-boss

#15yrsago Gold pills turn your innermost parts into chambers of wealth https://web.archive.org/web/20110930011010/https://www.citizen-citizen.com/collections/all/products/gold-pills

#10yrsago The Red Cross brought in an AT&T exec as CEO and now it’s a national disaster https://www.propublica.org/article/the-corporate-takeover-of-the-red-cross

#10yrsago Philips pushes lightbulb firmware update that locks out third-party bulbs https://www.techdirt.com/2015/12/14/lightbulb-drm-philips-locks-purchasers-out-third-party-bulbs-with-firmware-update/

#10yrsago UK spy agency posts data-mining software to Github https://github.com/gchq/Gaffer

#10yrsago Cybercrime 3.0: stealing whole houses https://memex.craphound.com/2015/12/14/cybercrime-3-0-stealing-whole-houses/

#10yrsago US politicians, ranked by their willingness to lie https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/13/opinion/campaign-stops/all-politicians-lie-some-lie-more-than-others.html

#10yrsago 24 privacy tools — not messaging apps — that don’t exist https://dymaxion.org/essays/pleasestop.html

#10yrsago North Carolina town rejects solar because it’ll suck up sunlight and kill the plants https://web.archive.org/web/20250813151735/https://www.roanoke-chowannewsherald.com/2015/12/08/woodland-rejects-solar-farm/

#10yrsago Giant hats were the cellphones of the silent movie era https://pipedreamdragon.tumblr.com/post/135065922736/movie-movie-etiquette-warnings-shown-before

#10yrsago Plaid Lumberjack Cake https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1hDl53c-kw

#10yrsago MRA Scott Adams: pictures and words by Scott Adams, together at last https://web.archive.org/web/20151214002415/https://mradilbert.tumblr.com/

#10yrsago American rents reach record levels of unaffordability https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/its-not-just-poor-who-cant-make-rent-n478501

#5yrsago Well-Armed Peasants https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/13/art-thou-down/#forsooth

#5yrsago Where money comes from https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/14/situation-normal/#mmt

#5yrsago China's best investigative stories of 2020 https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/14/situation-normal/#gijn

#5yrsago Situation Normal https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/14/situation-normal/#more-constellation-games

#1yrago Social media needs (dumpster) fire exits https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes

#1yrago The GOP is not the party of workers https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/13/occupy-the-democrats/#manchin-synematic-universe

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, June 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. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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

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

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13.12.2025 à 17:14

Pluralistic: Federal Wallet Inspectors (13 Dec 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (5213 mots)


Today's links

  • Federal Wallet Inspectors: Does tech *really* move too fast to regulate?
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Soda can Van de Graff; Amazon rents a copy of the web; Boardgame Remix Kit; No furniture photos please we're British; Youtube vs fair use; Carbon offsets are bullshit; Arkham model railroad; Happy Birthday is in the public domain; Ted Cruz hires Cambridge Analytica; The kid who wanted to join the NSA; Daddy Daughter Xmas Podcast 2020.
  • Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
  • Recent appearances: Where I've been.
  • Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Colophon: All the rest.


A modified FBI badge. It now reads 'Federal Wallet Investigators.' It is made out to 'Timothy J Shotspotter.' It is held in the three-fingered, gloved grip of a cartoon character. Around its edges, we see a cartoon room from a public domain Betty Boop cartoon.

Federal Wallet Inspectors (permalink)

Look, I'm not trying to say that new technologies never raise gnarly new legal questions, but what I am saying is that a lot of the time, the "new legal challenges" raised by technology are somewhere between 95% to 100% bullshit, ginned up by none-too-bright tech bros and their investors, and then swallowed by regulators and lawmakers who are either so credulous they'd lose a game of peek-a-boo, or (likely) in on the scam.

Take "fintech." As Trashfuture's Riley Quinn is fond of saying, "when you hear 'fintech,' think 'unregulated bank'":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/02/shadow-banking-2-point-oh/#leverage

I mean, the whole history of banking is: "Bankers think of a way to do reckless things that are wildly profitable (in the short term) and catastrophic (in the long term). They offer bribes and other corrupt incentives to their watchdogs to let them violate the rules, which leads to utter disaster." From the 19th century "panics" to the crash of '29 to the S&L collapse to the 2008 Great Financial Crisis and beyond, this just keeps happening.

Much of the time, the bankers involved have some tissue-thin explanation for why what they're doing isn't really a violation of the rules. Think of the lenders who, in the runup to the Great Financial Crisis, insisted that they weren't engaged in risky lending because they had a fancy equation that proved that the mortgage-backed securities they were issuing were all sound, and it was literally impossible that they'd all default at once.

The fact that regulators were bamboozled by this is enraging. In hindsight (and for many of us at least, at the time), it's obvious that the bankers went to their watchdogs and said, "We'd like to break the law," and the watchdogs said, "Sure, but would you mind coming up with some excuse that I can repeat later when someone asks me why I let you do this crime?"

It's like in the old days of medical marijuana, where you'd get on a call with a dial-a-doc and say, "Please can I have some weed?" and the doc would say, "Tell me about your headaches," and you'd say, "Uh, I have headaches?" and they'd say "Great, here's your weed!"

The alternative is that these regulators are so bafflingly stupid that they can't be trusted to dress themselves. "My stablecoin is a fit financial instrument to integrate into the financial system" is as credible a wheeze as some crypto bro walking up to Cory Booker, flashing a homemade badge, and snapping out, "Federal Wallet Inspector, hand it over."

I mean, at that point, I kind of hope they're corrupt, because the alternative is that they are basically a brainstem and a couple of eyestalks in a suit.

What I'm saying is, "We just can't figure out if crypto is violating finance laws" is a statement that can only be attributed to someone very stupid, or in on the game.

Speaking of "someone very stupid, or in on the game," Congress just killed a rule that would have guaranteed that the US military could repair its own materiel:

https://federalnewsnetwork.com/congress/2025/12/congress-quietly-strips-right-to-repair-provisions-from-2026-ndaa-despite-wide-support/

Military right to repair is the most brainless of all possible no-brainers. When a generator breaks down in the field – even in an active war-zone – the US military has to ship it back to America to be serviced by the manufacturer. That's not because you can't train a Marine to fix a generator – it's because the contractual and technical restrictions that military contractors insist on ban the military from fixing its stuff:

https://www.pogo.org/fact-sheets/fact-sheet-the-right-to-repair-for-the-united-states-military

This violates a very old principle in sound military administration. Abraham Lincoln insisted that the contractors who supplied the Union army had to use standardized tooling and ammo, because it would be very embarrassing for the Commander-in-Chief to have to stand on the field at Gettysburg with a megaphone and shout, "Sorry boys, war's canceled this week, our sole supplier's gone on vacation."

And yet, after mergers of large military contractors resulted in just a handful of "primary" companies serving the Pentagon, private equity vampires snapped up all the subcontractors who were sole-source suppliers of parts to those giants. They slashed the prices of those parts so that the primary contractors used as many as possible in the materiel they provided to the US DoD, and then raised the prices of replacement parts, some with 10,000% margins, which the Pentagon now has to pay for so long as they own those jets and other big-ticket items:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/29/fractal-bullshit/#dayenu

This isn't a complicated scam. It's super straightforward, and the right to repair rule that Congress killed addressed it head on. But Congressional enemies of this bill insisted that it would have untold "unintended consequences" and instead passed a complex rule, riddled with loopholes, because there was something unique and subtle about the blunt issue of price-gouging:

https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/final_-_warren_letter_to_dod_re_right_to_repair_consequences_092524.pdf

Either these lawmakers are so stupid that they fell for the ole "Federal Wallet Inspector" gambit, or they're in on the game. I know which explanation my money is on.

Maybe this has already occurred to you, but lately I've come to realize that there's another dimension to this, a way in which critics of tech help this gambit along. After all, it's pretty common for tech critics to preface their critiques with words to the effect of, "Of course, this technology has raced ahead of regulators' ability to keep pace with it. Those dastardly tech-bros have slipped the net once again!"

The unspoken (and sometimes very loudly spoken) corollary of this is, "Only a tech-critic as perspicacious and forward looking as me is capable of matching wits with those slippery tech-bros, and I have formulated a sui generis policy prescription that can head them off at the pass."

Take the problem of deepfakes, including deepfake porn. There's a pretty straightforward policy response to this: a privacy law that allows you to prevent the abuse of your private information (including to create deepfakes) that unlawfully process your personal information for an illegitimate purpose. To make sure that this law can be enforced, include a "private right of action," which means that individuals can sue to enforce it (and activist orgs and no-win/no-fee lawyers can sue on their behalf). That way, you can get justice even if the state Attorney General or the federal Department of Justice decides not to take your case.

Privacy law is a great idea. It can navigate nuances, like the fact that privacy is collective, not individual – for example, it can intervene when your family members give their (your) DNA to a scam like 23andme, or when a friend posts photos of you online:

https://jacobin.com/2021/05/cory-doctorow-interview-bill-gates-intellectual-property

But privacy law gets a bad rap. In the EU, they've had the GDPR – a big, muscular privacy law – for nine years, and all it's really done is drown the continent in cookie-consent pop-ups. But that's not because the GDPR is flawed, it's because Ireland is a tax-haven that has lured in the world's worst corporate privacy-violators, and to keep them from moving to another tax haven (like Malta or Cyprus or Luxembourg), it has to turn itself into a crime-haven. So for the entire life of the GDPR, all the important privacy cases in Europe have gone to Ireland, and died there:

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

Now, again, this isn't a complicated technical question that is hard to resolve through regulation. It's just boring old corruption. I'm not saying that corruption is easy to solve, but I am saying that it's not complicated. Irish politicians made the country's economy dependent on the Irish state facilitating criminal activity by American firms. The EU doesn't want to provoke a constitutional crisis by forcing Ireland (and the EU's other crime-havens) to halt this behavior.

That's a hard thing to do! It's just not a complicated thing to do. The routine violations of EU privacy law by American tech companies aren't the result of "tech racing ahead of the law." It's just corruption. You can't fix corruption by passing more laws; they'll just be corruptly enforced, too.

But thanks to a mix of bad incentives – politicians wanting to be seen to do something without actually upsetting the apple-cart; AI critics wanting to inflate their importance by claiming that they're fighting something novel and complex, as opposed to something that's merely boring and hard – we get policy proposals that will likely worsen the problem.

Take Denmark's decision to fight deepfakes by creating a new copyright over your likeness:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/27/deepfakes-denmark-copyright-law-artificial-intelligence

Copyright – a property right – is an incredibly bad way to deal with human rights like privacy. For one thing, it makes privacy into a luxury good that only the wealthy can afford (remember, a discount for clicking through a waiver of your privacy right is the same thing as an extra charge for not waiving your privacy rights). For another, property rights are very poorly suited to managing things that have joint ownership, such as private information. As soon as you turn private information into private property, you have to answer questions like, "Which twin owns the right to their face" and "Who owns the right to the fact that your abusive mother is your mother – you, or her? And if it's her, does she get to stop you from publishing a memoir about the abuse?"

Copyright – a state-backed transferable monopoly over expression – is really hard to get right. Legislatures and courts have struggled to balance free expression and copyright for centuries, and there's a complex web of "limitations and exceptions" to copyright. Privacy is also incredibly complex, and has its own limitations and exceptions, and they are very different from copyright's limits. I mean, they have to be: privacy rules defend your human right to a personal zone of autonomy; copyright is intended to create economic incentives to produce new creative works. It would be very weird if the same rules served both ends.

I can't believe that Denmark's legislators failed to consider privacy as the solution to deepfakes. If they did, they are very, very stupid. Rather, they decided that fighting the corruption that keeps privacy law from being enforced in the EU was too hard, so they just did something performative, creating a raft of new problems, without solving the old one.

Here in the USA, there's lots of lawmakers who are falling into this trap. Take the response to chatbots that give harmful advice to children and teens. The answer that many American politicians (as well as lawmakers abroad, in Australia, Canada, the UK and elsewhere) have come up with is to force AI companies to identify who is and is not a child and treat them differently.

This boils down to a requirement for AI companies to collect much more information on their users (to establish their age), which means that all the AI harms that stem from privacy violations (AI algorithms that steal wages, hike prices, discriminate in hiring and lending and policing, etc) are now even harder to stop.

A simple alternative to this would be updating privacy law to limit how AI companies can gather and use everyone's data – which would mean that you could protect kids from privacy invasions without (paradoxically) requiring them (and you) to disclose all kinds of private information to determine how old they are.

The insistence – by AI critics and AI boosters – that AI is so different from other technologies that you can't address it by limiting the collection, retention and processing of private information is a way in which AI critics and AI hucksters end up colluding to promote a view of AI as an exceptional technology. It's not. AI is a normal technology:

https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/ai-as-normal-technology

Sometimes this argument descends into grimly hilarious parody. Argue for limits on AI companies' collection, retention and processing of private information and AI boosters will tell you that this would require so much labor-intensive discernment about training data that it would make it impossible to continue training AI until it becomes intelligent enough to solve all our problems. But also, when you press the issue, they'll sometimes say that AI is already so "intelligent" that it can derive (that is, guess) private information about you without needing your data, so a new privacy law won't help.

In other words, applying privacy limitations to AI means we'll never get a "superintelligence,"; and also, we already have a superintelligence so there's no point in applying privacy limitations to AI.

It's true that technology can give rise to novel regulatory challenges, but it's also true that claiming that a technology is so novel that existing regulation can't resolve its problems is just a way of buying time to commit more crimes before the regulators finally realize that your flashy new technology is just a boring old scam.

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 Americans smile, Brits grimace? https://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/magazine/national-smiles.html

#20yrsago HOWTO make a soda-can Van de Graaf https://scitoys.com/scitoys/scitoys/electro/electro6.html

#20yrsago Credit-card-sized USB drive https://web.archive.org/web/20051214084824/http://walletex.com/

#20yrsago Homeland Security: Mini-golf courses are terrorist targets https://web.archive.org/web/20060215153821/https://www.kron.com/Global/story.asp?S=4226663

#20yrsago Amazon rents access to a copy of the Web https://battellemedia.com/archives/2005/12/alexa_make_that_amazon_looks_to_change_the_game

#15yrsago Pornoscanners trivially defeated by pancake-shaped explosives https://web.archive.org/web/20101225211840/http://springerlink.com/content/g6620thk08679160/fulltext.pdf

#10yrsago HO fhtagn! Detailed model railroad layout recreates HP Lovecraft’s Arkham https://web.archive.org/web/20131127042302/http://www.ottgallery.com/MRR.html

#10yrsago Suicide rates are highest in spring — not around Christmas https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/12/no-suicides-dont-rise-during-the-holidays/419436/

#10yrsago Airbnb hosts consistently discriminate against black people https://www.benedelman.org/publications/airbnb-011014.pdf

#10yrsago What will it take to get MIT to stand up for its own students and researchers? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQdl_JdTars

#10yrsago Experts baffled to learn that 2 years olds are being prescribed psychiatric drugs https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/11/us/psychiatric-drugs-are-being-prescribed-to-infants.html?_r=0

#10yrsago Happy Birthday’s copyright status is finally, mysteriously settled https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/business/media/happy-birthday-copyright-case-reaches-a-settlement.html?_r=0

#10yrsago Proposal: keep the nuclear launch codes in an innocent volunteer’s chest-cavity https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/09/19/the-heart-of-deterrence/

#10yrsago Obama promises statement on encryption before Xmas (maybe) https://web.archive.org/web/20151211042128/https://www.dailydot.com/politics/white-house-encryption-policy-response-petition/

#10yrsago Harlem Cryptoparty: Crypto matters for #blacklivesmatter https://web.archive.org/web/20151218183924/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-black-community-needs-encryption

#10yrsago Backslash: a toolkit for protesters facing hyper-militarized, surveillance-heavy police https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/12/backslash-anti-surveillance-gadgets-for-protesters/

#10yrsago Ted Cruz campaign hires dirty data-miners who slurped up millions of Facebook users’ data https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/11/senator-ted-cruz-president-campaign-facebook-user-data

#10yrsago The Tor Project has a new executive director: former EFF director Shari Steele! https://blog.torproject.org/greetings-tors-new-executive-director/

#10yrsago What I told the kid who wanted to join the NSA https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/11/west-point-cybersecurity-nsa-privacy-edward-snowden

#10yrsago Copyfraud: Disney’s bogus complaint over toy photo gets a fan kicked off Facebook https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/12/disney-initially-drops-then-doubles-down-on-dmca-claim-over-star-wars-figure-pic/

#15yrsago Sales pitch from an ATM-skimmer vendor https://krebsonsecurity.com/2010/12/why-gsm-based-atm-skimmers-rule/

#15yrsago Boardgame Remix Kit makes inspired new games out of old Monopoly, Clue, Trivial Pursuit and Scrabble sets https://web.archive.org/web/20101214210548/http://www.boardgame-remix-kit.com/sample/boardgame-remix-kit-sample.pdf

#10yrsago Britons will need copyright licenses to post photos of their own furniture https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/12/you-may-soon-need-a-licence-to-take-photos-of-that-classic-designer-chair-you-bought/

#5yrsago Outgoing Facebookers blast the company https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/12/fairy-use-tale/#badge-posts

#5yrsago Carbon offsets are bullshit https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/12/fairy-use-tale/#greenwashing

#5yrsago Youtube, fair use, competition, and the death of the artist https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/12/fairy-use-tale/#content-id

#5yrsago A lethally boring story https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/11/number-eight/#erisa

#5yrsago Daddy Daughter Xmas Podcast 2020 https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/11/number-eight/#youll-go-down-in-mystery

#5yrsago Antitrust and Facebook's paid disinformation https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/11/number-eight/#curse-of-bigness

#1yrago The housing emergency and the second Trump term https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/11/nimby-yimby-fimby/#home-team-advantage

#1yrago A Democratic media strategy to save journalism and the nation https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/12/the-view-from-somewhere/#abolish-rogan

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, June 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. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF

11.12.2025 à 17:13

Pluralistic: Instacart reaches into your pocket and lops a third off your dollars (11 Dec 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (5806 mots)


Today's links


A 1950s image of a mother and daughter pushing a shopping cart down a grocery store aisle. The left halves of these figures have stylized ASCII art superimposed over them. Behind them looms the hostile red eye of HAL9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' The flood is gilded.

Instacart reaches into your pocket and lops a third off your dollars (permalink)

There's a whole greedflation-denial cottage industry that insists that rising prices are either the result of unknowable, untameable and mysterious economic forces, or they're the result of workers having too much money and too many jobs.

The one thing we're absolutely not allowed to talk about is the fact that CEOs keep going on earnings calls to announce that they are hiking prices way ahead of any increase in their costs, and blaming inflation:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/20/quiet-part-out-loud/#profiteering

Nor are we supposed to notice the "price consultancies" that let the dominant firms in many sectors – from potatoes to meat to rental housing – fix prices in illegal collusive arrangements that are figleafed by the tissue-thin excuse that "if you use an app to fix prices, it's not a crime":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/25/potatotrac/#carbo-loading

And we're especially not supposed to notice the proliferation of "personalized pricing" businesses that use surveillance data to figure out how desperate you are and charge you a premium based on that desperation:

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

Surveillance pricing – when you are charged more for the same goods than someone else, based on surveillance data about the urgency of your need and the cash in your bank account – is a way for companies to reach into your pocket and devalue the dollars in your wallet. After all, if you pay $2 for something that I pay $1 for, that's just the company saying that your dollars are only worth half as much as mine:

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

It's a form of cod-Marxism: "from each according to their desperation":

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

The economy is riddled with surveillance pricing gouging. You are almost certainly paying more than your neighbors for various items, based on algorithmic price-setting, every day. Case in point: More Perfect Union and Groundwork Collaborative teamed up with Consumer Reports to recruit 437 volunteers from across America to log in to Instacart at the same time and buy the same items from 15 stores, and found evidence of surveillance pricing at Albertsons, Costco, Kroger, and Sprouts Farmers Market:

https://groundworkcollaborative.org/work/instacart/

The price-swings are wild. Some test subjects are being charged 23% more than others. The average variance for "the exact same items, from the exact same locations, at the exact same time" comes out to 7%, or "$1,200 per year for groceries" for a family of four.

The process by which your greedflation premium is assigned is opaque. The researchers found that Instacart shoppers ordering from Target clustered into seven groups, but it's not clear how Instacart decides how much extra to charge any given shopper.

Instacart – who acquired Eversight, a surveillance pricing company, in 2022 – blamed the merchants (who, in turn, blamed Instacart). Instacart also claimed that they didn't use surveillance data to price goods, but hedged, admitting that the consumer packaged goods duopoly of Unilever and Procter & Gamble do use surveillance data in connection with their pricing strategies.

Finally, Instacart claimed that this was all an "experiment" to "learn what matters most to consumers and how to keep essential items affordable." In other words, they were secretly charging you more (for things like eggs and bread) because somehow that lets them "keep essential items affordable."

Instacart said their goal was to help "retail partners understand consumer preferences and identify categories where they should invest in lower prices."

Anyone who's done online analytics can easily pierce this obfuscation, but for those of you who haven't had the misfortune of directing an iterated, A/B tested optimization effort, I'll unpack this statement.

Say you have a pool of users and a bunch of variations on a headline. You randomly assign different variants to different users and measure clickthroughs. Then you check to see which variants performed best, and dig into the data you have on those users to see if there are any correlations that tie together users who liked a given approach.

This might let you discover that, say, women over 40 click more often on headlines that mention kittens. Then you generate more variations based on these conclusions – different ways of mentioning kittens – and see which of these variations perform best, and whether the targeted group of users split into smaller subgroups (women over 40 in the midwest prefer "tabby kitten" while their southern sisters prefer "kitten" without a mention of breed).

By repeatedly iterating over these steps, you can come up with many highly refined variants, and you can use surveillance data to target them to ever narrower, more optimized slices of your user-base.

Obviously, this is very labor intensive. You have to do a lot of tedious analysis, and generate a lot of variants. This is one of the reasons that slopvertising is so exciting to the worst people on earth: they imagine that they can use AI to create a self-licking ice-cream cone, performing the analysis and generating endless new variations, all untouched by human hands.

But when it comes to prices, it's much easier to produce variants – all you're doing is adding or subtracting from the price you show to shoppers. You don't need to get the writing team together to come up with new ways of mentioning kittens in a headline – you can just raise the price from $6.23 to $6.45 and see if midwestern women over 40 balk or add the item to their shopping baskets.

And here's the kicker: you don't need to select by gender, racial or economic criteria to end up with a super-racist and exploitative arrangement. That's because race, gender and socioeconomic status have broad correlates that are easily discoverable through automated means.

For example, thanks to generations of redlining, discriminatory housing policy, wage discrimination and environmental racism, the poorest, sickest neighborhoods in the country are also the most racialized and are also most likely to be "food deserts" where you can't just go to the grocery store and shop for your family.

What's more, the private equity-backed dollar store duopoly have waged a decades-long war on community grocery stores, enveloping them with dollar stores that use their access to preferential discounts (from companies like Unilever and Procter & Gamble, another duopoly) to force grocers out of business:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/27/walmarts-jackals/#cheater-sizes

Then these dollar stores run a greedflation scam that is so primitive, it's almost laughable: they just charge customers much higher amounts than the prices shown on the shelves and price-tags:

https://www.consumeraffairs.com/news/do-all-those-low-dollar-store-prices-really-add-up-120325.html

When you live in a food desert where your only store is a Dollar General that defrauds you at the cash-register, you are more likely to accept a higher price from Instacart, because you have fewer choices than someone in a middle-class neighborhood with two or three competing grocers. And the people who live in those food deserts are more likely to be poor, which, in America, is an excellent predictor of whether they are Black or brown.

Which is to say, without ever saying "Charge Black people more for groceries," Instacart can easily A/B split its way into a system where they predictably and reliably charge Black people more for groceries. That's the old cod-Marxism at work: "from each according to their desperation."

This is so well-understood that anyone who sets one of these systems in motion should be understood to be deliberately seeking to do racist profiteering under cover of an algorithm. It's empiricism-washing: "I'm not racist, I just did some math" (that produced a predictably racist outcome):

https://www.reuters.com/article/world/insight-amazon-scraps-secret-ai-recruiting-tool-that-showed-bias-against-women-idUSKCN1MK0AG/

This is the dark side and true meaning of "business optimization." The optimal business pays its suppliers and workers nothing, and charges its customers everything it can. Obviously, businesses need to settle for suboptimal outcomes, because workers won't show up if they don't get paid, and customers won't buy things that cost everything they have⹋.

⹋ Unless, of course, you are an academic publisher, in which case this is just how you do business.

A business "optimizes" its workforce by finding ways to get them to accept lower wages. For example, they can bind their workers with noncompete "agreements" that ban Wendy's cashiers from quitting their job and making $0.25 more per hour at the McDonald's next door (one in 18 American workers have been locked into one of these contracts):

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

Or they can lock their workers in with "training repayment agreement provisions" (TRAPs) – contractual clauses that force workers to pay their bosses thousands of dollars if they quit or get fired:

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

But the most insidious form of worker optimization is "algorithmic wage discrimination." That's when a company uses surveillance data to lower the wages of workers. For example, contract nurses are paid less if the app that hires them discovers (through the unregulated data-broker sector) that they have a lot of credit-card debt. After all, nurses who are heavily indebted can't afford to be choosy and turn down lowball offers:

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

This is the other form of surveillance pricing: pricing labor based on surveillance data. It's more cod-Marxism: "From each according to their desperation."

Forget "becoming ungovernable": to defeat these evil fuckers, we have to become unoptimizable:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/20/billionaireism/#surveillance-infantalism

How do we do that? Well, nearly every form of "optimization" begins with surveillance. They can't figure out whether they can charge you more if they can't spy on you. They can't figure out whether they can pay you less if they can't spy on you, either.

And the reason they can spy on you is because we let them. The last consumer privacy law to pass out of Congress was a 1988 bill that bans video-store clerks from disclosing your VHS rental history. Every other form of consumer surveillance is permitted under US federal law.

So step one of this process is to ban commercial surveillance. Banning algorithmic price discrimination is all well and good, but it is, ultimately, a form of redistribution. We're trying to make the companies share some of the excess they extract from our surveillance data. But predistribution – ending surveillance itself, in this case – is always far more effective than redistribution:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/31/losing-the-crypto-wars/#surveillance-monopolism

How do we do that? Well, we need to build a coalition. At the Electronic Frontier Foundation, we call this "privacy first": you can't solve all the internet's problems by fixing privacy, but you won't fix most of them unless we get privacy right, and so the (potential) coalition for a strong privacy regime is large and powerful:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

But of course, "privacy first," doesn't mean "just privacy." We also need tools that target algorithmic pricing per se. In New York State, there's a new law that requires disclosure of algorithmic pricing, in the form of a prominent notification reading, "THIS PRICE WAS SET BY AN ALGORITHM USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA."

This is extremely weaksauce, and might even be worse than nothing. In California we have Prop 65, a rule that requires businesses to post signs and add labels any time they expose you to chemicals "known to the state of California to cause cancer." This caveat emptor approach (warn people, let them vote with their wallets) has led to every corner of California's built environment being festooned with these warnings. Today, Californians just ignore these warnings, the same way that web users ignore the "privacy policy" disclosures on the sites they visit:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/19/gotcha/#known-to-the-state-of-california-to-cause-cancer

The right approach isn't to (merely) warn people about carcinogens (or privacy risks). The right approach is regulating harmful business practices, whether those practices give you a tumor or pick your pocket.

Under Biden, former FTC chair Lina Khan undertook proceedings to ban algorithmic pricing altogether. Trump's FTC killed that, along with all the other quality-of-life enhancing measures the FTC had in train (Trump's FTC chair replaced these with a program to root out "wokeness" in the agency).

Today, Khan is co-chair of Zohran Mamdani's transition team, and she will use the mayor's authority (under the New York City Consumer Protection Law of 1969, which addresses "unconscionable" commercial practices) to ban algorithmic pricing in NYC:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/15/unconscionability/#standalone-authority

Khan wasn't Biden's only de-optimizer. Under chair Rohit Chopra, Biden's Consumer Finance Protection Bureau actually banned the data-brokers who power surveillance pricing:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/16/the-second-best-time-is-now/#the-point-of-a-system-is-what-it-does

And of course, Trump's CFPB (neutered by Musk and his broccoli-haired brownshirts at DOGE) killed that effort:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/15/asshole-to-appetite/#ssn-for-sale

But the CFPB staffer who ran that effort has gone to work on an effort to leverage a New Jersey state privacy law to crush the data-broker industry:

https://www.wired.com/story/daniels-law-new-jersey-online-privacy-matt-adkisson-atlas-lawsuits/

These are efforts to optimize corporations for human thriving, by making them charge us less and pay us more. For while we are best off when we are unoptimizable, we are also best off when corporations are totally optimized – for our benefit.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Free voicemail helps homeless people get jobs https://web.archive.org/web/20051210021850/http://www.cvm.org/

#20yrsago Anti-P2P company decides to focus on selling music instead https://de.advfn.com/borse/NASDAQ/LOUD/nachrichten/13465769/loudeye-to-exit-content-protection-services-busine

#20yrsago Caller Eye-Deer’s eyes glow when phone rings https://www.flickr.com/photos/84221353@N00/71889050/in/pool-69453349@N00

#20yrsago EFF to Sunncomm: release a list of all infected CDs! https://web.archive.org/web/20051212072537/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004245.php

#20yrsago Only 2% of music-store downloaders care about legality of their music https://web.archive.org/web/20051225200658/http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/5002/tempo2005.html

#20yrsago Dykes on Bikes gives the Trademark Office a linguistics lesson https://web.archive.org/web/20060523133217/https://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/12/09/MNGQOG5D7P1.DTL&type=printable

#20yrsago Robert Sheckley has died https://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007078.html

#20yrsago Xbox 360 DRM makes your rip your CDs again https://www.gamespot.com/articles/microsoft-xbox-360-hands-on-report/1100-6139672/

#20yrsago Music publishers: Jail for lyric-sites http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4508158.stm

#15yrsago 2600 Magazine condemns DDoS attacks against Wikileaks censors https://web.archive.org/web/20101210213130/https://www.2600.com/news/view/article/12037

#15yrsago UK supergroup records 4’33”, hopes to top Xmas charts https://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/dec/06/cage-against-machine-x-factor

#15yrsago FarmVille’s secret: making you anxious https://web.archive.org/web/20101211120105/http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6224/catching_up_with_jonathan_blow.php?print=1

#15yrsago Rogue Archivist beer https://web.archive.org/web/20101214060929/https://livingproofbrewcast.com/2010/12/giving-the-rogue-archivist-to-its-namesake/

#15yrsago Hossein “Hoder” Derakhshan temporarily released from Iranian prison https://cyrusfarivar.com/blog/2010/12/09/iranian-blogging-pioneer-temporarily-released-from-prison/

#15yrsago Student protesters in London use Google Maps to outwit police “kettling” https://web.archive.org/web/20101212042006/https://bengoldacre.posterous.com/student-protestors-using-live-tech-to-outwit

#15yrsago Google foreclosure maps https://web.archive.org/web/20170412162114/http://ritholtz.com/2010/12/google-map-foreclosures/
#15yrsago Theory and practice of queue design https://passport2dreams.blogspot.com/2010/12/third-queue.html

#15yrsago Legal analysis of the problems of superherodom https://lawandthemultiverse.com/

#10yrsago A great, low-tech hack for teaching high-tech skills https://miriamposner.com/blog/a-better-way-to-teach-technical-skills-to-a-group/

#10yrsago In case you were wondering, there’s no reason to squirt coffee up your ass https://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2015/12/10/starbutts-or-how-is-it-still-a-thing-that-people-are-shooting-coffee-up-their-nether-regions

#10yrsago Survey of wealthy customers leads insurer to offer “troll insurance” https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/insurance/12041832/Troll-insurance-to-cover-the-cost-of-internet-bullying.html

#10yrsago US State Department staffer sexually blackmailed women while working at US embassy https://web.archive.org/web/20151210230259/https://www.networkworld.com/article/3013633/security/ex-us-state-dept-worker-pleads-guilty-to-extensive-sextortion-hacking-and-cyberstalking-acts.html

#10yrsago Robert Silverberg’s government-funded guide to the psychoactive drugs of sf https://web.archive.org/web/20151211050648/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-us-government-funded-an-investigation-into-sci-fi-drug-use-in-the-70s

#10yrsago Toy demands that kids catch crickets and stuff them into an electronic car https://www.wired.com/2015/12/um-so-the-bug-racer-is-an-actual-toy-car-driven-by-crickets/

#10yrsago The crypto explainer you should send to your boss (and the FBI) https://web.archive.org/web/20151209011457/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/12/08/you-already-use-encryption-heres-what-you-need-to-know-about-it/

#10yrsago French PM defies Ministry of Interior, says he won’t ban open wifi or Tor https://web.archive.org/web/20160726031106/https://www.connexionfrance.com/Wifi-internet-ban-banned-17518-view-article.html

#10yrsago The no-fly list really is a no-brainer https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/09/no-fly-list-errors-gun-control-obama

#10yrsago America: shrinking middle class, growing poverty, the rich are getting richer https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2015/12/09/the-american-middle-class-is-losing-ground/

#10yrsago Marriott removing desks from its hotel rooms “because Millennials” https://web.archive.org/web/20151210034312/http://danwetzelsports.tumblr.com/post/134754150507/who-stole-the-desk-from-my-hotel-room

#10yrsago China’s top Internet censor: “There’s no Internet censorship in China” https://hongkongfp.com/2015/12/09/there-is-no-internet-censorship-in-china-says-chinas-top-censor/

#10yrsago Stolen-card crime sites use “cop detection” algorithms to flag purchases https://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/12/when-undercover-credit-card-buys-go-bad/

#10yrsago UK National Crime Agency: if your kids like computers, they’re probably criminals https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjYrxzSe3DU

#10yrsago US immigration law: so f’ed up that Trump’s no-Muslim plan would be constitutional https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/opinion/trumps-anti-muslim-plan-is-awful-and-constitutional.html?_r=0

#10yrsago Ecuador’s draft copyright law: legal to break DRM to achieve fair use https://medium.com/@AndresDelgadoEC/big-achievement-for-creative-commons-in-ecuador-national-assembly-decides-that-fair-use-trumps-drm-c8cdd9c57e01#.n1vkccd3r

#10yrsago One billion Creative Commons licenses in use https://stateof.creativecommons.org/2015/

#10yrsago The moral character of cryptographic work https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/moral-fn.pdf

#10yrsago Everybody knows: FBI won’t confirm or deny buying cyberweapons from Hacking Team https://web.archive.org/web/20151209163839/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-fbi-wont-confirm-or-deny-buying-hacking-team-spyware-even-though-it-did

#10yrsago European Commission resurrects an unkillable stupid: the link tax https://web.archive.org/web/20160913095014/https://openmedia.org/en/bad-idea-just-got-worse-how-todays-european-copyright-plans-will-damage-internet

#5yrsago Why we can't have nice things https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/10/borked/#bribery

#5yrsago Facebook vs Robert Bork https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/10/borked/#zucked

#1yrago Tech's benevolent-dictator-for-life to authoritarian pipeline https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/10/bdfl/#high-on-your-own-supply

#1yrago Predicting the present https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/09/radicalized/#deny-defend-depose

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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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, June 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. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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