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🖋 Cory DOCTOROW
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PLURALISTIC

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28.10.2026 à 11:54

Pluralistic: Agents vs ecommerce (28 Oct 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3677 mots)


Today's links


A blasted, dark, cratered moonscape, dominated by an overturned shopping cart, which is being swarmed with killer robots from pulp magazines.

Agents vs ecommerce (permalink)

The first widely read piece of tech criticism I ever wrote was "Metacrap: Putting the torch to the seven strawmen of the meta-utopia," a response to the underlying philosophy of the "Semantic Web" that I published in 2001:

https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm

The piece holds up surprisingly well today (if I do say so myself), and not just for its criticism of the ontological incoherence of "web semantics." The most relevant concept I develop in that piece is a criticism of any plan that starts with "first, everyone else in the world just needs to set aside their needs and advantages in favor of my priorities, and then my plan will work."

This is especially relevant today in the context of "agentic AI." When this idea was first mooted, the big idea was that you could instruct a chatbot to venture out onto the public, unstructured web and it would do your bidding, for example, finding all the flights that fit your criteria and comparing prices for all of them, picking the best one and booking it for you.

This idea quickly foundered. Each step in that process was too complex and specialized for a single chatbot; so the notion quickly gave way to "swarms" of specialized chatbots – one to search the web and identify likely travel websites; one to search those websites; one to evaluate flights against your criteria, one to handle the transaction, and so on.

Through specialization, these bots could be made far more accurate, but at a price: both the literal price of all the extra computation that goes into powering a "swarm" versus a single process, and the reliability price that arises from complexity. That's because error rates are multiplicative: combine two bots with low failure rates into a single system and that system will have a higher failure rate than any of its components. This compounding error rate only increases as you add more and more bots, so every time you add a new specialized bot to decrease the error rate in its area of specialization, you increase the overall error rate of the system by adding more complexity to it.

Despite this, companies pressed on ahead with "agentic," without any regard to the realities or consequences. For example, Microsoft has repeatedly announced that it will modify Windows to eliminate all forms of PC-side privacy and confidentiality, sending a continuous stream of screenshots to Microsoft's cloud servers so that your Microsoft "agent" can access your private data on Microsoft's cloud:

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

But the real fix for "agentic" is for everyone in the world to rearrange their affairs to the benefit of AI agents. This is the same demand that the Semantic Web people made in the early oughts, and it has the same problems. The Semantic Web people operated on the assumption that there were freestanding, objectively correct ways of describing things and that everyone who put information on the web would eventually come to see that adopting these correct semantics was to everyone's advantage.

In reality, these semantic differences are the expression of real, serious, unresolvable philosophical, technical, moral and political arguments. The reason that some media outlets won't describe trans women as women isn't because they lack an appreciation of objectively correct semantic classifications – it's because they're bigots. That's the same reason "race realists" insist that there is a biological category called "race," that exists despite everything computational genomics has proved:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/16/combat-wheelchairs/#race-realism

In my book The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, I predicted that a similar dynamic would play out when it came to agentic AI and websites. The reason websites are so inhospitable to bots is that ecommerce sites don't want to be legible to automated tools:

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

Ecommerce websites deploy a wide range of sleazy tactics to raise prices, including surveillance pricing:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/07/gouged/#aeropain

They use market power to rig whole categories, forcing prices up:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/15/enshittipedia/

Multiple law-enforcers, Republic and Democrat, state and federal, have sued companies for "drip pricing" and "junk fees" that make it impossible to know what the actual price is until you've spent a long-ass time going through the purchase process:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/07/drip-drip-drip/#drip-off

Surveillance pricing, drip pricing, junk fees, price fixing and "most favored nation" deals are the source of all the growth in profitability by the economy's largest, most important firms. These tactics require opacity and are antithetical to the kinds of automated comparison-shopping that agentic peddlers promise:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/14/the-price-is-wright/#enforcement-priorities

These tactics are facially illegal and despite this, they are widely practiced. Cheating is so profitable that it's cheaper for firms to buy off regulators and pay fines than it is for them to stop criming. The fantasy that these same companies would welcome agentic shopping bots with open arms is just as implausible as the idea that if we feed enough words to the word-guessing program, it will wake up and become a "super intelligence":

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/18/surprise/#wow-signal

What's more, the AI companies know this. Google's big plan to make AI profitable is to sell merchants the power to combine its surveillance data with its AI tools to price-gouge shoppers:

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

And right on time, ecommerce websites are mass-blocking AI agents:

https://gizmodo.com/online-shopping-platforms-turn-against-third-party-ai-agents-2000831298

They're doing it in part because AI agents allow shoppers to cheat (for example, by renewing a "temporary" hold on a used item to block other buyers indefinitely), but also because they don't want automation tools on their platforms at all. These tools are a frontal assault on all the most exciting (and sleaziest) ways to make money in the waning hours of end-stage capitalism. Far from welcoming bots, ecommerce sites were always going to block them.

It's easy to come up with amazing applications for technology if you're allowed to assume that you can get everyone else in the world to set aside their priorities and their interests in favor of yours. But unless someone has a plan to do that, we shouldn't take them seriously.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Hack your Aibo https://web.archive.org/web/20010516005338/http://aibohack.com/

#20yrsago History of calculator watches https://watchismo.blogspot.com/2006/10/calculating-history-of-led-calculator.html

#15yrsago How Occupy has shifted the national debate https://www.salon.com/2011/10/27/the_victory_ows_has_already_won/

#15yrsago UK public reimbursed Margaret Thatcher was reimbursed for more than £500K in personal expenses https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2011/oct/28/margaret-thatcher-expenses-claim

#15yrsago Depression the Hyperbole and a Half way https://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2011/10/adventures-in-depression.html

#15yrsago Philippines president Duterte says God threatened to crash his plane if he didn’t stop swearing https://www.khaosodenglish.com/news/international/2016/10/28/duterte-says-god-told-stop-cursing/

#15yrsago Public safety codes are now free online for all https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/28/public-safety-codes-are-now-free-online-for-all/

#10yrsago Dr Seuss estate has crushed a kickstarter for a Seuss/Trek mashup https://web.archive.org/web/20170425161011/https://www.popehat.com/2016/10/26/popehat-signal-help-defend-a-seuss-trek-parody-under-fair-use/

#10yrsago Undercover with a prepper militia that patrols the border to fight “drug cartels” https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/undercover-border-militia-immigration-bauer/

#10yrsago The “Blacks for Trump” guy used to be in a murder cult https://web.archive.org/web/20161027133828/https://fusion.net/story/362459/blacks-for-trump-michael-the-black-man-yahweh-cult/

#5yrsago Europe's trustbusters lose the plot https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/28/clintons-ghost/#filternet

#5yrsago All of science gets a general index https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/28/clintons-ghost/#cornucopia-concordance

#5yrsago The new DRM-breaking exemptions just dropped https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/28/clintons-ghost/#felony-contempt-of-business-model

#1yrago Raymond Biesinger's "9 Times My Work Has Been Ripped Off" https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/28/productive-seething/#fuck-you-pay-me

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 518 (30331 total).

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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

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https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF

27.10.2026 à 10:08

Pluralistic: History is something you do (27 Oct 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4136 mots)


Today's links


A closeup of a roulette wheel at rest. The ball has been replaced with the planet Earth. A flying fist is jetting through the air at it and is about to knock it.

History is something you do (permalink)

Prediction is hard. Especially about the future. That Yogi Berra gem proves that you don't have to be a science fiction writer to get irritated with people insisting that you must know what's going to happen tomorrow, but (as a sf writer), I can tell you that this is one of our main occupational hazards.

Obviously, this is a self-inflicted injury. Our genre is full of big names who self-mythologized as scientific Nostradamuses. From the "future history" bar-charts in Heinlein's books (I was once on a panel with Robert Silverberg where he referred to RAH as "Robert A Timeline") to the McGuffin of Asimov's Foundation series: a "scientific" discipline that could predict the trajectory of human civilization for millennia into the future.

But me, I find the prospect of predicting the future incredibly dismal – even offensive. A predictable future is set in stone, immune to human agency. A predictable future runs on rails, and we're the prisoners of history, tied to the tracks.

For me, the most exciting thing about sf is the idea that the future is contingent. Sf is a long, sharp pin that can prick inevitabilism's bubble: that assertion by tech-bros and policymakers alike that the future is out of our hands and must be accommodated, not shaped. Inevitabilism is a form of vulgar Thatcherism, the assertion that "there is no alternative."

If The Market won't deliver an energy transition, and it leaves us to boil in our own skins, drown in the rising seas, and roast in wildfires, then tough shit humanity, there is no alternative. If there's a tech company eavesdropping on all of our communications technologies and following us as we move through digital and physical space (and turning the juiciest tidbits over to ICE), that's not the tech company's fault: there is no alternative. If some broadly useful statistical tools are delivered in the most climate-destroying, economy-wrecking, job-killing, quality-vaporizing way possible, that's just How It Is. It's not Sam Altman or Dario Amodei's fault: there is no alternative.

Science fiction can do more than imagine how "General AI" might change society: sf can imagine a society that doesn't make the fanciful leap from a word-guessing sentence-extruder to a machine god. Sf can imagine a world that debuts "AI" as a joint supercomputing project between the IPCC and Sandia National Labs whose primary purpose is to improve the fidelity of climate models, and whose spinoffs are modest but interesting open source tools that people run on regular computers with normal energy footprints.

Considered as a predictive literature, sf is a colossal failure. If our books are to be taken as roadmaps to an inevitable future, we have all flunked out of cartography school. More than 99.9% of these maps describe a territory that never emerged. All claims of sf's predictive value are just survivor bias, feats of Texas marksmanship in which we fire a shotgun into the side of a barn and then draw a target around the place where the holes cluster.

What's more likely: that sf is 99.9% fake fortune-tellers and 0.1% seers and soothsayers; or that the "predictions that came true" in sf are just the inevitable bullseyes that you'd score if you threw enough darts?

Prediction is a weak and helpless activity, the obsession of people who don't think they can change anything. It's the superstitious dread that gives rise to astrology. Far better to be a Luddite who asserts that there is more than one way to introduce a technology to a society. To be a Luddite is to insist that humans are in charge of humanity, not the iron laws of economics, not the great forces of history, not the uncaring and illusory constellations. At its best, sf is a proudly Luddite literature:

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/

The insistence that we can change things is an active posture. It's an activist posture. At its radical best, sf is activist, because it engages with more than what the machine does, insisting on changing who the machine does it for and who the machine does it to.

Which is why I find demands to offer predictions for the future so irritating. People who think that sf writers can predict the future have the field's role exactly backwards. My intention isn't to demoralize you into tying yourself to history's tracks – I'm here to show you how to grab the wheel and steer off the rails altogether.

The reason this seems so implausible is that the "there is no alternative" people have convinced us that all change is the result of individuals. To change the world, you must fashion yourself into one of history's mediocre Great Men, a Musk or Zuck. Our oligarchs are the avatars of the Great Forces of History. They have seen the predictable, inevitable future and have been allocated trillions by the capital markets to ensure that we arrive there on time, running straight down those shining rails, no matter how many people are tied to the tracks.

Another motif of Thatcherism (and hence inevitabilism) is that "there is no such thing as society," which means that all change is the result of individuals, which means that only Great Men can hope to change anything. If there is no such thing as society, then it follows that there's no such thing as mass movements, there's no such thing as trade unions, and there's no such thing as revolutions.

If there's no such thing as society, then eruptions of students and workers in the streets must be nothing more than mob violence – it can't possibly be a political eruption. If you're an inevitabilist than Occupy was nothing more than millions of individual "virtue signallers" and #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter were the individual follies of innumerable "social justice warriors."

As an activist, I'm not interested in predicting the future, I'm interested in changing it. When I speak about "the post-American internet" that we could create by exploiting the policy space that has been opened by Trump's incontinent belligerence, my intention is to get you to help build it, not to get you to prepare yourself for that inevitable outcome:

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

Obviously, some aspects of our future are locked in. The climate violence our political and business elites inflicted on the world locked in rising seas, extreme weather, habitat-loss driven zoonotic plagues and massive refugee crises. Those are inevitable. What's entirely up to us is what we do about them.

Do we create full employment for every person who will live for the next 300 years, relocating our coastal cities inland, treating the sick, retrofitting our infrastructure, and accommodating our neighbors who are driven out of their homes? Or do we let the stupidest, worst people among us lead us into the ecofascism of border walls, drone warfare, and exterminationism? That's our choice.

We've had generations of being told to "vote with our wallets" instead of organizing in political, labor and social movements. Voting with your wallet doesn't work (billionaires' wallets are thicker than yours, they win those votes), and if you lose enough of those wallet elections, it's easy to fall into the despair of believing that the future is inevitable:

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

I think this is why "prediction markets" have caught on so ferociously. While prediction markets are sold as a way for people to "inject information" into markets, they are actually a rigged system that transfers money from everyday "investors" to insiders:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/24/degenerated-gambling/#oracle-capture

Prediction markets are the perfect pastime for history's prisoners. If you fancy yourself a plaything of the gods whose future is already written, then prediction markets are a way for you and your fellow prisoners to bet on what torments will come next. And of course oligarchs love prediction markets, because they're the ones who can rig the odds, say, by placing a bet on a war and then leading the country to that war.

They are the gods, the only ones who get to make history, so a market for bets on what history will do next is a way to enrich history's avatars at the expense of history's victims.

In science fiction, we often meet powerful aliens who tell us "resistance is futile" as they conquer our world and set about exterminating us. But if resistance was truly futile, no one would have to say it.

When they tell us "there is no alternative," what they mean is "stop trying to think of alternatives." To imagine radically is to move beyond the helplessness of prediction: a radical imagination dares to insist that history is what we make, not what happens to us.

(Image: Ralf Roletschek, CC BY-SA 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Canon of St Paul’s resigns over plans to evict Occupy London https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/27/giles-fraser-st-pauls-profile

#15yrsago Orange County city council unanimous: Occupy tents are a form of speech https://web.archive.org/web/20111029021151/http://www.occupy-oc.org/tears-stream-as-city-council-unanimously-agrees-occupy-tents-are-a-form-of-speech/

#15yrsago Edible Venn diagram: the piagram https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/g8nxo/i_realize_its_a_bit_late_for_pi_day_but_heres_my/

#15yrsago SOPA: US House of Reps copyright bill proposes national censorship, attacks on hosting services, Twitter, YouTube https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/10/disastrous-ip-legislation-back-–-and-it’s-worse-ever

#15yrsago Google rejects JWZ’s 2-step plan to end the nym wars https://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/10/google-nymwars-redux/

#15yrsago Toronto mayor confronted by comedy interviewer calls 911, reportedly shouts “You bitches! Don’t you fucking know? I’m Rob fucking Ford, the mayor of this city! https://www.joeydevilla.com/2011/10/27/im-rob-fucking-ford-or-the-mayor-the-ambush-and-the-911-call/

#15yrsago Canadian Tory MP: Don’t worry about violating our stupid new copyright law, because we probably won’t catch you if you do https://web.archive.org/web/20111029155739/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6089/125/

#10yrsago UK MPs realise that age filtering won’t work so now they just want to block all porn in the UK https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/now-we-want-censorship-the-digital-economy-bill-is-running-out-of-control/

#10yrsago Samsung abuses copyright to censor satirical exploding phone Grand Theft Auto mod https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/10/samsung-sets-its-reputation-fire-bogus-dmca-takedown-notices

#10yrsago EU lies and the British tabloids who told them https://web.archive.org/web/20160626051921/https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2016/06/daily-chart-15

#10yrsago The Pirate Party are poised to form Iceland’s government in Saturday’s election https://qz.com/817784/icelands-pirate-party-looks-likely-to-take-the-countrys-general-election-on-oct-29

#5yrsago Hospital rings up $2755 upcharge by sending pregnant woman to ER https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/27/crossing-a-line/#zero-fucks-given

#1yrago Shake Shack wants you to shit yourself to death https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/27/shit-shack/#binding-arbitration

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 530 (29813 total).

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF

26.10.2026 à 16:47

Pluralistic: Sovereign citizens, but for news (26 Oct 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (5094 mots)


Today's links

  • Sovereign citizens, but for news: By reading the LA Times, you agree…
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Patenting tax dodges; 6-word sf; Newscorp shareholders v Murdoch; Ancient German ophthalmology cult; Trolley problem is stupid; Trump's influence peddling to Chinese millionaire; Al Franken v binding arbitration; Yoga pants spite parade; Dems' secret Congressional committee; RIAA v your PC; "Going Under"; "Machine Man"; Aging goths; "Everfair"; Kremlin will destabilize Ukraine; FCC fronts for Big Cable; Straight Outta Vagina; Remixed TED Talk about remixing; Authoritarian debt.
  • Upcoming appearances: Vienna, Kilkenny, Courtenay, Vancouver, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Montreal.
  • Recent appearances: Where I've been.
  • Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Colophon: All the rest.


The original Art Deco LA Times building. Draped over it is a fringed naval flag. Superimposed over the building is the text of the LAT's outrageous dickover 'consent' dialog.

Sovereign citizens, but for news (permalink)

When it comes to terrible practices by website operators, it takes a lot to shock me. I literally wrote the book on the subject. But last night, I encountered a piece of genuinely appalling fuckery and I can't get it out of my head, because it's such a perfect storm of outrageous conduct and institutional decay.

It happened when I followed a link to an LA Times article. Having lived in LA three times (and having been an Angeleno for a decade and counting this time around) I generally have warm feelings for the Times. The Times's Festival of Books is a great event that I speak at most years, and I'm broadly happy to have a daily newspaper covering my city.

That said, the Times has been chipping away at my goodwill for the past decade. First, there's the personal: after a Festival of Books appearance some years ago, the books editor approached me and asked if I'd contribute regular book reviews to the paper. I said yes, and then immediately my editor got laid off, reportedly so they could avoid giving him benefits that would come with seniority.

I wrote several reviews for a new editor, though the paper never sent me a contract for any of them – or a payment! Many months (and published reviews) later, an editor I'd never had contact with at the paper got in touch to get the paperwork squared away, and the Times sent me a contract with broad, one-sided language that I would never sign onto.

Given that they'd already published my work, there wasn't much they could do to make me sign the contract, so, after quite a lot of wrangling, I eventually got the offensive clauses removed and got paid (but I never got invited to write another review for them).

To be honest, this is par for the course. The last time the New York Times asked me to write for them, they refused to remove some similar clauses from their contract (something they'd done previously), and the contracts person just ghosted me after a couple of volleys.

A similar thing happened with the Washington Post the last time I wrote for them, except they (like the LAT) published the work and then sent me a one-sided, manifestly unfair contract that I refused to sign. Given they'd already published the op-ed there wasn't anything they could do about it, so eventually I got a better contract and a payment (and again, that was the last time the Post asked me to write for them).

Basically, there's an epidemic of bad legal terms sweeping the American media industry, and while the LA Times isn't the worst offender (at least they didn't ask me to assign any related patents, trademarks and copyrights to fictional characters, as Conde Nast does!), they're not what you'd call "writer-friendly" in their contracting terms.

But again, that's hardly unique. If I disqualified news outlets because they tried to shift liability to, and grab rights from, their writers, I'd be left with damned few media outlets.

But on the editorial side, the Times has a bunch of billionaire-shaped red flags. The paper's owner is the Trump-allied, severely AI-pilled biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, whose editorial interference in the Times is comparable to Bezos's interference in the Post. Like Bezos, Soon-Shiong killed the paper's endorsement for Kamala Harris:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/26/us/los-angeles-times-endorsement-soon-shiong.html

And I have my suspicions that Soon-Shiong might have been behind the layoff that killed Brian Merchant's beat as the country's first technology critic, from which perch Merchant assayed some acerbic, well-reasoned criticism of tech billionaires and AI:

https://talkingbiznews.com/media-news/ex-la-times-tech-columnist-merchant-joining-ai-now-institute/

Again, that's not disqualifying. If I boycotted every newspaper owned by a reprehensible billionaire, I'd have to turn my back on e.g. the NYT with its morbidly wealthy, union-busting owners:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/new-york-times-illegally-busted-union-campaign-national-labor-relations-board-alleges/

But unlike the NYT, the LA Times has followed the playbook of Alden Capital papers (like the Chicago Tribune), shipping a skinnier paper with less original reporting at a higher price (which is why I canceled my subscription):

https://archive.is/hOhpu

But even that isn't disqualifying. Like the Tribune, the LAT still employs dedicated, talented reporters who do excellent work, which is how I came to be following a link to a recent article yesterday…and how I came to find myself confronted by an enshittificatory gambit that shocked even me.

Here's what got me: when I visited the Times, I got a dickover that blocked all the content on the page until I clicked "Continue," and the text of that dickover is a breathtaking piece of enshittified legal fuckery:

By continuing, you agree to our Terms of Service, which include arbitration and a class action waiver, and our Privacy Policy. You agree that we and our third-party vendors may collect and use your information, including through cookies, pixels and similar technologies, for the purposes set forth in our Privacy Policy such as personalizing your experience and ads.

This is wildly illegal and incredibly immoral. The paper claims that by simply reading an article, you agree that you can never, ever sue them for virtually any reason, and that you have consented to effectively unlimited surveillance and commercial exploitation of your private data.

It's hard to overstate how dangerous this kind of binding arbitration waiver is, but to give one example: Disney makes people who sign up for free trials of Disney Plus "consent" to one of these waivers. When a woman was killed by a Disney World restaurant that lied about the allergens in its food, the company told a judge that her grieving widower couldn't sue them because he'd waived that right by signing up for a trial of D+:

https://lawreview.missouri.edu/infinite-arbitration-how-one-click-can-take-you-out-of-court-forever/

The company later backed off for that one specific case, but subsequently doubled down on binding arbitration. By putting an arbitration clause in its terms, the LAT could head off my right to sue them if they stiffed me on those reviews I wrote for them, Brian Merchant's right to sue them for wrongful termination, and your right to sue them if you get run over by a newspaper delivery van.

Then there's the privacy clause: the LAT is a California paper, and in California, we have the CCPA, a reasonably good privacy law. Under the CCPA, privacy waivers have to be explicit, informed and can be withdrawn at any time. What's more, the CCPA has broad prohibitions against "dark patterns" that this dickover almost certainly violates:

https://cppa.ca.gov/announcements/2024/20240904.html

In theory, there's a way to avoid all of this: you could just use the "Kill Sticky" bookmarklet or an adblock filter to block or dismiss the dickover without ever clicking "continue":

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/21/dickovers/#block-element

But this is an industrial strength dickover; it uses advanced tricks to block existing dickover killers, likely a combination of shadow DOM and an "important" scroll-lock in the html.

Like I say, this shocks the conscience. Under this standard, the Times's reporters could find themselves bound to legal "agreements" with the companies they investigate online that could interfere with their reporting. Just as bad is how these illegal measures mislead the Times's readership on two of the most important consumer issues facing Californians (and all internet users) today.

As Jargoggles points out, this is the corporate version of the bizarre nonsense that Sovereign Citizens gabble at cops when they get pulled over for driving with a special "sheriff's license plate," and at judges to insist that they lack jurisdiction due to the tassels on the courtroom flag:

https://kolektiva.social/@jargoggles/117503729678727400

A newspaper's job is to inform its readership, not mislead it.

The very idea that everyone who reads a single article on a newspaper's website "consents" to an 8,865-word privacy policy (that would take 53-67 minutes to read according to Firefox's "Reader Mode" estimate) is a bad joke:

https://www.latimes.com/privacy-policy

The joke gets even worse when you add in the 7,103-word Terms of Service (estimated read: 41-50 minutes):

https://www.latimes.com/terms-of-service

So what can you do? Well, you can use this uBlock filter that blocks the dickover without setting the LAT's "consent" cookie to "1":

latimes.com##+js(trusted-set, window.ctUser, { "loggedIn": true, "ready": true, "subStatus": "1" })

https://infosec.exchange/@deFractal/117505049281552873

If you're a Californian, you can file a complaint with the California Privacy Protection Agency:

https://cppa.ca.gov/webapplications/complaint

As Don Marti points out, businesses dealing with Californians are legally required to acknowledge and honor the Global Privacy Control signal from your browser:

https://federate.social/@dmarti/117504985464483210

Here's an ambitious countermove. Buried in that 7,103-word terms of service is this gem: you can opt out of the binding arbitration within 30 days of "agreeing" to it by sending an email to termsofservice@latimes.com with the subject line "MANDATORY ARBITRATION AND CLASS ACTION WAIVER OPT-OUT". Someone could build a browser mod that automatically sends that email to the company whenever you land on an latimes.com page. You could even include my all-purpose email footer:

By reading this email, 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.

All of this is fun to contemplate, but it's hardly enough. It should be illegal for a company to knowingly offer unenforceable contracting terms, especially in its non-negotiable, boilerplate contracts. It's already illegal for California companies to put noncompete clauses in their contracts. In other words, noncompetes aren't just unenforceable in California, they're illegal, and we should extend that prohibition (with sanctions for noncompliant firms and their general counsels) to privacy and arbitration:

https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bonta-issues-consumer-alert-reminding-california-workers-their

Because the LAT isn't the only news outlet that's engaged in this kind of illegal, immoral, conscience-shocking, dickover-delivered enshittification. It's also SOP at Bloomberg:

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:kaagvvv22ki4ccsymevrpfxk/bafkreia4yxewg2chpwgki3ftzq7fnl7s454efx5oev6h6siqlsnenrjpe4

These gambits are infectious, and they're spreading. Time to bend the curve.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago RIAA denies asking for criminal immunity for hacking your computer https://memex.craphound.com/2001/10/26/remember-when-the-riaa-tried/

#20yrsago Big Mac pumpkin https://web.archive.org/web/20061031170037/http://bitsandpieces1.blogspot.com/2006/10/big-mac-pumpkin.html

#20yrsago Going Under: moving kids’ novel https://memex.craphound.com/2006/10/26/going-under-moving-kids-novel/

#20yrsago Accountants patent tax-dodges https://web.archive.org/web/20061029080957/http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/10/19/business/norris20.php

#20yrsago 6-word sf stories https://web.archive.org/web/20061109183215/https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/sixwords.html

#15yrsago Using machine translation techniques to attack ciphers reveals secrets of ancient German ophthalmology cult https://web.archive.org/web/20111025035607/http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/people/copiale-11.pdf

#15yrsago The Homeland Directive: taut technothriller for the paranoid era https://memex.craphound.com/2011/10/25/the-homeland-directive-taut-technothriller-for-the-paranoid-era/

#15yrsago NewsCorp shareholders revolt against Murdoch family https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/may/08/rupert-murdoch-news-corporation

#15yrsago One-percenter: why I support Occupy https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2011/10/21/1028500/community/A-Voice-From-the-1/

#15yrsago Debunking the OccupyLondon “empty tents” story https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/oct/25/occupy-london-part-time-protest

#15yrsago Machine Man: a discomfiting novel about the antihuman side of transhumanism https://memex.craphound.com/2011/10/26/machine-man-a-discomfiting-novel-about-the-antihuman-side-of-transhumanism/

#15yrsago Goths age gracefully https://www.theguardian.com/education/2011/oct/24/goth-culture-research

#10yrsago Everfair: a diverse, ambitious steampunk novel of Fabian socialists and American Black Zionists in Belgian Congo https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/26/everfair-a-diverse-ambitious-steampunk-novel-of-fabian-socialists-and-american-black-zionists-in-belgian-congo/

#10yrsago Leaked Kremlin memos reveal plan to destabilize Ukraine https://globalvoices.org/2016/10/25/hackers-publish-kremlin-aides-e-mails-allege-plan-to-destabilize-ukraine/

#10yrsago When the FCC asked about unlocking set-top boxes, the Copyright Office ran to the MPAA https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/10/newly-released-documents-show-hollywood-influenced-copyright-offices-comments-set

#10yrsago Pussy Riot’s “Straight Outta Vagina”: sacrelicious Russian feminist pop anthem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bp-KeVBNz0A

#10yrsago TED talk about remixes and appropriating made by remixing and appropriating TED talks about remixing and appropriating https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLlbzI5HURM

#10yrsago Warner Bros angry that someone other than the MPAA is running an illegal internal movie server https://torrentfreak.com/warner-bros-claims-agency-ran-its-own-pirate-movie-site-161025/

#10yrsago AT&T developed a “product” for spying on all its customers and made millions selling it to warrantless cops https://web.archive.org/web/20170504105645/https://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/10/25/at-t-is-spying-on-americans-for-profit

#10yrsago Lawsuit: mayor’s social media blocklists are public records https://www.techdirt.com/2016/10/24/pinac-director-sues-miami-beach-mayor-over-refusal-to-release-social-media-blocklists/

#10yrsago EFF asks court to let American sue Ethiopia for hacking his computer and rounding up his friends https://www.eff.org/press/releases/american-illegally-wiretapped-home-ethiopian-government-deserves-his-day-court-eff

#10yrsago Donald Trump’s super PAC promised a Chinese millionaire access, influence in exchange for a secret $2 million donation https://web.archive.org/web/20161024192242/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/24/exclusive-investigation-donald-trump-faces-foreign-donor-fundrai/

#10yrsago Al Franken and FCC commissioner Clyburn want limits on forced arbitration https://time.com/4541176/al-franken-arbitration-clauses/?iid=sr-link1

#10yrsago Mercedes’ weird “Trolley Problem” announcement continues stupid debate about self-driving cars https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/25/mercedes-weird-trolley-problem-announcement-continues-dumb-debate-about-self-driving-cars/

#10yrsago When Californians vote on legal weed, they’ll also vote on wiping millions of arrest records https://web.archive.org/web/20161027161505/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/california-to-vote-on-wiping-old-weed-arrests

#10yrsago Dickhead’s anti-yoga-pants letter to the editor sparks yoga-pants-parade https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37751422

#10yrsago RIP science fiction great Sheri Tepper https://locusmag.com/2016/10/sheri-s-tepper-1929-2016/

#5yrsago The Dems' most secret Congressional committee https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/25/people-do-stuff/#personnel-are-policy

#5yrsago Maxing out our global credit-card with authoritarian debt https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/26/inequality-and-guard-labor/#just-watch-me

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 547 (29282 total).

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

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23.10.2026 à 22:44

Pluralistic: Critique and writing (23 Oct 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4593 mots)


Today's links

  • Critique and writing: The most important part of a writing workshop is trying to fix other people's stories.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: USPS nukes the mail; Enron Explorer; "Scored"; UAE's international hacker legion; NZ provides hacking tools to torturers; Truecrypt insecure; The Traitorous Eight.
  • Upcoming appearances: Vancouver, Ottawa, Vienna, Kilkenny, Courtenay, Vancouver, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Montreal.
  • 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 vast field of complicated machinery composed of many-times-overlaid 19th century printing presses. Caught in these gears are several figures who are all writing - a bearded Greek in a loincloth, a severe doge, a grande dame, a lady upon her settee, a recording angel, two drunken clerks at a table, a tormented poet in a wig. Invading the scene is a many-tentacled pulp robot.

Critique and writing (permalink)

Through my own writing life, nothing has done more to improve my writing than diligent participation in peer-based workshops; that's where a group of writers, all at about the same stage in their artistic development, gather to read one another's work and offer feedback specifically aimed at improving each other's stories.

This is a deceptively simple exercise, and the reasons it works so well are quite counter-intuitive. The most obvious benefit is the way that a workshop encourages you to write at all. When you're at the start of your writing career, you are almost totally reliant upon your own internal self-discipline to keep producing.

Acquiring that self-discipline is infinitely valuable, but it's also incredibly hard. Being part of a group of writers who expect you to regularly turn in new work adds a very useful bit of external motivation that augments your still nascent self-discipline. Knowing you have to turn in a story for the group by Friday can get you in gear when you feel discouraged or blocked.

Before you're getting published regularly (or at all), your critiquing circle might be the only source of validation you get for your work, so the knowledge that you're in for that validation if you get that story in on time is a great motivator. But this is where the counter-intuitive part comes in: as great as it feels to be the center of your peers' attention and to get close feedback on the work you sweated over, that's not the real value you get from a writing workshop, at least not at the start of your career.

Your peers' critiques can help you fix weaknesses in your story, and even teach you a little about how to avoid those weaknesses in future work. You might get feedback that turns an unpublishable story into a published one. But the point of a writing workshop isn't merely to make your stories better – it's to make you better at writing stories.

That's where critiquing other writers' stories comes in. The process of reading and re-reading someone else's imperfect work and devoting real mental energy to figuring out what's not working in it and how to fix it is how you develop the creative instincts that allow you to automatically and unconsciously avoid pitfalls and make breakthroughs in your own work.

Even if none of the feedback you offer is ever incorporated into the story you're critiquing, the act of preparing and delivering that critique is the most reliable fast-track to becoming a better writer yourself. There's something very valuable in the combination of thinking critically, being exposed to other workshop members' ideas about the story under discussion, and working with source material that you can look at with more objectivity because it didn't come out of your own head.

I bring all this up because I've now heard from a few beginning writers who tell me that they're finding LLMs to be good editorial feedback generators. They value the editorial suggestions they get from a chatbot after they finish their work, and use it to help them with a new draft. Without commenting on whether I think LLM feedback is editorially useful (I certainly wouldn't ever ask a chatbot for that kind of feedback), I want to point out that when it comes to improving your writing, getting editorial notes on your work is distinctly inferior to offering criticism of other writers' work.

The reality is that when you're starting out as a writer, the vast majority of work you produce will be artistically unsalvageable. The much-vaunted "million words of crap" you write on the way to becoming a publishable writer are about learning to marry technique to artistic vision and to sharpen both. Getting editorial feedback that helps you shore up the weakest spots in a story that is ultimately never published and constitutes a learning exercise has value, but it has far less value than applying the things you've learned from making and fixing those mistakes to your next story.

With vanishingly few exceptions, a commercially and artistically successful writer isn't someone who writes one great story or novel: a writing career is defined by a body of work, which means that you have to do more than rewrite. You have to write the next thing, and the next thing, and the next.

Having an editor-on-demand of highly variable (and often dubious) quality might help you improve your writing, but it's no substitute for participating in a peer workshop. The idea that an LLM might be able to stand in for a workshop is grounded in the fallacy that the point of a workshop is to have people tell you how to fix your story, rather than analyzing other people's writing in order to develop your own critical skills.

Look: it's a cliche to say "every writer is different," but I really believe that every writer is different, and that's down to the legibility of the writing process to other writers. If you're a painter or sculptor or other visual artist, you've likely spent many hours in a studio with many other practitioners while all of you work from the same life model or still life. If you're a musician, you've almost certainly played music with other musicians. If you're a dancer, you've definitely danced with other dancers.

But writers get precious little exposure to other writers' process. At best we might look at each other's drafts. A musician can listen to every note another musician produces while riffing or composing a new work or interpreting a work. Writers don't get to watch words emerge from each other's fingertips. Being observed that closely while you write would be ghastly and paralyzingly invasive.

I've taught a lot of writers over the years and I've had many discussions with my peers about their writing process, and I'm here to tell you that pretty much every writer finds every other writer's process baffling. We each of us invent an idiosyncratic process for ourselves that will never fully work for anyone else.

So if you value editorial feedback from a chatbot (ideally, a local one running on your computer and not one of the "foundation models" that are torching the planet and elevating the worst people on earth to positions of political, technical and commercial prominence), that's fine, you do you.

But even if that's the case, I still want you to know that whatever you're getting out of the chatbot is fundamentally different, and (I believe) much less useful than participating in a peer workshop.

That's what I wanted to say today, but I predict that an appreciable number of readers are about to email me to ask how these "peer workshops" work. There's a ton of variability in how these are conducted, but the basic shape of them is that in advance of each session, one or more writers submits a finished work to the other writers, who then read through the manuscript at least twice, making notes that include both minor copyedits and broader, thematic notes. They may write a brief editorial response as well, ranging from a paragraph to a couple of pages.

Then the workshop convenes. Each writer briefly expresses their views about the story under consideration, focusing on those thematic and structural notes on what worked and didn't work in the story, with suggestions for improving the latter. You don't need to point out every typo – they're noted on the manuscript. Critiquers don't need to repeat one another. If another workshop member says the thing you were planning to say, you can just say "Ditto what so-and-so said about whatever." If you have nothing to add when your turn comes about, it's fine to pass.

Those are pretty much universal characteristics of a peer workshop. Here are some variations that I am dogmatically committed to, but which other workshoppers might disagree with:

  • Every writer should submit regularly to the workshop. There is a serious risk that attending a workshop can become a substitute for actually writing. It is no kindness to your workshopmates to let them stay in the circle if it leads them to stop writing.

  • The subject of each session must not speak during the critiques, except to answer direct questions that are not related to the writing itself (e.g., "I couldn't figure out what word this was supposed to be – can you clarify?"). The subject can speak after all the other writers have spoken.

  • Each person in the critiquing circle speaks once, in turn, without being interrupted. No cross-talk allowed. It is useful to set a time-limit for critiques.

  • No partial manuscripts. It's not really possible to critique a story unless you have the complete tale. Novels can be workshopped as three chapters and an outline.

  • Stories should be distributed in advance and read in advance. Don't have writers read their work aloud for critique, as this can lead to critiquing the delivery rather than the material.

  • Critique the story, not the writer. It's fine to be offended by something in the story, but not OK to accuse your workshopmates of being bad people for having offended you.

  • Discourage resubmission of revised stories. Workshopping produces sharply diminishing returns. If you really want feedback on a rewrite, approach people individually and ask if they'll read the new draft.

Any group of three or more writers can start a workshop. You'll need to locate writers who are at about the same stage in their artistic and professional lives as you, and find a physical place (or a videoconference service) where you can meet. Library meeting rooms are a favorite, and so is rotating between workshop members' homes. Set a regular schedule – weekly, fortnightly, monthly, possibly quarterly – and stick to it.

If you write genre fiction and you are interested in attending a peer workshop that also has an instructor to guide the sessions, lecture, set exercises, etc, I can recommend the three workshops I've taught:

  • Clarion (UC San Diego, six weeks):

https://clarion.ucsd.edu/ (I'm also a 1992 Clarion grad)

  • Clarion West (Seattle, six weeks):

https://www.clarionwest.org/

  • Viable Paradise (Martha's Vineyard, one week):

https://viableparadise.com/

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago UK anti-terror laws could bankrupt ISPs https://web.archive.org/web/20011118143634/http://www.vnunet.com/News/1126338

#25yrsago What's an "iPod?" https://web.archive.org/web/20011024015856/http://www.apple.com/ipod/

#25yrsago Bible, Koran or Mein Kampf? https://web.archive.org/web/20011109123124/http://www.salon.com/people/feature/2001/10/24/book_quiz/index.html

#25yrsago Tongan court jester scam costs king millions https://web.archive.org/web/20011224034152/http://pidp.eastwestcenter.org/pireport/2001/October/10-23-01.htm

#25yrsago USPS irradiating the mail to fight anthrax attacks https://web.archive.org/web/20011109100316/http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991468

#20yrsago Enron Explorer mines Enron’s emails https://web.archive.org/web/20061106204850/http://enron.trampolinesystems.com/

#20yrsago Investigative journal: “Fair use is not applicable” https://archive.blogs.harvard.edu/shlep/2006/10/23/whaddayaknow-about-fair-use-and-copyright/

#20yrsago Warners stiffs African amputee film extras on prosthetics promise https://web.archive.org/web/20061105004400/http://www.nypost.com/seven/10232006/gossip/pagesix/pagesix.htm

#20yrsago Former FCC Chairman shills against Net Neutrality https://web.archive.org/web/20061028043416/http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/003577.shtml

#15yrsago Plotting advice for fiction writers http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/013243.html

#15yrsago DARPA wants vampire satellites to harvest parts from dead sats prior to decommissioning https://web.archive.org/web/20111022223128/http://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Releases/2011/10/20.aspx

#15yrsago Understanding the hyperrich through the lens of tomorrow’s history http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/10/a-cultural-experiment.html

#15yrsago Scored: pulse-pounding/thought-provoking YA novel about surveillance https://memex.craphound.com/2011/10/24/scored-pulse-pounding-thought-provoking-ya-novel-about-surveillance/

#10yrsago UAE surveillance contractor is recruiting an army of foreign hackers to break into its citizens’ devices https://web.archive.org/web/20161024141138/https://theintercept.com/2016/10/24/darkmatter-united-arab-emirates-spies-for-hire/

#10yrsago Publicly-funded NZ company sold mass surveillance tech to torturers and GCHQ https://web.archive.org/web/20161023101410/https://theintercept.com/2016/10/23/endace-mass-surveillance-gchq-governments/

#10yrsago RIP, Tom Hayden: Yippie, radical, politician, author https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-37749127

#10yrsago Audit reveals significant vulnerabilities in Truecrypt and its successors https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2016/10/18/veracrypt-security-audit/

#5yrsago Cyber-mercenaries helped Saudis hack an NYT reporter https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/24/breaking-the-news/#kingdom

#5yrsago The Traitorous Eight and the Battle of Germanium Valley https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/24/the-traitorous-eight-and-the-battle-of-germanium-valley/

#1yrago Checking in on the state of Amazon's chickenized reverse-centaurs https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/23/traveling-salesman-solution/#pee-bottles

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 550 (28730 total).

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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

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21.10.2026 à 22:05

Pluralistic: Adversarial interoperability is a team sport (21 Oct 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (5803 mots)


Today's links

  • Adversarial interoperability is a team sport: Vibe-coded jailbreaks are fun, but don't solve the problem.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Labour Whip's pro-Iraq war threats; LoC's emulators; Kevin Mitnick plays CIA stooge; ICE: "The warrant is coming out of my balls"; WIPO's secret trademark meeting; Linking isn't libel (in Canada); Make: singing busts; Tory minister kills Turing's Law; Trump hotels rebrand as "Scion".
  • Upcoming appearances: Vancouver, Ottawa, Vienna, Kilkenny, Courtenay, Vancouver, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Montreal.
  • 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 medieval engraving of an Italianate city; floating in the middle is a giant skull (anterior view). Surrounding the skull is a series of 17th C European machine parts, being worked by tiny engravings of 17th C rude mechanicals. A strangely erotic, massive flower looms out of the right; standing amid its proudly thrusting stamen is a 17th C swordsman.

Adversarial interoperability is a team sport (permalink)

Enshittification is particularly galling because (in theory, at least), digital technology should be really hard to enshittify.

That's because the only digital computer we know how to build is the "Turing-complete, universal von Neumann machine," which is to say, a calculating engine capable of computing every valid program. In some deep, important, foundational sense, every computer is the same as every other computer. Sure, they vary in terms of speed, storage and RAM, but given enough time and electricity, every computer can run every program.

This has profound implications for enshittification. Say a tech boss takes away a feature you value (as when Sonos pushed an update that removed nearly all the functionality from its "smart" speakers), or adds a feature you hate (like when Chamberlain blocked third-party apps from controlling its garage doors so it could force its customers to view seven ads before they could open or close their garages). At that point, a programmer can write an "interoperable" program that restores the good feature or blocks the bad one.

This program can be costlessly and instantaneously distributed to every affected technology user, and those users will likely pay something for it. After all, enshittification is a way to shift value away from technology users to tech companies, which makes the case for you paying for disenshittification technology that wrestles that value back.

All of that means that, in a state of nature, companies that are contemplating enshittification need to worry that their greed will tempt new companies to enter the market and poach their customers and suppliers. This alone might be enough to frighten companies off from enshittificatory gambits, and if companies press ahead regardless, then they open market opportunities for better companies that can costlessly, instantaneously usurp the original manufacturer's relationship with their entire affected customer base.

That's how it should work. But in 1998, Bill Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and Section 1201 of the DMCA establishes a felony (punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine) for reverse-engineering and modifying technology without the manufacturer's permission. Then, the US Trade Rep spent the next 25 years making sure that every US trading partner had an identical (or even worse!) "anticircumvention" law:

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

The result is a grotesquely asymmetrical digital world, in which companies are free to use the flexibility of digital computers to downgrade or brick your digital devices, but where you commit a crime if you avail yourself of a countermeasure to get more out of something you own. This is the core technological factor at play in enshittification.

Enter AI. Thanks to vibe-coding, everyday people are rolling their own software for their devices and building the tools to shatter the digital locks that manufacturers use to block disenshittification. An excellent article by 404 Media's Jason Koebler runs down some of these hacks, including drop-in replacements for smart TV software that blocks the endless ads and surveillance that have made TVs all but unusable:

https://www.404media.co/reverse-engineer-anything-is-the-new-wild-west-of-ai/

These AI tools mix several techniques to disenshittify users' devices. One major component is automating the installation of existing alternative firmware for these devices that have been (possibly illegally) created by hobbyists and uploaded to various code repositories. Installing these alternative OSes is typically a gnarly task, requiring the user to do a lot of complex, fiddly, highly technical work to bypass their devices' digital locks.

In a world without anticircumvention law, a company that sold alternative OSes could hire a ton of programmers and UX developers to smooth over this process, but this is beyond the reach of a typical hobbyist or even a community of hobbyists, especially if they must operate in the shadows, under the threat of civil and criminal liability.

There's a useful analogy here to the trajectory of desktop versions of GNU/Linux. The first time I tried to install Linux (on an original iMac, in the late 1990s), the installation process included a multi-week post-installation wrangle that saw me (often unsuccessfully) compiling key modules from source code and then painstakingly configuring them to get the computer's graphics and I/O working reliably.

Fast forward 30+ years and installing Linux is trivial, thanks to highly capitalized companies like Canonical (makers of Ubuntu, the flavor of Linux I've used for nearly 20 years now). Installing Ubuntu today merely requires that you download the OS to a thumbdrive, reboot your computer using the drive as a startup disk, and click "install." Canonical's installer automatically hunts down the correct software for your hardware and configures it. Canonical writes and contributes to a lot of parts of the Linux OS, but the most important work it does is the fiddly, painstaking, labor- and capital-intensive work of perfecting that installer so it Just Works.

Much of what a vibe-coded jailbreaking tool does is stand in for Canonical, but for hobbyist OSes for smart TVs and speakers and many other devices. These LLMs patiently research every weird error and peccadillo and parse through message boards and logfiles detailing other hobbyists' struggles to get the code working and methodically apply and adapt those solutions until your device Just Works.

Some of these vibe-coded interop tools go farther than that. According to Koebler's coverage, some device owners had their coding assistants scratch-build entirely new, heavily customized OSes for their devices, complete with bypasses that allow this new code to be installed despite the manufacturer's countermeasures which are designed to prevent this. Delightfully, many of these users have created software that revives their bricked, discontinued devices. This poses the possibility of a world in which manufacturers no longer have the last word in your use of your own property: the mere fact that the manufacturer lost interest in a device and killswitched it does not mean that you must consign that valuable device to a landfill to become immortal, toxic e-waste.

All of this is good news. Some of the most sophisticated jailbreaking tools (such as those on the super viral "Reverse Engineer Anything" Github page) run locally, on your own computer, without invoking the "frontier models" that the big, awful AI companies have created:

https://github.com/morluto/rea

This is good even if you're just modifying your own devices to get them to more closely conform to your own use-case. LLMs are genuinely good at coming up with the abstruse and obscure configuration lines and other incantations to get your technology working. Recently, I used a local model to fine-tune the power-management on my new laptop in ways that go beyond the options that are exposed through user-friendly graphic interfaces. The LLM spat out a grub "GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT" line that (again) Just Worked.

The last time I had to do this, I spent days painstakingly trouble-shooting options by trial-and-error. Using a chatbot to fill in the gaps left by decisions about which configuration options to place within reach of regular users and which to reserve for power-users has made my computer much more useful to me for the things I want to do, like writing and making collages.

The reality is that it's just not practical for technology developers to turn every conceivable function of your computer into a simple-to-use, accessible tool. A large part of technology design is about leaving things out (or, as my favorite Eno Oblique Strategy goes, "Be the first person to not do something that no one else has ever thought of not doing before"). No matter how thoughtful and diligent a technology designer is, they will never fully anticipate the needs and exigencies of their users. That's why the motto of the disability rights movement is "Nothing about us without us."

The users of technology know more about their use-cases than can ever be captured through a requirements gathering exercise and user testing. One of the best and proudest legacies of technology is the lineage of "user-friendly" programming tools that let nontechnical people design their own applications that exactly met their needs, from Hypercard to Visual Basic to Scratch, a lineage that vibe-coding tools are arguably part of:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/25/other-people/#right-there

But these tools are not perfect (nothing is). For all that Hypercard lets you do many things that would otherwise require a skilled programmer, it was also always limited relative to, say, writing MacOS code in Objective C. Your Hypercard program might do exactly what you needed it to, but slowly, and sometimes unreliably, and with serious limitations, such as a relatively low ceiling for the number of records you could add to a database.

Vibe-coded personal apps aren't necessarily subject to these limitations, but they come with some significant risks. Vibe-code can have serious security vulnerabilities that expose the user to things like identity theft or sextortion. It's conceivable that a vibe-coded garage-door opener app might make it possible for attackers to open your garage door when you're not home (or worse, when you are!). Depending on your risk-tolerance and expertise, these might be acceptable prices, or they might be too high.

But it's important to clearly identify the problem here: if the alternative OS you install on your smart TV exposes you to privacy-invading hack attacks, the problem is the defect in that software. The problem isn't that you had the temerity to rip out the manufacturer's own software and replace it with code of your choosing. You bought that TV, it's yours, and you don't owe the manufacturer an obligation to expose yourself to its own, built-in, intentional surveillance and invasive ads.

Here's a parallel: you have the right to put any shoelaces in your running shoes. Sure, Nike might prefer you to lace up your Jordans with its expensive OEM laces, but that's Nike's problem, not yours. Now, Nike might argue that by using no-name laces, you run the risk of having a lace break while you're running, which could also break your ankle. That's certainly a possibility: shoelaces do break, and Nike might be justifiably proud of the quality of its laces. But if your generic laces snap (and so does your ankle), the problem is that the shoelaces you chose were defective. The problem is not that you chose someone else's laces.

Your stuff is yours. You can put anyone's milk on your cereal, not just the milk that Kellogg's endorses. If the milk you choose is sour and you have to pour your cereal down the toilet, that's too bad, but it doesn't mean that Kellogg's should have the right to shame you for having the temerity to choose the milk you preferred, and it certainly doesn't militate for DMCA-style enforcement to coerce you into using Kellogg's official milk in the name of protecting you from food wastage.

I raise this because there's a live debate over this subject, which is well represented in the latest 404 Media podcast:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbG1qwxMtU0

In the podcast, Koebler and his 404 co-founder Joseph Cox express misgivings about various possible uses of "slop interop." Koebler discusses the fact that John Deere sells the same physical tractor at many different price-points, depending on which software a farmer chooses, and raises the possibility that a farmer might vibe-code software that replicates the high-end functionality without paying for it. Koebler discusses two possible downsides to this: first, that the vibe-coded software might be defective and expose the farmer to risk; and second, a question about whether it's fair or just for a farmer to get those additional functions of their tractor without paying for them.

I think the first objection is entirely legitimate. The software you run on your expensive tractor should be secure, both for your own benefit and for the security of our food supply. That's actually a pretty good reason to ditch John Deere's own software, which is very insecure:

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

But I think the second question – whether it's legit to get this functionality without paying John Deere for it – is spurious. Sure, if John Deere provides you with that functionality, then they can send you the bill for it. But if you provide yourself with that functionality, using software you procured independently of John Deere, then John Deere has no right to get paid for it, and they certainly shouldn't have the right to stop you.

That tractor is yours. The fact that John Deere manufactured it is irrelevant. If you pay a contractor to build a house for you and later on pay a different contractor to add another bathroom to it, you don't owe the first contractor anything. It's your house (and if that bathroom has a leaky toilet, that's a matter between you and the second contractor, and not a reason to force you to only use your original contractor).

The law defines a narrow slice of functions that manufacturers get to control: those ideas that a patent examiner deems "novel, useful and nonobvious." It's legit (and good) for commercial operators to copy and improve the ideas of their rivals and competitors. It's why skilled tradespeople cluster together in the same geographic area.

Take Clerkenwell, the neighborhood in London where precision machining was invented by the jewelers and machinists who clustered there during the Longitude rewards. The reason all those competitors sought such close promixity to one another was because they wanted to copy the new techniques their rivals were developing (even if that meant that their rivals would be able to copy them):

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

If you're old enough to remember the advent of spreadsheets and the rollout of Visicalc, Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel, you'll know that every time a software vendor invented a new spreadsheet feature, all the other ones immediately copied it. This wasn't bad for spreadsheets: it was good for spreadsheets, just as copying your competitors was good for precision machining in Clerkenwell.

Everything from GNU/Linux (a feature-for-feature clone of AT&T Unix) to SAMBA (a plug-compatible clone of Microsoft's SMB) to iWork (file-compatible, feature compatible clones of MS Office's apps) came about through this "adversarial interoperability." What's more, the heyday of this kind of adversarial interop was also the heyday of disenshittification, the era in which any anti-feature installed by your existing vendor could be countered by a disenshittifying patch from a new one:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

The question of whether vibe-coded software is any good is separate from the question of whether it's good to replace the software in your devices, even if you replace it with software that has features that the manufacturer would normally charge a premium for. You are under no obligation to arrange your commercial affairs to the financial benefit of manufacturers, and anyone who claims to be surprised that someone they sold a device to used it to benefit themselves at the manufacturer's expenses is either disingenuous…or unserious. You bought it, it's yours.

But just as this vibe-coded adversarial interop has drawn both valid and spurious criticism, it's also drawn excitement that is partially justified and partially overblown.

When it comes to reviving bricked devices or rooting out the surveillance and ads from your smart TV, vibe-coded interop tools are genuinely exciting. These are the kinds of enshittification that can truly be remediated with individual jailbreaks.

But the real, meaty examples of enshittification can't be addressed on an individual level – they require systemic fixes. If you jailbreak your iPhone so that it can use alternative app stores, that fact is not sufficient to cause those alternative app stores to come into existence. If we want to stop Apple from levying a $100b "app tax" on the digital economy, it's not enough for individuals to vibe-code their own iPhone patches. We need to repeal the law that bans jailbreaking iPhones, so that a would-be alternative app store can raise capital and pay programmers and tech support staff and salespeople to assemble rival catalogs of software and help customers figure out how to get up their phones to use it.

The same goes for jailbreaking your printer so it accepts generic ink. Sure, this may work for you if you're up for refilling your own cartridges, and I'm sure that you can find someone on Alibaba who will sell you ink by the gallon. But the mere fact that a few users have secretly and privately jailbroken their inkjets won't conjure up a generic inkjet cartridge manufacturing sector. For that to happen, we need to make jailbreaking printers legal, not just possible.

Indeed, if we want to improve the quality of all that jailbreaking code the chatbots are writing and circulating, we need to be able to put those jailbreaks in public repositories for public inspection and public critique. It's possible for some of the code produced by an LLM to be slop, and for other code to be fine, and for yet a third tranche of code to be remediable slop that can be made robust and reliable through auditing and refactoring. You can't figure out which is which if you have to keep that vibe code a secret on pain of a long prison-sentence.

I think there's good cause to be excited at the prospect of getting your devices working better, or just working at all. I think that even if the code stops working after a while, that's still fine – either you got more use out of your device than you would have without the new code, or maybe you just make more code that runs for a while for you, and then you do it again.

These individual improvements to your devices and technology are worth celebrating. But they are no substitute for systemic intervention. If we're going to have a new, good internet, a post-American internet that truly disenshittifies America's defective tech exports and replaces them with robust, transparent digital public goods, we need to make reverse-engineering legal again. Once we fix our policy, then we can fix our code:

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

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Secret recording of Labour Whip demanding support for Iraq invasion https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/oct/22/uk.september11

#25yrsago LoC launches emulator-based digital file preservation https://web.archive.org/web/20011217002337/http://www.techreview.com/magazine/oct01/innovation5.asp

#25yrsago Kevin Mitnick to play CIA lackey https://web.archive.org/web/20011111105016/http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/22395.html

#15yrsago ACLU Tennessee brings suit against ICE officers who broke into house and said, “We don’t need a warrant, we’re ICE, the warrant is coming out of my balls.” https://web.archive.org/web/20111025092605/http://www.aclu.org/blog/immigrants-rights/we-dont-need-warrant-were-ice/

#15yrsago WIPO’s secret, corporate-run trademark enforcement meeting https://web.archive.org/web/20220121054715/https://craphound.com/PROGRAMManilaEdited10212011-FINAL.pdf

#15yrsago Canada’s Supreme Court: Linking isn’t libel https://web.archive.org/web/20111026134334/http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-15374238

#15yrsago HOWTO recreate the Haunted Mansion’s singing busts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRtiiMW47i4

#10yrsago Facebook’s crackdown on publishers feeds has sites paying celebs to repost https://digiday.com/media/facebook-thirsty-publishers-turn-celebrities-worm-news-feed/

#10yrsago Internet-destroying outages were caused by “amateurish” IoT malware https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/10/hacked-cameras-dvrs-powered-todays-massive-internet-outage/

#10yrsago Tory minister’s filibuster kills Turing’s law and pardons for 65,000 persecuted gay men https://www.theguardian.com/law/2016/oct/21/chris-bryant-commons-plea-gay-pardon-law

#10yrsago Trump hotels, faced with massive declines in bookings, rebrand as “Scion Hotels” https://web.archive.org/web/20161023182616/http://www.travelandleisure.com/hotels-resorts/trump-scion-hotels

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 533 (27469 total).

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF

20.10.2026 à 19:24

Pluralistic: The death of history's most successful publisher (20 Oct 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3423 mots)


Today's links


A haunted burial ground by a lake, with a bat flying overhead. A haint in a shroud floats over the scene, its face is the Google Android droid. The sole, listing tombstone reads 'I'm feeling lucky.'

The death of history's most successful publisher (permalink)

I published my first story in 1988, when I was 17 years old. Today, at 55, I've published more than 30 books, with three more coming in the next year or so. In the intervening years, I've spent a lot of time thinking and talking about publishing.

I've had plenty of opportunity to reflect on publishing: I've been a bookseller and worked in libraries, I wrote a column for Publishers Weekly, self-published a few books of my own, published the first-ever book licensed under Creative Commons, and broke several Kickstarter records for audiobook projects. But most of all, I've worked with publishing professionals: publicists, marketing directors, operations people, copyeditors, and, above all, editors.

My first novel editor was the magnificent Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who supported my publishing career from the very start, donating to help send me to the Clarion science fiction writers' workshop and inviting me to come read slush at Tor Books whenever I was in New York. Patrick didn't teach me everything I know about publishing, but he sure taught me a lot about publishing, and hardly a day goes by without my having cause to reflect on one of our many discussions over our decades-long professional and personal association.

Out of all the things I learned about publishing from Patrick, one truth stands out above all: publishing is "the act of making something public." Publishing may or may not involve editing, layout, printing, binding, marketing or other activities that we associate with publishing houses, but publishing always involves identifying a work, identifying an audience, and finding ways to connect that work to that audience.

This definition does a lot of useful work. For one thing, it locates publishing as part of the hard problem of human society, namely, "getting people to care about something that matters to you." Beyond publishing, this is the crux of politics, religion and commerce:

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

For another, this definition lets us understand that (for most of its existence) Google was the most successful publisher in human history. No other institution of any kind connected more works with more audiences. Lots of people have heard of Google's wildly unsuccessful motto "Don't be evil," but far fewer are familiar with Google's wildly successful mission statement, "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

But all of that is in the past tense. With its AI projects – AI summaries, the Gemini chatbot – Google has abandoned the practice of "connecting works with audiences." Today, Google's function is to plunder all the works on the internet and chop them up and arrange them in an unimaginably vast, multidimensional array for the explicit purpose of preventing audiences from connecting with those works.

For most of its history, Google operated in a virtuous cycle with publishers whereby they allowed Google to crawl their sites and Google located audiences and connected them with the pages on those sites. Today, that cycle has turned vicious, with Google acting as a parasite that extracts value from the web's publishers and offers nothing in return.

This is entirely in keeping with the enshittification hypothesis: that once a platform is liberated from the disciplining forces of competition, regulation, labor and interoperability, it will squeeze its suppliers and users and harvest all the value for itself:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

But AI represents a new phase in enshittification. Google has assayed enshittificatory gambits in the past, like deliberately worsening its search results in order to force you to search repeatedly, which gave the company more chances to show you ads:

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

But as sleazy as those gambits were, they were profitable. In some important sense, they were sustainable. Assuming Google could carry on indefinitely scamming its users in this way, they'd continue to bring in more cash than they spent, and continue to be the world's most successful publisher, connecting works and audiences (albeit in a deliberately degraded way).

Contrast this with AI, the money-losingest endeavor in the history of human civilization. Google is losing hundreds of billions of dollars on AI. The more AI Google does, the worse the company's financial footing becomes. If Google does this for long enough, it may cease to exist altogether. This collapse can only be prolonged by Google's ongoing extraction of value from web publishers, who no longer have their works connected with audiences via Google search results. Instead, Google usurps those audiences, shows them as many ads as it can, and still loses money in the bargain.

In Tim Wu's Age of Extraction, Wu lays out a thesis about how intermediaries – middlemen who perform a useful function connecting different groups, firms and individuals – are prone to developing "main character syndrome," abandoning their role as facilitators for others and abusing their position to make themselves the prime beneficiary of the transactions they facilitate:

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

Google has a scorching case of main character syndrome, and nowhere is that more obvious than in its AI-fueled transformation into web-scale parasite. The fact that this gambit might well destroy Google and the publishers the company once served – rather than merely enshittifying search with worse results and more ads – makes the whole thing look more like a Mafia bust-out than the enshittification of the first half of the 2020s:

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

It's certainly an ignominious end for history's most successful publisher (as was).

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Reenacting the Civil War with 44,000 ceramic cats in handmade uniforms https://web.archive.org/web/20011021022729/http://www.phillyburbs.com/intelligencerrecord/news/news_intell/1332513.htm

#20yrsago More on publishing and “okaysellers” https://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/bestsellers_oka/#008116

#15yrsago HOWTO make a Frankenstein hat https://web.archive.org/web/20111022194802/http://deliacreates.blogspot.com/2011/10/hey-frankie.html

#15yrsago Copyright policy in the UK: an evidence-free zone https://www.openrightsgroup.org/publications/cant-look-now-finding-film-online/

#15yrsago Clockwork Fagin on Escape Pod https://delivery-edge.libsyn.com/shows/18601/items/1737698/EP315_ClockworkFagin.mp3

#10yrsago At long last, America’s racist, crazy tough-on-crime prosecutors are losing elections https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2828803

#5yrsago Imperfections in your Bluetooth beacons allow for unstoppable tracking https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/21/sidechannels/#ble-eding

#1yrago Carl Hiaasen's 'Fever Beach' https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/21/florida-duh/#strokerz-for-liberty

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 514 (27116 total).

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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