Today's links

• The enshittification of labor: Pavlina Tcherneva, getting her peanut butter in my chocolate.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: 3D printing with tape-guns; TPP is the worst; HP ends customers' lives.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

The enshittification of labor (permalink)

While I formulated the idea of enshittification to refer to digital platforms and their specific technical characteristics, economics and history, I am very excited to see other theorists extend the idea of enshittification beyond tech and into wider policy realms.

There's an easy, loose way to do this, which is using "enshittification" to refer to "things generally getting worse." To be clear, I am fine with this:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/#this-toilet-has-no-central-nervous-system

But there's a much more exciting way to broaden "enshittification," which starts with the foundation of the theory: that the things we rely on go bad when the system stops punishing this kind of deliberate degradation and starts rewarding it. In other words, the foundation of enshittification is the enshittogenic policy environment:

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

That's where Pavlina Tcherneva comes in. Tcherneva is an economist whose work focuses on the power of a "job guarantee," which is exactly what it sounds like: a guarantee from the government to employ anyone who wants a job, by either finding or creating a job that a) suits that person's talents and abilities and b) does something useful and good. If this sounds like a crazy pipe-dream to you, let me remind you that American had a job guarantee and it was wildly successful, and created (among other things), the system of national parks, a true jewel in America's crown:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/23/foxconned/#ccc

Tcherneva's latest paper is "The Death of the Social Contract and the Enshittification of Jobs," in which she draws a series of careful and compelling parallels between my work on enshittification and today's employment crisis, showing how a job guarantee is the ultimate disenshittifier of work:

https://www.levyinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/wp_1100.pdf

Tcherneva starts by proposing a simplified model of enshittification, mapping my three stages onto three of her own:

1. Bait: Lure in users with a great, often subsidized, service.

2. Trap: Use that captive audience to attract businesses (sellers, creators, advertisers).

3. Switch: Exploit those groups by degrading the experience for everyone to extract maximum profit.

How do these map onto the current labor market and economy? For Tcherneva, the "bait" stage was "welfare state capitalism," which was "shaped by post–Great Depression government reforms and lasted through the 70s." This was the era in which the chaos of the Great Depression gave rise to fiscal and monetary policy that promoted macroeconomic stability. It was the era of economic safety nets and mass-scale federal investment in American businesses, through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, a federal entity that expanded into directly funding large companies during WWII. After the war, the US Treasury continued to play a direct role in finance, through procurement, infrastructure spending and provision of social services.

As Tcherneva writes, this is widely considered the "Golden Age" of the US economy, a period of sustained growth and rising standard of living (she also points out that these benefits were very unevenly distributed, thanks to compromises made with southern white nationalists that exempted farm labor, and a pervasive climate of misogyny that carved out home work).

The welfare state capitalism stage was celebrated not merely for the benefits that it brought, but also for the system it supplanted. Before welfare state capitalism, we had 19th century "banker capitalism," in which cartels and trusts controlled every aspect of our lives and gave rise to a string of spectacular economic bubbles and busts. Before that, we had the "industrial capitalism" of the Industrial Revolution, where large corporations seized power. Before that, it was "merchant capitalism," and before that, feudalism – where workers were bound to a lord's land, unable to escape the economic and geographic destiny assigned to them at birth.

So welfare state capitalism was a welcome evolution, at least for the workers who got to reap its benefits. But welfare state capitalism was short-lived. To understand what came next, Tcherneva cites Hyman Minsky (whose "theory of capitalist development" provides this epochal nomenclature for the various stages of capitalism over the centuries).

Minsky calls the capitalism that supplanted welfare state capitalism "money manager capitalism," the system that reigned from the Reagan revolution until the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. This was an era of "deregulation, eroding worker power, rapid increase in inequality, and a rise of the money manager class." It's the period of financialization, which favored the creation of gigantic conglomerates that wrapped banking services (loans, credit cards, etc) around their core offerings, from GE to Amazon.

Then came the crash of 2008, which gave us our current era, the era of "international money manager capitalism," which is the system in which gigantic, transnational funds capture our economy pumping and dumping a series of scammy bubbles, like crypto, metaverse, blockchain, and (of course) AI:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/econopocalypse/#subprime-intelligence

Welfare state capitalism was the "bait" stage of the enshittification of labor. Public subsidies and regulation produced an environment in which (many) workers were able to command a large share of the fruits of their labor, securing both a living wage and old-age surety. This was the era of the "family wage," in which a single earner could supply all the necessities of life to a family: an owner-occupied home, material sufficiency, and enough left over for vacations, Christmas presents and other trappings of "the good life."

During this stage, the "social contract" meant the government training a skilled workforce (through universal education) and public goods like roads and utilities. Companies got big contracts, but only if they accepted collective bargaining from their unions. Governments and corporations collaborated to secure a comfortable requirement for workers.

But this arrangement lacked staying power, thanks to a key omission in the social contract: the guarantee of a good job. Rather than continuing the job guarantee that brought America out of the Depression, all the post-New Deal order could offer the unemployed was unemployment insurance. This wasn't so important while America was booming and employers were begging for workers, but when growth slowed, the lack of a job guarantee suddenly became the most important fact of many workers' lives.

This was foreseen by the architects of the New Deal. FDR's "Second Bill of (Economic) Rights" would have guaranteed every American "national healthcare, paid vacation, and a guaranteed job":

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

These guarantees were never realized, and for Tcherneva, this failure doomed welfare state capitalism. Unions were powerful during an era of tight labor markets and able to wring concessions out of capital, but once demand for workers ebbed (thanks to slowing growth and, later, offshoring), bosses could threaten workers with unemployment, breaking union power.

The social contract was bait, promising "economic security and decent jobs" through cooperation between the government, corporations and unions.

The switch came from Reagan, with mass-scale deregulation, a hack-and-slash approach to social spending, and the enshrining of a permanently unemployed reserve army of workers whose "job" was fighting inflation (by not having a job). Trump has continued this, with massive cuts to the federal workforce. Today, "job insecurity is not an unfortunate consequence of shifting economic winds, it is the objective of public policy."

For money manager capitalism, unemployment is a feature, not a bug – literally. Neoliberal economists invented something called the NAIRU ("non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment"), which deliberately sets out to keep a certain percentage of workers in a state of unemployment, in order to fight inflation.

Here's how that works: if the economy is at full employment (meaning everyone who wants a job has one), and prices go up (say, because bosses decide to increase their rate of profit), then workers will demand and receive a pay-rise, because bosses can't afford to fire those "greedy" workers – there are no unemployed workers to replace them.

This means that if bosses want to maintain their rate of profit, they will have to raise prices again to pay those higher wages for their workers. But after that, workers' pay no longer goes as far as it used to, so workers demand another raise and then bosses have to hike prices again (if they are determined not to allow the decline of their own profits). This is called "the wage-price spiral" and it's what happens when bosses refuse to accept lower profits and workers have the power to demand that their wages get adjusted to keep up with prices.

Of course, this only makes sense if you think that bosses should be guaranteed their profits, even if that means that workers' real take-home pay (measured by purchasing power) declines. You aren't supposed to notice this, though. That's why neoliberal economists made it a sin to ask about "distributional effects" (that is, asking about how the pie gets divided) – you're only supposed to care about how big the pie gets:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/28/imagine-a-horse/#perfectly-spherical-cows-of-uniform-density-on-a-frictionless-plane

With the adoption of NAIRU, joblessness "was now officially sanctioned as necessary for the health of the economy." You could not survive unless you had a job, not everyone could have a job, and the jobs were under control of a financialized, concentrated corporate sector. Companies merged and competition disappeared. If you refused to knuckle under to the boss at your (formerly) good factory job, there wasn't another factory that would put you on the line. The alternative to those decaying industrial jobs were "unemployment and low-wage service sector work."

That's where the final phase of the enshittification of labor comes in: the "trap." For Tcherneva, the trap is "the brutal fact of necessity itself." You cannot survive without a roof over your head, without electricity, without food and without healthcare. As these are not provided by the state, the only way to procure them (apart from inherited wealth) is through work, and access to work is entirely in the hands of the private sector.

Once corporations capture control of housing (through corporate landlords), healthcare (though corporate takeover of hospitals, pharma, etc), and power (through privatization of utilities), they can squeeze the people who depend on these things, because there is no competitor. You can't opt out of shelter, food, electricity and healthcare – at least, not without substantial hardship.

In my own theory of enshittification, platforms hunt relentlessly for sources of lock-in (e.g., the high switching costs of losing your social media community or your platform data) and, having achieved it, squeeze users and businesses, secure in the knowledge that users can't readily leave for a better service. This is compounded by monopolization (which reduces the likelihood that a better service even exists) and regulatory capture (which gives companies a free hand to squeeze with). Once a company can squeeze you, it will.

Here, Tcherneva is translating this to macroeconomic phenomena: control over the labor market and capture of the necessaries of life allows companies to squeeze, and so they do. A company rips you off for the same reason your dog licks its balls: because it can.

Tcherneva describes the era of money manager capitalism as "the slow, grinding enshittification of daily life." It's an era of corporate landlords raising the rent and skimping on maintenance, while hitting tenants with endless junk fees. It's an era of corporate hospitals gouging you on bills, skimping on care, and screwing healthcare workers. It's an era of utilities capturing their public overseers and engaging in endless above-inflation price hikes:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/24/surfa/#mark-ellis

This is the "trap" of Tcherneva's labor enshittification, and it kicked off "a decades-long enshittification of working life." Enshittified labor is "low-wage jobs with unpredictable schedules and no benefits." Half of American workers earn less than $25/hour. The federal minimum wage is stuck at $7.25/hour. Half of all renters are rent-burdened and a third of homeowners are mortgage-burdened. A quarter of renters are severely rent-burdened, with more than half their pay going to rent.

Money manager capitalism's answer to this is…more finance. Credit cards, payday loans, home equity loans, student loans. All this credit isn't nearly sufficient to keep up with rising health, housing, and educational prices. This locks workers into "a lifetime of servicing debt, incurred to simulate a standard of living the social contract had once promised but their wages could no longer deliver."

To manage this impossible situation, money manager capitalism spun up huge "securitized" debt markets, the CDOs and ABSes that led to the Great Financial Crisis (today, international money manager capitalism is spinning up even more forms of securitized debts).

In my theory of enshittification, there are four forces that keep tech platforms from going bad: competition, regulation, a strong workforce and interoperability. For Tcherneva, these forces all map onto the rise and fall of the American standard of living.

Competition: Welfare state capitalism was born in a time of tight labor markets. Workers could walk out of a bad job and into a good one, forcing bosses to compete for workers (including by dealing fairly with unions). This was how we got the "good job," one with medical, retirement, training and health care benefits.

Regulation: The New Deal established the 40-hour week, minimum wages, overtime, and the right to unionize. As with tech regulation, this was backstopped by competition – the existence of a tight labor market meant that companies had to concede to regulation. As with tech regulation, the capture of the state meant the end of the benefits of regulation. With the rise of NAIRU, regulation was captured by bosses, with the government now guaranteeing a pool of unemployed workers who could be used to terrorize uppity employees into meek acceptance.

Interoperability: In tech enshittification, the ability to take your data, relationships and devices with you when you switch to a competitor means that the companies you do business with have to treat you well, or risk your departure. In labor enshittification, bosses use noncompetes, arbitration, trade secrecy, and nondisparagement to keep workers from walking across the street and into a better job. Some workers are even encumbered with "training repayment agreement provisions (TRAPs) that force them to pay thousands of dollars if they quit their jobs:

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

Worker power: In tech enshittification, tech workers – empowered by the historically tight tech labor market – are able to hold the line, refusing to enshittify the products they develop, with the constant threat that they can walk out the door and get a job elsewhere. In labor enshittification, NAIRU, combined with corporate capture of the necessaries of life and the retreat of unionization, means that workers have very little power to demand a better situation, which means their bosses can worsen things to their shriveled hearts' content.

As with my theory of enshittification, the erosion of worker power is an accelerant for labor enshittification. Weaker competition for workers means weaker labor power, which means weaker power to force the government to regulate. This sets the stage for more consolidation, weaker workers, and more state capture. This is the completion of the bait-trap-switch of the postwar social contract.

For Tcherneva, this enshittification arises out of the failure to create a job guarantee as part of the New Deal. And yet, a job guarantee remains very popular today:

https://www.jobguarantee.org/resources/public-support/

How would a job guarantee disenshittify the labor market? The job guarantee means a "permanent, publicly provided employment opportunity to anyone ready and willing to work, it establishes an effective floor for the entire labor market."

Under a job guarantee, any private employer wishing to hire a worker will have to beat the job guarantee's wages and benefits. No warehouse or fast-food chain could offer "poverty wages, unpredictable hours, and a hostile environment." It's an incentive to the private sector to compete for labor by restoring the benefits that characterized America's "golden age."

What's more, a job guarantee is administrable. A job guarantee means that workers can always access a safe, good job, even if the state fails to adequately police private-sector employers and their wages and working conditions. A job guarantee does much of the heavy lifting of enforcing a whole suite of regulations: "minimum wage laws, overtime rules, safety standards—that are constantly subject to political attack, corporate lobbying, and enforcement challenges."

A job guarantee also restores interoperability to the labor market. Rather than getting trapped in a deskilled, low-waged gig job, those at the bottom of the labor market will always have access to a job that comes with training and skills development, without noncompetes and other gotchas that trap workers in shitty jobs. For workers this means "career advancement and mobility." For society, "it delivers a pipeline of trained personnel to tackle our most pressing challenges."

And best of all, a job guarantee restores worker power. The fact that you can always access a decent job at a socially inclusive wage means that you don't have to eat shit when it comes to negotiating for your housing, health care and education. You can tell payday lenders, for-profit scam colleges (like Trump University), and slumlords to go fuck themselves.

Tcherneva concludes by pointing out that, as with tech enshittification, labor enshittification "is a political choice, not an economic inevitability." Labor enshittification is the foreseeable outcome of specific policies undertaken in living memory by named individuals. As with tech enshittification, we are under no obligation to preserve those enshittificatory policies. We can replace them with better ones.

If you want to learn more about the job guarantee, you can read my review of her book on the subject:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/22/jobs-guarantee/#job-guarantee

And the interview I did with her about it for the LA Times:

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2020-06-24/forget-ubi-says-an-economist-its-time-for-universal-basic-jobs

Tcherneva and I are appearing onstage together next week in Lisbon at Web Summit to discuss this further:

https://websummit.com/sessions/lis25/2a479f57-a938-485a-acae-713ea9529292/working-it-out-job-security-in-the-ai-era/

And I assume that the video will thereafter be posted to Websummit's Youtube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/@websummit

Hey look at this (permalink)

• What EFF Needs in a New Executive Director https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/what-eff-needs-new-executive-director

• Complaint v Ireland to European Commission re process appointing ex-Meta lobbyist as Data Protection Commissioner https://www.iccl.ie/digital-data/complaint-v-ireland-to-european-commission-re-process-appointing-ex-meta-lobbyist-as-data-protection-commissioner/

• Budget 2025 talks a big competition game but lacks punch https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/budget-2025-talks-a-big-competition

• Snug Plug https://snugplugstore.com/

• Comparing the Industries Who Have Routinely Sued Their Regulators with the Industries Who Rarely Have https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5620230

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago PATRIOT Act secret-superwarrants use is up 10,000 percent https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/05/AR2005110501366_pf.html

#10yrsago Protopiper: tape-gun-based 3D printer extrudes full-size furniture prototypes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beRA4sIjxa8

#10yrsago EFF on TPP: all our worst fears confirmed https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/11/release-full-tpp-text-after-five-years-secrecy-confirms-threats-users-rights

#10yrsago TPP will ban rules that require source-code disclosure https://www.keionline.org/39045

#10yrsago Publicity Rights could give celebrities a veto over creative works https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/11/eff-asks-supreme-court-apply-first-amendment-speech-about-celebrities-0

#10yrsago How TPP will clobber Canada’s municipal archives and galleries of historical city photos https://www.geekman.ca/single-post/2015/11/the-tpp-vs-municipal-archives.html

#5yrsago HP ends its customers' lives https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/06/horrible-products/#inkwars

#1yrago Every internet fight is a speech fight https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/06/brazilian-blowout/#sovereignty-sure-but-human-rights-even-moreso

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Burbank: Burbank Book Festival, Nov 8
  https://www.burbankbookfestival.com/

• Lisbon: A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet, with Rabble (Web Summit), Nov 12
  https://websummit.com/sessions/lis25/92f47bc9-ca60-4997-bef3-006735b1f9c5/a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet/

• Cardiff: Hay Festival After Hours, Nov 13
  https://www.hayfestival.com/c-203-hay-festival-after-hours.aspx

• Oxford: Enshittification and Extraction: The Internet Sucks Now with Tim Wu (Oxford Internet Institute), Nov 14
  https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/events/enshittification-and-extraction-the-internet-sucks-now/

• London: Enshittification with Sarah Wynn-Williams and Chris Morris, Nov 15
  https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2025/event/cory-doctorow-with-sarah-wynn-williams

• London: Downstream IRL with Aaron Bastani (Novara Media), Nov 17
  https://dice.fm/partner/tickets/event/oen5rr-downstream-irl-aaron-bastani-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-17th-nov-earth-london-tickets

• London: Enshittification with Carole Cadwalladr (Frontline Club), Nov 18
  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/in-conversation-enshittification-tickets-1785553983029

• Virtual: Enshittification with Vass Bednar (Vancouver Public Library), Nov 21
  https://www.crowdcast.io/@bclibraries-present

• Toronto: Jailbreaking Canada (OCAD U), Nov 27
  https://www.ocadu.ca/events-and-exhibitions/jailbreaking-canada

• San Diego: Enshittification at the Mission Hills Branch Library, Dec 1
  https://libraryfoundationsd.org/events/doctorow

• Seattle: Neuroscience, AI and Society (University of Washington), Dec 4
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/neuroscience-ai-and-society-cory-doctorow-tickets-1735371255139

• Madison, CT: Enshittification at RJ Julia, Dec 8
  https://rjjulia.com/event/2025-12-08/cory-doctorow-enshittification

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Reimagining Digital Public Infrastructure (Attention: Govern Or Be Governed)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8JuXDfDtBY

• Enshittification and How To Fight It (ILSR)
  https://www.whoshallrule.com/p/enshittification-and-how-to-fight

• Big Tech’s “Enshittification” & Bill McKibben on Solar Hope for the Planet
  https://www.writersvoice.net/2025/11/cory-doctorow-on-big-techs-enshittification-bill-mckibben-on-solar-hope-for-the-planet/

• Enshittification and the Rot Economy with Ed Zitron (Clarion West)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz71pIWbFyc

• Amanpour & Co (New Yorker Radio Hour)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8l1uSb0LZg

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links

• The 40-year economic mistake that let Google conquer (and enshittify) the world: If reality doesn't fit the theory, ignore reality.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: The Master Switch; Dueling useless machines; Chrome delists Symantec; Someone tried to buy the UK; "Made to Kill"; #Audiblegate; Sony lies about de-rootkitifier; “Aurora”; Bluesky and enshittification; Polostan; New Zealand's 3 strikes law; Open Kinekt drivers; Co-op platforms vs Uber; Chelsea Manning's surveillance reform bill.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

The 40-year economic mistake that let Google conquer (and enshittify) the world (permalink)

A central fact of enshittification is that the growth of quality-destroying, pocket-picking monopolists wasn't an accident, nor was it inevitable. Rather, named individuals, in living memory, advocated for and created pro-enshittificatory policies, ushering in the enshittocene.

The greatest enshittifiers of all are the neoliberal economists who advocated for the idea that monopolies are good, because (in their perfect economic models), the only way for a company to secure a monopoly is to be so amazing that we all voluntarily start buying its products and services, and the instant a monopoly starts to abuse its market power, new companies will enter the market and poach us all from the bloated incumbent.

This "consumer welfare" theory of antitrust is obviously wrong, and it's the best-known neoliberal monopoly delusion. But it's not the only one! Another pro-monopoly ideology we can thank the Chicago School economists for is "industrial organization" (IO), a theory that insists that vertical monopolies are actually really good. This turns out to be one of the most consequentially catastrophic mistakes in modern economic history.

What's a "vertical monopoly"? That's when a company takes over parts of the supply chain both upstream and downstream from it. Take Essilor Luxottica, the eyeglasses monopoly that owns every brand of frames you've ever heard of, from Coach and Oakley to Versace and Bausch and Lomb. That's a horizontal lobby – the company took over every eyewear brand under the sun. But they also created a vertical monopoly by buying most of the major eyeglass retailers (Sunglass Hut, Lenscrafters, etc), and by buying up most of the optical labs in the world (Essilor makes the majority of corrective lenses, worldwide). They also own Eyemed, the world's largest eyeglasses insurer.

IO theory predicts that even if a company like Essilor Luxxotica uses its monopoly power to price gouge in one part of the eyeglass supply chain (e.g. by raising the price of frames, which Essilor Luxxotica has done, by over 1,000%), that they will use some of those extraordinary profits to keep all their other products as cheap as possible. If Luxottica can use its market power to mark up the price of frames by a factor of ten, then IO theory predicts that they'll keep the prices of lenses and insurance as low as possible, in order to make it harder for lens or insurance companies to get into the frame business. By using monopoly frame profits to starve those rivals of profits, Essilor Luxxotica can keep them so poor that they can't afford to branch out and compete with Essilor Luxottica's high-priced frames.

Like so much in neoliberal economics, this is nothing but "a superior moral justification for selfishness" (h/t John Kenneth Galbraith). IO is a way for the greediest among us to convince policymakers that their greed is good, and produces a benefit for all of us. By energetically peddling this economic nonsense, monopolists and their pet economists have done extraordinary harm to the world, while getting very, very rich.

Google is a real poster-child for what happens to a market when regulators adopt IO ideas. "Google’s hidden empire," is a new paper out today from Aline Blankertz, Brianna Rock and Nicholas Shaxson, which tells the story of how IO let Google become the enshittified, thrice-convicted monopolist it is today:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.02931

The authors mostly look at the history of how EU regulators dealt with Google's long string of mergers. By the time Google embarked on this shopping spree, the European Commission had already remade itself as a Chicago School, IO-embracing regulator. The authors trace this to 2001, when the EC blocked a merger between GE and Honeywell, which had been approved in the USA. This provoked howls of disapproval and mockery from Chicago School proponents, who mocked the EC for not hiring enough "IO expertise," contrasting the Commission's staff with the US FTC, which had 50 PhD (neoliberal) economists on the payroll. Stung, the EU embarked on a "Big Bang" hiring spree for Chicago School economists in 2004, remaking the way it viewed competition policy for decades to come.

This is the context for Google's wave of highly consequential vertical mergers, the most important of which being its acquisition of Doubleclick, the ad-tech company that allowed Google to acquire the monopoly it was last year convincted of operating:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/google-found-guilty-of-monopolization

When Google sought regulatory approval in the EU for its Doubleclick acquisition, the EC's economists blithely predicted that this wouldn't lead to any harmful consequences. Sure, it would let Google dominate the tools used by publishers to place ads on their pages; and by the advertisers who placed those ads; and the marketplace in which the seller and buyer tools transacted business. But that's a vertical monopoly, and any (IO-trained) fule kno that this is a perfectly innocuous arrangement that can't possibly lead to harmful monopoly conduct.

The EC arrived at this extraordinary conclusion by paying outside economists a lot of money for advice (that kind of pretzel logic doesn't come cheap). Two decades later, Google/Doubleclick was abusing its monopoly so badly that the EU fined the company €2.95 billion.

It's not like Google/Doubleclick took two decades to start screwing over advertisers and publishers. Right from the jump, it was clear that this merger was an anticompetitive disaster, but that didn't stop the EC from waving through more mergers, like 2020's Google acquisition of Fitbit:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/01/the-years-of-repair/#google-fitbit

Once again, the EC concluded that this merger, being "vertical," couldn't have any deleterious effects. In reality, Google-Fitbit was a classic "killer acquisition," in which Google bought out and killed the dominant player in a sector it was planning to enter, in order to shut down a competitor. Within a few years, the Fitbit had been enshittified beyond all recognition.

Despite these regulatory failures (and many more like them), the EC remains firmly committed to IO and its supremely chill posture on vertical monopolization. But as bad as IO is for regulating vertical mergers, it's even less well suited for addressing Google's main tactic for shaping markets: vertical investments.

Google Ventures (GV) is Google's investment arm, and it is vastly larger than the venture arms of other Big Tech companies. Google invests in far more companies than it buys outright, and also far more companies than any other Big Tech company does. GV is the only tech company investment fund that shows up in the top-ten list of VCs by deal.

In the paper, the authors use data from Pitchbook to create a sense of Google's remarkable investment portfolio. Many of these deals go through "Google for Startups," which allows Google to acquire an equity stake in companies for "in-kind contributions," mainly access to Google's cloud servers and data.

By investing so widely, Google can exert enormous force on the shape of the entire tech ecosystem, ensuring that the companies that do succeed don't compete with Google's most lucrative lines of business, but rather funnel users and businesses into using Google's services.

This activity isn't tracked by academics, regulators, or stock analysts. It's the "hidden empire" of the paper's title. 9556 companies show up in Pitchbook as receiving Big Tech investments up to 2024. 5,899 of those companies got their investments from Google.

Combine Google's free hand to engage in vertical acquisitions and its invisible empire of portfolio companies, and you have a world-spanning entity with damned few checks on its power.

What's more, as the authors write, Google is becoming an arm of US foreign power. Back in 2024, Google made a $24b acquisition offer to the cybersecurity company Wiz, which turned it down, out of fear that the Biden administration's antitrust enforcers would tank the deal. After Donald Trump's election – which saw antitrust enforcement neutralized except as a tool for blackmailing companies Trump doesn't like – Wiz sold to Google for $32b.

The Wiz acquisition is an incredibly dangerous one from a competitive perspective. Wiz provides realtime cybersecurity monitoring for the networks of large corporations, meaning that any Wiz customer necessarily shares a gigantic amount of sensitive data with the company – and now, with Google, which owns Wiz, and competes with many of its customers.

Google has already mastered the art of weaponizing the data that it collects from users, but with Wiz, it gains unprecedented access to sensitive data from the world's businesses.

Google's consolidation of market power – power it has abused so badly that it has lost three federal antitrust cases – can be directly traced to the foolish notions of Industrial Organization theory and its misplaced faith in vertical mergers.

As the authors write, it's long past time we abandoned this failed ideology. The Google/Wiz merger still has to clear regulatory approval in the EU. This represents a chance for the EC to abandon its tragic, decades-long, unrequited love affair with IO and block this nakedly anticompetitive merger.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Lina Khan co-chairs Mamdani's transition team https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/11/05/nyregion/nyc-mayor-mamdani

• The Democrats' problem in the Senate is not progressives https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/democrats-need-a-bigger-senate-solution

• How anti-cybercrime laws are being weaponized to repress journalism. https://www.cjr.org/analysis/nigeria-pakistan-jordan-cybercrime-laws-journalism.php

• Internet Archive’s legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/11/the-internet-archive-survived-major-copyright-losses-whats-next/

• Hack Exposes Kansas City’s Secret Police Misconduct List https://www.wired.com/story/hack-exposes-kansas-city-kansas-polices-secret-misconduct-list/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago BBC Archive database — early info https://web.archive.org/web/20051102024643/https://www.hackdiary.com/archives/000071.html

#20yrsago Sony releases de-rootkit-ifier, lies about risks from rootkits https://web.archive.org/web/20051126084940/http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=921

#20yrsago Pew study: Kids remix like hell https://web.archive.org/web/20051104022412/http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/166/source/rss/report_display.asp

#15yrsago How I use the Internet when I’m playing with my kid https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/nov/02/cory-doctorow-children-and-computers

#15yrsago Bedtime Story: Supernatural thriller about the dark side of “getting lost in a good book” https://memex.craphound.com/2010/11/02/bedtime-story-supernatural-thriller-about-the-dark-side-of-getting-lost-in-a-good-book/

#15yrsago The Master Switch: Tim “Net Neutrality” Wu explains what’s at stake in the battle for net freedom https://memex.craphound.com/2010/11/01/the-master-switch-tim-net-neutrality-wu-explains-whats-at-stake-in-the-battle-for-net-freedom/

#15yrsago Times Online claims 200K paid users: but where’s the detailed breakdown? https://memex.craphound.com/2010/11/01/times-online-claims-200k-paid-users-but-wheres-the-detailed-breakdown/

#15yrsago Duelling useless machines: a metaphor for polarized politics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkgoSOSGrx4

#15yrsago Hari Prasad, India’s evoting researcher, working to save Indian democracy from dirty voting machines https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/11/2010-pioneer-award-winner-hari-prasad-defends

#15yrsago Science fiction tells us all laws are local — just like the Web https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-a-cosmopolitan-literature-for-the-cosmopolitan-web/

#15yrsago UK Lord claims mysterious "foundation" wants to give Britain £17B, no strings attached http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/11/conspiracy-theories.html

#15yrsago New Zealand proposes “guilty until proven innocent” copyright law to punish accused infringers https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/11/new-zealand-p2p-proposal-guilty-until-proven-innocent/

#15yrsago Toronto cops who removed their name-tags during the G20 to avoid identification will be docked a day’s pay https://web.archive.org/web/20101107144339/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/nearly-100-toronto-officers-to-be-disciplined-over-summit-conduct/article1784884/

#15yrsago $2K bounty for free/open Kinect drivers (Microsoft thinks this is illegal!) https://blog.adafruit.com/2010/11/04/the-open-kinect-project-the-ok-prize-get-1000-bounty-for-kinect-for-xbox-360-open-source-drivers/

#15yrsago TSA official slipped white powder into fliers’ bags, told them they’d been caught with coke and were under arrest https://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/stupid/memos-detail-tsa-officers-cocaine-pranks

#10yrsago Firefox’s new privacy mode also blocks tracking ads https://web.archive.org/web/20151104081611/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/11/mozilla-ships-tracking-protection-firefox

#10yrsago Predatory lenders trick Google into serving ads to desperate, broke searchers https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/google-searches-privacy-danger/413614/

#10yrsago Fighting Uber’s Death Star with a Rebel Alliance of co-op platforms https://web.archive.org/web/20151107021010/http://www.shareable.net/blog/how-platform-coops-can-beat-death-stars-like-uber-to-create-a-real-sharing-economy

#10yrsago If the Kochs want criminal justice reform, why do they fund tough-on-crime GOP candidates? https://theintercept.com/2015/11/03/soft-on-crime-ads/

#10yrsago Chelsea Manning publishes a 129-page surveillance reform bill from her cell in Leavenworth https://web.archive.org/web/20151103175813/https://s3.amazonaws.com/fftf-cms/media/medialibrary/2015/11/manning-memo.pdf

#10yrsago EPA finds more Dieselgate emissions fraud in VW’s Audis and Porsches https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/business/some-porsche-models-found-to-have-emissions-cheating-software.html

#10yrsago Ranking Internet companies’ data-handling: a test they all fail https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/nov/03/ranking-digital-rights-project-data-protection

#10yrsago Big Data refusal: the nuclear disarmament movement of the 21st century https://booktwo.org/notebook/big-data-no-thanks/

#10yrsago Made to Kill: 1960s killer-robot noir detective novel https://memex.craphound.com/2015/11/03/made-to-kill-1960s-killer-robot-noir-detective-novel/

#10yrsago Chrome won’t trust Symantec-backed SSL as of Jun 1 unless they account for bogus certs https://security.googleblog.com/2015/10/sustaining-digital-certificate-security.html

#10yrsago Beautiful, free/open 3D printed book of lost Louis H. Sullivan architectural ornaments https://web.archive.org/web/20151109231301/https://twentysomethingsullivan.com/

#10yrsago America’s a rigged carnival game that rips off the poor to fatten the rich https://web.archive.org/web/20151104012651/http://robertreich.org/post/132363519655

#10yrsago As America’s middle class collapses, no one is buying stuff anymore https://web.archive.org/web/20151105142153/http://uk.businessinsider.com/the-disappearing-middle-class-is-threatening-major-retailers-2015-10

#10yrsago Irish government to decriminalise personal quantities of many drugs https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/injection-rooms-for-addicts-to-open-next-year-in-drug-law-change-says-minister-1.2413509

#10yrsago Book and Bed: Tokyo’s coffin hotel/bookstore https://bookandbedtokyo.com/en/

#10yrsago Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Aurora”: space is bigger than you think https://memex.craphound.com/2015/11/02/kim-stanley-robinsons-aurora-space-is-bigger-than-you-think/

#5yrsago Trustbusting Google https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/02/unborked/#borked

#5yrsago Trump billed the White House $3 per glass of waterhttps://pluralistic.net/2020/11/02/unborked/#beltway-bandits

#5yrsago Trump's electoral equilibrium https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/02/unborked/#maso-fascism

#5yrsago A hopeful future https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/03/somebody-will/#somebody-will

#5yrsago Get an extra vote https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/03/somebody-will/#nudge-nudge

#5yrsago How Audible robs indie audiobook creatorshttps://pluralistic.net/2020/11/03/somebody-will/#acx

#5yrsago Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/03/somebody-will/#a-not-i

#1yrago Bluesky and enshittification https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yourself-to-a-federated-mast

#1yrago Shifting $677m from the banks to the people, every year, forever https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/01/bankshot/#personal-financial-data-rights

#1yrago Neal Stephenson's "Polostan" https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/04/bomb-light/#nukular

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Miami: Cloudfest, Nov 6
  https://www.cloudfest.com/usa/

• Burbank: Burbank Book Festival, Nov 8
  https://www.burbankbookfestival.com/

• Lisbon: A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet, with Rabble (Web Summit), Nov 12
  https://websummit.com/sessions/lis25/92f47bc9-ca60-4997-bef3-006735b1f9c5/a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet/

• Cardiff: Hay Festival After Hours, Nov 13
  https://www.hayfestival.com/c-203-hay-festival-after-hours.aspx

• Oxford: Enshittification and Extraction: The Internet Sucks Now with Tim Wu (Oxford Internet Institute), Nov 14
  https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/events/enshittification-and-extraction-the-internet-sucks-now/

• London: Enshittification with Sarah Wynn-Williams and Chris Morris, Nov 15
  https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2025/event/cory-doctorow-with-sarah-wynn-williams

• London: Downstream IRL with Aaron Bastani (Novara Media), Nov 17
  https://dice.fm/partner/tickets/event/oen5rr-downstream-irl-aaron-bastani-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-17th-nov-earth-london-tickets

• London: Enshittification with Carole Cadwalladr (Frontline Club), Nov 18
  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/in-conversation-enshittification-tickets-1785553983029

• Virtual: Enshittification with Vass Bednar (Vancouver Public Library), Nov 21
  https://www.crowdcast.io/@bclibraries-present

• Toronto: Jailbreaking Canada (OCAD U), Nov 27
  https://www.ocadu.ca/events-and-exhibitions/jailbreaking-canada

• San Diego: Enshittification at the Mission Hills Branch Library, Dec 1
  https://libraryfoundationsd.org/events/doctorow

• Seattle: Neuroscience, AI and Society (University of Washington), Dec 4
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/neuroscience-ai-and-society-cory-doctorow-tickets-1735371255139

• Madison, CT: Enshittification at RJ Julia, Dec 8
  https://rjjulia.com/event/2025-12-08/cory-doctorow-enshittification

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Reimagining Digital Public Infrastructure (Attention: Govern Or Be Governed)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8JuXDfDtBY

• Enshittification and How To Fight It (ILSR)
  https://www.whoshallrule.com/p/enshittification-and-how-to-fight

• Big Tech’s “Enshittification” & Bill McKibben on Solar Hope for the Planet
  https://www.writersvoice.net/2025/11/cory-doctorow-on-big-techs-enshittification-bill-mckibben-on-solar-hope-for-the-planet/

• Enshittification and the Rot Economy with Ed Zitron (Clarion West)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz71pIWbFyc

• Amanpour & Co (New Yorker Radio Hour)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8l1uSb0LZg

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links

• "Science Comics Computers: How Digital Hardware Works": Steampunk dinosaurs scratch-build a pressurized air-based, Turing complete, universal von Neumann machine.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Google Print vs Great Ormond; Lincolnbot; "Zoo City"; Killed by your tapeworm's cancer; NZ Colossus; How to have cancer.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

"Science Comics Computers: How Digital Hardware Works" (permalink)

In Science Comics Computers: How Digital Hardware Works, legendary cypherpunk Perry Metzger teams up with Penelope Spector and illustrator Jerel Dye for a tour-de-force young adult comic book that uses hilarious steampunk dinosaurs to demystify the most foundational building-blocks of computers. It's astounding:

https://www.veniac.com/

"Science Comics" is a long-running series from First Second, the imprint that also published my middle-grades comic In Real Life and my picture book Poesy the Monster-Slayer (they are also publishing my forthcoming middle-grades graphic novel Unauthorized Bread and adult graphic novel Enshittification). But long before I was a First Second author, I was a giant First Second fan, totally captivated by their string of brilliant original comics and English translations of beloved comics from France, Spain and elsewhere. The "Science Comics" series really embodies everything I love about the imprint: the combination of whimsy, gorgeous art, and a respectful attitude towards young readers that meets them at their level without ever talking down to them:

https://us.macmillan.com/series/sciencecomics

But as great as the whole "Science Comics" series is, How Digital Hardware Works is even better. Our guide to the most profound principles in computer science is a T Rex named Professor Isabella Brunel, who dresses in steampunk finery that matches the Victorian, dinosaur-filled milieu in which she operates.

Brunel begins by introducing us to "Veniac," a digital computer that consists of a specially designed room in which a person performs all the steps involved in the operations of a computer. This person – a celebrated mathematician (she has a Fields Medal) velociraptor named Edna – moves slips of paper in and out of drawers, looks up their meaning in a decoder book, tacks them up on a corkboard register, painstakingly completing the operations that comprise the foundations of computing.

Here the authors are showing the reader that computing can be abstracted from computing. The foundation of computing isn't electrical engineering, microlithography, or programming: it's logic.

When I was six or seven, my father brought home a computer science teaching tool from Bell Labs called "CARDiac," the "CARDboard Illustrative Aid to Computation." This was a papercraft digital computer that worked in nearly the same way as the Veniac, with you playing the role of Edna, moving little tokens around, penciling and erasing values in registers, and painstakingly performing the operations to run values through adders and then move them to outputs:

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

CARDiac was profoundly formative for me. No matter how infinitesimal and rapid the components of a modern computer are, I have never lost sight of the fact that they are performing the same operations I performed with a CARDiac on my child-sized desk in my bedroom. This is exactly the mission of CARDiac, whose creators, David Hagelbarger and Saul Fingerman, were worried that the miniaturization of computers (in 1968!) was leading to a time where it would be impossible to truly grasp how they worked. If you want to build your own CARDiac, here's a PDF you can download and get started with:

https://www.instructables.com/CARDIAC-CARDboard-Illustrative-Aid-to-Computation-/

But of course, you don't need to print, assemble and operate a CARDIac to get the fingertip feeling of what's going on inside a computer. Watching a sassy velociraptor perform the operations will work just as well. After Edna lays down this conceptual framework, Brunel moves on to building a mechanical digital computer, one composed of mechanical switches that can be built up into logic gates, which can, in turn, be ganged together to create every part of a universal computer that can compute every valid program.

This mechanical computer – the "Brawniac" – runs on compressed air, provided by a system of pumps that either supply positive pressure (forcing corks upwards to either permit or block airflow) or negative pressure (which sucks the corks back down, toggling the switch's state). This simple switch – you could probably build one in your kitchen out of fish-tank tubing and an aquarium pump – is then methodically developed into every type of logic gate. These gates are then combined to replicate every function of Edna in her special Veniac room, firmly anchoring the mechanical nuts-and-bolts of automatic computing with the conceptual framework.

This goes beyond demystification: the authors here are attaching a handle to this big, nebulous, ubiquitous hyperobject that permeates every part of our lives and days, allowing the reader to grasp and examine it from all angles. While there's plenty of great slapstick, fun art, and terrific characters in this book that will make you laugh aloud, the lasting effect upon turning the last page isn't just entertainment, it's empowerment.

No wonder they were able to tap the legendary hardware hacker Andrew "bunnie" Huang to contribute an outstanding introduction to this book, one that echoes the cri de coeur in in the intro that bunnie generously provided for my young adult novel Little Brother. No one writes about the magic of hacking hardware like bunnie:

https://memex.craphound.com/2016/12/30/the-hardware-hacker-bunnie-huangs-tour-de-force-on-hardware-hacking-reverse-engineering-china-manufacturing-innovation-and-biohacking/

Bunnie isn't the only computing legend associated with this book. Lead author Perry Metzger founded the Cryptography mailing list and is a computing pioneer in his own right.

The authors have put up a website at veniac.com that promises educator guides and a Veniac simulator. These will doubtless serve as excellent companions to the book itself, but even without them, this is an incredible accomplishment.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Zohran Mamdani: “Hope Is Alive” https://jacobin.com/2025/11/zohran-mamdani-election-victory-speech/

• Credit Card-Thin Handheld Has 300 Games and A Multiplayer Cable https://www.yankodesign.com/2025/11/05/credit-card-thin-handheld-has-300-games-and-a-multiplayer-cable/

• ‘The Big Short’ Investor Michael Burry Bets Against AI Hype https://gizmodo.com/the-big-short-investor-michael-burry-bets-against-ai-hype-2000681316

• I'm an Amazon employee, and I co-sign this letter anonymously https://www.amazonclimatejustice.org/open-letter#sign-form

• Epic and Google agree to settle their lawsuit and change Android’s fate globally https://www.theverge.com/policy/813991/epic-google-proposed-settlement

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Google print hurts kids! https://memex.craphound.com/2005/11/05/hospital-google-print-hurts-kids/

#15yrsago HOWTO graft the RFID from a payment-card onto your phone https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2010/rfid-transplantation/

#15yrsago Lincolnbot Mark I https://web.archive.org/web/20101107224026/http://disneyparks.disney.go.com/blog/2010/11/walt-disney-one-mans-dream-re-opens-with-new-magic-fond-memories-at-disney’s-hollywood-studios/

#15yrsago Crutchfield Dermatology of Minneapolis claims copyright in everything you write, forever, to keep you from posting complaints on the net https://memex.craphound.com/2010/11/05/crutchfield-dermatology-of-minneapolis-claims-copyright-in-everything-you-write-forever-to-keep-you-from-posting-complaints-on-the-net/

#15yrsago Botmasters include fake control interface to ensnare security researchers https://web.archive.org/web/20101106004833/https://blog.tllod.com/2010/11/03/statistics-dont-lie-or-do-they/

#15yrsago Young Asian refugee claimant sneaks onto Air Canada flight from HK disguised as old white guy https://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/11/04/canada.disguised.passenger/index.html

#15yrsago Zoo City: hard-boiled South African urban fantasy makes murder out of magic https://memex.craphound.com/2010/11/05/zoo-city-hard-boiled-south-african-urban-fantasy-makes-murder-out-of-magic/

#15yrsago Shortly after Murdoch buys National Geographic, he fires its award-winning journalists https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2011/07/20/wall-street-journal-under-rupert-murdoch/

#10yrsago British government will (unsuccessfully) ban end-to-end encryption https://memex.craphound.com/2015/11/05/british-government-will-unsuccessfully-ban-end-to-end-encryption/

#10yrsago Man killed by his tapeworm’s cancer https://www.livescience.com/52695-tapeworm-cancer.html?cmpid=514645

#10yrsago Washington Redskins’ lawyers enumerate other grossly offensive trademarks for the USPTO https://www.techdirt.com/2015/11/04/how-redskins-delightfully-vulgar-court-filing-won-me-over/

#10yrsago New Zealand’s lost colossus: all-mechanical racetrack oddsmaking computer https://hackaday.com/2015/11/04/tote-boards-the-impressive-engineering-of-horse-gambling/

#5yrsago Ant, Uber, and the true nature of money https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/05/gotta-be-a-pony-under-there/#jack-ma

#1yrago How to have cancer https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/05/carcinoma-angels/#squeaky-nail

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469

• Miami: Cloudfest, Nov 6
  https://www.cloudfest.com/usa/

• Burbank: Burbank Book Festival, Nov 8
  https://www.burbankbookfestival.com/

• Lisbon: A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet, with Rabble (Web Summit), Nov 12
  https://websummit.com/sessions/lis25/92f47bc9-ca60-4997-bef3-006735b1f9c5/a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet/

• Cardiff: Hay Festival After Hours, Nov 13
  https://www.hayfestival.com/c-203-hay-festival-after-hours.aspx

• Oxford: Enshittification and Extraction: The Internet Sucks Now with Tim Wu (Oxford Internet Institute), Nov 14
  https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/events/enshittification-and-extraction-the-internet-sucks-now/

• London: Enshittification with Sarah Wynn-Williams and Chris Morris, Nov 15
  https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2025/event/cory-doctorow-with-sarah-wynn-williams

• London: Downstream IRL with Aaron Bastani (Novara Media), Nov 17
  https://dice.fm/partner/tickets/event/oen5rr-downstream-irl-aaron-bastani-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-17th-nov-earth-london-tickets

• London: Enshittification with Carole Cadwalladr (Frontline Club), Nov 18
  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/in-conversation-enshittification-tickets-1785553983029

• Virtual: Enshittification with Vass Bednar (Vancouver Public Library), Nov 21
  https://www.crowdcast.io/@bclibraries-present

• San Diego: Enshittification at the Mission Hills Branch Library, Dec 1
  https://libraryfoundationsd.org/events/doctorow

• Seattle: Neuroscience, AI and Society (University of Washington), Dec 4
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/neuroscience-ai-and-society-cory-doctorow-tickets-1735371255139

• Madison, CT: Enshittification at RJ Julia, Dec 8
  https://rjjulia.com/event/2025-12-08/cory-doctorow-enshittification

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Enshittification and How To Fight It (ILSR)
  https://www.whoshallrule.com/p/enshittification-and-how-to-fight

• Big Tech’s “Enshittification” & Bill McKibben on Solar Hope for the Planet
  https://www.writersvoice.net/2025/11/cory-doctorow-on-big-techs-enshittification-bill-mckibben-on-solar-hope-for-the-planet/

• Enshittification and the Rot Economy with Ed Zitron (Clarion West)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz71pIWbFyc

• Amanpour & Co (New Yorker Radio Hour)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8l1uSb0LZg

• Enshittification is Not Inevitable (Team Human)
  https://www.teamhuman.fm/episodes/339-cory-doctorow-enshittification-is-not-inevitable

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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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

Today's links

• There's one thing EVERY government can do to shrink Big Tech: The path to a post-American internet.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: D2020; Sony rootkit; Public Enemy vs the internet; NYC plute Hallowe'en.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

There's one thing EVERY government can do to shrink Big Tech (permalink)

As the old punchline goes, "If you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here." It's a gag that's particularly applicable to monopolies: once a company has secured a monopoly, it doesn't just have the power to block new companies from competing with it, it also has the power to capture governments and thwart attempts to regulate it or break it up.

40 years ago, a group of right-wing economists decided that this was a feature, not a bug, and convinced the world's governments to stop enforcing competition law, anti-monopoly law, and antitrust law, deliberately encouraging a global takeover by monopolies, duopolies and cartels. Today, virtually every sector of our economy is dominated by five or fewer firms:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

These neoliberal economists knew that in order to stop us from getting there ("there" being a world where everyday people have economic and political freedom), they'd have to get us "here" – a world where even the most powerful governments find themselves unable to address concentrated corporate power. They wanted to drag us into a oligarchy, and take away any hope of us escaping to a fairer, more pluralistic world.

They succeeded. Today, rich and powerful governments struggle to do anything to rein in Big Tech. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney contemplated levying a 3% tax on America's tax-dodging tech giants…for all of five seconds. All Trump had to do was meaningfully clear his throat and Carney folded:

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/30/in-tech-tax-cave-trump-and-carney-may-have-both-gotten-what-they-wanted-00433980

Canada also tried forcing payments to Canadian news agencies from tech giants, and failed in the most predictable way imaginable. Facebook simply blocked all Canadian news on its platforms (this being exactly what it had done in every other country where this was tried). Google paid out some money, and the country's largest newspaper killed its long-running investigative series into Big Tech's sins. Then Google slashed its payments.

These payments were always a terrible idea. The only beneficial part of how Big Tech relates to the news is in making it easy for people to find and discuss the news. News you're not allowed to find or talk about isn't "news," it's "a secret." The thing that Big Tech steals from the news isn't links, it's money: 30% of every in-app payment is stolen by the mobile duopoly; 51% of every ad dollar is stolen by the ad-tech duopoly; and social media holds news outlets' subscribers hostage and forces news companies to pay to "boost" their content to reach the people who follow them.

In other words, extracting payments for links is a form of redistribution, a clawback of some of Big Tech's stolen loot. It isn't predistribution, which would block Big Tech from stealing the loot in the first place.

Canada is a wealthy nation, but only 41m people call it home. The EU is also wealthy, and it is home to 500m people. You'd think that the EU could get further than Canada, but, faced with the might of the tech cartel, it has struggled to get anything done.

Take the GDPR, Europe's landmark privacy law. In theory, this law bans the kind of commercial surveillance that Big Tech thrives on. In practice, these companies just flew an Irish flag of convenience, which not only let them avoid paying their taxes – it also let them get away with illegal surveillance, by capturing the Irish privacy regulator, who does nothing to defend Europeans' privacy:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

It's hard to overstate just how supine the Irish state is in relation to the American tech giants that pretend to call Dublin their home. The country's latest privacy regulator is an ex-Meta executive!

https://www.article19.org/resources/ireland-adopt-new-transparent-process-to-appoint-data-protection-commissioner/

(Perhaps he can hang out with the UK's newly appointed head of competition enforcement, who used to be the head of Amazon UK:)

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

For the EU, Ireland is just part of the problem when it comes to regulating Big Tech. The EU's latest tech regulations are the sweeping, even visionary Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act. If tech companies obeyed these laws, that would go a long way to addressing their monopoly abuses. So of course, they're not obeying the laws.

Apple has threatened to leave the EU altogether rather than comply with a modest order requiring it to allow third party payments and app stores:

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

And they've buried the EU in complex litigation that could drag on for a decade:

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:62025TN0354

And Trump has made it clear that he is Big Tech's puppet, and any attempt to get American tech companies to obey EU law will be met with savage retaliation:

https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/05/tech/google-eu-antitrust-fine-adtech

When it comes to getting Big Tech to obey the law, if we wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here.

But the fact that it's hard to get Big Tech to do the bidding of publicly accountable governments doesn't mean that those governments are powerless. There's one institution a government has total control over: itself.

The world's governments have all signed up to "anticircumvention" laws that criminalize reverse-engineering and modifying US tech products. This was done at the insistence of the US Trade Rep, who has spent this entire century using the threat of tariffs to bully every country in the world into signing up to laws that ban their own technologists from directly blocking American Big Tech companies' scams.

It's because of anticircumvention laws that a Canadian company can't go into business making an alternative Facebook client that blocks ads but restores the news. It's because of anticircumvention laws that a Canadian company can't go into business with a product that lets media companies bypass the Meta/Google ad-tech duopoly.

It's because of anticircumvention laws that a European company can't go into business modifying your phone, car, apps, smart devices and operating system to block all commercial surveillance. If companies can't get your data, they can't violate the GDPR. It's because of anticircumvention laws that a European company can't sell you a hardware dongle that breaks into your iPhone and replaces Apple's ripoff app store with a Made-in-the-EU alternative.

Anticircumvention law is the reason Canada's only response to Trump's illegal tariffs is more tariffs, which make everything in Canada more expensive. Get rid of anticircumvention law and Canada could get into the business of shifting billions of dollars from American tech monopolists to Canadian startups and the Canadian people:

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

Anticirumvention law is the reason the EU can't get its data out of the Big Tech silos that Trump controls, which lets Trump shut down any European government agency or official that displeases him:

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

American monopolists like John Deere have installed killswitches in every tractor in the world – killswitches that can't be removed until we get rid of anticircumvention laws, which will let us create open source firmware for tractors. Until we do that, Trump can shut down all the agriculture in any country that makes him angry:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/20/post-american-internet/#huawei-with-american-characteristics

For a decade, we've been warned that allowing China to supply our telecoms infrastructure was geopolitical suicide, because it would mean that China could monitor and terminate our network traffic. That's the threat that Trump's America now poses for the whole world, as Trump makes it clear that America doesn't have allies or trading partners, only rivals and competitors, and he will stop at nothing to beat them.

And if you are worried about China, well, perhaps you should be. The world's incredible rush to solarization has left us with millions of solar installations whose inverters are also subject to arbitrary updates by their (Chinese) manufacturers, including updates that could render them inoperable. The only way around this? Get rid of anticircumvention law and replace all the software in these critical systems with open source, transparent, owner-controlled alternatives:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/23/our-friend-the-electron/#to-every-man-his-castle

Getting Big Tech to do your government's bidding is a big lift. The companies are too big to jail, especially with Trump behind them. That's why each of America's Big Tech CEOs paid $1m out of their own pockets to sit behind him on the dais at the inauguration:

https://apnews.com/article/trump-inauguration-tech-billionaires-zuckerberg-musk-wealth-0896bfc3f50d941d62cebc3074267ecd

Even America can't bring its tech companies to heel. When Google was convicted of being an illegal monopolist, the judge punished the company by sentencing it to…nothing:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/03/unpunishing-process/#fucking-shit-goddammit-fuck

But ultimately, breakups and fines and interoperabilty mandates are all forms of redistribution – a way to strip the companies of the spoils of their decades-long looting spree. That's a laudable goal, but if we want to get there, we must start with predistribution: halting the companies' ongoing extraction efforts, by getting rid of the laws that prevent other technologists from unfucking their products and halting their cash- and data-ripoffs.

Do that long and hard enough and we stand a real chance of draining off so much of their power that we can get moving on those redistributive moves. And getting rid of anticircumvention laws only requires that governments control their own behavior – unlike taxing or fining companies, which only works if governments can control the behavior of companies that have proven, time and again, to be more powerful than any country in the world.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• The Forgotten History of Socialism and the Occult https://jacobin.com/2025/10/socialism-occult-mysticism-marxism-history/

• Study: AI Models Trained On Clickbait Slop Result In AI ‘Brain Rot,’ ‘Hostility’ https://www.techdirt.com/2025/10/31/study-ai-models-trained-on-clickbait-slop-result-in-ai-brain-rot-hostility/

• The Validation Machines https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/10/validation-ai-raffi-krikorian/684764/

• The Department of Defense Wants Less Proof its Software Works https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/department-defense-wants-less-proof-its-software-works

• Ireland: Adopt new, transparent process to appoint Data Protection Commissioner https://www.article19.org/resources/ireland-adopt-new-transparent-process-to-appoint-data-protection-commissioner/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Sony DRM uses black-hat rootkits https://web.archive.org/web/20051102053346/http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/10/sony-rootkits-and-digital-rights.html

#20yrsago Suncomm encourages people to break its DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20051116115847/http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2005/10/drm_crippled_cd.html

#20yrsago Public Enemy’s Internet strategy https://web.archive.org/web/20051103053915/https://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,69403,00.html

#10yrsago Petition: Rename Stephen Harper to “Calgary International Airport” https://www.change.org/p/rename-stephen-harper-to-calgary-international-airport

#10yrsago Hallowe’en with NYC’s super-rich https://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2015/10/29/fashion/halloween-in-manhattans-most-expensive-zip-codes/s/29UESHALLOWEEN-slide-LRGS.html

#5yrsago D2020 https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/31/walkies/#probabilistic

#5yrsago The Americans https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/31/walkies/#among-us

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Virtual: Peoples and Things with danah boyd and Lee Vinsel, Nov 3
  https://www.youtube.com/live/WjFvGPLpskk

• Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469

• Miami: Cloudfest, Nov 6
  https://www.cloudfest.com/usa/

• Burbank: Burbank Book Festival, Nov 8
  https://www.burbankbookfestival.com/

• Lisbon: A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet, with Rabble (Web Summit), Nov 12
  https://websummit.com/sessions/lis25/92f47bc9-ca60-4997-bef3-006735b1f9c5/a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet/

• Cardiff: Hay Festival After Hours, Nov 13
  https://www.hayfestival.com/c-203-hay-festival-after-hours.aspx

• Oxford: Enshittification and Extraction: The Internet Sucks Now with Tim Wu (Oxford Internet Institute), Nov 14
  https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/events/enshittification-and-extraction-the-internet-sucks-now/

• London: Enshittification with Sarah Wynn-Williams and Chris Morris, Nov 15
  https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2025/event/cory-doctorow-with-sarah-wynn-williams

• London: Downstream IRL with Aaron Bastani (Novara Media), Nov 17
  https://dice.fm/partner/tickets/event/oen5rr-downstream-irl-aaron-bastani-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-17th-nov-earth-london-tickets

• London: Enshittification with Carole Cadwalladr (Frontline Club), Nov 18
  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/in-conversation-enshittification-tickets-1785553983029

• Virtual: Enshittification with Vass Bednar (Vancouver Public Library), Nov 21
  https://www.crowdcast.io/@bclibraries-present

• Seattle: Neuroscience, AI and Society (University of Washington), Dec 4
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/neuroscience-ai-and-society-cory-doctorow-tickets-1735371255139

• Madison, CT: Enshittification at RJ Julia, Dec 8
  https://rjjulia.com/event/2025-12-08/cory-doctorow-enshittification

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Enshittification and the Rot Economy with Ed Zitron (Clarion West)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz71pIWbFyc

• Amanpour & Co (New Yorker Radio Hour)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8l1uSb0LZg

• Enshittification is Not Inevitable (Team Human)
  https://www.teamhuman.fm/episodes/339-cory-doctorow-enshittification-is-not-inevitable

• The Great Enshittening (The Gray Area)
  https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophypodcasts/comments/1obghu7/the_gray_area_the_great_enshittening_10202025/

• Enshittification (Smart Cookies)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BoORwEPlQ0

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links

• The internet was made for privacy: And unmade by regulators.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Materialist conspiratorialism; TSA ball-fondlers; Anonymous to dox 1,000 Klansmen; Amazon hates private property; The Great Firewall of Cameron.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

The internet was made for privacy (permalink)

While "tech exceptionalism" can be a grave sin (as with the "move fast and break things" ethos that wrecked so much of our world, especially its labor markets), there are ways in which tech is truly exceptional, in the sense of bringing forth capabilities and affordances that have never existed before, in all of human history.

One obvious way in which tech is exceptional: its flexibility. Digital computers are "Turing-complete, universal von Neumann machines," which means that they are engines capable of computing every valid program. They are truly general purpose. We have many other general purpose machines, of course, but they are simple things, like wheels. Computers are unique in that they are both complex and universal, and every computer can run every program. Just as we don't know how to make knives that only cut in beneficial ways, we also don't know how to make computers that only run desirable programs.

Every computer can run every program, including ones that the user doesn't want (viruses), or that the manufacturer doesn't want (ad-blockers). No one knows how to make a computer that is almost Turing-complete. There's no such thing as "Turing-complete minus one." We can't make a computer that only runs the programs the manufacturer has authorized – all we can do is criminalize the act of modifying your own computer to do what you tell it to, even if the manufacturer objects:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/

I've devoted a lot of my life to exploring the policy implications of this amazing fact, but that's not the only amazing, exceptional thing about technology. There's at least one other way in which modern digital technology has produced something that is genuinely, civilizationally novel: encryption.

Encryption – scrambling data so that it can only be read by its intended recipient – is an age-old project for both the authorities (who used ciphers to keep their secrets safe since the time of the Caesars) and for those who would overthrow them (revolutionary movements have always used codes to protect themselves from the authorities they sought to dethrone).

But WWII ushered in a new era, in which encryption (and attempts to break it) went digital, as Alan Turing and the codebreakers of Bletchley Park turned their efforts to a computer-aided mathematics of scrambling and descrambling. In the decades that followed, a modern form of encryption emerged, one that was powerful beyond the wildest dreams of the Caesars and their revolutionary adversaries.

Modern, computerized encryption can scramble data to the point where it is literally unscramblable by an unauthorized party. In the eyeblink moment between you pressing the camera button on your phone and the resulting image being saved to its mass storage, the bits that make up that image are scrambled so thoroughly that even if every hydrogen atom in the universe were made into a computer, and even if all those computers were put to work guessing at the key, we would run out of time and universe before we ran out of keys.

Even futuristic, experimental technologies like quantum computing that may revolutionize codebreaking are also revolutionizing scrambling itself:

https://signal.org/blog/pqxdh/

The history of encryption is seriously fraught. Until the early 1990s, the NSA classed working encryption as a munition and banned civilian access to a whole branch of mathematics. It wasn't until Cindy Cohn – then a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, now its executive director – convinced a court that the First Amendment protected the right to publish computer code, that we were all able to gain access to this essential technology, which today safeguards your messages, files, banking transactions, and the software updates for your car's brakes, your pacemaker, and the informatics on airplanes. Cohn has announced her retirement from EFF in 2026, and while she will be sorely missed, we do have her memoir, Privacy's Defender, to look forward to:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262051248/privacys-defender/

The legalization of encryption was a starting gun for the internet itself, as true information security entered the picture and pervaded every part of service design. Every security crisis, every scandal (e.g. Snowden), jolted the effort to encrypt the internet forward, and in this way, much of the internet lurched into a state we can call "encrypted by default."

But even as this privacy-preserving technology was perfected and made ubiquitous, something weird and contradictory happened: mass surveillance also took off online. The ad-tech industry – and its handmaidens, the data-broker industry – rigged the game so that our private activities were only encrypted in such a way as to defend their privacy, but not ours. Our data is encrypted in transit to the servers we interact with, and when it is at rest on those servers' mass storage devices, but it is not encrypted in a way that prevents companies from data-mining it, or decrypting it and selling it on or giving it away or combining it with surveillance data purchased or traded from others.

This isn't an inevitability: it's a choice. The ubiquity of surveillance in the age of encryption is a policy choice. The reason companies don't encrypt our data so that they can't use it against us is because they don't have to. Congress hasn't updated American consumer privacy law since 1988, when they passed a law that prohibits video store clerks from disclosing our VHS rentals:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/20/privacy-first-second-third/#malvertising

Why hasn't Congress updated our privacy rights since Die Hard was in theaters? Because American cops and spies love commercial internet surveillance. Tech companies and data brokers are a source of fine-grained, off-the-books, warrantless surveillance data that the American state is totally addicted to. There is no difference between "commercial surveillance" and "government surveillance" – they are a fused symbiote and neither could survive without the other:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#axciom

Governments have hated encryption since the Clinton era, and have been attempting to subvert it since computers came in beige boxes and modems screamed in agony every time you tried to look at the internet:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/clipper-chips-birthday-looking-back-22-years-key-escrow-failures

It's no mystery why we don't have federal bans on facial recognition – if we did, ICE wouldn't be able to nonconsensually, warrantlessly steal your face and store it for 15 years (at least):

https://www.404media.co/you-cant-refuse-to-be-scanned-by-ices-facial-recognition-app-dhs-document-says/

Why did the EU allow Ireland to facilitate mass surveillance for a decade after the GDPR's passage? Because European authorities also hate encryption and say that it is a "totally erroneous perception that it is everyone's civil liberty to communicate on encrypted messaging services":

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/09/chat-control-back-menu-eu-it-still-must-be-stopped-0

The internet could be the most privacy-preserving communications medium in history. Instead, it has ushered in an era of nightmarish surveillance. This isn't a technology problem. It's a policy problem. Criminals spy on us online because our governments wanted to spy on us online, so they let corporations spy on us online.

Imagine what the internet would look like today if, in its early regulatory moments, our elected representatives had demanded privacy, rather than trying to ban it. Sure, some corporations would have spied on us anyway, and criminals would have done their best to compromise our privacy, but criminals and rogue firms wouldn't have been able to attract capital to engage in conduct that was likely to give rise to massive fines and criminal prosecutions for violating the privacy laws Congress never bothered to write for us.

Think of it this way: sure, there are e-commerce sites that are just scams, that take your money and never ship you goods. Those sites don't have IPOs, they're not listed on stock exchanges, and they get shut down or blocked. They exist in the shadows, not in the light. Imagine if that was the kind of commercial surveillance industry we'd gotten: marginal, shadowy, illegal, forever on the run. There would still have been some bad privacy invasions, but these would have been crimes, not Harvard Business Review case-studies:

https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=51748

(And before you email me about that one time Paypal closed your account and kept your money or Ebay wouldn't give you a refund, sure, that's right, those things suck, and the companies should face penalties for them, but their business model isn't stealing money from their customers; but Google and Meta and Apple's business model is 100% stealing data from their customers.)

Instead of treating data theft the way we treat monetary theft, we're now increasingly treating monetary theft like data theft. The legislative formalization of cryptocurrency will now allow companies to steal your money with the same blissful lack of consequence as Google faced for stealing your private information:

https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-89/

We're rounding the corner on a decade since the beginning of the fight against Big Tech, and the efforts to cut it down to size. These keep foundering on the political economy of crushing an all-powerful monopolist – namely, that it is all-powerful.

You can't tax Big Tech:

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

You can't break it up:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/a-judge-lets-google-get-away-with

Donald Trump has made it clear that he'd rather let Putin annex Brussels than allow the EU to fine tech companies:

https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/05/tech/google-eu-antitrust-fine-adtech

Breakups, taxes and fines are all forms of redistribution, which seek to address the harms of monopoly after the monopoly has been formed. The failure to make privacy protections as inviolable as financial protections is a missed opportunity for predistribution. Bans on data collection, mining, and sale would have prevented these monopolies from forming in the first place. Predistribution is far more effective than redistribution:

https://jacobin.com/2025/10/predistribution-welfare-state-inequality-class

It's amazing that the privacy-invading internet has somehow beaten the encrypted internet. It's crazy that the only entity that will promise to encrypt your data beyond the reach of a data broker, an ad-tech giant, or a government is a ransomware criminal, who will also encrypt your data beyond your reach:

https://www.wired.com/story/state-of-ransomware-2024/

It didn't have to be this way. This wasn't a technology failure. It wasn't a commercial failure. It was a policy failure. Since the 1990s, whenever push came to shove, governments decided that they would rather preserve their ability to spy on us than keep us safe from private spying.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Animal Costumes from the 1862 Fairytale Ball of the Jung-München Artist’s Association https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/maskenfest/

• New physical attacks are quickly diluting secure enclave defenses from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/10/new-physical-attacks-are-quickly-diluting-secure-enclave-defenses-from-nvidia-amd-and-intel/

• If Musk was broke, he’d just be another asshole with bad ideas https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/if-musk-was-broke-he-d-just-be-another-asshole-with-bad-ideas-cory-doctorow-20251023-p5n4u6.html

• FCC Republicans force prisoners and families to pay more for phone calls https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/10/fcc-republicans-force-prisoners-and-families-to-pay-more-for-phone-calls/

• norecognition https://github.com/hevnsnt/norecognition

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Baen Books to launch online sf mag edited by Eric Flint https://web.archive.org/web/20060702073036/http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/?id=33090

#15yrsago Dirty debt collectors frightened victims with fake “sheriffs,” “courtroom,” “judges” https://web.archive.org/web/20101106001140/https://www.thepittsburghchannel.com/r/25569199/detail.html

#15yrsago TSA demands testicular fondling as an alternative to naked scanners https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/10/for-the-first-time-the-tsa-meets-resistance/65390/

#15yrsago Brain-imaging and neurorealism: what does it mean to “feel something” in your brain? https://www.badscience.net/2010/10/neuro-realism/

#15yrsago Animaniacs vs Newt Gingrich — the lost episode https://www2.cruzio.com/~keeper/UAdearmr.html

#15yrsago Canada’s telcoms regulator gives bloated, throttling incumbent the keys to the kingdom https://web.archive.org/web/20101031090505/http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/globe-on-technology/crtc-ruling-handcuffs-competitive-market-teksavvy/article1778211/

#15yrsago Rent-seeking in the 21st century: where eBay, free software, Foxconn and the MPAA come from https://web.archive.org/web/20101102151059/http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/10/points-of-control-rent-extract.html

#10yrsago Patent trolls: The Eastern District of Texas must die so that we all may live https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/its-time-federal-circuit-shut-down-eastern-district-texas

#10yrsago Anonymous threatens to dump real names of 1,000 KKK members https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/anonymous-hackers-threaten-release-names-ku-klux-klan-members-n453246

#10yrsago UK govt: no crypto back doors, just repeal the laws of mathematics https://betanews.com/2015/10/28/uk-government-says-app-developers-wont-be-forced-to-implement-backdoors/

#10yrsago David Cameron promises law to force ISPs to censor a secret blacklist https://web.archive.org/web/20151029155602/http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-10/28/cameron-porn-filter-law-net-neutrality

#10yrsago EU Parliament votes to drop criminal charges and grant asylum to Snowden https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/29/edward-snowden-eu-parliament-vote-extradition

#10yrsago Thanks to the meth wars, cold medicine’s effective ingredient isn’t https://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2015/10/26/the-popular-over-the-counter-cold-medicine-that-science-says-doesnt-work/

#10yrsago UK police & spies will have warrantless access to your browsing history https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/11964655/Police-to-be-granted-powers-to-view-your-internet-history.html

#10yrsago NM judge believes daily prison rape is a fit punishment for nearly all defendants https://web.archive.org/web/20151030003120/http://www.ijreview.com/2015/10/458319-judge-calls-18-year-old-a-b-but-shes-only-trying-to-help/

#10yrsago Charity with US Characteristics: how our oligarchs buy their way out of criticism https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Robert-Reich/2015/0408/How-the-Koch-brothers-and-the-super-rich-are-buying-their-way-out-of-criticism

#10yrsago Christ, what an asshole. https://memex.craphound.com/2015/10/30/christ-what-an-asshole-2/

#5yrsago Facebook loses users, makes more money https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/30/rigged-game/#tails-you-lose

#5yrsago Sue your medical bully https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/29/victim-complex/#i-object

#5yrsago Violent cops' deadly victim complex https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/29/victim-complex/#marsys-law

#5yrsago Amazon says only corporations own property https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/29/victim-complex/#digital-feudalism

#1yrago Conspiratorialism as a material phenomenon https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/29/hobbesian-slop/#cui-bono

#1yrago AI's "human in the loop" isn't https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/30/a-neck-in-a-noose/#is-also-a-human-in-the-loop

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Virtual: Peoples and Things with danah boyd and Lee Vinsel, Nov 3
  https://www.youtube.com/live/WjFvGPLpskk

• Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469

• Miami: Cloudfest, Nov 6
  https://www.cloudfest.com/usa/

• Burbank: Burbank Book Festival, Nov 8
  https://www.burbankbookfestival.com/

• Lisbon: A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet, with Rabble (Web Summit), Nov 12
  https://websummit.com/sessions/lis25/92f47bc9-ca60-4997-bef3-006735b1f9c5/a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet/

• Cardiff: Hay Festival After Hours, Nov 13
  https://www.hayfestival.com/c-203-hay-festival-after-hours.aspx

• Oxford: Enshittification and Extraction: The Internet Sucks Now with Tim Wu (Oxford Internet Institute), Nov 14
  https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/events/enshittification-and-extraction-the-internet-sucks-now/

• London: Enshittification with Sarah Wynn-Williams and Chris Morris, Nov 15
  https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2025/event/cory-doctorow-with-sarah-wynn-williams

• London: Downstream IRL with Aaron Bastani (Novara Media), Nov 17
  https://dice.fm/partner/tickets/event/oen5rr-downstream-irl-aaron-bastani-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-17th-nov-earth-london-tickets

• London: Enshittification with Carole Cadwalladr (Frontline Club), Nov 18
  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/in-conversation-enshittification-tickets-1785553983029

• Virtual: Enshittification with Vass Bednar (Vancouver Public Library), Nov 21
  https://www.crowdcast.io/@bclibraries-present

• Seattle: Neuroscience, AI and Society (University of Washington), Dec 4
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/neuroscience-ai-and-society-cory-doctorow-tickets-1735371255139

• Madison, CT: Enshittification at RJ Julia, Dec 8
  https://rjjulia.com/event/2025-12-08/cory-doctorow-enshittification

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Enshittification and the Rot Economy with Ed Zitron (Clarion West)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz71pIWbFyc

• Amanpour & Co (New Yorker Radio Hour)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8l1uSb0LZg

• Enshittification is Not Inevitable (Team Human)
  https://www.teamhuman.fm/episodes/339-cory-doctorow-enshittification-is-not-inevitable

• The Great Enshittening (The Gray Area)
  https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophypodcasts/comments/1obghu7/the_gray_area_the_great_enshittening_10202025/

• Enshittification (Smart Cookies)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BoORwEPlQ0

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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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

Today's links

• When AI prophecy fails: Hating workers is a hell of a drug.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: SCOTUS lets the FBI kidnap Americans; Inequality perverts justice; Free the McFlurry!
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

When AI prophecy fails (permalink)

Amazon made $35 billion in profit last year, so they're celebrating by laying off 14,000 workers (a number they say will rise to 30,000). This is the kind of thing that Wall Street loves, and this layoff comes after a string of pronouncements from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy about how AI is going to let them fire tons of workers.

That's the AI story, after all. It's not about making workers more productive or creative. The only way to recoup the $700 billion in capital expenditure to date (to say nothing of AI companies' rather fanciful coming capex commitments) is by displacing workers – a lot of workers. Bain & Co say the sector needs to be grossing $2 trillion by 2030 in order to break even, which is more than the combined grosses of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple Nvidia and Meta:

https://www.bain.com/about/media-center/press-releases/20252/$2-trillion-in-new-revenue-needed-to-fund-ais-scaling-trend—bain–companys-6th-annual-global-technology-report/

Every investor who has put a nickel into that $700b capex is counting on bosses firing a lot of workers and replacing them with AI. Amazon is also counting on people buying a lot of AI from it after firing those workers. The company has sunk $120b into AI this year alone.

There's just one problem: AI can't do our jobs. Oh, sure, an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job, but that's the world's easiest sales-call. Your boss is relentlessly horny for firing you:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete

But there's a lot of AI buyers' remorse. 95% of AI deployments have either produced no return on capital, or have been money-losing:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/01/25/1436/we-analyzed-16625-papers-to-figure-out-where-ai-is-headed-next/

AI has "no significant impact on workers’ earnings, recorded hours, or wages":

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933

What's Amazon to do? How do they convince you to buy enough AI to justify that $180b in capital expenditure? Somehow, they have to convince you that an AI can do your workers' jobs. One way to sell that pitch is to fire a ton of Amazon workers and announce that their jobs have been given to a chatbot. This isn't a production strategy, it's a marketing strategy – it's Amazon deliberately taking an efficiency loss by firing workers in a desperate bid to convince you that you can fire your workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/05/ex-princes-of-labor/#hyper-criti-hype

Amazon does use a lot of AI in its production, of course. AI is the "digital whip" that Amazon uses to allow itself to control drivers who (nominally) work for subcontractors. This lets Amazon force workers into unsafe labor practices that endanger them and the people they share the roads with, while offloading responsibility onto "independent delivery service" operators and the drivers themselves:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/23/traveling-salesman-solution/#pee-bottles

Amazon leadership has announced that AI has replaced or will shortly replace its coders as well. But chatbots can't do software engineering – sure, they can write code, but writing code is only a small part of software engineering. An engineer's job is to maintain a very deep and wide context window, one that considers how each piece of code interacts with the software that executes before it and after it, and with the systems that feed into it and accept its output.

There's one thing AI struggles with beyond all else: maintaining context. Each linear increase in context that you demand from AI results in an exponential increase in computational expense. AI has no object permanence. It doesn't know where it's been and it doesn't know where it's going. It can't remember how many fingers it's drawn, so it doesn't know when to stop. It can write a routine, but it can't engineer a system.

When tech bosses dream of firing coders and replacing them with AI, they're fantasizing about getting rid of their highest-paid, most self-assured workers and transforming the insecure junior programmers leftover into AI babysitters whose job it is to evaluate and integrate that code at a speed that no one – much less a junior programmer – can meet if they are to do a careful and competent job:

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/how-ai-is-killing-jobs-in-the-tech-f39

The jobs that can be replaced with AI are the jobs that companies already gave up on doing well. If you've already outsourced your customer service to an overseas call-center whose workers are not empowered to solve any of your customers' problems, why not fire those workers and replace them with chatbots? The chatbots also can't solve anyone's problems, and they're even cheaper than overseas call-center workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/06/unmerchantable-substitute-goods/#customer-disservice

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote that he "is convinced" that firing workers will make the company "AI ready," but it's not clear what he means by that. Does he mean that the mass firings will save money while maintaining quality, or that mass firings will help Amazon recoup the $180,000,000,000 it spent on AI this year?

Bosses really want AI to work, because they really, really want to fire you. As Allison Morrow writes for CNN bosses are firing workers in anticipation of the savings AI will produce…someday:

https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/28/business/what-amazons-mass-layoffs-are-really-about

All this can feel improbable. Would bosses really fire workers on the promise of eventual AI replacements, leaving themselves with big bills for AI and falling revenues as the absence of those workers is felt?

The answer is a resounding yes. The AI industry has done such a good job of convincing bosses that AI can do their workers' jobs that each boss for whom AI fails assumes that they've done something wrong. This is a familiar dynamic in con-jobs.

The people who get sucked into pyramid schemes all think that they are the only ones failing to sell any of the "merchandise" they shell out every month to buy, and that no one else has a garage full of unsold leggings or essential oils. They don't know that, to a first approximation, the MLM industry has no sales, and relies entirely on "entrepreneurs" lying to themselves and one another about the demand for their wares, paying out of their own pocket for goods that no one wants.

The MLM industry doesn't just rely on this deception – they capitalize on it, by selling those self-flagellating "entrepreneurs" all kinds of expensive training courses that promise to help them overcome the personal defects that stop them from doing as well as all those desperate liars boasting about their incredible MLM sales success:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/05/free-enterprise-system/#amway-or-the-highway

The AI industry has its own version of those sales coaching courses – there's a whole secondary industry of management consultancies and business schools offering high-ticket "continuing education" courses to bosses who think that the only reason the AI they've purchased isn't saving them money is that they're doing AI wrong.

Amazon really needs AI to work. Last week, Ed Zitron published an extensive analysis of leaked documents showing how much Amazon is making from AI companies who are buying cloud services from it. His conclusion? Take away AI and Amazon's cloud division is in steep decline:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/costs/

What's more, those big-money AI customers – like Anthropic – are losing tens of billions of dollars per year, relying on investors to keep handing them money to incinerate. Amazon needs bosses to believe they can fire workers and replace them with AI, because that way, investors will keep giving Anthropic the money it needs to keep Amazon in the black.

Amazon firing 30,000 workers in the run-up to Christmas is a great milestone in enshittification. America's K-shaped recovery means that nearly all of the consumption is coming from the wealthiest American households, and these households overwhelmingly subscribe to Prime. Prime-subscribing households do not comparison shop. After all, they've already prepaid for a year's shipping in advance. These households start and end nearly every shopping trip in the Amazon app.

If Amazon fires 30,000 workers and tanks its logistics network and e-commerce systems, if it allows itself to drown in spam and scam reviews, if it misses its delivery windows and messes up its returns, that will be our problem, not Amazon's. In a world of commerce where Amazon's predatory pricing, lock-in, and serial acquisitions has left us with few alternatives, Amazon can truly be "too big to care":

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/05/way-past-its-prime-how-did-amazon-get-so-rubbish

From that enviable position, Amazon can afford to enshittify its services in order to sell the big AI lie. Killing 30,000 jobs is a small price to pay if it buys them a few months before a reckoning for its wild AI overspending, keeping the AI grift alive for just a little longer.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Eugene Debs and All Of Us https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/eugene-debs-and-all-of-us

• US Business Cycles 1954-2020 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXRC3RrngcI

• Ed Zitron Gets Paid to Love AI. He Also Gets Paid to Hate AI https://web.archive.org/web/20251029140249/https://www.wired.com/story/ai-pr-ed-zitron-profile/

• Worried About AI Monopoly? Embrace Copyright’s Limits https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/worried-about-ai-monopoly–embrace-copyright-s-limits

Object permanence (permalink)

#10yrsago Librarian of Congress puts impossible conditions on your right to jailbreak your 3D printer https://michaelweinberg.org/post/132021560865/unlocking-3d-printers-ruling-is-a-mess

#10yrsago The two brilliant, prescient 20th century science fiction novels you should read this election season https://memex.craphound.com/2015/10/28/the-two-brilliant-prescient-20th-century-science-fiction-novels-you-should-read-this-election-season/

#10yrsago Hundreds of city police license plate cams are insecure and can be watched by anyone https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/license-plate-readers-exposed-how-public-safety-agencies-responded-massive

#10yrsago Appeals court holds the FBI is allowed to kidnap and torture Americans outside US borders https://www.techdirt.com/2015/10/28/court-your-fourth-fifth-amendment-rights-no-longer-exist-if-you-leave-country/

#10yrsago South Carolina sheriff fires the school-cop who beat up a black girl at her desk https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/28/south-carolina-parents-speak-out-school-board

#10yrsago The more unequal your society is, the more your laws will favor the rich https://web.archive.org/web/20151028133814/http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/10/the-more-unequal-the-country-the-more-the-rich-rule.html

#5yrsago Trump abandons supporters to freeze https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/28/trumpcicles/#omaha

#5yrsago RIAA's war on youtube-dl https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/28/trumpcicles/#yt-dl

#1yrago The US Copyright Office frees the McFlurry https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/28/mcbroken/#my-milkshake-brings-all-the-lawyers-to-the-yard

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469

• Miami: Cloudfest, Nov 6
  https://www.cloudfest.com/usa/

• Burbank: Burbank Book Festival, Nov 8
  https://www.burbankbookfestival.com/

• Lisbon: A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet, with Rabble (Web Summit), Nov 12
  https://websummit.com/sessions/lis25/92f47bc9-ca60-4997-bef3-006735b1f9c5/a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet/

• Cardiff: Hay Festival After Hours, Nov 13
  https://www.hayfestival.com/c-203-hay-festival-after-hours.aspx

• Oxford: Enshittification and Extraction: The Internet Sucks Now with Tim Wu (Oxford Internet Institute), Nov 14
  https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/events/enshittification-and-extraction-the-internet-sucks-now/

• London: Enshittification with Sarah Wynn-Williams and Chris Morris, Nov 15
  https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2025/event/cory-doctorow-with-sarah-wynn-williams

• London: Downstream IRL with Aaron Bastani (Novara Media), Nov 17
  https://dice.fm/partner/tickets/event/oen5rr-downstream-irl-aaron-bastani-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-17th-nov-earth-london-tickets

• London: Enshittification with Carole Cadwalladr (Frontline Club), Nov 18
  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/in-conversation-enshittification-tickets-1785553983029

• Virtual: Enshittification with Vass Bednar (Vancouver Public Library), Nov 21
  https://www.crowdcast.io/@bclibraries-present

• Seattle: Neuroscience, AI and Society (University of Washington), Dec 4
  https://compneuro.washington.edu/news-and-events/neuroscience-ai-and-society/

• Madison, CT: Enshittification at RJ Julia, Dec 8
  https://rjjulia.com/event/2025-12-08/cory-doctorow-enshittification

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Enshittification and the Rot Economy with Ed Zitron (Clarion West)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz71pIWbFyc

• Amanpour & Co (New Yorker Radio Hour)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8l1uSb0LZg

• Enshittification is Not Inevitable (Team Human)
  https://www.teamhuman.fm/episodes/339-cory-doctorow-enshittification-is-not-inevitable

• The Great Enshittening (The Gray Area)
  https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophypodcasts/comments/1obghu7/the_gray_area_the_great_enshittening_10202025/

• Enshittification (Smart Cookies)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BoORwEPlQ0

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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