Today's links

• (Digital) Elbows Up: How Canada Can Become a Nation of Jailbreakers, Reclaim Our Digital Sovereignty, Win the Trade-War, and Disenshittify Our Technology.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Workaholic Goethe; Prehistory of the Sony rootkit; Wunderkammer front room; Dolphin teleportation symposium: now with more Eisenhowers
• 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.

(Digital) Elbows Up (permalink)

I'm in Toronto to participate in a three-day "speculative design" workshop at OCAD U, where designers, technologists and art students are thinking up cool things Canadians could do if we reformed our tech law:

https://www.ocadu.ca/events-and-exhibitions/jailbreaking-canada

As part of that workshop, I delivered a keynote speech last night, entitled "(Digital) Elbows Up: How Canada Can Become a Nation of Jailbreakers, Reclaim Our Digital Sovereignty, Win the Trade-War, and Disenshittify Our Technology."

The talk was recorded and I'll add the video to this post when I get it, but in the meantime, here's the transcript of my speech. Thank you to all my collaborators at OCAD U for bringing me in and giving me this wonderful opportunity!

==

My theory of enshittification describes the process by which platforms decay. First, they are good to their end users, while finding a way to lock those users in.

Then, secure in the knowledge that they can make things worse for those users, without risking their departure, the platforms make things worse in order to make things attractive for business customers. Who also get locked in, dependent on those captive users.

And then, in the third stage of enshittification, platforms raid those business customers, harvesting all available surpluses for their shareholders and executives, leaving behind the bare, mingy homeopathic residue of value needed to keep users locked to the platform and businesses locked to the users, such that the final, ideal stage of the enshittified platform is a attained: a giant pile of shit.

This observational piece of the theory is certainly valuable, inasumuch as it lets us scoop up this big, diffuse, enraging phenonmenon, capture in a net and attach a handle to it and call it "enshittification," recognising how we're being screwed.

But much more important is the enshittification hypothesis's theoretical piece, its account of why this is happening now.

Let me start by saying that I do not attribute blame for enshittification to your poor consumer choices. Despite the endless insistences of the right, your consumption choices aren't the arbiters of policy.

The reason billionaires urge you to vote with your wallets is that their wallets are so much thicker than yours. This is the only numeric advantage the wealthy and powerful enjoy. They are in every other regards an irrelevant, infinitesimal minority. In a vote of ballots, rather than wallets, they will lose every time, which is why they are so committed to this wallet-voting nonsense. The wallet-vote is the only vote they can hope to win.

The idea that consumers are the final arbiters of society is a laughable, bitter counsel of despair. You will not shop your way free of a monopoly, any more than you will recycle your way out of wildfires. Shop as hard as you like, you will not – cannot – end enshittification.

Enshittification is not the result of your failure to grasp that "if you're not paying for the product, you're the product." You're the product if you pay. You're the product if you don't pay. The determinant of your demotion to "the product" is whether the company can get away with treating you as the product.

So what about the companies? What about the ketamine-addled zuckermuskian failures who have appointed themselves eternal dictators over the digital lives of billions of people? Can we blame them for enshittifying our world?

Well, yes…and no.

It's obviously true that it takes a certain kind of sociopath to run a company like Facebook or Google or Apple. The suicide nets around Chinese iPhone factories are a choice, not a integral component of the phone manufacturing process.

But these awful men are merely filling the niches that our policy environment have created. If Elon Musk ODs on ket today, there will be an overnight succession battle among ten horrible Big Balls, and the victor who emerges from that war will be indistinguishable from Musk himself.

The problem isn't that the wrong person is running Facebook and thus exercising a total veto over the digital lives of four billion people, the problem is that such a job exists. We don't need to perfect Zuck. We don't need to replace Zuck. We need to abolish Zuck.

So where does the blame lie?

It lies with policy makers. Regulators and politicians who created an enshittogenic environment: a rigged game whose terrible rules guarantee that the worst people doing the worst things will fare best.

These are the true authors of enshittification: the named individuals who, in living memory, undertook specific policy decisions, that had the foreseeable and foreseen outcome of ushering in the enshittocene. Policymakers who were warned at the time that this would happen, who ignored that advice and did it anyway.

It is these people and their terrible, deliberate misconduct that we need to remember. It is their awful policies that we must overthrow, otherwise, all we can hope to do is replace one monster with another.

So, in that spirit, let us turn to the story of one of these enshittogenic policy choices and the men who made it.

This policy is called "anti-circumvention" and it is the epicenter of the enshittogenic policy universe. Under anti-circumvention law, it is a crime to modify a device that you own, if the company that sold it to you would prefer that you didn't.

All a company has to do is demarcate some of its code as off-limits to modification, by adding something called an "access control," and, in so doing, they transform the act changing any of that code into a felony, a jailable offense.

The first anticircumvention law is America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA. Under Section 1201 of the DMCA, helping someone modify code behind an access control is a serious crime, punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine. Crucially, this is true whether or not you break any other law. Under DMCA 1201, simply altering a digital device to do a perfectly legal thing becomes a jailable crime, if the manufacturer wills it so and manifests that will with an "access control."

I recognize that this is all very abstract, so let me make it concrete. When you buy a printer from HP, it becomes your property. What's property? Well, let's use the standard definition that every law student learns in first year property law, from Sir William Blackstone's 1753 treatise:

"Property: that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe."

The printer is yours. It's your property. You have sole and despotic dominion over it in exclusion of any other individual in the universe.

But HP printers ship with a program that checks to see whether you're using HP ink, and if it suspects that you've bought generic ink, the printer refuses to use it. Now, Congress never passed a law saying "If you buy an HP printer, you have to buy HP ink, too." That would be a weird law,given the whole sole-and-despotic dominion thing.

But because HP puts an "access control" in the ink-checking code, they can conjure up a brand new law: a law that effectively requires you to use HP ink.

Anticircumvention is a way for legislatures to outsource law-making to corporations. Once a corporation adds an access control to its product, they can create a new felony for using it in ways that benefit you at the expense of the company's shareholders.

So another way of saying "anticircumvention law" is "felony contempt of business model." It's a way for a corporation to threaten you with prison if you don't use your property in the way they want you to.

That's anti-circumvention law.

The DMCA was a enshittifier's charter, an invitation for corporations to use tactical "access controls" to write invisible, private laws that would let them threaten their customers – and competitors who might help those customers – with criminal prosecution.

Now, the DMCA has a known, living author, Bruce Lehman, a corporate IP lawyer who did a turn in government service as Bill Clinton's IP Czar.

Lehman tried several ways to get American policymakers to adopt this stupid idea, only to be rebuffed. So, undaunted, he traveled to Geneva, home of the World Intellectual Property Organization or WIPO, aa UN "specialized agency" that makes the world's IP treaties. At Lehman's insistence, WIPO passed a pair of treaties in 1996, collectively known as the "Internet Treaties," and in 1998, he got Congress to pass the DMCA, in order to comply with the terms of these treaties, a move he has since repeatedly described as "doing an end-run around Congress."

This guy, Bruce Lehman, he is still with us, breathing the same air as you and me. We are sharing a planet with the Louis Pasteur of making everything as shitty as possible.

But Bruce Lehman only enshittified America, turning our southern cousins into fodder for the immortal colony organisms we call limited liability corporations. To understand how Canada enshittified, we have to introduce some Canadian enshittifiers.

Specifically, two of Stephen Harper's ministers: James Moore, Harper's Heritage minister, and the disgraced sex-pest Tony Clement, who was then Industry minister. Stephen Harper really wanted a Canadian anti-circumvention law, and he put Clement and Moore in charge of the effort.

Everyone knew that it was going to be a hard slog. After all, Canadians had already rejected anti-circumvention law three times. Back in 2006, Sam Bulte – a Liberal MP in Paul Martin's government – tried to get this law through, but it was so unpopular that she lost her seat in Parkdale, which flipped to the NDP for a generation.

Moore and Clement hatched a plan to sell anti-circumvention to the Canadian people. They decided to do a consultation on the law. The thinking was that if we all "felt heard" then we wouldn't be so angry when they rammed it through.

Boy, did that backfire. 6,138 of us filed consultation responses categorically rejecting this terrible law, and only 53 responses offered support for the idea.

How were Moore and Clement going to spin this? Simple. Moore went to a meeting of the International Chamber of Commerce in Toronto, and gave a speech where he denounced all 6,132 of us as "babyish" and "radical extremists." Then Harper whipped his caucus and in 2012, Bill C-11, the Copyright Modernisation Act passed, and we got a Made-in-Canada all-purpose, omnienshittificatory anti-circumvention law.

Let's be clear about what this law does: because it makes no exemptions for circumvention for lawful purposes, Canada's anti-circumvention law criminalizes anything you do with your computer, phone or device, if it runs counter to the manufacturer's wishes.

It's an invitation for foreign manufacturers to use Canada's courts to punish Canadian customers and Canadian companies for finding ways to make the products we buy and use less shitty.

Anti-circumvention is at the root of the repair emergency. All companies have to do is add an "initialization" routine to their devices, so that any new parts installed in a car, or a tractor, or a phone, or a ventilator has to be unlocked by the manufacturer's representative before the device will recognize the new part, and it becomes a crime for an independent mechanic, or a farmer, or an independent repair shop, or a hospital technician to fix a car, or a tractor, or a phone, or a ventilator.

This is called "parts pairing" or "VIN locking. "Now, we did pass C-244, a national Right to Repair law, last year, but it's just a useless ornament, because it doesn't override anti-circumvention. So Canadians can't fix their own technology if the manufacturers uses an access control to block the repair.

Anti-circumvention means we can't fix things when they break, and it also means that we can't fix them when they arrive pre-broken by their enshittifying manufacturers.

Take the iPhone: it can only use one app store, Apple's official one, and everyone who puts an app in the app store has to sign up to use Apple's payment processor, which takes 30 cents out of every dollar you spend inside an app.

That means that when a Canadian user sends $10 to a month to a Canadian independent news outlet or podcast, $3 out of that $10 gets sucked out of the transaction and lands in Cupertino, California, where it is divvied by Apple's shareholders and executives.

It's not just news sites. Every dollar you send through an app to a performer on Patreon, a crafter on Etsy, a games company, or a software company takes a roundtrip through Silicon Valley and comes back 30 cents lighter.

A Canadian company could bypass the iPhone's "access controls" and give you a download or a little hardware dongle that installed a Canadian app store, one that used the Interac network to process payments for free, eliminating Apple and Google's 30% tax on Canada's entire mobile digital economy.

And indeed, we have 2024's Bill C-294, an interoperability law, that lets Canadians do this. But just as with the repair law, our interoperability law is also useless, because it doesn't repeal the anti-circumvention law, meaning you are only allowed to reverse engineer products to make interoperable alternatives if there is no access control in the way. Of course, every company that's in a position to rip you off just adds an access control.

The fact that foreign corporations have the final say over how Canadians use their own property is a font of endless enshittification. Remember when we told Facebook to pay news outlets for links and Facebook just removed all links to the news? Our anti-circumvention law is the only reason that a Canadian company couldn't jailbreak the Facebook app and give you an alternative app, one that slurped up everything Facebook was waiting to show you in your feed, all the updates from your friend and your groups while blocking all the surveillance, the ads and the slop and the recommendations, and then mixing in the news that you wanted to see.

Remember when we tried to get Netflix to show Canadian content in your recommendations and search results? Anti-circumvention is the only reason some Canadian company can't jailbreak the Netflix app and give you an alternative client that lets you stream all your Netflix shows but also shows you search results from the NFB and any other library of Canadian media, while blocking Netflix's surveillance.

Anticircumvention means that Canadian technologists can't seize the means of computation, which means that we're at the mercy of American companies and we only get the rights that they decide to give us.

Apple will block Facebook's apps from spying on you while you use your iPhone, but they won't let you block Apple from spying on you while you use your iPhone, to gather exactly the same data Facebook steals from you, for exactly the same purpose: to target ads to you.

Apple will screen the apps in its app store to prevent malicious code from running on your iPhone, but if you want to run a legitimate app and Apple doesn't want you to, they will block it from the app store and you will just have to die mad.

That's what's happened in October, when Apple kicked an app called ICE Block out of the App Store. ICE Block is an app that warns you if masked thugs are at large in your neighborhood waiting to kidnap you and send you to a camp. Apple decided that ICE thugs were a "protected class" that ICE Block discriminated against, hey decided that you don't deserve to be safe from ICE kidnappings, and what they say goes.

The road to enshittification hell is paved with anticircumvention. We told our politicians this, a decade and a half ago, and they called us "babyish radical extremists" and did it anyway.

Now, I've been shouting about this for decades. I was one of those activists who helped get Sam Bulte unelected and flipped her seat for 20 years. But I will be the first person to tell you that I have mostly failed at preventing enshittification.

Bruce Lehman, James Moore and even Tony "dick pic" Clement are way better at enshittifying the world than I am at disenshittifying it. Of course, they have an advantage over me: they are in a coalition with the world's most powerful corporations and their wealthy investors.

Whereas my coalition is basically, you know, you folks. People who care about human rights, workers' rights, consumer rights, privacy rights. And guys, I hate to tell you, but we're losing.

Let's talk about how we start winning.

Any time you see a group of people successfully push for a change that they've been trying to make unsuccessfully for a long-ass time it's a sure bet that they've found some coalition partners. People who want some of the same things, who've set aside their differences and joined the fight.

That's the Trump story, all over. The Trump coalition is basically, all the billionaires, plus the racists, plus the dopes who'd vote for a slime mold if it promised to lower their taxes by a nickle, even though they somehow expect to have roads and schools. Well, maybe not schools. You know, Ford Nation.

Plus everyone who correctly thinks the Democratic Party are a bunch of do-nothing sellouts, who think they can bully you into voting for genocide because the other guy is an out-and-out fascist.

Billionaires, racists, freaks with low-tax brain-worms and people who hate the sellout Dems: Trump's built a coalition that gets stuff done. Sure, it's terrible stuff, but you can't deny that they're getting it done.

To escape from the enshittificatory black hole that Clement and Moore blew in Canadian policy, we need a coalition, too. And thanks to Trump and his incontinent belligerence, we're getting one.

Let's start with the Trump tariffs. When I was telling you about how anticircumvention law took four tries under two different Prime Ministers, perhaps you wondered "Why did all these Canadian politicians want this stupid law in the first place?"

After all, it's not like Canadian companies are particularly enriched by this law. Sure, it lets Ted Rogers rent you a cable box that won't let you attach a video recorder, so you have to pay for Rogers' PVR, which only lets you record some shows, and deletes them after a set time, and won't let you skip the ads.

But the amount of extra money Rogers makes off this disgusting little racket is dwarfed by the billions that Canadian business leave on the table every year, by not going into business disenshittifying America's shitty tech exports. To say nothing of the junk fees and app taxes and data that those American companies rip off every Canadian for.

So why were these Canadian MPs and prime ministers from both the Liberals and the Tories so invested in getting anticircumvention onto our law-books?

Simple: the US Trade Rep threatened us with tariffs if we didn't pass an anti-circuvmention law.

Remember, digital products are slippery. If America bans circumvention, and American companies starts screwing the American public, that just opens an opportunity for companies elsewhere in the world to make disenshittifying products, which any American with an internet connection and a payment method can buy. Downloading jailbreaking code is much easier than getting insulin shipped from a Canadian pharmacy!

So the US Trade Rep's top priority for the past quarter-century has been bullying America's trading partners into passing anti-circumvention laws to render their own people defenseless against American tech companies' predation and to prevent non-American tech companies from going into business disenshittifying America's defective goods.

The threat of tariffs was so serious that multiple Canadian PMs from multiple parties tried multiple times to get a law on the books that would protect us from tariffs.

And then in comes Trump, and now we have tariffs anyway.

And let me tell you: when someone threatens to burn your house down if you don't follow their orders, and you follow their orders, and they burn your house down anyway, you are an absolute sucker if you keep following their orders.

We could respond to the tariffs by legalizing circumvention, and unleashing Canadian companies to go into business raiding the margins of the most profitable lines of business of the most profitable corporations the world has ever seen.

Sure, Canada might not ever have a company like Research In Motion again, but what we could have is a company that sells the tools to jailbreak iPhones to anyone who wants to set up an independent iPhone store, bypassing Apple's 30% app tax and its high-handed judgments about what apps we can and can't have.

Apple's payment processing business is worth $100b/year. We could offer people a 90% discount and still make $10b/year. And unlike Apple, we wouldn't have to assume the risk and capital expenditure of making phones. We could stick Apple with all of the risk and expense, and cream off the profits.

That's fair, isn't it? It's certainly how Big Tech operates. When Amazon started, Jeff Bezos said to the publishers, "Your margin is my opportunity." $100b/year off a 30% payment processing fee is a hell of a margin, and a hell of an opportunity.

With Silicon Valley, it's always "disruption for thee, not for me. When they do it to us, that's progress, when we do it to them, it's piracy (and every pirate wants to be an admiral).

Now, of course, Canada hasn't responded to the Trump tariffs with jailbreaking. Our version of "elbows up" turns out to mean retaliatory tariffs. Which is to say, we're making everything we buy from America more expensive for us, which is a pretty weird way of punishing America, eh?

It's like punching yourself in the face really hard and hoping the downstairs neighbour says "Ouch."

Plus, it's pretty indiscriminate. We're not angry at Americans. We're angry at Trump and his financial backers. Tariffing soybeans just whacks some poor farmer in a state that begins and ends with a vowel who's never done anything bad to Canada.

I guarantee you that poor bastard is making payments on a John Deere tractor, which costs him an extra $200 every time it breaks down, because after he fixes it himself, he has to pay two hundred bucks to John Deere and wait two days for them to send out a technician who types an unlock code into the tractor's console that unlocks the "parts pairing," so the tractor recognises the new part.

Instead of tariffing that farmer's soybeans, we could sell him the jailbreaking tool that lets him fix his tractor without paying an extra $200 to John Deere.

Instead of tsking at Elon Musk over his Nazi salute, we could sell every mechanic in the world a Tesla jailbreaking kit that unlocks all the subscription features and software upgrades, without sending a dime to Tesla, kicking Elon Musk square in the dongle.

This is all stuff we could be doing. We could be building gigantic Canadian tech businesses, exporting to a global market, whose products make everything cheaper for every Canadian, and everyone else in the world, including every American.

Because the American public is also getting screwed by these companies, and we could stand on guard for them, too. We could be the Disenshittification Nation.

But that's not what we've done. Instead, we've decided to make everything in Canada more expensive, which is just about the stupidest political strategy I've ever heard of.

This might be the only thing Carney could do that's less popular than firing 10,000 civil servants and replacing them with chatbots on the advice of the world's shadiest art dealer, who is pretty sure that if we keep shoveling words into the word-guessing program it will wake up and become intelligent.

Which is just, you know, stupid. It's like thinking that if we just keep breeding our horses to run faster, one of our mares will eventually give birth to a locomotive. Human beings are not word-guessing programs who know more words that ChatGPT.

So it's clear that the coalition of "people who care about digital rights" and "people who want to make billions of dollars off jailbreaking tech" isn't powerful enough to break the coalition that makes hundreds of billions of dollars from enshittification.

But Trump – yes, Trump! – keeps recruiting people to our cause.

Trump has made it clear that America no longer has allies, nor does it have trading partners. It has adversaries and rivals. And Trump's favorite weapon for attacking his foreign adversaries are America's tech giants.

When the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against Bejamin Netanyahu for ordering a genocide, Trump denounced them, and Microsoft shut down their Outlook accounts.

The chief prosecutor and other justices immediately lost access to all the working files of the court, to their email archives, to their diaries and address books.

This was a giant, blinking sign, visible from space, reading AMERICAN TECHNOLOGY CANNOT BE TRUSTED.

Trump's America only has adversaries and rivals, and Trump will pursue dominance by bricking your government, your businesses, your whole country.

It's not just administrative software that Trump can send kill signals to. Remember when those Russian looters stole Ukrainian tractors and they turned up in Crimea? John Deere sent a kill-signal to the tractors and permanently immobilized them.

This was quite a cool little comeuppance, the kind of thing a cyberpunk writer like me can certainly relish. But anyone who thinks about this for, oh, ten seconds will immediately realise that anyone who can push around the John Deere company can order the permanent immobilization of any tractor in the world, or all the tractors in your country.

Because John Deere is a monopolist, and whatever part of the market Deere doesn't control is controlled by Massey Ferguson, and Trump can order the bricking of those tractors, too.

This is the thing we were warned we'd face if we let Huawei provide our telecoms infrastructure, and those warnings weren't wrong. We should be worried about any gadget that we rely on that can be bricked by its manufacturer.

Because that means we are at risk from the manufacturer, from governments who can suborn the manufacturer, from corporate insiders who can hijack the manufacturer's control systems, and from criminals who can impersonate the manufacturer to our devices.

This is the third part of our coalition: not just digital rights weirdos like me; not just investors and technologists looking to make billions; but also national security hawks who are justifiably freaking out about America, China, or someone else shutting down key pieces of their country, from its food supply to its administrative capacity.

Trump is a crisis, and crises precipitate change.

Just look at Europe. Before Putin invaded Ukraine, the EU was a decade behind on its energy transition goals. Now, just a few years later, they're 15 years ahead of schedule.

It turns out that a lot of "impossible" things are really just fights you'd rather not have. No one wants to argue with some tedious German who hates the idea of looking at "ugly solar panels" on their neighbour's balcony. But once you're all shivering in the dark, that's an argument you will have and you will win.

Today, another mad emperor is threatening Europe – and the world. Trump's wanton aggression has given rise to a new anti-enshittification coalition: digital rights advocates, investors and technologists, and national security hawks; both the ones who worry about America, and the ones who worry about China.

That's a hell of a coalition!

The time is right to become a disenshittification nation, to harness our own tech talent, and the technologists who are fleeing Trump's America in droves, along with capital from investors who'd like to back a business whose success isn't determined by how many $TRUMP Coins they buy.

Jailbreaking is how Canada cuts American Big Tech down to size.

It's unlike everything else we've tried, like the Digital Services Tax, or forcing Netflix to support cancon, or making Facebook and Google pay to link to the news.

All of those tactics involve making these companies that are orders of magnitude richer than Canada do something they absolutely do not want to do.

Time and again, they've shown that we don't have the power to make them do things. But you know what Canada has total power over? What Canada does.

We are under no obligation to continue to let these companies use our courts to attack our technologists, our businesses, our security researchers, our tech co-ops, our nonprofits, who want to jailbreak America's shitty tech, to seize the means of computation, to end the era in which American tech companies can raid our wallets and our data with impunity.

In a jailbroken Canada, we don't have to limit ourselves to redistribution, to taxing away some of the money that the tech giants steal from us. In a jailbroken Canada, we can do predistribution. We can stop them from stealing our money in the first place.

And if we don't do it, someone else will. Because every country was arm-twisted into passing an anti-circumvention law like ours. Every country had a supine and cowardly lickspittle like James Moore or Tony Clement who'd do America's bidding, a quisling who'd put their nation's people and businesses in chains, rather than upset the US Trade Rep.

And all of those countries are right where we are: hit with tariffs, threatened by Trump, waiting for the day that Microsoft or Oracle or Google or John Deere bricks their businesses, their government, their farms.

One of those countries is going to jump at this opportunity, the opportunity to consume the billions in rents stolen by US Tech giants, and use them as fuel for a single-use rocket booster that launches their tech sector into a stable orbit for decades to come.

That gives them the hottest export business in living memory: a capital-light, unstoppable suite of products that save businesses and consumers money, while protecting their privacy.

If we sleep on this, we'll still benefit. We'll get the consumer surplus that comes from buying those jailbreaking tools online and using them to disenshittify our social media, our operating systems, our vehicles, our industrial and farm equipment.

But we won't get the industrial policy, the chance to launch a whole sector of businesses, each with the global reach and influence of RIM or Nortel.

That'll go to someone else. The Europeans are already on it. They're funding and building the "Eurostack": free, open source, auditable and trustworthy versions of the US tech silos. We're going to be able to use that here.

I mean, why not? We'll just install that code on metal running in Canadian data-centres, and we'll debug it and add features to it, and so will everyone else.

Because that's how IT should work, and it should go beyond just the admin and database software that businesses and governments rely on. We should be building drop-in, free, open software for everything: smart speakers, smart TVs, smart watches, phones, cars, tractors, powered wheelchairs, ventilators.

That's how it should already be: that the software that powers these devices that we entrust with our data, our integrity, our lives should be running code that anyone can see, test, and improve.

That's how science works, after all. Before we had science, we had something kind of like science. We had alchemy. Alchemy was very similar to science, in that an alchemist would observe some natural phenomena in the world, hypothesise a causal relationship between them, and design an experiment to validate that hypothesis.

But here's where alchemy and science diverge: unlike a scientist, an alchemist wouldn't publish their results. They'd keep them secret, rather than exposing them to the agony of adversarial peer review, where your enemies seek out every possible reason to discredit your work. This let the alchemists kid themselves about the stuff they thought they'd discovered, and that's why every alchemist discovered for themself, in the hardest way possible, that you shouldn't drink mercury.

But after 500 years of this, alchemy finally achieved its long sought-after goal of converting something common to something of immeasurable value. Alchemy discovered how to transform the base metal of superstition into the precious metal of knowledge, through the crucible of publishing.

Disclosure is the difference between knowledge and ignorance. Openness is the difference between dying of mercury poisoning and discovering medicine.

The fact that we have a law on our statute books, in the year of two thousand and twenty-five, that criminalises discovering how the software we rely on works, and telling other people about it and improving it – well, it's pretty fucking pathetic, isn't it?

We don't have to keep on drinking the alchemists' mercury. We don't have to remain prisoners of the preposterous policy blunders of Tony Clement and James Moore. We don't have to tolerate the endless extraction of Big Tech. We don't have to leave billions on the table. We need not abide the presence of lurking danger in all our cloud-connected devices.

We can be the vanguard of a global movement of international nationalism, of digital sovereignty grounded in universal, open, transparent software, a commons that everyone contributes to and relies upon. Something more like science than technology.

Like the EU's energy transition, this is a move that's long overdue. Like the EU's energy transition, amad emperor has created the conditions for us to get off of our asses, to build a better world.

We could be a disenshittification nation. We could seize the means of computation. We could have a new, good internet that respects our privacy and our wallets. We could make a goddamned fortune doing it.

And once we do it, we could protect ourselves from spineless digital vassals of the mad king on our southern border, and rescue our American cousins to boot.

What's not to like?

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• The UK Has It Wrong on Digital ID. Here’s Why https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/uk-has-it-wrong-digital-id-heres-why

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Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrago Ten (sensible) startup rules https://web.archive.org/web/20060324072607/https://evhead.com/2005/11/ten-rules-for-web-startups.asp

#20yrsago Bosnian town unveils Bruce Lee statue of peace http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4474316.stm

#20yrsago Sony rootkit author asked for free code to lock up music https://web.archive.org/web/20051130023447/https://groups.google.de/group/microsoft.public.windowsmedia.drm/msg/7cb5c4ad49fa206e

#20yrsago Singapore’s executioner gets fired http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4477012.stm

#20yrsago Pre-history of the Sony rootkit https://web.archive.org/web/20181126020952/https://community.osr.com/discussion/42117#T3

#15yrsago Support the magnetic ribbon industry ribbon! https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/ecr1t/ill_see_your_empty_gesture_and_raise_you/

#15yrsago Molecular biologist on the dangers of pornoscanners https://web.archive.org/web/20101125192455/https://myhelicaltryst.blogspot.com/2010/11/tsa-x-ray-backscatter-body-scanner.html

#15yrsago Wunderkammerer front room crammed with nooks https://web.archive.org/web/20101125184317/http://mocoloco.com/fresh2/2010/11/23/villa-j-by-marge-arkitekter.php

#15yrsago Delightful science fiction story in review of $6800 speaker cable https://www.amazon.com/review/R3I8VKTCITJCX6/ref=cm_cr_dp_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B000J36XR2&nodeID=172282&tag=&linkCode=

#15yrsago German Pirate Party members strip off for Berlin airport scanner protest https://web.archive.org/web/20101129043459/https://permaculture.org.au/2010/11/26/full-monty-scanner-or-enhanced-pat-down-the-only-options/

#10yrsago Dolphin teleportation symposium: now with more Eisenhowers! https://twitpic.com/3aqqa0

#10yrsago Vtech breach dumps 4.8m families’ information, toy security is to blame https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/11/when-children-are-breached-inside-the-massive-vtech-hack/

#10yrsago A Canadian teenager used America’s militarized cops to terrorize women gamers for years https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/magazine/the-serial-swatter.html?_r=0

#10yrsago What the 1980s would have made of the $5 Raspberry Pi https://www.wired.com/beyond-the-beyond/2015/11/raspberry-pi-five-bucks-us/

#10yrsago Workaholic Goethe wished he’d been better at carving out time for quiet reflection https://www.wired.com/beyond-the-beyond/2015/11/the-aged-herr-goethe-never-had-enough-time-for-himself/

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• 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

• Virtual: Poetic Technologies with Brian Eno (David Graeber Institute), Dec 8
  https://davidgraeber.institute/poetic-technologies-with-cory-doctorow-and-brian-eno/

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

• Hamburg: Chaos Communications Congress, Dec 27-30
  https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/infos/index.html

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Escape Forward with Cristina Caffarra
  https://escape-forward.com/2025/11/27/enshittification-of-our-digital-experience/

• Why Every Platform Betrays You (Trust Revolution)
  https://fountain.fm/episode/bJgdt0hJAnppEve6Qmt8

• How the internet went to sh*t (Prospect Magazine)
  https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/podcasts/prospect-podcast/71663/cory-doctorow-how-the-internet-went-to-sht

• Enshittification and “Breaking Kings” (Web Summit)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpLudlrwS_g

• Enshittification Nation (The Lever)
  https://www.levernews.com/enshittification-nation/

• Enshittification with Oh God What Now
  https://castbox.fm/episode/Why-Tech-Sucks-%E2%80%93%C2%A0Cory-Doctorow-on-Enshittification-and-how-to-fix-it-id4634015-id876127534

• Enshittification with The Lede (New Lines Magazine)
  https://newlinesmag.com/podcast/why-the-internet-got-bad-and-how-to-fix-it/

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, June 2026

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links

• Normie diffusion and technophilia: Who will seize the means of computation?
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Centaur teddybears; Vaginal yeast sourdough; Snoopers Charter rebuttal; "The Paradox"; Bossware is unfair.
• 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.

Normie diffusion and technophilia (permalink)

It's an accepted (but wrong) fact that some groups of people are just more technologically adventurous by temperament, and that's why they adopt technologies before the rest of society (think here of pornographers, kids, and terrorists).

As I've written before, these groups aren't more (or less) temperamentally inclined to throw themselves into mastering new technologies. Rather, they have more reason to do so:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/21/early-adopters/#sex-tech

Whenever a new communications technology arrives, it is arriving into a world of existing communications technologies, which are, by definition, easier to use. They're easier to use for two reasons: the obvious reason is that you're more likely to be familiar with an existing technology than you are with a new technology. After all, it's literally impossible to be familiar with a technology that has just been invented!

But the other reason that existing communications technologies are easier to use is that communication is – again, by definition – something you do with other people. That means that if you want to use a new communications tool to talk with someone else, it is not sufficient for you to master that technology's use – you must also convince the other person you're hoping to reach to master that technology, too.

In economic terms, the "opportunity cost" (the amount of time you lose for doing other things) of mastering a new communications tool isn't limited to your own education, but also to the project of convincing someone else to master that tool, and then showing them how to use it.

If the existing communications technology is working for you, mastering the new tool is mostly cost, with very little upside. Perhaps you are a technophile by temperament and derive intrinsic satisfaction from exploring a new tool, and that's why you do it, but even so, you're going to find yourself in the bind of trying to convince the people you'd like to communicate with to follow your lead. And if they're all being well-served by the existing communications tools, and if they're not technophiles, you're asking them to engage in a lot of labor and endure a high opportunity cost for no obvious benefit. It's a hard slog.

But there are many groups of people for whom the existing technology does not work, and one of the biggest ways an existing technology can fail is if the authorities are using it to suppress your communications and/or spy on your usage in order to frustrate your goals.

This brings us back to sex workers, kids and terrorists. All three groups are typically poorly served by the existing communications technology. If you're a pornographer in the age of celluloid film, you either have to convince your customers to visit (and risk being seen entering) an adult movie theater, or you have to convince them to buy an 8mm projector and mail order your reels (and risk being caught having them delivered).

No wonder pornographers and sex workers embraced the VCR! No wonder they embraced the internet! No wonder they embraced cryptocurrency (if your bank accounts are liable to being frozen and/or seized, it's worth figuring out how to use an esoteric payment method and endure the risk of its volatility and technological uncertainty). Today, sex workers and their customers are doubtless mastering VPNs (to evade anonymity-stripping "age verification" systems) and Tor hidden services (to evade "online safety" laws).

The alternative to using these systems isn't the status quo – making use of existing websites, existing payment methods, existing connection tools. The alternative is nothing. So it's worth learning to use these new tools, and to engage in the social labor of convincing others to join you in using them.

Then there's kids. Unlike sex workers, kids' communications aren't broadly at risk of being suppressed so much as they are at risk of being observed by authority figures with whom they have an adversarial relationship.

When you're a kid, you want to talk about things without your parents, teachers, principals, or (some of) your peers or siblings listening in. You want to plan things without these people listening in, because they might try and stop you from doing them, or punish you if you succeed.

So again, it's worth figuring out how to use new technologies, because the existing ones are riddled with censorship and surveillance back-doors ("parental controls") that can be deployed to observe your communications, interdict your actions, and punish you for the things that you manage to pull off.

So of course kids are also "early adopters" – but not because being a kid makes you a technophile. Many kids are technophiles and many are not, but whether or not a kid finds mastering a new technology intrinsically satisfying, they will likely have to do so, if they want to communicate with their peers.

For terrorists, the case for mastering new technologies combines the sex-workers' cases and kids' cases: terrorists' communications are both illegal and societally unacceptable (like sexual content) and terrorists operate in an environment in which entities far more powerful than them seek to observe and interdict their plans, and punish them after the fact for their actions (like kids).

So once again, terrorists are apt to master new communications technologies, but not because seeking to influence political outcomes by acts of violence against civilian populations is somehow tied to deriving intrinsic satisfaction from mastering new technologies, but rather because the existing technologies are dangerously unsuitable for your needs.

Note that just because being in one of these groups doesn't automatically make you a technophile, it doesn't mean that there are no technophiles among these groups. Some people are into tech and the sex industry. Some kids love mastering new technologies. Doubtless this is true of some terrorists, too.

I haven't seen any evidence that being a kid, or a terrorist, or a sex-worker, makes you any less (or any more) interested in technology than anyone else. Some of us just love this stuff for its own sake. Other people just want a tool that works so they can get on with their lives. That's true of every group of people.

The difference is that if you're a technophile in a group of people who have a damned good reason to endure the opportunity cost of mastering a new technology, you have a much more receptive audience for your overheated exhortations to try this amazing new cool thing you've discovered.

What's more, there are some situational and second-order effects that come into play as a result of these dynamics. For example, kids are famously "cash-poor and time-rich" which means that spending the time to figure out new technologies when they're still in stage one of enshittification (when they deliver a lot of value at their lowest cost, often free) is absolutely worth it.

Likewise, the fact that sex-workers are often the first commercial users of a new communications technology means that there's something especially ugly about the fact that these services jettison sex workers the instant they get leaned on by official prudes. The story of the internet is the story of businesses who owe their commercial existence to sex workers, who have since rejected them and written them out of their official history.

It also means that technophiles who aren't kids, pornographers or terrorists are more likely to find themselves in techno-social spaces that have higher-than-average cohorts of all three groups. This means that bright young technologists can find themselves being treated as peers by accomplished adults (think of Aaron Swartz attending W3C meetings as a pre-teen after being welcomed as a peer in web standardization online forums).

It also means that technophiles are more likely than the average person to have accidentally clicked on a terrorist atrocity video. And it means that pornographers and sex-workers are more likely to be exposed to technologically adventurous people in purely social, non-sexual online interactions, because they're among the first arrivals in new technological spaces, when they are still mostly esoteric, high-tech realms, which means that even among the less technophilic members of that group, there's probably an above-average degree of familiarity with things that are still way ahead of the tech mainstream.

My point is that we should understand that the adoption of technology by disfavored, at risk, or prohibited groups is driven by material factors, not by some hidden ideological link between sex and tech, or youth and tech, or terrorism and tech.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Chasing Oligarchs Across Borders https://gijn.org/stories/gijc25-cross-border-investigations-tips-oligarchs/

• Canada Needs a Commissioner Who Fights Monopolies https://action.openmedia.org/page/182266/petition/1

• Fifteen Years https://xkcd.com/3172/

• The Rent Is Too Damn High: Did Trump Just 'Bless' Using AI to Jack Up Rents? https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/an-odd-settlement-on-rent-fixing

• Biretrograde Clock – Lasercut https://www.instructables.com/Biretrograde-Clock-Lasercut/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago TSA makes flier remove body jewelry https://web.archive.org/web/20051129025951/https://pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/s_397618.html

#20yrsago Microsoft caught subverting UN process, censoring FOSS references https://web.archive.org/web/20051128030303/https://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/linuxunix/0,39020390,39238443,00.htm

#15yrsago Zimbabwean law will put legislation, parliamentary gazette, etc, under state copyright https://web.archive.org/web/20101129133649/https://www.theindependent.co.zw/local/28907-general-laws-bill-inimical-to-democracy.html

#10yrsago Steiff Japan’s centaur teddybears http://www.steiff-shop.jp/2007w_ltd/037351_seet.html

#10yrsago Woman adds vaginal yeast to sourdough starter, Internet flips out https://web.archive.org/web/20180808194241/https://anotherangrywoman.com/2015/11/25/baking-and-eating-cuntsourdough/

#10yrsago Party like it’s 1998: UK government bans ripping CDs — again https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/11/thanks-to-the-music-industry-it-is-illegal-to-make-private-copies-of-music-again/

#10yrsago Devastating technical rebuttal to the Snoopers Charter https://www.me.uk/IPBill-evidence1.pdf

#10yrsago AIDS-drug-gouging hedge-douche reneges on promise to cut prices for Daraprim https://www.techdirt.com/2015/11/25/turing-refuses-to-lower-cost-daraprim-hides-news-ahead-thanksgiving-holiday/

#10yrsago US credit union regulator crushed Internet Archive’s non-predatory, game-changing bank https://blog.archive.org/2015/11/24/difficult-times-at-our-credit-union/

#10yrsago The last quarter-century of climate talks explained, in comics form https://web.archive.org/web/20151126142914/http://www.nature.com/news/the-fragile-framework-1.18861

#10yrsago The Paradox: a secret history of magical London worthy of Tim Powers https://memex.craphound.com/2015/11/26/the-paradox-a-secret-history-of-magical-london-worthy-of-tim-powers/

#1yrago Bossware is unfair (in the legal sense, too) https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/26/hawtch-hawtch/#you-treasure-what-you-measure

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• 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

• Virtual: Poetic Technologies with Brian Eno (David Graeber Institute), Dec 8
  https://davidgraeber.institute/poetic-technologies-with-cory-doctorow-and-brian-eno/

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

• Hamburg: Chaos Communications Congress, Dec 27-30
  https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/infos/index.html

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Why Every Platform Betrays You (Trust Revolution)
  https://fountain.fm/episode/bJgdt0hJAnppEve6Qmt8

• How the internet went to sh*t (Prospect Magazine)
  https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/podcasts/prospect-podcast/71663/cory-doctorow-how-the-internet-went-to-sht

• Enshittification and “Breaking Kings” (Web Summit)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpLudlrwS_g

• Enshittification Nation (The Lever)
  https://www.levernews.com/enshittification-nation/

• Enshittification with Oh God What Now
  https://castbox.fm/episode/Why-Tech-Sucks-%E2%80%93%C2%A0Cory-Doctorow-on-Enshittification-and-how-to-fix-it-id4634015-id876127534

• Enshittification with The Lede (New Lines Magazine)
  https://newlinesmag.com/podcast/why-the-internet-got-bad-and-how-to-fix-it/

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, June 2026

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links

• O(N^2) nationalism: Trumpism can only be defeated through international nationalism.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Paywall kremlinology; How to fix everything; Office365 is spyware; State-owned Amazon.
• 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.

O(N^2) nationalism (permalink)

In their 2023 book Underground Empire, political scientists Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman describe how the modern world runs on US-based systems that other nations treat(ed) as neutral platforms, and how that is collapsing:

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

Think of the world's fiber optic cables: for most of the internet's history, it was a given that one end of the majority of the world's transoceanic fiber would make landfall on one of the coasts of the USA. US telcos paid to interconnect these fiber head-ends – even ones on opposite coasts – with extremely reliable, high-speed links.

This made a certain kind of sense. Pulling fiber across an ocean is incredibly expensive and difficult. Rather than run cables between each nation in the world, countries could connect to the US, and, in a single hop, connect to anywhere else.

This is a great deal, provided that you trust the USA to serve as an honest broker for the world's internet traffic. Then, in 2013, the Snowden leaks revealed that America's National Security Agency was spying on pretty much everyone in the world.

Since then, the world has undergone a boom in new transoceanic fiber, most of it point-to-point links between two countries. Despite the prodigious logistical advantages of a hub-and-spoke model for ocean-spanning fiber networks, there just isn't any nation on Earth that can be entrusted with the world's information chokepoint, lest they yield to temptation to become the world's gatekeeper.

Don't get me wrong: there are also advantages to decentralized (or even better, distributed) interconnections in the world's data infrastructure. A more dispersed network topology is more resilient against a variety of risks, from political interference to war to meteor strikes.

But connecting every country to every other country is a very expensive proposition. Our planet has 205 sovereign nations, and separately connecting each of them to the rest will require 20,910 links.

In complexity theory, this is an "Order N-squared" ("O(n^2)") problem – every additional item in the problem set squares the number of operations needed to solve it. We aren't anywhere near a world where every country has a link to every other country on Earth. Instead, we're in an unsettled period, where warring theories about how to decentralize, and by how much, have created a weird, lopsided network topology.

Obviously, fiber interconnection isn't the most important "neutral platform" that the US (formerly) provided to the rest of the world. The most important American platform is the US dollar, which most countries in the world use as a reserve currency, and also as a standard for clearing international transactions. If someone in Thailand wants to buy oil from someone in Saudi Arabia, they do so in dollars. This is called "dollar clearing."

The case for dollar clearing is similar to the case for linking all the world's fiber through US data-centers. It's a big lift to ask every seller to price their goods in every potential buyer's currency, and it's a lot to ask every Thai baht holder to race around the world seeking someone who'll sell them Saudi riyals – and then there's the problem of what they do with the change left over from the transaction.

Establishing liquid markets for every pair of every currency has the same kind of complexity as the problem of establishing fiber links between every country.

Since the mid-20th century, we've solved this problem by treating the US dollar as a neutral platform. Countries opened savings accounts at the US Federal Reserve and stashed large numbers of US dollars there (when someone says, "China owns umpty-billion in US debt," they just mean, "There's a bank account in New York at the Fed with China's name on it that has been marked up with lots of US dollars").

Merchants, institutions and individuals that wanted to transact across borders used the SWIFT system, which is nominally international, but which, practically speaking, is extremely deferential to the US government.

Issuing the world's reserve and reference currency was a source of enormous power for the US, but only to the extent that it used that power sparingly, and subtly. The power of dollarization depended on most people believing that the dollar was mostly neutral – that the US wouldn't risk dollar primacy by nakedly weaponizing the dollar. Dollarization was a bet that America First hawks would have the emotional maturity to instrumentalize the dollar in the most sparing and subtle of fashion.

But today, no one believes that the dollar is neutral. First came the Argentine sovereign debt default: in 2001, the government of Argentina wiped out investors who were holding its bonds. In 2005, a group of American vulture capitalists scooped up this worthless paper for pennies, then sued in New York to force Argentina to make good on the bonds, and a US court handed over Argentina's foreign reserves, which were held on US soil.

That was the opening salvo in a series of events showed everyone in the world that the US dollar wasn't a neutral platform, but was, rather, a creature of US policy. This culminated with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which saw the seizure of Russian assets in the USA and a general blockade on Russians using the SWIFT system to transfer money.

Whether or not you like the fact that Russian assets were transferred to Ukraine to aid in its defense against Russian aggression (I like it, for the record), there's no denying that this ended the pretense that the dollar was a neutral platform. It was a signal to every leader in the world that the dollar could only be relied upon for transaction clearing and foreign reserves to the extent that you didn't make the USA angry at you.

Today, Donald Trump has made it clear that the US's default posture to every country in the world is anger. The US no longer has allies, nor does it have trading partners. Today, every country in the world is America's adversary and its rival.

But de-dollarization isn't easy. It presents the same O(n^2) problem as rewiring the world's fiber: creating deep, liquid markets to trade every currency against every other currency is an impossible lift (thus far), and there's no obvious candidate as a replacement for the dollar as a clearing currency.

As with fiber, we are in an unsettled period, with no obvious answer, and lots of chaotic, one-off gestures towards de-dollarization. For example, Ethiopia is re-valuing its foreign debt in Chinese renminbi:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-20/ethiopia-in-talks-with-china-to-convert-dollar-loans-into-yuan

But fiber and dollars aren't the only seemingly neutral platforms that America provided to the world as a way of both facilitating the world's orderly operation and consolidating America's centrality and power on the global stage.

America is also the world's great digital exporter. The world's governments, corporations and households run on American cloud software, like Google Docs and Office365. Their records are held in Oracle databases. Their messages and media run on iPhones. Their cloud compute comes from AWS.

The Snowden revelations shook this arrangement, but it held. The EU extracted a series of (ultimately broken) promises from the US to the effect that America wouldn't spy on Europeans using Big Tech. And now, after a brittle decade of half-measures and uneasy peace with American tech platforms, Trump has made it clear that he will not hesitate to use American tech platforms to pursue his geopolitical goals.

Practically speaking, that means that government officials that make Trump angry can expect to have their cloud access terminated:

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

Trump can – and does – shut down entire international administrative agencies, without notice or appeal, as a means of coercing them into embracing American political goals.

What's more, US tech giants have stopped pretending that they will not share sensitive EU data – even data housed on servers in the EU – with American spy agencies, and will keep any such disclosures a secret from the European governments, companies and individuals who are affected:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2025/07/22/microsoft-cant-keep-eu-data-safe-from-us-authorities/

All this has prompted a rush of interest in the "Eurostack," an effort to replicate the functionality of US tech companies' cloud services:

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

But the Eurostack's proponents are really working on the preliminaries to digital sovereignty. It's not enough to have alternatives to US Big Tech. There also needs to be extensive work on migration tools, to facilitate the move to those alternatives. No one is going to manually copy/paste a million documents out of their ministry or corporation's GSuite repository and into a Eurostack equivalent. There are a few tools that do this today, but they're crude and hard to use, because they are probably illegal under America's widely exported IP laws.

Faithfully transferring those files, permissions, edit histories and metadata to new clouds will require a kind of guerrilla warfare called "adversarial interoperability." Adversarial interoperability is the process of making a new thing work with an existing thing, against the wishes of the existing thing's manufacturer:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

The problem is that adversarial interoperability has been mostly criminalized in countries all around the world, thanks to IP laws that prohibit study, reverse engineering and modification of software without permission. These laws were spread all over the world at the insistence of the US Trade Representative, who, for 25 years, has made this America's top foreign trade priority.

Countries that balked at enacting laws were threatened with tariffs. Virtually every country in the world fell into line:

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

But then Trump happened. The Trump tariffs apply to countries that have voluntarily blocked their own investors and entrepreneurs from making billions by supplying products that unlock and improve America's enshittified tech exports. These blocks also exposed everyone in the world to the data- and cash-plundering scams of US Big Tech, by preventing the creation of privacy blockers, alt clients, jailbreaking kits, and independent app stores for phones, tablets and consoles.

What's more, the laws that block reverse-engineering are also used to block repair, forcing everyone from train operators to hospitals to drivers to everyday individuals to pay a high premium and endure long waits to get their equipment serviced by the manufacturer's authorized representatives:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/record-scratch/#autoenshittification

These US-forced IP laws come at a high price. They allow American companies to pick your nation's pockets and steal its data. They interfere with repair and undermine resiliency. They also threaten security researchers who audit critical technologies and identify their dangerous defects:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/30/life-finds-a-way/#ink-stained-wretches

On top of that, they expose your country to a range of devastating geopolitical attacks by the Trump administration, who have made it clear that they will order American tech companies to brick whole governments as punishment for failing to capitulate to US demands. And of course, all of these remote killswitches can be operated by anyone who can hack or trick the manufacturer, including the Chinese state:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/07/foreseeable-outcomes/#calea

Speaking of China, isn't this exactly the kind of thing we were warned would happen if we allowed Chinese technology into western telecommunications systems? The Chinese state would spy on us, and, in times of extremis, could shut down our critical infrastructure with a keystroke.

This is exactly what America is doing now (and has been doing for some time, as Snowden demonstrated). But it's actually pretty reasonable to assume that a regime as competent and ambitious (and ruthless) as Xi Jinping's might make use of this digital power if doing so serves its geopolitical goals.

And there is a hell of a lot of cloud-connected digital infrastructure that Xi does (or could) control, including the solar inverters and batteries that are swiftly replacing fossil fuel in the EU:

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

And if you're worried about China shutting down your solar energy, you should also worry about America's hold on the embedded processors in your country's critical systems.

Take tractors. Remember when Putin's thugs looted millions of dollars' worth of tractors from Ukraine and spirited them away to Chechnya? The John Deere company sent a kill command to those tractors and bricked them, rendering them permanently inoperable:

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

Sure, there's a certain cyberpunk frisson in this tale of a digital comeuppance for Russian aggressors. But think about this for ten seconds and you'll realize that it means that John Deere can shut down any tractor in the world – including all the tractors in your country, if Donald Trump forces them to:

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

The national security case for digital sovereignty includes people worried about American aggression. It includes people worried about Chinese aggression. It includes people worried about other countries that might infiltrate and make use of these remote kill switches. And it includes people worried about criminals doing the same.

True digital sovereignty requires more than building Eurostack data-centers and the software to run on them. It requires more than repealing the IP laws that block cloud customers from migrating their data to those Eurostack servers. It requires the replacement of the cloud software and embedded code that power our infrastructure and administrative tools.

This is a gigantic task. Ripping out all the proprietary code that powers our cloud software and devices and replacing it with robust, auditable, user-modifiable free/open source software is a massive project.

It's also a project that's long overdue. And crises precipitate change. Putin's invasion of Ukraine vaporized every barrier to Europe's solar conversion, rocketing the bloc from ten years behind schedule to fifteen years ahead of schedule in just a few years.

The fact that changing out all the proprietary, opaque, vulnerable code in our world and replacing it with open, free, reliable code is hard has no bearing on whether it is necessary.

It is necessary. What's more, replacing all the code isn't like replacing the dollar, or replacing the fiber. It isn't hamstrung by the O(n^2) problem.

Because if the Eurostack code is open and free, it can also be the Canadian stack, the Mexican stack, the Ghanaian stack, and the Vietnamese stack. It can be a commons, a set of core technologies that everyone studies for vulnerabilities and improves, that everyone adds features to, that everyone localizes and administers and bears the costs for.

It is a novel and curious form of "international nationalism," a technology that is more like a science. In the same way that the Allies and the Axis both used the same radio technologies to communicate, a common, open digital infrastructure is one that everyone – even adversaries – can rely upon.

This is a move that's long overdue. It's a move that's in the power of every government, because it merely involves changing your own domestic laws to enable adversarial interoperability. Its success doesn't depend on a foreign state forcing Apple or Google or Microsoft or Oracle to do something they don't want to do:

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

The opportunity and challenge of building the post-American internet is part of the package of global de-Americanization, which includes running new fiber and de-dollarization. But the post-American internet is unique in that it is the only part of this project that can be solved everywhere, all at once, and that gets cheaper and easier as more nations join in.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• On contrarian history https://going-medieval.com/2025/11/25/on-contrarian-history/

• Game Theory Explains How Algorithms Can Drive Up Prices https://www.wired.com/story/game-theory-explains-how-algorithms-can-drive-up-prices/

• Part 1: My Life Is a Lie https://www.yesigiveafig.com/p/part-1-my-life-is-a-lie

• The American Pay Cut That Gave Us Obama and Trump, Twice https://www.americasundoing.com/p/it-works-if-you-work-it

• Americans are holding onto devices longer than ever and it’s costing the economy https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/23/how-device-hoarding-by-americans-is-costing-economy.html

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Transformers costumes that turn into cars and jets https://web.archive.org/web/20051127021810/http://www.marksprojects.com/costumestrans.htm

#15yrsago London police brutally kettle children marching for education https://web.archive.org/web/20101126000126/http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie-penny/2010/11/children-police-kettle-protest

#15yrsago Kremlinology with Rupert Murdoch: what do the Times paywall numbers mean? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/nov/25/times-paywall-cory-doctorow

#10yrsago Ifixit is the new Justice League of America and Kyle Wiens is its Superman https://web.archive.org/web/20151125125009/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-to-fix-everything

#5yrsago Random Penguin to buy Simon & Schuster https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/#merger-to-monopoly

#5yrsago A state-owned Amazon https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/#correo-compras

#5yrsago Office 365 spies on employees for bosses https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/#clippys-revenge

#5yrsago Tech in SF https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/#asl

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• 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

• Virtual: Poetic Technologies with Brian Eno (David Graeber Institute), Dec 8
  https://davidgraeber.institute/poetic-technologies-with-cory-doctorow-and-brian-eno/

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

• Hamburg: Chaos Communications Congress, Dec 27-30
  https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/infos/index.html

Recent appearances (permalink)

• How the internet went to sh*t (Prospect Magazine)
  https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/podcasts/prospect-podcast/71663/cory-doctorow-how-the-internet-went-to-sht

• Enshittification and “Breaking Kings” (Web Summit)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpLudlrwS_g

• Enshittification Nation (The Lever)
  https://www.levernews.com/enshittification-nation/

• Enshittification with Oh God What Now
  https://castbox.fm/episode/Why-Tech-Sucks-%E2%80%93%C2%A0Cory-Doctorow-on-Enshittification-and-how-to-fix-it-id4634015-id876127534

• Enshittification with The Lede (New Lines Magazine)
  https://newlinesmag.com/podcast/why-the-internet-got-bad-and-how-to-fix-it/

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, June 2026

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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"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

• Google steers Americans looking for health care into "junk insurance" : An enshittified search monopolist meets the worst health care system imaginable.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Disaster fantasies; "Sea to Sea"; Veronica Belmont on surviving memeification; Email carcinization.
• 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.

Google steers Americans looking for health care into "junk insurance" (permalink)

Being "the enshittification guy" means that people expect you to weigh in on every service or platform that has been deliberately worsened to turn a buck. It's an impossible task (and a boring one besides). There's too much of this shit, and it's all so mid – a real "banality of enshittification" situation.

So these days, I really only take note of fractally enshittified things, exponentially enshittified things, omnienshittified things. Things like the fact that Google is sending people searching for health care plans to "junk insurance" that take your money and then pretty much just let you die:

https://pluralistic.net/junk-insurance

"Junk insurance" is a health insurance plan that is designed as a short-term plan that you might use for a couple of days or a week or two, say, if you experience a gap in coverage as you move between two jobs. These plans can exclude coverage for pre-existing conditions and typically exclude niceties like emergency room visits and hospitalization:

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Broader-View_July_2020.pdf

Crucially, these plans do not comply with the Affordable Care Act, which requires comprehensive coverage, and bans exclusions for pre-existing conditions. These plans only exist because of loopholes in the ACA, designed for very small-scale employers or temporary coverage.

The one thing junk insurance does not skimp on is sales and marketing. These plans outbid the rest of the market when it comes to buying Google search ads, meaning that anyone who uses Google to research health insurance will be inundated with ads for these shitty plans. The plans also spend a fortune on "search engine optimization" – basically, gaming the Google algorithm – so that the non-ad Google results for health insurance are also saturated with these garbage plans.

The plans also staff up boiler-rooms full of silver-tongued high-pressure sales staff who pick up on the first ring and hard-sell you on their plans, deliberately misleading you into locking into their garbage plans.

That's right, locking in. While Obamacare is nominally a "market based" healthcare system (because Medicare For All would be communism), you are only allowed to change vendors twice per year, during "open enrollment," these narrow biannual windows in which you get to "vote with your wallet" against a plan that has screwed you over and/or endangered your life.

Which means that if a fast-talking salesdroid from a junk insurance company can trick you into signing up for a garbage plan that will leave you bankrupt and/or dead if you have a major health crisis, you are stuck for at least six months in that trap, and won't escape without first handing over thousands of dollars to that scumbag's boss.

Amazingly enough, these aren't even the worst kinds of garbage health plans that you can buy in America: those would be the religious "health share" programs that sleazy evangelical "entrepreneurs" suck their co-religionists into, which cost the world and leave you high and dry when you or your kids get hurt or sick:

https://armandalegshow.com/episode/is-it-ever-appropriate-to-fudge-a-little/

The fact that there are multiple kinds of scam health insurance in America, in which companies are legally permitted to take your money and then deny you care (even more than the "non-scam" insurance plans do) shows you the problem with turning health into a market. "Caveat emptor" may make sense when you're buying a used blender at a yard-sale. Apply it to the system that's supposed to take care of you if you're diagnosed with cancer, hit by a bus, or develop eclampsia, and it's a literally fatal system.

This is just one of the ways in which the uniparty is so terrible for Americans. The Republicans want to swap out shitty regulated for-profit health insurance with disastrous unregulated for-profit health insurance, and then give you a couple thousand bucks to yolo on a plan that seems OK to you:

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/24/republicans-push-obamacare-tax-credit-alternatives-as-deadline-looms.html

This is like letting Fanduel run your country's health system: everyday people are expected to place fifty-way parlay bets on their health, juggling exclusions, co-pays, deductibles, and network coverage in their head. Bet wrong, and you go bankrupt (if you're lucky), or just die (if you're not).

Democrats, meanwhile, want to maintain the (garbage) status quo (because Medicare for All is communism), and they'll shut down the government to make it clear that they want this. But then they'll capitulate, because they want it, but not that badly.

But like I say, America is an Enshittification Nation, and I don't have time or interest for cataloging mere unienshittificatory aspects of life here. To preserve my sanity and discretionary time, I must limit myself to documenting the omnienshittificatory scams that threaten us from every angle at once.

Which brings me back to Google. Without Google, these junk insurance scams would be confined to the margins. They'd have to resort to pyramid selling, or hand-lettered roadside signs, or undisclosed paid plugs in religious/far-right newsletters.

But because Google has utterly succumbed to enshittification, and because Google has an illegal monopoly – a 90% market share – that it maintains by bribing competitors like Apple to stay out of the search market, junk insurance scams can make bank – and ruin Americans' lives wholesale – by either tricking or paying Google to push junk insurance on unsuspecting searchers.

This isn't merely a case of Google losing the SEO and spam wars to shady operators. As we learned in last year's antitrust case (where Google was convicted of operating an illegal search monopoly), Google deliberately worsened its search results, in order to force you to search multiple times (and see multiple screens full of ads) as a way to goose search revenue:

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

Google didn't just lose that one antitrust case, either. It lost three cases, as three federal judges determined that Google secured and maintains an illegal monopoly that allows it to control the single most important funnel for knowledge and truth for the majority of people on Earth. The company whose mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," now serves slop, ads, spam and scams because its customers have nowhere to go, so why bother spending money making search good (especially when there's money to be made from bad search results)?

Google isn't just too big to fail, it's also too big to jail. One of the judges who found Google guilty of maintaining an illegal monopoly decided not to punish them for it, and to allow them to continue bribing Apple to stay out of the search market, because (I'm not making this up), without that $20b+ annual bribe, Apple might not be able to afford to make cool new iPhone features:

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

Once a company is too big to fail and too big to jail, it becomes too big to care. Google could prevent slop, spam and scams from overrunning its results (and putting its users lives and fortunes at risk), it just *chooses not to:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

Google is the internet's absentee landlord. Anyone who can make a buck by scamming you can either pay Google to help, or trick Google into helping, or – as is the case with junk insurance – both:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/15/inhuman-gigapede/#coprophagic-ai

America has the world's stupidest health care system, an industry that has grown wildly profitable by charging Americans the highest rates in the rich world, while delivering the worst health outcomes in the rich world, while slashing health workers' pay and eroding their working conditions.

It's omnienshittified, a partnership between the enshittified search giant and the shittiest parts of the totally enshittified health industry.

It's also a reminder of what we stand to gain when we finally smash Google and break it up: disciplining our search industry will make it competitive, regulatable, and force it to side with the public against all kinds of scammers. Junk insurance should be banned, but even if we just end the junk insurance industry's ability to pay the world's only major search engine to help it kill us, that would be a huge step forward.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Nvidia’s ‘I’m Not Enron’ memo has people asking a lot of questions already answered by that memo https://www.theverge.com/business/828047/nvidia-enron-conspiracy-accounting

• How Black Friday Loyalty Programs Rip Off Shoppers https://economicpopulist.substack.com/p/how-black-friday-loyalty-programs

• The Hater's Guide To NVIDIA https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-guide-to-nvidia/

• GrapheneOS migrates server infrastructure from France amid police intimidation claims https://www.privacyguides.org/news/2025/11/22/grapheneos-migrates-server-infrastructure-from-france-amid-police-intimidation-claims/

• Competition Commissioner Boswell calls it quits early https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/competition-commissioner-matthew

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Solar utility pole: streetlight, WiFi, CCTV and charger https://web.archive.org/web/20060508050552/http://www.starsightproject.com/en/africa/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=12&Itemid=52

#20yrsago Sony rootkit recall makes The Onion https://web.archive.org/web/20051126015022/http://www.theonion.com/content/node/42988

#15yrsago Menstruating woman subjected to TSA grope because panty-liner obscured her vulva on pornoscanner https://blog.gladrags.com/2010/11/24/tsa-groin-searches-menstruating-woman/

#15yrsago Set to Sea: moving and beautiful graphic novel about a poet who becomes an involuntary sailor https://memex.craphound.com/2010/11/24/set-to-sea-moving-and-beautiful-graphic-novel-about-a-poet-who-becomes-an-involuntary-sailor/

#10yrsago Cultural appropriation? Hindu nationalists used yoga as an anti-colonialist export https://web.archive.org/web/20151124030935/http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2015/11/university_canceled_yoga_class_no_it_s_not_cultural_appropriation_to_practice.html

#10yrsago Leaked recording: pollution lobbyists discuss exploiting Syrian refugee crisis https://theintercept.com/2015/11/24/lobbyists-refugee-crisis/

#10yrsago Dell apologizes for preinstalling bogus root-certificate on computers https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/11/dell-apologizes-for-https-certificate-fiasco-provides-removal-tool/

#10yrsago Veronica Belmont on being overtaken by a meme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTThblbbnkM

#10yrsago J Edgar Hoover was angry that the Boy Scouts didn’t thank him effusively enough https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/nov/24/j-edgar-hoover-insults/

#10yrsago WTO rules against US dolphin-safe tuna labels because they’re unfair to Mexican fisheries https://theintercept.com/2015/11/24/wto-ruling-on-dolphin-safe-tuna-labeling-illustrates-supremacy-of-trade-agreements/

#10yrsago Shamrock shake: Pfizer’s Irish “unpatriotic loophole” ducks US taxes https://arstechnica.com/science/2015/11/with-160-billion-merger-pfizer-moves-to-ireland-and-dodges-taxes/

#5yrsago Talking interop on EFF's podcast https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/24/zawinskiian-carcination/#comcom

#5yrsago Cheap Chinese routers riddled with backdoors https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/24/zawinskiian-carcination/#jetstream

#5yrsago Emailifaction is digital carcinization https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/24/zawinskiian-carcination/#carcinization

#5yrsago Saudi Aramco is gushing debt https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/24/zawinskiian-carcination/#gusher

#5yrsago Sci-Fi Genre https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/24/zawinskiian-carcination/#asl

#1yrago The far right grows through "disaster fantasies" https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/24/mall-ninja-prophecy/#mano-a-mano

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• 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

• Virtual: Poetic Technologies with Brian Eno (David Graeber Institute), Dec 8
  https://davidgraeber.institute/poetic-technologies-with-cory-doctorow-and-brian-eno/

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

• Hamburg: Chaos Communications Congress, Dec 27-30
  https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/infos/index.html

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Enshittification Nation (The Lever)
  https://www.levernews.com/enshittification-nation/

• Enshittification with Oh God What Now
  https://castbox.fm/episode/Why-Tech-Sucks-%E2%80%93%C2%A0Cory-Doctorow-on-Enshittification-and-how-to-fix-it-id4634015-id876127534

• Enshittification with The Lede (New Lines Magazine)
  https://newlinesmag.com/podcast/why-the-internet-got-bad-and-how-to-fix-it/

• Today in Focus (The Guardian)
  https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2025/nov/24/enshittification-how-we-got-the-internet-no-one-asked-for-podcast

• Enshittification with Vass Bednar (Vancouver Public Library)
  https://www.crowdcast.io/c/0wzs9iu1q225

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

• Cooking in Maximum Security: A companion volume to "Prisoners' Inventions."
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Cursed house; Randall Munroe's stick figures; Reverse engineering a gig work platform; Barbie surveillance toy teardown; Labor and large firms.
• 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.

Cooking in Maximum Security (permalink)

Cooking in Maximum Security is a slim volume of prisoners' recipes and improvised cooking equipment, a testament to the ingenuity of a network of prisoners in Italy's maximum security prisons:

https://halfletterpress.com/cooking-in-maximum-security/

Cooking in Maximum Security has a new English translation from Half Letter Press, who also publish the classic Prisoners' Inventions, which is one of my favorite books of all time, a collection of keenly observed, beautifully drawn material improvisations from America's prisons:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/09/king-rat/#mother-of-invention

Prison cookbooks are a genre unto themselves, with "underground" classics like Jailhouse Cookbook:

http://jailhousecookbook.com/

And slick coffee-table books like Prison Ramen:

https://www.eater.com/23900359/gastropod-instant-ramen-prison-ramen-recipes-stories-maruchan-cup-noodle

But Cooking in Maximum Security drills down much deeper on the method than those other books, elevating the makerish improvisation of the chefs whose work it reproduces. They explain how to make an oven out of a wooden stool lined with cigarette foil and draped with heavy blankets, into which a small gas burner is introduced:

https://www.cookinginmaximumsecurity.com/tools/

Or how to turn a toothbrush handle and the razor blade from a pencil-sharpener into an all-purpose paring knife:

https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-l4sjfhdy/images/stencil/2048×2048/products/771/3042/CookinginMax4__83959.1762438870.jpg?c=2

These field-expedient gadget improvisations are incredibly satisfying. They have the vibe of a good episode of Scrapheap Challenge, or the high-stakes duct-tape ingenuity of Apollo 13. And while these recipes and build notes were collected in the 2010s, the pencil/charcoal illustrations have a classic 1970s feel, like the illustrations out of the Moosewood Cookbook or The Joy of Sex. If you love the kind of clever repurposings that filled the pages of Make magazine, you'll love this.

Plus, the food sounds incredible. Mouth-watering. Fresh bread whose dough was warmed and risen by setting it atop the heat-radiating surface of a CRT television!

One thing that sets Cooking in Maximum Security apart from other prison cookbooks is the unique character of Italian maximum security prisons, in which visitors are allowed to bring a fairly large variety of goods to inmates, and where the commissary is stocked with an incredible variety of basic ingredients, including things like goat and beef livers (the book reproduces an entire commissary menu, with prices, as an appendix). Prisoners have access to beer and wine, and find endless uses for old beer cans. The book also drops in casual clues about life in an Italian prison, for example, when it suggests getting your wooden stirrer by taking down a crucifix and using that.

Cooking in Maximum Security arose out of a project called "MoCa" (a play on the essential moka coffee maker that is the most versatile and widely used tool in this book). Prisoners met with, and corresponded with, outside helpers who put together the entire volume. One collaborator, Mario, died shortly after sending a long letter (reproduced in an appendix) from solitary confinement, and this letter, along with other notes interspersed through the recipes, give a brilliant anthropological account of life in Italian maximum security prisons.

The MoCa project isn't done – they've embarked on "Phase II," which will collect recipes from Spanish prisoners.

It's a remarkable book, and an essential companion to Prisoner's Inventions.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Bossware booms as bots determine whether you're doing a good job https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/23/bossware_monitor_remote_employees/

• Morality offsets https://www.metafilter.com/48233/Dumping-the-SUV-guilt#1171485

• Nation’s Largest Landlord Is Encouraged to Break the Law With Measly Fine for Price Fixing Scheme That Kept Rents Artificially High and Worsened Homelessness Crisis | naked capitalism https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/11/nations-largest-landlord-is-encouraged-to-break-the-law-with-measly-fine-for-price-fixing-scheme-that-kept-rents-artificially-high-and-worsened-american-homelessness-crisis.html

• Fran Sans https://emilysneddon.com/fran-sans-essay

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Sony rootkit hurts artists https://web.archive.org/web/20051125121608/http://businessweek.com/technology/content/nov2005/tc20051122_343542.htm

#20yrsago Anti-game lawyer loses right to practice law in Alabama https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2005/11/5613-2/

#20yrsago Tech business niches begging to be filled https://techcrunch.com/2005/11/21/companies-id-like-to-profile-but-dont-exist/

#20yrsago Giving EU air-passenger data to US DHS is illegal https://www.rte.ie/news/2005/1122/70024-eu/

#15yrsago What John Pistole means when he talks about “enhanced” TSA checkpoints https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wrDzMD_BC8

#15yrsago Rock-Paper-Scissors-Lizard-Spock explained in 32 seconds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJKHFPBwDRA

#15yrsago TSA looks at Adam Savage’s junk, misses his two 12″ razor blades https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3yaqq9Jjb4

#10yrsago What’s inside a “Hello Barbie” surveillance toy? https://www.somersetrecon.com/blog/2015/11/20/hello-barbie-security-part-1-teardown

#10yrsago J Edgar Hoover loved Efrem Zimbalist’s “FBI” https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/nov/23/efrem-zimbalist-fbi-file/

#10yrsago Blankets: New edition of Craig Thompson’s graphic masterpiece https://memex.craphound.com/2015/11/23/blankets-new-edition-of-craig-thompsons-graphic-masterpiece/

#10yrsago Randall Munroe does a Q&A with stick-figure comics https://time.com/4116921/randall-munroe-draws-his-own-conclusions/

#10yrsago On the grotesque obsession with accomplished women’s fertility https://harpers.org/archive/2015/10/the-mother-of-all-questions/?single=1

#10yrsago How browser extensions steal logins & browsing habits; conduct corporate espionage https://labs.detectify.com/security-guidance/chrome-extensions-google-is-tracking-you/

#10yrsago Activist tricked into 6-year relationship with undercover cop tells her story https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/nov/20/lisa-jones-girlfriend-of-undercover-police-office-mark-kennedy-interview

#5yrsago An Especially Cursed House https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/22/especially-cursed/#mcmansion-hell

#5yrsago Guatemala's guillotines https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/23/opsec-and-personal-security/#guillotines

#5yrsago The power of procurements https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/23/opsec-and-personal-security/#procurements

#5yrsago Labor and large firms https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/23/opsec-and-personal-security/#monopsony

#5yrsago A textbook grift https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/23/opsec-and-personal-security/#racket

#5yrsago Australian predictive policing tool for kids https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/23/opsec-and-personal-security/#phrenology

#5yrsago Opsec and personal security https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/23/opsec-and-personal-security/#asl

#1yrago Reverse engineers bust sleazy gig work platform https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/23/hack-the-class-war/#robo-boss

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• 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

• Virtual: Poetic Technologies with Brian Eno (David Graeber Institute), Dec 8
  https://davidgraeber.institute/poetic-technologies-with-cory-doctorow-and-brian-eno/

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

• Hamburg: Chaos Communications Congress, Dec 27-30
  https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/infos/index.html

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Today in Focus (The Guardian)
  https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2025/nov/24/enshittification-how-we-got-the-internet-no-one-asked-for-podcast

• Enshittification with Vass Bednar (Vancouver Public Library)
  https://www.crowdcast.io/c/0wzs9iu1q225

• Tech unions against enshittification (TUC)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m11hmiHu6Tc

• It’s not your job to fix the internet (Vergecast)
  https://www.theverge.com/podcast/822822/enshittification-cory-doctorow-interview-vergecast

• Enshittification with danah boyd and Lee Vinsel (Peoples & Things)
  https://newbooksnetwork.com/cory-doctorow-on-enshittification-why-everything-suddenly-got-worse-and-what-to-do-about-it

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

• Boss preppers: What does a captain of industry have to offer after the shit hits the fan?
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Yahoo blocks webmail for adblockers; Badly forgiving student debt.
• 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.

Boss preppers (permalink)

Sometimes, you learn a fact that makes everything else make sense – one of those keystone insights that puts a whole phenomenon into perspective. For example, the fact that preppers are engaged in a very specific type of wish-fulfillment.

I learned this during the first part of the pandemic lockdowns, when preppers were very much in our collective consciousness. On the Media featured an interview between Micah Loewinger and Richard Mitchell, author of Dancing at Armageddon: Survivalism and Chaos in Modern Times which features ethnographic studies of preppers:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/22/preppers-are-larpers/#preppers-unprepared

Mitchell described how preppers make ready for specific forms of societal collapse, based not on the likelihood of the event itself, but rather, based on how useful they would be in that situation. For example, a water chemist has made extensive preparations for an event in which terrorists poison the water-supply. When pressed, he couldn't explain why terrorists would choose his town to target with an attack like this, but basically thought it would be really cool if the only person who could save his town was him.

This is the "disaster fantasy" that propels the prepper movement, in which a functional, high-tech world of wicked, systemic problems is replaced with a fallen, low-tech society where the problems are all simple. A world of simple problems is a world of individual actors, where every struggle is just about what one person can make someone else do, or offer to someone else. It's a perfect world if you've been raised on Thatcher's neoliberal doctrine that "there is no such thing as society," only to find yourself in a society in which you can only make real change by participating in collective efforts:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/24/mall-ninja-prophecy/#mano-a-mano

All this raises the question of what rich preppers are prepping for. If your contribution to society consists of "allocating capital" and/or giving people orders, what, exactly, is the disaster that fulfills your fantasy of a world where your unique skills are the only thing that can save us all? What kind of a disaster needs a boss?

In Douglas Rushkoff's 2022 book Survival of the Richest, he describes a surreal "futurism" consulting gig in which a bunch of wealthy investor types asked him to help them figure out how to keep their mercenaries in line after "The Event" (the end of the world):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

These guys had the idea that what a fallen civilization needed was bosses, you see, but they were self-aware enough to recognize that the people who survived the apocalypse might not recognize their unique genius and simply fall into line. In order to assert their natural role as leaders after the shit hit the fan, these guys would need an army of heavily armed mercenaries. But again, these guys were self-aware enough to recognize that the mercenaries might also fail to recognize their unique fitness to rule and opt instead to slaughter them and raid their hoarded food, ammo and medical supplies.

So they wanted Rushkoff's advice – should they fit the mercs with bomb-collars that were on a dead-man's switch that would go off if the boss croaked? This was such a weird and revealing moment that Rushkoff got a whole book out of exploring the desire of the wealthy to both secede from the rest of us, and keep us all in line.

I was inspired by this and other experiences with people fantasizing about the world's end to take a run at rewriting Edgar Allan Poe's "Masque of the Red Death" as a story about investor/ubermenschen in a luxury bunker at the end of the world (spoiler: it doesn't go well for them):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/14/masque-of-the-red-death/#masque

All of this has been very much on my mind lately because I've been reading Quinn Slobodian's amazing Hayek's Bastards, a closely researched history of the merger of the neoliberal wing of the conservative movement with its white nationalist faction, producing a conservativism obsessed with "hard borders, hard-wired human difference, and hard money":

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/472194/hayeks-bastards-by-slobodian-quinn/9780241774984

It's a revelatory history, one that argues convincingly that the brooding, violent racism of MAGA isn't so much a break with "Romney conservativism" of the "respectable" Republican Party as it is the attainment of the goals of the party's longstanding dominant tendency.

"Hard-wired human differences" refers to the "scientific racism" that the likes of Elon Musk pushes, the junk science that insists that there is such a thing as a "race," and that IQ measures something important and immutable, and that different "races" have different IQs, which is why some "races" do well, while others do poorly:

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

"Hard-wired human difference" militate for "hard borders," since the teeming billions of racially inferior people in other countries would – given half a chance – come to the "good" countries and turn them into "shithole countries." This is the nonsense that Musk is peddling when he compares Britons to "hobbits" and warns that they're about to be overrun by people who will "start raping the kids":

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/elon-musk-compares-brits-to-hobbits-amid-shock-immigration-claim_uk_69089785e4b0c4a0f509d6f5?origin=home-latest-unit

But because the soft-headed, soft-hearted hobbits keep electing leaders who don't understand this, they'll get "overrun" by the bad "races," who demand welfare handouts, which the state can't afford, triggering "money printing" and Musk's other obsession, national debts:

https://fortune.com/2025/07/01/trump-spending-bill-pain-points-critics-elon-musk-medicaid-national-debt-clean-energy/

(Which is to say, Musk's understanding of money is just as wrongheaded as his understanding of genomics):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/10/compton-cowboys/#the-deficit-myth

In the disaster fantasy, the failure of hard borders leads to the inevitable consequences of hard-wired human differences, which means that we need "hard money" – gold. The modern right is a linear descendant of the goldbug movement, composed of grifters who made fortunes terrifying racists into buying gold as a hedge against the day when the collapse of the welfare state leads to race war and the dollar's vaporization:

https://mises.org/library/book/gold-peace-and-prosperity?d7_alias_migrate=1

For goldbugs, the coming collapse seems to be one that will demand coin collectors. In Hayek's Bastards, Slobodian quotes all these goldbug preppers furiously dreaming of a day when a single gold coin will let them buy a whole city block in Manhattan. Somehow, they've conceived of disaster scenario where the most needful of all things is a ductile metal with a few marginal uses in electronics.

It's a very weird kind of disaster fantasy. One can only assume that the guys figuring out how to assemble an army of bomb-collared mercs will just stroll over to these goldbugs' lesser bunkers and take their precious coins.

The modern goldbug is, of course, a crypto weirdo, and man is that a weird thing to be a prepper about. It will be a very odd apocalypse indeed that takes down all of modern civilization except for blockchains.

(Image: Morten Jensen, CC BY 2.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Qualcomm enshittified Arduino https://www.linkedin.com/posts/adafruit_opensource-privacy-techpolicy-activity-7396903362237054976-r14H/

• Why is knowledge getting so expensive? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PygUK16aQgk

• Cooking Temperature and Hold Time Affect Beef Brisket Textural Properties and Cooking Yield https://www.iastatedigitalpress.com/mmb/article/id/18269/

• The Dairy Products Theory of Dead Media (2004) https://bruces.medium.com/the-dairy-products-theory-of-dead-media-2004-34842e069335

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Sony insider: DRM is discredited at Sony https://memex.craphound.com/2005/11/20/sony-insider-drm-is-discredited-at-sony/

#20yrsago Microsoft: Trusted Computing sucks! https://web.archive.org/web/20060821002450/http://news.com.com/Who+has+the+right+to+control+your+PC/2100-1029_3-5961609.html

#20yrsago EFF brings class-action against Sony! https://web.archive.org/web/20051125183030/https://www.eff.org/news/archives/2005_11.php#004192

#20yrsago Texas sues Sony over rootkits — YEE-HAW! https://web.archive.org/web/20060204212201/https://www.oag.state.tx.us/oagNews/release.php?id=1266

#20yrsago 1,000 sqft secret chamber discovered in Indian National Library https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/secret-chamber-in-national-library/articleshow/6957358.cms

#15yrsago Who owns your mortgage, the mind-croggling flowchart edition https://web.archive.org/web/20101118032158/https://www.zerohedge.com/article/just-when-you-thought-you-knew-something-about-mortgage-securitizations

#15yrsago When did you choose to be straight? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJtjqLUHYoY

#15yrsago Dear airlines: goodbye https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/11/dear-airline-im-leaving-you/66750/

#15yrsago How TSA screeners feel about junk-touching https://web.archive.org/web/20140928131617/https://flyingwithfish.boardingarea.com/2010/11/18/tsa-enhanced-pat-downs-the-screeners-point-of-view/

#10yrsago Yahoo blocks some users from accessing email until they turn off ad-blocking https://web.archive.org/web/20151121172408/https://consumerist.com/2015/11/20/use-adblock-and-yahoo-may-block-you-from-reading-your-e-mail/

#10yrsago Alan Moore’s brilliantly bonkers lost 1980s Star Wars comics https://web.archive.org/web/20151122232854/https://www.techtimes.com/tags/alan-moores-star-wars

#10yrsago The secret history of the Haunted Mansion’s hall of changing paintings https://longforgottenhauntedmansion.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-changing-portrait-hall-that-never.html

#10yrsago England: You have four days to reply to the secret consultation on the NHS’s future https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/19/nhs-mandate-england-consulation-deadline

#10yrsago Southwest Airlines surrenders to racists, refuses boarding to Arab-American passengers https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/national-international/philly-pizza-shop-owner-profiled-southwest-airlines/89976/

#5yrsago Nintendo vs Nintendees https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/21/wrecking-ball/#ssbm

#5yrsago Google's monopoly rigged the ad market https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/20/sovkitsch/#adtech

#5yrsago Facebook bullies watchdog https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/20/sovkitsch/#adobserver

#5yrsago We're already (badly) forgiving student debt https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/20/sovkitsch/#student-debt

#5yrsago Little Revolutions https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/20/sovkitsch/#asl

#1yrago Expert agencies and elected legislatures https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/21/policy-based-evidence/#decisions-decisions

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• 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

• Hamburg: Chaos Communications Congress, Dec 27-30
  https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/infos/index.html

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Enshittification with Vass Bednar (Vancouver Public Library)
  https://www.crowdcast.io/c/0wzs9iu1q225

• Tech unions against enshittification (TUC)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m11hmiHu6Tc

• It’s not your job to fix the internet (Vergecast)
  https://www.theverge.com/podcast/822822/enshittification-cory-doctorow-interview-vergecast

• Enshittification with danah boyd and Lee Vinsel (Peoples & Things)
  https://newbooksnetwork.com/cory-doctorow-on-enshittification-why-everything-suddenly-got-worse-and-what-to-do-about-it

• Enshittification and Extraction: The Internet Sucks Now, with Tim Wu (Oxford Internet Institute)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkYxMQJ9c94

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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