Today's links

• The Post-American Internet: My speech from Hamburg's Chaos Communications Congress.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Error code 451; Public email address Mansplaining Lolita; NSA backdoor in Juniper Networks; Don't bug out; Nurses whose shitty boss is a shitty app.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

The Post-American Internet (permalink)

On December 28th, I delivered a speech entitled "A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet" for 39C3, the 39th Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg, Germany. This is the transcript of that speech.

Many of you know that I'm an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation – EFF. I'm about to start my 25th year there. I know that I'm hardly unbiased, but as far as I'm concerned, there's no group anywhere on Earth that does the work of defending our digital rights better than EFF.

I'm an activist there, and for the past quarter-century, I've been embroiled in something I call "The War on General Purpose Computing."

If you were at 28C3, 14 years ago, you may have heard me give a talk with that title. Those are the trenches I've been in since my very first day on the job at EFF, when I flew to Los Angeles to crash the inaugural meeting of something called the "Broadcast Protection Discussion Group," an unholy alliance of tech companies, media companies, broadcasters and cable operators.

They'd gathered because this lavishly corrupt American congressman, Billy Tauzin, had promised them a new regulation – a rule banning the manufacture and sale of digital computers, unless they had been backdoored to specifications set by that group, specifications for technical measures to block computers from performing operations that were dispreferred by these companies' shareholders.

That rule was called "the Broadcast Flag," and it actually passed through the American telecoms regulator, the Federal Communications Commission. So we sued the FCC in federal court, and overturned the rule.

We won that skirmish, but friends, I have bad news, news that will not surprise you. Despite wins like that one, we have been losing the war on the general purpose computer for the past 25 years.

Which is why I've come to Hamburg today. Because, after decades of throwing myself against a locked door, the door that leads to a new, good internet, one that delivers both the technological self-determination of the old, good internet, and the ease of use of Web 2.0 that let our normie friends join the party, that door has been unlocked.

Today, it is open a crack. It's open a crack!

And here's the weirdest part: Donald Trump is the guy who's unlocked that door.

Oh, he didn't do it on purpose! But, thanks to Trump's incontinent belligerence, we are on the cusp of a "Post-American Internet," a new digital nervous system for the 21st century. An internet that we can build without worrying about America's demands and priorities.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not happy about Trump or his policies. But as my friend Joey DaVilla likes to say "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla." The only thing worse than experiencing all the terror that Trump has unleashed on America and the world would be going through all that and not salvaging anything out of the wreckage.

That's what I want to talk to you about today: the post-American Internet we can wrest from Trump's chaos.

A post-American Internet that is possible because Trump has mobilized new coalition partners to join the fight on our side. In politics, coalitions are everything. Any time you see a group of people suddenly succeeding at a goal they have been failing to achieve, it's a sure bet that they've found some coalition partners, new allies who don't want all the same thing as the original forces, but want enough of the same things to fight on their side.

That's where Trump came from: a coalition of billionaires, white nationalists, Christian bigots, authoritarians, conspiratorialists, imperialists, and self-described "libertarians" who've got such a scorching case of low-tax brain worms that they'd vote for Mussolini if he'd promise to lower their taxes by a nickel.

And what's got me so excited is that we've got a new coalition in the War on General Purpose Computers: a coalition that includes the digital rights activists who've been on the lines for decades, but also people who want to turn America's Big Tech trillions into billions for their own economy, and national security hawks who are quite rightly worried about digital sovereignty.

My thesis here is that this is an unstoppable coalition. Which is good news! For the first time in decades, victory is in our grasp.

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So let me explain: 14 years ago, I stood in front of this group and explained the "War on General Purpose Computing." That was my snappy name for this fight, but the boring name that they use in legislatures for it is "anticircumvention,"

Under anticircumvention law, it's a crime to alter the functioning of a digital product or service, unless the manufacturer approves of your modification, and – crucially – this is true whether or not your modification violates any other law.

Anticircumvention law originates in the USA: Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 establishes a felony punishable by a five year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense for bypassing an "access control" for a copyrighted work.

So practically speaking, if you design a device or service with even the flimsiest of systems to prevent modification of its application code or firmware, it's a felony – a jailable felony – to modify that code or firmware. It's also a felony to disclose information about how to bypass that access control, which means that pen-testers who even describe how they access a device or system face criminal liability.

Under anticircumvention law any manufacturer can trivially turn their product into a no-go zone, criminalizing the act of investigating its defects, criminalizing the act of reporting on its defects, and criminalizing the act of remediating its defects.

This is a law that Jay Freeman rightly calls "Felony Contempt of Business Model." Anticircumvention became the law of the land in 1998 when Bill Clinton signed the DMCA. But before you start snickering at those stupid Americans, know this: every other country in the world has passed a law just like this in the years since. Here in the EU, it came in through Article 6 of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive.

Now, it makes a certain twisted sense for the US to enact a law like this, after all, they are the world's tech powerhouse, home to the biggest, most powerful tech companies in the world. By making it illegal to modify digital products without the manufacturer's permission, America enhances the rent-extracting power of the most valuable companies on US stock exchanges.

But why would Europe pass a law like this? Europe is a massive tech importer. By extending legal protection to tech companies that want to steal their users' data and money, the EU was facilitating a one-way transfer of value from Europe to America. So why would Europe do this?

Well, let me tell you about the circumstances under which other countries came to enact their anticircumvention laws and maybe you'll spot a pattern that will answer this question.

Australia got its anticircumvention law through the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement, which obliges Australia to enact anticircumvention law.

Canada and Mexico got it through the US-Mexico-Canada Free Trade Agreement, which obliges Canada and Mexico to enact anticircumvention laws.

Andean nations like Chile got their anticircumvention laws through bilateral US free trade agreements, which oblige them to enact anticircumvention laws.

And the Central American nations got their anticircumvention laws through CAFTA – The Central American Free Trade Agreement with the USA – which obliges them to enact anticircumvention laws, too.

I assume you've spotted the pattern by now: the US trade representative has forced every one of its trading partners to adopt anticircumvention law, to facilitate the extraction of their own people's data and money by American firms. But of course, that only raises a further question: Why would every other country in the world agree to let America steal its own people's money and data, and block its domestic tech sector from making interoperable products that would prevent this theft?

Here's an anecdote that unravels this riddle: many years ago, in the years before Viktor Orban rose to power, I used to guest-lecture at a summer PhD program in political science at Budapest's Central European University. And one summer, after I'd lectured to my students about anticircumvention law, one of them approached me.

They had been the information minister of a Central American nation during the CAFTA negotiations, and one day, they'd received a phone-call from their trade negotiator, calling from the CAFTA bargaining table. The negotiator said, "You know how you told me not to give the Americans anticircumvention under any circumstances? Well, they're saying that they won't take our coffee unless we give them anticircumvention. And I'm sorry, but we just can't lose the US coffee market. Our economy would collapse. So we're going to give them anticircumvention. I'm really sorry."

That's it. That's why every government in the world allowed US Big Tech companies to declare open season on their people's private data and ready cash.

The alternative was tariffs. Well, I don't know if you've heard, but we've got tariffs now!

I mean, if someone threatens to burn your house down unless you follow their orders, and then they burn your house down anyway, you don't have to keep following their orders. So…Happy Liberation Day?

So far, every country in the world has had one of two responses to the Trump tariffs. The first one is: "Give Trump everything he asks for (except Greenland) and hope he stops being mad at you." This has been an absolute failure. Give Trump an inch, he'll take a mile. He'll take fucking Greenland. Capitulation is a failure.

But so is the other tactic: retaliatory tariffs. That's what we've done in Canada (like all the best Americans, I'm Canadian). Our top move has been to levy tariffs on the stuff we import from America, making the things we buy more expensive. That's a weird way to punish America! It's like punching yourself in the face as hard as you can, and hoping the downstairs neighbor says "Ouch!"

And it's indiscriminate. Why whack some poor farmer from a state that begins and ends with a vowel with tariffs on his soybeans. That guy never did anything bad to Canada.

But there's a third possible response to tariffs, one that's just sitting there, begging to be tried: what about repealing anticircumvention law?

If you're a technologist or an investor based in a country that's repealed its anticircumvention law, you can go into business making disenshittificatory products that plug into America's defective tech exports, allowing the people who own and use those products to use them in ways that are good for them, even if those uses make the company's shareholders mad.

Think of John Deere tractors: when a farmer's John Deere tractor breaks down, they are expected to repair it, swapping in new parts and assemblies to replace whatever's malfing. But the tractor won't recognize that new part and will not start working again, not until the farmer spends a couple hundred bucks on a service callout from an official John Deere tractor repair rep, whose only job is to type an unlock code into the tractor's console, to initialize the part and pair it with the tractor's main computing unit.

Modding a tractor to bypass this activation step violates anticircumvention law, meaning farmers all over the world are stuck with this ripoff garbage, because their own government will lock up anyone who makes a tractor mod that disables the parts-pairing check in this American product.

So what if Canada repealed Bill C-11, the Copyright Modernization Act of 2012 (that's our anticircumvention law)? Well, then a company like Honeybee, which makes tractor front-ends and attachments, could hire some smart University of Waterloo computer science grads, and put 'em to work jailbreaking the John Deere tractor's firmware, and offer it to everyone in the world. They could sell the crack to anyone with an internet connection and a payment method, including that poor American farmer whose soybeans we're currently tariffing.

It's hard to convey how much money is on the table here. Take just one example: Apple's App Store. Apple forces all app vendors into using its payment processor, and charges them a 30 percent commission on every euro spent inside of an app.

30 percent! That's such a profitable business that Apple makes $100 billion per year on it. If the EU repeals Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, some smart geeks in Finland could reverse-engineer Apple's bootloaders and make a hardware dongle that jailbreaks phones so that they can use alternative app stores, and sell the dongle – along with the infrastructure to operate an app store – to anyone in the world who wants to go into business competing with Apple for users and app vendors.

Those competitors could offer a 90% discount to every crafter on Etsy, every performer on Patreon, every online news outlet, every game dev, every media store. Offer them a 90% discount on payments, and still make $10b/year.

Maybe Finland will never see another Nokia, but Nokia's a tough business to be in. You've got to make hardware, which is expensive and risky. But if the EU legalizes jailbreaking, then Apple would have to incur all the expense and risk of making and fielding hardware, while those Finnish geeks could cream off the $100b Apple sucks out of the global economy in an act of a disgusting, rip-off rent-seeking.

As Jeff Bezos said to the publishers: "Your margin is my opportunity." With these guys, it's always "disruption for thee, but 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.

Well, screw that. Move fast and break Tim Cook's things. Move fast and break kings!

It's funny: I spent 25 years getting my ass kicked by the US Trade Representative (in my defense, it wasn't a fair fight). I developed a kind of grudging admiration for the skill with which the USTR bound the entire world to a system of trade that conferred parochial advantages to America and its tech firms, giving them free rein to loot the world's data and economies. So it's been pretty amazing to watch Trump swiftly and decisively dismantle the global system of trade and destroy the case for the world continuing to arrange its affairs to protect the interests of America's capital class.

I mean, it's not a path I would have chosen. I'd have preferred no Trump at all to this breakthrough. But I'll take this massive own-goal if Trump insists. I mean, I'm not saying I've become an accelerationist, but at this point, I'm not exactly not an accelerationist.

Now, you might have heard that governments around the world have been trying to get Apple to open its App Store, and they've totally failed at this. When the EU hit Apple with an enforcement order under the Digital Markets Act, Apple responded by offering to allow third party app stores, but it would only allow those stores to sell apps that Apple had approved of.

And while those stores could use their own payment processors, Apple would charge them so much in junk fees that it would be more expensive to process a payment using your own system, and if Apple believed that a user's phone had been outside of the EU for 21 days, they'd remotely delete all that user's data and apps.

When the EU explained that this would not satisfy the regulation, Apple threatened to pull out of the EU. Then, once everyone had finished laughing, Apple filed more than a dozen bullshit objections to the order hoping to tie this up in court for a decade, the way Google and Meta did for the GDPR.

It's not clear that the EU can force Apple to write code that opens up the iOS platform for alternative app stores and payment methods, but there is one thing that the EU can absolutely do with 100% reliability, any time they want: the EU can decide not to let Apple use Europe's courts to shut down European companies that defend European merchants, performers, makers, news outlets, game devs and creative workers, from Apple's ripoff, by jailbreaking phones.

All the EU has to do is repeal Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, and, in so doing, strip Apple of the privilege of mobilizing the European justice system to shore up Apple's hundred billion dollar annual tax on the world's digital economy. The EU company that figures out how to reliably jailbreak iPhones will have customers all over the world, including in the USA, where Apple doesn't just use its veto over which apps you can run on your phone to suck 30% out of every dollar you spend, but where Apple also uses its control over the platform to strip out apps that protect Apple's customers from Trump's fascist takeover.

Back in October, Apple kicked the "ICE Block" app out of the App Store. That's an app that warns the user if there's a snatch squad of masked ICE thugs nearby looking to grab you off the street and send you to an offshore gulag. Apple internally classified ICE kidnappers as a "protected class," and then declared the ICE Block infringed on the rights of these poor, beset ICE goons.

And speaking of ICE thugs, there are plenty of qualified technologists who have fled the US this year, one step ahead of an ICE platoon looking to put them and their children into a camp. Those skilled hackers are now living all over the world, joined by investors who'd like to back a business whose success will be determined by how awesome its products are, and not how many $TRUMP coins they buy.

Apple's margin could be their opportunity.

Legalizing jailbreaking, raiding the highest margin lines of business of the most profitable companies in America is a much better response to the Trump tariffs than retaliatory tariffs.

For one thing, this is a targeted response: go after Big Tech's margins and you're mounting a frontal assault on the businesses whose CEOs each paid a million bucks to sit behind Trump on the inauguration dais.

Raiding Big Tech's margins is not an attack on the American people, nor on the small American businesses that are ripped off by Big Tech. It's a raid on the companies that screw everyday Americans and everyone else in the world. It's a way to make everyone in the world richer at the expense of these ripoff companies.

It beats the shit out of blowing hundreds of billions of dollars building AI data-centers in the hopes that someday, a sector that's lost nearly a trillion dollars shipping defective chatbots will figure out a use for GPUs that doesn't start hemorrhaging money the minute they plug them in.

So here are our new allies in the war on general-purpose computation: businesses and technologists who want to make billions of dollars raiding Big Tech's margins, and policymakers who want their country to be the disenshittification nation – the country that doesn't merely protect its people's money and privacy by buying jailbreaks from other countries, but rather, the country that makes billions of dollars selling that privacy and pocketbook-defending tech to the rest of the world.

That's a powerful alliance, but those are not the only allies Trump has pushed into our camp. There's another powerful ally waiting in the wings.

Remember last June, when the International Criminal Court in the Hague issued an arrest warrant for the génocidaire Benjamin Netanyahu, and Trump denounced the ICC, and then the ICC lost its Outlook access, its email archives, its working files, its address books, its calendars?

Microsoft says they didn't brick the ICC – that it's a coincidence. But when it comes to a he-said/Clippy-said between the justices of the ICC and the convicted monopolists of Microsoft, I know who I believe.

This is exactly the kind of infrastructural risk that we were warned of if we let Chinese companies like Huawei supply our critical telecoms equipment. Virtually every government ministry, every major corporation, every small business and every household in the world have locked themselves into a US-based, cloud-based service.

The handful of US Big Tech companies that supply the world's administrative tools are all vulnerable to pressure from the Trump admin, and that means that Trump can brick an entire nation.

The attack on the ICC was an act of cyberwarfare, like the Russian hackers who shut down Ukrainian power-generation facilities, except that Microsoft doesn't have to hack Outlook to brick the ICC – they own Outlook.

Under the US CLOUD Act of 2018, the US government can compel any US-based company to disclose any of its users' data – including foreign governments – and this is true no matter where that data is stored. Last July, Anton Carniaux, Director of Public and Legal Affairs at Microsoft France, told a French government inquiry that he "couldn't guarantee" that Microsoft wouldn't hand sensitive French data over to the US government, even if that data was stored in a European data-center.

And under the CLOUD Act, the US government can slap gag orders on the companies that it forces to cough up that data, so there'd be no way to even know if this happened, or whether it's already happened.

It doesn't stop at administrative tools, either: remember back in 2022, when Putin's thugs looted millions of dollars' worth of John Deere tractors from Ukraine and those tractors showed up in Chechnya? The John Deere company pushed an over-the-air kill signal to those tractors and bricked 'em.

John Deere is every bit as politically vulnerable to the Trump admin as Microsoft is, and they can brick most of the tractors in the world, and the tractors they can't brick are probably made by Massey Ferguson, the number-two company in the ag-tech cartel, which is also an American company and just as vulnerable to political attacks from the US government.

Now, none of this will be news to global leaders. Even before Trump and Microsoft bricked the ICC they were trying to figure out a path to "digital sovereignty." But the Trump administration's outrageous conduct and rhetoric over past 11 months has turned "digital sovereignty" from a nice-to-have into a must-have.

So finally, we're seeing some movement, like "Eurostack," a project to clone the functionality of US Big Tech silos in free/open source software, and to build EU-based data-centers that this code can run on.

But Eurostack is heading for a crisis. It's great to build open, locally hosted, auditable, trustworthy services that replicate the useful features of Big Tech, but you also need to build the adversarial interoperability tools that allow for mass exporting of millions of documents, the sensitive data-structures and edit histories.

We need scrapers and headless browsers to accomplish the adversarial interoperability that will guarantee ongoing connectivity to institutions that are still hosted on US cloud-based services, because US companies are not going to facilitate the mass exodus of international customers from their platform.

Just think of how Apple responded to the relatively minor demand to open up the iOS App Store, and now imagine the thermonuclear foot-dragging, tantrum-throwing and malicious compliance they'll come up with when faced with the departure of a plurality of the businesses and governments in a 27-nation bloc of 500,000,000 affluent consumers.

Any serious attempt at digital sovereignty needs migration tools that work without the cooperation of the Big Tech companies. Otherwise, this is like building housing for East Germans and locating it in West Berlin. It doesn't matter how great the housing is, your intended audience is going to really struggle to move in unless you tear down the wall.

Step one of tearing down that wall is killing anticircumvention law, so that we can run virtual devices that can be scripted, break bootloaders to swap out firmware and generally seize the means of computation.

So this is the third bloc in the disenshittification army: not just digital rights hippies like me; not just entrepreneurs and economic development wonks rubbing their hands together at the thought of transforming American trillions into European billions; but also the national security hawks who are 100% justified in their extreme concern about their country's reliance on American platforms that have been shown to be totally unreliable.

This is how we'll get a post-American internet: with an unstoppable coalition of activists, entrepreneurs and natsec hawks.

This has been a long time coming. Since the post-war settlement, the world has treated the US as a neutral platform, a trustworthy and stable maintainer of critical systems for global interchange, what the political scientists Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman call the "Underground Empire." But over the past 15 years, the US has systematically shattered global trust in its institutions, a process that only accelerated under Trump.

Take transoceanic fiber optic cables: the way the transoceanic fiber routes were planned, the majority of these cables make landfall on the coasts of the USA where the interconnections are handled. There's a good case for this hub-and-spoke network topology, especially compared to establishing direct links between every country. That's an Order(N^2) problem: directly linking each of the planet Earth's 205 countries to every other country would require 20,910 fiber links.

But putting all the world's telecoms eggs in America's basket only works if the US doesn't take advantage of its centrality, and while many people worried about what the US could do with the head-ends of the world's global fiber infra, it wasn't until Mark Klein's 2006 revelations about the NSA's nation-scale fiber optic taps in AT&T's network, and Ed Snowden's 2013 documents showing the global scale of this wiretapping, that the world had to confront the undeniable reality that the US could not be trusted to serve as the world's fiber hub.

It's not just fiber. The world does business in dollars. Most countries maintain dollar accounts at the Fed in New York as their major source of foreign reserves. But in 2005, American vulture capitalists bought up billions of dollars worth of Argentinian government bonds after the sovereign nation of Argentina had declared bankruptcy.

They convinced a judge in New York to turn over the government of Argentina's US assets to them to make good on loans that these debt collectors had not issued, but had bought up at pennies on the dollar. At that moment, every government in the world had to confront the reality that they could not trust the US Federal Reserve with their foreign reserves. But what else could they use?

Without a clear answer, dollar dominance continued, but then, under Biden, Putin-aligned oligarchs and Russian firms lost access to the SWIFT system for dollar clearing. This is when goods – like oil – are priced in dollars, so that buyers only need to find someone who will trade their own currency for dollars, which they can then swap for any commodity in the world.

Again, there's a sound case for dollar clearing: it's just not practical to establish deep, liquid pairwise trading market for all of the world's nearly 200 currencies, it's another O(N^2) problem.

But it only works if the dollar is a neutral platform. Once the dollar becomes an instrument of US foreign policy – whether or not you agree with that policy – it's no longer a neutral platform, and the world goes looking for an alternative.

No one knows what that alternative's going to be, just as no one knows what configuration the world's fiber links will end up taking. There's kilometers of fiber being stretched across the ocean floor, and countries are trying out some pretty improbable gambits as dollar alternatives, like Ethiopia revaluing its sovereign debt in Chinese renminbi. Without a clear alternative to America's enshittified platforms, the post-American century is off to a rocky start.

But there's one post-American system that's easy to imagine. The project to rip out all the cloud connected, backdoored, untrustworthy black boxes that power our institutions, our medical implants, our vehicles and our tractors; and replace it with collectively maintained, open, free, trustworthy, auditable code.

This project is the only one that benefits from economies of scale, rather than being paralyzed by exponential crises of scale. That's because any open, free tool adopted by any public institution – like the Eurostack services – can be audited, localized, pen-tested, debugged and improved by institutions in every other country.

It's a commons, more like a science than a technology, in that it is universal and international and collaborative. We don't have dueling western and Chinese principles of structural engineering. Rather, we have universal principles for making sure buildings don't fall down, adapted to local circumstances.

We wouldn't tolerate secrecy in the calculations used to keep our buildings upright, and we shouldn't tolerate opacity in the software that keeps our tractors, hearing aids, ventilators, pacemakers, trains, games consoles, phones, CCTVs, door locks, and government ministries working.

The thing is, software is not an asset, it's a liability. The capabilities that running software delivers – automation, production, analysis and administration – those are assets. But the software itself? That's a liability. Brittle, fragile, forever breaking down as the software upstream of it, downstream of it, and adjacent to it is updated or swapped out, revealing defects and deficiencies in systems that may have performed well for years.

Shifting software to commons-based production is a way to reduce the liability that software imposes on its makers and users, balancing out that liability among many players.

Now, obviously, tech bosses are totally clueless when it comes to this. They really do think that software is an asset. That's why they're so fucking horny to have chatbots shit out software at superhuman speeds. That's why they think it's good that they've got a chatbot that "produces a thousand times more code than a human programmer."

Producing code that isn't designed for legibility and maintainability, that is optimized, rather, for speed of production, is a way to incur tech debt at scale.

This is a neat encapsulation of the whole AI story: the chatbot can't do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with a chatbot that can't do your job.

Your boss is an easy mark for that chatbot hustler because your boss hates you. In their secret hearts, bosses understand that if they stopped coming to work, the business would run along just fine, but if the workers stopped showing up, the company would grind to a halt.

Bosses like to tell themselves that they're in the driver's seat, but really, they fear that they're strapped into the back seat playing with a Fisher Price steering wheel. For them, AI is a way to wire the toy steering wheel directly into the company's drive-train. It's the realization of the fantasy of a company without workers.

When I was walking the picket line in Hollywood during the writer's strike, a writer told me that you prompt an AI the same way a studio boss gives shitty notes to a writer's room: "Make me ET, but make it about a dog, and give it a love interest, and a car-chase in the third act."

Say that to a writer's room and they will call you a fucking idiot suit and tell you "Why don't you go back to your office and make a spreadsheet, you nitwit. The grownups here are writing a movie."

Meanwhile, if you give that prompt to a chatbot, it will cheerfully shit out a script exactly to spec. The fact that this script will be terrible and unusable is less important than the prospect of a working life in which no one calls you a fucking idiot suit.

AI dangles the promise of a writer's room without writers, a movie without actors, a hospital without nurses, a coding shop without coders.

When Mark Zuckerberg went on a podcast and announced that the average American had three friends, but wanted 15 friends, and that he could solve this by giving us chatbots instead of friends, we all dunked on him as an out-of-touch billionaire Martian who didn't understand the nature of friendship.

But the reality is that for Zuck, your friends are a problem. Your friends' interactions with you determine how much time you spend on his platforms, and thus how many revenue-generating ads he can show you.

Your friends stubbornly refuse to organize their relationship with you in a way that maximizes the return to his shareholders. So Zuck is over there in Menlo Park, furiously fantasizing about replacing your friends with chatbots, because that way, he can finally realize the dream of a social media service without any socializing.

Rich, powerful people are, at root, solipsists. The only way to amass a billion dollars is to inflict misery and privation on whole populations. The only way to look yourself in the mirror after you've done that, is to convince yourself that those people don't matter, that, in some important sense, they aren't real.

Think of Elon Musk calling everyone who disagrees with him an "NPC,” or all those "Effective Altruists," who claimed the moral high ground by claiming to care about 53 trillion imaginary artificial humans who will come into existence in 10,000 years at the expense of extending moral consideration to people alive today.

Or think of how Trump fired all the US government scientists, and then announced the "Genesis" program, declaring that the US would begin generating annual "moonshot"-scale breakthroughs, with a chatbot. It's science without scientists.

Chatbots can't really do science, but from Trump's perspective, they're still better than scientists, because a chatbot won't ever tell him not to stare at an eclipse, or not to inject bleach. A chatbot won't ever tell him that trans people exist, or that the climate emergency is real.

Powerful people are suckers for AI, because AI fuels the fantasy of a world without people: just a boss and a computer, and no ego-shattering confrontations with people who know how to do things telling you "no."

AI is a way to produce tech debt at scale, to replace skilled writers with defective spicy autocomplete systems, to lose money at a rate not seen in living memory.

Now, compare that with the project of building a post-American internet: a project to reduce tech debt, to unlock America's monopoly trillions and divide them among the world's entrepreneurs (for whom they represent untold profits), and the world's technology users (for whom they represent untold savings); all while building resiliency and sovereignty.

Now, some of you are probably feeling pretty cynical about this right now. After all, your political leaders have demonstrated decades of ineffectual and incompetent deference to the US, and an inability to act, even when the need was dire. If your leaders couldn't act decisively on the climate emergency, what hope do we have of them taking this moment seriously?

But crises precipitate change. Remember when another mad emperor – Vladimir Putin – invaded Ukraine, and Europe experienced a dire energy shortage? In three short years, the continent's solar uptake skyrocketed. The EU went from being 15 years behind in its energy transition, to ten years ahead of schedule.

Because when you're shivering in the dark, a lot of fights you didn't think were worth it are suddenly existential battles you can't afford to lose. Sure, no one wants to argue with a tedious neighbor who has an aesthetic temper tantrum at the thought of a solar panel hanging from their neighbor's balcony.

But when it's winter, and there's no Russian gas, and you're shivering in the dark, then that person can take their aesthetic objection to balcony solar, fold it until it's all corners, and shove it right up their ass.

Besides, we don't need Europe to lead the charge on a post-American internet by repealing anticircumvention. Any country could do it! And the country that gets there first gets to reap the profits from supplying jailbreaking tools to the rest of the world, it gets to be the Disenshittification Nation, and everyone else in the world gets to buy those tools and defend themselves from US tech companies' monetary and privacy plunder.

Just one country has to break the consensus, and the case for every country doing so is the strongest it's ever been. It used to be that countries that depended on USAID had to worry about losing food, medical and cash supports if they pissed off America. But Trump killed USAID, so now that's a dead letter.

Meanwhile, America's status as the planet's most voracious consumer has been gutted by decades of anti-worker, pro-billionaire policies. Today, the US is in the grips of its third consecutive "K-shaped" recovery, that's an economic rally where the rich get richer, and everyone else gets poorer. For a generation, America papered over that growing inequality with easy credit, with everyday Americans funding their consumption with credit cards and second and third mortgages.

So long as they could all afford to keep buying, other countries had to care about America as an export market. But a generation of extraction has left the bottom 90% of Americans struggling to buy groceries and other necessities, carrying crushing debt from skyrocketing shelter, education and medical expenses that they can't hope to pay down, thanks to 50 years of wage stagnation.

The Trump administration has sided firmly with debt collectors, price gougers, and rent extractors. Trump neutered enforcement against rent-fixing platforms like Realpage, restarted debt payments for eight million student borrowers, and killed a plan to make live-saving drugs a little cheaper, leaving Americans to continue to pay the highest drug prices in the world.

Every dollar spent servicing a loan is a dollar that can't go to consumption. And as more and more Americans slip into poverty, the US is gutting programs that spend money on the public's behalf, like SNAP, the food stamps program that helps an ever-larger slice of the American public stave off hunger.

America is chasing the "world without people" dream, where working people have nothing, spend nothing, and turn every penny over to rentiers who promptly flush that money into the stock market, shitcoins, or gambling sites. But I repeat myself.

Even the US military – long a sacrosanct institution – is being kneecapped to enrich rent-seekers. Congress just killed a military "right to repair" law. So now, US soldiers stationed abroad will have to continue the Pentagon's proud tradition of shipping materiel from generators to jeeps back to America to be fixed by their manufacturers at a 10,000% markup, because the Pentagon routinely signs maintenance contracts that prohibit it from teaching a Marine how to fix an engine.

The post-American world is really coming on fast. As we repeal our anticircumvention laws, we don't have to care what America thinks, we don't have to care about their tariffs, because they're already whacking us with tariffs; and because the only people left in the US who can afford to buy things are rich people, who just don't buy enough stuff. There's only so many Lambos and Sub-Zeros even the most guillotineable plute can usefully own.

But what if European firms want to go on taking advantage of anticircumvention laws? Well, there's good news there, too. "Good news," because the EU firms that rely on anticircumvention are engaged in the sleaziest, most disgusting frauds imaginable.

Anticircumvention law is the reason that Volkswagen could get away with Dieselgate. By imposing legal liability on reverse-engineers who might have discovered this lethal crime, Article 6 of the Copyright Directive created a chilling effect, and thousands of Europeans died, every year.

Today, Germany's storied automakers are carrying on the tradition of Dieselgate, sabotaging their cars to extract rent from drivers. From Mercedes, which rents you the accelerator pedal in your luxury car, only unlocking the full acceleration curve of your engine if you buy a monthly subscription; to BMW, which rents you the automated system that automatically dims your high-beams if there's oncoming traffic.

Legalize jailbreaking and any mechanic in Europe could unlock those subscription features for one price, and not share any of that money with BMW and Mercedes.

Then there's Medtronic, a company that pretends it is Irish. Medtronic is the world's largest med-tech company, having purchased all their competitors, and then undertaken the largest "tax-inversion" in history, selling themselves to a tiny Irish firm, in order to magick their profits into a state of untaxable grace, floating in the Irish Sea.

Medtronic supplies the world's most widely used ventilators, and it booby-traps them the same way John Deere booby-traps its tractors. After a hospital technician puts a new part in a Medtronic ventilator, the ventilator's central computing unit refuses to recognize the part until it completes a cryptographic handshake, proving that an authorized Medtronic technician was paid hundreds of euros to certify a repair that the hospital's own technician probably performed.

It's just a way to suck hundreds of euros out of hospitals every time a ventilator breaks. This would be bad enough, but during the covid lockdowns, when every ventilator was desperately needed, and when the planes stopped flying, there was no way for a Medtronic tech to come and bless the hospital technicians' repairs. This was lethal. It killed people.

There's one more European company that relies on anticircumvention that I want to discuss here, because they're old friends of CCC: that's the Polish train company Newag. Newag sabotages its own locomotives, booby-trapping them so that if they sense they have been taken to a rival's service yard, the train bricks itself. When the train operator calls Newag about this mysterious problem, the company "helpfully" remotes into the locomotive's computers, to perform "diagnostics," which is just sending a unbricking command to the vehicle, a service for which they charge 20,000 euros.

Last year, Polish hackers from the security research firm Dragon Sector presented on their research into this disgusting racket in this very hall, and now, they're being sued by Newag under anticircumvention law, for making absolutely true disclosures about Newag's deliberately defective products.

So these are the European stakeholders for anticircumvention law: the Dieselgate killers, the car companies who want to rent you your high-beams and accelerator, the med-tech giant that bricked all the ventilators during the pandemic, and the company that tied Poland to the train-tracks.

I relish the opportunity to fight these bastards in Brussels, as they show up and cry "Won't someone think of the train saboteurs?"

The enshittification of technology – the decay of the platforms and systems we rely on – has many causes: the collapse of competition, regulatory capture, the smashing of tech workers' power. But most of all, enshittification is the result of anticircumvention law's ban on interoperability.

By blocking interop, by declaring war on the general-purpose computer, our policy-makers created an enshittogenic environment that rewarded companies for being shitty, and ushered in the enshittocene, in which everything is turning to shit.

Let's call time on enshittification. Let's seize the means of computation. Let's build the drop-in, free, open, auditable alternatives to the services and firmware we rely on.

Let's end the era of silos. I mean, isn't it fucking weird how you have to care which network someone is using if you want to talk to them? Instead of just deciding who you want to talk to?

The fact that you have to figure out whether the discussion you're trying to join is on Twitter or Bluesky, Mastodon or Instagram – that is just the most Prodigy/AOL/Compuserve-ass way of running a digital world. I mean, 1990 called and they want their walled gardens back

Powerful allies are joining our side in the War on General Purpose Computation. It's not just people like us, who've been fighting for this whole goddamned century, but also countries that want to convert American tech's hoarded trillions into fuel for a single-use rocket that boosts their own tech sector into a stable orbit.

It's national security hawks who are worried about Trump bricking their ministries or their tractors, and who are also worried – with just cause – about Xi Jinping bricking all their solar inverters and batteries. Because, after all, the post-American internet is also a post-Chinese internet!

Nothing should be designed to be field updatable without the user's permission. Nothing critical should be a black box.

Like I said at the start of this talk, I have been doing this work for 24 years at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, throwing myself at a door that was double-locked and deadbolted, and now that door is open a crack and goddammit, I am hopeful.

Not optimistic. Fuck optimism! Optimism is the idea that things will get better no matter what we do. I know that what we do matters. Hope is the belief that if we can improve things, even in small ways, we can ascend the gradient toward the world we want, and attain higher vantage points from which new courses of action, invisible to us here at our lower elevation, will be revealed.

Hope is a discipline. It requires that you not give in to despair. So I'm here to tell you: don't despair.

All this decade, all over the world, countries have taken up arms against concentrated corporate power. We've had big, muscular antitrust attacks on big corporations in the US (under Trump I and Biden); in Canada; in the UK; in the EU and member states like Germany, France and Spain; in Australia; in Japan and South Korea and Singapore; in Brazil; and in China.

This is a near-miraculous turn of affairs. All over the world, governments are declaring war on monopolies, the source of billionaires' wealth and power.

Even the most forceful wind is invisible. We can only see it by its effects. What we're seeing here is that whenever a politician bent on curbing corporate power unfurls a sail, no matter where in the world that politician is, that sail fills with wind and propels the policy in ways that haven't been seen in generations.

The long becalming of the fight over corporate power has ended, and a fierce, unstoppable wind is blowing. It's not just blowing in Europe, or in Canada, or in South Korea, Japan, China, Australia or Brazil. It's blowing in America, too. Never forget that as screwed up and terrifying as things are in America, the country has experienced, and continues to experience, a tsunami of antitrust bills and enforcement actions at the local, state and federal level.

And never forget that the post-American internet will be good for Americans. Because, in a K-shaped, bifurcated, unequal America, the trillions that American companies loot from the world don't trickle down to Americans. The average American holds a portfolio of assets that rounds to zero, and that includes stock in US tech companies.

The average American isn't a shareholder in Big Tech, the average American is a victim of Big Tech. Liberating the world from US Big Tech is also liberating America from US Big Tech.

That's been EFF's mission for 35 years. It's been my mission at EFF for 25 years. If you want to get involved in this fight – and I hope you do – it can be your mission, too. You can join EFF, and you can join groups in your own country, like Netzpolitik here in Germany, or the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, or La Quadrature du Net in France, or the Open Rights Group in the UK, or EF Finland, or ISOC Bulgaria, XNet, DFRI, Quintessenz, Bits of Freedom, Openmedia, FSFE, or any of dozens of organizations around the world.

The door is open a crack, the wind is blowing, the post-American internet is upon us: a new, good internet that delivers all the technological self-determination of the old, good internet, and the ease of use of Web 2.0 so that our normie friends can use it, too.

And I can't wait for all of us to get to hang out there. It's gonna be great.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• The Enshittifinancial Crisis https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-enshittifinancial-crisis/

• Austrian Supreme Court: Meta must give users full access to their data https://noyb.eu/en/austrian-supreme-court-meta-must-give-users-full-access-their-data

• the myth of merit in the managerial class https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-merit-in-the-managerial

• ECI, Ethical Computing Initiative https://aol.codeberg.page/eci/

• BMW Patents Proprietary Screws That Only Dealerships Can Remove https://carbuzz.com/bmw-roundel-logo-screw-patent/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Online sf mag Infinite Matrix goes out with a bang – new Gibson, Rucker, Kelly https://web.archive.org/web/20060101120510/https://www.infinitematrix.net/

#20yrsago Wil McCarthy’s wonderful “Hacking Matter” as a free download https://web.archive.org/web/20060103052051/http://wilmccarthy.com/hm.htm

#15yrsago Papa Sangre: binaural video game with no video https://web.archive.org/web/20101224170833/http://www.papasangre.com/

#15yrsago DDoS versus human rights organizations https://cyber.harvard.edu/publications/2010/DDoS_Independent_Media_Human_Rights

#15yrsago Why I have a public email address https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/dec/21/keeping-email-address-secret-spambots

#15yrsago How the FCC failed the nation on Net Neutrality https://web.archive.org/web/20101224075655/https://www.salon.com/technology/network_neutrality/index.html?story=/tech/dan_gillmor/2010/12/21/fcc_network_neutrality

#15yrsago Bankster robberies: Bank of America and friends wrongfully foreclose on customers, steal all their belongings https://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/22/business/22lockout.html?_r=1&hp

#10yrsago India’s deadly exam-rigging scandal: murder, corruption, suicide and scapegoats https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/17/the-mystery-of-indias-deadly-exam-scam

#10yrsago Copyright infringement “gang” raided by UK cops: 3 harmless middle-aged karaoke fans https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/12/uk-police-busts-karaoke-gang-for-sharing-songs-that-arent-commercially-available/

#10yrsago IETF approves HTTP error code 451 for Internet censorship https://web.archive.org/web/20151222155906/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-http-451-error-code-for-censorship-is-now-an-internet-standard

#10yrsago Billionaire Sheldon Adelson secretly bought newspaper, ordered all hands to investigate judges he hated https://web.archive.org/web/20151220081546/http://www.reviewjournal.com/news/las-vegas/judge-adelson-lawsuit-subject-unusual-scrutiny-amid-review-journal-sale

#10yrsago Tax havens hold $7.6 trillion; 8% of world’s total wealth https://web.archive.org/web/20160103142942/https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/01/14/parking-the-big-money/

#10yrsago Mansplaining Lolita https://lithub.com/men-explain-lolita-to-me/

#10yrsago Lifelock admits it lied in its ads (again), agrees to $100M fine https://web.archive.org/web/20151218000258/https://consumerist.com/2015/12/17/identity-theft-company-lifelock-once-again-failed-to-actually-keep-identities-protected-must-pay-100m/

#10yrsago Uninsured driver plows through gamer’s living-room wall and creams him mid-Fallout 4 https://www.gofundme.com/f/helpforbenzo

#10yrsago Juniper Networks backdoor confirmed, password revealed, NSA suspected https://www.wired.com/2015/12/juniper-networks-hidden-backdoors-show-the-risk-of-government-backdoors/

#10yrsago A survivalist on why you shouldn’t bug out https://waldenlabs.com/10-reasons-not-to-bug-out/

#1yrago Nurses whose shitty boss is a shitty app https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point

#1yrago Proud to be a blockhead https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/21/blockheads-r-us/#vocational-awe

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Denver: Enshittification at Tattered Cover Colfax, Jan 22
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-live-at-tattered-cover-colfax-tickets-1976644174937

• Colorado Springs: Guest of Honor at COSine, Jan 23-25
  https://www.firstfridayfandom.org/cosine/

• Ottawa: Enshittification at Perfect Books, Jan 28
  https://www.instagram.com/p/DS2nGiHiNUh/

• Toronto: Enshittification and the Age of Extraction with Tim Wu, Jan 30
  https://nowtoronto.com/event/cory-doctorow-and-tim-wu-enshittification-and-extraction/

Recent appearances (permalink)

• The Enshitification Life Cycle with David Dayen (Organized Money)
  https://www.buzzsprout.com/2412334/episodes/18399894

• Enshittificaition on The Last Show With David Cooper:
  https://www.iheart.com/podcast/256-the-last-show-with-david-c-31145360/episode/cory-doctorow-enshttification-december-16-2025-313385767

• (Digital) Elbows Up (OCADU)
  https://vimeo.com/1146281673

• How to Stop “Ensh*ttification” Before It Kills the Internet (Capitalisn't)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34gkIvYiHxU

• Enshittification on The Daily Show
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2e-c9SF5nE

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 (thebezzle.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:

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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

• A perfect distillation of the social uselessness of finance: A final thought for the yule.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Droidflake; Spy Skymall; Malthus is a dope; Happy Public Domain Day 2025.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For now.

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

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Meta Is Considering Charging Business Pages To Post Links https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/meta-considering-charging-business-pages-to-post-links/808099/

• The original Mozilla "Dinosaur" logo artwork https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/12/the-original-mozilla-dinosaur-logo-artwork/

• A Local Self-Reliance Agenda for New York City: ILSR’s Memo to Mamdani https://ilsr.org/articles/memo-mamdani/

• Apple loses its appeal of a scathing contempt ruling in iOS payments case https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/12/epic-celebrates-the-end-of-the-apple-tax-after-appeals-court-win-in-ios-payments-case/

• The Internet’s Tollbooth Operators https://prospect.org/2025/12/10/internets-tollbooth-operators-wu-review/

• Barnum's Law of CEOs https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2025/12/barnums-law-of-ceos.html

• Google Starts Sharing All Your Text Messages With Your Employer https://archive.ph/wE2U7#selection-3936.0-3936.1

Object permanence (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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

• Denver: Enshittification at Tattered Cover Colfax, Jan 22
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-live-at-tattered-cover-colfax-tickets-1976644174937

• Colorado Springs: Guest of Honor at COSine, Jan 23-25
  https://www.firstfridayfandom.org/cosine/

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Enshittification on The Last Show With David Cooper:
  https://www.iheart.com/podcast/256-the-last-show-with-david-c-31145360/episode/cory-doctorow-enshttification-december-16-2025-313385767

• (Digital) Elbows Up (OCADU)
  https://vimeo.com/1146281673

• How to Stop “Ensh*ttification” Before It Kills the Internet (Capitalisn't)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34gkIvYiHxU

• Enshittification on The Daily Show
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2e-c9SF5nE

• Enshittification with Four Ways to Change the World (Channel 4)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZQaEeuuI3Q

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 (thebezzle.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: John Naughton (https://memex.naughtons.org/).

Currently writing:

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

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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https://doctorow.medium.com/

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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

• Happy Public Domain Day 2026! The best way to cut through the hellishly complex thicket and bring our culture back to life.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Weird D&D advice; Email sabbaticals.
• 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.

Happy Public Domain Day 2026! (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Dashiell Hammett's Maltese Falcon

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

• The first four Nancy Drew books

• The first Dick and Jane book

• TS Eliot's Ash Wednesday

• Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men

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

• Somerset Maugham's Cakes and Ale

• Bertrand Russell's The Conquest of Happiness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hey look at this (permalink)

• NVIDIA Isn't Enron – So What Is It? https://www.wheresyoured.at/nvidia-isnt-enron-so-what-is-it/

• How Google Maps quietly allocates survival across London’s restaurants – and how I built a dashboard to see through it https://laurenleek.substack.com/p/how-google-maps-quietly-allocates

• Who do they think you are? https://hidden-selves.wove.co/

• Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea. https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horrible-no-good-idea/

• Mobile Voting Project’s vote-by-smartphone has real security gaps https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2025/12/16/mobile-voting-projects-vote-by-smartphone-has-real-security-gaps/

Object permanence (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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

• Denver: Enshittification at Tattered Cover Colfax, Jan 22
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-live-at-tattered-cover-colfax-tickets-1976644174937

• Colorado Springs: Guest of Honor at COSine, Jan 23-25
  https://www.firstfridayfandom.org/cosine/

Recent appearances (permalink)

• (Digital) Elbows Up (OCADU)
  https://vimeo.com/1146281673

• How to Stop “Ensh*ttification” Before It Kills the Internet (Capitalisn't)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34gkIvYiHxU

• Enshittification on The Daily Show
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2e-c9SF5nE

• Enshittification with Four Ways to Change the World (Channel 4)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZQaEeuuI3Q

• The Plan is to Make the Internet Worse. Forever. (Novarra Media)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wE8G-d7SnY

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 (thebezzle.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

• America's collapsing consumption is the world's disenshittification opportunity: America's loss is the post-American internet's gain.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: DanKam; Backyard M*A*S*H; Blockchain voting is bullshit.
• 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://archive.is/WAMWI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hey look at this (permalink)

• The Ross Dowson Archive https://archive.org/details/rossdowson?tab=collection

• The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Criticizing AI https://distro.f-91w.club/reverse-centaur/reverse-centaur_imposed.pdf

• Daddy-Daughter Podcast, 2025 Edition https://craphound.com/news/2025/12/14/daddy-daughter-podcast-2025-edition/

• Old Teslas Are Falling Apart https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/old-teslas-falling-apart

• EFF Launches Age Verification Hub as Resource Against Misguided Laws https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-launches-age-verification-hub-resource-against-misguided-laws

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago PSP 2.01 firmware unlocked https://web.archive.org/web/20060115012844/https://psp3d.com/showthread.php?t=874

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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

• Denver: Enshittification at Tattered Cover Colfax, Jan 22
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-live-at-tattered-cover-colfax-tickets-1976644174937

• Colorado Springs: Guest of Honor at COSine, Jan 23-25
  https://www.firstfridayfandom.org/cosine/

Recent appearances (permalink)

• (Digital) Elbows Up (OCADU)
  https://vimeo.com/1146281673

• How to Stop “Ensh*ttification” Before It Kills the Internet (Capitalisn't)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34gkIvYiHxU

• Enshittification on The Daily Show
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2e-c9SF5nE

• Enshittification with Four Ways to Change the World (Channel 4)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZQaEeuuI3Q

• The Plan is to Make the Internet Worse. Forever. (Novarra Media)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wE8G-d7SnY

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 (thebezzle.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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