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🖋 Cory DOCTOROW
Science fiction author, activist and journalist
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PLURALISTIC

▸ les 10 dernières parutions

13.04.2026 à 07:29

Pluralistic: Austerity creates fascism (13 Apr 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4540 mots)


Today's links

  • Austerity creates fascism: We can't afford to not afford nice things.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: The Server of Amontillado; Flapper's Dictionary; Mastercard v rec.humor.funny; Philippines electoral data breach; A front page from the Trump presidency; Spike Lee x Bernie Sanders; France v password hashing; Algorithms as Central European folk-dances; Save Comcast; Lex Luthor v export controls; Zuckerberg in the dock.
  • Upcoming appearances: Toronto, San Francisco, London, Berlin, NYC, Hay-on-Wye, London.
  • 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 line of Nazis at the Nuremburg rally, throwing Nazi salutes. Their backs are to us. Facing them is a hand-tinted group of child laborers from the early 20th century, squinting suspiciously at them.

Austerity creates fascism (permalink)

I'm worried about AI psychosis. Specifically, I'm worried about the psychosis that makes our "capital allocators" spend $1.4T on the money-losingest technology in the history of the human race, in pursuit of a bizarre fantasy that if we teach the word-guessing program enough words, it will take all the jobs. That's some next-level underpants-gnomery:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/12/normal-technology/#bubble-exceptionalism

The thing that worries me about billionaires' AI psychosis isn't concern for their financial solvency. No, what I worry about is what happens when the seven companies that comprise a third of the S&P 500 stop trading the same $100b IOU around while pretending it's in all of their bank accounts at once and implode, vaporizing a third of the US stock market.

My concern about a massive collapse in the capital markets isn't that workers will suffer directly. Despite all the Wonderful Life rhetoric about your money being in Joe's house and the Kennedy house and Mrs Macklin's house, the reality is that the median US worker has $955 saved for retirement. You could nuke the whole financial system and not take a dime out of most workers' pockets:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/955-saved-for-retirement-millions-are-in-that-boat-150003868.html

No, the thing that has me terrified about AI is that when it craters and takes the economy with it, that we will respond the same way we have during every financial crisis of the 21st century: with austerity, and austerity breeds fascism.

There's a direct line from every K-shaped recovery to every strong-man who's currently sending masked gunmen into the streets. The Hungarian dictator Viktor Orban rose to power after people who'd been suckered into denominating their mortgages in Swiss francs lost their houses when the currency markets moved suddenly, because the swindlers who'd sold them those mortgages took the position that wanting to live somewhere automatically made you an expert in forex risk, so caveat fuckin' emptor, baby.

Back in America, Obama decided to bail out the banks and not the people. His treasury secretary Tim Geithner told him the banks were headed for a catastrophic crash and could only be saved if he "foamed the runways" with everyday Americans' mortgages. Millions of Americans lost their homes to foreclosure as banks, flush with public cash, threw them out of their homes and then flipped them to investment banks who became the country's worst slumlords:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/08/wall-street-landlords/#the-new-slumlords

Americans were understandably not entirely happy with this outcome. So when Hillary Clinton replied to Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" with "America is already great," her message was, "Vote for me if you think everything is great; vote for Trump if you think everything is fucked":

https://www.politico.com/blogs/2016-dem-primary-live-updates-and-results/2016/03/clinton-america-is-already-great-220078

"Austerity begets fascism" is one of those things that makes a lot of intuitive sense, but it turns out that there's a good empirical basis for believing it. In "Public Service Decline and Support for the Populist Right" four economists from the LSE and Bocconi provide an excellent look at the linkage between austerity and support for fascists:

https://catherinedevries.eu/NHS.pdf

Here's how they break it down. Political scientists have assembled a large, reproducible body of evidence to show that "public service provision is crucial to people’s perceptions of their quality of life and living standards." Good public services are the basis for "the social contract between rulers and the ruled" – pay your taxes and obey the laws, and in return, you will be well served.

When public services go wrong, people don't always know who to blame, but they definitely notice that something is going wrong, so when public services fail, people stop trusting the state, and that social contract starts to fray. They start to suspect that elites are lining their pockets rather than managing the system, and they "withdraw their support" for the system.

Fascists thrive in these conditions. Fascists come to power by mobilizing grievances. By choosing a scapegoat, fascists can create support from people who are justifiably furious that the services they rely on have collapsed. So when you can't get shelter, or health care, or elder care, or child care, or an education for your kids, you become a mark for a fascist grifter with a story about "undeserving migrants" who've taken the benefits that should rightly accrue to "deserving natives."

(This is grimly hilarious, given that the wizened, decrepit rich world is critically dependent on migrants as a source of healthy, working-age workers who pay massive amounts into the system while barely making use of it, many of whom plan on retiring to their home countries when they do reach the age where they're likely to extract a net loss to the benefits system.)

Enter the NHS, a beloved institution that is hailed as the pride of the nation by both the political left and the right. The majority of Britons use the NHS, with only 12-14% of the population "going private," so when the NHS declines, everybody notices (what's more, even people with private care use the NHS for many of their needs).

Britons love the NHS and they want the government to spend more on it. There's "a broad public consensus that the government is not going far enough when it comes to funding." That's because generations of cuts to the NHS have left it substantially hollowed out, with major parts of the service handed over to for-profit entities who overcharge and underserve.

The most tangible and immediate evidence of this slow-motion collapse comes when your local general practitioner ("family doctor" or "primary care physician" in Americanese) shuts down. The UK has lost 1,700 GP practices since 2013.

Reasoning that a GP closure would make people angry at the system, the economists behind the paper wanted to see what happened to people's political beliefs when their GP's office shut. They relied on the GP Patient Survey, a longitudinal study run by NHS England and Ipsos Mori. The survey polls a statistically significant random sample of patients from every GP practice in the NHS and then weights the results "to reflect the demographic characteristics of the local population according to UK Census estimates." It's good data.

The researchers cross-referenced this with various high-quality instruments that measured the political views of Britons, like the U Essex Understanding Society Panel, drawing on 13 years' worth of surveys from 2009-2022, gaining access to a protected version of the dataset with fine-grained geographic information about survey respondents, which allowed them to link responses to the "catchment areas" for specific GPs' office. They combined this data with the British Election Study panel, which has surveyed voters 29 times since 2014.

Most of the paper describes the careful work the researchers did to analyze, cross-reference and validate this data, but what interested me was the conclusion: that people who see a severe degradation in the quality of the services they rely on switch their political affiliation to one of Britain's fascist parties – UKIP, the Brexit Party, or Reform – parties that have called for ethnic cleansing in Britain.

This is what has me scared. We can see the looming economic crises in our near future. If it's not the AI crash that triggers the next wave of austerity, it'll be the oil crisis created by Trump's bungling in the Strait of Epstein. And of course, we could always get a twofer, because the Gulf States that were pouring hundreds of billions into AI data-centers now need every cent to rebuild the LNG shipping terminals and oil refineries that Iran blew up after Trump, Hegseth, and Netanyahu started murdering all the schoolgirls they could target. Once they nope out of the AI bubble, that could trigger the collapse.

This is a study about the NHS, but it's not just about the NHS. It's perfectly reasonable to assume that people react this way when they experience cuts to their road maintenance, their schools, their community centers, and any other service they rely on. Fascism – what Hannah Arendt called 'organized loneliness' – can only take root when people stop believing that their society will reward their lawfulness with an orderly and humane existence.

The crisis is coming, but whether we do austerity when it gets here is our choice. Everywhere we turn, political leaders are rejecting generations of failed austerity in favor of "sewer socialism" – the idea that you get people to trust their government by earning that trust. Zohran Mamdani is fixing 100,000 potholes in the first 100 days, despite the multi-billion dollar deficit that outgoing Mayor Eric Adams created by "running the city like a business":

https://prospect.org/2026/04/10/zohran-mamdani-getting-new-york-city-believe-in-government/

In Canada and the UK, party leaders like Avi Lewis (NDP) and Zack Polanski (Greens) are vowing to fight the coming crises by spending, not cutting. Compare that with UK fascist leader Nigel Farage, who says that if he's elected, he'll create a "paramilitary style" British ICE, building concentration camps for 24,000 migrants, with the hope of deporting 288,000 people per year:

https://www.thenerve.news/p/reform-deportation-operation-restoring-justice-data-surveillance-palantir-uk-labour

"Socialism or barbarism" isn't just a cliche – it's actually a choice on the ballot.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago The Server of Amontillado https://web.archive.org/web/20070112024841/http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20010409S0012

#25yrsago Mastercard threatens the moderator of rec.humor.funny https://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/01/Apr/mcrhf.html

#15yrsago Sweden exports sweatshops: Ikea’s first American factory https://web.archive.org/web/20190404035900/https://www.latimes.com/business/la-xpm-2011-apr-10-la-fi-ikea-union-20110410-story.html

#15yrsago Canada’s New Democratic Party promises national broadband and net neutrality https://web.archive.org/web/20110412064952/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5734/125/

#15yrsago Flapper’s dictionary: 1922 https://bookflaps.blogspot.com/2011/04/flappers-dictionary.html

#15yrsago Toronto’s Silver Snail to leave Queen Street West https://web.archive.org/web/20110409181737/http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/article/970520–the-silver-snail-comics-icon-sold-to-move

#15yrsago WI county clerk whose homemade voting software found 14K votes for Tea Party judge is an old hand at illegal campaigning https://web.archive.org/web/20110412121323/http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/elections/article_7e777016-62b2-11e0-9b74-001cc4c002e0.html

#15yrsago Canadian Tories’ campaign pledge: We will spy on the Internet https://web.archive.org/web/20110412125250/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5733/125/

#15yrsago France to require unhashed password storage https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-12983734

#15yrsago Central European folk-dancers illustrated sorting algorithms https://www.i-programmer.info/news/150-training-a-education/2255-sorting-algorithms-as-dances.html

#10yrsago Save Comcast! https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/save-comcast

#10yrsago Goldman Sachs will pay $5B for fraudulent sales of toxic debt, no one will go to jail https://web.archive.org/web/20160412155435/https://consumerist.com/2016/04/11/goldman-sachs-to-pay-5b-to-settle-charges-of-selling-troubled-mortgages-ahead-of-the-financial-crisis/

#10yrsago How could Lex Luthor beat the import controls on kryptonite? https://lawandthemultiverse.com/2016/04/11/batman-v-superman-and-import-licenses/

#10yrsago Congresscritters spend 4 hours/day on the phone, begging for money https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ylomy1Aw9Hk

#10yrsago Philippines electoral data breach much worse than initially reported, possibly worst ever https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/every-voter-in-philippines-exposed/

#10yrsago A cashless society as a tool for censorship and social control https://web.archive.org/web/20260311032317/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/cashless-society/477411/

#10yrsago Boston Globe previews a front page from the Trump presidency https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/2797782/Ideas-Trump-front-page.pdf

#10yrsago Spike Lee interviews Bernie Sanders: Vermont, Trump, Clinton, guns and Brooklyn https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/bernie-sanders-interviewed-by-spike-lee-thr-new-york-issue-880788/

#5yrsago Youtube blocks advertisers from targeting "Black Lives Matter" https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/10/brand-safety-rupture/#brand-safety

#5yrsago Google's short-lived data-advantage https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/11/halflife/#minatory-legend

#1yrago Zuckerberg in the dock https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/11/it-is-better-to-buy/#than-to-compete

#1yrago The most remarkable thing about antitrust (that no one talks about) https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/10/solidarity-forever-2/#oligarchism

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

  • "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

Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection):

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

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF

11.04.2026 à 15:34

Pluralistic: Don't Be Evil (11 Apr 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3531 mots)


Today's links


A sci-fi pulp robot holding a grotesque inverted severed head of a beared man aloft, zapping it with rays from its eye-visor. Behind the robot is a scene of collapsing Roman pillars.

Don't Be Evil (permalink)

How I knew I was officially Old: I stopped being disoriented by the experience of meeting with grown-ass adults who wanted to thank me for the books of mine they'd read in their childhoods, which helped shape their lives. Instead of marveling that a book that felt to me like it was ten seconds old was a childhood favorite of this full-grown person, I was free to experience the intense gratification of knowing I'd helped this person find their way, and intense gratitude that they'd told me about it (including you, Sean – it was nice to meet you last night at Drawn and Quarterly in Montreal!).

Now that I am Old, I find myself dwelling on key junctures from my life. It's not nostalgia ("Nostalgia is a toxic impulse" – J. Hodgman) – rather, it's an attempt to figure out how I got here ("My god! What have I done?" – D. Byrne), and also, how the world got this way.

There's one incident I return to a lot, a moment that didn't feel momentous at the time, but which, on reflection, seems to have a lot to say about this moment – both for me, and for the world we live in.

Back in the late 1990s, I co-founded a dotcom company, Opencola. It was a "free/open, peer-to-peer search and recommendation system." The big idea was that we could combine early machine learning technology with Napster-style P2P file sharing and a web-crawler to help you find things that would interest you. The way it was gonna work was that you'd have a folder on your desktop and you could put things in it that you liked and the system would crawl other users' folders, and the open web, and copy things into your folder that it found that seemed related to the stuff you liked. You could refine the system's sensibilities by thumbs-up/thumbs-downing the suggestions, and it would refine its conception of your preferences over time. As with Napster and its successors, you could also talk to the people whose collections enriched your own, allowing you to connect with people who shared even your most esoteric interests.

Opencola didn't make it. Our VCs got greedy when Microsoft offered to buy us and tried to grab all the equity away from the founders. I quit and went to EFF, and my partners got very good jobs at Microsoft, and the company was bought for its tax-credits by Opentext, and that was that.

(Well, not quite – several of the programmers who worked on the project have rebooted it, which is very cool!)

https://opencola.io/

But back in the Opencola days, we three partners would have these regular meetings where we'd brainstorm ways that we could make money off of this extremely cool, but frankly very noncommercial idea. As with any good brainstorming session, there were "no bad ideas," so sometimes we would veer off into fanciful territory, or even very evil territory.

It's one of those evil ideas that I keep coming back to. Sometimes, during these money-making brainstorm sessions, we'd decompose the technology we were working on into its component parts to see if any subset of them might make money ("Be the first person to not do something no one has ever not done before" – B. Eno).

We had a (by contemporary standards, primitive) machine-learning system; we had a web crawler; and we had a keen sense of how the early web worked. In particular, we were really interested in a new, Linux-based search tool that used citation analysis – a close cousin to our own collaborative filter, harnessing latent clues about relevance implicit in the web's structure – to produce the best search results the web had ever seen. Like us, this company had no idea how to make money, so we were watching it very carefully. That company was called "Google."

That's where the evil part came in. We were pretty sure we could extract a list of the 100,000 most commonly searched terms from Google, and then we could use our web-crawler to capture the top 100 results for each. We could feed these to our Bayesian machine-learning tool to create statistical models of the semantic structure of these results, and then we could generate thousands of pages of word-salad for each of those keywords that matched those statistical models, along with interlinks that could trick Google's citation analysis model. Plaster those word-salad pages with ads, and voila – free cash flow!

Of course, we didn't do it. But even as we developed this idea, the room crackled with a kind of dark, excited dread. We weren't any smarter than many other rooms full of people who were engaged in exercises just like this one. The difference was, we loved the web. The idea of someone deliberately poisoning it this way churned our stomachs. The whole point of Opencola was to connect people with each other based on their shared interests. We loved Google and how it helped you find the people who wrote the web in ways that delighted and informed you. This kind of spam, aimed at wrecking Google's ability to help people make sense of the things we were all posting to the internet, was…grotesque.

I didn't know the term then, but what we were doing amounted to "red-teaming" – thinking through the ways that attackers could destroy something that we valued. Later, we tried "blue-teaming," trying to imagine how our tools might help us fight back if someone else got the same idea and went through with it.

I didn't know the term "blue-teaming" then, either. Once I learned these terms, they brought a lot of clarity to the world. Today, I have another term that I turn to when I am trying to rally other people who love the internet and want it to be good: "Tron-pilled." Tron "fought for the user." Lots of us technologists are Tron-pilled. Back in the early days, when it wasn't clear that there was ever going to be any money in this internet thing, being Tron-pilled was pretty much the only reason to get involved with it. Sure, there were a few monsters who fell into the early internet because it offered them a chance to torment strangers at a distance, but they were vastly outnumbered by the legion of Tron-pilled nerds who wanted to make the internet better because we wanted all our normie friends to have the same kind of good time we were having.

The point of this is that there were lots of people back then who had the capacity to imagine the kind of gross stuff that Zuckerberg, Musk, and innumerable other scammers, hustlers and creeps got up to on the web. The thing that distinguished these monsters wasn't their genius – it was their callousness. When we brainstormed ways to break the internet, we felt scared and were inspired to try to save it. When they brainstormed ways to break the internet, they created pitch-decks.

And still: the old web was good in so many ways for so long. The Tron-pilled amongst us held the line. When we build a new, good, post-American internet, we're going to need a multitude of Tron-pilled technologists, old and young, who build, maintain – and, above all, defend it.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Trotsky’s assassination – according to the FBI https://web.archive.org/web/20010413212536/http://foia.fbi.gov/trotsky.htm

#25yrsago Online headline-writing guidelines from Jakob Nielsen https://memex.craphound.com/2001/04/09/headline-writing-guidelines-from-legendary-usability/

#25yrsago Floppy-disk stained-glass windows https://web.archive.org/web/20010607052511/http://www.acme.com/jef/crafts/bathroom_windows.html

#15yrsago English school principal announces zero tolerance for mismatched socks https://nationalpost.com/news/u-k-school-cracks-down-on-bad-manners

#1yrago EFF's lawsuit against DOGE will go forward https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/09/cases-and-controversy/#brocolli-haired-brownshirts

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

  • "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

Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection):

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

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF

10.04.2026 à 11:57

Pluralistic: Canny Valley and Creative Commons (10 Apr 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (6760 mots)


Today's links


A mockup of Canny Valley, set into an oil painting of a pastoral scene.

Canny Valley and Creative Commons (permalink)

Last year, I ran a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign to pre-sell my ebooks, audiobooks and hardcovers of my book Enshittification, which went on to be an international bestseller, selling out 10 printings in the first 11 weeks:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/enshittification-the-drm-free-audiobook

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/10/canny-valley#limited-edition

The cover of the Canny Valley paperback, on a worn Persian rug in my office.

I've done many of these Kickstarter campaigns now, and I always try to come up with something special for backers – some limited edition book or tchotchke that lets me scratch my own itch for making beautiful physical things, and also lets a few backers splash out on a truly special item. I've come up with some doozies, like:

  • A hand-copied manuscript for the original, never-before-seen ending for my novel Little Brother

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/attack-surface-audiobook-for-the-third-little-brother-book/rewards

  • Hand-annotated pages making fun of Robert Bork's The Antitrust Paradox, displayed in shadow boxes:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/chokepoint-capitalism-an-audiobook-amazon-wont-sell/rewards

  • A leather bound, extremely limited edition copy of Red Team Blues, with a secret miniature bound copy of the unedited manuscript for The Bezzle in a hidden cavity:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-another-audiobook-that-amazon-wont-sell/rewards

  • And, for Enshittification, Canny Valley, a limited edition book of my collage illustrations from Pluralistic, made from Creative Commons and public domain sources, with an introduction by Bruce Sterling:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/enshittification-the-drm-free-audiobook/rewards

I put 100 copies of Canny Valley up for sale in the Enshittification Kickstarter and all of them sold out in a matter of days. However, as promised at the time, there is a second chance to get a copy of the book, through the Creative Commons 25th anniversary fundraiser, which has just kicked off:

https://mailchi.mp/creativecommons/were-turning-25-book-giveaway

The whole print run for Canny Valley was limited to 500 copies, and it is the only run I will do for the book. 100 copies were sold to Kickstarter backers, I kept 25 for myself, and the remaining 375 are now available as a thank-you gift for people who make tax-deductible gifts to CC.

I have been a great supporter of Creative Commons since its inception – literally, I was around when Aaron Swartz, Matt Haughey and Lisa Rein worked with Larry Lessig to design the data scheme and user interface to create, use and re-use Creative Commons licenses. My debut novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, was the first book ever released under a CC license:

https://craphound.com/down/download

Creative Commons arose out of the copyright wars of the early 2000s, in which the severe deficiencies of using copyright as the primary form of internet regulation were becoming ever clearer. Then – as now – the internet was filling up with material that everyday people produced together, incorporating one another's work, as well as popular works that had meaning to them. Virtually all of this material violated copyright law, and bringing it into compliance would cost hundreds of billions of dollars in billable lawyer hours to draft, negotiate and sign all the licenses needed to avoid both criminal and civil liability.

That's where CC came in: a team of international lawyers standardized a set of legal licenses that did something new and necessary: facilitated sharing and remix, rather than restricting them. Simply apply a CC license to your work – say, a Wikipedia contribution, a Flickr photo, or a story on AO3 – and others would be able to reproduce, adapt and recombine that work with other CC licensed works. What's more, thanks to the heroic efforts of the international CC team, these licenses were able to span borders, languages and legal systems, meaning that a Japanese animator can create a short based on a French story, using Australian 3D assets and a Croatian soundtrack:

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/list.en

It's hard to overstate what a heroic feat of lawyering this is. Making a set of documents that allows creativity to spread freely across 45+ (often very different) legal systems is arguably the most ambitious piece of applied IP legal research ever undertaken. Today, tens of billions of works are CC licensed, including (to name just one example), all of Wikipedia.

I rely heavily on CC licensed works to make the images that run over my posts on Pluralistic, my CC-licensed newsletter. I combine these with public domain images in the GIMP (a powerful free/open Photoshop replacement that runs GNU/Linux, MacOS and Windows) to make my collages, which you can download in high-rez (and freely re-use, thanks to the CC licenses I apply to each of them) from this Flickr set of 350+ items:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/albums/72177720316719208?sd

Canny Valley collects 80 of my favorite collages in a beautiful book that was printed on 100lb Mohawk paper on an Indigo digital offset printer and bound with PVA glue that will last a century, at Pasadena's Typecraft, a family-owned print shop that's been in business for more than 100 years:

https://www.typecraft.com/live2/who-we-are.html

It was designed by the type legend John D Berry:

https://johndberry.com/

And the introduction was written by my friend and mentor, the cyberpunk pioneer and digital art impresario Bruce Sterling:

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

An unflattering collage depicting Elon Musk as a baby in a bathtub, from the interior of the Canny Valley paperback, on a worn Persian rug in my office.

I published a long post that explained my creative process last year, including Bruce's intro (which is also CC licensed). I'm going to reproduce Bruce's intro below, but you can read the whole post here:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

I love these little books and I love that there's a chance for a few more people to lay hands on their own – and I especially love that this will support Creative Commons, an organization that produces digital public goods for a new, good internet:

https://mailchi.mp/creativecommons/were-turning-25-book-giveaway

==

INTRODUCTION

by Bruce Sterling

In 1970 a robotics professor named Masahiro Mori discovered a new problem in aesthetics. He called this "bukimi no tani genshō."

The Japanese robots he built were functional, so the "bukimi no tani" situation was not an engineering problem. It was a deep and basic problem in the human perception of humanlike androids.

A flayed human face with huge, staring eyes, held open with cruel calipers. The calipers' handles bear the 'As Seen On TV' logos. In the center of each pupil is an Amazon Prime logo. Behind this figure is a static-distorted title card for a K-Tel record of the month club ad.

Humble assembly robots, with their claws and swivels, those looked okay to most people. Dolls, puppets and mannequins, those also looked okay.

Living people had always aesthetically looked okay to people. Especially, the pretty ones.

However, between these two realms that the late Dr Mori was gamely attempting to weld together — the world of living mankind and of the pseudo-man-like machine– there was an artistic crevasse. Anything in this "Uncanny Valley" looked, and felt, severely not-okay. These overdressed robots looked and felt so eerie that their creator's skills became actively disgusting. The robots got prettier, but only up to a steep verge. Then they slid down the precipice and became zombie doppelgangers.

The ruins of the Temple of Jupiter, taken in the late 18th century, overlooking a stretch Lebanon. It has been emblazoned with the 1970s-era logo for the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. Before it stands a figure taken from an early 1900s illustrated bible, depicting a Hebrew priest making an offering to the golden calf at the foot of Mt Sinai. The priest's head has been replaced with the head of Milton Friedman. The calf has been adorned with a golden top-hat and a radiating halo of white light.

That's also the issue with the aptly-titled "Canny Valley" art collection here. People already know how to react aesthetically to traditional graphic images. Diagrams are okay. Hand-drawn sketches and cartoons are also okay. Brush-made paintings are mostly fine. Photographs, those can get kind of dodgy.

A photo taken on the Space Shuttle, showing an astronaut pointing at a switch on a control panel. The photo has been altered. The astronaut's head has been replaced with a grinning, horned devil-woman's head. The switch has been replaced with a red-guarded toggle switch, labeled 'SELF-DESTRUCT!' The astronaut's arms have been colorized to match the brick-red skin of the demon head. The background has been slightly blurred. Mike (modified)/https://www.flickr.com/photos/stillwellmike/15676883261/CC BY-SA 2.0/https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

Digital collages that slice up and weld highly disparate elements like diagrams, cartoons, sketches and also photos and paintings, those trend toward the uncanny.

The pixel-juggling means of digital image-manipulation are not art-traditional pencils or brushes. They do not involve the human hand, or maybe not even the human eye, or the human will. They're not fixed on paper or canvas; they're a Frankenstein mash-up landscape of tiny colored screen-dots where images can become so fried that they look and feel "cursed." They're conceptually gooey congelations, stuck in the valley mire of that which is and must be neither this-nor-that.

A scythe-wielding, crook-backed Father Time bends low to stare into the face of a cherubic Baby New Year. Father Time wears a backwards baseball-cap with the Tiktok logo. Baby New Year is waving goodbye and holding a satchel decorated with the 'code waterfall' from the credit sequences of the Wachowskis' 'Matrix' movies. The background is a stormy sky, with a forked lightning striking between the two figures.

A modern digital artist has billions of jpegs in files, folders, clouds and buckets. He's never gonna run out of weightless grist from that mill.

Why would Cory Doctorow — novelist, journalist, activist, opinion columnist and so on — want to lift his typing fingers from his lettered keyboard, so as to create graphics with cut-and-paste and "lasso tools"?

An early 20th century editorial cartoon depicting the Standard Oil Company an a world-spanning octopus clutching the organs of state - White House, Capitol dome, etc - in its tentacles. It has been altered: to its left, curled within its tentacles, stands an early 20th century cartoon depicting Uncle Sam as a policeman with a billyclub, with a DOJ Antitrust Division crest on his chest. On its right, one of its tentacles clutches an early Google 'I'm Feeling Lucky' button. Its head has been colored in with bands in the colors of the Google logo, surmounted by the Chrome logo. Its eyes have been replaced with the eyes of HAL9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' Nestled in one of its armpits is the Android robot. Cryteria (modified)/https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg/CC BY 3.0/https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

Cory Doctorow also has some remarkably tangled, scandalous and precarious issues to contemplate, summarize and discuss. They're not his scandalous private intrigues, though. Instead, they're scandalous public intrigues. Or, at least Cory struggles to rouse some public indignation about these intrigues, because his core topics are the tangled penthouse/slash/underground machinations of billionaire web moguls.

Cory really knows really a deep dank lot about this uncanny nexus of arcane situations. He explains the shameful disasters there, but they're difficult to capture without torrents of unwieldy tech jargon.

I think there are two basic reasons for this.

The important motivation is his own need to express himself by some method other than words.

I'm reminded here of the example of H. G. Wells, another science fiction writer turned internationally famous political pundit. HG Wells was quite a tireless and ambitious writer — so much so that he almost matched the torrential output of Cory Doctorow.

An old woodcut of a disembodied man's hand operating a Ouija board planchette. It has been modified to add an extra finger and thumb. It has been tinted green. It has been placed on a 'code waterfall' backdrop as seen in the credit sequences of the Wachowskis' 'Matrix' movies.

But HG Wells nevertheless felt a compelling need to hand-draw cartoons. He called them "picshuas." These hundreds of "picshuas" were rarely made public. They were usually sketched in the margins of his hand-written letters. Commonly the picshuas were aimed at his second wife, the woman he had renamed "Jane." These picshuas were caricatures, or maybe rapid pen-and-ink conceptual outlines, of passing conflicts, events and situations in the life of Wells. They seemed to carry tender messages to Jane that the writer was unable or unwilling to speak aloud to her. Wells being Wells, there were always issues in his private life that might well pose a challenge to bluntly state aloud: "Oh by the way, darling, I've built a second house in the South of France where I spend my summers with a comely KGB asset, the Baroness Budberg." Even a famously glib and charming writer might feel the need to finesse that.

A Soviet propaganda poster depicting two workers holding flags in front of a locomotive. The flags have been replaced with US flags. The locomotive's face has been replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' The maxim below has been replaced with the lettering from a Walmart 'everyday low prices' sign. The background has been replaced with a posterized grocery aisle. Cryteria (modified)/https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg/CC BY 3.0/https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

Cory Doctorow also has some remarkably tangled, scandalous and precarious issues to contemplate, summarize and discuss. They're not his scandalous private intrigues, though. Instead, they're scandalous public intrigues. Or, at least Cory struggles to rouse some public indignation about these intrigues, because his core topics are the tangled penthouse/slash/underground machinations of billionaire web moguls.

Cory really knows really a deep dank lot about this uncanny nexus of arcane situations. He explains the shameful disasters there, but they're difficult to capture without torrents of unwieldy tech jargon.

A demonic figure cropped from the 'Hell' section of Hieronymus Bosch's 'Garden of Earthly Delights.' She is on all fours, looking over her shoulder. Her entire rectum has been removed, revealing smaller, industrious demonic figures at work inside her guts. Her open rectum has been limned in radioactive acid-green light. Atop her flat hat is an open box of radium suppositories, lid open to reveal (entirely inadequate) health warnings. The background is a dark, abstract damask wallpaper pattern.

So instead, he diligently clips, cuts, pastes, lassos, collages and pastiches. He might, plausibly, hire a professional artist to design his editorial cartoons for him. However, then Cory would have to verbally explain all his political analysis to this innocent graphics guy. Then Cory would also have to double-check the results of the artist and fix the inevitable newbie errors and grave misunderstandings. That effort would be three times the labor for a dogged crusader who is already working like sixty.

It's more practical for him to mash-up images that resemble editorial cartoons.

He can't draw. Also, although he definitely has a pronounced sense of aesthetics, it's not a aesthetic most people would consider tasteful. Cory Doctorow, from his very youth, has always had a "craphound" aesthetic. As an aesthete, Cory is the kind of guy who would collect rain-drenched punk-band flyers that had fallen off telephone poles and store them inside a 1950s cardboard kid-cereal box. I am not scolding him for this. He's always been like that.

A magnified image of the inside of an automated backup tape library, with gleaming racks of silver tape drives receding into the distance. In the foreground is a pile of dirt being shoveled by three figures in prisoner's stripes. Two of the figures' heads have been replaced with cliche hacker-in-hoodie heads, from which shine yellow, inverted Amazon 'smile' logos, such that the smile is a frown. The remaining figure's head has been replaced with a horse's head. Behind the figure is an impatiently poised man in a sharp business suit, glaring at his watch. His head has been replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' Cryteria (modified)/https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg/CC BY 3.0/https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

As Wells used to say about his unique "picshuas," they seemed like eccentric scribblings, but over the years, when massed-up as an oeuvre, they formed a comic burlesque of an actual life. Similarly, one isolated Doctorow collage can seem rather what-the-hell. It's trying to be "canny." If you get it, you get it. If you don't get the first one, then you can page through all of these, and at the end you will probably get it. En masse, it forms the comic burlesque of a digital left-wing cyberspatial world-of-hell. A monster-teeming Silicon Uncanny Valley of extensively raked muck.

Sigmund Freud's study with his famous couch. Behind the couch stands an altered version of the classic Freud portrait in which he is smoking a cigar. Freud's clothes and cigar have all been tinted in bright neon colors. His head has been replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' His legs have been replaced with a tangle of tentacles

There are a lot of web-comix people who like to make comic fun of the Internet, and to mock "the Industry." However, there's no other social and analytical record quite like this one. It has something of the dark affect of the hundred-year-old satirical Dada collages of Georg Schultz or Hannah Hoch. Those Dada collages look dank and horrible because they're "Dada" and pulling a stunt. These images look dank and horrible because they're analytical, revelatory and make sense.

If you do not enjoy contemporary electronic politics, and instead you have somehow obtained an art degree, I might still be able to help you with my learned and well-meaning intro here. I can recommend a swell art-critical book titled "Memesthetics" by Valentina Tanni. I happen to know Dr. Tanni personally, and her book is the cat's pyjamas when it comes to semi-digital, semi-collage, appropriated, Situationiste-detournement, net.art "meme aesthetics." I promise that I could robotically mimic her, and write uncannily like her, if I somehow had to do that. I could even firmly link the graphic works of Cory Doctorow to the digital avant-garde and/or digital folk-art traditions that Valentina Tanni is eruditely and humanely discussing. Like with a lot of robots, the hard part would be getting me to stop.

A painting of Ulysses tied to the mast, beset by flying sirens. The sirens' wings have been replaced with the Bluesky butterfly wing logo. On the deck of Ulysses' trireme is a giant poop emoji.

Cory works with care on his political meme-cartoons — because he is using them to further his own personal analysis, and to personally convince himself. They're not merely sharp and partisan memes, there to rouse one distinct viewer-emotion and make one single point. They're like digital jigsaw-puzzle landscape-sketches — unstable, semi-stolen and digital, because the realm he portrays is itself also unstable, semi-stolen and digital. The cartoons are dirty and messy because the situations he tackles are so dirty and messy. That's the grain of his lampoon material, like the damaged amps in a punk song. A punk song that was licensed by some billionaire and then used to spy on hapless fans with surveillance-capitalism.

A photo of an orange Telemation acoustic coupler next to an avocado-green German 611 dial phone, whose receiver is socketed to the coupler in what Neal Stephenson memorably described as 'a kind of informational soixante-neuf.' The image has been modified to put a colorized version of Woody Guthrie's iconic 'THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS' hand-lettered label on the side of the coupler. Felix Winkelnkemper (modified)/https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Acoustic_Coupler.jpg/CC BY-SA 4.0/https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.

Since that's how it goes, that's also what you're in for. You have been warned, and these collages will warn you a whole lot more.

If you want to aesthetically experience some elegant, time-tested collage art that was created by a major world artist, then you should gaze in wonder at the Max Ernst masterpiece, "Une semaine de bonté" ("A Week of Kindness"). This indefinable "collage novel" aka "artist's book" was created in the troubled time of 1934. It's very uncanny rather than "canny, "and it's also capital-A great Art. As an art critic, I could balloon this essay to dreadful robotic proportions while I explain to you in detail why this weirdo mess is a lasting monument to the expressive power of collage. However, Cory Doctorow is not doing Max Ernst's dreamy, oneiric, enchanting Surrealist art. He would never do that and it wouldn't make any sense if he did.

A heavily armed and armored figure with the head of a foolishly grinning 19th century newsie. He stands in the atrium of a pink, vintage mall.

Cory did this instead. It is art, though. It is what it is, and there's nothing else like it. It's artistic expression as Cory Doctorow has a sincere need to perform that, and in twenty years it will be even more rare and interesting. It's journalism ahead of its time (a little) and with a passage of time, it will become testimonial.

Bruce Sterling — Ibiza MMXXV

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Al Franken wants a balanced war budget #15yrsago Fake-make: counterfeit handmade objects from big manufacturers https://web.archive.org/web/20110410125346/http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/04/untouched-by-human-hands.html

#15yrsago Marketplace for hijacked computers https://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/04/is-your-computer-listed-for-rent/

#15yrsago Fake-make: counterfeit handmade objects from big manufacturers https://web.archive.org/web/20110410125346/http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/04/untouched-by-human-hands.html

#10yrsago Pope invites Bernie Sanders to Vatican to speak about “social, economic, and environmental” issues https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-35999269#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa

#10yrsago Baby sues US government for searching his diapers in racial profiling/War on Terror case https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/04/baby-who-had-his-diapers-searched-at-airport-is-part-of-class-action-suit/

#10yrsago Tax investigators and bill collectors use Rich Kids of Instagram to uncover oligarchs’ hidden millions https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/03/super-rich-discover-hidden-risks-instagram-yachts-jets

#10yrsago The international art market is a money laundry whose details are in the Panama Papers https://web.archive.org/web/20160408024110/https://fusion.net/story/288515/panama-papers-leak-art-market/

#10yrsago UK government warns people that copyright trolls are a scam https://torrentfreak.com/uk-govt-issues-advice-on-dealing-with-copyright-trolls-160408/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Torrentfreak+(Torrentfreak)

#10yrsago Why the rise of ransomware attacks should worry you https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/04/ok-panic-newly-evolved-ransomware-is-bad-news-for-everyone/

#5yrsago Howard Dean's racist, genocidal pharma sellout https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/08/howard-dino/#the-scream

#1yrago We CAN have nice things https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/08/howard-dino/#payfors

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. First draft complete. Second draft underway.

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

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

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

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09.04.2026 à 12:50

Pluralistic: Cindy Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (09 Apr 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3492 mots)


Today's links


Cindy Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (permalink)

I've known EFF executive director Cindy Cohn for 27 years. I met her when I needed cyberlaw advice for a startup I'd helped found. We got along so well that I ended up quitting the startup and going to work at EFF. Now, Cindy's memoir, Privacy's Defender, is on the shelves:

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

I'm hardly a disinterested party here, obviously. I was at Cindy's wedding, I've danced with her at Burning Man, and I've worked with her for most of my adult life. What's more, I was present for many of the pivotal moments she recounts in this book. But still: this is a great book that I found utterly captivating.

Cohn's been with EFF since its earliest days, when she litigated one of the most important cases in computing history, the Bernstein case, which legalized civilian access to encryption technology and changed the world:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-established-code-speech

Cryptographers had been arguing with the US government over the ban on working encryption technology for years before Cohn joined the fight, and they'd tried all manner of arguments to overturn the ban: technical arguments, political arguments, financial arguments. All of these efforts failed – they didn't even make a dent.

Cohn's genius was the way she formulated a free speech argument about the ban on encryption: arguing that computer code was a form of expressive speech, entitled to protection under the First Amendment. While she didn't come up with this idea, it was her gift for assembling a narrative and a cadre of unimpeachable experts that carried the day.

In this age of bad faith right-wing trolling about "free speech" and "cancel culture," it's easy to forget how central free speech cases and causes have been for the advancement of human rights and human thriving. Free speech cases gave us the nation's first privacy protections, protection for unions, and protection for civil rights organizers.

Cohn never forgets this. Her decades with EFF are a history of the fight for speech rights (and thus privacy rights) on the internet. After the US government seized on the 9/11 attacks as a pretext to dismantle privacy and turn the internet into a system of ubiquitous surveillance, Cohn (along with EFF, of course!) was at the center of the fight for digital rights. The same prescience and strategic brilliance that led her to take up the Bernstein case and win it were with her through those millennial years, and her description of our cases, campaigns and fights in those years vividly foreshadows the moment we are in today.

The same goes for her "three letter agency" chapter, which takes up our fights against the NSA and other US agencies in the wake of whistleblower disclosures by Mark Klein and Edward Snowden. These accounts are one part master class in legal tactics; one part battle cry for a global pushback against the transformation of the internet into the perfect surveillance and control machine, and one part personal memoir of a tactician, finding ways to leverage a righteous cause to raise a guerrilla army of experts, co-counsel, amici, and champions who carried our message to the world.

All of this is connected back to her other legal career, as a human rights defender litigating on behalf of the survivors of a massacre perpetrated by a death squad working on behalf of Chevron in Nigeria. Cohn skilfully connects these very concrete, visible human rights struggles to the invisible – and no less important – human rights work she carried out for EFF.

I didn't just have a front-row seat for this stuff – I had backstage passes for a lot of it (though not the juiciest national security cases, which required EFF lawyers to maintain total secrecy from colleagues, spouses, even our board, on pain of a long prison sentence for disclosing classified information). Even so, Cohn's pacey, smart retelling of these events brought them to life for me, and of course, there's a coherence that you get after the fact that is missing when you're living through it in a moment.

But what really enlivened this delightful book were the personal details that Cohn weaves into the story. I've always known that she was an adoptee (and I even have a small, strange, coincidental connection to her birth family), but Cohn's intimate, personal, frank memoir of her early family life, and her bittersweet connection to her birth family were so intimate and well-told that I felt like I was getting to know my dear friend all over again.

Cindy is retiring from EFF (but not the law) in a couple of months. This book is a beautiful capstone to a brilliant career that defined the fight for cyber rights, and a deep, accessible dive into the defining tech and human rights battles of this century.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Advanced office-supply sculpture: paperclip dodecahedron https://web.archive.org/web/20171122055732/https://makezine.com/2011/04/07/paperclip-snub-dodecahedron/

#15yrsago World Bank: gold farming (etc) paid poor countries $3B in 2009 https://web.archive.org/web/20110410134037/http://www.infodev.org/en/Publication.1056.html

#15yrsago Class war comics: Scrap Iron Man versus international capital https://web.archive.org/web/20110410215907/https://www.chinamieville.net/post/4406165249/rejected-pitch

#15yrsago Colombian Justice Minister ramming through extremist copyright legislation without public consultation https://web.archive.org/web/20110707053554/http://karisma.org.co/?p=667

#15yrsago Glenn Beck’s brain https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/glenn-beck-fox-news-brain-chart/

#10yrsago Why 40 years of official nutritional guidelines prescribed a low-fat diet that promoted heart disease https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/07/the-sugar-conspiracy-robert-lustig-john-yudkin

#10yrsago Fearing the Pirate Party, Iceland’s government scrambles to avoid elections https://web.archive.org/web/20160407183022/https://theintercept.com/2016/04/07/icelands-government-tries-cling-protesters-pirates-gates/

#10yrsago The price of stealing an identity is crashing, with no bottom in sight https://qz.com/656459/its-never-been-cheaper-to-steal-someones-digital-identity-on-the-internet

#10yrsago Bernie Sanders can only win if nonvoters turn out at the polls, and they almost never do https://web.archive.org/web/20160408145116/https://www.vox.com/2016/4/6/11373862/bernie-sanders-voter-lists

#10yrsago To understand the link between corporations and Hillary Clinton, look at philosophy, not history https://web.archive.org/web/20160406223353/https://www.thenation.com/article/the-problem-with-hillary-clinton-isnt-just-her-corporate-cash-its-her-corporate-worldview/

#10yrsago The US Government’s domestic spy-planes take weekends and holidays off https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/spies-in-the-skies

#10yrsago A perfect storm of broken business and busted FLOSS backdoors everything, so who needs the NSA? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwcl17Q0bpk

#5yrsago Door Dashers organize app-defeating solidarity https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/07/cruelty-by-design/#declinenow

#5yrsago Leaked NYPD "goon squad" manual https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/07/cruelty-by-design/#blam-blam-blam

#1yrago Tariffs and monopolies https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/07/it-matters-how-you-slice-it/#too-big-to-care

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. First draft complete. Second draft underway.

  • "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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