Today's links

• Instacart reaches into your pocket and lops a third off your dollars: A/B splitting your way into doing a total fucking racism.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Predicting the present; Caller eye-deer; RIP Robert Sheckley; Student protesters and Google Maps vs kettling; If your kids like computers, they're criminals; A billion CC licenses; The moral character of cryptographic work; EC resurrects link-taxes.
• 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.

Instacart reaches into your pocket and lops a third off your dollars (permalink)

There's a whole greedflation-denial cottage industry that insists that rising prices are either the result of unknowable, untameable and mysterious economic forces, or they're the result of workers having too much money and too many jobs.

The one thing we're absolutely not allowed to talk about is the fact that CEOs keep going on earnings calls to announce that they are hiking prices way ahead of any increase in their costs, and blaming inflation:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/20/quiet-part-out-loud/#profiteering

Nor are we supposed to notice the "price consultancies" that let the dominant firms in many sectors – from potatoes to meat to rental housing – fix prices in illegal collusive arrangements that are figleafed by the tissue-thin excuse that "if you use an app to fix prices, it's not a crime":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/25/potatotrac/#carbo-loading

And we're especially not supposed to notice the proliferation of "personalized pricing" businesses that use surveillance data to figure out how desperate you are and charge you a premium based on that desperation:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again

Surveillance pricing – when you are charged more for the same goods than someone else, based on surveillance data about the urgency of your need and the cash in your bank account – is a way for companies to reach into your pocket and devalue the dollars in your wallet. After all, if you pay $2 for something that I pay $1 for, that's just the company saying that your dollars are only worth half as much as mine:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/24/price-discrimination/

It's a form of cod-Marxism: "from each according to their desperation":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/11/socialism-for-the-wealthy/#rugged-individualism-for-the-poor

The economy is riddled with surveillance pricing gouging. You are almost certainly paying more than your neighbors for various items, based on algorithmic price-setting, every day. Case in point: More Perfect Union and Groundwork Collaborative teamed up with Consumer Reports to recruit 437 volunteers from across America to log in to Instacart at the same time and buy the same items from 15 stores, and found evidence of surveillance pricing at Albertsons, Costco, Kroger, and Sprouts Farmers Market:

https://groundworkcollaborative.org/work/instacart/

The price-swings are wild. Some test subjects are being charged 23% more than others. The average variance for "the exact same items, from the exact same locations, at the exact same time" comes out to 7%, or "$1,200 per year for groceries" for a family of four.

The process by which your greedflation premium is assigned is opaque. The researchers found that Instacart shoppers ordering from Target clustered into seven groups, but it's not clear how Instacart decides how much extra to charge any given shopper.

Instacart – who acquired Eversight, a surveillance pricing company, in 2022 – blamed the merchants (who, in turn, blamed Instacart). Instacart also claimed that they didn't use surveillance data to price goods, but hedged, admitting that the consumer packaged goods duopoly of Unilever and Procter & Gamble do use surveillance data in connection with their pricing strategies.

Finally, Instacart claimed that this was all an "experiment" to "learn what matters most to consumers and how to keep essential items affordable." In other words, they were secretly charging you more (for things like eggs and bread) because somehow that lets them "keep essential items affordable."

Instacart said their goal was to help "retail partners understand consumer preferences and identify categories where they should invest in lower prices."

Anyone who's done online analytics can easily pierce this obfuscation, but for those of you who haven't had the misfortune of directing an iterated, A/B tested optimization effort, I'll unpack this statement.

Say you have a pool of users and a bunch of variations on a headline. You randomly assign different variants to different users and measure clickthroughs. Then you check to see which variants performed best, and dig into the data you have on those users to see if there are any correlations that tie together users who liked a given approach.

This might let you discover that, say, women over 40 click more often on headlines that mention kittens. Then you generate more variations based on these conclusions – different ways of mentioning kittens – and see which of these variations perform best, and whether the targeted group of users split into smaller subgroups (women over 40 in the midwest prefer "tabby kitten" while their southern sisters prefer "kitten" without a mention of breed).

By repeatedly iterating over these steps, you can come up with many highly refined variants, and you can use surveillance data to target them to ever narrower, more optimized slices of your user-base.

Obviously, this is very labor intensive. You have to do a lot of tedious analysis, and generate a lot of variants. This is one of the reasons that slopvertising is so exciting to the worst people on earth: they imagine that they can use AI to create a self-licking ice-cream cone, performing the analysis and generating endless new variations, all untouched by human hands.

But when it comes to prices, it's much easier to produce variants – all you're doing is adding or subtracting from the price you show to shoppers. You don't need to get the writing team together to come up with new ways of mentioning kittens in a headline – you can just raise the price from $6.23 to $6.45 and see if midwestern women over 40 balk or add the item to their shopping baskets.

And here's the kicker: you don't need to select by gender, racial or economic criteria to end up with a super-racist and exploitative arrangement. That's because race, gender and socioeconomic status have broad correlates that are easily discoverable through automated means.

For example, thanks to generations of redlining, discriminatory housing policy, wage discrimination and environmental racism, the poorest, sickest neighborhoods in the country are also the most racialized and are also most likely to be "food deserts" where you can't just go to the grocery store and shop for your family.

What's more, the private equity-backed dollar store duopoly have waged a decades-long war on community grocery stores, enveloping them with dollar stores that use their access to preferential discounts (from companies like Unilever and Procter & Gamble, another duopoly) to force grocers out of business:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/27/walmarts-jackals/#cheater-sizes

Then these dollar stores run a greedflation scam that is so primitive, it's almost laughable: they just charge customers much higher amounts than the prices shown on the shelves and price-tags:

https://www.consumeraffairs.com/news/do-all-those-low-dollar-store-prices-really-add-up-120325.html

When you live in a food desert where your only store is a Dollar General that defrauds you at the cash-register, you are more likely to accept a higher price from Instacart, because you have fewer choices than someone in a middle-class neighborhood with two or three competing grocers. And the people who live in those food deserts are more likely to be poor, which, in America, is an excellent predictor of whether they are Black or brown.

Which is to say, without ever saying "Charge Black people more for groceries," Instacart can easily A/B split its way into a system where they predictably and reliably charge Black people more for groceries. That's the old cod-Marxism at work: "from each according to their desperation."

This is so well-understood that anyone who sets one of these systems in motion should be understood to be deliberately seeking to do racist profiteering under cover of an algorithm. It's empiricism-washing: "I'm not racist, I just did some math" (that produced a predictably racist outcome):

https://www.reuters.com/article/world/insight-amazon-scraps-secret-ai-recruiting-tool-that-showed-bias-against-women-idUSKCN1MK0AG/

This is the dark side and true meaning of "business optimization." The optimal business pays its suppliers and workers nothing, and charges its customers everything it can. Obviously, businesses need to settle for suboptimal outcomes, because workers won't show up if they don't get paid, and customers won't buy things that cost everything they have⹋.

⹋ Unless, of course, you are an academic publisher, in which case this is just how you do business.

A business "optimizes" its workforce by finding ways to get them to accept lower wages. For example, they can bind their workers with noncompete "agreements" that ban Wendy's cashiers from quitting their job and making $0.25 more per hour at the McDonald's next door (one in 18 American workers have been locked into one of these contracts):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/09/germanium-valley/#i-cant-quit-you

Or they can lock their workers in with "training repayment agreement provisions" (TRAPs) – contractual clauses that force workers to pay their bosses thousands of dollars if they quit or get fired:

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

But the most insidious form of worker optimization is "algorithmic wage discrimination." That's when a company uses surveillance data to lower the wages of workers. For example, contract nurses are paid less if the app that hires them discovers (through the unregulated data-broker sector) that they have a lot of credit-card debt. After all, nurses who are heavily indebted can't afford to be choosy and turn down lowball offers:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point

This is the other form of surveillance pricing: pricing labor based on surveillance data. It's more cod-Marxism: "From each according to their desperation."

Forget "becoming ungovernable": to defeat these evil fuckers, we have to become unoptimizable:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/20/billionaireism/#surveillance-infantalism

How do we do that? Well, nearly every form of "optimization" begins with surveillance. They can't figure out whether they can charge you more if they can't spy on you. They can't figure out whether they can pay you less if they can't spy on you, either.

And the reason they can spy on you is because we let them. The last consumer privacy law to pass out of Congress was a 1988 bill that bans video-store clerks from disclosing your VHS rental history. Every other form of consumer surveillance is permitted under US federal law.

So step one of this process is to ban commercial surveillance. Banning algorithmic price discrimination is all well and good, but it is, ultimately, a form of redistribution. We're trying to make the companies share some of the excess they extract from our surveillance data. But predistribution – ending surveillance itself, in this case – is always far more effective than redistribution:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/31/losing-the-crypto-wars/#surveillance-monopolism

How do we do that? Well, we need to build a coalition. At the Electronic Frontier Foundation, we call this "privacy first": you can't solve all the internet's problems by fixing privacy, but you won't fix most of them unless we get privacy right, and so the (potential) coalition for a strong privacy regime is large and powerful:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

But of course, "privacy first," doesn't mean "just privacy." We also need tools that target algorithmic pricing per se. In New York State, there's a new law that requires disclosure of algorithmic pricing, in the form of a prominent notification reading, "THIS PRICE WAS SET BY AN ALGORITHM USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA."

This is extremely weaksauce, and might even be worse than nothing. In California we have Prop 65, a rule that requires businesses to post signs and add labels any time they expose you to chemicals "known to the state of California to cause cancer." This caveat emptor approach (warn people, let them vote with their wallets) has led to every corner of California's built environment being festooned with these warnings. Today, Californians just ignore these warnings, the same way that web users ignore the "privacy policy" disclosures on the sites they visit:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/19/gotcha/#known-to-the-state-of-california-to-cause-cancer

The right approach isn't to (merely) warn people about carcinogens (or privacy risks). The right approach is regulating harmful business practices, whether those practices give you a tumor or pick your pocket.

Under Biden, former FTC chair Lina Khan undertook proceedings to ban algorithmic pricing altogether. Trump's FTC killed that, along with all the other quality-of-life enhancing measures the FTC had in train (Trump's FTC chair replaced these with a program to root out "wokeness" in the agency).

Today, Khan is co-chair of Zohran Mamdani's transition team, and she will use the mayor's authority (under the New York City Consumer Protection Law of 1969, which addresses "unconscionable" commercial practices) to ban algorithmic pricing in NYC:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/15/unconscionability/#standalone-authority

Khan wasn't Biden's only de-optimizer. Under chair Rohit Chopra, Biden's Consumer Finance Protection Bureau actually banned the data-brokers who power surveillance pricing:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/16/the-second-best-time-is-now/#the-point-of-a-system-is-what-it-does

And of course, Trump's CFPB (neutered by Musk and his broccoli-haired brownshirts at DOGE) killed that effort:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/15/asshole-to-appetite/#ssn-for-sale

But the CFPB staffer who ran that effort has gone to work on an effort to leverage a New Jersey state privacy law to crush the data-broker industry:

https://www.wired.com/story/daniels-law-new-jersey-online-privacy-matt-adkisson-atlas-lawsuits/

These are efforts to optimize corporations for human thriving, by making them charge us less and pay us more. For while we are best off when we are unoptimizable, we are also best off when corporations are totally optimized – for our benefit.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Uber is selling your ride and food ordering data to advertisers for marketing insights https://boingboing.net/2025/12/08/uber-is-selling-your-ride-and-food-ordering-data-to-advertisers-for-marketing-insights.html

• 404 Media Is Making a Zine https://www.404media.co/404-media-is-making-a-zine/

• Maybe a General Strike Isn’t So Impossible Now https://labornotes.org/2025/12/maybe-general-strike-isnt-so-impossible-now

• The Naibbe cipher: a substitution cipher that encrypts Latin and Italian as Voynich Manuscript-like ciphertext https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01611194.2025.2566408

• Bringing organizational maturity to radical groups https://blog.bl00cyb.org/2025/12/bringing-organizational-maturity-to-radical-groups/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Free voicemail helps homeless people get jobs https://web.archive.org/web/20051210021850/http://www.cvm.org/

#20yrsago Anti-P2P company decides to focus on selling music instead https://de.advfn.com/borse/NASDAQ/LOUD/nachrichten/13465769/loudeye-to-exit-content-protection-services-busine

#20yrsago Caller Eye-Deer’s eyes glow when phone rings https://www.flickr.com/photos/84221353@N00/71889050/in/pool-69453349@N00

#20yrsago EFF to Sunncomm: release a list of all infected CDs! https://web.archive.org/web/20051212072537/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004245.php

#20yrsago Only 2% of music-store downloaders care about legality of their music https://web.archive.org/web/20051225200658/http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/5002/tempo2005.html

#20yrsago Dykes on Bikes gives the Trademark Office a linguistics lesson https://web.archive.org/web/20060523133217/https://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/12/09/MNGQOG5D7P1.DTL&type=printable

#20yrsago Robert Sheckley has died https://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007078.html

#20yrsago Xbox 360 DRM makes your rip your CDs again https://www.gamespot.com/articles/microsoft-xbox-360-hands-on-report/1100-6139672/

#20yrsago Music publishers: Jail for lyric-sites http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4508158.stm

#15yrsago 2600 Magazine condemns DDoS attacks against Wikileaks censors https://web.archive.org/web/20101210213130/https://www.2600.com/news/view/article/12037

#15yrsago UK supergroup records 4’33”, hopes to top Xmas charts https://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/dec/06/cage-against-machine-x-factor

#15yrsago FarmVille’s secret: making you anxious https://web.archive.org/web/20101211120105/http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6224/catching_up_with_jonathan_blow.php?print=1

#15yrsago Rogue Archivist beer https://web.archive.org/web/20101214060929/https://livingproofbrewcast.com/2010/12/giving-the-rogue-archivist-to-its-namesake/

#15yrsago Hossein “Hoder” Derakhshan temporarily released from Iranian prison https://cyrusfarivar.com/blog/2010/12/09/iranian-blogging-pioneer-temporarily-released-from-prison/

#15yrsago Student protesters in London use Google Maps to outwit police “kettling” https://web.archive.org/web/20101212042006/https://bengoldacre.posterous.com/student-protestors-using-live-tech-to-outwit

#15yrsago Google foreclosure maps https://web.archive.org/web/20170412162114/http://ritholtz.com/2010/12/google-map-foreclosures/
#15yrsago Theory and practice of queue design https://passport2dreams.blogspot.com/2010/12/third-queue.html

#15yrsago Legal analysis of the problems of superherodom https://lawandthemultiverse.com/

#10yrsago A great, low-tech hack for teaching high-tech skills https://miriamposner.com/blog/a-better-way-to-teach-technical-skills-to-a-group/

#10yrsago In case you were wondering, there’s no reason to squirt coffee up your ass https://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2015/12/10/starbutts-or-how-is-it-still-a-thing-that-people-are-shooting-coffee-up-their-nether-regions

#10yrsago Survey of wealthy customers leads insurer to offer “troll insurance” https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/insurance/12041832/Troll-insurance-to-cover-the-cost-of-internet-bullying.html

#10yrsago US State Department staffer sexually blackmailed women while working at US embassy https://web.archive.org/web/20151210230259/https://www.networkworld.com/article/3013633/security/ex-us-state-dept-worker-pleads-guilty-to-extensive-sextortion-hacking-and-cyberstalking-acts.html

#10yrsago Robert Silverberg’s government-funded guide to the psychoactive drugs of sf https://web.archive.org/web/20151211050648/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-us-government-funded-an-investigation-into-sci-fi-drug-use-in-the-70s

#10yrsago Toy demands that kids catch crickets and stuff them into an electronic car https://www.wired.com/2015/12/um-so-the-bug-racer-is-an-actual-toy-car-driven-by-crickets/

#10yrsago The crypto explainer you should send to your boss (and the FBI) https://web.archive.org/web/20151209011457/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/12/08/you-already-use-encryption-heres-what-you-need-to-know-about-it/

#10yrsago French PM defies Ministry of Interior, says he won’t ban open wifi or Tor https://web.archive.org/web/20160726031106/https://www.connexionfrance.com/Wifi-internet-ban-banned-17518-view-article.html

#10yrsago The no-fly list really is a no-brainer https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/09/no-fly-list-errors-gun-control-obama

#10yrsago America: shrinking middle class, growing poverty, the rich are getting richer https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2015/12/09/the-american-middle-class-is-losing-ground/

#10yrsago Marriott removing desks from its hotel rooms “because Millennials” https://web.archive.org/web/20151210034312/http://danwetzelsports.tumblr.com/post/134754150507/who-stole-the-desk-from-my-hotel-room

#10yrsago China’s top Internet censor: “There’s no Internet censorship in China” https://hongkongfp.com/2015/12/09/there-is-no-internet-censorship-in-china-says-chinas-top-censor/

#10yrsago Stolen-card crime sites use “cop detection” algorithms to flag purchases https://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/12/when-undercover-credit-card-buys-go-bad/

#10yrsago UK National Crime Agency: if your kids like computers, they’re probably criminals https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjYrxzSe3DU

#10yrsago US immigration law: so f’ed up that Trump’s no-Muslim plan would be constitutional https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/opinion/trumps-anti-muslim-plan-is-awful-and-constitutional.html?_r=0

#10yrsago Ecuador’s draft copyright law: legal to break DRM to achieve fair use https://medium.com/@AndresDelgadoEC/big-achievement-for-creative-commons-in-ecuador-national-assembly-decides-that-fair-use-trumps-drm-c8cdd9c57e01#.n1vkccd3r

#10yrsago One billion Creative Commons licenses in use https://stateof.creativecommons.org/2015/

#10yrsago The moral character of cryptographic work https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/moral-fn.pdf

#10yrsago Everybody knows: FBI won’t confirm or deny buying cyberweapons from Hacking Team https://web.archive.org/web/20151209163839/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-fbi-wont-confirm-or-deny-buying-hacking-team-spyware-even-though-it-did

#10yrsago European Commission resurrects an unkillable stupid: the link tax https://web.archive.org/web/20160913095014/https://openmedia.org/en/bad-idea-just-got-worse-how-todays-european-copyright-plans-will-damage-internet

#5yrsago Why we can't have nice things https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/10/borked/#bribery

#5yrsago Facebook vs Robert Bork https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/10/borked/#zucked

#1yrago Tech's benevolent-dictator-for-life to authoritarian pipeline https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/10/bdfl/#high-on-your-own-supply

#1yrago Predicting the present https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/09/radicalized/#deny-defend-depose

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)

• 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

• Enshittification (Future Knowledge)
  https://futureknowledge.transistor.fm/episodes/enshittification

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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Today's links

• Big Tech joins the race to build the world's heaviest airplane: Die as Microsoft, or live to become the IBM you overthrew.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Bean-sprouting keyboard; Ink rant; FBI wanted to deport John Lennon; "Concrete Park"; Plutocratic lane-changes.
• 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.

Big Tech joins the race to build the world's heaviest airplane (permalink)

I have a weird fascination with early-stage Bill Gates, after his mother convinced a pal of hers – chairman of IBM's board of directors – to give her son the contract to provide the operating system for the new IBM PC. Gates and his pal Paul Allen tricked another programmer into selling them the rights to DOS, which they sold to IBM, setting Microsoft on the path to be one of the most profitable businesses in human history.

IBM could have made its own OS, of course. They were just afraid to, because they'd just narrowly squeaked out of a 12-year antitrust war with the Department of Justice (evocatively memorialized as "Antitrust's Vietnam"):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/02/the-true-genius-of-tech-leaders/

The US government traumatized IBM so badly that they turned over their crown jewels to these two prep-school kids, who scammed a pal out of his operating system for $50k and made billions from it. Despite owing his business to IBM (or perhaps because of this fact), Gates routinely mocked IBM as a lumbering dinosaur that was headed for history's scrapheap. He was particularly scornful of IBM's software development methodology, which, to be fair, was pretty terrible: IBM paid programmers by the line of code. Gates called this "the race to build the world's heaviest airplane."

After all, judging software by lines of code is a terrible idea. To the extent that "number of lines of code" has any correlation with software quality, reliability or performance, it has a negative correlation. While it's certainly possible to write software with too few lines of code (e.g. when instructions are stacked on a single line, obfuscating its functionality and making it hard to maintain), it's far more common for programmers to use too many steps to solve a problem. The ideal software is just right: verbose enough to be legible to future maintainers, streamlined enough to omit redundancies.

This is broadly true of many products, and not just airplanes. Office memos should be long enough to be clear, but no longer. Home insulation should be sufficient to maintain the internal temperature, but no more.

Ironically, enterprise tech companies' bread and butter is selling exactly this kind of qualitative measurement for bosses who want an easy, numeric way to decide which of their workers to fire, and leading the pack is Microsoft, whose flagship Office365 lets bosses assess their workers' performance on meaningless metrics like how many words they type, ranking each worker against other workers within the division, with rival divisions and within rival firms. Yes, Microsoft actually boasts to companies about the fact that if you use their products, they will gather sensitive data about how your workers perform individually and as a team, and share that information with your competitors!

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/#clippys-revenge

But while tech companies employed programmers to develop this kind of bossware to be used on other companies' employees, they were loath to apply them to their own workers. For one thing, it's just a very stupid way to manage a workforce, as Bill Gates himself would be the first to tell you (candidly, provided he wasn't trying to sell you an enterprise Office 365 license). For another, tech workers wouldn't stand for it. After all, these were the "princes of labor," each adding a million dollars or more to their boss's bottom line, and in such scarce supply that a coder could quit a job after the morning scrum and have a new one by the pre-dinner pickleball break:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/27/some-animals/#are-more-equal-than-others

Tech workers mistook the fear this dynamic instilled in their bosses for respect. They thought the reason their bosses gave them free massage therapists and kombucha on tap and a gourmet cafeteria was that their bosses liked them. After all, these bosses were all techies. A coder wasn't a worker, they were a temporarily embarrassed founder. That's why Zuck and Sergey tuned into those engineering town hall meetings and tolerated being pelted with impertinent questions about the company's technology and business strategy.

Actually, tech bosses didn't like tech workers. They didn't see them as peers. They saw them as workers. Problem workers, at that. Problems to be solved.

And wouldn't you know it, supply caught up with demand and tech companies instituted a program of mass layoffs. When Google laid off 12,000 workers (just before a $80b stock buyback that would have paid their wages for 27 years), they calmed investors by claiming that they weren't doing this because business was bad – they were just correcting some pandemic-era overhiring. But Google didn't just fire junior programmers – they targeted some of their most senior (and thus mouthiest and highest-paid) techies for the chop.

Today, Sergey and Zuck no longer attend engineering meetings ("Not a good use of my time" -M. Zuckerberg). Tech workers are getting laid off at the rate of naughts. And none of these bastards can shut up about how many programmers they plan on replacing with AI:

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

And wouldn't you know it, the shitty monitoring and ranking technology that programmers made to be used on other workers is finally being used on them:

https://jonready.com/blog/posts/everyone-in-seattle-hates-ai.html

Naturally, the excuse is monitoring AI usage. Microsoft – along with all the other AI-peddling tech companies – keeps claiming that their workers adore using AI to write software, but somehow, also have to monitor workers so they can figure out which ones to fire because they're not using AI enough:

https://www.itpro.com/software/development/microsoft-claims-ai-is-augmenting-developers-rather-than-replacing-them

This is the "shitty technology adoption curve" in action. When you have a terrible, destructive technology, you can't just deploy it on privileged people who get taken seriously in policy circles. You start with people at the bottom of the privilege gradient: prisoners, mental patients, asylum-seekers. Then, you work your way up the curve – kids, gig workers, blue collar workers, pink collar workers. Eventually, it comes for all of us:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

As Ed Zitron writes, tech hasn't had a big, successful product (on the scale of, say, the browser or the smartphone) in more than a decade. Tech companies have seemingly run out of new trillion-dollar industries to spawn. Tech bosses are pulling out all the stops to make their companies seem as dynamic and profitable as they were in tech's heyday.

Firing workers and blaming it on AI lets tech bosses transform a story that would freak out investors ("Our business is flagging and we had to fire a bunch of valuable techies") into one that will shake loose fresh billions in capital ("Our AI product is so powerful it let us fire a zillion workers!").

And for tech bosses, mass layoffs offer another, critical advantage: pauperizing those princes of labor, so that they can shed their company gyms and luxury commuter busses, cut wages and benefits, and generally reset the working expectations of the tech workers who sit behind a keyboard to match the expectations of tech workers who assemble iPhones, drive delivery vans, and pack boxes in warehouses.

For tech workers who currently don't have a pee bottle or a suicide net at their job-site, it's long past time to get over this founder-in-waiting bullshit and get organized. Recognize that you're a worker, and that workers' only real source of power isn't ephemeral scarcity, it's durable solidarity:

https://techworkerscoalition.org/

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Your Data Might Determine How Much You Pay for Eggs https://www.wired.com/story/algorithmic-pricing-eggs-ny-law/

• Judge hints Vizio TV buyers may have rights to source code licensed under GPL https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/05/vizio_gpl_source_code_ruling/

• Chamberlain blocks smart home integrations with its garage door openers — again https://www.theverge.com/tech/839294/chamberlain-myq-garage-door-opener-update-blocks-aftermarket-controllers

• Smart Garage Door Opener https://3reality.com/product/smartgarage-door-opener/

• The Best Books in eBooks and Audiobooks of 2025 https://www.kobo.com/us/en/p/best-books-of-2025

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago WaWa Digital Cameras threatens to break customer’s neck https://thomashawk.com/2005/12/abusive-new-york-camera-store.html

#20yrsago Keyboard used as bean-sprouting medium https://web.archive.org/web/20051205011830/http://www.nada.kth.se/~hjorth/krasse/english.html

#15yrsago Judge to copyright troll: get lost https://torrentfreak.com/acslaw-take-alleged-file-sharers-to-court-but-fail-on-a-grand-scale-101209/

#15yrsago Ink cartridge rant https://web.archive.org/web/20101211080931/http://www.inkcartridges.uk.com/Remanufactured-HP-300-CC640EE-Black.html

#15yrsago 1.1 billion US$100 notes out of circulation due to printing error https://www.cnbc.com/2010/12/07/the-fed-has-a-110-billion-problem-with-new-benjamins.html

#15yrsago EFF wants Righthaven to pay for its own ass-kicking https://web.archive.org/web/20101211011932/https://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/12/payup-troll/

#15yrsago danah boyd explains email sabbaticals https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/12/08/i-am-offline-on-email-sabbatical-from-december-9-january-12.html

#15yrsago TSA subjects India’s US ambassador to public grope because of her sari https://web.archive.org/web/20101211113821/http://travel.usatoday.com/flights/post/2010/12/india-diplomat-gets-humiliating-pat-down-at-mississippi-airport-/134197/5?csp=outbrain&csp=obnetwork

#15yrsago California’s safety codes are now open source! https://code.google.com/archive/p/title24/

#10yrsago When the INS tried to deport John Lennon, the FBI pitched in to help https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/dec/08/john-lennons-fbi-file-1/

#10yrsago The Big List of What’s Wrong with the TPP https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/12/how-tpp-will-affect-you-and-your-digital-rights

#10yrsago Concrete Park: apocalyptic, afrofuturistic graphic novel of greatness https://memex.craphound.com/2015/12/08/concrete-park-apocalyptic-afrofuturistic-graphic-novel-of-greatness/

#10yrsago Denmark’s top anti-piracy law firm pocketed $25m from rightsholders, then went bankrupt https://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-lawyer-milked-copyright-holders-for-millions-151208/

#5yrsago Uber pays to get rid of its self-driving cars https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/08/required-reading/#goober

#5yrsago All the books I reviewed in 2020 https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/08/required-reading/#recommended-reading

#5yrsago Ford patents plutocratic lane-changes https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/08/required-reading/#walkaway

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 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

• Enshittification (Future Knowledge)
  https://futureknowledge.transistor.fm/episodes/enshittification

• We have become slaves to Silicon Valley (Politics JOE)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzEUvh1r5-w

• How Enshittification is Destroying The Internet (Frontline Club)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oovsyzB9L-s

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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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

• Elon Musk's Blue Tick scam: The EU bans giant teddybears.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Denver bomb squad vs 8" toy robot; Iceland's atheist religion; Largest strike in human history; Ad-tech is a bubble; Battery rationality; Pasta carpet; "With a Little Help"; Crooked Timber on Pikett; Tiki-mug menorah; China vs Big Data-backstabbing.
• 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.

Elon Musk's Blue Tick scam (permalink)

In my book Enshittification, I develop the concept of "giant teddybears," a scam that has been transposed from carnival midway games to digital platforms. The EU has just fined Elon Musk $140m for running a giant teddybear scam on Twitter:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/12/elon-musks-x-first-to-be-fined-under-eus-digital-service-act/

Growing up, August 15 always meant two things for my family: my mother's birthday and the first day of the CNE, a giant traveling fair that would park itself on Toronto's waterfront for the last three weeks of summer. We'd get there early, and by 10AM, there'd always be some poor bastard lugging around a galactic-scale giant teddybear that was offered as a prize at one of the midway games.

Now, nominally, the way you won a giant teddybear was by getting five balls in a peach basket. To a first approximation, this is a feat that no one has ever accomplished. Rather, a carny had beckoned this guy over and said, "Hey, fella, I like your face. Tell you what I'm gonna do: you get just one ball in the basket and I'll give you one of these beautiful, luxurious keychains. If you win two keychains, I'll let you trade them in for one of these gigantic teddybears."

Why would the carny do this? Because once this poor bastard took possession of the giant teddybear, he was obliged to conspicuously lug it around the CNE midway in the blazing, muggy August heat. All who saw him would think, "Hell if that dumbass can win a giant teddybear, I'm gonna go win one, too!" Charitably, you could call him a walking advertisement. More accurately, though, he was a Judas goat.

Digital platforms have the ability to give out giant teddybears at scale. Because digital platforms have the flexibility that comes with running things on computers, platforms can pick out individual platform participants and make them King For the Day, showering them in riches that they will boast of, luring in other suckers who will lose everything:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

That's how Tiktok works: the company's "heating tool" lets them drive traffic to Tiktok performers by cramming their videos into millions of random people's feeds, overriding Tiktok's legendary recommendation algorithm. Those "heated" performers get millions of views on their videos and go on to spam all the spaces where similar performers hang out, boasting of the fame and riches that await other people in their niche if they start producing for Tiktok:

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

Uber does it, too: as Veena Dubal documents in her work on "algorithmic wage discrimination," Uber offers different drivers wildly different wages for performing the same work. The lucky few who get an Uber giant teddybear hang out in rideshare groupchats and forums, trumpeting their incredible gains from the platform, while everyone else blames themselves for "being bad at the app," as they drive and drive, only to go deeper and deeper into debt:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

Everywhere you look online, you see giant teddybears. Think of Joe Rogan being handed hundreds of millions of dollars to relocate his podcast to Spotify, an also-ran podcast platform that is desperately trying to capture the medium of podcasting, turning an open protocol into a proprietary, enclosed, Spotify-exclusive content stream:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/27/enshittification-resistance/#ummauerter-garten-nein

The point of the conspicuous, over-the-odds payment to Rogan isn't just to get Rogan onto Spotify – it's to convince every other podcaster that Spotify is a great place to make podcasts for. It isn't, though: when Spotify bought Gimlet Media, they locked Gimlet's podcasts inside Spotify's walled garden/maximum security prison. If you wanted to listen to a Gimlet podcast, you'd have to switch to using Spotify's app (and submitting to Spotify's invasive surveillance and restrictions on fast-forwarding through ads, etc).

Pretty much no one did this. After an internal revolt by Gimlet podcast hosts – whose podcasts were dwindling to utter irrelevance because no one was listening to them anymore – Spotify moved those Gimlet podcasts back onto the real internet, where they belong.

When Musk bought Twitter, he started handing out tons of giant teddybears – most notably, he created an opaque monetization scheme for popular Twitter posters, which allowed him to thumb the scales for a few trolls he liked, who obliged him by loudly proclaiming just how much money you could make by trolling professionally on Twitter. Needless to say, the vast majority of people who try this make either nothing, or a sum so small that it rounds to nothing.

But Musk's main revenue plan for Twitter – the thing he repeatedly promised would allow him to recoup the tens of billions he borrowed to buy the platform – was selling blue tick verification.

Twitter created blue ticks to solve a serious platform problem. Twitter users kept getting sucked in by impersonators who would trick them into participating in scams or believing false things. To protect those users, Twitter offered a verification scheme for "notable people" who were likely to face impersonation. The verification system was never very good – I successfully lobbied them to improve it a little when I was being impersonated on Twitter (I got them to stop insisting that users fax them a scan of their ID, or, more realistically, to send them ID via a random, insecure email-to-fax gateway). But it did the job reasonably well.

Predictably, though, the verification scheme also became something of a (weird and unimportant) status-symbol, allowing a certain kind of culture warrior to peddle grievances about how only "lamestream media libs" were getting blue ticks, while brave Pizzagaters and 4chan refugees were denied this important recognition.

Musk's plan to sell blue ticks leaned heavily into these grievances. He promised to "democratize" verification, for $8/month (or, for businesses, many thousands of dollars per month). Users who didn't buy blue ticks would have their content demoted and hidden from their own followers. Users who paid for blue ticks would have their content jammed into everyone's feeds, irrespective of whether Twitter's own content recommendation algorithms predicted those users would enjoy it. Best of all, Twitter wouldn't do much verifying – you could give Twitter $8, claim to be anyone at all, and chances are, you would be able to assume any identity you wanted, post any bullshit you wanted, and get priority placement in millions of users' feeds.

This was a massive gift to scammers, trolls and disinformation peddlers. For $8, you could pretend to be a celebrity in order to endorse a stock swindle, shitcoin hustle, or identity theft scheme. You could post market-moving disinformation from official-looking corporate accounts. You could pose as a campaigning politician or a reporter and post reputation-destroying nonsense.

This is where the EU comes in. In 2024, the EU enacted a pair of big, muscular Big Tech antitrust laws, the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA). These are complex pieces of legislation, and I don't like everything in them, but some parts of them are amazing: bold and imaginative breaks from the dismal history of ineffective or counterproductive tech regulation.

Under the DSA, the EU has fined Twitter about $140m for exposing users to scams via this blue tick giant teddybear wheeze (much of that sum is punitive, because Twitter flagrantly obstructed the Commission's investigations). The DSA (sensibly) doesn't require user verification, but it does expect companies that tell their users that some accounts are verified and can be trusted, to actually verify that they actually can be trusted.

I think there's a second DSA claim to be made here, beyond the failure to verify. Musk's plan to sell blue ticks was a disaster: while many, many scammers (and a few trolls) bought blue ticks, no one else did. The blue tick – which Musk thought of as a valuable status symbol that he could sell – was quickly devalued. "Account with a blue tick" was never all that prestigious, but under Musk, it came to mean "account that pushes scams, gore, disinformation, porn and/or hate."

So Musk did something very funny and sweaty. He restored blue ticks to millions of high-follower accounts (including my own). And despite the fact that Musk had created about a million different kinds of blue ticks that denoted different kinds of organizations and payment schemes, these free blue ticks were indistinguishable from the paid ones.

In other words, Musk set out to trick users into thinking that the most prominent people they followed believed that it was worth spending $8/month on a blue tick. It was an involuntary giant teddybear scam. Every time a prominent user with a free blue tick posts, they help Musk trick regular Twitter users into thinking that these worthless $8/month subscriptions are worth shelling out for.

I think the Commission could run another, equally successful enforcement action against Musk and Twitter over this scam, too.

Trump has been bellyaching nonstop about the DSA and DMA, threatening EU nations and businesses with tariffs and other TACO retribution if they go ahead with DSA/DMA enforcement. Let's hope the EU calls his bluff.

Of course, Musk could get out of paying these fines by moving all his businesses out of the EU, which, frankly, would be a major result for Europe.

(Image: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 4.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Netflix Is Trying to Buy Warner Bros Discovery. That Would Be a Disaster for America. https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/netflix-is-trying-to-buy-warner-bros

• How popular is ecosocialist transformation? https://jasonhickel.substack.com/p/how-popular-is-ecosocialist-transformation

• Luigi Mangione Official Legal Fund for all 3 Cases https://www.givesendgo.com/luigi-defense-fund

• Trump’s Katrina Is Coming https://prospect.org/2025/12/05/trumps-katrina-is-coming-fema/

• DEFT: DSPs for Equitable and Fair Treatment https://deft-us.com/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago What’s involved in different publishing jobs? https://web.archive.org/web/20050306095536/http://www.penguin.co.uk/static/packages/uk/aboutus/jobs_workingpeng.html

#20yrsago Sony finally releases rookit uninstaller — sort of https://web.archive.org/web/20051204015131/http://cp.sonybmg.com/xcp/english/updates.html

#20yrsago EFF forces Sony/Suncomm to fix its spyware https://web.archive.org/web/20051210024413/https://www.eff.org/news/archives/2005_12.php#004234

#20yrsago Warner Music attacks specialized web-browser https://web.archive.org/web/20051210024927/http://www.pearworks.com/pages/pearLyrics.html

#20yrsago Sony’s DRM security fix leaves your computer more vulnerable https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2005/12/07/mediamax-bug-found-patch-issued-patch-suffers-same-bug/

#15yrsago Internet furnishes fascinating tale of a civil rights era ghosttown on demandhttps://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/eddwx/what_the_hell_happened_to_cairo_illinois/

#15yrsago Pasta carpet! https://wemakecarpets.wordpress.com/2010/11/02/pasta-carpet-2/

#15yrsago With a Little Help launch! https://memex.craphound.com/2010/12/07/with-a-little-help-launch/

#15yrsago Denver bomb squad defeats 8″ toy robot after hours-long standoff https://www.denverpost.com/2010/12/01/toy-robot-detours-traffic-near-coors-field/

#15yrsago UK govt demands an end to evidence-based drug policy https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/dec/05/government-scientific-advice-drugs-policy?&

#10yrsago Iceland’s fastest-growing “religion” courts atheists by promising to rebate religious tax https://icelandmonitor.mbl.is/news/politics_and_society/2015/12/01/icelanders_flocking_to_the_zuist_religion/

#10yrsago Springer Nature to release 100,000 titles as DRM-free bundles https://web.archive.org/web/20151210051243/https://www.digitalbookworld.com/2015/bitlit-partners-with-springer-to-offer-ebook-bundles/

#10yrsago Solo: Hope Larson’s webcomic of rock-n-roll, romance, and desperation https://memex.craphound.com/2015/12/07/solo-hope-larsons-webcomic-of-rock-n-roll-romance-and-desperation/

#10yrsago Body-painted models disappear into the Wonders of the World https://www.trinamerry.com/trinamerryblog/sevenwondersbodypaint

#10yrsago Make: the simplest electric car toy, a homopolar motor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPzJr1jjHnQ

#10yrsago Thomas Piketty seminar on Crooked Timber https://crookedtimber.org/2016/01/04/thomas-piketty-seminar/

#10yrsago MAKE: a tiki-mug menorah https://web.archive.org/web/20151208123229/http://news.critiki.com/2015/12/05/tiki-mug-menorah-a-how-to-from-poly-hai/

#10yrsago Harvard Business School: Talented assholes are more trouble than they’re worth https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication

#10yrsago Multi-generational cruelty: America’s prisons shutting down kids’ visitations https://web.archive.org/web/20151204063410/https://www.thenation.com/article/2-7m-kids-have-parents-in-prison-theyre-losing-their-right-to-visit/

#10yrsago READ: Kim Stanley Robinson’s first standalone story in 25 years! https://reactormag.com/oral-argument-kim-stanley-robinson//

#10yrsago French Ministry of Interior wants to ban open wifi, Tor https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/12/france-looking-at-banning-tor-blocking-public-wi-fi/

#5yrsago China’s war on big data backstabbing https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/07/backstabbed/#big-data-backstabbing

#5yrsago The largest strike in human history https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/06/surveillance-tulip-bulbs/#modi-miscalulation

#5yrsago Ad-tech as a bubble overdue for a bursting https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/06/surveillance-tulip-bulbs/#adtech-bubble

#1yrago Battery rationality https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/06/shoenabombers/#paging-dick-cheney

#1yrago A year in illustration (2024) https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/07/great-kepplers-ghost/#art-adjacent

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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

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

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

• 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)

>

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

• Enshittification (Future Knowledge)
  https://futureknowledge.transistor.fm/episodes/enshittification

• We have become slaves to Silicon Valley (Politics JOE)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzEUvh1r5-w

• How Enshittification is Destroying The Internet (Frontline Club)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oovsyzB9L-s

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

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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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

• Metabolizing the theory of "political capitalism": How many $TRUMP coins should your company buy?
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: NZ doesn't want US-style copyright; Tron: Reloaded; Mass shootings and gun profits; Descartes God has failed; "The Big Fix."
• 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.

Metabolizing the theory of "political capitalism" (permalink)

It's a strange fact that the more sophisticated and polished a theory gets, the simpler it tends to be. New theories tend to be inspired by a confluence of many factors, and early attempts to express the theory will seek to enumerate and connect everything that seems related, which is a lot.

But as you develop the theory, it gets progressively more streamlined as you realize which parts can be safely omitted or combined without sacrificing granularity or clarity. This simplification requires a lot of iteration and reiteration, over a lot of time, for a lot of different audiences and critics. As Thoreau wrote (paraphrasing Pascal), "Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short."

This week, I encountered a big, exciting theory that is still in the "long and complicated" phase, with so many moving parts that I'm having trouble keeping them straight in my head. But the idea itself is fascinating and has so much explanatory power, and I've been thinking about it nonstop, so I'm going to try to metabolize a part of it here today, both to bring it to your attention, and to try and find some clarity for myself.

At issue is Dylan Riley and Robert Brenner's theory of "political capitalism," which I encountered through John Ganz's writeup of a panel he attended to discuss Riley and Brenner's work:

https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/politics-and-capitalist-stagnation

Riley and Brenner developed this theory through a pair of very long (and paywalled) articles in the New Left Review. First is 2022's "Seven Theses on American Politics" (£3), which followed the Democrats' surprisingly good showing in the 2022 midterms:

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii138/articles/4813

The second article, "The Long Downturn and Its Political Results" (£4), is even longer, and it both restates the theory of "Seven Theses" and addresses several prominent critics of their work:

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii155/articles/dylan-riley-robert-brenner-the-long-downturn-and-its-political-results

(If you're thinking about reading the source materials – and I urge you to do so – I think you can safely just read the second article, as it really does recap and streamline the original.)

So what is this theory? Ganz does a good job of breaking it down (better than Riley and Brenner, who, I think, still have a lot of darlings they can't bring themselves to murder). Here's my recap of Ganz's, then, with a few notes from the source texts thrown in.

Riley and Brenner are advancing both an economic and a political theory, with the latter growing out of the former. The economic theory seeks to explain two phenomena, the "Long Boom" (post-WWII to the 1960s or so), and the "Long Downturn" (ever since).

During the Long Boom, the US economy (and some other economies) experienced a period of sustained growth, without the crashes that had been the seemingly inevitable end-point of previous growth periods. Riley and Brenner say that these crashes were the result of business owners making the (locally) rational decision to hang on to older machines and tools even as new ones came online.

Businesses are always looking to invest in new automation in a bid to wring more productivity from their workers. Profits come from labor, not machines, and as your competitors invest in the same machines as you've just bought, the higher rate of profit you got when you upgraded your machines will be eroded, as competitors chase each others' customers with lower prices.

But not everyone is willing to upgrade when a new machine is invented. If you're still paying for the old machines, you just can't afford to throw them away and get the latest and greatest ones. Instead, as your competitors slash prices (because they have new machines that let them make the same stuff at a lower price), you must lower your prices too, accepting progressively lower profits.

Eventually, your whole sector is using superannuated machines that they're still making payments on, and the overall rate of profit in the sector has dwindled to unsustainable levels. "Zombie companies" (companies that have no plausible chance of paying off their debts) dominate the economy. This is the "secular stagnation" that economists dread. Note that this whole thing is driven by the very same forces that make capitalism so dynamic: the falling rate of profit that gives rise to a relentless chase for new, more efficient processes. This is a stagnation born of dynamism, and the harder you yank on the "make capitalism more dynamic" lever, the more stagnant it becomes.

Hoover and Mellon's austerity agenda in the 1920s sought to address this by triggering mass bankruptcies, in a brutal bid to "purge" those superannuated machines and the companies that owned them, at the expense of both workers and creditors. This wasn't enough.

Instead, we got WWII, in which the government stepped in to buy things at rates that paid for factories to be retooled, and which pressed the entire workforce into employment. This is the trigger for the Long Boom, as America got a do-over with all-new capital and a freshly trained workforce with high morale and up-to-date skills.

So that's the Long Boom. What about the Great Downturn? This is where Ganz's account begins. As the "late arrivals" (Japan, West Germany, South Korea, and, eventually China) show up on the world stage, they do their own Long Boom, having experienced an even more extreme "purge" of their zombie firms and obsolete machines. This puts downward pressure on profits in the USA (and, eventually, the late arrivals), leading to the Long Stagnation, a 50 year period in which the rate of profit in the USA has steadily declined.

This is most of the economic theory, and it contains the germ of the political theory, too. During the Long Boom, there was plenty to go around, and the US was able to build out a welfare state, its ruling class was willing to tolerate unions, and movements for political and economic equality for women, sexual minorities, disabled people, racial minorities, etc, were able to make important inroads.

But the political theory gets into high gear after years of Great Downturn. That's when the world has an oversupply of cheap goods and a sustained decline in the rate of profit, and the rate of profit declines every time someone invents a more efficient and productive technology. Companies in Downturn countries need to find a new way to improve their profits – they need to invest in something other than improved methods of production.

That's where "political capitalism" comes in. Political capitalism is the capitalism you get when the cheapest, most reliable way to improve your rate of profit is to invest in the political process, to get favorable regulation, pork barrel government contracts, and cash bailouts. As Ganz puts it, "capitalists have gone from profit-seekers to rent-seekers," or, as Brenner and Riley write, capitalists now seek "a return on investment largely or completely divorced from material production."

There's a sense in which this is immediately recognizable. The ascendancy of political capitalism tracks with the decline in antitrust enforcement, the rise of monopolies, a series of massive bailouts, and, under Trump, naked kleptocracy. In the US, "raw political power is the main source of return on capital."

The "neoliberal turn" of late Carter/Reagan is downstream of political capitalism. When there was plenty to go around, the capital classes and the political classes were willing to share with workers. When the Great Downturn takes hold, bosses turn instead to screwing workers and taking over the political system. Fans of Bridget Read's Little Bosses Everywhere will know this as the moment in which Gerry Ford legalized pyramid schemes in order to save the founders of Amway, who were big GOP donors who lived in Ford's congressional district:

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

Manufacturing's rate of profit has never recovered from this period – there have been temporary rallies, but the overall trend is down, down, down.

But this is just the beginning of the political economy of Brenner and Riley's theory. Remember, this all started with an essay that sought to make sense of the 2022 midterms. Much of the political theory deals with electoral politics, and what has happened with America's two major political parties.

Under political capitalism, workers are split into different groups depending on their relationship to political corruption. The "professional managerial class" (workers with degrees and other credentials) end up aligned with center-left parties, betting that these parties will use political power to fund the kinds of industries that hire credentialed workers, like health and education. Non-credentialed workers align themselves with right-wing parties that promise to raise their wages by banning immigrants and ending free trade.

Ganz's most recent book, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s looks at the origins of the conspiratorial right that became MAGA:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374605445/whentheclockbroke/

He says that Riley and Brenner's theory really helps explain the moment he chronicled in his own book, for example, the way that Ross Perot (an important Trump predecessor) built power by railing against "late arrivals" like Japan, Germany and South Korea.

This is also the heyday of corporate "finacialization," which can be thought of as the process by which companies stop concerning themselves with how to make and sell superior products more efficiently, and instead devote themselves to financial gimmicks that allow shareholders to extract wealth from the firm. It's a period of slashed R&D budgets, mass layoffs, union-busting, and massive corporate borrowing.

In the original papers, Riley and Brenner drop all kinds of juicy, eye-opening facts and arguments to support their thesis. For example, in the US, more and more machinery is idle. In the 1960s, the US employed 85% of its manufacturing capacity. It was 78% in the 1980s, and now it's 75%. One quarter of "US plant and equipment is simply stagnating."

Today's economic growth doesn't come from making stuff, it comes from extraction, buttressed by law. Looser debt rules allowed households to continue to consume by borrowing, with the effect that a substantial share of workers' wages go to servicing debt, which is to say, paying corporations for the privilege of existing, over and above the cost of the goods and services we consume.

But the debt industry itself hasn't gotten any more efficient: "the cost of moving a dollar from a saver to a borrower was about two cents in 1910; a hundred years later, it was the same." They're making more, but they haven't made any improvements – all the talk of "fintech" and "financial engineering" have not produced any efficiencies. "This puzzle resolves itself once we recognize that the vast majority of financial innovation is geared towards figuring out how to siphon off resources through fees, insider information and lobbying."

Reading these arguments, I was struck by how this period also covers the rise and rise of "IP." This is a period in which your ability to simply buy things declined, replaced with a system in which you rent and subscribe to things – forever. From your car to your thermostat, the key systems in your life are increasingly a monthly bill, meaning that every time you add something to your life, it's not a one-time expenditure; it's a higher monthly cost of living, forever.

The rise and rise of IP is certainly part of political capitalism. The global system of IP comes from political capture, such as the inclusion of an IP chapter ("TRIPS") in the World Trade Agreement, as well as the WIPO Copyright Treaties. This is basically a process by which large (mostly American) businesses reorganized the world's system of governance and law to allow them to extract rents and slash R&D. The absurd, inevitable consequence of this nonsense is today's "capital light" chip companies, that don't make chips, just designs, which are turned out by one or two gigantic companies, mostly in Taiwan.

Of course, Riley and Brenner aren't the first theorists to observe that our modern economy is organized around extracting rents, rather than winning profits. Yanis Varoufakis likens the modern economy to medieval feudalism, dubbing the new form "technofeudalism":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

Riley and Brenner harken back to a different kind of feudal practice as the antecedant to political capitalism: "tax-farming."

Groups of entrepreneurs would advance money to the sovereign in exchange for the right to collect taxes from a given territory or population. Their ‘profit’ consisted in the difference between the money that they advanced to the ruler for the right to tax and what they could extract from the population through the exercise of that right. So, these entrepreneurs invested in politics, the control of means of administration and the means of violence, as a method for extracting surplus, in this way making for a politically constituted form of rent.

Unlike profits, rents are "largely or completely divorced from material production," "they ‘create no wealth’ and … they ‘reduce economic growth and reallocate incomes from the bottom to the top.'"

To make a rent, you need an asset, and in today's system, high asset prices are a top political priority: governments intervene to keep the prices of houses high, to protect corporate bonds, and, of course, to keep AI companies' shares and IOUs from going to zero. The economy is dominated by "a large group of politically dependent firms and households…profoundly reliant on a policy of easy credit on the part of government… The US economy as a whole is sustained by lending, backed up by government, with profits accruing from production under excruciating pressure."

Our social programs have been replaced by public-private partnerships that benefit these "politically dependent firms." Bush's Prescription Drug Act didn't seek to recoup public investment in pharma research through lower prices – it offered a (further) subsidy to pharma companies in exchange for (paltry/nonexistent) price breaks. Obama's Affordable Care Act transferred hundreds of billions to investors in health corporations, who raised prices and increased their profits. Trump's CARES Act bailed out every corporate debtor in the country. Biden's American Rescue Plan, CHIPS Act and Inflation Reduction Act don't offer public services or transfer funds to workers – instead, they offer subsidies to the for-profit sector.

Electorally, political capitalism is a system of "vertiginous levels of campaign expenditure and open corruption on a vast scale." It pushed workers into the arms of far-right parties, while re-organizing center-left parties as center-right parties of the lanyard class. Both parties are hamstrung because "in a persistently low- or no-growth environment…parties can no longer operate on the basis of programmes for growth."

This is really just scraping the surface. I think it's well worth £4 to read the source document. I look forward to the further development of this theory, to its being streamlined. It's got a lot of important things to say, even if it is a little hard to metabolize at present.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• EU's New Digital Package Proposal Promises Red Tape Cuts but Guts GDPR Privacy Rights https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/eus-new-digital-package-proposal-promises-red-tape-cuts-guts-gdpr-privacy-rights

• Looks Like We Can Finally Kiss the Metaverse Goodbye https://gizmodo.com/looks-like-we-can-finally-kiss-the-metaverse-goodbye-2000695825

• A New Anonymous Phone Carrier Lets You Sign Up With Nothing but a Zip Code https://www.wired.com/story/new-anonymous-phone-carrier-sign-up-with-nothing-but-a-zip-code/

• Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/12/microsoft-slashes-ai-sales-growth-targets-as-customers-resist-unproven-agents/

• The Hidden Cost of Ceding Government Procurement to a Monopoly Gatekeeper https://ilsr.org/article/independent-business/turning-public-money-into-amazons-profits/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Student ethnographies of World of Warcraft https://web.archive.org/web/20051208020004/http://www.trinity.edu/adelwich/mmo/students.html

#20yrsago Sony rootkit ripped off anti-DRM code to break into iTunes https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2005/12/04/hidden-feature-sony-drm-uses-open-source-code-add-apple-drm/

#20yrsago English info on France’s terrible proposed copyright law https://web.archive.org/web/20060111032903/http://eucd.info/index.php?English-readers

#15yrsago New Zealand leak: US-style copyright rules are a bad deal https://web.archive.org/web/20101206090519/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5498/125/

#15yrsago Tron: Reloaded, come for the action, stay for the aesthetics https://memex.craphound.com/2010/12/05/tron-reloaded-come-for-the-action-stay-for-the-aesthetics/

#10yrsago Unelectable Lindsey Graham throws caution to the wind https://web.archive.org/web/20151206030630/https://gawker.com/i-am-tired-of-this-crap-lindsey-graham-plays-thunderi-1746116881

#10yrsago Every time there’s a mass shooting, gun execs & investors gloat about future earnings https://theintercept.com/2015/12/03/mass-shooting-wall-st/

#10yrsago How to bake spice-filled sandworm bread https://web.archive.org/web/20151205193104/https://kitchenoverlord.com/2015/12/03/dune-week-spice-filled-sandworm/

#5yrsago Descartes' God has failed and Thompson's Satan rules our computers https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/05/trusting-trust/#thompsons-devil

#5yrsago Denise Hearn and Vass Bednar's "The Big Fix" https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/05/ted-rogers-is-a-dope/#galen-weston-is-even-worse

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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

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

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

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

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Enshittification (Future Knowledge)
  https://futureknowledge.transistor.fm/episodes/enshittification

• We have become slaves to Silicon Valley (Politics JOE)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzEUvh1r5-w

• How Enshittification is Destroying The Internet (Frontline Club)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oovsyzB9L-s

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

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

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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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