LePartisan.info À propos Podcasts Fil web
Flux grenoblois
Fr3 Alpes Fr.Bleu Isère Infos épinglées Agendas Ressources Assos Webcams
Écologie BLOGS Revues Médias
🖋 Cory DOCTOROW
Science fiction author, activist and journalist
Souscrire à ce FLUX

PLURALISTIC

▸ les 10 dernières parutions

23.04.2025 à 15:32

Pluralistic: Sarah Wynn-Williams's 'Careless People' (23 Apr 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (6854 mots)


Today's links


The Crown Books cover for Sarah Wynn-Williams's 'Careless People.'

Sarah Wynn-Williams's 'Careless People' (permalink)

I never would have read Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams's tell-all memoir about her years running global policy for Facebook, but then Meta's lawyer tried to get the book suppressed and secured an injunction to prevent her from promoting it:

https://www.npr.org/2025/03/14/nx-s1-5318854/former-meta-executive-barred-from-discussing-criticism-of-the-company

So I've got something to thank Meta's lawyers for, because it's a great book! Not only is Wynn-Williams a skilled and lively writer who spills some of Facebook's most shameful secrets, but she's also a kick-ass narrator (I listened to the audiobook, which she voices):

https://libro.fm/audiobooks/9781250403155-careless-people

I went into Careless People with strong expectations about the kind of disgusting behavior it would chronicle. I have several friends who took senior jobs at Facebook, thinking they could make a difference (three of them actually appear in Wynn-Williams's memoir), and I've got a good sense of what a nightmare it is as a company.

But Wynn-Williams was a lot closer to three of the key personalities in Facebook's upper echelon than anyone in my orbit: Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and Joel Kaplan, who was elevated to VP of Global Policy after the Trump II election. I already harbor an atavistic loathing of these three based on their public statements and conduct, but the events Wynn-Williams reveals from their private lives make them out to be beyond despicable. There's Zuck, whose underlings let him win at board-games like Settlers of Catan because he's a manbaby who can't lose (and who accuses Wynn-Williams of cheating when she fails to throw a game of Ticket to Ride while they're flying in his private jet). There's Sandberg, who demands the right to buy a kidney for her child from someone in Mexico, should that child ever need a kidney.

Then there's Kaplan, who is such an extraordinarily stupid and awful oaf that it's hard to pick out just one example, but I'll try. At one point, Wynn-Williams gets Zuck a chance to address the UN General Assembly. As is his wont, Zuck refuses to be briefed before he takes the dais (he's repeatedly described as unwilling to consider any briefing note longer than a single text message). When he gets to the mic, he spontaneously promises that Facebook will provide internet access to refugees all over the world. Various teams at Facebook then race around, trying to figure out whether this is something the company is actually doing, and once they realize Zuck was just bullshitting, set about trying to figure out how to do it. They get some way down this path when Kaplan intervenes to insist that giving away free internet to refugees is a bad idea, and that instead, they should sell internet access to refugees. Facebookers dutifully throw themselves into this absurd project, which dies when Kaplan fires off an email stating that he's just realized that refugees don't have any money. The project dies.

The path that brought Wynn-Williams into the company of these careless people is a weird – and rather charming – one. As a young woman, Wynn-Williams was a minor functionary in the New Zealand diplomatic corps, and during her foreign service, she grew obsessed with the global political and social potential of Facebook. She threw herself into the project of getting hired to work on Facebook's global team, working on strategy for liaising with governments around the world. The biggest impediment to landing this job is that it doesn't exist: sure, FB was lobbying the US government, but it was monumentally disinterested in the rest of the world in general, and the governments of the world in particular.

But Wynn-Williams persists, pestering potentially relevant execs with requests, working friends-of-friends (Facebook itself is extraordinarily useful for this), and refusing to give up. Then comes the Christchurch earthquake. Wynn-Williams is in the US, about to board a flight, when her sister, a news presenter, calls her while trapped inside a collapsed building (the sister hadn't been able to get a call through to anyone in NZ). Wynn-Williams spends the flight wondering if her sister is dead or alive, and only learns that her sister is OK through a post on Facebook.

The role Facebook played in the Christchurch quake transforms Wynn-Williams's passion for Facebook into something like religious zealotry. She throws herself into the project of landing the job, and she does, and after some funny culture-clashes arising from her Kiwi heritage and her public service background, she settles in at Facebook.

Her early years there are sometimes comical, sometimes scary, and are characteristic of a company that is growing quickly and unevenly. She's dispatched to Myanmar amidst a nationwide block of Facebook ordered by the ruling military junta and at one point, it seems like she's about to get kidnapped and imprisoned by goons from the communications ministry. She arranges for a state visit by NZ Prime Minister John Key, who wants a photo-op with Zuckerberg, who – oblivious to the prime minister standing right there in front of him – berates Wynn-Williams for demanding that he meet with some jackass politician (they do the photo-op anyway).

One thing is clear: Facebook doesn't really care about countries other than America. Though Wynn-Williams chalks this up to plain old provincial chauvinism (which FB's top eschelon possess in copious quantities), there's something else at work. The USA is the only country in the world that a) is rich, b) is populous, and c) has no meaningful privacy protections. If you make money selling access to dossiers on rich people to advertisers, America is the most important market in the world.

But then Facebook conquers America. Not only does FB saturate the US market, it uses its free cash-flow and high share price to acquire potential rivals, like Whatsapp and Instagram, ensuring that American users who leave Facebook (the service) remain trapped by Facebook (the company).

At this point, Facebook – Zuckerberg – turns towards the rest of the world. Suddenly, acquiring non-US users becomes a matter of urgency, and overnight Wynn-Williams is transformed from the sole weirdo talking about global markets to the key asset in pursuit off the company's top priority.

Wynn-Williams's explanation for this shift lies in Zuckerberg's personality, his need to constantly dominate (which is also why his subordinates have learned to let him win at board games). This is doubtless true: not only has this aspect of Zuckerberg's personality been on display in public for decades, Wynn-Williams was able to observe it first-hand, behind closed doors.

But I think that in addition to this personality defect, there's a material pressure for Facebook to grow that Wynn-Williams doesn't mention. Companies that grow get extremely high price-to-earnings (P:E) ratios, meaning that investors are willing to spend many dollars on shares for every dollar the company takes in. Two similar companies with similar earnings can have vastly different valuations (the value of all the stock the company has ever issued), depending on whether one of them is still growing.

High P:E ratios reflect a bet on the part of investors that the company will continue to grow, and those bets only become more extravagant the more the company grows. This is a huge advantage to companies with "growth stocks." If your shares constantly increase in value, they are highly liquid – that is, you can always find someone who's willing to buy your shares from you for cash, which means that you can treat shares like cash. But growth stocks are better than cash, because money grows slowly, if at all (especially in periods of extremely low interest rates, like the past 15+ years). Growth stocks, on the other hand, grow.

Best of all, companies with growth stocks have no trouble finding more stock when they need it. They just type zeroes into a spreadsheet and more shares appear. Contrast this with money. Facebook may take in a lot of money, but the money only arrives when someone else spends it. Facebook's access to money is limited by exogenous factors – your willingness to send your money to Facebook. Facebook's access to shares is only limited by endogenous factors – the company's own willingness to issue new stock.

That means that when Facebook needs to buy something, there's a very good chance that the seller will accept Facebook's stock in lieu of US dollars. Whether Facebook is hiring a new employee or buying a company, it can outbid rivals who only have dollars to spend, because that bidder has to ask someone else for more dollars, whereas Facebook can make its own stock on demand. This is a massive competitive advantage.

But it is also a massive business risk. As Stein's Law has it, "anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." Facebook can't grow forever by signing up new users. Eventually, everyone who might conceivably have a Facebook account will get one. When that happens, Facebook will need to find some other way to make money. They could enshittify – that is, shift value from the company's users and customers to itself. They could invent something new (like metaverse, or AI). But if they can't make those things work, then the company's growth will have ended, and it will instantaneously become grossly overvalued. Its P:E ratio will have to shift from the high value enjoyed by growth stocks to the low value endured by "mature" companies.

When that happens, anyone who is slow to sell will lose a ton of money. So investors in growth stocks tend to keep one fist poised over the "sell" button and sleep with one eye open, watching for any hint that growth is slowing. It's not just that growth gives FB the power to outcompete rivals – it's also the case that growth makes the company vulnerable to massive, sudden devaluations. What's more, if these devaluations are persistent and/or frequent enough, the key FB employees who accepted stock in lieu of cash for some or all of their compensation will either demand lots more cash, or jump ship for a growing rival. These are the very same people that Facebook needs to pull itself out of its nosedives. For a growth stock, even small reductions in growth metrics (or worse, declines) can trigger cascades of compounding, mutually reinforcing collapse.

This is what happened in early 2022, when Meta posted slightly lower-than-anticipated US growth numbers, and the market all pounded on the "sell" button at once, lopping $250,000,000,000 of the company's valuation in 24 hours. At the time, it was the worst-ever single day losses for any company in human history:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2022/02/03/facebook-faces-an-existential-moment-after-230-billion-stock-crash/

Facebook's conquest of the US market triggered an emphasis on foreign customers, but not just because Zuck is obsessed with conquest. For Facebook, a decline in US growth posed an existential risk, the possibility of mass stock selloffs and with them, the end of the years in which Facebook could acquire key corporate rivals and executives with "money" it could print on the premises, on demand.

So Facebook cast its eye upon the world, and Wynn-Williams's long insistence that the company should be paying attention to the political situation abroad suddenly starts landing with her bosses. But those bosses – Zuck, Sandberg, Kaplan and others – are "careless." Zuck screws up opportunity after opportunity because he refuses to be briefed, forgets what little information he's been given, and blows key meetings because he refuses to get out of bed before noon. Sandberg's visits to Davos are undermined by her relentless need to promote herself, her "Lean In" brand, and her petty gamesmanship. Kaplan is the living embodiment of Green Day's "American Idiot" and can barely fathom that foreigners exist.

Wynn-Williams's adventures during this period are very well told, and are, by turns, harrowing and hilarious. Time and again, Facebook's top brass snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, squandering incredible opportunities that Wynn-Williams secures for them because of their pettiness, short-sightedness, and arrogance (that is, their carelessness).

But Wynn-Williams's disillusionment with Facebook isn't rooted in these frustrations. Rather, she is both personally and professionally aghast at the company's disgusting, callous and cruel behavior. She describes how her boss, Joel Kaplan, relentlessly sexually harasses her, and everyone in a position to make this stop tells her to shut up and take it. When Wynn-Williams give birth to her second child, she hemorrhages, almost dies, and ends up in a coma. Afterwards, Kaplan gives her a negative performance review because she was "unresponsive" to his emails and texts while she was dying in an ICU. This is a significant escalation of the earlier behavior she describes, like pestering her with personal questions about breastfeeding, video-calling her from bed, and so on (Kaplan is Sandberg's ex-boyfriend, and Wynn-Williams describes another creepy event where Sandberg pressures her to sleep next to her in the bedroom on one of Facebook's jets, something Wynn-Williams says she routinely does with the young women who report to her).

Meanwhile, Zuck is relentlessly pursuing Facebook's largest conceivable growth market: China. The only problem: China doesn't want Facebook. Zuck repeatedly tries to engineer meetings with Xi Jinping so he can plead his case in person. Xi is monumentally hostile to this idea. Zuck learns Mandarin. He studies Xi's book, conspicuously displays a copy of it on his desk. Eventually, he manages to sit next to Xi at a dinner where he begs Xi to name his next child. Xi turns him down.

After years of persistent nagging, lobbying, and groveling, Facebook's China execs start to make progress with a state apparatchik who dangles the possibility of Facebook entering China. Facebook promises this factotum the world – all the surveillance and censorship the Chinese state wants and more. Then, Facebook's contact in China is jailed for corruption, and they have to start over.

At this point, Kaplan has punished Wynn-Williams – she blames it on her attempts to get others to force him to stop his sexual harassment – and cut her responsibilities in half. He tries to maneuver her into taking over the China operation, something he knows she absolutely disapproves of and has refused to work on – but she refuses. Instead, she is put in charge of hiring the new chief of China operations, giving her access to a voluminous paper-trail detailing the company's dealings with the Chinese government.

According to Wynn-Williams, Facebook actually built an extensive censorship and surveillance system for the Chinese state – spies, cops and military – to use against Chinese Facebook users, and FB users globally. They promise to set up caches of global FB content in China that the Chinese state can use to monitor all Facebook activity, everywhere, with the implication that they'll be able to spy on private communications, and censor content for non-Chinese users.

Despite all of this, Facebook is never given access to China. However, the Chinese state is able to use the tools Facebook built for it to attack independence movements, the free press and dissident uprisings in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Meanwhile, in Myanmar, a genocide is brewing. NGOs and human rights activists keep reaching out to Facebook to get them to pay attention to the widespread use of the platform to whip up hatred against the country's Muslim minority group, the Rohinga. Despite having expended tremendous amounts of energy to roll out "Free Basics" in Myanmar (a program whereby Facebook bribes carriers to exclude its own services from data caps), with the result that in Myanmar, "the internet" is synonymous with "Facebook," the company has not expended any effort to manage its Burmese presence. The entire moderation staff consists of one (later two) Burmese speakers who are based in Dublin and do not work local hours (later, these two are revealed as likely stooges for the Myanmar military junta, who are behind the genocide plans).

The company has also failed to invest in Burmese language support for its systems – posts written in Burmese script are not stored as Unicode, meaning that none of the company's automated moderation systems can parse it. The company is so hostile to pleas to upgrade these systems that Wynn-Williams and some colleagues create secret, private Facebook groups where they can track the failures of the company and the rising tide of lethal violence in the country (this isn't the only secret dissident Facebook group that Wynn-Williams joins – she's also part of a group of women who have been sexually harassed by colleagues and bosses).

The genocide that follows is horrific beyond measure. And, as with the Trump election, the company's initial posture is that they couldn't possibly have played a significant role in a real-world event that shocked and horrified its rank-and-file employees.

The company, in other words, is "careless." Warned of imminent harms to its users, to democracy, to its own employees, the top executives simply do not care. They ignore the warnings and the consequences, or pay lip service to them. They don't care.

Take Kaplan: after figuring out that the company can't curry favor with the world's governments by selling drone-delivered wifi to refugees (the drones don't fly and the refugees are broke), he hits on another strategy. He remakes "government relations" as a sales office, selling political ads to politicians who are seeking to win over voters, or, in the case of autocracies, disenfranchised hostage-citizens. This is hugely successful, both as a system for securing government cooperation and as a way to transform Facebook's global policy shop from a cost-center to a profit-center.

But of course, it has a price. Kaplan's best customers are dictators and would-be dictators, formenters of hatred and genocide, authoritarians seeking opportunities to purge their opponents, through exile and/or murder.

Wynn-Williams makes a very good case that Facebook is run by awful people who are also very careless – in the sense of being reckless, incurious, indifferent.

But there's another meaning to "careless" that lurks just below the surface of this excellent memoir: "careless" in the sense of "arrogant" – in the sense of not caring about the consequences of their actions.

To me, this was the most important – but least-developed – lesson of Careless People. When Wynn-Williams lands at Facebook, she finds herself surrounded by oafs and sociopaths, cartoonishly selfish and shitty people, who, nevertheless, have built a service that she loves and values, along with hundreds of millions of other people.

She's not wrong to be excited about Facebook, or its potential. The company may be run by careless people, but they are still prudent, behaving as though the consequences of screwing up matter. They are "careless" in the sense of "being reckless," but they care, in the sense of having a healthy fear (and thus respect) for what might happen if they fully yield to their reckless impulses.

Wynn-Williams's firsthand account of the next decade is not a story of these people becoming more reckless, rather, it's a story in which the possibility of consequences for that recklessness recedes, and with it, so does their care over those consequences.

Facebook buys its competitors, freeing it from market consequences for its bad acts. By buying the places where disaffected Facebook users are seeking refuge – Instagram and Whatsapp – Facebook is able to insulate itself from the discipline of competition – the fear that doing things that are adverse to its users will cause them to flee.

Facebook captures its regulators, freeing it from regulatory consequences for its bad acts. By playing a central role in the electoral campaigns of Obama and then other politicians around the world, Facebook transforms its watchdogs into supplicants who are more apt to beg it for favors than hold it to account.

Facebook tames its employees, freeing it from labor consequences for its bad acts. As engineering supply catches up with demand, Facebook's leadership come to realize that they don't have to worry about workforce uprisings, whether incited by impunity for sexually abusive bosses, or by the company's complicity in genocide and autocratic oppression.

First, Facebook becomes too big to fail.

Then, Facebook becomes too big to jail.

Finally, Facebook becomes too big to care.

This is the "carelessness" that ultimately changes Facebook for the worse, that turns it into the hellscape that Wynn-Williams is eventually fired from after she speaks out once too often. Facebook bosses aren't just "careless" because they refuse to read a briefing note that's longer than a tweet. They're "careless" in the sense that they arrive at a juncture where they don't have to care who they harm, whom they enrage, who they ruin.

There's a telling anaecdote near the end of Careless People. Back in 2017, leaks revealed that Facebook's sales-reps were promising advertisers the ability to market to teens who felt depressed and "worthless":

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/facebook-helped-advertisers-target-teens-who-feel-worthless/

Wynn-Williams is – rightly – aghast about this, and even more aghast when she sees the company's official response, in which they disclaim any knowledge that this capability was being developed and fire a random, low-level scapegoat. Wynn-Williams knows they're lying. She knows that this is a routine offering, one that the company routinely boasts about to advertisers.

But she doesn't mention the other lies that Facebook tells in this moment: for one thing, the company offers advertisers the power to target more teens than actually exist. The company proclaims the efficacy of its "sentiment analysis" tool that knows how to tell if teens are feeling depressed or "worthless," even though these tools are notoriously inaccurate, hardly better than a coin-toss, a kind of digital phrenology.

Facebook, in other words, isn't just lying to the public about what it offers to advertisers – it's lying to advertisers, too. Contra those who say, "if you're not paying for the product, you're the product," Facebook treats anyone it can get away with abusing as "the product" (just like every other tech monopolist):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Wynn-Williams documents so many instances in which Facebook's top executives lie – to the courts, to Congress, to the UN, to the press. Facebook lies when it is beneficial to do so – but only when they can get away with it. By the time Facebook was lying to advertisers about its depressed teen targeting tools, it was already colluding with Google to rig the ad market with an illegal tool called "Jedi Blue":

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

Facebook's story is the story of a company that set out to become too big to care, and achieved that goal. The company's abuses track precisely with its market dominance. It enshittified things for users once it had the users locked in. It screwed advertisers once it captured their market. It did the media-industry-destroying "pivot to video" fraud once it captured the media:

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

The important thing about Facebook's carelessness is that it wasn't the result of the many grave personality defects in Facebook's top executives – it was the result of policy choices. Government decisions not to enforce antitrust law, to allow privacy law to wither on the vine, to expand IP law to give Facebook a weapon to shut down interoperable rivals – these all created the enshittogenic environment that allowed the careless people who run Facebook to stop caring.

The corollary: if we change the policy environment, we can make these careless people – and their successors, who run other businesses we rely upon – care. They may never care about us, but we can make them care about what we might do to them if they give in to their carelessness.

Meta is in global regulatory crosshairs, facing antitrust action in the USA:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/18/chatty-zucky/#is-you-taking-notes-on-a-criminal-fucking-conspiracy

And muscular enforcement pledges in the EU:

https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/eu-says-it-will-enforce-digital-rules-irrespective-ceo-location-2025-04-21/

As Martin Luther King, Jr put it:

The law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that is pretty important.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Free Culture Movement turns one https://web.archive.org/web/20050426022041/http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/002838.shtml

#15yrsago India’s copyright bill gets it right https://web.archive.org/web/20100425031519/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4974/196/

#15yrsago Hitler’s pissed off about fair use https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBO5dh9qrIQ

#10yrsago Fascinating, wide-ranging discussion with William Gibson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmh29gwEy7Y

#10yrsago Tory chairman accused of smearing party rivals’ Wikipedia entries https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/apr/21/grant-shapps-accused-of-editing-wikipedia-pages-of-tory-rivals

#10yrsago John Oliver on patent trolls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bxcc3SM_KA

#5yrsago Disney heiress slams top execs' compensation https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/22/filternet/#castmembers

#5yrsago Covid burns through Charter Cable employees https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/22/filternet/#thomas-rutledge-murderer

#5yrsago Unmasking the registrants of the "reopen" websites https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/22/filternet/#krebs

#5yrsago Apartment buildings didn't cause the pandemic https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/22/filternet/#kate-wagner

#5yrsago Web-wide copyright filters would be a disaster https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/22/filternet/#filternet

#1yrago Paying for it doesn't make it a market https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/22/kargo-kult-kaptialism/#dont-buy-it

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)

  • 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/

  • 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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: Nimby and the D-Hoppers CONCLUSION https://craphound.com/stories/2025/04/13/nimby-and-the-d-hoppers-conclusion/

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

22.04.2025 à 15:28

Pluralistic: More Everything Forever (22 Apr 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3465 mots)


Today's links


The Basic Books cover for Adam Becker's 'More Everything Forever.'

More Everything Forever (permalink)

ForeverAstrophysicist Adam Becker knows a few things about science and technology – enough to show, in a new book called More Everything Forever that the claims that tech bros make about near-future space colonies, brain uploading, and other skiffy subjects are all nonsense dressed up as prediction:

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/adam-becker/more-everything-forever/9781541619593/

Becker investigates the personalities, the ideologies, the coalitions, the histories, and crucially, the grifts behind such science fictional pursuits as infinite life-extension, space colonization, automation panic, AI doomerism, longtermism, effective altruism, rationalism, and conciousness uploading.

This is, loosely speaking, the bundle of ideologies that Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres dubbed TESCREAL (transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, (modern) cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and longtermism):

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

While these are largely associated with modern Silicon Valley esoteric techbros (and the odd Oxfordian like Nick Bostrom), they have very deep roots, which Becker excavates – like Nikolai Fyodorov's 18th century "cosmism," a project to "scientifically" resurrect everyone who ever lived inside of a simulation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Fyodorov_(philosopher)

In their modern incarnation, these ideas largely originate in science fiction novels. That is to say, they were made up and popularized by people like me, the vast majority of whom made no pretense of being able to predict the future or even realistically describe a path from the present to the future they were presenting. Science fiction is something between a card trick and a consensual con game, where the writer shows you just enough detail to make you think that the rest of it must be lurking somewhere in the wings. No one in sf has ever explained how consciousness uploading could possibly work, and neither have any of the advocates for consciousness uploading – the difference is that (most of) the sf writers know they're just making stuff up.

Becker's central question is how many "smart" people (some of them very smart and accomplished, others merely very certain that they are smart despite all evidence to the contrary) can mistake futuristic allegories made up by pulp writers for prophesy?

In answering this question, he uncovers a corollary of Upton Sinclair's famous maxim that "it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it," namely, that "it is easy to get a person to believe something when doing so will make them feel good about themselves."

The beliefs that Becker explores in this book sometimes make the believers rich (like the AI grifters who run around shouting about AI taking over the world and turning us all into paperclips). Sometimes, they make their believers feel good about being selfish assholes (like longtermism, which holds that all the misery in the world today is worth it if you can make 24 heptillion hypothetical simulated people just a little happy in 10,000 years). Sometimes, they make their believers feel good about life after death, or eternal life – the same pitch that religions have been roping in followers with since the stone age.

What differentiates these beliefs from other faith-based claims is that their followers claim that they aren't operating on faith, but on science, reason and rationality. This is where the fact that Becker is a bona fide astrophysicist comes in. Not only is he personally qualified to debunk claims about space colonization, but he's also familiar with the rigorous process of scientific inquiry, and capable of consulting experts and listening to them. That's how he concludes, for example, that having your head cut off and frozen when you die is just a form of corpse mutilation, with a zero point zero zero zero zero percent chance of someone recovering your mind from your freezerburned brain.

Like his subjects, Becker has a complicated relationship with science fiction. He, too, enjoys the imaginative flights of the genre, its delightful thought-experiments, its gnarly moral conundra. I love these too. They make for a fascinating and often useful lens for understanding and challenging our own relationship with technology and our very humanity. Ultimately, Becker is exploring the difference between reading sf because it makes you think in new ways, and reading sf as a kind of prophetic text, and – crucially – he's asserting that it's perfectly possible to enjoy this stuff without organizing your moral life around hypothetical heptillions of virtual people living in the year 25,000; or, indeed, having your head cut off and frozen.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Fit 20 functions into a single 5.25″ drive bay https://web.archive.org/web/20050311060916/http://www.xoxide.com/sunbeam-superior-panel.html

#20yrsago Ghana nationalizes folklore, threatens jail for folk artists https://www.modernghana.com/entertainment/2319/expert-criticises-copyright-bill.html

#20yrsago MPAA bribing NYC cops to bust bootleg DVD sellers? https://nypost.com/2005/04/21/police-payoff-probe-dvd-busters-eyed/

#10yrsago Sony sends pre-emptive threat letter to journalists https://www.techdirt.com/2015/04/21/our-response-to-sony-sending-us-threat-letter-reporting-companys-leaked-emails/

#5yrsago Smart bassinet can be remotely hacked https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/21/all-in-it-together/#shaken-baby-syndrome

#5yrsago Australian regulator takes up Right to Repair for tractors https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/21/all-in-it-together/#tenant-farmers

#5yrsago Texas AG: We'll imprison people who warn about getting covid while voting https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/21/all-in-it-together/#ken-paxton

#5yrsago Amazon workers plan nationwide walkout https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/21/all-in-it-together/#leverage

#5yrsago Whole Foods has a union-busting "heatmap" app https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/21/all-in-it-together/#guard-labor-v-redistribution

#5yrsago Talking bunker-busting with Trashfuture https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/21/all-in-it-together/#trashfuture

#5yrsago Multi-level dungeon built into the drawers of an old dresser https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/21/all-in-it-together/#peter-heeringa

#5yrsago Every Covid-19 Commerical is Exactly the Same https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/21/all-in-it-together/#b-roll

#5yrsago Private equity blew millions on pro-surprise-billing ads while cutting doctor pay https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/21/all-in-it-together/#doctor-patient-unity

#5yrsago Podcasting John Scalzi's The Last Emperox https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/21/all-in-it-together/#scalzi

#5yrsago Phishers deploy fake contact-tracing warnings https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/21/all-in-it-together/#co-evolution

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)

  • 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/

  • 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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: Nimby and the D-Hoppers CONCLUSION https://craphound.com/stories/2025/04/13/nimby-and-the-d-hoppers-conclusion/

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

21.04.2025 à 16:28

Pluralistic: Trump's FTC opens the floodgates for tariff profiteering (21 Apr 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4289 mots)


Today's links


The produce section of a grocery store, with Kroger's signage. It is animated. The image fades to a version in which all the hand-lettered price signs are replaced with code waterfalls as seen in the credit-sequences of the Wachowskis' 'Matrix' movies. The image fades again and the huge, menacing eye of HAL9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey' appears in the center aisle, and all the prices have doubled. The image fades again and the doubled prices are replaced with the code waterfall again. The image then loops.

Trump's FTC opens the floodgates for tariff profiteering (permalink)

Have you heard that tariffs are going to drive prices up? Me too. There's a good reason we're hearing a lot of talk about tariffs prices: tariffs are a tax that is ultimately paid by consumers. Trump plans to raise $6t in tariffs, making them the largest tax increase in US history:

https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2025/04/03/as-trump-throws-the-world-economy-into-chaos-with-his-tariff-trade-war-heres-what-ohio-can-expect/

But that $6t is just for starters. If there's one thing we learned from the pandemic supply-chain shocks, it's that corporate CEOs never let an emergency go to waste. Bosses, knowing that you'd been warned to expect higher prices, went ahead and jacked up their prices way over inflation, blaming it on covid, on stimulus checks, on Biden, on the phase of the moon. Blaming it on anything – except greed. That's why we called it "excuseflation":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/11/price-over-volume/#pepsi-pricing-power

How do we know that bosses were jacking up prices? They told us so! In investor calls, corporate executives boasted that "consumer expectations" gave them "pricing power," and that they were making bank from it. From oil to eggs, excuseflation – greedflation – is everywhere:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/23/cant-make-an-omelet/#keep-calm-and-crack-on

Neoclassical economists insist that this is impossible. For greedflation to be real, companies would have to somehow collude to raise prices. After all, if prices go up for one seller and not another, shoppers will follow the invisible hand as it points them to those bargains. There's some truth to that, in a competitive market. But what if we were to waste 40 years, waving through anticompetitive mergers until most sectors of the economy were dominated by five or fewer companies:

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

When a sector is controlled by a handful of firms, there's plenty of opportunities for "tacit collusion." And not all the collusion is tacit: in concentrated sectors, all the C-suite types know each other. They've worked with each other for their whole careers, jumping from one company to another. They're godparents to each others' children, executors of one-another's estate, members of the same polycules. No wonder the Communist revolutionary Adam Smith wrote:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

But we live in the computer age. We aren't cavemen, confined to whispering price information to one another with our flapping meat-mouths. We have computers! Better still, we have data brokers, who allow for collusive price-raising, gather price data from all the dominant players in a sector, then "advising" each company on how to set its prices. Somehow, the optimal, coordinate pricing strategy is always to make prices higher. That's true with meat:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy

And it's true with rent:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/11/nimby-yimby-fimby/#home-team-advantage

This kind of third-party price-rigging is illegal, of course, but decades of antitrust neglect allowed these "economic termites" to multiply and fill the walls of our society:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/economic-termites-are-everywhere

But never let it be said that monopolists can't innovate. Thanks to the total failure of Congress to pass consumer privacy legislation since 1988, the humble price-fixing data-broker has transformed into the "surveillance pricing" industry:

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

With surveillance pricing, sellers buy your financial data from the unregulated data-broker industry and use it to set a different price for every customer. For example, McDonald's has invested in a company called "Plexure" that can tell when someone at the drive-through has just been paid, so that the seller can add a dollar to the price of their daily breakfast sandwich. And surveillance pricing isn't limited to buyers – sellers can get surveillance-priced, too. Take nurses, whose staffing agencies have been replaced by a cartel of three apps that buy nurses' credit data before offering them a shift, so that they can offer a lower wage to nurses carrying high credit-card debts (indebted, desperate workers will sell their labor for less):

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

The industry calls this "personalized pricing," and they tout the possibility that it will result in poorer people getting bargains from sellers who know just how little they can afford. In their telling, it's a kind of cod-Marxism, organized around "to each according to their ability (to pay)":

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

There's precious little evidence that personalized pricing is lowering anyone's prices. Indeed, the main benefit of personalized pricing – apart from price-gouging, that is – is that it's hard to detect. When prices are different for every customer, how does a customer know they're getting ripped off?

That's what Biden's FTC set out to discover. Last summer, they opened an investigation into surveillance pricing, with the goal of cracking down on the practice:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/24/gouging-the-all-seeing-eye/#i-spy

Then came the election, and a change in leadership at the FTC. Out with Lina Khan, the most effective FTC chair in generations, in with Andrew Ferguson, the decidedly mid Trump footsoldier whose first official act was to kill the surveillance pricing investigation and replace it with an internal snitch-line where FTC employees could report each other for being "woke":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/24/enforcement-priorities/#enemies-lists

This is a damned shame, because the country's largest, most successful "pricing consultancies" – like PROS Holding – are advising their clients to get ready to jack up prices in order to take advantage of consumer expectations of inflation from tariffs, as Katya Schwenk reports for The Lever:

https://www.levernews.com/how-trump-is-helping-price-gougers-exploit-his-tariffs/

You don't have to take Schwenk's word for it. You can watch pricing guru Craig Zawada's webinar for yourself:

https://pros.com/learn/webinars/navigating-tariff-increases-future-proof-pricing-strategy

Zawada works for PROS Holdings, a notorious price-setting technology provider. In the webinar, Zawada tells viewers that thanks to tariffs, "there is perhaps more of a window to make changes to your pricing than there has been before…customers expect change. Now is the time to take advantage."

Of course, you're the one he wants them to take advantage of.

PROS is one of the firms targeted by Khan's FTC and let off the hook under Ferguson. A former FTC official summed it up nicely: "The message that is coming out of this administration… is that the watchdog is gone and companies feel emboldened to rip people off. It’s open season on American consumers."

What's open season look like? Pricing consultant Drew Marconi hosted a webinar where he advised clients "You may just have to rip the Band-Aid — jack up prices and see what happens. You’re going to be surprised by how much room you have":

https://www.linkedin.com/events/7315531163840774144/comments/

And the firms are listening. Autozone's last 2024 earnings call included this reassuring news: "if we get tariffs… we’ll generally raise prices ahead of — [when] we know what the tariffs will be":

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4723049-autozone-inc-azo-q4-2024-earnings-call-transcript

Pricing consultants are advising their clients against charging "tariff surcharges," noting that customers will expect these to go away when (if) the tariffs end. Instead, they advise businesses to raise prices in expectation of "faster, lasting implementation of price increases":

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/10/30/companies-tariffs-trump-prices/

Ferguson has warned that the FTC will crack down on tariff profiteers who raise prices over and above the additional costs imposed by tariffs. But he said this even as he was shutting down the agency's investigations into the companies that facilitate exactly this kind of profiteering. Still, Ferguson is ridding the FTC of "woke." I'm sure that'll be a comfort to Americans as they fill in a loan application so they can afford a new tire for their car.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago India rejects software patents https://yro.slashdot.org/story/05/04/20/2311255/software-patents-stopped-in-india

#15yrsago Kids and mobile phones: waiting for the surveillance shoe to drop https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/20/kids-and-mobile-phones-waiting-for-the-surveillance-shoe-to-drop/

#15yrsago Magazine by and for the volcano-stranded https://web.archive.org/web/20100423042252/https://www.losowsky.com/magtastic/2010/what-we-do-next/

#15yrsago Spying school took “thousands” of photos of students with covert webcam app, caught kids sleeping, half-dressed https://www.wired.com/2010/04/webcamscanda/

#15yrsago Ireland High Court gives entertainment giants the power to disconnect whole families from the net https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/04/major-labels-go-bragh-as-irish-judge-allows-3-strikes/

#15yrsago Carbon offsets: fraud, exaggeration, and poorly run projects https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2010/0420/Buying-carbon-offsets-may-ease-eco-guilt-but-not-global-warming

#10yrsago Helen Keller, feminist, radical socialist, anti-racist activist and civil libertarian https://truthout.org/articles/the-radical-dissent-of-helen-keller/

#5yrsago Amazon is stronger – and weaker – than ever https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/20/great-danes/#crisis-means-crossroads

#5yrsago Trump's antitrust report card: F- https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/20/great-danes/#aaint

#5yrsago 94.5% of "small business" money went to giant corporations https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/20/great-danes/#ppp

#5yrsago Cars correlated with contagion in NYC https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/20/great-danes/#methodological-errors

#5yrsago Australian academic spyware https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/20/great-danes/#proctorio

#5yrsago Zoom claims it uses AI to stop sexytimes https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/20/great-danes/#nudity-detector-vans

#5yrsago Denmark: no bailouts for companies headquartered in tax havens https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/20/great-danes/#great-danes

#1yrago Greedflation, but for prisoners https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/20/captive-market/#locked-in

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)

  • 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/

  • 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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Naked Capitalism (https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/).

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: Nimby and the D-Hoppers CONCLUSION https://craphound.com/stories/2025/04/13/nimby-and-the-d-hoppers-conclusion/

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

19.04.2025 à 15:08

Pluralistic: Against transparency (19 Apr 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4527 mots)


Today's links


A three-headed jack-in-the-box, sproinging out of a box bearing a Facebook terms of service update notice. Each of Jack's heads has been replaced with the hostile red eye of HAL 9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' Each head wears a top hat. Two of Jack's six hands have been replaced with Facebook 'thumbs up' icons. Each of the three aspects of Jack brandishes a cruel whip.

Against transparency (permalink)

Walk down any street in California for more than a couple minutes and you will come upon a sign warning you that a product or just an area "contains chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer."

These warnings are posted to comply with Prop 65, a 1986 law that requires firms to notify you if they're exposing you to cancer risk. The hope was that a legal requirement to warn people about potential carcinogens would lead to a reduction in the use of carcinogens in commonly used products. But the joke's on us: since nearly everything has chemicals that trigger Prop 65 warnings, the warnings become a kind of background hiss. I've lived in California five times now, and I've never once seen a shred of evidence that a Prop 65 warning deters anyone from buying, consuming, using, or approaching anything. I mean, Disneyland is plastered in these warnings.

The idea behind Prop 65 was to "inform consumers" so they could "vote with their wallets." But "is this carcinogenic?" isn't a simple question. Many chemicals are carcinogenic if they come into contact with bare skin, or mucus membranes, but not if they are – for example – underfoot, in contact with the soles of your shoes. Other chemicals are dangerous when they're fresh and offgassing, but become safe once all the volatiles and aromatics have boiled off of them.

Prop 65 is often presented as a story of overregulation, but I think it's a matter of underregulation. Rather than simply telling you that there's a potential carcinogen nearby and leaving you to figure out whether you've exceeded your risk threshold, a useful regulatory framework would require firms to use their products in ways that minimize cancer risk. For example, if a product ships with a chemical that is potentially carcinogenic for a couple weeks after it is manufactured, then the law could require the manufacturer to air out the product for 14 days before shipping it to the wholesaler.

"Caveat emptor" has its place – say, at a yard-sale, or when buying lemonade from a kid raising money for a school trip – but routine shopping shouldn't be a life-or-death matter that you can only survive if you are willing and able to review extensive, peer-reviewed, paywalled toxicology literature. When a product poses a serious threat to our health, it should either be prohibited, or have its use circumscribed, so that a reasonable, prudent person doing normal things doesn't have to worry that they've missed a potentially lethal gotcha.

In other words, transparency is nice, but it's not enough.

Think of the "privacy policies" you're asked to click through a thousand times a day. No one reads these. No one has ever read these. For the first six months that Twitter was in business, its privacy policy was full of mentions to Flickr, because that's where they ganked the policy from, and they missed a bunch of search/replace operations. That's funny – but far funnier is that no one at Twitter read the privacy policy, because if they had, they would have noticed this.

You know what would be better than a privacy policy? A privacy law. The last time Congress passed a consumer privacy law was in 1988, when they banned video store clerks from disclosing which VHS cassettes you took home. The fact is that virtually any privacy violation, no matter how ghastly or harmful to you, is legal, provided that you are "notified" through a privacy policy.

Which is why privacy policies are actually privacy invasion policies. No one reads these things because we all know we disagree with every word in them, including "and" and "the." They all boil down to, "By being stupid enough to use this service, you agree that I'm allowed to come to your house, punch your grandmother, wear your underwear, make long distance calls, and eat all the food in your fridge."

And like Prop 65 warnings, these privacy policies are everywhere, and – like Prop 65 warnings – they have proven useless. Companies don't craft better privacy policies because so long as everyone has a terrible bullshit privacy policy, there's no reason to.

My blog, pluralistic.net has two privacy policies. One sits across the top of every page:

Privacy policy: we don't collect or retain any data at all ever period.

The other one appears in the sidebar:

By reading this website, 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.

The second one is a joke, obviously (it sits above a sidebar element that proclaims "Optimized for Netscape Navigator."). But what's most funny is that when I used to run it at the bottom of all my emails, I totally freaked out a bunch of reps from Big Tech companies on a standards committee that was trying to standardize abusive, controlling browser technology and cram it down two billion peoples' throats. These guys kvetched endlessly that it was unfair for me to simply declare that they'd agreed that they would do a bunch of stuff for me on behalf of their bosses.

My first response was, of course, "Lighten up, Francis." But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that these guys actually believed that showering someone in endless volleys of fine print actually created legal contracts and consent, and that I might someday sue their employers because I had cleverly released myself from their BOGUS AGREEMENTS.

Of course, that would be very stupid. I can't just wave a piece of paper in your face, shout "YOU AGREED" and steal your bike. But substitute "bike" for "private data" and that's exactly the system we have with privacy policies. Rather than providing notice of odious and unconscionable behavior and hoping that "market forces" sort it out, we should just update privacy law so that doing certain things with your private data is illegal, without your ongoing, continuous, revocable consent.

Obviously, this would come as a severe shock to the tech economy, which is totally structured around commercial surveillance. But the fact that an extremely harmful practice is also extremely widespread is not a reason to keep on doing it – it's a reason to stop. There was a time when we let companies sell radium suppositories, and then, one day, we just banned companies from telling you to put nuclear waste up your asshole:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/19/just-stop-putting-that-up-your-ass/#harm-reduction

We didn't fall back on the "freedom to contract" or "bodily autonomy." Sure, what you do with your body is your own business, but that doesn't imply that quacks should have free rein to trick you into using their murderous products.

And just as there are legitimate, therapeutic uses of radioisotopes (I'm having a PT scan on Monday!), there are legitimate reasons to share your private data. We don't need to resort to outright bans – we can just regulate things. For example, in 2022 Stanford Law's Mark Lemley proposed an absolutely ingenious answer to abusive Terms of Service:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/10/be-reasonable/#i-would-prefer-not-to

Lemley proposes constructing a set of "default rules" for routine agreements, made up of the "explicit and implicit" rules of contracts, including common law, the Uniform Commercial Code, and the Restatement of Contracts. Any time you're presented with a license agreement, you can turn it down in favor of the "default rules" that everyone knows and understands. Anyone who accepts a EULA instead must truly be consenting to a special set of rules. If you want your EULA to get chosen over the default rules, you need to make it short, clear and reasonable.

If we're gonna replace "caveat emptor" with rules that let you go about your business without reading 10,000,000 words of bullshit legalese every time you leave your house (or pick up your phone), we need smart policymakers to create those rules.

Since 2010, America has had an agency that was charged with creating and policing those rules, so you could do normal stuff without worrying that you were accidentally signing your life away. That agency is called the the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, and though it did good work for its first decade of existence, it wasn't until the Biden era, when Rohit Chopra took over the agency, that it came into its own.

Under Chopra, the CFPB became a powerhouse, going after one scam after another, racking up a series of impressive wins:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/10/getting-things-done/#deliverism

The CFPB didn't just react, either. They staffed up with smart technologists and created innovative, smart, effective initiatives to keep you from getting ripped off:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/01/bankshot/#personal-financial-data-rights

Under Chopra, the CFPB was in the news all the time, as they scored victory after victory. These days, the CFPB is in the news again, but for much uglier reasons. For billionaire scammers like Elon Musk, CFPB is the most hated of all the federal agencies. Musk's Doge has been trying to "delete the CFPB" since they arrived on the scene, but their hatred has made them so frenzied that they keep screwing up and losing in court. They just lost again:

https://prospect.org/justice/2025-04-18-federal-judge-halts-cfpb-purge-again/

Trumpland is full of the people on the other side of those EULAs, the people who think that if they can trick you out of your money, "that makes me smart":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/04/its-not-a-lie/#its-a-premature-truth

If Musk can trick you into buying a Tesla after lying about full self driving, that doesn't make him a scammer, "that makes him smart." If Trump can stiff his contractors, that doesn't make him a crook, "that makes him smart."

It's not a coincidence that these guys went after the CFPB. It's no mystery why they've gone after every watchdog that keeps you from getting scammed, poisoned or maimed, from the FDA to the EPA to the NLRB. They are the kind of people who say, "So long as it was in the fine print, and so long I could foist that fine-print on you, that's a fair deal." For them, caveat emptor is a Latin phrase that means, "Surprise, you're dead."

It's bad enough when companies do this to us, be they Big Tech, health insurers or airlines. But when the government takes these grifters' side over yours – when grifters take over the government – hold onto your wallets:

https://www.citationneeded.news/trump-crypto-empire/

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago New copyright bill panders to Christian Right, copyfighters, Hollywood https://web.archive.org/web/20050421040240/https://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,67269,00.html

#10yrsago A bill to fix America’s most dangerous computer law https://www.techdirt.com/2015/04/17/bill-introduced-to-fix-broken-dmca-anti-circumvention-rules/

#10yrsago Inside Islamic State’s spookocracy https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/islamic-state-files-show-structure-of-islamist-terror-group-a-1029274.html

#10yrsago Internet.org: delivering poor Internet to poor people https://scroll.in/article/721541/Poor-internet-for-poor-people:-why-Facebook’s-Internet.org-amounts-to-economic-racism

#10yrsago Iridescent insect sculptures from ewaste https://www.etsy.com/shop/DewLeaf?ref=shopsection_leftnav_1

#5yrsago Poor countries denied covid aid https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/19/shared-microbial-destiny-2/#shared-microbial-destiny

#5yrsago Gilead, the remdesivir welfare queens https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/19/shared-microbial-destiny-2/#remdesivir

#5yrsago 80% of the stimulus tax break will go to 43,000 people https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/19/shared-microbial-destiny-2/#trickle-down

#1yrago Precaritize bosses https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/19/make-them-afraid/#fear-is-their-mind-killer

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)

  • 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/

  • 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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: Nimby and the D-Hoppers CONCLUSION https://craphound.com/stories/2025/04/13/nimby-and-the-d-hoppers-conclusion/

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

10 / 10
 Persos A à L
Mona CHOLLET
Anna COLIN-LEBEDEV
Julien DEVAUREIX
Cory DOCTOROW
EDUC.POP.FR
Marc ENDEWELD
Michel GOYA
Hubert GUILLAUD
Gérard FILOCHE
Alain GRANDJEAN
Hacking-Social
Samuel HAYAT
Dana HILLIOT
François HOUSTE
Tagrawla INEQQIQI
Infiltrés (les)
Clément JEANNEAU
Paul JORION
Michel LEPESANT
Frédéric LORDON
Blogs persos du Diplo
LePartisan.info
 
 Persos M à Z
Henri MALER
Christophe MASUTTI
Romain MIELCAREK
Richard MONVOISIN
Corinne MOREL-DARLEUX
Timothée PARRIQUE
Thomas PIKETTY
PLOUM
VisionsCarto
Yannis YOULOUNTAS
Michaël ZEMMOUR
 
  Numérique
Christophe DESCHAMPS
Louis DERRAC
Olivier ERTZSCHEID
Olivier EZRATY
Framablog
Francis PISANI
Pixel de Tracking
Irénée RÉGNAULD
Nicolas VIVANT
 
  Collectifs
Arguments
Bondy Blog
Dérivation
Dissidences
Mr Mondialisation
Palim Psao
Paris-Luttes.info
ROJAVA Info
 
  Créatifs / Art / Fiction
Nicole ESTEROLLE
Julien HERVIEUX
Alessandro PIGNOCCHI
XKCD
🌓