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PLURALISTIC

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11.03.2026 à 20:11

Pluralistic: AI "journalists" prove that media bosses don't give a shit (11 Mar 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (5297 mots)


Today's links


A cutaway of a rocky underground, with a cylindrical brick cistern. Trapped in the prison is a 16th century drudge seated before a wheel on which rest a series of books that rotate along with the wheel.

AI "journalists" prove that media bosses don't give a shit (permalink)

Ed Zitron's a fantastic journalist, capable of turning a close read of AI companies' balance-sheets into an incandescent, exquisitely informed, eye-wateringly profane rant:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-bubble-is-an-information-war/

That's "Ed, the financial sleuth." But Ed has another persona, one we don't get nearly enough of, which I delight in: "Ed the stunt journalist." For example, in 2024, Ed bought Amazon's bestselling laptop, "a $238 Acer Aspire 1 with a four-year-old Celeron N4500 Processor, 4GB of DDR4 RAM, and 128GB of slow eMMC storage" and wrote about the experience of using the internet with this popular, terrible machine:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/

It sucked, of course, but it sucked in a way that the median tech-informed web user has never experienced. Not only was this machine dramatically underpowered, but its defaults were set to accept all manner of CPU-consuming, screen-filling ad garbage and bloatware. If you or I had this machine, we would immediately hunt down all those settings and nuke them from orbit, but the kind of person who buys a $238 Acer Aspire from Amazon is unlikely to know how to do any of that and will suffer through it every day, forever.

Normally the "digital divide" refers to access to technology, but as access becomes less and less of an issue, the real divide is between people who know how to defend themselves from the cruel indifference of technology designers and people who are helpless before their enshittificatory gambits.

Zitron's stunt stuck with me because it's so simple and so apt. Every tech designer should be forced to use a stock configuration Acer Aspire 1 for a minimum of three hours/day, just as every aviation CEO should be required to fly basic coach at least one out of three flights (and one of two long-haul flights).

To that, I will add: every news executive should be forced to consume the news in a stock browser with no adblock, no accessibility plugins, no Reader View, none of the add-ons that make reading the web bearable:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/07/reader-mode/#personal-disenshittification

But in all honesty, I fear this would not make much of a difference, because I suspect that the people who oversee the design of modern news sites don't care about the news at all. They don't read the news, they don't consume the news. They hate the news. They view the news as a necessary evil within a wider gambit to deploy adware, malware, pop-ups, and auto-play video.

Rawdogging a Yahoo News article means fighting through a forest of pop-ups, pop-unders, autoplay video, interrupters, consent screens, modal dialogs, modeless dialogs – a blizzard of news-obscuring crapware that oozes contempt for the material it befogs. Irrespective of the words and icons displayed in these DOM objects, they all carry the same message: "The news on this page does not matter."

The owners of news services view the news as a necessary evil. They aren't a news organization: they are an annoying pop-up and cookie-setting factory with an inconvenient, vestigial news entity attached to it. News exists on sufferance, and if it was possible to do away with it altogether, the owners would.

That turns out to be the defining characteristic of work that is turned over to AI. Think of the rapid replacement of customer service call centers with AI. Long before companies shifted their customer service to AI chatbots, they shifted the work to overseas call centers where workers were prohibited from diverging from a script that made it all but impossible to resolve your problems:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/06/unmerchantable-substitute-goods/#customer-disservice

These companies didn't want to do customer service in the first place, so they sent the work to India. Then, once it became possible to replace Indian call center workers who weren't allowed to solve your problems with chatbots that couldn't resolve your problems, they fired the Indian call center workers and replaced them with chatbots. Ironically, many of these chatbots turn out to be call center workers pretending to be chatbots (as the Indian tech joke goes, "AI stands for 'Absent Indians'"):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

"We used an AI to do this" is increasingly a way of saying, "We didn't want to do this in the first place and we don't care if it's done well." That's why DOGE replaced the call center reps at US Customs and Immigration with a chatbot that tells you to read a PDF and then disconnects the call:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/06/doge-ball/#n-600

The Trump administration doesn't want to hear from immigrants who are trying to file their bewildering paperwork correctly. Incorrect immigration paperwork is a feature, not a bug, since it can be refined into a pretext to kidnap someone, imprison them in a gulag long enough to line the pockets of a Beltway Bandit with a no-bid contract to operate an onshore black site, and then deport them to a country they have no connection with, generating a fat payout for another Beltway Bandit with the no-bid contract to fly kidnapped migrants to distant hellholes.

If the purpose of a customer service department is to tell people to go fuck themselves, then a chatbot is obviously the most efficient way of delivering the service. It's not just that a chatbot charges less to tell people to go fuck themselves than a human being – the chatbot itself means "go fuck yourself." A chatbot is basically a "go fuck yourself" emoji. Perhaps this is why every AI icon looks like a butthole:

https://velvetshark.com/ai-company-logos-that-look-like-buttholes

So it's no surprise that media bosses are so enthusiastic about replacing writers with chatbots. They hate the news and want it to go away. Outsourcing the writing to AI is just another way of devaluing it, adjacent to the existing enshittification that sees the news buried in popups, autoplays, consent dialogs, interrupters and the eleventy-million horrors that a stock browser with default settings will shove into your eyeballs on behalf of any webpage that demands them:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet

Remember that summer reading list that Hearst distributed to newspapers around the country, which turned out to be stuffed with "hallucinated" titles? At first, the internet delighted in dunking on Marco Buscaglia, the writer whose byline the list ran under. But as 404 Media's Jason Koebler unearthed, Buscaglia had been set up to fail, tasked with writing most of a 64-page insert that would have normally been the work of dozens of writers, editors and fact checkers, all on his own:

https://www.404media.co/chicago-sun-times-prints-ai-generated-summer-reading-list-with-books-that-dont-exist/

When Hearst hires one freelancer to do the work of dozens, they are saying, "We do not give a shit about the quality of this work." It is literally impossible for any writer to produce something good under those conditions. The purpose of Hearst's syndicated summer guide was to bulk out the newspapers that had been stripmined by their corporate owners, slimmed down to a handful of pages that are mostly ads and wire-service copy. The mere fact that this supplement was handed to a single freelancer blares "Go fuck yourself" long before you clap eyes on the actual words printed on the pages.

The capital class is in the grips of a bizarre form of AI psychosis: the fantasy of a world without people, where any fool idea that pops into a boss's head can be turned into a product without having to negotiate its creation with skilled workers who might point out that your idea is pretty fucking stupid:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-wheel/#billionaire-solipsism

For these AI boosters, the point isn't to create an AI that can do the work as well as a person – it's to condition the world to accept the lower-quality work that will come from a chatbot. Rather than reading a summer reading list of actual books, perhaps you could be satisfied with a summer reading list of hallucinated books that are at least statistically probable book-shaped imaginaries?

The bosses dreaming up use-cases for AI start from a posture of profound and proud ignorance of how workers who do useful things operate. They ask themselves, "If I was a ______, how would I do the job?" and then they ask an AI to do that, and declare the job done. They produce utility-shaped statistical artifacts, not utilities.

Take Grammarly, a company that offers statistical inferences about likely errors in your text. Grammar checkers aren't a terrible idea on their face, and I've heard from many people who struggle to express themselves in writing (either because of their communications style, or because they don't speak English as a first language) for whom apps like Grammarly are useful.

But Grammarly has just rolled out an AI tool that is so obviously contemptuous of writing that they might as well have called it "Go fuck yourself, by Grammarly." The new product is called "Expert Review," and it promises to give you writing advice "inspired" by writers whose writing they have ingested. I am one of these virtual "writing teachers" you can pay Grammarly for:

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/890921/grammarly-ai-expert-reviews

This is not how writing advice works. When I teach the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' workshop, my job isn't to train the students to produce work that is strongly statistically correlated with the sentence structure and word choices in my own writing. My job – the job of any writing teacher – is to try and understand the student's writing style and artistic intent, and to provide advice for developing that style to express that intent.

What Grammarly is offering isn't writing advice, it's stylometry, a computational linguistics technique for evaluating the likelihood that two candidate texts were written by the same person. Stylometry is a very cool discipline (as is adversarial stylometry, a set of techniques to obscure the authorship of a text):

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

But stylometry has nothing to do with teaching someone how to write. Even if you want to write a pastiche in the style of some writer you admire (or want to send up), word choices and sentence structure are only incidental to capturing that writer's style. To reduce "style" to "stylometry" is to commit the cardinal sin of technical analysis: namely, incinerating all the squishy qualitative aspects that can't be readily fed into a model and doing math on the resulting dubious quantitative residue:

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-qualia/

If you wanted to teach a chatbot to teach writing like a writer, you would – at a minimum – have to train that chatbot on the instruction that writer gives, not the material that writer has published. Nor can you infer how a writer would speak to a student by producing a statistical model of the finished work that writer has published. "Published work" has only an incidental relationship to "pedagogical communication."

Critics of Grammarly are mostly focused on the effrontery of using writers' names without their permission. But I'm not bothered by that, honestly. So long as no one is being tricked into thinking that I endorsed a product or service, you don't need my permission to say that I inspired it (even if I think it's shit).

What I find absolutely offensive about Grammarly is not that they took my name in vain, but rather, that they reduced the complex, important business of teaching writing to a statistical exercise in nudging your work into a word frequency distribution that hews closely to the average of some writer's published corpus. This is Grammarly's fraud: not telling people that they're being "taught by Cory Doctorow," but rather, telling people that they are being "taught" anything.

Reducing "teaching writing" to "statistical comparisons with another writer's published work" is another way of saying "go fuck yourself" – not to the writers whose identities that Grammarly has hijacked, but to the customers they are tricking into using this terrible, substandard, damaging product.

Preying on aspiring writers is a grift as old as the publishing industry. The world is full of dirtbag "story doctors," vanity presses, fake literary agents and other flimflam artists who exploit people's natural desire to be understood to steal from them:

https://writerbeware.blog/

Grammarly is yet another company for whom "AI" is just a way to lower quality in the hopes of lowering expectations. For Grammarly, helping writers with their prose is an irritating adjunct to the company's main business of separating marks from their money.

In business theory, the perfect firm is one that charges infinity for its products and pays zero for its inputs (you know, "scholarly publishing"). For bosses, AI is a way to shift their firm towards this ideal.

In this regard, AI is connected to the long tradition of capitalist innovation, in which new production efficiencies are used to increase quantity at the expense of quality. This has been true since the Luddite uprising, in which skilled technical workers who cared deeply about the textiles they produced using complex machines railed against a new kind of machine that produced manifestly lower quality fabric in much higher volumes:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/26/enochs-hammer/#thats-fronkonsteen

It's not hard to find credible, skilled people who have stories about using AI to make their work better. Elsewhere, I've called these people "centaurs" – human beings who are assisted by machines. These people are embracing the socialist mode of automation: they are using automation to improve quality, not quantity.

Whenever you hear a skilled practitioner talk about how they are able to hand off a time-consuming, low-value, low-judgment task to a model so they can focus on the part that means the most to them, you are talking to a centaur. Of course, it's possible for skilled practitioners to produce bad work – some of my favorite writers have published some very bad books indeed – but that isn't a function of automation, that's just human fallibility.

A reverse centaur (a person conscripted to act as a peripheral to a machine) is trapped by the capitalist mode of automation: quantity over quality. Machines work faster and longer than humans, and the faster and harder a human can be made to work, the closer the firm can come to the ideal of paying zero for its inputs.

A reverse centaur works for a machine that is set to run at the absolute limit of its human peripheral's capability and endurance. A reverse centaur is expected to produce with the mechanical regularity of a machine, catching every mistake the machine makes. A reverse centaur is the machine's accountability sink and moral crumple-zone:

https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/260

AI is a normal technology, just another set of automation tools that have some uses for some users. The thing that makes AI signify "go fuck yourself" isn't some intrinsic factor of large language models or transformers. It's the capitalist mode of automation, increasing quantity at the expense of quality. Automation doesn't have to be a way to reduce expectations in the hopes of selling worse things for more money – but without some form of external constraint (unions, regulation, competition), that is inevitably how companies will wield any automation, including and especially AI.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago History of the Disney Haunted Mansion’s stretching portraits https://longforgottenhauntedmansion.blogspot.com/2011/03/many-faces-ofthe-other-stretching.html

#15yrsago Readers Against DRM (logo) https://web.archive.org/web/20110311213843/https://readersbillofrights.info/RAD

#15yrsago Lost Souls: Audio adaptation of a classic vampire novel https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/10/lost-souls-audio-adaptation-of-a-classic-vampire-novel/

#15yrsago Time‘s appraisal of the first WorldCon https://web.archive.org/web/20080906184034/https://time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,761661-1,00.html

#15yrsago Insipid thrift-store landscapes improved with monsters https://imgur.com/involuntary-collaborations-i-buy-other-peoples-landscape-paintings-yard-sales-goodwill-put-monsters-them-r-pics-2780-march-11-2011-Oujbl

#15yrsago Fight 8-track piracy with this 1976 record sleeve https://www.flickr.com/photos/supraterra/5516574440/in/pool-41894168726@N01

#15yrsago Michigan Republicans create “financial martial law”; appointees to replace elected local officials https://web.archive.org/web/20120409124750/http://www.dailytribune.com/articles/2011/03/10/news/doc4d78d0d4d764d009636769.txt

#10yrsago Lawsuit reveals Obama’s DoJ sabotaged Freedom of Information Act transparency https://web.archive.org/web/20160309183758/https://news.vice.com/article/it-took-a-foia-lawsuit-to-uncover-how-the-obama-administration-killed-foia-reform

#10yrsago If the FBI can force decryption backdoors, why not backdoors to turn on your phone’s camera? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/10/apple-fbi-could-force-us-to-turn-on-iphone-cameras-microphones

#10yrsago Disgruntled IS defector dumps full details of tens of thousands of jihadis https://web.archive.org/web/20160330061315/https://news.sky.com/story/1656777/is-documents-identify-thousands-of-jihadis

#10yrsago Using distributed code-signatures to make it much harder to order secret backdoors https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/cothority-to-apple-lets-make-secret-backdoors-impossible/

#10yrsago Open Source Initiative says standards aren’t open unless they protect security researchers and interoperability https://web.archive.org/web/20190822053758/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/03/-are-only-open-if-they-protect-security-and-interoperability

#1yrago Eggflation is excuseflation https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/10/demand-and-supply/#keep-cal-maine-and-carry-on

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1031 words today, 47410 total)

  • "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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10.03.2026 à 16:23

Pluralistic: Ad-tech is fascist tech (10 Mar 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4475 mots)


Today's links


Times Square, lit up by night. Every ad sprouts a giant CCTV bubble. A green smoke crawls over the landscape.

Ad-tech is fascist tech (permalink)

A core tenet of the enshittification hypothesis is that all the terrible stuff we're subjected to in our digital lives today is the result of foreseeable (and foreseen) policy choices, which created the enshittogenic policy environment in which the worst people's worst ideas make the most money:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/10/say-their-names/#object-permanence

Take commercial surveillance. Google didn't have to switch from content-based ads (which chose ads based on your search terms and the contents of webpages) to surveillance-based ads (which used dossiers on your searches, emails, purchases and physical movements to target ads to you, personally). The content-based ads made Google billions, but the company made a gamble that surveillance-based ads would make them more money.

That gamble had two parts: the first was that advertisers would pay more for surveillance ads. This is the part we all focus on – the collusion between people who want to sell us stuff and companies willing to spy on us to help them do it.

But the other half of the bet is far more important: namely, whether spying on us would cost Google anything. Would they face fines? Would users collect massive civil judgments over these privacy violations? Would Google face criminal charges? These are the critical questions, because even if advertisers are willing to pay a premium for surveillance ads, it only makes sense to collect that premium if the excess profit it represents is larger than the anticipated penalties for committing surveillance crimes.

What's more, advertisers and Google execs all work for their shareholders, in a psychotic "market system" in which the myth of "fiduciary duty" is said to require companies to hurt us right up to the point where the harms they inflict on the world cost them more than the additional profits those harms deliver:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/18/falsifiability/#figleaves-not-rubrics

But the policymakers who ultimately determine whether the fines, judgments and criminal penalties outstrip the profits from spying – they work for us. They draw their paychecks from the public purse in exchange for safeguarding our interests, and they have manifestly failed at this.

Why did Google decide to start spying on us? For the same reason your dog licks its balls: because they could. The last consumer privacy law to make it out of the US Congress was a 1988 bill that banned video-store clerks from disclosing your VHS rentals:

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

And yes, the EU did pass a comprehensive consumer privacy law, but then abdicated any duty to enforce the GDPR, because US Big Tech companies pretend to be Irish, and Ireland is a crime-haven that lets the tax-evaders who maintain the fiction of a Dublin HQ break any EU law they find inconvenient:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/01/erin-go-blagged/#big-tech-omerta

The most important question for Google wasn't "Will advertisers pay more for surveillance targeting?" It was "Will lawmakers clobber us for spying on the whole internet?" And the answer to that second question was a resounding no.

Why did policymakers fail us? It's not much of a mystery, I'm afraid. Policymakers failed us because cops and spies hate privacy laws and lobby like hell against them. Cops and spies love commercial surveillance, because the private sector's massive surveillance dossiers are an off-the-books trove of warrantless surveillance data that the government can't legally collect. What's more, even if the spying was legal, buying private sector surveillance data is much cheaper than creating a public sector surveillance apparatus to collect the same info:

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

The harms of mass commercial surveillance were never hard to foresee. 20 years ago, Radar magazine commissioned a story from me about "the day Google turned evil," and I turned in "Scroogled," which was widely shared and reprinted:

https://web.archive.org/web/20070920193501/https://radaronline.com/from-the-magazine/2007/09/google_fiction_evil_dangerous_surveillance_control_1.php/

Radar is long gone, though it's back in the news now, thanks to the revelation that it was financed via Jeffrey Epstein as part of his plan to both control and loot magazines and newspapers:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Epstein/comments/142bufo/radar_magazine_lines_up_financing_published_2004/

But the premise of "Scroogled" lives on. 20 years ago, I wrote a story in which the bloated, paranoid, lawless DHS raided ad-tech databases of behavioral data in order to target people for secret arrests, extraordinary rendition, and torture.

It took a minute, but today, the DHS is paying data-brokers and ad-tech giants like Google for commercial surveillance data that it is using to feed the systems that automatically decide who will be kidnapped, rendered and tortured by ICE:

https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/27/ice_data_advertising_tech_firms/

I want to be clear here: I'm not claiming any prescience – quite the reverse in fact. My point is that it just wasn't very hard to see what would happen if we let the surveillance advertising industry run wild. Our lawmakers were warned. They did nothing. They exposed us to this risk, which was both foreseeable and foreseen.

Nor did the ICE/ad-tech alliance drop out of the sky. The fascist mobilization of ad-tech data for a racist pogrom is the latest installment in a series of extremely visible, worsening weaponizations of commercial surveillance. Just last year, I testified before Biden's CFPB at hearings on a rule to kill the data-broker industry, where we heard from the Pentagon about ad-tech targeting of American military personnel with gambling problems for location-based ads that reached them in their barracks:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/20/privacy-first-second-third/#malvertising

Biden's CFPB passed the data broker-killing rule, but Trump and DOGE nuked it before it went into effect. Trump officials didn't offer any rationale for this, despite the fact that the testimony in that hearing included a rep from the AARP who described how data brokers let advertisers target seniors with signs of dementia (a core Trump voter bloc). I don't know for sure, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the Stephen Miller wing of the Trump coalition wanted data brokers intact so that they could use them to round up and imprison/torture/murder/enslave non-white people and Trump's political enemies.

Despite this eminently foreseeable outcome of the ad-tech industry, many perfectly nice people who made extremely nice salaries working in ad-tech are rather alarmed by this turn of events:

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/

On Adxchanger.com, ad-tech exec David Nyurenberg writes, "The Privacy ‘Zealots’ Were Right: Ad Tech’s Infrastructure Was Always A Risk":

https://www.adexchanger.com/data-driven-thinking/the-privacy-zealots-were-right-ad-techs-infrastructure-was-always-a-risk/

Nyurenberg opens with a very important point – not only is ad-tech dangerous, it's also just not very good at selling stuff. The claims for the efficacy of surveillance advertising are grossly overblown, and used to bilk advertisers out of high premiums for a defective product:

https://truthset.com/the-state-of-data-accuracy-form/

There's another point that Nyurenberg doesn't make, but which is every bit as important: many of ad-tech's fiercest critics have abetted ad-tech's rise by engaging in "criti-hype" (repeating hype claims as criticism):

https://peoples-things.ghost.io/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype/

The "surveillance capitalism" critics who repeated tech's self-serving mumbo-jumbo about "hacking our dopamine loops" helped ad-tech cast itself in the role of mind-controlling evil sorcerers, which greatly benefited these self-styled Cyber-Rasputins when they pitched their ads to credulous advertisers:

https://pluralistic.net/HowToDestroySurveillanceCapitalism

Nyurenberg points to European privacy activists like Johnny Ryan and Max Schrems, who have chased American surveillance advertising companies out of the Irish courts and into other EU territories and even Europe's federal court, pointing out that these two (and many others!) have long warned the world about the way that this data would be weaponized. Johnny Ryan famously called ad-tech's "realtime bidding" system, "the largest data breach ever recorded":

https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/453/html/

Ryan is referring to the fact that you don't even have to buy an ad to amass vast databases of surveillance data about internet users. When you land on a webpage, every one of the little boxes where an ad will eventually show up gets its own high-speed auction in which your private data is dangled before anyone with an ad-tech account, who gets to bid on the right to shove an ad into your eyeballs. The losers of that auction are supposed to delete all your private data that they get to see through this process, but obviously they do not.

And Max Schrems has hollered from the mountaintops for years about the inevitability of authoritarian governments helping themselves to ad-tech data in order to suppress dissent and terrorize their political opposition:

https://www.bipc.com/european-high-court-finds-eu-us-privacy-shield-invalid

Nyurenberg says his friends in ad-tech are really upset that these (eminently foreseeable) outcomes have come to pass, but (he says), ad-tech bosses claim they have no choice but to collaborate with the Trump regime. After all, we've seen what Trump does to companies that don't agree to help him commit crimes:

https://apnews.com/article/anthropic-trump-pentagon-hegseth-ai-104c6c39306f1adeea3b637d2c1c601b

Nyurenberg closes by upbraiding his ad-tech peers for refusing to engage with their critics during the decades in which it would have been possible to do something to prevent this outcome. Ad-tech insiders dismissed privacy activists as unrealistic extremists who wanted to end advertising itself and accused ad-tech execs of wanting to create a repressive state system of surveillance. In reality, critics were just pointing out the entirely foreseeable repressive state surveillance that ad-tech would end up enabling.

I'm quite pleased to see Nyurenberg calling for a reckoning among his colleagues, but I think there's plenty of blame to spread around. Sure, the ad-tech industry built this fascist dragnet – but a series of governments around the world let them do it. There was nothing inevitable about mass commercial surveillance. It doesn't even work very well! Mass commercial surveillance is the public-private partnership from hell, where cops and spies shielded ad-tech companies from regulation in exchange for those ad-tech companies selling cops and spies unlimited access to their databases.

Our policymakers are supposed to work for us. They failed us. Don't let anyone tell you that the greed and depravity of ad-tech are the sole causes of Trump's use of ad-tech to decide who to kidnap and send to a Salvadoran slave-labor camp. Policymakers should have known. They did know. They had every chance to stop this. They did not.

(Image: Jakub Hałun, CC BY 4.0; Myotus, CC BY-SA 4.0; Lewis Clarke, CC BY-SA 2.0; modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Toronto transit fans to Commission: withdraw anagram map lawsuit threat https://web.archive.org/web/20060407230329/http://www.ttcrider.ca/anagram.php

#15yrsago BBC newsteam kidnapped, hooded and beaten by Gadaffi’s forces https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-12695077

#15yrsago Activists seize Saif Gadaffi’s London mansion https://web.archive.org/web/20110310091023/https://london.indymedia.org/articles/7766

#10yrsago Spacefaring and contractual obligations: who’s with me? https://memex.craphound.com/2016/03/09/spacefaring-and-contractual-obligations-whos-with-me/

#10yrsago Home Depot might pay up to $0.34 in compensation for each of the 53 million credit cards it leaked https://web.archive.org/web/20160310041148/https://www.csoonline.com/article/3041994/security/home-depot-will-pay-up-to-195-million-for-massive-2014-data-breach.html

#10yrsago How to make a tiffin lunch pail from used tuna fish cans https://www.instructables.com/Tiffin-Box-from-Tuna-Cans/

#10yrsago “Water Bar” celebrates the wonder and fragility of tap water https://www.minnpost.com/cityscape/2016/03/world-s-first-full-fledged-water-bar-about-open-minneapolis/

#10yrsago French Parliament votes to imprison tech execs for refusal to decrypt https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/03/france-votes-to-penalise-companies-for-refusing-to-decrypt-devices-messages/

#10yrsago Anti-censorship coalition urges Virginia governor to veto “Beloved” bill https://ncac.org/incident/coalition-to-virginia-governor-veto-the-beloved-bill

#10yrsago Washington Post: 16 negative stories about Bernie Sanders in 16 hours https://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/03/08/washington-post-ran-16-negative-stories-bernie-sanders-16-hours

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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Recent appearances (permalink)


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Latest books (permalink)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1038 words today, 46380 total)

  • "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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09.03.2026 à 17:46

Pluralistic: Billionaires are a danger to themselves and (especially) us (09 Mar 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (5854 mots)


Today's links


A king on a sumptuous, much elaborated throne; in one hand he holds a sceptre of office, in the other, the leashes for two fierce stone dogs that guard the throne. The king's head has been replaced with a character who was used as the basis for MAD Magazine's Alfred E Neumann. The new head sports a conical dunce cap. Behind the king is a large group of 1960s business men, seated and standing, in conservative suits. The background is the view from the 80th floor of World Trade Center 3. The floor has been carpeted in sumptuous tabriz from the Ottoman court.

Billionaires are a danger to themselves and (especially) us (permalink)

Even if rich people were no more likely to believe stupid shit than you or me, it would still be a problem. After all, I believe in my share of stupid shit (and if you think that none of the shit you believe in is stupid, then I'm afraid we've just identified at least one kind of stupid shit you believe in).

The problem isn't whether rich people believe stupid shit; it's the fact that when a rich person believes something stupid, that belief can turn into torment for dozens, thousands, or millions of people.

Here's a historical example that I think about a lot. In 1928, Henry Ford got worried about the rubber supply chain. All the world's rubber came from plantations in countries that he had limited leverage over and he was worried that these countries could kneecap his operation by cutting off the supply. So Ford decided he would start cultivating rubber in the Brazilian jungles, judging that Brazil's politicians were biddable, bribeable or bludgeonable and thus not a risk.

Ford took over a large area of old-growth jungle in Brazil and decreed that a town be built there. But not just any town: Ford decreed that the town of Fordlandia would be a replica of Dearborn, the company town he controlled in Michigan. Now, leaving aside the colonialism and other ethical considerations, there are plenty of practical reasons not to replicate Dearborn, MI on the banks of the Rio Tapajós.

For one thing, Brazil is in the southern hemisphere, and Dearborn is in the northern hemisphere. The prefab houses that Ford ordered for Fordlandia had windows optimized for southern exposure, which is the normal way of designing a dwelling in the northern hemisphere. In the southern hemisphere, you try and put your windows on the other side of the building.

Ford's architects told him this, and proposed having the factory flip the houses' orientation. But Ford was adamant: he'd had a vision for a replica of his beloved Dearborn plunked down smack in the middle of the Amazon jungle, and by God, that was what he would get:

https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/02/fordlandia-novelistic-history-of-henry-fords-doomed-midwestern-town-in-the-amazon-jungle/

Fordlandia was a catastrophe for so many reasons, and the windows are just a little footnote, but it's a detail that really stuck with me because it's just so stupid. Ford was a vicious antisemite, a bigot, a union-buster and an all-round piece of shit, but also, he believed that his opinions trumped the axial tilt of the planet Earth.

In other words, Henry Ford wasn't merely evil – he was also periodically as thick as pigshit. Ford's cherished stupidities didn't just affect him, they also meant that a whole city full of people in the Amazon had windows facing the wrong direction. Like I said, I sometimes believe stupid things, but those stupid things aren't consequential the way that rich people's cherished stupidities are.

This would be bad enough if rich people were no more prone to stupid beliefs than the rest of us, but it's actually worse than that. When I believe something stupid, it tends to get me in trouble, which means that (at least some of the time), I get to learn from my mistakes. But if you're a rich person, you can surround yourself with people who will tell you that you are right even when you are so wrong, with the result that you get progressively more wrong, until you literally kill yourself:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/alternative-medicine-extend-abbreviate-steve-jobs-life/

A rich person could surround themselves with people who tell them that they're being stupid, but in practice, this almost never happens. After all, the prime advantage to accumulating as much money as possible is freedom from having to listen to other people. The richer you are, the fewer people there are who can thwart your will. Get rich enough and you can be found guilty of 34 felonies and still become President of the United States of America.

But wait, it gets even worse! Hurting other people is often a great way to get even more rich. So the richer you get, the more insulated you are from consequences for hurting other people, and the more you hurt other people, the richer you get.

What a world! The people whose wrong beliefs have the widest blast-radius and inflict the most collateral damage also have the fewest sources of external discipline that help them improve their beliefs, and often, that collateral damage is a feature, not a bug.

Billionaires are a danger to themselves and (especially) to the rest of us. They are wronger than the median person, and the consequences of their wrongness are exponentially worse than the consequences of the median person's mistake.

This has been on my mind lately because of a very local phenomenon.

I live around the corner from Burbank airport, a great little regional airport on the edge of Hollywood. It was never brought up to code, so the gates are really close together, which means the planes park really close together, and there's no room for jetways, so they park right up against the terminal. The ground crews wheel staircase/ramps to both the front and back of the plane. That means that you can walk the entire length of the terminal in about five minutes, and boarding and debarking takes less than half the time of any other airport. Sure, if one of those planes ever catches fire, every other plane is gonna go boom, and everyone in the terminal is toast, but my sofa-to-gate time is like 15 minutes.

Best of all, Burbank is a Southwest hub. When we moved here a decade ago, this was great. Southwest, after all, has free bag-check, open seating, a great app, friendly crews, and a generous policy for canceling or changing reservations.

If you fly in the US, you know what's coming next. In 2024, a hedge fund called Elliott Investment Management acquired an 11% stake in SWA, forced a boardroom coup that saw it replace five of the company's six directors, and then instituted a top to bottom change in airline policies. The company eliminated literally everything that Southwest fliers loved about the airline, from the free bags to the open seating:

https://www.reddit.com/r/SouthwestAirlines/comments/1ji79zt/elliott_management_is_dismantling_everything/

The airline went from being the least enshittified airline in America to the most. Southwest is now worse than Spirit airlines – no, really. Southwest doesn't just merely charge for seat selection, but if you refuse to pay for seat selection, they preferentially place you in a middle seat even on a half-empty flight, as a way of pressuring you to pay the sky-high junk fee for seat selection:

https://www.reddit.com/r/SouthwestAirlines/comments/1rd2g0k/ngl_thought_yall_were_joking/

Obviously, passengers who are given middle seats (and the passengers around them, who paid for window or aisle seats) don't like this, so they try to change seats. So SWA now makes its flight attendants order passengers not to switch seats, and they've resorted to making up nonsense about "weight balancing":

https://www.reddit.com/r/SouthwestAirlines/comments/1roz1bg/you_can_change_to_an_empty_seatbut_only_until_we/

Even without junk fees, Southwest's fares are now higher than their rivals. I'm flying to San Francisco tomorrow to host EFF executive director Cindy Cohn's book launch at City Lights:

https://citylights.com/events/cindy-cohn-launch-party-for-privacys-defender/

Normally, I would have just booked a SWA flight from Burbank to SFO or Oakland (which gets less fog and is more reliable). But the SWA fare – even without junk fees – was higher than a United ticket out of the same airport, even including a checked bag, seat selection, etc. Southwest is genuinely worse than Spirit now: not only does it have worse policies (forcing occupancy of middle seats!), and more frustrated, angrier flight crew (flight attendants are palpably sick of arguing with passengers), but SWA is now more expensive than United!

All of this is the fault of one billionaire: Elliott Investment Management CEO Paul Singer, one of America's most guillotineable plutes. This one guy personally enshittified Southwest Airlines, along with many other businesses in America and abroad. Because of this one guy, millions of people are made miserable every single day. Singer flogged off his shares and made a tidy profit. He's long gone. But SWA will never recover, and every day until its collapse, millions of passengers and flight attendants will have a shitty day because of this one guy:

https://www.wfaa.com/article/money/business/southwest-airlines-activist-investor-elliott-lower-ownership-stake/287-470b5131-ef1a-4648-a8ec-4cc017f7914c

Even if Paul Singer were no more prone to ethical missteps than you or me, the fact that he is morbidly wealthy means that his ethical blind spots leave behind a trail of wreckage that rivals a comet. And of course, being as rich as Paul Singer inflicts a lasting neurological injury that makes you incapable of understanding how wrong you are, which means that Paul Singer is doubly dangerous.

Billionaires aren't just a danger when they're trying to make money, either. One of the arguments in favor of billionaires is that sometimes, the "good" billionaires take up charitable causes. But even here, billionaires can cause sweeping harm. Take Bill Gates, whose charitable projects include waging war on the public education system, seeking to replace public schools with charter schools.

Gates has no background in education, but he spent millions on this project. He is one of the main reasons that poor communities around the country have been pressured to shutter their public schools and replace them with weakly regulated, extractive charters:

https://apnews.com/article/92dc914dd97c487a9b9aa4b006909a8c

This was a catastrophe. A single billionaire dilettante's cherished stupidity wrecked the educational chances of a generation of kids:

https://dissidentvoice.org/2026/03/free-market-charter-schools-wreak-havoc-in-michigan/

Gates was a prep-school kid, so it's weird for him to have forceful views about a public education system he never experienced. In reality, it's not so much that Gates has forceful views about schools – rather, he has forceful views about teachers' unions, which he wishes to see abolished. Gates is one of America's most vicious union-busters:

https://teamster.org/2019/10/teamsters-union-and-allies-protest-bill-gates-and-cambridge-union-society/

Gates's ideology permeates all of his charitable work. We all know about Gates's work on public health, but less well known is the role that Gates has played in blocking poor countries from exercising their rights under the WTO to override drug patents in times of emergency. In the 2000s, the Gates Foundation blocked South Africa from procuring the anti-retroviral AIDS drugs it was entitled to under the WTO's TRIPS agreement. The Gates Foundation blocked the Access to Medicines WIPO treaty, which would have vastly expanded the Global South's ability to manufacture life-saving drugs. And during the acute phase of the covid pandemic, Gates personally intervened to kill the WHO Covid-19 Technology Access Pool and to get Oxford to renege on its promise to make an open-source vaccine:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#gates-foundation

It's not that Gates is insincere in his desire to improve public health outcomes – it's that his desire to improve public health conflicts with his extreme ideology of maximum intellectual property regimes. Gates simply opposes open science and compulsory licenses on scientific patents, even when that kills millions of people (as it did in South Africa). Gates's morbid wealth magnifies his cherished stupidities into weapons of mass destruction.

Gates is back in the news these days because of his membership in the Epstein class. Epstein is the poster child for the ways that wealth is a force-multiplier for bad ideas. We can't separate Epstein's sexual predation from his wealth. Epstein spun elaborate junk-science theories to justify raping children, becoming mired in that most rich-guy coded of quagmires, eugenics:

https://www.statnews.com/2026/02/24/epstein-cell-line-george-church-harvard-personal-genome-project/

Epstein openly discussed his plans to seed the planet with his DNA, reportedly telling one scientist that he planned to fill his ranch with young trafficked girls and to keep 20 of them pregnant with his children at all times:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/31/business/jeffrey-epstein-eugenics.html

We still don't know where Epstein's wealth came from, but we know that he was a central node in a network of vast riches, much of which he directed to his weird scientific projects. That network also protected him from consequences for his prolific child-rape project, which had more than 1,000 survivors.

In embracing eugenics junk science, Epstein was ahead of the curve. Today, eugenics is all the rage, reviving an idea that went out of fashion shortly after the Fordlandia era. After all, Henry Ford didn't just build a private city where his word was law – he also bought up media companies to promote his ideas of racial superiority:

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

Despite being too cringe to make it onto Epstein island, Elon Musk is the standard bearer for the dangers of billionaireism:

https://people.com/emails-reveal-that-elon-musk-asked-jeffrey-epstein-about-visiting-his-island-11896842

Like Henry Ford, he craves company towns where his word is law:

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/inside-starbase-spacex-elon-musk-company-town/

Like Ford, he buys up media companies and then uses them to push his batshit ideas about racial superiority:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/01/eugenics-isnt-dead-its-thriving-in-tech/

Like Paul Singer, he is a master enshittifier who never met a junk fee he didn't fall in love with:

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/01/tech/musk-twitter-verification-price

And like Epstein, he wants to seed the human race with his babies, and has built a secret compound in the desert he plans to fill with women he has impregnated:

https://www.realtor.com/news/celebrity-real-estate/elon-musk-compound-austin-children/

Billionaires and their lickspittles will tell you that all of this is wrong: the market selects "capital allocators" by executing a vast, distributed computer program whose logic gates are every producer and consumer in The Economy (TM), and whose data are trillions of otherwise uncomputable buy and sell decisions.

This is a tautology: the argument goes that only good people are made rich, and therefore all the rich people are good. If rich people had as many cherished stupidities as I claim, The Economy (TM) would relieve them of their wealth, and thus their power to allocate capital, and thus their potential to hurt people by being wrong, which means that they must be right.

This is the stupidest (and most destructive) of all of billionaireism's cherished stupidities: that we live in a meritocracy, which means that whatever the richest people want must be right. It's a modern update to the doctrine of divine providence, which held that we can discern god's favor through wealth. The more god loves you, the richer he makes you.

This can't be true, because every single economic cataclysm in the history of the world was the fault of rich people. Rich people gave us the 19th century's bank panics. They gave us the South Seas bubble. They gave us the Great Depression, and the S&L Crisis, and the Great Financial Crisis. They invented greedflation and created the cost of living crisis. Today, they are teeing up an AI crash that will make 2008 look like the best day of your life:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington

The old left aphorism has it that "every billionaire is a policy failure." That's true, but it's incomplete. Every billionaire is a machine for producing policy failures at scale.

(Image: Aude, CC BY 4.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Indie label uses heartfelt note instead of copy-restriction http://blog.resonancefm.com/archives/48

#20yrsago Clay Shirky’s ETECH presentation on the politics of social software https://craphound.com/youshutupetech2006.txt

#20yrsago Judge quotes Adam Sandler movie in decision blasting defendant https://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/crime/motion-denied-because-youre-idiot

#15yrsago Video game in your browser’s location bar web.archive.org/web/20110309212313/http://probablyinteractive.com/url-hunter

#15yrsago Wondrous, detailed map of the history of science fiction https://web.archive.org/web/20110310152548/http://scimaps.org/submissions/7-digital_libraries/maps/thumbs/024_LG.jpg

#15yrsago American Library Association task forces to take on ebook lending https://web.archive.org/web/20110310085634/https://www.wo.ala.org/districtdispatch/?p=5749

#15yrsago Wisconsin capitol bans recording, flags, reading, balloons, chairs, bags, backpacks, photography, etc etc etc https://captimes.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/more-rules-released-for-state-capitol-visitors/article_f044044f-6183-5128-b718-d5dffbfdb573.html

#15yrsago Librarians Against DRM logo https://web.archive.org/web/20110308170030/https://readersbillofrights.info/librariansagainstDRM

#15yrsago Extinct invertebrates caught in a 40 million year old sex act https://web.archive.org/web/20110303234001/http://news.discovery.com/animals/40-million-year-old-sex-act-captured-in-amber.html

#15yrsago Improvised toilets of earthquake-struck Christchurch https://web.archive.org/web/20110310044912/https://www.showusyourlongdrop.co.nz/

#15yrsago Canadian MP who shills for the record industry is an enthusiastic pirate https://web.archive.org/web/20110310163136/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5673/125/

#15yrsago The Monster: the fraud and depraved indifference that caused the subprime meltdown https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/07/the-monster-the-fraud-and-depraved-indifference-that-caused-the-subprime-meltdown/

#15yrsago Self-destructing ebooks: paper’s fragility is a bug, not a feature https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/08/ebooks-harpercollins-26-times

#10yrsago Senior U.S. immigration judge says 3 and 4 year old children can represent themselves in court https://web.archive.org/web/20160304201631/http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2016/03/04/us-judge-says-3-and-4-year-olds-can-represent-themselves-in-immigration-court.html

#10yrsago Crimefighting for fun and profit: data-mining Medicare fraud and likely whistleblowers https://www.wired.com/2016/03/john-mininno-medicare/

#10yrsago Extensive list of space opera cliches https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/03/towards-a-taxonomy-of-cliches-.html

#10yrsago Verizon pays $1.35M FCC settlement for using “supercookies” https://web.archive.org/web/20160308111653/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/verizon-settles-over-supercookies

#10yrsago Group chat: “an all-day meeting with random participants and no agenda” https://signalvnoise.com/svn3/is-group-chat-making-you-sweat/#.1chnl7hf4

#10yrsago Less than a year on, America has all but forgotten the epic Jeep hack https://www.wired.com/2016/03/survey-finds-one-4-americans-remembers-jeep-hack/

#10yrsago Racial justice organizers to FBI vs Apple judge: crypto matters to #blacklivesmatter https://theintercept.com/2016/03/08/the-fbi-vs-apple-debate-just-got-less-white/

#1yrago Gandersauce https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/08/turnabout/#is-fair-play

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America ( words today, total)

  • "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.

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

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07.03.2026 à 19:02

Pluralistic: The web is bearable with RSS (07 Mar 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4485 mots)


Today's links


An anatomical drawing of a cross-section of a man's head. The eyeball has been replaced by an RSS logo. To the left of the face is a 'code waterfall' effect as seen in the credit sequences of the Wachowskis' 'Matrix' movie. To the right are clouds of grey roiling clouds, infiltrating the brain as well.

The web is bearable with RSS (permalink)

Never let them tell you that enshittification was a mystery. Enshittification isn't downstream of the "iron laws of economics" or an unrealistic demand by "consumers" to get stuff for free.

Enshittification comes from specific policy choices, made by named individuals, that had the foreseeable and foreseen result of making the web worse:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/07/take-it-easy/#but-take-it

Like, there was once a time when an ever-increasing proportion of web users kept tabs on what was going on with RSS. RSS is a simple, powerful way for websites to publish "feeds" of their articles, and for readers to subscribe to those feeds and get notified when something new was posted, and even read that new material right there in your RSS reader tab or app.

RSS is simple and versatile. It's the backbone of podcasts (though Apple and Spotify have done their best to kill it, along with public broadcasters like the BBC, all of whom want you to switch to proprietary apps that spy on you and control you). It's how many automated processes communicate with one another, untouched by human hands. But above all, it's a way to find out when something new has been published on the web.

RSS's liftoff was driven by Google, who released a great RSS reader called "Google Reader" in 2007. Reader was free and reliable, and other RSS readers struggled to compete with it, with the effect that most of us just ended up using Google's product, which made it even harder to launch a competitor.

But in 2013, Google quietly knifed Reader. I've always found the timing suspicious: it came right in the middle of Google's desperate scramble to become Facebook, by means of a product called Google Plus (G+). Famously, Google product managers' bonuses depended on how much G+ engagement they drove, with the effect that every Google product suddenly sprouted G+ buttons that either did something stupid, or something that confusingly duplicated existing functionality (like commenting on Youtube videos).

Google treated G+ as an existential priority, and for good reason. Google was running out of growth potential, having comprehensively conquered Search, and having repeatedly demonstrated that Search was a one-off success, with nearly every other made-in-Google product dying off. What successes Google could claim were far more modest, like Gmail, Google's Hotmail clone. Google augmented its growth by buying other peoples' companies (Blogger, YouTube, Maps, ad-tech, Docs, Android, etc), but its internal initiatives were turkeys.

Eventually, Wall Street was going to conclude that Google had reached the end of its growth period, and Google's shares would fall to a fraction of their value, with a price-to-earnings ratio commensurate with a "mature" company.

Google needed a new growth story, and "Google will conquer Facebook's market" was a pretty good one. After all, investors didn't have to speculate about whether Facebook was profitable, they could just look at Facebook's income statements, which Google proposed to transfer to its own balance sheet. The G+ full-court press was as much a narrative strategy as a business strategy: by tying product managers' bonuses to a metric that demonstrated G+'s rise, Google could convince Wall Street that they had a lot of growth on their horizon.

Of course, tying individual executives' bonuses to making a number go up has a predictably perverse outcome. As Goodhart's law has it, "Any metric becomes a target, and then ceases to be a useful metric." As soon as key decision-makers' personal net worth depending on making the G+ number go up, they crammed G+ everywhere and started to sneak in ways to trigger unintentional G+ sessions. This still happens today – think of how often you accidentally invoke an unbanishable AI feature while using Google's products (and products from rival giant, moribund companies relying on an AI narrative to convince investors that they will continue to grow):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/02/kpis-off/#principal-agentic-ai-problem

Like I said, Google Reader died at the peak of Google's scramble to make the G+ number go up. I have a sneaking suspicion that someone at Google realized that Reader's core functionality (helping users discover, share and discuss interesting new web pages) was exactly the kind of thing Google wanted us to use G+ for, and so they killed Reader in a bid to drive us to the stalled-out service they'd bet the company on.

If Google killed Reader in a bid to push users to discover and consume web pages using a proprietary social media service, they succeeded. Unfortunately, the social media service they pushed users into was Facebook – and G+ died shortly thereafter.

For more than a decade, RSS has lain dormant. Many, many websites still emit RSS feeds. It's a default behavior for WordPress sites, for Ghost and Substack sites, for Tumblr and Medium, for Bluesky and Mastodon. You can follow edits to Wikipedia pages by RSS, and also updates to parcels that have been shipped to you through major couriers. Web builders like Jason Kottke continue to surface RSS feeds for elaborate, delightful blogrolls:

https://kottke.org/rolodex/

There are many good RSS readers. I've been paying for Newsblur since 2011, and consider the $36 I send them every year to be a very good investment:

https://newsblur.com/

But RSS continues to be a power-user coded niche, despite the fact that RSS readers are really easy to set up and – crucially – make using the web much easier. Last week, Caroline Crampton (co-editor of The Browser) wrote about her experiences using RSS:

https://www.carolinecrampton.com/the-view-from-rss/

As Crampton points out, much of the web (including some of the cruftiest, most enshittified websites) publish full-text RSS feeds, meaning that you can read their articles right there in your RSS reader, with no ads, no popups, no nag-screens asking you to sign up for a newsletter, verify your age, or submit to their terms of service.

It's almost impossible to overstate how superior RSS is to the median web page. Imagine if the newsletters you followed were rendered with black, clear type on a plain white background (rather than the sadistically infinitesimal, greyed-out type that designers favor thanks to the unkillable urban legend that black type on a white screen causes eye-strain). Imagine reading the web without popups, without ads, without nag screens. Imagine reading the web without interruptors or "keep reading" links.

Now, not every website publishes a fulltext feed. Often, you will just get a teaser, and if you want to read the whole article, you have to click through. I have a few tips for making other websites – even ones like Wired and The Intercept – as easy to read as an RSS reader, at least for Firefox users.

Firefox has a built-in "Reader View" that re-renders the contents of a web-page as black type on a white background. Firefox does some kind of mysterious calculation to determine whether a page can be displayed in Reader View, but you can override this with the Activate Reader View, which adds a Reader View toggle for every page:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/activate-reader-view/

Lots of websites (like The Guardian) want you to login before you can read them, and even if you pay to subscribe to them, these sites often want you to re-login every time you visit them (especially if you're running a full suite of privacy blockers). You can skip this whole process by simply toggling Reader View as soon as you get the login pop up. On some websites (like The Verge and Wired), you'll only see the first couple paragraphs of the article in Reader View. But if you then hit reload, the whole article loads.

Activate Reader View puts a Reader View toggle on every page, but clicking that toggle sometimes throws up an error message, when the page is so cursed that Firefox can't figure out what part of it is the article. When this happens, you're stuck reading the page in the site's own default (and usually terrible) view. As you scroll down the page, you will often hit pop-ups that try to get you to sign up for a mailing list, agree to terms of service, or do something else you don't want to do. Rather than hunting for the button to close these pop-ups (or agree to objectionable terms of service), you can install "Kill Sticky," a bookmarklet that reaches into the page's layout files and deletes any element that isn't designed to scroll with the rest of the text:

https://github.com/t-mart/kill-sticky

Other websites (like Slashdot and Core77) load computer-destroying Javascript (often as part of an anti-adblock strategy). For these, I use the "Javascript Toggle On and Off" plugin, which lets you create a blacklist of websites that aren't allowed to run any scripts:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/javascript-toggler/

Some websites (like Yahoo) load so much crap that they defeat all of these countermeasures. For these websites, I use the "Element Blocker" plug-in, which lets you delete parts of the web-page, either for a single session, or permanently:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/element-blocker/

It's ridiculous that websites put so many barriers up to a pleasant reading experience. A slow-moving avalanche of enshittogenic phenomena got us here. There's corporate enshittification, like Google/Meta's monopolization of ads and Meta/Twitter's crushing of the open web. There's regulatory enshittification, like the EU's failure crack down on companies the pretend that forcing you to click an endless stream of "cookie consent" popups is the same as complying with the GDPR.

Those are real problems, but they don't have to be your problem, at least when you want to read the web. A couple years ago, I wrote a guide to using RSS to improve your web experience, evade lock-in and duck algorithmic recommendation systems:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/16/keep-it-really-simple-stupid/#read-receipts-are-you-kidding-me-seriously-fuck-that-noise

Customizing your browser takes this to the next level, disenshittifying many websites – even if they block or restrict RSS. Most of this stuff only applies to desktop browsers, though. Mobile browsers are far more locked down (even mobile Firefox – remember, every iOS browser, including Firefox, is just a re-skinned version of Safari, thanks to Apple's ban on rival browser engines). And of course, apps are the worst. An app is just a website skinned in the right kind of IP to make it a crime to improve it in any way:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet

And even if you do customize your mobile browser (Android Firefox lets you do some of this stuff), many apps (Twitter, Tumblr) open external links in their own browser (usually an in-app Chrome instance) with all the bullshit that entails.

The promise of locked-down mobile platforms was that they were going to "just work," without any of the confusing customization options of desktop OSes. It turns out that taking away those confusing customization options was an invitation to every enshittifier to turn the web into an unreadable, extractive, nagging mess. This was the foreseeable – and foreseen – consequence of a new kind of technology where everything that isn't mandatory is prohibited:

https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/01/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago 200 Eyemodule photos from Disneyland https://craphound.com/030401/

#20yrsago Fourth Amendment luggage tape https://ideas.4brad.com/node/367

#15yrsago Glenn Beck’s syndicator runs a astroturf-on-demand call-in service for radio programs https://web.archive.org/web/20110216081007/http://www.tabletmag.com/life-and-religion/58759/radio-daze/

#15yrsago 20 lies from Scott Walker https://web.archive.org/web/20110308062319/https://filterednews.wordpress.com/2011/03/05/20-lies-and-counting-told-by-gov-walker/

#10yrsago The correlates of Trumpism: early mortality, lack of education, unemployment, offshored jobs https://web.archive.org/web/20160415000000*/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/04/death-predicts-whether-people-vote-for-donald-trump/

#10yrsago Hacking a phone’s fingerprint sensor in 15 mins with $500 worth of inkjet printer and conductive ink https://web.archive.org/web/20160306194138/http://www.cse.msu.edu/rgroups/biometrics/Publications/Fingerprint/CaoJain_HackingMobilePhonesUsing2DPrintedFingerprint_MSU-CSE-16-2.pdf

#10yrsago Despite media consensus, Bernie Sanders is raising more money, from more people, than any candidate, ever https://web.archive.org/web/20160306110848/https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/sanders-keeps-raising-money–and-spending-it-a-potential-problem-for-clinton/2016/03/05/a8d6d43c-e2eb-11e5-8d98-4b3d9215ade1_story.html

#10yrsago Calculating US police killings using methodologies from war-crimes trials https://granta.com/violence-in-blue/

#1yrago Brother makes a demon-haunted printer https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/05/printers-devil/#show-me-the-incentives-i-will-show-you-the-outcome

#1yrago Two weak spots in Big Tech economics https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/06/privacy-last/#exceptionally-american

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1012 words today, 45361 total)

  • "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/

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