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Pluralistic: Who broke the internet? (08 May 2025)
Thu, 08 May 2025 17:54:14 +0000 Today's links Who broke the internet?: My new podcast series from the CBC. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Who broke the internet? (permalink) "Who Broke the Internet?" is a new podcast from CBC Understood that I host and co-wrote – it's a four-part series that explains how the enshitternet came about, and, more importantly, what we can do about it. Episode one is out this week: https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1353-the-naked-emperor/episode/16144078-dont-be-evil The thesis of the series – and indeed, of my life's work – is that the internet didn't turn to shit because of the "great forces of history," or "network effects," or "returns to scale." Rather, the Great Enshittening is the result of specific policy choices, made in living memory, by named individuals, who were warned at the time that this would happen, and they did it anyway. These wreckers are the largely forgotten authors of our misery, and they mingle with impunity in polite society, never fearing that someone might be sizing them up for a pitchfork. "Who Broke the Internet?" aims to change that. But the series isn't just about holding these named people accountable for their enshittificatory deeds: it's about understanding the policies that created the enshittocene, so that we can dismantle them and build a new, good internet that is fit for purpose, namely, helping us overcome and survive environmental collapse, oligarchic control, fascism and genocide. The crux of enshittification theory is this: tech bosses made their products and services so much worse in order to extract more rents from end-users and business customers. The reason they did this is because they could. Over 20+ years, our policymakers created an environment of impunity for enshittifying companies, sitting idly by (or even helping out) as tech companies bought or destroyed their competitors; captured their regulators; neutered tech workers' power; and expanded IP laws to ensure that technology could only ever be used to attack us, but never to defend us. These four forces – competition, regulation, labor power and interoperability – once acted as constraints, because they punished enshittifying gambits. Make your product worse and users, workers and suppliers would defect to a competitor; or a regulator would fine you or even bring criminal charges; or your irreplaceable workers would down tools and refuse to obey your orders; or another technologist would come up with an alternative client, an ad-blocker, a scraper, or compatible spare parts, plugins or mods that would permanently sever your relationship with whomever you were tormenting. As these constraints fell away, the environment became enshittogenic: rather than punishing enshittification, it rewarded it. Individual enshittifiers within companies triumphed in their factional struggles with corporate rivals, like the Google revenue czar who vanquished the Search czar, deliberately worsening search results so we'd have to repeatedly search to get the answers we seek, creating more opportunities to show us ads: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ An enshittogenic environment meant that individuals within companies who embraced plans to worsen things to juice profits were promoted, displacing workers and managers who felt an ethical or professional obligation to make good and useful things. Top tech bosses – the C-suite – went from being surrounded by "adult supervision" who checked their worst impulses with dire warnings about competition, government punishments, or worker revolt to being encysted in a casing of enthusiastic enshittifiers who competed to see who could come up with the most outrageously enshittificatory gambits. "Who Broke the Internet?" covers the collapse of all of these constraints, but its main focus is on IP law – specifically, anticircumvention law, which bans technologists from reverse-engineering and modifying the technologies we own and use (AKA "interoperability" or "adversarial interoperability"). Interoperability is at the center of the enshittification story because interop is an unavoidable characteristic of anything built out of computers. Computers are, above all else, flexible. Formally speaking, our computers are "Turing-complete universal von Neumann machines," which is to say that every one of our computers is capable of running every valid program. That flexibility is why we call computers a "general purpose" technology. The same computer that helps your optometrist analyze your retina can also control your car's anti-lock braking system, and it can also play Doom. Enshittification runs on that flexibility. It's that flexibility that allows a digital product or service to offer different prices, search rankings, recommendations, and costs to every user, every time they interact with it: https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/ It's that flexibility that lets tech companies send over-the-air "updates" to your property that take away functionality you paid for and valued, and then sell it back to you as an "upgrade" or worse, a monthly subscription: https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure But that flexibility cuts both ways. The fact that every computer can run every valid program means that for every enshittificatory app and update, there's a disenshittificatory program you could install that would reverse the damage. For every program that tells your HP printer to reject third-party ink, forcing you to buy HP's own colored water at $10,000/gallon, there's another program that tells your HP printer to enthusiastically accept third-party ink that costs mere pennies: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer In other words, show me a 10-foot enshittifying wall, and I'll show you an 11-foot disenshittifying ladder. Interoperability has long been technology's most important disenshittifier. Interop harnesses the rapaciousness of tech bros and puts it in service to making things better. Someone who hacks Instagram to take out the ads and recommendations and just show you posts from people you follow need not be motivated by the desire to make your life better – they can be motivated by the desire to poach Instagram users and build a rival business, and still make life better for you: https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/the-og-app-instagram-alternative-ad-free/ And if they succeed and then recapitulate the sins of Instagram's bosses, turning the screws on users with ads, suggestions and slop? That just invites more disenshittifying interoperators to do unto them as they did unto Zuck. That's the way it used to work: the 10-foot piles of shit deployed by tech bosses conjured up 11-foot ladders. This is what disruption is, when it is at its best. There's nothing wrong with moving fast and breaking things – provided the things you're breaking belong to billionaire enshittifiers. Those things need to be broken. Enter IP law. For the past 25+ years, IP law has been relentlessly expanded in ways that ensure that disruption is always for thee, never me. "IP" has come to mean, "Any law that lets a dominant company reach out and exert control over its critics, competitors and customers": https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/ The most pernicious IP law is far and away "anticircumvention." Under anticircumvention, it is illegal to "break a digital lock" that controls access to a copyrighted work, including software (and digital locks are software, so any digital lock automatically gets this protection). This is mind-bending, particularly because it's one of those things that's so unreasonable, so very, very stupid that it's easy to think you're misunderstanding it, because surely it can't be that stupid. But oh, it is. One of the best ways to grasp this point is to start with what you might do in a world without digital locks. Take your printer: if HP raises the price of ink, you might start to refill your cartridges or buy third-party cartridges. Obviously, this is not a copyright violation. Ink is not a copyrighted work. But once HP puts a digital lock on the printer that checks to see if you've done an end-run around the HP ink ripoff, then refilling your cartridge becomes illegal, because you have to break that digital lock to get your printer to use the ink you've chosen. Or think about cars: taking your car to your mechanic does not violate anyone's copyright. It's your car, you decide who fixes it. But all car makers use digital locks to prevent mechanics from reading out the diagnostic information they need to access to fix your car. If a mechanic wants to know why your check engine light has turned on, they have to buy a tool – spending five-figure sums every year for every manufacturer – in order to decode that error. Now, it's your car, and error messages aren't copyrighted works, but bypassing the lock that prevents independent diagnosis is a crime, thanks to anticircumvention law. Then there's app stores. You bought your console. You bought your phone. These devices are your property. If I want to sell you some software I've written so you can run it on your device, that's not a copyright violation. It is the literal opposite of a copyright violation: an author selling their copyrighted works to a customer who gets to enjoy those works using their own property. But the digital lock on your iPhone, Xbox, Playstation and Switch all prevent your device from running software unless it is delivered by the manufacturer's app store, which takes 30 cents out of every dollar you spend. Installing software without going through the manufacturer's app store requires that you break the device's digital lock, and that's a crime, which means that buying a copyrighted work from its author becomes a copyright violation! This is what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business model." We created laws – again, in living memory, thanks to known individuals – that had the foreseeable, explicit intent of making it illegal to disenshittify the products and services you rely on. We created this enshittogenic environment, and we got the enshittocene. That's where "Who Broke the Internet?" comes in. We tell the story of Bruce Lehman, who was Bill Clinton's IP czar. Anticircumvention was really Lehman's brainchild, and he had a plan to make it the law of the land. When Al Gore was overseeing the demilitarization of the internet (the "Information Superhighway" proceedings), Lehman pitched this idea to him as the new rules of the road for the internet. To Gore's eternal credit, he flatly rejected Lehman's proposal as the batshit nonsense it plainly was. So Lehman scuttled to Switzerland, where a UN agency, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) was crafting a pair of new treaties to create a global system of internet regulation. Lehman lobbied the national delegations to WIPO to put anticircumvention in their treaties, and he succeeded – partially. WIPO is a very bad agency, since the majority of delegations that are sent to Geneva by the world's nations come from poor countries in the global south, and they're made up of experts in things like water, agriculture and child health. The vast majority of national reps at WIPO are not experts in IP, and they are often easy prey for fast-talking lobbyists from US-based media, pharma and tech companies, as well as the US government reps who carry their water. But even at WIPO, Lehman's proposal was viewed as far too extreme. In the end, the anticircumvention rules embedded in the WIPO treaties are much more reasonable than Lehman's demands. Under the WIPO treaty, signatories must pass laws that make copyright infringement extra illegal if you have to break a digital lock on the way. But if you break a lock and you don't infringe copyright (say, because you refilled a printer cartridge, took your car to an independent mechanic, or got some software without using an app store), then you're fine. Lehman's next move was to convince Congress that they needed to pass a version of the anticircumvention rule that went far beyond the obligations in the WIPO treaties. In this, he was joined by powerful, deep-pocketed lobbyists from Big Content, and later, Big Tech. They successfully pressured Congress into passing Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998 – a law that protects digital locks, at the expense of copyright and the creative workers whom copyright is said to serve. Lehman has repeatedly, publicly described this maneuver as "doing an end-run around Congress." Once America adopted this extreme anticircumvention rule, the US Trade Representative made it America's top priority to ram identical laws through the legislatures of all of America's trading partners, under the explicit or tacit threat of tariffs on any country that refused (the information minister of a Central American country once told me that the USTR threatened them, saying that if they didn't accept anticircumvention as a clause in the Central American Free Trade Agreement – CAFTA – they would lose their ability to export soybeans to America). Canada took more than a decade to enact its own version of the anticircumvention rule, which was the source of public outrage by the USTR and US industry lobbyists. These neocolonialists found plenty of Parliamentary sellouts willing to introduce laws on their behalf, but every time this happened, the Canadian people reacted with a kind of mass outrage that had never been seen in response to highly technical proposals for internet regulation. For example, the Liberal MP Sam Bulte was challenged on her support of the rule by her Parkdale constituents at a public meeting, and had a screeching meltdown, screaming that she would not be "bullied by user-rights zealots and EFF members." Voters put "User-Rights Zealot" signs on their lawns and voted her out of office. Anticircumvention remained a priority for the US, and they found new MPs to do their dirty work. Stephen Harper's Conservatives made multiple tries at this. After Jim Prentice utterly failed to get the rule through Parliament, the brief was picked up by Heritage Minister James Moore (who liked to call himself "the iPad Minister") and now-disgraced Industry Minister Tony Clement. Clement and Moore tried to diffuse the opposition to the proposal by conducting a public consultation on it. This backfired horribly. Over 6,000 Canadians wrote into the consultation with individual, detailed, personal critiques of anticircumvention, explaining how the rule would hurt them at work and at home. Only 53 submissions supported the rule. Moore threw away these 6,130 negative responses, justifying this by publicly calling them the "babyish" views of "radical extremists": https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/15/radical-extremists/#sex-pest Named individuals created policies in living memory. They were warned about the foreseeable outcomes of those proposals. They passed them anyway – and then no one held them accountable. Until now. The point of remembering where these policies came from isn't (merely) to ensure that these people are forever remembered as the monsters they showed themselves to be. Rather, it is to recover the true history of enshittification, the choices we made that led to enshittification, so that we can reverse those policies, disenshittify our tech, and give rise to a new, good internet that's fit for the purpose of being the global digital nervous system for a species facing a polycrisis of climate catastrophe, oligarchy, fascism and genocide. There's never been a more urgent moment to reconsider those enshittificatory policies – and there's never been a more auspicious moment, either. After all, Canada's anticircumvention law exists because it was supposed to guarantee tariff-free access to American markets. That promise has been shattered, permanently. It's time to get rid of that law, and make it legal for Canadian technologists to give the Canadian public the tools they need to escape from America's Big Tech bullies, who pick our pockets with junk-fees and lock-in, and who attack our social, legal and civil lives with social media walled gardens: https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/beauty-eh/#its-the-only-war-the-yankees-lost-except-for-vietnam-and-also-the-alamo-and-the-bay-of-ham "Understood: Who Broke the Internet" is streaming now. We've got three more episodes to go – part two drops on Monday (and it's a banger). You can subscribe to it wherever you get your podcasts, and here's the RSS feed: https://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/nakedemperor.xml Hey look at this (permalink) Sneakers 4K Blu-ray https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Sneakers-4K-Blu-ray/343185/ (h/t Hacker News) Billionaire Blasts Private Equity's Continued Grifting as Performance Falls Further https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/05/billionaire-blasts-private-equitys-continued-grifting-as-performance-falls-further.html A new bill would force Apple to allow third-party app stores https://www.theverge.com/news/662180/app-store-freedom-act-apple-third-party-app-stores Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Self-referential multiple-choice test https://web.archive.org/web/20050126084907/https://math.wisc.edu/~propp/srat-Q #15yrsago Big Content’s depraved indifference https://memex.craphound.com/2010/05/08/big-contents-depraved-indifference/ #15yrsago Use rust particles to reveal the data on your credit-card’s magstripe https://www.tetherdcow.com/another-science-experiment/ #15yrsago FCC hands Hollywood the keys to your PC, home theater and future https://memex.craphound.com/2010/05/07/fcc-hands-hollywood-the-keys-to-your-pc-home-theater-and-future/ #15yrsago Walt Disney World’s Haunted Mansion: stupendous essay https://passport2dreams.blogspot.com/2010/05/history-and-haunted-mansion.html #15yrsago Eating IHOP’s cheesecake-stuffed pancakes https://www.salon.com/2010/05/07/ihop_pancake_stackers_the_new_kfc_double_down/ #10yrsago Drug pump is “most insecure” devices ever seen by researcher https://securityledger.com/2015/05/researcher-drug-pump-the-least-secure-ip-device-ive-ever-seen/ #10yrsago Appeals Court rejects NSA’s bulk phone-record collection program https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-hails-court-ruling-rejecting-nsa-bulk-collection-americans-phone-records #10yrsago Keurig CEO blames disastrous financials on DRM https://money.cnn.com/2015/05/06/investing/keurig-green-mountain-earnings-stock-fall/index.html #5yrsago Volcano gods demand workers https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/08/volcano-gods/#reopening #5yrsago US public health officials on apps: "Meh" https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/08/volcano-gods/#shoe-leather #5yrsago Wechat spies on non-Chinese users for in-China censorship https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/07/just-look-at-it/#training-data #5yrsago Sidewalk Labs pulls out of Toronto https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/07/just-look-at-it/#ding-dong #5yrsago Unix and Adversarial Interoperability https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/07/just-look-at-it/#multics #5yrsago EU: "Cookie walls violate the GDPR" https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/07/just-look-at-it/#cookie-theatre #5yrsago Helicopter flyover of deserted Disneyland https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/07/just-look-at-it/#emptyland #5yrsago Wink will brick your smart home if you don't pay a monthly fee <a #ebook"="" 05="" 07="" 2020="" href="https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/07/just-look-at-it/#wink'>https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/07/just-look-at-it/#wink</a> #5yrsago EFF's Guide to Digital Rights During the Pandemic <a href=" https:="" just-look-at-it="" pluralistic.net="">https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/07/just-look-at-it/#ebook #5yrsago America is united https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/07/just-look-at-it/#national-unity #5yrsago The TSA is hoarding N95s https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/07/just-look-at-it/#taking-shit-away #1yrago The disenshittified internet starts with loyal "user agents" https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet Upcoming appearances (permalink) Pittsburgh: Picks and Shovels at White Whale Books, May 15 https://whitewhalebookstore.com/events/20250515 Pittsburgh: PyCon, May 16 https://us.pycon.org/2025/schedule/ Virtual: Writing to Resist (California Writers Club Berkeley): https://cwc-berkeley.org/writing-to-resist-5-18-25/ PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22 https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025 PDX: Picks and Shovels with bunnie Huang at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20 https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0 London: How To Academy with Riley Quinn, Jul 1 https://howtoacademy.com/events/cory-doctorow-the-fight-against-the-big-tech-oligarchy/ Manchester: Picks and Shovels at Blackwell's Bookshop, Jul 2 https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1308451968059 Manchester: Co-operatives UK Co-op Congress keynote, Jul 3 https://www.uk.coop/events-and-training/events-calendar/co-op-congress-2025-book-your-place New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ Recent appearances (permalink) How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It (Cloudfest) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ai-fC-2Bpo Move Fast and Break Kings https://flipboard.video/w/2aH2AFNTPjcdWCMqjPB5N3?start=2s Beyond the Web (Ostrom Workshop) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WfO-9G4EgQ Latest books (permalink) Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. 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 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: Pluralistic: Mark Zuckerberg announces mind-control ray (again) (07 May 2025)
Wed, 07 May 2025 12:51:57 +0000 Today's links Mark Zuckerberg announces mind-control ray (again): The business model for AI is the same as the business model for Big Data – bilking credulous advertisers. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2105, 2020, 2024 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Mark Zuckerberg announces mind-control ray (again) (permalink) Mark Zuckerberg has told investors how he plans to make back the tens of billions he's spending on AI: he's going to use it to make advertisements that can bypass our critical faculties and convince anyone to buy anything. In other words, Meta will make an AI mind-control ray and rent it out to grateful advertisers. Here, Zuck is fulfilling the fundamental duty of every CEO of every high-growth tech company: explaining how his company will continue to grow. These growth stories are key, because growth stocks trade at a huge premium relative to the stocks of "mature" companies. Every dollar Meta brings in boosts their share price to a much greater degree than the dollars earned by companies with similar rates of profit, but slower rates of growth. This premium represents a bet by investors that Meta will continue to grow, which means that the instant Meta stops growing, the value of its shares will plummet, to reflect the fact that it is a "mature" company, not a "growth" company. So Zuck needs to do everything he can to keep investors believing that Meta will continue to grow. After all, Zuck's key employees and top managers all take much (or even most!) of their compensation in Meta stock, which means that the instant the company stops growing, those workers' pay will plummet and they will seek employment elsewhere, depriving Meta of the workers it needs to successfully create or conquer a new market and once again become a growth stock. This is why Zuck keeps telling stories. The most important story Zuck tells is about himself, the boy genius who converted a tool for nonconsensually rating the fuckability of Harvard undergrads into a social media monopoly with four billion users. Zuck's cult of personality isn't the product of mere narcissism – it's a tool for creating the material conditions for ongoing investor confidence: https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-shirt-latin-what-does-it-say-explained-words-2024-9 If Zuck is a boy genius, then Zuck's pronouncements take on the character of prophesy. When Zuck announced the "pivot to video," investors poured tens of billions into Facebook stock and into video-first online news production, despite the fact that Zuck was obviously lying: https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/facebook-online-video-pivot-metrics-false.html The "boy genius" story is an example of Silicon Valley's storied "reality distortion field," pioneered by Steve Jobs. Like Jobs, Zuck is a Texas marksman, who fires a shotgun into the side of a barn and then draws a target around the holes. Jobs is remembered for his successes, and forgiven his (many, many) flops, and so is Zuck. The fact that pivot to video was well understood to have been a catastrophic scam didn't stop people from believing Zuck when he announced "metaverse." Zuck lost more than $70b on metaverse, but, being a boy genius Texas marksman, he is still able to inspire confidence from credulous investors. Zuck's AI initiatives generated huge interest in Meta's stock, with investors betting that Zuck would find ways to keep Meta's growth going, despite the fact that AI has the worst unit economics of any tech venture in living memory. AI is a business that gets more expensive as time goes on, and where the market's willingness to pay goes down over time. This makes the old dotcom economics of "losing money on every sale, but making it up in volume" look positively rosy: https://www.wheresyoured.at/reality-check/ Now, Zuck has finally described how he's going to turn AI's terrible economics around: he's going to ask AI to design his advertisers' campaigns, and these will be so devastatingly effective that advertisers will pay a huge premium to advertise on Meta: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/the-ai-revolution-is-an-advertising-revolution-morning-brief-100001467.html This narrative is especially galling because it's literally the same story Zuck has been telling for decades: "Facebook has built a mind-control ray out of Big Data, and we can sell anything to anyone": https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/30/dont-believe-the-criti-hype/#ordinary-mediocrities This is a facially absurd proposition. After all, everyone who's ever claimed to have perfected mind-control – Rasputin, Mesmer, MK-ULTRA, neurolinguistic programming grifters and pathetic "pick up artists" – was a liar. Either they were lying to themselves, or to everyone else. Or both. But many of tech's critics helped sell this narrative (and thus helped Meta sell ads). Many critics have fallen prey to the sin of "criti-hype," Lee Vinsel's term for critiquing the claims of your adversary without bothering to ask whether they are true: https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/02/euthanize-rentiers/#dont-believe-the-hype The project of convincing investors that tech's "dopamine hackers" had perfected mind-control with warmed over, non-replicable Skinnerian behavior-mod techniques and mass surveillance sold a hell of a lot of ads. After all, if there's one kind of person the advertising sector has always been able to sell to, it's advertising executives, who are the easiest of marks for a story about how easy it is to trick the public into buying whatever you're selling: https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/05/florida-man/#wannamakers-ghost Every ad-tech sales-bro who takes a meeting with an advertising executive finds himself pushing on an open door. Advertisers desperately wants to believe in mind-control rays. Think of the department store magnate John Wannamaker, who said, "half my advertising spending is wasted – I just don't know which half." Imagine: some advertising exec convinced John Wannamaker that he was only wasting half of his advertising spending! I've long maintained that the threat from AI to workers isn't that AI can do your job – it's that an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job: https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete The corollary here is that it doesn't matter if AI can design ads that work, not so long as an AI ad salesman can sell this proposition to advertisers, and not so long as a tech CEO can sell it to investors. AI keeps passing the worst kinds of Turing tests – for example, it's great at convincing people who are prone to life-destroying hallucinations that they are talking to God: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spiritual-delusions-destroying-human-relationships-1235330175/ Zuck kept up his growth story with this mind control narrative for more than a decade, got caught committing a string of spectacular frauds, and then lured investors back into his stock offerings by telling the same story. This isn't just an indictment of Zuck, it's a stinging rebuke to the whole idea that markets are a kind of infallible computer for assessing and operationalizing information. The market's "thought process" demonstrably lacks the object permanence that most babies acquire by the time they are a year old. You can tell when your child has acquired object permanence by the fact that they cease to enjoy "peek-a-boo" (object permanence means they understand where you have gone when your face is hidden). In claiming that AI will give him an infinite growth mind-control ray, Mark Zuckerberg is challenging the market to a game of peek-a-boo – and he's winning. (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) The Epochalypse Project https://epochalypse-project.org Censoring Social Media https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2025/04/28/Censoring-Social-Media RSA cofounder: The world would've been better without cryptocurrencies https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/29/crypto_pioneers/ (h/t Super Punch) Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago V-TV DAY: WE WON THE BROADCAST FLAG FIGHT! https://memex.craphound.com/2005/05/06/v-tv-day-we-won-the-broadcast-flag-fight/ #20yrsago Google Accelerator is bad news for Web apps https://signalvnoise.com/archives2/google_web_accelerator_hey_not_so_fast_an_alert_for_web_app_designers #15yrsago UNESCO’s bizarre World Anti-Piracy Observatory https://web.archive.org/web/20100308001509/http://portal.unesco.org/culture/en/ev.php-URL_ID=39055&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html #15yrsago Naked scanner reveals airport screener’s tiny penis, sparks steel baton fight with fellow officers https://www.staugustine.com/story/news/nation-world/2010/05/08/airport-screener-charged-attack-over-daily-jokes/16232427007/ #15yrsago India’s e-voting machines vulnerable to fraud https://indiaevm.org #15yrsago Roy Lichtenstein’s estate claims copyright over the images he appropriated <a "="" 05="" 06="" 2015="" balkaninsight.com="" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20100509220603/http://www.elsinoremusic.net/'>https://web.archive.org/web/20100509220603/http://www.elsinoremusic.net/</a> #10yrsago Mass protests, brutal crackdown in Macedonia <a href=" https:="" macedonia-police-quells-anti-government-protest="">https://balkaninsight.com/2015/05/06/macedonia-police-quells-anti-government-protest/ #10yrsago Which UK MPs rebel against the party, and with whom do they ally? https://vartree.blogspot.com/2015/05/vizualizing-rebel-alliances-in-uk.html #10yrsago Legal threat against security researcher claims he violated lock’s copyright https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/05/lawyers-threaten-researcher-over-key-cloning-bug-in-high-security-lock/ #10yrsago Talent, practice and doing the hard stuff https://locusmag.com/2015/05/cory-doctorow-shorter/ #5yrsago Ohio's got snitchline for bosses whose workers who won't go back https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/06/moloch-demands-death/#life-or-death #5yrsago Appeals court says Miami jail doesn't need to provide soap https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/06/moloch-demands-death/#death-sentence #5yrsago Scarfolk death statistics https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/06/moloch-demands-death/#scarfolk #5yrsago Sacrifice banks to save businesses https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/06/moloch-demands-death/#no-choice #5yrsago America's corporate lobbyists want a bailout https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/06/moloch-demands-death/#human-centipede #1yrago Amazon illegally interferes with an historic UK warehouse election https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/06/one-click-to-quit-the-union/#foxglove Upcoming appearances (permalink) Pittsburgh: Picks and Shovels at White Whale Books, May 15 https://whitewhalebookstore.com/events/20250515 Pittsburgh: PyCon, May 16 https://us.pycon.org/2025/schedule/ Virtual: Writing to Resist (California Writers Club Berkeley): https://cwc-berkeley.org/writing-to-resist-5-18-25/ PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22 https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025 PDX: Picks and Shovels with bunnie Huang at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20 https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0 London: How To Academy with Riley Quinn, Jul 1 https://howtoacademy.com/events/cory-doctorow-the-fight-against-the-big-tech-oligarchy/ Manchester: Picks and Shovels at Blackwell's Bookshop, Jul 2 https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1308451968059 Manchester: Co-operatives UK Co-op Congress keynote, Jul 3 https://www.uk.coop/events-and-training/events-calendar/co-op-congress-2025-book-your-place New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ Recent appearances (permalink) Don't Be Evil (Who Killed the Internet?) https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/audio/9.6746333 How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It (Cloudfest) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ai-fC-2Bpo Move Fast and Break Kings https://flipboard.video/w/2aH2AFNTPjcdWCMqjPB5N3?start=2s Latest books (permalink) Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. 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: Slashdot (https://slashdot.org/). 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: Pluralistic: The Adventures of Mary Darling (06 May 2025)
Tue, 06 May 2025 15:35:01 +0000 Today's links The Adventures of Mary Darling: A cracking read, a virtuoso act of gender jiu-jitsu, a Sherlock story like no other, a rough trip to fairyland, and the real, true story of Peter Pan. What a book! Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. The Adventures of Mary Darling (permalink) Science fiction great Pat Murphy has written some classics – including books that were viciously suppressed by the heirs of JRR Tolkien! – but with The Adventures of Mary Darling, she's outdone even her own impressive self: https://tachyonpublications.com/product/the-adventures-of-mary-darling/ The titular Mary Darling here is the mother of Wendy, John and and Michael Darling, the three children who are taken by Peter Pan to Neverland in JM Barrie's 1902 book The Little White Bird, which later became Peter Pan. If you recall your Barrie, you'll remember that it ends with the revelation that Wendy, John and Michael weren't the first Darlings to go to Neverland: when Mary Darling was a girl, she, too, made the journey. Murphy's novel opens with Mary Darling and her husband George coming home from a dinner party to discover their three children missing, the window open, and their nanny, a dog called Nana, barking frantically in the yard. John is frightened, but Mary is practically petrified, inconsolable and rigid with fear. Soon, Mary's beloved uncle, John Watson, is summoned to the house, along with his famous roommate, the detective Sherlock Holmes. With Holmes on the case, surely the children will be found? Of course not. Holmes is incapable of understanding where the Darling children have gone, because to do so would be to admit the existence of the irrational and fantastic, and, more importantly, to accept the testimony of women, lower-class people, and pirates. Holmes has all the confidence of the greatest detective alive, which means he is of no help at all. Neither is George Darling, who, as a kind of act of penance for letting his children be stolen away, takes to Nana's doghouse, and insists that he will not emerge from it until the children are returned. He takes his meals in the doghouse, and is carried in it to and from the taxis that bring him to work and home again. Only Mary can rescue her children. John Watson discovers her consorting with Sam, a one-legged Pacific Islander who is a known fence and the finest rat-leather glovemaker in London, these being much prized by London's worst criminal gangs. Horrified that Mary is keeping such ill company, Watson confronts her and Sam (and Sam's parrot, who screeches nonstop piratical nonsense), only to be told that Mary knows what she is doing, and that she is determined to see her children home safe. Mary, meanwhile, is boning up on her swordplay and self-defense (taught by a Suffragist swordmaster in a room above an Aerated Bread Company tearoom, these being the only public place in Victorian London where a respectable woman can enjoy herself without a male escort). She's acquiring nautical maps. She's going to Neverland. What follows is a very rough guide to fairyland. It's a story that recovers the dark asides from Barrie's original Pan stories, which were soaked with blood, cruelty and death. The mermaids want to laugh as you drown. The fairies hate you and want you to die. And Peter Pan doesn't care how many poorly trained Lost Boy starvelings die in his sorties against pirates, because he knows where there are plenty more Lost Boys to be found in the alienated nurseries of Victorian London, an ocean away. More importantly, it's a story that revolves around the women in Barrie's world, who are otherwise confined to the edges and shadows of the action. In Barrie's Pan, Wendy is a "mother," Tiger Lily is a "princess," and Mary is a barely-there adult whose main role is to smile wistfully at the memory of when she was a girl and got to serve as Peter's "mother." And Holmes? Apart from one love interest and a stalwart housekeeper, Holmes has very little time or regard for women. This is so central to the Holmes cannon that the Arthur Conan Doyle estate actually sued over Netflix's Enola Holmes movie, arguing that Enola displayed basic respect for women, a feature that doesn't appear until the very end of the Holmes canon, and – the estate argued – those final stories were still in copyright: https://www.cbr.com/why-enola-holmes-has-nice-version-sherlock/ Murphy's woman's-eye-view of Peter Pan, Neverland and the Lost Boys dilates the narrow aperture through which Peter Pan plays out, revealing a great deal of exciting, fun, frightening stuff that was always off in the wings. She gives flesh and substance to characters like Tiger Lily, by giving her the semi-fictionalized identity of one of the many American First Nations people who toured Europe and Africa, putting on Wild West shows that won eternal fame and cultural currency for the "American Indian," even as the USA was seeking to exterminate them and their memory. Likewise, Murphy's pirates are grounded in the reality of pirate ships: democratic, anarchic, and far more fun than Robert Louis Stevenson would have you believe. While Murphy's pirates are about a century too late (as are Barrie's), they are in other regards pretty rigorous, which makes them extraordinarily great literary figures. If you read David Graeber's posthumous Pirate Enlightenment, you'll know about the Zana-Malata of Madagascar, the descendants of anarchist pirates and matriarchal Malagasy women, who pranked and hoaxed British merchant sailors for generations, deliberately creating a mythology of south seas pirate kings: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/24/zana-malata/#libertalia This hybrid culture of bold, fierce matriarchal Malagasy women and their anarchist pirate husbands play a central role in the book's resolution, and Murphy's pirate utopia is so well drawn and homely that I found myself wanting to move there. This is a profoundly political book, but it's such a romp, too! Murphy has a real flair for this kind of thing. Back in 1999, she published the brilliant There and Back Again, an all-female retelling of The Hobbit (in spaaaaace!) that was widely celebrated…right up to the moment that Christopher Tolkien used baseless copyright threats to get the book withdrawn from sale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_and_Back_Again_(novel) Billionaire failsons of long-dead writers notwithstanding, you can still read There and Back Again by borrowing a copy of the book from the Internet Archive's Open Library: https://openlibrary.org/works/OL15436385W/There_and_back_again Murphy's mashup of Holmes, Pan, South Seas pirate anarchists, and other salutary and exciting personages, milieux, furniture and tropes of the Victorian adventure story is an unmissable triumph, a romp, a delight. Hey look at this (permalink) Locus Fundraiser 2025 https://www.indiegogo.com/at/locusmag2025 (includes personalized, signed copies of my books!) Out of Order Book Series! https://www.torforgeblog.com/2025/05/01/out-of-order-book-series/ Who Broke the Internet? https://app.magellan.ai/listen_links/coryunderstood Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Space Needle to be converted to WiFi antenna https://web.archive.org/web/20050506113417/http://www.komotv.com/stories/36658.htm #20yrsago How tech could replace the US healthcare system https://web.archive.org/web/20050427012918/http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.05/view.html?pg=5 #20yrsago DRM and music research https://web.archive.org/web/20060106133157/http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/plamere/20050505#listen_only_music #15yrsago How I got phished https://locusmag.com/2010/05/cory-doctorow-persistence-pays-parasites/ #15yrsago Stross explains why he’s voting LibDem https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/05/party-election-broadcast.html #15yrsago HOWTO Tell a debt-collector to go to hell https://web.archive.org/web/20100507214045/https://consumerist.com/2010/05/this-is-how-you-tell-a-zombie-debt-collector-to-buzz-off.html #15yrsago Scholarly essay nails Gilligan’s Island’s hidden subtext https://web.archive.org/web/20100508025302/http://www.fightthebias.com/Resources/Humor/island.htm #15yrsago Canadian Prime Minister promises to enact a Canadian DMCA in six weeks https://web.archive.org/web/20100508202357/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5008/125/ #10yrsago House Republicans hold hearing on politics in science, don’t invite any scientists https://www.science.org/content/article/house-panel-holds-hearing-politically-driven-science-sans-scientists #5yrsago Teen Vogue on socialist feminism https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/05/the-hard-stuff/#wages-for-housework #5yrsago A federal jobs guarantee https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/05/the-hard-stuff/#jobs-guarantee #5yrsago Pandemic profiteering could create social chaos https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/05/the-hard-stuff/#pandemic-profiteers #5yrsago Leaked Trump doc projects 3000 US deaths/day https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/05/the-hard-stuff/#lethal-incompetence #5yrsago Negativland's "This is Not Normal" https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/05/the-hard-stuff/#letter-u-numeral-2 #5yrsago What "writing rules" actually mean https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/05/the-hard-stuff/#said-bookism Upcoming appearances (permalink) Pittsburgh: Picks and Shovels at White Whale Books, May 15 https://whitewhalebookstore.com/events/20250515 Pittsburgh: PyCon, May 16 https://us.pycon.org/2025/schedule/ Virtual: Writing to Resist (California Writers Club Berkeley): https://cwc-berkeley.org/writing-to-resist-5-18-25/ PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22 https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025 PDX: Picks and Shovels with bunnie Huang at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20 https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0 London: How To Academy with Riley Quinn, Jul 1 https://howtoacademy.com/events/cory-doctorow-the-fight-against-the-big-tech-oligarchy/ Manchester: Picks and Shovels at Blackwell's Bookshop, Jul 2 https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1308451968059 Manchester: Co-operatives UK Co-op Congress keynote, Jul 3 https://www.uk.coop/events-and-training/events-calendar/co-op-congress-2025-book-your-place New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ Recent appearances (permalink) How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It (Cloudfest) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ai-fC-2Bpo Move Fast and Break Kings https://flipboard.video/w/2aH2AFNTPjcdWCMqjPB5N3?start=2s Beyond the Web (Ostrom Workshop) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WfO-9G4EgQ Latest books (permalink) Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. 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: Pluralistic: Bridget Read's 'Little Bosses Everywhere' (05 May 2025)
Mon, 05 May 2025 13:52:07 +0000 Today's links Bridget Read's 'Little Bosses Everywhere': America is a Ponzi scheme. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Bridget Read's 'Little Bosses Everywhere' (permalink) Pyramid schemes are as American as apple pie. If you doubt it, just read Little Bosses Everywhere, Bridget Read's deeply researched, horrifying, amazing investigative book on the subject, which is out today from Crown: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/715421/little-bosses-everywhere-by-bridget-read/ Read, an investigative journalist at Curbed, takes us through the history of the "industry," which evolved out of Depression-era snake oil salesmen, Tupperware parties, and magical thinking cults built around books like Think and Grow Rich. This fetid swamp gives rise to a group of self-mythologizing scam artists who found companies like Amway and Mary Kay, claiming outlandish – and easily debunked – origin stories that the credulous press repeats, alongside their equally nonsensical claims about the "opportunities" they are creating for their victims. In Read's telling, there's only two kinds of MLM participants: suckers (who lose lots and lots of money) and predators (who rake in that money). MLMs pretend that they're doing "direct sales," cutting out the middleman to peddle vitamins, household cleaners, cosmetics, tights or jewelry. But the actual sales volume of these products rounds to zero. The money in the system – tens of billions of dollars per year in the US alone – is almost entirely being spent by "salespeople" who are required to buy a certain amount of "product" every month, either as a condition of membership, or in order to attain some kind of bonus or status. The "salespeople" in these systems are effectively in a cult, and the high-pressure techniques that Read describes will be instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with cultic dynamics, or even just a casual listener to the Conspirituality podcast: https://www.conspirituality.net/episodes And, as with other cults, MLM members are tormented endlessly by other cult members into trying to recruit their friends and family-members. Sometimes, they succeed, and the cult grows a little – but usually not for very long. Most people who get recruited into an MLM quickly figure out that it's impossible to make any money – indeed, it's impossible to avoid losing a lot of money – and bail. The meat-and-potatoes of the MLM industry are the minority who don't see through the scam. They believe that they are deficient, because everyone else is reporting such incredible returns from "the program." They charge more product to their credit cards, insisting to their "uplines" that they are selling machines (and not that they are filling their garages and attics and living rooms and kitchen cupboards with unsold, unsellable junk). What they don't understand is that all the "successes" in the cult are either scammers who are getting rich off people like them, or they are people like them, going deep into debt and desperately trying to pretend that they're selling as well as those uplines. The US government and various law enforcement agencies have taken various runs at these cults, but the cults have always won. That's down to enforcers buying into the cult leader/scammers' essential lie: that, at the end of the day, MLM is a system for selling things to people. That isn't true, has never been true, and never will be true. But by crafting rules and tests that attempt to sort the "legitimate" MLMs from the "scam" MLMs, enforcers fall into the scammers' trap. The scammers welcome rules that distinguish "good" MLMs from "bad" MLMs, because it's trivial to create the superficial appearance of adherence to these rules while flouting them. For example, if the rule says that "independent sales representatives" must sell to at least ten outside customers, they can simply make up the names of ten people and charge it to their card. This happens routinely, but there's no auditing, and besides, the MLM victims are all "independent business owners," so if there were any penalties for these violations, they would fall to the victims, not the cult. Meanwhile, the scammers know it's a scam, and the failure of their victims to sell the useless "product" the cult is nominally organized around is a feature, not a bug. The hordes of indebted, cost-sunk, self-castigating failures are suckers for yet another scam: selling victims "training" to improve their sales technique. After all, if everyone around you is selling this crap without breaking a sweat, the failing must be your own. You need coaching, training, seminars, cassettes, books, retreats, all of it piling debt on debt. The internal operations of these cults are shrouded in mystery, but Read lifts the veil and makes masterful sense of the horrors lurking beneath. In this, she is somewhat aided by MLM cult leaders' propensity for suing one another, as various sub-bosses build up massive followings of their own and seek to usurp the cult leader by founding their own parallel cults or sub-cults. These lawsuits sometimes drag the cults' dirty laundry out in public, and Read sorts through these court filings very carefully. Unfortunately, the cults' propensity for suing also helps suppress a lot of dirty laundry, because MLM leaders love to sue ex-cult members who participate in online forums where they document their expenses, and they use these cult victims' own money to pay for the court cases that silence them. MLMs aren't just cults, they're religious cults. Since the very earliest days, pyramid scheme runners have declared themselves to be engaged in an extension of their Christian (mostly Calvinist) faith. The engine of a pyramid scheme needs social capital for fuel: to bring in new recruits, a cult member has to draw on the bonds of trust, fellowship and solidarity in order to convince their targets that this is a bona fide enterprise (and not a cult). Faith groups – especially fringe faith groups – have this kind of capital in spades. This goes double for faiths that demand large families (which is why we see such deep penetration of MLMs into Mormonism and orthodox Judiasm). If your faith demands that you produce a "quiverfull" of mouths to feed, then the chances are that you will not be able to survive without being enmeshed in a mutual support network with your co-religionists. MLMs convert this trust, generosity and mutual dependency into cash (at a ruinous exchange rate) and then funnel it "upline" to the cult leaders, who reap billions. Of course, those kinds of bonds are not solely forged on the basis of faith: racialized people, women, and other groups who face systemic discrimination depend on one another for mutual aid, which makes them vulnerable to another MLM pitch: "predatory inclusion": https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/27/predatory-inclusion/#equal-opportunity-scammers Predatory inclusion is when scam artists adopt the language of social justice to pitch their cons – think of all the crypto bros who sold their ripoff schemes as a way to "achieve independence for women" or "build Black wealth" (thanks, Spike Lee): https://www.vice.com/en/article/spike-lee-made-an-ad-for-cryptocurrency-atms-and-its-bizarre/ Predatory inclusion is parasitic upon the bonds of solidarity forged in adversity, and this goes double for the MLM variety. As MLMs cut away the strands of the web of mutual support, the cult leaders replace them with rabid anti-Communism, the kind of far-right rhetoric that brought Christian conservatives into the Reagan coalition and ultimately led to Trump's fascist takeover. Here's how that move works: "You are a small, independent businessperson, the backbone of America. You will realize the American dream through your own backbone and work ethic (and therefore your current failure is due to your own lack of both). People who want to shut down pyramid schemes say they want to protect you, but really they want the government to decide who can and can't own a business. They're Communists, and in coming for MLMs, they're coming for America itself." Some of America's richest family dynasties owe their wealth to pyramid schemes. They are dynasties of fraud, and they funneled their criminal gains into far right political projects. The Heritage Foundation – the authors of Project 2025 and Trump's master strategists – got their start with money from Rich DeVos (father in law of Betsy DeVos, who served as Secretary of Education in the first Trump cabinet). The far-right dark money machine runs on MLM money. In fact, there's a good case to be made that everything rotten in today's world is built on the tactics of MLMs. Take the "gig economy." Companies like Uber promise drivers a high hourly wage. A small number of drivers are randomly allocated extremely large payouts by the system, in order to convert them into Judas goats, who fill gig-work message boards with tales of their good fortune. As Veena Dubal documents in her seminal work on "algorithmic wage discrimination," this tactic is devastatingly effective, convincing other Uber drivers to put in extremely long hours for sub-starvation wages, and then blame themselves for "being bad at Uber" – just like the downlines at Mary Kay and Amway who think the problem is with them: https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men Trump, of course, is the ultimate expression of the MLM grift – and not only because he licensed his name to two different pyramid schemes. Trump embodies the MLM ethic of lying about how rich you are so that marks send you their money to get in on the "opportunity" and then blame themselves when the promised riches never materialize. Erik Baker once described MLMs as a kind of bizarro-world version of unions. In the world of labor organizing, success lies in finding the people with the most social capital, the ones who are trusted by their coworkers, and teaching them to have a structured organizing conversation. This is exactly what MLMs do – but the difference lies in the goal of that structured organizing conversation. For union organizers, the goal is build solidarity as a means to improving the lives of everyone in the community. For MLM organizers, the goal is to destroy solidarity, atomizing the community, shattering its bonds, leaving its members defenseless as they are fleeced by the cult's leaders and their henchmen: https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/05/power-of-positive-thinking/#the-socialism-of-fools Neoliberalism's war-cry is Thatcher's "There is no such thing as society." The past 40 years have been a long process of tearing us away from one another, teaching us to see one another as marks, to mistrust systems of mutual aid as Communism. Read's Little Bosses Everywhere is a brilliantly told, deeply researched history of the past and present of the ultimate business model for late-stage capitalism: destroying the lives of everyone around you while pretending to be a small businessperson. Hey look at this (permalink) Spotify already has an app ready to test Apple’s new rules https://www.theverge.com/news/659891/spotify-ios-app-update-apple-payment-rules (h/t Slashdot) DOJ confirms it wants to break up Google’s ad business https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/05/doj-confirms-it-wants-to-break-up-googles-ad-business/ 2025 Locus Awards Top Ten Finalists https://locusmag.com/2025/05/2025-locus-awards-top-ten-finalists/ (The Bezzle is a finalist!) Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Haunted Mansion executed in sand https://web.archive.org/web/20050507151039/http://strangecosmos.com/content/item/101751.html #20yrsago Ukranian TV sign-language interpreter blew whistle on crooked vote https://web.archive.org/web/20050503154101/http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/nationworld/sfl-ainterpreter01may01,0,341946.story?coll=sfla-news-nationworld #20yrsago 3D printer made from Meccano and hot-glue <a 04="" 2005="" brazil.aids"="" href="https://blog.rebang.com/?p=101'>https://blog.rebang.com/?p=101</a> #20yrsago Brazil rejects Bush’s faith-based AIDS money <a href=" https:="" may="" world="" www.theguardian.com="">https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/may/04/brazil.aids #20yrsago Boy Scout badge in Intellectual Property https://web.archive.org/web/20050522080926/http://news.com.com/2061-10796_3-5693563.html"> #15yrsago Satellite photos catch Greek tax-evaders https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/world/europe/02evasion.html #15yrsago Six reasons to hate Facebook’s new anti-privacy system, “Connections” https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/05/things-you-need-know-about-facebook #15yrsago Viacom is becoming a lawsuit company instead of a TV company https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/may/04/viacom-youtube #15yrsago Bruce Schneier explains how to prevent terrorist attacks like Times Square car-bomb https://archive.nytimes.com/roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/03/times-square-bombs-and-big-crowds/ #15yrsago London cops’ signs in Internet cafe warn against loading porn and “extremism” https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/4581218328/ #15yrsago Windsor Executive Solutions: Bruce Sterling and Chris Nakashima-Brown’s transhuman monarch story https://futurismic.com/2010/05/04/new-fiction-windsor-executive-solutions-by-chris-nakashima-brown-and-bruce-sterling/ #15yrsago BBC to project real-time election results on Big Ben’s tower https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/election_2010/8656578.stm #15yrsago Terry Pratchett: Doctor Who isn’t science fiction https://web.archive.org/web/20100506141559/http://www.sfx.co.uk/2010/05/03/guest-blog-terry-pratchett-on-doctor-who/ #15yrsago HOWTO live out of your car https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/byaac/comment/c0p5qkh/ #15yrsago Star Wars Loteria tribute https://web.archive.org/web/20100505204544/http://www.chepo.net/ #10yrsago FBI replies to Stingray Freedom of Information request with 5,000 blank pages https://www.techdirt.com/2015/05/01/fbi-hands-over-5000-pages-stingray-info-to-muckrock-redacts-nearly-all-it/,/a> #10yrsago Court says DEA is allowed to secretly fill your truck with weed, get into firefights with Zetas https://www.techdirt.com/2015/05/01/who-pays-when-dea-destroys-your-vehicle-kills-your-employee-during-botched-sting-hint-not-dea/ #10yrsago Disrupting Richard Scarry https://welcometobusinesstown.tumblr.com #10yrsago Every question in every Q&A session https://web.archive.org/web/20150502151150/http://the-toast.net/2015/05/01/every-question-in-every-qa-session-ever/ #10yrsago Algorithmic guilt: using secret algorithms to kick people off welfare https://slate.com/technology/2015/04/the-dangers-of-letting-algorithms-enforce-policy.html #5yrsago Kim Stanley Robinson on "our rewritten imagination" https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/02/rewriting-our-imaginations/#ksr #5yrsago Ticketmaster gets $500m from Mohammad bin Salman <a <a="" apps="" be="" contact="" could="" href="https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/02/rewriting-our-imaginations/#exposure-notification" than="" tracing"="" useless="" worse="">https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/02/rewriting-our-imaginations/#exposure-notification #5yrsago Prisons, meatpacking plants, nursing homes https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/02/rewriting-our-imaginations/#superclusters #5yrsago My talk at Republica online https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/02/rewriting-our-imaginations/#republica #5yrsago The Making of Prince of Persia https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/03/give-me-slack/#pop #5yrsago Lockdown CO2 and structural roots of the climate emergency https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/03/give-me-slack/#reality-is-a-leftist #5yrsago XML inventor quits Amazon over whistleblower firings https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/04/which-side-are-you-on/#tim-bray #5yrsago The failure of software licensing https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/04/which-side-are-you-on/#tivoization-and-beyond #5yrsago Wired workers have unionized https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/04/which-side-are-you-on/#solidarity #5yrsago Hospital CEOs making millions amid cuts https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/04/which-side-are-you-on/#administrative-bloat #5yrsago Pandemic could make Big Tech our permanent overlords https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/04/which-side-are-you-on/#trustbusting #1yrago Rosemary Kirstein's "The Steerswoman" https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/04/the-wulf/#underground-fave #1yrago Google is (still) losing the spam wars to zombie news-brands https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/#site-reputation-abuse #1yrago CDA 230 bans Facebook from blocking interoperable tools https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/02/kaiju-v-kaiju/#cda-230-c-2-b Upcoming appearances (permalink) Pittsburgh: Picks and Shovels at White Whale Books, May 15 https://whitewhalebookstore.com/events/20250515 Pittsburgh: PyCon, May 16 https://us.pycon.org/2025/schedule/ Virtual: Writing to Resist (California Writers Club Berkeley): https://cwc-berkeley.org/writing-to-resist-5-18-25/ PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22 https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025 PDX: Picks and Shovels with bunnie Huang at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20 https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0 London: How To Academy with Riley Quinn, Jul 1 https://howtoacademy.com/events/cory-doctorow-the-fight-against-the-big-tech-oligarchy/ Manchester: Picks and Shovels at Blackwell's Bookshop, Jul 2 https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1308451968059 Manchester: Co-operatives UK Co-op Congress keynote, Jul 3 https://www.uk.coop/events-and-training/events-calendar/co-op-congress-2025-book-your-place New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ Recent appearances (permalink) How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It (Cloudfest) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ai-fC-2Bpo Move Fast and Break Kings https://flipboard.video/w/2aH2AFNTPjcdWCMqjPB5N3?start=2s Beyond the Web (Ostrom Workshop) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WfO-9G4EgQ Latest books (permalink) Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. 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: Pluralistic: AI and the fatfinger economy (02 May 2025)
Fri, 02 May 2025 20:28:37 +0000 Today's links AI and the fatfinger economy: Every slip of the finger is money in the bank. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: 2015, 2020, 2024 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. AI and the fatfinger economy (permalink) Have you noticed that all the buttons you click most frequently to invoke routine, useful functions in your device have been moved, and their former place is now taken up by a curiously butthole-esque icon that summons an unwanted AI? https://velvetshark.com/ai-company-logos-that-look-like-buttholes These traps for the unwary aren't accidental, but neither are they placed there solely because tech companies think that if they can trick you into using their AI, you'll be so impressed that you'll become a regular user. To understand why you find yourself repeatedly fatfingering your way into an unwanted AI interaction – and why those interactions are so hard to exit – you have to understand something about both the macro- and microeconomics of high-growth tech companies. Growth is a heady advantage for tech companies, and not because of an ideological commitment to "growth at all costs," but because companies with growth stocks enjoy substantial, material benefits. A growth stock trades at a higher "price to earnings ratio" ("P:E") than a "mature" stock. Because of this, there are a lot of actors in the economy who will accept shares in a growing company as though they were cash (indeed, some might prefer shares to cash). This means that a growing company can outbid their rivals when acquiring other companies and/or hiring key personnel, because they can bid with shares (which they get by typing zeroes into a spreadsheet), while their rivals need cash (which they can only get by selling things or borrowing money). The problem is that all growth ends. Google has a 90% share of the search market. Google isn't going to appreciably increase the number of searchers, short of desperate gambits like raising a billion new humans to maturity and convincing them to become Google users (this is the strategy behind Google Classroom, of course). To continue posting growth, Google needs gimmicks. For example, in 2019, Google intentionally made Search less accurate so that users would have to run multiple queries (and see multiple rounds of ads) to find the answers to their questions: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ Thanks to Google's monopoly, worsening search perversely resulted in increased earnings, and Wall Street rewarded Google by continuing to trade its stock with that prized high P:E. But for Google – and other tech giants – the most enduring and convincing growth stories comes from moving into adjacent lines of business, which is why we've lived through so many hype bubbles: metaverse, web3, cryptocurrency, and now, of course, AI. For a company like Google, the promise of these bubbles is that it will be able to double or triple in size, by dominating an entirely new sector. With that promise comes peril: growth must eventually stop ("anything that can't go on forever eventually stops"). When that happens, the company's stock instantaneously goes from being a "growth stock" to being a "mature stock" which means that its P:E is way too high. Anyone holding growth stock knows that there will come a day when those stocks will transition, in an eyeblink, from being undervalued to being grossly overvalued, and that when that day comes, there will be a mass sell-off. If you're still holding the stock when that happens, you stand to lose bigtime: https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/06/privacy-last/#exceptionally-american So everyone holding a growth stock sleeps with one eye open and their fists poised over the "sell" button. Managers of growth companies know how jittery their investors are, and they do everything they can to keep the growth story alive, as a matter of life and death. But mass sell-offs aren't just bad for the company – it's also very bad for the company's key employees, that is, anyone who's been given stock in addition to their salary. Those people's portfolios are extremely heavy on their employer's shares, and they stand to disproportionately lose in the event of a selloff. So they are personally motivated to keep the growth story alive. That's where these growth-at-all-stakes maneuvers bent on capturing an adjacent sector come from. If you remember the Google Plus days, you'll remember that every Google service you interacted with had some important functionality ripped out of it and replaced with a G+-based service. To make sure that happened, Google's bosses decreed that the company's bonuses would be tied to the amount of G+ activity each division generated. In companies where bonuses can amount to 90% of your annual salary or more, this was a powerful motivator. It meant that every product team at Google was fully aligned on a project to cram G+ buttons into their product design. Whether or not these made sense for users, they always made sense for the product team, whose ability to take a fancy Christmas holiday, buy a new car, or pay their kids' private school tuition depended on getting you to use G+. Once you understand how corporate growth stories are converted to "key performance indicators" that drive product design, many of the annoyances of digital services suddenly make a great deal of sense. You know how it's almost impossible to watch a show on a streaming video service without accidentally tapping a part of the screen that whisks you to a completely different video? The reason you have to handle your phone like a photonegative while watching a movie – the reason every millimeter of screen real-estate has been boobytrapped with an icon that takes you somewhere else – is that streaming services believe that their customers are apt to leave when they feel like there's nothing new to watch. These bosses have made their product teams' bonuses dependent on successfully "recommending" a show you've never seen or expressed any interest in to you: https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/15/the-fatfinger-economy/ Of course, bosses understand that their workers will be tempted to game this metric. They want to distinguish between "real" clicks that lead to interest in a new video, and fake fatfinger clicks that you instantaneously regret. The easiest way to distinguish between these two types of click is to measure how long you watch the new show before clicking away. Of course, this is also entirely gameable: all the product manager has to do is take away the "back" button, so that an accidental click to a new video is extremely hard to cancel. The five seconds you spend figuring out how to get back to your show are enough to count as a successful recommendation, and the product team is that much closer to a luxury ski vacation next Christmas. So this is why you keep invoking AI by accident, and why the AI that is so easy to invoke is so hard to dispel. Like a demon, a chatbot is much easier to summon than it is to rid yourself of. Google is an especially grievous offender here. Familiar buttons in Gmail, Gdocs, and the Android message apps have been replaced with AI-summoning fatfinger traps. Android is filled with these pitfalls – for example, the bottom-of-screen swipe gesture used to switch between open apps now summons an AI, while ridding yourself of that AI takes multiple clicks. This is an entirely material phenomenon. Google doesn't necessarily believe that you will ever want to use AI, but they must convince investors that their AI offerings are "getting traction." Google – like other tech companies – gets to invent metrics to prove this proposition, like "how many times did a user click on the AI button" and "how long did the user spend with the AI after clicking?" The fact that your entire "AI use" consisted of hunting for a way to get rid of the AI doesn't matter – at least, not for the purposes of maintaining Google's growth story. Goodhart's Law holds that "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." For Google and other AI narrative-pushers, every measure is designed to be a target, a line that can be made to go up, as managers and product teams align to sell the company's growth story, lest we all sell off the company's shares. (Image: Pogrebnoj-Alexandroff, CC BY-SA 3.0; Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; modified) Hey look at this (permalink) Army Will Seek Right to Repair Clauses in All Its Contracts https://www.404media.co/army-will-seek-right-to-repair-clauses-in-all-its-contracts/ Washington’s Right to Repair Bill Heads to the Governor https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/05/washingtons-right-repair-bill-heads-governor roons https://whomtech.com/roons/ (h/t Metafilter) Object permanence (permalink) #10yrsago Encryption backdoors are like TSA luggage-locks for the Internet https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/01/encryption-wont-work-if-it-has-a-back-door-only-the-good-guys-have-keys-to- #10yrsago Tell the Copyright Office not to criminalize using unapproved goop in a 3D printer https://makezine.com/article/digital-fabrication/3d-printing-workshop/really-3d-printer/ #10yrsago Stupid patent for the ages: “Changing order quantities” https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/stupid-patent-month-eclipse-ip-casts-shadow-over-innovation #10yrsago Computer scientist/Congressman: crypto backdoors are “technologically stupid,” DA is “offensive” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YG0bUmuj4tg #5yrsago Americans overwhelmingly support pandemic containment measures: Pluralistic: Apple faces criminal sanctions for defying App Store antitrust order (01 May 2025)
Thu, 01 May 2025 20:42:05 +0000 Today's links Apple faces criminal sanctions for defying App Store antitrust order: They lied to the judge, then covered it up, and now she's PISSED. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020, 2024 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Apple faces criminal sanctions for defying App Store antitrust order (permalink) Epic, makers of the wildly popular Fortnite video-game, have waged a one-company war against the "app tax" – the 15-30% rake that the mobile duopoly of Apple/Google take out of every penny we spend inside of apps. Epic's own digital practices are hardly spotless: just this year, the company was caught cheating players – many of them children – with deceptive practices and had to refund over $72m: https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/refunds/fortnite-refunds But in this fight, Epic is on the side of the angels. The 30% that Apple/Google sucks out of the mobile economy is a brutal tax, and not just on app makers. Patreon performers recently raised a stink when the company announced that it would be clawing back 30% of the money pledged by their supporters – that 30% surcharge is passed straight through to Apple/Google: https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/12/24218629/patreon-membership-ios-30-percent-apple-tax From independent news outlets to crafters selling their work out of small storefronts, all the way up to massive entertainment services like Disney Plus and Fortnite, the mobile cartel takes 30% out of every dollar, a racket they maintain with onerous rules that ban apps from using their own payment processors, or even from encouraging users to click a link that brings them to a web-based payment screen. 30% is a gigantic markup on payment processing. It's ten times the going rate for payments in the USA, already one of the most expensive places in the world to transfer money from one party to another. In the EU, payment processing typically runs 1%…or less. But crafters, Patreon podcasters and small-town newspapers are in no position to fight Google and Apple. Instead, we get Epic, a multi-billion-dollar company that's gone to the mattresses to fight these multi-trillion-dollar companies. Personally, I dote on billionaire-on-trillionaire violence. Epic was wildly successful. It mopped up the floor with Google, securing an especially punitive award from a judge who was furious that Google had destroyed evidence: https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/12/im-feeling-lucky/#hugger-mugger Epic also won against Apple, though not as thoroughly as it had with Google, because Apple had the commonsense not to get up to the kind of shenanigans that make federal judges very, very mad. In the Google case, the court found that Google had acted as a monopolist and ordered it to open up the payment system in Google Play, a direct blow to the Android app tax. In the Apple case, the judge did not find that Apple had acted as a monopolist, but did rule that the App Store's payment processing racket violated the law, and ordered Apple to end its own app tax: https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/30/epic-games-just-scored-a-major-win-against-apple/ That's where things get gnarly. Apple is addicted to corrupt sources of income – like the tens of billions it illegally receives every year in bribes from Google to make it the default search: https://apnews.com/article/google-antitrust-search-engine-verdict-apple-319a61f20fb11510097845a30abaefd8 And it really, really loves the app tax. When the EU ordered Apple to allow third-party app stores (as a way of killing the app tax), the company cooked up a malicious compliance plan that was comically corrupt: https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/06/spoil-the-bunch/#dma So, the mere fact that a federal judge had ordered Apple to open up its app store to competing payment processors was not going convince Apple to actually do it. Instead, Apple cooked up a set of rules for third-party payment processing that would make it more costly to use someone else's payments, piling up a mountain of junk fees and using scare screens and other deceptive warnings to discourage users from making payments through a rival system: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/judge-rules-apple-executive-lied That's the kind of thing that is apt to make a federal judge angry – and, as noted, angry federal judges can make life very hard for tech monopolists, a lesson Google learned when it destroyed key evidence in its Epic case. But Apple didn't just flout the court order – they lied about it to cover it up, and Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is furious. She held that Alex Roman, Apple's Vice-President of Finance, "outright lied under oath," and she has raised the possibility of criminal contempt penalties for Apple: https://regmedia.co.uk/2025/05/01/pacer_epic_vs_apple_injunction_judgement.pdf The judge further wrote: This is an injunction, not a negotiation. There are no do-overs once a party willfully disregards a court order. Time is of the essence. The Court will not tolerate further delays. As previously ordered, Apple will not impede competition. The Court enjoins Apple from implementing its new anticompetitive acts to avoid compliance with the Injunction. Effective immediately Apple will no longer impede developers’ ability to communicate with users nor will they levy or impose a new commission on off-app purchases In other words, any junk fees, any impediments to opening up third party payments, will be swiftly and harshly dealt with. As of right now developers can start to build third-party payments into their apps and Apple cannot block them. It's the end of the app tax, a source of about $100b/year for Apple: https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/01/apple_epic_lies_possible_crime/ The world is on fire and everything is terrible, but we are also living through the most consequential season in the history of the war on corporate tech power. Google has been convicted three times of being a monopolist and is almost certainly going to have to sell off Chrome, most of its ad-tech stack, and possibly Android. Meta just put up a pathetic showing in an equally serious antitrust case that could see it forced to sell off Instagram and Whatsapp: https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/11/it-is-better-to-buy/#than-to-compete Countries around the world have passed big, sweeping, muscular antitrust laws specifically aimed at smashing corporate tech power, like the EU's Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act: https://www.eff.org/pages/adoption-dsadma-notre-analyse Most importantly, all of this is happening from the bottom up. There is no dark money campaign to fuck up the tech companies. The politicians and enforcers who are taking on Big Tech are being shoved from behind by billions of everyday people who are furious and refuse to take it any longer: https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/10/solidarity-forever-2/#oligarchism I am deeply grateful for the public servants who have championed this cause, but I also know that these people are the effect of our movement, not the cause. When Kier Starmer fires Britain's brilliant and effective top competition enforcer and replaces him with the former head of Amazon UK, that does nothing to tamp down the political outrage that Britons feel towards America's tech giants: https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter All over the world, countries that passed IP laws to protect US tech interests in exchange for tariff-free access to US markets are grappling with the end of free trade with America. This represents a generational opportunity to pass laws that enable local technologists to jailbreak US tech exports and liberate their people from the extractive practices of Big Tech forever: https://archive.is/CiBIz There is nothing harder to stop than an idea whose time has come to pass. (Image: Alex Popovkin, Bahia, Brazil from Brazil, CC BY 2.0; Hubertl, CC BY-SA 4.0; modified) Hey look at this (permalink) How an AI "therapist" relates to someone in active psychosis https://x.com/AISafetyMemes/status/1916889492172013989 (h/t Super Punch) The digital countermove to Trump tariffs https://www.ft.com/content/b882f3a7-f8c9-4247-9662-3494eb37c30b Cage-Tech https://www.cage-tech.com (h/t JWZ) Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Doonesbury on DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20050501170432/http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full_date=20050501 #15yrsago AT&T asks government to create national censorwall and system for disconnecting accused infringers https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/04/att-calls-for-us-3-strikes-tribunal-web-censorship/ #15yrsago Asimov’s opens to electronic submission https://web.archive.org/web/20050514080931/http://www.asimovs.com/info/guidelines.shtml #10yrsago Lego store detains 11 year old customer, accuses his father of being an unfit parent https://www.freerangekids.com/lego-store-detains-boy-11-for-being-too-young-to-shop-alone/ #10yrsago Telescreen watch: Vizio adds spyware to its TVs https://web.archive.org/web/20150905093150/http://www.vizio.com/smartinteractivity #5yrsago AMC: "We will never show another Universal movie" https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/30/day-and-date/#vertical-integration #5yrsago Financial services workers dying for junk mail https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/30/day-and-date/#broadridge-financial-solutions #5yrsago Swedish covid death rates soar above neighbors' https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/30/day-and-date/#tubers #5yrsago Medicare for All (Congressjerks) https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/30/day-and-date/#m4a4c #5yrsago Berlin in color, after the Reich's fall https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/30/day-and-date/#bouncing-rubble #1yrago Live Nation/Ticketmaster is buying Congress https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/30/nix-fix-the-tix/#something-must-be-done-there-we-did-something Upcoming appearances (permalink) Auckland: Unity Books, May 2, 6PM https://www.eventbrite.co.nz/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1320740102199 Wellingon: Unity Books, May 3, 3PM https://www.unitybooks.co.nz/news-and-events/author-talk-picks-and-shovels-by-cory-doctorow Pittsburgh: Picks and Shovels at White Whale Books, May 15 https://whitewhalebookstore.com/events/20250515 Pittsburgh: PyCon, May 16 https://us.pycon.org/2025/schedule/ Virtual: Writing to Resist (California Writers Club Berkeley): https://cwc-berkeley.org/writing-to-resist-5-18-25/ PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22 https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025 PDX: Picks and Shovels with bunnie Huang at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20 https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0 London: How To Academy with Riley Quinn, Jul 1 https://howtoacademy.com/events/cory-doctorow-the-fight-against-the-big-tech-oligarchy/ Manchester: Picks and Shovels at Blackwell's Bookshop, Jul 2 https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1308451968059 Manchester: Co-operatives UK Co-op Congress keynote, Jul 3 https://www.uk.coop/events-and-training/events-calendar/co-op-congress-2025-book-your-place New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ Recent appearances (permalink) How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It (Cloudfest) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ai-fC-2Bpo Move Fast and Break Kings https://flipboard.video/w/2aH2AFNTPjcdWCMqjPB5N3?start=2s Beyond the Web (Ostrom Workshop) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WfO-9G4EgQ Latest books (permalink) Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. 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: Pluralistic: Republicans want to force students to pay off scam college loans (30 Apr 2025)
Thu, 01 May 2025 00:58:40 +0000 Today's links Republicans want to force students to pay off scam college loans: Incredibly, they've found a way to make student debt WORSE. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020, 2024 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Republicans want to force students to pay off scam college loans (permalink) House Republicans have a great plan to pay for Trump's tax-cuts for the rich: jacking up the cost of federal student loans, while eliminating protections for students who are scammed by fake universities: https://prospect.org/education/2025-04-30-republicans-education-upper-class-privilege-student-loans/ Every GOP legislator and especially Congressional committee chairs are scrambling to find cuts that can offset Trump's plans to make his 2017 tax cuts permanent and then add more cuts on top of that. The failure of Doge to make any appreciable savings has left Trump high and dry, with unfunded tax cuts that will flunk even the most compliant, ass-kissing Congressional Budget Office analysis: https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/elon-musk-doge-savings-trump-rcna203051 Enter the House Education and Workforce Committee, whose Republican members have found a way to save $330b over the next decade, through the simple expedient of making working families choose between foregoing education for their kids, or burdening those kids with brutal, crushing debts for the rest of their lives – debts that can't be discharged in bankruptcy, even if the student becomes totally, permanently disabled – not even if the "university" that charged them all that tuition is later shut down for running a scam. Trump knows a lot about scams in higher ed, of course. His own ill-fated "Trump 'University,'" a fraudulent, non-accredited institution that stole millions of dollars from unsuspecting students: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_University Trump U isn't the only scam college out there, not by a damn sight. The Department of Education's "Borrower Defense to Repayment" system allows students who've been scammed by fraudulent institutions to have their debts canceled. That's the clause that the GOP members of the House Education and Workforce Committee plan to kill. This will not only leave fraud victims on the hook for a lifetime of debt – it will also make it easier for scam institutions to re-open and prey upon even more students. The Republicans' giveaway to scam universities kills the "gainful employment" rule that requires that universities prove that their grads can actually get work in the fields they graduate in. The GOP plan will kill all subsidized undergrad loans, meaning that interest will be piled on student loans while students are still at school, so a grad with a four-year degree will also owe four years worth of compounded interest on their freshman year loans. Undergrad loans are capped at $50k, less than half the price of a degree at most state colleges. The GOP members say that the $50k cap covers the "median tuition" – meaning that it is lower than tuition at half the country's institutions. GOP members have also called for changes to "income based repayment," with sharply rising payments that will shoot up every time a graduate's income crosses a line. Under this plan, a student grad earning $10k-$20k would have to pay 1% of their income to service their loans. For each $10k increase in graduate pay, repayment goes up by 1% – so if a grad earning $99.9k gets a raise to $100k, their repayments will shoot up from 9% of their annual income to 10%. That means a $100 raise could leave a graduate $850 poorer. This proposal will roll back Biden-era changes to the interest charged to borrowers on income-based repayment. Under the new rules, interest will continue to compound on your loan even if you're earning peanuts, meaning that the poorest grads will have the highest lifetime interest charges and likely die with unpaid student loans that exceed the principle several times over (remember, the only debt that can be charged against your Social Security is student loans). The Republican proposal also screws grads working through a Public Service Loan Forgiveness plan, which cancels your student debt after ten years of work in public service. The Republicans want to increase the payments due from grads during that decade of public service. Also, med-school grads would no longer receive credit towards PSLF debt cancellation for the years they spend in residencies, which will drain the supply of freshly minted doctors who staff community health clinics. They also want to gut Pell grants, changing eligibility to limits grants to "full time" students (30+ hours/week of courses), which will strike hardest at the poorest students, who often attend school part time while working. Raising the price of a good education and lowering protections against receiving a bad education is an attack on the very idea of education as a source of social mobility. After all, the students most likely to be trapped by a scam college are students from families without a lot of college grads, who lack the means of assessing educational quality. During the New Deal, America created two parallel paths to social mobility: labor protections and subsidized home ownership. As with every American social initiative, the New Deal was undermined by racism, sexism and xenophobia, and excluded many of America's most disfavored minorities from its benefits. After WWII, two groups of Americans fought to change the New Deal. The wealthy fought to roll back its protections, while the rest of us fought to extend those benefits to Black people, indigenous people, Latino people, women, queers, and others who were left out from the start: https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/26/horsehoe-crab/#substantive-disagreement They made a lot of progress, but then came the Reagan revolution, which wiped out labor protections (including defined benefit pensions) and doubled down on home ownership as the only means of securing a comfortable and dignified life. Over the next quarter-century, this turned a lucky group of workers into real-estate millionaires, even as their wages stagnated and the cost of education and health care skyrocketed: https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/ Housing prices also skyrocketed. Of course they did: the only way that owning a house could be an "investment" (as opposed to a way to fulfill the human need for shelter) is if the price of keeping a roof over your head went up. But owning an expensive house in a world of stagnant wages and rising health and education costs is a recipe for not owning a house anymore, because you'll have to liquidate that home to cover your bills or get your kids through school. This century hasn't just been a time in which housing grew more valuable (and thus more expensive) – it's been an era in which its easier than ever to be forced out of your home: https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/06/the-end-of-the-road-to-serfdom/ Trading labor protection for real-estate speculation was always going to end badly for workers. The retreat of organized labor has paved the way for a rollback of all the post-war prosperity, allowing America's oligarchs to create a new Gilded Age where education is reserved for failsons of wealthy families, which is fine, because the rest of us won't need a degree to shine their shoes, clean their toilets, and screw the little screws in on iPhones: https://www.theverge.com/news/644320/us-commerce-secretary-howard-lutnick-says-well-be-making-iphones-in-the-us Hey look at this (permalink) Car Subscription Features Raise Your Risk of Government Surveillance, Police Records Show https://www.wired.com/story/police-records-car-subscription-features-surveillance/ Who Pays the Price When Cochlear Implants Go Obsolete? https://www.sapiens.org/culture/planned-obsolescence-cochlear-implants/ The Tech Companies Fighting To Sell Your Data https://www.levernews.com/the-tech-companies-fighting-to-sell-your-data/ Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Danny O’Brien goes to work at EFF! https://web.archive.org/web/20050507123924/https://www.oblomovka.com/entries/2005/04/29#1114782180 #15yrsago 1939 World’s Fair: the future’s cradle, in pictures https://web.archive.org/web/20100501170616/http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2010/04/gallery-1939-worlds-fair/ #10yrsago British austerity: a failed experiment abandoned by the rest of the world https://www.theguardian.com/business/ng-interactive/2015/apr/29/the-austerity-delusion #10yrsago Translation: once they learn the truth, techies hate and fear us https://www.wired.com/2015/04/us-defense-secretary-snowden-caused-tensions-techies/ #10yrsago FBI’s crypto backdoor plans require them to win the war on general purpose computing http://webpolicy.org/2015/04/28/you-cant-backdoor-a-platform/ #10yrsago Anyone can open a Master Lock padlock in under two minutes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09UgmwtL12c #10yrsago Couples counsellor who assigns Ikea furniture assembly calls Liatorp “The Divorcemaker” https://web.archive.org/web/20150430183654/https://laist.com/2015/04/28/santa_monica_therapist_uses_ikea_as.php #10yrsago UK Tories forged letter of support in the Telegraph from “5,000 small businesses” https://sturdyblog.wordpress.com/2015/04/27/small-business-letter-to-the-telegraph-an-attempt-to-defraud-the-electorate/ #5yrsago How monopolism crashed the US food supply https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/29/banjo-nazis/#butchery #5yrsago Legendary troubleshooting stories https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/29/banjo-nazis/#cuckoos-egg #5yrsago Medical debt collection during the pandemic https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/29/banjo-nazis/#armbreakers #5yrsago British Library releases 1.9m images https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/29/banjo-nazis/#it-belongs-in-a-museum #5yrsago NSO Group employee used Pegasus cyberweapon to stalk a woman https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/29/banjo-nazis/#loveint #5yrsago Founder of AI surveillance company was a Nazi who helped shoot up a synagogue https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/29/banjo-nazis/#damien-patton-nazi #5yrsago Talking Radicalized with the CBC https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/29/banjo-nazis/#zuckervegans #5yrsago Bayesian reasoning and covid-19 https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/29/banjo-nazis/#uncertainty #5yrsago Cigna claims to be rolling in dough and on the verge of bankruptcy https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/29/banjo-nazis/#someones-lying #1yrago Cigna's nopeinator https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/29/what-part-of-no/#dont-you-understand Upcoming appearances (permalink) Auckland: Unity Books, May 2, 6PM https://www.eventbrite.co.nz/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1320740102199 Wellingon: Unity Books, May 3, 3PM https://www.unitybooks.co.nz/news-and-events/author-talk-picks-and-shovels-by-cory-doctorow Pittsburgh: Picks and Shovels at White Whale Books, May 15 https://whitewhalebookstore.com/events/20250515 Pittsburgh: PyCon, May 16 https://us.pycon.org/2025/schedule/ Virtual: Writing to Resist (California Writers Club Berkeley): https://cwc-berkeley.org/writing-to-resist-5-18-25/ PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22 https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025 PDX: Picks and Shovels with bunnie Huang at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20 https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0 London: How To Academy with Riley Quinn, Jul 1 https://howtoacademy.com/events/cory-doctorow-the-fight-against-the-big-tech-oligarchy/ Manchester: Picks and Shovels at Blackwell's Bookshop, Jul 2 https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1308451968059 Manchester: Co-operatives UK Co-op Congress keynote, Jul 3 https://www.uk.coop/events-and-training/events-calendar/co-op-congress-2025-book-your-place New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ Recent appearances (permalink) How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It (Cloudfest) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ai-fC-2Bpo Move Fast and Break Kings https://flipboard.video/w/2aH2AFNTPjcdWCMqjPB5N3?start=2s Beyond the Web (Ostrom Workshop) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WfO-9G4EgQ Latest books (permalink) Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. 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: Pluralistic: Mike Lee and Jim Jordan want to kill the law that bans companies from cheating you (29 Apr 2025)
Tue, 29 Apr 2025 19:42:28 +0000 Today's links Mike Lee and Jim Jordan want to kill the law that bans companies from cheating you: Section 5 of the FTC Act is a century-old Swiss Army Knife for fighting corruption. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Mike Lee and Jim Jordan want to kill the law that bans companies from cheating you (permalink) House and Senate Republicans are on the verge of killing Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, one of the most potent anti-corruption laws on the US statute books: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/house-gop-proposes-eliminating-key More than a century ago, Congress passed the FTCA, and they made a point of including a clause that granted the new independent agency broad authority to investigate and prohibit "unfair and deceptive methods of competition." As Matt Stoller writes, over the ensuing 100 years, the FTC has used Section 5 to go after "illegal commissions, firms spying on rivals, sabotage, messing around with patents or regulations." But starting with the Reagan era, both Republican and Democratic presidents have appointed FTC chairs who were loath to invoke FTCA 5, shying away from the power and duty Congress had given them. This all changed with Biden's FTC chair Lina Khan, who revived the law, using it to punish companies for invading your privacy, blocking repair, locking workers in with noncompete clauses, and more: https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/P221202Section5PolicyStatement.pdf FTCA has been repeatedly upheld by the Supreme Court, and Congress liked the way it worked so much that when they created the Department of Transport, they copy-pasted the language of FTCA into the DOT's enabling legislation. Pete Buttigieg, Biden's Transport secretary, refused to use this power, but when Khan's chief of staff moved over to Transport, it became a powerhouse regulator, fighting ripoffs and scams in aviation, rail and more: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge Neoclassical economists hate laws like Section 5. The entire basis of neoliberal economics is that the economy can be modeled – and thus controlled – using mathematics. This ideology requires that economists ignore all qualitative aspects of society. Notoriously, economic modeling treats power as irrelevant, because it can't be quantified and plugged into a model: https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/03/all-models-are-wrong/#some-are-useful This is a hell of a deal for the powerful. Ignoring power lets a rich person who buys a starving person's kidneys claim to be engaged in a "voluntary transaction." Ignoring power lets private equity funds claim that gouging you on emergency room care and ambulance rides is fine, because you "freely chose" to be rushed to their hospital while dying of a heart attack. If we can all agree that power doesn't matter, then we can do away with all workplace protections, from the minimum wage to worker safety. Take power out of the equation, and you can claim that any worker on starvation wages who loses an arm in a badly maintained machine "freely contracted" into that situation. Oligarchs and their lickspittles have waged a generations-long war on the very concept of power, and this assault on Section 5 of the FTC Act is just the latest skirmish. You see, "unfair and deceptive" is a qualitative idea, one that requires consideration of power relationships. The abolition of fairness as a concept is central to Trumpism. Notoriously, Trump has claimed that any time he successfully rips someone off, "That makes him smart": https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/04/its-not-a-lie/#its-a-premature-truth The Trump movement is full of extremely successful cheats and liars. There's VCs like Mark Andreesen, whose fund paid a $100m bribe to Kickstarter execs in exchange for a fake cryptocurrency launch, in a bid to lure more retail investors into the crypto bubble that Andreesen-Horowitz played a central role in: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/untold-story-kickstarter-crypto-hail-120000205.html And of course, there's Elon Musk, who lies about his cars, his robots, his rockets, his AI, and everything else. No wonder Elon Musk wants to get rid of a law that bans "unfair and deceptive methods of competition." The bid to kill Section 5 of the FTC Act is hidden deep in a budget reconciliation amendment introduced by Rep Jim Jordan (R-OH), which pastes in sloppy language drafted by Sen Mike Lee (R-UT). The mechanism by which this amendment will neuter Section 5 is eye-glazingly complex, though Stoller does his best to make it comprehensible. Far more important than the method by which Section 5 of the FTC Act will be gutted is the consequence of doing so. Stripping the FTC of the power to chase unfair and deceptive conduct will fire a starting pistol for even more ripoffs and scams. Worse than that, the Jordan amendment will kill enforcement of existing consent decrees from companies that have been successfully prosecuted under Section 5, allowing them to restart the scams that attracted regulatory scrutiny. The Trump administration has been touting antitrust as its "alternative to regulation," drawing an arbitrary line between "regulation" and "antitrust." Antitrust is absolutely regulation: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/antitrust-enforcement-not-regulation-doj-163251704.html Indeed, antitrust is the most important regulation of all, because it's the regulation that keeps companies from getting so large and powerful that they can ignore all the other regulations. Without antitrust, companies become too big to fail, then too big to jail, then too big to care. The Trump admin will absolutely continue to do antitrust, but in the Trumpiest way possible – by attacking companies that offend Trump, rather than attacking companies that harm the public: https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/12/the-enemy-of-your-enemy/#is-your-enemyis This is gangsterism, the thing that comes after capitalism collapses into feudalism. In gangsterism, "fairness" and "power" have no place. All that's left is a kind of caveat emptor brainworm that insists that if you got scammed, you should have shopped more carefully. And if you got scammed at gunpoint, you just need to understand that the gun was held by the invisible hand, and it was pointed at you in an economically efficient manner. Hey look at this (permalink) At 93, legendary Disney imagineer Bob Gurr has stories to tell https://www.latimes.com/travel/story/2025-04-25/bob-gurr-disneyland-imagineer-documentary-tour (h/t Alice) Birth rates are falling. But solutions are focused on the wrong thing. https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/birth-rates-are-falling-but-solutions The World After Amazon https://afteramazon.world Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Tell US govt not to steal tax-funded weather from the public https://web.archive.org/web/20050429182910/https://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-8-40-2452.jsp #20yrsago Fairfax libraries waste tax-dollars on DRM https://www.his.com/~pshapiro/audiobook.html #20yrsago Dirty tricks at WIPO https://web.archive.org/web/20050429182910/https://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-8-40-2452.jsp #15yrsago Goodhart’s Law: Once you measure something, it changes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law #15yrsago All of Gopherspace as a single download https://changelog.complete.org/archives/1466-download-a-piece-of-internet-history #15yrsago Timeline of Facebook privacy policy: from reasonable (2005) to apocalyptic (2010) https://web.archive.org/web/20100501041847/http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline/ #15yrsago Top US psychiatric pharmaceuticals, 2009 edition https://web.archive.org/web/20100429082228/https://psychcentral.com/lib/2010/top-25-psychiatric-prescriptions-for-2009 #15yrsago Canadian record industry won’t say what it wants https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2010/04/cria-on-copyright-specifics/ #15yrsago Music industry spokesman loves child porn https://christianengstrom.wordpress.com/2010/04/27/ifpis-child-porn-strategy/ #15yrsago Mississippi school purges top student from yearbook for being lesbian https://www.jacksonfreepress.com/news/2010/apr/26/school-cuts-gay-student-photo-from-yearbook/ #10yrsago Lifting the lid on Scientology’s fatally woo version of rehab https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/apr/27/narconon-incident-reports/ #5yrsago "Essential" workers will strike across America for May Day https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/28/force-multiplier/#mayday #5yrsago Citizen DJ https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/28/force-multiplier/#brianfoo #5yrsago NYC will pedestrianize 40 miles of city streets https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/28/force-multiplier/#pandemic-urbanism #5yrsago Foreclosure vultures hold illegal auctions on courthouse steps https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/28/force-multiplier/#first-against-the-wall #5yrsago The law is free https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/28/force-multiplier/#go-carl-go #5yrsago DRM and CHI https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/28/force-multiplier/#fraud Upcoming appearances (permalink) Auckland: Unity Books, May 2, 6PM https://www.eventbrite.co.nz/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1320740102199 Wellingon: Unity Books, May 3, 3PM https://www.unitybooks.co.nz/news-and-events/author-talk-picks-and-shovels-by-cory-doctorow Pittsburgh: Picks and Shovels at White Whale Books, May 15 https://whitewhalebookstore.com/events/20250515 Pittsburgh: PyCon, May 16 https://us.pycon.org/2025/schedule/ Virtual: Writing to Resist (California Writers Club Berkeley): https://cwc-berkeley.org/writing-to-resist-5-18-25/ PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22 https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025 PDX: Picks and Shovels with bunnie Huang at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20 https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0 London: How To Academy with Riley Quinn, Jul 1 https://howtoacademy.com/events/cory-doctorow-the-fight-against-the-big-tech-oligarchy/ Manchester: Picks and Shovels at Blackwell's Bookshop, Jul 2 https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1308451968059 Manchester: Co-operatives UK Co-op Congress keynote, Jul 3 https://www.uk.coop/events-and-training/events-calendar/co-op-congress-2025-book-your-place New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ Recent appearances (permalink) How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It (Cloudfest) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ai-fC-2Bpo Move Fast and Break Kings https://flipboard.video/w/2aH2AFNTPjcdWCMqjPB5N3?start=2s Beyond the Web (Ostrom Workshop) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WfO-9G4EgQ Latest books (permalink) Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. 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: Pluralistic: The enshittification of tech jobs (27 Apr 2025)
Sun, 27 Apr 2025 21:37:10 +0000 Today's links The enshittification of tech jobs: Our last line of defense has fallen. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020, 2024 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. The enshittification of tech jobs (permalink) Tech workers are a weird choice for "princes of labor," but for decades they've enjoyed unparalleled labor power, expressed in high wages, lavish stock grants, and whimsical campuses with free laundry and dry-cleaning, gourmet cafeterias, and kombucha on tap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhUtdgVZ7MY All of this, despite the fact that tech union density is so low it can barely be charted. Tech workers' power didn't come from solidarity, it came from scarcity. When you're getting five new recruiter emails every day, you don't need a shop steward to tell your boss to go fuck themselves at the morning scrum. You can do it yourself, secure in the knowledge that there's a company across the road who'll give you a better job by lunchtime. Tech bosses sucked up to their workers because tech workers are insanely productive. Even with sky-high salaries, every hour a tech worker puts in on the job translates into massive profits. Which created a conundrum for tech bosses: if tech workers produce incalculable value for the company every time they touch their keyboards, and if there aren't enough tech workers to go around, how do you get whichever tech workers you can hire to put in as many hours as possible? The answer is a tactic that Fobazi Ettarh called "vocational awe": https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/ "Vocational awe" describes the feeling that your work matters so much that you should accept all manner of tradeoffs and calamities to get the job done. Ettarh uses the term to describe the pathology of librarians, teachers, nurses and other underpaid, easily exploited workers in "caring professions." Tech workers are weird candidates for vocational awe, given how well-paid they are, but never let it be said that tech bosses don't know how to innovate – they successfully transposed an exploitation tactic from the most precarious professionals to the least precarious. As farcical as all the engineer-pampering tech bosses got up to for the first couple decades of this century was, it certainly paid off. Tech workers stayed at the office for every hour that god sent, skipping their parents' funerals and their kids' graduations to ship on time. Snark all you like about empty platitudes like "organize the world's information and make it useful" or "bring the world closer together," but you can't argue with results: workers who could – and did – bargain for anything from their bosses…except a 40-hour work-week. But for tech bosses, this vocational awe wheeze had a fatal flaw: if you convince your workforce that they are monk-warriors engaged in the holy labor of bringing forth a new, better technological age, they aren't going to be very happy when you order them to enshittify the products they ruined their lives to ship. "I fight for the user" has been lurking in the hindbrains of so many tech workers since the Tron years, somehow nestling comfortably alongside of the idea that "I don't need a union, I'm a temporarily embarrassed founder." Tech bosses don't actually like workers. You can tell by the way they treat the workers they don't fear. Sure, Tim Cook's engineers get beer-fattened, chestnut finished and massaged like Kobe cows, but Cook's factory workers in China are so maltreated that Foxconn (the cutout Apple uses to run "iPhone City" where Apple's products are made) had to install suicide nets to reduce the amount of spatter from workers who would rather die than put in another hour at Tim Apple's funtime distraction rectangle factory: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-life-death-forbidden-city-longhua-suicide-apple-iphone-brian-merchant-one-device-extract Jeff Bezos's engineers get soft-play areas, one imported Australian barista for each mini-kitchen, and the kind of Japanese toilet that doesn't just wash you after but also offers you a trim and dye-job, but Amazon delivery drivers are monitored by AIs that narc them out for driving with their mouths open (singing is prohibited in Uncle Jeff's delivery pods!) and have to piss in bottles; meanwhile, Amazon warehouse workers are injured at three times the rate of other warehouse workers. This is how tech bosses would treat tech workers…if they could. And now? They can. Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Katherine Bindley describes the new labor dynamics at Big Tech: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/tech-workers-are-just-like-the-rest-of-us-miserable-at-work/ar-AA1DDKjh It starts with Meta, who just announced a 5% across-the-board layoff – on the same day that it doubled executive bonuses. But it's not just the workers who get shown the door who suffer in this new tech reality – the workers on the job are having to do two or three jobs, for worse pay, and without all those lovely perks. Take Google, where founder Sergey Brin just told his workers that they should be aiming for a "sweet spot" of 60 hours/week. Brin returned to Google to oversee its sweaty and desperate "pivot to AI," and like so many tech execs, he's been trumpeting the increased productivity that chatbots will deliver for coders. But a coder who picks up their fired colleagues' work load by pulling 60-hour work-weeks isn't "more productive," they're more exploited. Amazon is another firm whose top exec, Andy Jassy, has boasted about the productivity gains of AI, but an Amazon Web Services manager who spoke to Bindley says that he's lost so many coders that he's now writing code for the first time in a decade. Then there's a Meta recruiter who got fired and then immediately re-hired, but as a "short term employee" with no merit pay, stock grants, or promotions. She has to continuously reapply for her job, and has picked up the workload of several fired colleagues who weren't re-hired. Meta managers (the ones whose bonuses were just doubled) call this initiative "agility." Amazon is famous for spying on its warehouse workers and drivers – and now its tech staff report getting popups warning them that their keystrokes are being monitored and analyzed, and their screens are being recorded. Bindley spoke to David Markley, an Amazon veteran turned executive coach, who attributed the worsening conditions (for example, managers being given 30 direct reports) to the "narrative" of AI. Not, you'll note, the actual reality of AI, but rather, the story that AI lets you "collapse the organization," slash headcount and salaries, and pauperize the (former) princes of labor. The point of AI isn't to make workers more productive, it's to make them weaker when they bargain with their bosses. Another of Bindley's sources went through eight rounds of interviews with a company, received an offer, countered with a request for 12% more than the offer, and had the job withdrawn, because "the company didn’t want to move ahead anymore based on the way the compensation conversation had gone." For decades, tech workers were able to flatter themselves that they were peers with their bosses – that "temporarily embarrassed founder" syndrome again. The Google founders and Zuck held regular "town hall" meetings where the rank-and-file engineers could ask impertinent questions. At Google, these have been replaced with "tightly scripted events." Zuckerberg has discontinued his participation in company-wide Q&As, because they are "no longer a good use of his time." Companies are scaling back perks in both meaningful ways (Netflix hacking away at parental leave), and petty ones (Netflix and Google cutting back on free branded swag for workers). Google's hacked back its "fun budget" for offsite team-building activities and replacement laptops for workers needing faster machines (so much for prioritizing "increasing worker productivity"). Trump's new gangster capitalism pits immiserated blue collar workers against the "professional and managerial class," attacking universities and other institutions that promised social mobility to the children of working families. Trump had a point when he lionized factory work as a source of excellent wages and benefits for working people without degrees, but he conspicuously fails to mention that factory work was deadly, low-waged and miserable – until factory workers formed unions: https://www.laborpolitics.com/p/unions-not-just-factories-will-make Re-shoring industrial jobs to the USA is a perfectly reasonable goal. Between uncertain geopolitics, climate chaos, monopolization and the lurking spectre of the next pandemic, we should assume that supply-chains will be repeatedly and cataclysmicly shocked over the next century or more. And yes, re-shoring product could provide good jobs to working people – but only if they're unionized. But Trump has gutted the National Labor Relations Board and stacked his administration with bloodsucking scabs like Elon Musk. Trump doesn't want to bring good jobs back to America – he wants to bring bad jobs back to America. He wants to reshore manufacturing jobs from territories with terrible wages, deadly labor conditions, and no environment controls by taking away Americans' wages, labor rights and environmental protections. He doesn't just want to bring home iPhone production, he wants to import the suicide nets of iPhone City, too. Tech workers are workers, and they once held the line against enshittification, refusing to break the things they'd built for their bosses in meaningless all-nighters motivated by vocational awe. Long after tech bosses were able to buy all their competitors, capture their regulators, and expand IP law to neutralize the threat of innovative, interoperable products like alternative app stores, ad-blockers and jailbreaking kits, tech workers held the line. There've been half a million US tech layoffs since 2023. Tech workers' scarcity-derived power has been vaporized. Tech workers can avoid the fate of the factory, warehouse and delivery workers their bosses literally work to death – but only by unionizing. In other words, the workers in re-shored factories and tech workers need the same thing. They are class allies – and tech bosses are their class enemies. This is class war. Hey look at this (permalink) Perplexity CEO says its browser will track everything users do online to sell 'hyper personalized' ads https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/24/perplexity-ceo-says-its-browser-will-track-everything-users-do-online-to-sell-hyper-personalized-ads/ (h/t Slashdot) Runaway Tren https://prospect.org/justice/2025-04-24-runaway-tren-de-aragua-colorado-housing-gangs/ How Monopolies Could Exploit the Tariff Shock https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/how-monopolies-could-exploit-the Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Architectures of Control: DRM in hardware https://web.archive.org/web/20050425184527/http://www.danlockton.co.uk/research/architectures.html #20yrsago Insect photos in naturalistic http://macro-focus https://bugdreams.com #20yrsago BBC: DRM makes music customers mad https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4474143.stm #20yrsago Guckert was at the White House even when there were no press briefings https://web.archive.org/web/20050428034248/https://www.rawstory.com/exclusives/byrne/secret_service_gannon_424.htm #20yrsago FBI warnings ruin CD art & art is the reason for buying CDs http://www.yarnivore.com/francis/archives/001102.html #20yrsago US govt admits RFID passports are danger to Americans https://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/27/politics/bowing-to-critics-us-to-alter-design-of-electronic-passports.html #15yrsago Considering cities as “dense meshes of active, communicating public objects” https://speedbird.wordpress.com/2010/04/24/frameworks-for-citizen-responsiveness-enhanced-toward-a-readwrite-urbanism/ #15yrsago Peter Watts won’t go to jail https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/26/peter-watts-wont-go-to-jail/ #15yrsago Canada’s Heritage Minister ready to bring back DMCA-style copyright, throwing out results of copyright consultation https://web.archive.org/web/20100428113301/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4979/135/ #15yrsago In praise of SFWA’s Grievance Committee https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/25/in-praise-of-sfwas-grievance-committee/ #15yrsago UK’s super-rich get even richer https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8642021.stm #15yrsago Protect your copyrights, boycott DRM-locked platforms https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/devices/article/42869-can-you-survive-a-benevolent-dictatorship.html #15yrsago Why I won’t buy an iPad, the podcast edition https://web.archive.org/web/20110114222040/https://podcasts.tvo.org/searchengine/audio/800832_48k.mp3 #15yrsago On Peter Watts’s sentencing hearing https://web.archive.org/web/20100429105210/http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=59215 #15yrsago The “fair use economy” is enormous, growing, and endangered by the relatively tiny entertainment industry https://web.archive.org/web/20110128152731/https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2010/04/fairuseeconomy.pdf #15yrsago UK election: ask your candidates if they’ll repeal the Digital Economy Act https://web.archive.org/web/20100430090624/http://action.openrightsgroup.org/ea-campaign/clientcampaign.do?ea.client.id=1422&ea.campaign.id=6449 #10yrsago Town will cut off power to families of kids who commit vandalism https://web.archive.org/web/20150419053210/https://www.illinoishomepage.net/story/d/story/cutting-vandalism-off-at-the-source/26297/gSM2PYl6P0CRIttIu_95BQ #10yrsago Portraits of e-waste pickers in Ghana https://www.wired.com/2015/04/kevin-mcelvaney-agbogbloshie/ #10yrsago In the 21st century, only corporations get to own property and we’re their tenants https://web.archive.org/web/20150428173001/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/how-digital-rights-management-keeps-value-in-hands-of-the-manufacturer/article24130876/ #10yrsago Obituary for an amazing history teacher https://web.archive.org/web/20150426235723/https://thescientificparent.org/teachers-be-like-robin-barker-james/ #10yrsago What the UK Greens actually believe about copyright http://tomchance.org/2015/04/24/making-copyright-work-for-creatives/ #10yrsago School bus driver bans little girl from reading https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-girl-told-to-stop-reading-book-by-school-bus-driver-1.3043652?cmp=rss #10yrsago Variations on the Trolley Problem https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/lesser-known-trolley-problem-variations #10yrsago Senators announce “Aaron Swartz Should Have Faced More Jail Time” bill https://www.techdirt.com/2015/04/23/senators-introduce-anti-aarons-law-to-increase-jail-terms-unauthorized-access-to-computers/ #10yrsago Kansas kid corrects anti-drug teacher, cops raid his house https://web.archive.org/web/20150423174017/http://benswann.com/exclusive-cops-raid-cannabis-oil-activist-because-her-son-discussed-medical-pot-facts-at-school/ #5yrsago Makers in a time of pandemic https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/25/send-pics/#makers #5yrsago A deflationary pandemic https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/25/send-pics/#fiscal-dominance #5yrsago The vernacular signage of the pandemic https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/25/send-pics/#frankfurt #5yrsago California Adventure, Minecraft edition https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/24/slicey-boi/#minecraft #5yrsago Security expert conned out of $10,000 https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/24/slicey-boi/#overconfidence #5yrsago Facebook let advertisers target "pseudoscience" and "conspiracy" https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/24/slicey-boi/#upton-sinclair-disease #5yrsago Amazon uses its sellers' data to figure out which products to clone https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/24/slicey-boi/#moral-hazard #5yrsago US telcoms sector isn't doing better than Europe's https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/24/slicey-boi/#opportunists #5yrsago Masks work https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/24/slicey-boi/#pewpew #5yrsago US healthcare fails insured people too https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/24/slicey-boi/#m4a #5yrsago "Inject disinfectant" vs both sides-ism https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/24/slicey-boi/#both-sides-ism #5yrsago A labradoodle breeder is in charge of America's vaccines https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/24/slicey-boi/#labradoodles #5yrsago Which guillotine is right for you https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/24/slicey-boi/#slicey-boi #5yrsago Hospital cuts healthcare workers' pay, pays six-figure exec bonuses https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/27/in-this-together/#all-in-this-together #5yrsago Pandemic proves ISP data-caps were always a pretense https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/27/in-this-together/#concast #5yrsago Billionaires thriving on our pandemic losses https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/27/in-this-together/#socialized-losses #5yrsago Podcasting Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/27/in-this-together/#alan-abel-andrew #5yrsago Indie booksellers during the pandemic https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/27/in-this-together/#glimmers-of-hope #1yrago The tax sharks are back and they're coming for your home https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/27/for-the-little-people/#alden-capital #1yrago The specific process by which Google enshittified its search https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan #1yrago Antitrust is a labor issue https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/25/capri-v-tapestry/#aiming-at-dollars-not-men Upcoming appearances (permalink) Auckland: Unity Books, May 2, 6PM https://www.eventbrite.co.nz/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1320740102199 Wellingon: Unity Books, May 3, 3PM https://www.unitybooks.co.nz/news-and-events/author-talk-picks-and-shovels-by-cory-doctorow Pittsburgh: Picks and Shovels at White Whale Books, May 15 https://whitewhalebookstore.com/events/20250515 Pittsburgh: PyCon, May 16 https://us.pycon.org/2025/schedule/ Virtual: Writing to Resist (California Writers Club Berkeley): https://cwc-berkeley.org/writing-to-resist-5-18-25/ PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22 https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025 PDX: Picks and Shovels with bunnie Huang at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20 https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0 London: How To Academy with Riley Quinn, Jul 1 https://howtoacademy.com/events/cory-doctorow-the-fight-against-the-big-tech-oligarchy/ Manchester: Picks and Shovels at Blackwell's Bookshop, Jul 2 https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1308451968059 Manchester: Co-operatives UK Co-op Congress keynote, Jul 3 https://www.uk.coop/events-and-training/events-calendar/co-op-congress-2025-book-your-place New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ Recent appearances (permalink) Move Fast and Break Kings https://flipboard.video/w/2aH2AFNTPjcdWCMqjPB5N3?start=2s Beyond the Web (Ostrom Workshop) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WfO-9G4EgQ Can we use the Internet for Democracy? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh_HON6iql8 Latest books (permalink) Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. 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: Slashdot (https://slashdot.org). 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: Pluralistic: Every complex ecosystem has parasites (24 Apr 2025)
Thu, 24 Apr 2025 11:56:57 +0000 Today's links Every complex ecosystem has parasites: The only way to eliminate fraud and waste is to become a trivial walled garden. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020, 2024 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Every complex ecosystem has parasites (permalink) Patrick "patio11" McKenzie is a fantastic explainer, the kind of person who breaks topics down in ways that stay with you, and creep into your understanding of other subjects, too. Take his 2022 essay, "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero": https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fraud/ It's a very well-argued piece, and here's the nut of it: The marginal return of permitting fraud against you is plausibly greater than zero, and therefore, you should welcome greater than zero fraud. In other words, if you allow some fraud, you will also allow through a lot of non-fraudulent business that would otherwise trip your fraud meter. Or, put it another way, the only way to prevent all fraud is to chase away a large proportion of your customers, whose transactions are in some way abnormal or unexpected. Another great explainer is Bruce Schneier, the security expert. In the wake of 9/11, lots of pundits (and senior government officials) ran around saying, "No price is too high to prevent another terrorist attack on our aviation system." Schneier had a foolproof way of shutting these fools up: "Fine, just ground all civilian aircraft, forever." Turns out, there is a price that's too high to pay for preventing air-terrorism. Latent in these two statements is the idea that the most secure systems are simple, and while simplicity is a fine goal to strive for, we should always keep in mind the maxim attributed to Einstein, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." That is to say, some things are just complicated. 20 years ago, my friend Kathryn Myronuk and I were talking about the spam wars, which were raging at the time. The spam wars were caused by the complexity of email: as a protocol (rather than a product), email is heterogeneous. There are lots of different kinds of email servers and clients, and many different ways of creating and rendering an email. All this flexibility makes email really popular, and it also means that users have a wide variety of use-cases for it. As a result, identifying spam is really hard. There's no reliable automated way of telling whether an email is spam or not – you can't just block a given server, or anyone using a kind of server software, or email client. You can't choose words or phrases to block and only block spam. Many solutions were proposed to this at the height of the spam wars, and they all sucked, because they all assumed that the way the proposer used email was somehow typical, thus we could safely build a system to block things that were very different from this "typical" use and not catch too many dolphins in our tuna nets: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt So Kathryn and I were talking about this, and she said, "Yeah, all complex ecosystems have parasites." I was thunderstruck. The phrase entered my head and never left. I even gave a major speech with that title later that year, at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference: https://craphound.com/complexecosystems.txt Truly, a certain degree of undesirable activity is the inevitable price you pay once you make something general purpose, generative, and open. Open systems – like the web, or email – succeed because they are so adaptable, which means that all kinds of different people with different needs find ways to make use of them. The undesirable activity in open systems is, well, undesirable, and it's valid and useful to try to minimize it. But minimization isn't the same as elimination. "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero," because "everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." Complexity is generative, but "all complex ecosystems have parasites." America is a complex system. It has, for example, a Social Security apparatus that has to serve more than 65 million people. By definition, a cohort of 65 million people will experience 65 one-in-a-million outliers every day. Social Security has to accommodate 65 million variations on the (surprisingly complicated) concept of a "street address": https://gist.github.com/almereyda/85fa289bfc668777fe3619298bbf0886 It will have to cope with 65 million variations on the absolutely, maddeningly complicated idea of a "name": https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ In cybernetics, we say that a means of regulating a system must be capable of representing as many states as the system itself – that is, if you're building a control box for a thing with five functions, the box needs at least five different settings: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/REQVAR.html So when we're talking about managing something as complicated as Social Security, we need to build a Social Security Administration that is just as complicated. Anything that complicated is gonna have parasites – once you make something capable of managing the glorious higgledy piggledy that is the human experience of names, dates of birth, and addresses, you will necessarily create exploitable failure modes that bad actors can use to steal Social Security. You can build good fraud detection systems (as the SSA has), and you can investigate fraud (as the SSA does), and you can keep this to a manageable number – in the case of the SSA, that number is well below one percent: https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IF/PDF/IF12948/IF12948.2.pdf But if you want to reduce Social Security fraud from "a fraction of one percent" to "zero percent," you can either expend a gigantic amount of money (far more than you're losing to fraud) to get a little closer to zero – or you can make Social Security far simpler. For example, you could simply declare that anyone whose life and work history can't fit in a simple database schema is not eligible for Social Security, kick tens of millions of people off the SSI rolls, and cause them to lose their homes and starve on the streets. This isn't merely cruel, it's also very, very expensive, since homelessness costs the system far more than Social Security. The optimum amount of fraud is non-zero. Conservatives hate complexity. That's why the Trump administration banned all research grants for proposals that contained the word "systemic" (as a person with so-far-local cancer, I sure worry about what happens when and if my lymphoma become systemic). I once described the conservative yearning for "simpler times," as a desire to be a child again. After all, the thing that made your childhood "simpler" wasn't that the world was less complicated – it's that your parents managed that complexity and shielded you from it. There's always been partner abuse, divorce, gender minorities, mental illness, disability, racial discrimination, geopolitical crises, refugees, and class struggle. The only people who don't have to deal with this stuff are (lucky) children. Complexity is an unavoidable attribute of all complicated processes. Evolution is complicated, so it produces complexity. It's convenient to think about a simplified model of genes in which individual genes produce specific traits, but it turns out genes all influence each other, are influenced in turn by epigenetics, and that developmental factors play a critical role in our outcomes. From eye-color to gender, evolution produces spectra, not binaries. It's ineluctably (and rather gloriously) complicated. The conservative project to insist that things can be neatly categorized – animal or plant, man or woman, planet or comet – tries to take graceful bimodal curves and simplify them into a few simple straight lines – one or zero (except even the values of the miniature transistors on your computer's many chips are never at "one" or "zero" – they're "one-ish" and "mostly zero"). Like Social Security, fraud in the immigration system is a negligible rounding error. The US immigration system is a baroque, ramified, many-tendriled thing (I have the receipts from the immigration lawyers who helped me get a US visa, a green card, and citizenship to prove it). It is already so overweighted with pitfalls and traps for the unwary that a good immigration lawyer might send you to apply for a visa with 600 pages of documentation (the most I ever presented) just to make sure that every possible requirement is met: https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/2242342898/in/photolist-zp6PxJ-4q9Aqs-2nVHTZK-2pFKHyf After my decades of experience with the US immigration system, I am prepared to say that the system is now at a stage where it is experiencing sharply diminishing returns from its anti-fraud systems. The cost of administering all this complexity is high, and the marginal amount of fraud caught by any new hoop the system gins up for migrants to jump through will round to zero. Which poses a problem for Trump and trumpists: having whipped up a national panic about out of control immigration and open borders, the only way to make the system better at catching the infinitesimal amount of fraud it currently endures is to make the rules simpler, through the blunt-force tactic of simply excluding people who should be allowed in the country. For example, you could ban college kids planning to spend the summer in the US on the grounds that they didn't book all their hotels in advance, because they're planning to go from city to city and wing it: https://www.newsweek.com/germany-tourists-deported-hotel-maria-lepere-charlotte-pohl-hawaii-2062046 Or you could ban the only research scientist in the world who knows how to interpret the results of the most promising new cancer imaging technology because a border guard was confused about the frog embryos she was transporting (she's been locked up for two months now): https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/horrified-harvard-scientists-ice-arrest-leaves-cancer-researchers-scrambling/ar-AA1DlUt8 Of course, the US has long operated a policy of "anything that confuses a border guard is grounds for being refused entry" but the Trump administration has turned the odd, rare outrage into business-as-usual. But they can lock up or turn away as many people as they want, and they still won't get the amount of fraud to zero. The US is a complicated place. People have complicated reasons for entering the USA – work, family reunion, leisure, research, study, and more. The only immigration system that doesn't leak a little at the seams is an immigration system that is so simple that it has no seams – a toy immigration system for a trivial country in which so little is going on that everything is going on. The only garden without weeds is a monoculture under a dome. The only email system without spam is a closed system managed by one company that only allows a carefully vetted cluster of subscribers to communicate with one another. The only species with just two genders is one wherein members who fit somewhere else on the spectrum are banished or killed, a charnel process that never ends because there are always newborns that are outside of the first sigma of the two peaks in the bimodal distribution. A living system – a real country – is complicated. It's a system, where people do things you'll never understand for perfectly good reasons (and vice versa). To accommodate all that complexity, we need complex systems, and all complex ecosystems have parasites. Yes, you can burn the rainforest to the ground and plant monocrops in straight rows, but then what you have is a farm, not a forest, vulnerable to pests and plagues and fire and flood. Complex systems have parasites, sure, but complex systems are resilient. The optimal level of fraud is never zero, because a system that has been simplified to the point where no fraud can take place within it is a system that is so trivial and brittle as to be useless. Hey look at this (permalink) DIY Book Lamp https://www.voltpaperscissors.com/diybooklamp Your primary source for news https://primarynewssource.org "A Lot of Emotion": The Rocky Marriage of Instagram and Facebook https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/a-lot-of-emotion-the-rocky-marriage Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago French court bans DRM for DVDs https://web.archive.org/web/20050424023258/https://www.01net.com/editorial/274752/droit/la-justice-interdit-de-proteger-les-dvd-contre-la-copie/ #20yrsago Why governments make stupid copyrights https://www.ft.com/content/39b697dc-b25e-11d9-bcc6-00000e2511c8 #20yrsago London Review of Books’s personals are really dirty and funny https://web.archive.org/web/20050426005000/http://www.lrb.co.uk/classified/index.php#PERSONALS #20yrsago German crooner’s megaphone-style covers of modern rock https://www.palast-orchester.de/en #15yrsago British Airways leaves stranded passengers all over world, jacks up prices on tickets home https://www.theguardian.com/news/blog/2010/apr/23/iceland-volcano-thousands-passengers-stranded #15yrsago Google highlights fair use defense to YouTube takedowns https://publicpolicy.googleblog.com/2010/04/content-id-and-fair-use.html #15yrsago Microsoft wins its $100M tax-break and amnesty from broke-ass Washington State https://web.archive.org/web/20100429061500/http://microsofttaxdodge.com/2010/04/microsoft-gets-nevada-royalty-tax-cut-and-tax-amnesty.html?all #10yrsago Privilege: you’re probably not the one percent https://jacobin.com/2015/04/1-99-percent-class-inequality #10yrsago Marissa Mayer makes 1,100 Yahooers jobless, calls it a “remix” https://web.archive.org/web/20150425183847/http://news.dice.com/2015/04/22/yahoo-called-its-layoffs-a-remix-dont-do-that/?CMPID=AF_SD_UP_JS_AV_OG_DNA_ #10yrsago Canadian Big Content spokesjerk says the public domain is against the public interest https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2015/04/canadian-recording-industry-works-entering-the-public-domain-are-not-in-the-public-interest/ #5yrsago Riot Baby https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/23/riot-baby/#Tochi-Onyebuchi #5yrsago Mayor of Las Vegas says the "free market" will decide what's safe https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/23/riot-baby/#carolyn-goodman #1yrago "Humans in the loop" must detect the hardest-to-spot errors, at superhuman speed https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs Upcoming appearances (permalink) Auckland: Unity Books, May 2, 6PM https://www.eventbrite.co.nz/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1320740102199 Wellingon: Unity Books, May 3, 3PM https://www.unitybooks.co.nz/news-and-events/author-talk-picks-and-shovels-by-cory-doctorow Pittsburgh: Picks and Shovels at White Whale Books, May 15 https://whitewhalebookstore.com/events/20250515 Pittsburgh: PyCon, May 16 https://us.pycon.org/2025/schedule/ Virtual: Writing to Resist (California Writers Club Berkeley): https://cwc-berkeley.org/writing-to-resist-5-18-25/ PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22 https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025 PDX: Picks and Shovels with bunnie Huang at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20 https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0 London: How To Academy with Riley Quinn, Jul 1 https://howtoacademy.com/events/cory-doctorow-the-fight-against-the-big-tech-oligarchy/ Manchester: Picks and Shovels at Blackwell's Bookshop, Jul 2 https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1308451968059 Manchester: Co-operatives UK Co-op Congress keynote, Jul 3 https://www.uk.coop/events-and-training/events-calendar/co-op-congress-2025-book-your-place New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ Recent appearances (permalink) Beyond the Web (Ostrom Workshop) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WfO-9G4EgQ Can we use the Internet for Democracy? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh_HON6iql8 Fightback Against Trump's Tariff Attack (Avi Lewis) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9sgIAc6z_o Latest books (permalink) Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. 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. 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