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- Pluralistic: Don't Be Evil (11 Apr 2026)
- Sat, 11 Apr 2026 13:34:48 +0000
Today's links Don't Be Evil: Evil genius is just a lack of shame. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: FBI x Trotsky; Jakob Nielsen x headlines; Floppy disk stained glass; Zero tolerance for mismatched socks; EFF v DOGE. Upcoming appearances: Toronto, San Francisco, London, Berlin, NYC, Hay-on-Wye, London. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Don't Be Evil (permalink) How I knew I was officially Old: I stopped being disoriented by the experience of meeting with grown-ass adults who wanted to thank me for the books of mine they'd read in their childhoods, which helped shape their lives. Instead of marveling that a book that felt to me like it was ten seconds old was a childhood favorite of this full-grown person, I was free to experience the intense gratification of knowing I'd helped this person find their way, and intense gratitude that they'd told me about it (including you, Sean – it was nice to meet you last night at Drawn and Quarterly in Montreal!). Now that I am Old, I find myself dwelling on key junctures from my life. It's not nostalgia ("Nostalgia is a toxic impulse" – J. Hodgman) – rather, it's an attempt to figure out how I got here ("My god! What have I done?" – D. Byrne), and also, how the world got this way. There's one incident I return to a lot, a moment that didn't feel momentous at the time, but which, on reflection, seems to have a lot to say about this moment – both for me, and for the world we live in. Back in the late 1990s, I co-founded a dotcom company, Opencola. It was a "free/open, peer-to-peer search and recommendation system." The big idea was that we could combine early machine learning technology with Napster-style P2P file sharing and a web-crawler to help you find things that would interest you. The way it was gonna work was that you'd have a folder on your desktop and you could put things in it that you liked and the system would crawl other users' folders, and the open web, and copy things into your folder that it found that seemed related to the stuff you liked. You could refine the system's sensibilities by thumbs-up/thumbs-downing the suggestions, and it would refine its conception of your preferences over time. As with Napster and its successors, you could also talk to the people whose collections enriched your own, allowing you to connect with people who shared even your most esoteric interests. Opencola didn't make it. Our VCs got greedy when Microsoft offered to buy us and tried to grab all the equity away from the founders. I quit and went to EFF, and my partners got very good jobs at Microsoft, and the company was bought for its tax-credits by Opentext, and that was that. (Well, not quite – several of the programmers who worked on the project have rebooted it, which is very cool!) https://opencola.io/ But back in the Opencola days, we three partners would have these regular meetings where we'd brainstorm ways that we could make money off of this extremely cool, but frankly very noncommercial idea. As with any good brainstorming session, there were "no bad ideas," so sometimes we would veer off into fanciful territory, or even very evil territory. It's one of those evil ideas that I keep coming back to. Sometimes, during these money-making brainstorm sessions, we'd decompose the technology we were working on into its component parts to see if any subset of them might make money ("Be the first person to not do something no one has ever not done before" – B. Eno). We had a (by contemporary standards, primitive) machine-learning system; we had a web crawler; and we had a keen sense of how the early web worked. In particular, we were really interested in a new, Linux-based search tool that used citation analysis – a close cousin to our own collaborative filter, harnessing latent clues about relevance implicit in the web's structure – to produce the best search results the web had ever seen. Like us, this company had no idea how to make money, so we were watching it very carefully. That company was called "Google." That's where the evil part came in. We were pretty sure we could extract a list of the 100,000 most commonly searched terms from Google, and then we could use our web-crawler to capture the top 100 results for each. We could feed these to our Bayesian machine-learning tool to create statistical models of the semantic structure of these results, and then we could generate thousands of pages of word-salad for each of those keywords that matched those statistical models, along with interlinks that could trick Google's citation analysis model. Plaster those word-salad pages with ads, and voila – free cash flow! Of course, we didn't do it. But even as we developed this idea, the room crackled with a kind of dark, excited dread. We weren't any smarter than many other rooms full of people who were engaged in exercises just like this one. The difference was, we loved the web. The idea of someone deliberately poisoning it this way churned our stomachs. The whole point of Opencola was to connect people with each other based on their shared interests. We loved Google and how it helped you find the people who wrote the web in ways that delighted and informed you. This kind of spam, aimed at wrecking Google's ability to help people make sense of the things we were all posting to the internet, was…grotesque. I didn't know the term then, but what we were doing amounted to "red-teaming" – thinking through the ways that attackers could destroy something that we valued. Later, we tried "blue-teaming," trying to imagine how our tools might help us fight back if someone else got the same idea and went through with it. I didn't know the term "blue-teaming" then, either. Once I learned these terms, they brought a lot of clarity to the world. Today, I have another term that I turn to when I am trying to rally other people who love the internet and want it to be good: "Tron-pilled." Tron "fought for the user." Lots of us technologists are Tron-pilled. Back in the early days, when it wasn't clear that there was ever going to be any money in this internet thing, being Tron-pilled was pretty much the only reason to get involved with it. Sure, there were a few monsters who fell into the early internet because it offered them a chance to torment strangers at a distance, but they were vastly outnumbered by the legion of Tron-pilled nerds who wanted to make the internet better because we wanted all our normie friends to have the same kind of good time we were having. The point of this is that there were lots of people back then who had the capacity to imagine the kind of gross stuff that Zuckerberg, Musk, and innumerable other scammers, hustlers and creeps got up to on the web. The thing that distinguished these monsters wasn't their genius – it was their callousness. When we brainstormed ways to break the internet, we felt scared and were inspired to try to save it. When they brainstormed ways to break the internet, they created pitch-decks. And still: the old web was good in so many ways for so long. The Tron-pilled amongst us held the line. When we build a new, good, post-American internet, we're going to need a multitude of Tron-pilled technologists, old and young, who build, maintain – and, above all, defend it. Hey look at this (permalink) Apple signs meaningless deal to make some less-important parts in America https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/26/apple_expands_list_of_bits/ Public Service Decline and Support for the Populist Right https://catherinedevries.eu/NHS.pdf Another Court Rules Copyright Can’t Stop People From Reading and Speaking the Law https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/another-court-rules-copyright-cant-stop-people-reading-and-speaking-law Yikes, Encryption’s Y2K Moment is Coming Years Early https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/yikes-encryptions-y2k-moment-coming-years-early Vertical Vertigo https://prospect.org/2026/04/10/apr-2026-magazine-vertical-vertigo-franchise-deregulation-antitrust-law/ Object permanence (permalink) #25yrsago Trotsky’s assassination – according to the FBI https://web.archive.org/web/20010413212536/http://foia.fbi.gov/trotsky.htm #25yrsago Online headline-writing guidelines from Jakob Nielsen https://memex.craphound.com/2001/04/09/headline-writing-guidelines-from-legendary-usability/ #25yrsago Floppy-disk stained-glass windows https://web.archive.org/web/20010607052511/http://www.acme.com/jef/crafts/bathroom_windows.html #15yrsago English school principal announces zero tolerance for mismatched socks https://nationalpost.com/news/u-k-school-cracks-down-on-bad-manners #1yrago EFF's lawsuit against DOGE will go forward https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/09/cases-and-controversy/#brocolli-haired-brownshirts Upcoming appearances (permalink) Toronto: DemocracyXchange, Apr 16 https://www.democracyxchange.org/news/cory-doctorow-to-open-dxc26-on-april-16 San Francisco: 2026 Berkeley Spring Forum on M&A and the Boardroom, Apr 23 https://www.theberkeleyforum.com/#agenda London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25 https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691 NYC: Enshittification at Commonweal Ventures, Apr 29 https://luma.com/ssgfvqz8 NYC: Techidemic with Sarah Jeong, Tochi Onyibuchi and Alia Dastagir (PEN World Voices), Apr 30 https://worldvoices.pen.org/event/techidemic/ Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20 https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19 https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25 https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2 SXSW London, Jun 2 https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901 Recent appearances (permalink) The internet is getting worse (CBC The National) https://youtu.be/dCVUCdg3Uqc?si=FMcA0EI_Mi13Lw-P Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today) https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech) https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074 The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah) https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doctorow-matthew-potolsky/ Latest books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/) "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor. "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE. "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X
- Pluralistic: Canny Valley and Creative Commons (10 Apr 2026)
- Fri, 10 Apr 2026 09:57:16 +0000
Today's links Canny Valley and Creative Commons: Another bite at the apple. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Bidenomics needs to be bigger; Al Franken's balanced war budget; Bernie x The Pope; Art is a money-laundry; UK government condemns copyright trolls; Howard Dean's genocidal pharma sellout. Upcoming appearances: Montreal, Toronto, San Francisco, London, Berlin, NYC, Hay-on-Wye, London. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Canny Valley and Creative Commons (permalink) Last year, I ran a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign to pre-sell my ebooks, audiobooks and hardcovers of my book Enshittification, which went on to be an international bestseller, selling out 10 printings in the first 11 weeks: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/enshittification-the-drm-free-audiobook If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog: https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/10/canny-valley#limited-edition I've done many of these Kickstarter campaigns now, and I always try to come up with something special for backers – some limited edition book or tchotchke that lets me scratch my own itch for making beautiful physical things, and also lets a few backers splash out on a truly special item. I've come up with some doozies, like: A hand-copied manuscript for the original, never-before-seen ending for my novel Little Brother https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/attack-surface-audiobook-for-the-third-little-brother-book/rewards Hand-annotated pages making fun of Robert Bork's The Antitrust Paradox, displayed in shadow boxes: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/chokepoint-capitalism-an-audiobook-amazon-wont-sell/rewards A leather bound, extremely limited edition copy of Red Team Blues, with a secret miniature bound copy of the unedited manuscript for The Bezzle in a hidden cavity: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-another-audiobook-that-amazon-wont-sell/rewards And, for Enshittification, Canny Valley, a limited edition book of my collage illustrations from Pluralistic, made from Creative Commons and public domain sources, with an introduction by Bruce Sterling: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/enshittification-the-drm-free-audiobook/rewards I put 100 copies of Canny Valley up for sale in the Enshittification Kickstarter and all of them sold out in a matter of days. However, as promised at the time, there is a second chance to get a copy of the book, through the Creative Commons 25th anniversary fundraiser, which has just kicked off: https://mailchi.mp/creativecommons/were-turning-25-book-giveaway The whole print run for Canny Valley was limited to 500 copies, and it is the only run I will do for the book. 100 copies were sold to Kickstarter backers, I kept 25 for myself, and the remaining 375 are now available as a thank-you gift for people who make tax-deductible gifts to CC. I have been a great supporter of Creative Commons since its inception – literally, I was around when Aaron Swartz, Matt Haughey and Lisa Rein worked with Larry Lessig to design the data scheme and user interface to create, use and re-use Creative Commons licenses. My debut novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, was the first book ever released under a CC license: https://craphound.com/down/download Creative Commons arose out of the copyright wars of the early 2000s, in which the severe deficiencies of using copyright as the primary form of internet regulation were becoming ever clearer. Then – as now – the internet was filling up with material that everyday people produced together, incorporating one another's work, as well as popular works that had meaning to them. Virtually all of this material violated copyright law, and bringing it into compliance would cost hundreds of billions of dollars in billable lawyer hours to draft, negotiate and sign all the licenses needed to avoid both criminal and civil liability. That's where CC came in: a team of international lawyers standardized a set of legal licenses that did something new and necessary: facilitated sharing and remix, rather than restricting them. Simply apply a CC license to your work – say, a Wikipedia contribution, a Flickr photo, or a story on AO3 – and others would be able to reproduce, adapt and recombine that work with other CC licensed works. What's more, thanks to the heroic efforts of the international CC team, these licenses were able to span borders, languages and legal systems, meaning that a Japanese animator can create a short based on a French story, using Australian 3D assets and a Croatian soundtrack: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/list.en It's hard to overstate what a heroic feat of lawyering this is. Making a set of documents that allows creativity to spread freely across 45+ (often very different) legal systems is arguably the most ambitious piece of applied IP legal research ever undertaken. Today, tens of billions of works are CC licensed, including (to name just one example), all of Wikipedia. I rely heavily on CC licensed works to make the images that run over my posts on Pluralistic, my CC-licensed newsletter. I combine these with public domain images in the GIMP (a powerful free/open Photoshop replacement that runs GNU/Linux, MacOS and Windows) to make my collages, which you can download in high-rez (and freely re-use, thanks to the CC licenses I apply to each of them) from this Flickr set of 350+ items: https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/albums/72177720316719208?sd Canny Valley collects 80 of my favorite collages in a beautiful book that was printed on 100lb Mohawk paper on an Indigo digital offset printer and bound with PVA glue that will last a century, at Pasadena's Typecraft, a family-owned print shop that's been in business for more than 100 years: https://www.typecraft.com/live2/who-we-are.html It was designed by the type legend John D Berry: https://johndberry.com/ And the introduction was written by my friend and mentor, the cyberpunk pioneer and digital art impresario Bruce Sterling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Sterling I published a long post that explained my creative process last year, including Bruce's intro (which is also CC licensed). I'm going to reproduce Bruce's intro below, but you can read the whole post here: https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce I love these little books and I love that there's a chance for a few more people to lay hands on their own – and I especially love that this will support Creative Commons, an organization that produces digital public goods for a new, good internet: https://mailchi.mp/creativecommons/were-turning-25-book-giveaway == INTRODUCTION by Bruce Sterling In 1970 a robotics professor named Masahiro Mori discovered a new problem in aesthetics. He called this "bukimi no tani genshō." The Japanese robots he built were functional, so the "bukimi no tani" situation was not an engineering problem. It was a deep and basic problem in the human perception of humanlike androids. Humble assembly robots, with their claws and swivels, those looked okay to most people. Dolls, puppets and mannequins, those also looked okay. Living people had always aesthetically looked okay to people. Especially, the pretty ones. However, between these two realms that the late Dr Mori was gamely attempting to weld together — the world of living mankind and of the pseudo-man-like machine– there was an artistic crevasse. Anything in this "Uncanny Valley" looked, and felt, severely not-okay. These overdressed robots looked and felt so eerie that their creator's skills became actively disgusting. The robots got prettier, but only up to a steep verge. Then they slid down the precipice and became zombie doppelgangers. That's also the issue with the aptly-titled "Canny Valley" art collection here. People already know how to react aesthetically to traditional graphic images. Diagrams are okay. Hand-drawn sketches and cartoons are also okay. Brush-made paintings are mostly fine. Photographs, those can get kind of dodgy. Digital collages that slice up and weld highly disparate elements like diagrams, cartoons, sketches and also photos and paintings, those trend toward the uncanny. The pixel-juggling means of digital image-manipulation are not art-traditional pencils or brushes. They do not involve the human hand, or maybe not even the human eye, or the human will. They're not fixed on paper or canvas; they're a Frankenstein mash-up landscape of tiny colored screen-dots where images can become so fried that they look and feel "cursed." They're conceptually gooey congelations, stuck in the valley mire of that which is and must be neither this-nor-that. A modern digital artist has billions of jpegs in files, folders, clouds and buckets. He's never gonna run out of weightless grist from that mill. Why would Cory Doctorow — novelist, journalist, activist, opinion columnist and so on — want to lift his typing fingers from his lettered keyboard, so as to create graphics with cut-and-paste and "lasso tools"? Cory Doctorow also has some remarkably tangled, scandalous and precarious issues to contemplate, summarize and discuss. They're not his scandalous private intrigues, though. Instead, they're scandalous public intrigues. Or, at least Cory struggles to rouse some public indignation about these intrigues, because his core topics are the tangled penthouse/slash/underground machinations of billionaire web moguls. Cory really knows really a deep dank lot about this uncanny nexus of arcane situations. He explains the shameful disasters there, but they're difficult to capture without torrents of unwieldy tech jargon. I think there are two basic reasons for this. The important motivation is his own need to express himself by some method other than words. I'm reminded here of the example of H. G. Wells, another science fiction writer turned internationally famous political pundit. HG Wells was quite a tireless and ambitious writer — so much so that he almost matched the torrential output of Cory Doctorow. But HG Wells nevertheless felt a compelling need to hand-draw cartoons. He called them "picshuas." These hundreds of "picshuas" were rarely made public. They were usually sketched in the margins of his hand-written letters. Commonly the picshuas were aimed at his second wife, the woman he had renamed "Jane." These picshuas were caricatures, or maybe rapid pen-and-ink conceptual outlines, of passing conflicts, events and situations in the life of Wells. They seemed to carry tender messages to Jane that the writer was unable or unwilling to speak aloud to her. Wells being Wells, there were always issues in his private life that might well pose a challenge to bluntly state aloud: "Oh by the way, darling, I've built a second house in the South of France where I spend my summers with a comely KGB asset, the Baroness Budberg." Even a famously glib and charming writer might feel the need to finesse that. Cory Doctorow also has some remarkably tangled, scandalous and precarious issues to contemplate, summarize and discuss. They're not his scandalous private intrigues, though. Instead, they're scandalous public intrigues. Or, at least Cory struggles to rouse some public indignation about these intrigues, because his core topics are the tangled penthouse/slash/underground machinations of billionaire web moguls. Cory really knows really a deep dank lot about this uncanny nexus of arcane situations. He explains the shameful disasters there, but they're difficult to capture without torrents of unwieldy tech jargon. So instead, he diligently clips, cuts, pastes, lassos, collages and pastiches. He might, plausibly, hire a professional artist to design his editorial cartoons for him. However, then Cory would have to verbally explain all his political analysis to this innocent graphics guy. Then Cory would also have to double-check the results of the artist and fix the inevitable newbie errors and grave misunderstandings. That effort would be three times the labor for a dogged crusader who is already working like sixty. It's more practical for him to mash-up images that resemble editorial cartoons. He can't draw. Also, although he definitely has a pronounced sense of aesthetics, it's not a aesthetic most people would consider tasteful. Cory Doctorow, from his very youth, has always had a "craphound" aesthetic. As an aesthete, Cory is the kind of guy who would collect rain-drenched punk-band flyers that had fallen off telephone poles and store them inside a 1950s cardboard kid-cereal box. I am not scolding him for this. He's always been like that. As Wells used to say about his unique "picshuas," they seemed like eccentric scribblings, but over the years, when massed-up as an oeuvre, they formed a comic burlesque of an actual life. Similarly, one isolated Doctorow collage can seem rather what-the-hell. It's trying to be "canny." If you get it, you get it. If you don't get the first one, then you can page through all of these, and at the end you will probably get it. En masse, it forms the comic burlesque of a digital left-wing cyberspatial world-of-hell. A monster-teeming Silicon Uncanny Valley of extensively raked muck. There are a lot of web-comix people who like to make comic fun of the Internet, and to mock "the Industry." However, there's no other social and analytical record quite like this one. It has something of the dark affect of the hundred-year-old satirical Dada collages of Georg Schultz or Hannah Hoch. Those Dada collages look dank and horrible because they're "Dada" and pulling a stunt. These images look dank and horrible because they're analytical, revelatory and make sense. If you do not enjoy contemporary electronic politics, and instead you have somehow obtained an art degree, I might still be able to help you with my learned and well-meaning intro here. I can recommend a swell art-critical book titled "Memesthetics" by Valentina Tanni. I happen to know Dr. Tanni personally, and her book is the cat's pyjamas when it comes to semi-digital, semi-collage, appropriated, Situationiste-detournement, net.art "meme aesthetics." I promise that I could robotically mimic her, and write uncannily like her, if I somehow had to do that. I could even firmly link the graphic works of Cory Doctorow to the digital avant-garde and/or digital folk-art traditions that Valentina Tanni is eruditely and humanely discussing. Like with a lot of robots, the hard part would be getting me to stop. Cory works with care on his political meme-cartoons — because he is using them to further his own personal analysis, and to personally convince himself. They're not merely sharp and partisan memes, there to rouse one distinct viewer-emotion and make one single point. They're like digital jigsaw-puzzle landscape-sketches — unstable, semi-stolen and digital, because the realm he portrays is itself also unstable, semi-stolen and digital. The cartoons are dirty and messy because the situations he tackles are so dirty and messy. That's the grain of his lampoon material, like the damaged amps in a punk song. A punk song that was licensed by some billionaire and then used to spy on hapless fans with surveillance-capitalism. Since that's how it goes, that's also what you're in for. You have been warned, and these collages will warn you a whole lot more. If you want to aesthetically experience some elegant, time-tested collage art that was created by a major world artist, then you should gaze in wonder at the Max Ernst masterpiece, "Une semaine de bonté" ("A Week of Kindness"). This indefinable "collage novel" aka "artist's book" was created in the troubled time of 1934. It's very uncanny rather than "canny, "and it's also capital-A great Art. As an art critic, I could balloon this essay to dreadful robotic proportions while I explain to you in detail why this weirdo mess is a lasting monument to the expressive power of collage. However, Cory Doctorow is not doing Max Ernst's dreamy, oneiric, enchanting Surrealist art. He would never do that and it wouldn't make any sense if he did. Cory did this instead. It is art, though. It is what it is, and there's nothing else like it. It's artistic expression as Cory Doctorow has a sincere need to perform that, and in twenty years it will be even more rare and interesting. It's journalism ahead of its time (a little) and with a passage of time, it will become testimonial. Bruce Sterling — Ibiza MMXXV Hey look at this (permalink) John Deere to Pay $99 Million in Monumental Right-to-Repair Settlement https://www.thedrive.com/news/john-deere-to-pay-99-million-in-monumental-right-to-repair-settlement Amazon Pulls Support for Perfectly Fine Older Kindles https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-pulls-support-for-perfectly-fine-older-kindles/ "Fahrenheit 11/9" – This is How Fascism Starts | Michael Moore https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfszwkoSdQA Honda Puts Its Garage Door Opener Behind a Paywall https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=Gb2fEBW0oDA Why Locus Matters More Than Ever https://reactormag.com/why-locus-matters-more-than-ever/ Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Al Franken wants a balanced war budget #15yrsago Fake-make: counterfeit handmade objects from big manufacturers https://web.archive.org/web/20110410125346/http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/04/untouched-by-human-hands.html #15yrsago Marketplace for hijacked computers https://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/04/is-your-computer-listed-for-rent/ #15yrsago Fake-make: counterfeit handmade objects from big manufacturers https://web.archive.org/web/20110410125346/http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/04/untouched-by-human-hands.html #10yrsago Pope invites Bernie Sanders to Vatican to speak about “social, economic, and environmental” issues https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-35999269#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa #10yrsago Baby sues US government for searching his diapers in racial profiling/War on Terror case https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/04/baby-who-had-his-diapers-searched-at-airport-is-part-of-class-action-suit/ #10yrsago Tax investigators and bill collectors use Rich Kids of Instagram to uncover oligarchs’ hidden millions https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/03/super-rich-discover-hidden-risks-instagram-yachts-jets #10yrsago The international art market is a money laundry whose details are in the Panama Papers https://web.archive.org/web/20160408024110/https://fusion.net/story/288515/panama-papers-leak-art-market/ #10yrsago UK government warns people that copyright trolls are a scam https://torrentfreak.com/uk-govt-issues-advice-on-dealing-with-copyright-trolls-160408/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Torrentfreak+(Torrentfreak) #10yrsago Why the rise of ransomware attacks should worry you https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/04/ok-panic-newly-evolved-ransomware-is-bad-news-for-everyone/ #5yrsago Howard Dean's racist, genocidal pharma sellout https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/08/howard-dino/#the-scream #1yrago We CAN have nice things https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/08/howard-dino/#payfors Upcoming appearances (permalink) Montreal: Bronfman Lecture (McGill), Apr 10 https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disrupter-tickets-1982706623885 Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, Apr 10 https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/4863920260410 Toronto: DemocracyXchange, Apr 16 https://www.democracyxchange.org/news/cory-doctorow-to-open-dxc26-on-april-16 San Francisco: 2026 Berkeley Spring Forum on M&A and the Boardroom, Apr 23 https://www.theberkeleyforum.com/#agenda London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25 https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691 NYC: Enshittification at Commonweal Ventures, Apr 29 https://luma.com/ssgfvqz8 NYC: Techidemic with Sarah Jeong, Tochi Onyibuchi and Alia Dastagir (PEN World Voices), Apr 30 https://worldvoices.pen.org/event/techidemic/ Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20 https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19 https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25 https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2 SXSW London, Jun 2 https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901 Recent appearances (permalink) The internet is getting worse (CBC The National) https://youtu.be/dCVUCdg3Uqc?si=FMcA0EI_Mi13Lw-P Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today) https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech) https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074 The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah) https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doctorow-matthew-potolsky/ Latest books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/) "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. First draft complete. Second draft underway. "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE. "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X
- Pluralistic: Cindy Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (09 Apr 2026)
- Thu, 09 Apr 2026 10:50:56 +0000
Today's links Cindy Cohn's "Privacy's Defender": The history of digital rights, from the very beginning to this very moment. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Tariffs and monopolies; Paperclip dodecahedron; Class war comix; Glenn Beck's brain; Iceland v Pirates; Dashers v apps; Leaked NYPD goon squad manual. Upcoming appearances: Montreal, Toronto, San Francisco, London, Berlin, NYC, Hay-on-Wye, London. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Cindy Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (permalink) I've known EFF executive director Cindy Cohn for 27 years. I met her when I needed cyberlaw advice for a startup I'd helped found. We got along so well that I ended up quitting the startup and going to work at EFF. Now, Cindy's memoir, Privacy's Defender, is on the shelves: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262051248/privacys-defender/ I'm hardly a disinterested party here, obviously. I was at Cindy's wedding, I've danced with her at Burning Man, and I've worked with her for most of my adult life. What's more, I was present for many of the pivotal moments she recounts in this book. But still: this is a great book that I found utterly captivating. Cohn's been with EFF since its earliest days, when she litigated one of the most important cases in computing history, the Bernstein case, which legalized civilian access to encryption technology and changed the world: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-established-code-speech Cryptographers had been arguing with the US government over the ban on working encryption technology for years before Cohn joined the fight, and they'd tried all manner of arguments to overturn the ban: technical arguments, political arguments, financial arguments. All of these efforts failed – they didn't even make a dent. Cohn's genius was the way she formulated a free speech argument about the ban on encryption: arguing that computer code was a form of expressive speech, entitled to protection under the First Amendment. While she didn't come up with this idea, it was her gift for assembling a narrative and a cadre of unimpeachable experts that carried the day. In this age of bad faith right-wing trolling about "free speech" and "cancel culture," it's easy to forget how central free speech cases and causes have been for the advancement of human rights and human thriving. Free speech cases gave us the nation's first privacy protections, protection for unions, and protection for civil rights organizers. Cohn never forgets this. Her decades with EFF are a history of the fight for speech rights (and thus privacy rights) on the internet. After the US government seized on the 9/11 attacks as a pretext to dismantle privacy and turn the internet into a system of ubiquitous surveillance, Cohn (along with EFF, of course!) was at the center of the fight for digital rights. The same prescience and strategic brilliance that led her to take up the Bernstein case and win it were with her through those millennial years, and her description of our cases, campaigns and fights in those years vividly foreshadows the moment we are in today. The same goes for her "three letter agency" chapter, which takes up our fights against the NSA and other US agencies in the wake of whistleblower disclosures by Mark Klein and Edward Snowden. These accounts are one part master class in legal tactics; one part battle cry for a global pushback against the transformation of the internet into the perfect surveillance and control machine, and one part personal memoir of a tactician, finding ways to leverage a righteous cause to raise a guerrilla army of experts, co-counsel, amici, and champions who carried our message to the world. All of this is connected back to her other legal career, as a human rights defender litigating on behalf of the survivors of a massacre perpetrated by a death squad working on behalf of Chevron in Nigeria. Cohn skilfully connects these very concrete, visible human rights struggles to the invisible – and no less important – human rights work she carried out for EFF. I didn't just have a front-row seat for this stuff – I had backstage passes for a lot of it (though not the juiciest national security cases, which required EFF lawyers to maintain total secrecy from colleagues, spouses, even our board, on pain of a long prison sentence for disclosing classified information). Even so, Cohn's pacey, smart retelling of these events brought them to life for me, and of course, there's a coherence that you get after the fact that is missing when you're living through it in a moment. But what really enlivened this delightful book were the personal details that Cohn weaves into the story. I've always known that she was an adoptee (and I even have a small, strange, coincidental connection to her birth family), but Cohn's intimate, personal, frank memoir of her early family life, and her bittersweet connection to her birth family were so intimate and well-told that I felt like I was getting to know my dear friend all over again. Cindy is retiring from EFF (but not the law) in a couple of months. This book is a beautiful capstone to a brilliant career that defined the fight for cyber rights, and a deep, accessible dive into the defining tech and human rights battles of this century. Hey look at this (permalink) Who Is L.A.’s Hero Posting Up These Anti-ICE Parking Signs? https://lataco.com/anti-ice-parking-signs Data Center Tech Lobbyists Fearmonger in Attempt to Retroactively Roll Back Right to Repair Law https://www.404media.co/data-center-tech-lobbyists-fearmonger-in-attempt-to-retroactively-roll-back-right-to-repair-law/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter Live Tax-Free and Die https://prospect.org/2026/04/08/apr-2026-magazine-live-tax-free-and-die/ Men Are Buying Hacking Tools to Use Against Their Wives and Friends https://www.wired.com/story/men-are-buying-hacking-tools-to-use-against-their-wives-and-friends/ How Trump Took the U.S. to War With Iran https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/us/politics/trump-iran-war.html Object permanence (permalink) #15yrsago Advanced office-supply sculpture: paperclip dodecahedron https://web.archive.org/web/20171122055732/https://makezine.com/2011/04/07/paperclip-snub-dodecahedron/ #15yrsago World Bank: gold farming (etc) paid poor countries $3B in 2009 https://web.archive.org/web/20110410134037/http://www.infodev.org/en/Publication.1056.html #15yrsago Class war comics: Scrap Iron Man versus international capital https://web.archive.org/web/20110410215907/https://www.chinamieville.net/post/4406165249/rejected-pitch #15yrsago Colombian Justice Minister ramming through extremist copyright legislation without public consultation https://web.archive.org/web/20110707053554/http://karisma.org.co/?p=667 #15yrsago Glenn Beck’s brain https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/glenn-beck-fox-news-brain-chart/ #10yrsago Why 40 years of official nutritional guidelines prescribed a low-fat diet that promoted heart disease https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/07/the-sugar-conspiracy-robert-lustig-john-yudkin #10yrsago Fearing the Pirate Party, Iceland’s government scrambles to avoid elections https://web.archive.org/web/20160407183022/https://theintercept.com/2016/04/07/icelands-government-tries-cling-protesters-pirates-gates/ #10yrsago The price of stealing an identity is crashing, with no bottom in sight https://qz.com/656459/its-never-been-cheaper-to-steal-someones-digital-identity-on-the-internet #10yrsago Bernie Sanders can only win if nonvoters turn out at the polls, and they almost never do https://web.archive.org/web/20160408145116/https://www.vox.com/2016/4/6/11373862/bernie-sanders-voter-lists #10yrsago To understand the link between corporations and Hillary Clinton, look at philosophy, not history https://web.archive.org/web/20160406223353/https://www.thenation.com/article/the-problem-with-hillary-clinton-isnt-just-her-corporate-cash-its-her-corporate-worldview/ #10yrsago The US Government’s domestic spy-planes take weekends and holidays off https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/spies-in-the-skies #10yrsago A perfect storm of broken business and busted FLOSS backdoors everything, so who needs the NSA? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwcl17Q0bpk #5yrsago Door Dashers organize app-defeating solidarity https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/07/cruelty-by-design/#declinenow #5yrsago Leaked NYPD "goon squad" manual https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/07/cruelty-by-design/#blam-blam-blam #1yrago Tariffs and monopolies https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/07/it-matters-how-you-slice-it/#too-big-to-care Upcoming appearances (permalink) Montreal: Bronfman Lecture (McGill), Apr 10 https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disrupter-tickets-1982706623885 Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, Apr 10 https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/4863920260410 Toronto: DemocracyXchange, Apr 16 https://www.democracyxchange.org/news/cory-doctorow-to-open-dxc26-on-april-16 San Francisco: 2026 Berkeley Spring Forum on M&A and the Boardroom, Apr 23 https://www.theberkeleyforum.com/#agenda London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25 https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691 NYC: Enshittification at Commonweal Ventures, Apr 29 https://luma.com/ssgfvqz8 NYC: Techidemic with Sarah Jeong, Tochi Onyibuchi and Alia Dastagir (PEN World Voices), Apr 30 https://worldvoices.pen.org/event/techidemic/ Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20 https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19 https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25 https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2 SXSW London, Jun 2 https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901 Recent appearances (permalink) The internet is getting worse (CBC The National) https://youtu.be/dCVUCdg3Uqc?si=FMcA0EI_Mi13Lw-P Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today) https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech) https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074 The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah) https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doctorow-matthew-potolsky/ Latest books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/) "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. First draft complete. Second draft underway. "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE. "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X
- Pluralistic: Process knowledge (08 Apr 2026)
- Wed, 08 Apr 2026 13:39:44 +0000
Today's links Process knowledge: We also serve who stand and wash. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Chicken Little; "Anya's Ghost"; Ad-tech's algorithmic cruelty. Upcoming appearances: Toronto, Montreal, Toronto, San Francisco, London, Berlin, NYC, Hay-on-Wye, London. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Process knowledge (permalink) "Intellectual property" was once an obscure legal backwater. Today, it is the dominant area of political economy, the organizing regime for almost all of our tech regulation, and the most valuable – and most controversial – aspect of global trade policy: https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/01/minilateralism/#own-goal Despite (or perhaps because of) its centrality, "intellectual property" is one of those maddeningly vague terms that applies to many different legal doctrines, as well as a set of nebulous, abstract thought-objects that do not qualify for legal protection. "IP" doesn't just refer to copyright, trademark and patent – though these "core three" systems are so heterogeneous in basis, scope and enforcement that the act of lumping them together into a single category confuses more than it clarifies. Beyond the "core three" of copyright, patent and trademark, "IP" also refers to a patchwork of "neighboring rights" that only exist to varying degrees around the world, like "anticircumvention rights," "database rights" and "personality rights." Then there are doctrines that have come to be thought of as IP, even though they were long considered separate: confidentiality, noncompete and nondisparagement. Finally, there are those "nebulous, abstract thought-objects" that get labeled "IP," even if no one can really define what they are – for example, the "format" deals that TV shows like Love Island or The Traitors make around the world, which really amount to consulting deals to help other TV networks create a local version of a popular show, but which are treated as the sale of some (nonexistent) exclusive right. It's hard to find a commonality amongst all these wildly different concepts, but a couple years ago, I hit on a working definition of "IP" that seems to cover all the bases: I say that "IP" means "any rule, law or policy that allows a company to exert control over its critics, competitors or customers": https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/ Put that way, it's easy to see why "IP" would be such a central organizing principle in a modern, end-stage capitalist world. But even though "IP" is treated as a firm's most important asset, it's actually far less important than another intangible: process knowledge. I first came across the concept of "process knowledge" in Dan Wang's Breakneck, a very good book about the rise and rise of Chinese manufacturing, industrialization and global dominance: https://danwang.co/breakneck/ I picked up Breakneck after reading other writers whom I admire who singled out the book's treatment of process knowledge for praise and further discussion. The political scientist Henry Farrell called process knowledge the key to economic development: https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/process-knowledge-is-crucial-to-economic While Dan Davies – a superb writer about organizations and their management – used England's Brompton Bicycles to make the abstract concept of process knowledge very concrete indeed: https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-brompton-ness-of-it-all So what is process knowledge? It's all the knowledge that workers collectively carry around in their heads – hard-won lessons that span firms and divisions, that can never be adequately captured through documentation. Think of a worker at a chip fab who finds themself with a load of microprocessors that have failed QA because they become unreliable when they're run above a certain clockspeed. If that worker knows enough about the downstream customers' processes, they can contact one of those customers and offer the chips for use in a lower-end product, which can save the fab millions and make millions more for the customer. This just happened to Apple, who seized upon a lot of "binned" microprocessors that were headed to the landfill and designed the Macbook Neo (a new, cheap, low-end laptop) around them, salvaging the defective chips by running them at lower speeds. The result? Apple's most successful laptop in years, which has now sold so well that Apple has exhausted the supply of defective chips and is scrambling to fill orders: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/04/07/macbook-neo-massive-dilemma/ Process knowledge is squishy, contingent, and wildly important in a world filled with entropy-stricken, off-spec, and stubbornly physical things. Work with a particular machine long enough and you will develop a Fingerspitzengefühl (fingertip feeling) for the optimal rate to introduce a new load of feedstock to it after it runs dry. Even more importantly: if you work with that machine long enough, you'll have the mobile phone number of the retired person who knows how to un-jam it if you try to reload it too fast on your usual technician's day off. This kind of knowledge can mean the difference between profitability and bankruptcy. So why isn't process knowledge given the centrality in our conceptions of what makes a corporation valuable? After reading Wang, Farrell and Davies, I formulated a theory: we ignore process knowledge for the same reason we exalt "IP," because process knowledge can't be bought or sold, can't be reflected on a balance-sheet, and can't be controlled, and because "IP" can. Process knowledge is far more important than "IP" (just try creating a vaccine from a set of instructions without the skilled technicians who have already spent years executing similar projects), but process knowledge is spread out amongst workers and can't be abstracted away by their bosses. Your boss can make you sign a contract assigning all your copyrights and patents to the business, but if you and your team quit your job, all that "IP" will plummet in value without the people who know how to mobilize it: https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/08/process-knowledge/#dance-monkey-dance "IP" isn't just a case of "you treasure what you measure" – it's also a case of "you measure what you treasure." Recently, I hit on a positively delightful Tumblr post that illustrated the importance of process knowledge, and the way that bosses systematically undervalue it: https://www.tumblr.com/explorerrowan/813098951730479104 This post is one of those glorious internet documents, a novel literary form for which we have no accepted term. It's composed of four major sections: a screenshotted impromptu Twitter thread made in reply to a throwaway post; a lengthy Tumblr reply to the screenshots; a second Tumblr reply to the first one; and then a chorus of more than 38,000 notes, replies, and hashtags added to it. I have no idea what to call this kind of document, in which some people are reacting to others without the others ever knowing about it, but also which is also written by so many authors, many of whom are explicitly interacting with one another. It's a "hypertext," sure, but what kind of hypertext? Whatever you call it, it's amazing. As noted, it opens with a Twitter exchange. The first tweet comes from an online dating influencer, "TheEcho13": I interviewed a gen z girlie 6 months ago and in the interview she told me that she does not like a challenge, has no interest in career progression, prefers to just do repetitive tasks and will never complain about being bored. I hired her. https://xcancel.com/TheEcho13/status/1948951885693813135#m In response, Viveros (a content creator from Alberta and one of the 4m people who saw the original tweet), replied with a short thread about the value of people like this, who "keep the lights on and the business functioning at everything from restaurants to post offices but now nobody’s interested in hiring them": https://xcancel.com/TheViveros/status/1949149720406110382#m These are the "lifer[s] who can teach new people how everything works, who knows what’s up in the system, who knows what the obscure solutions are, and who can help calm down the asshole regulars because they know them more personally." In other words, the keepers of the process knowledge. When this screenshotted exchange was posted to Tumblr, it prompted Blinkpatch, who describes themself as a "genderfluid," "ancient" "drifter" who pines for "solar-punk flavored revolution" to reply with a brilliant anecdote about their stint working as a dishwasher: https://weaselle.tumblr.com/post/790895560390492160/whenever-i-think-about-the-value-of-something At 16, Blinkpatch was hired as a restaurant dishwasher under the tutelage of Claudio, a 60-year old "career dish pit man." Claudio had washed dishes for his whole life, reveling in the fact that he could get work in any city, at any time. When Claudio realized that Blinkpatch was taking the job seriously, the training began in earnest. Claudio asked Blinkpatch if they wanted to be able to clock off at midnight at the end of each shift, and when Blinkpatch said they did, Claudio laid a lot of process knowledge on them: This machine takes two full minutes to run a cycle. We are on the clock for 8 hours. That means we have a maximum of 240 times we can run this machine. If you want to wash all those dishes, clean your station, mop, and clock off by midnight? This machine has to be on and running every second of the shift. If you don’t have a full load of dishes collected, scraped, rinsed, stacked, and ready to go into the dishwasher the second it’s done every single time? You can’t do it. If, over the course of 8 hours, you let this machine lay idle for just one minute in between finishing each load and being turned on again? Instead of 240 loads, you’ll do 160 loads. These are the parameters, the kind of thing any Taylorist with a stopwatch could tell you. But Claudio went on to explain how that extra idle minute would translate to chaos in the kitchen, as the cooks ran out of pots and the servers ran out of plates, and how they would take out their frustrations on the dishwasher. To optimize that dishwasher, Blinkpatch would need to have a reserve of bulky, machine-filling items that could be run through the machine any time a load finished before there was a sufficient supply of smaller items. If they failed at this, Blinkpatch would be washing dishes until 2AM, rather than clocking out at midnight. Blinkpatch's takeaway was that dishwashing was the bottleneck the whole restaurant ran through – and how that meant that Claudio, who was "unambitious" by conventional standards, had the best understanding of the restaurant's overall operations of anyone on site. He was the keeper of the process knowledge This reply prompted another response, from "Marisol," a "haunted house actress and accidental IT person" who told the story of her time working at a medical office that specialized in mental health and addiction recovery: https://www.tumblr.com/marisolinspades/790960414106304512/all-of-this-disaster-befalls-any-company-that The company was in the midst of standing up its own purpose-built facility, and the CEO was working intensively with the architect to design this new building. When Marisol – the receptionist – happened to be consulted on the near-final design plan, "it took all of three seconds for two major issues to jump out." First: "The receptionist can’t see the waiting room from her desk with this layout. It’s around the corner and blocked by a wall." This meant that she couldn't "keep track of the patients who are waiting." The architect and CEO wanted to know why she couldn't use the sign-in sheet to manage this. She explained that not everyone signs in – people who are there for a check-in or group therapy need to be directed to the other side of the building, while "some people are painfully shy and if I don’t appear warm and inviting they won’t approach." The CEO and architect asked whether this happened often, and she replied "every day." They didn't believe her. Nor did they believe her when she said that the receptionists needed to have continuous access to the chart room throughout the day – they insisted that since charts for the day's patients were pulled in the morning, it would be OK to house them through two sets of locked doors, a five-minute walk away (that way, workers wouldn't be tempted to "goof off" in the room). They wanted to keep the chart room locked, with the key entrusted to the CEO, who would supervise every entry. Marisol explained that charts were pulled continuously, any time there was a crisis or a patient had a question for a nurse, or when a patient came in due to a cancellation. All told, reception went into the chart room 20-30 times/day. The "goofing off" they thought workers got up to in the chart room was "when we got news that a patient had died and we were crying. And even then, we filed charts as we sobbed because no one in this office has free time." The CEO and architect were still disbelieving, so Marisol had them sit with her for an hour. They didn't last an hour – they left, taking the blueprints with them. The punchline: Marisol bemoans the fact that she wasn't given more time with those blueprints, because then she might have spotted that they'd forgotten to include any closets, including closets for the janitors. As a result, all their cleaning supplies and holiday decorations were stolen from the cabinets in the bathrooms that they were forced to stash them in. Marisol blames this on a "CEO who had never worked a lower level job in his life wasn’t convinced closets were worth it." This is doubtless true – but we can generalize this, to "a CEO who didn't appreciate process knowledge." I've come to believe that process knowledge is the most undervalued part of our society. So undervalued that business geniuses like Elon Musk think you can fire skilled lifers from key government agencies and simply hire new ones if turns out you cut too deep. So undervalued that Trump thinks that you can simply stand up new factories in response to tariffs, and that "training" will somehow allow people to go to work making things that haven't been produced onshore in a generation. And of course, the people who value process knowledge the least are the AI bros who think you can replace skilled workers with a chatbot trained on the things they say and write down, as though that somehow captured everything they know. Hey look at this (permalink) Greens Could Be ‘Kingmakers’ in Wales as Leader Reveals Power-Sharing Demands https://bylinetimes.com/2026/04/07/greens-wales-elections-senedd-coalition-leader-power-sharing-demands/ Voter Suppression, Executive Order Style https://prospect.org/2026/04/07/trump-voter-suppression-executive-order-14339-citizenship-post-office/ “Economic Civil War”: States Push Laws to Shield Oil and Gas Companies From Accountability https://www.propublica.org/article/climate-change-alec-leonard-leo-lawsuits-fossil-fuel-oil-gas-immunity A Retrospective on Bidenomics https://prospect.org/2026/04/07/apr-2026-magazine-retrospective-on-bidenomics/ Music giant Universal gets $64bn takeover offer https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz0ex432dmyo Object permanence (permalink) #15yrsago Chicken Little: what do you sell to an immortal, vat-bound quadrillionaire? https://web.archive.org/web/20110408210327/http://www.tor.com/stories/2011/04/chicken-little #15yrsago Anya’s Ghost: sweet and scary ghost story about identity https://memex.craphound.com/2011/04/06/anyas-ghost-sweet-and-scary-ghost-story-about-identity/ #10yrsago The UK government’s voice-over-IP standard is designed to be backdoored https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1476827/ #5yrsago Ad-tech's algorithmic cruelty https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/06/digital-phrenology/#weaponized-nostalgia #5yrsago The real cancel culture https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/06/digital-phrenology/#digital-phrenology Upcoming appearances (permalink) Toronto: Humber Polytechnic President's Lecture Series, Apr 8 https://liberalarts.humber.ca/current-students/resources/conferences-and-lectures/presidents-lecture-series.html Montreal: Bronfman Lecture (McGill), Apr 10 https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disrupter-tickets-1982706623885 Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, Apr 10 https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/4863920260410 Toronto: DemocracyXchange, Apr 16 https://www.democracyxchange.org/news/cory-doctorow-to-open-dxc26-on-april-16 San Francisco: 2026 Berkeley Spring Forum on M&A and the Boardroom, Apr 23 https://www.theberkeleyforum.com/#agenda London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25 https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691 NYC: Enshittification at Commonweal Ventures, Apr 29 https://luma.com/ssgfvqz8 NYC: Techidemic with Sarah Jeong, Tochi Onyibuchi and Alia Dastagir (PEN World Voices), Apr 30 https://worldvoices.pen.org/event/techidemic/ Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20 https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19 https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25 https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2 SXSW London, Jun 2 https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901 Recent appearances (permalink) The internet is getting worse (CBC The National) https://youtu.be/dCVUCdg3Uqc?si=FMcA0EI_Mi13Lw-P Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today) https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech) https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074 The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah) https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doctorow-matthew-potolsky/ Latest books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/) "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. First draft complete. Second draft underway. "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE. "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X
- Pluralistic: Switzerland's Goldilocks fiber (07 Apr 2026)
- Tue, 07 Apr 2026 07:20:37 +0000
Today's links Switzerland's Goldilocks fiber: Public provision is a layered question. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: EU appoints henhouse fox (copyright); Emacs x Tron: Legacy; Spammer v dead man's AOL account; Scott Walker's pork fountain; "No toilets, try Amazon"; Iceland falls (x Panama Papers); Rooms in Milanese sewers; China bans Panama Papers; "Parent Hacks"; "The Nameless City"; Phishing the world's top breach expert. Upcoming appearances: Toronto, Montreal, Toronto, San Francisco, London, Berlin, NYC, Hay-on-Wye, London. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Switzerland's Goldilocks fiber (permalink) If you live in Switzerland you can get a 25Gbit fiber link to your home. That's 25Gbit symmetrical – upload and download. On a dedicated connection that's yours and yours alone. From multiple providers. And you can switch providers with the click of a mouse. It's the ne plus ultra, magnifico, wunderschön: https://www.init7.net/de/internet/fiber7/ In a fascinating blog post, Stefan Schüller unpacks how this came to pass, in Switzerland, a country known for its impassable mountains and its impossible national telco (Swisscom): https://sschueller.github.io/posts/the-free-market-lie/ Schüller describes the Swiss system as a kind of Goldilocks approach that's midway between two failed systems: the American "free market" system and the German state provision system. Most people in the US can't get fiber at all, and if you can get it, it's probably 1Gbit, and available from a single provider (that's nearly my situation in Los Angeles, where I can buy 2Gbit symmetrical fiber from AT&T, who run a shared connection on old Worldcom fiber they've lit up). Some (very foolish) people say that Starlink represents a competitive alternative to fiber. This is nonsense – first, because Starlink is another natural monopoly (how many competing satellite constellations can we cram into stable orbits before they start smashing into each other?), and second, because satellite is millions of times slower than fiber: https://www.somebits.com/weblog/tech/bad/starlink-nov-2022-data-caps.html In Germany, most people also have a single fiber provider, and the connection they get is shared, and caps out at 1-2Gbit. Meanwhile, the Swiss can get connections that are far faster, and cheaper. How did they do it? For starters, the Swiss recognized what any Simcity player knows: fiber is a "natural monopoly." It doesn't make any sense to build multiple, competing fiber networks – any more than it would make sense to build multiple, competing sewer systems or electric grids. In the US, private fiber providers get city permits to dig up the roads and lay their network. If you have two competing networks, they dig up the road twice. You'd think that the (more regulated) Germans would lay a single network, but they, too, have multiple, competing networks. German regulators have a complex set of priorities and constraints: to encourage competition, they promote the idea of competing networks in competing trenches, often just meters apart (rather than on competing services running over the same fiber and/or fiber run through the same conduit – pipe – laid in a single trench). This makes setting up fiber extremely capital-intensive, so Germany backstops this system with "essential facilities sharing" – a rule that requires the incumbent (formerly state-owned, now partially state-owned) Deutsche Telekom to offer space in its conduit to smaller ISPs that want to thread their own fiber from their data-centers to their customers' homes. This is a good idea in theory – but in practice, DT has largely captured its regulators and so it is free to place all kinds of administrative hurdles in the paths of competitors seeking to use its lines. The result is that Germans can get fiber from multiple, heavily capitalized network providers who overbuilt redundant systems under the city streets, squandering capital digging trenches that they could have spent on providing faster and/or cheaper connections. Meanwhile, in the US, they leave this all up to "the market" (though, of course, there's no way "the market" could get fiber laid down without public participation, because the clearing price for privately negotiated licenses to dig up every street in town is "infinity"). The US is dominated by a cartel of massive incumbents: there's AT&T (formerly a regulated monopoly that was so entangled with the US government that it was effectively a for-profit state enterprise) and the cable giants, Comcast and Charter, who divide up the country into exclusive territories like the Pope dividing up the "New World." These companies generally enjoy regional monopolies, which means they're less interested in making profits (money you get by mobilizing capital) than they are from extracting rent (money you get from sweating assets). For example, when Frontier went bankrupt in 2020, we got to look at its internal bookkeeping system, and learned that the company treated 1m customers who had no alternative carriers as special assets because it could charge them more for worse service and poor maintenance: https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/15/useful-idiotsuseful-idiots/ This means that US fiber networks tend to be underbuilt (the opposite of Germany's overbuilt networks), meaning that even if you're buying "gigabit" fiber, you're probably sharing that one gig connection with your whole block or neighborhood, so you only get your nominal throughput at weird hours when all the other subscribers aren't streaming Netflix. (Note that there are cities in the US with a better situation; particularly cities served by Ting, which is owned by Hover, the amazing domain registry. Ting operates an excellent mobile carrier and a fiber networks in many cities. If you are lucky enough to have Ting as an option, then you should treasure that option.) So, that's Germany and America. What did they do in Switzerland? For starters, they ran a four-strand, dedicated line (an insulated wire with four separate strands of fiber in it) to every house. That wire terminates at your wall with a "neutral, open hub." Any carrier can provide service over those four strands: Swisscom (the incumbent, majority state-owned carrier); Init7 or Salt (national, commercial carriers); or a local ISP. Each of the strands in your neutral hub operate independently. That means that you can switch from one carrier to another with a click. You can also run two or more carriers' signal through your hub, meaning that you can try out a new carrier before canceling your old one. The carriers compete on price, speed and customer service – but they don't compete on who can actually connect your home to the internet. The origins of this excellent system are in 2008, when Switzerland's Federal Communications Commission convened a roundtable to determine the future of the country's broadband. Incredibly, it was Swisscom that pushed for the multi-strand, dedicated fiber system, on the grounds that anything less would lead to monopolization. I say "incredibly," because in all my travels over the past three decades, a single encounter with Swisscom stands out as the most absurd and backwards run-in I ever experienced with a telco. It was while I was working as EFF's delegate to the United Nations in Geneva, as part of an infinitesimal coalition of digital rights group convened by James Love and Manon Ress of Knowledge Ecology International. Geneva is not a forgiving city for someone working for a cash-strapped NGO: it's a city where everyone (except you) is on a lavish expense account courtesy of a national government, or (better still) an industry body that lobbies the UN. My usual daggy two-star hotel (which cost as much as a four-star in London) didn't have its own wifi: instead, you signed on through Swisscom, which did not offer its own payment processing. To get onto the Swisscom wifi, you had to buy a scratch-off prepaid card that was good for a certain number of hours or minutes. The hotel was always sold out of these cards. So my normal ritual upon my arrival in Geneva was to scour the tobacco shops around the train station for scratch-off cards. Normally, this would take four or five tries – the shops would either be completely sold out, or would only have the two-hour cards (needless to say, these were a lot more expensive on a per-hour basis than the one-day and multi-day cards). On one trip, though, all the shops were sold out of these cards, so I skipped breakfast the next morning to wait outside the doors of the Swisscom offices, which opened five minutes late (the only business in Switzerland that wasn't achingly prompt!). The clerk let me in eventually, but when I approached his counter, he made me trudge to the opposite end of the room to take a number (I was the only person in the shop). After an ostentatious delay, the clerk called out "Numero un!" and I went up to his counter and asked for a three-day card. No dice, he was sold out. Two-day cards? Nope. One-day? Uh-uh. He only had two-hour cards, too. Literally, the Swiss national telco had run out of integers. This incident stuck with me so durably that I wrote it into my third novel, Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town. You can hear me read that passage here: https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/17/aura-of-benevolence/#sctt-slt So it's frankly amazing to me to learn that Swisscom – who will forever be synonymous in my mind with the most catastrophically stupid internet delivery system imaginable – demanded this anti-monopoly fiber rollout. But – as Schüller points out – Swisscom's foray into uncharacteristic reasonableness was short-lived. By 2020, the company had regressed to its mean, and was demanding an end to the neutral, four-strand, point-to-point system, petitioning for regulatory permission to switch to a cheaper, slower, shared hub-and-spoke system. This system wouldn't just be slower – it would also require all of Swisscom's rivals to rent access to its fiber, with Swisscom having the final say over who could compete with it and how. This went all the way to the Swiss federal courts, who ruled that Swisscom had failed to demonstrate "sufficient technological or economic grounds" for the change and fined the company CHF18m for wasting everyone's time with this stupid idea (that is, "violating Swiss competition law"). And so it is that, in 2026, you can get 25Gbit symmetrical fiber throughout Switzerland. Wunderschön! Schüller closes out his piece with a set of recommendations for countries hoping to replicate Switzerland's broadband miracle: open access to physical infrastructure; point-to-point service; neutral fiber standards; municipal fiber; and strong antitrust enforcement to keep the incumbent carriers in line. These are great recommendations; they address the contradiction of regulated monopoly telcoms provision. On the one hand, these networks are natural monopolies, and they can only exist with extensive government intervention (at a minimum, to clear the way for poles, trenches and conduit for the physical fiber). On the other hand, telcoms (especially broadband) play an important role in the political realm, because broadband connections are essential to civic and political engagement. You can't turn people out for a protest, or run an election campaign, a referendum, a ballot initiative, a regulatory notice-and-comment campaign, or even a campaign to get people to a public meeting or listening session without broadband. This means that state-provided broadband is an incredibly tempting target for political corruption and regulatory capture. Think of all the terrible things that governments are doing with broadband regulation today, like Trump demanding that service providers turn over the identities and locations of his political enemies so that ICE can hunt them down and kidnap or murder them; or "age verification" systems that accumulate mountains of easily raided personal information on adults and children. Do you want Trump's FCC chairman Brendan Carr setting content moderation policies for your internet connection? The guy who wants to pull TV and radio stations' broadcast licenses if they criticize Trump and Israel's catastrophic Iran war? https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/17/brendan-carr-pretends-to-be-tough-demands-broadcasters-support-disastrous-war/ Do you want your local ISP being run by your mayor? I mean, sure, there are some reasonable mayors out there, but imagine if your ISP was managed by Eric Adams, Boris Johnson…or Rob Ford: https://www.patreon.com/posts/rob-ford-part-1-111985831 Saying that broadband should be run "like a utility," raises more questions than it answers. I, too, want broadband run "like a utility," but that doesn't mean that I want the whole show to be provided solely by my federal or municipal government. A "utility" model for broadband should mean running conduit to every home in town, with point-to-point connections that deliver broadband via a municipally owned network – but not just that. The municipal network should also offer "essential facilities sharing" in two forms: first, they should allow anyone to set up an ISP by renting shelf-space in the municipal data-center and installing their own switches that can provide internet to anyone in town. This would let large and small companies set up ISPs, as well as co-ops and nonprofits, or even tinkerers wanting to provide access to a group of friends. Beyond that, the city should rent space in the conduit itself, to support point-to-point links beyond those offered by the city – for example, between a university campus and an offsite supercomputing center, or two buildings owned by the same company, or even as a parallel set of fiber connections run by someone who's fed up with getting their internet service from Eric Adams. This is a "pluralized" utility model: one that involves the city in providing infrastructure at several layers, as well as a "public option" – but which doesn't allow a city that's in thrall to Moms For Liberty to decide what you can say on the internet. This principle generalizes beyond internet provision, too. Many people have observed that social media, with its strong "network effects" (meaning its value increases as more people use it), could be a "natural monopoly" and want a social media "utility." I can see the reasoning there, but if there's one thing we've learned from zuckermuskian legacy social media, it's that centralized control over speech forums is a moral hazard and an attractive nuisance. It's a political prize beyond measure, and it attracts all sorts of skullduggerous bids to suborn it and harness it to some political faction. But there's a pluralized utility model for social media, too, thanks to modern, federated social media systems like Mastodon and Bluesky. These are open platforms that can support multiple, interconnected servers that all talk to one another. Unlike, say, Twitter, where you can only talk to other Twitter users, federated social media allows you to talk with anyone on any server, provided they want to talk with you. As with fiber, a "utility" model for federated social media would feature public intervention at multiple layers of the system. Governments could (should!) run their own servers, providing the canonical source of government information. They can also provide turnkey cloud services for people who want to start their own services – and they can spin out the code that goes into these services into free/open source projects that others can use (and contribute to). Governments could support people who are trying to migrate off of legacy social media (for example, through library workshops and helplines), and pay to label and tag media (for example, media that is compliant with the public education curriculum). Governments could also offer public servers where you could sign up to get online – and because federated social media makes it easy to move your account from one server to another, it would be easy to move from that server to one run by a nonprofit, a co-op or a business: https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/25/eurostack/#viktor-orbans-isp Think of this pluralized utility model as being something like your city's roads. It's great for your city to provide roads, and great for them to run buses on those roads, and to create bike lanes and bike parking spots and other infrastructure. For roads to be "public," it does not follow that everything on them be licensed and operated by the municipal government: we can still have private bikes, bikeshares, regulated taxis and licensed private motor vehicles. The roads are still "public" but Boris Johnson doesn't get to decide where you can go. A utility model needn't be all-or-nothing. As the Swiss have demonstrated, public provision of various layers of the system, combined with strong regulation, combined with a public option, can deliver a best-of-all-worlds solution. Hey look at this (permalink) Nick Chater on the Nudge Movement and Blaming The Individual for Corporate Wrongdoing https://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/news/200/nick-chater-on-the-nudge-movement-and-blaming-the-individual-for-corporate-wrongdoing Why We’re Removing Our Programmatic Ads https://prospect.org/2026/04/06/why-were-removing-our-programmatic-ads/ Actually, people love to work hard https://www.anildash.com/2026/04/06/people-love-to-work-hard/ Object permanence (permalink) #15yrsago Recording industry lobbyist appointed head of copyright for European Commission https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/04/top-music-industry-lawyer-now-eu-copyright-chief/ #15yrsago How emacs got into Tron: Legacy https://web.archive.org/web/20110407224426/http://jtnimoy.net/workviewer.php?q=178 #15yrsago Dead man’s AOL account hijacked by spammer https://ip.topicbox.com/groups/ip/T274c51b2ba843fb0-Mb6bf8853b1ed34a26b07ce44/deceasesd-father-in-law-spamming-friends-and-family-two-years-on #15yrsago Scarring Party: megaphone songs, sea chanteys and dark vaudeville tunes https://web.archive.org/web/20110406044523/http://www.avclub.com/milwaukee/articles/the-scarring-party-losing-teeth%2C43871/ #15yrsago Snaggly table made out of computer junk https://web.archive.org/web/20110406044521/http://brcdesigns.com/furniture/binary-low-table #15yrsago Scott Walker gives cushy $85.5K/year government job to major donor’s young, underqualified son https://web.archive.org/web/20110406040138/https://thinkprogress.org/2011/04/04/scott-walker-hires-dropout/ #15yrsago Closing down Borders sign: “No toilets, try Amazon” https://web.archive.org/web/20110406044522/https://consumerist.com/2011/04/sign-at-borders-store-closing-in-chicago-tells-customers-where-to-find-a-restroom.html #15yrsago What is legitimate “newsgathering” and what is “piracy”? https://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2011/04/05/why-arianna-huffington-is-bill-kellers-somali-pirate/ #10yrsago Iceland’s Prime Minister asks to dissolve Parliament https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-35966412 #10yrsago Artist installs rooms beneath Milan’s sewer entrances https://web.archive.org/web/20160406132425/https://www.biancoshock.com/borderlife.html #10yrsago Banned on China’s Internet: all discussion of the Panama Papers https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-35957235 #10yrsago Google reaches into customers’ homes and bricks their gadgets https://arlogilbert.com/the-time-that-tony-fadell-sold-me-a-container-of-hummus-cb0941c762c1#.srp9ym34a #10yrsago Middle class housing projects are the Bay Area’s future https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/welcome-to-the-future-middle-class-housing-projects #10yrsago Pollster explains how Chamber of Commerce can steamroller empathetic execs into opposing progressive policies https://web.archive.org/web/20160406190524/https://gawker.com/business-execs-support-progressive-policies-but-the-ch-1768898477 #10yrsago How to write about scientists who are women https://www.doublexscience.org/the-finkbeiner-test/ #10yrsago Garden: XKCD’s latest maddening, relaxing webtoy https://xkcd.com/1663/#3978da67-1ead-45e1-a293-9c8e4918a147 #10yrsago Parent Hacks: illustrated guide is the best kind of parenting book https://memex.craphound.com/2016/04/05/parent-hacks-illustrated-guide-is-the-best-kind-of-parenting-book/ #10yrsago The Nameless City: YA graphic novel about diplomacy, hard and soft power, colonialism, bravery, and parkour https://memex.craphound.com/2016/04/05/the-nameless-city-ya-graphic-novel-about-diplomacy-hard-and-soft-power-colonialism-bravery-and-parkour/ #5yrsago How Facebook will benefit from its massive breach https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/05/zucks-oily-rags/#into-the-breach #1yrago How the world's leading breach expert got phished https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/05/troy-hunt/#teach-a-man-to-phish Upcoming appearances (permalink) Toronto: Humber Polytechnic President's Lecture Series, Apr 8 https://liberalarts.humber.ca/current-students/resources/conferences-and-lectures/presidents-lecture-series.html Montreal: Bronfman Lecture (McGill), Apr 10 https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disrupter-tickets-1982706623885 Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, Apr 10 https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/4863920260410 Toronto: DemocracyXchange, Apr 16 https://www.democracyxchange.org/news/cory-doctorow-to-open-dxc26-on-april-16 San Francisco: 2026 Berkeley Spring Forum on M&A and the Boardroom, Apr 23 https://www.theberkeleyforum.com/#agenda London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25 https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691 NYC: Enshittification at Commonweal Ventures, Apr 29 https://luma.com/ssgfvqz8 NYC: Techidemic with Sarah Jeong, Tochi Onyibuchi and Alia Dastagir (PEN World Voices), Apr 30 https://worldvoices.pen.org/event/techidemic/ Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20 https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19 https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25 https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2 SXSW London, Jun 2 https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901 Recent appearances (permalink) The internet is getting worse (CBC The National) https://youtu.be/dCVUCdg3Uqc?si=FMcA0EI_Mi13Lw-P Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today) https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech) https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074 The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah) https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doctorow-matthew-potolsky/ Latest books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/) "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. First draft complete. Second draft underway. "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE. "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X
- Pluralistic: Your boss wants to use surveillance data to cut your wages (06 Apr 2026)
- Mon, 06 Apr 2026 09:04:57 +0000
Today's links Your boss wants to use surveillance data to cut your wages: Tech rights are labor rights (again). Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Arthur C Clarke v Buddhist monks (x DST); Bomb squad v life-size Mario power-ups; Panama Papers; Chinese antitrust; Consumerism v New Jim Crow; Absurd English spelling; Save Netflix! David Cameron's dad v Panama Papers; Trick photos with a giant coin; End-stage capitalism. Upcoming appearances: Toronto, Montreal, Toronto, San Francisco, London, Berlin, NYC, Hay-on-Wye, London. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Your boss wants to use surveillance data to cut your wages (permalink) What industry calls "personalized pricing" is really surveillance pricing: using digital tools' flexibility to change the price for each user, and using surveillance data to guess the worst price you'll accept: https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/24/price-discrimination/ At root, surveillance pricing allows companies to revalue both your savings and your labor. If you get charged $2 for something I only pay $1 for, the seller is essentially reaching into your bank account and revaluing the dollars in it at 50 cents apiece. If you get paid $1 for a job that I make $2 for, then the boss is valuing your labor at 50% of my labor: https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/24/price-discrimination/# Surveillance pricing is a key part of enshittification, relying on three of the key enshittificatory factors that have transformed this era into the enshittocene: I. Monopoly: Surveillance pricing is undesirable to both workers and buyers, so in a competitive market, surveillance pricing would drive labor and consumption to non-surveilling rivals: https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/ II. Regulatory capture: Surveillance pricing only exists because of weak regulation and weak enforcement of existing regulations. To engage in surveillance pricing, a company must first put you under surveillance, something that is only possible in the absence of effective privacy law. In the USA, privacy law hasn't been updated since Congress passed a law in 1988 that banned video-store clerks from disclosing your VHS rentals: https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/31/losing-the-crypto-wars/#surveillance-monopolism In the EU, the strong privacy provisions in the GDPR have been neutralized by US tech giants who fly an Irish flag of convenience. Ireland attracts these companies by allowing them to evade their taxes, but it can only keep these companies by allowing them to break any law that gets in their way, because if Meta can pretend to be Irish this week, it could pretend to be Maltese (or Cypriot, Luxembourgeois, or Dutch) next week: https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town What's more, competition laws in the EU and the USA ban surveillance pricing, but a half-century of lax competition law enforcement has allowed companies to routinely engage in the "unfair and deceptive methods of competition" banned in both territories. III. Twiddling: "Twiddling" is my word for the way that digitized businesses can use computers' flexibility to alter their prices, offers, and other fundamentals on a per-user, per-session basis. It's not enough to spy on users: to engage in surveillance pricing, you have to be able to mobilize that surveillance data from instant to instant, changing the prices for every user. This can only be done once a business has been digitized: https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/ Combine monopoly, weak privacy law, weak competition law, and digitization, and you don't just make surveillance pricing possible – at that point, it's practically inevitable. This is what it means to create an enshittogenic policy environment: by arranging policy so that the most awful schemes of the worst people are the most profitable, you guarantee that those people will end up organizing commercial and labor markets. When surveillance pricing is applied to labor, we call it "algorithmic wage discrimination," a term coined by Veena Dubal based on her research with Uber drivers: https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men Uber uses historic data on drivers to make inferences about how economically precarious they are, and then extracts a "desperation premium" from their wages. Drivers who are pickier about which rides they accept ("pickers") are offered higher wages than drivers who take any ride ("ants"): https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4331080 On the back-end, Uber is inferring that the reason an ant will accept a worse job is that they have fewer choices – they are more strapped for cash and/or have fewer options for earning a higher wage. This is a straightforward form of algorithmic wage discrimination, using the blunt signal of how discriminating a driver is when signing onto a job to titer the subsequent wage offered to that driver. More sophisticated forms of algorithmic wage discrimination draw on external sources of data to set the price of your labor. That's the situation for contract nurses, whose traditional brick-and-mortar staffing agencies have been replaced by nationwide apps that market themselves as "Uber for nursing." These apps use commercial surveillance data from the unregulated data-broker sector to check on how much credit card debt a nurse is carrying and whether that debt is delinquent to set a wage: the more debt you have and the more dire your indebtedness is, the lower the wage you are offered (and therefore the more debt you accumulate – lather, rinse, repeat): https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point Surveillance wages are now proliferating to other parts of the economy, as "consultancies" offer software to employers that let them set all parts of your compensation – base wage, annual raises, and bonuses – based on your perceived desperation, as derived from commercial surveillance data that has been collected about you: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/employers-are-using-your-personal-data-to-figure-out-the-lowest-salary-youll-accept-c2b968fb Genna Contino's Marketwatch article on the phenomenon offers a concise definition of "surveillance wages": a system in which wages are based not on an employee’s performance or seniority, but on formulas that use their personal data, often collected without employees’ knowledge. This means that carrying a credit-card balance, taking out a payday loan, or even discussing your indebtedness on social media can all lead to lower wages in the future. Contino references a recent report released by Dubal and tech strategist Wilneida Negrón, surveying 500 large firms, which concluded that surveillance wages are now being offered in sectors as diverse as "healthcare, customer service, logistics and retail." Customers for surveillance wage tools include "Intuit, Salesforce, Colgate-Palmolive, Amwell and Healthcare Services Group": https://equitablegrowth.org/how-artificial-intelligence-uncouples-hard-work-from-fair-wages-through-surveillance-pay-practices-and-how-to-fix-it/ After a brief crackdown under Biden, the Trump regime has been extraordinarily welcoming to surveillance pricing companies, dropping investigations and cases against firms that engaged in the practice. A few states are stepping in to fill the gap, with New York state passing a rule requiring disclosure of surveillance pricing – a modest step that was nevertheless fought tooth-and-nail by the state's businesses. In Colorado, a new House bill called the "Prohibit Surveillance Data to Set Prices and Wages Act" would prohibit the use of personal information in wage-setting: https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/hb25-1264 This bill hasn't passed yet, but it's already doing useful work. Companies universally deny using surveillance data to set wages, insisting that they merely pay for consulting services that give them advice on how they could do surveillance wages – but don't actually take that advice. However, these same companies – including Uber and Lyft – are ferociously lobbying against the bill, raising an obvious question, articulated by the bill's co-sponsor Rep Javier Mabrey (D-1): if these companies don't pay surveillance wages, then "what is the problem of codifying in law that you’re not allowed to?" Surveillance wages are a rare profitable use-case for AI, in part because surveillance wages don't need to be "correct" in order to be effective. An employee who is offered a wage that's slightly higher than the lowest sum they'd accept still represents a savings to the company's wage-bill. As ever, AI is great for fully automating tasks if you don't care whether they're done well: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/22/nobodys-home/#squeeze-that-hog The fact that surveillance wages are calculated by external contractors enables employers to engage in otherwise illegal price-fixing. If all the garages in town set mechanics' wages using the same surveillance pricing tool, then a mechanic looking for a job will get the same lowball offer from all nearby employers. If those bosses were to gather around a table and fix the wage for any (or all) mechanics, that would be wildly illegal, but the fact that this is done via a software package lets the bosses claim they're not actually colluding. This is a common practice in other forms of price-fixing. We see it in meat, potato products, and, of course, rental accommodations (hey there, Realpage!). It's a genuinely stupid ruse based on the absurd idea that "it's not a crime if we do it with an app": https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/25/potatotrac/#carbo-loading Speaking of crimes that are implausibly deniable when undertaken with an app: surveillance wages also allow employers to offer lower wages to women and brown and Black people while maintaining the pretense that they're in compliance with laws banning gender and racial discrimination. In the wider economy, women and racialized people are already offered lower wages and – thanks to the legacy of racial discrimination in employment and housing – are more likely to be indebted: https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/ By tapping into data brokers' dossiers that reveal the economic precarity of jobseekers, surveillance pricing allows employers to systematically lower the wages of women and Black and brown people, who have the highest incidence of indebtedness, while still claiming to offer race- and gender-blind wages. This is a phenomenon that Patrick Ball calls "empiricism washing": first, move the illegal racist discrimination into an algorithm, then insist that "numbers can't be racist." But this isn't just about lowering wages at the bottom of the employment market. In recent history, the employers most eager to illegally lower their workers' wages are tech bosses, who had to pay massive fines for illegally colluding on "no poach" agreements to suppress the earning power of high-paid computer programmers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation (This is why the tech industry is so horny for AI – tech bosses can't wait to fire a ton of programmers and use the resulting terror to force down the wages of the remaining tech workers:) https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-wheel/#billionaire-solipsism Which means that the very programmers who write and maintain the surveillance wage software used on the rest of us are especially likely to have the tools they created turned on them. Hey look at this (permalink) Toronto’s Transit Crisis Is a Class Crisis https://jacobin.com/2026/04/toronto-transit-uber-lyft-class/ Share Festival Call for Artists 2026: “Popular Singularity” https://bruces.medium.com/share-festival-call-for-artists-2026-popular-singularity-3b8daf92370f The machines are fine. I'm worried about us. https://ergosphere.blog/posts/the-machines-are-fine/ More Than One Way to Tax a Billionaire https://4taxfairness.substack.com/p/more-than-one-way-to-tax-a-billionaire Bernie vs. Claude https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3AtWdeu_G0 Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Arthur C Clarke fights Buddhist monks over Daylight Savings Time http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4865972.stm #20yrsago What parts of the .COM space are registered? https://web.archive.org/web/20060411133458/https://www.yafla.com/dforbes/2006/03/29.html #20yrsago Bomb squad called out to “defuse” life-size Super Mario power-ups https://web.archive.org/web/20060405034455/http://www.recordpub.com/article.php?pathToFile=archive/04012006/news/&file=_news1.txt&article=1&tD=04012006 #20yrsago Poems showing the absurdities of English spelling https://web.archive.org/web/20060405223008/https://www.spellingsociety.org/news/media/poems.php #20yrsago Isaac Newton’s alchemical “chymistry” notebook scans https://web.archive.org/web/20060612203137/http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/newton/index.jsp #20yrsago Poems showing the absurdities of English spelling https://web.archive.org/web/20060405223008/https://www.spellingsociety.org/news/media/poems.php #20yrsago Isaac Newton’s alchemical “chymistry” notebook scans https://web.archive.org/web/20060612203137/http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/newton/index.jsp #15yrsago Misleading government stats and the innumerate media who repeat them https://www.badscience.net/2011/04/anarchy-for-the-uk-ish/ #15yrsago US Customs’ domain-seizure program blocks free speech, leaves alleged pirates largely unscathed https://torrentfreak.com/us-governments-pirate-domain-seizures-failed-miserably-110403/ #15yrsago Misleading government stats and the innumerate media who repeat them https://www.badscience.net/2011/04/anarchy-for-the-uk-ish/ #15yrsago US Customs’ domain-seizure program blocks free speech, leaves alleged pirates largely unscathed https://torrentfreak.com/us-governments-pirate-domain-seizures-failed-miserably-110403/ #10yrsago Panama Papers: Largest leak in history reveals political and business elite hiding trillions in offshore havens https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/03/the-panama-papers-how-the-worlds-rich-and-famous-hide-their-money-offshore #10yrsago America’s teachers are being trained in a harsh interrogation technique that produces false confessions https://web.archive.org/web/20160404143447/https://www.alternet.org/education/why-are-k-12-school-leaders-being-trained-coercive-interrogation-techniques #10yrsago LA’s new rule: homeless people are only allowed to own one trashcan’s worth of things https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-apartments-demolished-20160402-story.html #10yrsago Save Netflix! https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/save-netflix #10yrsago The TSA spent $1.4M on an app to tell it who gets a random search https://kevin.burke.dev/kevin/tsa-randomizer-app-cost-336000/ #10yrsago Iceland’s Prime Minister says he won’t resign, mass demonstrations gain momentum https://icelandmonitor.mbl.is/news/politics_and_society/2016/03/31/anti_government_demo_planned_for_monday/ #10yrsago Panama Papers reveal the tax-avoidance strategies of David Cameron’s father https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/04/panama-papers-david-cameron-father-tax-bahamas #10yrsago Studio sculpts giant coin, photographs it alongside normal objects to make them look tiny https://skrekkogle.com/projects/50c/ #5yrsago China's antitrust surge https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/03/ambulatory-wallets/#sectoral-balances #5yrsago Consumerism won't defeat Georgia's Jim Crow https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/03/ambulatory-wallets/#christmas-voting-turkeys #1yrago End-stage capitalism https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/04/anything-that-cant-go-on/#forever-eventually-stops Upcoming appearances (permalink) Toronto: Humber Polytechnic President's Lecture Series, Apr 8 https://liberalarts.humber.ca/current-students/resources/conferences-and-lectures/presidents-lecture-series.html Montreal: Bronfman Lecture (McGill), Apr 10 https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disrupter-tickets-1982706623885 Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, Apr 10 https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/4863920260410 Toronto: DemocracyXchange, Apr 16 https://www.democracyxchange.org/news/cory-doctorow-to-open-dxc26-on-april-16 San Francisco: 2026 Berkeley Spring Forum on M&A and the Boardroom, Apr 23 https://www.theberkeleyforum.com/#agenda London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25 https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691 NYC: Enshittification at Commonweal Ventures, Apr 29 https://luma.com/ssgfvqz8 NYC: Techidemic with Sarah Jeong, Tochi Onyibuchi and Alia Dastagir (PEN World Voices), Apr 30 https://worldvoices.pen.org/event/techidemic/ Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20 https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19 https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25 https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2 SXSW London, Jun 2 https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901 Recent appearances (permalink) The internet is getting worse (CBC The National) https://youtu.be/dCVUCdg3Uqc?si=FMcA0EI_Mi13Lw-P Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today) https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech) https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074 The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah) https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doctorow-matthew-potolsky/ Latest books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/) "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. First draft complete. Second draft underway. "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE. "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X
- Pluralistic: EU ready to cave to Trump on tech (04 Apr 2026)
- Sat, 04 Apr 2026 07:49:19 +0000
Today's links EU ready to cave to Trump on tech: Surrendermonkeys ahoy. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: "Among a Thousand Fireflies"; "fiscal" not "physical"; Ontario's pusher premiere can't distribute vaccines; You need your head examined (if you trust an AI therapist); Women tell Pence about their periods; Zombie economy and digital arm-breakers; The trouble with tariffs. Upcoming appearances: Toronto, Montreal, Toronto, San Francisco, London, Berlin, NYC, Hay-on-Wye, London. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. EU ready to cave to Trump on tech (permalink) Crises precipitate change. That's no reason to induce a crisis, but you'd be a fool to let a crisis go to waste. Donald Trump is the greatest crisis of our young century, and the EU looks set to squander the opportunity, to its own terrible detriment. For more than a decade, it's been clear that the American internet was not fit for purpose. The whistleblowers Mark Klein and Edward Snowden revealed that the US had weaponized its status as the world's transoceanic fiber-optic hub to spy on the entire planet: https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-11-26-difficult-multipolarism-eurostack-5a527c32f149 US tech giants flouted privacy laws, gleefully plundering the world's cash and data with products that they remorselessly enshittified: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/30/zucksauce/#gandersauce American companies repurposed their over-the-air software update capabilities to remotely brick expensive machinery in service to geopolitical priorities: https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/ Then Trump and his tech companies started attacking key public institutions around the world, shutting down access for senior judges who attempted to hold Trump's international authoritarian allies to account for their crimes: https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/20/post-american-internet/#huawei-with-american-characteristics If Trump wants to steal Greenland, he doesn't need tanks or missiles. He can just tell Microsoft and Oracle to brick the entire Danish state and all of its key firms, blocking their access to their email archives, files, databases, and other key administrative tools. If Denmark still holds out, Trump can brick all their tractors, smart speakers, and phones. If Denmark still won't give up Greenland, Trump could blackhole all Danish IP addresses for the world's majority of transoceanic fiber. At the click of a mouse, Trump could shut down the world's supply of Lego, Ozempic, and delicious, lethally strong black licorice. Now, these latent offensive capabilities were obvious long before Trump, but the presidents who weaponized them in the pre-Trump era did so in subtle and deniable ways, or under a state of exception (e.g. in response to spectacular terrorist attacks or in the immediate aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine) that let bystanders assure themselves that this wouldn't become a routine policy. After all, America profited so much from the status quo in which America and its trading partners all pretended that US tech wouldn't be weaponized for geopolitical aims, so a US president would be a fool to shatter the illusion. And even if the president was so emotionally incontinent that he demanded the naked weaponization of America's defective, boobytrapped tech exports, the power blocs that the president relies on would stop him, because they are so marinated in the rich broth that America drained from the world using Big Tech. This is "status quo bias" in action. No one wants to let go of the vine they're swinging from until they have a new vine firmly in their grasp – but you can't reach the next vine unless you release your death-grip on your current one. So it was that, year after year, the world allowed itself to become more dependent on America's easily weaponizable tech, making the tech both more dangerous and harder to escape. Enter Trump (a crisis) (and crises precipitate change). Under Trump, the illusion of a safe interdependence crumbled. Every day, in new and increasingly alarming ways, Trump makes it clear that America doesn't have allies or trading partners, only adversaries and rivals. Every day, Trump proves to the world that American tech isn't merely untrustworthy – it's a live, dire, urgent danger to your state, your companies, and your people. The best time to get shut of the American internet was 15 years ago. The second best time is right fucking now. NOW! The result is the burgeoning movement to build a "post-American internet." In Canada, PM Mark Carney's announcement of a "rupture" has the country rethinking its deep connections to the American internet and asking what it could do to escape it: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/27/i-want-to-do-it/#now-make-me-do-it Europe, meanwhile, has multiple, advanced, well-funded initiatives to leave the American internet behind and migrate to a post-American internet, like "Eurostack" and the European Digital Infrastructure Consortium: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/edic But status quo bias exerts a powerful gravity. A reactionary counterrevolution is being waged in the European Commission – the permanent bureaucracy that executes Europe's laws and regulations. Within the EC, an ascendant faction has announced plans for a "dialogue" with representatives from the Trump regime to let them direct the enforcement of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and Digital Services Act (DSA), Europe's landmark 2024 anti-Big Tech regulations: https://www.politico.eu/article/fatal-decision-eu-slammed-for-caving-to-us-pressure-on-digital-rules/ The DMA and DSA require America's tech giants to open up their platforms in ways that would halt the plunder of Europeans' private data and cash. US tech giants have flatly refused to comply with these rules, relying on Trump to get them out of any obligations under EU law: https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/26/empty-threats/#500-million-affluent-consumers That's a sound bet. After all, the last thing Trump did before his inauguration was publicly announce his intention to destroy any country that attempted to enforce these laws: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/23/us/politics/trump-davos-europe-tariffs.html He's making good on his threats. He's already sanctioned a group of officials who helped draft the DSA: https://www.npr.org/2025/12/24/nx-s1-5655855/trump-administration-bars-5-europeans-from-entry-to-the-u-s-over-alleged-censorship And he's ordered his tech companies to turn over the private emails and messages of other European officials, so he can identify the ones most dangerous to US tech plunder and sanction them, too: https://www.politico.eu/article/us-congress-judiciary-committee-big-tech-private-communication-eu-officials/ The quislings and appeasers in the Commission who've been spooked by Trump's belligerence (or tempted by offers of cushy jobs in Big Tech after they leave public service) are selling out the EU's future. Caving to Trump won't make him more favorably disposed to Europe or Europeans. Trump treats every capitulation as a sign of weakness that signals that he can safely ignore his end of the bargain and demand twice as much. For Trump, the "art of the deal" can be summed up in one word: reneging. Within the EU, there's fury at the Commission's announcement of "dialogue." As Politico's Milena Wälde reports, lawmakers like Alexandra Geese (Greens) say that this is a move that eliminates the "sovereign path for Europe" by letting tech giants "grade their own homework." She calls it a "fatal decision for our companies and our democracy." Moving to the post-American internet is hard – but it will only get harder. Sure, Europe could wait for the next crisis to let go of the Big Tech vine and grab the Eurostack one, but that next crisis will be far, far worse. The EU can't afford to wait for Trump to brick one or more of its member states to (finally, at long last) take this threat seriously: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition Hey look at this (permalink) The Far-Right Cash Machine https://prospect.org/2026/04/02/apr-2026-magazine-far-right-cash-machine-racist-crowdfunding/ Homocore Anthology https://www.flukemags.com/product/homocore Lessons from History: The DOJ vs Microsoft https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/our-submission-to-the-cma-on-apples-ios-interoperability-commitments/#3-lessons-from-history-the-doj-vs-microsoft Data Sharing and Syndication Remedies in US v Google https://insights.sumitsharma.consulting/p/google-search-remedies-implementation?hide_intro_popup=true Who Goes AI? https://www.todayintabs.com/p/who-goes-ai Object permanence (permalink) #10yrsago Among a Thousand Fireflies: children’s book shows the sweet, alien love stories unfolding in our own backyards https://memex.craphound.com/2016/04/01/among-a-thousand-fireflies-childrens-book-shows-the-sweet-alien-love-stories-unfolding-in-our-own-backyards/ #10yrsago After biggest bribery scandal in history, police raids and investigations https://www.smh.com.au/business/police-raids-and-more-revelations-the-fallout-of-the-unaoil-scandal-20160401-gnw9mx.html #10yrsago Bernie Sanders’ South Bronx rally, featuring Rosario Dawson, Spike Lee, and Residente https://www.c-span.org/program/campaign-2016/senator-bernie-sanders-campaign-rally-in-south-bronx/437114 #10yrsago Freshman Missouri Rep almost made it 3 months before introducing bill urging members to say “fiscal,” not “physical” https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/03/31/hero-lawmaker-urges-colleagues-to-stop-saying-physical-when-they-mean-fiscal/ #10yrsago Indiana women phone the governor’s office to tell him about their periods https://web.archive.org/web/20160401170206/https://fusion.net/story/286941/periods-for-pence-indiana-women-calling-governor/ #10yrsago United pilot orders Arab-American family off his flight for “safety” https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/national-international/united-airlines-arab-american-plane/58370/ #10yrsago 33 state Democratic parties launder $26M from millionaires for Hillary https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/01/how-hillary-clinton-bought-the-loyalty-of-33-state-democratic-parties/ #10yrsago White SC cops pull black passenger out of car, take turns publicly cavity-searching him https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2016/04/01/video-shows-white-cops-performing-roadside-cavity-search-of-black-man/ #5yrsago The zombie economy and digital arm-breakers https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers #5yrsago Ontario's drug-dealer premier is shockingly bad at distributing vaccines https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/01/incompetent-drug-dealer/#what-a-dope #5yrsago The zombie economy and digital arm-breakers https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers #1yrago What's wrong with tariffs https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/02/me-or-your-lying-eyes/#spherical-cows-on-frictionless-surfaces #1yrago What's wrong with tariffs https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/02/me-or-your-lying-eyes/#spherical-cows-on-frictionless-surfaces #1yrago Anyone who trusts an AI therapist needs their head examined https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/01/doctor-robo-blabbermouth/#fool-me-once-etc-etc Upcoming appearances (permalink) Toronto: Humber Polytechnic President's Lecture Series, Apr 8 https://liberalarts.humber.ca/current-students/resources/conferences-and-lectures/presidents-lecture-series.html Montreal: Bronfman Lecture (McGill), Apr 10 https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disrupter-tickets-1982706623885 Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, Apr 10 https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/4863920260410 Toronto: DemocracyXchange, Apr 16 https://www.democracyxchange.org/news/cory-doctorow-to-open-dxc26-on-april-16 San Francisco: 2026 Berkeley Spring Forum on M&A and the Boardroom, Apr 23 https://www.theberkeleyforum.com/#agenda London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25 https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691 NYC: Enshittification at Commonweal Ventures, Apr 29 https://luma.com/ssgfvqz8 NYC: Techidemic with Sarah Jeong, Tochi Onyibuchi and Alia Dastagir (PEN World Voices), Apr 30 https://worldvoices.pen.org/event/techidemic/ Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20 https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19 https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25 https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2 SXSW London, Jun 2 https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901 Recent appearances (permalink) Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today) https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech) https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074 The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah) https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doctorow-matthew-potolsky/ Tanner Humanities Lecture (U Utah) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Yf1nSyekI Latest books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/) "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. First draft complete. Second draft underway. "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE. "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. 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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- Pluralistic: It's extremely good that Claude's source-code leaked (02 Apr 2026)
- Thu, 02 Apr 2026 10:19:42 +0000
Today's links It's extremely good that Claude's source-code leaked: Careful what you wish for. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: "Elephantmen"; Eve Online war bankrolled by casino; Phishers take Mattel for $3m; Sanders wins 6 primaries, CNN airs Jesus "documentary"; Cuba is a vaccine powerhouse; Embroidered Toast; Mass layoffs at ATT. Upcoming appearances: Toronto, Montreal, Toronto, San Francisco, London, Berlin, NYC, Hay-on-Wye, London. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. It's extremely good that Claude's source-code leaked (permalink) Anthropic's developers made an extremely basic configuration error, and as a result, the source-code for Claude Code – the company's flagship coding assistant product – has leaked and is being eagerly analyzed by many parties: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47586778 In response, Anthropic is flooding the internet with "takedown notices." These are a special kind of copyright-based censorship demand established by section 512 of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA 512), allowing for the removal of material without any kind of evidence, let alone a judicial order: https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-races-to-contain-leak-of-code-behind-claude-ai-agent-4bc5acc7 Copyright is a "strict liability" statute, meaning that you can be punished for violating copyright even if you weren't aware that you had done so. What's more, "intermediaries" – like web hosts, social media platforms, search engines, and even caching servers – can be held liable for the copyright violations their users engage in. The liability is tremendous: the DMCA provides for $150,000 per infringement. DMCA 512 is meant to offset this strict liability. After all, there's no way for a platform to know whether one of its users is infringing copyright – even if a user uploads a popular song or video, the provider can't know whether they've licensed the work for distribution (or even if they are the creator of that work). A cumbersome system in which users would upload proof that they have such a license wouldn't just be onerous – it would still permit copyright infringement, because there's no way for an intermediary to know whether the distribution license the user provided was genuine. As a compromise, DMCA 512 absolves intermediaries from liability, if they "expeditiously remove" material upon notice that it infringes someone's copyright. In practice, that means that anyone can send a notice to any intermediary and have anything removed from the internet. The intermediary who receives this notice can choose to ignore it, but if the notice turns out to be genuine, they can end up on the hook for $150,000 per infringement. The intermediary can also choose to allow their user to "counternotify" (dispute the accusation) and can choose to reinstate the material, but they don't have to. Just as an intermediary can't determine whether a user has the rights to the things they post, they also can't tell if the person on the other end of a takedown notice has the right to demand its removal. In practice, this means that a takedown notice, no matter how flimsy, has a very good chance of making something disappear from the internet – forever. From the outset, DMCA 512 was the go-to tool for corporate censorship, the best way to cover up misdeeds. I first got involved in this back in 2003, when leaked email memos from Diebold's voting machine division revealed that the company knew that its voting machines were wildly insecure, but they were nevertheless selling them to local election boards across America, who were scrambling to replace their mechanical voting machines in the wake of the 2000 Bush v Gore "hanging chad" debacle, which led to Bush stealing the presidency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot The stakes couldn't be higher, in other words. Diebold – whose CEO was an avowed GW Bush partisan who'd promised to "deliver the votes for Bush" – was the country's leading voting machine supplier. The company knew its voting machines were defective, that they frequently crashed and lost their vote counts on election night, and that Diebold technicians were colluding with local electoral officials to secretly "estimate" the lost vote totals so that no one would hold either the official or Diebold responsible for these defective machines: https://www.salon.com/2003/09/23/bev_harris/ Diebold sent thousands of DMCA 512 takedown notices in an attempt to suppress the leaked memos. Eventually, EFF stepped in to provide pro-bono counsel to the Online Policy Group and ended Diebold's flood: https://www.eff.org/cases/online-policy-group-v-diebold Diebold wasn't the last company to figure out how to abuse copyright to censor information of high public interest. There's a whole industry of shady "reputation management" companies that collect large sums in exchange for scrubbing the internet of information their clients want removed from the public eye. They specialize in sexual abusers, war criminals, torturers, and fraudsters, and their weapon of choice is the takedown notice. Jeffrey Epstein spent tens of thousands of dollars on "reputation management" services to clean up his online profile: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/18/business/media/jeffrey-epstein-online.html There are lots of ways to use the takedown system to get true information about your crimes removed from the internet. My favorite is the one employed by Eliminalia, one of the sleazier reputation laundries (even by the industry's dismal standards). Eliminalia sets up WordPress sites and copies press articles that cast its clients in an unfavorable light to these sites, backdating them so they appear to have been published before the originals. They swap out the bylines for fictitious ones, then send takedowns to Google and other search engines to get the "infringing" stories purged from their search indices. Once the original articles have been rendered invisible to internet searchers, Eliminalia takes down their copy, and the story of their client's war crimes, rapes, or fraud disappears from the public eye: https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#dark-ops The takedown system is so tilted in favor of censorship that it takes a massive effort to keep even the smallest piece of information online in the face of a determined adversary. In 2007, the key for AACS (a way of encrypting video for "digital rights management") leaked online. The key was a 16-digit number, the kind of thing you could fit in a crossword puzzle, but the position of the industry consortium that created the key was that this was an illegal integer. They sent hundreds of thousands of takedowns over the number, and it was only the determined action of an army of users that kept the number online: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controversy The shoot-first, ask-questions-never nature of takedown notices makes for fertile ground for scammers of all kinds, but the most ironic takedown ripoffs are the Youtube copystrike blackmailers. After Viacom sued Youtube in 2007 over copyright infringement, Google launched its own in-house copyright management system, meant to address Viacom's principal grievance in the suit. Viacom was angry that after they had something removed from Youtube, another user could re-upload it, and they'd have to send another takedown, playing Wack-a-Mole with the whole internet. Viacom didn't want a takedown system, they wanted a staydown system, whereby they could supply Google with a list of the works whose copyrights they controlled and then Youtube would prevent anyone from uploading those works. (This was extremely funny, because Viacom admitted in court that its marketing departments would "rough up" clips of its programming and upload them to Youtube, making them appear to be pirate copies, in a bid to interest Youtube users in Viacom's shows, and sometimes Viacom's lawyers would get confused and send threatening letters to Youtube demanding that these be removed:) https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/broadcast-yourself/ Youtube's notice-and-staydown system is Content ID, an incredibly baroque system that allows copyright holders (and people pretending to be copyright holders) to "claim" video and sound files, and block others from posting them. No one – not even the world's leading copyright experts – can figure out how to use this system to uphold copyright: https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/27/nuke-first/#ask-questions-never However, there is a large cohort of criminals and fraudsters who have mastered Content ID and they use it to blackmail independent artists. You see, Content ID implements a "three strikes" policy: if you are accused of three acts of copyright infringement, Youtube permanently deletes your videos and bars you from the platform. For performers who rely on Youtube to earn their living – whether through ad-revenues or sponsorships or as a promotional vehicle to sell merchandise, recordings and tickets – the "copystrike" is an existential risk. Enter the fraudster. A fraudster can set up multiple burner Youtube accounts and file spurious copyright complaints against a creator (usually a musician). After two of these copystrikes are accepted and the performer is just one strike away from losing their livelihood, the fraudster contacts the performer and demands blackmail money to rescind the complaints, threatening to file that final strike and put the performer out of business: https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/08/copyfraud/#beethoven-just-wrote-music The fact that copyright – nominally a system intended to protect creative workers – is weaponized against the people it is meant to serve is ironic, but it's not unusual. Copyright law has been primarily shaped by creators' bosses – media companies like Viacom – who brandish "starving artists" as a reason to enact policies that ultimately benefit capital at the expense of labor. That was what inspired Rebecca Giblin and me to write our 2022 book Chokepoint Capitalism: how is it that copyright has expanded in every way for 40 years (longer duration, wider scope, higher penalties), resulting in media companies that are more profitable than ever, with higher gross and net revenues, even as creative workers have grown poorer, both in total compensation and in the share of the profits they generate? https://chokepointcapitalism.com/ The first half of Chokepoint Capitalism is a series of case studies that dissect the frauds and scams that both media and tech companies use to steal from creative workers. The second half are a series of "shovel-ready" policy proposals for new laws and rules that would actually put money in artists' pockets. Some of these policy prescriptions are copyright-related, but not all of them. For example, we have a chapter on how the Hollywood "guild" system (which allows unionized workers to bargain with all the studios at once) has been a powerful antidote to corporate power. This is called "sectoral bargaining" and it's been illegal since 1947's Taft-Hartley Act, but the Hollywood guilds were grandfathered in. When we wrote about the power of sectoral bargaining, it was in reference to the Writers Guild's incredible triumph over the four giant talent agencies, who'd invented a scam that inverted the traditional revenue split between writer and agent, so the agencies were taking in 90% and the writers were getting just 10%: https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/06/no-vitiated-air/#WME-CAA-next Two years later, the Hollywood Writers struck again, this time over AI in the writers' room, securing a stunning victory over the major studios: https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/ Notably, the writers strike was a labor action, not a copyright action. The writers weren't demanding a new copyright that would allow them to control whether their work could be used to train an AI. They struck for the right not to have their wages eroded by AI – to have the right to use (or not use) AI, as they saw fit, without risking their livelihoods. Right now, many media companies are demanding a new copyright that would allow them to control AI training, and many creative workers have joined in this call. The media companies aren't arguing against infringing uses of AI models – they're arguing that the mere creation of such a model infringes copyright. They claim that making a transient copy of a work, analyzing that work, and publishing that analysis is a copyright infringement: https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids Here's a good rule of thumb: any time your boss demands a new rule, you should be very skeptical about whether that rule will benefit you. It's clear that the media companies that have sued the AI giants aren't "anti-AI." They don't want to prevent AI from replacing creative workers – they just want to control how that happens. When Disney and Universal sue Midjourney, it's not to prevent AI models from being trained on their catalogs and used to pauperize the workers whose work is in those catalogs. What these companies want is to be paid a license fee for access to their catalogs, and then they want the resulting models to be exclusive to them, and not available to competitors: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/03/its-a-trap-2/#inheres-at-the-moment-of-fixation These companies are violently allergic to paying creative workers. Disney takes the position that when it buys a company like Lucasfilm, it secures the right to publish the works Lucasfilm commissioned, but not the obligation to pay the royalties that Lucasfilm owes when those works are sold: https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/30/disney-still-must-pay/#pay-the-writer As Theresa Nielsen Hayden quipped during the Napster Wars: "Just because you're on their side, it doesn't mean they're on your side." If these companies manage to get copyright law expanded to restrict scraping, analysis, and publication of factual information, they won't use those new powers to increase creators' pay – they'll use them the same way they've used every new copyright created in the past 40 years, to make themselves richer at the expense of artists: https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/03/just-a-stick/#authorsbargain The Claude Code leak is full of fascinating information about a tool that – like Diebold's voting machines – is at the very center of the most important policy debates of our time. Here's just one example: Claude is almost certainly implicated in the US missile that murdered a building full of little girls in Iran last month: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/26/ai-got-the-blame-for-the-iran-school-bombing-the-truth-is-far-more-worrying Of course I see the irony. Anthropic has taken an extremely aggressive posture on copyright's "limitations and exceptions," arguing that it can train its models on any information it can find, and that it can knowingly download massive troves of infringing works for that purpose. It's darkly hilarious to see the company firehosing copyright complaints by the thousands in order to prevent the dissemination, dissection and discussion of the source-code that leaked due to the company's gross incompetence: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/26/04/01/158240/anthropic-issues-copyright-takedown-requests-to-remove-8000-copies-of-claude-code-source-code#comments But what's objectionable about Anthropic – and the AI sector – isn't copyright. The thing that makes these companies disgusting is their gleeful, fraudulent trumpeting about how their products will destroy the livelihoods of every kind of worker: https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete And it's their economic fraud, the inflation of a bubble that will destroy the economy when it bursts: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-subprime-ai-crisis-is-here/ It's their enthusiastic deployment of AI tools for mass surveillance and mass killing. (Anthropic is no exception, despite what you may have heard:) https://www.thetechbubble.info/p/how-much-a-dollar-cost If the media bosses get their way, and manage to make it even more illegal – and practically harder – to host, discuss, and publish facts about copyrighted works, then leaks like the Claude Code disclosures will never see the light of day. It's only because of decades of hard-fought battles to push back on this nonsense that we are able to identify and learn about the defects in Claude Code that are revealed by this source-code leak. I'm angry about the AI industry, but not because of copyright. I'm angry at them for the reasons Cat Valente articulated so well in her "Blood Money" essay: https://catvalente.substack.com/p/blood-money-the-anthropic-settlement These companies' stated goals are terrible: They took the books I wrote for children and used them to make it possible for children to not bother with reading ever again. They took the books I wrote about love to create chatbots that isolate people and prevent them from finding human love in the real world, that make it difficult for them to even stand real love, which is not always agreeable, not always positive, not always focused on end-user engagement. They took the books I wrote about hope and glitter in the face of despair and oppression and used it to make a Despair-and-Oppression generator. These goals are entirely compatible with copyright. The New York Times is suing over AI – and they're licensing their writers' words to train an AI model: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/business/media/new-york-times-amazon-ai-licensing.html The NYT wants more copyright. You know what the NYT doesn't want? More labor rights. The NYT are vicious union-busters: https://actionnetwork.org/letters/new-york-times-stop-union-busting If we creative workers are going to pour our scarce resources into getting a new policy to address the threats that our bosses – and the AI companies they are morally and temperamentally indistinguishable from – represent to our livelihoods, then let that new policy be a renewed sectoral bargaining right for every worker. It was sectoral bargaining (a collective, solidaristic right) and not copyright (an individual, commercial right) that saw off AI in the Hollywood writers' strike. Copyright positions the creative worker as a small business – an LLC with an MFA – bargaining B2B with another firm. To the extent that copyright helps us, it is largely incidental. Sure, we were able to file for a few thousand bucks per book that Anthropic downloaded from a pirate site to train its models on. But Anthropic doesn't have to use a shadow library to get those books – it can just pay our bosses to get them. It's great that Claude Code's source is online. It's great that we have the ability to pore over, analyze and criticize this code, which has become so consequential in so many ways. It's great the copyright is weak enough that this is possible (for now). Expanding copyright will gain little for creative workers, except for a new reason to be angry about how our audiences experience our work. Expanding labor rights will gain much, for every worker, including our audiences. It's an idea that our bosses – and AI hucksters – hate with every fiber of their beings. Hey look at this (permalink) Dear Ms. Goode https://michaelchabon.substack.com/p/dear-ms-goode INX preparing for immediate price increases https://www.labelandnarrowweb.com/breaking-news/inx-preparing-for-immediate-price-increases/ New Washington law bans noncompete agreements https://www.seattletimes.com/business/local-business/new-washington-law-bans-noncompete-agreements/ Dopamine Is Not Why Kids Love Social Media https://www.usermag.co/p/dopamine-is-not-why-kids-love-social THIS IS WHAT CORPORATE CAPTURE LOOKS LIKE! https://corporateeurope.org/en/2026/04/what-corporate-capture-looks Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Desperate WI Republican congressman struggling to get by on $174K turns to copyright trolling https://web.archive.org/web/20110404001110/http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/03/gopers-demand-sean-duffy-salary-tape-be-pulled-from-the-internet.php?ref=fpblg #15yrsago Redditor outs astroturfer with 20 accounts https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/gepnl/gamepro_g4tv_and_vgchartz_gamrfeed_have_been/ #15yrsago Britain’s back-room negotiations to establish a national, extrajudicial Internet censorship regime https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/minister-confirms-voluntary-site-blocking-discussions/ #15yrsago Elephantmen: Dr Moreau meets apocalyptic noir science fiction comic https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/31/elephantmen-dr-moreau-meets-apocalyptic-noir-science-fiction-comic/ #10yrsago Bitcoin transactions could consume as much energy as Denmark by the year 2020 https://web.archive.org/web/20160401031103/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/bitcoin-could-consume-as-much-electricity-as-denmark-by-2020 #10yrsago Online casino bankrolls largest-ever, ruinously expensive war in Eve Online https://www.polygon.com/2016/3/31/11334014/eve-online-war/ #10yrsago Russia bans Polish “Communist Monopoly” board-game https://www.newsweek.com/russia-bans-polands-communist-monopoly-being-anti-russian-438972?rx=us #10yrsago “Reputation management” companies apparently induce randos to perjure themselves by pretending to be anonymous posters https://www.techdirt.com/2016/03/31/latest-reputation-management-bogus-defamation-suits-bogus-companies-against-bogus-defendants/ #10yrsago Leak: Alaska superdelegate denies duty to represent her state’s voters in 2016 elections https://web.archive.org/web/20160717042158/http://usuncut.com/politics/alaska-superdelegate/ #10yrsago Phishers trick Mattel into transferring $3M to a Chinese bank https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mattel-vs-chinese-cyberthieves-its-no-game/ #10yrsago CNN celebrates Sanders’ six primary victories by airing a “documentary” about Jesus https://fair.org/home/as-sanders-surges-cable-news-runs-prison-reality-show-jesus-documentary/ #10yrsago Hungarian ruling party wants to ban all working cryptography https://web.archive.org/web/20160405014411/http://budapestbeacon.com/public-policy/fidesz-wants-make-encryption-software-illegal/33462 #10yrsago Embroidered toast https://www.behance.net/gallery/31502957/Everyday-bread# #5yrsago AI has a GIGO problem https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/31/vaccine-for-the-global-south/#imagenot #5yrsago Sacklers to use Purdue bankruptcy to escape justice https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/31/vaccine-for-the-global-south/#claims-extinguished #5yrsago Cuba is a vaccine powerhouse https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/31/vaccine-for-the-global-south/#Soberana-Abdala #5yrsago AT&T will lay off thousands more https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/31/vaccine-for-the-global-south/#we-dont-have-to-care #1yrago Private-sector Trumpism https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/31/madison-square-garden/#autocrats-of-trade Upcoming appearances (permalink) Toronto: Humber Polytechnic President's Lecture Series, Apr 8 https://liberalarts.humber.ca/current-students/resources/conferences-and-lectures/presidents-lecture-series.html Montreal: Bronfman Lecture (McGill), Apr 10 https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disrupter-tickets-1982706623885 Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, Apr 10 https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/4863920260410 Toronto: DemocracyXchange, Apr 16 https://www.democracyxchange.org/news/cory-doctorow-to-open-dxc26-on-april-16 San Francisco: 2026 Berkeley Spring Forum on M&A and the Boardroom, Apr 23 https://www.theberkeleyforum.com/#agenda London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25 https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691 NYC: Enshittification at Commonweal Ventures, Apr 29 https://luma.com/ssgfvqz8 NYC: Techidemic with Sarah Jeong, Tochi Onyibuchi and Alia Dastagir (PEN World Voices), Apr 30 https://worldvoices.pen.org/event/techidemic/ Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20 https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19 https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25 https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2 SXSW London, Jun 2 https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901 Recent appearances (permalink) Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today) https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech) https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074 The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah) https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doctorow-matthew-potolsky/ Tanner Humanities Lecture (U Utah) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Yf1nSyekI Latest books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/) "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. First draft complete. Second draft underway. "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE. "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X
- Pluralistic: Trumpismo vs minilateralism (01 Apr 2026)
- Wed, 01 Apr 2026 10:59:24 +0000
Today's links Trumpismo vs minilateralism: The enemy gets a vote. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: My new sigfile is unstoppable; TBL on the future of the web (2006); Wonder Woman sweater pattern; Unpatchable drug cabinets; 50-building mural; DRM v (the next) Netflix. Upcoming appearances: Toronto, Montreal, Toronto, San Francisco, London, Berlin, NYC, Hay-on-Wye, London. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Trumpismo vs minilateralism (permalink) As November Kelly has pointed out, the weirdest thing about Trumpismo is how the man seethes and rails against a game that is thoroughly rigged in America's favor, because he resents having to pretend to play the game at all: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/26/i-dont-want/#your-greenback-dollar Before Trump, the deal was that everyone would pretend that we had a "rules-based international order" in which every country got a fair deal, even as America cheated like hell and sucked the world dry. It's really impossible to overstate how advantageous this was to America. By pretending to be a neutral interchange spot for transoceanic fiber cables, it got to spy on the world's internet traffic: https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/26/difficult-multipolarism/#eurostack By pretending to have a neutral currency, it got to exercise "dollar dominance" through which the nations of the world sent America the things they dug out of the ground or built in their factories, in exchange for America making small adjustments to a spreadsheet at the Federal Reserve. And by pretending its tech exports were neutral platforms, America got to raid the world's private data and bank accounts, spying and looting to its heart's content. When Trump kicked off his campaign of incontinent belligerence – putting tariffs on the exports of countries populated only by penguins, trying to steal Greenland – it became impossible for the world's leaders to carry on this pretense. This led to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney – the world's most Davos man – standing up at this year's World Economic Forum to denounce the whole post-war settlement as a bullshit arrangement, announcing that we were in a period of "rupture" and promising a new world of "variable geometry" in which "middle powers" would exist in overlapping webs of alliances, without the USA: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/27/i-want-to-do-it/#now-make-me-do-it Now, thanks to Trump's America First agenda, America's many advantages are collapsing. The dollar is in retreat, with Ethiopia revaluing its national debt in Chinese renminbi: https://fidelpost.com/ethiopia-and-china-move-toward-final-stage-of-debt-restructuring-agreement/ Even worse: Trump's disastrous war of choice in Iran is heading for a humiliating defeat for the dollar, with Iran announcing that any peace deal will require a $2m/ship toll to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, a toll they're already collecting, payable only in renminbi: https://www.nbcnews.com/world/iran/irans-tehran-toll-booth-forces-tankers-pay-millions-leave-strait-hormu-rcna265258 (I really hope Trump's plan to rename it the "Strait of Trump" catches on, so that his name in invoked with every tanker that traverses the strait, weakening the dollar and America's power – a very fitting legacy.) For the past quarter-century, I've fought the US Trade Representative in various international fora, as the USTR piled all kinds of conditions America's trading partners that made it impossible to pursue any kind of technological sovereignty: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition Every now and then, I think about how furious the USTR must be, watching Trump blunder through all the subtle traps they wove around the planet. Take the "digital trade agenda," a set of policies that the US has made its top priority for a decade. Countries that succumbed to the digital trade agenda had to agree not to pursue "data localization" (rules that ban companies from moving or storing data about the people of your country outside of its borders), and they had to agree to duty-free status for digital exports like apps, music, games, ebooks and videos. Today, the digital trade agenda is in tatters. Data localization is the top priority, with projects like the Eurostack and the European Digital Infrastructure Consortium breaking all land-speed records to build on-shore apps and data-centers that will keep data out of the hands of American companies and the American government: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/edic And this week, duty-free status for digital assets hit the skids when a meeting of the World Trade Organization saw America's demands for a 10-year renewal of a global deal fail because Brazil wouldn't agree to it. Brazil has good reasons to mistrust the digital trade agenda, after Trump and Microsoft colluded to shut down a high court judge's online life in retaliation for passing sentence on the Trump-allied former dictator, Jair Bolsonaro: https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0211 Brazil blocked the 10-year renewal of the duty-free status of digital exports, worldwide. In its place, the US got a two-year renewal – meaning that US companies' ability to export their digital products after 2028 will depend on whatever Trump does in the next two years, a period during which we know Trump is going to be a raging asshole (assuming he doesn't have a stroke first). Even more interesting: Brazil struck a "minilateral" digital duty-free deal with 66 non-US countries, including Canada and the EU: https://www.csmonitor.com/Editorials/the-monitors-view/2026/0331/EU-and-Canada-lean-into-a-new-world-role?icid=rss Now, the US is a powerhouse exporter of digital goods, and has been since the start. This was such a given that in Neal Stephenson's 1992 cyberpunk classic Snow Crash, Stephenson imagined a future where the US had all but collapsed, save for the three things it did better than anyone else in the world: "music, movies and microcode": https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015147/Music-Movies-Microcode-High-Speed Today, America's media and software industries are dying, and Trump is holding a pillow over their faces. He stole Tiktok and gave it to his buddy Larry Ellison, whose failson's acquisition and merger of two of the five remaining studios Trump also waved through: https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/28/golden-mean/#reality-based-community Game studios are ensloppifying their flagship products, alienating their most ardent customers, and are laying off thousands of programmers and artists following incestuous mergers that leave them hopelessly bloated: https://www.blog.udonis.co/mobile-marketing/mobile-games/activision-blizzard-layoffs Meanwhile, there's a global cultural market that's sweeping away American media: from K-pop (and K-zombies) to Heated Rivalry to Brazil funk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funk_carioca Now, thanks to Trump, there are just a couple of years until America's wilting cultural exports will face high tariffs from markets where international media is surging. This is how the American century ends: not with a bang, but with a Trump. Hey look at this (permalink) The Subprime AI Crisis Is Here https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-subprime-ai-crisis-is-here/ Endgame for the Open Web https://www.anildash.com/2026/03/27/endgame-open-web/ RSS-Lance https://github.com/sysadminmike/rss-lance California bill would require parent bloggers to delete content of minors on social media https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-03-26/california-could-require-parent-bloggers-to-delete-content-of-minors Full network of clitoral nerves mapped out for first time https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/mar/29/full-network-clitoral-nerves-mapped-out-first-time-women-pelvic-surgery Object permanence (permalink) #25yrsago My new sigfile https://memex.craphound.com/2001/03/30/ #20yrsago TBL's "The Future of the Web" https://web.archive.org/web/20070706130940/http://webcast.oii.ox.ac.uk/download/oii/20060314_139/20060314_139.mp3 #20yrsago Bruce Sterling's bumper stickers https://web.archive.org/web/20060401010820/https://www.bumperactive.com/archives/000685.jsp #15yrsago Kinect makes UAV even more autonomous https://www.suasnews.com/2011/03/mit-slam-quad-using-kinect/ #15yrsago This frozen yogurt store offers the best discounts around https://memex.craphound.com/2016/03/30/this-frozen-yogurt-store-offers-the-best-discounts-around/ #10yrsago Amazing fan-made Wonder Woman sweater pattern to download and knit https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/wonder-woman-2 #10yrsago Automated drug cabinets have 1400+ critical vulns that will never be patched https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2016/03/30/1400-flaws-automated-medical-supply-system/ #10yrsago Playable records laser-etched in cheese, eggplant and ham https://web.archive.org/web/20160323075536/http://www.thevinylfactory.com/vinyl-factory-news/matthew-herbert-tortilla-edible-vinyl/ #10yrsago Up to half of the Americans killed by police have a disability https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/mar/29/media-must-report-police-violence-towards-disabled-people #10yrsago Judge says Citibank’s law-school loan isn’t “student debt” and can be discharged in bankruptcy https://abcnews.com/Business/judges-ruling-law-school-grads-debt-signal-seismic/story?id=37981518 #10yrsago How a street artist pulled off a 50-building mural in Cairo’s garbage-collector district https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/29/world/middleeast/cairo-mural-garbage.html #10yrsago CNBC’s secure password tutorial sent your password in the clear to 30 advertisers https://web.archive.org/web/20160331095151/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/cnbc-tried-and-massively-failed-to-teach-people-about-password-security #10yrsago How DRM would kill the next Netflix (and how the W3C could save it) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/03/interoperability-and-w3c-defending-future-present #5yrsago America needs a high-fiber broadband diet https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/30/fight-for-44/#slowpokes #5yrsago Minimum wage vs Wall Street bonuses https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/30/fight-for-44/#fight-for-44 Upcoming appearances (permalink) Toronto: Humber Polytechnic President's Lecture Series, Apr 8 https://liberalarts.humber.ca/current-students/resources/conferences-and-lectures/presidents-lecture-series.html Montreal: Bronfman Lecture (McGill), Apr 10 https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disrupter-tickets-1982706623885 Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, Apr 10 https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/4863920260410 Toronto: DemocracyXchange, Apr 16 https://www.democracyxchange.org/news/cory-doctorow-to-open-dxc26-on-april-16 San Francisco: 2026 Berkeley Spring Forum on M&A and the Boardroom, Apr 23 https://www.theberkeleyforum.com/#agenda London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25 https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691 NYC: Enshittification at Commonweal Ventures, Apr 29 https://luma.com/ssgfvqz8 Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20 https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19 https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25 https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2 SXSW London, Jun 2 https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901 Recent appearances (permalink) Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today) https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech) https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074 The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah) https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doctorow-matthew-potolsky/ Tanner Humanities Lecture (U Utah) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Yf1nSyekI Latest books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/) "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. First draft complete. Second draft underway. "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE. "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ 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: State Dems must stop ICE from stealing the midterms (31 Mar 2026)
- Tue, 31 Mar 2026 10:00:59 +0000
Today's links State Dems must stop ICE from stealing the midterms: The literal least they can do. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Power-strip bug; "Peaceful Baghdad" was actually Istanbul; Disney pirates Disney font; AMC v day-and-date; SF growth chart; Cuba’s meritocratic free med schools; Trump strategist v Trump; Monopoly so fragile. Upcoming appearances: Montreal, London, Berlin, NYC, Hay-on-Wye, London. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. State Dems must stop ICE from stealing the midterms (permalink) Donald Trump has announced his intention to steal the midterms with a voter suppression law that would ban the mail-in voting that he himself uses (which he claims is not fit for purpose). This voter suppression campaign is Trump's number one policy priority, and the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act that would accomplish this is behind the shutdown and aviation chaos that has hamstrung the country for weeks: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/save-act-voting-rights-congress/ SAVE requires voters to show up at the polls in possession of ID like birth certificates and passports, and it will fill our polling places with armed, masked ICE agents – you know, the guys who just randomly kidnap and murder people for having accents, speaking a language other than English, or being visibly brown. During Trump's aviation crisis, Trump heard about "Linda," a woman who called into a far right talk-radio program to suggest that ICE be deployed to American airports to backstop the TSA agents who'd stopped showing up for work on the very reasonable grounds that they hadn't been paid in a month: https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-may-have-got-his-ice-airport-idea-from-linda-from-arizona/ Trump loved the idea and the next thing you knew, ICE was at the airports, hanging around like a bad smell and being totally useless. It turns out that the TSA is a trained workforce, unlike ICE, who receive precisely 47 days of training as a kind of MAGA Kabbalah (Trump is the 47th president): https://www.wired.com/story/ice-agents-frustrate-airport-employees-as-shutdown-drags-on/ ICE's uselessness at the country's airports was beyond farcical, though, as ever, The Onion found and nailed the farce in "How ICE is assisting TSA": https://theonion.com/how-ice-is-assisting-tsa/ Overseeing the removal of shoes, belts, and abuelas Confiscating, then brandishing dangerous items Assuming all milling-around duties Culling weaker travelers when lines get too long Commiserating about failing the police academy Drinking any shampoo that exceeds the carry-on volume limit Simplifying the customs interview to one question about skull size But having ICE in the airports does serve one purpose. As Steve Bannon gloated on his podcast, ICE in the airports is a way to soften people up for ICE in the polling stations. He called it a "test run" for the midterms: https://www.ms.now/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/steve-bannon-calls-ice-agents-at-airports-part-of-a-test-run-for-the-midterm-elections Writing for Jacobin, Eric Blanc points out that Democrats don't have to sit by passively while Trump – who repeatedly promised that if you voted for him in 2024, "you won't have to vote anymore" – steals an election: https://jacobin.com/2026/03/ice-trump-election-theft-laws/ That's because America has a federal system of government, and the administration of its elections is firmly, constitutionally, unarguably in the hands of the states, and the states have large collections of highly trained, highly armed officials who can enforce their laws. On March 13, the New Mexico state legislature passed a law banning armed federal officials from showing their fascist asses anywhere within 50 feet of a polling place or ballot drop-box: https://www.koat.com/article/new-mexico-prohibits-armed-agents-voting-sites/70729595 Other blue states like "California, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, and Washington" are contemplating similar laws. It's a start, but as Blanc says, what the fuck are the other blue statehouses waiting for? This is a white-hot, hair-on-fire emergency. There isn't a moment to spare. This should be on the agenda for every union, at every demonstration, at every DSA and Democratic Club meeting. As Blanc says, if we wait until November to find out what Trump is going to do, it'll be too late. The time to act is now. This is – as Blanc says – a "concrete, winnable demand that unions, student organizations, and immigrant and democracy defense groups could organize around today." And that organizing would "onboard and develop scores of new leaders in this fight nationwide." I know where we can start. Unions across America have called for a general strike on May Day (May 1), under the banner "No work, no school, no shopping." As we rally on May Day, let defending our right to vote be at the top of our agenda. Mark your calendars: https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?ref=paydayreport.com&mid=1_b8qBUINLYWeLiwpFSfUO2SmX2w6TWA&ll=37.724800549268%2C-96.94920235000001&z=4 (Image: Chad Davis, CC BY 4.0; Jami430, CC BY-SA 4.0; modified) Hey look at this (permalink) Avi Lewis Is the New Leader of Canada’s NDP https://jacobin.com/2026/03/avi-lewis-canada-ndp-election/ A Political Instrument of the People https://lewisforleader.ca/ideas/party-renewal-full-plan She Owed Her Insurer a Nickel, So It Canceled Her Coverage https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/insurer-missed-payments-dropped-coverage-florida-bill-of-the-month-march-2026/ How the AI bubble bursts https://martinvol.pe/blog/2026/03/30/how-the-ai-bubble-bursts/ Fold Catastrophes https://tachyonpublications.com/product/fold-catastrophes/ Object permanence (permalink) #25yrsago Gobler Toys https://web.archive.org/web/20010331150924/http://www.goblertoys.com/pages/goblertoys.html #20yrsago Power-strip with hidden GSM hardware https://web.archive.org/web/20060412201921/https://www.spy-labs.com/infinity.htm #20yrsago I Hate DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20060406063345/https://www.ihatedrm.com/cs2/ #20yrsago GOP hopeful’s photo of “peaceful Baghdad” was really Istanbul https://web.archive.org/web/20060405225546/http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002274257 #20yrsago Disney using freeware Disney-inspired font in its signs https://flickr.com/photos/mrg/sets/49427/ #20yrsago Yahoo could stay in China and stop sending its users to jail https://web.archive.org/web/20060411085309/http://rconversation.blogs.com/rconversation/2006/03/yahoo_abominati.html #20yrsago AMC CEO: why we won’t show DVD simul-release movies https://web.archive.org/web/20060426042457/https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.04/start.html?pg=15 #15yrsago Canadian ISPs admit that their pricing is structured to discourage Internet use https://web.archive.org/web/20110401033318/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5711/125/ #15yrsago Science fiction growth-chart takes your kid from Tribble to Vader https://web.archive.org/web/20110331134518/http://geeky-dad.tumblr.com/post/3869493918/my-daughter-is-turning-one-soon-and-i-decided-we #15yrsago Open access legal scholarship is 50% more likely to be cited than material published in proprietary journals https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1777090 #15yrsago Senior London cops lie to peaceful protestors, stage mass arrest https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/mar/28/cuts-protest-uk-uncut-fortnum #10yrsago Cuba’s free med schools are the meritocratic institutions that America’s private system can’t match https://www.wired.com/2016/03/students-ditching-america-medical-school-cuba/ #10yrsago As criminal justice reform looms, private prison companies get into immigration detention, halfway houses, electronic monitoring, mental health https://web.archive.org/web/20160331101534/https://www.ozy.com/fast-forward/private-prisons-fight-back/66970 #10yrsago Surveillance has reversed the net’s capacity for social change https://web.archive.org/web/20160429233747/https://m.jmq.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/02/25/1077699016630255.full.pdf?ijkey=1jxrYu4cQPtA6&keytype=ref&siteid=spjmq #10yrsago Top Trump strategist quits, writes an open letter warning America about him https://web.archive.org/web/20160330035435/http://www.xojane.com/issues/stephanie-cegielski-donald-trump-campaign-defector #10yrsago Doctors who get pharma money prescribe brand-name drugs instead of generics https://www.propublica.org/article/doctors-who-take-company-cash-tend-to-prescribe-more-brand-name-drugs #10yrsago GOP’s anti-abortion strategy could establish precedent for massive, corrupt regulation https://web.archive.org/web/20160329045614/http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/fans-of-economic-liberty-shouldnt-be-so-quick-to-regulate-abortion/475566/ #10yrsago Turkish government tells German ambassador to ban video satirizing president Erdoğan https://web.archive.org/web/20260316070423/https://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/tuerkei-verlangt-offenbar-das-extra-3-video-zu-loeschen-a-1084490.html #5yrsago Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/29/efficient-markets-hypothesis/#statistical-inference #5yrsago Big Salmon's aquaturf https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/29/efficient-markets-hypothesis/#aquaturf #5yrsago Noble Lies https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/29/efficient-markets-hypothesis/#masks-and-trade #5yrsago Monopoly so fragile https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/29/efficient-markets-hypothesis/#too-big-to-sail #1yrago #RedForEd rides again in LA https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/29/jane-mcalevey/#trump-is-a-scab Upcoming appearances (permalink) Montreal: Bronfman Lecture (McGill), Apr 10 https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disrupter-tickets-1982706623885 Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, Apr 10 https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/4863920260410 London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25 https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691 NYC: Enshittification at Commonweal Ventures, Apr 29 https://luma.com/ssgfvqz8 Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20 https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19 https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25 https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2 SXSW London, Jun 2 https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901 Recent appearances (permalink) Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today) https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech) https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074 The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah) https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doctorow-matthew-potolsky/ Tanner Humanities Lecture (U Utah) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Yf1nSyekI Latest books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/) "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. First draft complete. Second draft underway. "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE. "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. 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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You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X