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- Pluralistic: Federal Wallet Inspectors (13 Dec 2025)
- Sat, 13 Dec 2025 16:14:50 +0000
Today's links Federal Wallet Inspectors: Does tech *really* move too fast to regulate? Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Soda can Van de Graff; Amazon rents a copy of the web; Boardgame Remix Kit; No furniture photos please we're British; Youtube vs fair use; Carbon offsets are bullshit; Arkham model railroad; Happy Birthday is in the public domain; Ted Cruz hires Cambridge Analytica; The kid who wanted to join the NSA; Daddy Daughter Xmas Podcast 2020. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Federal Wallet Inspectors (permalink) Look, I'm not trying to say that new technologies never raise gnarly new legal questions, but what I am saying is that a lot of the time, the "new legal challenges" raised by technology are somewhere between 95-100% bullshit, ginned up by none-too-bright tech bros and their investors, and then swallowed by regulators and lawmakers who are either so credulous they'd lose a game of peek-a-boo, or (likely) in on the scam. Take "fintech." As Trashfuture's Riley Quinn is fond of saying, "when you hear 'fintech,' think 'unregulated bank'": https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/02/shadow-banking-2-point-oh/#leverage I mean, the whole history of banking is: "Bankers think of a way to do reckless things that are wildly profitable (in the short term) and catastrophic (in the long term). They offer bribes and other corrupt incentives to their watchdogs to let them violate the rules, which leads to utter disaster." From the 19th century "panics" to the crash of '29 to the S&L collapse to the 2008 Great Financial Crisis and beyond, this just keeps happening. Much of the time, the bankers involved have some tissue-thin explanation for why what they're doing isn't really a violation of the rules. Think of the lenders who, in the runup to the Great Financial Crisis, insisted that they weren't engaged in risky lending because they had a fancy equation that proved that the mortgage-backed securities they were issuing were all sound, and it was literally impossible that they'd all default at once. The fact that regulators were bamboozled by this is enraging. In hindsight (and for many of us at least, at the time), it's obvious that the bankers went to their watchdogs and said, "We'd like to break the law," and the watchdogs said, "Sure, but would you mind coming up with some excuse that I can repeat later when someone asks me why I let you do this crime?" It's like in the old days of medical marijuana, where you'd get on a call with a dial-a-doc and say, "Please can I have some weed?" and the doc would say, "Tell me about your headaches," and you'd say, "Uh, I have headaches?" and they'd say "Great, here's your weed!" The alternative is that these regulators are so bafflingly stupid that they can't be trusted to dress themselves. "My stablecoin is a fit financial instrument to integrate into the financial system" is as credible a wheeze as some crypto bro walking up to Cory Booker, flashing a homemade badge, and snapping out, "Federal Wallet Inspector, hand it over." I mean, at that point, I kind of hope they're corrupt, because the alternative is that they are basically a brainstem and a couple of eyestalks in a suit. What I'm saying is, "We just can't figure out if crypto is violating finance laws" is a statement that can only be attributed to someone very stupid, or in on the game. Speaking of "someone very stupid, or in on the game," Congress just killed a rule that would have guaranteed that the US military could repair its own materiel: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/congress/2025/12/congress-quietly-strips-right-to-repair-provisions-from-2026-ndaa-despite-wide-support/ Military right to repair is the most brainless of all possible no-brainers. When a generator breaks down in the field – even in an active war-zone – the US military has to ship it back to America to be serviced by the manufacturer. That's not because you can't train a Marine to fix a generator – it's because the contractual and technical restrictions that military contractors insist on ban the military from fixing its stuff: https://www.pogo.org/fact-sheets/fact-sheet-the-right-to-repair-for-the-united-states-military This violates a very old principle in sound military administration. Abraham Lincoln insisted that the contractors who supplied the Union army had to use standardized tooling and ammo, because it would be very embarrassing for the Commander-in-Chief to have to stand on the field at Gettysburg with a megaphone and shout, "Sorry boys, war's canceled this week, our sole supplier's gone on vacation." And yet, after mergers of large military contractors resulted in just a handful of "primary" companies serving the Pentagon, private equity vampires snapped up all the subcontractors who were sole-source suppliers of parts to those giants. They slashed the prices of those parts so that the primary contractors used as many as possible in the materiel they provided to the US DoD, and then raised the prices of replacement parts, some with 10,000% margins, which the Pentagon now has to pay for so long as they own those jets and other big-ticket items: https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/29/fractal-bullshit/#dayenu This isn't a complicated scam. It's super straightforward, and the right to repair rule that Congress killed addressed it head on. But Congressional enemies of this bill insisted that it would have untold "unintended consequences" and instead passed a complex rule, riddled with loopholes, because there was something unique and subtle about the blunt issue of price-gouging: https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/final_-_warren_letter_to_dod_re_right_to_repair_consequences_092524.pdf Either these lawmakers are so stupid that they fell for the ole "Federal Wallet Inspector" gambit, or they're in on the game. I know which explanation my money is on. Maybe this has already occurred to you, but lately I've come to realize that there's another dimension to this, a way in which critics of tech help this gambit along. After all, it's pretty common for tech critics to preface their critiques with words to the effect of, "Of course, this technology has raced ahead of regulators to keep pace with it. Those dastardly tech-bros have slipped the net once again!" The unspoken (and sometimes very loudly spoken) corollary of this is, "Only a tech-critic as perspicacious and forward looking as me is capable of matching wits with those slippery tech-bros, and I have formulated a sui generis policy prescription that can head them off at the pass." Take the problem of deepfakes, including deepfake porn. There's a pretty straightforward policy response to this: a privacy law that allows you to prevent the abuse of your private information (including to create deepfakes) that unlawfully process your personal information for an illegitimate purpose. To make sure that this law can be enforced, include a "private right of action," which means that individual can sue to enforce it (and activist orgs and no-win/no-fee lawyers can sue on their behalf). That way, you can get justice even if the state Attorney General or the federal Department of Justice decides not to take your case. Privacy law is a great idea. It can navigate nuances, like the fact that privacy is collective, not individual – for example, it can intervene when your family members give their (your) DNA to a scam like 23andme, or when a friend posts photos of you online: https://jacobin.com/2021/05/cory-doctorow-interview-bill-gates-intellectual-property But privacy law gets a bad rap. In the EU, they've had the GDPR – a big, muscular privacy law – for nine years, and all it's really done is drown the continent in cookie-consent pop-ups. But that's not because the GDPR is flawed, it's because Ireland is a tax-haven that has lured in the world's worst corporate privacy-violators, and to keep them from moving to another tax haven (like Malta or Cyprus or Luxembourg), it has to turn itself into a crime-haven. So for the entire life of the GDPR, all the important privacy cases in Europe have gone to Ireland, and died there: https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/01/erin-go-blagged/#big-tech-omerta Now, again, this isn't a complicated technical question that is hard to resolve through regulation. It's just boring old corruption. I'm not saying that corruption is easy to solve, but I am saying that it's not complicated. Irish politicians made the country's economy dependent on the Irish state facilitating criminal activity by American firms. The EU doesn't want to provoke a constitutional crisis by forcing Ireland (and the EU's other crime-havens) to halt this behavior. That's a hard thing to do! It's just not a complicated thing to do. The routine violations of EU privacy law by American tech companies isn't the result of "tech racing ahead of the law." It's just corruption. You can't fix corruption by passing more laws; they'll just be corruptly enforced, too. But thanks to a mix of bad incentives – politicians wanting to be seen to do something without actually upsetting the apple-cart; AI critics wanting to inflate their importance by claiming that they're fighting something novel and complex, as opposed to something that's merely boring and hard – we get policy proposals that will likely worsen the problem. Take Denmark's decision to fight deepfakes by creating a new copyright over your likeness: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/27/deepfakes-denmark-copyright-law-artificial-intelligence Copyright – a property right – is an incredibly bad way to deal with human rights like privacy. For one thing, it makes privacy into a luxury good that only the wealthy can afford (remember, a discount for clicking through a waiver of your privacy right is the same thing as an extra charge for not waiving your privacy rights). For another, property rights are very poorly suited to managing things that have joint ownership, such as private information. As soon as you turn private information into private property, you have to answer questions like, "Which twin owns the right to their face" and "Who owns the right to the fact that your abusive mother is your mother – you, or her? And if it's her, does she get to stop you from publishing a memoir about the abuse?" Copyright – a state-backed transferable monopoly over expression – is really hard to get right. Legislatures and courts have struggled to balance free expression and copyright for centuries, and there's a complex web of "limitations and exceptions" to copyright. Privacy is also incredibly complex, and has its own limitations and exceptions, and they are very different from copyright's limits. I mean, they have to be: privacy rules defend your human right to a personal zone of autonomy; copyright is intended to create economic incentives to produce new creative works. It would be very weird if the same rules served both ends. I can't believe that Denmark's legislators failed to consider privacy as the solution to deepfakes. If they did, they are very, very stupid. Rather, they decided that fighting the corruption that keeps privacy law from being enforced in the EU was too hard, so they just did something performative, creating a raft of new problems, without solving the old one. Here in the USA, there's lots of lawmakers who are falling into this trap. Take the response to chatbots that give harmful advice to children and teens. The answer that many American politicians (as well as lawmakers abroad, in Australia, Canada, the UK and elsewhere) have come up with is to force AI companies to identify who is and is not a child and treat them differently. This boils down to a requirement for AI companies to collect much more information on their users (to establish their age), which means that all the AI harms that stem from privacy violations (AI algorithms that steal wages, hike prices, discriminate in hiring and lending and policing, etc) are now even harder to stop. A simple alternative to this would be updating privacy law to limit how AI companies can gather and use everyone's data – which would mean that you could protect kids from privacy invasions without (paradoxically) requiring them (and you) to disclose all kinds of private information to determine how old they are. The insistence – by AI critics and AI boosters – that AI is so different from other technologies that you can't address it by limiting the collection, retention and processing of private information is a way in which AI critics and AI hucksters end up colluding to promote a view of AI as an exceptional technology. It's not. AI is a normal technology: https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/ai-as-normal-technology Sometimes this argument descends into grimly hilarious parody. Argue for limits on AI companies' collection, retention and processing of private information and AI boosters will tell you that this would require so much labor-intensive discernment about training data that it would make it impossible to continue training AI until it becomes intelligent enough to solve all our problems. But also, when you press they issue, they'll sometimes say that AI is already so "intelligent" that it can derive (that is, guess) private information about you without needing your data, so a new privacy law won't help. In other words, applying privacy limitations to AI means we'll never get a "superintelligence,"; and also, we already have a superintelligence so there's no point in applying privacy limitations to AI. It's true that technology can give rise to novel regulatory challenges, but it's also true that claiming that a technology is so novel that existing regulation can't resolve its problems is just a way of buying time to commit more crimes before the regulators finally realize that your flashy new technology is just a boring old scam. Hey look at this (permalink) Every Drink in “Casablanca” (1942) https://bruces.medium.com/every-drink-in-casablanca-1942-348e7c543810 clbre is a fork of calibre with the aim of stripping out the AI integration https://github.com/grimthorpe/clbre EU Report Distills AI-Training Lessons from Napster Piracy Era: Don’t Sue, License https://torrentfreak.com/eu-report-distills-ai-training-lessons-from-napster-piracy-era-dont-sue-license/ Rebuilding Imaginary Futures: Il Versificatore, 2025 https://bruces.medium.com/rebuilding-imaginary-futures-il-versificatore-2025-3178a12be2aa John Varley, 1947-2025 https://floggingbabel.blogspot.com/2025/12/john-varley-1947-2025.html Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Americans smile, Brits grimace? https://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/magazine/national-smiles.html #20yrsago HOWTO make a soda-can Van de Graaf https://scitoys.com/scitoys/scitoys/electro/electro6.html #20yrsago Credit-card-sized USB drive https://web.archive.org/web/20051214084824/http://walletex.com/ #20yrsago Homeland Security: Mini-golf courses are terrorist targets https://web.archive.org/web/20060215153821/https://www.kron.com/Global/story.asp?S=4226663 #20yrsago Amazon rents access to a copy of the Web https://battellemedia.com/archives/2005/12/alexa_make_that_amazon_looks_to_change_the_game #15yrsago Pornoscanners trivially defeated by pancake-shaped explosives https://web.archive.org/web/20101225211840/http://springerlink.com/content/g6620thk08679160/fulltext.pdf #10yrsago HO fhtagn! Detailed model railroad layout recreates HP Lovecraft’s Arkham https://web.archive.org/web/20131127042302/http://www.ottgallery.com/MRR.html #10yrsago Suicide rates are highest in spring — not around Christmas https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/12/no-suicides-dont-rise-during-the-holidays/419436/ #10yrsago Airbnb hosts consistently discriminate against black people https://www.benedelman.org/publications/airbnb-011014.pdf #10yrsago What will it take to get MIT to stand up for its own students and researchers? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQdl_JdTars #10yrsago Experts baffled to learn that 2 years olds are being prescribed psychiatric drugs https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/11/us/psychiatric-drugs-are-being-prescribed-to-infants.html?_r=0 #10yrsago Happy Birthday’s copyright status is finally, mysteriously settled https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/business/media/happy-birthday-copyright-case-reaches-a-settlement.html?_r=0 #10yrsago Proposal: keep the nuclear launch codes in an innocent volunteer’s chest-cavity https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/09/19/the-heart-of-deterrence/ #10yrsago Obama promises statement on encryption before Xmas (maybe) https://web.archive.org/web/20151211042128/https://www.dailydot.com/politics/white-house-encryption-policy-response-petition/ #10yrsago Harlem Cryptoparty: Crypto matters for #blacklivesmatter https://web.archive.org/web/20151218183924/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-black-community-needs-encryption #10yrsago Backslash: a toolkit for protesters facing hyper-militarized, surveillance-heavy police https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/12/backslash-anti-surveillance-gadgets-for-protesters/ #10yrsago Ted Cruz campaign hires dirty data-miners who slurped up millions of Facebook users’ data https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/11/senator-ted-cruz-president-campaign-facebook-user-data #10yrsago The Tor Project has a new executive director: former EFF director Shari Steele! https://blog.torproject.org/greetings-tors-new-executive-director/ #10yrsago What I told the kid who wanted to join the NSA https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/11/west-point-cybersecurity-nsa-privacy-edward-snowden #10yrsago Copyfraud: Disney’s bogus complaint over toy photo gets a fan kicked off Facebook https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/12/disney-initially-drops-then-doubles-down-on-dmca-claim-over-star-wars-figure-pic/ #15yrsago Sales pitch from an ATM-skimmer vendor https://krebsonsecurity.com/2010/12/why-gsm-based-atm-skimmers-rule/ #15yrsago Boardgame Remix Kit makes inspired new games out of old Monopoly, Clue, Trivial Pursuit and Scrabble sets https://web.archive.org/web/20101214210548/http://www.boardgame-remix-kit.com/sample/boardgame-remix-kit-sample.pdf #10yrsago Britons will need copyright licenses to post photos of their own furniture https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/12/you-may-soon-need-a-licence-to-take-photos-of-that-classic-designer-chair-you-bought/ #5yrsago Outgoing Facebookers blast the company https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/12/fairy-use-tale/#badge-posts #5yrsago Carbon offsets are bullshit https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/12/fairy-use-tale/#greenwashing #5yrsago Youtube, fair use, competition, and the death of the artist https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/12/fairy-use-tale/#content-id #5yrsago A lethally boring story https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/11/number-eight/#erisa #5yrsago Daddy Daughter Xmas Podcast 2020 https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/11/number-eight/#youll-go-down-in-mystery #5yrsago Antitrust and Facebook's paid disinformation https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/11/number-eight/#curse-of-bigness #1yrago The housing emergency and the second Trump term https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/11/nimby-yimby-fimby/#home-team-advantage #1yrago A Democratic media strategy to save journalism and the nation https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/12/the-view-from-somewhere/#abolish-rogan Upcoming appearances (permalink) Hamburg: Chaos Communications Congress, Dec 27-30 https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/infos/index.html Denver: Enshittification at Tattered Cover Colfax, Jan 22 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-live-at-tattered-cover-colfax-tickets-1976644174937 Colorado Springs: Guest of Honor at COSine, Jan 23-25 https://www.firstfridayfandom.org/cosine/ Recent appearances (permalink) How to Stop “Ensh*ttification” Before It Kills the Internet (Capitalisn't) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34gkIvYiHxU Enshittification on The Daily Show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2e-c9SF5nE Enshittification with Four Ways to Change the World (Channel 4) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZQaEeuuI3Q The Plan is to Make the Internet Worse. Forever. (Novarra Media) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wE8G-d7SnY Enshittification (Future Knowledge) https://futureknowledge.transistor.fm/episodes/enshittification Latest books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (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) "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE. "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X
- Pluralistic: Instacart reaches into your pocket and lops a third off your dollars (11 Dec 2025)
- Thu, 11 Dec 2025 16:13:02 +0000
Today's links Instacart reaches into your pocket and lops a third off your dollars: A/B splitting your way into doing a total fucking racism. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Predicting the present; Caller eye-deer; RIP Robert Sheckley; Student protesters and Google Maps vs kettling; If your kids like computers, they're criminals; A billion CC licenses; The moral character of cryptographic work; EC resurrects link-taxes. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Instacart reaches into your pocket and lops a third off your dollars (permalink) There's a whole greedflation-denial cottage industry that insists that rising prices are either the result of unknowable, untameable and mysterious economic forces, or they're the result of workers having too much money and too many jobs. The one thing we're absolutely not allowed to talk about is the fact that CEOs keep going on earnings calls to announce that they are hiking prices way ahead of any increase in their costs, and blaming inflation: https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/20/quiet-part-out-loud/#profiteering Nor are we supposed to notice the "price consultancies" that let the dominant firms in many sectors – from potatoes to meat to rental housing – fix prices in illegal collusive arrangements that are figleafed by the tissue-thin excuse that "if you use an app to fix prices, it's not a crime": https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/25/potatotrac/#carbo-loading And we're especially not supposed to notice the proliferation of "personalized pricing" businesses that use surveillance data to figure out how desperate you are and charge you a premium based on that desperation: https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again Surveillance pricing – when you are charged more for the same goods than someone else, based on surveillance data about the urgency of your need and the cash in your bank account – is a way for companies to reach into your pocket and devalue the dollars in your wallet. After all, if you pay $2 for something that I pay $1 for, that's just the company saying that your dollars are only worth half as much as mine: https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/24/price-discrimination/ It's a form of cod-Marxism: "from each according to their desperation": https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/11/socialism-for-the-wealthy/#rugged-individualism-for-the-poor The economy is riddled with surveillance pricing gouging. You are almost certainly paying more than your neighbors for various items, based on algorithmic price-setting, every day. Case in point: More Perfect Union and Groundwork Collaborative teamed up with Consumer Reports to recruit 437 volunteers from across America to login to Instacart at the same time and buy the same items from 15 stores, and found evidence of surveillance pricing at Albertsons, Costco, Kroger, and Sprouts Farmers Market: https://groundworkcollaborative.org/work/instacart/ The price-swings are wild. Some test subjects are being charged 23% more than others. The average variance for "the exact same items, from the exact same locations, at the exact same time" comes out to 7%, or "$1,200 per year for groceries" for a family of four. The process by which your greedflation premium is assigned is opaque. The researchers found that Instacart shoppers ordering from Target clustered into seven groups, but it's not clear how Instacart decides how much extra to charge any given shopper. Instacart – who acquired Eversight, a surveillance pricing company, in 2022 – blamed the merchants (who, in turn, blamed Instacart). Instacart also claimed that they didn't use surveillance data to price goods, but hedged, admitting that the consumer packaged goods duopoly of Unilever and Procter & Gamble do use surveillance data in connection with their pricing strategies. Finally, Instacart claimed that this was all an "experiment" to "learn what matters most to consumers and how to keep essential items affordable." In other words, they were secretly charging you more (for things like eggs and bread) because somehow that lets them "keep essential items affordable." Instacart said their goal was to help "retail partners understand consumer preferences and identify categories where they should invest in lower prices." Anyone who's done online analytics can easily pierce this obfuscation, but for those of you who haven't had the misfortune of directing an iterated, A/B tested optimization effort, I'll unpack this statement. Say you have a pool of users and a bunch of variations on a headline. You randomly assign different variants to different users and measure clickthroughs. Then you check to see which variants performed best, and dig into the data you have on those users to see if there are any correlations that tie together users who liked a given approach. This might let you discover that, say, women over 40 click more often on headlines that mention kittens. Then you generate more variations based on these conclusions – different ways of mentioning kittens – and see which of these variations perform best, and whether the targeted group of users split into smaller subgroups (women over 40 in the midwest prefer "tabby kitten" while their southern sisters prefer "kitten" without a mention of breed). By repeatedly iterating over these steps, you can come up with many highly refined variants, and you can use surveillance data to target them to ever narrower, more optimized slices of your user-base. Obviously, this is very labor intensive. You have to do a lot of tedious analysis, and generate a lot of variants. This is one of the reasons that slopvertising is so exciting to the worst people on earth: they imagine that they can use AI to create a self-licking ice-cream cone, performing the analysis and generating endless new variations, all untouched by human hands. But when it comes to prices, it's much easier to produce variants – all you're doing is adding or subtracting from the price you show to shoppers. You don't need to get the writing team together to come up with new ways of mentioning kittens in a headline – you can just raise the price from $6.23 to $6.45 and see if midwestern women over 40 balk or add the item to their shopping baskets. And here's the kicker: you don't need to select by gender, racial or economic criteria to end up with a super-racist and exploitative arrangement. That's because race, gender and socioeconomic status have broad correlates that are easily discoverable through automated means. For example, thanks to generations of redlining, discriminatory housing policy, wage discrimination and environmental racism, the poorest, sickest neighborhoods in the country are also the most racialized and are also most likely to be "food deserts" where you can't just go to the grocery store and shop for your family. What's more, the private equity-backed dollar store duopoly have waged a decades-long war on community grocery stores, enveloping them with dollar stores that use their access to preferential discounts (from companies like Unilever and Procter & Gamble, another duopoly) to force grocers out of business: https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/27/walmarts-jackals/#cheater-sizes Then these dollar stores run a greedflation scam that is so primitive, it's almost laughable: they just charge customers much higher amounts than the prices shown on the shelves and price-tags: https://www.consumeraffairs.com/news/do-all-those-low-dollar-store-prices-really-add-up-120325.html When you live in a food desert where your only store is a Dollar General that defrauds you at the cash-register, you are more likely to accept a higher price from Instacart, because you have fewer choices than someone in a middle-class neighborhood with two or three competing grocers. And the people who live in those food deserts are more likely to be poor, which, in America, is an excellent predictor of whether they are Black or brown. Which is to say, without ever saying, "Charge Black people more for groceries," Instacart can easily A/B split its way into a system where they predictably and reliably charge Black people more for groceries. That's the old cod-Marxism at work: "from each according to their desperation." This is so well-understood that anyone who sets one of these systems in motion should be understood to be deliberately seeking to do racist profiteering under cover of an algorithm. It's empiricism-washing: "I'm not racist, I just did some math" (that produced a predictably racist outcome): https://www.reuters.com/article/world/insight-amazon-scraps-secret-ai-recruiting-tool-that-showed-bias-against-women-idUSKCN1MK0AG/ This is the dark side and true meaning of "business optimization." The optimal business pays its suppliers and workers nothing, and charges its customers everything it can. Obviously, businesses need to settle for suboptimal outcomes, because workers won't show up if they don't get paid, and customers won't buy things that cost everything they have⹋. ⹋ Unless, of course, you are an academic publisher, in which case this is just how you do business. A business "optimizes" its workforce by finding ways to get them to accept lower wages. For example, they can bind their workers with noncompete "agreements" that ban Wendy's cashiers from quitting their job and making $0.25 more per hour at the McDonald's next door (one in 18 American workers have been locked into one of these contracts): https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/09/germanium-valley/#i-cant-quit-you Or they can lock their workers in with "training repayment agreement provisions" (TRAPs) – contractual clauses that force workers to pay their bosses thousands of dollars if they quit or get fired: https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/04/its-a-trap/#a-little-on-the-nose But the most insidious form of worker optimization is "algorithmic wage discrimination." That's when a company uses surveillance data to lower the wages of workers. For example, contract nurses are paid less if the app that hires them discovers (through the unregulated data-broker sector) that they have a lot of credit-card debt. After all, nurses who are heavily indebted can't afford to be choosy and turn down lowball offers: https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point This is the other form of surveillance pricing: pricing labor based on surveillance data. It's more cod-Marxism: "From each according to their desperation." Forget "becoming ungovernable": to defeat these evil fuckers, we have to become unoptimizable: https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/20/billionaireism/#surveillance-infantalism How do we do that? Well, nearly every form of "optimization" begins with surveillance. They can't figure out whether they can charge you more if they can't spy on you. They can't figure out whether they can pay you less if they can't spy on you, either. And the reason they can spy on you is because we let them. The last consumer privacy law to pass out of Congress was a 1988 bill that bans video-store clerks from disclosing your VHS rental history. Every other form of consumer surveillance is permitted under US federal law. So step one of this process is to ban commercial surveillance. Banning algorithmic price discrimination is all well and good, but it is, ultimately, a form of redistribution. We're trying to make the companies share some of the excess they extract from our surveillance data. But predistribution – ending surveillance itself, in this case – is always far more effective than redistribution: https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/31/losing-the-crypto-wars/#surveillance-monopolism How do we do that? Well, we need to build a coalition. At the Electronic Frontier Foundation, we call this "privacy first": you can't solve all the internet's problems by fixing privacy, but you won't fix most of them unless we get privacy right, and so the (potential) coalition for a strong privacy regime is large and powerful: https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy But of course, "privacy first," doesn't mean "just privacy." We also need tools that target algorithmic pricing per se. In New York State, there's a new law that requires disclosure of algorithmic pricing, in the form of a prominent notification reading, "THIS PRICE WAS SET BY AN ALGORITHM USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA." This is extremely weaksauce, and might even be worse than nothing. In California we have Prop 65, a rule that requires businesses to post signs and add labels any time they expose you to chemicals "known to the state of California to cause cancer." This caveat emptor approach (warn people, let them vote with their wallets) has led to every corner of California's built environment to be festooned with these warnings. Today, Californians just ignore these warnings, the same way that web users ignore the "privacy policy" disclosures on the sites they visit: https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/19/gotcha/#known-to-the-state-of-california-to-cause-cancer The right approach isn't to (merely) warn people about carcinogens (or privacy risks). The right approach is regulating harmful business practices, whether those practices give you a tumor or pick your pocket. Under Biden, former FTC chair Lina Khan undertook proceedings to ban algorithmic pricing altogether. Trump's FTC killed that, along with all the other quality-of-life enhancing measures the FTC had in train (Trump's FTC chair replaced these with a program to root out "wokeness" in the agency). Today, Khan is co-chair of Zohran Mamdani's transition team, and she will use the mayor's authority (under the New York City Consumer Protection Law of 1969, which addresses "unconscionable" commercial practices) to ban algorithmic pricing in NYC: https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/15/unconscionability/#standalone-authority Khan wasn't Biden's only de-optimizer. Under chair Rohit Chopra, Biden's Consumer Finance Protection Bureau actually banned the data-brokers who power surveillance pricing: https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/16/the-second-best-time-is-now/#the-point-of-a-system-is-what-it-does And of course, Trump's CFPB (neutered by Musk and his broccoli-haired brownshirts at DOGE) killed that effort: https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/15/asshole-to-appetite/#ssn-for-sale But the CFPB staffer who ran that effort has gone to work on an effort to leverage a New Jersey state privacy law to crush the data-broker industry: https://www.wired.com/story/daniels-law-new-jersey-online-privacy-matt-adkisson-atlas-lawsuits/ These are efforts to optimize corporations for human thriving, by making them charge us less and pay us more. For while we are best off when we are unoptimizable, we are also best off when corporations are totally optimized – for our benefit. (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) Uber is selling your ride and food ordering data to advertisers for marketing insights https://boingboing.net/2025/12/08/uber-is-selling-your-ride-and-food-ordering-data-to-advertisers-for-marketing-insights.html 404 Media Is Making a Zine https://www.404media.co/404-media-is-making-a-zine/ Maybe a General Strike Isn’t So Impossible Now https://labornotes.org/2025/12/maybe-general-strike-isnt-so-impossible-now The Naibbe cipher: a substitution cipher that encrypts Latin and Italian as Voynich Manuscript-like ciphertext https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01611194.2025.2566408 Bringing organizational maturity to radical groups https://blog.bl00cyb.org/2025/12/bringing-organizational-maturity-to-radical-groups/ Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Free voicemail helps homeless people get jobs https://web.archive.org/web/20051210021850/http://www.cvm.org/ #20yrsago Anti-P2P company decides to focus on selling music instead https://de.advfn.com/borse/NASDAQ/LOUD/nachrichten/13465769/loudeye-to-exit-content-protection-services-busine #20yrsago Caller Eye-Deer’s eyes glow when phone rings https://www.flickr.com/photos/84221353@N00/71889050/in/pool-69453349@N00 #20yrsago EFF to Sunncomm: release a list of all infected CDs! https://web.archive.org/web/20051212072537/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004245.php #20yrsago Only 2% of music-store downloaders care about legality of their music https://web.archive.org/web/20051225200658/http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/5002/tempo2005.html #20yrsago Dykes on Bikes gives the Trademark Office a linguistics lesson https://web.archive.org/web/20060523133217/https://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/12/09/MNGQOG5D7P1.DTL&type=printable #20yrsago Robert Sheckley has died https://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007078.html #20yrsago Xbox 360 DRM makes your rip your CDs again https://www.gamespot.com/articles/microsoft-xbox-360-hands-on-report/1100-6139672/ #20yrsago Music publishers: Jail for lyric-sites http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4508158.stm #15yrsago 2600 Magazine condemns DDoS attacks against Wikileaks censors https://web.archive.org/web/20101210213130/https://www.2600.com/news/view/article/12037 #15yrsago UK supergroup records 4’33”, hopes to top Xmas charts https://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/dec/06/cage-against-machine-x-factor #15yrsago FarmVille’s secret: making you anxious https://web.archive.org/web/20101211120105/http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6224/catching_up_with_jonathan_blow.php?print=1 #15yrsago Rogue Archivist beer https://web.archive.org/web/20101214060929/https://livingproofbrewcast.com/2010/12/giving-the-rogue-archivist-to-its-namesake/ #15yrsago Hossein “Hoder” Derakhshan temporarily released from Iranian prison https://cyrusfarivar.com/blog/2010/12/09/iranian-blogging-pioneer-temporarily-released-from-prison/ #15yrsago Student protesters in London use Google Maps to outwit police “kettling” https://web.archive.org/web/20101212042006/https://bengoldacre.posterous.com/student-protestors-using-live-tech-to-outwit #15yrsago Google foreclosure maps https://web.archive.org/web/20170412162114/http://ritholtz.com/2010/12/google-map-foreclosures/ #15yrsago Theory and practice of queue design https://passport2dreams.blogspot.com/2010/12/third-queue.html #15yrsago Legal analysis of the problems of superherodom https://lawandthemultiverse.com/ #10yrsago A great, low-tech hack for teaching high-tech skills https://miriamposner.com/blog/a-better-way-to-teach-technical-skills-to-a-group/ #10yrsago In case you were wondering, there’s no reason to squirt coffee up your ass https://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2015/12/10/starbutts-or-how-is-it-still-a-thing-that-people-are-shooting-coffee-up-their-nether-regions #10yrsago Survey of wealthy customers leads insurer to offer “troll insurance” https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/insurance/12041832/Troll-insurance-to-cover-the-cost-of-internet-bullying.html #10yrsago US State Department staffer sexually blackmailed women while working at US embassy https://web.archive.org/web/20151210230259/https://www.networkworld.com/article/3013633/security/ex-us-state-dept-worker-pleads-guilty-to-extensive-sextortion-hacking-and-cyberstalking-acts.html #10yrsago Robert Silverberg’s government-funded guide to the psychoactive drugs of sf https://web.archive.org/web/20151211050648/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-us-government-funded-an-investigation-into-sci-fi-drug-use-in-the-70s #10yrsago Toy demands that kids catch crickets and stuff them into an electronic car https://www.wired.com/2015/12/um-so-the-bug-racer-is-an-actual-toy-car-driven-by-crickets/ #10yrsago The crypto explainer you should send to your boss (and the FBI) https://web.archive.org/web/20151209011457/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/12/08/you-already-use-encryption-heres-what-you-need-to-know-about-it/ #10yrsago French PM defies Ministry of Interior, says he won’t ban open wifi or Tor https://web.archive.org/web/20160726031106/https://www.connexionfrance.com/Wifi-internet-ban-banned-17518-view-article.html #10yrsago The no-fly list really is a no-brainer https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/09/no-fly-list-errors-gun-control-obama #10yrsago America: shrinking middle class, growing poverty, the rich are getting richer https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2015/12/09/the-american-middle-class-is-losing-ground/ #10yrsago Marriott removing desks from its hotel rooms “because Millennials” https://web.archive.org/web/20151210034312/http://danwetzelsports.tumblr.com/post/134754150507/who-stole-the-desk-from-my-hotel-room #10yrsago China’s top Internet censor: “There’s no Internet censorship in China” https://hongkongfp.com/2015/12/09/there-is-no-internet-censorship-in-china-says-chinas-top-censor/ #10yrsago Stolen-card crime sites use “cop detection” algorithms to flag purchases https://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/12/when-undercover-credit-card-buys-go-bad/ #10yrsago UK National Crime Agency: if your kids like computers, they’re probably criminals https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjYrxzSe3DU #10yrsago US immigration law: so f’ed up that Trump’s no-Muslim plan would be constitutional https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/opinion/trumps-anti-muslim-plan-is-awful-and-constitutional.html?_r=0 #10yrsago Ecuador’s draft copyright law: legal to break DRM to achieve fair use https://medium.com/@AndresDelgadoEC/big-achievement-for-creative-commons-in-ecuador-national-assembly-decides-that-fair-use-trumps-drm-c8cdd9c57e01#.n1vkccd3r #10yrsago One billion Creative Commons licenses in use https://stateof.creativecommons.org/2015/ #10yrsago The moral character of cryptographic work https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/moral-fn.pdf #10yrsago Everybody knows: FBI won’t confirm or deny buying cyberweapons from Hacking Team https://web.archive.org/web/20151209163839/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-fbi-wont-confirm-or-deny-buying-hacking-team-spyware-even-though-it-did #10yrsago European Commission resurrects an unkillable stupid: the link tax https://web.archive.org/web/20160913095014/https://openmedia.org/en/bad-idea-just-got-worse-how-todays-european-copyright-plans-will-damage-internet #5yrsago Why we can't have nice things https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/10/borked/#bribery #5yrsago Facebook vs Robert Bork https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/10/borked/#zucked #1yrago Tech's benevolent-dictator-for-life to authoritarian pipeline https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/10/bdfl/#high-on-your-own-supply #1yrago Predicting the present https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/09/radicalized/#deny-defend-depose Upcoming appearances (permalink) Hamburg: Chaos Communications Congress, Dec 27-30 https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/infos/index.html Denver: Enshittification at Tattered Cover Colfax, Jan 22 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-live-at-tattered-cover-colfax-tickets-1976644174937 Colorado Springs: Guest of Honor at COSine, Jan 23-25 https://www.firstfridayfandom.org/cosine/ Recent appearances (permalink) How to Stop “Ensh*ttification” Before It Kills the Internet (Capitalisn't) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34gkIvYiHxU Enshittification on The Daily Show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2e-c9SF5nE Enshittification with Four Ways to Change the World (Channel 4) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZQaEeuuI3Q The Plan is to Make the Internet Worse. Forever. (Novarra Media) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wE8G-d7SnY Enshittification (Future Knowledge) https://futureknowledge.transistor.fm/episodes/enshittification Latest books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE. "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. 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
- Pluralistic: Big Tech joins the race to build the world's heaviest airplane (09 Dec 2025)
- Tue, 09 Dec 2025 11:01:50 +0000
Today's links Big Tech joins the race to build the world's heaviest airplane: Die as Microsoft, or live to become the IBM you overthrew. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Bean-sprouting keyboard; Ink rant; FBI wanted to deport John Lennon; "Concrete Park"; Plutocratic lane-changes. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Big Tech joins the race to build the world's heaviest airplane (permalink) I have a weird fascination with early-stage Bill Gates, after his mother convinced a pal of hers – chairman of IBM's board of directors – to give her son the contract to provide the operating system for the new IBM PC. Gates and his pal Paul Allen tricked another programmer into selling them the rights to DOS, which they sold to IBM, setting Microsoft on the path to be one of the most profitable businesses in human history. IBM could have made its own OS, of course. They were just afraid to, because they'd just narrowly squeaked out of a 12-year antitrust war with the Department of Justice (evocatively memorialized as "Antitrust's Vietnam"): https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/02/the-true-genius-of-tech-leaders/ The US government traumatized IBM so badly that they turned over their crown jewels to these two prep-school kids, who scammed a pal out of his operating system for $50k and made billions from it. Despite owing his business to IBM (or perhaps because of this fact), Gates routinely mocked IBM as a lumbering dinosaur that was headed for history's scrapheap. He was particularly scornful of IBM's software development methodology, which, to be fair, was pretty terrible: IBM paid programmers by the line of code. Gates called this "the race to build the world's heaviest airplane." After all, judging software by lines of code is a terrible idea. To the extent that "number of lines of code" has any correlation with software quality, reliability or performance, it has a negative correlation. While it's certainly possible to write software with too few lines of code (e.g. when instructions are stacked on a single line, obfuscating its functionality and making it hard to maintain), it's far more common for programmers to use too many steps to solve a problem. The ideal software is just right: verbose enough to be legible to future maintainers, streamlined enough to omit redundancies. This is broadly true of many products, and not just airplanes. Office memos should be long enough to be clear, but no longer. Home insulation should be sufficient to maintain the internal temperature, but no more. Ironically, enterprise tech companies' bread and butter is selling exactly this kind of qualitative measurements for bosses who want an easy, numeric way to decide which of their workers to fire, and leading the pack is Microsoft, whose flagship Office365 lets bosses assess their workers' performance on meaningless metrics like how many words they type, ranking each worker against other workers within the division, with rival divisions and within rival firms. Yes, Microsoft actually boasts to companies about the fact that if you use their products, they will gather sensitive data about how your workers perform individually and as a team, and share that information with your competitors! https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/#clippys-revenge But while tech companies employed programmers to develop this kind of bossware to be used on other companies' employees, they were loathe to apply them to their own workers. For one thing, it's just a very stupid way to manage a workforce, as Bill Gates himself would be the first to tell you (candidly, provided he wasn't trying to sell you an enterprise Office 365 license). For another, tech workers wouldn't stand for it. After all, these were the "princes of labor," each adding a million dollars or more to their boss's bottom line, and in such scarce supply that a coder could quit a job after the morning scrum and have a new one by the pre-dinner pickleball break: https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/27/some-animals/#are-more-equal-than-others Tech workers mistook the fear this dynamic instilled in their bosses for respect. They thought the reason their bosses gave them free massage therapists and kombucha on tap and a gourmet cafeteria was that their bosses liked them. After all, these bosses were all techies. A coder wasn't a worker, they were a temporarily embarrassed founder. That's why Zuck and Sergey tuned into those engineering town hall meetings and tolerated being pelted with impertinent questions about the company's technology and business strategy. Actually, tech bosses didn't like tech workers. They didn't see them as peers. They saw them as workers. Problem workers, at that. Problems to be solved. And wouldn't you know it, supply caught up with demand and tech companies instituted a program of mass layoffs. When Google laid off 12,000 workers (just before a $80b stock buyback that would have paid their wages for 27 years), they calmed investors by claiming that they weren't doing this because business was bad – they were just correcting some pandemic-era overhiring. But Google didn't just fire junior programmers – they targeted some of their most senior (and thus mouthiest and highest-paid) techies for the chop. Today, Sergey and Zuck no longer attend engineering meetings ("Not a good use of my time" -M. Zuckerberg). Tech workers are getting laid off at the rate of naughts. And none of these bastards can shut up about how many programmers they plan on replacing with AI: https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/05/ex-princes-of-labor/#hyper-criti-hype And wouldn't you know it, the shitty monitoring and ranking technology that programmers made to be used on other workers is finally being used on them: https://jonready.com/blog/posts/everyone-in-seattle-hates-ai.html Naturally, the excuse is monitoring AI usage. Microsoft – along with all the other AI-peddling tech companies – keep claiming that their workers adore using AI to write software, but somehow, also have to monitor workers so they can figure out which ones to fire because they're not using AI enough: https://www.itpro.com/software/development/microsoft-claims-ai-is-augmenting-developers-rather-than-replacing-them This is the "shitty technology adoption curve" in action. When you have a terrible, destructive technology, you can't just deploy it on privileged people who get taken seriously in policy circles. You start with people at the bottom of the privilege gradient: prisoners, mental patients, asylum-seekers. Then, you work your way up the curve – kids, gig workers, blue collar workers, pink collar workers. Eventually, it comes for all of us: https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware As Ed Zitron writes, tech hasn't had a big, successful product (on the scale of, say, the browser or the smartphone) in more than a decade. Tech companies have seemingly run out of new trillion-dollar industries to spawn. Tech bosses are pulling out all the stops to make their companies seem as dynamic and profitable as they were in tech's heyday. Firing workers and blaming it on AI lets tech bosses transform a story that would freak out investors ("Our business is flagging and we had to fire a bunch of valuable techies") into one that will shake loose fresh billions in capital ("Our AI product is so powerful it let us fire a zillion workers!"). And for tech bosses, mass layoffs offer another, critical advantage: pauperizing those princes of labor, so that they can shed their company gyms and luxury commuter busses, cut wages and benefits, and generally reset the working expectations of the tech workers who sit behind a keyboard to match the expectations of tech workers who assemble iPhones, drive delivery vans, and pack boxes in warehouses. For tech workers who currently don't have a pee bottle or a suicide net at their job-site, it's long past time to get over this founder-in-waiting bullshit and get organized. Recognize that you're a worker, and that workers' only real source of power isn't ephemeral scarcity, it's durable solidarity: https://techworkerscoalition.org/ (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) Your Data Might Determine How Much You Pay for Eggs https://www.wired.com/story/algorithmic-pricing-eggs-ny-law/ Judge hints Vizio TV buyers may have rights to source code licensed under GPL https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/05/vizio_gpl_source_code_ruling/ Chamberlain blocks smart home integrations with its garage door openers — again https://www.theverge.com/tech/839294/chamberlain-myq-garage-door-opener-update-blocks-aftermarket-controllers Smart Garage Door Opener https://3reality.com/product/smartgarage-door-opener/ The Best Books in eBooks and Audiobooks of 2025 https://www.kobo.com/us/en/p/best-books-of-2025 Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago WaWa Digital Cameras threatens to break customer’s neck https://thomashawk.com/2005/12/abusive-new-york-camera-store.html #20yrsago Keyboard used as bean-sprouting medium https://web.archive.org/web/20051205011830/http://www.nada.kth.se/~hjorth/krasse/english.html #15yrsago Judge to copyright troll: get lost https://torrentfreak.com/acslaw-take-alleged-file-sharers-to-court-but-fail-on-a-grand-scale-101209/ #15yrsago Ink cartridge rant https://web.archive.org/web/20101211080931/http://www.inkcartridges.uk.com/Remanufactured-HP-300-CC640EE-Black.html #15yrsago 1.1 billion US$100 notes out of circulation due to printing error https://www.cnbc.com/2010/12/07/the-fed-has-a-110-billion-problem-with-new-benjamins.html #15yrsago EFF wants Righthaven to pay for its own ass-kicking https://web.archive.org/web/20101211011932/https://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/12/payup-troll/ #15yrsago danah boyd explains email sabbaticals https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/12/08/i-am-offline-on-email-sabbatical-from-december-9-january-12.html #15yrsago TSA subjects India’s US ambassador to public grope because of her sari https://web.archive.org/web/20101211113821/http://travel.usatoday.com/flights/post/2010/12/india-diplomat-gets-humiliating-pat-down-at-mississippi-airport-/134197/5?csp=outbrain&csp=obnetwork #15yrsago California’s safety codes are now open source! https://code.google.com/archive/p/title24/ #10yrsago When the INS tried to deport John Lennon, the FBI pitched in to help https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/dec/08/john-lennons-fbi-file-1/ #10yrsago The Big List of What’s Wrong with the TPP https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/12/how-tpp-will-affect-you-and-your-digital-rights #10yrsago Concrete Park: apocalyptic, afrofuturistic graphic novel of greatness https://memex.craphound.com/2015/12/08/concrete-park-apocalyptic-afrofuturistic-graphic-novel-of-greatness/ #10yrsago Denmark’s top anti-piracy law firm pocketed $25m from rightsholders, then went bankrupt https://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-lawyer-milked-copyright-holders-for-millions-151208/ #5yrsago Uber pays to get rid of its self-driving cars https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/08/required-reading/#goober #5yrsago All the books I reviewed in 2020 https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/08/required-reading/#recommended-reading #5yrsago Ford patents plutocratic lane-changes https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/08/required-reading/#walkaway Upcoming appearances (permalink) Hamburg: Chaos Communications Congress, Dec 27-30 https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/infos/index.html Denver: Enshittification at Tattered Cover Colfax, Jan 22 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-live-at-tattered-cover-colfax-tickets-1976644174937 Colorado Springs: Guest of Honor at COSine, Jan 23-25 https://www.firstfridayfandom.org/cosine/ Recent appearances (permalink) Enshittification with Four Ways to Change the World (Channel 4) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZQaEeuuI3Q The Plan is to Make the Internet Worse. Forever. (Novarra Media) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wE8G-d7SnY Enshittification (Future Knowledge) https://futureknowledge.transistor.fm/episodes/enshittification We have become slaves to Silicon Valley (Politics JOE) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzEUvh1r5-w How Enshittification is Destroying The Internet (Frontline Club) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oovsyzB9L-s Latest books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE. "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X
- Pluralistic: Elon Musk's Blue Tick scam (08 Dec 2025)
- Mon, 08 Dec 2025 13:01:31 +0000
Today's links Elon Musk's Blue Tick scam: The EU bans giant teddybears. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Denver bomb squad vs 8" toy robot; Iceland's atheist religion; Largest strike in human history; Ad-tech is a bubble; Battery rationality; Pasta carpet; "With a Little Help"; Crooked Timber on Pikett; Tiki-mug menorah; China vs Big Data-backstabbing. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Elon Musk's Blue Tick scam (permalink) In my book Enshittification, I develop the concept of "giant teddybears," a scam that has been transposed from carnival midway games to digital platforms. The EU has just fined Elon Musk $140m for running a giant teddybear scam on Twitter: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/12/elon-musks-x-first-to-be-fined-under-eus-digital-service-act/ Growing up, August 15 always meant two things for my family: my mother's birthday and the first day of the CNE, a giant traveling fair that would park itself on Toronto's waterfront for the last three weeks of summer. We'd get there early, and by 10AM, there'd always be some poor bastard lugging around a galactic-scale giant teddybear that was offered as a prize at one of the midway games. Now, nominally, the way you won a giant teddybear was by getting five balls in a peach basket. To a first approximation, this is a feat that no one has ever accomplished. Rather, a carny had beckoned this guy over and said, "Hey, fella, I like your face. Tell you what I'm gonna do: you get just one ball in the basket and I'll give you one of these beautiful, luxurious keychains. If you win two keychains, I'll let you trade them in for one of these gigantic teddybears." Why would the carny do this? Because once this poor bastard took possession of the giant teddybear, he was obliged to conspicuously lug it around the CNE midway in the blazing, muggy August heat. All who saw him would think, "Hell if that dumbass can win a giant teddybear, I'm gonna go win one, too!" Charitably, you could call him a walking advertisement. More accurately, though, he was a Judas goat. Digital platforms have the ability to give out giant teddybears at scale. Because digital platforms have the flexibility that comes with running things on computers, platforms can pick out individual platform participants and make them King For the Day, showering them in riches that they will boast of, luring in other suckers who will lose everything: https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/ That's how Tiktok works: the company's "heating tool" lets them drive traffic to Tiktok performers by cramming their videos into millions of random people's feeds, overriding Tiktok's legendary recommendation algorithm. Those "heated" performers get millions of views on their videos and go on to spam all the spaces where similar performers hang out, boasting of the fame and riches that await other people in their niche if they start producing for Tiktok: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys Uber does it, too: as Veena Dubal documents in her work on "algorithmic wage discrimination," Uber offers different drivers wildly different wages for performing the same work. The lucky few who get an Uber giant teddybear hang out in rideshare groupchats and forums, trumpeting their incredible gains from the platform, while everyone else blames themselves for "being bad at the app," as they drive and drive, only to go deeper and deeper into debt: https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men Everywhere you look online, you see giant teddybears. Think of Joe Rogan being handed hundreds of millions of dollars to relocate his podcast to Spotify, an also-ran podcast platform that is desperately trying to capture the medium of podcasting, turning an open protocol into a proprietary, enclosed, Spotify-exclusive content stream: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/27/enshittification-resistance/#ummauerter-garten-nein The point of the conspicuous, over-the-odds payment to Rogan isn't just to get Rogan onto Spotify – it's to convince every other podcaster that Spotify is a great place to make podcasts for. It isn't, though: when Spotify bought Gimlet Media, they locked Gimlet's podcasts inside Spotify's walled garden/maximum security prison. If you wanted to listen to a Gimlet podcast, you'd have to switch to using Spotify's app (and submitting to Spotify's invasive surveillance and restrictions on fast-forwarding through ads, etc). Pretty much no one did this. After an internal revolt by Gimlet podcast hosts – whose podcasts were dwindling to utter irrelevance because no one was listening to them anymore – Spotify moved those Gimlet podcasts back onto the real internet, where they belong. When Musk bought Twitter, he started handing out tons of giant teddybears – most notably, he created an opaque monetization scheme for popular Twitter posters, which allowed him to thumb the scales for a few trolls he liked, who obliged him by loudly proclaiming just how much money you could make by trolling professionally on Twitter. Needless to say, the vast majority of people who try this make either nothing, or a sum so small that it rounds to nothing. But Musk's main revenue plan for Twitter – the thing he repeatedly promised would allow him to recoup the tens of billions he borrowed to buy the platform – was selling blue tick verification. Twitter created blue ticks to solve a serious platform problem. Twitter users kept getting sucked in by impersonators who would trick them into participating in scams or believing false things. To protect those users, Twitter offered a verification scheme for "notable people" who were likely to face impersonation. The verification system was never very good – I successfully lobbied them to improve it a little when I was being impersonated on Twitter (I got them to stop insisting that users fax them a scan of their ID, or, more realistically, to send them ID via a random, insecure email-to-fax gateway). But it did the job reasonably well. Predictably, though, the verification scheme also became something of a (weird and unimportant) status-symbol, allowing a certain kind of culture warrior to peddle grievances about how only "lamestream media libs" were getting blue ticks, while brave Pizzagaters and 4chan refugees were denied this important recognition. Musk's plan to sell blue ticks leaned heavily into these grievances. He promised to "democratize" verification, for $8/month (or, for businesses, many thousands of dollars per month). Users who didn't buy blue ticks would have their content demoted and hidden from their own followers. Users who paid for blue ticks would have their content jammed into everyone's feeds, irrespective of whether Twitter's own content recommendation algorithms predicted those users would enjoy it. Best of all, Twitter wouldn't do much verifying – you could give Twitter $8, claim to be anyone at all, and chances are, you would be able to assume any identity you wanted, post any bullshit you wanted, and get priority placement in millions of users' feeds. This was a massive gift to scammers, trolls and disinformation peddlers. For $8, you could pretend to be a celebrity in order to endorse a stock swindle, shitcoin hustle, or identity theft scheme. You could post market-moving disinformation from official-looking corporate accounts. You could pose as a campaigning politician or a reporter and post reputation-destroying nonsense. This is where the EU comes in. In 2024, the EU enacted a pair of big, muscular Big Tech antitrust laws, the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA). These are complex pieces of legislation, and I don't like everything in them, but some parts of them are amazing: bold and imaginative breaks from the dismal history of ineffective or counterproductive tech regulation. Under the DSA, the EU has fined Twitter about $140m for exposing users to scams via this blue tick giant teddybear wheeze (much of that sum is punitive, because Twitter flagrantly obstructed the Commission's investigations). The DSA (sensibly) doesn't require user verification, but it does expect companies that tell their users that some accounts are verified and can be trusted, to actually verify that they actually can be trusted. I think there's a second DSA claim to be made here, beyond the failure to verify. Musk's plan to sell blue ticks was a disaster: while many, many scammers (and a few trolls) bought blue ticks, no one else did. The blue tick – which Musk thought of as a valuable status symbol that he could sell – was quickly devalued. "Account with a blue tick" was never all that prestigious, but under Musk, it came to mean "account that pushes scams, gore, disinformation, porn and/or hate." So Musk did something very funny and sweaty. He restored blue ticks to millions of high-follower accounts (including my own). And despite the fact that Musk had created about a million different kinds of blue ticks that denoted different kinds of organizations and payment schemes, these free blue ticks were indistinguishable from the paid ones. In other words, Musk set out to trick users into thinking that the most prominent people they followed believed that it was worth spending $8/month on a blue tick. It was an involuntary giant teddybear scam. Every time a prominent user with a free blue tick posts, they help Musk trick regular Twitter users into thinking that these worthless $8/month subscriptions are worth shelling out for. I think the Commission could run another, equally successful enforcement action against Musk and Twitter over this scam, too. Trump has been bellyaching nonstop about the DSA and DMA, threatening EU nations and businesses with tariffs and other TACO retribution if they go ahead with DSA/DMA enforcement. Let's hope the EU calls his bluff. Of course, Musk could get out of paying these fines by moving all his businesses out of the EU, which, frankly, would be a major result for Europe. (Image: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 4.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) Netflix Is Trying to Buy Warner Bros Discovery. That Would Be a Disaster for America. https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/netflix-is-trying-to-buy-warner-bros How popular is ecosocialist transformation? https://jasonhickel.substack.com/p/how-popular-is-ecosocialist-transformation Luigi Mangione Official Legal Fund for all 3 Cases https://www.givesendgo.com/luigi-defense-fund Trump’s Katrina Is Coming https://prospect.org/2025/12/05/trumps-katrina-is-coming-fema/ DEFT: DSPs for Equitable and Fair Treatment https://deft-us.com/ Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago What’s involved in different publishing jobs? https://web.archive.org/web/20050306095536/http://www.penguin.co.uk/static/packages/uk/aboutus/jobs_workingpeng.html #20yrsago Sony finally releases rookit uninstaller — sort of https://web.archive.org/web/20051204015131/http://cp.sonybmg.com/xcp/english/updates.html #20yrsago EFF forces Sony/Suncomm to fix its spyware https://web.archive.org/web/20051210024413/https://www.eff.org/news/archives/2005_12.php#004234 #20yrsago Warner Music attacks specialized web-browser https://web.archive.org/web/20051210024927/http://www.pearworks.com/pages/pearLyrics.html #20yrsago Sony’s DRM security fix leaves your computer more vulnerable https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2005/12/07/mediamax-bug-found-patch-issued-patch-suffers-same-bug/ #15yrsago Internet furnishes fascinating tale of a civil rights era ghosttown on demandhttps://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/eddwx/what_the_hell_happened_to_cairo_illinois/ #15yrsago Pasta carpet! https://wemakecarpets.wordpress.com/2010/11/02/pasta-carpet-2/ #15yrsago With a Little Help launch! https://memex.craphound.com/2010/12/07/with-a-little-help-launch/ #15yrsago Denver bomb squad defeats 8″ toy robot after hours-long standoff https://www.denverpost.com/2010/12/01/toy-robot-detours-traffic-near-coors-field/ #15yrsago UK govt demands an end to evidence-based drug policy https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/dec/05/government-scientific-advice-drugs-policy?& #10yrsago Iceland’s fastest-growing “religion” courts atheists by promising to rebate religious tax https://icelandmonitor.mbl.is/news/politics_and_society/2015/12/01/icelanders_flocking_to_the_zuist_religion/ #10yrsago Springer Nature to release 100,000 titles as DRM-free bundles https://web.archive.org/web/20151210051243/https://www.digitalbookworld.com/2015/bitlit-partners-with-springer-to-offer-ebook-bundles/ #10yrsago Solo: Hope Larson’s webcomic of rock-n-roll, romance, and desperation https://memex.craphound.com/2015/12/07/solo-hope-larsons-webcomic-of-rock-n-roll-romance-and-desperation/ #10yrsago Body-painted models disappear into the Wonders of the World https://www.trinamerry.com/trinamerryblog/sevenwondersbodypaint #10yrsago Make: the simplest electric car toy, a homopolar motor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPzJr1jjHnQ #10yrsago Thomas Piketty seminar on Crooked Timber https://crookedtimber.org/2016/01/04/thomas-piketty-seminar/ #10yrsago MAKE: a tiki-mug menorah https://web.archive.org/web/20151208123229/http://news.critiki.com/2015/12/05/tiki-mug-menorah-a-how-to-from-poly-hai/ #10yrsago Harvard Business School: Talented assholes are more trouble than they’re worth https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication #10yrsago Multi-generational cruelty: America’s prisons shutting down kids’ visitations https://web.archive.org/web/20151204063410/https://www.thenation.com/article/2-7m-kids-have-parents-in-prison-theyre-losing-their-right-to-visit/ #10yrsago READ: Kim Stanley Robinson’s first standalone story in 25 years! https://reactormag.com/oral-argument-kim-stanley-robinson// #10yrsago French Ministry of Interior wants to ban open wifi, Tor https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/12/france-looking-at-banning-tor-blocking-public-wi-fi/ #5yrsago China’s war on big data backstabbing https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/07/backstabbed/#big-data-backstabbing #5yrsago The largest strike in human history https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/06/surveillance-tulip-bulbs/#modi-miscalulation #5yrsago Ad-tech as a bubble overdue for a bursting https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/06/surveillance-tulip-bulbs/#adtech-bubble #1yrago Battery rationality https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/06/shoenabombers/#paging-dick-cheney #1yrago A year in illustration (2024) https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/07/great-kepplers-ghost/#art-adjacent Upcoming appearances (permalink) Virtual: Poetic Technologies with Brian Eno (David Graeber Institute), Dec 8 https://davidgraeber.institute/poetic-technologies-with-cory-doctorow-and-brian-eno/ Madison, CT: Enshittification at RJ Julia, Dec 8 https://rjjulia.com/event/2025-12-08/cory-doctorow-enshittification Hamburg: Chaos Communications Congress, Dec 27-30 https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/infos/index.html Denver: Enshittification at Tattered Cover Colfax, Jan 22 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-live-at-tattered-cover-colfax-tickets-1976644174937 Colorado Springs: Guest of Honor at COSine, Jan 23-25 https://www.firstfridayfandom.org/cosine/ Recent appearances (permalink) > The Plan is to Make the Internet Worse. Forever. (Novarra Media) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wE8G-d7SnY Enshittification (Future Knowledge) https://futureknowledge.transistor.fm/episodes/enshittification We have become slaves to Silicon Valley (Politics JOE) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzEUvh1r5-w How Enshittification is Destroying The Internet (Frontline Club) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oovsyzB9L-s Escape Forward with Cristina Caffarra https://escape-forward.com/2025/11/27/enshittification-of-our-digital-experience/ Latest books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE. "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X
- Pluralistic: Metabolizing the theory of "political capitalism" (06 Dec 2025)
- Sat, 06 Dec 2025 19:48:56 +0000
Today's links Metabolizing the theory of "political capitalism": How many $TRUMP coins should your company buy? Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: NZ doesn't want US-style copyright; Tron: Reloaded; Mass shootings and gun profits; Descartes God has failed; "The Big Fix." Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Metabolizing the theory of "political capitalism" (permalink) It's a strange fact that the more sophisticated and polished a theory gets, the simpler it tends to be. New theories tend to be inspired by a confluence of many factors, and early attempts to express the theory will seek to enumerate and connect everything that seems related, which is a lot. But as you develop the theory, it gets progressively more streamlined as you realize which parts can be safely omitted or combined without sacrificing granularity or clarity. This simplification requires a lot of iteration and reiteration, over a lot of time, for a lot of different audiences and critics. As Thoreau wrote (paraphrasing Pascal), "Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short." This week, I encountered a big, exciting theory that is still in the "long and complicated" phase, with so many moving parts that I'm having trouble keeping them straight in my head. But the idea itself is fascinating and has so much explanatory power, and I've been thinking about it nonstop, so I'm going to try to metabolize a part of it here today, both to bring it to your attention, and to try and find some clarity for myself. At issue is Dylan Riley and Robert Brenner's theory of "political capitalism," which I encountered through John Ganz's writeup of a panel he attended to discuss Riley and Brenner's work: https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/politics-and-capitalist-stagnation Riley and Brenner developed this theory through a pair of very long (and paywalled) articles in the New Left Review. First is 2022's "Seven Theses on American Politics" (£3), which followed the Democrats' surprisingly good showing in the 2022 midterms: https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii138/articles/4813 The second article, "The Long Downturn and Its Political Results" (£4), is even longer, and it both restates the theory of "Seven Theses" and addresses several prominent critics of their work: https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii155/articles/dylan-riley-robert-brenner-the-long-downturn-and-its-political-results (If you're thinking about reading the source materials – and I urge you to do so – I think you can safely just read the second article, as it really does recap and streamline the original.) So what is this theory? Ganz does a good job of breaking it down (better than Riley and Brenner, who, I think, still have a lot of darlings they can't bring themselves to murder). Here's my recap of Ganz's, then, with a few notes from the source texts thrown in. Riley and Brenner are advancing both an economic and a political theory, with the latter growing out of the former. The economic theory seeks to explain two phenomena, the "Long Boom" (post-WWII to the 1960s or so), and the "Long Downturn" (ever since). During the Long Boom, the US economy (and some other economies) experienced a period of sustained growth, without the crashes that had been the seemingly inevitable end-point of previous growth periods. Riley and Brenner say that these crashes were the result of business owners making the (locally) rational decision to hang on to older machines and tools even as new ones came online. Businesses are always looking to invest in new automation in a bid to wring more productivity from their workers. Profits come from labor, not machines, and as your competitors invest in the same machines as you've just bought, the higher rate of profit you got when you upgraded your machines will be eroded, as competitors chase each others' customers with lower prices. But not everyone is willing to upgrade when a new machine is invented. If you're still paying for the old machines, you just can't afford to throw them away and get the latest and greatest ones. Instead, as your competitors slash prices (because they have new machines that let them make the same stuff at a lower price), you must lower your prices too, accepting progressively lower profits. Eventually, your whole sector is using superannuated machines that they're still making payments on, and the overall rate of profit in the sector has dwindled to unsustainable levels. "Zombie companies" (companies that have no plausible chance of paying off their debts) dominate the economy. This is the "secular stagnation" that economists dread. Note that this whole thing is driven by the very same forces that make capitalism so dynamic: the falling rate of profit that gives rise to a relentless chase for new, more efficient processes. This is a stagnation born of dynamism, and the harder you yank on the "make capitalism more dynamic" lever, the more stagnant it becomes. Hoover and Mellon's austerity agenda in the 1920s sought to address this by triggering mass bankruptcies, in a brutal bid to "purge" those superannuated machines and the companies that owned them, at the expense of both workers and creditors. This wasn't enough. Instead, we got WWII, in which the government stepped in to buy things at rates that paid for factories to be retooled, and which pressed the entire workforce into employment. This is the trigger for the Long Boom, as America got a do-over with all-new capital and a freshly trained workforce with high morale and up-to-date skills. So that's the Long Boom. What about the Great Downturn? This is where Ganz's account begins. As the "late arrivals" (Japan, West Germany, South Korea, and, eventually China) show up on the world stage, they do their own Long Boom, having experienced an even more extreme "purge" of their zombie firms and obsolete machines. This puts downward pressure on profits in the USA (and, eventually, the late arrivals), leading to the Long Stagnation, a 50 year period in which the rate of profit in the USA has steadily declined. This is most of the economic theory, and it contains the germ of the political theory, too. During the Long Boom, there was plenty to go around, and the US was able to build out a welfare state, its ruling class was willing to tolerate unions, and movements for political and economic equality for women, sexual minorities, disabled people, racial minorities, etc, were able to make important inroads. But the political theory gets into high gear after years of Great Downturn. That's when the world has an oversupply of cheap goods and a sustained decline in the rate of profit, and the rate of profit declines every time someone invents a more efficient and productive technology. Companies in Downturn countries need to find a new way to improve their profits – they need to invest in something other than improved methods of production. That's where "political capitalism" comes in. Political capitalism is the capitalism you get when the cheapest, most reliable way to improve your rate of profit is to invest in the political process, to get favorable regulation, pork barrel government contracts, and cash bailouts. As Ganz puts it, "capitalists have gone from profit-seekers to rent-seekers," or, as Brenner and Riley write, capitalists now seek "a return on investment largely or completely divorced from material production." There's a sense in which this is immediately recognizable. The ascendancy of political capitalism tracks with the decline in antitrust enforcement, the rise of monopolies, a series of massive bailouts, and, under Trump, naked kleptocracy. In the US, "raw political power is the main source of return on capital." The "neoliberal turn" of late Carter/Reagan is downstream of political capitalism. When there was plenty to go around, the capital classes and the political classes were willing to share with workers. When the Great Downturn takes hold, bosses turn instead to screwing workers and taking over the political system. Fans of Bridget Read's Little Bosses Everywhere will know this as the moment in which Gerry Ford legalized pyramid schemes in order to save the founders of Amway, who were big GOP donors who lived in Ford's congressional district: https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/05/free-enterprise-system/#amway-or-the-highway Manufacturing's rate of profit has never recovered from this period – there have been temporary rallies, but the overall trend is down, down, down. But this is just the beginning of the political economy of Brenner and Riley's theory. Remember, this all started with an essay that sought to make sense of the 2022 midterms. Much of the political theory deals with electoral politics, and what has happened with America's two major political parties. Under political capitalism, workers are split into different groups depending on their relationship to political corruption. The "professional managerial class" (workers with degrees and other credentials) end up aligned with center-left parties, betting that these parties will use political power to fund the kinds of industries that hire credentialed workers, like health and education. Non-credentialed workers align themselves with right-wing parties that promise to raise their wages by banning immigrants and ending free trade. Ganz's most recent book, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s looks at the origins of the conspiratorial right that became MAGA: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374605445/whentheclockbroke/ He says that Riley and Brenner's theory really helps explain the moment he chronicled in his own book, for example, the way that Ross Perot (an important Trump predecessor) built power by railing against "late arrivals" like Japan, Germany and South Korea. This is also the heyday of corporate "finacialization," which can be thought of as the process by which companies stop concerning themselves with how to make and sell superior products more efficiently, and instead devote themselves to financial gimmicks that allow shareholders to extract wealth from the firm. It's a period of slashed R&D budgets, mass layoffs, union-busting, and massive corporate borrowing. In the original papers, Riley and Brenner drop all kinds of juicy, eye-opening facts and arguments to support their thesis. For example, in the US, more and more machinery is idle. In the 1960s, the US employed 85% of its manufacturing capacity. It was 78% in the 1980s, and now it's 75%. One quarter of "US plant and equipment is simply stagnating." Today's economic growth doesn't come from making stuff, it comes from extraction, buttressed by law. Looser debt rules allowed households to continue to consume by borrowing, with the effect that a substantial share of workers' wages go to servicing debt, which is to say, paying corporations for the privilege of existing, over and above the cost of the goods and services we consume. But the debt industry itself hasn't gotten any more efficient: "the cost of moving a dollar from a saver to a borrower was about two cents in 1910; a hundred years later, it was the same." They're making more, but they haven't made any improvements – all the talk of "fintech" and "financial engineering" have not produced any efficiencies. "This puzzle resolves itself once we recognize that the vast majority of financial innovation is geared towards figuring out how to siphon off resources through fees, insider information and lobbying." Reading these arguments, I was struck by how this period also covers the rise and rise of "IP." This is a period in which your ability to simply buy things declined, replaced with a system in which you rent and subscribe to things – forever. From your car to your thermostat, the key systems in your life are increasingly a monthly bill, meaning that every time you add something to your life, it's not a one-time expenditure; it's a higher monthly cost of living, forever. The rise and rise of IP is certainly part of political capitalism. The global system of IP comes from political capture, such as the inclusion of an IP chapter ("TRIPS") in the World Trade Agreement, as well as the WIPO Copyright Treaties. This is basically a process by which large (mostly American) businesses reorganized the world's system of governance and law to allow them to extract rents and slash R&D. The absurd, inevitable consequence of this nonsense is today's "capital light" chip companies, that don't make chips, just designs, which are turned out by one or two gigantic companies, mostly in Taiwan. Of course, Riley and Brenner aren't the first theorists to observe that our modern economy is organized around extracting rents, rather than winning profits. Yanis Varoufakis likens the modern economy to medieval feudalism, dubbing the new form "technofeudalism": https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital Riley and Brenner harken back to a different kind of feudal practice as the antecedant to political capitalism: "tax-farming." Groups of entrepreneurs would advance money to the sovereign in exchange for the right to collect taxes from a given territory or population. Their ‘profit’ consisted in the difference between the money that they advanced to the ruler for the right to tax and what they could extract from the population through the exercise of that right. So, these entrepreneurs invested in politics, the control of means of administration and the means of violence, as a method for extracting surplus, in this way making for a politically constituted form of rent. Unlike profits, rents are "largely or completely divorced from material production," "they ‘create no wealth’ and … they ‘reduce economic growth and reallocate incomes from the bottom to the top.'" To make a rent, you need an asset, and in today's system, high asset prices are a top political priority: governments intervene to keep the prices of houses high, to protect corporate bonds, and, of course, to keep AI companies' shares and IOUs from going to zero. The economy is dominated by "a large group of politically dependent firms and households…profoundly reliant on a policy of easy credit on the part of government… The US economy as a whole is sustained by lending, backed up by government, with profits accruing from production under excruciating pressure." Our social programs have been replaced by public-private partnerships that benefit these "politically dependent firms." Bush's Prescription Drug Act didn't seek to recoup public investment in pharma research through lower prices – it offered a (further) subsidy to pharma companies in exchange for (paltry/nonexistent) price breaks. Obama's Affordable Care Act transferred hundreds of billions to investors in health corporations, who raised prices and increased their profits. Trump's CARES Act bailed out every corporate debtor in the country. Biden's American Rescue Plan, CHIPS Act and Inflation Reduction Act don't offer public services or transfer funds to workers – instead, they offer subsidies to the for-profit sector. Electorally, political capitalism is a system of "vertiginous levels of campaign expenditure and open corruption on a vast scale." It pushed workers into the arms of far-right parties, while re-organizing center-left parties as center-right parties of the lanyard class. Both parties are hamstrung because "in a persistently low- or no-growth environment…parties can no longer operate on the basis of programmes for growth." This is really just scraping the surface. I think it's well worth £4 to read the source document. I look forward to the further development of this theory, to its being streamlined. It's got a lot of important things to say, even if it is a little hard to metabolize at present. Hey look at this (permalink) EU's New Digital Package Proposal Promises Red Tape Cuts but Guts GDPR Privacy Rights https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/eus-new-digital-package-proposal-promises-red-tape-cuts-guts-gdpr-privacy-rights Looks Like We Can Finally Kiss the Metaverse Goodbye https://gizmodo.com/looks-like-we-can-finally-kiss-the-metaverse-goodbye-2000695825 A New Anonymous Phone Carrier Lets You Sign Up With Nothing but a Zip Code https://www.wired.com/story/new-anonymous-phone-carrier-sign-up-with-nothing-but-a-zip-code/ Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/12/microsoft-slashes-ai-sales-growth-targets-as-customers-resist-unproven-agents/ The Hidden Cost of Ceding Government Procurement to a Monopoly Gatekeeper https://ilsr.org/article/independent-business/turning-public-money-into-amazons-profits/ Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Student ethnographies of World of Warcraft https://web.archive.org/web/20051208020004/http://www.trinity.edu/adelwich/mmo/students.html #20yrsago Sony rootkit ripped off anti-DRM code to break into iTunes https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2005/12/04/hidden-feature-sony-drm-uses-open-source-code-add-apple-drm/ #20yrsago English info on France’s terrible proposed copyright law https://web.archive.org/web/20060111032903/http://eucd.info/index.php?English-readers #15yrsago New Zealand leak: US-style copyright rules are a bad deal https://web.archive.org/web/20101206090519/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5498/125/ #15yrsago Tron: Reloaded, come for the action, stay for the aesthetics https://memex.craphound.com/2010/12/05/tron-reloaded-come-for-the-action-stay-for-the-aesthetics/ #10yrsago Unelectable Lindsey Graham throws caution to the wind https://web.archive.org/web/20151206030630/https://gawker.com/i-am-tired-of-this-crap-lindsey-graham-plays-thunderi-1746116881 #10yrsago Every time there’s a mass shooting, gun execs & investors gloat about future earnings https://theintercept.com/2015/12/03/mass-shooting-wall-st/ #10yrsago How to bake spice-filled sandworm bread https://web.archive.org/web/20151205193104/https://kitchenoverlord.com/2015/12/03/dune-week-spice-filled-sandworm/ #5yrsago Descartes' God has failed and Thompson's Satan rules our computers https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/05/trusting-trust/#thompsons-devil #5yrsago Denise Hearn and Vass Bednar's "The Big Fix" https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/05/ted-rogers-is-a-dope/#galen-weston-is-even-worse Upcoming appearances (permalink) Virtual: Poetic Technologies with Brian Eno (David Graeber Institute), Dec 8 https://davidgraeber.institute/poetic-technologies-with-cory-doctorow-and-brian-eno/ Madison, CT: Enshittification at RJ Julia, Dec 8 https://rjjulia.com/event/2025-12-08/cory-doctorow-enshittification Hamburg: Chaos Communications Congress, Dec 27-30 https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/infos/index.html Denver: Enshittification at Tattered Cover Colfax, Jan 22 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-live-at-tattered-cover-colfax-tickets-1976644174937 Recent appearances (permalink) Enshittification (Future Knowledge) https://futureknowledge.transistor.fm/episodes/enshittification We have become slaves to Silicon Valley (Politics JOE) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzEUvh1r5-w How Enshittification is Destroying The Internet (Frontline Club) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oovsyzB9L-s Escape Forward with Cristina Caffarra https://escape-forward.com/2025/11/27/enshittification-of-our-digital-experience/ Why Every Platform Betrays You (Trust Revolution) https://fountain.fm/episode/bJgdt0hJAnppEve6Qmt8 Latest books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE. "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X
- Pluralistic: The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI (05 Dec 2025)
- Fri, 05 Dec 2025 14:34:39 +0000
Today's links The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI: My speech for U Washington's Neuroscience, AI and Society lecture series. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Pac Man ghost algorithms; The US wrote Spain's copyright law; Illinois makes prisoners rent their cells; "Urban Transport Without the Hot Air"; "Ministry for the Future": Canada sues Google; In defense of 230; NYPD racist murder postmortem; Student debt trap; "That makes me smart." Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI (permalink) Last night, I gave a speech for the University of Washington's "Neuroscience, AI and Society" lecture series, through the university's Computational Neuroscience Center. It was called "The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI," and it's based on the manuscript for my next book, "The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI," which will be out from Farrar, Straus and Giroux next June: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/future-tense-neuroscience-ai-and-society-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1735371255139 The talk was sold out, but here's the text of my lecture. I'm very grateful to UW for the opportunity, and for a lovely visit to Seattle! == I'm a science fiction writer, which means that my job is to make up futuristic parables about our current techno-social arrangements to interrogate not just what a gadget does, but who it does it for, and who it does it to. What I don't do is predict the future. No one can predict the future, which is a good thing, since if the future were predictable, that would mean that what we all do couldn't change it. It would mean that the future was arriving on fixed rails and couldn't be steered. Jesus Christ, what a miserable proposition! Now, not everyone understands the distinction. They think sf writers are oracles, soothsayers. Unfortunately, even some of my colleagues labor under the delusion that they can "see the future." But for every sf writer who deludes themselves into thinking that they are writing the future, there are a hundred sf fans who believe that they are reading the future, and a depressing number of those people appear to have become AI bros. The fact that these guys can't shut up about the day that their spicy autocomplete machine will wake up and turn us all into paperclips has led many confused journalists and conference organizers to try to get me to comment on the future of AI. That's a thing I strenuously resisted doing, because I wasted two years of my life explaining patiently and repeatedly why I thought crypto was stupid, and getting relentless bollocked by cryptocurrency cultists who at first insisted that I just didn't understand crypto. And then, when I made it clear that I did understand crypto, insisted that I must be a paid shill. This is literally what happens when you argue with Scientologists, and life is Just. Too. Short. So I didn't want to get lured into another one of those quagmires, because on the one hand, I just don't think AI is that important of a technology, and on the other hand, I have very nuanced and complicated views about what's wrong, and not wrong, about AI, and it takes a long time to explain that stuff. But people wouldn't stop asking, so I did what I always do. I wrote a book. Over the summer I wrote a book about what I think about AI, which is really about what I think about AI criticism, and more specifically, how to be a good AI critic. By which I mean: "How to be a critic whose criticism inflicts maximum damage on the parts of AI that are doing the most harm." I titled the book The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish it in June, 2026. But you don't have to wait until then because I am going to break down the entire book's thesis for you tonight, over the next 40 minutes. I am going to talk fast. # Start with what a reverse centaur is. In automation theory, a "centaur" is a person who is assisted by a machine. You're a human head being carried around on a tireless robot body. Driving a car makes you a centaur, and so does using autocomplete. And obviously, a reverse centaur is machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine. Like an Amazon delivery driver, who sits in a cabin surrounded by AI cameras, that monitor the driver's eyes and take points off if the driver looks in a proscribed direction, and monitors the driver's mouth because singing isn't allowed on the job, and rats the driver out to the boss if they don't make quota. The driver is in that van because the van can't drive itself and can't get a parcel from the curb to your porch. The driver is a peripheral for a van, and the van drives the driver, at superhuman speed, demanding superhuman endurance. But the driver is human, so the van doesn't just use the driver. The van uses the driver up. Obviously, it's nice to be a centaur, and it's horrible to be a reverse centaur. There are lots of AI tools that are potentially very centaur-like, but my thesis is that these tools are created and funded for the express purpose of creating reverse-centaurs, which is something none of us want to be. But like I said, the job of an sf writer is to do more than think about what the gadget does, and drill down on who the gadget does it for and who the gadget does it to. Tech bosses want us to believe that there is only one way a technology can be used. Mark Zuckerberg wants you to think that it's technologically impossible to have a conversation with a friend without him listening in. Tim Cook wants you to think that it's technologically impossible for you to have a reliable computing experience unless he gets a veto over which software you install and without him taking 30 cents out of every dollar you spend. Sundar Pichai wants you think that it's impossible for you to find a webpage unless he gets to spy on you from asshole to appetite. This is all a kind of vulgar Thatcherism. Margaret Thatcher's mantra was "There is no alternative." She repeated this so often they called her "TINA" Thatcher: There. Is. No. Alternative. TINA. "There is no alternative" is a cheap rhetorical slight. It's a demand dressed up as an observation. "There is no alternative" means "STOP TRYING TO THINK OF AN ALTERNATIVE." Which, you know, fuck that. I'm an sf writer, my job is to think of a dozen alternatives before breakfast. So let me explain what I think is going on here with this AI bubble, and sort out the bullshit from the material reality, and explain how I think we could and should all be better AI critics. # Start with monopolies: tech companies are gigantic and they don't compete, they just take over whole sectors, either on their own or in cartels. Google and Meta control the ad market. Google and Apple control the mobile market, and Google pays Apple more than $20 billion/year not to make a competing search engine, and of course, Google has a 90% Search market-share. Now, you'd think that this was good news for the tech companies, owning their whole sector. But it's actually a crisis. You see, when a company is growing, it is a "growth stock," and investors really like growth stocks. When you buy a share in a growth stock, you're making a bet that it will continue to grow. So growth stocks trade at a huge multiple of their earnings. This is called the "price to earnings ratio" or "P/E ratio." But once a company stops growing, it is a "mature" stock, and it trades at a much lower P/E ratio. So for every dollar that Target – a mature company – brings in, it is worth ten dollars. It has a P/E ratio of 10, while Amazon has a P/E ratio of 36, which means that for every dollar Amazon brings in, the market values it at $36. It's wonderful to run a company that's got a growth stock. Your shares are as good as money. If you want to buy another company, or hire a key worker, you can offer stock instead of cash. And stock is very easy for companies to get, because shares are manufactured right there on the premises, all you have to do is type some zeroes into a spreadsheet, while dollars are much harder to come by. A company can only get dollars from customers or creditors. So when Amazon bids against Target for a key acquisition, or a key hire, Amazon can bid with shares they make by typing zeroes into a spreadsheet, and Target can only bid with dollars they get from selling stuff to us, or taking out loans, which is why Amazon generally wins those bidding wars. That's the upside of having a growth stock. But here's the downside: eventually a company has to stop growing. Like, say you get a 90% market share in your sector, how are you gonna grow? Once the market decides that you aren't a growth stock, once you become mature, your stock is revalued, to a P/E ratio befitting a mature stock. If you are an exec at a dominant company with a growth stock, you have to live in constant fear that the market will decide that you're not likely to grow any further. Think of what happened to Facebook in the first quarter of 2022. They told investors that they experienced slightly slower growth in the USA than they had anticipated, and investors panicked. They staged a one-day, $240B sell off. A quarter-trillion dollars in 24 hours! At the time, it was the largest, most precipitous drop in corporate valuation in human history. That's a monopolist's worst nightmare, because once you're presiding over a "mature" firm, the key employees you've been compensating with stock, experience a precipitous pay-drop and bolt for the exits, so you lose the people who might help you grow again, and you can only hire their replacements with dollars. With dollars, not shares. And the same goes for acquiring companies that might help you grow, because they, too, are going to expect money, not stock. This is the paradox of the growth stock. While you are growing to domination, the market loves you, but once you achieve dominance, the market lops 75% or more off your value in a single stroke if they don't trust your pricing power. Which is why growth stock companies are always desperately pumping up one bubble or another, spending billions to hype the pivot to video, or cryptocurrency, or NFTs, or Metaverse, or AI. I'm not saying that tech bosses are making bets they don't plan on winning. But I am saying that winning the bet – creating a viable metaverse – is the secondary goal. The primary goal is to keep the market convinced that your company will continue to grow, and to remain convinced until the next bubble comes along. So this is why they're hyping AI: the material basis for the hundreds of billions in AI investment. # Now I want to talk about how they're selling AI. The growth narrative of AI is that AI will disrupt labor markets. I use "disrupt" here in its most disreputable, tech bro sense. The promise of AI – the promise AI companies make to investors – is that there will be AIs that can do your job, and when your boss fires you and replaces you with AI, he will keep half of your salary for himself, and give the other half to the AI company. That's it. That's the $13T growth story that MorganStanley is telling. It's why big investors and institutionals are giving AI companies hundreds of billions of dollars. And because they are piling in, normies are also getting sucked in, risking their retirement savings and their family's financial security. Now, if AI could do your job, this would still be a problem. We'd have to figure out what to do with all these technologically unemployed people. But AI can't do your job. It can help you do your job, but that doesn't mean it's going to save anyone money. Take radiology: there's some evidence that AIs can sometimes identify solid-mass tumors that some radiologists miss, and look, I've got cancer. Thankfully, it's very treatable, but I've got an interest in radiology being as reliable and accurate as possible. If my Kaiser hospital bought some AI radiology tools and told its radiologists: "Hey folks, here's the deal. Today, you're processing about 100 x-rays per day. From now on, we're going to get an instantaneous second opinion from the AI, and if the AI thinks you've missed a tumor, we want you to go back and have another look, even if that means you're only processing 98 x-rays per day. That's fine, we just care about finding all those tumors." If that's what they said, I'd be delighted. But no one is investing hundreds of billions in AI companies because they think AI will make radiology more expensive, not even if that also makes radiology more accurate. The market's bet on AI is that an AI salesman will visit the CEO of Kaiser and make this pitch: "Look, you fire 9/10s of your radiologists, saving $20m/year, you give us $10m/year, and you net $10m/year, and the remaining radiologists' job will be to oversee the diagnoses the AI makes at superhuman speed, and somehow remain vigilant as they do so, despite the fact that the AI is usually right, except when it's catastrophically wrong. "And if the AI misses a tumor, this will be the human radiologist's fault, because they are the 'human in the loop.' It's their signature on the diagnosis." This is a reverse centaur, and it's a specific kind of reverse-centaur: it's what Dan Davies calls an "accountability sink." The radiologist's job isn't really to oversee the AI's work, it's to take the blame for the AI's mistakes. This is another key to understanding – and thus deflating – the AI bubble. The AI can't do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job. This is key because it helps us build the kinds of coalitions that will be successful in the fight against the AI bubble. If you're someone who's worried about cancer, and you're being told that the price of making radiology too cheap to meter, is that we're going to have to re-home America's 32,000 radiologists, with the trade-off that no one will ever be denied radiology services again, you might say, "Well, OK, I'm sorry for those radiologists, and I fully support getting them job training or UBI or whatever. But the point of radiology is to fight cancer, not to pay radiologists, so I know what side I'm on." AI hucksters and their customers in the C-suites want the public on their side. They want to forge a class alliance between AI deployers and the people who enjoy the fruits of the reverse centaurs' labor. They want us to think of ourselves as enemies to the workers. Now, some people will be on the workers' side because of politics or aesthetics. They just like workers better than their bosses. But if you want to win over all the people who benefit from your labor, you need to understand and stress how the products of the AI will be substandard. That they are going to get charged more for worse things. That they have a shared material interest with you. Will those products be substandard? There's every reason to think so. Earlier, I alluded to "automation blindness, "the physical impossibility of remaining vigilant for things that rarely occur. This is why TSA agents are incredibly good at spotting water bottles. Because they get a ton of practice at this, all day, every day. And why they fail to spot the guns and bombs that government red teams smuggle through checkpoints to see how well they work, because they just don't have any practice at that. Because, to a first approximation, no one deliberately brings a gun or a bomb through a TSA checkpoint. Automation blindness is the Achilles' heel of "humans in the loop." Think of AI software generation: there are plenty of coders who love using AI, and almost without exception, they are senior, experienced coders, who get to decide how they will use these tools. For example, you might ask the AI to generate a set of CSS files to faithfully render a web-page across multiple versions of multiple browsers. This is a notoriously fiddly thing to do, and it's pretty easy to verify if the code works – just eyeball it in a bunch of browsers. Or maybe the coder has a single data file they need to import and they don't want to write a whole utility to convert it. Tasks like these can genuinely make coders more efficient and give them more time to do the fun part of coding, namely, solving really gnarly, abstract puzzles. But when you listen to business leaders talk about their AI plans for coders, it's clear they're not looking to make some centaurs. They want to fire a lot of tech workers – 500,000 over the past three years – and make the rest pick up their work with coding, which is only possible if you let the AI do all the gnarly, creative problem solving, and then you do the most boring, soul-crushing part of the job: reviewing the AIs' code. And because AI is just a word guessing program, because all it does is calculate the most probable word to go next, the errors it makes are especially subtle and hard to spot, because these bugs are literally statistically indistinguishable from working code (except that they're bugs). Here's an example: code libraries are standard utilities that programmers can incorporate into their apps, so they don't have to do a bunch of repetitive programming. Like, if you want to process some text, you'll use a standard library. If it's an HTML file, that library might be called something like lib.html.text.parsing; and if it's a DOCX file, it'll be lib.docx.text.parsing. But reality is messy, humans are inattentive and stuff goes wrong, so sometimes, there's another library, this one for parsing PDFs, and instead of being called lib.pdf.text.parsing, it's called lib.text.pdf.parsing. Now, because the AI is a statistical inference engine, because all it can do is predict what word will come next based on all the words that have been typed in the past, it will "hallucinate" a library called lib.pdf.text.parsing. And the thing is, malicious hackers know that the AI will make this error, so they will go out and create a library with the predictable, hallucinated name, and that library will get automatically sucked into your program, and it will do things like steal user data or try and penetrate other computers on the same network. And you, the human in the loop – the reverse centaur – you have to spot this subtle, hard to find error, this bug that is literally statistically indistinguishable from correct code. Now, maybe a senior coder could catch this, because they've been around the block a few times, and they know about this tripwire. But guess who tech bosses want to preferentially fire and replace with AI? Senior coders. Those mouthy, entitled, extremely highly paid workers, who don't think of themselves as workers. Who see themselves as founders in waiting, peers of the company's top management. The kind of coder who'd lead a walkout over the company building drone-targeting systems for the Pentagon, which cost Google ten billion dollars in 2018. For AI to be valuable, it has to replace high-wage workers, and those are precisely the experienced workers, with process knowledge, and hard-won intuition, who might spot some of those statistically camouflaged AI errors. Like I said, the point here is to replace high-waged workers. And one of the reasons the AI companies are so anxious to fire coders is that coders are the princes of labor. They're the most consistently privileged, sought-after, and well-compensated workers in the labor force. If you can replace coders with AI, who cant you replace with AI? Firing coders is an ad for AI. Which brings me to AI art. AI art – or "art" – is also an ad for AI, but it's not part of AI's business model. Let me explain: on average, illustrators don't make any money. They are already one of the most immiserated, precartized groups of workers out there. They suffer from a pathology called "vocational awe." That's a term coined by the librarian Fobazi Ettarh, and it refers to workers who are vulnerable to workplace exploitation because they actually care about their jobs – nurses, librarians, teachers, and artists. If AI image generators put every illustrator working today out of a job, the resulting wage-bill savings would be undetectable as a proportion of all the costs associated with training and operating image-generators. The total wage bill for commercial illustrators is less than the kombucha bill for the company cafeteria at just one of Open AI's campuses. The purpose of AI art – and the story of AI art as a death-knell for artists – is to convince the broad public that AI is amazing and will do amazing things. It's to create buzz. Which is not to say that it's not disgusting that former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati told a conference audience that "some creative jobs shouldn't have been there in the first place," and that it's not especially disgusting that she and her colleagues boast about using the work of artists to ruin those artists' livelihoods. It's supposed to be disgusting. It's supposed to get artists to run around and say, "The AI can do my job, and it's going to steal my job, and isn't that terrible?" Because the customers for AI – corporate bosses – don't see AI taking workers' jobs as terrible. They see it as wonderful. But can AI do an illustrator's job? Or any artist's job? Let's think about that for a second. I've been a working artist since I was 17 years old, when I sold my first short story, and I've given it a lot of thought, and here's what I think art is: it starts with an artist, who has some vast, complex, numinous, irreducible feeling in their mind. And the artist infuses that feeling into some artistic medium. They make a song, or a poem, or a painting, or a drawing, or a dance, or a book, or a photograph. And the idea is, when you experience this work, a facsimile of the big, numinous, irreducible feeling will materialize in your mind. Now that I've defined art, we have to go on a little detour. I have a friend who's a law professor, and before the rise of chatbots, law students knew better than to ask for reference letters from their profs, unless they were a really good student. Because those letters were a pain in the ass to write. So if you advertised for a postdoc and you heard from a candidate with a reference letter from a respected prof, the mere existence of that letter told you that the prof really thought highly of that student. But then we got chatbots, and everyone knows that you generate a reference letter by feeding three bullet points to an LLM, and it'll barf up five paragraphs of florid nonsense about the student. So when my friend advertises for a postdoc, they are flooded with reference letters, and they deal with this flood by feeding all these letters to another chatbot, and ask it to reduce them back to three bullet points. Now, obviously, they won't be the same bullet-points, which makes this whole thing terrible. But just as obviously, nothing in that five-paragraph letter except the original three bullet points are relevant to the student. The chatbot doesn't know the student. It doesn't know anything about them. It cannot add a single true or useful statement about the student to the letter. What does this have to do with AI art? Art is a transfer of a big, numinous, irreducible feeling from an artist to someone else. But the image-gen program doesn't know anything about your big, numinous, irreducible feeling. The only thing it knows is whatever you put into your prompt, and those few sentences are diluted across a million pixels or a hundred thousand words, so that the average communicative density of the resulting work is indistinguishable from zero. It's possible to infuse more communicative intent into a work: writing more detailed prompts, or doing the selective work of choosing from among many variants, or directly tinkering with the AI image after the fact, with a paintbrush or Photoshop or The Gimp. And if there will ever be a piece of AI art that is good art – as opposed to merely striking, or interesting, or an example of good draftsmanship – it will be thanks to those additional infusions of creative intent by a human. And in the meantime, it's bad art. It's bad art in the sense of being "eerie," the word Mark Fisher uses to describe "when there is something present where there should be nothing, or there is nothing present when there should be something." AI art is eerie because it seems like there is an intender and an intention behind every word and every pixel, because we have a lifetime of experience that tells us that paintings have painters, and writing has writers. But it's missing something. It has nothing to say, or whatever it has to say is so diluted that it's undetectable. The images were striking before we figured out the trick, but now they're just like the images we imagine in clouds or piles of leaves. We're the ones drawing a frame around part of the scene, we're the ones focusing on some contours and ignoring the others. We're looking at an inkblot, and it's not telling us anything. Sometimes that can be visually arresting, and to the extent that it amuses people in a community of prompters and viewers, that's harmless. I know someone who plays a weekly Dungeons and Dragons game over Zoom. It's transcribed by an open source model running locally on the dungeon master's computer, which summarizes the night's session and prompts an image generator to create illustrations of key moments. These summaries and images are hilarious because they're full of errors. It's a bit of harmless fun, and it bring a small amount of additional pleasure to a small group of people. No one is going to fire an illustrator because D&D players are image-genning funny illustrations where seven-fingered paladins wrestle with orcs that have an extra hand. But bosses have and will fire illustrators, because they fantasize about being able to dispense with creative professionals and just prompt an AI. Because even though the AI can't do the illustrator's job, an AI salesman can convince the illustrator's boss to fire them and replace them with an AI that can't do their job. This is a disgusting and terrible juncture, and we should not simply shrug our shoulders and accept Thatcherism's fatalism: "There is no alternative." So what is the alternative? A lot of artists and their allies think they have an answer: they say we should extend copyright to cover the activities associated with training a model. And I'm here to tell you they are wrong: wrong because this would inflict terrible collateral damage on socially beneficial activities, and it would represent a massive expansion of copyright over activities that are currently permitted – for good reason!. Let's break down the steps in AI training. First, you scrape a bunch of web-pages. This is unambiguously legal under present copyright law. You do not need a license to make a transient copy of a copyrighted work in order to analyze it, otherwise search engines would be illegal. Ban scraping and Google will be the last search engine we ever get, the Internet Archive will go out of business, that guy in Austria who scraped all the grocery store sites and proved that the big chains were colluding to rig prices would be in deep trouble. Next, you perform analysis on those works. Basically, you count stuff on them: count pixels and their colors and proximity to other pixels; or count words. This is obviously not something you need a license for. It's just not illegal to count the elements of a copyrighted work. And we really don't want it to be, not if you're interested in scholarship of any kind. And it's important to note that counting things is legal, even if you're working from an illegally obtained copy. Like, if you go to the flea market, and you buy a bootleg music CD, and you take it home and you make a list of all the adverbs in the lyrics, and you publish that list, you are not infringing copyright by doing so. Perhaps you've infringed copyright by getting the pirated CD, but not by counting the lyrics. This is why Anthropic offered a $1.5b settlement for training its models based on a ton of books it downloaded from a pirate site: not because counting the words in the books infringes anyone's rights, but because they were worried that they were going to get hit with $150k/book statutory damages for downloading the files. OK, after you count all the pixels or the words, it's time for the final step: publishing them. Because that's what a model is: a literary work (that is, a piece of software) that embodies a bunch of facts about a bunch of other works, word and pixel distribution information, encoded in a multidimensional array. And again, copyright absolutely does not prohibit you from publishing facts about copyrighted works. And again, no one should want to live in a world where someone else gets to decide which truthful, factual statements you can publish. But hey, maybe you think this is all sophistry. Maybe you think I'm full of shit. That's fine. It wouldn't be the first time someone thought that. After all, even if I'm right about how copyright works now, there's no reason we couldn't change copyright to ban training activities, and maybe there's even a clever way to wordsmith the law so that it only catches bad things we don't like, and not all the good stuff that comes from scraping, analyzing and publishing. Well, even then, you're not gonna help out creators by creating this new copyright. If you're thinking that you can, you need to grapple with this fact: we have monotonically expanded copyright since 1976, so that today, copyright covers more kinds of works, grants exclusive rights over more uses, and lasts longer. And today, the media industry is larger and more profitable than it has ever been, and also: the share of media industry income that goes to creative workers is lower than its ever been, both in real terms, and as a proportion of those incredible gains made by creators' bosses at the media company. So how it is that we have given all these new rights to creators, and those new rights have generated untold billions, and left creators poorer? It's because in a creative market dominated by five publishers, four studios, three labels, two mobile app stores, and a single company that controls all the ebooks and audiobooks, giving a creative worker extra rights to bargain with is like giving your bullied kid more lunch money. It doesn't matter how much lunch money you give the kid, the bullies will take it all. Give that kid enough money and the bullies will hire an agency to run a global campaign proclaiming "think of the hungry kids! Give them more lunch money!" Creative workers who cheer on lawsuits by the big studios and labels need to remember the first rule of class warfare: things that are good for your boss are rarely what's good for you. The day Disney and Universal filed suit against Midjourney, I got a press release from the RIAA, which represents Disney and Universal through their recording arms. Universal is the largest label in the world. Together with Sony and Warner, they control 70% of all music recordings in copyright today. It starts: "There is a clear path forward through partnerships that both further AI innovation and foster human artistry." It ends: "This action by Disney and Universal represents a critical stand for human creativity and responsible innovation." And it's signed by Mitch Glazier, CEO of the RIAA. It's very likely that name doesn't mean anything to you. But let me tell you who Mitch Glazier is. Today, Mitch Glazier is the CEO if the RIAA, with an annual salary of $1.3m. But until 1999, Mitch Glazier was a key Congressional staffer, and in 1999, Glazier snuck an amendment into an unrelated bill, the Satellite Home Viewer Improvement Act, that killed musicians' right to take their recordings back from their labels. This is a practice that had been especially important to "heritage acts" (which is a record industry euphemism for "old music recorded by Black people"), for whom this right represented the difference between making rent and ending up on the street. When it became clear that Glazier had pulled this musician-impoverishing scam, there was so much public outcry, that Congress actually came back for a special session, just to vote again to cancel Glazier's amendment. And then Glazier was kicked out of his cushy Congressional job, whereupon the RIAA started paying more than $1m/year to "represent the music industry." This is the guy who signed that press release in my inbox. And his message was: The problem isn't that Midjourney wants to train a Gen AI model on copyrighted works, and then use that model to put artists on the breadline. The problem is that Midjourney didn't pay RIAA members Universal and Disney for permission to train a model. Because if only Midjourney had given Disney and Universal several million dollars for training rights to their catalogs, the companies would have happily allowed them to train to their heart's content, and they would have bought the resulting models, and fired as many creative professionals as they could. I mean, have we already forgotten the Hollywood strikes? I sure haven't. I live in Burbank, home to Disney, Universal and Warner, and I was out on the line with my comrades from the Writers Guild, offering solidarity on behalf of my union, IATSE 830, The Animation Guild, where I'm a member of the writers' unit. And I'll never forget when one writer turned to me and said, "You know, you prompt an LLM exactly the same way an exec gives shitty notes to a writers' room. You know: 'Make me ET, except it's about a dog, and put a love interest in there, and a car chase in the second act.' The difference is, you say that to a writers' room and they all make fun of you and call you a fucking idiot suit. But you say it to an LLM and it will cheerfully shit out a terrible script that conforms exactly to that spec (you know, Air Bud)." These companies are desperate to use AI to displace workers. When Getty Images sues AI companies, it's not representing the interests of photographers. Getty hates paying photographers! Getty just wants to get paid for the training run, and they want the resulting AI model to have guardrails, so it will refuse to create images that compete with Getty's images for anyone except Getty. But Getty will absolutely use its models to bankrupt as many photographers as it possibly can. A new copyright to train models won't get us a world where models aren't used to destroy artists, it'll just get us a world where the standard contracts of the handful of companies that control all creative labor markets are updated to require us to hand over those new training rights to those companies. Demanding a new copyright just makes you a useful idiot for your boss, a human shield they can brandish in policy fights, a tissue-thin pretense of "won't someone think of the hungry artists?" When really what they're demanding is a world where 30% of the investment capital of the AI companies go into their shareholders' pockets. When an artist is being devoured by rapacious monopolies, does it matter how they divvy up the meal? We need to protect artists from AI predation, not just create a new way for artists to be mad about their impoverishment. And incredibly enough, there's a really simple way to do that. After 20+ years of being consistently wrong and terrible for artists' rights, the US Copyright Office has finally done something gloriously, wonderfully right. All through this AI bubble, the Copyright Office has maintained – correctly – that AI-generated works cannot be copyrighted, because copyright is exclusively for humans. That's why the "monkey selfie" is in the public domain. Copyright is only awarded to works of human creative expression that are fixed in a tangible medium. And not only has the Copyright Office taken this position, they've defended it vigorously in court, repeatedly winning judgments to uphold this principle. The fact that every AI created work is in the public domain means that if Getty or Disney or Universal or Hearst newspapers use AI to generate works – then anyone else can take those works, copy them, sell them, or give them away for free. And the only thing those companies hate more than paying creative workers, is having other people take their stuff without permission. The US Copyright Office's position means that the only way these companies can get a copyright is to pay humans to do creative work. This is a recipe for centaurhood. If you're a visual artist or writer who uses prompts to come up with ideas or variations, that's no problem, because the ultimate work comes from you. And if you're a video editor who uses deepfakes to change the eyelines of 200 extras in a crowd-scene, then sure, those eyeballs are in the public domain, but the movie stays copyrighted. But creative workers don't have to rely on the US government to rescue us from AI predators. We can do it ourselves, the way the writers did in their historic writers' strike. The writers brought the studios to their knees. They did it because they are organized and solidaristic, but also are allowed to do something that virtually no other workers are allowed to do: they can engage in "sectoral bargaining," whereby all the workers in a sector can negotiate a contract with every employer in the sector. That's been illegal for most workers since the late 1940s, when the Taft-Hartley Act outlawed it. If we are gonna campaign to get a new law passed in hopes of making more money and having more control over our labor, we should campaign to restore sectoral bargaining, not to expand copyright. Our allies in a campaign to expand copyright are our bosses, who have never had our best interests at heart. While our allies in the fight for sector bargaining are every worker in the country. As the song goes, "Which side are you on?" OK, I need to bring this talk in for a landing now, because I'm out of time, so I'm going to close out with this: AI is a bubble and bubbles are terrible. Bubbles transfer the life's savings of normal people who are just trying to have a dignified retirement to the wealthiest and most unethical people in our society, and every bubble eventually bursts, taking their savings with it. But not every bubble is created equal. Some bubbles leave behind something productive. Worldcom stole billions from everyday people by defrauding them about orders for fiber optic cables. The CEO went to prison and died there. But the fiber outlived him. It's still in the ground. At my home, I've got 2gb symmetrical fiber, because AT&T lit up some of that old Worldcom dark fiber. All things being equal, it would have been better if Worldcom hadn't ever existed, but the only thing worse than Worldcom committing all that ghastly fraud would be if there was nothing to salvage from the wreckage. I don't think we'll salvage much from cryptocurrency, for example. Sure, there'll be a few coders who've learned something about secure programming in Rust. But when crypto dies, what it will leave behind is bad Austrian economics and worse monkey JPEGs. AI is a bubble and it will burst. Most of the companies will fail. Most of the data-centers will be shuttered or sold for parts. So what will be left behind? We'll have a bunch of coders who are really good at applied statistics. We'll have a lot of cheap GPUs, which'll be good news for, say, effects artists and climate scientists, who'll be able to buy that critical hardware at pennies on the dollar. And we'll have the open source models that run on commodity hardware, AI tools that can do a lot of useful stuff, like transcribing audio and video, describing images, summarizing documents, automating a lot of labor-intensive graphic editing, like removing backgrounds, or airbrushing passersby out of photos. These will run on our laptops and phones, and open source hackers will find ways to push them to do things their makers never dreamt of. If there had never been an AI bubble, if all this stuff arose merely because computer scientists and product managers noodled around for a few years coming up with cool new apps for back-propagation, machine learning and generative adversarial networks, most people would have been pleasantly surprised with these interesting new things their computers could do. We'd call them "plugins." It's the bubble that sucks, not these applications. The bubble doesn't want cheap useful things. It wants expensive, "disruptive" things: Big foundation models that lose billions of dollars every year. When the AI investment mania halts, most of those models are going to disappear, because it just won't be economical to keep the data-centers running. As Stein's Law has it: "Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." The collapse of the AI bubble is going to be ugly. Seven AI companies currently account for more than a third of the stock market, and they endlessly pass around the same $100b IOU. Bosses are mass-firing productive workers and replacing them with janky AI, and when the janky AI is gone, no one will be able to find and re-hire most of those workers, we're going to go from disfunctional AI systems to nothing. AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed there with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more. So we need to get rid of this bubble. Pop it, as quickly as we can. To do that, we have to focus on the material factors driving the bubble. The bubble isn't being driven by deepfake porn, or election disinformation, or AI image-gen, or slop advertising. All that stuff is terrible and harmful, but it's not driving investment. The total dollar figure represented by these apps doesn't come close to making a dent in the capital expenditures and operating costs of AI. They are peripheral, residual uses: flashy, but unimportant to the bubble. Get rid of all those uses and you reduce the expected income of AI companies by a sum so small it rounds to zero. Same goes for all that "AI Safety" nonsense, that purports to concern itself with preventing an AI from attaining sentience and turning us all into paperclips. First of all, this is facially absurd. Throwing more words and GPUs into the word-guessing program won't make it sentient. That's like saying, "Well, we keep breeding these horses to run faster and faster, so it's only a matter of time until one of our mares gives birth to a locomotive." A human mind is not a word-guessing program with a lot of extra words. I'm here for science fiction thought experiments, don't get me wrong. But also, don't mistake sf for prophesy. SF stories about superintelligence are futuristic parables, not business plans, roadmaps, or predictions. The AI Safety people say they are worried that AI is going to end the world, but AI bosses love these weirdos. Because on the one hand, if AI is powerful enough to destroy the world, think of how much money it can make! And on the other hand, no AI business plan has a line on its revenue projections spreadsheet labeled "Income from turning the human race into paperclips." So even if we ban AI companies from doing this, we won't cost them a dime in investment capital. To pop the bubble, we have to hammer on the forces that created the bubble: the myth that AI can do your job, especially if you get high wages that your boss can claw back; the understanding that growth companies need a succession of ever-more-outlandish bubbles to stay alive; the fact that workers and the public they serve are on one side of this fight, and bosses and their investors are on the other side. Because the AI bubble really is very bad news, it's worth fighting seriously, and a serious fight against AI strikes at its roots: the material factors fueling the hundreds of billions in wasted capital that are being spent to put us all on the breadline and fill all our walls with high-tech asbestos. (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) Politics and Capitalist Stagnation https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/politics-and-capitalist-stagnation An Analysis of the Proposed Spirit Financial-Credit Union 1 Merger. The Consequences for the Credit Union System https://chipfilson.com/2025/12/an-analysis-of-the-proposed-spirit-financal-credit-union-1-merger/ Zillow deletes climate risk data from listings after complaints it harms sales https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/dec/01/zillow-removes-climate-risk-data-home-listings After Years of Controversy, the EU’s Chat Control Nears Its Final Hurdle: What to Know https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/after-years-controversy-eus-chat-control-nears-its-final-hurdle-what-know How the dollar-store industry overcharges cash-strapped customers while promising low prices https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/03/customers-pay-more-rising-dollar-store-costs Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Haunted Mansion papercraft model adds crypts and gates https://www.haunteddimensions.raykeim.com/index313.html #20yrsago Print your own Monopoly money https://web.archive.org/web/20051202030047/http://www.hasbro.com/monopoly/pl/page.treasurechest/dn/default.cfm #15yrsago Bunnie explains the technical intricacies and legalities of Xbox hacking https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2010/usa-v-crippen-a-retrospective/ #15yrsago How Pac Man’s ghosts decide what to do: elegant complexity https://web.archive.org/web/20101205044323/https://gameinternals.com/post/2072558330/understanding-pac-man-ghost-behavior #15yrsago Glorious, elaborate, profane insults of the world https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/efee7/what_are_your_favorite_culturally_untranslateable/?sort=confidence #15yrsago Walt Disney World castmembers speak about their search for a living wage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5BMQ3xQc7o #15yrsago Wikileaks cables reveal that the US wrote Spain’s proposed copyright law https://web.archive.org/web/20140723230745/https://elpais.com/elpais/2010/12/03/actualidad/1291367868_850215.html #15yrsago Cities made of broken technology https://web.archive.org/web/20101203132915/https://agora-gallery.com/artistpage/Franco_Recchia.aspx #10yrsago The TPP’s ban on source-code disclosure requirements: bad news for information security https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/12/tpp-threatens-security-and-safety-locking-down-us-policy-source-code-audit #10yrsago Fossil fuel divestment sit-in at MIT President’s office hits 10,000,000,000-hour mark https://twitter.com/FossilFreeMIT/status/672526210581274624 #10yrsago Hacker dumps United Arab Emirates Invest Bank’s customer data https://www.dailydot.com/news/invest-bank-hacker-buba/ #10yrsago Illinois prisons spy on prisoners, sue them for rent on their cells if they have any money https://www.chicagotribune.com/2015/11/30/state-sues-prisoners-to-pay-for-their-room-board/ #10yrsago Free usability help for privacy toolmakers https://superbloom.design/learning/blog/apply-for-help/ #10yrsago In the first 334 days of 2015, America has seen 351 mass shootings (and counting) https://web.archive.org/web/20151209004329/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/30/there-have-been-334-days-and-351-mass-shootings-so-far-this-year/ #10yrsago Not even the scapegoats will go to jail for BP’s murder of the Gulf Coast https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/12/manslaughter-charges-dropped-in-bp-spill-case-nobody-from-bp-will-go-to-prison/ #10yrsago Urban Transport Without the Hot Air: confusing the issue with relevant facts! https://memex.craphound.com/2015/12/03/urban-transport-without-the-hot-air-confusing-the-issue-with-relevant-facts/ #5yrsago Breathtaking Iphone hack https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/03/ministry-for-the-future/#awdl #5yrsago Graffitists hit dozens of NYC subway cars https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/03/ministry-for-the-future/#getting-up #5yrsago The Ministry For the Future https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/03/ministry-for-the-future/#ksr #5yrsago Monopolies made America vulnerable to covid https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/03/ministry-for-the-future/#big-health #5yrsago Section 230 is Good, Actually https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/04/kawaski-trawick/#230 #5yrsago Postmortem of the NYPD's murder of a Black man https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/04/kawaski-trawick/#Kawaski-Trawick #5yrsago Student debt trap https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/04/kawaski-trawick/#strike-debt #1yrago "That Makes Me Smart" https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/04/its-not-a-lie/#its-a-premature-truth #1yrago Canada sues Google https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/03/clementsy/#can-tech Upcoming appearances (permalink) Virtual: Poetic Technologies with Brian Eno (David Graeber Institute), Dec 8 https://davidgraeber.institute/poetic-technologies-with-cory-doctorow-and-brian-eno/ Madison, CT: Enshittification at RJ Julia, Dec 8 https://rjjulia.com/event/2025-12-08/cory-doctorow-enshittification Hamburg: Chaos Communications Congress, Dec 27-30 https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/infos/index.html Denver: Enshittification at Tattered Cover Colfax, Jan 22 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-live-at-tattered-cover-colfax-tickets-1976644174937 Recent appearances (permalink) Enshittification (Future Knowledge) https://futureknowledge.transistor.fm/episodes/enshittification We have become slaves to Silicon Valley (Politics JOE) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzEUvh1r5-w How Enshittification is Destroying The Internet (Frontline Club) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oovsyzB9L-s Escape Forward with Cristina Caffarra https://escape-forward.com/2025/11/27/enshittification-of-our-digital-experience/ Why Every Platform Betrays You (Trust Revolution) https://fountain.fm/episode/bJgdt0hJAnppEve6Qmt8 Latest books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE. "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X
- Pluralistic: A year in illustration (2025 edition) (03 Dec 2025)
- Wed, 03 Dec 2025 18:05:02 +0000
Today's links A year in illustration (2025 edition): I think I'm getting the hang of this? Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: HADOPI is born; Tea Party wants to disenfranchise renters; How to kill TPP; Mozilla ejects Thunderbird; Rosa Parks was a lifelong radical activist. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. A year in illustration (2025 edition) (permalink) One of the most surprising professional and creative developments of my middle-age has been discovering my love of collage. I have never been a "visual" person – I can't draw, I can't estimate whether a piece of furniture will fit in a given niche, I can't catch a ball, and I can't tell you if a picture is crooked. When Boing Boing started including images with our posts in the early 2000s, I hated it. It was such a chore to find images that were open licensed or public domain, and so many of the subjects I wrote about are abstract and complex and hard to illustrate. Sometimes, I'd come up with a crude visual gag and collage together a few freely usable images as best as I could and call it a day. But over the five years that I've been writing Pluralistic, I've found myself putting more and more effort and thought into these header images. Without realizing it, I put more and more time into mastering The GIMP (a free/open Photoshop alternative), watching tutorial videos and just noodling from time to time. I also discovered many unsuspected sources of public domain work, such as the Library of Congress, whose search engine sucks, but whose collection is astounding (tip: use Kagi or Google to search for images with the "site:loc.gov" flag). I also discovered the Met's incredible collection: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search And the archives of H Armstrong Roberts, an incredibly prolific stock photographer whose whole corpus is in the public domain. You can download more than 14,000 of his images from the Internet Archive (I certainly did!): https://archive.org/details/h-armstrong-roberts Speaking of the Archive and search engine hacks, I've also developed a method for finding hi-rez images that are otherwise very hard to get. Often, an image search will turn up public domain results on commercial stock sites like Getty. If I can't find public domain versions elsewhere (e.g. by using Tineye reverse-image search), I look for Getty's metadata about the image's source (that is, which book or collection it came from). Then I search the Internet Archive and other public domain repositories for high-rez PDF scans of the original work, and pull the images out of there. Many of my demons come from Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros, an 18th century updating of a 11th century demonolgy text, which you can get as a hi-rez at the Wellcome Trust: https://wellcomecollection.org/works/cvnpwy8d Five years into my serious collage phase, I find myself increasingly pleased with the work I'm producing. I actually self-published a little book of my favorites this year (Canny Valley), which Bruce Sterling provided an intro for and which the legendary book designed John Berry laid out fot me, and I'm planning future volumes: https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce I've been doing annual illustration roundups for the past several years, selecting my favorites from the year's crop: 2022: https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/25/a-year-in-illustration/ 2023: https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/21/collages-r-us/ 2024: https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/07/great-kepplers-ghost/ It's a testament to how much progress I've made that when it came time to choose this year's favorites, I had 33 images I wanted to highlight. Much of this year's progress is down to my friend and neighbor Alistair Milne, an extremely talented artist and commercial illustrator who has periodically offered me little bits of life-changing advice on composition and technique. I've also found a way to use these images in my talks: I've pulled together a slideshow of my favorite (enshittification-related) images, formatted for 16:9 (the incredibly awkward aspect ratio that everyone seems to expect these days), with embedded Creative Commons attributions. When I give a talk, I ask to have this run behind me in "kiosk mode," looping with a 10-second delay between each slide. Here's an up-to-date (as of today) version: https://archive.org/download/enshittification-slideshow/enshittification.pptx If these images intrigue you and you'd like hi-rez versions to rework on your own, you can get full rez versions of all my blog collagesin my "Pluralistic Collages" Flickr set: https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/albums/72177720316719208 They're licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, though some subelements may be under different licenses (check the image descriptions for details). But everything is licensed for remix and commercial distribution, so go nuts! All the books I reviewed in 2025 The underlying image comes from the Library of Congress (a search for "reading + book") (because "reading" turns up pictures of Reading, PA and Reading, UK). I love the poop emoji from the cover of the US edition of Enshittification and I'm hoping to get permission to do a lot more with it. https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/02/constant-reader/#too-many-books Meta's new top EU regulator is contractually prohibited from saying mean things about Meta Mark Zuckerberg's ghastly Metaverse avatar is such a gift to his critics. I can't believe his comms team let him release it! The main image is an H Armstrong Roberts classic of a beat cop wagging his finger at a naughty lad on a bicycle. The Wachowskis' 'code waterfall' comes from this generator: https://github.com/yeaayy/the-matrix https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/01/erin-go-blagged/#big-tech-omerta The long game In my intro to last year's roundup, I wrote about Joseph Keppler, the incredibly prolific illustrator and publisher who founded Puck magazine and drew hundreds of illustrations, many of them editorial cartoons that accompanied articles that criticized monopolies and America's oligarch class. As with so much of his work, Keppler's classic illustration of Rockefeller as a shrimpy, preening king updates very neatly to today's context, through the simple expedient of swapping in Zuck's metaverse avatar. https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/20/if-you-wanted-to-get-there/#i-wouldnt-start-from-here Facebook's fraud files I love including scanned currency in my illustrations. Obviously, large-denomination bills make for great symbols in posts about concentrated wealth and power, but also, US currency is iconic, covered in weird illustrations, and available as incredibly high-rez scans, like this 7,300+ pixel-wide C-note: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._hundred_dollar_bill,_1999.jpg It turns out that intaglio shading does really cool stuff when you tweak the curves. I love what happened to Ben Franklin's eyes in this one. (Zuck's body is another Keppler/Puck illo!) https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/08/faecebook/#too-big-to-care There's one thing EVERY government can do to shrink Big Tech This is another Keppler/Roberts mashup. Keppler's original is Teddy Roosevelt as a club-wielding ("speak softly and carry a big stick") trustbusting Goliath. The crying baby and money come from an H Armstrong Roberts tax-protest stock photo (one of the money sacks was originally labeled "TAXES"). This one also includes one of my standbys, Cryteria's terrific vector image of HAL 9000's glaring red eye, always a good symbolic element for stories about Big Tech, surveillance, and/or AI: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/01/redistribution-vs-predistribution/#elbows-up-eurostack When AI prophecy fails The chain-gang photo comes from the Library of Congress. That hacker hoodie is a public domain graphic ganked from Wikimedia Commons. I love how the HAL 9000 eye pops as the only color element in this one. https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/29/worker-frightening-machines/#robots-stole-your-jerb-kinda Checking in on the state of Amazon's chickenized reverse-centaurs Another H Armstrong Roberts remix: originally, this was a grinning delivery man jugging several parcels. I reskinned him and his van with Amazon delivery livery, and matted in the horse-head to create a "reverse centaur" (another theme I return to often). I used one of Alistair Milne's tips to get that horse's head right: rather than trying to trace all the stray hairs on the mane, I traced them with a fine brush tool on a separate layer, then erased the strays from the original and merged down to get a nice, transparency-enabled hair effect. https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/23/traveling-salesman-solution/#pee-bottles The mad king's digital killswitch The Uncle Sam image is Keppler's (who else?). In the original (which is about tariffs! everything old is new!), Sam's legs have become magnets that are drawing in people and goods from all over the world. The Earth-from-space image is a NASA pic. Love that all works of federal authorship are born in the public domain! https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/20/post-american-internet/#huawei-with-american-characteristics Microsoft, Tear Down That Wall! Clippy makes a perfect element for posts about chatbots. It's hard to think that Microsoft shipped a product with such a terrible visual design, but at the same time, I gotta give 'em credit, it's so awful that it's still instantly recognizable, 25 years later. https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/15/freedom-of-movement/#data-dieselgate A disenshittification moment from the land of mass storage Another remix of Keppler's excellent Teddy Roosevelt/trustbuster giant image, this time with Ben Franklin's glorious C-note phiz. God, I love using images from money! https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/10/synology/#how-about-nah Apple's unlawful evil Alistair Milne helped me work up a super hi-rez version of Trump's hair from his official (public domain) 2024 presidential portrait. Lots of tracing those fine hairs, and boy does it pay off. Apple's "Think Different" wordmark (available as a vector on Wikimedia Commons) is a gift to the company's critics. The fact that the NYPD actually routinely show up for protests dressed like this makes my job too easy. https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/06/rogue-capitalism/#orphaned-syrian-refugees-need-not-apply Blue Bonds Another C-note remix. One of the things I love about remixing US currency is that every part of it is so immediately identifiable, meaning that just about any crop works. The California bear comes from a public domain vector on Wikimedia Commons. I worked hard to get the intaglio effect to transfer to the bear, but only with middling success. Thankfully, I was able to work at massive resolution (like, 4,000 px wide) and reduce the image, which hides a lot of my mistakes. https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/04/fiscal-antifa/#post-trump The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh Another money scan, this time a hyperinflationary Zimbabwean dollar (I also looked at some Serbian hyperinflationary notes, but the Zimbabwean one was available at a higher rez). Not thrilled about the engraving texture on the HAL 9000, but the Sam Altman intaglio kills. I spent a lot of time tweaking that using G'mic, a good (but uneven) plugin suite for the GIMP. https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/econopocalypse/#subprime-intelligence Rage Against the (Algorithmic Management) Machine This one made this year's faves list purely because I was so happy with how the Doordash backpack came out. The belligerent worker is part of a Keppler diptych showing a union worker and a boss facing off against one another with a cowering consumer caught in the crossfire. I'm not thrilled about this false equivalence, but I'll happily gank the figures, which are great. https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/25/roboboss/#counterapps The enshittification of solar (and how to stop it) I spent a lot of time tweaking the poop emoji on those solar panels, eventually painstakingly erasing the frames from the overlay image. It was worth it. https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/23/our-friend-the-electron/#to-every-man-his-castle AI psychosis and the warped mirror One of those high-concept images that came out perfect. Replacing Narcissus's face (and reflection) with HAL 9000 made for a striking image that only took minutes to turn out. https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/17/automating-gang-stalking-delusion/#paranoid-androids Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox The businessman trundling up a long concrete staircase is another H Armstrong Roberts. That staircase became very existential as soon as I stripped out the grass on either side of it. Finding that horse-head took a lot of doing (the world needs more CC-licensed photos of horses from that angle!). The computer in the background comes from a NASA Ames archive of photos of all kinds of cool stuff – zeppelins, spacesuits, and midcentury "supercomputers." https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/11/vulgar-thatcherism/#there-is-an-alternative Radical juries Another high-concept image that just worked. It took me more time to find a good public domain oil painting of a jury than it did to transform each juror into Karl Marx. I love how this looks. https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/22/jury-nullification/#voir-dire LLMs are slot-machines It's surprisingly hard to find a decent public domain photo of a slot machine in use. I eventually started to wonder if Vegas had a no-cameras policy in the early years. Eventually, the Library of Commerce came through with a scanned neg that was high enough rez that I could push the elements I wanted to have stand out from an otherwise muddy, washed-out image. https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/16/jackpot/#salience-bias Zuckermuskian solipsism The laborers come from an LoC collection of portraits of children who worked in coal mines in the 1910s. They're pretty harrowing stuff. I spent a long plane ride cropping each individual out of several of these images. https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/18/seeing-like-a-billionaire/#npcs Good ideas are popular The original crowd scene (a presidential inauguration, if memory serves) was super high-rez, which made it very easy to convincingly matte in the monkeys and the Congressional dome. I played with tinting this one, but pure greyscale looked a lot better. https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/07/the-people-no-2/#water-flowing-uphill By all means, tread on those people Another great high concept. The wordiness of Wilhoit's Law makes this intrinsically funny. There's a public domain vector-art Gadsen flag on Wikimedia Commons. I found a Reddit forum where font nerds had sleuthed out the typeface for the words on the original. https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/26/sole-and-despotic-dominion/#then-they-came-for-me AI's pogo-stick grift The pogo stick kid is another H Armstrong Roberts gank. I spent ages trying to get the bounce effect to look right, and then Alistair Milne fixed it for me in like 10 seconds. The smoke comes from an oil painting of the eruption of Vesuvius from the Met. It's become my go-to "hellscape" background. https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/02/inventing-the-pedestrian/#three-apis-in-a-trenchcoat The worst possible antitrust outcome The smoke from Vesuvius makes another appearance. I filled the Android droid with tormented figures from Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights," which is an amazing painting that is available as a more than 15,000 pixel wide (!) scan on Wikimedia Commons. https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/03/unpunishing-process/#fucking-shit-goddammit-fuck Conservatism considered as a movement of bitter rubes Boy, I love this one. The steamship image is from the Met. The carny barker is a still of WC Fields, whose body language is impeccable. It took a long-ass time to get a MAGA hat in the correct position, but I eventually found a photo of an early 20th C baseball player and then tinted his hat and matted in the MAGA embroidery. https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/22/all-day-suckers/#i-love-the-poorly-educated Your Meta AI prompts are in a live, public feed These guys on the sofa come from Thomas Hawke, who has recovered and scanned nearly 30,000 "found photos" – collections from estates, yard-sales, etc: https://www.flickr.com/search/?sort=date-taken-desc&safe_search=1&tags=foundphotograph&user_id=51035555243%40N01&view_all=1 The Shining-esque lobby came from the Library of Congress, where it is surprisingly easy to find images of buildings with scary carpets. https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/19/privacy-breach-by-design/#bringing-home-the-beacon Strange Bedfellows and Long Knives Another great high-concept that turned out great. I think that matting the Heritage Foundation chiselwork into the background really pulls it together, and I'm really happy with the glow-up I did for the knives. https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/21/et-tu-sloppy-steve/#fractured-fairytales Are the means of computation even seizable? I spent so long cutting out this old printing press, but boy has it stood me in good stead. I think there's like five copies of that image layered on top of each other here. The figure is an inside joke for all my Luddite trufan pals outthere, a remix of a classic handbill depicting General Ned Ludd. https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/14/pregnable/#checkm8 Mark Zuckerberg announces mind-control ray (again) I was worried that this wouldn't work unless you were familiar with the iconic portrait photo of Rasputin, but that guy was such a creepy-ass-looking freak, and Zuck's metaverse avatar is so awful, that it works on its own merits, too. https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/07/rah-rah-rasputin/#credulous-dolts Mike Lee and Jim Jordan want to kill the law that bans companies from cheating you The original image was so grainy, but it was also fantastic and I spent hours rehabbing it. It's a posed, comedic photo of two Australian miners in the bush cheating at cards, rooking a third man. The Uncle Sam is (obviously) from Keppler. https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/29/cheaters-and-liars/#caveat-emptor-brainworms Mark Zuckerberg personally lost the Facebook antitrust case This one got more, "Wow is that ever creepy" comments than any of the other ones. I was going for Chatty Cathy, but that Zuck metaverse avatar is so weird and bad that it acts like visual MSG in any image, amplifying its creepiness to incredible heights. https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/18/chatty-zucky/#is-you-taking-notes-on-a-criminal-fucking-conspiracy Machina economicus The image is from an early illustrated French edition of HG Wells's War of the Worlds. I love how this worked out, and a family of my fans in Ireland commissioned a paint-by-numbers of it and painted it in and mailed it to me. It's incredible. If I re-use this, I will probably swap out the emoji for the graphic from the book's cover. https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/14/timmy-share/#a-superior-moral-justification-for-selfishness How the world's leading breach expert got phished I don't understand how composition works, but I know when I've lucked into a good composition. This is a good composition! I made this on the sofa of Doc and Joyce Searles in Bloomington, Indiana while I was in town for my Picks and Shovels book tour. https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/05/troy-hunt/#teach-a-man-to-phish Anyone who trusts an AI therapist needs their head examined I worked those tentacles for so long, trying to get Freud/Cthulhu/HAL's lower half just right. In the end, it all paid off. https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/01/doctor-robo-blabbermouth/#fool-me-once-etc-etc You can't save an institution by betraying its mission The "fireman" is an image from the Department of Defense of a soldier demoing a flamethrower (I hacked in the firefighter's uniform). I spent a lot of time trying to get a smoky look for the foreground here, but I don't think it succeeded. https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/19/selling-out/#destroy-the-village-to-save-it
- Pluralistic: All the books I reviewed in 2025 (02 Dec 2025)
- Tue, 02 Dec 2025 13:01:55 +0000
Today's links All the books I reviewed in 2025: A year in books. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: David Byrne v RIAA; Sam Buck vs Starbucks; Eek-A-Trad; Mesopotamian DRM; Distanced stage plays. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. All the books I reviewed in 2025 (permalink) I read as much as I could in 2025, but as ever, I have finished the year bitterly aware of how many wonderful books I didn't get to, whose spines glare daggers at me whenever I sit down at my desk, beneath my groaning To Be Read shelf. But I did write nearly two dozen reviews here on Pluralistic in calendar 2025, which I round up below. If these aren't enough for you, please check out the lists from previous years. 2024: https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/02/booklish/#2024-in-review 2023: https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/01/bookmaker/#2023-in-review 2022: https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/01/bookishness/#2022-in-review 2021: https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/08/required-ish-reading/#bibliography 2020: https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/08/required-reading/#recommended-reading Now that my daughter is off at college (!), I have a lot fewer kids' books in my life than I did when she was growing up. I miss 'em! (And I miss her, too, obviously). But! I did manage to read a couple great kids' books this year that I recommend to you without reservation, both for your own pleasure and for any kids in your life, and I wanted to call them out separately, since (good) books are such good gifts for kids: Daniel Pinkwater's Jules, Penny and the Rooster (middle-grades novel) https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/11/klong-you-are-a-pickle-2/#martian-space-potato Perry Metzger, Penelope Spector and Jerel Dye's Science Comics Computers: How Digital Hardware Works (graphic novel nonfiction) https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/05/xor-xand-xnor-nand-nor/#brawniac NONFICTION I. Cooking in Maximum Security, Matteo Guidi Cooking in Maximum Security is a slim volume of prisoners' recipes and improvised cooking equipment, a testament to the ingenuity of a network of prisoners in Italy's maximum security prisons. https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/24/moca-moka/#culinary-apollo-13 II. 9 Times My Work Has Been Ripped Off, Raymond Biesinger A masterclass in how creative workers can transform the endless, low-grade seething about the endless ripoffs of the industry into something productive and even profound. https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/28/productive-seething/#fuck-you-pay-me III. Three Rocks, Bill Griffiths What better format for a biography of Ernie Bushmiller, creator of the daily Nancy strip, than a graphic novel? And who better to write and draw it than Bill Griffith, creator of Zippy the Pinhead, a long-running and famously surreal daily strip? Griffith is carrying on the work of Scott McCloud, whose definitive Understanding Comics used the graphic novel form to explain the significance and method of sequential art, singling out Nancy for special praise. https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/27/the-snapper/#9-to-107-spikes IV. The Blues Brothers, Daniel de Visé A brilliantly told, brilliantly researched tale that left me with a much deeper understanding of – and appreciation for – the cultural phenomenon that I was (and am) swept up in. https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/21/1060-west-addison/#the-new-oldsmobiles-are-in-early-this-year V. Close to the Machine, Ellen Ullman Ullman's subtitle for the book is "Technophilia and its discontents," and therein lies the secret to its magic. Ullman loves programming computers, loves the way they engage her attention, her consciousness, and her intelligence. Her descriptions of the process of writing code – of tackling a big coding project – are nothing less than revelatory. She captures something that a million technothriller movies consistently fail to even approach: the dramatic interior experience of a programmer who breaks down a complex problem into many interlocking systems, the momentary and elusive sense of having all those systems simultaneously operating in a high-fidelity mental model, the sense of being full, your brain totally engaged in every way. It's a poetics of language that meets and exceeds the high bar set by the few fiction writers who've ever approached a decent rendering of this feeling, like William Gibson. https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/16/beautiful-code/#hackers-disease VI. Chasing Shadows, Ron Deibert Deibert's pulse-pounding, sphinter-tightening true memoir of his battles with the highly secretive cyber arms industry whose billionaire owners provide mercenary spyware that's used by torturers, murderers and criminals to terrorize their victims. https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/04/citizen-lab/#nso-group VII. Little Bosses Everywhere, Bridget Read Read, an investigative journalist at Curbed, takes us through the history of the multi-level marketing "industry," which evolved out of Depression-era snake oil salesmen, Tupperware parties, and magical thinking cults built around books like Think and Grow Rich. This fetid swamp gives rise to a group of self-mythologizing scam artists who founded companies like Amway and Mary Kay, claiming outlandish – and easily debunked – origin stories that the credulous press repeats, alongside their equally nonsensical claims about the "opportunities" they are creating for their victims. https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/05/free-enterprise-system/#amway-or-the-highway VIII. Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams Wynn-Williams was a lot closer to three of the key personalities in Facebook's upper echelon than anyone in my orbit: Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and Joel Kaplan, who was elevated to VP of Global Policy after the Trump II election. I already harbor an atavistic loathing of these three based on their public statements and conduct, but the events Wynn-Williams reveals from their private lives make them out to be beyond despicable. There's Zuck, whose underlings let him win at board-games like Settlers of Catan because he's a manbaby who can't lose (and who accuses Wynn-Williams of cheating when she fails to throw a game of Ticket to Ride while they're flying in his private jet). There's Sandberg, who demands the right to buy a kidney for her child from someone in Mexico, should that child ever need a kidney. https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf IX. More Everything Forever, Adam Becker Astrophysicist Adam Becker knows a few things about science and technology – enough to show, in a new book called More Everything Forever that the claims that tech bros make about near-future space colonies, brain uploading, and other skiffy subjects are all nonsense dressed up as prediction. https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/22/vinges-bastards/#cyberpunk-is-a-warning-not-a-suggestion X. Murder the Truth, David Enrich A brave, furious book about the long-running plan by America's wealthy and corrupt to "open up the libel laws" so they can destroy their critics. In taking on the libel-industrial complex – a network of shadowy, thin-skinned, wealthy litigation funders; crank academics; buck-chasing lawyer lickspittle sociopaths; and the most corrupt Supreme Court justice on the bench today – Enrich is wading into dangerous territory. After all, he's reporting on people who've made it their life's mission to financially destroy anyone who has the temerity to report on their misdeeds. https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/17/actual-malice/#happy-slapping FICTION I. Letters From an Imaginary Country, Theodora Goss Goss spins extremely weird, delightful and fun scenarios in these stories and she slides you into them like they were a warm bath. Before you know it, you're up to your nostrils in story, the water filling your ears, and you don't even remember getting in the tub. They're that good. Goss has got a pretty erudite and varied life-history to draw on here. She's a Harvard-trained lawyer who was born in Soviet Hungary, raised across Europe and the UK and now lives in the USA. She's got a PhD in English Lit specializing in gothic literature and monsters and was the research assistant on a definitive academic edition of Dracula. Unsurprisingly, she often writes herself into her stories as a character. https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/11/athena-club/#incluing II. The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice, Margaret Killjoy A collection of three linked short stories set in Killjoy's celebrated Danielle Cain series, which Alan Moore called "ideal reading for a post-truth world. Danielle Cain is a freight-train-hopping, anarcho-queer hero whose adventures are shared by solidaristic crews of spellcasting, cryptid-battling crustypunk freaks and street-fighters. https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/18/anarcho-cryptid/#decameron-and-on III. Fever Beach, Carl Hiaasen Hiaasen's method is diabolical and hilarious: each volume introduces a bewildering cast of odd, crooked, charming, and/or loathsome Floridians drawn from his long experience chronicling the state and its misadventures. After 20-some volumes in this vein (including Bad Monkey, lately adapted for Apple TV), something far weirder than anything Hiaasen ever dreamed up came to pass: Donald Trump, the most Florida Man ever, was elected president. If you asked an LLM to write a Hiaasen novel, you might get Trump: a hacky, unimaginative version of the wealthy, callous, scheming grifters of the Hiaasenverse. Back in 2020, Hiaasen wrote Trump into Squeeze Me, a tremendous and madcap addition to his canon. Fever Beach is the first Hiaasen novel since Squeeze Me, and boy, does Hiaasen ever have MAGA's number. It's screamingly funny, devilishly inventive, and deeply, profoundly satisfying. With Fever Beach, Hiaasen makes a compelling case for Florida as the perfect microcosm of the terrifying state of America, and an even more compelling case for his position as its supreme storyteller. https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/21/florida-duh/#strokerz-for-liberty IV. Jules, Penny and the Rooster, Daniel Pinkwater Jules and her family have just moved to a suburb called Bayberry Acres in the sleepy dormitory city of Turtle Neck and now she's having a pretty rotten summer. All that changes when Jules enters an essay contest in the local newspaper to win a collie (a contest she enters without telling her parents, natch) and wins. Jules names the collie Penny, and they go for long rambles in the mysterious woods that Bayberry Acres were carved out of. It's on one of these walks that they meet the rooster, a handsome, proud, friendly fellow who lures Penny over the stone wall that demarcates the property line ringing the spooky, abandoned mansion/castle at the center of the woods. Jules chases Penny over the wall, and that's when everything changes. On the other side of that wall is a faun, and little leprechaun-looking guys, and a witch (who turns out to be a high-school chum of her city-dwelling, super-cool aunt), and there's a beast in a hidden dilapidated castle. After Jules sternly informs the beast that she's far too young to be anyone's girlfriend – not even a potentially enchanted prince living as a beast in a hidden castle – he disabuses her of this notion and tells her that she is definitely the long-prophesied savior of the woods, whose magic has been leaking out over years. Nominally this is a middle-grades book, and while it will certainly delight the kids in your life, I ate it up. The purest expression of Pinkwater's unique ability to blend the absurd and the human and make the fantastic normal and the normal fantastic. I laughed long and hard, and turned the final page with that unmissable Pinkwatertovian sense of satisfied wonder. https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/11/klong-you-are-a-pickle-2/#martian-space-potato V. Where the Axe Is Buried, Ray Nayler An intense, claustrophobic novel of a world run by "rational" AIs that purport to solve all of our squishy political problems with empirical, neutral mathematics. It's a birchpunk tale of AI skulduggery, lethal robot insects, radical literature, swamp-traversing mechas, and political intrigue that flits around a giant cast of characters, creating a dizzying, in-the-round tour of Nayler's paranoid world. A work of first-rate science fiction, which provides an emotional flythrough of how Larry Ellison's vision of an AI-driven surveillance state where everyone is continuously observed, recorded and judged by AIs so we are all on our "best behavior" would obliterate the authentic self, authentic relationships, and human happiness. https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/20/birchpunk/#cyberspace-is-everting VI. Lessons in Magic and Disaster, Charlie Jane Anders A novel about queer academia, the wonder of thinking very hard about very old books, and the terror and joy of ambiguous magic. Anders tosses a lot of differently shaped objects into the air, and then juggles them, interspersing the main action with excerpts from imaginary 18th century novels (which themselves contain imaginary parables) that serve as both a prestige and a framing device. It's the story of Jamie, a doctoral candidate at a New England liberal arts college who is trying to hold it all together while she finishes her dissertation. That would be an impossible lift, except for Jamie's gift for maybe-magic – magic that might or might not be real. Certain places ("liminal spaces") call to Jamie. These are abandoned, dirty, despoiled places, ruins and dumps and littered campsites. When Jamie finds one of these places, she can improvise a ritual, using the things in her pockets and school bag as talismans that might – or might not – conjure small bumps of luck and fortune into Jamie's path. There's a lot of queer joy in here, a hell of a lot of media theory, and some very chewy ruminations on the far-right mediasphere. There's romance and heartbreak, danger and sacrifice, and most of all, there's that ambiguous magic, which gets realer and scarier as the action goes on. https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/19/revenge-magic/#liminal-spaces VII. The Adventures of Mary Darling, Pat Murphy The titular Mary Darling here is the mother of Wendy, John and and Michael Darling, the three children who are taken by Peter Pan to Neverland in JM Barrie's 1902 book The Little White Bird, which later became Peter Pan. After Mary's children go missing, Mary's beloved uncle, John Watson, is summoned to the house, along with his famous roommate, the detective Sherlock Holmes. However, Holmes is incapable of understanding where the Darling children have gone, because to do so would be to admit the existence of the irrational and fantastic, and, more importantly, to accept the testimony of women, lower-class people, and pirates. Holmes has all the confidence of the greatest detective alive, which means he is of no help at all. Only Mary can rescue her children. John Watson discovers her consorting with Sam, a one-legged Pacific Islander who is a known fence and the finest rat-leather glovemaker in London, these being much prized by London's worst criminal gangs. Horrified that Mary is keeping such ill company, Watson confronts her and Sam (and Sam's parrot, who screeches nonstop piratical nonsense), only to be told that Mary knows what she is doing, and that she is determined to see her children home safe. What follows is a very rough guide to fairyland. It's a story that recovers the dark asides from Barrie's original Pan stories, which were soaked with blood, cruelty and death. The mermaids want to laugh as you drown. The fairies hate you and want you to die. And Peter Pan doesn't care how many poorly trained Lost Boy starvelings die in his sorties against pirates, because he knows where there are plenty more Lost Boys to be found in the alienated nurseries of Victorian London, an ocean away. https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/06/nevereverland/#lesser-ormond-street GRAPHIC NOVELS AND COMICS I. Science Comics Computers: How Digital Hardware Works, Perry Metzger, Penelope Spector and Jerel Dye Legendary cypherpunk Perry Metzger teams up with Penelope Spector and illustrator Jerel Dye for a tour-de-force young adult comic book that uses hilarious steampunk dinosaurs to demystify the most foundational building-blocks of computers. The authors take pains to show the reader that computing can be abstracted from computing. The foundation of computing isn't electrical engineering, microlithography, or programming: it's logic. While there's plenty of great slapstick, fun art, and terrific characters in this book that will make you laugh aloud, the lasting effect upon turning the last page isn't just entertainment, it's empowerment. https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/05/xor-xand-xnor-nand-nor/#brawniac II. Feeding Ghosts, Tessa Hulls A stunning memoir that tells the story of three generations of Hulls's Chinese family. It was a decade in the making, and it is utterly, unmissably brilliant. It tells the story of Hulls's quest to understand – and heal – her relationship with her mother, a half-Chinese, half-Swiss woman who escaped from China as a small child with her own mother, a journalist who had been targeted by Mao's police. Each of the intertwined narratives – revolutionary China, Rose's girlhood, Hulls's girlhood, the trips to contemporary China, Hulls's adulthood and Sun Yi's institutionalizations and long isolation – are high stakes, high-tension scenarios, beautifully told. Hulls hops from one tale to the next in ways that draw out the subtle, imporant parallels between each situation, subtly amplifying the echoes across time and space. Feeding Ghosts has gone on to win the Pulitzer Prize, only the second graphic novel in history to take the honor (the first was Maus, another memoir of intergenerational trauma, horrific war, and the American immigrant experience). https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/02/filial-piety/#great-leap-forward III. The Murder Next Door, Hugh D'Andrade Hugh D'Andrade is a brilliant visual communicator, the art director responsible for the look-and-feel of EFF's website. He's also haunted by a murder – the killing of the mother of his childhood playmates, which cast a long, long shadow over his life, as he recounts in his debut graphic novel. It's a haunting, beautiful meditation on masculinity, trauma, and fear. Hugh is a superb illustrator, particularly when it comes to bringing abstract ideas to life, and this is a tale beautifully told. https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/10/pivot-point/#eff IV. Simplicity, Mattie Lubchansky Simplicity is set in the not-so-distant future, in which the US has dissolved and its major centers have been refashioned as "Administrative and Security Territories" – a fancy way of saying "walled corporate autocracies." Lucius Pasternak is an anthropology grad student in the NYC AST, a trans-man getting by as best as he can, minimizing how much he sells out. Pasternak's fortunes improve when he gets a big, juicy assignment: to embed with a Catskills community of weirdo sex-hippies who supply the most coveted organic produce in the NYC AST. They've been cloistered in an old summer camp since the 1970s, and when civilization collapsed, it barely touched them. Pasternak's mission is to chronicle the community and its strange ways for a billionaire's vanity-project museum of New York State. This is post-cyberpunk, ecosexual revolutionary storytelling at its finest. https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/01/ecosexuality/#nyc-ast V. The Weight, Melissa Mendes A book that will tear your heart out, it will send you to a dreamy world of pastoral utopianism, then it will tear your heart out. Again. A story of cyclic abuse, unconditional love, redemption, and tragedy, the tale of Edie, born to an abusive father and a teen mother, who is raised away from her family, on a military base where she runs feral with other children, far from the brutality of home. This becomes a sweet and lovely coming-of-age tale as Edie returns to her grandparents' home, and then turns to horror again. The Weight is a ferocious read, the sweetness of the highs there to provide texture for the bitterness of the lows. https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/21/weighty/#edie-is-a-badass TWO MORE (BY ME) This was a light reading year for me, but, in my defense, I did some re-reading, including all nine volumes of Naomi Novik's incredible Temeraire: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/08/temeraire/#but-i-am-napoleon But the main reason I didn't read as much as I normally would is that I published two international bestsellers of my own this year. The first was Picks and Shovels, a historical technothriller set in the early 1980s, when the PC was first being born. It's the inaugural adventure of Martin Hench, my hard-fighting, two-fisted, high-tech forensic accountant crimefighter, and it's designed to be read all on its own. Marty's first adventure sees him pitted against the owners of a weird PC pyramid-sales cult: a Mormon bishop, an orthodox rabbi and a Catholic priest, whose PC business is a front for a predatory faith-based sales cult: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels/ The other book was Enshittification, the nonfiction book I'm touring now (I wrote all this up on the train to San Diego, en route to an event at the Mission Hills Library). It's a book-length expansion of my theory of platform decay ("enshittification"), laying out the process by which the tech platforms we rely on turn themselves into piles of shit, and (more importantly), explaining why this is happening now: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ I've got a stack of books I'm hoping to read in the new year, but I'm going to have to squeeze them in among several other book projects of my own. First, there's The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, which drops in June from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. I'm also *writing a new book, The Post-American Internet (about the internet we could have now that Trump has destroyed America's soft power and its grip on global tech policy. There's also a graphic novel adaptation of Unauthorized Bread (with Blue Delliquanti), which Firstsecond will publish in late 2026 or 2027; and a graphic novel adaptation of Enshittification (with Koren Shadmi), which Firstsecond will publish in 2027. But of course I'm gonna get to at least some of those books on my overflowing TBR shelf, and when I do, I'll review them here on Pluralistic for you. You can follow my Reviews tag if you want to stay on top of these (there's also an RSS feed for that tag): https://pluralistic.net/tag/reviews/ Hey look at this (permalink) RETRACTED: Safety Evaluation and Risk Assessment of the Herbicide Roundup and Its Active Ingredient, Glyphosate, for Humans https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0273230099913715 Prisoners’ Inventions https://www.lapl.org/events/exhibits/no-prior-art/exhibitions/ Inside a Group of Vigilantes with One Goal: Painting Crosswalks to Protect Pedestrians https://people.com/inside-secretive-group-vigilantes-one-goal-painting-crosswalks-save-pedestrians-11849437 The AI bubble isn’t new — Karl Marx explained the mechanisms behind it nearly 150 years ago https://theconversation.com/the-ai-bubble-isnt-new-karl-marx-explained-the-mechanisms-behind-it-nearly-150-years-ago-270663 Let's See What's Going On Down At The Piss Factory https://www.todayintabs.com/p/let-s-see-what-s-going-on-down-at-the-piss-factory Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Man flies 1MM miles on a 60 day unlimited ticket, wins 10 more flights https://web.archive.org/web/20051203031434/http://au.news.yahoo.com/051201/15/x0z4.html #20yrsago Schneier: Aviation security is a bad joke https://web.archive.org/web/20060212060858/http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,69712,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_2 #20yrsago David Byrne gets RIAA warning https://web.archive.org/web/20051223160922/http://journal.davidbyrne.com/2005/12/12105_rant_abou.html #20yrsago Sam Buck sued for naming her coffee shop after herself https://web.archive.org/web/20051231144818/https://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2005/12/01/financial/f132605S26.DTL #20yrsago Eek-A-Mouse jamming with Irish pub musicians https://web.archive.org/web/20051211095248/http://www.alphabetset.net/audio/t-woc/eek_trad.mp3 #15yrsago Bowls made from melted army men https://web.archive.org/web/20071011212754/http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/388073/how_to_make_a_bowl_from_melted_army.html #15yrsago TSA recommends using sexual predator tactics to calm kids at checkpoints https://web.archive.org/web/20101204044209/https://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/airport-patdowns-grooming-children-sex-predators-abuse-expert/ #15yrsago University of Glasgow gives away software, patents, consulting https://www.gla.ac.uk/news/archiveofnews/2010/november/headline_181588_en.html #15yrsago Judge in Xbox hacker trial unloads both barrels on the prosecution https://web.archive.org/web/20101203054828/https://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/12/xbox-judge-riled/ #10yrsago Scholars and activists stand in solidarity with shuttered research-sharing sites https://custodians.online/ #10yrsago Mesopotamian boundary stones: the DRM of pre-history https://web.archive.org/web/20151130212151/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/before-drm-there-were-mesopotamian-boundary-stones #10yrsago Canadian civil servants grooming new minister to repeat Harper’s Internet mistakes https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2015/11/what-canadian-heritage-officials-didnt-tell-minister-melanie-joly-about-copyright/ #5yrsago Distanced stage plays https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/01/autophagic-buckeyes/#xanadu #5rsago Ohio spends tax dollars to destroy Ohio https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/01/autophagic-buckeyes/#subsidized-autophagia Upcoming appearances (permalink) Seattle: Neuroscience, AI and Society (University of Washington), Dec 4 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/neuroscience-ai-and-society-cory-doctorow-tickets-1735371255139 Virtual: Poetic Technologies with Brian Eno (David Graeber Institute), Dec 8 https://davidgraeber.institute/poetic-technologies-with-cory-doctorow-and-brian-eno/ Madison, CT: Enshittification at RJ Julia, Dec 8 https://rjjulia.com/event/2025-12-08/cory-doctorow-enshittification Hamburg: Chaos Communications Congress, Dec 27-30 https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/infos/index.html Recent appearances (permalink) We have become slaves to Silicon Valley (Politics JOE) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzEUvh1r5-w How Enshittification is Destroying The Internet (Frontline Club) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oovsyzB9L-s Escape Forward with Cristina Caffarra https://escape-forward.com/2025/11/27/enshittification-of-our-digital-experience/ Why Every Platform Betrays You (Trust Revolution) https://fountain.fm/episode/bJgdt0hJAnppEve6Qmt8 How the internet went to sh*t (Prospect Magazine) https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/podcasts/prospect-podcast/71663/cory-doctorow-how-the-internet-went-to-sht Latest books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE. "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X
- Pluralistic: Meta's new top EU regulator is contractually prohibited from hurting Meta's feelings (01 Dec 2025)
- Mon, 01 Dec 2025 16:02:56 +0000
Today's links Meta's new top EU regulator is contractually prohibited from saying mean things about Meta: It's one thing to hire an ex-Meta lobbyist, another entirely if she's signed a non-disparagement contract. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Custom M&M restrictions; Vacuum-bag dust houses; Winner-Take-All Politics; Pre-mutated products; Disney World on strike; "Ship Breaker"; TSA patdowns a "homosexual agenda"; RÄT. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Meta's new top EU regulator is contractually prohibited from saying mean things about Meta (permalink) "Regulatory capture" is one of those concepts that can seem nebulous and abstract. How can you really know when a regulator has failed to protect you because they were in bed with the companies they were supposed to be regulating, and when this is just because they're bad at their job. "Never attribute to malice," etc etc. The difficulty of pinning down real instances of regulatory capture is further complicated by the arguments of right-wing economists, who claim that regulatory capture is inevitable, that companies will always grow to the point where they can overpower the state and use it to shut down smaller companies before they can become a threat. They use this as an argument for abolishing all regulation, rather than, you know, stopping monopolies from growing until they are more powerful than the state: https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/ Despite this confusion, there are times when regulatory capture is anything but subtle. Especially these times, when the corporate world, spooked by the pandemic-era surge in antitrust enforcement, have launched a gloves-off/mask-off offensive to simply take over their governments, abandoning any pretext of being responsive to democratically accountable processes or agencies. You've got David Sacks, Trump's billionaire AI czar, who is directing American AI policy while holding (hundreds of?) millions of dollars worth of stock in companies that stand to directly benefit from his work in the US government: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/30/technology/david-sacks-white-house-profits.html?unlocked_article_code=1.5E8.Nb2d.3L204EF4nliq Sacks has threatened the New York Times, demanding that they "abandon" the story about his conflicts of interest: https://protos.com/david-sacks-sends-silly-legal-threat-to-the-new-york-times/ And he's hired the law-firm that is at the center of a decades-long open conspiracy to end press freedom in America, bankrolled and overseen by the same people who planned and executed the destruction of American abortion rights: https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/17/actual-malice/#happy-slapping This isn't a strictly US affair, either. In the UK, Prime Minister Keir Starmer rang in 2025 by firing the country's top competition regulator and replacing him with the former head of Amazon UK, one of the country's most notorious monopolists, whose tax evasion, labor abuses, and anticompetitive mergers and tactics had been on the Competition and Markets Authority's agenda for years: https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter Today, this same swindle is playing out in Canada. Competition Commissioner Matthew Boswell – recently endowed with the most sweeping enforcement powers of any competition regulator in the world – has resigned early. Now, Canada's monopolists are openly calling for one of their own top execs to take over the office for the next five years, citing a bizarre Canadian tradition of alternating between civil servants and revolving-door corporate insiders in turn: https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/competition-commissioner-matthew However, there is one country that always, always brings home the gold in the Regulatory Capture Olympics: Ireland. Ireland had the misfortune to establish itself as a tax haven, meaning it makes pennies by helping the worst corporations in the world (especially US Big Tech companies) hide billions from global tax authorities. Being a tax haven sucks, because tax havens must also function as crime havens. After all, the tech companies that pretend to be Irish have no loyalty to the country – they are there solely because Ireland will help them cheat the rest of the world. What's more, any company that can hire lawyers to do the paperwork to let it pretend that it's Irish this week could pay those lawyers to pretend that it is Cypriot, or Maltese, or Dutch, or Luxembourgeois next week. To keep these American companies from skipping town, Ireland must bend its entire justice system to the facilitation of all of American tech companies' crimes. Of course, there is no class of crime that American tech companies commit more flagrantly or consequentially than the systematic, ruthless invasion of our privacy. Nine years ago, the EU passed the landmark General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a big, muscular privacy law that bans virtually all of the data-collection undertaken by America's tech companies. However, because these companies pretend they are Irish, they have been able to move all GDPR enforcement to Ireland, where the Data Protection Commissioner could always be relied upon to let these companies get away with murder: https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town If you have formed the (widespread) opinion that the GDPR is worse than useless, responsible for nothing more than an endless stream of bullshit "cookie consent" pop-ups, blame the Irish DPC. American tech companies have pretended that they are allowed to substitute these cookie popups for doing the thing the GDPR demands of them (not spying on you at all). This is an obvious violation of the GDPR, and the only way an enforcer could possibly fail to see this is if they served a government whose entire economy depended on keeping Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai happy. It's impossible to explain something to a regulator when their paycheck depends on them not understanding it. Incredibly, Ireland has found a way to make this awful situation even worse. They've appointed Niamh Sweeney, an ex-Meta lobbyist, to the role of Irish Data Protection Commissioner. Her resume includes "six years at Meta, according to her LinkedIn profile. She was head of public policy, Ireland for Facebook before becoming WhatsApp’s director of public policy for Europe, Middle East and Africa": https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2025/09/17/ex-tech-lobbyist-named-to-data-protection-commission/ In their complaint to the European Commission, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties lays out a devastating case against Sweeney's fitness to serve – the fact that she has broad, deep, obvious conflicts of interest that should automatically disqualify her from the role: https://www.iccl.ie/digital-data/complaint-v-ireland-to-european-commission-re-process-appointing-ex-meta-lobbyist-as-data-protection-commissioner/#_ftn11 Among other things, Meta execs – like Sweeney – are given piles of stock options and shares in the company. The decisions that Sweeney will be called upon to make as DPC will have a significant and lasting negative effect on Meta's stocks – if Meta is banned from surveilling 500m affluent European consumers, they will make a lot less money. But that's just for starters. Meta execs also sign contracts that bind them to: Nondisparagement: ex-Meta executives are permanently barred from "making any disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental comments to any person or entity concerning [Meta's] products, services or programs; its business affairs, operation, management and financial condition…" Nondisclosure: ex-Meta executives are broadly prohibited from discussing their employment, or disclosing the things they learned while working at the company. Forced arbitration: if Meta believes that a former exec has violated these clauses, they can order the former exec to be silent, and bill them tens of thousands of dollars every time they speak out. Former executives sign away the right to contest these fines and orders in front of a judge; instead, all claims are heard by an "arbitrator" – a corporate lawyer who is paid by Meta and is in charge of deciding whether Meta (who pays their invoices) is right or wrong. We know about these contractual terms because they have been applied to Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former top Meta exec who published a whistleblower memoir, Careless People, which discloses many of Meta's most terrible practices, from systemic sexual harassment at the highest echelon to a worldwide surveillance collaboration with the Chinese government to complicity in the Rohingya genocide, to the fact that Mark Zuckerberg cheats at Settlers of Catan and his underlings let him win: https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf Meta dragged Wynn-Williams in front of Meta's pet arbitrator over the statements in her book (without disputing their truthfulness). The arbitrator has fined Wynn-Williams $111,000,000 for speaking out ($50,000 per violation), and has barred her from promoting her book in any way. The company has ordered her not to testify before the US Congress or the UK Parliament. The clauses in Wynn-Williams contract are very similar (if not identical) to the clauses that the US National Labor Relations Board ruled unenforceable: https://www.hcamag.com/us/specialization/employment-law/nlrb-rules-metas-7200-confidentiality-agreements-unlawful/499180 Wynn-Williams appeared on stage with me last month at London's Barbican Centre, in a book-tour event moderated by Chris Morris. Whenever we talked about Meta or Careless People, Wynn-Williams would fall silent and assume a blank facial expression, lest she make another statement that would result in Meta seeking another $50,000 from her under the terms of her contract. In their complaint to the EU, ICCL raises the extremely likely probability that Sweeney is bound by the same contractual terms as Wynn-Williams, meaning that Meta's top regulator in Ireland, the country where Meta pretends to be based, will be contractually prohibited from saying anything that makes Mark Zuckerberg feel bad about himself. This isn't just a matter for Ireland, either. Given the nature of European federalism, most of Meta's violations of European privacy laws will start with the Irish DPC – in other words, all 500,000,000 Europeans will be forced to complain to someone who is legally barred from upsetting Zuck's digestion. Tax havens are a global scourge. By allowing American tech companies to evade their taxes around the world, Ireland is complicit in starving countries everywhere of tax revenue they are properly owed. Perhaps even worse than this, though, is the fact that these cod-Irish American companies can always out-compete their domestic rivals all over the world, because those companies have to pay tax, while Meta does not. Ireland has been every bit as important in exporting US Big Tech around the world as the US has been. But Ireland has another key export, one that is confined to the European Union. Because every tax haven must be a crime haven, and because Big Tech's favorite crime is illegal surveillance, Ireland has exported American tech spying to the whole European Union. That's how things stand today, and how they've stood since the passage of the GDPR. If you'd asked me a year ago, I would have said that this is as terrible as things could get. But now that Ireland has put an ex-Meta exec in charge of deciding whether Meta is invading Europeans' privacy, without confirming whether this dingo babysitter is even allowed to criticize Meta, it's clear that things could get much worse than I ever imagined. (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) A Remarkable Assertion from A16Z https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/a-remarkable-assertion-from-a16z NYC Realtime Subway Clock https://nookwoodworking.com/products/nyc-realtime-subway-clock?variant=42620252717218 Big Tech’s Invisible Hand https://apublica.org/especial/big-techs-invisible-hand/ Santa plc https://open.spotify.com/episode/1HpeETwCsmYAUWM1g06lhI MAGA Antitrust Is Officially Dead: DOJ Sanctions Price Fixing With Slap on the Wrist Settlement Against Rental Housing Collusion Kingpin RealPage https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/12/maga-antitrust-is-officially-dead-doj-sanctions-illegal-behavior-with-slap-on-the-wrist-settlement-against-price-fixing-kingpin-realpage.html Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Custom M&Ms: just don’t mention the war, your hometown, or nouns https://memex.craphound.com/2005/11/28/custom-mms-just-dont-mention-the-war-your-hometown-or-nouns/ #20yrsago Sony CD spyware installs and can run permanently, even if you click “Decline” https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2005/11/28/mediamax-permanently-installs-and-runs-unwanted-software-even-if-user-declines-eula/ #20yrsago Programmers on Sony’s spyware DRM asked for newsgroup help too https://groups.google.com/g/microsoft.public.windowsmedia.sdk/c/kWKbc54lLxo?hl=en&pli=1#cf2c1677c4ce5138 #20yrsago Vacuum-bag dust houses sculpted by former house-cleaner https://web.archive.org/web/20051127031640/http://mocoloco.com/art/archives/001661.php #20yrsago Sony knew about rootkits 28 days before the story broke https://web.archive.org/web/20051202044828/http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov2005/tc20051129_938966.htm #20yrsago How the next version of the GPL will be drafted https://gplv3.fsf.org/process-definition/ #20yrsago No Xmas for Sony protest badge https://web.archive.org/web/20051203044536/https://gigi.pixcode.com/noxmas.gif #20yrsago HOWTO defeat Apple’s anti-DVD-screenshot DRM https://highschoolblows.blogspot.com/2005/11/take-screenshot-of-dvd-player-in-os-x.html #20yrsago EFF: DMCA exemption process is completely bullshit https://web.archive.org/web/20051204031027/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004212.php #15yrsago Paolo Bacigalupi’s SHIP BREAKER: YA adventure story in a post-peak-oil world https://memex.craphound.com/2010/11/30/paolo-bacigalupis-ship-breaker-ya-adventure-story-in-a-post-peak-oil-world/ #15yrsago Walt Disney World employees demand a living wage https://thedisneyblog.com/2010/12/01/disney-world-union-takes-offensive/ #15yrsago Hotel peephole doctored for easy removal and spying https://www.flickr.com/photos/kentbrew/5221903189/ #15yrsago DC-area county official says TSA patdowns are “homosexual agenda” https://dcist.com/story/10/11/30/loudoun-county-official-tsa-pat-dow/ #15yrsago Dmitry Sklyarov and co. crack Canon’s “image verification” anti-photoshopping tool https://web.archive.org/web/20110808200303/https://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/113010-analyst-finds-flaws-in-canon.html #15yrsago TSA scans uniformed pilots, but airside caterers bypass all screening https://web.archive.org/web/20101125095532/https://www.salon.com/technology/ask_the_pilot/2010/11/22/tsa_screening_of_pilots/index.html #15yrsago BP sued in Ecuador for violating the “rights of Nature” https://www.democracynow.org/2010/11/29/headlines/bp_sued_in_ecuadorian_court_for_violating_rights_of_nature #15yrsago Four horsemen of the information apocalypse: Cohen, Fanning, Johansen and Frankel https://web.archive.org/web/20101126191152/https://time.com/time/specials/packages/printout/0,29239,2032304_2032746_2032903,00.html #15yrsago Winner-Take-All Politics: how America’s super-rich got so much richer https://memex.craphound.com/2010/11/29/winner-take-all-politics-how-americas-super-rich-got-so-much-richer/ #15yrsago EFF on US domain copyright seizures https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/11/us-government-seizes-82-websites-draconian-future #15yrsago Where’s Molly: heartbreaking reunion with developmentally disabled sister institutionalized 47 years ago https://web.archive.org/web/20101129193304/http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/11/28/sunday/main7096335.shtml #15yrsago “Death-row inmate” seeks last meal advice on Amazon message-board https://web.archive.org/web/20101130212132/http://www.amazon.com/tag/health/forum/ref=cm_cd_pg_pg1?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx1EO24KZG65FCB&cdPage=1&cdSort=oldest&cdThread=Tx3FNFNI6N592DI #10yrsago You’re only an “economic migrant” if you’re poor and brown https://historyned.blog/2015/09/09/the-wandering-academic-or-how-no-one-seems-to-notice-that-i-am-an-economic-migrant/ #10yrsago Pre-mutated products: where did all those “hoverboards” come from? https://memex.craphound.com/2015/11/29/pre-mutated-products-where-did-all-those-hoverboards-come-from/ #10yrsago Millennials are cheap because they’re broke https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/12/millennials-arent-saving-money-because-theyre-not-making-money/383338/?utm_source=SFFB #5yrsago Attack Surface in the New York Times https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/30/selmers-train/#times #5yrsago RÄT https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/30/selmers-train/#honey-morello #5yrsago Open law and the rule of law https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/30/selmers-train/#rogue-archivist #5yrsago Twitter is more redeemable than Facebook https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/30/selmers-train/#epistemic-superiority Upcoming appearances (permalink) San Diego: Enshittification at the Mission Hills Branch Library, Dec 1 https://libraryfoundationsd.org/events/doctorow Seattle: Neuroscience, AI and Society (University of Washington), Dec 4 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/neuroscience-ai-and-society-cory-doctorow-tickets-1735371255139 Virtual: Poetic Technologies with Brian Eno (David Graeber Institute), Dec 8 https://davidgraeber.institute/poetic-technologies-with-cory-doctorow-and-brian-eno/ Madison, CT: Enshittification at RJ Julia, Dec 8 https://rjjulia.com/event/2025-12-08/cory-doctorow-enshittification Hamburg: Chaos Communications Congress, Dec 27-30 https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/infos/index.html Recent appearances (permalink) We have become slaves to Silicon Valley (Politics JOE) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzEUvh1r5-w How Enshittification is Destroying The Internet (Frontline Club) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oovsyzB9L-s Escape Forward with Cristina Caffarra https://escape-forward.com/2025/11/27/enshittification-of-our-digital-experience/ Why Every Platform Betrays You (Trust Revolution) https://fountain.fm/episode/bJgdt0hJAnppEve6Qmt8 How the internet went to sh*t (Prospect Magazine) https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/podcasts/prospect-podcast/71663/cory-doctorow-how-the-internet-went-to-sht Latest books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE. "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. 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- Pluralistic: (Digital) Elbows Up (28 Nov 2025)
- Fri, 28 Nov 2025 09:00:28 +0000
Today's links (Digital) Elbows Up: How Canada Can Become a Nation of Jailbreakers, Reclaim Our Digital Sovereignty, Win the Trade-War, and Disenshittify Our Technology. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Workaholic Goethe; Prehistory of the Sony rootkit; Wunderkammer front room; Dolphin teleportation symposium: now with more Eisenhowers Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. (Digital) Elbows Up (permalink) I'm in Toronto to participate in a three-day "speculative design" workshop at OCAD U, where designers, technologists and art students are thinking up cool things Canadians could do if we reformed our tech law: https://www.ocadu.ca/events-and-exhibitions/jailbreaking-canada As part of that workshop, I delivered a keynote speech last night, entitled "(Digital) Elbows Up: How Canada Can Become a Nation of Jailbreakers, Reclaim Our Digital Sovereignty, Win the Trade-War, and Disenshittify Our Technology." The talk was recorded and I'll add the video to this post when I get it, but in the meantime, here's the transcript of my speech. Thank you to all my collaborators at OCAD U for bringing me in and giving me this wonderful opportunity! == My theory of enshittification describes the process by which platforms decay. First, they are good to their end users, while finding a way to lock those users in. Then, secure in the knowledge that they can make things worse for those users without risking their departure, the platforms make things worse in order to make things attractive for business customers. Who also get locked in, dependent on those captive users. And then, in the third stage of enshittification, platforms raid those business customers, harvesting all available surpluses for their shareholders and executives, leaving behind the bare, mingy homeopathic residue of value needed to keep users locked to the platform and businesses locked to the users, such that the final, ideal stage of the enshittified platform is attained: a giant pile of shit. This observational piece of the theory is certainly valuable, inasumuch as it lets us scoop up this big, diffuse, enraging phenomenon, capture it in a net, attach a handle to it and call it "enshittification," recognising how we're being screwed. But much more important is the enshittification hypothesis's theoretical piece, its account of why this is happening now. Let me start by saying that I do not attribute blame for enshittification to your poor consumer choices. Despite the endless insistences of the right, your consumption choices aren't the arbiters of policy. The reason billionaires urge you to vote with your wallets is that their wallets are so much thicker than yours. This is the only numeric advantage the wealthy and powerful enjoy. They are in every other regards an irrelevant, infinitesimal minority. In a vote of ballots, rather than wallets, they will lose every time, which is why they are so committed to this wallet-voting nonsense. The wallet-vote is the only vote they can hope to win. The idea that consumers are the final arbiters of society is a laughable, bitter counsel of despair. You will not shop your way free of a monopoly, any more than you will recycle your way out of wildfires. Shop as hard as you like, you will not – cannot – end enshittification. Enshittification is not the result of your failure to grasp that "if you're not paying for the product, you're the product." You're the product if you pay. You're the product if you don't pay. The determinant of your demotion to "the product" is whether the company can get away with treating you as the product. So what about the companies? What about the ketamine-addled zuckermuskian failures who have appointed themselves eternal dictators over the digital lives of billions of people? Can we blame them for enshittifying our world? Well, yes…and no. It's obviously true that it takes a certain kind of sociopath to run a company like Facebook or Google or Apple. The suicide nets around Chinese iPhone factories are a choice, not an integral component of the phone manufacturing process. But these awful men are merely filling the niches that our policy environment has created. If Elon Musk ODs on ket today, there will be an overnight succession battle among ten horrible Big Balls, and the victor who emerges from that war will be indistinguishable from Musk himself. The problem isn't that the wrong person is running Facebook and thus exercising a total veto over the digital lives of four billion people, the problem is that such a job exists. We don't need to perfect Zuck. We don't need to replace Zuck. We need to abolish Zuck. So where does the blame lie? It lies with policy makers. Regulators and politicians who created an enshittogenic environment: a rigged game whose terrible rules guarantee that the worst people doing the worst things will fare best. These are the true authors of enshittification: the named individuals who, in living memory, undertook specific policy decisions, that had the foreseeable and foreseen outcome of ushering in the enshittocene. Policymakers who were warned at the time that this would happen, who ignored that advice and did it anyway. It is these people and their terrible, deliberate misconduct that we need to remember. It is their awful policies that we must overthrow, otherwise all we can hope to do is replace one monster with another. So, in that spirit, let us turn to the story of one of these enshittogenic policy choices and the men who made it. This policy is called "anti-circumvention" and it is the epicenter of the enshittogenic policy universe. Under anti-circumvention law, it is a crime to modify a device that you own, if the company that sold it to you would prefer that you didn't. All a company has to do is demarcate some of its code as off-limits to modification, by adding something called an "access control," and, in so doing, they transform the act of changing any of that code into a felony, a jailable offense. The first anticircumvention law is America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA. Under Section 1201 of the DMCA, helping someone modify code behind an access control is a serious crime, punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine. Crucially, this is true whether or not you break any other law. Under DMCA 1201, simply altering a digital device to do a perfectly legal thing becomes a jailable crime, if the manufacturer wills it so and manifests that will with an "access control." I recognize that this is all very abstract, so let me make it concrete. When you buy a printer from HP, it becomes your property. What's property? Well, let's use the standard definition that every law student learns in first year property law, from Sir William Blackstone's 1753 treatise: "Property: that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe." The printer is yours. It's your property. You have sole and despotic dominion over it in exclusion of any other individual in the universe. But HP printers ship with a program that checks to see whether you're using HP ink, and if it suspects that you've bought generic ink, the printer refuses to use it. Now, Congress never passed a law saying "If you buy an HP printer, you have to buy HP ink, too." That would be a weird law, given the whole sole-and-despotic dominion thing. But because HP puts an "access control" in the ink-checking code, they can conjure up a brand new law: a law that effectively requires you to use HP ink. Anticircumvention is a way for legislatures to outsource law-making to corporations. Once a corporation adds an access control to its product, they can create a new felony for using it in ways that benefit you at the expense of the company's shareholders. So another way of saying "anticircumvention law" is "felony contempt of business model." It's a way for a corporation to threaten you with prison if you don't use your property in the way they want you to. That's anti-circumvention law. The DMCA was an enshittifier's charter, an invitation for corporations to use tactical "access controls" to write invisible, private laws that would let them threaten their customers – and competitors who might help those customers – with criminal prosecution. Now, the DMCA has a known, living author, Bruce Lehman, a corporate IP lawyer who did a turn in government service as Bill Clinton's IP Czar. Lehman tried several ways to get American policymakers to adopt this stupid idea, only to be rebuffed. So, undaunted, he traveled to Geneva, home of the World Intellectual Property Organization or WIPO, a UN "specialized agency" that makes the world's IP treaties. At Lehman's insistence, WIPO passed a pair of treaties in 1996, collectively known as the "Internet Treaties," and in 1998, he got Congress to pass the DMCA, in order to comply with the terms of these treaties, a move he has since repeatedly described as "doing an end-run around Congress." This guy, Bruce Lehman, is still with us, breathing the same air as you and me. We are sharing a planet with the Louis Pasteur of making everything as shitty as possible. But Bruce Lehman only enshittified America, turning our southern cousins into fodder for the immortal colony organisms we call limited liability corporations. To understand how Canada enshittified, we have to introduce some Canadian enshittifiers. Specifically, two of Stephen Harper's ministers: James Moore, Harper's Heritage minister, and the disgraced sex-pest Tony Clement, who was then Industry minister. Stephen Harper really wanted a Canadian anti-circumvention law, and he put Clement and Moore in charge of the effort. Everyone knew that it was going to be a hard slog. After all, Canadians had already rejected anti-circumvention law three times. Back in 2006, Sam Bulte – a Liberal MP in Paul Martin's government – tried to get this law through, but it was so unpopular that she lost her seat in Parkdale, which flipped to the NDP for a generation. Moore and Clement hatched a plan to sell anti-circumvention to the Canadian people. They decided to do a consultation on the law. The thinking was that if we all "felt heard" then we wouldn't be so angry when they rammed it through. Boy, did that backfire. 6,138 of us filed consultation responses categorically rejecting this terrible law, and only 53 responses offered support for the idea. How were Moore and Clement going to spin this? Simple. Moore went to a meeting of the International Chamber of Commerce in Toronto, and gave a speech where he denounced all 6,138 of us as "babyish" and "radical extremists." Then Harper whipped his caucus and in 2012, Bill C-11, the Copyright Modernisation Act passed, and we got a Made-in-Canada all-purpose, omnienshittificatory anti-circumvention law. Let's be clear about what this law does: because it makes no exemptions for circumvention for lawful purposes, Canada's anti-circumvention law criminalizes anything you do with your computer, phone or device, if it runs counter to the manufacturer's wishes. It's an invitation for foreign manufacturers to use Canada's courts to punish Canadian customers and Canadian companies for finding ways to make the products we buy and use less shitty. Anti-circumvention is at the root of the repair emergency. All companies have to do is add an "initialization" routine to their devices, so that any new parts installed in a car, or a tractor, or a phone, or a ventilator have to be unlocked by the manufacturer's representative before the device will recognize the new part, and it becomes a crime for an independent mechanic, or a farmer, or an independent repair shop, or a hospital technician to fix a car, or a tractor, or a phone, or a ventilator. This is called "parts pairing" or "VIN locking." Now, we did pass C-244, a national Right to Repair law, last year, but it's just a useless ornament, because it doesn't override anti-circumvention. So Canadians can't fix their own technology if the manufacturer uses an access control to block the repair. Anti-circumvention means we can't fix things when they break, and it also means that we can't fix them when they arrive pre-broken by their enshittifying manufacturers. Take the iPhone: it can only use one app store, Apple's official one, and everyone who puts an app in the app store has to sign up to use Apple's payment processor, which takes 30 cents out of every dollar you spend inside an app. That means that when a Canadian user sends $10 a month to a Canadian independent news outlet or podcast, $3 out of that $10 gets sucked out of the transaction and lands in Cupertino, California, where it is divvied by Apple's shareholders and executives. It's not just news sites. Every dollar you send through an app to a performer on Patreon, a crafter on Etsy, a games company, or a software company takes a roundtrip through Silicon Valley and comes back 30 cents lighter. A Canadian company could bypass the iPhone's "access controls" and give you a download or a little hardware dongle that installed a Canadian app store, one that used the Interac network to process payments for free, eliminating Apple and Google's 30% tax on Canada's entire mobile digital economy. And indeed, we have 2024's Bill C-294, an interoperability law, that lets Canadians do this. But just as with the repair law, our interoperability law is also useless, because it doesn't repeal the anti-circumvention law, meaning you are only allowed to reverse engineer products to make interoperable alternatives if there is no access control in the way. Of course, every company that's in a position to rip you off just adds an access control. The fact that foreign corporations have the final say over how Canadians use their own property is a font of endless enshittification. Remember when we told Facebook to pay news outlets for links and Facebook just removed all links to the news? Our anti-circumvention law is the only reason that a Canadian company couldn't jailbreak the Facebook app and give you an alternative app, one that slurped up everything Facebook was waiting to show you in your feed, all the updates from your friend and your groups while blocking all the surveillance, the ads and the slop and the recommendations, and then mixing in the news that you wanted to see. Remember when we tried to get Netflix to show Canadian content in your recommendations and search results? Anti-circumvention is the only reason some Canadian company can't jailbreak the Netflix app and give you an alternative client that lets you stream all your Netflix shows but also shows you search results from the NFB and any other library of Canadian media, while blocking Netflix's surveillance. Anticircumvention means that Canadian technologists can't seize the means of computation, which means that we're at the mercy of American companies and we only get the rights that they decide to give us. Apple will block Facebook's apps from spying on you while you use your iPhone, but they won't let you block Apple from spying on you while you use your iPhone, to gather exactly the same data Facebook steals from you, for exactly the same purpose: to target ads to you. Apple will screen the apps in its app store to prevent malicious code from running on your iPhone, but if you want to run a legitimate app and Apple doesn't want you to, they will block it from the app store and you will just have to die mad. That's what's happened in October, when Apple kicked an app called ICE Block out of the App Store. ICE Block is an app that warns you if masked thugs are at large in your neighborhood waiting to kidnap you and send you to a camp. Apple decided that ICE thugs were a "protected class" that ICE Block discriminated against. They decided that you don't deserve to be safe from ICE kidnappings, and what they say goes. The road to enshittification hell is paved with anticircumvention. We told our politicians this, a decade and a half ago, and they called us "babyish radical extremists" and did it anyway. Now, I've been shouting about this for decades. I was one of those activists who helped get Sam Bulte unelected and flipped her seat for 20 years. But I will be the first person to tell you that I have mostly failed at preventing enshittification. Bruce Lehman, James Moore and even Tony "dick pic" Clement are way better at enshittifying the world than I am at disenshittifying it. Of course, they have an advantage over me: they are in a coalition with the world's most powerful corporations and their wealthy investors. Whereas my coalition is basically, you know, you folks. People who care about human rights, workers' rights, consumer rights, privacy rights. And guys, I hate to tell you, but we're losing. Let's talk about how we start winning. Any time you see a group of people successfully push for a change that they've been trying to make unsuccessfully for a long-ass time it's a sure bet that they've found some coalition partners. People who want some of the same things, who've set aside their differences and joined the fight. That's the Trump story, all over. The Trump coalition is basically, all the billionaires, plus the racists, plus the dopes who'd vote for a slime mold if it promised to lower their taxes by a nickle, even though they somehow expect to have roads and schools. Well, maybe not schools. You know, Ford Nation. Plus everyone who correctly thinks the Democratic Party are a bunch of do-nothing sellouts, who think they can bully you into voting for genocide because the other guy is an out-and-out fascist. Billionaires, racists, freaks with low-tax brain-worms and people who hate the sellout Dems: Trump's built a coalition that gets stuff done. Sure, it's terrible stuff, but you can't deny that they're getting it done. To escape from the enshittificatory black hole that Clement and Moore blew in Canadian policy, we need a coalition, too. And thanks to Trump and his incontinent belligerence, we're getting one. Let's start with the Trump tariffs. When I was telling you about how anticircumvention law took four tries under two different Prime Ministers, perhaps you wondered "Why did all these Canadian politicians want this stupid law in the first place?" After all, it's not like Canadian companies are particularly enriched by this law. Sure, it lets Ted Rogers rent you a cable box that won't let you attach a video recorder, so you have to pay for Rogers' PVR, which only lets you record some shows, and deletes them after a set time, and won't let you skip the ads. But the amount of extra money Rogers makes off this disgusting little racket is dwarfed by the billions that Canadian businesses leave on the table every year, by not going into business disenshittifying America's shitty tech exports. To say nothing of the junk fees and app taxes and data that those American companies rip off every Canadian for. So why were these Canadian MPs and prime ministers from both the Liberals and the Tories so invested in getting anticircumvention onto our law-books? Simple: the US Trade Rep threatened us with tariffs if we didn't pass an anti-circuvmention law. Remember, digital products are slippery. If America bans circumvention, and American companies start screwing the American public, that just opens an opportunity for companies elsewhere in the world to make disenshittifying products, which any American with an internet connection and a payment method can buy. Downloading jailbreaking code is much easier than getting insulin shipped from a Canadian pharmacy! So the US Trade Rep's top priority for the past quarter-century has been bullying America's trading partners into passing anti-circumvention laws to render their own people defenseless against American tech companies' predation and to prevent non-American tech companies from going into business disenshittifying America's defective goods. The threat of tariffs was so serious that multiple Canadian PMs from multiple parties tried multiple times to get a law on the books that would protect us from tariffs. And then in comes Trump, and now we have tariffs anyway. And let me tell you: when someone threatens to burn your house down if you don't follow their orders, and you follow their orders, and they burn your house down anyway, you are an absolute sucker if you keep following their orders. We could respond to the tariffs by legalizing circumvention, and unleashing Canadian companies to go into business raiding the margins of the most profitable lines of business of the most profitable corporations the world has ever seen. Sure, Canada might not ever have a company like Research In Motion again, but what we could have is a company that sells the tools to jailbreak iPhones to anyone who wants to set up an independent iPhone store, bypassing Apple's 30% app tax and its high-handed judgments about what apps we can and can't have. Apple's payment processing business is worth $100b/year. We could offer people a 90% discount and still make $10b/year. And unlike Apple, we wouldn't have to assume the risk and capital expenditure of making phones. We could stick Apple with all of the risk and expense, and cream off the profits. That's fair, isn't it? It's certainly how Big Tech operates. When Amazon started, Jeff Bezos said to the publishers, "Your margin is my opportunity." $100b/year off a 30% payment processing fee is a hell of a margin, and a hell of an opportunity. With Silicon Valley, it's always "disruption for thee, not for me." When they do it to us, that's progress, when we do it to them, it's piracy (and every pirate wants to be an admiral). Now, of course, Canada hasn't responded to the Trump tariffs with jailbreaking. Our version of "elbows up" turns out to mean retaliatory tariffs. Which is to say, we're making everything we buy from America more expensive for us, which is a pretty weird way of punishing America, eh? It's like punching yourself in the face really hard and hoping the downstairs neighbour says "Ouch." Plus, it's pretty indiscriminate. We're not angry at Americans. We're angry at Trump and his financial backers. Tariffing soybeans just whacks some poor farmer in a state that begins and ends with a vowel who's never done anything bad to Canada. I guarantee you that poor bastard is making payments on a John Deere tractor, which costs him an extra $200 every time it breaks down, because after he fixes it himself, he has to pay two hundred bucks to John Deere and wait two days for them to send out a technician who types an unlock code into the tractor's console that unlocks the "parts pairing," so the tractor recognises the new part. Instead of tariffing that farmer's soybeans, we could sell him the jailbreaking tool that lets him fix his tractor without paying an extra $200 to John Deere. Instead of tsking at Elon Musk over his Nazi salute, we could sell every mechanic in the world a Tesla jailbreaking kit that unlocks all the subscription features and software upgrades, without sending a dime to Tesla, kicking Elon Musk square in the dongle. This is all stuff we could be doing. We could be building gigantic Canadian tech businesses, exporting to a global market, whose products make everything cheaper for every Canadian, and everyone else in the world, including every American. Because the American public is also getting screwed by these companies, and we could stand on guard for them, too. We could be the Disenshittification Nation. But that's not what we've done. Instead, we've decided to make everything in Canada more expensive, which is just about the stupidest political strategy I've ever heard of. This might be the only thing Carney could do that's less popular than firing 10,000 civil servants and replacing them with chatbots on the advice of the world's shadiest art dealer, who is pretty sure that if we keep shoveling words into the word-guessing program it will wake up and become intelligent. Which is just, you know, stupid. It's like thinking that if we just keep breeding our horses to run faster, one of our mares will eventually give birth to a locomotive. Human beings are not word-guessing programs who know more words than ChatGPT. Now, it's clear that the coalition of "people who care about digital rights" and "people who want to make billions of dollars off jailbreaking tech" isn't powerful enough to break the coalition that makes hundreds of billions of dollars from enshittification. But Trump – yes, Trump! – keeps recruiting people to our cause. Trump has made it clear that America no longer has allies, nor does it have trading partners. It has adversaries and rivals. And Trump's favorite weapons for attacking his foreign adversaries are America's tech giants. When the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against Bejamin Netanyahu for ordering a genocide, Trump denounced them, and Microsoft shut down their Outlook accounts. The chief prosecutor and other justices immediately lost access to all the working files of the court, to their email archives, to their diaries and address books. This was a giant, blinking sign, visible from space, reading AMERICAN TECHNOLOGY CANNOT BE TRUSTED. Trump's America only has adversaries and rivals, and Trump will pursue dominance by bricking your government, your businesses, your whole country. It's not just administrative software that Trump can send kill signals to. Remember when those Russian looters stole Ukrainian tractors and they turned up in Crimea? John Deere sent a kill-signal to the tractors and permanently immobilized them. This was quite a cool little comeuppance, the kind of thing a cyberpunk writer like me can certainly relish. But anyone who thinks about this for, oh, ten seconds will immediately realise that anyone who can push around the John Deere company can order the permanent immobilization of any tractor in the world, or all the tractors in your country. Because John Deere is a monopolist, and whatever part of the market Deere doesn't control is controlled by Massey Ferguson, and Trump can order the bricking of those tractors, too. This is the thing we were warned we'd face if we let Huawei provide our telecoms infrastructure, and those warnings weren't wrong. We should be worried about any gadget that we rely on that can be bricked by its manufacturer. Because that means we are at risk from the manufacturer, from governments who can suborn the manufacturer, from corporate insiders who can hijack the manufacturer's control systems, and from criminals who can impersonate the manufacturer to our devices. This is the third part of our coalition: not just digital rights weirdos like me; not just investors and technologists looking to make billions; but also national security hawks who are justifiably freaking out about America, China, or someone else shutting down key pieces of their country, from its food supply to its administrative capacity. Trump is a crisis, and crises precipitate change. Just look at Europe. Before Putin invaded Ukraine, the EU was a decade behind on its energy transition goals. Now, just a few years later, they're 15 years ahead of schedule. It turns out that a lot of "impossible" things are really just fights you'd rather not have. No one wants to argue with some tedious German who hates the idea of looking at "ugly solar panels" on their neighbour's balcony. But once you're all shivering in the dark, that's an argument you will have and you will win. Today, another mad emperor is threatening Europe – and the world. Trump's wanton aggression has given rise to a new anti-enshittification coalition: digital rights advocates, investors and technologists, and national security hawks; both the ones who worry about America, and the ones who worry about China. That's a hell of a coalition! The time is right to become a disenshittification nation, to harness our own tech talent, and the technologists who are fleeing Trump's America in droves, along with capital from investors who'd like to back a business whose success isn't determined by how many $TRUMP Coins they buy. Jailbreaking is how Canada cuts American Big Tech down to size. It's unlike everything else we've tried, like the Digital Services Tax, or forcing Netflix to support cancon, or making Facebook and Google pay to link to the news. All of those tactics involve making these companies that are orders of magnitude richer than Canada do something they absolutely do not want to do. Time and again, they've shown that we don't have the power to make them do things. But you know what Canada has total power over? What Canada does. We are under no obligation to continue to let these companies use our courts to attack our technologists, our businesses, our security researchers, our tech co-ops, our nonprofits, who want to jailbreak America's shitty tech, to seize the means of computation, to end the era in which American tech companies can raid our wallets and our data with impunity. In a jailbroken Canada, we don't have to limit ourselves to redistribution, to taxing away some of the money that the tech giants steal from us. In a jailbroken Canada, we can do predistribution. We can stop them from stealing our money in the first place. And if we don't do it, someone else will. Because every country was arm-twisted into passing an anti-circumvention law like ours. Every country had a supine and cowardly lickspittle like James Moore or Tony Clement who'd do America's bidding, a quisling who'd put their nation's people and businesses in chains, rather than upset the US Trade Rep. And all of those countries are right where we are: hit with tariffs, threatened by Trump, waiting for the day that Microsoft or Oracle or Google or John Deere bricks their businesses, their government, their farms. One of those countries is going to jump at this opportunity, the opportunity to consume the billions in rents stolen by US Tech giants, and use them as fuel for a single-use rocket booster that launches their tech sector into a stable orbit for decades to come. That gives them the hottest export business in living memory: a capital-light, unstoppable suite of products that save businesses and consumers money, while protecting their privacy. If we sleep on this, we'll still benefit. We'll get the consumer surplus that comes from buying those jailbreaking tools online and using them to disenshittify our social media, our operating systems, our vehicles, our industrial and farm equipment. But we won't get the industrial policy, the chance to launch a whole sector of businesses, each with the global reach and influence of RIM or Nortel. That'll go to someone else. The Europeans are already on it. They're funding and building the "Eurostack": free, open source, auditable and trustworthy versions of the US tech silos. We're going to be able to use that here. I mean, why not? We'll just install that code on metal running in Canadian data-centres, and we'll debug it and add features to it, and so will everyone else. Because that's how IT should work, and it should go beyond just the admin and database software that businesses and governments rely on. We should be building drop-in, free, open software for everything: smart speakers, smart TVs, smart watches, phones, cars, tractors, powered wheelchairs, ventilators. That's how it should already be: that the software that powers these devices that we entrust with our data, our integrity, our lives should be running code that anyone can see, test, and improve. That's how science works, after all. Before we had science, we had something kind of like science. We had alchemy. Alchemy was very similar to science, in that an alchemist would observe some natural phenomena in the world, hypothesise a causal relationship between them, and design an experiment to validate that hypothesis. But here's where alchemy and science diverge: unlike a scientist, an alchemist wouldn't publish their results. They'd keep them secret, rather than exposing them to the agony of adversarial peer review, where your enemies seek out every possible reason to discredit your work. This let the alchemists kid themselves about the stuff they thought they'd discovered, and that's why every alchemist discovered for themself, in the hardest way possible, that you shouldn't drink mercury. But after 500 years of this, alchemy finally achieved its long sought-after goal of converting something common to something of immeasurable value. Alchemy discovered how to transform the base metal of superstition into the precious metal of knowledge, through the crucible of publishing. Disclosure is the difference between knowledge and ignorance. Openness is the difference between dying of mercury poisoning and discovering medicine. The fact that we have a law on our statute books, in the year of two thousand and twenty-five, that criminalises discovering how the software we rely on works, and telling other people about it and improving it – well, it's pretty fucking pathetic, isn't it? We don't have to keep on drinking the alchemists' mercury. We don't have to remain prisoners of the preposterous policy blunders of Tony Clement and James Moore. We don't have to tolerate the endless extraction of Big Tech. We don't have to leave billions on the table. We need not abide the presence of lurking danger in all our cloud-connected devices. We can be the vanguard of a global movement of international nationalism, of digital sovereignty grounded in universal, open, transparent software, a commons that everyone contributes to and relies upon. Something more like science than technology. Like the EU's energy transition, this is a move that's long overdue. Like the EU's energy transition, a mad emperor has created the conditions for us to get off of our asses, to build a better world. We could be a disenshittification nation. We could seize the means of computation. We could have a new, good internet that respects our privacy and our wallets. We could make a goddamned fortune doing it. And once we do it, we could protect ourselves from spineless digital vassals of the mad king on our southern border, and rescue our American cousins to boot. What's not to like? Hey look at this (permalink) The UK Has It Wrong on Digital ID. Here’s Why https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/uk-has-it-wrong-digital-id-heres-why Sex Workers Built an ‘Anti-OnlyFans’ to Take Control of Their Profits https://www.wired.com/story/sex-workers-built-an-anti-onlyfans-to-take-control-of-their-profits/ Object permanence (permalink) #20yrago Ten (sensible) startup rules https://web.archive.org/web/20060324072607/https://evhead.com/2005/11/ten-rules-for-web-startups.asp #20yrsago Bosnian town unveils Bruce Lee statue of peace http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4474316.stm #20yrsago Sony rootkit author asked for free code to lock up music https://web.archive.org/web/20051130023447/https://groups.google.de/group/microsoft.public.windowsmedia.drm/msg/7cb5c4ad49fa206e #20yrsago Singapore’s executioner gets fired http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4477012.stm #20yrsago Pre-history of the Sony rootkit https://web.archive.org/web/20181126020952/https://community.osr.com/discussion/42117#T3 #15yrsago Support the magnetic ribbon industry ribbon! https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/ecr1t/ill_see_your_empty_gesture_and_raise_you/ #15yrsago Molecular biologist on the dangers of pornoscanners https://web.archive.org/web/20101125192455/https://myhelicaltryst.blogspot.com/2010/11/tsa-x-ray-backscatter-body-scanner.html #15yrsago Wunderkammerer front room crammed with nooks https://web.archive.org/web/20101125184317/http://mocoloco.com/fresh2/2010/11/23/villa-j-by-marge-arkitekter.php #15yrsago Delightful science fiction story in review of $6800 speaker cable https://www.amazon.com/review/R3I8VKTCITJCX6/ref=cm_cr_dp_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B000J36XR2&nodeID=172282&tag=&linkCode= #15yrsago German Pirate Party members strip off for Berlin airport scanner protest https://web.archive.org/web/20101129043459/https://permaculture.org.au/2010/11/26/full-monty-scanner-or-enhanced-pat-down-the-only-options/ #10yrsago Dolphin teleportation symposium: now with more Eisenhowers! https://twitpic.com/3aqqa0 #10yrsago Vtech breach dumps 4.8m families’ information, toy security is to blame https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/11/when-children-are-breached-inside-the-massive-vtech-hack/ #10yrsago A Canadian teenager used America’s militarized cops to terrorize women gamers for years https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/magazine/the-serial-swatter.html?_r=0 #10yrsago What the 1980s would have made of the $5 Raspberry Pi https://www.wired.com/beyond-the-beyond/2015/11/raspberry-pi-five-bucks-us/ #10yrsago Workaholic Goethe wished he’d been better at carving out time for quiet reflection https://www.wired.com/beyond-the-beyond/2015/11/the-aged-herr-goethe-never-had-enough-time-for-himself/ Upcoming appearances (permalink) San Diego: Enshittification at the Mission Hills Branch Library, Dec 1 https://libraryfoundationsd.org/events/doctorow Seattle: Neuroscience, AI and Society (University of Washington), Dec 4 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/neuroscience-ai-and-society-cory-doctorow-tickets-1735371255139 Virtual: Poetic Technologies with Brian Eno (David Graeber Institute), Dec 8 https://davidgraeber.institute/poetic-technologies-with-cory-doctorow-and-brian-eno/ Madison, CT: Enshittification at RJ Julia, Dec 8 https://rjjulia.com/event/2025-12-08/cory-doctorow-enshittification Hamburg: Chaos Communications Congress, Dec 27-30 https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/infos/index.html Recent appearances (permalink) Escape Forward with Cristina Caffarra https://escape-forward.com/2025/11/27/enshittification-of-our-digital-experience/ Why Every Platform Betrays You (Trust Revolution) https://fountain.fm/episode/bJgdt0hJAnppEve6Qmt8 How the internet went to sh*t (Prospect Magazine) https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/podcasts/prospect-podcast/71663/cory-doctorow-how-the-internet-went-to-sht Enshittification and “Breaking Kings” (Web Summit) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpLudlrwS_g Enshittification Nation (The Lever) https://www.levernews.com/enshittification-nation/ Enshittification with Oh God What Now https://castbox.fm/episode/Why-Tech-Sucks-%E2%80%93%C2%A0Cory-Doctorow-on-Enshittification-and-how-to-fix-it-id4634015-id876127534 Enshittification with The Lede (New Lines Magazine) https://newlinesmag.com/podcast/why-the-internet-got-bad-and-how-to-fix-it/ Latest books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE. "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. 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