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 Pluralistic

Cory Doctorow's blog

Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist and journalist

His latest book is ATTACK SURFACE, a standalone adult sequel to LITTLE BROTHER. He is also the author HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM, nonfiction about conspiracies and monopolies; and of RADICALIZED and WALKAWAY, science fiction for adults, a YA graphic novel called IN REAL LIFE; and young adult novels like HOMELAND, PIRATE CINEMA and LITTLE BROTHER. His first picture book was POESY THE MONSTER SLAYER (Aug 2020). He maintains a daily blog at Pluralistic.net. He works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is a MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate, is a Visiting Professor of Computer Science at Open University, a Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of North Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in Los Angeles.

Publié le 08.03.2025 à 15:23

Pluralistic: Gandersauce (08 Mar 2025)


Today's links


A 19th C illustration of a crying baby about to crawl out of a bathtub. The baby's face has been replaced with Elon Musk's. A Canada goose flies overhead. The baby's bare bum has a giant splat of birdshit on it.

Gandersauce (permalink)

It's true that capitalists by and large hate capitalism – given their druthers, entrepreneurs would like to attain a perch from which they get to set prices and wages and need not fear competitors. A market where everything is up for grabs is great – if you're the one doing the grabbing. Less so if you're the one whose profits, customers and workers are being grabbed at.

But while all capitalists hate all capitalism, a specific subset of capitalists really, really hate a specific kind of capitalism. The capitalists who hate capitalism the most are Big Tech bosses, and the capitalism they hate the most is techno-capitalism. Specifically, the techno-capitalism of the first decade of this century – the move fast/break things capitalism, the beg forgiveness, not permission capitalism, the blitzscaling capitalism.

The capitalism tech bosses hate most of all is disruptive capitalism, where a single technological intervention, often made by low-resourced individuals or small groups, can upend whole industries. That kind of disruption is only fun when you're the disruptor, but it's no fun for the disruptees.

Jeff Bezos's founding mantra for Amazon was "your margin is my opportunity." This is a classic disruption story: I'm willing to take a smaller profit than the established players in the industry. My lower prices will let me poach their customers, so I grow quickly and find more opportunities to cut margins but make it up in volume. Bezos described this as a flywheel that would spin faster and faster, rolling up more and more industries. It worked!

https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/10/at-amazon-the-flywheel-effect-drives-innovation/

The point of that flywheel wasn't the low prices, of course. Amazon is a paperclip-maximizing artificial intelligence, and the paperclip it wants to maximize is profits, and the path to maximum profits is to charge infinity dollars for things that cost you zero dollars. Infinite prices and nonexistent wages are Amazon's twin pole-stars. Amazon warehouse workers don't have to be injured at three times the industry average, but maiming workers is cheaper than keeping them in good health. Once Amazon vanquished its competitors and captured its the majority of US consumers, it raised prices, and used its market dominance to force everyone else to raise their prices, too. Call it "bezosflation":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos

We could disrupt Amazon in lots of ways. We could scrape all of Amazon's "ASIN" identifiers and make browser plugins that let local sellers advertise when they have stock of the things you're about to buy on Amazon:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/10/view-a-sku/

We could hack the apps that monitor Amazon drivers, from their maneuvers to their eyeballs, so drivers had more autonomy and their bosses couldn't punish them for prioritizing their health and economic wellbeing over Amazon's. An Amazon delivery app mod could even let drivers earn extra money by delivering for Amazon's rivals while they're on their routes:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

We could sell Amazon customers virtual PVRs that let them record and keep the shows they like, which would make it easier to quit Prime, and would kill Amazon's sleazy trick of making all the Christmas movies into extra-cost upsells from November to January:

https://www.amazonforum.com/s/question/0D54P00007nmv9XSAQ/why-arent-all-the-christmas-movies-available-through-prime-its-a-pandemic-we-are-stuck-at-home-please-add-the-oldies-but-goodies-to-prime

Rival audiobook stores could sell jailbreaking kits for Audible subscribers who want to move over to a competing audiobook platform, stripping Amazon's DRM off all their purchases and converting the files to play on a non-Amazon app:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff

Jeff Bezos's margin could be someone else's opportunity…in theory. But Amazon has cloaked itself – and its apps and offerings – in "digital rights management" wrappers, which cannot be removed or tampered with under pain of huge fines and imprisonment:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

Amazon loves to disrupt, talking a big game about "free markets and personal liberties" – but let someone attempt to do unto Amazon as Amazon did unto its forebears, and the company will go running to Big Government for a legal bailout, asking the state to enforce its business model:

https://apnews.com/article/washington-post-bezos-opinion-trump-market-liberty-97a7d8113d670ec6e643525fdf9f06de

You'll find this cowardice up and down the tech stack, wherever you look. Apple launched the App Store and the iTunes Store with all kinds of rhetoric about how markets – paying for things, rather than getting them free through ads – would correct the "market distortions." Markets, we were told, would produce superior allocations, thanks to price and demand signals being conveyed through the exchange of money for goods and services.

But Apple will not allow itself to be exposed to market forces. They won't even let independent repair shops compete with their centrally planned, monopoly service programs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/22/apples-cement-overshoes/

Much less allow competitors to create rival app stores that compete for users and apps:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/06/spoil-the-bunch/#dma

They won't even refurbishers re-sell parts from phones and laptops that are beyond repair:

https://www.shacknews.com/article/108049/apple-repair-critic-louis-rossmann-takes-on-us-customs-counterfeit-battery-seizure

And they take the position that if you do manage to acquire a donor part from a dead phone or laptop, that it is a felony – under the same DRM laws that keep Amazon's racket intact – to install them in a busted device:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/27/24097042/right-to-repair-law-oregon-sb1596-parts-pairing-tina-kotek-signed

"Rip, mix, burn" is great when it's Apple doing the ripping, mixing and burning, but let anyone attempt to return the favor and the company turns crybaby, whining to Customs and Border Patrol and fed cops to protect itself from being done unto as it did.

Should we blame the paperclip-maximizing Slow AI corporations for attempting to escape disruptive capitalism's chaotic vortex? I don't think it matters: I don't deplore this whiny cowardice because it's hypocritical. I hate it because it's a ripoff that screws workers, customers and the environment.

But there is someone I do blame: the governments that pass the IP laws that allow Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and other tech giants shut down anyone who wants to disrupt them. Those governments are supposed to work for us, and yet they passed laws – like Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act – that felonize reverse-engineering, modding and tinkering. These laws create an enshittogenic environment, which produces enshittification:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/record-scratch/#autoenshittification

Bad enough that the US passed these laws and exposed Americans to the predatory conduct of tech enshittifiers. But then the US Trade Representative went slithering all over the world, insisting that every country the US trades with pass their own versions of the laws, turning their citizens into an all-you-can-steal buffet for US tech gougers:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/31/hall-of-famer/#necensuraninadados

This system of global "felony contempt of business-model" statutes came into being because any country that wanted to export to the USA without facing tariffs had to pass a law banning reverse-engineering of tech products in order to get a deal. That's why farmers all over the world can't fix their tractors without paying John Deere hundreds of dollars for each repair the farmer makes to their own tractor:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

But with Trump imposing tariffs on US trading partners, there is now zero reason to keep those laws on the books around the world, and every reason to get rid of them. Every country could have the kind of disruptors who start a business with just a little capital, aimed directly at the highest margins of these stupidly profitable, S&P500-leading US tech giants, treating those margins as opportunities. They could jailbreak HP printers so they take any ink-cartridge; jailbreak iPhones so they can run any app store; jailbreak tractors so farmers can fix them without paying rent to Deere; jailbreak every make and model of every car so that any mechanic can diagnose and fix it, with compatible parts from any manufacturer. These aren't just nice things to do for the people in your country's borders: they are businesses, massive investment opportunities. The first country that perfects the universal car diagnosing tool will sell one to every mechanic in the world – along with subscriptions that keep up with new cars and new manufacturer software updates. That country could have the relationship to car repairs that Finland had to mobile phones for a decade, when Nokia disrupted the markets of every landline carrier in the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/03/friedmanite/#oil-crisis-two-point-oh

The US companies that could be disrupted thanks to the Trump tariffs are directly implicated in the rise of Trumpism. Take Tesla: the company's insane valuation is a bet by the markets that Tesla will be able to charge monthly fees for subscription features and one-off fees for software upgrades, which will be wiped out when your car changes hands, triggering a fresh set of payments from the next owner.

That business model is entirely dependent on making it a crime to reverse-engineer and mod a Tesla. A move-fast-and-break-things disruptor who offered mechanics a tool that let them charge $50 (or €50!) to unlock every Tesla feature, forever, could treat Musk's margins as their opportunity – and what an opportunity it would be!

That's how you hurt Musk – not by being performatively aghast at his Nazi salutes. You kick that guy right in the dongle:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/#franklinite

The act of unilaterally intervening in a market, product or sector – that is, "moving fast and breaking things" – is not intrinsically amoral. There's plenty of stuff out there that needs breaking. The problem isn't disruption, per se. Don't weep for the collapse of long-distance telephone calls! The problem comes when the disruptor can declare an end to history, declare themselves to be eternal kings, and block anyone from disrupting them.

If Uber had been able to nuke the entire taxi medallion system – which was dominated by speculators who charged outrageous rents to drivers – and then been smashed by driver co-ops who modded gig-work apps to keep the fares for themselves, that would have been amazing:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/21/contra-nihilismum/#the-street-finds-its-own-use-for-things

The problem isn't disruption itself, but rather, the establishment of undisruptable, legally protected monopolies whose crybaby billionaire CEOs never have to face the same treatment they meted out to the incumbents who were on the scene when they were starting out.

We need some disruption! Their margins are your opportunity. It's high time we started moving fast and breaking US Big Tech!

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago User-created content in Second Life: Ondrejka’s GDC talk https://crystaltips.typepad.com/wonderland/2005/03/cory_o_on_secon.html

#15yrsago iPhone developer EULA turns programmers into serfs https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/03/iphone-developer-program-license-agreement-all

#15yrsago Stomach-churning details of CIA waterboarding crimes https://www.salon.com/2010/03/09/waterboarding_for_dummies/

#10yrsago #15yrsago Stomach-churning details of CIA waterboarding crimes https://memex.craphound.com/2015/03/08/snowbirds-guide-to-avoiding-corrupt-cops-on-i-75/

#10yrsago Is a reputation economy really an economy? https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/05/01/the-economics-of-social-status/

#10yrsago Imaginary ISIS attack on Louisiana and the twitterbots who loved it https://render.betaworks.com/media-hacking-3b1e350d619c

#10yrsago McDonald’s sues to block Seattle’s minimum wage https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-mcdonalds-sue-minimum-wage-hike_b_6809736

#10yrsago Italy’s Hacking Team allegedly sold Ethiopia’s despots cyberweapons used to attack journalists https://citizenlab.ca/2015/03/hacking-team-reloaded-us-based-ethiopian-journalists-targeted-spyware/

#10yrsago SC Supreme Court: magistrates must be able to tell time and read https://www.loweringthebar.net/2015/03/judge-wanted-must-be-able-to-read-tell-time.html

#5yrsago John Deere is Right to Repair's archnemesis https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/09/pig-pedometer-blaze/#huskerdont

#5yrsago Yanis Varoufakis on how austerity leads to fascism https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/09/pig-pedometer-blaze/#debtslavery

#5yrsago UCSC strike prompts systemwide student and faculty solidarity strikes https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/09/pig-pedometer-blaze/#eattheregents

#5yrsago Shat-out pig pedometer sparks farm-fire https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/09/pig-pedometer-blaze/#flamingpigs

#5yrsago Jesse Jackson endorses Sanders https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/09/pig-pedometer-blaze/#jessejackson

#5yrsago European Right to Repair for phones is finally on the horizon https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/08/ghost-flights/#eurighttorepair

#5yrsago EU airspace is full of empty planes https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/08/ghost-flights/#ghostflights

#1yrago Palantir's NHS-stealing Big Lie https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/08/the-fire-of-orodruin/#are-we-the-baddies

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

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

  • The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

Latest podcast: With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It https://craphound.com/news/2025/02/26/with-great-power-came-no-responsibility-how-enshittification-conquered-the-21st-century-and-how-we-can-overthrow-it/

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Publié le 06.03.2025 à 16:25

Pluralistic: Two weak spots in Big Tech economics (06 Mar 2025)


Today's links


A US treasury printing press, running off sheets of greenbacks, attended by a printer. The printer's head has been replaced with the glaring, hostile eye of HAL 9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey,' and is topped with a top-hat. The background has been replaced with a 'code waterfall' as seen in the credit sequences of the Wachowskis' 'Matrix' movies.

Two weak spots in Big Tech economics (permalink)

Big Tech's astonishing scale is matched only by its farcical valuations – price-to-earnings ratios that consistently dwarf the capitalization of traditional hard-goods businesses. For example, Amazon's profit-to-earnings ratio is 37.65; Target's is only 13.34. That means that investors value every dollar Amazon brings in at three times the value they place on a dollar spent at Target.

The fact that Big Tech stocks trade at such a premium isn't merely of interest to tech investors, or even to the personal wealth managers who handle the assets of tech executives whose personal portfolios are full of their employers' stock options.

The high valuations of tech stocks don't just reflect an advantage over bricks and mortar firms – they are the advantage. If you're Target and you're hoping to hire someone who's just interviewed at Amazon, you have to beat Amazon's total compensation offer. But when Amazon makes that offer, they can pay some – maybe even most – of the offer in stock, rather than in cash.

This is a huge advantage! After all, to get dollars, both Amazon and Target have to convince you to spend money in their stores (or, in Amazon's case, with its cloud, or as a Prime sub, etc etc). Both Amazon and Target get their dollars from entities outside of the firm's four walls, and the dollars only come in when they convince someone else to do business with them.

But stock comes from inside the firm. Amazon makes new Amazon shares by typing zeroes into a spreadsheet. They don't have to convince you to buy anything in order to issue that new stock. That is their call, and their call alone.

Amazon can buy lots of things with stock – not just the labor of in-demand technical workers who command six-figure salaries. They can even buy whole companies using stock. So if Amazon and Target are bidding against one another for an anticompetitive acquisition of a key supplier or competitor, Amazon can beat Target's bid without having to spend the dollars its shareholders would like them to divert to dividends, stock buybacks, etc.

In other words, a company with a fantastic profit/earning ratio has its own money-printer that produces currency that can be used to buy labor and even acquire companies.

But why do investors value tech stocks so highly? In part, it's just circular reasoning: a company with a high stock price can beat its competitors because it has a high stock price, so I should buy its stock, which will drive up its stock price even further.

But there's more to this than self-fulfilling prophecy. The high price of tech stocks reflects the market's belief that these companies will continue to grow. If you think a company will be ten times bigger in two years, and it's only priced at three times as much as mature rivals that have stopped growing altogether, then that 300% stock premium is a bargain, because the company will have 1,000% growth in just a couple years. Tech companies have proven themselves, time and again, to be capable of posting incredible growth – think of how quickly Google went from a niche competitor to established search engines to the dominant player, with a 90% market share.

That kind of growth is enough to make anyone giddy, but it eventually runs up against the law of large numbers: doubling a small number is easy, doubling a large number is much, much harder. A search engine that's used by 90% of the world can't double its users – there just aren't enough people to sign up. They'd need to breed several billion new humans, raise them to maturity, and then convince them to be Google users.

And here's the thing: the flipside of the huge profits that can be reaped by investors who buy stocks at a premium in anticipation of growth is the certainty that you will be wiped out if you're still holding the stock when the growth halts. When Amazon stops growing, its PE ratio should fall to something like Target's, which means that its stock should decline by two thirds on that day.

Which is why Big Tech investors tend to be twitchy, hair-trigger types, easily stampeded into mass selloffs. That's what happened in 2022, when Facebook admitted to investors that it had grown more slowly than it had projected, and investors staged the largest stock selloff in history (to that point – hi, Nvidia!), wiping a quarter-trillion dollars off Meta's valuation in a day:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2022/02/03/stocks-plunge-after-facebooks-massive-sell-off-nasdaq-falls-37/

As Stein's Law has it: "anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." Growth stocks have to stop growing, eventually, and when they do, you'd better beat everyone else to the fire exit, or you're going to get crushed in the stampede.

Which is why tech companies are so obsessed with both actual growth, and stories about growth. Facebook spent tens of billions on bribes to telcos around the world, demanding that they charge extra to access non-Facebook websites and apps, in a bid to sign up "the next billion users":

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/02/countries-zero-rating-have-more-expensive-wireless-broadband-countries-without-it

That wasn't just about some ideological commitment to growth – it was about the real, material advantages that a growing company has, namely, that it can substitute the stock it creates for free by typing zeroes into a spreadsheet for money that it can only get by convincing you to give your money to it.

"Facebook Zero" (as this bribery program was called) was about actual growth: finding people who weren't Facebook users and turning them into Facebook users, preferably forever (thanks to Facebook's suite of lock-in tactics that make it a digital roach motel that users check into but don't check out of):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

But plenty of the things that Big Tech gets up to are about the narrative of growth. That's why Big Tech has pumped every tech bubble of this stupid decade: metaverse, cryptocurrency, AI. These technologies have each been at the forefront of Big Tech marketing and investor communications, but not solely because they represented a market opportunity. Rather, they represented a more-or-less plausible explanation for how these companies that were on the wrong side of the law of large numbers could continue to double in size, without breeding billions of new customers to sign up for their services.

The tell – as always – comes in the way that these companies refute their critics. When critics point out that Facebook spent $1.2 billion on a metaverse product that only has 32 users:

https://futurism.com/the-byte/metaverse-decentraland-report-active-users

Or that practically no one buys anything with cryptocurrency:

https://www.mollywhite.net/annotations/latecomers-guide-to-crypto/

Not even when the government gives them free crypto and passes a law forcing merchants to accept crypto:

https://bitcoinblog.de/2024/09/02/weak-bitcoin-adoption-in-el-salvador-disappoints-the-president/

Or that hardly anyone uses AI, and what uses it does have are often low-value:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai-business/

The "narrative entrepreneurs" behind the claims of infinite growth from these technologies all have the same response: "That's what they said about the web, and yet it grew really fast! People who lacked the vision to understand the web's potential missed out. Buy [crypto|metaverse|AI] or have fun being poor!"

It's true – there were a lot of people who were blithely dismissive of the web, and they were wrong. But the fact that the web's skeptics were wrong doesn't mean that skepticism itself is foolish. People were also skeptical of Qibi, Beanie Babies, and the Segway – all of which were predicted to continue to increase in value forever and become permanently installed as significant facts in the economy. The fact that lots of people think something is stupid is not a reliable indicator that it is actually great.

So it's not just that capitalism adopts "the ideology of a tumor" in insisting that infinite growth is possible. The value in corporate claims to eternal growth is not aesthetic, it is material. If the market believes a company will grow, then that company gets to print its own money, which lets it outcompete mature rivals, which lets it grow some more.

But! When the company runs out of growth potential, the process runs in reverse. Not only do executives – whose portfolios are stuffed full of their own company's shares – stand to lose most of their net worth overnight, but once a company's stock starts to decline, it can expect to see an exodus of the key personnel who are compensated in now-worthless stock. That means that once a company hits a bad bump in the road that sets it off course, it needs to worry about losing all the skilled employees who can get it back on the road.

So growth is important, not for its own sake, but for how it affects the cost basis of companies, and thus determines their competitive outlook. But not all growth is created equal.

Remember when Facebook pissed away billions in a bid to capture "the next billion users"? Those users – people from poor countries in the global south – were not as valuable to Facebook as its US customers. The news that sparked a $250 billion, one-day selloff of Facebook shares wasn't merely about anemic growth – it was specifically about anemic growth in the USA.

American customers are worth more than other users to Big Tech – that's true even of users from other populous countries, and of users from other wealthy countries. Norway is rich as hell, but each Norwegian Facebook user is worth pennies on the kroner compared to American users. And there are brazilians of people in South America, but they're worth even less per capita than Norwegians are. Even the whole EU, with its 500m+ relatively wealthy consumers, is only worth a fraction of the US market.

Why is the American market so prized by Big Tech? Because it the only country in the world at the center of a Venn diagram with three overlapping circles. America is the only country in the world that is:

a) populous;

b) wealthy; and

c) totally lacking in legal privacy protections.

The US Congress last updated American consumer privacy law in 1988, when the Video Privacy Protection Act was passed to protect Americans from the high-tech threat of…video store clerks leaking your rental history to the newspapers. Despite the bewildering, obvious, serious privacy risks that have emerged since Die Hard was in theaters, Congress has done nothing to extend Americans' consumer privacy rights.

There are other rich countries where privacy law sucks, but they are small countries with few people. There are extremely populous poor countries with shitty privacy laws, but they're poor. Tech has to steal the private data of dozens of those people to make as much money as they can get from selling the data of just one American. And there are other rich, populous countries – like Germany, say – but those countries actually defend the privacy of the people who live there, and so the revenue tech gets from each of those users is even lower than the RPU for the undefended poor people of the global south.

America is exceptional in that it represents the one place where there are lots of wealthy people who are totally defenseless. We're an all-you-can-eat buffet for the privacy-annihilating voyeurs of Silicon Valley.

These are the two dirty secrets of Big Tech's economics. These companies are reliant on the fragile narrative of infinite growth, and that narrative isn't merely about global growth, but it is particularly and especially about growth in the USA.

Tech's power comes from an implausible story of discovering an endless stream of Americans to sign up and screw over. That story is extremely load-bearing – so much so that by the instant at which the first crack appears, collapse is only moments away. And boy, are there cracks:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/power-cut/

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago EU software patents pass in the teeth of decency and democracy https://web.archive.org/web/20050310004103/http://wiki.ffii.org/Cons050307En

#20yrsago Europe’s “Broadcast Flag” dangers https://web.archive.org/web/20050305062313/http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21595

#20yrsago Koster’s keynote from Game Developers Conference https://crystaltips.typepad.com/wonderland/2005/03/raphs_keynote.html

#20yrsago Sterling on the counterfeits of Belgrade https://web.archive.org/web/20050223100218/https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/view.html?pg=4

#15yrsago Ubisoft DRM servers go down, punishing customers but not pirates https://www.escapistmagazine.com/Ubisoft-DRM-Authentication-Servers-Go-Down/

#10yrsago Albuquerque PD encrypts videos before releasing them in records request https://www.techdirt.com/2015/03/06/albuquerque-police-dept-complies-with-records-request-releasing-password-protected-videos-not-password/

#10yrsago Judge who invented Ferguson’s debtor’s prisons owes $170K in tax https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/mar/06/ferguson-judge-owes-unpaid-taxes-ronald-brockmeyer

#10yrsago Hartford, CT says friends can’t room together unless some of them are servants https://www.courant.com/2015/02/17/hartford-upholds-action-against-scarborough-street-family/

#10yrsago Improving the estimate of US police killings https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-new-estimate-of-killings-by-police-is-way-higher-and-still-too-low/

#5yrsago The savior of Waterstones will turn every B&N into an indie https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/07/bookselling-is-back/#dauntbn

#5yrsago Compromise threatens Intel's chip-within-a-chip https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/07/bookselling-is-back/#csme

#5yrsago Gig economy drivers won't get sick-pay if they have covid-19 symptoms https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/07/bookselling-is-back/#covid-gig

#5yrsago Audio from last night's Canada Reads event in Kelowna https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/07/bookselling-is-back/#kelowna

#1yrago 1900s futurism https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/07/the-gernsback-continuum/#wheres-my-jetpack

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

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

  • The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

Latest podcast: With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It https://craphound.com/news/2025/02/26/with-great-power-came-no-responsibility-how-enshittification-conquered-the-21st-century-and-how-we-can-overthrow-it/

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Publié le 05.03.2025 à 17:15

Pluralistic: Brother makes a demon-haunted printer (05 Mar 2025)


Today's links


A giant, complicated, mechanical printing press. Looming over it is an 18th-century demon from the Compendium Rarissimum Totius Artis Magicae; it is a eating severed human leg, and waving another leg in the air. In the background rise dark red flames. The printer has a Brother logo.

Brother makes a demon-haunted printer (permalink)

You guys, I don't want to bum you out or anything, but I think there's a good chance than some self-described capitalists aren't really into capitalism.

Sorry.

Take incentives: Charlie Munger, capitalism's quippiest pitchman, famously said, "Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome." And here's some mindblowing horseshoe theory for ya: Munger agrees with the noted Communist agitator Adam Smith, whose anti-rentier, pro-government-regulation jeremiad "The Wealth of Nations" contains this notorious passage:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.

Incentives matter – if you design a system that permits abuse, you should expect abuse. Now, I'm not 100% on board with this: every one of us has ways to undetectably cheat the system and enrich ourselves, but most of the time, most of us play by the rules.

But it's different for corporations: the myth of "shareholder supremacy" has reached pandemic levels among the artificial lifeforms we call corporate persons, and it's impossible to rise through the corporate ranks without repeating and believing the catechism that there is a law that requires executives to lie, cheat and steal if it results in an extra dollar for the investors, in the name of "fiduciary duty":

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

And this attitude has leaked out into politics and everyday life, so that many of our neighbors have been brainwashed into thinking that a successful cheat is a success in life, that pulling a fast one "makes you smart":

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

In a world dominated by a belief in the moral virtue and legal necessity of ripping off anyone you can get away with cheating, then, sure, any system that permits cheating is a system in which cheating will occur.

This shouldn't be controversial, but if so, how are we to explain the whole concept of the Internet of Things? Installing networked computers into our appliances, office equipment, vehicles and homes is an invitation of mischief: the software in those computers can be remotely altered after you purchase them, taking away the features you paid for and then selling them back to you.

Now, an advocate for market-based solutions has a ready-made response to this: if a company downgrades a device you own, this merely invites another company to step in with a disenshittifying plug-in that makes things better. If the company that made your garage-door opener pushes an over-the-air update that blocks you from using an ad-free, well-designed app and forces you to use an enshittified app that forces you to look at ads before you can open the garage, well, that's an opportunity for a rival company to sell you a better software update for your garage-door opener, one that restores the lost functionality:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

I'm no hayekpilled market truefan, but I'm pretty sure that would work.

However.

The problem is that since 1998, that kind of reverse-engineering has been a felony under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which bans bypassing "an effective access control"

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

There's a pretty obvious incentive at play when companies have the ability to unilaterally alter how their products work after you buy them and you are legally prohibited to change how the product works after you buy them. This is the first lesson of the Darth Vader MBA: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

I've been banging this drum for decades now – like when I got into a public (friendly) spat with the editor of Wired magazine over their reviews of DRM-based media devices. I argued that it was irresponsible to review a device that could be unilaterally downgraded by the manufacturer at any time, without – at a minimum – noting that the feature you're buying the gadget for might disappear without warning after you've shelled out your hard-earned money:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/03/painful-burning-dribble/#law-of-intended-consequences

Of course, companies that get a reputation for these kinds of shenanigans might lose market share to better competitors. Sure, if the company that made your phone or your thermostat or your insulin pump reached into it across the internet and made it worse, you're shit out of luck when it comes to that device. But you can buy your next device from a better company, right?

Well, sure – in a competitive market, that's a plausible theory of "market discipline." Companies that fear losing business to rivals might behave themselves better.

In theory.

But in practice, the world's "advanced economies" have spent the past 40 years running an uncontrolled experiment in what happens if you don't enforce competition law, and instead allow companies to buy all their competitors. The result is across-the-board industrial oligopolies, cartels, duopolies and monopolies in nearly every category of good and service:

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

Now, even a duopoly has some competition. If you don't like Coke, there's always Pepsi. But again, in practice, companies in concentrated industries find it easy to "tacitly collude" to adopt one another's worst habits – the differences between the outrageous payment processing charged by Apple's App Store and the junk fees charged by Google Play are about as meaningful as the differences between Coke and Pepsi.

Which brings me to printers.

I know.

Ugh.

Printers are the worst and HP is the worst of the worst. For years, HP has been abusing its market dominance – and its customers' wallets – by inflating the price of ink and rolling out countermeasures to prevent you from refilling your old cartridges or buying third-party ink. Worse, HP have mastered the Darth Vader MBA, bushing updates to its printers that sneakily downgrade them after you've bought them and taken them home.

Here's a sneaky trick HP came up with: they send a "security update" to your printer. After you click "OK," a little progress bar zips across the screen and the printer reboots itself, and then…nothing. The printer declares itself to be "up to date" and works exactly like it did before you installed the update. But inside the printer, a countdown timer has kicked off, and then, months later, the "security update" activates itself, like a software Manchurian Candidate.

Because that "security update" protects the security of HP, against HP customers. It is designed to detect and reject the very latest third-party ink cartridges, which means that if you've just bought a year's worth of ink at Costco, you might wake up the next day and discover that your printer will no longer accept them – because of an update you ran six months before.

Why does HP put such a long fuse on its logic bomb? For the same reason that viruses like covid evolve to be contagious before you show symptoms. If the update immediately broke compatibility with third party ink, word would spread, and some HP customers would turn off their printers' wifi before the "security update" could be applied to them.

By asymptomatically incubating the infection over a long, patient timescale, HP maximizes the spread of the contagion, guaranteeing a global pandemic of enshittiification:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

HP has done this – and worse – over and over, and every time I write about it, people pop up to recommend their Brother printers as the enshittification-free alternative. I own a Brother, an HL3170-CDW laser printer that's basically indestructible, cheerfully accepts third-party toner, and costs almost nothing to run.

But I still don't connect it to my wifi. The idea that Brother is a better company than HP – that is possesses some intrinsic antienshittificatory virtue – has always struck me as a foolish belief. Brother has means, motive and opportunity to push over-the-air downgrades to block third-party ink as HP.

Which is exactly what they've done.

Yesterday, Louis Rossman, hero of the Right to Repair movement, revealed that Brother had just pushed a mandatory over-the-air update that locks out third-party ink:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpHX_9fHNqE

Rossman has a thorough technical breakdown of the heist, but it boils down to this. Brother is just as shit as HP. Look from the men to the pigs and the pigs to the men all you want – you will never spot the difference. Take the Pepsi Challenge – bet you won't be able to guess which is which:

https://wiki.rossmanngroup.com/wiki/Brother_ink_lockout_%26_quality_sabotage

This was the absolutely predictable outcome of the regulatory incentives our corporate overlords created, the enormous, far-reaching power we handed to these corporations. With that great power came no responsibility:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/#franklinite

Filling our devices with computers that run programs that can be changed in secret, that we're not allowed to inspect or alter? It's a recipe for a demon-haunted world, where the devices we entrust with our livelihood, our privacy and our wellbeing are possessed by hellions who escape from the digital Tartarus and are unleashed upon humanity.

Demons have possessed the Internet of Things. It's in Teslas:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

and in every other car, too:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

Our devices – phones, pacemakers, appliances and home security systems – are designed to prevent us to find out what they're doing. That means that when malicious software infects them, then – by design – these devices prevent us from knowing about it or doing anything about it:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/18/descartes-delenda-est/#self-destruct-sequence-initiated

This should not come as a surprise to anyone. Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago How legitimacy ties activists’ hands https://comeuppance.blogspot.com/2005/02/parable-about-possibilities-of-dissent.html

#10yrsago DMCA abuser ordered to pay $25K to WordPress https://torrentfreak.com/wordpress-wins-25000-from-dmca-takedown-abuser-150305/

#10yrsago Finnish millionaire gets EUR54K speeding ticket https://web.archive.org/web/20150307073104/http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-31709454

#10yrsago William Gibson on fashion https://www.heddels.com/2015/03/william-gibson-interview-buzz-rickson-line-tech-wear-limits-authenticity/

#5yrsago The web is unusably beshitted with terrible ad-tech https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/06/robolawyers-vs-databrokers/#chumboxes-r-us

#5yrsago South Korea's beating covid-19 with free testing https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/06/robolawyers-vs-databrokers/#skcovid

#5yrsago Clearview AI says it only lets cops use its facial recognition tool but it's lying https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/06/robolawyers-vs-databrokers/#clearviewlied

#5yrsago A grifty AI company conned the state of Utah into giving access to everything https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/06/robolawyers-vs-databrokers/#banjo

#5yrsago American Catholic officials helped priests who preyed on children escape to Mexico https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/06/robolawyers-vs-databrokers/#complicity

#5yrsago The king of Dutch climate denial was secretly in Shell's pay https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/06/robolawyers-vs-databrokers/#shellpapers

#1yrago Electrons, not molecules https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/06/exxonknew/#🔥

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

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

  • The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Slashdot (https://slashdot.org).

Currently writing:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

Latest podcast: With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It https://craphound.com/news/2025/02/26/with-great-power-came-no-responsibility-how-enshittification-conquered-the-21st-century-and-how-we-can-overthrow-it/

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:

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Publié le 04.03.2025 à 13:52

Pluralistic: There Were Always Enshittifiers (04 Mar 2025)


Today's links


A modified vintage Byte Magazine cover. The original is an oil painting closeup of a man's hands and wristwatch; the wristwatch is a computer screen with a minuscule keyboard; the man's other hand is inserting a tiny floppy-disk into its side. It has been modified. It has been center-sliced to create a landscape orientation work. The Byte wordmark has been moved down to within the frame. The screen of the watch/computer has been replaced with a pixelated, 8-bit poop emoji. A tiny Martin Hench figure, as depicted on the cover of my novel 'Picks and Shovels,' has been added to the Byte wordmark, so that the figure is running between the 't' and the 'e'.

There Were Always Enshittifiers (permalink)

My latest Locus column is "There Were Always Enshittifiers." It's a history of personal computing and networked communications that traces the earliest days of the battle for computers as tools of liberation and computers as tools for surveillance, control and extraction:

https://locusmag.com/2025/03/commentary-cory-doctorow-there-were-always-enshittifiers/

The occasion for this piece is the publication of my latest Martin Hench novel, a standalone book set in the early 1980s called "Picks and Shovels":

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels

The MacGuffin of Picks and Shovels is a "weird PC" company called Fidelity Computing, owned by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest, and an orthodox rabbi. It sounds like the setup for a joke, but the punchline is deadly serious: Fidelity Computing is a pyramid selling cult that preys on the trust and fellowship of faith groups to sell the dreadful Fidelity 3000 PC and its ghastly peripherals.

You see, Fidelity's products are booby-trapped. It's not merely that they ship with programs whose data-files can't be read by apps on any other system – that's just table stakes. Fidelity's got a whole bag of tricks up its sleeve – for example, it deliberately damages a specific sector on every floppy disk it ships. The drivers for its floppy drive initialize any read or write operation by checking to see if that sector can be read. If it can, the computer refuses to recognize the disk. This lets the Reverend Sirs (as Fidelity's owners style themselves) run a racket where they sell these deliberately damaged floppies at a 500% markup, because regular floppies won't work on the systems they lure their parishioners into buying.

Or take the Fidelity printer: it's just a rebadged Oki­data ML-80, the workhorse tractor feed printer that led the market for years. But before Fidelity ships this printer to its customers, they fit it with new tractor feed sprockets whose pins are slightly more widely spaced than the standard 0.5" holes on the paper you can buy in any stationery store. That way, Fidelity can force its customers to buy the custom paper that they exclusively peddle – again, at a massive markup.

Needless to say, printing with these wider sprocket holes causes frequent jams and puts a serious strain on the printer's motors, causing them to burn out at a high rate. That's great news – for Fidelity Computing. It means they get to sell you more overpriced paper so you can reprint the jobs ruined by jams, and they can also sell you their high-priced, exclusive repair services when your printer's motors quit.

Perhaps you're thinking, "OK, but I can just buy a normal Okidata printer and use regular, cheap paper, right?" Sorry, the Reverend Sirs are way ahead of you: they've reversed the pinouts on their printers' serial ports, and a normal printer won't be able to talk to your Fidelity 3000.

If all of this sounds familiar, it's because these are the paleolithic ancestors of today's high-tech lock-in scams, from HP's $10,000/gallon ink to Apple and Google's mobile app stores, which cream a 30% commission off of every dollar collected by an app maker. What's more, these ancient, weird misfeatures have their origins in the true history of computing, which was obsessed with making the elusive, copy-proof floppy disk.

This Quixotic enterprise got started in earnest with Bill Gates' notorious 1976 "open letter to hobbyists" in which the young Gates furiously scolds the community of early computer hackers for its scientific ethic of publishing, sharing and improving the code that they all wrote:

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

Gates had recently cloned the BASIC programming language for the popular Altair computer. For Gates, his act of copying was part of the legitimate progress of technology, while the copying of his colleagues, who duplicated Gates' Altair BASIC, was a shameless act of piracy, destined to destroy the nascent computing industry:

As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?

Needless to say, Gates didn't offer a royalty to John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, the programmers who'd invented BASIC at Dartmouth College in 1963. For Gates – and his intellectual progeny – the formula was simple: "When I copy you, that's progress. When you copy me, that's piracy." Every pirate wants to be an admiral.

For would-be ex-pirate admirals, Gates's ideology was seductive. There was just one fly in the ointment: computers operate by copying. The only way a computer can run a program is to copy it into memory – just as the only way your phone can stream a video is to download it to its RAM ("streaming" is a consensus hallucination – every stream is a download, and it has to be, because the internet is a data-transmission network, not a cunning system of tubes and mirrors that can make a picture appear on your screen without transmitting the file that contains that image).

Gripped by this enshittificatory impulse, the computer industry threw itself headfirst into the project of creating copy-proof data, a project about as practical as making water that's not wet. That weird gimmick where Fidelity floppy disks were deliberately damaged at the factory so the OS could distinguish between its expensive disks and the generic ones you bought at the office supply place? It's a lightly fictionalized version of the copy-protection system deployed by Visicalc, a move that was later publicly repudiated by Visicalc co-founder Dan Bricklin, who lamented that it confounded his efforts to preserve his software on modern systems and recover the millions of data-files that Visicalc users created:

http://www.bricklin.com/robfuture.htm

The copy-protection industry ran on equal parts secrecy and overblown sales claims about its products' efficacy. As a result, much of the story of this doomed effort is lost to history. But back in 2017, a redditor called Vadermeer unearthed a key trove of documents from this era, in a Goodwill Outlet store in Seattle:

https://www.reddit.com/r/VintageApple/comments/5vjsow/found_internal_apple_memos_about_copy_protection/

Vaderrmeer's find was a Apple Computer binder from 1979, documenting the company's doomed "Software Security from Apple's Friends and Enemies" (SSAFE) project, an effort to make a copy-proof floppy:

https://archive.org/details/AppleSSAFEProject

The SSAFE files are an incredible read. They consist of Apple's best engineers beavering away for days, cooking up a new copy-proof floppy, which they would then hand over to Apple co-founder and legendary hardware wizard Steve Wozniak. Wozniak would then promptly destroy the copy-protection system, usually in a matter of minutes or hours. Wozniak, of course, got the seed capital for Apple by defeating AT&T's security measures, building a "blue box" that let its user make toll-free calls and peddling it around the dorms at Berkeley:

https://512pixels.net/2018/03/woz-blue-box/

Woz has stated that without blue boxes, there would never have been an Apple. Today, Apple leads the charge to restrict how you use your devices, confining you to using its official app store so it can skim a 30% vig off every dollar you spend, and corralling you into using its expensive repair depots, who love to declare your device dead and force you to buy a new one. Every pirate wants to be an admiral!

https://www.vice.com/en/article/tim-cook-to-investors-people-bought-fewer-new-iphones-because-they-repaired-their-old-ones/

Revisiting the early PC years for Picks and Shovels isn't just an excuse to bust out some PC nostalgiacore set-dressing. Picks and Shovels isn't just a face-paced crime thriller: it's a reflection on the enshittificatory impulses that were present at the birth of the modern tech industry.

But there is a nostalgic streak in Picks and Shovels, of course, represented by the other weird PC company in the tale. Computing Freedom is a scrappy PC startup founded by three women who came up as sales managers for Fidelity, before their pangs of conscience caused them to repent of their sins in luring their co-religionists into the Reverend Sirs' trap.

These women – an orthodox lesbian whose family disowned her, a nun who left her order after discovering the liberation theology movement, and a Mormon woman who has quit the church over its opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment – have set about the wozniackian project of reverse-engineering every piece of Fidelity hardware and software, to make compatible products that set Fidelity's caged victims free.

They're making floppies that work with Fidelity drives, and drives that work with Fidelity's floppies. Printers that work with Fidelity computers, and adapters so Fidelity printers will work with other PCs (as well as resprocketing kits to retrofit those printers for standard paper). They're making file converters that allow Fidelity owners to read their data in Visicalc or Lotus 1-2-3, and vice-versa.

In other words, they're engaged in "adversarial interoperability" – hacking their own fire-exits into the burning building that Fidelity has locked its customers inside of:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

This was normal, back then! There were so many cool, interoperable products and services around then, from the Bell and Howell "Black Apple" clones:

https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads%2Fbell-howell-apple-ii.64651%2F

to the amazing copy-protection cracking disks that traveled from hand to hand, so the people who shelled out for expensive software delivered on fragile floppies could make backups against the inevitable day that the disks stopped working:

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

Those were wild times, when engineers pitted their wits against one another in the spirit of Steve Wozniack and SSAFE. That era came to a close – but not because someone finally figured out how to make data that you couldn't copy. Rather, it ended because an unholy coalition of entertainment and tech industry lobbyists convinced Congress to pass the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998, which made it a felony to "bypass an access control":

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/07/section-1201-dmca-cannot-pass-constitutional-scrutiny

That's right: at the first hint of competition, the self-described libertarians who insisted that computers would make governments obsolete went running to the government, demanding a state-backed monopoly that would put their rivals in prison for daring to interfere with their business model. Plus ça change: today, their intellectual descendants are demanding that the US government bail out their "anti-state," "independent" cryptocurrency:

https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-78/

In truth, the politics of tech has always contained a faction of "anti-government" millionaires and billionaires who – more than anything – wanted to wield the power of the state, not abolish it. This was true in the mainframe days, when companies like IBM made billions on cushy defense contracts, and it's true today, when the self-described "Technoking" of Tesla has inserted himself into government in order to steer tens of billions' worth of no-bid contracts to his Beltway Bandit companies:

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/lawmakers-question-musk-influence-over-verizon-faa-contract-2025-02-28/

The American state has always had a cozy relationship with its tech sector, seeing it as a way to project American soft power into every corner of the globe. But Big Tech isn't the only – or the most important – US tech export. Far more important is the invisible web of IP laws that ban reverse-engineering, modding, independent repair, and other activities that defend American tech exports from competitors in its trading partners.

Countries that trade with the US were arm-twisted into enacting laws like the DMCA as a condition of free trade with the USA. These laws were wildly unpopular, and had to be crammed through other countries' legislatures:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/15/radical-extremists/#sex-pest

That's why Europeans who are appalled by Musk's Nazi salute have to confine their protests to being loudly angry at him, selling off their Teslas, and shining lights on Tesla factories:

https://www.malaymail.com/news/money/2025/01/24/heil-tesla-activists-protest-with-light-projection-on-germany-plant-after-musks-nazi-salute-video/164398

Musk is so attention-hungry that all this is as apt to please him as anger him. You know what would really hurt Musk? Jailbreaking every Tesla in Europe so that all its subscription features – which represent the highest-margin line-item on Tesla's balance-sheet – could be unlocked by any local mechanic for €25. That would really kick Musk in the dongle.

The only problem is that in 2001, the US Trade Rep got the EU to pass the EU Copyright Directive, whose Article 6 bans that kind of reverse-engineering. The European Parliament passed that law because doing so guaranteed tariff-free access for EU goods exported to US markets.

Enter Trump, promising a 25% tariff on European exports.

The EU could retaliate here by imposing tit-for-tat tariffs on US exports to the EU, which would make everything Europeans buy from America 25% more expensive. This is a very weird way to punish the USA.

On the other hand, now that Trump has announced that the terms of US free trade deals are optional (for the US, at least), there's no reason not to delete Article 6 of the EUCD, and all the other laws that prevent European companies from jailbreaking iPhones and making their own App Stores (minus Apple's 30% commission), as well as ad-blockers for Facebook and Instagram's apps (which would zero out EU revenue for Meta), and, of course, jailbreaking tools for Xboxes, Teslas, and every make and model of every American car, so European companies could offer service, parts, apps, and add-ons for them.

When Jeff Bezos launched Amazon, his war-cry was "your margin is my opportunity." US tech companies have built up insane margins based on the IP provisions required in the free trade treaties it signed with the rest of the world.

It's time to delete those IP provisions and throw open domestic competition that attacks the margins that created the fortunes of oligarchs who sat behind Trump on the inauguration dais. It's time to bring back the indomitable hacker spirit that the Bill Gateses of the world have been trying to extinguish since the days of the "open letter to hobbyists." The tech sector built a 10 foot high wall around its business, then the US government convinced the rest of the world to ban four-metre ladders. Lift the ban, unleash the ladders, free the world!

In the same way that futuristic sf is really about the present, Picks and Shovels, an sf novel set in the 1980s, is really about this moment.

I'm on tour with the book now – if you're reading this today (Mar 4) and you're in DC, come see me tonight with Matt Stoller at 6:30PM at the Cleveland Park Library:

https://www.loyaltybookstores.com/picksnshovels

And if you're in Richmond, VA, come down to Fountain Bookshop and catch me with Lee Vinsel tomorrow (Mar 5) at 7:30PM:

https://fountainbookstore.com/events/1795820250305

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

#10yrsago The book thieves of 1990s London https://thedabbler.co.uk/2015/03/the-book-theives-of-london/

#5yrsago African Whatsapp modders are outcompeting Facebook https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/05/warner-chappell-copyfraud/#gbwhatsapp

#5yrsago Copyright experts' panel on fair use removed from Youtube https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/05/warner-chappell-copyfraud/#kafkatube

#5yrsago Bookstores, libraries, human thriving and mental health https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/05/warner-chappell-copyfraud/#booksbooksbooks

#5yrsago Keyless car fobs can be defeated with a cheap RFID cloner https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/05/warner-chappell-copyfraud/#toy-yoda

#5yrsago Right to Repair is the right to resilience https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/05/warner-chappell-copyfraud/#righttoresilience

#5yrsago Decentralizing the web is a human problem https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/05/warner-chappell-copyfraud/#dweb

#5yrsago RIP, Jim Tyre https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/05/warner-chappell-copyfraud/#jimtyre

#5yrsago Warner Chappel discoved a new form of copyright fuckery so dense it blew a wormhole into another dimension https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/05/warner-chappell-copyfraud/#warnerchappell

#1yrago The real problem with anonymity https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/04/greater-corporate-fuckward-theory/#counterintuit-ive
*

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

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

  • The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

Latest podcast: With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It https://craphound.com/news/2025/02/26/with-great-power-came-no-responsibility-how-enshittification-conquered-the-21st-century-and-how-we-can-overthrow-it/

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

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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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Publié le 03.03.2025 à 13:10

Pluralistic: Ideas Lying Around (03 Mar 2025)


Today's links


Oil derricks superimposed against a 'code waterfall' as seen in the credit sequences of the Wachowskis' 'Matrix' movies. In the foreground is Trump's hair.

Ideas Lying Around (permalink)

I get a special pleasure from citing Milton Friedman. I like to imagine that as I do, he groans around the red-hot spit protruding from his jaws, prompting howls of laughter from the demons who pelt him with molten faeces for all eternity.

If you're lucky enough not to know about Friedman, here's the short version. Friedman was a kind of court sorcerer to Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Augusto Pinochet, and other assorted authoritarian, hard-right leaders who set us on the path to the hellscape we inhabit today. But before Friedman rose to prominence and influence, he was a crank. Specifically, he was a crank who dedicated his life to rolling back all the progress of the New Deal and re-establishing the Gilded Age:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/06/the-end-of-the-road-to-serfdom/

In his crank days, people were justifiably skeptical of this project. "Milton," they'd say, "people like New Deal programs. They like the minimum wage, the 40-hour work-week, and the assurance that they won't be maimed, poisoned, burned alive, or otherwise killed on the job. They relish a dignified retirement, quality education for their children, and the assurance that no one is starving to death in their country's borders. People like national parks! They like Medicare! They like libraries, museums, and reliable weather forecasts! How, Milton, do you propose to convince the vast majority of people that they should settle for being forelock-tugging plebs, groveling before their social betters for the chance to scrub their toilets?"

Friedman had an answer: "In times of crisis, ideas can move from the fringe to the center in an eyeblink. Our job is to keep good ideas lying around, in anticipation of that crisis."

When the oil crisis hit, when prices spiked in the USA and abroad, Friedman seized his opportunity. The years following the oil crisis saw a violent political revolution in which organized labor, social justice movements, and the political opposition to oligarchy were crushed under police batons and the guns of Pinochet's thugs. The world was transformed. Left parties like UK Labour were remade as austerity-pilled neoliberals (not for nothing did Margaret Thatcher call Tony Blair "her greatest accomplishment," and it took Bill Clinton to pass a welfare "reform" bill that was too extreme even for Reagan to get through Congress).

Friedman was a monster.

But.

He had a hell of a theory of change.

When prices spiral, when people can't pay their bills anymore, when their retirement savings are wiped out, anything is possible. The oil crisis wasn't Jimmy Carter's fault, but the voters still delivered a Ba'ath Party-style Republican majority in 1980. The covid shocks weren't the fault of the world governments that presided over pandemic inflation, but they were creamed in the ensuing elections.

Let's talk about Trump's tariffs here. Trump's goal is to force a re-shoring of the American industrial capacity that was shipped to low-wage, low-regulation corporate havens around the world after the Reagan revolution. The pandemic provided a vivid lesson about the problems with long, brittle supply chains where all the slack has been extracted and converted to dividends and stock buybacks. That kind of system may work well – at least to the extent that it keeps Walmart's shelves full of cheap goods – but holy shit did it ever fail badly. Re-shoring is a good idea, as are other forms of pro-resiliency industrial policy.

But re-shoring doesn't happen overnight. As we saw during China's covid lockdowns, when one supplier ceases to ship goods, other suppliers can't spring up overnight to take up the slack. China itself became a manufacturing powerhouse thanks to extensive state support and planning, and it took decades. That kind of patient, long-run, planned process is the best-case scenario (and it still caused wrenching dislocations to Chinese society). Simply throwing up tariff walls and demanding that industry figure it out – amid the resulting economic chaos and the political instability it brings – isn't a plan, it's a disaster.

Redistributing the means of production around the world is a necessary and urgent project, but it won't be advanced through Trump's rapid, unscheduled mid-air disassembly of the global system of trade. Tariffs will cause breakdowns in neoliberalism's fragile supply chains, and the ensuing chaos – mass unemployment, shortages, political rage – will make it even harder for countries (including the USA) to rebuild the productive capacity vaporized by 40 years of neoliberalism.

This is our oil crisis, in other worlds: a moment in which a belligerent superpower's ill-considered monkeying with the underpinnings of global production will cause chaos, the crisis in which "ideas can move from the periphery to the center" in an eyeblink. If Steve Bannon can call himself a Leninist, then leftists can call themselves Friedmanites. This is our opportunity.

Or rather, it's our opportunity to seize – or lose. Governments are defaulting to retaliatory tariffs as the best response to Trump's tariffs. This is political poison: making everything your country imports from the USA more expensive is a very weird way to punish America for its trade war. Remember the glaring lesson of pandemic inflation: a government that presides over rising prices will be destroyed by the electorate.

There's a much better alternative, one that strikes at the very roots of American oligarchy, whose extreme wealth and corrosive political influence comes from its holdings in rent-extracting monopolies, especially Big Tech monopolies.

Tech giants are the major factor in US economic health. Take Big Tech stocks out of the S&P 500 and you've got a stagnant market punctuated by periods of decline. Superficially, US tech companies have different sources of extraordinary profit, but a closer look reveals that they all share the same foundation: Big Tech makes the bulk of its money in the form of monopoly rents, backstopped by global IP treaties.

Apple and Google take a 30% cut of every dollar spent in an app, and it's a felony to jailbreak a phone to make a new app store with the industry standard 1-3% transaction fees. Google and Meta take 51% out of every ad dollar, and publishers and advertisers are locked into their ecosystems by abusive contracts and technological countermeasures. HP charges $10,000/gallon for the colored water you put in your printer, and third-party ink and refills violate the anti-circumvention laws the US has crammed down the throats of every country's legislature. Tesla makes its fattest margins by renting you features that are installed in your car at the factory, from autopilot to the ability to use your battery's whole charge, raking in monthly fees from you and anyone you sell your car to – and the reason your mechanic can't just permanently unlock all that DLC for $50 is the IP laws that your country agreed to enforce in order to trade with the USA. Mechanics pay $10k/year per manufacturer for the tools to interpret the error codes generated by your car, and the only reason no one is selling a $50/month universal diagnostic service is – once again – US-originated IP laws that came in a parcel with trade agreements that gave your country's exporters access to US markets. Farmers pay John Deere $200 every time they fix their own tractors, because the repairs won't work until a technician comes out and types an unlock code into the tractor's keyboard – and bypassing that unlock code is a crime under the laws passed to comply with international treaties.

These aren't profits – they're rents. It's money Big Tech gets from owning a factor of production, not money it gets from actually making something. The app maker takes all the risks, but Apple and Google cream off 30% of their gross income. Big Tech's profits are almost an afterthought when compared to its rents, the junk-fee platform fees and farcically expensive consumables. For tech firms, capitalism was a transitional phase between feudalism…and technofeudalism:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

America's robust GDP figures are a mirage, artificially buoyed up by the monopoly rents extracted by US Big Tech, who prey on Americans and foreigners:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/18/pikettys-productivity/#reaganomics-revenge

But foreigners don't have to tolerate this nonsense. Governments around the world signed up to protect giant American companies from small domestic competitors (from local app stores – for phones, games consoles, and IoT gadgets – to local printer cartridge remanufacturers) on the promise of tariff-free access to US markets. With Trump imposing tariffs will-ye or nill-ye on America's trading partners large and small, there is no reason to go on delivering rents to US Big Tech.

The first country or bloc (hi there, EU!) to do this will have a giant first-mover advantage, and could become a global export powerhouse, dominating the lucrative markets for tools that strike at the highest-margin lines of business of the most profitable companies in the history of the human race. Like Jeff Bezos told the publishers: "your margin is my opportunity":

https://www.marketplacepulse.com/articles/the-cost-of-your-margin-is-my-opportunity

In times of crisis, ideas can move from the periphery to the center in an eyeblink. Many of us have spent decades organizing and mobilizing against these extractive, dangerous, destabilizing abuses of technology, where the computer-powered devices we rely on for everything are designed to serve their manufacturers' shareholders, at our expense. And yet, these technologies have only proliferated, infecting everything from insulin pumps and ventilators to coffee makers and "smart" TVs.

It's time for a global race to the top – for countries to compete with one another to see who will capture US Big Tech's margins the fastest and most aggressively. Not only will this make things cheaper for everyone else in the world – it'll also make things cheaper for Americans, because once there is a global, profitable trade in software that jailbreaks your Big Tech devices and services, it will surely leak across the US border. Canada doesn't have to confine itself to selling reasonably priced pharmaceuticals to beleaguered Americans – it can also set up a brisk trade in the tools of technological self-determination and liberation from Big Tech bondage.

Taking the margins for Big Tech's most profitable enterprises to zero, globally, will strike at the very heart of American oligarchy, and the hundreds of millions tech giants flushed into the political system to put Trump into office again. A race to the top for technological liberation benefits everyone – including Americans.

Truly, it would be a rising tide that lifted all boats (except for oligarchs' superyachts – those, it will swamp and sink).

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Free Software Foundation tears MPAA a new one in Grokster brief http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/grokster-amicus.pdf

#20yrsago Best-selling musicians’ ask SCOTUS to keep P2P legal https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna7052758

#20yrsago Canadian defense minister on US no-fly list? https://web.archive.org/web/20050304010813/https://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7067117/

#15yrsago LibDem Lords seek to ban web-lockers (YouSendIt, etc) in the UK https://memex.craphound.com/2010/03/03/libdem-lords-seek-to-ban-web-lockers-yousendit-etc-in-the-uk/

#15yrsago Building high-speed wireless in Afghanistan out of garbage https://freerangeinternational.com/2010/02/05/the-jalalabad-fab-fi-network-continues-to-grow-with-a-little-help-from-their-friends/

#15yrsago HOWTO make smarter dumb mistakes about the future https://web.archive.org/web/20100305123739/https://locusmag.com/Perspectives/2010/03/cory-doctorow-making-smarter-dumb.html

#15yrsago EFF’s annual DMCA whitepaper gets a refresh https://www.eff.org/wp/unintended-consequences-under-dmca

#15yrsago Audiobook DRM versus the patrons of the Cleveland Library https://web.archive.org/web/20100304072959/http://www.bradcolbow.com/archive.php/?p=205

#15yrsago Danish activists demand to know why their governments block ACTA transparency https://www-computerworld-dk.translate.goog/art/55244/lene-espersen-skal-i-samraad-om-antipirat-aftale?_x_tr_sl=da&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en

#10yrsago America’s growing gangs of armed, arrest-making, untrained rent-a-cops https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/private-police-carry-guns-and-make-arrests-and-their-ranks-are-swelling/2015/02/28/29f6e02e-8f79-11e4-a900-9960214d4cd7_story.html

#10yrsago Bruce Schneier’s Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World https://memex.craphound.com/2015/03/02/bruce-schneiers-data-and-goliath-the-hidden-battles-to-collect-your-data-and-control-your-world/

#10yrsago Ed Snowden says he’ll face trial in the US https://web.archive.org/web/20150303161035/http://news.yahoo.com/edward-snowden-ready-return-states-144245040.html

#10yrsago First-ever photo of light behaving as a wave and particle https://phys.org/news/2015-03-particle.html

#10yrsago Three steps to save ourselves from firmware attacks https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/03/hardwired-for-betrayal

#10yrsago Razorhurst: blood-drenched gang warfare and ghosts in Gilded Age Sydney https://memex.craphound.com/2015/03/03/razorhurst-blood-drenched-gang-warfare-and-ghosts-in-gilded-age-sydney/

#5yrsago Japanese condiment company releases "sliced mayo" https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/03/just-a-stick/#bourbonmayo

#5yrsago Recycling spy agencies' malware for fun and profit https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/03/just-a-stick/#nobus

#5yrsago Facebook neutered "Download Your Data" https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/03/just-a-stick/#foolmetwice

#5yrsago A Lever Without a Fulcrum Is Just a Stick https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/03/just-a-stick/#authorsbargain

#5yrsago EFF's Surveillance Self-Defense guide for students https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/03/just-a-stick/#yallow-complete

#5yrsago The next frontier for school censorware is spying on kids all the time https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/02/be-the-helper/#kiddyfud

#5yrsago My new podcast, "Disasters Don’t Have to End in Dystopia" https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/02/be-the-helper/#paradisebuiltinhell

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

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

  • The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

Latest podcast: With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It https://craphound.com/news/2025/02/26/with-great-power-came-no-responsibility-how-enshittification-conquered-the-21st-century-and-how-we-can-overthrow-it/

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

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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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Publié le 01.03.2025 à 11:26

Pluralistic: Zincchump Linkdump (01 Mar 2025)


Today's links


Jigsaw puzzle pieces, scattered in an NYC gutter.

Zincchump Linkdump (permalink)

I've got a really good excuse for finishing this week with a folder full of links that didn't make it into the newsletter – I'm on a crazy book tour and I've been in four cities this week alone. Time for another linkdump! Here's the previous 28 'dumps:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

I like to start these 'dumps off on an upbeat note, and this week, I've got something gratifyingly cool and wondrous. Stars Reach is a "living galaxy sandbox MMORPG" led by Raph Koster, the legendary designer of games like Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxy. It's kickstarting right now:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/starsreach/stars-reach

Here's the pitch:

Whether it’s water turning dirt to mud or forests growing back after a devastating fire, every action leaves a mark. This isn’t a static world built by developers – it’s a living, breathing galaxy shaped by you. Resculpt landscapes, build entire cities, and yeah, ruin more planets just like humanity ruined their original eight homeworlds. That’s okay – there are always more worlds in our endless galaxy.

I've seen demos of this coming together for years and it is mind-boggling. You can play it like a galactic trade-empire builder, a shoot 'em up, a first person shooter, a resource management game, a MUD, and more. There are thousands of procedurally generated planets with realistic geology, geography and ecosystems. It's like something out of a Neal Stephenson novel. They're mostly done and just raising money to finish and launch. I gave 'em $100. They're projecting delivery in January. I can't wait!

It's pretty wonderful to see accomplished creators like Koster, who have gone from strength to strength, making a series of ever-cooler things as technological advancements let him realize the vision he'd been chasing since the 8-bit days. It's quite a contrast with HP, a company that was once world-renowned for making the highest quality, most reliable instruments and machines, and is now synonymous with the scuzzy inkjet rip-off.

I love a good dig at HP. This week, The Register's Paul Kunert scored a direct hit with a short news squib about the executive compensation package announced for HP CEO Enrique Lores: "261,658 toner cartridges" (that is, $19.36m):

https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/26/hp_ceo_pay_for_2024/

I would like to live in a world in which all unreasonable expenses were denominated in HP printer cartridges (much as the BBC compares ever extremely large or massy thing to a London double-decker bus). Anything to make it easier to grasp the vast forces that shape our world and bring them into focus so we can understand them – and destroy or change them.

One economic school that does this extraordinarily well is "Capital as Power," which concerns itself with the "social power of capital" – that is, how capital shapes our behavior and outcomes. It's a complicated but extraordinarily clear and useful framework for making sense of the world. This week, Naked Capitalism published a long colloquoy on Capital as Power, featuring Michael Hudson (a great economist and historian of debt), political economist Tim Di Muzio, and two of CasP's top proponents, Jonathan Nitzan and Blair Fix (whose work I have featured in this newsletter many times). It's a long, fascinating discussion – just the thing to relax with over a weekend:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/02/capital-as-power-in-the-21st-century-a-conversation.html

Capital as Power grapples with power, the force that neoclassical economists could never figure out how to fit into a neat mathematical model and thus decided to discard. Refusing to think about power gets you into all kinds of trouble, from deciding that markets for human kidneys are "voluntary" to the denaturing of political parties into institutionalist weaklings like the Democrats, who are completely overwhelmed by the power-focused MAGA GOP as it dismantles the nation.

Writing for The American Prospect, Nick Tagliaferro rounds up "Ten Democrats Who Need to Be Primaried":

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-02-27-these-ten-democrats-need-to-be-primaried/

For years, Tagliaferro was the loudest voice on the Primary School newsletter, which covered primary races. In this guillotine-inspiring listicle, he presents such swamp creatures as Levi Strauss failson Dan Goldman (NY-10), who spent $5m of his inherited wealth to win his seat, from which perch he has done everything he can to undermine his more militant anti-Trump colleagues in the House. More familiar names like Josh Gottheimer (NJ-05) – whom Tagliaferro calls "single most needlessly antagonistic centrist in Congress" – and the ardent homophobe Stephen Lynch (MA-08).

OK, I've got to get into my rental car now and make the 3h drive from State College, PA, where I just did a talk at Penn State, to Doylestown, PA, where I'm speaking this afternoon:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-picks-and-shovels-a-martin-hench-novel-tickets-1146230880419

From there, I'm going to Baltimore (tomorrow):

https://redemmas.org/events/

and then I'll be in DC on Tuesday:

https://www.loyaltybookstores.com/picksnshovels

You can catch the whole tour schedule here:

http://martinhench.com

New dates that I'll be adding soon include Pittsburgh:

https://us.pycon.org/2025/about/keynote-speakers/#cory-doctorow

As well as Wellington and Auckland, NZ; and Manchester and London, UK.

Before I go, one last wonderful link to be getting on with. Framework – who make the repairable, modifiable laptop that I love more than any hardware I've ever owned – just announced a bunch of fantastic new machines, including a rugged new, 12" touchscreen laptop with a 180' hinge:

https://frame.work/laptop12

and a desktop PC (!) that has insanely high specs and a fully customizable chassis:

https://frame.work/fi/en/blog/introducing-the-framework-desktop

I spend so much time on the road, I have no conceivable use for a desktop PC, but man, this is tempting. What a sweet rig!


A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago KGB Guide to London released by MI5 https://web.archive.org/web/20050303022107/https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/releases/2005/highlights_march/march1/default.htm

#20yrsago Euro software patents reanimated through corrupt officials 0wned by Microsoft https://yro.slashdot.org/story/05/02/28/2223232/eu-commission-declines-patent-debate-restart

#20yrsago Deluded Sony music exec can’t read his own study https://constitutionalcode.blogspot.com/2005/02/us-market-not-antagonistic-towards-drm.html

#20yrsago Greedy DRM vendors want more in royalties than the total market for digital music https://web.archive.org/web/20050912194259/http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/computersecurity/2005-02-25-drm-infighting_x.htm?POE=click-refer

#20yrsago Halle Berry accepts “Razzie” for Catwoman, calls it a “piece of shit” https://web.archive.org/web/20050306093431/https://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?storyID=7748301&type=entertainmentNews

#20yrsago Help rat on people who sing Happy Birthday! https://unhappybirthday.com

#20yrsago Comp sci profs smackdown the movie studios https://web.archive.org/web/20050303023425/http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/000776.html

#20yrsago Costa Rican telco wants to criminalize VoIP https://www.networkcomputing.com/network-infrastructure/costa-rica-may-criminalize-voip

#15yrsago If chess were redesigned by MMORPG developers https://akma.disseminary.org/2010/03/if-chess-were-invented-by-mmog-developers/

#15yrsago Super Punch’s webby Tarot https://web.archive.org/web/20121127052014/https://www.superpunch.net/2010/03/introducing-super-punch-tarot.html

#15yrsago Profile of ex-narc who’s declared war on the “War on Drugs” https://web.archive.org/web/20110522054851/http://trueslant.com/stephenwebster/2010/02/25/barry-cooper-drug-war-insurgent/

#15yrsago Cyberwar hype was cooked up to sell Internet-breaking garbage to the military https://www.wired.com/2010/03/cyber-war-hype/

#15yrsago Petition to make “Hella” the prefix for 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 https://web.archive.org/web/20160411032355/https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Official-Petition-to-Establish-Hella-as-the-SI-Prefix-for-1027/277479937276?v=info

#15yrsago Architectural fan-drawings of classic sitcom houses https://www.markmoorefineart.com/artists/mark-bennett

#15yrsago Biggest-ever ACTA leak: secret copyright treaty dirty laundry motherlode https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2010/03/acta-leak-with-country-positions/

#15yrsago UK Digital Economy Bill will wipe out indie WiFi hotspots in libraries, unis, cafes https://web.archive.org/web/20100301020722/http://news.zdnet.co.uk/communications/0,1000000085,40057470,00.htm?tag=mncol;txt

#10yrsago Ad-hoc museums of a failing utopia: photos of Soviet shop-windows https://memex.craphound.com/2015/02/28/ad-hoc-museums-of-a-failing-utopia-photos-of-soviet-shop-windows/

#10yrsago Your voice-to-text speech is recorded and sent to strangers https://www.vice.com/en/article/strangers-on-the-internet-are-listening-to-peoples-phone-voice-commands/

#10yrsago Internet-fired elections and the politics of business as usual https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/27/internet-era-politics-means-safe-seats-are-a-thing-of-the-past

#10yrsago Kansas Senate wants to imprison teachers who assign books it dislikes https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article11212511.html

#10yrsago First-hand reports of torture from Homan Square, Chicago PD’s “black site” https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/27/chicago-abusive-confinment-homan-square

#5yrsago Jury refuses to convict Extinction Rebellion activists https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/01/shared-microbial-destiny/#necessitydefense

#5yrsago America's uninsured will turn a covid crisis into a covid disaster https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/01/shared-microbial-destiny/#covidclasswar

#5yrsago The US already has Medicare for All https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/01/shared-microbial-destiny/#NHS2PTOH

#5yrsago The wealthy are chartering jets to avoid coronavirus https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/01/shared-microbial-destiny/#plutesinspace

#5yrsago Trump's rhetoric fits eerily well into the Tolkien canon https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/01/shared-microbial-destiny/#maketolkiengreatagain

#5yrsago Venezuelan women's "army" break into dead factories to reboot them https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/27/pluralistic-your-daily-link-dose-27-feb-2020/#chavismo

#5yrsago Neoliberalism kills, the coronavirus edition https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/27/pluralistic-your-daily-link-dose-27-feb-2020/#pandemiccapitalism

#5yrsago Talking Radicalized with The Next Chapter https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/27/pluralistic-your-daily-link-dose-27-feb-2020/#thenextchapter

#5yrsago Norman Rockwell turned into a radical civil rights activist https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/27/pluralistic-your-daily-link-dose-27-feb-2020/#murdermississippi

#5yrsago Ripping the window-dressing off the .ORG selloff https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/27/pluralistic-your-daily-link-dose-27-feb-2020/#itsanethos

#5yrsago CDC guide to filter-mask-friendly facial hair https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/27/pluralistic-your-daily-link-dose-27-feb-2020/#zappa

#5yrsago Don't trust Google to build Toronto's Smart City https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/27/pluralistic-your-daily-link-dose-27-feb-2020/#minorityreport

#5yrsago How to lie with (coronavirus) maps https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/28/pluralistic-your-daily-link-dose-28-feb-2020/#cartonerd

#5yrsago Let's Encrypt issues its billionth cert https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/28/pluralistic-your-daily-link-dose-28-feb-2020/#letsencrypt

#5yrsago Clearview AI's customer database leaks https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/28/pluralistic-your-daily-link-dose-28-feb-2020/#petard

#1yrago When private equity destroys your hospital https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/28/5000-bats/#charnel-house

#1yrago Hypothetical AI election disinformation risks vs real AI harms https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/27/ai-conspiracies/#epistemological-collapse

#1yrago Amazon's financial shell game let it create an "impossible" monopoly https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/01/managerial-discretion/#junk-fees

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7, 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

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

  • The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

Latest podcast: With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It https://craphound.com/news/2025/02/26/with-great-power-came-no-responsibility-how-enshittification-conquered-the-21st-century-and-how-we-can-overthrow-it/

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Publié le 26.02.2025 à 12:04

Pluralistic: With Great Power Came No Responsibility (26 Feb 2025)


Today's links


Me, giving the Ursula Franklin Lecture at the University of Toronto.

With Great Power Came No Responsibility (permalink)

Last night, I traveled to Toronto to deliver the annual Ursula Franklin Lecture at the University of Toronto's Innis College:

The lecture was called "With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It." It's the latest major speech in my series of talks on the subject, which started with last year's McLuhan Lecture in Berlin:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel

And continued with a summer Defcon keynote:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess

This speech specifically addresses the unique opportunities for disenshittification created by Trump's rapid unscheduled midair disassembly of the international free trade system. The US used trade deals to force nearly every country in the world to adopt the IP laws that make enshittification possible, and maybe even inevitable. As Trump burns these trade deals to the ground, the rest of the world has an unprecedented opportunity to retaliate against American bullying by getting rid of these laws and producing the tools, devices and services that can protect every tech user (including Americans) from being ripped off by US Big Tech companies.

I'm so grateful for the chance to give this talk. I was hosted for the day by the Centre for Culture and Technology, which was founded by Marshall McLuhan, and is housed in the coach house he used for his office. The talk itself took place in Innis College, named for Harold Innis, who is definitely the thinking person's Marshall McLuhan. What's more, I was mentored by Innis's daughter, Anne Innis Dagg, a radical, brilliant feminist biologist who pretty much invented the field of giraffology:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/19/pluralist-19-feb-2020/#annedagg

But with all respect due to Anne and her dad, Ursula Franklin is the thinking person's Harold Innis. A brilliant scientist, activist and communicator who dedicated her life to the idea that the most important fact about a technology wasn't what it did, but who it did it for and who it did it to. Getting to work out of McLuhan's office to present a talk in Innis's theater that was named after Franklin? Swoon!

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

Here's the text of the talk, lightly edited:

I know tonight’s talk is supposed to be about decaying tech platforms, but I want to start by talking about nurses.

A January 2025 report from Groundwork Collective documents how increasingly nurses in the USA are hired through gig apps – "Uber for nurses” – so nurses never know from one day to the next whether they're going to work, or how much they'll get paid.

There's something high-tech going on here with those nurses' wages. These nursing apps – a cartel of three companies, Shiftkey, Shiftmed and Carerev – can play all kinds of games with labor pricing.

Before Shiftkey offers a nurse a shift, it purchases that worker's credit history from a data-broker. Specifically, it pays to find out how much credit-card debt the nurse is carrying, and whether it is overdue.

The more desperate the nurse's financial straits are, the lower the wage on offer. Because the more desperate you are, the less it'll take to get get you to come and do the gruntwork of caring for the sick, the elderly, and the dying.

Now, there are lots of things going on here, and they're all terrible. What's more, they are emblematic of “enshittification,” the word I coined to describe the decay of online platforms.

When I first started writing about this, I focused on the external symptomology of enshittification, a three stage process:

First, the platform is good to its end users, while finding a way to lock them in.

Like Google, which minimized ads and maximized spending on engineering for search results, even as they bought their way to dominance, bribing every service or product with a search box to make it a Google search box.

So no matter what browser you used, what mobile OS you used, what carrier you had, you would always be searching on Google by default. This got so batshit that by the early 2020s, Google was spending enough money to buy a whole-ass Twitter, every year or two, just to make sure that no one ever tried a search engine that wasn't Google.

That's stage one: be good to end users, lock in end users.

Stage two is when the platform starts to abuse end users to tempt in and enrich business customers. For Google, that’s advertisers and web publishers. An ever-larger fraction of a Google results page is given over to ads, which are marked with ever-subtler, ever smaller, ever grayer labels. Google uses its commercial surveillance data to target ads to us.

So that's stage two: things get worse for end users and get better for business customers.

But those business customers also get locked into the platform, dependent on those customers. Once businesses are getting as little as 10% of their revenue from Google, leaving Google becomes an existential risk. We talk a lot about Google's "monopoly" power, which is derived from its dominance as a seller. But Google is also a monopsony, a powerful buyer.

So now you have Google acting as a monopolist to its users (stage one), and a monoposonist for its business customers (stage two) and here comes stage three: where Google claws back all the value in the platform, save a homeopathic residue calculated to keep end users locked in, and business customers locked to those end users.

Google becomes enshittified.

In 2019, Google had a turning point. Search had grown as much as it possibly could. More than 90% of us used Google for search, and we searched for everything. Any thought or idle question that crossed our minds, we typed into Google.

How could Google grow? There were no more users left to switch to Google. We weren't going to search for more things. What could Google do?

Well, thanks to internal memos published during last year's monopoly trial against Google, we know what they did. They made search worse. They reduced the system's accuracy it so you had to search twice or more to get to the answer, thus doubling the number of queries, and doubling the number of ads.

Meanwhile, Google entered into a secret, illegal collusive arrangement with Facebook, codenamed Jedi Blue, to rig the ad market, fixing prices so advertisers paid more and publishers got less.

And that's how we get to the enshittified Google of today, where every query serves back a blob of AI slop, over five paid results tagged with the word AD in 8-point, 10% grey on white type, which is, in turn, over ten spammy links from SEO shovelware sites filled with more AI slop.

And yet, we still keep using Google, because we're locked into it. That's enshittification, from the outside. A company that's good to end users, while locking them in. Then it makes things worse for end users, to make things better for business customers, while locking them in. Then it takes all the value for itself and turns into a giant pile of shit.

Enshittification, a tragedy in three acts.

I started off focused on the outward signs of enshittification, but I think it's time we start thinking about what's going in inside the companies to make enshittification possible.

What is the technical mechanism for enshittification? I call it twiddling. Digital businesses have infinite flexibility, bequeathed to them by the marvellously flexible digital computers they run on. That means that firms can twiddle the knobs that control the fundamental aspects of their business. Every time you interact with a firm, everything is different: prices, costs, search rankings, recommendations.

Which takes me back to our nurses. This scam, where you look up the nurse's debt load and titer down the wage you offer based on it in realtime? That's twiddling. It's something you can only do with a computer. The bosses who are doing this aren't more evil than bosses of yore, they just have better tools.

Note that these aren't even tech bosses. These are health-care bosses, who happen to have tech.

Digitalization – weaving networked computers through a firm or a sector – enables this kind of twiddling that allows firms to shift value around, from end users to business customers, from business customers back to end users, and eventually, inevitably, to themselves.

And digitalization is coming to every sector – like nursing. Which means enshittification is coming to every sector – like nursing.

The legal scholar Veena Dubal coined a term to describe the twiddling that suppresses the wages of debt-burdened nurses. It's called "Algorithmic Wage Discrimination," and it follows the gig economy.

The gig economy is a major locus of enshittification, and it’s the largest tear in the membrane separating the virtual world from the real world. Gig work, where your shitty boss is a shitty app, and you aren't even allowed to call yourself an employee.

Uber invented this trick. Drivers who are picky about the jobs the app puts in front of them start to get higher wage offers. But if they yield to temptation and take some of those higher-waged option, then the wage starts to go down again, in random intervals, by small increments, designed to be below the threshold for human perception. Not so much boiling the frog as poaching it, until the Uber driver has gone into debt to buy a new car, and given up the side hustles that let them be picky about the rides they accepted. Then their wage goes down, and down, and down.

Twiddling is a crude trick done quickly. Any task that's simple but time consuming is a prime candidate for automation, and this kind of wage-theft would be unbearably tedious, labor-intensive and expensive to perform manually. No 19th century warehouse full of guys with green eyeshades slaving over ledgers could do this. You need digitalization.

Twiddling nurses' hourly wages is a perfect example of the role digitization pays in enshittification. Because this kind of thing isn't just bad for nurses – it's bad for patients, too. Do we really think that paying nurses based on how desperate they are, at a rate calculated to increase that desperation, and thus decrease the wage they are likely to work for, is going to result in nurses delivering the best care?

Do you want to your catheter inserted by a nurse on food stamps, who drove an Uber until midnight the night before, and skipped breakfast this morning in order to make rent?

This is why it’s so foolish to say "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product." “If you’re not paying for the product” ascribes a mystical power to advertising-driven services: the power to bypass our critical faculties by surveilling us, and data-mining the resulting dossiers to locate our mental bind-spots, and weaponize them to get us to buy anything an advertiser is selling.

In this formulation, we are complicit in our own exploitation. By choosing to use "free" services, we invite our own exploitation by surveillance capitalists who have perfected a mind-control ray powered by the surveillance data we're voluntarily handing over by choosing ad-driven services.

The moral is that if we only went back to paying for things, instead of unrealistically demanding that everything be free, we would restore capitalism to its functional, non-surveillant state, and companies would start treating us better, because we'd be the customers, not the products.

That's why the surveillance capitalism hypothesis elevates companies like Apple as virtuous alternatives. Because Apple charges us money, rather than attention, it can focus on giving us better service, rather than exploiting us.

There's a superficially plausible logic to this. After all, in 2022, Apple updated its iOS operating system, which runs on iPhones and other mobile devices, introducing a tick box that allowed you to opt out of third-party surveillance, most notably Facebook’s.

96% of Apple customers ticked that box. The other 4% were, presumably drunk, or Facebook employees, or Facebook employees who were drunk. Which makes sense, because if I worked for Facebook, I'd be drunk all the time.

So on the face of it, it seems like Apple isn't treating its customers like "the product." But simultaneously with this privacy measure, Apple was secretly turning on its own surveillance system for iPhone owners, which would spy on them in exactly the way Facebook had, for exactly the same purpose: to target ads to you based on the places you'd been, the things you'd searched for, the communications you'd had, the links you'd clicked.

Apple didn't ask its customers for permission to spy on them. It didn't let opt out of this spying. It didn’t even tell them about it, and when it was caught, Apple lied about it.

It goes without saying that the $1000 Apple distraction rectangle in your pocket is something you paid for. The fact that you've paid for it doesn't stop Apple from treating you as the product. Apple treats its business customers – app vendors – like the product, screwing them out of 30 cents on every dollar they bring in, with mandatory payment processing fees that are 1,000% higher than the already extortionate industry norm.

Apple treats its end users – people who shell out a grand for a phone – like the product, spying on them to help target ads to them.

Apple treats everyone like the product.

This is what's going on with our gig-app nurses: the nurses are the product. The patients are the product. The hospitals are the product. In enshittification, "the product" is anyone who can be productized.

Fair and dignified treatment is not something you get as a customer loyalty perk, in exchange for parting with your money, rather than your attention. How do you get fair and dignified treatment? Well, I'm gonna get to that, but let's stay with our nurses for a while first.

The nurses are the product, and they're being twiddled, because they've been conscripted into the tech industry, via the digitalization of their own industry.

It's tempting to blame digitalization for this. But tech companies were not born enshittified. They spent years – decades – making pleasing products. If you're old enough to remember the launch of Google, you'll recall that, at the outset, Google was magic.

You could Ask Jeeves questions for a million years, you could load up Altavista with ten trillion boolean search operators meant to screen out low-grade results, and never come up with answers as crisp, as useful, as helpful, as the ones you'd get from a few vaguely descriptive words in a Google search-bar.

There's a reason we all switched to Google. Why so many of us bought iPhones. Why we joined our friends on Facebook. All of these services were born digital. They could have enshittified at any time. But they didn't – until they did. And they did it all at once.

If you were a nurse, and every patient that staggered into the ER had the same dreadful symptoms, you'd call the public health department and report a suspected outbreak of a new and dangerous epidemic.

Ursula Franklin held that technology's outcomes were not preordained. They are the result of deliberate choices. I like that very much, it's a very science fictional way of thinking about technology. Good science fiction isn't merely about what the technology does, but who it does it for, and who it does it to.

Those social factors are far more important than the mere technical specifications of a gadget. They're the difference between a system that warns you when you're about to drift out of your lane, and a system that tells your insurer that you nearly drifted out of your lane, so they can add $10 to your monthly premium.

They’re the difference between a spell checker that lets you know you've made a typo, and bossware that lets your manager use the number of typos you made this quarter so he can deny your bonus.

They’re the difference between an app that remembers where you parked your car, and an app that uses the location of your car as a criterion for including you in a reverse warrant for the identities of everyone in the vicinity of an anti-government protest.

I believe that enshittification is caused by changes not to technology, but to the policy environment. These are changes to the rules of the game, undertaken in living memory, by named parties, who were warned at the time about the likely outcomes of their actions, who are today very rich and respected, and face no consequences or accountability for their role in ushering in the enshittocene. They venture out into polite society without ever once wondering if someone is sizing them up for a pitchfork.

In other words: I think we created a crimogenic environment, a perfect breeding pool for the most pathogenic practices in our society, that have therefore multiplied, dominating decision-making in our firms and states, leading to a vast enshittening of everything.

And I think there's good news there, because if enshittification isn't the result of a new kind of evil person, or the great forces of history bearing down on the moment to turn everything to shit, but rather the result of specific policy choices, then we can reverse those policies, make better ones and emerge from the enshittocene, consigning the enshitternet to the scrapheap of history, a mere transitional state between the old, good internet, and a new, good internet.

I'm not going to talk about AI today, because oh my god is AI a boring, overhyped subject. But I will use a metaphor about AI, about the limited liability company, which is a kind of immortal, artificial colony organism in which human beings serve as a kind of gut flora. My colleague Charlie Stross calls corporations "slow AI.”

So you've got these slow AIs whose guts are teeming with people, and the AI's imperative, the paperclip it wants to maximize, is profit. To maximize profits, you charge as much as you can, you pay your workers and suppliers as little as you can, you spend as little as possible on safety and quality.

Every dollar you don't spend on suppliers, workers, quality or safety is a dollar that can go to executives and shareholders. So there's a simple model of the corporation that could maximize its profits by charging infinity dollars, while paying nothing to its workers or suppliers, and ignoring quality and safety.

But that corporation wouldn't make any money, for the obvious reasons that none of us would buy what it was selling, and no one would work for it or supply it with goods. These constraints act as disciplining forces that tamp down the AI's impulse to charge infinity and pay nothing.

In tech, we have four of these constraints, anti-enshittificatory sources of discipline that make products and services better, pay workers more, and keep executives’ and shareholders' wealth from growing at the expense of customers, suppliers and labor.

The first of these constraints is markets. All other things being equal, a business that charges more and delivers less will lose customers to firms that are more generous about sharing value with workers, customers and suppliers.

This is the bedrock of capitalist theory, and it's the ideological basis for competition law, what our American cousins call "antitrust law."

The first antitrust law was 1890's Sherman Act, whose sponsor, Senator John Sherman, stumped for it from the senate floor, saying:

If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity. 

Senator Sherman was reflecting the outrage of the anitmonopolist movement of the day, when proprietors of monopolistic firms assumed the role of dictators, with the power to decide who would work, who would starve, what could be sold, and what it cost.

Lacking competitors, they were too big to fail, too big to jail, and too big to care. As Lily Tomlin used to put it in her spoof AT&T ads on SNL: "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.”

So what happened to the disciplining force of competition? We killed it. Starting 40-some years ago, the Reagaonomic views of the Chicago School economists transformed antitrust. They threw out John Sherman's idea that we need to keep companies competitive to prevent the emergence of "autocrats of trade,"and installed the idea that monopolies are efficient.

In other words, if Google has a 90% search market share, which it does, then we must infer that Google is the best search engine ever, and the best search engine possible. The only reason a better search engine hasn't stepped in is that Google is so skilled, so efficient, that there is no conceivable way to improve upon it.

We can tell that Google is the best because it has a monopoly, and we can tell that the monopoly is good because Google is the best.

So 40 years ago, the US – and its major trading partners – adopted an explicitly pro-monopoly competition policy.

Now, you'll be glad to hear that this isn't what happened to Canada. The US Trade Rep didn't come here and force us to neuter our competition laws. But don't get smug! The reason that didn't happen is that it didn't have to. Because Canada had no competition law to speak of, and never has.

In its entire history, the Competition Bureau has challenged three mergers, and it has halted precisely zero mergers, which is how we've ended up with a country that is beholden to the most mediocre plutocrats imaginable like the Irvings, the Westons, the Stronachs, the McCains and the Rogerses.

The only reason these chinless wonders were able to conquer this country is that the Americans had been crushing their monopolists before they could conquer the US and move on to us. But 40 years ago, the rest of the world adopted the Chicago School's pro-monopoly "consumer welfare standard,” and we got…monopolies.

Monopolies in pharma, beer, glass bottles, vitamin C, athletic shoes, microchips, cars, mattresses, eyeglasses, and, of course, professional wrestling.

Remember: these are specific policies adopted in living memory, by named individuals, who were warned, and got rich, and never faced consequences. The economists who conceived of these policies are still around today, polishing their fake Nobel prizes, teaching at elite schools, making millions consulting for blue-chip firms.

When we confront them with the wreckage their policies created, they protest their innocence, maintaining – with a straight face – that there's no way to affirmatively connect pro-monopoly policies with the rise of monopolies.

It's like we used to put down rat poison and we didn't have a rat problem. Then these guys made us stop, and now rats are chewing our faces off, and they're making wide innocent eyes, saying, "How can you be sure that our anti-rat-poison policies are connected to global rat conquest? Maybe this is simply the Time of the Rat! Maybe sunspots caused rats to become more fecund than at any time in history! And if they bought the rat poison factories and shut them all down, well, so what of it? Shutting down rat poison factories after you've decided to stop putting down rat poison is an economically rational, Pareto-optimal decision."

Markets don't discipline tech companies because they don't compete with rivals, they buy them. That's a quote, from Mark Zuckerberg: “It is better to buy than to compete.”

Which is why Mark Zuckerberg bought Instagram for a billion dollars, even though it only had 12 employees and 25m users. As he wrote in a spectacularly ill-advised middle-of-the-night email to his CFO, he had to buy Instagram, because Facebook users were leaving Facebook for Instagram. By buying Instagram, Zuck ensured that anyone who left Facebook – the platform – would still be a prisoner of Facebook – the company.

Despite the fact that Zuckerberg put this confession in writing, the Obama administration let him go ahead with the merger, because every government, of every political stripe, for 40 years, adopted the posture that monopolies were efficient.

Now, think about our twiddled, immiserated nurses. Hospitals are among the most consolidated sectors in the US. First, we deregulated pharma mergers, and the pharma companies gobbled each other up at the rate of naughts, and they jacked up the price of drugs. So hospitals also merged to monopoly, a defensive maneuver that let a single hospital chain corner the majority of a region or city and say to the pharma companies, "either you make your products cheaper, or you can't sell them to any of our hospitals."

Of course, once this mission was accomplished, the hospitals started screwing the insurers, who staged their own incestuous orgy, buying and merging until most Americans have just three or two insurance options. This let the insurers fight back against the hospitals, but left patients and health care workers defenseless against the consolidated power of hospitals, pharma companies, pharmacy benefit managers, group purchasing organizations, and other health industry cartels, duopolies and monopolies.

Which is why nurses end up signing on to work for hospitals that use these ghastly apps. Remember, there's just three of these apps, replacing dozens of staffing agencies that once competed for nurses' labor.

Meanwhile, on the patient side, competition has never exercised discipline. No one ever shopped around for a cheaper ambulance or a better ER while they were having a heart attack. The price that people are willing to pay to not die is “everything they have.”

So you have this sector that has no business being a commercial enterprise in the first place, losing what little discipline they faced from competition, paving the way for enshittification.

But I said there are four forces that discipline companies. The second one of these forces is regulation, discipline imposed by states.

It’s a mistake to see market discipline and state discipline as two isolated realms. They are intimately connected. Because competition is a necessary condition for effective regulation.

Let me put this in terms that even the most ideological libertarians can understand. Say you think there should be precisely one regulation that governments should enforce: honoring contracts. For the government to serve as referee in that game, it must have the power to compel the players to honor their contracts. Which means that the smallest government you can have is determined by the largest corporation you're willing to permit.

So even if you're the kind of Musk-addled libertarian who can no longer open your copy of Atlas Shrugged because the pages are all stuck together, who pines for markets for human kidneys, and demands the right to sell yourself into slavery, you should still want a robust antitrust regime, so that these contracts can be enforced.

When a sector cartelizes, when it collapses into oligarchy, when the internet turns into "five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four," then it captures its regulators.

After all, a sector with 100 competing companies is a rabble, at each others' throats. They can't agree on anything, especially how they're going to lobby.

While a sector of five companies – or four – or three – or two – or one – is a cartel, a racket, a conspiracy in waiting. A sector that has been boiled down to a mere handful of firms can agree on a common lobbying position.

What's more, they are so insulated from "wasteful competition" that they are aslosh in cash that they can mobilize to make their regulatory preferences into regulations. In other words, they can capture their regulators.

“Regulatory capture" may sound abstract and complicated, so let me put it in concrete terms. In the UK, the antitrust regulator is called the Competition and Markets Authority, run – until recently – by Marcus Bokkerink. The CMA has been one of the world's most effective investigators and regulators of Big Tech fuckery.

Last month, UK PM Keir Starmer fired Bokkerink and replaced him with Doug Gurr, the former head of Amazon UK. Hey, Starmer, the henhouse is on the line, they want their fox back.

But back to our nurses: there are plenty of examples of regulatory capture lurking in that example, but I'm going to pick the most egregious one, the fact that there are data brokers who will sell you information about the credit card debts of random Americans.

This is because the US Congress hasn't passed a new consumer privacy law since 1988, when Ronald Reagan signed a law called the Video Privacy Protection Act that bans video store clerks from telling newspapers which VHS cassettes you took home. The fact that Congress hasn't updated Americans' privacy protections since Die Hard was in theaters isn't a coincidence or an oversight. It is the expensively purchased inaction of a heavily concentrated – and thus wildly profitable – privacy-invasion industry that has monetized the abuse of human rights at unimaginable scale.

The coalition in favor of keeping privacy law frozen since the season finale of St Elsewhere keeps growing, because there is an unbounded set of ways to transform the systematic invasion of our human rights into cash. There's a direct line from this phenomenon to nurses whose paychecks go down when they can't pay their credit-card bills.

So competition is dead, regulation is dead, and companies aren't disciplined by markets or by states.

But there are four forces that discipline firms, contributing to an inhospitable environment for the reproduction of sociopathic. enshittifying monsters.

So let's talk about those other two forces. The first is interoperability, the principle of two or more things working together. Like, you can put anyone's shoelaces in your shoes, anyone's gas in your gas tank, and anyone's lightbulbs in your light-socket. In the non-digital world, interop takes a lot of work, you have to agree on the direction, pitch, diameter, voltage, amperage and wattage for that light socket, or someone's gonna get their hand blown off.

But in the digital world, interop is built in, because there's only one kind of computer we know how to make, the Turing-complete, universal, von Neumann machine, a computing machine capable of executing every valid program.

Which means that for any enshittifying program, there's a counterenshittificatory program waiting to be run. When HP writes a program to ensure that its printers reject third-party ink, someone else can write a program to disable that checking.

For gig workers, antienshittificatory apps can do yeoman duty. For example, Indonesian gig drivers formed co-ops, that commission hackers to write modifications for their dispatch apps. For example, the taxi app won't book a driver to pick someone up at a train station, unless they're right outside, but when the big trains pull in that's a nightmare scene of total, lethal chaos.

So drivers have an app that lets them spoof their GPS, which lets them park up around the corner, but have the app tell their bosses that they're right out front of the station. When a fare arrives, they can zip around and pick them up, without contributing to the stationside mishegas.

In the USA, a company called Para shipped an app to help Doordash drivers get paid more. You see, Doordash drivers make most of their money on tips, and the Doordash driver app hides the tip amount until you accept a job, meaning you don't know whether you're accepting a job that pays $1.50 or $11.50 with tip, until you agree to take it. So Para made an app that extracted the tip amount and showed it to drivers before they clocked on.

But Doordash shut it down, because in America, apps like Para are illegal. In 1998, Bill Clinton signed a law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and section 1201 of the DMCA makes is a felony to "bypass an access control for a copyrighted work," with penalties of $500k and a 5-year prison sentence for a first offense. So just the act of reverse-engineering an app like the Doordash app is a potential felony, which is why companies are so desperately horny to get you to use their apps rather than their websites.

The web is open, apps are closed. The majority of web users have installed an ad blocker (which is also a privacy blocker). But no one installs an ad blocker for an app, because it's a felony to distribute that tool, because you have to reverse-engineer the app to make it. An app is just a website wrapped in enough IP so that the company that made it can send you to prison if you dare to modify it so that it serves your interests rather than theirs.

Around the world, we have enacted a thicket of laws, we call “IP laws,” that make it illegal to modify services, products, and devices, so that they serve your interests, rather than the interests of the shareholders.

Like I said, these laws were enacted in living memory, by people who are among us, who were warned about the obvious, eminently foreseeable consequences of their reckless plans, who did it anyway.

Back in 2010, two ministers from Stephen Harper's government decided to copy-paste America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act into Canadian law. They consulted on the proposal to make it illegal to reverse engineer and modify services, products and devices, and they got an earful! 6,138 Canadians sent in negative comments on the consultation. They warned that making it illegal to bypass digital locks would interfere with repair of devices as diverse as tractors, cars, and medical equipment, from ventilators to insulin pumps.

These Canadians warned that laws banning tampering with digital locks would let American tech giants corner digital markets, forcing us to buy our apps and games from American app stores, that could cream off any commission they chose to levy. They warned that these laws were a gift to monopolists who wanted to jack up the price of ink; that these copyright laws, far from serving Canadian artists would lock us to American platforms. Because every time someone in our audience bought a book, a song, a game, a video, that was locked to an American app, it could never be unlocked.

So if we, the creative workers of Canada, tried to migrate to a Canadian store, our audience couldn't come with us. They couldn't move their purchases from the US app to a Canadian one.

6,138 Canadians told them this, while just 54 respondents sided with Heritage Minister James Moore and Industry Minister Tony Clement. Then, James Moore gave a speech, at the International Chamber of Commerce meeting here in Toronto, where he said he would only be listening to the 54 cranks who supported his terrible ideas, on the grounds that the 6,138 people who disagreed with him were "babyish…radical extremists."

So in 2012, we copied America's terrible digital locks law into the Canadian statute book, and now we live in James Moore and Tony Clement's world, where it is illegal to tamper with a digital lock. So if a company puts a digital lock on its product they can do anything behind that lock, and it's a crime to undo it.

For example, if HP puts a digital lock on its printers that verifies that you're not using third party ink cartridges, or refilling an HP cartridge, it's a crime to bypass that lock and use third party ink. Which is how HP has gotten away with ratcheting the price of ink up, and up, and up.

Printer ink is now the most expensive fluid that a civilian can purchase without a special permit. It's colored water that costs $10k/gallon, which means that you print out your grocery lists with liquid that costs more than the semen of a Kentucky Derby-winning stallion.

That's the world we got from Clement and Moore, in living memory, after they were warned, and did it anyway. The world where farmers can't fix their tractors, where independent mechanics can't fix your car, where hospitals during the pandemic lockdowns couldn't service their failing ventilators, where every time a Canadian iPhone user buys an app from a Canadian software author, every dollar they spend takes a round trip through Apple HQ in Cupertino, California and comes back 30 cents lighter.

Let me remind you this is the world where a nurse can't get a counter-app, a plug-in, for the “Uber for nurses” app they have to use to get work, that lets them coordinate with other nurses to refuse shifts until the wages on offer rise to a common level or to block surveillance of their movements and activity.

Interoperability was a major disciplining force on tech firms. After all, if you make the ads on your website sufficiently obnoxious, some fraction of your users will install an ad-blocker, and you will never earn another penny from them. Because no one in the history of ad-blockers has ever uninstalled an ad-blocker. But once it's illegal to make an ad-blocker, there's no reason not to make the ads as disgusting, invasive, obnoxious as you can, to shift all the value from the end user to shareholders and executives.

So we get monopolies and monopolies capture their regulators, and they can ignore the laws they don't like, and prevent laws that might interfere with their predatory conduct – like privacy laws – from being passed. They get new laws passed, laws that let them wield governmental power to prevent other companies from entering the market.

So three of the four forces are neutralized: competition, regulation, and interoperability. That left just one disciplining force holding enshittification at bay: labor.

Tech workers are a strange sort of workforce, because they have historically been very powerful, able to command high wages and respect, but they did it without joining unions. Union density in tech is abysmal, almost undetectable. Tech workers' power didn't come from solidarity, it came from scarcity. There weren't enough workers to fill the jobs going begging, and tech workers are unfathomnably productive. Even with the sky-high salaries tech workers commanded, every hour of labor they put in generated far more value for their employers.

Faced with a tight labor market, and the ability to turn every hour of tech worker overtime into gold, tech bosses pulled out all the stops to motivate that workforce. They appealed to workers' sense of mission, convinced them they were holy warriors, ushering in a new digital age. Google promised them they would "organize the world's information and make it useful.” Facebook promised them they would “make the world more open and connected."

There's a name for this tactic: the librarian Fobazi Ettarh calls it "vocational awe." That’s where an appeal to a sense of mission and pride is used to motivate workers to work for longer hours and worse pay.

There are all kinds of professions that run on vocational awe: teaching, daycares and eldercare, and, of course, nursing.

Techies are different from those other workers though, because they've historically been incredibly scarce, which meant that while bosses could motivate them to work on projects they believed in, for endless hours, the minute bosses ordered them to enshittify the projects they'd missed their mothers' funerals to ship on deadline these workers would tell their bosses to fuck off.

If their bosses persisted in these demands, the techies would walk off the job, cross the street, and get a better job the same day.

So for many years, tech workers were the fourth and final constraint, holding the line after the constraints of competition, regulation and interop slipped away. But then came the mass tech layoffs. 260,000 in 2023; 150,000 in 2024; tens of thousands this year, with Facebook planning a 5% headcount massacre while doubling its executive bonuses.

Tech workers can't tell their bosses to go fuck themselves anymore, because there's ten other workers waiting to take their jobs.

Now, I promised I wouldn't talk about AI, but I have to break that promise a little, just to point out that the reason tech bosses are so horny for AI Is because they think it'll let them fire tech workers and replace them with pliant chatbots who'll never tell them to fuck off.

So that's where enshittification comes from: multiple changes to the environment. The fourfold collapse of competition, regulation, interoperability and worker power creates an enshittogenic environment, where the greediest, most sociopathic elements in the body corporate thrive at the expense of those elements that act as moderators of their enshittificatory impulses.

We can try to cure these corporations. We can use antitrust law to break them up, fine them, force strictures upon them. But until we fix the environment, the contagion will spread to other firms.

So let's talk about how we create a hostile environment for enshittifiers, so the population and importance of enshittifying agents in companies dwindles to 1990s levels. We won't get rid of these elements. So long as the profit motive is intact, there will be people whose pursuit of profit is pathological, unmoderated by shame or decency. But we can change the environment so that these don't dominate our lives.

Let's talk about antitrust. After 40 years of antitrust decline, this decade has seen a massive, global resurgence of antitrust vigor, one that comes in both left- and right-wing flavors.

Over the past four years, the Biden administration’s trustbusters at the Federal Trade Commission, Department of Justice and Consumer Finance Protection Bureau did more antitrust enforcement than all their predecessors for the past 40 years combined.

There's certainly factions of the Trump administration that are hostile to this agenda but Trump's antitrust enforcers at the DoJ and FTC now say that they'll preserve and enforce Biden's new merger guidelines, which stop companies from buying each other up, and they've already filed suit to block a giant tech merger.

Of course, last summer a judge found Google guilty of monopolization, and now they're facing a breakup, which explains why they've been so generous and friendly to the Trump administration.

Meanwhile, in Canada, our toothless Competition Bureau's got fitted for a set of titanium dentures last June, when Bill C59 passed Parliament, granting sweeping new powers to our antitrust regulator.

It's true that UK PM Keir Starmer just fired the head of the UK Competition and Markets Authority and replaced him with the ex-boss of Amazon UK boss.But the thing that makes that so tragic is that the UK CMA had been doing astonishingly great work under various conservative governments.

In the EU, they've passed the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, and they're going after Big Tech with both barrels. Other countries around the world – Australia, Germany, France, Japan, South Korea and China (yes, China!) – have passed new antitrust laws, and launched major antitrust enforcement actions, often collaborating with each other.

So you have the UK Competition and Markets Authority using its investigatory powers to research and publish a deep market study on Apple's abusive 30% app tax, and then the EU uses that report as a roadmap for fining Apple, and then banning Apple's payments monopoly under new regulations.Then South Korea and Japan trustbusters translate the EU's case and win nearly identical cases in their courts

What about regulatory capture? Well, we're starting to see regulators get smarter about reining in Big Tech. For example, the EU's Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act were designed to bypass the national courts of EU member states, especially Ireland, the tax-haven where US tech companies pretend to have their EU headquarters.

The thing about tax havens is that they always turn into crime havens, because if Apple can pretend to be Irish this week, it can pretend to be Maltese or Cypriot or Luxembourgeois next week. So Ireland has to let US Big Tech companies ignore EU privacy laws and other regulations, or it'll lose them to sleazier, more biddable competitor nations.

So from now on, EU tech regulation is getting enforced in the EU's federal courts, not in national courts, treating the captured Irish courts as damage and routing around them.

Canada needs to strengthen its own tech regulation enforcement, unwinding monopolistic mergers from the likes of Bell and Rogers, but most of all, Canada needs to pursue an interoperability agenda.

Last year, Canada passed two very exciting bills: Bill C244, a national Right to Repair law; and Bill C294, an interoperability law. Nominally, both of these laws allow Canadians to fix everything from tractors to insulin pumps, and to modify the software in their devices from games consoles to printers, so they will work with third party app stores, consumables and add-ons.

However, these bills are essentially useless, because these bills don’t permit Canadians to acquire tools to break digital locks. So you can modify your printer to accept third party ink, or interpret a car's diagnostic codes so any mechanic can fix it, but only if there isn't a digital lock stopping you from doing so, because giving someone a tool to break a digital lock remains illegal thanks to the law that James Moore and Tony Clement shoved down the nation's throat in 2012.

And every single printer, smart speaker, car, tractor, appliance, medical implant and hospital medical device has a digital lock that stops you from fixing it, modifying it, or using third party parts, software, or consumables in it.

Which means that these two landmark laws on repair and interop are useless. So why not get rid of the 2012 law that bans breaking digital locks? Because these laws are part of our trade agreement with the USA. This is a law needed to maintain tariff-free access to US markets.

I don’t know if you've heard, but Donald Trump is going to impose a 25%, across-the-board tariff against Canadian exports. Trudeau's response is to impose retaliatory tariffs, which will make every American product that Canadians buy 25% more expensive. This is a very weird way to punish America!

You know what would be better? Abolish the Canadian laws that protect US Big Tech companies from Canadian competition. Make it legal to reverse-engineer, jailbreak and modify American technology products and services. Don't ask Facebook to pay a link tax to Canadian newspapers, make it legal to jailbreak all of Meta's apps and block all the ads in them, so Mark Zuckerberg doesn't make a dime off of us.

Make it legal for Canadian mechanics to jailbreak your Tesla and unlock every subscription feature, like autopilot and full access to your battery, for one price, forever. So you get more out of your car, and when you sell it, then next owner continues to enjoy those features, meaning they'll pay more for your used car.

That's how you hurt Elon Musk: not by being performatively appalled at his Nazi salutes. That doesn't cost him a dime. He loves the attention. No! Strike at the rent-extracting, insanely high-margin aftermarket subscriptions he relies on for his Swastikar business. Kick that guy right in the dongle!

Let Canadians stand up a Canadian app store for Apple devices, one that charges 3% to process transactions, not 30%. Then, every Canadian news outlet that sells subscriptions through an app, and every Canadian software author, musician and writer who sells through a mobile platform gets a 25% increase in revenues overnight, without signing up a single new customer.

But we can sign up new customers, by selling jailbreaking software and access to Canadian app stores, for every mobile device and games console to everyone in the world, and by pitching every games publisher and app maker on selling in the Canadian app store to customers anywhere without paying a 30% vig to American big tech companies.

We could sell every mechanic in the world a $100/month subscription to a universal diagnostic tool. Every farmer in the world could buy a kit that would let them fix their own John Deere tractors without paying a $200 callout charge for a Deere technician who inspects the repair the farmer is expected to perform.

They'd beat a path to our door. Canada could become a tech export powerhouse, while making everything cheaper for Canadian tech users, while making everything more profitable for anyone who sells media or software in an online store. And – this is the best part – it’s a frontal assault on the largest, most profitable US companies, the companies that are single-handedly keeping the S&P 500 in the black, striking directly at their most profitable lines of business, taking the revenues from those ripoff scams from hundreds of billions to zero, overnight, globally.

We don't have to stop at exporting reasonably priced pharmaceuticals to Americans! We could export the extremely lucrative tools of technological liberation to our American friends, too.

That's how you win a trade-war.

What about workers? Here we have good news and bad news.

The good news is that public approval for unions is at a high mark last seen in the early 1970s, and more workers want to join a union than at any time in generations, and unions themselves are sitting on record-breaking cash reserves they could be using to organize those workers.

But here's the bad news. The unions spent the Biden years, when they had the most favorable regulatory environment since the Carter administration, when public support for unions was at an all-time high, when more workers than ever wanted to join a union, when they had more money than ever to spend on unionizing those workers, doing fuck all. They allocated mere pittances to union organizing efforts with the result that we finished the Biden years with fewer unionized workers than we started them with.

Then we got Trump, who illegally fired National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox, leaving the NLRB without a quorum and thus unable to act on unfair labor practices or to certify union elections.

This is terrible. But it’s not game over. Trump fired the referees, and he thinks that this means the game has ended. But here's the thing: firing the referee doesn't end the game, it just means we're throwing out the rules. Trump thinks that labor law creates unions, but he's wrong. Unions are why we have labor law. Long before unions were legal, we had unions, who fought goons and ginks and company finks in` pitched battles in the streets.

That illegal solidarity resulted in the passage of labor law, which legalized unions. Labor law is passed because workers build power through solidarity. Law doesn't create that solidarity, it merely gives it a formal basis in law. Strip away that formal basis, and the worker power remains.

Worker power is the answer to vocational awe. After all, it's good for you and your fellow workers to feel a sense of mission about your jobs. If you feel that sense of mission, if you feel the duty to protect your users, your patients, your patrons, your students, a union lets you fulfill that duty.

We saw that in 2023 when Doug Ford promised to destroy the power of Ontario's public workers. Workers across the province rose up, promising a general strike, and Doug Ford folded like one of his cheap suits. Workers kicked the shit out of him, and we'll do it again. Promises made, promises kept.

The unscheduled midair disassembly of American labor law means that workers can have each others' backs again. Tech workers need other workers' help, because tech workers aren't scarce anymore, not after a half-million layoffs. Which means tech bosses aren't afraid of them anymore.

We know how tech bosses treat workers they aren't afraid of. Look at Jeff Bezos: the workers in his warehouses are injured on the job at 3 times the national rate, his delivery drivers have to pee in bottles, and they are monitored by AI cameras that snitch on them if their eyeballs aren't in the proscribed orientation or if their mouth is open too often while they drive, because policy forbids singing along to the radio.

By contrast, Amazon coders get to show up for work with pink mohawks, facial piercings, and black t-shirts that say things their bosses don't understand. They get to pee whenever they want. Jeff Bezos isn't sentimental about tech workers, nor does he harbor a particularized hatred of warehouse workers and delivery drivers. He treats his workers as terribly as he can get away with. That means that the pee bottles are coming for the coders, too.

It's not just Amazon, of course. Take Apple. Tim Cook was elevated to CEO in 2011. Apple's board chose him to succeed founder Steve Jobs because he is the guy who figured out how to shift Apple's production to contract manufacturers in China, without skimping on quality assurance, or suffering leaks of product specifications ahead of the company's legendary showy launches.

Today, Apple's products are made in a gigantic Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou nicknamed "iPhone City.” Indeed, these devices arrive in shipping containers at the Port of Los Angeles in a state of pristine perfection, manufactured to the finest tolerances, and free of any PR leaks.

To achieve this miraculous supply chain, all Tim Cook had to do was to make iPhone City a living hell, a place that is so horrific to work that they had to install suicide nets around the worker dorms to catch the plummeting bodies of workers who were so brutalized by Tim Cook's sweatshop that they attempted to take their own lives.

Tim Cook is also not sentimentally attached to tech workers, nor is he hostile to Chinese assembly line workers. He just treats his workers as badly as he can get away with, and with mass layoffs in the tech sector he can treat his coders much, much worse

How do tech workers get unions? Well, there are tech-specific organizations like Tech Solidarity and the Tech Workers Coalition. But tech workers will only get unions by having solidarity with other workers and receiving solidarity back from them. We all need to support every union. All workers need to have each other's backs.

We are entering a period of omnishambolic polycrisis.The ominous rumble of climate change, authoritarianism, genocide, xenophobia and transphobia has turned into an avalanche. The perpetrators of these crimes against humanity have weaponized the internet, colonizing the 21st century's digital nervous system, using it to attack its host, threatening civilization itself.

The enshitternet was purpose-built for this kind of apocalyptic co-option, organized around giant corporations who will trade a habitable planet and human rights for a three percent tax cut, who default us all into twiddle-friendly algorithmic feed, and block the interoperability that would let us escape their clutches with the backing of powerful governments whom they can call upon to "protect their IP rights."

It didn't have to be this way. The enshitternet was not inevitable. It was the product of specific policy choices, made in living memory, by named individuals.

No one came down off a mountain with two stone tablets, intoning Tony Clement, James Moore: Thou shalt make it a crime for Canadians to jailbreak their phones. Those guys chose enshittification, throwing away thousands of comments from Canadians who warned them what would come of it.

We don't have to be eternal prisoners of the catastrophic policy blunders of mediocre Tory ministers. As the omnicrisis polyshambles unfolds around us, we have the means, motive and opportunity to craft Canadian policies that bolster our sovereignty, protect our rights, and help us to set every technology user, in every country (including the USA) free.

The Trump presidency is an existential crisis but it also presents opportunities. When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla. We once had an old, good internet, whose major defect was that it required too much technical expertise to use, so all our normie friends were excluded from that wondrous playground.

Web 2.0's online services had greased slides that made it easy for anyone to get online, but escaping from those Web 2.0 walled gardens meant was like climbing out of a greased pit. A new, good internet is possible, and necessary. We can build it, with all the technological self-determination of the old, good internet, and the ease of use of Web 2.0.

A place where we can find each other, coordinate and mobilize to resist and survive climate collapse, fascism, genocide and authoritarianism. We can build that new, good internet, and we must.

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Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Science fiction can make you a better Unitarian https://www.uuworld.org/articles/spiritual-science-fiction

#20yrsago Why Wikipedia works, and how the Britannica bully got it wrong https://web.archive.org/web/20050301003539/http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/free_issues/issue_02/fud_based_encyclopedia/

#10yrsago Nerdcore Net Neutrality rap https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlBj4rrBbCc

#10yrsago Emma Thompson on tax-strike until HSBC tax evaders are jailed https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/feb/25/emma-thompson-greg-wise-tax-boycott-hsbc-scandal

#10yrsago Companies should never try to intercept their users’ encrypted traffic https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/02/dear-software-vendors-please-stop-trying-intercept-your-customers-encrypted

#10yrsago World War 3 Illustrated: prescient outrage from the dawn of the Piketty apocalypse https://memex.craphound.com/2015/02/26/world-war-3-illustrated-prescient-outrage-from-the-dawn-of-the-piketty-apocalypse/

#10yrsago VA boss caught lying about serving in the Special Forces https://www.politico.com/story/2015/02/robert-mcdonald-veterans-affairs-lie-special-forces-115446

#5yrsago McMansion Hell visits 1971 https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/26/pluralistic-your-daily-link-dose-26-feb-2020/#morriscounty

#5yrsago The Smithsonian publishes 2.8m hi-rez images into the public domain https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/26/pluralistic-your-daily-link-dose-26-feb-2020/#openaccess

#5yrsago Medicare for All would be the biggest take-home pay increase in a generation https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/26/pluralistic-your-daily-link-dose-26-feb-2020/#m4a

#5yrsago Clarence Thomas admits he blew it on Brand X https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/26/pluralistic-your-daily-link-dose-26-feb-2020/#opps

#1yrago Incomplete vs. overshoot https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/26/horsehoe-crab/#substantive-disagreement

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Latest books (permalink)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

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

  • The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

Latest podcast: Picks and Shovels virtual launch with Yanis Varoufakis and David Moscrop, presented by Jacobin https://craphound.com/novels/redteamblues/2025/02/16/picks-and-shovels-virtual-launch-with-yanis-varoufakis-and-david-moscrop-presented-by-jacobin/

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

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

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