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 03.07.2025 à 11:29

Pluralistic: Trump's not gonna protect workers from forced labor (03 Jul 2025)


Today's links


A kneeling figure, shackled hand-and-foot with ball-and-chains at his ankles. His face is that of a turn-of-the-century newsie, grinning broadly under a torn cloth cap. Behind him is a heavily halftoned neon HELP WANTED sign, askew over a indistinct black hellscape ganked from the third panel of Boschs's 'Garden of Earthly Delights.'

Trump's not gonna protect workers from forced labor (permalink)

As fascism burns across America, it's important to remember that Trump and his policies are not popular. Sure, the racism and cruelty excites a minority of (very broken) people, but every component of the Trump agenda is extremely unpopular with the American people, from tax cuts for billionaires to kidnapping our neighbors and shipping them to concentration camps.

Keeping this fact in mind is essential if we are to nurture hope's embers, and fan them into the flames of change. Trumpism is a coalition of people who hate each other, who agree on almost nothing, whose fracture lines are one deft tap away from shattering:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/14/fracture-lines/#disassembly-manual

The vast unpopularity of Trumpism presents endless opportunities for breaking off parts of his coalition. Take noncompete "agreements": contractual clauses that ban workers from taking a job with any of their employers' competitors for years. One in 18 Americans has been captured by a noncompete, and the median noncompete victim is a minimum-wage fast-food worker whose small business tyrant boss wants to be sure that she doesn't quit working the register at Wendy's and start making $0.25/hour more flipping burgers at McDonald's.

The story of noncompetes is bullshit from top to bottom. The argument goes, "Your boss invests heavily in training you, and lets you in on all his valuable trade-secrets. When you walk out the door and go to work for a competitor, you're stealing all that training and knowledge. Without noncompetes, no boss will invest in the knowledge-intensive industries that are the future of our economy."

Now, like I said, the vast majority of people under noncompetes are working low-waged, menial jobs with little to no training, and no proprietary trade secrets to speak of. Which makes sense: workers with less bargaining power end up signing worse contracts. That's half the case against noncompetes.

Here's the other half: the most IP-intensive, profitable, knowledge-based industries in America operate without any noncompetes. California's state constitution bans noncompetes, which means that every worker in Hollywood and Silicon Valley is free to quit their job and walk across the street and join a rival.

If Hollywood and tech are examples of industries that "can't attract investment," then we should be shooting for every sector of the American economy to be so starved for capital. Silicon Valley's origin story is based on the ability of key workers at knowledge-intensive firms to quit their jobs and go to work for a direct competitor: the first Silicon Valley company was Shockley Semiconductors, founded by William Shockley, who won the Nobel Prize for inventing silicon transistors.

Shockley literally put the "silicon" in Silicon Valley, but he never shipped a working chip, because he was a deranged, paranoid eugenicist who ran such a dysfunctional company that eight of his top engineers quit to found a rival company, Fairchild Semiconductor. Then two of the "Traitorous Eight" quit the Fairchild to start Intel, and the year after, another Fairchild employee quit to start AMD:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/24/the-traitorous-eight-and-the-battle-of-germanium-valley/

This never stopped. Woz quit HP and Jobs quit Atari to start Apple and the tradition of extremely well-capitalized companies being founded by key employees who quit market-leading firms to compete with their old bosses continues to this day. There are many things we can say about AI, but no one will claim that AI companies – especially not those in California, where noncompetes are banned – have trouble attracting investment. Half of the leading AI companies were founded by people who couldn't stand working for Sam Altman at Openai and quit to found a competitor. Just last week, Altman flipped out because Mark Zuckerberg poached his key scientists to work on competing products at Meta:

https://fortune.com/2025/06/28/meta-four-openai-researchers-superintelligence-team-ai-talent-competition/

Knowledge-intensive industries are provably compatible with a system of free labor where workers can work for anyone they want. You know who understands this? The lawyers who draw up employment contracts with noncompete clauses in them: the American Bar Association bans noncompetes for lawyers! Every law firm in America operates without noncompetes!

Everyone hates noncompetes. They are bullshit, and only get worse with time, as the largest companies in America metastasize into sprawling conglomerates, they compete with everyone. Who isn't a competitor of Amazon's?

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/02/its-the-economy-stupid/#neofeudal

Biden's antitrust enforcers hated noncompetes, too. Former FTC chair Lina Khan held listening tours and solicited comments to hear workers stories about noncompetes, developing a record that she used to create a rule that banned noncompetes nationwide:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/25/capri-v-tapestry/#aiming-at-dollars-not-men

America's oligarchs weren't happy. They sued to overturn the rule, and got a nationwide injunction (you know, those things that Trump's illegitimate Supreme Court claims are unenforceable) that suspended the FTC rule pending a full hearing.

It's clear that Trump's FTC is going to walk away from this fight and let the rule die. Trumpism is wildly unpopular, and this is no exception. Americans overwhelmingly support banning noncompetes, but Trump's richest donors are terrified of another Great Resignation and want to keep us indentured to their shitty companies, so Trump's FTC will sell us all out.

But that's not the end of things. As David Dayen writes for The American Prospect, states and local governments can pass their own noncompete bans, and they are:

https://prospect.org/labor/2025-07-02-ftc-noncompete-state-regulation-workers-wages/

Take NYC mayor-in-waiting Zohran Mamdani: unlike Trump (and the Democratic Party's billionaire wing), Mamdani campaigned by offering to create policies that are popular, including a ban on noncompetes. New York City has two distinct groups of workers who are screwed over by noncompetes. One of those groups is Wall Street finance bros, who work for some of the most legendarily toxic assholes to ever draw breath, and are overwhelming bound by noncompetes that will all become null and void the day Mamdani dons his sash.

The other group of workers Mamdani will liberate are those at the very bottom of the income distribution, from fast food workers to gig workers to doormen, who are victims of some of the dirtiest noncompete clauses in America, including "bondage fees":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/21/bondage-fees/#doorman-building

Big cities are filled with workers who are getting screwed by noncompetes and every city government has it in their power to liberate every one of those workers (who are also voters).

States can do even better. There are already four states that ban noncompetes, two of them blood red: California, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Oklahoma. Other states place significant restrictions on noncompetes, including Washington, Colorado, Illinois, Virginia, Maryland, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Maine. Nevada bans noncompetes for hourly workers, Idaho only allows them for "key employees"; Louisiana limits noncompetes to two years, and NJ bans noncompetes for domestic workers.

Up and down the country, in states blue and red, noncompetes are unpopular, and banning noncompetes is popular:

https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/majority-americans-support-ftc-ruling-would-ban-non-compete-agreements

Oregon just banned noncompetes for doctors and other health workers, as part of a sweeping, bipartisan law that banned the "corporate practice of medicine":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/20/the-doctor-will-gouge-you-now/#states-rights

Oregon's in good company: noncompetes are banned in the health sector in 32 states, including Arkansas, Indiana and Colorado.

Lina Khan's FTC developed an irrefutable evidentiary record about the abusive nature of noncompetes, proving that industries can attract capital and field successful companies without them. States have it in their power to step in where Trump has betrayed American workers. This isn't the most efficient way to protect workers – that would be a federal ban on noncompetes – but it will still get the job done, and it will weaken the Trump coalition, which is barely holding together as it is.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Futures for SF writers that aren’t the Singularity https://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/2008/08/25/fresh-sf-futures/

#10yrsago Secret court will let NSA do mass surveillance for another six months https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/06/secret-us-court-allows-resumption-of-bulk-phone-metadata-spying/

#10yrsago Bigoted officials: First Amendment means we don’t have to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples https://edition.cnn.com/2015/06/30/us/same-sex-marriage-supreme-court-ruling-holdouts/index.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fcnn_topstories+(RSS%3A+CNN+-+Top+Stories)

#10yrsago McKinney, TX wants $79K to retreive emails of the cop who tackled bikini-clad teen https://www.techdirt.com/2015/06/30/city-claims-it-will-take-9000-hours-79000-to-fulfill-gawkers-request-emails-related-to-abusive-police-officer/

#10yrsago We’ve evolved to disbelieve evolution https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2015/06/29/418289762/don-t-believe-in-evolution-try-thinking-harder

#10yrsago US Customs and Border Protection: America’s largest, most corrupt police force https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-border-patrol-20150630-story.html#page=1

#5yrsago Snowden on Little Brother https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/01/bossware/#omnibus

#5yrsago Sun Ra's syllabus https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/01/bossware/#sun-ra

#5yrsago Invigilation CEO doxes student https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/01/bossware/#moral-exemplar

#5yrsago Big Cop's corporate armorers https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/01/bossware/#charitable-laundering

#5yrsago Bossware https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/01/bossware/#bossware

#5yrsago EFF on EU interoperability policy https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/01/bossware/#eu-interop

#1yrago Austin Grossman's 'Fight Me' https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/01/the-big-genx-chill/#im-super-thanks-for-asking

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)

  • Uncanny Valley: A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

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

  • 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:

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Publié le 02.07.2025 à 10:13

Pluralistic: Tessa Hulls's "Feeding Ghosts" (2 Jul 2025)


Today's links


The Farrar, Straus, Giroux cover for Tessa Hulls's 'Feeding Ghosts.'

Tessa Hulls's "Feeding Ghosts" (permalink)

Tessa Hulls's debut graphic novel is Feeding Ghosts, a stunning memoir that tells the story of three generations of her Chinese family. It was a decade in the making, and it is utterly, unmissably brilliant:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374601652/feedingghosts/

Feeding Ghosts is about Hulls's quest to understand – and heal – her relationship with her mother, a half-Chinese, half-Swiss woman who escaped from China as a small child with her own mother, a journalist who had been targeted by Mao's police. Hulls's grandmother, Sun Yi, wrote a bestselling memoir about her experiences in post-revolutionary Shanghai that made her both famous and notorious, in part because of the salacious details of Sun Yi's affair with the Swiss diplomat who fathered Rose, Hulls's mother.

In Hong Kong, Sun Yi's mental health declines precipitously. Some combination of mental illness and trauma – both from the horrors of the Sino-Japanese War and her torture at the hands of the Chinese police – sends her into a spiral of paranoid delusions. But Sun Yi has a community of people who feel an obligation to support her in Hong Kong, including one of her rich "boyfriends" – and Rose is sent away to a fancy, British-run girl's school dominated by expats where she acquires a cut-glass accent and learns to mix with upper-class, colonial English gentry.

Hulls is born to Rose many years later, after Rose has emigrated to the USA, attended university, married twice – the second time to Hull's father, an Englishman – and moved her mother in with her. For Hulls, growing up in Rose's household as the only Asian kid in a small American town is a series of torments. Her mentally ill grandmother lives in one bedroom, gripped by delusions, compulsively writing, fretting, begging with her few English words for Rose to come back. Rose, meanwhile, is a duty-stricken domestic saint who does all the cooking and cleaning, cares for her children and her husband, and looks after her totally isolated, profoundly disturbed mother.

Hulls grows up in the shadow of the intergenerational trauma – genocide, war crimes, colonialist discrimination, untreated mental illness, and everyday American racism – that haunts her family. Rose veers from doting to shouting, terrified that Hulls is sliding into the family's madness, unable to understand or grapple with Hulls's identity as a self-proclaimed "mixed-race" Eurasian person, born in America, unable to speak Chinese or to understand her Chinese identity.

All of this biography is interspersed through several time-hopping sections that recount the history of the Chinese revolution and the lives of Sun Yi and Rose, along with scenes from the decade that Hulls spent writing and drawing Feeding Ghosts, during which she and her mother travel to see their family in China, on a literal and figurative journey of reconciliation.

It sounds complex and confusing, but it's anything but. Each of the intertwined narratives – revolutionary China, Rose's girlhood, Hulls's girlhood, the trips to contemporary China, Hulls's adulthood and Sun Yi's institutionalizations and long isolation – are high stakes, high-tension scenarios, beautifully told. Hulls hops from one tale to the next in ways that draw out the subtle, imporant parallels between each situation, subtly amplifying the echoes across time and space.

In the final third of this long, large book, we get to the meat of Hulls's own story: her tempestuous relationship with her mother, her mother's immersion in a psychoanalytic cult, the sad demise of Sun Yi, and the wild flight of Hulls herself, in which she breaks off her stultifying engagement and teaches herself to be a bicycle mechanic and begins cycling all over the world, living on pennies and consummating her love of wild and empty spaces. At college, she becomes a cook through a weekly women's drunken pie-baking night, and somehow parlays that into a long session as a cook in Antarctica on McMurdo Station.

This final third acts as a kind of keystone to the many interwoven tales, as well as to the complex relationship between Hulls, her mother, and her own sense of self. Up until this point, the different threads of Hulls's family's story are subtle echoes of one another, motifs that repeat and vary. But in this final third, the reader – and Hulls – experience a profound psychological realization about how the three stories of these three generation of women, along with China's tumultuous history and the experience of an American immigrant all produced the person whose bold illustrations and sharp prose we've been immersed in for hundreds of pages. It's a wild moment.

Hulls's art style runs to dark, stylized inks, with horrors and ghosts puncturing individual panels' frames and wending through the page. It's a phantasmagorical experience.

Feeding Ghosts came out in March, and has gone on to win the Pulitzer Prize, only the second graphic novel in history to take the honor (the first was Maus, another memoir of intergenerational trauma, horrific war, and the American immigrant experience).

The prize is a big deal, obviously, and it's no coincidence that this kind of ambitious illustrated memoir has won both graphic novel Pulitzers. Hulls joins the annals of world-altering comic-book memoirists, from Lynda Barry to Emil Ferris (My Favorite Thing is Monsters) to Art Spiegelman and Chester Brown. She has pulled of a magnificent feat, one that illuminates history, contemporary racial and gender politics, the immigrant experience, and the impossible problems of parents and children in the aftermath of unspeakable trauma.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Anti-DRM badges https://web.archive.org/web/20050701004506/http://nootropic.blogspot.com/2005/06/gallery-of-drm-related-antipixel.html

#15yrsago ACLU: America is riddled with politically motivated surveillance https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/Spyfiles_2_0.pdf

#15yrsago Toronto cops justify extreme G20 measures with display of LARPing props, weapons from unrelated busts https://web.archive.org/web/20100702002151/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/weapons-seized-in-g20-arrests-put-on-display/article1622761/

#15yrsago Copyright best practices for communications scholars https://web.archive.org/web/20100628005458/http://centerforsocialmedia.org/fair-use/related-materials/codes/code-best-practices-fair-use-scholarly-research-communication

#15yrsago G20 police used imaginary law to jail harass demonstrators and jailed protestors in dangerous and abusive “detention center” https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/29/g20-police-used-imaginary-law-to-jail-harass-demonstrators-and-jailed-protestors-in-dangerous-and-abusive-detention-center/

#10yrsago Why I’m leaving London https://memex.craphound.com/2015/06/29/why-im-leaving-london/

#10yrsago Neal Stephenson on the story behind Seveneves http://www.bookotron.com/agony/audio/2015/2015-interviews/neal_stephenson-2015.mp3

#10yrsago Brian Wood’s Starve: get to your comic shop now! https://memex.craphound.com/2015/06/29/brian-woods-starve-get-to-your-comic-shop-now/

#10yrsago BBC’s list of pages de-indexed through Europe’s “right to be forgotten” https://www.bbc.co.uk/webarchive/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2Fblogs%2Finternet%2Fentries%2F1d765aa8-600b-4f32-b110-d02fbf7fd379

#5yrsago NYC housing lottery favors the least-needy https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#market-failure

#5yrsago Facebook and Trump collaborate on rule-rigging https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#fb-hearts-dt

#5yrsago How to break up Google https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#braygoog

#5yrsago Female Furies https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#apokolips-now

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)

  • Uncanny Valley: A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

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

  • 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:

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Publié le 01.07.2025 à 07:41

Pluralistic: How much (little) are the AI companies making? (30 Jun 2025)


Today's links


A carny barker waving his top-hat and selling tickets from a roll; his head has been replaced with the hostile red eye of HAL9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' The background is a magnified, halftoned detail from a US$100 bill.

How much (little) are the AI companies making? (permalink)

If there's one area where tech has shown a consistent aptitude for innovation, it's in accounting tricks that make money-losing companies appear wildly profitable. And AI is the greatest innovator of all (when it comes to accounting gimmicks).

Since the dotcom era, tech companies have boasted about giving stuff away but "making it up in volume," inventing an ever-sweatier collection of shell-games that let them hide the business's true profit and loss.

The all-time world champeen of this kind of finance fraud is Masayoshi Son, the founder of Softbank, who acts as the bagman for the Saudi royals' personal investments. Remember last decade when the tech press was all abuzz about "unicorns" – startups that were worth $1b? That was Son: he would take a startup like Wework, declare its brand to be worth $1b, invest an infinitesimal fraction of $1b in the company based on that valuation (sometimes with a rube co-investor) and declare the valuation to be "market-based." A whole string of garbage companies achieved unicornhood by means of this unbelievably stupid trick:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/27/voluntary-carbon-market/#trust-me

Of course, every finance bro is familiar with Stein's Law: "anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." Sure, the Saudi royals could be tapped to piss away $31b on Uber, losing $0.41 on every dollar for 13 years, but eventually they're going to turn off the money spigot and attempt to flog their shares to retail and institutional suckers. To make that work, they have to invent new accounting tricks, like when Uber "sold" its failing overseas ride-hailing businesses to international rivals in exchange for stock, then declared that these companies' illiquid stock had skyrocketed in value, tipping Uber into the black:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/05/a-lousy-taxi/#a-giant-asterisk

Even companies that are actually profitable (in the sense of bringing in more revenue than it costs to keep the business's lights on) love to juice their stats, and the worst offenders are the Big Tech companies, who reap a vast commercial reward from creating the illusion that they are continuing to grow, even after they've dominated their sector.

Take Google: once the company attained a 90% global search market-share, there were no more immediate prospects for growth. I mean, sure, they could raise a billion new humans to maturity and train them to be Google customers (e.g., the business plan for Google Classroom), but that takes more than a decade, and Google needed growth right away. So the company hatched a plan to make search worse, so that its existing users would have to search multiple times to get the information they sought, and each additional search would give Google another chance to show you an ad:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

But that was small potatoes. What Google – and the rest of the tech sector – needed was a massive growth story, a story about how their companies, worth trillions of dollars, could double or triple in size in the coming years. There's a kind of reflexive anti-capitalist critique that locates the drive to tell growth stories in ideology: "endless growth is the ideology of a tumor," right?

But spinning an endless growth story isn't merely ideological. It's a firmly materialistic undertaking. Companies that appear to be growing have market caps that are an order of magnitude larger than companies that are considered "mature" and at the end of their growth phase. For every dollar that Ford brings in, the market is willing to spend $8.60 on its stock. For every dollar Tesla brings in, the market is willing to spend $118 on its stock.

That means that when Tesla and Ford compete to buy something – like another company, or the labor of highly sought after technical specialists – Tesla has a nearly unbeatable advantage. Rather than raiding its precious cash reserves to fund its offer, Tesla can offer stock. Ford can only spend as many dollars as it brings in through sales, but Tesla can make more stock, on demand, simply by typing numbers into a spreadsheet.

So when Tesla bids against Ford, Ford has to use dollars, and Tesla can use shares. And even if the acquisition target – a key employee or a startup that's on the acquisitions market – wants dollars instead of shares, Tesla can stake its shares as collateral for loans at a rate that's 1,463% better than the rate Ford gets when it collateralizes a loan based on its own equity:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/07/rah-rah-rasputin/#credulous-dolts

In other words, if you can tell a convincing growth story, it's much easier to grow. The corollary, though, is that when a growth company stops growing, when it becomes "mature," it experiences a massive sell-off of its stock, as its share price plummets to a tenth or less of the old "growth" valuation. That's why the biggest tech companies in the world have spent the past decade – the decade after they monopolized their sectors and conquered the world – pumping a series of progressively stupider bubbles: metaverse, cryptocurrency, and now, AI.

Tech companies don't need these ventures to be successful – they just need them to seem to be plausibly successful for long enough to keep the share price high until the next growth story heaves over the horizon. So long as Mister Market thinks tech is a "growth" sector and not a "mature" sector, tech bosses will be able to continue to pay for things with stock rather than cash, and their own stockholdings will continue to be valued at sky-high rates.

That's why AI is being crammed into absofuckinglutely everything. It's why the button you used to tap to start a new chat summons up an AI that takes seven taps to banish again – it's so tech companies can tell Wall Street that people are "using AI" which means that their companies are still part of a growth industry and thus entitled to gigantic price-to-earnings ratios:

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

The reality, of course, is that people hate AI. Telling people that your product is "AI enabled" makes them less likely to use it:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19368623.2024.2368040#d1e1096

People – who have had an infinitude of AI crammed down their throats – are already sick of AI. Policymakers and financiers – credulous dolts who fall for tech marketing hype every! fucking! time – are convinced that AI Is The Future. This presents a dilemma for tech companies, who research the hell out of how people actually use their products and thus must be extremely aware of how hated AI is, but whose leadership is desperate to show investors that they are about to experience explosive growth through the miracle of AI.

The reality is that AI is a very bad business. It has dogshit unit economics. Unlike all the successful tech of the 21st century, each generation of AI is more expensive to make, not cheaper. And unlike the most profitable tech services of this century, AI gets more costly to operate the more users it has.

You can be forgiven for not knowing this, though. As Ed Zitron points out in a long, excellent article about the credulity and impuissance of the tech press, the actual numbers suuuuuck:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/make-fun-of-them/

  • Microsoft

Spending: $80b in 2025

Projecting: $13b in 2025

Actually: $10b comes from Openai giving back compute credits Microsoft gave to Openai, bringing the true total to $3b.

  • Meta

Spending: $72b in 2025

Receiving: At most $600m in gross revenue from selling "smart" Raybans, which might not actually be loss-leaders, meaning it's possible that they're making less than $0.00.

  • Amazon

Spending: $100b in 2025

Projecting: $5b in revenue in 2025

  • Google

Spending: $75b in 2025

Projecting: They won't say, possibly zero.

As Zitron points out: this industry is projecting $327b in spending this year, with $18b in revenue and zero profits. For comparison: smart watches are a $32b/year industry.

Now, what about Openai? Well, they're one of Masoyoshi Son's special children, of a piece with Wework and Uber. Openai is projecting $12.7b in revenue this year, with losses of $14b. Add in a bunch of also-rans like Perplexity and Surge, and the revenue rises to $32.3b. But…if you chuck them in, you also get total expenditures of $370.8b.

These are by no means the only funny numbers in the AI industry. Take "Stargate," a data-center initiative with a price tag of $500b. Actual funds committed? $40b.

These are terrible numbers, but also, these are some genuinely impressive accounting gimmicks. They are certain to keep the bubble pumping for months or perhaps years, convincing gullible bosses to fire talented employees and replace them with bumbling chatbots that will linger for years or decades, the asbestos in the walls of our high-tech civilization.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Wil Wheaton’s Slashdot interview https://slashdot.org/story/05/06/27/0926218/wil-wheaton-strikes-back

#20yrsago Anti-DRM badges https://web.archive.org/web/20050701004506/http://nootropic.blogspot.com/2005/06/gallery-of-drm-related-antipixel.html

#15yrsago ACLU: America is riddled with politically motivated surveillance https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/Spyfiles_2_0.pdf

#15yrsago Toronto cops justify extreme G20 measures with display of LARPing props, weapons from unrelated busts https://web.archive.org/web/20100702002151/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/weapons-seized-in-g20-arrests-put-on-display/article1622761/

#15yrsago Copyright best practices for communications scholars https://web.archive.org/web/20100628005458/http://centerforsocialmedia.org/fair-use/related-materials/codes/code-best-practices-fair-use-scholarly-research-communication

#15yrsago G20 police used imaginary law to jail harass demonstrators and jailed protestors in dangerous and abusive “detention center” https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/29/g20-police-used-imaginary-law-to-jail-harass-demonstrators-and-jailed-protestors-in-dangerous-and-abusive-detention-center/

#15yrsago Canada repeating Britain’s dirty copyright legislation process https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jun/29/canada-copyright-digital-economy

#15yrsago London cops enforce imaginary law against brave, principled teenaged photographer https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/officers-claim-they-don-t-need-law-to-stop-photographer-taking-pictures-2012827.html

#15yrsago Globe and Mail journalist arrested and kettled at G20 Toronto https://web.archive.org/web/20100630110103/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/g8-g20/toronto/caught-in-the-storm-penned-in-at-queen-street/article1621255/

#15yrsago UK government hushed up internal analysis of anti-drug strategy to avoid ridicule https://transform-drugs.blogspot.com/2010/06/home-office-internal-document-reveals.html

#15yrsago My Twitter debate with Minister who introduced Canada’s DMCA https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/28/my-twitter-debate-with-minister-who-introduced-canadas-dmca/

#10yrsago Why I’m leaving London https://memex.craphound.com/2015/06/29/why-im-leaving-london/

#10yrsago Neal Stephenson on the story behind Seveneves http://www.bookotron.com/agony/audio/2015/2015-interviews/neal_stephenson-2015.mp3

#10yrsago Brian Wood’s Starve: get to your comic shop now! https://memex.craphound.com/2015/06/29/brian-woods-starve-get-to-your-comic-shop-now/

#10yrsago BBC’s list of pages de-indexed through Europe’s “right to be forgotten” https://www.bbc.co.uk/webarchive/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2Fblogs%2Finternet%2Fentries%2F1d765aa8-600b-4f32-b110-d02fbf7fd379

#5yrsago NYC housing lottery favors the least-needy https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#market-failure

#5yrsago Facebook and Trump collaborate on rule-rigging https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#fb-hearts-dt

#5yrsago How to break up Google https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#braygoog

#5yrsago Female Furies https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#apokolips-now

#5yrsago Bailouts should come with strings attached https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/28/kings-shilling/#tanstaafl

#1yrago The reason you can't buy a car is the same reason that your health insurer let hackers dox you https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/28/dealer-management-software/#antonin-scalia-stole-your-car

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:

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

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https://doctorow.medium.com/

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Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links


A carny barker waving his top-hat and selling tickets from a roll; his head has been replaced with the hostile red eye of HAL9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' The background is a magnified, halftoned detail from a US$100 bill.

How much (little) are the AI companies making? (permalink)

If there's one are where tech has shown a consistent aptitude for innovation, it's in accounting tricks that make money-losing companies appear wildly profitable. And AI is the greatest innovator of all (when it comes to accounting gimmicks).

Since the dotcom era, tech companies have boasted about giving stuff away but "making it up in volume," inventing an ever-sweatier collection of shell-games that let them hide the business's true profit and loss.

The all-time world champeen of this kind of finance fraud is Masayoshi Son, the founder of Softbank, who acts as the bagman for the Saudi royals' personal investments. Remember last decade when the tech press was all abuzz about "unicorns" – startups that were worth $1b? That was Son: he would take a startup like Wework, declare its brand to be worth $1b, invest an infinitesimal fraction of $1b in the company based on that valuation (sometimes with a rube co-investor) and declare the valuation to be "market-based." A whole string of garbage companies achieved unicornhood by means of this unbelievably stupid trick:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/27/voluntary-carbon-market/#trust-me

Of course, every finance bro is familiar with Stein's Law: "anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." Sure, the Saudi royals could be tapped to piss away $31b on Uber, losing $0.41 on every dollar for 13 years, but eventually they're going to turn off the money spigot and attempt to flog their shares to retail and institutional suckers. To make that work, they have to invent new accounting tricks, like when Uber "sold" its failing overseas ride-hailing businesses to international rivals in exchange for stock, then declared that these companies' illiquid stock had skyrocketed in value, tipping Uber into the black:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/05/a-lousy-taxi/#a-giant-asterisk

Even companies that are actually profitable (in the sense of bringing in more revenue than it costs to keep the business's lights on) love to juice their stats, and the worst offenders are the Big Tech companies, who reap a vast commercial reward from creating the illusion that they are continuing to grow, even after they've dominated their sector.

Take Google: once the company attained a 90% global search market-share, there were no more immediate prospects for growth. I mean, sure, they could raise a billion new humans to maturity and train them to be Google customers (e.g., the business plan for Google Classroom), but that takes more than a decade, and Google needed growth right away. So the company hatched a plan to make search worse, so that its existing users would have to search multiple times to get the information they sought, and each additional search would give Google another chance to show you an ad:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

But that was small potatoes. What Google – and the rest of the tech sector – needed was a massive growth story, a story about how their companies, worth trillions of dollars, could double or triple in size in the coming years. There's a kind of reflexive anti-capitalist critique that locates the drive to tell growth stories in ideology: "endless growth is the ideology of a tumor," right?

But spinning an endless growth story isn't merely ideological. It's a firmly materialistic undertaking. Companies that appear to be growing have market caps that are an order of magnitude larger than companies that are consisdered "mature" and at the end of their growth phase. For every dollar that Ford brings in, the market is willing to spend $8.60 on its stock. For every dollar Tesla brings in, the market is willing to spend $118 on its stock.

That means that when Tesla and Ford compete to buy something – like another company, or the labor of highly sought after technical specialists – Tesla has a nearly unbeatable advantage. Rather than raiding its precious cash reserves to fund its offer, Tesla can offer stock. Tesla can only spend as many dollars as it brings in through sales, but Tesla can make more stock, on demand, simply by typing numbers into a spreadsheet.

So when Tesla bids against Ford, Ford has to use dollars, and Tesla can use shares. And even if the acquisition target – a key employee or a startup that's on the acquisitions market – wants dollars instead of shares, Tesla can stake its shares as collateral for loans at a rate that's 1,463% better than the rate Ford gets when it collateralizes a loan based on its own equity:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/07/rah-rah-rasputin/#credulous-dolts

In other words, if you can tell a convincing growth story, it's much easier to grow. The corollary, though, is that when a growth company stops growing, when it becomes "mature," it experiences a massive sell-off of its stock, as its share price plummets to a tenth or less of the old "growth" valuation. That's why the biggest tech companies in the world have spent the past decade – the decade after they monopolized their sectors and conquered the world – pumping a series of progressively stupider bubbles: metaverse, cryptocurrency, and now, AI.

Tech companies don't need these ventures to be successful – they just need them to seem to be plausibly successful for long enough to keep the share price high until the next growth story heaves over the horizon. So long as Mister Market thinks tech is a "growth" sector and not a "mature" sector, tech bosses will be able to continue to pay for things with stock rather than cash, and their own stockholdings will continue to be valued at sky-high rates.

That's why AI is being crammed into absofuckingloutely everything. it's why the button you used to tap to start a new chat summons up an AI that takes seven taps to banish again – it's so tech companies can tell Wall Street that people are "using AI" which means that their companies are still part of a growth industry and thus entitled to gigantic price-to-earnings ratios:

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

The reality, of course, is that people hate AI. Telling people that your product is "AI enabled" makes less likely to use it:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19368623.2024.2368040#d1e1096

People – who have had an infinitude of AI crammed into down their throats – are already sick of AI. Policymakers and financiers – credulous dolts who fall for tech marketing hype every! fucking! time – are convinced that AI Is The Future. This presents a dilemma for tech companies, who research the hell out of how people actually use their products and thus must be extremely aware of how hated AI is, but whose leadership is desperate to show investors that they are about to experience explosive growth through the miracle of AI.

The reality is that AI is a very bad business. It has dogshit unit economics. Unlike all the successful tech of the 21st century, each generation of AI is more expensive to make, not cheaper. And unlike the most profitable tech services of this century, AI gets more costly to operate the more users it has.

You can be forgiven for not knowing this, though. As Ed Zitron points out in a long, excellent article about the credulity and impuissance of the tech press, the actual numbers suuuuuck:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/make-fun-of-them/

  • Microsoft

Spending: $80b in 2025

Projecting: $13b in 2025

Actually: $10b comes from Openai giving back compute credits Microsoft gave to Openai, bringing the true total to $3b.

  • Meta

Spending: $72b in 2025

Receiving: At most $600m in gross revenue from selling "smart" Raybans, which might not actually be loss-leaders, meaning it's possible that they're making less than $0.00.

  • Amazon

Spending: $100b in 2025

Projecting: $5b in revenue in 2025

  • Google

Spending: $75b in 2025

Projecting: They won't say, possibly zero.

As Zitron points out: this industry is projecting $327b in spending this year, with $18b in revenue and zero profits. For comparison: smart watches are a $32b/year industry.

Now, what about Openai? Well, they're one of Masoyoshi Son's special children, of a piece with Wework and Uber. Openai is projecting $12.7b in revenue this year, with losses of $14b. Add in a bunch of also-rans like Perplexity and Surge, and the revenue rises to $32.3b. But…if you chuck them in, you also get total exenditure of $370.8b.

These are by no means the only funny numbers in the AI industry. Take "Stargate," a data-center initiative with a price tag of $500b. Actual funds committed? $40b.

These are terrible numbers, but also, these are some genuinely impressive accounting gimmicks. They are certain to keep the bubble pumping for months or perhaps years, convincing gullible bosses to fire talented employees and replace them with bumbling chatbots that will linger for years or decades, the asbestos in the walls of our high-tech civilization.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Wil Wheaton’s Slashdot interview https://slashdot.org/story/05/06/27/0926218/wil-wheaton-strikes-back

#20yrsago Anti-DRM badges https://web.archive.org/web/20050701004506/http://nootropic.blogspot.com/2005/06/gallery-of-drm-related-antipixel.html

#15yrsago ACLU: America is riddled with politically motivated surveillance https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/Spyfiles_2_0.pdf

#15yrsago Toronto cops justify extreme G20 measures with display of LARPing props, weapons from unrelated busts https://web.archive.org/web/20100702002151/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/weapons-seized-in-g20-arrests-put-on-display/article1622761/

#15yrsago Copyright best practices for communications scholars https://web.archive.org/web/20100628005458/http://centerforsocialmedia.org/fair-use/related-materials/codes/code-best-practices-fair-use-scholarly-research-communication

#15yrsago G20 police used imaginary law to jail harass demonstrators and jailed protestors in dangerous and abusive “detention center” https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/29/g20-police-used-imaginary-law-to-jail-harass-demonstrators-and-jailed-protestors-in-dangerous-and-abusive-detention-center/

#15yrsago Canada repeating Britain’s dirty copyright legislation process https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jun/29/canada-copyright-digital-economy

#15yrsago London cops enforce imaginary law against brave, principled teenaged photographer https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/officers-claim-they-don-t-need-law-to-stop-photographer-taking-pictures-2012827.html

#15yrsago Globe and Mail journalist arrested and kettled at G20 Toronto https://web.archive.org/web/20100630110103/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/g8-g20/toronto/caught-in-the-storm-penned-in-at-queen-street/article1621255/

#15yrsago UK government hushed up internal analysis of anti-drug strategy to avoid ridicule https://transform-drugs.blogspot.com/2010/06/home-office-internal-document-reveals.html

#15yrsago My Twitter debate with Minister who introduced Canada’s DMCA https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/28/my-twitter-debate-with-minister-who-introduced-canadas-dmca/

#10yrsago Why I’m leaving London https://memex.craphound.com/2015/06/29/why-im-leaving-london/

#10yrsago Neal Stephenson on the story behind Seveneves http://www.bookotron.com/agony/audio/2015/2015-interviews/neal_stephenson-2015.mp3

#10yrsago Brian Wood’s Starve: get to your comic shop now! https://memex.craphound.com/2015/06/29/brian-woods-starve-get-to-your-comic-shop-now/

#10yrsago BBC’s list of pages de-indexed through Europe’s “right to be forgotten” https://www.bbc.co.uk/webarchive/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2Fblogs%2Finternet%2Fentries%2F1d765aa8-600b-4f32-b110-d02fbf7fd379

#5yrsago NYC housing lottery favors the least-needy https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#market-failure

#5yrsago Facebook and Trump collaborate on rule-rigging https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#fb-hearts-dt

#5yrsago How to break up Google https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#braygoog

#5yrsago Female Furies https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#apokolips-now

#5yrsago Bailouts should come with strings attached https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/28/kings-shilling/#tanstaafl

#1yrago The reason you can't buy a car is the same reason that your health insurer let hackers dox you https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/28/dealer-management-software/#antonin-scalia-stole-your-car

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:

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Publié le 28.06.2025 à 15:17

Pluralistic: Antitrust defies politics' law of gravity (28 Jun 2025)


Today's links


An inflatable pig balloon against a blue sky, bearing the Zohran for Mayor logo. The Chrysler Building sits to one side.

Antitrust defies politics' law of gravity (permalink)

In 2014, I read a political science paper that nearly convinced me to quit my lifelong career as an activist: "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens," published in Perspectives on Politics:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

The paper's authors are Martin Gilens, a UCLA professor of Public Policy; and Northwestern's Benjamin Page, a professor of Decision Making. Gilens and Page studied a representative sample of 1,779 policy issues, analyzing the effect that the preferences of different groups of people had on the outcome. They wanted to find out what drove policy: money, or popularity?

It's money. It's totally, utterly money. When billionaires want something, it literally doesn't matter how much the rest of us hate it, they're gonna get their way. When billionaires hate something, it doesn't matter how popular it is with the rest of us, we're not gonna get it. As Gilens and Page put it:

economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

I know the cynics out there are hollering "no duh" at their computers right now, but bear with me here. Gilens and Page's research shows that you and I have no voice in policy outcomes. Based on these findings, the only way we can change society is to try and woo oligarchs so they champion our cause. This reduces democracy to a competition to see who can pour the most honey into a plutocrat's ear. Mass mobilizations – millions of people in the streets – only matter to the extent that they bring a tear to a billionaire's eye.

This just shattered me. I've been haunted by it ever since. I've tried some tactical gambits based on this data, but honestly, I don't want to improve the world by swaying the ultra-rich. Mostly, I've spent the decade since I read the Gilens/Page paper working on mass mobilizations and mass opinion-influencing. I reasoned (or maybe rationalized) that while oligarchs were running the nation now, that was subject to change, and that was a change that I was sure wouldn't come from America's plutocrats committing mass class-suicide.

Then, something incredible happened. All this decade, a tide of antitrust vigor has swept the planet. The EU has passed big, muscular tech competition laws like the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, and has by God enforced them, and have patched the enforcement weaknesses in the GDPR. EU member-states – France, Germany, Spain – have passed their own big, ambitious national laws that go further than DSA/DMA. Even Ireland – a country that deliberately prostrated itself to US Big Tech – is getting in on the act, with the country's Social Media Czar railing against the "enshittification" of tech:

https://www.independent.ie/business/technology/chairman-of-irish-social-media-regulator-says-europe-should-not-be-seduced-by-mario-draghis-claims/a526530600.html

Not just the EU, of course. Australia and Canada have taken some big swings at Big Tech, and Canada is pressing ahead with its digital services tax of 3% for onshore earnings of tech companies with more than CAD20m in annual turnover, despite the fact that Trump has promised to end all trade talks with Canada in retaliation:

https://financialpost.com/technology/canadas-digital-services-tax-g7

Antitrust fever has swept both of the world's superpowers. Under Trump I, the DOJ and FTC brought key cases against Facebook and Google, and then Biden's antitrust enforcers went to town on all forms of monopoly, carrying on the Trump cases and reviving some of the law's most elegant weapons from a more civilized age, like the Robinson-Patman Act:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/01/ftc-sues-pepsico-rigging-soft-drink-competition

Admittedly, Trump's FTC and DOJ have carried on some of Biden's work, even as they've killed some of the Biden era's most important cases, and made a general Trumpian mockery of the idea that antitrust law is a tool for economic justice:

https://economicpopulist.substack.com/p/weekly-rewind-62725

Trump killing antitrust law is normal. That's what politics has been like for this whole century, and it's what politics is like in every other domain: billionaires get their way on climate, on labor, on whatever bullshit they get into their fool fucking heads:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2025/06/27/jeff-bezos-lauren-sanchez-married-wedding-venice/84349820007/

But it's a mistake to think that Trump killed antitrust enforcement in the USA out of a special conservative deference to millionaires and enthusiasm for corrosive and predatory monopolies. In the UK, four consecutive Conservative Prime Ministers presided over the best competition law enforcement in British history – and it was Labour's Keir Starmer who fired the head of the UK Competition and Markets Authority and replaced him with the ex-head of Amazon UK:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter

It is completely normal for both "progressive" and "conservative" parties to wield the entire apparatus of state to the benefit of powerful monopolists. The antitrust enforcement – in the US, the UK, the EU, Australia, Germany, France and Spain – are totally aberrant. And it's not just in these countries where political science's law of gravity reversed itself: there've been giant, brutal antitrust cases in Japan and South Korea, and China has passed aggressive tech antitrust laws that strike directly at the giant Chinese tech companies that Cold War 2.0 creeps insist are just branches of the Chinese Communist Party:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/07/backstabbed/#big-data-backstabbing

This is fucking wild.

This is water flowing uphill.

This is pigs flying.

This is hell freezing over.

There is no billionaire constituency for antimonopoly work. Oligarchs aren't funneling dark money to trustbuster orgs. Antimonopoly work strikes at the beating heart of the system that creates and sustains billionaires.

This is a political outcome that the people want, and that billionaires hate, and billionaires are losing.

How is this happening? Why is this happening? I don't know, exactly. I suspect that some of this is related to Stein's Law: "anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." Monopolists corrupt our political system, maim and impoverish workers, gouge their customers on enshittified, overpriced garbage. They are an existential threat to the survival of the human species.

The system is so broken and the mainstream of politics endlessly gaslights us, telling us that corrupt and degraded institutions are either just fine ("America Was Always Great" -H. Clinton) or need to be destroyed, rather than redeemed ("Delete CFPB" -E. Musk). People know that the system only caters to the whims of billionaires and tells the rest of us to eat shit. They hate the fucking system.

Over and over again, we've seen outbreaks of furious, joyous, uncompromising leftist activism: Occupy, Bernie 2016, Bernie 2020, George Floyd, the Women's March, No Kings, Climate Strikes, on and on. Over and over, liberal "centrists" have joined with the right to crush these movements.

Meanwhile, the right has only moved from strength to strength by offering a libidinal, furious promise of root-and-branch change. The only team that's promising radical change is the right. Parties like UK Labour and the Democrats offer austerity and genocide with slightly more polite aesthetics ("[If I'm elected], fundamentally nothing will change" -J. Biden).

I think that centrist suppression of the left has pushed 90 percent of the energy for major change into right wing nihilist movements, but the anti-corporate, anti-monopolist energy has not dissipated. It's formed a kind of invisible political wind that has filled the sails of these antimonopoly projects all over the world.

But anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. Zohran Mamdani just won the NYC Democratic mayoral primary election. That wasn't supposed to happen. The worst people on Earth showered the hereditary King of New York with so much money it was coming out of his fucking pores and he still ate shit. Guys who've got so much money they were able to get Columbia University to collude in shipping its students off to gulags for having the temerity to oppose genocide tried to do it to Mamdani and we kicked their teeth in.

The world is organized around the whims of billionaires, but it doesn't have to be. Most of us are not esoteric authoritarian freaks pining for a CEO of America who'll track us all using mandatory Fitbits and assign us jobs based on an AI's estimation of our cranial geometry. Those ideas are not popular. Now, it's true that this century has been defined by extremely unpopular ideas winning the day. But anything that can't go on eventually stops.

Sure, they smeared Jeremy Corbyn and replaced him with Austeritybot 3000, and Labour is collapsing as a result, and if an election were called today, Nigel Farage would sweep the board, assuming the PM's seat ahead of a Ba'ath Party style majority.

But on today's Trashfuture podcast, I learned about the leadership contest for the Green Party, in which genuinely progressive candidate, Zack Polanski, is running:

https://backzack.com/

Labour has walked away from voters. The Tories are in chaos. The Libdems permanently discredited themselves in the coalition government. The youthquake that buoyed up Corbyn was driven by a desperate hunger for change. The party grandees that purged Labour of everyone who wanted a better country have created a massive constituency that's up for grabs.

I'm desperate for change, too. I've joined the Greens, and I'll be voting for Polanski in the leadership race:

https://join.greenparty.org.uk/join-us/

(Image: Frank Vincentz, Petri Krohn, CC BY-SA 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Secret Congressional policy reports published https://web.archive.org/web/20050629020405/http://www.opencrs.com/

#20yrsago Brazil to US pharma co: slash AIDS drug prices or lose patent https://web.archive.org/web/20190918065156/https://www.ft.com/content/816699fe-e50a-11d9-95f3-00000e2511c8

#20yrsago Hilary Rosen: Killing Napster didn’t bring market control https://web.archive.org/web/20050629010724/http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/hilary-rosen/the-wisdom-of-the-court-_3259.html

#15yrsago Canadian cops’ history of agents provocateurs and the G20 https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/27/canadian-cops-history-of-agents-provocateurs-and-the-g20/

#15yrsago Stiglitz: spending cuts won’t cure recession https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/osborne-s-first-budget-it-s-wrong-wrong-wrong-2011501.html

#5yrsago Snowden on tech's Oppenheimers https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/27/belated-oppenheimers/#oppenheimers

#5yrsago Santa Cruz bans predictive policing https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/27/belated-oppenheimers/#banana-slugs

#1yrago Copyright takedowns are a cautionary tale that few are heeding https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/27/nuke-first/#ask-questions-never

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:

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Publié le 27.06.2025 à 16:40

Pluralistic: Bill Griffith's 'Three Rocks' (27 Jun 2025)


Today's links


The Abrams' Books cover for Bill Griffith's 'Three Rocks.'

Bill Griffith's 'Three Rocks' (permalink)

What better format for a biography of Ernie Bushmiller, creator of the daily Nancy strip, than a graphic novel? And who better to write and draw it than Bill Griffith, creator of Zippy the Pinhead, a long-running and famously surreal daily strip?

https://store.abramsbooks.com/products/three-rocks

Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller, the Man Who Created Nancy is more than a biography, though. Griffith is carrying on the work of Scott McCloud, whose definitive Understanding Comics used the graphic novel form to explain the significance and method of sequential art, singling out Nancy for special praise:

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

For Griffith – and a legion of comics legends who worship Bushmiller – the story of Bushmiller's life and the story of Nancy and its groundbreaking methodology are inseparable. We watch as Bushmiller starts out as a teenaged dropout copy-boy in the bullpen at a giant news syndicate, running errands for the paper's publisher and, eventually, its cartoonists. Bushmiller burns to get into the funnies, and he's got a good head for gags, but his draftsmanship needs work. He secretly enrolls in a life-drawing class, which does him little good, but he applies himself and applies himself, and eventually is given his big break: taking over Fritzi Ritz, a daily cartoon serial about a sexy flapper.

Bushmiller's run on Fritzi Ritz outlasts flappers, and, as he struggles to keep the character relevant amidst changing times, he eventually hits on a "Cousin Oliver" gambit: adding in a sassy niece named Nancy:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CousinOliver

Cousin Oliverae are rarely successful, but Nancy turned out to be the exception that proved the rule. Nancy took over the strip, and "Aunt Fritzi" receded in importance, taking a backstage to Nancy and her pal Sluggo.

As Nancy came into her own, so did Bushmiller. Bushmiller combined an impeccable sense of the gag (he started with his punchline panel – "the snapper" – and worked backwards) with a visual style that he refined to something so pure and refined that it inspired generations of comics creators.

Bushmiller was the master of simplifying, and then simplifying more, and then simplifying even more. Visually, his characters and his furniture (especially the iconic "three rocks" of the title) are refined to something so iconic they're practically ideograms. While some accused Bushmiller of re-using a small set of drawings, Griffith makes the convincing case that Bushmiller perfected a small number of icons, and repeated them as motifs. Indeed, these characters are so perfect and finely tuned that when Griffith inserts Nancy, Sluggo and other characters from Bushmillerville into his graphic novel, he doesn't re-draw them – rather, Griffith carefully crops these characters out and collages them into his own panels. Every image of Nancy in this book was drawn by Ernie Bushmiller.

This pared-down, severely restricted graphic style provides the perfect toolkit for the Bushmiller gag, which, at its best, is profoundly surrealistic, often playing on the form of the comic itself (for example, when Nancy asks Sluggo to give her a push on a bicycle, Sluggo obliges by stepping out of the comic and tipping the final panel at 45 degrees, sending Nancy rolling "downhill"). These meta-humorous gags give rise to Griffith's key insight: that Nancy isn't a comic about what it's like to be a kid – it's a comic about what it's like to be a cartoon character.

This is such a good organizing principle for understanding Nancy's staying power and influence. Other cartoons like Peanuts are nominally about being a kid, but are actually about being a small adult. Nancy, meanwhile, shares a lineage with, say, Animaniacs and Bugs Bunny and Groucho Marx (who, we learn, wore out his welcome with Bushmiller and his wife by relentlessly hitting on the latter at celebrity dinners at the Brown Derby). It's no wonder that Scott McCloud, the prophet-explainer of sequential art, loves Nancy: she practically invented stepping outside the frame and making us think about how these pictures and words worked, and why, and she made us laugh the whole time.

Bushmiller had a unique mind. He was a workaholic, turning out a 7-day/week strip for decades, even as he shouldered a variety of side-projects and other strips. Once he started making money, he moved to the Connecticut suburbs where he could have a work-room big enough to accommodate four drafting boards, so he could work on four strips at once. He would sometimes get a year ahead of schedule with his publishers. It was only very late in his life that Bushmiller took on any kind of assistants, and even then, he obsessively supervised them, counting the spikes in every depiction of Nancy's hair to ensure that they fell within the regulation 69-107 spikes.

Despite his massive following among artists, hipsters and intellectuals, Bushmiller insisted that the secret to his success was in his devotion to simplicity and the universality it brought. Bushmiller's editorial process seems to have consisted almost entirely of his removing words, images and lines from his panels, paring them down further and further until they became, essentially, narrated pictograms – almost funny Ikea assembly instructions.

Griffith – a daily cartoonist workaholic who has been turning out Zippy strips since 1971 – bursts with admiration for Bushmiller, and this biography saves a lot of space for Bushmiller himself, with long sections given over to reproductions of some of Nancy's best outings. Griffith has had more than half a century to think about what makes surreal comic-strips tick, and, like McCloud, he pours these out on the page, but largely confines himself to illustrating his insights with Bushmiller strips and panels. The result is a heady volume: a great biography and a great book of literary criticism and comic arts theory.

Nancy is still around, written and drawn by the amazing Olivia Jaimes, whose first collection of new Nancy comics I called "incredibly, fantastically, impossibly great":

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/17/the-first-book-collecting-the-new-nancy-comic-is-incredibly-fantastically-impossibly-great/

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Adventurer’s Club from Walt Disney World recreated in painstaking detail with Half-Life engine https://insidethemagic.net/2010/06/walt-disney-worlds-adventurers-club-virtually-recreated-for-fans-to-once-again-explore/

#15yrsago Texas GOP comes out against oral sex, the UN, and the Supreme Court https://web.archive.org/web/20100626003418/https://www.nydailynews.com/news/2010/06/22/2010-06-22_texas_gop_platform_criminalize_gay_marriage_and_ban_sodomy_outlaw_strip_clubs_an.html

#15yrsago Monkey-Pirate-Robot-Ninja-Zombie: Rock Paper Scissors 9.0 https://web.archive.org/web/20100625003931/http://markarayner.com/blog/archives/1613

#10yrsago Harry Reid tells BLM’s Burning Man squad to suck it up https://web.archive.org/web/20150628195105/http://hoh.rollcall.com/harry-reid-to-burning-man-rescue/

#10yrsago Supreme Court upholds marriage equality! https://www.theguardian.com/law/live/2015/jun/26/supreme-court-rules-same-sex-marriage

#10yrsago Wil Wheaton on depression https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6ACzT6PCDw

#10yrsago 2.5 million data points show: America’s ISPs suck, and AT&T sucks worst https://www.measurementlab.net/blog/interconnection_and_measurement_update/

#5yrsago Microcontent guidelines for 2020 https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/26/police-riots/#nielsen-98

#5yrsago "Violent protests" vs "violent police" https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/26/police-riots/#police-riot

#5yrsago Sympathy for the mask-shy https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/26/police-riots/#harm-reduction

#5yrsago Let's get rid of nursing homes https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/26/police-riots/#nursing-homes

#5yrsago Splash Mountain to purge Song of the South https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/26/police-riots/#minstrelsy

#5yrsago Copyright keeps police use-of-force training a secret https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/26/police-riots/#post-due

#1yrago Cleantech has an enshittification problem https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/26/unplanned-obsolescence/#better-micetraps

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:

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Publié le 26.06.2025 à 19:25

Pluralistic: Surveillance is inequality's stabilizer (26 Jun 2025)


Today's links


A set of antique brass scales. In one is the staring red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' In the other is a chibi guillotine character. In the foreground are the backs of a crowd of Victorian onlookers. The background is a tangled forest of Trump's hair.

Surveillance is inequality's stabilizer (permalink)

The "dictator's dilemma" pits a dictator's desire to create social stability by censoring public communications in order to prevent the spread of anti-regime messages with the dictator's need to know whether powerful elites are becoming restless and plotting a coup:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/26/dictators-dilemma/#garbage-in-garbage-out-garbage-back-in

Closely related to the dictator's dilemma is "authoritarian blindness," where an autocrat's censorship regime keeps them from finding out about important, socially destabilizing facts on the ground, like whether a corrupt local official is comporting themself so badly that the people are ready to take to the streets:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/24/pluralist-your-daily-link-dose-24-feb-2020/#thatswhatxisaid

The modern Chinese state has done more to skillfully navigate the twin hazards of the dictator's dilemma and authoritarian blindness than any other regime in history. Take Xi Jinping's 2012-2015 anticorruption purge, which helped him secure another ten year term as Party Secretary. Xi targeted legitimately corrupt officials in this sweeping purge, but – crucially – he only targeted corrupt officials in the power-base of his rivals for Party leader, while leaving corrupt officials in his own power base unscathed:

https://web.archive.org/web/20181222163946/https://peterlorentzen.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Lorentzen-Lu-Crackdown-Nov-2018-Posted-Version.pdf

How did Xi accomplish this feat? Through intense, fine-grained surveillance, another area in which modern China excels. Chinese online surveillance is often paired with censorship, both petty (banning Winnie the Pooh, whom Xi is often mocked for resembling) and substantial (getting Apple to modify Airdrop for every user in the world in order to prevent the spread of anti-regime messages before a key Party leadership contest).

But there are a lot of instances where China spies on its people but doesn't censor them, even if they are expressing dissatisfaction with the government. Chinese censors allow a surprising amount of complaint about official incompetence, overreach and corruption, but they completely suppress any calls for mobilization to address these complaints. You can be as angry as you want with the government online, but you can't call for protests to do something about it:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1251722

This makes perfect sense in the context of "authoritarian blindness": by allowing online complaint, an autocrat can locate the hot-spots where things are reaching a boiling-over point, and by blocking public manifestations, the autocrat can prevent the public from turning their failings into a flashpoint that endangers the autocracy.

In other words, autocrats can reserve to themselves the power to decide how to defuse public anger: they can suppress it, using surveillance data about the people who led the online debate about official failures to figure out who to intimidate, arrest, or disappear. Or they can address it through measures like firing corrupt local officials or funding local social programs (toxic waste cleanups, smokestack regulation, building schools and hospitals, etc) that make people feel better about their government.

Autocracy is an inherently unstable social situation. No society can deliver everything that everyone in it desires: if you tear down existing low-density housing and build apartment blocks to decrease a housing shortage, you'll delight people who are un- or under-housed, and you'll infuriate people who are happily housed under the status quo. In every society, there's always someone getting their way at the expense of someone else.

Obviously, widespread unhappiness is inherently socially destabilizing. After all, no society can police every action of every person. From littering to parking in disabled parking spots, from paying your taxes to washing your hands before serving food, a society relies primarily on people following the rules even though they face little to no risk of being punished for breaking them. The easiest way to get people to follow the rules is to foster a sense of the rules' legitimacy: people may not agree with or understand the rationale for a rule, but if they view the process by which the rule was decided on as a legitimate one, then they may follow it anyway.

This legitimacy is a source of social stability. Sure, your candidate might lose the election, or the government might enact a policy you hate, but if you think the election was fair and you believe that you can change the policy through democratic means, then you will be on the side of preserving the system, rather than overturning it.

A democracy's claim to legitimacy lies in its popular mandate: "Sure, I don't like this decision, but it was fairly made." By contrast, a dictator's legitimacy comes from their claims to wisdom: "Sure, I don't like this decision, but the Supreme Generalissimo is the smartest man in history, and he says it was the right call."

You can see how this is a brittle arrangement, even if the dictator is a skilled autocrat who makes generally great decisions: even a great decision is going to have winners and losers, and it might be hard to convince the losers that they keep losing because they deserve to lose. And that's the best outcome, where an autocrat is right. But what about when the autocrat is wrong? What about when the autocrat makes a bunch of decisions that make nearly everyone consistently worse off, either because the autocrat is a fool, or because they are greedy and are stealing everything that isn't nailed down?

Every society needs stabilizers, but autocracies need more stabilizers than democracies, because the story about why you, personally, are getting screwed is a lot less convincing in an autocracy ("The autocrat is right and you are wrong, suck it up") than it is in a democracy ("This was the fairest compromise possible, and if it wasn't, we need to elect someone new so it changes").

The Snowden revelations taught us that there is no distinction between commercial surveillance and government surveillance. Governments spy, sure, but the most effective way for governments to spy on us is by raiding the data troves assembled by technology companies (for one thing, these troves are assembled at our own expense – we foot the bill for this spying whenever we send money to a phone or tech company). The tech companies were willing participants in this process: the original Snowden leak, about the "PRISM" program, showed how tech companies made millions of dollars by siphoning off user data to the NSA on demand:

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

It was only later that we learned about another NSA program, "Upstream," through which the NSA was wiretapping the tech companies' data-centers, acquiring all of their user data, and then requesting the data that interested them through PRISM, as a form of "parallel construction," which is when an agency learns a fact through a secret system, and then uses a less-secret system to acquire the same fact, in order to maintain the secrecy of the first system:

https://www.eff.org/pages/upstream-prism

Upstream really pissed off the tech companies. After all, they'd been dutifully rolling over and handing out their users' data in violation of US law, risking their businesses to help the NSA do mass spying, and the NSA paid them back by secretly spying on the tech companies themselves! That's a hell of a way to say thank you to your co-conspirators. After Upstream, the tech companies finally started encrypting the links between their data-centers, which made Upstream-style collection infinitely harder:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/yahoo-will-encrypt-between-data-centers-use-ssl-for-all-sites/

But that hardly ended the mass surveillance private-public partnership. Congress continued to do nothing about privacy (the last federal consumer privacy law Congress gave Americans is 1988's Video Privacy Protection Act, which bans video store clerks from telling newspapers about the VHS cassettes you take home) (we used to be a country). That meant that tech companies could collect our data will-ye or nill-ye, and that data brokers could buy and sell that data without any oversight or limitation:

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

There's many reasons that Congress failed to act on privacy. Obviously, they face immense pressure from lobbyists for the commercial surveillance industry – but they also face covert and powerful pressure from public safety agencies, cops, and spies, who rely on private sector data as a source of off-the-books, warrantless, ubiquitous surveillance.

Why does America need so much spying? Well, because America has always been imperfectly democratic, from its inception as a enslaving nation where millions of people were denied both the ballot and personhood; and as a patriarchal nation where half of the remaining people were also denied the franchise; and as a colonialist nation where an entire culture of people had been subject to genocide, land theft, and systematic oppression. This is an obviously unstable arrangement. Whether in chains, on a reservation, or under the thumb of a husband or father, there were plenty of Americans who had no reason to buy into the system, accept its legitimacy, or follow its rules. To keep the system intact, it wasn't enough to terrorize these populations – America's rulers had to know where to inflict terror, which is to say, where order was closest to collapsing.

Some of America's first spies were private sector union-busters, the Pinkerton agency, who served as a private spy army for bosses who wanted to find the leverage points in the worker uprisings that swept the country. The Pinkertons' pitch was that it was cheaper to pay them to figure out who the most important union leaders were and target them for violence, kidnapping, and killing than it was to give all your workers a raise.

This is an important aspect of the surveillance project. Spying is part of a broader class of activities called "guard labor" – anything you might pay someone to do that results in fewer guillotines being built on your lawn. Guard labor can be paying someone to build a wall around your estate or neighborhood. It can be paying security guards to patrol the wall. It can be paying for CCTV operators, or drone operators. It can be paying for surveillance, too.

Guard labor isn't free. The pitch for guard labor is that it is a cheaper way to get social stability than the alternative: building schools and hospitals, paying a living wage, lowering prices, etc. It follows that when you make guard labor cheaper, you can build fewer schools and hospitals, pay lower wages, and raise prices more, and buy more guard labor to counter the destabilizing effect of these policies, and still come out ahead.

American politics has been growing ever more unstable since the 1970s, when the oil crisis gave way to the Reagan revolution and its raft of pro-oligarch, anti-human policies. Since then, we've seen an unbroken trend to wage stagnation and widening inequality. As a new American oligarch class emerged, they gained near-total control over the levers of power. In a now-famous 2014 paper, political scientists reviewed 1,779 policy fights and found that the only time these cashed out in a way that reflected popular will is when elites favored them, too. When elites objected to something, it literally didn't matter how popular it was with everyone else, it just didn't happen:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

It's pretty hard to make the case that the system is legitimate when it only does things that rich people want, and never does things the vast majority of people want when these conflict with rich peoples' desires. Some of these outcomes are merely disgusting and immoral, like abetting genocide in Gaza, but more frequently, the policies elites favor are ones that make the rich richer: climate inaction, blocking Medicare for All, smashing unions, dismantling anti-corruption and campaign finance laws.

I don't think it's a coincidence that America's democracy has become significantly less democratic at the same time that mass surveillance has grown. Mass surveillance makes guard labor much cheaper, which means that the rich can make their lives better at all of our expense and still afford the amount of guard labor it takes to keep the guillotines at bay.

Cheap guard labor also allows the rich to strike devil's bargains that would otherwise be instantaneously destabilizing. For example, the second Trump election required an alliance between the tiny minority of ultra-rich with the much larger minority of virulent racists who were promised the realization of their psychotic fantasy of masked, armed goons snatching brown people off the streets and sending them to offshore slave labor camps. That alliance might be a good way to elect a president who'll dismantle anticorruption law and slash taxes, but it won't do you much good if the resulting ethnic cleansing terror provokes a popular uprising. But what if ICE can rely on Predator drones and cell-site simulators to track the identities of everyone who comes out to a protest:

https://www.wired.com/story/cbp-predator-drone-flights-la-protests/

What if ICE can buy off-the-shelf facial recognition tools and use them to identify people who are brave enough to step between snatch-squads and their neighbors?

https://www.404media.co/ice-is-using-a-new-facial-recognition-app-to-identify-people-leaked-emails-show/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter

Each advance in surveillance tech makes worse forms of oppression, misgovernance and corruption possible, by making it cheaper to counter the destabilizing effect of destroying the lives of the populace, through identifying the bravest, angriest, and most effective opposition figures so they can be targeted for harassment, violence, arrest, or kidnapping.

America's private sector surveillance industry has always served as a means of identifying and punishing people who fought for a better country. The first credit reporting bureau was the Retail Credit Company, which used a network of spies and paid informants to identify "race mixers," queers, union organizers and leftists so that banks could deny them credit, landlords could deny them housing, and employers could deny them jobs:

https://jacobin.com/2017/09/equifax-retail-credit-company-discrimination-loans/

Retail Credit continued to do this until 1975, when, finally, popular opinion turned against the company, so it changed its name…

…to Equifax.

Today, Equifax is joined by a whole industry of elite enforcers who use spying, legal harassments, mercenaries and troll armies to offset the socially destabilizing effects of the wealthy's misrule:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/launderers-enforcers-bagmen/#procurers

But despite centuries of American mass surveillance, America's oligarchs keep finding themselves in the midst of great existential crises. That's because guard labor – even surveillance-supercharged guard labor – is no substitute for policies that make the country better off. Oligarchs may want to tend the nation like a shepherd tends its flock, leaving enough lambs around to grow next year's wool. But they're all competing with one another, and they understand that the sheep they spare will like as not end up on a rival's dinner table. Under those circumstances, every oligarch ends up in a race to see who can turn us into lambchops first.

This is the dictator's dilemma, American style. The rich always overestimate how much social stability their guard labor has bought them, and they're easy marks for any creepy, malodorous troll with a barn full of machine-gun equipped drones:

https://twitter.com/postoctobrist/status/1909853731559973094

They accumulate mounting democratic debts, as destabilizing rage builds in the public, erupting in the Civil War, in the summer of 68, in the Battle of Seattle, in the Rodney King uprising, in the George Floyd protests, the Los Angeles rebellion. They think they can spy their way into a country where they have everything and we have nothing, and we like it (or at least, never dare complain about it).

They're wrong.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Adventurer’s Club from Walt Disney World recreated in painstaking detail with Half-Life engine https://insidethemagic.net/2010/06/walt-disney-worlds-adventurers-club-virtually-recreated-for-fans-to-once-again-explore/

#15yrsago Texas GOP comes out against oral sex, the UN, and the Supreme Court https://web.archive.org/web/20100626003418/https://www.nydailynews.com/news/2010/06/22/2010-06-22_texas_gop_platform_criminalize_gay_marriage_and_ban_sodomy_outlaw_strip_clubs_an.html

#15yrsago Monkey-Pirate-Robot-Ninja-Zombie: Rock Paper Scissors 9.0 https://web.archive.org/web/20100625003931/http://markarayner.com/blog/archives/1613

#10yrsago Harry Reid tells BLM’s Burning Man squad to suck it up https://web.archive.org/web/20150628195105/http://hoh.rollcall.com/harry-reid-to-burning-man-rescue/

#10yrsago Supreme Court upholds marriage equality! https://www.theguardian.com/law/live/2015/jun/26/supreme-court-rules-same-sex-marriage

#10yrsago Wil Wheaton on depression https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6ACzT6PCDw

#10yrsago 2.5 million data points show: America’s ISPs suck, and AT&T sucks worst https://www.measurementlab.net/blog/interconnection_and_measurement_update/

#5yrsago Microcontent guidelines for 2020 https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/26/police-riots/#nielsen-98

#5yrsago "Violent protests" vs "violent police" https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/26/police-riots/#police-riot

#5yrsago Sympathy for the mask-shy https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/26/police-riots/#harm-reduction

#5yrsago Let's get rid of nursing homes https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/26/police-riots/#nursing-homes

#5yrsago Splash Mountain to purge Song of the South https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/26/police-riots/#minstrelsy

#5yrsago Copyright keeps police use-of-force training a secret https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/26/police-riots/#post-due

#1yrago Cleantech has an enshittification problem https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/26/unplanned-obsolescence/#better-micetraps

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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Recent appearances (permalink)


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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 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


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ISSN: 3066-764X

Publié le 25.06.2025 à 19:13

Pluralistic: What's a "public internet?" (25 Jun 2025)


Today's links


The EU flag, with a cluster of blue-tinted fiber optics in its background.

What's a "public internet?" (permalink)

The "Eurostack" is a (long overdue) project to publicly fund a European "stack" of technology that is independent from American Big Tech (as well as other powers' technology that has less hold in Europe, such as Chinese and Russian tech):

https://www.euro-stack.info/

But "technological soveriegnty" is a slippery and easily abused concept. Policies like "national firewalls" and "data localization" (where data on a country's population need to be kept on onshore servers) can be a means to different ends. Data localization is important if you want to keep an American company from funneling every digital fact about everyone in your country to the NSA. But it's also a way to make sure that your secret police can lay hands on population-scale data about anyone they might want to kidnap and torture:

https://doctorow.medium.com/theyre-still-trying-to-ban-cryptography-33aa668dc602

At its worst, "technological sovereignty" is a path to a shattered internet with a million dysfunctional borders that serve as checkpoints where thuggish customs inspectors can stop you from availing yourself of privacy-preserving technology and prevent you from communicating with exiled dissidents and diasporas.

But at its best, "technological sovereignty" is a way to create world-girding technology that can act as an impartial substrate on which all manner of domestic and international activities can play out, from a group of friends organizing a games night, to scientists organizing a symposium, to international volunteer corps organizing aid after a flood.

In other words, "technological sovereignty" can be a way to create a public internet that the whole public controls – not just governments, but also people, individuals who can exercise their own technological self-determination, controlling crucial aspects of their own technology usage, like "who will see this thing I'm saying?" and "whose communications will I see, and which ones can I block?"

A "public internet" isn't the same thing as "an internet that is operated by your government," but you can't get a public internet without government involvement, including funding, regulation, oversight and direct contributions.

Here's an example of different ways that governments can involve themselves in the management of one part of the internet, and the different ways in which this will create more or less "public" internet services: fiber optic lines.

Fiber is the platinum standard for internet service delivery. Nothing else comes even close to it. A plastic tube under the road that is stuffed with fiber optic strands can deliver billions of times more data than copper wires or any form of wireless, including satellite constellations like Starlink:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/30/fight-for-44/#slowpokes

(Starlink is the most antifuturistic technology imaginable – a vision of a global internet that gets slower and less reliable as more people sign up for it. It makes the dotcom joke of "we lose money on every sale but make it up in volume" look positively bankable.)

The private sector cannot deliver fiber. There's no economical way for a private entity to secure the rights of way to tear up every street in every city, to run wires into every basement or roof, to put poles on every street corner. Same goes for getting the rights of way to string fiber between city limits across unincorporated county land, or across the long hauls that cross national and provincial or state borders.

Fiber itself is cheap like borscht – it's literally made out of sand – but clearing the thicket of property rights and political boundaries needed to get wire everywhere is a feat that can only be accomplished through government intervention.

Fiber's opponents rarely acknowledge this. They claim, instead, that the physical act of stringing wires through space is somehow transcendentally hard, despite the fact that we've been doing this with phone lines and power cables for more than a century, through the busiest, densest cities and across the loneliest stretches of farmland. Wiring up a country is not the lost art of a fallen civilization, like building pyramids without power-tools or embalming pharoahs. It's something that even the poorest counties in America can manage, bringing fiber across forbidding mountain passes on the back of a mule named "Ole Bub":

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-one-traffic-light-town-with-some-of-the-fastest-internet-in-the-us

When governments apply themselves to fiber provision, you get fiber. Don't take my word for it – ask Utah, a bastion of conservative, small-government orthodoxy, where 21 cities now have blazing fast 10gb internet service thanks to a public initiative called (appropriately enough) "Utopia":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/16/symmetrical-10gb-for-119/#utopia

So government has to be involved in fiber, but how should they involve themselves in it? One model – the worst one – is for the government to intervene on behalf of a single company, creating the rights of way for that company to lay fiber in the ground or string it from poles. The company then owns the network, even though the fiber and the poles were the cheapest part of the system, worth an unmeasurably infinitesimal fraction of the value of all those rights of way.

In the worst of the worst, the company that owns this network can do anything they want with its fiber. They can deny coverage to customers, or charge thousands of dollars to connect each new homes to the system. They can gouge on monthly costs, starve their customer service departments or replace them with mindless AI chatbots. They can skimp on maintenance and keep you waiting for days or weeks when your internet goes out. They can lard your bill with junk fees, or force you to accept pointless services like landlines and cable TV as a condition of getting the internet.

They can also play favorites with local businesses: maybe they give great service to every Domino's pizza place at knock-down rates, and make up for it by charging extra to independent pizza parlors that want to accept internet orders and stream big sports matches on the TV over the bar.

They can violate Net Neutrality, slowing down your connection to sites unless their owners agree to pay bribes for "premium carriage." They can censor your internet any way they see fit. Remember, corporations – unlike governments – are not bound by the First Amendment, which means that when a corporation is your ISP, they can censor anything they feel like:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/15/useful-idiotsuseful-idiots/#unrequited-love

Governments can improve on this situation by regulating a monopoly fiber company. They can require the company to assume a "universal service" mandate, meaning they must connect any home or business that wants it at a set rate. Governments can ban junk fees, set minimum standards for customer service and repair turnarounds, and demand neutral carriage. All of this can improve things, though its a lot of work to administer, and the city government may lack the resources and technical expertise to investigate every claim of corporate malfeasance, and to perform the technical analysis to evaluate corporate excuses for slow connections and bungled repairs.

That's the worst model: governments clear the way for a private monopolist to set up your internet, offering them a literally priceless subsidy in the form of rights of way, and then, maybe, try to keep them honest.

Here's the other extreme: the government puts in the fiber itself, running conduit under all the streets (either with its own crews or with contract crews) and threading a fiber optic through a wall of your choice, terminating it with a box you can plug your wifi router into. The government builds a data-center with all the necessary switches for providing service to you and your neighbors, and hires people to offer you internet service at a reasonable price and with reasonable service guarantees.

This is a pretty good model! Over 750 towns and cities – mostly conservative towns in red states – have this model, and they're almost the only people in America who consistently describe themselves as happy with their internet service:

https://ilsr.org/articles/municipal-broadband-skyrocket-as-alternative-to-private-models/

(They are joined in their satisfaction by a smattering of towns served by companies like Ting, who bought out local cable companies and used their rights of way to bring fiber to households.)

This is a model that works very well, but can fail very badly. Municipal governments can be pretty darned kooky, as five years of MAGA takeovers of school boards, library boards and town councils have shown, to say nothing of wildly corrupt big-city monsters like Eric Adams (ten quintillion congratulations to Zohran Mamdani!). If there's one thing I've learned from the brilliant No Gods No Mayors podcast, it's that mayors are the weirdest people alive:

https://www.patreon.com/collection/869728?view=condensed

Remember: Sarah Palin got her start in politics as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska. Do you want to have to rely on Sarah Palin for your internet service?

https://www.patreon.com/posts/119567308?collection=869728

How about Rob Ford? Do you want the crack mayor answering your tech support calls? I didn't think so:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/rob-ford-part-1-111985831

But that's OK! A public fiber network doesn't have to be one in which the government is your only choice for ISP. In addition to laying fiber and building a data-center and operating a municipal ISP, governments can also do something called "essential facilities sharing":

https://transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Common_Carrier/Orders/1999/fcc99238.pdf

Governments all over the world did this in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and some do it still. Under an essential facilities system, the big phone company (BT in the UK, Bell in Canada, AT&T and the Baby Bells in the USA) were required to rent space to their competitors in their data centers. Anyone who wants to set up an ISP can install their own switching gear at a telephone company central office and provide service to any business or household in the country.

If the government lays fiber in your town, they can both operate a municipal fiber ISP and allow anyone else to set up their own ISP, renting them shelf-space at the data-center. That means that the town college can offer internet to all its faculty and students (not just the ones who live in campus housing), and your co-op can offer internet service to its members. Small businesses can offer specialized internet, and so can informal groups of friends. So can big companies. In this model, everyone is guaranteed both the right to get internet access and the right to provide internet access. It's a great system, and it means that when Mayor Sarah Palin decides to cut off your internet, you don't need to sue the city – you can just sign up with someone else, over the same fiber lines.

That's where essential facilities sharing starts, but that's not where it needs to stop. When the government puts conduit (plastic tubes) in the ground for fiber, they can leave space for more fiber to fished through, and rent space in the conduit itself. That means that an ISP that wants to set up its own data center can run physically separate lines to its subscribers. It means that a university can do a point-to-point connection between a remote scientific instrument like a radio telescope and the campus data-center. A business can run its own lines between branch offices, and a movie studio can run dedicated lines from remote sound-stages to the edit suites at its main facility.

This is a truly public internet service – one where there is a publicly owned ISP, but also where public infrastructure allows for lots of different kinds of entities to provide internet access. It's insulated from the risks of getting your tech support from city hall, but it also allows good local governments to provide best-in-class service to everyone in town, something that local governments have a pretty great track record with.

The Eurostack project isn't necessarily about fiber, though. Right now, Europeans are thinking about technological sovereignty through the lens of software and services. That's fair enough, though it does require some rethinking of the global fiber system, which has been designed so that the US government can spy on and disconnect every other country in the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties

Just as with the example of fiber, there are a lot of ways the EU and member states could achieve "technological sovereignty." They could just procure data-centers, server software, and the operation of social media, cloud hosting, mobile OSes, office software, and other components of Europeans' digital lives from the private sector – sort of like asking a commercial operator to run your town's internet service.

The EU has pretty advanced procurement rules, designed to allow European governments to buy from the private sector while minimizing corruption and kickbacks. For example, there's a rule that the lowest priced bid that conforms to all standards needs to win the contract. This sounds good (and it is, in many cases) but it's how Newag keeps selling trains in Poland, even after they were caught boobytrapping their trains so they would immobilize themselves if the operator took them for independent maintanance:

https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-we-ve-not-been-trained-for-this-life-after-the-newag-drm-disclosure

The EU doesn't have to use public-private partnerships to build the Eurostack. They could do it all themselves. The EU and/or member states could operate public data centers. They could develop their own social media platforms, mobile OSes, and apps. They could be the equivalent of the municipal ISP that offers fast fiber to everyone in town.

As with public monopoly ISPs, this is a system that works well, but fails badly. If you think Elon Musk is a shitty social media boss, wait'll you see the content moderation policies of Viktor Orban – or Emmanuel Macron:

https://jacobin.com/2025/06/france-solidarity-urgence-palestine-repression

Publicly owned data centers could be great, but also, remember that EU governments have never given up on their project of killing working encryption so that their security services can spy on everyone. Austria's doing it right now!

https://www.yahoo.com/news/austrian-government-agrees-plan-allow-150831232.html

Ever since Snowden, EU governments have talked a good line about the importance of digital privacy. Remember Angela Merkel's high dudgeon about how her girlhood in the GDR gave her a special horror of NSA surveillance?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-24647268

Apparently, Merkel managed to get over her horror of mass surveillance and back total, unaccountable, continuous digital surveillance over all of Germany:

https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/06/24/germanys-new-surveillance-laws-raise-privacy-concerns

So there's good reasons to worry about having your data – and your apps – hosted in an EU cloud.

To create a European public internet, it's neither necessary nor desirable to have your digital life operated by the EU and its member states, nor by its private contractors. Instead, the EU could make Eurostack a provider of technological public goods.

For example, the EU could work to improve federated social media systems, like Mastodon and Bluesky. EU coders could contribute to the server and client software for both. They could participate in future versions of the standard. They could provide maintenance code in response to bug reports, and administer bug bounties. They could create tooling for server administrators, including moderation tools, both for Mastodon and for Bluesky, whose "composable moderation" system allows users to have the final say over their moderation choices. The EU could perform and/or fund labelling work to help with moderation.

The EU could also provide tooling to help server administrators stand up their own independent Mastodon and Bluesky servers. Bluesky needs a lot of work on this, still. Bluesky's CTO has got a critical piece of server infrastructure to run on a Raspberry Pi for a few euros per month:

https://justingarrison.com/blog/2024-12-02-run-a-bluesky-pds-from-home/

Previously, this required a whole data center and cost millions to operate, so this is great. But this now needs to be systematized, so that would-be Bluesky administrators can download a package and quickly replicate the feat.

Ultimately, the choice of Mastodon or Bluesky shouldn't matter all that much to Europeans. These standards can and should evolve to the point where everyone on Bluesky can talk to everyone on Mastodon and vice-versa, and where you can easily move your account from one server to another, or one service to another. The EU already oversees systems for account porting and roaming on mobile networks – they can contribute to the technical hurdles that need to be overcome to bring this to social media:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes

In addition to improving federated social media, the EU and its member states can and should host their own servers, both for their own official accounts and for public use. Giving the public a digital home is great, especially if anyone who chafes at the public system's rules can hop onto a server run by a co-op, a friend group, a small business or a giant corporation with just a couple clicks, without losing any of their data or connections.

This is essential facilities sharing for services. Combine it with public data centers and tooling for migrating servers from and to the public server to a private, or nonprofit, or co-op data-center, and you've got the equivalent of publicly available conduit, data-centers, and fiber.

In addition to providing code, services and hardware, the EU can continue to provide regulation to facilitate the public internet. They can expand the very limited interoperability mandates in the Digital Markets Act, forcing legacy social media companies like Meta and Twitter to stand up APIs so that when a European quits their service for new, federated media, they can stay in touch with the friends they left behind (think of it as Schengen for social media, with guaranteed free movement):

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

With the Digital Service Act, the EU has done a lot of work to protect Europeans from fraud, harassment and other online horribles. But a public internet also requires protections for service providers – safe harbors and carve outs that allow you to host your community's data and conversations without being dragged into controversies when your users get into flamewars with each other. If we make the people who run servers liable for their users' bad speech acts, then the only entities that will be able to afford the lawyers and compliance personnel will be giant American tech companies run by billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/04/kawaski-trawick/#230

A "public internet" isn't an internet that's run by the government: it's a system of publicly subsidized, publicly managed public goods that are designed to allow everyone to participate in both using and providing internet services. The Eurostack is a brilliant idea whose time arrived a decade ago. Digital sovereignty projects are among the most important responses to Trumpism, a necessary step to build an independent digital nervous system the rest of the world can use to treat the USA as damage and route around it. We can't afford to have "digital sovereignty" be "national firewalls 2.0" – we need a public internet, not 200+ national internets.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Tit of justice reinstated by Supreme Torturer Gonzales https://web.archive.org/web/20050910170445/http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-06-24-doj-statue_x.htm

#20yrsago What tomorrow’s Grokster Supreme Court ruling will mean https://web.archive.org/web/20050827114341/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/003742.php

#15yrsago Toronto’s secret ID law used to arrest G20 protestor https://web.archive.org/web/20100628022932/http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/torontog20summit/article/828372–man-arrested-and-left-in-wire-cage-under-new-g20-law

#10yrsago Why parents in Cincinnati camp out for 16 days to get a kindergarten spot https://medium.com/@hellogerard/waiting-for-kindergarten-62a14d4f1ce5

#10yrsago Stephen Harper ready to sign TPP and throw Tory rural base under the bus https://memex.craphound.com/2015/06/25/stephen-harper-ready-to-sign-tpp-and-throw-tory-rural-base-under-the-bus/

#10yrsago How the UK Prime Minister’s office gets around Freedom of Information requests https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/downing-st-accused-of-deliberate-attempts-to-avoid-freedom-of-information-requests-as-exstaff-reveal-automated-deletion-system-10325231.html

#10yrsago They’re tearing down the Adventurer’s Club https://memex.craphound.com/2015/06/25/theyre-tearing-down-the-adventurers-club/

#10yrsago David Byrne and St Vincent celebrate Color Guard with astounding Contemporary Color show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8jSWQtC_fA

#5yrsago 759 Trump atrocities https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/25/canada-reads/#m-o

#5yrsago How Big Tech distorts discourse https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/25/canada-reads/#oii

#1yrago Mirion Malle's "So Long Sad Love" https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/25/missing-step/#the-fog-of-love

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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Recent appearances (permalink)


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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 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:

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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