Today's links

• It's extremely good that Claude's source-code leaked: Careful what you wish for.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: "Elephantmen"; Eve Online war bankrolled by casino; Phishers take Mattel for $3m; Sanders wins 6 primaries, CNN airs Jesus "documentary"; Cuba is a vaccine powerhouse; Embroidered Toast; Mass layoffs at ATT.
• Upcoming appearances: Toronto, Montreal, Toronto, San Francisco, London, Berlin, NYC, Hay-on-Wye, London.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

It's extremely good that Claude's source-code leaked (permalink)

Anthropic's developers made an extremely basic configuration error, and as a result, the source-code for Claude Code – the company's flagship coding assistant product – has leaked and is being eagerly analyzed by many parties:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47586778

In response, Anthropic is flooding the internet with "takedown notices." These are a special kind of copyright-based censorship demand established by section 512 of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA 512), allowing for the removal of material without any kind of evidence, let alone a judicial order:

https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-races-to-contain-leak-of-code-behind-claude-ai-agent-4bc5acc7

Copyright is a "strict liability" statute, meaning that you can be punished for violating copyright even if you weren't aware that you had done so. What's more, "intermediaries" – like web hosts, social media platforms, search engines, and even caching servers – can be held liable for the copyright violations their users engage in. The liability is tremendous: the DMCA provides for $150,000 per infringement.

DMCA 512 is meant to offset this strict liability. After all, there's no way for a platform to know whether one of its users is infringing copyright – even if a user uploads a popular song or video, the provider can't know whether they've licensed the work for distribution (or even if they are the creator of that work). A cumbersome system in which users would upload proof that they have such a license wouldn't just be onerous – it would still permit copyright infringement, because there's no way for an intermediary to know whether the distribution license the user provided was genuine.

As a compromise, DMCA 512 absolves intermediaries from liability, if they "expeditiously remove" material upon notice that it infringes someone's copyright. In practice, that means that anyone can send a notice to any intermediary and have anything removed from the internet. The intermediary who receives this notice can choose to ignore it, but if the notice turns out to be genuine, they can end up on the hook for $150,000 per infringement. The intermediary can also choose to allow their user to "counternotify" (dispute the accusation) and can choose to reinstate the material, but they don't have to. Just as an intermediary can't determine whether a user has the rights to the things they post, they also can't tell if the person on the other end of a takedown notice has the right to demand its removal. In practice, this means that a takedown notice, no matter how flimsy, has a very good chance of making something disappear from the internet – forever.

From the outset, DMCA 512 was the go-to tool for corporate censorship, the best way to cover up misdeeds. I first got involved in this back in 2003, when leaked email memos from Diebold's voting machine division revealed that the company knew that its voting machines were wildly insecure, but they were nevertheless selling them to local election boards across America, who were scrambling to replace their mechanical voting machines in the wake of the 2000 Bush v Gore "hanging chad" debacle, which led to Bush stealing the presidency:

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

The stakes couldn't be higher, in other words. Diebold – whose CEO was an avowed GW Bush partisan who'd promised to "deliver the votes for Bush" – was the country's leading voting machine supplier. The company knew its voting machines were defective, that they frequently crashed and lost their vote counts on election night, and that Diebold technicians were colluding with local electoral officials to secretly "estimate" the lost vote totals so that no one would hold either the official or Diebold responsible for these defective machines:

https://www.salon.com/2003/09/23/bev_harris/

Diebold sent thousands of DMCA 512 takedown notices in an attempt to suppress the leaked memos. Eventually, EFF stepped in to provide pro-bono counsel to the Online Policy Group and ended Diebold's flood:

https://www.eff.org/cases/online-policy-group-v-diebold

Diebold wasn't the last company to figure out how to abuse copyright to censor information of high public interest. There's a whole industry of shady "reputation management" companies that collect large sums in exchange for scrubbing the internet of information their clients want removed from the public eye. They specialize in sexual abusers, war criminals, torturers, and fraudsters, and their weapon of choice is the takedown notice. Jeffrey Epstein spent tens of thousands of dollars on "reputation management" services to clean up his online profile:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/18/business/media/jeffrey-epstein-online.html

There are lots of ways to use the takedown system to get true information about your crimes removed from the internet. My favorite is the one employed by Eliminalia, one of the sleazier reputation laundries (even by the industry's dismal standards).

Eliminalia sets up WordPress sites and copies press articles that cast its clients in an unfavorable light to these sites, backdating them so they appear to have been published before the originals. They swap out the bylines for fictitious ones, then send takedowns to Google and other search engines to get the "infringing" stories purged from their search indices. Once the original articles have been rendered invisible to internet searchers, Eliminalia takes down their copy, and the story of their client's war crimes, rapes, or fraud disappears from the public eye:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#dark-ops

The takedown system is so tilted in favor of censorship that it takes a massive effort to keep even the smallest piece of information online in the face of a determined adversary. In 2007, the key for AACS (a way of encrypting video for "digital rights management") leaked online. The key was a 16-digit number, the kind of thing you could fit in a crossword puzzle, but the position of the industry consortium that created the key was that this was an illegal integer. They sent hundreds of thousands of takedowns over the number, and it was only the determined action of an army of users that kept the number online:

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

The shoot-first, ask-questions-never nature of takedown notices makes for fertile ground for scammers of all kinds, but the most ironic takedown ripoffs are the Youtube copystrike blackmailers.

After Viacom sued Youtube in 2007 over copyright infringement, Google launched its own in-house copyright management system, meant to address Viacom's principal grievance in the suit. Viacom was angry that after they had something removed from Youtube, another user could re-upload it, and they'd have to send another takedown, playing Wack-a-Mole with the whole internet. Viacom didn't want a takedown system, they wanted a staydown system, whereby they could supply Google with a list of the works whose copyrights they controlled and then Youtube would prevent anyone from uploading those works.

(This was extremely funny, because Viacom admitted in court that its marketing departments would "rough up" clips of its programming and upload them to Youtube, making them appear to be pirate copies, in a bid to interest Youtube users in Viacom's shows, and sometimes Viacom's lawyers would get confused and send threatening letters to Youtube demanding that these be removed:)

https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/broadcast-yourself/

Youtube's notice-and-staydown system is Content ID, an incredibly baroque system that allows copyright holders (and people pretending to be copyright holders) to "claim" video and sound files, and block others from posting them. No one – not even the world's leading copyright experts – can figure out how to use this system to uphold copyright:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/27/nuke-first/#ask-questions-never

However, there is a large cohort of criminals and fraudsters who have mastered Content ID and they use it to blackmail independent artists. You see, Content ID implements a "three strikes" policy: if you are accused of three acts of copyright infringement, Youtube permanently deletes your videos and bars you from the platform. For performers who rely on Youtube to earn their living – whether through ad-revenues or sponsorships or as a promotional vehicle to sell merchandise, recordings and tickets – the "copystrike" is an existential risk.

Enter the fraudster. A fraudster can set up multiple burner Youtube accounts and file spurious copyright complaints against a creator (usually a musician). After two of these copystrikes are accepted and the performer is just one strike away from losing their livelihood, the fraudster contacts the performer and demands blackmail money to rescind the complaints, threatening to file that final strike and put the performer out of business:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/08/copyfraud/#beethoven-just-wrote-music

The fact that copyright – nominally a system intended to protect creative workers – is weaponized against the people it is meant to serve is ironic, but it's not unusual. Copyright law has been primarily shaped by creators' bosses – media companies like Viacom – who brandish "starving artists" as a reason to enact policies that ultimately benefit capital at the expense of labor.

That was what inspired Rebecca Giblin and me to write our 2022 book Chokepoint Capitalism: how is it that copyright has expanded in every way for 40 years (longer duration, wider scope, higher penalties), resulting in media companies that are more profitable than ever, with higher gross and net revenues, even as creative workers have grown poorer, both in total compensation and in the share of the profits they generate?

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

The first half of Chokepoint Capitalism is a series of case studies that dissect the frauds and scams that both media and tech companies use to steal from creative workers. The second half are a series of "shovel-ready" policy proposals for new laws and rules that would actually put money in artists' pockets. Some of these policy prescriptions are copyright-related, but not all of them.

For example, we have a chapter on how the Hollywood "guild" system (which allows unionized workers to bargain with all the studios at once) has been a powerful antidote to corporate power. This is called "sectoral bargaining" and it's been illegal since 1947's Taft-Hartley Act, but the Hollywood guilds were grandfathered in. When we wrote about the power of sectoral bargaining, it was in reference to the Writers Guild's incredible triumph over the four giant talent agencies, who'd invented a scam that inverted the traditional revenue split between writer and agent, so the agencies were taking in 90% and the writers were getting just 10%:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/06/no-vitiated-air/#WME-CAA-next

Two years later, the Hollywood Writers struck again, this time over AI in the writers' room, securing a stunning victory over the major studios:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/

Notably, the writers strike was a labor action, not a copyright action. The writers weren't demanding a new copyright that would allow them to control whether their work could be used to train an AI. They struck for the right not to have their wages eroded by AI – to have the right to use (or not use) AI, as they saw fit, without risking their livelihoods.

Right now, many media companies are demanding a new copyright that would allow them to control AI training, and many creative workers have joined in this call. The media companies aren't arguing against infringing uses of AI models – they're arguing that the mere creation of such a model infringes copyright. They claim that making a transient copy of a work, analyzing that work, and publishing that analysis is a copyright infringement:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

Here's a good rule of thumb: any time your boss demands a new rule, you should be very skeptical about whether that rule will benefit you. It's clear that the media companies that have sued the AI giants aren't "anti-AI." They don't want to prevent AI from replacing creative workers – they just want to control how that happens.

When Disney and Universal sue Midjourney, it's not to prevent AI models from being trained on their catalogs and used to pauperize the workers whose work is in those catalogs. What these companies want is to be paid a license fee for access to their catalogs, and then they want the resulting models to be exclusive to them, and not available to competitors:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/03/its-a-trap-2/#inheres-at-the-moment-of-fixation

These companies are violently allergic to paying creative workers. Disney takes the position that when it buys a company like Lucasfilm, it secures the right to publish the works Lucasfilm commissioned, but not the obligation to pay the royalties that Lucasfilm owes when those works are sold:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/30/disney-still-must-pay/#pay-the-writer

As Theresa Nielsen Hayden quipped during the Napster Wars: "Just because you're on their side, it doesn't mean they're on your side." If these companies manage to get copyright law expanded to restrict scraping, analysis, and publication of factual information, they won't use those new powers to increase creators' pay – they'll use them the same way they've used every new copyright created in the past 40 years, to make themselves richer at the expense of artists:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/03/just-a-stick/#authorsbargain

The Claude Code leak is full of fascinating information about a tool that – like Diebold's voting machines – is at the very center of the most important policy debates of our time. Here's just one example: Claude is almost certainly implicated in the US missile that murdered a building full of little girls in Iran last month:

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/26/ai-got-the-blame-for-the-iran-school-bombing-the-truth-is-far-more-worrying

Of course I see the irony. Anthropic has taken an extremely aggressive posture on copyright's "limitations and exceptions," arguing that it can train its models on any information it can find, and that it can knowingly download massive troves of infringing works for that purpose. It's darkly hilarious to see the company firehosing copyright complaints by the thousands in order to prevent the dissemination, dissection and discussion of the source-code that leaked due to the company's gross incompetence:

https://developers.slashdot.org/story/26/04/01/158240/anthropic-issues-copyright-takedown-requests-to-remove-8000-copies-of-claude-code-source-code#comments

But what's objectionable about Anthropic – and the AI sector – isn't copyright. The thing that makes these companies disgusting is their gleeful, fraudulent trumpeting about how their products will destroy the livelihoods of every kind of worker:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete

And it's their economic fraud, the inflation of a bubble that will destroy the economy when it bursts:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-subprime-ai-crisis-is-here/

It's their enthusiastic deployment of AI tools for mass surveillance and mass killing. (Anthropic is no exception, despite what you may have heard:)

https://www.thetechbubble.info/p/how-much-a-dollar-cost

If the media bosses get their way, and manage to make it even more illegal – and practically harder – to host, discuss, and publish facts about copyrighted works, then leaks like the Claude Code disclosures will never see the light of day. It's only because of decades of hard-fought battles to push back on this nonsense that we are able to identify and learn about the defects in Claude Code that are revealed by this source-code leak.

I'm angry about the AI industry, but not because of copyright. I'm angry at them for the reasons Cat Valente articulated so well in her "Blood Money" essay:

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/blood-money-the-anthropic-settlement

These companies' stated goals are terrible:

They took the books I wrote for children and used them to make it possible for children to not bother with reading ever again. They took the books I wrote about love to create chatbots that isolate people and prevent them from finding human love in the real world, that make it difficult for them to even stand real love, which is not always agreeable, not always positive, not always focused on end-user engagement. They took the books I wrote about hope and glitter in the face of despair and oppression and used it to make a Despair-and-Oppression generator.

These goals are entirely compatible with copyright. The New York Times is suing over AI – and they're licensing their writers' words to train an AI model:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/business/media/new-york-times-amazon-ai-licensing.html

The NYT wants more copyright. You know what the NYT doesn't want? More labor rights. The NYT are vicious union-busters:

https://actionnetwork.org/letters/new-york-times-stop-union-busting

If we creative workers are going to pour our scarce resources into getting a new policy to address the threats that our bosses – and the AI companies they are morally and temperamentally indistinguishable from – represent to our livelihoods, then let that new policy be a renewed sectoral bargaining right for every worker. It was sectoral bargaining (a collective, solidaristic right) and not copyright (an individual, commercial right) that saw off AI in the Hollywood writers' strike.

Copyright positions the creative worker as a small business – an LLC with an MFA – bargaining B2B with another firm. To the extent that copyright helps us, it is largely incidental. Sure, we were able to file for a few thousand bucks per book that Anthropic downloaded from a pirate site to train its models on. But Anthropic doesn't have to use a shadow library to get those books – it can just pay our bosses to get them.

It's great that Claude Code's source is online. It's great that we have the ability to pore over, analyze and criticize this code, which has become so consequential in so many ways. It's great the copyright is weak enough that this is possible (for now).

Expanding copyright will gain little for creative workers, except for a new reason to be angry about how our audiences experience our work. Expanding labor rights will gain much, for every worker, including our audiences. It's an idea that our bosses – and AI hucksters – hate with every fiber of their beings.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Dear Ms. Goode https://michaelchabon.substack.com/p/dear-ms-goode

• INX preparing for immediate price increases https://www.labelandnarrowweb.com/breaking-news/inx-preparing-for-immediate-price-increases/

• New Washington law bans noncompete agreements https://www.seattletimes.com/business/local-business/new-washington-law-bans-noncompete-agreements/

• Dopamine Is Not Why Kids Love Social Media https://www.usermag.co/p/dopamine-is-not-why-kids-love-social

• THIS IS WHAT CORPORATE CAPTURE LOOKS LIKE! https://corporateeurope.org/sites/default/files/2026-03/REPORT_CORPORATE

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Desperate WI Republican congressman struggling to get by on $174K turns to copyright trolling https://web.archive.org/web/20110404001110/http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/03/gopers-demand-sean-duffy-salary-tape-be-pulled-from-the-internet.php?ref=fpblg

#15yrsago Redditor outs astroturfer with 20 accounts https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/gepnl/gamepro_g4tv_and_vgchartz_gamrfeed_have_been/

#15yrsago Britain’s back-room negotiations to establish a national, extrajudicial Internet censorship regime https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/minister-confirms-voluntary-site-blocking-discussions/

#15yrsago Elephantmen: Dr Moreau meets apocalyptic noir science fiction comic https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/31/elephantmen-dr-moreau-meets-apocalyptic-noir-science-fiction-comic/

#10yrsago Bitcoin transactions could consume as much energy as Denmark by the year 2020 https://web.archive.org/web/20160401031103/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/bitcoin-could-consume-as-much-electricity-as-denmark-by-2020

#10yrsago Online casino bankrolls largest-ever, ruinously expensive war in Eve Online https://www.polygon.com/2016/3/31/11334014/eve-online-war/

#10yrsago Russia bans Polish “Communist Monopoly” board-game https://www.newsweek.com/russia-bans-polands-communist-monopoly-being-anti-russian-438972?rx=us

#10yrsago “Reputation management” companies apparently induce randos to perjure themselves by pretending to be anonymous posters https://www.techdirt.com/2016/03/31/latest-reputation-management-bogus-defamation-suits-bogus-companies-against-bogus-defendants/

#10yrsago Leak: Alaska superdelegate denies duty to represent her state’s voters in 2016 elections https://web.archive.org/web/20160717042158/http://usuncut.com/politics/alaska-superdelegate/

#10yrsago Phishers trick Mattel into transferring $3M to a Chinese bank https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mattel-vs-chinese-cyberthieves-its-no-game/

#10yrsago CNN celebrates Sanders’ six primary victories by airing a “documentary” about Jesus https://fair.org/home/as-sanders-surges-cable-news-runs-prison-reality-show-jesus-documentary/

#10yrsago Hungarian ruling party wants to ban all working cryptography https://web.archive.org/web/20160405014411/http://budapestbeacon.com/public-policy/fidesz-wants-make-encryption-software-illegal/33462

#10yrsago Embroidered toast https://www.behance.net/gallery/31502957/Everyday-bread#

#5yrsago AI has a GIGO problem https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/31/vaccine-for-the-global-south/#imagenot

#5yrsago Sacklers to use Purdue bankruptcy to escape justice https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/31/vaccine-for-the-global-south/#claims-extinguished

#5yrsago Cuba is a vaccine powerhouse https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/31/vaccine-for-the-global-south/#Soberana-Abdala

#5yrsago AT&T will lay off thousands more https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/31/vaccine-for-the-global-south/#we-dont-have-to-care

#1yrago Private-sector Trumpism https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/31/madison-square-garden/#autocrats-of-trade

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Toronto: Humber Polytechnic President's Lecture Series, Apr 8
  https://liberalarts.humber.ca/current-students/resources/conferences-and-lectures/presidents-lecture-series.html

• Montreal: Bronfman Lecture (McGill), Apr 10
  https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disrupter-tickets-1982706623885

• Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, Apr 10
  https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/4863920260410

• Toronto: DemocracyXchange, Apr 16
  https://www.democracyxchange.org/news/cory-doctorow-to-open-dxc26-on-april-16

• San Francisco: 2026 Berkeley Spring Forum on M&A and the Boardroom, Apr 23
  https://www.theberkeleyforum.com/#agenda

• London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25
  https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691

• NYC: Enshittification at Commonweal Ventures, Apr 29
  https://luma.com/ssgfvqz8

• NYC: Techidemic with Sarah Jeong, Tochi Onyibuchi and Alia Dastagir (PEN World Voices), Apr 30
  https://worldvoices.pen.org/event/techidemic/

• Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

• SXSW London, Jun 2
  https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech

• Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU

• Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech)
  https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074

• The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah)
  https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doctorow-matthew-potolsky/

• Tanner Humanities Lecture (U Utah)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Yf1nSyekI

Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

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

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

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

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. First draft complete. Second draft underway.

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

• "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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Today's links

• Trumpismo vs minilateralism: The enemy gets a vote.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: My new sigfile is unstoppable; TBL on the future of the web (2006); Wonder Woman sweater pattern; Unpatchable drug cabinets; 50-building mural; DRM v (the next) Netflix.
• Upcoming appearances: Toronto, Montreal, Toronto, San Francisco, London, Berlin, NYC, Hay-on-Wye, London.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

Trumpismo vs minilateralism (permalink)

As November Kelly has pointed out, the weirdest thing about Trumpismo is how the man seethes and rails against a game that is thoroughly rigged in America's favor, because he resents having to pretend to play the game at all:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/26/i-dont-want/#your-greenback-dollar

Before Trump, the deal was that everyone would pretend that we had a "rules-based international order" in which every country got a fair deal, even as America cheated like hell and sucked the world dry. It's really impossible to overstate how advantageous this was to America. By pretending to be a neutral interchange spot for transoceanic fiber cables, it got to spy on the world's internet traffic:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/26/difficult-multipolarism/#eurostack

By pretending to have a neutral currency, it got to exercise "dollar dominance" through which the nations of the world sent America the things they dug out of the ground or built in their factories, in exchange for America making small adjustments to a spreadsheet at the Federal Reserve. And by pretending its tech exports were neutral platforms, America got to raid the world's private data and bank accounts, spying and looting to its heart's content.

When Trump kicked off his campaign of incontinent belligerence – putting tariffs on the exports of countries populated only by penguins, trying to steal Greenland – it became impossible for the world's leaders to carry on this pretense.

This led to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney – the world's most Davos man – standing up at this year's World Economic Forum to denounce the whole post-war settlement as a bullshit arrangement, announcing that we were in a period of "rupture" and promising a new world of "variable geometry" in which "middle powers" would exist in overlapping webs of alliances, without the USA:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/27/i-want-to-do-it/#now-make-me-do-it

Now, thanks to Trump's America First agenda, America's many advantages are collapsing. The dollar is in retreat, with Ethiopia revaluing its national debt in Chinese renminbi:

https://fidelpost.com/ethiopia-and-china-move-toward-final-stage-of-debt-restructuring-agreement/

Even worse: Trump's disastrous war of choice in Iran is heading for a humiliating defeat for the dollar, with Iran announcing that any peace deal will require a $2m/ship toll to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, a toll they're already collecting, payable only in renminbi:

https://www.nbcnews.com/world/iran/irans-tehran-toll-booth-forces-tankers-pay-millions-leave-strait-hormu-rcna265258

(I really hope Trump's plan to rename it the "Strait of Trump" catches on, so that his name in invoked with every tanker that traverses the strait, weakening the dollar and America's power – a very fitting legacy.)

For the past quarter-century, I've fought the US Trade Representative in various international fora, as the USTR piled all kinds of conditions America's trading partners that made it impossible to pursue any kind of technological sovereignty:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

Every now and then, I think about how furious the USTR must be, watching Trump blunder through all the subtle traps they wove around the planet.

Take the "digital trade agenda," a set of policies that the US has made its top priority for a decade. Countries that succumbed to the digital trade agenda had to agree not to pursue "data localization" (rules that ban companies from moving or storing data about the people of your country outside of its borders), and they had to agree to duty-free status for digital exports like apps, music, games, ebooks and videos.

Today, the digital trade agenda is in tatters. Data localization is the top priority, with projects like the Eurostack and the European Digital Infrastructure Consortium breaking all land-speed records to build on-shore apps and data-centers that will keep data out of the hands of American companies and the American government:

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/edic

And this week, duty-free status for digital assets hit the skids when a meeting of the World Trade Organization saw America's demands for a 10-year renewal of a global deal fail because Brazil wouldn't agree to it. Brazil has good reasons to mistrust the digital trade agenda, after Trump and Microsoft colluded to shut down a high court judge's online life in retaliation for passing sentence on the Trump-allied former dictator, Jair Bolsonaro:

https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0211

Brazil blocked the 10-year renewal of the duty-free status of digital exports, worldwide. In its place, the US got a two-year renewal – meaning that US companies' ability to export their digital products after 2028 will depend on whatever Trump does in the next two years, a period during which we know Trump is going to be a raging asshole (assuming he doesn't have a stroke first).

Even more interesting: Brazil struck a "minilateral" digital duty-free deal with 66 non-US countries, including Canada and the EU:

https://www.csmonitor.com/Editorials/the-monitors-view/2026/0331/EU-and-Canada-lean-into-a-new-world-role?icid=rss

Now, the US is a powerhouse exporter of digital goods, and has been since the start. This was such a given that in Neal Stephenson's 1992 cyberpunk classic Snow Crash, Stephenson imagined a future where the US had all but collapsed, save for the three things it did better than anyone else in the world: "music, movies and microcode":

https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015147/Music-Movies-Microcode-High-Speed

Today, America's media and software industries are dying, and Trump is holding a pillow over their faces. He stole Tiktok and gave it to his buddy Larry Ellison, whose failson's acquisition and merger of two of the five remaining studios Trump also waved through:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/28/golden-mean/#reality-based-community

Game studios are ensloppifying their flagship products, alienating their most ardent customers, and are laying off thousands of programmers and artists following incestuous mergers that leave them hopelessly bloated:

https://www.blog.udonis.co/mobile-marketing/mobile-games/activision-blizzard-layoffs

Meanwhile, there's a global cultural market that's sweeping away American media: from K-pop (and K-zombies) to Heated Rivalry to Brazil funk:

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

Now, thanks to Trump, there are just a couple of years until America's wilting cultural exports will face high tariffs from markets where international media is surging.

This is how the American century ends: not with a bang, but with a Trump.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• The Subprime AI Crisis Is Here https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-subprime-ai-crisis-is-here/

• Endgame for the Open Web https://www.anildash.com/2026/03/27/endgame-open-web/

• RSS-Lance https://github.com/sysadminmike/rss-lance

• California bill would require parent bloggers to delete content of minors on social media https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-03-26/california-could-require-parent-bloggers-to-delete-content-of-minors

• Full network of clitoral nerves mapped out for first time https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/mar/29/full-network-clitoral-nerves-mapped-out-first-time-women-pelvic-surgery

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago My new sigfile https://memex.craphound.com/2001/03/30/

#20yrsago TBL's "The Future of the Web" https://web.archive.org/web/20070706130940/http://webcast.oii.ox.ac.uk/download/oii/20060314_139/20060314_139.mp3

#20yrsago Bruce Sterling's bumper stickers https://web.archive.org/web/20060401010820/https://www.bumperactive.com/archives/000685.jsp

#15yrsago Kinect makes UAV even more autonomous https://www.suasnews.com/2011/03/mit-slam-quad-using-kinect/

#15yrsago This frozen yogurt store offers the best discounts around https://memex.craphound.com/2016/03/30/this-frozen-yogurt-store-offers-the-best-discounts-around/

#10yrsago Amazing fan-made Wonder Woman sweater pattern to download and knit https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/wonder-woman-2

#10yrsago Automated drug cabinets have 1400+ critical vulns that will never be patched https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2016/03/30/1400-flaws-automated-medical-supply-system/

#10yrsago Playable records laser-etched in cheese, eggplant and ham https://web.archive.org/web/20160323075536/http://www.thevinylfactory.com/vinyl-factory-news/matthew-herbert-tortilla-edible-vinyl/

#10yrsago Up to half of the Americans killed by police have a disability https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/mar/29/media-must-report-police-violence-towards-disabled-people

#10yrsago Judge says Citibank’s law-school loan isn’t “student debt” and can be discharged in bankruptcy https://abcnews.com/Business/judges-ruling-law-school-grads-debt-signal-seismic/story?id=37981518

#10yrsago How a street artist pulled off a 50-building mural in Cairo’s garbage-collector district https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/29/world/middleeast/cairo-mural-garbage.html

#10yrsago CNBC’s secure password tutorial sent your password in the clear to 30 advertisers https://web.archive.org/web/20160331095151/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/cnbc-tried-and-massively-failed-to-teach-people-about-password-security

#10yrsago How DRM would kill the next Netflix (and how the W3C could save it) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/03/interoperability-and-w3c-defending-future-present

#5yrsago America needs a high-fiber broadband diet https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/30/fight-for-44/#slowpokes

#5yrsago Minimum wage vs Wall Street bonuses https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/30/fight-for-44/#fight-for-44

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Toronto: Humber Polytechnic President's Lecture Series, Apr 8
  https://liberalarts.humber.ca/current-students/resources/conferences-and-lectures/presidents-lecture-series.html

• Montreal: Bronfman Lecture (McGill), Apr 10
  https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disrupter-tickets-1982706623885

• Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, Apr 10
  https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/4863920260410

• Toronto: DemocracyXchange, Apr 16
  https://www.democracyxchange.org/news/cory-doctorow-to-open-dxc26-on-april-16

• San Francisco: 2026 Berkeley Spring Forum on M&A and the Boardroom, Apr 23
  https://www.theberkeleyforum.com/#agenda

• London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25
  https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691

• NYC: Enshittification at Commonweal Ventures, Apr 29
  https://luma.com/ssgfvqz8

• Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

• SXSW London, Jun 2
  https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech

• Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU

• Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech)
  https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074

• The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah)
  https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doctorow-matthew-potolsky/

• Tanner Humanities Lecture (U Utah)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Yf1nSyekI

Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

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

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

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

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. First draft complete. Second draft underway.

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

• "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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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

• State Dems must stop ICE from stealing the midterms: The literal least they can do.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Power-strip bug; "Peaceful Baghdad" was actually Istanbul; Disney pirates Disney font; AMC v day-and-date; SF growth chart; Cuba’s meritocratic free med schools; Trump strategist v Trump; Monopoly so fragile.
• Upcoming appearances: Montreal, London, Berlin, NYC, Hay-on-Wye, London.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

State Dems must stop ICE from stealing the midterms (permalink)

Donald Trump has announced his intention to steal the midterms with a voter suppression law that would ban the mail-in voting that he himself uses (which he claims is not fit for purpose).

This voter suppression campaign is Trump's number one policy priority, and the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act that would accomplish this is behind the shutdown and aviation chaos that has hamstrung the country for weeks:

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/save-act-voting-rights-congress/

SAVE requires voters to show up at the polls in possession of ID like birth certificates and passports, and it will fill our polling places with armed, masked ICE agents – you know, the guys who just randomly kidnap and murder people for having accents, speaking a language other than English, or being visibly brown.

During Trump's aviation crisis, Trump heard about "Linda," a woman who called into a far right talk-radio program to suggest that ICE be deployed to American airports to backstop the TSA agents who'd stopped showing up for work on the very reasonable grounds that they hadn't been paid in a month:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-may-have-got-his-ice-airport-idea-from-linda-from-arizona/

Trump loved the idea and the next thing you knew, ICE was at the airports, hanging around like a bad smell and being totally useless. It turns out that the TSA is a trained workforce, unlike ICE, who receive precisely 47 days of training as a kind of MAGA Kabbalah (Trump is the 47th president):

https://www.wired.com/story/ice-agents-frustrate-airport-employees-as-shutdown-drags-on/

ICE's uselessness at the country's airports was beyond farcical, though, as ever, The Onion found and nailed the farce in "How ICE is assisting TSA":

https://theonion.com/how-ice-is-assisting-tsa/

Overseeing the removal of shoes, belts, and abuelas

Confiscating, then brandishing dangerous items

Assuming all milling-around duties

Culling weaker travelers when lines get too long

Commiserating about failing the police academy

Drinking any shampoo that exceeds the carry-on volume limit

Simplifying the customs interview to one question about skull size

But having ICE in the airports does serve one purpose. As Steve Bannon gloated on his podcast, ICE in the airports is a way to soften people up for ICE in the polling stations. He called it a "test run" for the midterms:

https://www.ms.now/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/steve-bannon-calls-ice-agents-at-airports-part-of-a-test-run-for-the-midterm-elections

Writing for Jacobin, Eric Blanc points out that Democrats don't have to sit by passively while Trump – who repeatedly promised that if you voted for him in 2024, "you won't have to vote anymore" – steals an election:

https://jacobin.com/2026/03/ice-trump-election-theft-laws/

That's because America has a federal system of government, and the administration of its elections is firmly, constitutionally, unarguably in the hands of the states, and the states have large collections of highly trained, highly armed officials who can enforce their laws.

On March 13, the New Mexico state legislature passed a law banning armed federal officials from showing their fascist asses anywhere within 50 feet of a polling place or ballot drop-box:

https://www.koat.com/article/new-mexico-prohibits-armed-agents-voting-sites/70729595

Other blue states like "California, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, and Washington" are contemplating similar laws.

It's a start, but as Blanc says, what the fuck are the other blue statehouses waiting for? This is a white-hot, hair-on-fire emergency. There isn't a moment to spare. This should be on the agenda for every union, at every demonstration, at every DSA and Democratic Club meeting. As Blanc says, if we wait until November to find out what Trump is going to do, it'll be too late. The time to act is now.

This is – as Blanc says – a "concrete, winnable demand that unions, student organizations, and immigrant and democracy defense groups could organize around today." And that organizing would "onboard and develop scores of new leaders in this fight nationwide."

I know where we can start. Unions across America have called for a general strike on May Day (May 1), under the banner "No work, no school, no shopping." As we rally on May Day, let defending our right to vote be at the top of our agenda. Mark your calendars:

https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?ref=paydayreport.com&mid=1_b8qBUINLYWeLiwpFSfUO2SmX2w6TWA&ll=37.724800549268%2C-96.94920235000001&z=4

(Image: Chad Davis, CC BY 4.0; Jami430, CC BY-SA 4.0; modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Avi Lewis Is the New Leader of Canada’s NDP https://jacobin.com/2026/03/avi-lewis-canada-ndp-election/

• A Political Instrument of the People https://lewisforleader.ca/ideas/party-renewal-full-plan

• She Owed Her Insurer a Nickel, So It Canceled Her Coverage https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/insurer-missed-payments-dropped-coverage-florida-bill-of-the-month-march-2026/

• How the AI bubble bursts https://martinvol.pe/blog/2026/03/30/how-the-ai-bubble-bursts/

• Fold Catastrophes https://tachyonpublications.com/product/fold-catastrophes/

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Gobler Toys https://web.archive.org/web/20010331150924/http://www.goblertoys.com/pages/goblertoys.html

#20yrsago Power-strip with hidden GSM hardware https://web.archive.org/web/20060412201921/https://www.spy-labs.com/infinity.htm

#20yrsago I Hate DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20060406063345/https://www.ihatedrm.com/cs2/

#20yrsago GOP hopeful’s photo of “peaceful Baghdad” was really Istanbul https://web.archive.org/web/20060405225546/http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002274257

#20yrsago Disney using freeware Disney-inspired font in its signs https://flickr.com/photos/mrg/sets/49427/

#20yrsago Yahoo could stay in China and stop sending its users to jail https://web.archive.org/web/20060411085309/http://rconversation.blogs.com/rconversation/2006/03/yahoo_abominati.html

#20yrsago AMC CEO: why we won’t show DVD simul-release movies https://web.archive.org/web/20060426042457/https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.04/start.html?pg=15

#15yrsago Canadian ISPs admit that their pricing is structured to discourage Internet use https://web.archive.org/web/20110401033318/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5711/125/

#15yrsago Science fiction growth-chart takes your kid from Tribble to Vader https://web.archive.org/web/20110331134518/http://geeky-dad.tumblr.com/post/3869493918/my-daughter-is-turning-one-soon-and-i-decided-we

#15yrsago Open access legal scholarship is 50% more likely to be cited than material published in proprietary journals https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1777090

#15yrsago Senior London cops lie to peaceful protestors, stage mass arrest https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/mar/28/cuts-protest-uk-uncut-fortnum

#10yrsago Cuba’s free med schools are the meritocratic institutions that America’s private system can’t match https://www.wired.com/2016/03/students-ditching-america-medical-school-cuba/

#10yrsago As criminal justice reform looms, private prison companies get into immigration detention, halfway houses, electronic monitoring, mental health https://web.archive.org/web/20160331101534/https://www.ozy.com/fast-forward/private-prisons-fight-back/66970

#10yrsago Surveillance has reversed the net’s capacity for social change https://web.archive.org/web/20160429233747/https://m.jmq.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/02/25/1077699016630255.full.pdf?ijkey=1jxrYu4cQPtA6&keytype=ref&siteid=spjmq

#10yrsago Top Trump strategist quits, writes an open letter warning America about him https://web.archive.org/web/20160330035435/http://www.xojane.com/issues/stephanie-cegielski-donald-trump-campaign-defector

#10yrsago Doctors who get pharma money prescribe brand-name drugs instead of generics https://www.propublica.org/article/doctors-who-take-company-cash-tend-to-prescribe-more-brand-name-drugs

#10yrsago GOP’s anti-abortion strategy could establish precedent for massive, corrupt regulation https://web.archive.org/web/20160329045614/http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/fans-of-economic-liberty-shouldnt-be-so-quick-to-regulate-abortion/475566/

#10yrsago Turkish government tells German ambassador to ban video satirizing president Erdoğan https://web.archive.org/web/20260316070423/https://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/tuerkei-verlangt-offenbar-das-extra-3-video-zu-loeschen-a-1084490.html

#5yrsago Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/29/efficient-markets-hypothesis/#statistical-inference

#5yrsago Big Salmon's aquaturf https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/29/efficient-markets-hypothesis/#aquaturf

#5yrsago Noble Lies https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/29/efficient-markets-hypothesis/#masks-and-trade

#5yrsago Monopoly so fragile https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/29/efficient-markets-hypothesis/#too-big-to-sail

#1yrago #RedForEd rides again in LA https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/29/jane-mcalevey/#trump-is-a-scab

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Montreal: Bronfman Lecture (McGill), Apr 10
  https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disrupter-tickets-1982706623885

• Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, Apr 10
  https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/4863920260410

• London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25
  https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691

• NYC: Enshittification at Commonweal Ventures, Apr 29
  https://luma.com/ssgfvqz8

• Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

• SXSW London, Jun 2
  https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech

• Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU

• Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech)
  https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074

• The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah)
  https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doctorow-matthew-potolsky/

• Tanner Humanities Lecture (U Utah)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Yf1nSyekI

Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

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

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

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

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. First draft complete. Second draft underway.

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

• "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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"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

• Market participation is exhausting: No one wants to be the sucker at the table.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: EMI DRM v Brazil; "The Information"; Genome patenter v copyright troll (let them fight); Green investing isn't; Trump loves Big Tech; Kleptones' "24 Hours"; Lasermonks; Ransomware hospital; News co-ops; AI "art" sucks; Swisscom wifi is $838/24h; Millennials don't exist; Why Microsoft's chatbot turned Nazi; NYC's best dumpster-dived food; RIP Diana Wynne Jones; What really happened at the student protests in Trafalgar Square; Church-owned insurer has secret pedo priest files; Names that break databases; Reality-based communities; Hugo for websites; Cop cabs; Fake pediatrician group; Bring Your Own Bigwheeel; "How To Talk About Videogames."
• Upcoming appearances: Montreal, London, NYC, Berlin, Hay-on-Wye, London.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

Market participation is exhausting (permalink)

We're a diverse species, cognitively speaking – different ways of thinking come more easily to some of us than others. I'm good at a lot of things, but I have terrible spatial sense. I can't parallel park or catch a ball, and I get lost so easily it's almost comical (it's a running joke in my family).

Luckily, I'm married to a woman with incredible spacial sense. My wife Alice can sit at one end of a basketball court and look at the scoreboard at the other end and say, "It's 1" off-center to the right and 1° off true clockwise." She'll be right. She's also a crack shot and an extremely proficient gamer (she was the first woman to play e-sports internationally, on the English Quake team).

I'm good at stuff she's not good at. I don't mind wading through personal admin and bookkeeping processes, while she finds these excruciating (and interestingly, it's reversed when it comes to work-related admin, which I find torturous and which she excels at). I love listening to audiobooks, which she can't focus on at all. She loves instrumental music, which I broadly find tedious; while I find it much easier to work while listening to music with great lyrics.

This is great. As a couple, we make up for one another's deficits and complement one another's strengths. Obviously, this is also true as a species: we all like doing different stuff in different ways, and that's good, because there is a lot of stuff to do, and it's pretty damned heterogenous. A complex, dynamic world demands a complex, dynamic response.

This is a bedrock of cybernetics, the study of systems control. The "law of requisite complexity" states, "in order to be efficaciously adaptive, the internal complexity of a system must match the external complexity it confronts":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_(cybernetics)

Cyberneticians and systems designers understand that their job is partly to design a set of controls that are as complex as the system they modulate, and partly to simplify that system to make it possible to control. Think of how you can make a database search run faster by confining it to one field in records from the past year, or how you can hold down the shift key to constrain a rectangular selection tool so it draws perfect squares.

This happens cognitively, too. Pretty much anyone can track their expenses from a work trip, but the company bookkeeper needs to have a certain "head for figures" that lets them do this all day long, for everyone's expenses, so we limit the kinds of bookkeeping we ask normies to do, and reserve the heavy lifting for specialists.

As a freelancer, I hire a bunch of people who have cognitive strengths that I lack. My accountant isn't just a person who knows more about tax law than I do – he's also someone who can manage the reconciliation of all my bookkeeping spreadsheets better than I ever could, and without the psychic trauma I experience when I try to do this on my own.

Likewise, my publisher employs copyeditors and proofreaders who find the typos that my brain just doesn't see, and when they send me back my marked-up manuscripts for review, I ask my mom to give them a pass, because she finds the typos they miss.

Sitting between me and my publishers are my agents (I have several of these, one for English-language literary deals, another for foreign rights, another for media, and yet another for speaking engagements). I love these folks, partly because the better they are at their jobs, the easier it is for me to pay my mortgage, but especially because they really enjoy doing things I hate doing: a) asking for money, and; b) haggling.

For me, haggling is (at best) embarrassing. At worst, it's humiliating. It's always exhausting. But for my agents, it's invigorating. Many's the time I've gotten on a video call with my agents after they've concluded a successful deal and they're glowing. Call it what you will: cognitive diversity, emotional diversity, neurodiversity…my agents and I have it, and it's good for all of us.

And here's the thing that makes these world-class hagglers great: they can switch it off. They're competitive as hell, they love to bargain hard, but they understand that they're playing an iterated game, and if they crush the publishers' representatives they're up against, then they'll ruin my good name.

More: when the bargaining's done and we're having a nice chat about everyday things, or getting together for dinner, they're not on. They're just normal, not wrestling over every detail. Bargaining is what they do, it's not who they are.

That doesn't just make them bearable as human beings, it also makes them better at their jobs. There's an old pal with whom I've done some creative work, and at one point I needed to pay them for their part in a project. They asked me to route the payment through their manager, and this manager assumed I was just another production hiring my buddy, and let loose with his full power at me over this payment, haggling for paperwork that would make Creative Commons releases impossible, as well as other (normal but not appropriate in this case) conditions. I emailed my pal, who emailed their manager to stand down and treat this as a friendly negotiation, whereupon Mr Hyde became Dr Jekyll and we wrapped things up in about ten minutes.

These haggler types do very well in our society, which is organized around the idea of efficient markets, where everyone is always bargaining to the last breath in order to "maximize their utility."

This ideology isn't just an observation ("society is a market"), it's also a demand ("society should be a market"). People who find aggressive haggling invigorating have taken over the operations of our civilization, and they are determined to convert everything to a marketplace, from waiting on hold for the IRS to looking for a parking place:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/07/markets-in-everything/#no-th-enq

The people running this game are so invigorated by haggling that they can't not haggle. They make putting a price on everything into a virtue. They want to be able to sell their kidneys. More importantly, they want to buy your kidneys.

In Sarah Wynn-Williams's Careless People, there's a memorable incident in which Sheryl Sandberg is shocked to the roots of her hair when she is told that she can't go to Mexico and buy a kidney if her child gets sick. Her child isn't even sick! She's just offended that this hypothetical situation wouldn't be resolved by bargaining:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf

For these people, cheating is just bargaining by another means. They embrace bizarre concepts like "revealed preferences," the idea that if you say you're dissatisfied with a bargain, but you accept it anyway, you have a "revealed preference" for the deal. In other words, if someone sells their kidney to Sheryl Sandberg in order to make the rent, they have a "revealed preference" for having only one kidney – and if they sell their privacy to Sheryl Sandberg in order to stay in touch with the people they love, they have a "revealed preference" for having their data extracted and exploited by Facebook:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/24/everything-not-mandatory/#is-prohibited

Trump is the apotheosis of this. The true "art of the deal" is just cheating. That's why he stiffed his workers, stiffed his suppliers, stiffed his backers and stiffed his base. If you can cheat and get away with it, it's not even cheating: "that makes you smart":

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

"Caveat emptor" makes sense at a yard-sale or an estate auction – but it's no way to operate a government or conduct your daily life. It's exhausting:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/29/cheaters-and-liars/#caveat-emptor-brainworms

Running the world on "caveat emptor" isn't just a transfer from workers to the wealthy, it's a transfer from people who are exhausted by bargaining to people who are invigorated by it. It's a way of transforming just one of the many differences in how humans think into the single most important success criterion, the major determinant of your life's chances. It's a way for the invigorated to utterly dominate the exhausted. It's the elevation of "stop hitting yourself" into political ideology.

The antidote to this is something Dan Davies calls "The Club Med theory." He argues that while mostly we sneer at inclusive holiday resorts as a way to go on vacation without having to engage with another country's culture and people, that the original value of these resorts (still present today) is the way they let you go on vacation without participating in markets:

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-club-med-theory

Club Med was founded by an Olympian named Gérard Blitz whose insight was that "what people seek from a holiday is not luxury or material comfort, but happiness." For Blitz, the value of an inclusive resort wasn't the open bar and the buffet, "it’s the relief from participation in the everyday economy."

As Davies points out, class differences (between guests, at least) are erased at inclusive resorts. The richest person at the resort eats and drinks the same food, goes on the same excursions, and participates in the same activities as the poorest person at the resort (yes, this is less true of today's inclusive resorts, which are full of "up-charges," representing the triumph of people who are invigorated by bargaining over people who are exhausted by it).

For Davies, the beauty of an inclusive resort is that it removes the "cognitive demands" of a market economy, which are inherently stressful: "Every transaction is a decision, and decisions cost energy."

Davies proposes that "this is quite difficult for people to understand if they have an economics degree." Why would the resort restaurants improve their food quality if they're not competing for your business? Why would servers hustle to make you happy if they're not competing for tips?

But this is not what happens. Resort-goers love the bartenders at the swim-up bar, and they are frustrated to the point of fury with the people selling necklaces, sunglasses and massages on the beach. These sellers "live or die by their ability to persuade people to part with money in exchange for goods and services." It's exhausting to be them, and it's exhausting to be approached by them.

Davies says that the best strategy to get someone to part with their money isn't necessarily to provide good service. As he learned in his stockbroker days, you can also "pester them mercilessly until they pay you to go away." In an unregulated market, you don't get a single vendor who comes around and offers you sunglasses once a day. The equilibrium of that market is to be woken from your nap or interrupted from your book every five minutes by someone who's hustling to make the rent. The economy doesn't "price in the externality" of your plummeting satisfaction with your holiday.

Davies isn't the first person to observe this. As he points out, in 1963, Galbraith wrote:

Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt.

I read Davies's short post last week and it stuck with me. The more I thought about it, the more I liked it – and the more I thought that there was something missing from it: the idea that there are some people who hate a life without bargaining. These people are invigorated by bargaining and exhausted by "total physical and mental inertia." They need to be hustling.

The people who turn up their noses at an inclusive resort aren't just people who want to have the "authentic experience" of a distant land – some of them are people who want to spend all day hustling and being hustled. People who need that energy.

Those people have a place in the world. I don't want those people trying to sell me a timeshare or trying to rope me into their MLM, but I'd love to have them negotiating on behalf of my union:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/05/power-of-positive-thinking/#the-socialism-of-fools

But even then, I'd want them to be like my agents, capable of stepping back from constant bargaining and to cease their remorseless seeking of advantage. I wouldn't want them to be Sandbergian would-be buyers of kidneys, full of self-serving tales of revealed preferences, caveat emptor and "that makes me smart."

As with anything, the dose makes the poison. I know lots of hustlers who are fun as hell to hang around, whom I'd trust with my life or at least my password. A lot of libertarians fit this mold: people who are truly committed to voluntarism and intrinsic generosity.

But libertarianism, like any movement, is a coalition, and within that coalition is a large group of people – people who are invigorated by bargaining – who are committed to dominating others by exhausting them. For them, bargaining isn't a cognitive demand, it's a cognitive invigorator. To the extent that they understand this, they think it's just a sign that they are born to rule. Caveat emptor. Revealed preferences. That makes me smart.

What's more, for people on the losing side of this trade, losing the bargain means being poorer, and being poorer means more cognitive demands – rationing out your pennies and eeling through the impossibly narrow gaps between payday and the day the bills are due. This produces a winner-take-all dynamic in which the losers of the bargaining game have less energy and wherewithal to bargain the next time around.

This is beautifully unpacked in (what else) a science fiction novel, Naomi Kritzer's Liberty's Daughter, a young adult novel about the teen daughter of a libertarian cult leader who is growing up on a seastead:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/21/podkaynes-dad-was-a-dick/#age-of-consent

Kritzer's novel beautifully plays out the "stop hitting yourself" justifications that eventually allow her libertarians to enslave others – after all, in a truly voluntaristic society, why wouldn't you have the freedom to sell yourself into slavery? And if you claim later that you're unhappy with this arrangement, tough shit – you've got a "revealed preference" for being a slave.

Caveat emptor. If you're the kind of person who gets charged up by bargaining, then you were born to rule.

If bargaining means cheating, well, "that makes you smart."

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Electronic Frontier Foundation to swap leaders as AI, ICE fights escalate https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/03/trump-made-opposing-government-spying-cool-again-effs-departing-chief-says/

• NYC Schools Release AI Policy That Tells Teachers AI Cannot Do Teacher’s Job https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/03/25/nyc-schools-release-ai-policy-that-tells-teachers-ai-cannot-do-teachers-job/

• How to Keep ICE Agents Out of Your Phone at the Airport https://theintercept.com/2026/03/25/ice-airports-phone-security-privacy-safety/

• End of “Chat Control”: EU Parliament Stops Mass Surveillance in Voting Thriller https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/end-of-chat-control-eu-parliament-stops-mass-surveillance-in-voting-thriller-paving-the-way-for-genuine-child-protection/

• The Handoff Problem https://blog.dshr.org/2026/03/the-handoff-problem.html

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago DIY circumcision revision (CW gross) https://web.archive.org/web/20010618005738/https://www.subgenius.com/subg-digest/v5/0206.html

#25yrsago Gen X guide to Disneyland https://web.archive.org/web/20010302143848/http://www.omnigroup.com/~cirocco/dizney/index.html

#25yrsago Hugo for best website https://web.archive.org/web/20010404222727/http://www.conjose.org/wsfs/wsfs_web.html

#20yrsago America’s worst WiFi hotels https://web.archive.org/web/20060404214142/http://www.hotelchatter.com/story/2006/3/27/21911/4235/hotels/Worst_WiFi_Hotels_2006

#20yrsago Help Peter Beagle sue the film-house that made “The Last Unicorn” https://web.archive.org/web/20060116061435/http://www.conlanpress.com/youcanhelp/

#20yrsago EMI releases Brazilian DRM CDs that totally hose their customers https://memex.craphound.com/2006/03/24/emi-releases-brazilian-drm-cds-that-totally-hose-their-customers/

#20yrsago Video reveals Belarus electoral fraud https://web.archive.org/web/20060506233026/http://www.media-ocean.de/2006/03/26/does-youtube-video-proove-election-fraud-in-belarus/

#20yrsago Kleptones new mashup double-CD free to download: “24 Hours” https://web.archive.org/web/20060810172451/http://www.kleptones.com/pages/downloads_24h.html

#20yrsago Steve Jobs, 2002: “You need the right to manage music on all devices” https://web.archive.org/web/20060509144710/http://www.songbirdnest.com/nivi/blog/jobs_france

#20yrsago Monks in Wisconsin refill printer cartridges https://web.archive.org/web/20060324043723/http://lasermonks.com/

#20yrsago DRM is Killing Music https://www.voidstar.com/node.php?id=2686

#20yrsago Swisscom WiFi at London conference centre costs $838.73/24h https://web.archive.org/web/20060329090917/https://benhammersley.com/FCE47259-78BA-4B5E-ABF2-F39B93520C85/Blog/C9043A4D-F791-4B7F-A8A7-3484779B4748.html

#20yrsago Most expensive Google ad keywords listed https://web.archive.org/web/20060325094245/http://www.cwire.org/2006/03/23/updated-highest-paying-adsense-keywords/

#20yrsago LA Times slams Marvel for trying to steal “superhero” https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-mar-26-ed-superhero26-story.html

#15yrsago Microsoft switches off privacy for Hotmail users in war-torn and repressive states https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/03/microsoft-shuts-https-hotmail-over-dozen-countries

#15yrsago Wisconsin GOP uses sunshine laws to harass prof who speculated about links with pressure group https://scholarcitizen.williamcronon.net/2011/03/24/open-records-attack-on-academic-freedom/

#15yrsago Koch-pranking Beast editor runs for Congress https://web.archive.org/web/20110326042435/http://www.murphycanhascongress.com/

#15yrsago Did Limewire shutdown really cause P2P music infringement to drop 30%? https://web.archive.org/web/20110428175101/http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/03/24/cnet_and_others_get_it_wrong_miss_the_actual_story.php

#15yrsago Man who wants to patent genome gets legal threat for embedding James Joyce quote in artificial lifeform https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidewalt/2011/03/14/craig-venters-genetic-typo/

#15yrsago James Gleick’s tour-de-force: The Information, a natural history of information theory https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/24/james-gleicks-tour-de-force-the-information-a-natural-history-of-information-theory/

#15yrsago NYT paywall sub is $100 more expensive than WSJ, Economist and Daily combined https://theunderstatement.com/post/4019228737/digital-subscription-prices-visualized-aka-the

#15yrsago RIP, Diana Wynne Jones https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/mar/27/diana-wynne-jones-obituary

#15yrsago Front-line report from Trafalgar Square paints a radically different picture https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2011/03/trafalgar-square-police-young

#15yrsago Deathless: Cat Valente’s beautiful fantasy of Stalinist Russia and the Siege of Leningrad https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/28/deathless-cat-valentes-beautiful-fantasy-of-stalinist-russia-and-the-siege-of-leningrad/

#10yrsago Cop Cabs: The NYPD has at least three fake taxis on NYC’s streets https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2016/mar/28/nypd-taxicabs/

#10yrsago Peer-reviewed online expert system will help you if you’ve been poisoned https://www.webpoisoncontrol.org/

#10yrsago The “American College of Pediatricians” is a hate group with fewer than 200 members https://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2016/03/28/speaking-of-bad-science-never-trust-the-american-college-of-pediatricians

#10yrsago Ransomware gets a lot faster by encrypting the master file table instead of the filesystem https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/petya-ransomware-skips-the-files-and-encrypts-your-hard-drive-instead/

#10yrsago Security-conscious darkweb crime marketplaces institute world-leading authentication practices https://web.archive.org/web/20160331091155/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/some-dark-web-markets-have-better-user-security-than-gmail-instagram

#10yrsago Saudi embassy hired mafiosi to smuggle Turkish PM Erdoğan’s son out of Italy ahead of money laundering charges https://web.archive.org/web/20160311095055/https://awdnews.com/top-news/rome’s-police-spokesman-saudi-embassy-helped-erdoğan’s-son-to-escape-the-police-custody-using-a-forged-saudi-passport-and-disguised-as-an-arab-diplomat

#10yrsago Photos from Bring Your Own Bigwheel 16 https://www.jwz.org/photos/2016-03-27-bigwheel/

#10yrsago How to Talk About Videogames: a book that is serious (but never dull) about games https://memex.craphound.com/2016/03/28/how-to-talk-about-videogames-a-book-that-is-serious-but-never-dull-about-games/

#10yrsago Names that break databases https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160325-the-names-that-break-computer-systems

#10yrsago Cops arrest public defender who was representing her client, face no discipline https://www.techdirt.com/2016/03/23/complaint-board-finds-police-officers-violated-policy-arresting-public-defender-who-demanded-they-stop-questioning-her-clients/

#10yrsago Vulnerability in recorders used by 70+ manufacturers’ CCTV systems has been known since 2014 https://web.archive.org/web/20160322204109/https://kerneronsec.com/2016/02/remote-code-execution-in-cctv-dvrs-of.html

#10yrsago Ransomware hackers steal a hospital. Again. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/03/hospital-declares-internet-state-of-emergency-after-ransomware-infection/

#10yrsago STUCK: Public transit’s moment arrives just as public spending disappears https://web.archive.org/web/20160327040633/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-immobile-masses-why-traffic-is-awful-and-public-transit-is-worse

#10yrsago East Harlem’s secret museum of gorgeous junk rescued from NYC’s trash https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/fascinating-photos-from-the-secret-trash-collection-in-a-new-york-sanitation-garage

#10yrsago Heatmaps of the human body in varying emotional states https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1321664111

#10yrsago Man exonerated after video shows unprovoked police beating, cops insist all is well https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/03/video-clears-texas-man-of-assaulting-cop-did-police-commit-perjury/

#10yrsago What you think about Millennials says a lot about you, nothing about them https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HFwok9SlQQ

#10yrsago Jerks were able to turn Microsoft’s chatbot into a Nazi because it was a really crappy bot https://web.archive.org/web/20160325221619/http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-to-make-a-not-racist-bot

#10yrsago When the antibiotics run out, maybe we can use GMO maggots to stave off infection https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12896-016-0263-z

#10yrsago King Arthur’s grave was a hoax invented by cash-strapped 12th C monks https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/03/medieval-monks-used-king-arthurs-grave-as-an-attraction-to-raise-money/

#10yrsago Eating from the trash of New York’s finest grocers and restaurants https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJmCUSb-ZVo

#10yrsago Catholic Church-owned insurer has secret files on paedophile priests https://www.theage.com.au/national/secret-archive-of-paedophile-crime-kept-by-catholic-churchs-insurers-20160317-gnlc6k.html

#10yrsago Names that break databases https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160325-the-names-that-break-computer-systems

#10yrsago Cops arrest public defender who was representing her client, face no discipline https://www.techdirt.com/2016/03/23/complaint-board-finds-police-officers-violated-policy-arresting-public-defender-who-demanded-they-stop-questioning-her-clients/

#10yrsago Vulnerability in recorders used by 70+ manufacturers’ CCTV systems has been known since 2014 https://web.archive.org/web/20160322204109/https://kerneronsec.com/2016/02/remote-code-execution-in-cctv-dvrs-of.html

#5yrsago Dirty NYPD cops can't lose https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/26/overfitness-factor/#heads-you-lose-tails-they-win

#5yrsago Dreaming and overfitting https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/26/overfitness-factor/#dreamtime

#5yrsago Good news about news co-ops https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/25/facebook-has-a-facebook-problem/#good-news

#5yrsago Zuckerpunch https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/25/facebook-has-a-facebook-problem/#played-for-zuckers

#5yrsago Green investing is a fraud https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/24/greenwashing/#bargaining

#

1yrago Trump loves Big Tech https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/24/whats-good-for-big-tech/#is-good-for-america

#1yrago Why I don't like AI art https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/25/communicative-intent/#diluted

#1yrago The AOC-Sanders anti-oligarch tour is all about organizing https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/26/not-me-us/#the-people-no

#1yrago Reality-Based Communities https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/27/use-your-mentality/#face-up-to-reality

#1yrago Big Tech and "captive audience venues" https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/28/street-pricing/#sportball-analogies

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Montreal: Bronfman Lecture (McGill), Apr 10
  https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disrupter-tickets-1982706623885

• Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, Apr 10
  https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/4863920260410

• London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25
  https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691

• NYC: Enshittification at Commonweal Ventures, Apr 29
  https://luma.com/ssgfvqz8

• Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

• SXSW London, Jun 2
  https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech

• Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU

• Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech)
  https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074

• The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah)
  https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doctorow-matthew-potolsky/

• Tanner Humanities Lecture (U Utah)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Yf1nSyekI

Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

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

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

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

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. First draft complete. Second draft underway.

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

• "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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"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

• The cost of doing business: "Market definition" is a denial-of-service attack on antitrust law.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Union Pacific v model railroads; Warners v Potter fans; NYT's trademark trolling; Why Rebecca Black mashups suck; Jabba the peep; Grenfell costs v tenants.
• Upcoming appearances: Berkeley, Montreal, London, Berlin, Hay-on-Wye.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

The cost of doing business (permalink)

The most important part of any law, rule or policy isn't what it permits or prohibits – it's whether you can enforce the law at all.

After all, as odious as a law that forbids people from thinking mean thoughts about Trump would be, it would also be completely unenforceable, and would ultimately just not be very important, except as a symbol of Trump's evil.

This property is called "administrability," meaning, "the degree to which an authority can administer the policy." There are many dimensions to administrability, including "Is it even possible to detect whether this policy has been violated?" In that same vein, there're questions like, "If you discover someone has violated this policy, will you be able to stop them from continuing to do so?" For example, the US routinely indicts North Korean hackers, but unless those hackers visit a place that the US can inveigle into arresting and extraditing them, it's a mostly symbolic gesture:

https://www.justice.gov/usao-cdca/pr/3-north-korean-military-hackers-indicted-wide-ranging-scheme-commit-cyber-attacks-and

One undertheorized aspect of administrability is "fact-intensivity"; that is, are there difficult, fact-intensive questions that need to be answered in order to determine whether someone has violated this policy?

Think of probate law: probate is often a lengthy and expensive process, especially if the deceased is "intestate" (has no will). To probate an estate, all the deceased's assets have to be cataloged and assessed, claims of heirs and inheritors have to be evaluated, etc, etc.

People spend a lot of time and money creating wills and family trusts largely to answer these questions when they're easiest to resolve (when you're still alive and can clearly express your preferences), because it's even more expensive and time-consuming to answer these questions when you're not around anymore to weigh in on them.

As complex and time-consuming as managing your estate can be, there's nothing wrong in theory with having a complicated, careful process in place for dealing with it. Taking care of your loved ones and disposing of your assets is something that's worth getting right, and people have all kinds of highly individual preferences for this that requires a lot of flexibility in the system. Making a system that's very customizable but also robust against fraud (or even honest mistakes) requires a lot of administrative superstructure to hold it all together.

And besides, probate isn't something we have to do very often. After all, most of us will only die one or fewer times. It's not like we have to figure this stuff out every day. It's the kind of thing you can do every couple of decades, over several hours, spread out over weeks.

Frequency, then, is the enemy of fact-intensivity. If you had to do probate-level form-filling to buy a cup of coffee or pay your electricity bill, that would be nuts. For one thing, it would be full employment for lawyers – and it would cost so much that by the time you got to the cafe or the gas-pump, you'd be too broke to actually complete the transaction.

This comes up a lot in discussions of tech policy, because once you computerize something, you can start to do it very quickly, which means that policies that added, say, a 1% admin overhead to a task before it was digitized can add up to a 1,000% overhead once it's digitized.

The best example of this is copyright: copyright is the most fact-intensive doctrine you deal with on a day to day basis. Technically, conclusively determining whether you have the right to forward an email could take a lawyer a whole day. Sure, most email forwarding is "fair use" (that is, it fits into one of copyright's "limitations and exceptions"), but any decent IP law prof could come up with ten email forwarding hypotheticals in ten minutes that could occupy a whole fourth-year IP law class for an entire semester.

One of the reasons copyright is so fact-intensive is that it was designed to be invoked infrequently. We're talking about a legal regime that was designed to answer questions about book and music publishing (and then adapted for other kinds of media), and even the most prolific publisher or label is going to deal with double-digits' worth of new works per season.

Meanwhile, the people working at that same publisher are likely forwarding hundreds, if not thousands of emails per day. If the publisher's copyright lawyers had to review every one of those forwards, they would never publish another book. They would go bankrupt.

Obviously, that's not how things work.

Why not, though?

Well, mostly because we just pretend copyright law isn't there. To the extent that we do acknowledge the potential for copyright liability from everyday activities that no one ever asks a lawyer to sign off on, we manage that liability through shitty, one-sided contracts. You have undoubtably clicked on dozens of agreements this year wherein you warranted that nothing you were doing violated copyright law (a neat trick, given that you probably have no idea whether any of the activities you routinely engage in could violate copyright) and further, you indemnified someone else for "all costs arising from any claims" associated with your activity.

That's an unbelievably shitty, one-sided clause for you to have "agreed" to, since "any claims" includes claims with no merit and "all costs" includes "money we paid someone who brought a bullshit claim to just go away."

In other words, you routinely click through these nonsense "agreements" where you promise to give every cent you have to anyone who wants it, if the company that made you click through that bullshit decides to promise some deranged rando a million bucks to settle their wild accusation that you violated their copyrights.

For complicated reasons, we're not all drowning in copyright lawsuits all the time, but if someone really wanted to fuck you up and they had deep enough pockets, they could use the fact that you're a giant, routine copyright infringer (just like everyone else) to wreck your life for years.

So obviously, it would have been better if we'd done some major refactoring of copyright law once the internet came along. My preferred fix? Carve out activities unrelated to the media industry's supply chain from copyright altogether:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/the-internets-original-sin/

Copyright isn't the only fact-intensive doctrine that's challenged by the cadence of digital life. The internet lets us do a lot of things, very quickly, meaning that even small factual questions pile up beyond any reasonable capacity to resolve them.

Take the debate over content moderation and hate speech. Hate speech and harassment online are serious problems and they disproportionately affect people who are getting the shitty end of the stick in the offline world, too. The legacy platforms obviously don't give a damn about these people, either.

So it's tempting to attempt to use policy to solve this real problem. Even if the US wasn't being run by a trollocracy, this would probably be a nonstarter in America, because hate speech is protected by the First Amendment, and purely speech-based harassment is hard to punish without falling afoul of 1A.

But other countries – notably the EU – are having a go at it. I think this is a doomed effort – but not because hate speech isn't a serious problem! Rather, because hate speech regulations are very fact intensive, and hate speech is very common. Frequency is the enemy of fact-intensivity.

Say the EU creates a rule requiring platforms to take reasonable measures to prevent hate speech. This requires

1. arriving at a common definition of hate speech;

2. adjudicating whether a given user's speech rises to that definition; and

3. determining whether the platform's technical measures were "reasonable."

This is the work of months, if not years. And hate speech happens hundreds of times per minute on the big platforms. It's just not an administrable policy.

Now, just because policy isn't administrable, it doesn't follow that there's nothing to be done. There's other ways to give relief to the targets of harassment and hate speech. To get to those ways, we have to ask ourselves why people who are tormented by trolls stay on the platforms that expose them to abuse.

There are plenty of extremely wrong explanations for this floating around. One is that Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are Cyber-Rasputins who can hypnotize us into using their platforms even if we don't like them, by "hacking our dopamine loops." This is a very silly explanation: everyone who's ever claimed to have perfected mind-control was a liar and/or deluded:

https://pluralistic.net/HowToDestroySurveillanceCapitalism

Another is that people are lying (possibly to themselves) when they say they don't like being harassed on legacy social media platforms. This theory – from neoclassical econ – is called "revealed preferences," and it holds that people whose actions go against their stated preferences are "revealing a preference" for the thing they're doing.

This is the sort of thing you end up believing in if you incur the kind of neurological injury that arises from pursuing an economics degree, which causes you to be incapable of reasoning about (or even perceiving) power. "Revealed preferences" tells you that if someone sells their kidney to pay the rent, they have a "revealed preference" for having one kidney.

Thankfully, there's a much simpler explanation for people's continued use of platforms where they are subject to abuse and harassment. It's this: the only thing worse than being a member of a disfavored minority who is subject to abuse and harassment is being a member of a disfavored minority who is subject to abuse and harassment who is also isolated from your community.

Leaving Facebook or Twitter means leaving behind the people who comfort and support you when you are subject to abuse. The more abuse and discrimination you face, the more that support matters, and the harder it is to leave that community behind. You love your community more than you hate Zuck or Musk, so you stay, because as much as you love them, it's transcendentally difficult to coordinate a mass departure for somewhere else. This is called the "collective action problem" and it's a regressive tax on the most abused platform users and communities.

This is a problem we can solve with policy! We can mandate that platforms support interoperability, so that when you leave a legacy platform like Twitter or Facebook for a modern platform like Mastodon or Bluesky, the messages addressed to you on the legacy platform are forwarded to your new home. That way you can have the people you love without the platform you hate.

This is a very administrable policy. The main lift is figuring out the nuts and bolts of interoperability, and while that's a big technical project, it's the kind of thing you only have to do once or twice. Then, if a platform fails in its duty to forward your messages after you leave, it's very easy for a regulator to determine whether it's violating the rules – they just have to send a message to your old account and see if it shows up for your new account:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/19/better-failure/#let-my-tweeters-go

A hate speech policy is hard to administer because it requires resolving a bunch of fact-intensive questions. A "right to exit" policy replaces all those fact-intensive questions with a bright line policy ("if you don't forward your former users' messages, you are guilty"), which can be administered at high speed.

Whenever a fact-intensive policy that regulates an infrequent activity fails because the activity becomes more frequent, you have two choices: you can either slow down the activity, or you can replace the fact-intensive questions with bright-line tests that can be resolved much more quickly.

But more often, we fail to do either, and everything goes very badly indeed.

That's more or less what's happened with "merger scrutiny," the part of antitrust law that lets competition regulators (or competitors) block or put conditions on mergers that involve large firms.

In these merger scrutiny cases, plaintiffs who challenge a merger are expected to resolve a bunch of extremely fact-intensive questions. Fail to resolve any of these questions and the merger goes ahead.

The most pernicious fact-intensive question that arises in antitrust cases is "market definition." That's pretty much what it sounds like: "What market is this company doing business in?" If you can prove that the companies in a proposed merger are in the same market, then it's a lot easier to prove that allowing the merger would reduce competition.

The problem is that "market" is a very slippery concept. As Tim Wu describes in his excellent book The Age of Extraction, "market definition" creates a near-infinite amount of wiggle-room:

https://www.wired.com/story/tim-wu-age-of-extraction/

When Wu was serving in the Obama FTC, he had a front-row seat for Google's acquisition of Waze. Now, obviously these companies are direct competitors, but the Obama administration wanted the merger to go through (it was dominated by people who thought monopolies are efficient and didn't want to do their jobs). So these officials decided that Google Maps' market was "finding out where you are" and that Waze's market was "getting you somewhere." It was really that stupid.

Writing for the Law and Political Economy project, Hal Singer explains how the fact-intensive nature of the "market definition" question makes it virtually impossible to prevent market concentration and abuse of dominance:

https://lpeproject.org/blog/the-market-definition-trap/

From Livenation/Ticketmaster to Paramount/Warner Brothers, the "market definition trap" leaves the public virtually defenseless before efforts to reorganize the economy into extractive, rapacious cartels.

In a recent interview with the Do Not Pass Go podcast, Paul Crampton (Canada's recently retired top competition judge) talks about the tsunami of mergers that Canada's Competition Bureau is expected to oversee:

https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/inside-canadas-competition-court

Fact-intensive market definition questions can't possibly be resolved at the pace of mergers. That's because companies' preferred growth strategy is combining, rather than competing. There's plenty of political problems with merging Paramount and Warner, but there's also a huge economic problem, because these companies are direct competitors who will soon operate as a single firm.

The M&A industry has staged a denial of service attack on its regulators, accelerating the pace of mergers involving large firms far beyond the ability of a regulator to resolve the fact-intensive questions these mergers raise. They've flooded the zone, and after the mergers go through and the companies start abusing their customers, workers and competitors, these same market definition questions bedevil any attempt to rein in this abuse of dominance.

Singer makes some excellent suggestions for legal reforms to resolve this, moving some of the fact-intensive questions to bright-line ones, such as "whether the challenged conduct injured workers, consumers, or some other counterparty."

This is the right approach. As we plan for a future in which legislatures recognize the enormous harms that monopolization inflicted on our societies, we need to come up with more bright-line rules for antimonopoly rules. These will lack some of the subtlety that fact-intensive treatment affords, but you can't do fact-intensive adjudication for high frequency activities. So maybe we say that no company can acquire or merge with another company more than once in 18 months, or that companies that share more than 10% of their customers can't merge.

Some "good" mergers will fail these tests, but that's the price we pay. If you want to move mergers from a rare occurrence to an everyday, you're going to have to accept a loss of nuance in the rules for these mergers. The alternative is the ugly, self-destructive mess we have today.

(Image: Harrison Keely, CC BY 4.0; DocteurCosmos, CC BY 3.0; modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• "Gooning Towards the Führer" as policy coordination https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/gooning-towards-the-fuhrer-as-policy

• The one thing everyone gets wrong about feminism https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/15/feminism-isnt-dead-rebecca-solnit

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Warner Bros v Potter fandom https://web.archive.org/web/20010331091849/http://www.potterwar.org.uk/home/index.html

#20yrsago Rant transcript from Game Developers’ Conference https://web.archive.org/web/20060404230422/http://crystaltips.typepad.com/wonderland/2006/03/gdc_game_develo.html

#20yrsago Union Pacific threatens to sue painters, model railroaders over trademark https://web.archive.org/web/20060413085045/https://www.trains.com/community/forum/topic.asp?page=-1&TOPIC_ID=60666&REPLY_ID=681783#681783

#20yrsago US frequent flier programs deliver less and less https://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/21/business/still-loyal-to-your-airline-you-must-be-looney-tunes.html

#20yrsago Mother Jones on IP overkill https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2006/03/intellectual-property-run-amok/

#20yrsago Comic advises women to call anti-abortion Senator to make their choices https://web.archive.org/web/20060321230542/http://minimumsecurity.net/toons2006/6034.htm

#20yrsago HOWTO become an early riser https://stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/05/how-to-become-an-early-riser/

#15yrsago Trademark thought experiment: when should intermediaries be cops? (Barista vs. Barbie) https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/23/trademark-thought-experiment-when-should-intermediaries-be-cops-barista-vs-barbie/

#15yrsago New York Times advances weird, self-destructive trademark theory to prop up its paywall https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/23/new-york-times-advances-weird-self-destructive-trademark-theory-to-prop-up-its-paywall/

#15yrsago LSE economists: file sharing isn’t killing music industry, but copyright enforcement will https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/03/is-file-sharing-the-global-future/

#15yrsago Anti-union group: send us secret, unlimited donations so we can bring transparency to politics! https://web.archive.org/web/20110325141411/https://www.wmc.org/MediaOutlet/display.cfm?ID=2485

#15yrsago Why Rebecca Black fascinates us, and why the mashups suck https://www.happyrobot.net/words/pony.asp?id=10233

#15yrsago Understanding the SSL security breach, preparing for the next one https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/03/iranian-hackers-obtain-fraudulent-https

#10yrsago Airlines celebrate record profits, having killed bereavement fares https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-lazarus-20160322-column.html

#10yrsago Bake: homemade Jabba the Hutt peeps https://www.starwars.com/news/jabba-the-hutt-marshmallow-treats

#5yrsago Tories pass Grenfell costs onto tenants https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/23/parliament-of-landlords/#slow-motion-arson

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Berkeley: Bioneers keynote, Mar 27
  https://conference.bioneers.org/

• Montreal: Bronfman Lecture (McGill), Apr 10
  https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disrupter-tickets-1982706623885

• Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, Apr 10
  https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/4863920260410

• London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25
  https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691

• Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech

• Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU

• Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech)
  https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074

• The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah)
  https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doctorow-matthew-potolsky/

• Tanner Humanities Lecture (U Utah)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Yf1nSyekI

Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

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

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

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

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. First draft complete. Second draft underway.

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

• "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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"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

• Goodhart's Law vs "prediction markets": Putting a gun to the metric's head.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Apple v interop; Yahoo v the world; Rasputin v the Haunted Mansion; Opening chord from A Hard Day's Night; Mondrian Pong; "IP": Patent trolls v Apple.
• Upcoming appearances: Berkeley, Montreal, London, Berlin, Hay-on-Wye.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

Goodhart's Law vs "prediction markets" (permalink)

The most selectively believed-in verse in the conservative catechism is the idea that "incentives matter."

Sure, "incentives matter" if you're seeking healthcare. That's why you're nibbled to death by co-pays and deductibles – if you could get healthcare whenever you felt like it, you might get too much healthcare. "Incentives matter," so we have to make sure that you only seek care when you really need it:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/14/timmy-share/#a-superior-moral-justification-for-selfishness

But rich people don't need to be disciplined by incentives. They can get no-bid contracts with Uncle Sucker without being tempted to rip off the USA. They can force their workers into nondisparagement clauses without being tempted to act like a colossal asshole, secure in the knowledge that they can sue workers who tattle on them. They can force their workers into noncompete clauses without being tempted to underpay and abuse their workers, secure in the knowledge that they can sue workers who take their labor elsewhere. They can force their workers into binding arbitration clauses without being tempted into maiming or killing them, secure in the knowledge that the workers can't sue them.

So incentives matter…when you're fucking over working people. But incentives don't matter, when you're gilding the Epstein class's lilies.

But incentives really do matter. That's the premise of Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." This comes up all the time. Google got its start by observing that people who made websites linked to other websites that they found important or worthy or informative. With this insight, Google repurposed the academic practice of "citation analysis" to predict which pages on the internet were most authoritative, calling it Pagerank.

Google Search, powered by Pagerank, was vastly superior to any search engine in history. But as soon as Google became the most popular search engine, people started making links to bad websites – sites filled with spam and malware and junk – in order to game the results. The metric – inbound links – became a target – get inbound links – and stopped being a useful metric.

There is something quite wonderful and life affirming about the idea of Pagerank: the idea that people are, on average, pretty good at figuring out what's good. Rather than taking Yahoo's approach of having experts rank and categorize every website on earth, Google trusted "the wisdom of crowds" and it worked (until they created an incentive to subvert it).

"The wisdom of crowds" was in the air in those days. James Surowiecki had a massive bestseller with that title in 2004, expounding on the idea that people were, in aggregate, good at figuring stuff out:

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

Surowiecki's book revolved around a famous anecdote from 1906, when 800 people at the Plymouth county fair were invited to guess at the weight of a slaughtered and dressed ox. Statistician (and eugenicist creep) Francis Galton noted that the average guess of 1207 lbs was within 1% of the actual weight, 1198 lbs. This turns out to be a repeatable phenomenon: if you get a lot of people – non-experts, experts, people paying close attention, people who barely think about it – to guess about something, the average is surprisingly accurate. Importantly, it's often more accurate than the best guess of experts.

This idea of the wisdom of crowds inspired a lot of 2000s-era internet projects. Some of them (Yahoo Answers) were pretty bad. Others (Wikipedia) were astounding. Of course, economists observed that "the wisdom of crowds" sounds a lot like the idea of "price discovery" – the idea that markets are a way of processing widely diffused information about desires and capacity in order to derive and emit signals about what should be produced.

Economists have long spoken of future events being "priced in" to markets – for example, the price of oil today reflects more than the diminished supply resulting from Trump's military blunders, it also reflects "the market's" belief that oil production capacity will be disrupted for a long time to come. Add up all the different buyers' and sellers' guesses about the future of oil (incorporating diffuse knowledge about damage to infrastructure, capacity to rebuild, and intentions of the actors) and (we're told) we'll get a number that accurately reflects the real situation.

And, unlike Pagerank, this number can't be manipulated by flooding the system with spurious, self-serving inputs. If you want to move this price, you have to buy or sell something, which costs money. And because the market is "deep" (with a lot of participants), the sums you'd have to inject into the system to alter its consensus is incredibly large – more than you could possibly stand to make by manipulating the price itself. Incentives matter.

Put "markets," "the wisdom of crowds" and "incentives matter" together and you get "prediction markets." Just create a market where people can bet real money on the outcomes of events and you can recreate Galton's ox-guessing miracle, but for everything – how much new solar capacity will come online in Pakistan next year; the likelihood that the Toronto Transit Commission will finish the Ontario Line this year; whether a biotech firm will ship an AIDS vaccine before 2040.

This is where Goodhart's law comes in. The idea that betting markets improve the wisdom of crowds because participants have "skin in the game" only works if the cheapest way to win a bet is to be right. If it's cheaper to win by cheating, well, "incentives matter," and you'll get cheating.

Any prediction market needs an "oracle" – a decisive source of truth about how an event turned out. "How much new solar capacity came online in Pakistan" this year sounds like an empirical question, but unless every bettor agrees to travel to Pakistan together and walk the land, counting solar panels and checking proof of their installation dates, these bettors need to agree on some third party assessor as authoritative and trust whatever they say.

Which means that the single most important factor in any prediction market is the quality of the oracle. If you let Trump be your oracle, he'll insist (on a daily basis) that his war in Iran is over, and that he had bigger crowds for his inauguration than anyone in history, and that every criminal is Somali, and on and on and on.

So you need to get someone trustworthy and diligent to serve as your oracle. But that person also has to be incorruptible, because otherwise a bettor will offer them a bribe to lie about the outcome of a bet. And if the oracle can't be bribed, they can be coerced.

That's just what's happened. Times of Israel war correspondent Emanuel Fabian didn't know that he was serving as an oracle for a bunch of degenerate gamblers on Polymarket – until he wrote a 150 word blog post that made a bunch of bettors in a $14m wager very, very angry:

https://www.timesofisrael.com/gamblers-trying-to-win-a-bet-on-polymarket-are-vowing-to-kill-me-if-i-dont-rewrite-an-iran-missile-story/

The $14m was riding on a bet about when Iran would successfully strike Israel, with "success" defined as a missile getting through without being intercepted. Fabian filed a routine report that a missile had struck an open area in Jerusalem without hurting anyone. That's when the degenerate gamblers found him.

At first, they sent thinly veiled threats, demanding that Fabian revise his reporting to say that the missile had been intercepted and that the impact was just wreckage from the interception. When Fabian did not revise his article, the gamblers tracked down his messaging IDs – Whatsapp, Discord, X – and bombarded him with escalating threats. A journalistic colleague contacted Fabian with the lie that his boss wanted Fabian to change the story, then admitted that he was actually invested in the wager, and offered to split the money with Fabian.

Then, a gambler calling himself "Haim" sent Fabian a new series of blood-curdling threats, including a promise to spend at least $900,000 (the money Haim said he stood to lose) on a hit-man to kill Fabian. Haim threatened Fabian's "lovely parents" and "brothers and sisters" too. The threats continued until Fabian published his article about the threats, then Haim disappeared.

Speaking to Charlie Warzel, Fabian said that he would never be able to report the same way again, because from now on, he'd be worried that some gambler would threaten to kill him if they didn't like what he wrote:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/03/emanuel-fabian-threats-polymarket/686454/?gift=nwn-guseqS6cY1kVeEKZAY9_c8Sv4UbJoz5hAUuU8YE&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

It's sadly not unusual for journalists to receive death threats for reporting the truth, and Israel is the most dangerous country in the world to be a journalist. The IDF has murdered at least 274 journalists to date:

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

But those journalists are being murdered for political reasons, because someone has an ideological stake in suppressing the truth. Fabian's talking about an entirely novel – and far less predictable – threat; namely, that you will piss off someone who guessed wrong about the outcome of some arbitrary event and who thinks that they can salvage their bet by intimidating you.

Writing for Techdirt, Mike Masnick talks about the sheer perversity of this: that prediction markets, far from being a means of surfacing hidden information, have become a system for distorting information:

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/19/prediction-markets-promised-better-information-instead-theyre-creating-powerful-incentives-to-corrupt-information/

As Masnick says, this is no routine proof of Goodhart's law, where a metric becomes a target. In this case, participants can "put a gun to the metric's head." And of course, not every journalist is as incorruptible as Fabian – think about Fabian's colleague who offered to split the take if Fabian would lie about the missile strike. So there's plenty of incentive to publish lies – and incentives matter, right?

Now, "prediction markets" are big business and they have plenty of apologists (incentives matter). These apologists will say that the corruption is a feature, not a bug, because prediction markets will attract insiders who cheat on the bets by using their insider knowledge, and that means that looking at the moving odds of an event can help everyone else figure out what's about to happen. If military insiders who know that Trump is about to kidnap the president of Venezuela and steal its oil start laying big bets that this is going to happen, the shifting odds are a signal about a true future event.

But even if you buy this perverse argument, it doesn't offset the even more perverse effect – that prediction markets create an incentive to corrupt our best sources of information, the oracles that every prediction market absolutely requires if it is going to hope to function.

Meanwhile, Polymarket and Kalshi suck at predicting things. As Molly White points out, the predictions in the recent Illinois 2nd District Congressional race weren't just incredibly wrong, they also precisely tracked the sums flooded into the election by cryptocurrency Super PACs, who tried (unsuccessfully) to buy the race. Polymarket and Kalshi are heavily crypto-coded (the only things you can do with crypto is buy other kinds of crypto, launder money, and make wagers) so these demonic freaks flush nearly as much money into the betting markets as they do into the elections they seek to corrupt:

https://bsky.app/profile/molly.wiki/post/3mhch3ze5nc2z

Prediction markets aren't good at producing information, but they're amazing at producing corruption. Polymarket and Kalshi have at last realized the unhinged fantasy of "assassination markets" – where you stochastically murder someone by putting up huge wagers at favorable odds that your target will be killed. Anyone can collect the wager by putting up a small counterwager and then bumping off the victim. But, as Protos's Cas Piancey and Mark Toon note, Polymarket and Kalshi know what side their bread is buttered on – they have banned bets on Trump's death (Trump's sons are heavily invested in both Polymarket and Kalshi):

https://protos.com/assassination-markets-are-legal-now-but-trump-doesnt-have-to-worry/

Incentives do matter. These are the foreseeable and foreseen outcomes of prediction markets. Many science fiction writers (Charlie Stross, Ted Chiang, me, and others!) have noted that long before the current AI bubble, our society was dominated by artificial life forms: the limited liability corporation, a "slow AI" that is an immortal colony organism that uses human beings as a form of inconvenient gut flora:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

Anyone who's worked with machine learning systems knows that they're prone to "reward hacking," like the ML-guided Roomba that was programmed to avoid collisions with walls and furniture as it found the quickest path around the room. The Roomba's collision sensor was on its front face, so the Roomba started moving around the room in reverse, smashing the hell out of the furnishings and walls, but never registering a hit:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190109142921/https://twitter.com/smingleigh/status/1060325665671692288

Markets are absolutely capable of inducing reward hacking in participants. The metric becomes a target. You think you're betting on the outcome of an event, but what you're really betting on is what an oracle will say the outcome was. No matter what the outcome is or how robust it is against outside influence, the oracle can be influenced with a gun to the temple. Sure, we all want "number go up," but why bother increasing the thing the number measures, when it's so much easier to threaten to dismember the person who publishes the number if they don't publish a higher number?

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Tickets to HOPE 26 go on sale Tuesday, March 24 https://store.2600.com/products/tickets-to-hope-26?variant=42147982737463

• Prediction Markets Promised Better Information. Instead They’re Creating Powerful Incentives to Corrupt Information. https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/19/prediction-markets-promised-better-information-instead-theyre-creating-powerful-incentives-to-corrupt-information/

• Suicidal Bootlicking as a Method of Governance https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/suicidal-bootlicking-as-a-method

• California bill aims to help vibe coders https://www.semafor.com/article/03/20/2026/california-bill-aims-to-help-vibe-coders

• Manipulating the Stock Market Is Trump's War Strategy https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-manipulating-the

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Airport screening doesn’t stop knives, bombs, or guns https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/03/airport_passeng.html

#20yrsago Apple’s hypocritical slam against French DRM-interop law http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4833010.stm

#20yrsago Vinge’s scientific computing Nature article about MMORPGs https://web.archive.org/web/20060411235146/http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060320/full/440411a.html

#20yrsago Yahoo: if you use our ads, you have to block non-US visitors https://memex.craphound.com/2006/03/22/yahoo-if-you-use-our-ads-you-have-to-block-non-us-visitors/

#20yrsago Stand-up comic gets his material from dumb patents https://web.archive.org/web/20060613212120/https://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70368-0.html?tw=rss.index

#15yrsago Chinese censorware nukes any voicecall that contains the word “protest” https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/22/world/asia/22china.html?_r=2&ref=world

#15yrsago Why Rasputin isn’t in the Haunted Mansion https://longforgottenhauntedmansion.blogspot.com/2011/03/famous-ghosts-and-ghosts-trying-to-make.html

#15yrsago HOWTO play the opening chord from ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ https://www.beatlesbible.com/features/hard-days-night-chord/

#15yrsago Google Book Search rejected: why not try fair use instead? https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/03/judge-rejects-google-book-monopoly/

#10yrsago Harvard Blue Book: peace in our time? https://web.archive.org/web/20160322020137/https://hlrecord.org/2016/03/the-blue-wars-a-report-from-the-front/

#10yrsago Mondrian pong https://b3ta.com/board/11191694

#10yrsago Silverpush says it’s not in the ultrasonic audio-tracker ad-beacons business anymore https://web.archive.org/web/20160324110815/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/silverpush-ftc-stop-eavesdropping-with-audio-beacons

#10yrsago Nixon started the War on Drugs because he couldn’t declare war on black people and hippies https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/?single=1

#10yrsago Anti-DRM demonstrators picket W3C meeting https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/03/scenes-anti-drm-protest-outside-w3c

#10yrsago Student loan garnisheeing topped $176M in three months https://web.archive.org/web/20160322023207/https://consumerist.com/2016/03/21/176m-in-wages-garnished-for-unpaid-federal-student-loans-in-just-three-months/

#10yrsago Dozens of car models can be unlocked and started with a cheap radio amp https://www.adac.de/rund-ums-fahrzeug/ausstattung-technik-zubehoer/assistenzsysteme/keyless/

#10yrsago US Embassy staffer ran a sextortion racket from work computer for 2 years https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/03/former-us-embassy-staffer-sentenced-to-nearly-five-years-for-sextortion/

#5yrsago Patent troll IP is more powerful than Apple's https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/22/gandersauce/#petard

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Berkeley: Bioneers keynote, Mar 27
  https://conference.bioneers.org/

• Montreal: Bronfman Lecture (McGill), Apr 10
  https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disrupter-tickets-1982706623885

• Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, Apr 10
  https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/4863920260410

• London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25
  https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691

• Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech

• Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU

• Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech)
  https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074

• The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah)
  https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doctorow-matthew-potolsky/

• Tanner Humanities Lecture (U Utah)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Yf1nSyekI

Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

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

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

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

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (646 words today, 55270 total) FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

• "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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https://twitter.com/doctorow

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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