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🖋 Cory DOCTOROW
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PLURALISTIC

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17.03.2025 à 10:08

Pluralistic: David Enrich's "Murder the Truth" (17 Mar 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4170 mots)


Today's links


The cover for the Harpercollins edition of David Enrich's 'Murder the Truth.'

David Enrich's "Murder the Truth" (permalink)

David Enrich's Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful is a brave, furious book about the long-running plan by America's wealthy and corrupt to "open up the libel laws" so they can destroy their critics:

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/murder-the-truth-david-enrich

Enrich is a veteran business reporter at the New York Times; he's reported extensively on high finance and sleaze, and has a knack for piercing the Shield of Boredom that protects finance crimes from scrutiny. His 2017 book The Spider's Web manages the nearly impossible trick of making the LIBOR-rigging conspiracy – which involved trillions, but in ways that were so baroque that hardly anyone noticed – comprehensible:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/09/24/the-spider-network-a-novelistic-account-of-the-mediocre-rich-men-who-robbed-the-world-with-libor/

In taking on the libel-industrial complex – a network of shadowy, thin-skinned, wealthy litigation funders; crank academics; buck-chasing lawyer lickspittle sociopaths; and the most corrupt Supreme Court justice on the bench today – Enrich is wading into dangerous territory. After all, he's reporting on people who've made it their life's mission to financially destroy anyone who has the temerity to report on their misdeeds.

As such, Enrich's writing is extremely cautious, sometimes comically so, but always intentionally, in a way that highlights the absurd chilling effect his subjects are attempting to induce in all of us.

The book primarily concerns itself with the effort to overturn Sullivan, a 1964 Supreme Court case that established protections for media outlets that report on public figures and commit minor factual errors, provided that the errors were neither negligent nor malicious.

Since Sullivan, media outlets have held the upper hand when reporting on public figures. While Sullivan isn't a license to simply make stuff up about celebrities, politicians and business leaders, it does mean that if a reporter makes a minor misstatement, it's on the subject of the reporting to prove that the error was negligent and/or malicious.

Before Sullivan, most defamation litigation happened in state courts, and southern courts allowed lawmakers and cops to sue newspapers that reported on racial terror campaigns during the civil rights fight. The judgments involved were so large that many media outlets simply gave up on reporting on the intimidation, violence and murder taking place in the Jim Crow south.

True to form, Clarence Thomas has led the charge to dismantle a law that was key to the struggle for rights for Black people and other disfavored minorities. In Enrich's telling, Thomas's animus for Sullivan started during his confirmation hearings, when Anita Hill described his relentless sexual harassment of the lawyers who worked for him, including Hill. Being the subject of a media firestorm that painted him as a disgusting, cruel sex-pest seems to have inspired Thomas in a decades-long campaign to find a case that would let him tear down Sullivan, so that wealthy people could once again intimidate reporters into silence. Of course, Thomas's hatred for Sullivan only grew when Propublica revealed that he had taken numerous "gifts" from wealthy "friends" who had business before the courts, revelations that will forever make Thomas's name a synonym for corruption.

Enrich's cast of characters includes a clutch of whiny, ultra-rich axe-grinders, who finance (often in secret) lawsuits that are designed to chip away at Sullivan. Some are international looters or corrupt ex-Soviet oligarchs, but others are ideologues, committed to the principle of impunity for the powerful.

He also introduces us to the lawyers who wage these battles. As you might imagine, the kind of lawyer who sits up at night figuring out how to help wealthy, powerful people destroy their critics is often a crank themselves, with "colorful" personal relations that Enrich reports on with meticulous prose, including the many denials and non-denials his subjects sent when he sought comment.

As with his LIBOR book, Enrich does yeoman duty here unpacking complex matters that would be dull in a lesser writer's hands. The litigation strategies devised by Sullivan's enemies are always convoluted and are sometimes clever, much like the litigation strategies used to kill campaign finance limits (Citizens United) and abortion rights (Dobbs). Indeed, many of the financiers, think-tanks and lawyers behind those plots are also would-be Sullivan slayers.

The best of these legal gambits are actually rather clever – locating innocent people who've been genuinely wronged by Sullivan (as the saying goes, "hard cases make bad law") and then using them to undermine Sullivan, without actually helping them in any way. It's positively fiendish.

We're in a moment when a lot of powerful people are getting far more powerful, and abusing that power to commit wildly corrupt acts. The only way we'll know about this is if the press can freely report on their misdeeds. Murder the Truth is a vital guide to the next Citizens United, the next Dobbs – a campaign to take away your right to know about the next assault on your rights that plutocrats will launch.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Help defend bloggers’ rights to keep their sources secret https://www.eff.org/cases/apple-v-does

#20yrsago Fans beg Sony to sell them lost Fiona Apple album that’s on P2P https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/morford/article/Who-Will-Free-Fiona-Apple-Suddenly-on-the-2723119.php

#20yrsago Grokster scorecard: what theories of liability do the amici endorse? https://craphound.com/grokster-charts.pdf

#20yrsago ETECH Notes: Life Hacks Live! https://craphound.com/etech2005-lifehacks.txt

#20yrsago Sterling and Steffen’s SXSW keynote https://web.archive.org/web/20050318074350/http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/002353.html

#20yrsago Orrin Hatch is head of new IP subcommitee https://www.technewsworld.com/story/hatch-to-lead-senate-panel-on-intellectual-property-41548.html

#20yrsago Hollywood stars look like crap in high-def https://web.archive.org/web/20050324045011/http://www.onhd.tv/thelist.htm

#20yrsago Self-replicating 3D printers https://web.archive.org/web/20050410074636/https://www.newscientist.com/article.ns/?id=dn7165

#20yrsago Andre Norton, RIP https://web.archive.org/web/20050318045717/https://www.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBIZ/books/03/17/obit.norton.ap/index.html

#15yrsago YouTube: Viacom secretly posted its videos even as they sued us for not taking down Viacom videos https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/broadcast-yourself/

#15yrsago Entertainment industry sours on term “pirate” — too sexy https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/03/piracy-sounds-too-sexy-say-rightsholders/

#15yrsago Is the UK record industry arrogant or stupid? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/mar/18/digital-economy-bill-calculated-loss

#15yrsago Michael Lewis’s THE BIG SHORT, visiting the econopocalypse through the lens of LIAR’S POKER https://memex.craphound.com/2010/03/17/michael-lewiss-the-big-short-visiting-the-econopocalypse-through-the-lens-of-liars-poker/

#10yrsago Playing the unplayable Death March (but not releasing the penguins) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3Nc4iR7rGA

#10yrsago NYPD officers who wikiwashed police brutality pages will get wrist-slaps https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20150316/civic-center/2-nypd-officers-who-edited-wikipedia-posts-face-no-punishment-sources-say/

#10yrsago The Glorkian Warrior Eats Adventure Pie https://memex.craphound.com/2015/03/17/the-glorkian-warrior-eats-adventure-pie/

#10yrsago J. Edgar Hoover palled around with a suspected commie spy https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/feb/26/fbi-files-congressman-dickstein-show-close-relatio/

#10yrsago DRM for woo: “light therapy” mask’s LED only works 30 times https://www.techdirt.com/2015/03/18/drm-how-to-make-30000-hour-led-bulbs/

#10yrsago Canadian court hands a gimme to copyright trolls https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2015/03/defending-privacy-doesnt-pay-federal-court-issues-ruling-in-voltage-teksavvy-costs/

#10yrsago Clinton’s sensitive email was passed through a third-party spam filtering service https://web.archive.org/web/20150317223142/http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2015/03/16/breaking-news-spam-filtering-service-had-access-to-clinton-classified-emails/comment-page-1/

#10yrsago Following the key Trans-Pacific Partnership senator with a 30′ blimp https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDKzwB8GhN0

#5yrsago Plague precautions from 1665 https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/18/diy-tp/#hello-1665

#5yrsago How to make your own toilet paper https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/18/diy-tp/#diy-tp

#5yrsago If nothing is for sale, how will covid stimulus work? https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/18/diy-tp/#covid-stimulus

#5yrsago 3D printed ventilator hero got a patent threat https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/18/diy-tp/#patently-absurd

#5yrsago Epidemiology and public health in 14 minutes https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/18/diy-tp/#explainer

#5yrsago Bigoted Republican Congressjerk votes against coronavirus relief because it might cover same-sex partnerships https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/18/diy-tp/#repandybiggs

#5yrsago How to split a single ventilator for four patients https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/18/diy-tp/#ventilator-sharing

#5yrsago John Green's mutual aid manifesto https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/18/diy-tp/#nerdfighters

#5yrsago American Airlines blew billions, now it wants a bailout https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/18/diy-tp/#aa-crashes

#5yrsago MAGA firefighters dismiss coronavirus as Democrat hoax https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/18/diy-tp/#trump-virus

#5yrsago Charter orders all workers to keep showing up https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/18/diy-tp/#sociopathy

#5yrsago Patent trolls try to shut down covid testing https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/17/pluralistic-17-mar-2020/#fortress-investment-group

#5yrsago Talking digital writing careers with the Writing Excuses podcast https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/17/pluralistic-17-mar-2020/#writing-excuses

#5yrsago Naomi Klein: this disaster has no room for disaster capitalism https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/17/pluralistic-17-mar-2020/#disaster-socialism

#5yrsago The Masque of the Red Death and Punch Brothers Punch https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/17/pluralistic-17-mar-2020/#punchmasque

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

15.03.2025 à 15:45

Pluralistic: Amazon annihilates Alexa privacy settings, turns on continuous, nonconsensual audio uploading (15 Mar 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4490 mots)


Today's links


A cylindrical black Alexa speaker on a coffee table; it is wearing a Darth Vader helmet.

Amazon annihilates Alexa privacy settings, turns on continuous, nonconsensual audio uploading (permalink)

Even by Amazon standards, this is extraordinarily sleazy: starting March 28, each Amazon Echo device will cease processing audio on-device and instead upload all the audio it captures to Amazon's cloud for processing, even if you have previously opted out of cloud-based processing:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/03/everything-you-say-to-your-echo-will-be-sent-to-amazon-starting-on-march-28/

It's easy to flap your hands at this bit of thievery and say, "surveillance capitalists gonna surveillance capitalism," which would confine this fuckery to the realm of ideology (that is, "Amazon is ripping you off because they have bad ideas"). But that would be wrong. What's going on here is a material phenomenon, grounded in specific policy choices and by unpacking the material basis for this absolutely unforgivable move, we can understand how we got here – and where we should go next.

Start with Amazon's excuse for destroying your privacy: they want to do AI processing on the audio Alexa captures, and that is too computationally intensive for on-device processing. But that only raises another question: why does Amazon want to do this AI processing, even for customers who are happy with their Echo as-is, at the risk of infuriating and alienating millions of customers?

For Big Tech companies, AI is part of a "growth story" – a narrative about how these companies that have already saturated their markets will still continue to grow. It's hard to overstate how dominant Amazon is: they are the leading cloud provider, the most important retailer, and the majority of US households already subscribe to Prime. This may sound like a good place to be, but for Amazon, it's actually very dangerous.

Amazon has a sky-high price/earnings ratio – about triple the ratio of other retailers, like Target. That scorching P/E ratio reflects a belief by investors that Amazon will continue growing. Companies with very high p/e ratios have an unbeatable advantage relative to mature competitors – they can buy things with their stock, rather than paying cash for them. If Amazon wants to hire a key person, or acquire a key company, it can pad its offer with its extremely high-value, growing stock. Being able to buy things with stock instead of money is a powerful advantage, because money is scarce and exogenous (Amazon must acquire money from someone else, like a customer), while new Amazon stock can be conjured into existence by typing zeroes into a spreadsheet:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/06/privacy-last/#exceptionally-american

But the downside here is that every growth stock eventually stops growing. For Amazon to double its US Prime subscriber base, it will have to establish a breeding program to produce tens of millions of new Americans, raising them to maturity, getting them gainful employment, and then getting them to sign up for Prime. Almost by definition, a dominant firm ceases to be a growing firm, and lives with the constant threat of a stock revaluation as investors belief in future growth crumbles and they punch the "sell" button, hoping to liquidate their now-overvalued stock ahead of everyone else.

For Big Tech companies, a growth story isn't an ideological commitment to cancer-like continuous expansion. It's a practical, material phenomenon, driven by the need to maintain investor confidence that there are still worlds for the company to conquer.

That's where "AI" comes in. The hype around AI serves an important material need for tech companies. By lumping an incoherent set of poorly understood technologies together into a hot buzzword, tech companies can bamboozle investors into thinking that there's plenty of growth in their future.

OK, so that's the material need that this asshole tactic satisfies. Next, let's look at the technical dimension of this rug-pull.

How is it possible for Amazon to modify your Echo after you bought it? After all, you own your Echo. It is your property. Every first year law student learns this 18th century definition of property, from Sir William Blackstone:

That sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.

If the Echo is your property, how come Amazon gets to break it? Because we passed a law that lets them. Section 1201 of 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act makes it a felony to "bypass an access control" for a copyrighted work:

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

That means that once Amazon reaches over the air to stir up the guts of your Echo, no one is allowed to give you a tool that will let you get inside your Echo and change the software back. Sure, it's your property, but exercising sole and despotic dominion over it requires breaking the digital lock that controls access to the firmware, and that's a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense.

The Echo is an internet-connected device that treats its owner as an adversary and is designed to facilitate over-the-air updates by the manufacturer that are adverse to the interests of the owner. Giving a manufacturer the power to downgrade a device after you've bought it, in a way you can't roll back or defend against is an invitation to run the playbook of the Darth Vader MBA, in which the manufacturer replies to your outraged squawks with "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further":

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

The ability to remotely, unilaterally alter how a device or service works is called "twiddling" and it is a key factor in enshittification. By "twiddling" the knobs and dials that control the prices, costs, search rankings, recommendations, and core features of products and services, tech firms can play a high-speed shell-game that shifts value away from customers and suppliers and toward the firm and its executives:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

But how can this be legal? You bought an Echo and explicitly went into its settings to disable remote monitoring of the sounds in your home, and now Amazon – without your permission, against your express wishes – is going to start sending recordings from inside your house to its offices. Isn't that against the law?

Well, you'd think so, but US consumer privacy law is unbelievably backwards. Congress hasn't passed a consumer privacy law since 1988, when the Video Privacy Protection Act banned video store clerks from disclosing which VHS cassettes you brought home. That is the last technological privacy threat that Congress has given any consideration to:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

This privacy vacuum has been filled up with surveillance on an unimaginable scale. Scumbag data-brokers you've never heard of openly boast about having dossiers on 91% of adult internet users, detailing who we are, what we watch, what we read, who we live with, who we follow on social media, what we buy online and offline, where we buy, when we buy, and why we buy:

https://gizmodo.com/data-broker-brags-about-having-highly-detailed-personal-information-on-nearly-all-internet-users-2000575762

To a first approximation, every kind of privacy violation is legal, because the concentrated commercial surveillance industry spends millions lobbying against privacy laws, and those millions are a bargain, because they make billions off the data they harvest with impunity.

Regulatory capture is a function of monopoly. Highly concentrated sectors don't need to engage in "wasteful competition," which leaves them with gigantic profits to spend on lobbying, which is extraordinarily effective, because a sector that is dominated by a handful of firms can easily arrive at a common negotiating position and speak with one voice to the government:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

Starting with the Carter administration, and accelerating through every subsequent administration except Biden's, America has adopted an explicitly pro-monopoly policy, called the "consumer welfare" antitrust theory. 40 years later, our economy is riddled with monopolies:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/17/monopolies-produce-billionaires/#inequality-corruption-climate-poverty-sweatshops

Every part of this Echo privacy massacre is downstream of that policy choice: "growth stock" narratives about AI, twiddling, DMCA 1201, the Darth Vader MBA, the end of legal privacy protections. These are material things, not ideological ones. They exist to make a very, very small number of people very, very rich.

Your Echo is your property, you paid for it. You paid for the product and you are still the product:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Now, Amazon says that the recordings your Echo will send to its data-centers will be deleted as soon as it's been processed by the AI servers. Amazon's made these claims before, and they were lies. Amazon eventually had to admit that its employees and a menagerie of overseas contractors were secretly given millions of recordings to listen to and make notes on:

https://archive.is/TD90k

And sometimes, Amazon just sent these recordings to random people on the internet:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/20/amazon-alexa-user-receives-audio-recordings-stranger-through-human-error/

Fool me once, etc. I will bet you a testicle* that Amazon will eventually have to admit that the recordings it harvests to feed its AI are also being retained and listened to by employees, contractors, and, possibly, randos on the internet.

*Not one of mine

(Image: Stock Catalog/https://www.quotecatalog.com, Sam Howzit; CC BY 2.0; modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago ETECH Notes: Feral Robotics and Some Other Quacking, Shaking, Bubbling Robots https://craphound.com/etech05-feral.txt

#20yrsago ETECH Notes: Folksonomy, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mess https://craphound.com/etech2005-folksonomy.txt

#20yrsago My talk from ETECH: All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites https://craphound.com/complexecosystems.txt

#20yrsago Apple steals iTunes customers’ paid-for rights to stream https://memex.craphound.com/2005/03/16/apple-steals-itunes-customers-paid-for-rights-to-stream/

#15yrsago Tim Bray on the iPhone vision https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/03/15/Joining-Google

#15yrsago London restaurant serves WWII rationing cuisine https://web.archive.org/web/20100315142846/http://www.timeout.com/london/restaurants/venue/2:26733/kitchen-front

#15yrsago Microbes on keyboards can be used to identify typists https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1000162107

#10yrsago Jeb Bush sold patronage and favors to his top political donors https://apnews.com/events-united-states-presidential-election-abeefccf71df4010bed132abb141efc8

#10yrsago Sending Terry Pratchett home with HTTP headers http://www.gnuterrypratchett.com

#10yrsago Constituent silenced by spammer-turned-UK Tory party chairman was telling the truth https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/mar/15/grant-shapps-admits-he-had-second-job-as-millioniare-web-marketer-while-mp

#5yrsago Italian hospitals fix their ventilators with 3D printed parts https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/16/tiktoks-secrets/#3dp-breathfree

#5yrsago Trump wants a US-only vaccine https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/16/tiktoks-secrets/#americavirus

#5yrsago How to pull your business out of China https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/15/denominators-matter/#strategic-withdrawal

#5yrsago Covered Dish https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/15/denominators-matter/#covereddish

#5yrsago Things to do with kids during lockdowns https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/15/denominators-matter/#family-time

#5yrsago Euroleaks: exposing the secret workings of the Eurogroup https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/15/denominators-matter/#euroleaks

#5yrsago The CIA's information security is really terrible https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/15/denominators-matter/#vault7

#5yrsago The Onion is there for us https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/15/denominators-matter/#ha-ha-only-serious

#5yrsago Chelsea Manning's supporters pay off her $256,000 fine in a day https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/15/denominators-matter/#chelsea-free

#5yrsago HRDAG analyzes the best covid-19 studies https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/15/denominators-matter/#denominators-matter

#1yrago Wellness surveillance makes workers unwell https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/15/wellness-taylorism/#sick-of-spying

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

13.03.2025 à 18:31

Pluralistic: The future of Amazon coders is the present of Amazon warehouse workers (13 Mar 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4935 mots)


Today's links


A magnified image of the inside of an automated backup tape library, with gleaming racks of silver tape drives receding into the distance. In the foreground is a pile of dirt being shoveled by three figures in prisoner's stripes. Two of the figures' heads have been replaced with cliche hacker-in-hoodie heads, from which shine yellow, inverted Amazon 'smile' logos, such that the smile is a frown. The remaining figure's head has been replaced with a horse's head. Behind the figure is an impatiently poised man in a sharp business suit, glaring at his watch. His head has been replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.'

The future of Amazon coders is the present of Amazon warehouse workers (permalink)

My theory of the "shitty technology adoption curve" holds that you can predict the future impact of abusive technologies on you by observing the way these are deployed against people who have less social power than you:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/11/the-shitty-tech-adoption-curve-has-a-business-model/

When you have a new, abusive technology, you can't just aim it at rich, powerful people, because when they complain, they get results. To successfully deploy that abusive tech, you need to work your way up the privilege gradient, starting with people with no power, like prisoners, refugees, and mental patients. This starts the process of normalization, even as it sands down some of the technology's rough edges against their tender bodies. Once that's done, you can move on to people with more social power – immigrants, blue collar workers, school children. Step by step, you normalize and smooth out the abusive tech, until you can apply it to everyone – even rich and powerful people. Think of the deployment of CCTV, facial recognition, location tracking, and web surveillance.

All this means that blue collar workers are the pioneering early adopters of the bossware that will shortly be tormenting their white-collar colleagues elsewhere in the business. It's as William Gibson prophesied: "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed" (it's pooled up thick and noxious around the ankles of blue-collar workers, refugees, mental patients, etc).

Nowhere is this rule more salient than in Big Tech firms. Tech companies have thoroughly segregated workforces. Delivery drivers, customer service reps, data-labelers, warehouse workers and other "green badge," low-status workers are the testing ground for their employer's own disciplinary technology, which monitors them down to the keystroke, the eye-movement, and the pee break. Meanwhile, the "blue badge" white-collar coders get stock options, gourmet cafeterias, free massages, day care and complimentary egg-freezing so they can delay fertility. Companies like Google not only use separate entrances for their different classes of workers – they stagger their shifts so that the elite workers don't even see their lower-status counterparts.

Importantly, almost none of these workers – whether low-status or high – are unionized. Tech union density is so thin, it's almost nonexistent. It's easy to see why elite tech workers wouldn't bother with unionizing: with such fantastic wages and so many perks, why endure the tedium of meetings and memos? But then there's the rest of the workers, who are subjected to endless "electronic whipping" by bossware and who take home wages that look like pocket change when compared to the tech division's compensation. These workers have every reason to unionize, living as they do in the dystopian future of labor.

At Amazon warehouses, workers are injured at three times the rate of warehouse workers at competing firms. They are penalized for "time off task" (like taking a piss break). They are made to stand in long, humiliating body-search lines when they go on- and off-shift, hours every week, without compensation. Variations on this theme play out in other blue-collar sectors of the Amazon empire, like Amazon delivery drivers and Whole Food shelf-stockers.

Those workers have every reason to unionize, and they have done their damndest, but Amazon has defeated worker union drives, again and again. How does Amazon win these battles? Simple: they cheat. They illegally fire union organizers:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/31/reality-endorses-sanders/#instacart-wholefoods-amazon

And then they smear unions to the press and to their own workers with lies (that subsequently leak):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/03/socially-useless-parasite/#christian-smalls

They spend millions on anti-union tech, spying on workers and creating "heatmaps" that let them direct their anti-union efforts to specific stores and facilities:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/21/all-in-it-together/#guard-labor-v-redistribution

They make workers use an official chat app, and then block any messages containing forbidden words, like "fairness," "grievance" and "diversity":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/05/doubleplusrelentless/#quackspeak

That's just the tip of the iceberg. A new investigation by Northwestern University's Teke Wiggin draws on worker interviews and FOIA requests to the NLRB to assemble a first-of-its-kind catalog of Amazon's labor-disciplining, union-busting tactics:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23780231251318389

Disciplining labor and busting unions go hand in hand. It's a simple equation: the harder it is for your workers to form a union, the worse you can treat them without facing labor reprisals, because individual workers' options are limited to a) quitting or b) sucking it up, while unionized workers can grieve, sue, and strike.

At the core of Amazon's labor discipline technology is "algorithmic management," which is exactly what it sounds like: replacing middle managers with software that counts your keystrokes, watches your eyeballs, or applies a virtual caliper to some other metric to decide whether you're a good worker or a rotten apple:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/26/hawtch-hawtch/#you-treasure-what-you-measure

Automation theory describes two poles of workplace automation: centaurs (in which workers are assisted by technology) and "reverse-centaurs" (in which workers provide assistance to technology):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/19/the-shakedown/#weird-flex

Amazon is a reverse-centaurism pioneer. Take the delivery drivers whose every maneuver, eyeball movement, and turn signal is analyzed and inevitably, found wanting, as workers seek to satisfy impossible quotas that can't even be met if you pee in a bottle instead of taking toilet breaks:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/20/release-energy/#the-bitterest-lemon

Then there's the warehouse workers who are also tormented with impossible, pisscall-annihilating quotas. Some of these workers are fitted with haptic wristbands that buzz to tell them they're being too slow at picking up an item and dropping it into a box, pushing them to faster, joint-destroying paces that account for Amazon's enduring position as the most worker-maiming warehouse employer in the nation:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/05/la-bookseller-royalty/#megacycle

In his paper, Wiggin does important work connecting these "electronic whips" to Amazon's arsenal of traditional union-busting weapons, like "captive audience" meetings where workers are forced to sit through hours of anti-union indoctrination. For Wiggin, bossware tools aren't just a stick to beat workers with – they're also a carrot that can be used to diffuse a worker's outrage ahead of a key union vote.

Algorithmic management isn't just software that wrings more work out of workers – it's software that replaces managers. By surveilling workers – both on the job and in social media spaces (like subreddits) where workers gather to talk, Amazon can tune the "electronic whip," reducing quotas and easing the pace of work so that workers view their jobs more favorably and are more receptive to anti-union propaganda.

This is "twiddling" – exploiting the digital flexibility of a system to "twiddle the knobs" governing its business logic, changing everything from prices to wages, search rankings to recommendations, in realtime, for every customer and worker:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

Twiddling combines surveillance data with flexible business logic to create an unbeatable house advantage. If you're an Amazon shopper, you get twiddled all the time, as Amazon replaces the best matches for your searches with paid results. If you buy that first product result, you'll pay an average of 29% more than the best match for your search:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

Worker-side twiddling is even more dystopian. When a nurse is assigned a shift by an "Uber for nurses" app, the app checks whether the worker has overdue credit card bills, which trigger lower wages (on the theory that an indebted worker is a desperate worker):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point

When it comes to union-busting, Amazon's found a new use for twiddling: lessening the pace of work, which Wiggin calls "algorithmic slack-cutting." The important thing about algorithmic slack-cutting is that it's only temporary. The algorithm that reduces your work-load in the runup to a union vote can then dial the pace of work up afterward, by small, random increments that are below the threshold at which they register on the human sensory apparatus. They're not so much boiling the frog as poaching it.

Meanwhile, Amazon gets to flood the zone with anti-union messages, including mandatory messages on the app that assigns your shifts – a captive audience meeting in every pocket.

Between social media surveillance and on-the-job surveillance, Amazon has built a powerful training set for algorithms designed to crush workplace democracy. That's how things go for Amazon's warehouse workers and delivery drivers, and the shelf-stockers at Whole Foods.

But of course, the picture is very different for Amazon's techies, who enjoy the industry standard of high wages and lavish perks.

For now.

The tech industry is in the midst of three years' worth of mass layoffs: 260K in 2023, 150k in 2024, tens of thousands this year. None of this is due to a shortfall in profits, mind: Google laid off 12,000 workers just weeks after staging a stock buyback that would have funded their salaries for 27 years. Meta just announced a 5% across-the-board headcount cut and that it was doubling its executive bonuses.

In other words, tech is firing workers not because it must, but because it can. When workers depend on scarcity – instead of unions – as a source of power, they dig their own graves. For well-paid, scarcity-based coders, every new computer science graduate is the enemy, eroding the scarcity that your wages depend on.

Amazon coders get to come to work with pink mohawks, facial piercings, and black t-shirts that say things their bosses don't understand. They get to pee whenever they want to. That's not because Jeff Bezos is sentimentally attached to techies and bears personal animus toward warehouse workers. Jeff Bezos wants to pay his workforce as little as he can. He treats his tech workers with respect because he's afraid of them, because if they quit, he can't replace them, and without their work, he can't make money.

Once there's an army of unemployed coders who'll take your job, Jeff Bezos doesn't have to fear you anymore. He can fire you and replace you the next day.

Bezos is obviously incredibly horny for this. Like most tech bosses, he dreams of a world in which entitled hackers can't call their bosses dumbshits and decline to frog when they shout "jump!" That's why Amazon PR puts so much energy into trumpeting the business's use of AI to replace coders:

https://www.hrgrapevine.com/us/content/article/2024-08-22-amazon-cloud-ceo-warns-software-engineers-ai-could-replace-your-coding-work-within-2-years

It's not just that they're excited about firing coders and saving money – they're even more excited about transforming the job of "Amazon coder," from someone who solves complex technical problems to someone who performs tedious code review on automatically generated code barfed up by a chatbot:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/01/human-in-the-loop/#monkey-in-the-middle

"Code reviewer" is a much less fulfilling job than "programmer." Code reviewers are also easier to replace than programmers. A code reviewer is a reverse-centaur, a servant to the machine. Every time you hear "AI-assisted programmer," you should substitute "programmer-assisted AI."

Programming is even more bossware-ready than working in a warehouse. The machines coders use are much easier to fit with surveillance technology that monitors their performance – and spies on their communications, looking for dissenting chatter – than a warehouse floor. The only thing that stopped Jeff Bezos from treating his programmers like his warehouse workers is their scarcity. That scarcity is now going away.

That's bad news for Amazon customers, too. Tech workers often feel a sense of duty to their users, a "vocational awe" that drives them to put in long hours to make things their users will enjoy. The labor power of tech workers has long served as a check on the impulse to enshittify those products:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

As tech workers' power wanes, they don't just lose the ability to protect themselves from their bosses' greediest, most sadistic urges – they also lose the power to defend all of us. Smart tech workers know this. That's why Amazon tech workers walked out in support of Amazon warehouse workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/19/deastroturfing/#real-power

Which led to their prompt dismissal:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/14/abolish-silicon-valley/#hang-together-hang-separately

Tech worker/gig worker solidarity is the only way workers can win against tech bosses and defeat the shitty technology adoption curve:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/13/solidarity-forever/#tech-unions

Wiggin's report isn't just a snapshot of Amazon warehouse workers' dystopian present – it's a promise of Amazon tech workers' future. The future is here, in Amazon warehouses, and every day, it's getting closer to Amazon's technical offices.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago How DRM will harm the developing world https://web.archive.org/web/20050317005030/https://www.eff.org/IP/DRM/itu_drm.php

#20yrsago AOL weasels about its Terms of Service https://yro.slashdot.org/story/05/03/14/0138215/aol-were-not-spying-on-aim-users

#20yrsago State of the Blogosphere: it’s big and it’s growing https://web.archive.org/web/20050324095805/http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000298.html

#10yrsago Anti-vaxxer ordered to pay EUR100K to winner of “measles aren’t real” bet https://web.archive.org/web/20150315001712/http://calvinayre.com/2015/03/13/business/biologist-ordered-to-pay-e100k-after-losing-wager-that-a-virus-causes-measles/

#5yrsago TSA lifts liquid bans, telcos lift data caps https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/14/masque-of-the-red-death/#security-theater

#5yrsago Honest Government Ads, Covid-19 edition https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/14/masque-of-the-red-death/#honest-covid

#5yrsago Ada Palmer on historical and modern censorship https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/14/masque-of-the-red-death/#ickyspeech

#5yrsago When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/14/masque-of-the-red-death/#eschatology-watch

#5yrsago Masque of the Red Death https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/14/masque-of-the-red-death/#masque

#1yrago The Coprophagic AI crisis https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/14/inhuman-centipede/#enshittibottification

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

12.03.2025 à 18:34

Pluralistic: Firing the refs doesn't end the game (12 Mar 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4764 mots)


Today's links


A cross-section of the head of a man who is wide-eyed and screaming. The head is elongated and is being sucked into a black hole.

Firing the refs doesn't end the game (permalink)

Let me tell you how I became a proud science denier, and how it saved my life.

It was about 15 years ago. I was living in London, and my wife's job came with a private health insurance buff that let us use private doctors instead of the NHS. I've had worsening chronic pain my whole life, and I've never found anything that made it better, so I thought, fine, I'll see a fancy specialist. So I started calling around to the quacks of Harley Street, London's elite medical precinct.

Soon, I found myself at the very posh offices of a psychopharmacologist who had good news for me: Opioids are safe! Far safer than we'd ever thought. So safe, in fact, that I should get on opioids right away, and take them every day for the rest of my life. I didn't have to worry about addiction. I'd be fine. He had a whole pile of peer-reviewed journal articles that supported this advice.

I didn't trust the science. I suspected that billionaire-owned pharma companies were engaged in a conspiracy to cook the evidence on the safety and efficacy of their products. I thought that the regulators who were supposed to prevent them from murdering me for money were in on the game – on the take, swapping favors for these companies for a promise of cushy industry jobs after they left the public sector.

I did my own research. I found people online who were citing other research from outside the establishment that confirmed my conspiracy theory. I decided that these strangers on the internet were more trustworthy than the respected, high-impact factor, peer-reviewed, tier-one scientific journals whose pages were full of claims about the safety and efficacy of daily opioid use for chronic pain sufferers like me. I took control over my own health. I didn't fill the Rx for the medicine my doctor had prescribed for me and advised me to start taking immediately. I fired my doctor.

I took these steps despite having no background in pharmacology, addiction studies, or medicine. I was totally unqualified to make that call. I was a science denier – but I was also right.

It probably saved my life.

A decade later, I found myself facing another medical question: should I get a new kind of vaccine, which was claimed to be effective against the covid-19 pandemic? The companies that manufactured that vaccines were part of the same industry that falsified the research on opioids. The regulators that signed off on those vaccines were the same regulators that signed off on opioid safety claims. Neither had ever been forced to reckon with the failures that led to the opioid epidemic. The procedures that allowed that shameful episode were the same, and the structures that allowed the perversion of those procedures were likewise the same. And once again, there was a clamor of dissenting voices from people who distrusted the official medical position on these new pharma products, insisting that they were the creations of pharma billionaires who didn't care if I lived or died, overseen by regulators who were utterly in their pockets.

I got the vaccine, and then several more. But I tell you what: I had no more rational basis to trust vaccines than I had for mistrusting opioids. I am not qualified to evaluate the scientific claims related to either question, and I know it.

This is an objectively very frightening situation to be in.

We navigate so many of these life-or-death technical questions every single day:

  • Is my Boeing plane airworthy?

  • Are the air traffic controllers adequately trained, staffed and rested?

  • Is the firmware for my antilock brakes of high quality?

  • Are the hygiene procedures at this restaurant robust enough to prevent the introduction of life-threatening pathogens and contaminants?

  • Are the pedagogical theories at my kid's school well-founded, or do they produce ignoramuses whose only skill is satisfying standardized testing rubrics?

  • Are the safety standards that specify the joists in my ceiling any good, or am I about to die, buried under tons of rubble?

Every one of these questions is the sort of thing that even highly skilled researchers and experts can – and do – disagree on. Definitively answering just one of these questions might require the equivalent of several PhDs. Realistically, you're not going to be able to personally arrive at a trustworthy answer to all of these, and it's very likely you won't even be able to answer any of them.

That's what experts are for. But that just raises another problem: how do you know which experts you should listen to?

You don't.

You can't. Even experts who mean well and are well-versed in their fields can make mistakes. For every big, consequential technical question, there are conflicts, both minor and major, among experts who seem to be qualified and honest. Figuring out which expert to trust is essentially the same problem as answering the question for yourself.

But despite all these problems, you are almost certainly alive as you read these words. How did that happen?

It's all down to referees. In our public policy forums, we entrust publicly accountable bureaucrats to hear all the claims of all the experts, sift through them, and then publish a (provisional) official truth. These public servants are procedurally bound to operate in the open, soliciting comments and countercomments to a public docket, holding public hearings, publishing readouts of private meetings with interested parties. Having gathered all the claims and counterclaims, these public servants reason in public, publishing not just a ruling, but the rationale for the ruling – why they chose to believe some experts over others.

The transparency obligations on these public servants – whom we call "regulators" – don't stop there, either. Regulators are required to both disclose their conflicts of interest, and to recuse themselves where those conflicts arise.

Finally, the whole process has multiple error-correction systems. Rules can be challenged in court on the grounds that they were set without following the rules, and the expert agencies that employ these regulators have their own internal procedures for re-opening an inquiry when new evidence comes to light.

The point of all this is to create something that you, me, and everyone we know can inspect, understand and verify. I may not have the cell biology chops to evaluate claims about MRNA vaccine safety, but I am equipped to look at the process by which the vaccines were approved and satisfy myself that they were robust. I can't evaluate the contents of most regulations, but I can certainly tell you whether the box the regulation shipped in was made of square cornered, stiff cardboard:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/25/black-boxes/#when-you-know-you-know

That's why the vaccine question was so tough. The opioid crisis had shown the procedure to be badly flawed, and the fact that neither the FDA nor Congress cleaned house after that crisis meant that the procedure was demonstrably faulty. Same goes for getting in a 737 MAX. The issue isn't that Boeing made some mistakes – it's that the FAA lets Boeing mark its own homework, even after Boeing was caught cheating:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/01/boeing-boeing/#mrsa

I'm not qualified to tell you how many rivets a jet plane's door-plug should have, but I can confidently say that Boeing has demonstrated that it doesn't know either, and the FAA has demonstrated that it has no interest in making Boeing any better at resolving this question.

It's no coincidence that our political process has been poisoned by conspiratorialism. America's ruling party is dominated by conspiracy fantasists who believe in all kinds of demonstrably untrue things about health, public safety, international politics, economics and more. They were voted in by an electorate that is similarly in the grips of conspiratorial beliefs.

It's natural to focus on these beliefs, but that focus hasn't gotten us anywhere. Far more important than what the Republican base believes is how they arrive at those beliefs. The Republican establishment – politicians, think-tankies, pundits, newscasters – have spent decades slandering expert agencies and also corrupting them, making them worse at their jobs and therefore easier to slander.

Market fundamentalism insists that "truth" is to be found in markets: if everyone is inserting radium suppositories, the government's has no business forcing you to stop stuffing radioactive waste up your asshole:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/19/just-stop-putting-that-up-your-ass/#harm-reduction

Rather than telling restaurants how often their chefs should wash their hands, we can let markets decide – merely require restaurants to display their handwashing procedures, and then diners can vote with their alimentary canals. To the septic goes the spoils! Of course, the government also has no business deciding whether their disclosures are truthful – isn't that why we have a First Amendment? So while we might require restaurants to display their handwashing procedures, we're not going to send the signage cops down to the diner to bust a restaurant for lying about those procedures.

The twin assault on both the credibility and reliability of expert agencies came to a head with the Loper Bright decision, in which the Supreme Court gutted expert agencies' rulemaking ability, seemingly in the expectation that Congress – overwhelming populated by very old people who trained as lawyers in the previous century – would make fine-grained safety rules covering everything from water to aerospace:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/21/policy-based-evidence/#decisions-decisions

Conspiratorialism is the inevitable outcome of a world in which:

a) You have to resolve complex, life-or-death technical questions which;

b) You are not qualified to answer; and

c) Cannot trust the referees who are supposed to navigate these questions on your behalf.

Conpsiratorialism is only secondarily about what you believe. Mostly, conspiratorialism is about how you arrive at those beliefs. Conspiratorialism isn't a problem of bad facts – it's a problem of bad epistemology.

We live in a true epistemological void, in which the truth is increasingly for sale.

That's the backdrop against which Doge is doing its dirty business. Doge's assault on expert agencies enjoys a depressing degree of popular support, but it's not hard to understand why: so many of our expert agencies have staged high-profile demonstrations of their unfitness, without any consequences, that it's easy to sell the story that these referees were all on the take.

They weren't, of course. Most expert regulators – career civil servants – really care about their jobs. They want to make sure you can survive a trip to the grocery story rather than shitting your guts out with listeria or giardia, that your plane doesn't collide with a military chopper, that your kids graduate school knowing more than how to pass a standardized test. The tragedy is that these honorable, skilled regulators' commitment to your wellbeing isn't enough to produce policies that actually safeguard your wellbeing.

Musk doesn't want to fix the real, urgent problems with America's administrative state: he wants to destroy it. He wants to fire the refs, because once you fire the refs, the game goes on – minus the rules. That's a great way to win support for authoritarian projects: "The state won't take care of you anymore (if it ever did, amirite?), but I will."

So they're firing the refs, and they're transforming the game of "survive until tomorrow" into Calvinball, a "nomic" in which the rules are whatever someone insists they are:

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

Musk and Trump are in for a surprise. They have the mistaken impression that the rules only reined in their billionaire pals and the corporations that produce their wealth. But one of the most consequential effects of these rules is to limit labor activism. The National Labor Relations Act put very strict limits on union organizing and union militancy. Now that Trump has effectively shut down the National Labor Relations Board (by illegally firing a Democratic board member, leaving the board without a quorum), all bets are off:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/29/which-side-are-you-on-2/#strike-three-yer-out

Trump won office in part by insisting that America's institutions were not fit for purpose. He wasn't lying about that (for a change). The thing he was lying about was his desire to fix them. Trump doesn't want honest refs – he wants no refs. To defeat Trumpism, we need to stop pretending that our institutions are just fine – we need to confront their failings head on and articulate a plan to fix them, rather than claiming "America was already great":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/that-boy-aint-right/#dinos-rinos-and-dunnos

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago AIM contract takes your privacy https://web.archive.org/web/20050303010141/http://www.aim.com/tos/tos.adp

#10yrsago NYPD caught wikiwashing Wikipedia entries on police brutality https://web.archive.org/web/20150313150951/http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/city-hall/2015/03/8563947/edits-wikipedia-pages-bell-garner-diallo-traced-1-police-plaza

#10yrsago Portland cops charge homeless woman with theft for charging her phone https://www.streetroots.org/news/2015/03/06/homeless-phone-charging-thief-wanted-security

#5yrsago Locked-down Siennese sing their city's hymn https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/13/go-katie-go/#canto-verbena

#5yrsago Malware that hides behind a realtime Covid-19 map https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/13/go-katie-go/#co-evolution

#5yrsago Trump's unfitness in a plague https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/13/go-katie-go/#public-choice-nihilism

#5yrsago Rep Katie Porter forces CDC boss to commit to free testing https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/13/go-katie-go/#katieporter

#5yrsago Chelsea Manning is free https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/13/go-katie-go/#chelseafree

#5yrsago Where I Write https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/13/go-katie-go/#whereiwrite

#5yrsago Announcing the third Little Brother book, Attack Surface https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/13/go-katie-go/#attack-surface

#1yrago Bullies want you to think they're on your side https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/13/hey-look-over-there/#lets-you-and-he-fight

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

11.03.2025 à 10:44

Pluralistic: Daniel Pinkwater's "Jules, Penny and the Rooster" (11 Mar 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3578 mots)


Today's links


The cover for the Tachyon edition of Daniel Pinkwater's 'Jules, Penny and the Rooster.'

Daniel Pinkwater's "Jules, Penny and the Rooster" (permalink)

"Cult author" is a maddeningly imprecise term – it might mean, "writer whose readers are a small but devoted band," or it might mean "writer whose readers are transformed forever by their work, so that they never see the world in the same way again."

That latter sense is what I mean when I call Daniel Pinkwater a "cult author." Pinkwater has written more than 100 books and has reached a vast audience, and those books are so singular, so utterly fantastic that when one Pinkwater fan meets another, they immediately launch into ecstatic raptures about these extraordinary works.

Pinkwater writes all kinds of books: memoir, picture books, middle-grades titles, young adult novels, extremely adult novels that appear to be young adult novels, and one of the classic works on dog-training (which I read, even though I don't own a dog and never plan on owning a dog) (it was great):

https://pinkwater.com/book/superpuppy-how-to-choose-raise-and-train-the-best-possible-dog-for-you/

Pinkwater has a new book out. It's great. Of course it's great. It's called Jules, Penny and the Rooster and it's nominally a middle-grades book, and while it will certainly delight the kids in your life, I ate it up:

https://tachyonpublications.com/product/jules-penny-the-rooster/

Jules and her family have just moved to a suburb called Bayberry Acres in the sleepy dormitory city of Turtle Neck and now she's having a pretty rotten summer. She misses all her friends back in the city, her grumpy bassoon-obsessed sister broke her finger and it staying home all summer watching old movies and hogging the TV instead of going to bassoon camp, and all the other kids in Bayberry Acres are literal babies, which may pay off in babysitting gigs, but makes for a lonely existence for Jules.

Worst of all: Jules's parents always promised that she could get a dog when they eventually moved out of their little apartment and bought a house with a yard in the suburbs, and now that this has come to pass, they're reneging. They say that all they promised was that they would "talk about getting a dog" after moving, and that "no, we're not getting a dog" constitutes "talking about it," and that settles the matter. Jules knows that what's really going on is that her parents have bought all new furniture and rugs and they're worried the dog will mess or chew on these. Jules loves her parents, but when she gets her own place, she's a) definitely getting a dog, and b) not allowing her parents to visit, because they might mess or chew on her furniture.

All that changes when Jules enters an essay contest in the local newspaper to win a collie (a contest she enters without telling her parents, natch) and wins – coming home from a visit to see her beloved aunt back in the old neighborhood to find her finger-nursing, oboe-obsessed big sister in possession of her new dog. After Jules and her sister do some fast talking to bring their parents around, Jules's summer – and her life in the suburbs – are rescued from a summer of lonely doldrums.

Jules names the collie Penny, and they go for long rambles in the mysterious woods that Bayberry Acres were carved out of. It's on one of these walks that they meet the rooster, a handsome, proud, friendly fellow who lures Penny over the stone wall that demarcates the property line ringing the spooky, abandoned mansion/castle at the center of the woods. Jules chases Penny over the wall, and that's when everything changes.

On the other side of that wall is a faun, and little leprechaun-looking guys, and a witch (who turns out to be a high-school chum of her city-dwelling, super-cool aunt), and there's a beast in a hidden dilapidated castle. After Jules sternly informs the beast that she's far too young to be anyone's girlfriend – not even a potentially enchanted prince living as a beast in a hidden castle – he disabuses her of this notion and tells her that she is definitely the long-prophesied savior of the woods, whose magic has been leaking out over years. Jules is pretty sure she's not the savior of anything, but the beast and the witch are very persuasive, and besides, the prophecy predicts that the girl who saves the woods will be in company of a magic wolf (Penny's no wolf, but close enough?) and a rooster. So maybe she is the savior?

This is where Pinkwater really whips the old weird/delightful plotting into gear, introducing a series of great, funny, quirky characters who all seem to know each other (a surprising number were in the same high-school as Jules's aunt), along with some spectacular, mouth-watering meals, beautifully drawn animal-human friendships, and more magical beings than you can shake a stick at.

The story of how Jules recovers the lost artifact that will save the woods' magic is just a perfect, delicious ice-cream cone of narrative, with sprinkles, that you want to share with a friend (rarely have I more keenly regretted that my kid is now a teen and past our old bedtime story ritual). As I wrote in my blurb:

"The purest expression of Pinkwater's unique ability to blend the absurd and the human and make the fantastic normal and the normal fantastic. I laughed long and hard, and turned the final page with that unmissable Pinkwatertovian sense of satisfied wonder."

I am so happy to be a fully subscribed member to the Pinkwater Cult (I've got the Martian space potato to prove it).

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Leaked UK record industry memo sets out plans for breaking copyright https://memex.craphound.com/2010/03/12/leaked-uk-record-industry-memo-sets-out-plans-for-breaking-copyright/

#15yrsago US census infographics from 1870 http://www.radicalcartography.net/index.html?9thcensus

#10yrsago RIP, Terry Pratchett https://memex.craphound.com/2015/03/12/rip-terry-pratchett/

#10yrsago How Harper’s “anti-terror” bill ends privacy in Canada https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2015/03/why-the-anti-terrorism-bill-is-really-an-anti-privacy-bill-bill-c-51s-evisceration-of-government-privacy/

#10yrsago Laptop killing booby-trapped USB drive https://hub.paper-checker.com/blog/usb-killers-how-they-work-and-how-to-protect-your-devices/

#5yrsago How to run a virtual classroom https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/12/boeing-crashes/#sosh

#5yrsago The EU's new Right to Repair rules finally come for electronics https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/12/boeing-crashes/#eur2r

#5yrsago Senate Republicans kill emergency sick leave during pandemic https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/12/boeing-crashes/#gopandemic

#5yrsago Boeing is even worse at financial engineering than they are at aircraft engineering https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/12/boeing-crashes/#boeing

#5yrsago Ars Technica's Covid-19 explainer is the best resource on the pandemic https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/12/boeing-crashes/#bethmole

#5yrsago A former top Cigna exec rebuts Joe Biden's healthcare FUD https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/12/boeing-crashes/#wendellpotter

#5yrsago Akil Augustine on Radicalized https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/12/boeing-crashes/#go-akil

#5yrsago TSA boss doubles down on taking away health care from part-time screeners https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/12/boeing-crashes/#sick-system

#1yrago Your car spies on you and rats you out to insurance companies https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/12/market-failure/#car-wars

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

10.03.2025 à 17:56

Pluralistic: Eggflation is excuseflation (10 Mar 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4996 mots)


Today's links


A 'stonks' meme, featuring a 3d modeled head atop the body of a man in a business suit, arms folded, standing before a stylized stock-chart with an orange arrow pointing up and to the right. The word 'stonks' has been replaced with 'eggs.' A cartoon drawing of a shattered, crying Humpty Dumpty is in the bottom left corner.

Eggflation is excuseflation (permalink)

Inflation has many complex causes and dynamics, but this much should be obvious: when prices go up, and the profits go up, the price rise – the "inflation" is in part the result of greed – it's greedflation.

Orthodox economists insist that greedflation is impossible. Sure, companies would prefer to jack up prices, but if they do, other companies would rush in to sell more cheaply. Besides, there are all these other plausible explanations for inflation, like the covid supply-chain shocks, or avian flu. But greedflation can easily take hold despite competitive pressures, and the fact of bird flu can fuel greedflation, rather than disproving it.

When an industry is heavily concentrated, when it is a cartel that controls key chokepoints that restrict access to key markets, then rising prices don't trigger discounts from rival companies, because rival companies simply can't get any market oxygen. And when a shock – covid, bird flu, etc – strikes, cartels can hike prices way over their higher costs, and point the finger of blame at the shock. This is a special subspecies of greedflation called "excuseflation":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/11/price-over-volume/#pepsi-pricing-power

Egg prices are at record highs, and we're told that this is the fault of bird flu. but a closer look demonstrates that eggflation is excuseflation. The egg industry is a vertical stack of monopolies, duopolies, and cartels, controlling everything from the genomes of egg-laying chickens to the raising and processing of chickens, to the distribution and retailing of eggs. These monopolists have conspired in the open to use the excuse of bird flu to restrict production and raise prices, over and over, every time bird flu strikes, posting record profits while poormouthing about their rising costs – costs that don't actually show up on their balance sheets.

In "Hatching a Conspiracy," an investigative series for Matt Stoller's BIG newsletter, antitrust lawyer Basel Musharbash lays out the history, mechanics, and fantastical profits of Big Egg, whose price-fixing and price-gouging are every bit as shameless as their excusemaking over bird flu:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/hatching-a-conspiracy-a-big-investigation

Start with bird flu itself. Bird flu outbreaks have been a fixture of poultry farming since time immemorial, though obviously things got worse with the advent of industrial poultry farming, with its bigger flocks in closer quarters. You'd think that, in the face of these frequent, deadly flus and the resulting mass culls, the poultry industry would have figured out how to cope with outbreaks, and you'd be right.

Bird flu culls can wipe out a lot of birds – over 115m layers in the US for the current flu – but these culls take place on a rolling basis, over a period of years. New layers can be incubated and raised very quickly, and there are large reserves of fertilized eggs that can be quickened on demand. Since the start of this current bird flu in 2021, egg production has only fallen by 3.5%. But even that picture is misleading, because American egg consumption has dropped over the same period by 7.5% – even as other countries have blocked imports of America's plaguey eggs, so the industry is shipping 2.5% fewer eggs abroad, too.

The upshot is the story about eggflation arising from bird flu doesn't withstand even cursory scrutiny. The industry claims it's raising prices to cope with a shortage that just doesn't exist. It's an excuse. It's excuseflation.

But – as our neoclassical econ friends will hasten to remind us – raising prices like this just invites competitors to flood into the market with cheaper options. The only way excuseflation can work is if the supply-chain is sewn up by a few dominant firms that can collude to rig markets and block new market entrants, and that is exactly what's happening here.

Start with the grocer's fridge, festooned today with signs warning you that you are limited to purchasing one dozen eggs per customer. At first blush, it may seem like that fridge's dwindling supply of eggs comes from a whole bunch of companies, but closer inspection reveals that nearly every egg for sale in America comes from a single company. Cal-Maine Foods is an obscure conglomerate that bought dozens of egg brands, including Farmhouse Eggs, Sunups, Sunny Meadow, Egg-Land’s Best and Land O’ Lakes eggs:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/23/cant-make-an-omelet/#keep-calm-and-crack-on

Cal-Maine CFO Max Bowman has done a series of investor calls trumpeting the company's rising profits, and attributing them to "significantly higher selling prices" and "our ability to adapt to inflationary market pressures." Investors responded with a buying frenzy, driving Cal-Maine's stock to record highs.

Since the start of the bird flu epidemic, Cal-Maine's profits have averaged between 300% and 600% of their pre-bird flu levels. But Cal-Maine's plague profiteering playbook didn't spring up out of nowhere in 2021. During the bird flu outbreaks of the 2000s, Cal-Maine observed that bird flus were good for big egg brands, increasing the price of eggs, but that these increases were transient, fading quickly as flock sizes recovered. During the 2015 bird flu pandemic, producers quickly raised layers to maturity and replaced their flocks, and saw only modest rises in egg prices (and profits).

This time, it's different. The 2021 bird flu outbreak sparked immediate, substantial, ongoing and durable increases in the price of eggs. The number of layers has plunged, driven by a dramatic decrease in the size of the "parent" flock, from whose fertilized eggs we get out supply of layers – from 3.1m hens in 2021 to 2.5m in 2025. The numbers don't tell the whole story, either – the parent flock is, on average, much older than historical norms, meaning that it produces fewer eggs.

That shortage can be seen in the number of pullets – immature hens – being added to farms since the bird flu outbreak. Despite record egg prices, farmers are not increasing the number of egg-laying birds on hand. As Musharbash writes, the only thing that's increased since the start of bird flu is profits. Parent flocks, fertilized eggs and pullets have all seen steady, deliberate decline. That has only worsened over three years. This isn't a bottleneck in the supply-chain – it's a monopoly at play.

Or, rather, monopolies. The whole poultry supply-chain is an inbred mess. The entire realm of chicken genetics – that is, which chickens exist at all – is controlled by two European firms, the PE-backed Hendrix Genetics and the billionaire-owned Erich Wesjohann Group. These companies have bought or killed virtually every source of egg-laying hens in America over 20 years. Here's Musharbash:

Today, no egg producer in this country can expand the number of hens in its flock — or even replace the hens it already has when they age out or die — without the cooperation of this duopoly. And, since the value of hens rises with the price of the eggs, when the price of eggs is high these two barons have a clear interest in keeping the supply of pullets to producers on a tight leash — so the high prices stick.

But not everyone is at the mercy of the Big Bird Genome: Cal-Maine has a sweetheart deal with them, and can apparently access as many egg-laying hens as they need, whenever they need them. This has allowed Cal-Maine to outbreed, outsupply, outsell and destroy any rival egg company that interfered with its business or refused to sell out. The 60-ish family-owned producers are stuck in a peripheral, disadvantaged role relative to Cal-Maine, and anyone who steps out of line gets immediately and totally crushed.

Cal-Maine dominates the United Egg Producers trade association. A judge compared Cal-Maine's relationship to the UEP to a "mob boss":

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ilnd.263305/gov.uscourts.ilnd.263305.713.0_5.pdf

Despite the fact that the UEP exists primarily to promote Cal-Maine's interests at the expense of other egg companies, family owned businesses like Rose Acre Farms have continued to join the association, seemingly out of the view that they have no hope of surviving unless they get in line. UEP acts as a kind of OPEC for eggs, setting production limits that the whole industry follows. As the court found, the EUP is a "bullhorn" through which Cal-Maine "barks out orders."

The UEP's own economists are admirably forthright in their description of this process. As economist Donald Bell put it in 1994: "More hens, less money!" You don't need an econ degree to understand the corollary: fewer hens, more money. And as the number of layers has plummeted, the wholesale price of eggs has climbed – up 75% in 2023 alone.

The US has a planned economy – the thing we were all told America would never submit to, not like the basket case USSR, with its dysfunctional production system and shortages. But America's eggs aren't at the mercy of technocrats – they're entirely dependent on the whims of greedy monopolists. When Trump Secretary of Ag Brooke Rollins met with Cal-Maine last month, she left promising to bribe Cal-Maine to increase production, at the most profitable moment in world history for these companies:

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/agriculture-secretary-brooke-rollins-my-plan-to-lower-egg-prices-6be0f881

Eggflation is a microcosm of other monopolies that dominate American industry, stealing from everyday people to enrich a tiny coterie of shareholders. This isn't even the only sleazy chicken monopoly in the USA – a different, equally sleazy arrangement dominates poultry farmers who raise birds for meat, called "chickenization":

https://rafiusa.org/undercontractfilm/christopher-leonard-on-chickenization-a-power-driven-drain-on-rural-america/

That's also true of the market for other kinds of meat, where a cartel pays a data-broker to help it fix prices:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy

These data-broker-coordinated cartels are everywhere you look in the USA, rigging the price of everything from potatoes to your rent:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/25/potatotrac/#carbo-loading

The next time you go to Denny's and wonder about the $0.50 per egg surcharge on the menu, remember, that charge isn't downstream of bird flu – it's the inevitable eggflation cause by excuseflation, a form of greedflation.

Musharbash has two more installments to go in his series for BIG, but if you're feeling impatient, you can read the report this series is adapted from, "Kings Over the Necessaries of Life”: Monopolization and the Elimination of Competition in America’s Agriculture System," which Musharbash wrote for Farm Action:

https://farmaction.us/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Kings-Over-the-Necessaries-of-Life-Monopolization-and-the-Elimination-of-Competition-in-Americas-Agriculture-System_Farm-Action.pdf

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Principles for the Internet in the age of terrorism https://dangillmor.typepad.com/dan_gillmor_on_grassroots/2005/03/madrid_terroris.html

#20yrsago Game developers’ amazing rants on the state of the industry https://crystaltips.typepad.com/wonderland/2005/03/burn_the_house_.html

#20yrsago Weirdo wants to sue because he has same name as video game character https://web.archive.org/web/20050316043002/https://gr.bolt.com/chatter/mailbag/mailbag.htm

#15yrsago French village went insane after CIA spiked its bread with LSD https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/7415082/French-bread-spiked-with-LSD-in-CIA-experiment.html

#15yrsago London Olympics: police powers to force spectators to remove non-sponsor items, enter houses, take posters https://web.archive.org/web/20100307080427/http://uk.news.yahoo.com/22/20100303/tts-uk-olympics-london-ca02f96.html

#15yrsago Leaked documents: UK record industry wrote web-censorship amendment https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/bpi-drafted-web-blocking/

#15yrsago Lesbian panic shuts down Mississippi high-school prom https://web.archive.org/web/20100314150231/http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/nation/6909566.html

#15yrsago TSA analyst indicted for tampering with terrorist watchlists https://web.archive.org/web/20100314044813/http://www.goodgearguide.com.au/article/339185/former_tsa_analyst_charged_computer_tampering/

#15yrsago EU Parliament votes 663-13 against ACTA’s enforcement measures https://web.archive.org/web/20100312073507/https://www.euractiv.com/en/health/meps-defy-commission-internet-piracy-agreement-news-326215

#10yrsago IT feudalism: the surveillance state and wealth gaps https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/10/nsa-gchq-technology-create-social-mobility-spy-on-citizens

#10yrsago Parliamentary Office of Science & Technology tells Cameron Tor is good, unstoppable https://web.archive.org/web/20150313184724/https://www.parliament.uk/briefing-papers/post-pn-488/the-darknet-and-online-anonymity/

#10yrsago Wikimedia sues the NSA https://diff.wikimedia.org/2015/03/10/wikimedia-v-nsa/

#10yrsago Eutopia: horror novel about Lovecraftian racism https://memex.craphound.com/2015/03/10/eutopia-horror-novel-about-lovecraftian-racism/

#10yrsago Senator on Internet privacy committee has never sent an email https://www.huffpost.com/entry/lindsey-graham_n_6826064

#10yrsago UK foreign secretary: stop talking about Snowden, let spies get on with it https://web.archive.org/web/20150315031642/http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2399082/government-minister-is-bored-with-snowden-and-wants-to-get-on-with-surveillance

#10yrsago Piketty on the pointless cruelty of European austerity https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/thomas-piketty-interview-about-the-european-financial-crisis-a-1022629.html

#5yrsago Podcast: A Lever Without a Fulcrum Is Just a Stick https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/11/i-stay-in-the-house/#artistsrights

#5yrsago Postmortem: the catastrophic EU Copyright Directive https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/11/i-stay-in-the-house/#article17

#5yrsago Scam-buster hacks into a scam-factory https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/11/i-stay-in-the-house/#scambaiting

#5yrsago Italy's "I Stay in the House" law https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/11/i-stay-in-the-house/#italiatine

#5yrsago Twitter's new Terms of Service help academics https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/11/i-stay-in-the-house/#acabot

#5yrsago Sensor Tower's VPNs and adblockers spied on users https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/11/i-stay-in-the-house/#quislings

#5yrsago Thomas Piketty endorses Sanders https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/10/piketty-loves-sanders/#pikettysanders

#5yrsago Detroit will reconnect water services during the Covid-19 emergency https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/10/piketty-loves-sanders/#drymotown

#5yrsago Safe and moral societies need "firewalls" between immigration and public services https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/10/piketty-loves-sanders/#firewalls

#1yrago The Foilies https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/11/no-foia/#id-tell-you-but-then-id-have-to-kill-you

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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

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

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