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🖋 Cory DOCTOROW
Science fiction author, activist and journalist

PLURALISTIC

▸ les 10 dernières parutions

30.05.2025 à 16:13

Pluralistic: Farewell (for the moment) (30 May 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3243 mots)


Today's links


A vintage photo of a fisherman in an old-fashioned, one-piece bathing suit holding aloft a long fishing rod from which dangles a fish. The image has been tinted. The fisherman's head has been replaced with a poop emoji. The fish is surrounded by a green nuclear glow. The background is a stylized magnified view of blood cells rushing through a vein.

Farewell (for the moment) (permalink)

I'm about to take a two-ish week sabbatical so I can (once again!) rewrite the Trump chapter of my Enshittification book (October 2025), and so that I can get my (thankfully very treatable) cancer irradiated:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/05/carcinoma-angels/#squeaky-nail

While I'm away, here are some things I'd like to call your attention to. First, some good news: the Washington Post Tech Guild just won a historic union vote with a giant majority, despite the vicious union-hating owner of the Post, a Mr Jeffrey Preston Bezos:

https://newsguild.org/washington-post-tech-guild-overwhelmingly-votes-to-certify-union-in-historic-election/

Even more good news: the GOP have ratfucked themselves, doing the work that our Democratic Party leaders can't or won't do. In overruling the parliamentarian in a bid to arrogate to themselves the power to kill California emission standards, Republican Senators have opened the door for Democrats to seize 10 hours of debate time for every single change Trump makes to federal regulations. These debates take precedence over all Senate business. They can even go back in time and demand 10 hours of floor debate on every agency action for the past 60 days. Basically, that means that Senate Dems can tie up the Senate until the 2026 mid-terms and beyond:

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-05-28-senate-democrats-stop-big-beautiful-bill/

Will they? I mean, it's the kind of tactic Mitch McConnell would have leapt at without even bothering to fully raise the lid of his sarcophagus. Chuck Schumer? I dunno. Maybe if we gave him a ping-pong paddle with some stylish sans serif text invoking each debate?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KADW3ZRZLVI

That's some good news I'm going to take with me into my coming break. I've really cleared my calendar for this time off, finishing up my CBC podcast "Understood: Who Broke the Internet?" just in the nick of time:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/26/babyish-radical-extremists/#cancon

The series prompted Harrison Mooney to do a long, fantastic interview with me for The Tyee, which sets out the series' thesis and call to action very well:

https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2025/05/27/Musk-Zuck-Use-Our-Love-Hostage/

If you're as pissed off about enshittification as I am and you happen to live in NYC, there's a support group for you! This week, I heard from a reader who's organized a monthly open mic "Evening on Enshittification," where attendees present and learn about different kinds of enshittification, from AI to dating and beyond:

https://partiful.com/e/Li1DGg7x5ohmCOf2hAkj

And if you're on the other coast, you can catch me TOMORROW in Seattle at the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival, where I'll be onstage with the folks from NPR's On The Media:

https://www.cascadepbs.org/festival/speaker/cory-doctorow

If a couple weeks without me is too much, please consider dialing into my virtual keynote for Fediforum on June 5:

https://fediforum.org/2025-06/

And of course, when I get back, I'm going to be finishing off my tour for Picks and Shovels with gigs in Portland, London, and Manchester:

http://martinhench.com

I've got a packed schedule in Portland: first, I'm doing a keynote at the Teardown conference on Friday, June 20:

https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025

Followed by a bookstore event with bunnie Huang at the Lloyd Center Barnes and Noble:

https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0

And a library gig on June 20 in Tualatin:

https://www.tualatinoregon.gov/library/author-talk-cory-doctorow

Londoners, you can catch me at the How To Academy on July 1, where I'll be doing a Canada Day book event with the amazing Riley Quinn, showrunner for Trashfuture:

https://howtoacademy.com/events/cory-doctorow-the-fight-against-the-big-tech-oligarchy/

And then I'm doing a bookstore event in Manchester at Blackwells on July 2:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1308451968059

Followed by a July 4 keynote for the Co-operatives UK Congress in Manchester:

https://www.uk.coop/events-and-training/events-calendar/co-op-congress-2025-book-your-place


A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Copyright prevented transmission of Beatles music to aliens https://memex.craphound.com/2005/05/29/copyright-prevented-transmission-of-beatles-music-to-aliens/

#10yrsago Pornoscanner lobbyist’s new job: overseeing TSA spending https://theintercept.com/2015/05/27/tsa-body-scanner-lobbyist-takes-congressional-job-overseeing-spending-tsa-security/

#5yrsago Canadian newsrooms restructure as co-ops https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/29/mind-control-skepticism/#co-ops

#5yrsago GOP lawmaker hid his diagnosis from Democrats https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/29/mind-control-skepticism/#flu-klux-klan

#5yrsago Walmart's crummy anti-theft AI https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/29/mind-control-skepticism/#neverseen

#5yrsago Masks work https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/29/mind-control-skepticism/#mask-up

#5yrsago What to do about the police https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/29/mind-control-skepticism/#qualified-immunity

#5yrsago Private equity goes mainstream https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/29/mind-control-skepticism/#looters

#5yrsago How the IoT reinforces gentrification https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/29/mind-control-skepticism/#automated-karens

#5yrsago Big Tech distorts our discourse https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/29/mind-control-skepticism/#tech-unexceptionalism

#5yrsago Bus drivers refuse to take arrested protesters to jail https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/30/up-is-not-down/#solidarity

#5yrsago Why I haven't written about CDA 230 https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/30/up-is-not-down/#cda230

#5yrsago Australia caves on "robodebt" https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/30/up-is-not-down/#robodebt

#1yrago Real innovation vs Silicon Valley nonsense https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/30/posiwid/#social-cost-of-carbon

#1yrago The Pizzaburger Presidency https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/29/sub-bushel-comms-strategy/#nothing-would-fundamentally-change

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

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

28.05.2025 à 20:24

Pluralistic: America is a scam (28 May 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4994 mots)


Today's links


Uncle Sam in a leg-hold trap. The trap is staked to a log, against which rests a sign bearing the MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN wordmark. In the background is a halftoned image of a waving US flag amidst the clouds.

America is a scam (permalink)

Donald Trump is many things: a racist, an authoritarian, a rapist… but what he is, and has always been, above all and from the very start, is a scammer:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/donald-trump-alter-ego-barron/2016/05/12/02ac99ec-16fe-11e6-aa55-670cabef46e0_story.html

The election of Donald Trump feeds many needs in the right wing coalition: the libidinal pleasure of seeing trans people, migrants, and anyone who isn't white getting terrorized by masked thugs and swivel-eyed loons; massive tax cuts for the oligarch class, especially those who (like Trump) inherit their wealth; the gutting of public education and the destruction of the barrier between church and state.

But the most important, best-served constituency in the Trump coalition is scammers. This has been his promise since his first campaign, when he boasted on national television that he cheated on his taxes because "that makes me smart":

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

Trump – who has run multiple pyramid schemes – is gutting enforcement against Ponzi scammers:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/05/free-enterprise-system/#amway-or-the-highway

Trump – who has repeatedly lied to investors and customers about his business plans – has elevated the 21st century's most notorious defrauder of investors and customers and put him in charge of restructuring the US government:

https://www.wired.com/story/theres-a-very-simple-pattern-to-elon-musks-broken-promises/

Under the previous administration, agencies like the FTC and (eventually) the DOT revived their powers to block "unfair and deceptive" commercial practices, from fast food restaurants forcing cashiers to sign noncompete "agreements" to Southwest Airlines selling tickets for planes that didn't exist and cancelling the least-booked flights every morning, stranding passengers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/16/for-petes-sake/#unfair-and-deceptive

But this administration has reversed course, demonstrating time and again that there is no rugpull too petty or cruel to pass up. Take this one: RFK Jr blames processed food for health problems on indigenous reservations, so the USDA is…killing the food banks that provide local, fresh produce to indigenous reservations:

https://www.propublica.org/article/tribal-food-grant-cuts-trump-rfk-jr

Trump is the ripoff candidate, the King of the Scam. Take Trumpcoin: the President of the United States of America issued his own shitcoin through which people could openly offer him bribes. Then he announced that he would reward the top 220 bribes with a private dinner where he could be directly lobbied for presidential favors. The top bribes were proffered by a rogues' gallery of domestic and foreign scammers and crooks, including billionaire felons seeking pardons for stealing from millions of normal investors:

https://www.citationneeded.news/trump-memecoin-dinner-guests/

But the actual attendees didn't really bribe Trump. They scammed him by taking short positions on their Trumpcoin holdings:

https://www.theverge.com/cryptocurrency/674327/trump-coin-short-sell-hedge-contest-dinner-winner

And the instant the guestlist was announced, they liquidated their holdings, tanking Trumpcoin's price:

https://protos.com/trump-token-15-since-dinner-as-40-of-guests-dump-by-dessert/

But Trump scammed them, by turning the "private dinner with the president" into a whistle-stop in which he breezed into the hall, spoke for 15 minutes, and then left by helicopter without meeting with any of his "guests":

https://link.nymag.com/view/640f640416f22cc291043cebntiap.15g1/0da0f946

This is the kind of scammer inception that threatens to create a black hole of superdense Scammium-238 that sucks the whole country into the scam singularity. But scammers don't care – the Art of the Scam is to race across the river on the backs of alligators without losing a leg. These people aren't long-termists, they've always got one foot out the door.

The Trump II presidency is the most scam-friendly presidency in history, and everyone knows it. The scammers are lining up to get their scams okayed – like Verizon, which wants to bring back the long-banned practice of locking your phone so that it only works on their network and refusing to unlock it:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/05/verizon-tries-to-get-out-of-merger-condition-requiring-it-to-unlock-phones/

Verizon had to promise to unlock its customers' phones as a condition of being given exclusive control over billions' worth of the public spectrum, and in exchange for the right to buy its competitor Tracphone, in a nakedly anticompetitive merger. They stand every chance of getting out of these obligations, because Trump's scammer FCC chair Brendan Carr has launched an initiative called "Delete, Delete, Delete" in which he is inviting scammers to nominate regulations that protect the public so he can get rid of them:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/03/fcc-democrat-to-resign-cementing-republican-majority-for-chairman-carr/

Trump handed control over the Department of Education to the scammer Linda McMahon, wife of the scammer Vince McMahon, who bought up every wrestling league so that his performers had nowhere else to go, then falsely reclassified them as independent contractors, taking away their health insurance and leaving them to beg for Gofundme pennies so they could die with dignity in their mid-fifties from their work-related injuries:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8UQ4O7UiDs

Linda McMahon, a scammer, has thrown 5.3 million student borrowers into collections, calling them "irresponsible." Another 5.59 million will enter default in the next six months. She's opened the door for these ex-students to have money taken out of their Social Security and other government payments, leaving them only $750/month to live on (this figure hasn't been inflation-adjusted since 1996). Each time they get dinged, another $20 in fees (for having their money taken away) will be added to their debts.

As David Dayen writes for The American Prospect, McMahon is also unleashing America's scammiest loan servicers on student borrowers:

https://prospect.org/education/2025-05-27-borrowers-besieged-student-debt/

Take Maximus (owners of the Default Resolution Group), which has been repeatedly sued for misleading debtors, illegally taking money out of their accounts, and failing to note which borrowers were legally protected from having their funds taken. DoE loan servicers have a long and dishonorable tradition of ripping off debtors – like the giant Navient, which was eventually barred from servicing student loans altogether:

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-bans-navient-from-federal-student-loan-servicing-and-orders-the-company-to-pay-120-million-for-wide-ranging-student-lending-failures/

Servicers like Maximus routinely fail in their legal obligation to inform debtors of their rights, and when debtors know their rights – for example, the right to contest wage garnishment – Maximus just ignores their paperwork:

https://escholarship.org/content/qt6rc8r76c/qt6rc8r76c_noSplash_41d21b1b129a7224ae49ae65621f8dda.pdf

Dayen cites a long list of Maximus's documented sins – for example, systematically failing to inform debtors that if they enter loan rehabilitation and make nine payments over ten months, they can avoid default. Every time a borrower completes this process, they come off of Maximus's books, so it's not hard to see why Maximus would fail to tell them about it.

The rules are incredibly complex. If you do enter loan rehabilitation, you can still have payments garnished from your paycheck until you've completed five separate payments. You can consolidate your loans – and possibly even get them canceled after 20-25 years – but that also erases any credit you've managed toward debt forgiveness, and starts piling interest on the new loan. If you get any of this wrong, you have to pay more every month, not less.

The CARES Act ordered Maximus to stop taking money away from debtors – but some workers had their paychecks docked for 17 months after the order went into effect, including borrowers who had already paid their debts in full:

https://protectborrowers.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/SBPC_AWG_Final.pdf

Buried in all the complexity around student debt are several obscure, difficult to navigate paths that can reduce or eliminate your payments. But these are almost impossible to find (the Office of Federal Student Aid's website devotes 39 words to them, several screens down the page). This has created an opportunity for a giant scam industry that takes desperate debtors' last dollars to fill in paperwork they could easily complete for themselves, or to pretend to fill in that paperwork and just walk away from them:

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/enforcement/actions/monster-loans-lend-tech-loans-and-associated-student-loan-debt-relief-companies/

These scam agencies charge thousands of dollars – up to 40% of your outstanding debt – for either doing nothing or doing something you can do yourself, but can't readily find out about. This can net them tens of millions of dollars, extracted from desperate debtors:

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/panda_prosperity_complaint.pdf

There's about to be a hell of lot more of those desperate debtors kicking around. The DOE is cutting $330 billion out of the student loan pool in order to fund Trump's tax-break for the ultra-rich. This will make government loans much more expensive for borrowers – but it'll also vastly reduce the amount that students can borrow through the government. The lifetime cap on undergrad loans is now $50k, and $100k for grad students. Pell grants are being taken away from anyone who isn't a full-time student with a 30-hour courseload (so the poorest students, who have to work part-time while they go to school, will be shut out of them).

Where will students get the rest of the money? From predatory lenders. Private student loans currently pay for 7% of borrowers' education expenses – soon, it could be 90%. This is great news for scam colleges, like Trump University, which encouraged students to take out predatory loans to pay sky-high tuition for a useless "education":

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

The Big Beautiful Bill contains numerous attacks on the safeguards against scam colleges. That means that even more public money will go to propping up fraudulent institutions, and naive students who are just looking to get an education will be on the hook to pay it back – with interest.

Dayen calls this "The Golden Age of Scams":

https://prospect.org/power/2025-05-27-golden-age-of-scams/

He likens the current griftogenic environment to the situation in Elizabethan England, where counterfeit money was in wide circulation. This prompted Sir Thomas Gresham to coin "Gresham's Law": "Bad money drives out good." Gresham observed that anyone who was passed a bad coin would try to spend it as soon as possible, and if they managed to do so, the sucker who received the bad coin would then hasten to get rid of it. Eventually, everyone is preferentially spending counterfeit money and hoarding their legitimate coins.

In Trump's scam-friendly America, honest businesses operate at a disadvantage. The car dealer that cheats you on the inspection report for your car, cheats you again on your loan, and cheats you a third time on warranty service will have more money to advertise and market than the honest seller across the street. The supplement-pushing grifter has more money to spend on marketing than the company that makes real medicine.

Trump is out there pardoning shady crypto exchanges, gutting the white collar crime cops, and accepting tens of millions of dollars in payments from companies and executives who are under investigation for stealing from the American people. The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau just shut down its kleptocracy unit (seriously!):

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/bondis-day-one-corporate-crime-memos-rattle-white-collar-bar

This is a far cry from how other governments operate. In Germany, two executives behind Volkswagen's Dieselgate sentence are personally going to prison, one of them for 4.5 years. 31 more executives are still being dragged through the courts:

https://apnews.com/article/volkswagen-germany-diesel-emissions-court-fraud-3878fcf6c06c9574bf5bff8d31029f90

Scams beget scams. Scammers will tell you that "you can't con an honest man," and try to make everyone complicit in their dishonesty. If you are convinced that being honest will get you taken advantage of, there's nothing for it but to turn scammer yourself. Trump and his scammer base will drive out every honest business and interaction in our economy – and when they steal from you, they'll flash their veneers and tell you "That makes me smart."

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Copyright prevented transmission of Beatles music to aliens https://memex.craphound.com/2005/05/29/copyright-prevented-transmission-of-beatles-music-to-aliens/

#10yrsago Pornoscanner lobbyist’s new job: overseeing TSA spending https://theintercept.com/2015/05/27/tsa-body-scanner-lobbyist-takes-congressional-job-overseeing-spending-tsa-security/

#5yrsago Canadian newsrooms restructure as co-ops https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/29/mind-control-skepticism/#co-ops

#5yrsago GOP lawmaker hid his diagnosis from Democrats https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/29/mind-control-skepticism/#flu-klux-klan

#5yrsago Walmart's crummy anti-theft AI https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/29/mind-control-skepticism/#neverseen

#5yrsago Masks work https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/29/mind-control-skepticism/#mask-up

#5yrsago What to do about the police https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/29/mind-control-skepticism/#qualified-immunity

#5yrsago Private equity goes mainstream https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/29/mind-control-skepticism/#looters

#5yrsago How the IoT reinforces gentrification https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/29/mind-control-skepticism/#automated-karens

#5yrsago Big Tech distorts our discourse https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/29/mind-control-skepticism/#tech-unexceptionalism

#1yrago The Pizzaburger Presidency https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/29/sub-bushel-comms-strategy/#nothing-would-fundamentally-change

#15yrsago Canadian students speak out against the Canadian DMCA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WA1RDyN7JTg

#10yrsago How metadata compromises you https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP_e56DsymA

#5yrsago Corporate Dems include military contractors in bailout https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/28/holographic-nano-layer-catalyser/#beltway-bandits

#5yrsago World video premiere of the Little Brother stage play https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/28/holographic-nano-layer-catalyser/#custom-made

#5yrsago Wisconsin cases surge after voting day https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/28/holographic-nano-layer-catalyser/#grandparents-optional-party

#5yrsago Teardown of an "anti-5g" USB stick https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/28/holographic-nano-layer-catalyser/#conspiragrifters

#5yrsago California is setting itself up for a brutal second wave https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/28/holographic-nano-layer-catalyser/#second-wave

#5yrsago Why ammosexuals are REALLY pointing guns at their own dicks https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/28/holographic-nano-layer-catalyser/#musketfuckers

#5yrsago "News" broadcasts air scripted Amazon commercial https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/28/holographic-nano-layer-catalyser/#quackspeak

#5yrsago Cuomo legalizes nursing-home murders https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/28/holographic-nano-layer-catalyser/#immunity-impunity

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

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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https://doctorow.medium.com/

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https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

27.05.2025 à 19:42

Pluralistic: AI turns Amazon coders into Amazon warehouse workers (27 May 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (6132 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 posed man in a sharp business suit, frowning at his watch. His head has been replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.'

AI turns Amazon coders into Amazon warehouse workers (permalink)

On a recent This Machine Kills episode, guest Hagen Blix described the ultimate form of "AI therapy" with a "human in the loop":

https://soundcloud.com/thismachinekillspod/405-ai-is-the-demon-god-of-capital-ft-hagen-blix

One actual therapist is just having ten chat GPT windows open where they just like have five seconds to interrupt the chatGPT. They have to scan them all and see if it says something really inappropriate. That's your job, to stop it.

Blix admits that's not where therapy is at…yet, but he references Laura Preston's 2023 N Plus One essay, "HUMAN_FALLBACK," which describes her as a backstop to a real-estate "virtual assistant," that masqueraded as a human handling the queries that confused it, in a bid to keep the customers from figuring out that they were engaging with a chatbot:

https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-44/essays/human_fallback/

This is what makes investors and bosses slobber so hard for AI – a "productivity" boost that arises from taking away the bargaining power of workers so that they can be made to labor under worse conditions for less money. The efficiency gains of automation aren't just about using fewer workers to achieve the same output – it's about the fact that the workers you fire in this process can be used as a threat against the remaining workers: "Do your job and shut up or I'll fire you and give your job to one of your former colleagues who's now on the breadline."

This has been at the heart of labor fights over automation since the Industrial Revolution, when skilled textile workers took up the Luddite cause because their bosses wanted to fire them and replace them with child workers snatched from Napoleonic War orphanages:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/26/enochs-hammer/#thats-fronkonsteen

Textile automation wasn't just about producing more cloth – it was about producing cheaper, worse cloth. The new machines were so easy a child could use them, because that's who was using them – kidnapped war orphans. The adult textile workers the machines displaced weren't afraid of technology. Far from it! Weavers used the most advanced machinery of the day, and apprenticed for seven years to learn how to operate it. Luddites had the equivalent of a Masters in Engineering from MIT.

Weavers' guilds presented two problems for their bosses: first, they had enormous power, thanks to the extensive training required to operate their looms; and second, they used that power to regulate the quality of the goods they made. Even before the Industrial Revolution, weavers could have produced more cloth at lower prices by skimping on quality, but they refused, out of principle, because their work mattered to them.

Now, of course weavers also appreciated the value of their products, and understood that innovations that would allow them to increase their productivity and make more fabric at lower prices would be good for the world. They weren't snobs who thought that only the wealthy should go clothed. Weavers had continuously adopted numerous innovations, each of which increased the productivity and the quality of their wares.

Long before the Luddite uprising, weavers had petitioned factory owners and Parliament under the laws that guaranteed the guilds the right to oversee textile automation to ensure that it didn't come at the price of worker power or the quality of the textiles the machines produced. But the factory owners and their investors had captured Parliament, which ignored its own laws and did nothing as the "dark, Satanic mills" proliferated. Luddites only turned to property destruction after the system failed them.

Now, it's true that eventually, the machines improved and the fabric they turned out matched and exceeded the quality of the fabric that preceded the Industrial Revolution. But there's nothing about the way the Industrial Revolution unfolded – increasing the power of capital to pay workers less and treat them worse while flooding the market with inferior products – that was necessary or beneficial to that progress. Every other innovation in textile production up until that time had been undertaken with the cooperation of the guilds, who'd ensured that "progress" meant better lives for workers, better products for consumers, and lower prices. If the Luddites' demands for co-determination in the Industrial Revolution had been met, we might have gotten to the same world of superior products at lower costs, but without the immiseration of generations of workers, mass killings to suppress worker uprisings, and decades of defective products being foisted on the public.

So there are two stories about automation and labor: in the dominant narrative, workers are afraid of the automation that delivers benefits to all of us, stand in the way of progress, and get steamrollered for their own good, as well as ours. In the other narrative, workers are glad to have boring and dangerous parts of their work automated away and happy to produce more high-quality goods and services, and stand ready to assess and plan the rollout of new tools, and when workers object to automation, it's because they see automation being used to crush them and worsen the outputs they care about, at the expense of the customers they care for.

In modern automation/labor theory, this debate is framed in terms of "centaurs" (humans who are assisted by technology) and "reverse-centaurs" (humans who are conscripted to assist technology):

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

There are plenty of workers who are excited at the thought of using AI tools to relieve them of some drudgework. To the extent that these workers have power over their bosses and their working conditions, that excitement might well be justified. I hear a lot from programmers who work on their own projects about how nice it is to have a kind of hypertrophied macro system that can generate and tweak little automated tools on the fly so the humans can focus on the real, chewy challenges. Those workers are the centaurs, and it's no wonder that they're excited about improved tooling.

But the reverse-centaur version is a lot darker. The reverse-centaur coder is an assistant to the AI, charged with being a "human in the loop" who reviews the material that the AI produces. This is a pretty terrible job to have.

For starters, the kinds of mistakes that AI coders make are the hardest mistakes for human reviewers to catch. That's because LLMs are statistical prediction machines, spicy autocomplete that works by ingesting and analyzing a vast corpus of written materials and then producing outputs that represent a series of plausible guesses about which words should follow one another. To the extent that the reality the AI is participating in is statistically smooth and predictable, AI can often make eerily good guesses at words that turn into sentences or code that slots well into that reality.

But where reality is lumpy and irregular, AI stumbles. AI is intrinsically conservative. As a statistically informed guessing program, it wants the future to be like the past:

https://reallifemag.com/the-apophenic-machine/

This means that AI coders stumble wherever the world contains rough patches and snags. Take "slopsquatting." For the most part, software libraries follow regular naming conventions. For example, there might be a series of text-handling libraries with names like "text.parsing.docx," "text.parsing.xml," and "text.parsing.markdown." But for some reason – maybe two different projects were merged, or maybe someone was just inattentive – there's also a library called "text.txt.parsing" (instead of "text.parsing.txt").

AI coders are doing inference based on statistical analysis, and anyone inferring what the .txt parsing library is called would guess, based on the other libraries, that it was "text.parsing.txt." And that's what the AI guesses, and so it tries to import that library to its software projects.

This creates a new security vulnerability, "slopsquatting," in which a malicious actor creates a library with the expected name, which replicates the functionality of the real library, but also contains malicious code:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/12/ai_code_suggestions_sabotage_supply_chain/

Note that slopsquatting errors are extremely hard to spot. As is typical with AI coding errors, these are errors that are based on continuing a historical pattern, which is the sort of thing our own brains do all the time (think of trying to go up a step that isn't there after climbing to the top of a staircase). Notably, these are very different from the errors that a beginning programmer whose work is being reviewed by a more senior coder might make. These are the very hardest errors for humans to spot, and these are the errors that AIs make the most, and they do so at machine speed:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

To be a human in the loop for an AI coder, a programmer must engage in sustained, careful, line-by-line and command-by-command scrutiny of the code. This is the hardest kind of code to review, and maintaining robotic vigilance over long periods at high speeds is something humans are very bad at. Indeed, it's the kind of task we try very hard to automate, since machines are much better at being machinelike than humans are. This is the essence of reverse-centaurism: when a human is expected to act like a machine in order to help the machine do something it can't do.

Humans routinely fail at spotting these errors, unsurprisingly. If the purpose of automation is to make superior goods at lower prices, then this would be a real concern, since a reverse-centaur coding arrangement is bound to produce code with lurking, pernicious, especially hard-to-spot bugs that present serious risks to users. But if the purpose of automation is to discipline labor – to force coders to accept worse conditions and pay – irrespective of the impact on quality, then AI is the perfect tool for the job. The point of the human isn't to catch the AI's errors so much as it is to catch the blame for the AI's errors – to be what Madeleine Clare Elish calls a "moral crumple zone":

https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/260

As has been the case since the Industrial Revolution, the project of automation isn't just about increasing productivity, it's about weakening labor power as a prelude to lowering quality. Take what's happened to the news industry, where mass layoffs are being offset by AI tools. At Hearst's King Features Syndicates, a single writer was charged with producing over 30 summer guides, the entire package:

https://www.404media.co/viral-ai-generated-summer-guide-printed-by-chicago-sun-times-was-made-by-magazine-giant-hearst/

That is an impossible task, which is why the writer turned to AI to do his homework, and then, infamously, published a "summer reading guide" that was full of nonexistent books that were hallucinated by a chatbot:

https://www.404media.co/chicago-sun-times-prints-ai-generated-summer-reading-list-with-books-that-dont-exist/

Most people reacted to this story as a consumer issue: they were outraged that the world was having a defective product foisted upon it. But the consumer issue here is downstream from the labor issue: when the writers at King Features Syndicate are turned into reverse-centaurs, they will inevitably produce defective outputs. The point of the worker – the "human in the loop" – isn't to supervise the AI, it's to take the blame for the AI. That's just what happened, as this poor schmuck absorbed an internet-sized rasher of shit flung his way by outraged social media users. After all, it was his byline on the story, not the chatbot's. He's the moral crumple-zone.

The implication of this is that consumers and workers are class allies in the automation wars. The point of using automation to weaken labor isn't just cheaper products – it's cheaper, defective products, inflicted on the unsuspecting and defenseless public who are no longer protected by workers' professionalism and pride in their jobs.

That's what's going on at Duolingo, where CEO Luis von Ahn created a firestorm by announcing mass firings of human language instructors, who would be replaced by AI. The "AI first" announcement pissed off Duolingo's workers, of course, but what caught von Ahn off-guard was how much this pissed off Duolingo's users:

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/05/25/0347239/duolingo-faces-massive-social-media-backlash-after-ai-first-comments

But of course, this makes perfect sense. After all, language-learners are literally incapable of spotting errors in the AI instruction they receive. If you spoke the language well enough to spot the AI's mistakes, you wouldn't need Duolingo! I don't doubt that there are countless ways in which AIs could benefit both language learners and the Duolingo workers who develop instructional materials, but for that to happen, workers' and learners' needs will have to be the focus of AI integration. Centaurs could produce great language learning materials with AI – but reverse-centaurs can only produce slop.

Unsurprisingly, many of the most successful AI products are "bossware" tools that let employers monitor and discipline workers who've been reverse-centaurized. Both blue-collar and white-collar workplaces have filled up with "electronic whips" that monitor and evaluate performance:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/02/despotism-on-demand/#virtual-whips

AI can give bosses "dashboards" that tell them which Amazon delivery drivers operate their vehicles with their mouths open (Amazon doesn't let its drivers sing on the job). Meanwhile, a German company called Celonis will sell your boss a kind of AI phrenology tool that assesses your "emotional quality" by spying on you while you work:

https://crackedlabs.org/en/data-work/publications/processmining-algomanage

Tech firms were among the first and most aggressive adopters of AI-based electronic whips. But these whips weren't used on coders – they were reserved for tech's vast blue-collar and contractor workforce: clickworkers, gig workers, warehouse workers, AI data-labelers and delivery drivers.

Tech bosses tormented these workers but pampered their coders. That wasn't out of any sentimental attachment to tech workers. Rather, tech bosses were afraid of tech workers, because tech workers possess a rare set of skills that can be harnessed by tech firms to produce gigantic returns. Tech workers have historically been princes of labor, able to command high salaries and deferential treatment from their bosses (think of the amazing tech "campus" perks), because their scarcity gave them power.

It's easy to predict how tech bosses would treat tech workers if they could get away with it – just look how they treat workers they aren't afraid of. Just like the textile mill owners of the Industrial Revolution, the thing that excites tech bosses about AI is the possibility of cutting off a group of powerful workers at the knees. After all, it took more than a century for strong labor unions to match the power that the pre-Industrial Revolution guilds had. If AI can crush the power of tech workers, it might buy tech bosses a century of free rein to shift value from their workforce to their investors, while also doing away with pesky Tron-pilled workers who believe they have a moral obligation to "fight for the user."

William Gibson famously wrote, "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." The workers that tech bosses don't fear are living in the future of the workers that tech bosses can't easily replace.

This week, the New York Times's veteran Amazon labor reporter Noam Scheiber published a deeply reported piece about the experience of coders at Amazon in the age of AI:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/25/business/amazon-ai-coders.html

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is palpably horny for AI coders, evidenced by investor memos boasting of AI's returns in "productivity and cost avoidance" and pronouncements about AI saving "the equivalent of 4,500 developer-years":

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/andy-jassy-8b1615_one-of-the-most-tedious-but-critical-tasks-activity-7232374162185461760-AdSz/

Amazon is among the most notorious abusers of blue-collar labor, the workplace where everyone who doesn't have a bullshit laptop job is expected to piss in a bottle and spend an unpaid hour before and after work going through a bag- and body-search. Amazon's blue-collar workers are under continuous, totalizing, judging AI scrutiny that scores them based on whether their eyeballs are correctly oriented, whether they take too long to pick up an object, whether they pee too often. Amazon warehouse workers are injured at three times national average. Amazon AIs scan social media for disgruntled workers talking about unions, and Amazon has another AI tool that predicts which shops and departments are most likely to want to unionize.

Scheiber's piece describes what it's like to be an Amazon tech worker who's getting the reverse-centaur treatment that has heretofore been reserved for warehouse workers and drivers. They describe "speedups" in which they are moved from writing code to reviewing AI code, their jobs transformed from solving chewy intellectual puzzles to racing to spot hard-to-find AI coding errors as a clock ticks down. Amazon bosses haven't ordered their tech workers to use AI, just raised their quotas to a level that can't be attained without getting an AI to do most of the work – just like the Chicago Sun-Times writer who was expected to write all 30 articles in the summer guide package on his own. No one made him use AI, but he wasn't going to produce 30 articles on deadline without a chatbot.

Amazon insists that it is treating AI as an assistant for its coders, but the actual working conditions make it clear that this is a reverse-centaur transformation. Scheiber discusses a dissident internal group at Amazon called Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, who link the company's use of AI to its carbon footprint. Beyond those climate concerns, these workers are treating AI as a labor issue.

Amazon's coders have been making tentative gestures of solidarity towards its blue-collar workforce since the pandemic broke out, walking out in support of striking warehouse workers (and getting fired for doing so):

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

But those firings haven't deterred Amazon's tech workers from making common cause with their comrades on the shop floor:

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

When techies describe their experience of AI, it sometimes sounds like they're describing two completely different realities – and that's because they are. For workers with power and control, automation turns them into centaurs, who get to use AI tools to improve their work-lives. For workers whose power is waning, AI is a tool for reverse-centaurism, an electronic whip that pushes them to work at superhuman speeds. And when they fail, these workers become "moral crumple zones," absorbing the blame for the defective products their bosses pushed out in order to goose profits.

As ever, what a technology does pales in comparison to who it does it for and who it does it to.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Bulk of American calories comes from sweet drinks https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/05/050527111920.htm

#20yrsago Chicago’s Bean sculpture is free to photograph, at last https://memex.craphound.com/2005/05/27/chicagos-bean-sculpture-is-free-to-photograph-at-last/

#15yrsago Man single-handedly building a metro rail https://englishrussia.com/2010/05/24/the-most-unusual-metro-in-the-world/

#15yrsago Canada’s copyright minister: superinfringer https://memex.craphound.com/2010/05/27/canadas-copyright-minister-superinfringer/

#15yrsago Pinkwater’s ADVENTURES OF A CAT-WHISKERED GIRL, sequel to Neddiad and Yggyssey https://memex.craphound.com/2010/05/27/pinkwaters-adventures-of-a-cat-whiskered-girl-sequel-to-neddiad-and-yggyssey/

#10yrsago Real estate bubble drives urban blight https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/why-are-there-so-many-shuttered-storefronts-in-the-west-village

#10yrsago IRS leaks 100K taxpayers’ data to identity thieves https://theintercept.com/2015/05/27/data-breaches-wreak-havoc/

#10yrsago Swiss cops’ dawn raid snags top FIFA officials https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/27/sports/soccer/fifa-officials-face-corruption-charges-in-us.html

#5yrsago The Toronto Star's new owners donated to far-right Tories https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/27/literal-gunhumping/#plutewatch

#5yrsago How to pay artists while fighting censorship and Big Tech https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/27/literal-gunhumping/#pay-artists

#5yrsago Ammosexuals point their guns at their crotches https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/27/literal-gunhumping/#youll-shoot-your-eye-out

#5yrsago Twitter's porn filters are dampening discussions of "cumgate" https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/27/literal-gunhumping/#cumgate

#5yrsago West Virginia's governor Jim Justice: billionaire, deadbeat https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/27/literal-gunhumping/#injustice

#5yrsago Hertz's bankruptcy was caused by private equity looting https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/27/literal-gunhumping/#hertz-uranus

#5yrsago Facebook shelved research that showed they were sowing division https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/27/literal-gunhumping/#joel-kaplan

#5yrsago Youtube is automatically blocking criticism of the Chinese Communist Party https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/27/literal-gunhumping/#communist-bandit

#1yrago Against Lore https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/27/cmon-do-it-again/#better_to_remain_silent_and_be_thought_a_fool_than_to_speak_and_remove_all_doubt

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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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)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • 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

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ISSN: 3066-764X

26.05.2025 à 17:38

Pluralistic: Who Broke the Internet, Part IV (26 May 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (5789 mots)


Today's links


The logo for 'Who Broke the Internet' - a shattered hard-drive with the CBC logomark.

Who Broke the Internet, Part IV (permalink)

"Kick 'Em In the Dongle" is the fourth and final episode of "Understood: Who Broke the Internet?", a podcast series I hosted and co-wrote for the CBC. It's quite a finale!

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1353-the-naked-emperor/episode/16148346-kick-em-in-the-dongle

The thesis of the series is the same as the thesis of enshittification: that the internet turned into a pile of shit because named people, in living memory, made policies that were broadly "enshittogenic" because they insulated businesses that tormented their end users and business customers from any consequences for their cheating:

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

Moreover, these people were warned at the time about the certain consequences of their policies, and they ignored and dismissed both expert feedback and public opinion. These people never faced consequences or any accountability for their actions, as tech criticism focused (understandably and deservedly) on the businesses that took advantage of the enshittogenic policies and enshittified, without any understanding that these firms were turning into piles of shit because of policies that reward them for doing so.

Episode one of the series tells the story of an enshittification poster-child: Google. We look at the paper-trail that emerged from the Department of Justice's successful monopoly prosecution of Google, and what it reveals about the sorry state of internet search today:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/08/who-broke-the-internet/#bruce-lehman

That paper-trail documents an intense power-struggle within Google: in 2019, Google's ad revenue czar went to war against Google's search boss, demanding that search be deliberately worsened. This may sound paradoxical (or even paranoid), but for Google, making search worse made a perverse kind of sense. The company's search revenue growth had stalled, for the obvious reason that Google had a 90% market share in search, which meant that basically everyone was a Google search user, leaving the company with no new potential customers to sign up.

In 2019, Prabhakar Raghavan – the ex-McKinsey, ex-Yahoo MBA who ran ad revenue for Google – came up with an ingenious solution: just make search worse. If you have to run multiple searches to find what you're looking for, that creates multiple chances to show you an ad:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Raghavan's nemesis was Ben Gomes, an OG googler who'd overseen the creation of the company's server infrastructure and had been crowned the head of search. Gomes hated Raghavan's idea, and in the memos, we get a blow-by-blow account of the epic fight inside Google between the enshittifiers and the anti-enshittification resistance, who are ultimately trounced, which is how we get today's sloppified, ad-poisoned, spam-centric Google search.

Raghavan and his clique are obviously greedy monsters, but that's not the whole story. The real question is, how did we get to the point where Google, a company justly famed for its emphasis on search quality, abandoned its commitment to excellence? That's the question we explore in episodes two and three.

Episode two is "Ctrl-ctrl-ctrl," and it reveals the original sin of tech, the origin of the worst tech policies in the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/13/ctrl-ctrl-ctrl/#free-dmitry

This is the tale of another epic struggle inside another giant institution, only this struggle takes place in government, not Google. We travel back to the Clinton years, when Vice President Al Gore was put in charge of demilitarizing the internet and transforming it into a service that welcomed the public, as well as private firms. Gore's rival in this project was Clinton's copyright czar, the white shoe entertainment lawyer Bruce Lehman.

Lehman wanted Gore to install an "anti-circumvention" policy on the new internet: under Lehman's proposal, copyright law would be rewritten to ban modifying ("circumventing") digital products, services and devices, whether or not those modifications led to anyone's copyrights being violated. Anti-circumvention would let dominant companies conscript the government to punish upstart rivals and tinkerers who dared to improve their products, say, by blocking commercial surveillance, or by turning off checks that blocked generic parts and consumables or independent repair, or by making existing products more accessible to people with disabilities.

Experts like Pam Samuelson hated this proposal and made a huge stink about it. This led to Gore categorically rejecting Lehman's ideas, so Lehman (in his own words) did "an end-run around Congress" and got the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to turn "anti-circumvention" into an international treaty obligation. Then he went back to Congress and got them to pass an anti-circumvention law, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that went even further than the WIPO treaties demanded.

Almost instantly, the direst predictions of Lehman's opponents came true. A Russian computer scientist named Dmitry Skylarov was arrested by the FBI for giving a technical conference presentation about the weaknesses in Adobe's ebook software, in which he explained how these allowed Adobe customers to do legal things, like transferring their ebooks to a new computer (Adobe's software blocked this).

The chilling effect of DMCA 1201 was deep and far-reaching. It created (in the words of Jay Freeman), a new "felony contempt of business model" system, in which a business could threaten to imprison anyone who tried to disenshittify their products, for example, by making it possible for hospitals to maintain their ventilators without paying a med-tech giant for overpriced, slow service:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/why-repair-techs-are-hacking-ventilators-with-diy-dongles-from-poland/

Anticircumvention law lets John Deere stop farmers from fixing their own tractors. It stops independent mechanics from fixing your car. It stops you from using cheap third-party inkjet cartridges. It's why Patreon performers lose 30 cents on every in-app subscription dollar, because only Apple can provide iPhone apps, and Apple uses that control to extract a 30% fee on in-app payments. It's why you can't stop apps from spying on you – and why Apple (which does block other companies apps from spying on you) can track every click, message and movement you make in order to target ads to you:

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

Anticircumvention let the garage-door opener company that bought every one of its rivals block integration with standard home automation tools, forcing you to use an app that makes you look at ads before you can open your garage-door:

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

Anticircumvention is why there's no such thing as a Tivo for streaming services, letting you record the programs you enjoy so you can watch them later (say, when Prime moves Christmas movies into the paid tier between October and January). It's why you can't get a scraper that lets you leave Facebook or Twitter for Mastodon or Bluesky, and continue to interact with your friends who are stuck on zuckermuskian legacy media:

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

It's why you can't get an alternative Instagram client that blocks spying, ads and "suggestions," just showing you the latest updates from the people you follow:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/29/23378541/the-og-app-instagram-clone-pulled-from-app-store

Of course, companies that abuse this government-granted weapon might still face consequences, if their behavior was so obnoxious that it drove us into the arms of their competitors. But for that to happen, we'd need to have meaningful competition, which brings me to episode three, "In God We Antitrust":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/19/khan-thought/#they-were-warned

Episode three goes even farther back in time, to the early 1980s, when a racist pig and Nixon co-conspirator named Robert Bork led a successful counterrevolution that destroyed antitrust enforcement in the US, and then around the world. It's thanks to Bork – and his idea that monopolies are "efficient" – that we got what Tom Eastman calls an internet of "five giant websites filled with screenshots of the other four." It's why every sector in our economy is controlled by a cartel, a duopoly or a monopoly:

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

If Bruce Lehman paved the way for Prabhakar Raghavan's enshittification of Google, then Robert Bork laid the road that Bruce Lehman traveled to Geneva and the WIPO Internet Treaties. Industry consolidation always leads to regulatory capture. A handful of gigantic companies can easily collude to present a disciplined message to its regulators and the fact that they don't compete with one another lets them steal so much from us that they have huge warchests they can use to get their policies enacted.

40 years of Bork's pro-monopoly policies has produced…monopolies. The reason a handful of powerful executives have more power than any of the world's governments – the reason the public is thwarted on everything from healthcare to climate, minimum wages to privacy – is that Robert Bork overturned generations of antitrust practice and created pro-oligarch policies that created a modern oligarchy.

The 2020s have seen an impressive and heartening global surge in antitrust activism, motivated by an urge to blunt or even shatter corporate power, bypassing apologetics about "efficiency" that can only be understood through mastering an esoteric mathematics whose own practitioners cheerfully describe it as disconnected from any observable reality:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0039368122000693

This global, grassroots movement has provoked a massive backlash from our technofeudal overlords, culminating in the 2024 re-election of Donald Trump, which is where we open our the fourth and final episode of "Understood: Who Broke the Internet?" Trump's inauguration stage featured some unusual attendees: the CEOs of the largest tech companies in America, who had personally donated a million bucks each to Trump's inauguration fund. These are some of the richest men in human history, and they were all in on Trump.

Trump lost no time in inflicting misery on the American people, illegally firing the agency personnel most closely associated with the antitrust movement and canceling many of their key policies. But for the rest of the world, the most prominent effect of Trumpism was the imposition of tariffs on every country in the world, including islands without any human inhabitants:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/03/donald-trump-tariffs-antarctica-uninhabited-heard-mcdonald-islands

The world is changing before our eyes, and it needn't change for the worse. As Trump transforms America into a hermit kingdom, countries around the world have a chance to consider what their policies might be like if they weren't organized around US priorities. That includes Canada.

Canada could retaliate against Trump's tariffs by legalizing and incubating Canadian companies that find ways to improve America's enshittified products, creating mods, plugins, alternative software and other tools that Canadians – and the world – would snap up. Every customer for these disenshittifying tools would constitute a targeted strike against technofeudalism, against Trumpism, against the companies whose CEOs sat behind Trump on the dais.

More: the Canadian companies that raided America's high-tech giants could use the sky-high rents they extracted through anti-circumvention laws as a kind of disposable rocket stage to boost a new Canadian tech sector into a stable orbit, giving Canada a global tech standing comparable to the power and wealth Finland enjoyed during the Nokia years.

That's something Canada could do, only it can't, yet, because of a 13-year old anti-circumvention law that was crammed onto Canada's statute-books by two ministers in Stephen Harper's government, James Moore and Tony Clement:

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

Harper charged Moore and Clement with getting an anticircumvention law because the US Trade Representative had made it clear that failing to do so would result in the US imposing tariffs on Canada. But Canadians hated the idea of this law. In 2004, a Liberal MP named Sam Bulte lost her Toronto seat after she attempted to ram an anticirumvention law through Parliament. The Tories tried to pass another anticircuvmention law in 2007, and faced so much pushback that the bill died.

Moore and Clement's tactic for defusing this opposition was to have a public consultation on anticircumvention law, to make it seem like the government was listening to the people. Boy, did that idea backfire: 6,138 Canadians wrote in to oppose the proposal. 54 supported it:

https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2010/04/copycon-final-numbers/

But Moore and Clement pressed on. Moore explained to an International Chamber of Commerce meeting in Toronto that he would be discarding nearly every consultation response he'd received, on the grounds that people who disagreed with him were "babyish…radical extremists":

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/copyright-debate-turns-ugly-1.898216

The most remarkable thing about Canada's 2012 adoption of anticircumvention law is that it came 14 years after the US passed the DMCA. We already had a thick record of the damage that law had done. We had all the evidence we needed to see how this US law had hurt everyday Americans. But Moore and Clement still tabled their bill, with language that was actually worse than the American law, dispensing with the largely ineffectual safeguards Congress had put in the 1998 DMCA.

More than a decade on, Canada's "digital locks" law has stalled the country's tech sector and left Canadians defenseless against American enshittification. Even the country's pioneering Right to Repair and interoperability laws, passed last year, can't undo this damage, because they only give Canadians the right to fix or improve things if they don't have to break a digital lock to do so, and everything has a digital lock these days, from ebikes to car parts.

Moore actually gave us a comment for the show, once again dismissing his critics by claiming there was no evidence that his law had created a chilling effect that stopped Canadians from making products and services that unrigged the game American big business forced us all to play. It's nice to see that Moore hasn't changed since his days of calling his detractors "babyish radical extremists." The very nature of "chilling effects" is that they can only be observed by looking at what didn't happen: Moore seems to interpret the fact that Canadians haven't shipped a privacy tool for phones, or an alternative app store for Xboxes, or a service that jailbreaks your car so any mechanic can fix it as evidence that Canadians wouldn't want these things (or that Canadian technologists are too stupid to deliver them).

Repealing Canada's anticircumvention laws would mark a turning point in tech regulation. For decades now, countries that are upset with tech companies' greed and cruelty have created policies that demand that Big Tech wield its extraordinary power more wisely. Think of content moderation laws, or laws that try to get tech companies to share some of their monopoly ripoff money with news outlets. These laws don't seek to take away power from tech giants – they just try to turn it to socially beneficial uses. This is a huge mistake. For a tech company to control its users' behavior, it must have power over those users, must observe every action they take and retain the ability to stop them. For a tech company to share its billions with news outlets, it must continue to make billions by ripping us all off:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-must-open-app-stores

The only tech regulation that will truly make us all better off is a regulation that shatters tech power – not one that seeks to harness it. That's what getting rid of anticircumvention would do: it would give us – internet users – the right to defend ourselves against exploitation, manipulation and abuse. It would let us decide how the devices, products and services we use work. It wouldn't just make it illegal for tech giants to use our technology to attack us – it would make it impossible for them to do so, because our technology would take orders from us, not them.

Repealing anticircumvention laws in Canada and around the world is the best path forward. Ironically, Donald Trump's "Liberation Day" has created the conditions for every country to liberate itself from America's grotesque tech policies – and to export our tools of technological liberation to our American friends, who were the first victims of US Big Tech.

I'm so pleased with how this show worked out. My collaborators – especially showrunner Acey Rowe and producer Matt Meuse – were stone brilliant as was our sound designer, Julian Uzielli. The whole team has done smashing work getting the word out about the show and making it sound smart and accessible. I couldn't have asked for a better group of colleagues to produce this show, and I couldn't be prouder of how it sounds.

You can subscribe to "Understood: Who Broke the Internet?" on any podcast app, even the enshittified ones, and you can get the RSS here:

https://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/nakedemperor.xml

Hey look at this (permalink)


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Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Music critic to labels: Give me CDs/MP3s/vinyl or don’t bother http://sfj.abstractdynamics.org/archives/005579.html

#20yrsago MIT Tech Review pre-publishing draft articles on a blog https://web.archive.org/web/20050524003647/http://www.continuousblog.net/2005/05/post.html

#20yrsago Schwarzenegger creates, then fills Potemkin pothole https://web.archive.org/web/20050602073302/https://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/05/27/GOVERNOR.TMP

#15yrsago A perfect marvel of vacuous malice https://memex.craphound.com/2010/05/26/a-perfect-marvel-of-vacuous-malice/

#15yrsago Canada’s own PATRIOT Act https://web.archive.org/web/20100530042800/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5059/125/

#15yrsago Schneier at the airport https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/05/scene_from_an_a.html

#15yrsago September 2008 crash cost $108K per US household https://web.archive.org/web/20110505220244/https://www.pewtrusts.org/our_work_report_detail.aspx?id=58695&category=618

#10yrsago Amazon will finally start paying tax in the UK https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/23/amazon-to-begin-paying-corporation-tax-on-uk-retail-sales

#10yrsago What Sony and Spotify’s secret deal really looks like https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/19/8621581/sony-music-spotify-contract

#10yrsago Poverty is a tax on cognition https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6_scuce5TA

#10yrsago Screw the techno-determinists — give me hope instead https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/26/hope-future-internet-activism-freedom

#10yrsago The Awesome: ass-kicking girl monster-hunter FTW! https://memex.craphound.com/2015/05/26/the-awesome-ass-kicking-girl-monster-hunter-ftw/

#10yrsago Al Qaeda’s job application form https://web.archive.org/web/20150520175956/https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ubl/english/Instructions

#5yrsago White Americans are increasingly opposed to democracy https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/26/pandemic-profiteers/#quiet-part-outloud

#5yrsago Uber is scrapping thousands of Jump bikes https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/26/pandemic-profiteers/#bezzlers

#5yrsago Texas profiteers make bank from NYC's homeless https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/26/pandemic-profiteers/#profiteering

#5yrsago Scarfolk on Cumgate https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/26/pandemic-profiteers/#private-law

#5yrsago Coronagrifting and other bad design fictions https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/24/coronagrifting/#coronagrifting

#5yrsago Bloomberg editorial calls for a supersized New Deal https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/24/coronagrifting/#more-fdr

#1yrago They brick you because they can https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/record-scratch/#autoenshittification

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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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

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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24.05.2025 à 20:04

Pluralistic: Drinkslump linkdump (24 May 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (5802 mots)


Today's links


My hand holding an advance copy of my next book, ENSHITTIFICATION WHY EVERYTHING GOT WORSE AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT, up against an ivy-covered wall. The cover features a poop emoji with a black bar over its mouth, and the bar is filled with grawlix (punctuation indicating profanity).

Drinkslump linkdump (permalink)

It's linkdump time, in which I skillfully weave together all the links that I was too busy to cram into the week's newsletter issues. Here's the previous 31 (!) installments:

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

This week's linkdump comes with a great excuse: I was off at the staff retreat for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, for intensive policy work (and a lot of team-bonding socializing – I karaoked "The Piano Has Been Drinking") with my colleagues on the front lines of the battle to disenshittify the internet. If you'd like to join that fight, here's a chance to do so: we're hiring a staff technologist!

https://www.paycomonline.net/v4/ats/web.php/jobs?clientkey=28620672D234BF368306CEB4A2746667

Of course, you don't have to work for EFF to make disenshittificatory tech. "Just a QR Code" is a new site that generates QR codes, operating entirely in your browser, without transmitting any data to a server or trying to cram ads into your eyeballs. The fact that it runs entirely in-browser means you can save this webpage and work with an offline copy to generate QR codes forever – even if the site goes down:

https://justaqrcode.com/

One of the best, longest-tenured gatherings of anti-enshittification technologists is HOPE, the Hackers On Planet Earth con spawned by 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. After getting evicted from their traditional digs at the Hotel Pennsylvania (which was bought by a billionaire who turned it into a crater and then lost interest), HOPE had to find new digs. The new location, St John's University in Queens, is fantastic, and the last event was so great they decided to go from biennial to annual:

https://hope.net/

But then, Trump hit. HOPE draws a sizable cohort of international attendees and speakers, and most of these people have decided that attending a genuinely fantastic hacker con isn't worth risk being sent to a Salvadoran slave-labor camp by a surly border guard. As a result, HOPE's numbers are dangerously low:

https://www.404media.co/hacker-conference-hope-says-fewer-people-buying-tickets-because-u-s-immigration-crackdown/

Please consider attending! HOPE is consistently one of the best events I've attended. The vibes are impeccable and the information is deep, gnarly and fantastic, and has a long, long track record of just being great.

Another beloved, long-running, print based institution is The Onion, which got a new lease on life when former disinformation reporter Ben Collins bought the site after quitting NBC, which had censured him for being too mean to Elon Musk:

https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/nbc-news-ben-collins-twitter-elon-musk-1235463474/

Having been burned by corporate journalistic cowardice, Collins decided to revive The Onion's tradition of merciless, trenchant parody. He also revived The Onion's tradition of showing up in the world as a printed artifact, spraying gallons of ink onto tons of vegetable pulp and shipping the result to mailboxes around the world (including mine):

https://membership.theonion.com/

Collins sat down for a long interview with Vanity Fair's Chris Murphy that is full of so many excellent moments and quips that I actually cheered aloud while reading it, more than once!

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/the-onions-ben-collins-knows-how-to-save-media

Collins believes he saved The Onion from "AI death," and I think he's right. Instead, he's produced a site that fights fascism using one of history's most reliable methods, satire: "There’s nothing fascists hate more than getting truly ripped on." Collins points out something interesting about Trump: "He never laughs…He’s funny in the sense that callous people can be particularly biting, but he’s not funny."

Here's his advice to other would-be media barons: "Kowtowing to power— your job is not that, nobody fucking wants that."

Among other things, Collins used The Onion to acquire Alex Jones's Infowars out of bankruptcy, only to have far-right legal shenanigans interrupt the hostile takeover (it's still in the courts).

(Paywall-busting version here:)

https://archive.is/aV2av

Another funny – but much angrier – independent media voice is Ed Zitron, one of the best ranters in technology. Ed's motto is "I hate them for what they did to the computer," a phrase I like so much I used it as the epigraph for my next book. Ed's just published the longest-ever post on his excellent "Where's Your Ed At?" newsletter, called "The Era of the Business Idiot":

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

In this post, Ed tried to answer the burning question, "Why are these objectively very stupid people given so much power over so much capital, and the lives of so many of us?" He lashes out at everyone – MBA programs, sociopathic Jack Welch-alikes, the supine press, and more. And he coins a truly excellent epithet for one of our most cherished business idiots, Open AI CEO Sam Altman:

SLOPPENHEIMER.

I love Ed's work, which focuses extensively on the internal ideological and personal traits of business leaders. But I think that any study of the enshittocene – and any effective opposition to enshittification – needs to start with policy, the legal arrangements that create an enshittogenic environment that allow the business idiots to wreak havoc without the constraints of competition, regulation, an empowered workforce or technological countermeasures.

In the EU, the epicenter of enshittogenesis is Ireland, a tax haven that has attracted the largest and worst American tech companies who maintain the fiction that they are based in Eire. But these companies are hardly loyal to Dublin: any company footloose enough to pretend that it's Irish this week can pretend to be Maltese, Luxembourgeois, Cypriot or Dutch next week. To keep those companies from upping sticks, Ireland must not only offer them criminally favorable tax treatment, they have to slow walk or ignore all regulations that discipline the enshittificatory impulses of Big Tech:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

Writing in Politico, Eoin Drea lays out the ways that Ireland is serving Trump's agenda to protect US Big Tech from EU regulators:

https://www.politico.eu/article/ireland-donald-trump-fines-white-house-washington-uk/

In particular, Drea identifies the risk that Ireland will shelter US companies from enforcement of the Digital Markets Act, the EU's "crowning legislative jewel." Ireland's PM has been carrying water for Trump, pressuring the EU to be "considered and measured" in its response to Trump's aggression; he's also vowed to "resist" the EU's digital taxes. Drea argues that centralizing enforcement of EU tech regulation in Brussels and the federal courts will relieve Ireland of the pressure to defend Trump's policies, since they will no longer be in a position to protect tech companies from Europe's rules.

When it comes to flouting EU rules, one of the most egregious "Irish" tech offenders is Meta. In a long article for Ars Technica, Ashley Belanger looks at Zuckerberg's recent statements about Facebook's future as a place where lonely people, having been alienated from their actual friends and families by a system that downranks posts from your social network to create space for ads and boosted posts, befriend AI chatbots instead:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/05/meta-hypes-ai-friends-as-social-medias-future-but-users-want-real-connections/

I contributed a little to Belanger's excellent reporting, discussing my work with EFF on what an interoperable Facebook might look like, and how it might set Facebook's prisoners free:

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

Mark Zuckerberg's transformation from a historically awful person to a historically monstrous person has been really something to see. In this week's Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal webtoon, Zach Weinersmith scores a body-blow on Zuck that was so perfect it made me bark with laughter:

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/gently

I firmly believe that Zuckerberg's transformation isn't due to the decay of his character. I think Zuck was always a creep, as any reader of Sarah Wynn-Williams's tell-all Facebook memoir Careless People can attest:

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

Rather, I think the collapse of the internet into what Tom Eastman calls "five giant websites filled with screenshots of the other four" relieved Zuck of his nagging fear that a competitor would poach his users if he abused them too much. This is the enshittogenic environment at work – when we let firms form cartels, their owners become oligarchs.

Tech is far from the only cartel. In publishing, we only have five major publishers left, and the largest, Bertelsmann, dwarfs the other four. It's hard to overstate how gigantic Bertelsmann is, but here's a trenchant example: Bertelsmann owns Penguin-Random House, and PRH has publishing deals with five sitting Supreme Court justices. This meant that a majority of the court had to recuse itself from hearing a plagiarism case involving a Ta-Nehisi Coates book. It's the first time a mass-recusal has scuppered a Supreme Court case since 1945, when the majority of justices disclosed that they were stockholders in Alcoa, a monopolist:

https://www.newsweek.com/five-supreme-court-justices-sit-out-case-rare-move-2074666

Oligarchs are intrinsically enshittogenic. Oligarchs use their money and power to support strongmen who will trade money for government action, like Donald Trump, who offered a private dinner for major holders of his TRUMP shitcoin. The announcement prompted a ferocious bidding war among foreign agents and convicted criminals to buy up Trumpcoins and get a seat at the table:

https://www.citationneeded.news/trump-memecoin-dinner-guests/

Trump defenders claimed that the president was just rewarding people who understood the value of his coin, and not selling influence at all. Apparently, the attendees didn't get the memo, with many of them dumping their Trumpcoins the instant they were added to the guest-list:

https://protos.com/trump-token-15-since-dinner-as-40-of-guests-dump-by-dessert/

Joke's on them, though: Trump stiffed them! He showed up, gave a 15 minute speech (practically a haiku by Trump's normal standard of bloviation), then climbed into a helicopter and flew away, hundreds of millions of dollars richer thanks to the suckers left to their rubber chicken banquet:

https://link.nymag.com/view/640f640416f22cc291043cebntiap.15g1/0da0f946

Those specific oligarchs didn't get a chance to petition Trump to enact their favored policies, but Trump is still delivering for oligarchs. The "Big Beautiful Bill" that was passed in the dead of night last week included a whole raft of "sleeper" provisions, each worse than the last, as enumerated by The American Prospect's Robert Kuttner:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2025-05-23-ten-sneaky-sleeper-provisions-trumps-big-beautiful-bill/

Among these:

  • taking away the courts' ability to use federal funds to hold government officials in contempt;

  • $45 billion for immigration gulags, to be built by Trump's favorite beltway bandits;

  • a nonprofit killer that lets the president cancel the nonprofit status of any org that challenges him (this died earlier last week and was revived in the "Big Beautiful Bill");

  • doubling the threshold for estate taxes, so a couple can leave $30m to their heirs tax-free, meaning that only 0.8% of US households will face any estate tax;

  • gutting the child tax credit, taking away support from 4.5m children of taxpaying parents who lack a Social Security Number and making millions more ineligible;

  • cutting health coverage for millions of people dependent on Obamacare; and

  • getting rid of the excise tax on gun silencers.

We're heading into some dark times indeed. It can be hard to imagine things ever getting better, but there was one author who consistently imagined bold, utopian, audacious far futures: Iain M. Banks, whose "Culture" series remain one of the greatest science fiction visions ever published:

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

Banks's books are available in cheap paperbacks, and there's no shortage of used copies, but if you're looking to get a truly gorgeous Banks volume, the Folio Society has you covered, with a new, slipcased edition of Use of Weapons:

https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/use-of-weapons.html

I love Folio books and often give them as Christmas gifts to the people who matter most to me on my list. This one comes with seven full-page illustrations by Dániel Taylor.

In other publishing news, I got a care-package from my publisher this week: a box of advance review copies of my next book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, which Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish next October:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

I'm very proud of how this one came out as a book, but I'm just as excited by how gorgeous this book is as an artifact:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/54540006021/

I'm going into the studio to record the audiobook in August, and there's a graphic novel and documentary in the offing.


A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Pat York: dear friend, writer, Boing Boing guestblogger, RIP https://memex.craphound.com/2005/05/22/pat-york-dear-friend-writer-boing-boing-guestblogger-rip/

#20yrsago Alan Moore tells DC Comics to get bent https://web.archive.org/web/20050527220922/http://www.comicbookresources.com/columns/index.cgi?column=litg&article=2153

#20yrsago Thurl Ravenscroft, RIP: voice of Haunted Mansion and Grinch song, Tony the Tiger https://web.archive.org/web/20050525220256/https://www.newsfromme.com/archives/2005_05_23.html#009891

#20yrsago Dutch mayor wants to ban hacker con https://web.archive.org/web/20050525160551/https://www.whatthehack.org/news/index_html

#15yrsago Ireland’s largest ISP begins disconnecting users who are accused of piracy https://web.archive.org/web/20100605170505/https://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/frontpage/2010/0524/1224271013389.html

#15yrsago Mark Twain’s autobiography to be finally published, 100 years after his death https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/books/news/after-keeping-us-waiting-for-a-century-mark-twain-will-finally-reveal-all-1980695.html

#15yrsago Igor Stravinsky, arrested for “tampering” with the Star Spangled Banner, 1940 https://web.archive.org/web/20100526120708/http://dcmusicaviva.blogspot.com/2009/03/stravinsky-mugshot.html

#15yrsago Mechanical irising peephole mechanism https://www.talkshopbot.com/forum/showthread.php?795-More-mechanical-wooden-silliness

#15yrsago InfoLadies of Bangladesh revolutionize rural life https://www.theguardian.com/journalismcompetition/professional-two-wheel-triumph

#15yrsago Google and Viacom blend high-profile copyright suits with extreme profanity, as nature intended https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/05/f-those-mother-f-ers-youtubeviacom-lawsuit-gets-dirty/

#15yrsago Google offers encrypted search https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/05/google-launches-encrypted-search

#15yrsago The Boneshaker: magic, latter-day Bradburian novel for young adults https://memex.craphound.com/2010/05/21/the-boneshaker-magic-latter-day-bradburian-novel-for-young-adults/

#15yrsago Scientology raid uncovers dossiers on local “enemies”: sexual habits, health info, political opinions https://www.ansa.it/web/notizie/rubriche/english/2010/05/20/visualizza_new.html_1794804082.html

#15yrsago Cracked vs. RIAA damages https://web.archive.org/web/20100524024915/http://www.cracked.com/funny-4003-the-pirate-bay/

#10yrsago NSA wanted to hack the Android store https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/spy-agencies-target-mobile-phones-app-stores-to-implant-spyware-1.3076546

#10yrsago GM says you don’t own your car, you just license it https://web.archive.org/web/20150522003554/https://consumerist.com/2015/05/20/gm-that-car-you-bought-were-really-the-ones-who-own-it/

#10yrsago Today’s terrifying Web security vulnerability, courtesy of the 1990s crypto wars https://memex.craphound.com/2015/05/21/todays-terrifying-web-security-vulnerability-courtesy-of-the-1990s-crypto-wars/

#10yrsago Mark Zuckerberg just dropped another $100M to protect his privacy https://slate.com/business/2015/05/tech-billionaires-and-privacy-why-facebook-s-mark-zuckerberg-is-spending-millions-on-a-private-island.html

#10yrsago Paper on changing peoples’ minds about marriage equality retracted https://retractionwatch.com/2015/05/20/author-retracts-study-of-changing-minds-on-same-sex-marriage-after-colleague-admits-data-were-faked/

#10yrsago The Man Who Sold The Moon https://memex.craphound.com/2015/05/22/the-man-who-sold-the-moon/

#10yrsago Popehat on depression https://web.archive.org/web/20150524013923/http://popehat.com/2015/05/21/happy-to-be-here/

#10yrsago An Internet of Things that act like red-light cameras https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/05/the-evil-business-plan-of-evil.html

#10yrsago danah boyd explains student privacy bills https://medium.com/message/which-students-get-to-have-privacy-e9773f9a064

#10yrsago Hedge funds buy swathes of foreclosed subprimes, force up rents, float rent-bonds https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/02/blackstone-rental-homes-bundled-derivatives/

#10yrsago Hacktivist sees too much, FBI lock him up on child-porn charges, produce no evidence https://www.newsweek.com/2015/05/29/porn-run-333599.html

#5yrsago Casio censors calculator modder's Github project https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/23/penguin-farts/#copyfraud

#5yrsago Covid apps and false positives https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/23/penguin-farts/#false-alarms

#5yrsago Physical BLINK tag https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/22/crisis-for-thee-not-me/#html-follies

#5yrsago Mum uses GDPR to force Gran to take down pics https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/22/crisis-for-thee-not-me/#family-feud

#5yrsago Coronavirus has made the super-rich MUCH richer https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/22/crisis-for-thee-not-me/#what-crisis

#5yrsago Copyright bots are slaughtering classical musicians' performances https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/22/crisis-for-thee-not-me/#filternet

#5yrsago Oh Joy Sex Toy's new teen sex-ed book https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/22/crisis-for-thee-not-me/#ojst

#5yrsago How spy agencies targeted Snowden journalists https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/21/profitable-butchers/#sources-and-methods

#5yrsago Monopolies killed corporate R&D https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/21/profitable-butchers/#all-d

#5yrsago Spotify's trying to kill podcasting https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/21/profitable-butchers/#rogan-monopolist

#5yrsago Black Americans' covid mortality is 2.5X white mortality https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/21/profitable-butchers/#ethnic-cleansing

#5yrsago On Madame Leota's side-table https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/21/profitable-butchers/#details-details

#5yrsago Private equity's healthcare playbook is terrifying https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/21/profitable-butchers/#looted

#5yrsago Patent troll sues ventilator makers https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/21/profitable-butchers/#ip-edge

#5yrsago The Lost Cause and MMT https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/21/profitable-butchers/#byebye-falc

#5yrsago Walt's grandson calls for Disney execs' bonuses to be canceled https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/21/profitable-butchers/#brad-lund

#1yrago Linkrot https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/21/noway-back-machine/#pew-pew-pew

#1yrago How finfluencers destroyed the housing and lives of thousands of people https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/22/koteswar-jay-gajavelli/#if-you-ever-go-to-houston

#1yrago Red Lobster was killed by private equity, not Endless Shrimp https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/23/spineless/#invertebrates

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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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)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/), Kottke (http://kottke.org/), Tim Harford (https://timharford.com/), Super Punch (https://www.superpunch.net/), Jamie Boyle (https://www.thepublicdomain.org/).

Currently writing:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

21.05.2025 à 16:18

Pluralistic: Strange Bedfellows and Long Knives (21 May 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4123 mots)


Today's links


A Renaissance oil-painting of the assassination of Julius Caesar, modified to give Caesar Trump's hair and turn his skin orange, to make the knives glow, and to emboss a Heritage Foundation logo on the wall behind the scene.

Strange Bedfellows and Long Knives (permalink)

My latest Locus Magazine column is "Strange Bedfellows and Long Knives," about the secret engine of sweeping political upheavals (like Trumpism) and their inherent fragility:

https://locusmag.com/2025/05/commentary-cory-doctorow-strange-bedfellows-and-long-knives/

Stories about major change usually focus on a group, but groups rarely achieve big, ambitious goals. Think about all the goal-oriented groups in your orbit, with missions like alleviating hunger, or beautifying your neighborhood, or changing the health-care system. They've been at it for decades, and while many groups do excellent work at the margins, blocking regressions and making modest advancements (or the occasional breakthrough), they're playing a game of inches.

But sometimes – the New Deal, the civil rights movement, the Reagan revolution, Trump II – we get a wholesale, foundational, societal change. Very rarely, that's because an existing group conceived of a devastating new tactic (think of Obama's online campaigning in 2008), but that's the exception. Almost always, the major upheavals in our society aren't caused by the same people trying a different tactic – they're the result of a coalition that forms around a shared set of goals.

Reagan rode to power thanks to the support of different groups, many of whom had cordially loathed one another for decades. Most notably, Reagan brokered a deal with evangelicals – whose movement was already organized around strict obedience to charismatic cult leaders – to end their decades long boycott of politics and show up at the polls for him:

https://www.salon.com/2014/02/22/reagans_christian_revolt_how_conservatives_hijacked_american_religion/

Evangelicals hated politicians (whom they viewed as obsessed with "worldly" matters to the exclusion of the spiritual) and they really hated the finance sector (whom they damned as both amoral sons of Mammon, and also, quietly, Jewish). Right wing politicians and the financiers they relied on viewed evangelicals as stupid, superstitious, and ungovernable. But by promising to deliver culture-war stuff (racism, restrictions on abortion, homophobia) to evangelicals, and tax-cuts and deregulation to the rich, Reagan fused two groups that had been largely stalled in achieving their goals for decades, and, with the backing of that coalition, rewrote the American consensus to give each of them some of what they wanted.

But here's the thing about coalitions: while they share some goals, they don't share all their goals. Two groups that have identical goals aren't actually two groups – that's just one group with two chapters. Moreover, the divergence in coalition members' goals are often – nearly always – in conflict. Which is to say, they want some of the same things, but there are always group members who want different, mutually exclusive, opposing things.

When coalitions are forming and campaigning, they tend to focus on their shared goals. But once they take power, it's their differences that matter.

Think of Tolkien: the Fellowship of the Ring forms by pulling together disparate factions to join in a shared quest that culminates in a massive battle in which (spoilers) they are victorious. But in the immediate aftermath of that victory, even before the wounded and the fallen have been recovered from the battlefield, we (spoilers) witness another fight, this one between the allies, over what the post-victory order will be. This is pretty much also what happened after WWII, when (spoilers) the USSR and the USA switched from being allies to being rivals even before anyone could (spoilers) clean Hitler's brains off the walls of his bunker.

Leftists get a front-row seat for the coalitional moves of the right, but we tend to miss the internecine struggle to claim the prize after their victories. One exception to this is Rick Perlstein, a leftist historian whose books Nixonland and Reaganland are definitive histories of the internal machinations that powered the right wing revolution. For years, Perlstein has been carefully reading the massive anthologies that the Heritage Foundation publishes in the runup to each election, in which various members of the right coalition spell out their post-victory goals. These were pretty obscure until last year, when we all became aware of the latest volume in the series, Project 2025:

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

Perlstein read Project 2025 – all of it, not just the individual chapters that were the most lurid and apocalyptic right-wing fantasies. Because Perlstein read all 900 pages, he was able to identify something that nearly everyone else missed, that Project 2025 is full of contradictory plans that are in direct opposition to one another:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-07-10-project-2025-republican-presidencies-tradition/

Project 2025 is usually credited to the Heritage Foundation, but it's more accurate to say that Heritage was the anthologist of the plan, not its author. They selected and assembled chapters written by various members of the Trump coalition. Now, as anthologist, it was Heritage's job to make as coherent a job of this as possible, but, as it turns out "as possible" wasn't very possible.

Project 2025 contains multiple, contradictory, mutually opposed prescriptions for monetary policy, taxation, foreign policy, domestic security, government reform, taxation, and more. Normally, an anthologist editing a volume like this would serve as a kind of referee, choosing winners from among these opposing sides. That surely happens all the time in Trumpland – doubtless there are crank eugenicists, Proud Boys, and Q-addled hallucinators who have cherished goals that would never make it into Project 2025.

But the fact that Heritage couldn't tell one (or two, or three) sides in these debates to go pound sand and elevate a single policy to canon tells us that there are opposing forces in the Trump coalition who are each so powerful that neither of them can overpower the others. These are the fracture lines in the Trump coalition, the places we should apply ourselves to if we want to neutralize the movement, shatter it back into a mob of warring factions.

As Naomi Klein says, this is something Steve Bannon has been doing to the left for years:

One of the things I’ve learned from studying Steve Bannon is he takes the task of peeling away parts of the Democrats’ coalition very seriously, and he’s done it very successfully again and again. So why wouldn’t we try to do it back to him?

https://prospect.org/culture/2025-05-13-moment-of-unparalleled-peril-interview-naomi-klein/

The Trump coalition's fracture lines are already showing, for example, in healthcare:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/20/clinical-trial-by-ordeal/#spoiled-his-brand-new-rattle

And tariffs:

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-peter-navarro/

And Elon Musk:

https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/08/business/elon-musk-peter-navarro-comments-tariffs

Trump held his coalition together during the war, but history tells us that now, after the victory, is the moment when Trump's coalition is most vulnerable, as members of that coalition realize that they won't get the things they were promised in exchange for the blood and treasure they expended to get Trump into office.

I've been a Locus columnist for two decades now. It remains the journal of record for the science fiction and fantasy field, a vital source of information and community. Locus is structured as a charitable nonprofit (I'm a donor) and it depends on support from readers like you to keep going. They're currently hosting their annual fundraiser, with many, many, many cool rewards, from signed books to the right to name a character in an upcoming novel, and beyond:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/locus-mag-science-fiction-fantasy-horror-2025#/

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Italian phone carriers have phone-unlockers arrested https://memex.craphound.com/2005/05/20/italian-phone-carriers-have-phone-unlockers-arrested/

#15yrsago Critical paths and self-publishing https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blogs/cory-doctorow/article/43187-closing-in.html

#15yrsago JHEREG license plate https://memex.craphound.com/2010/05/20/jhereg-license-plate/

#15yrsago UK government promises immediate, sweeping, pro-liberty reform https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/05/new-uk-govt-to-curb-cctv-scrap-id-cards-help-open-source/

#15yrsago Canada’s sellout Heritage Minister ready to hand copyright to Hollywood https://web.archive.org/web/20100523073407/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5049/125/

#15yrsago NYC sidewalk with a tourist lane https://web.archive.org/web/20100523071746/http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-446601?hpt=Sbin

#15yrsago Charts of UK Parliamentary language usage, 1935- https://web.archive.org/web/20100523074752/http://contentini.com/an-analysis-of-uk-parliamentary-language-1935-2010/

#15yrsago NYC writer’s space throws out last remaining typewriter user https://web.archive.org/web/20100523093837/http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2010/05/20/2010-05-20_untitled__typewriter20m.html

#15yrsago World Sauna Championships: blisters, peeling skin, burned throats https://www.espn.com/espn/news/story?id=5198604

#10yrsago Digital rights news from 2025 https://edri.org/our-work/edri-gram-300-digital-rights-news-2025/

#10yrsago FBI spies on tar sands opponents under banner of “national security” https://web.archive.org/web/20150523001136/https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/19/fbi-invokes-national-security-justify-surveillance-tar-sands-protestors/

#10yrsago Bottled water: the ultimate throwback to feudal selfishness https://gizmodo.com/stop-drinking-bottled-water-1704609514

#10yrsago Chris Christie denounces “civil liberties extremists” https://www.huffpost.com/entry/chris-christie-911-attacks-coffin_n_7309628

#5yrsago Ifixit's medtech repair manual trove is full to bursting https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/20/oil-in-the-cloud/#ifixit

#5yrsago Re-positive coronavirus cases are not infectious https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/20/oil-in-the-cloud/#whew

#5yrsago Google vows no custom AI for oil and gas https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/20/oil-in-the-cloud/#no-ml-for-oil

#5yrsago Grocer won't show employees results from mandatory temp-checks https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/20/oil-in-the-cloud/#thermal-privacy

#5yrsago Software secrecy https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/20/oil-in-the-cloud/#floss

#5yrsago Climate and machine learning https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/20/oil-in-the-cloud/#digging-coal-with-your-spacebar

#5yrsago Hackers on Planet Earth, in the cloud https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/20/oil-in-the-cloud/#hope

#1yrago The new globalism is global labor https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/20/a-common-foe/#the-multinational-playbook

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

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.

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