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 Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist and journalist

His latest book is ATTACK SURFACE, a standalone adult sequel to LITTLE BROTHER. He is also the author HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM, nonfiction about conspiracies and monopolies; and of RADICALIZED and WALKAWAY, science fiction for adults, a YA graphic novel called IN REAL LIFE; and young adult novels like HOMELAND, PIRATE CINEMA and LITTLE BROTHER. His first picture book was POESY THE MONSTER SLAYER (Aug 2020). He maintains a daily blog at Pluralistic.net. He works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is a MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate, is a Visiting Professor of Computer Science at Open University, a Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of North Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in Los Angeles.
Liens : - « Détruire le capitalisme de surveillance » 68 p. pdf, trad. Framalang, gratuit. - How to destroy surveillance capitalism Online version.

Publié le 16.10.2026 à 08:40

Pluralistic: Load-bearing (16 Oct 2026)


Today's links


A detail from Dore's engraving of Samson destroying the temple, depicting tumbling classical columns. Amid the columns, wreaking havoc, are three sf pulp magazine robots.

Load-bearing (permalink)

You find the weirdest stuff inside your walls. Our house was built in 1949 and we're its third owner, and I have no idea what those other people were doing, but at one point someone installed a junction box full of live, bare wires that they filled with crumpled newspaper (!); and don't get me started on the decision not to put vapor barriers in the kitchen windows (we were one good shake away from the entire front of the house falling down when we discovered that one, and while it cost us an extra $19,000 to fix, that was still cheaper than rebuilding the whole front of the house).

Plus there was the unpermitted drainage system installed down the side of the house that must have attracted some (undocumented) planning inspector negativity; at least, that's the only reason I can think of for someone to have filled those drains with concrete (!!), a fact we discovered during the first heavy rainfall after moving in, when the water rose to shin-height (!!!).

But the weirdest and most nerve-wracking mysteries were the "structural" members of dubious quality, placement and utility. Some of them only seemed to be holding stuff up, but on closer inspection turned out to be free-floating 2x4s, not anchored to anything. On more than one occasion, our builders have moved jacks into position and removed those random uprights, only to discover that they weren't holding anything up.

Say what you will about this method, but it is decisive: if you remove a vertical member and nothing falls down, you can be pretty sure that wasn't a load-bearing member.

(This is a metaphor about AI.)

You can be forgiven for rolling your eyes when the subject of "digital sovereignty" comes up. Rhetorically, "digital sovereignty" is a coded way for a politician to say, "We should build a fuckton of AI data-centers while bypassing any environmental review":

https://datacentremagazine.com/technology-and-ai/keir-starmers-2bn-pledge-how-the-uk-plans-to-advance-ai

But AI has nothing to do with digital sovereignty. It is not load-bearing. All it takes to understand this is a little thought-experiment. Imagine that we removed all the chatbots from Canada, or the UK, or the EU, or the USA. What would fall down?

Nothing important.

Every public administrative body – national, regional and local – would continue to function. Every firm – large and small – would continue to trade. Households would be unscathed, save for their youngest members, who would suffer the indignity and tedium of having to do their own homework again.

Which is not to say that "digital sovereignty" is a nothingburger. The walls of our nations are filled with load-bearing digital members. It's just that these are the most boring, regular-degular-ass technologies imaginable.

Like Microsoft Office 365. Take away M365 and every ministry collapses, every firm shutters, and many if not most households will be in serious trouble.

And here's the thing: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella paid $1m out of his own pocket to join the murderer's row of tech CEOs who sat behind Trump on the inaugural dais:

https://apnews.com/article/trump-inauguration-tech-billionaires-zuckerberg-musk-wealth-0896bfc3f50d941d62cebc3074267ecd

Microsoft donated $10 million to Trump's Epstein Memorial Ballroom:

https://www.geekwire.com/2026/leaked-list-shows-what-microsoft-amazon-and-other-tech-giants-are-giving-for-the-white-house-ballroom/

Microsoft provides the back-end administrative infrastructure for Trump's racist pogroms (take away M365 and ICE would collapse):

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/17/ice-microsoft-technology-immigration-crackdown

The CEO of Microsoft France admitted that if Trump ordered the company to spy on French citizens' data (or the data of the French government), his company would comply, in secret:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2025/07/22/microsoft-cant-keep-eu-data-safe-from-us-authorities/

And here's the kicker: Microsoft has terminated the M365 and Outlook access of international public officials whose official acts made Trump angry, starting with the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, who lost his accounts after he swore out the genocide warrant for Netanyahu:

https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Microsofts-ICC-email-block-reignites-European-data-sovereignty-concerns

This is a white-hot, 278-alarm digital sovereignty dumpster-fire. M365 – as well as cloud software from Oracle, Google, Apple, Amazon and other US tech giants that have fused themselves with the Trump regime in exchange for tax breaks and antitrust forbearance – is load-bearing, and worse, those 2x4s are filled with termites and dry-rot.

Digital sovereignty is as real as real can be. It just has nothing to do with AI. AI isn't load-bearing. Boring-ass tech monopolist cloud software is…and we can not trust it:

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

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Anthrax terrorist's handwriting https://web.archive.org/web/20011017003926/http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/p/nm/20011016/ts/mdf70100.html

#20yrsago Help find stolen WEB GEEK license plate https://web.archive.org/web/20061017222733/https://www.backupbrain.com/2006_10_15_archive.html#a004964#a004964

#15yrsago UK media swallowed the “adult content” filter line https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/oct/17/adult-content-filters-good-parenting

#10yrsago Arizona Republic editor responds to death threats following Clinton endorsement https://eu.azcentral.com/story/opinion/2016/10/16/publisher-response-to-threats-after-republic-endorsement-clinton-trump/92058964/

#5yrsago Against the great forces of history https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/17/against-the-great-forces-of-history/

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)

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

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 503 (26039 total).

  • "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • 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

Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection):

https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Publié le 15.10.2026 à 13:03

Pluralistic: Expedia amazoned hotel rooms (15 Oct 2026)


Today's links

  • Expedia amazoned hotel rooms: Everything more expensive for everyone, monopolies everywhere, and we're all screwed.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Delta v dovening; "Play Money"; Alabama's ethnic cleansing; We trust neuroscience over psychology; Billionaires' anti-homeless pogrom; Game devs v DRM; What security means; Microsoft, tear down that wall! Publisher won't revert rights; SNL's Trump/Clinton debate; Chicago Tribune's murder; AI after AI.
  • Upcoming appearances: Paris, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Vienna, Kilkenny, Oxford, Sheffield, Oxford, Montreal.
  • Recent appearances: Where I've been.
  • Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Colophon: All the rest.


A faded, scratched postcard advertising the 'Edge of Town Motel.' Next to the motel sign is a vast pink piggybank, out of whose slot rises a motel key on a diamond keychain, emblazoned with a metallic dollar-sign.

Expedia amazoned hotel rooms (permalink)

No matter where you shop, you're getting screwed by Amazon. Amazon has found a way to make everything you buy – at Target, at a mom-and-pop shop, even direct from the manufacturer – more expensive. And they're not the only one: Expedia's done the same thing, but for hotel rooms.

Here's how Amazon broke the economy: first, they locked in a key group of shoppers. The vast majority of affluent shoppers in the USA have Amazon Prime accounts. Having prepaid for a year's shipping in advance, those Prime subscribers start their purchasing journey by searching Amazon, and if they find what they're looking for, that's where it ends.

America's affluent top decile – the 10% of richest Americans – do the majority of America's shopping, a phenomenon that has only been accelerated by America's precipitous slide into oligarchy, which has exhausted the savings and the credit-card limits and the home equity of the majority of Americans, who increasingly can't afford to buy anything:

https://dreamagainusa.org/

If you want to sell things in America, you must sell them in the place where the top decile shops, and that's Amazon. For merchants, that is an incredibly expensive proposition: 51-60% of every dollar you spend with an independent merchant on Amazon is claimed by Amazon through junk fees, listing fees, commissions, processing fees and other scams:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/04/cheating-at-fraud/#absentee-rentier

Merchants don't have 51-60% margins they can afford to turn over to Amazon. To remain viable while selling on Amazon, they have to raise prices. Amazon doesn't mind if prices go up, so long as Amazon's price remains competitive. So Amazon imposes a requirement on its suppliers called "most favored nation," which requires sellers to offer their best price on Amazon:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/25/most-favored-nation/#price-fixing

Practically speaking, that means that when you raise your price on Amazon, you must raise your prices everywhere by the same amount, which means that no matter where you shop (Target, Walmart, the corner store or direct from the factory), you pay the Amazon Tax.

The Amazon Tax is a prime (you should forgive the expression) example of enshittification, in which an intermediary (a business that sits between buyers and sellers, AKA, "a platform") screws both customers and sellers to benefit itself.

But Amazon isn't the only example of a powerful digital intermediary that has used its market power to impose an economy-wide tax. Wherever you look online, you find digital giants who grew the way Amazon grew (buying all of their competitors) and then did what Amazon did (squeezing buyers and sellers, making prices higher everywhere).

That's what happened with Expedia. Almost every travel site you can find online has been purchased by Expedia (Hotels.com, Travelocity, and Orbitz), and the ones that aren't Expedia subsidiaries were acquired by its main rival, Priceline (Booking.com, Kayak, Agoda and even Opentable). Nearly all the hotel rooms are booked by a tiny minority of travelers – largely that same top decile that Amazon has so thoroughly captured and locked in – and hoteliers can't live without their business, and they're almost all Expedia and/or Priceline customers. Expedia accounts for 80% of all hotel bookings by dollar value.

Expedia's position, in other words, is basically Amazon's position, so Expedia is doing exactly what Amazon is doing: they charge huge fees to hotels, and then force the hotels to raise their prices everywhere through a "most favored nation" deal:

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.369601/gov.uscourts.wawd.369601.1.0.pdf

But – as Lee Hepner writes for the BIG newsletter – Expedia has figured out ways to out-Amazon Amazon. They've copied one of Amazon's sleaziest businesses, and made it worse:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/how-expedia-rigs-travel-markets-and

Here's Amazon's sleaziest commercial practice: when you search Amazon, the top results for your search aren't the best matches for your queries; they're products sold by the companies willing to pay the most for search placement, in a "real-time auction" that runs every time you search. The cost of winning that auction comes out of your pocket through higher prices: the first result for an Amazon query is, on average, 29% more expensive than the best match. The top row is 25% more expensive. On average, the best match for your query is 17 positions down the screen, on the second page, where almost no one ever bothers to scroll:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/03/subprime-attention-rent-crisis/#euthanize-rentiers

This rip-off is Amazon's most profitable line of business, more profitable than AWS or Prime. It makes the company more than $80b/year. And – incredibly – Expedia's found a way to make it even worse.

Like Amazon, Expedia auctions off its search results. They call this their "VIP listing" program. Practically speaking, hotels have to pay for this, because it boosts booking rates by 42% (the first ten results on an Expedia search-results page get 62% of the clicks). VIP listing is expensive for the merchant – but it's even more expensive for you and me.

That's because Expedia requires hotels in its VIP listings programs to raise their prices on non-Expedia sites by 10-25%…INDEFINITELY.

Let me repeat that: to stay in business, hotels need to be on Expedia. To stay in business on Expedia, hotels have to raise their prices to pay Expedia's junk fees, but they have to raise their prices everywhere else. But to really stay in business on Expedia, hotels have to use the VIP program, which is even more expensive. And – one more time – hotels in the VIP program have to jack up their prices everywhere else, INDEFINITELY. This means that, throughout the economy, hotel prices are rising at a superinflationary rate, because Expedia – who command 80% of the market – are pushing those prices up.

This goes a long way to explaining why US hotel rates rose 58% from a 2020 average of $103/night to a 2025 average of $162/night. It explains why hotel prices rose by 5% last year, which is double the rate of inflation. And this is why Expedia stock is up 65% since the start of the Iran war, a fact that Expedia CEO Ariane Gorin attributes to "higher margins" from "higher prices":

https://s202.q4cdn.com/757635260/files/doc_financials/2026/q2/Q2-2026-Earnings-Presentation-Final.pdf

In his coverage of the Expedia lawsuit – which brought many of these details to light – Hepner notes that hotels themselves have undergone near-total cartelization, with Hilton, Marriott, and Choice International owning the majority of all hotels after a string of acquisitions that went largely unchallenged by slumbering antitrust regulators around the world. These consolidated chains have also jacked up prices and enshittified their service, slashing housekeeping and check-in staff and allowing their facilities to slip into disrepair.

This, too, is characteristic of monopolization: whenever a monopoly takes over part of its supply chain, the rest of the supply chain consolidates to prevent itself from being ripped off by the new giant. This is the story of publishers consolidating to defend themselves from Borders/B&N, Walmart and Costco, then Amazon; and it's the story of literary agencies consolidating to resist the power of those overgrown publishers.

And it's the story of health-care, which saw consolidation in pharmaceuticals leading to mergers among hospitals, who screwed the insurers, who also consolidated.

In every case, it's the workers and the people who rely on them that get the shitty end of the stick. Hotel guests, readers and patients pay more for inferior products. Writers, editors, doctors, nurses, hotel staff and housekeepers get lower pay and worse working-conditions:

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

There is nothing wrong with the idea of an intermediary. Most writers can't publish and sell their own books, and few travelers can navigate finding hotels in strange cities without help. The problem of intermediaries is that when intermediaries gain monopoly power – by buying their rivals and capturing buyers and sellers – they are able to squeeze both. As Tim Wu says, this is the moment when a company that's supposed to be helping becomes a predator, acquires "main character syndrome" and makes every transaction all about the middleman, at the expense of the people buying and selling:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/05/absentee-landlord/

There are so many reasons for inflation and the cost of living crisis: wage stagnation, wars of choice in Iran, environmental cataclysm after environmental cataclysm. But under cover of these real factors is a cohort of what Matt Stoller calls "economic termites," parasites that have infested the walls of our economy and are devouring it from within.

You can't solve this by shopping. Calling the hotel direct won't fix it: they have to be on Expedia to survive, and to be on Expedia, they have to sign up for VIP service, and to keep VIP service, they have to make their prices higher everywhere. To fix this, we need systemic action: the corporate death penalty for the companies that are consuming the structural members of our society.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Delta diverts flight after passenger reports praying Hassids as suicidal jihadis https://web.archive.org/web/20011016000622/http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20011015/od/delta_dc_1.html

#20yrsago Play Money: memoir of a year selling game-gold https://memex.craphound.com/2006/10/15/play-money-memoir-of-a-year-selling-game-gold/

#15yrsago Cereal Monsters: Frankenberry and friends as Universal classic monsters https://www.deviantart.com/jasonedmiston/art/Cereal-Monsters-106139367

#15yrsago Alabama’s racist “immigration” law creates misery and fear for brown people https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/14/alabama-immigration-law-families-trapped

#15yrsago Neuroscience explanations are more believable than mere psychological ones https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2778755/

#15yrsago Writer: “my publisher said I could only get the rights to my out-of-print book back if I bought their leftover copies from them” https://writerbeware.blog/2011/10/18/guest-blog-post-fitzhenry-and-whiteside-writer-beware/

#10yrsago SNL’s Trump/Clinton debate sketch makes Saturday Night great again https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVMW_1aZXRk

#10yrsago The pathogens of Wells Fargo’s corruption fester in every large corporation https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/three-things-to-know-to-hold-wells-fargo-accountable

#10yrago Billionaire tech investors back ballot initiative to purge homeless people from San Francisco https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/2016/10/14/silicon-valleys-acute-homeless-problem-ballot/91082346/

#10yrsago Game developers say no to DRM: “hurts our customers” https://web.archive.org/web/20161013180206/https://kotaku.com/pc-game-developers-say-anti-piracy-tech-would-make-thei-1787747680

#10yrsago After being outed for massive hack and installing an NSA “rootkit,” Yahoo cancels earnings call https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/yahoo-hacking-verizon_n_5800eef7e4b0e8c198a78b14

#5yrsago ROT 8000 and what "security" means https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/15/fargo-north-decoder/#on-trusting-trust

#5yrsago The Chicago Tribune is being murdered before our eyes https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/16/sociopathic-monsters/#all-the-news-thats-fit-to-print

#1yrago The AI that we'll have after AI https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/16/post-ai-ai/#productive-residue

#1yrago Microsoft, Tear Down That Wall! https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/15/freedom-of-movement/#data-dieselgate

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)

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

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 508 (25536 total).

  • "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • 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

Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection):

https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

\

Publié le 13.10.2026 à 13:50

Pluralistic: Bundestrojaner (13 Oct 2026)


Today's links

  • Bundestrojaner: You can't make people more secure by making them less secure.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: 9/11 sitcom; Jon Norman v Philcon; Bruce Sterling's post-9/11 geopolitics; Polaroid bankrupt; David Mamet x Shel Silverstein; "Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow"; Canadian government calls abortion doctors "terrorists"; Shanghai Ikea kicks out lonely, loitering seniors; Black Panther self-care.
  • Upcoming appearances: Paris, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Vienna, Kilkenny, Oxford, Sheffield, Oxford, Montreal.
  • Recent appearances: Where I've been.
  • Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Colophon: All the rest.


A moody, silhouetted Trojan horse, with a glowing horse skeleton partially visible inside it. It is acrawl with 1950s pulp robots. It stands in a psychedelic mist, through which peek vivid, brightly colored flowers.

Bundestrojaner (permalink)

Every morning, I revisit my blog headlines from this date, going back 25 years, 20 years, 15 years, 10 years, 5 years, and one year. I publish the most interesting ones in a section of my newsletter that I call "object permanence," and I think it's the most useful part of my day.

"Object permanence," of course, is a reference to the stage in an infant's development when they acquire the ability to connect events in the past to events in the present, which is why it's the point at which babies cease to be amazed by peek-a-boo. I've been blogging for more than a quarter century, and these daily trawls through the things I considered important enough to share are an unexpectedly powerful way to connect the events of the past to the events of the present.

Take cybersecurity, a subject that is filling today's headlines, primarily due to a spate of poorly understood (and criminally poorly explained) incidents in which AI companies' hacking tools broke into various servers on the internet, sometimes trashing them:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/12/god-in-the-box/#llms-are-fake

In my discussions of this subject, I've been at pains to tease apart two different aspects of these incidents: first, that it's wrong to speak of bots "going rogue" here (they're doing what they're designed to do); but second, that the alarming thing about these incidents is that they illustrate how deeply unserious our approach to information security has been, and remains.

This is important context, and context is what gives us the object permanence we need to both understand and address real problems, like the two related facts that a) our IT systems are poorly constructed and indifferently maintained; and b) the people who are supposed to be fixing this keep making it worse.

The worst culprits here are governments, though the private sector is also terrible (in truth, our cybersecurity nightmare is something of a private-public partnership from hell). Governments are deeply compromised when it comes to digital security because they have an irreconcilable conflict of interest: on the one hand, they want to defend their countries' administrative systems, firms and households from digital attacks. But on the other hand, they really want to be able to launch attacks on their adversaries, both foreign and domestic.

Worse: because governments don't know who those adversaries might be (or might become at some later date), the state security apparatuses of the world's governments keep insisting that all working computer security must be dismantled, so they can spy on all of us in order to figure out whom among us is a Bad Guy, and then "travel back in time" through each newly discovered "bad guy's" communications to identify their confederates and detail their nefarious plots.

This is an old, old, old fight. It was arguably the first policy fight of the digital era: the fight over whether we could have working encryption at all. Old hands call this era "the crypto wars" (from when "crypto" meant "cryptography"), when the NSA classed working encryption code as a "munition" and criminalized civilian access to it. That was a very hard-fought fight, and it was won decisively by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and our just-retired executive director Cindy Cohn, who, as a young lawyer, litigated the "Bernstein case" that established that code was a form of expressive speech protected by the First Amendment. If you're interested in learning more about this, you should read Cindy's newly published memoir, Privacy's Defender (all profits go to EFF):

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262051248/privacys-defender/

Before Cindy came on the scene, the crypto wars were being fought primarily by the "cypherpunks," a motley gang of computer security enthusiasts of many political stripes who were unified by their conviction that the most important aspect of security was defensive. The fact that the NSA wanted to be able to read the private messages and files of their adversaries (the "Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse": terrorists, drug traffickers, child pornographers and organized crime) must not be allowed to trump the fact that any encryption that the NSA could pierce could also be pierced by bad guys: corporate spies, state-sponsored spies, griefers, petty criminals, stalkers, identity thieves and other creeps.

This argument was so indisputable, it's a tautology: "You cannot make a computer user more secure by making their computers less secure." We don't know how to make a computer that only "good guys" can break into, but which "bad guys" bounce off of. Either we make computers more secure, or we don't.

We didn't.

In the decades since the crypto wars, governments have embarked upon an uninterrupted program to weaken the security of our computers, with catastrophic effect. The most spectacular example is unquestionably the spy agencies' doctrine called "NOBUS," which stands for "no one but us"; as in "No one but us is smart enough to find this bug, which means that we can withhold its discovery from the manufacturer, which will allow us to weaponize this bug and use it to attack our enemies. Because no one but us is smart enough to find this bug, none of those enemies will ever discover it, weaponize it, and use it to attack the people who pay our salaries, who expect us to keep them safe."

This turns out to be both catastrophically wrong and catastrophically dangerous. A series of leaks of computer vulnerabilities hoarded by both the NSA and CIA under NOBUS confirmed that these bugs were independently rediscovered by criminals and state actors at the rate of about 20% per year. Worse, though, is that these bugs don't need to be independently rediscovered, because the NSA and CIA both leaked them.

The highest-profile leak was an NSA-hoarded vulnerability in Windows they codenamed "Eternal Blue." Eternal Blue leaked in 2017, whereupon cybercriminals hybridized it with some otherwise undistinguished ransomware to create Wannacry, a devastating piece of malware that took down hospitals, banks and oil pipelines, as well as the entire city government of Baltimore and the British Library:

https://cdn.sanity.io/files/v5dwkion/production/99206a2d1e9f07b35712b78f7d75fbb09560c08d.pdf

But NOBUS isn't the only example of spy agencies making our computers less secure in the name of making us more secure. Perhaps the most egregious example of that are the Bundestrojaners, malicious software purchased by the German government, whose customs agents secretly installed it on the computers of unsuspecting people during border inspections. This "lawful interception" software was hugely invasive: it could grab your screen, plunder your hard drive, and install and execute software on your computer, all with the utmost stealth, intended to keep you from knowing it was installed and operating on your computer. But it wasn't merely invasive – it was insecure, so anyone (rival spies, criminals, stalkers) could scan the internet for infected computers and take them over:

https://www.ccc.de/en/updates/2011/staatstrojaner

You really couldn't ask for a more perfect example of the maxim that you can't make computer users more secure by making their computers less secure. Despite this, governments continue to demand the introduction of grave, universal secure vulnerabilities into our digital lives. Take "chat control," a proposal to force every device manufacturer to install software that continuously scans your devices for child sex abuse material (AKA "child porn"):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/eu-parliament-blocks-mass-scanning-our-chats-whats-next

There are plenty of things wrong with this, starting with the fact that it requires your device to secretly grab and transmit sensitive images from your phone, which might include sensitive images of your kids that were requested by their doctors. This isn't a hypothetical: it's something that happened to a dad who subsequently lost his email, his login to every other account, his phone number, all of his files (including his tax records and his business data), and every photo he had ever taken of his family, without appeal, after Google automatically detected a photo he took of his son to send to the family pediatrician. Google also falsely accused this man of sexually abusing his child and sicced the SFPD on him:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/22/allopathic-risk/#snitches-get-stitches

But even if you're not worried about this, you should still have the object permanence to recall the lessons of NOBUS and the Bundestrojaner. We can't make computer users more secure by making their computers less secure, and it's hard to imagine something more insecure than a computer that you entrust with every sensitive detail of your life that is designed to run computer code in secret that you can neither inspect nor terminate (let alone delete).

Hardly a day goes by without some country demanding that your computer's security be weakened in the name of protecting you. For years, both Conservative and Labour UK governments have been steaming towards a total ban on working encryption in the name of catching bad guys:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/05/theyre-still-trying-to-ban-cryptography/

It's happening in Canada, too, where somehow "digital sovereignty" means "making every device used in Canada vulnerable to foreign spies so that our own spies can access our private communications":

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/05/canadas-bill-c-22-repackaged-version-last-years-surveillance-nightmare

Then there's the "age verification" laws proliferating all around the world. Remember, there's no such thing as "age verification," there's only "spying on everyone, all the time, to figure out who the kids are":

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/23/destroy-the-village/#to-save-it

Age verification requires multiple entities to assemble vast corpuses of the kinds of sensitive identification papers that would allow identity thieves to destroy the finances and lives of everyone in the country, and (as foretold) every time it's tried, these files leak. Someday, this will lead to doxing whole countries:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/discord-faces-backlash-over-age-checks-after-data-breach-exposed-70000-ids/

Age verification is the latest and worst stage in governments' fraught relationship with private sector data-collection. The USA is the worst offender here: it is the largest, richest country in the world that has essentially no privacy protections. The last time the US updated its federal privacy law was in 1988, when the Video Privacy Protection Act banned the disclosure of your VHS rentals. Tech companies spy on you for the same reason your dog licks its balls – because they can, and no one stops them:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/10/ice-tech/#foreseeable-outcomes

Which raises an obvious question: why hasn't Congress updated privacy law? And why hasn't the EU figured out how to force the US companies that pretend to be Irish to obey European privacy law? The answer is that governments love private sector data-collection, because it gives them a cheap, off-the-books source of warrantless access to information they aren't legally allowed to acquire:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#axciom

From Flock cameras to ICE's use of Google data in its ethnic cleansing campaign, the US government and the commercial surveillance industry have created a public-private partnership from hell, where governments refuse to block commercial spying and companies hand their commercial surveillance data over to governments in return.

From there, it was a short leap to governments insisting that the private sector gather our data. That's the right way to think about age verification, chat control, and other mandates for corporations to spy on us using our devices and our accounts: a government requirement for private-sector mass surveillance.

I have plenty of hostility to corporate overreach, but to have any hope of fighting that overreach, we need governments to be on our side. But for our governments, when it comes to cybersecurity, we are the enemy, and spying corporations are our governments' allies.

Sometimes, that's utterly, literally true. Governments around the world are addicted to buying spyware from cyber-arms dealers, mostly headquartered in Israel and the UAE (with the odd Italian and British company for variety). These arms-dealers practice NOBUS-by-proxy, wherein they discover or pay bounties for bugs in widely used hardware, operating systems and applications and – rather than reporting them to the manufacturer – hoard them and weaponize them, and then sell the weapons to criminals, corporations, and our governments, who give them billions of our money to ensure that our computers have huge, glaring defects in them that leave us terribly vulnerable:

https://citizenlab.ca/focus-area/targeted-surveillance/

In a world where our governments' national security apparatuses were genuinely committed to our safety and security, they would criminally prosecute these companies, not make their owners into billionaires.

This is the context we should all be thinking about when it comes to these "rogue AI hacking agents." The IT systems that these irresponsibly deployed software products have trashed were already terrifyingly vulnerable…by design. Rather than fix these systems, our governmental "security" agencies have spent the past 40 years making them less secure, in order to make it easier for them to catch "bad guys," who now find it trivial to attack us through systems we are all totally reliant upon.

In every way, in every area of law, governments fail to take our security seriously. That even includes copyright law. All over the world, the US Trade Representative has ensured that every country has an "anti-circumvention" law that makes it a crime to reverse-engineer and modify software without permission:

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

From the very start, these have been a security nightmare. Remember the "Sony Rootkit?" Between 2005-2007, Sony-BMG Music distributed over 6m CDs that were deliberately infected with a piece of malicious software called a "rootkit" that was used to disable your computer's ability to rip (copy) music CDs.

The way this rootkit did so was depraved in its indifference to the security of Sony-BMG's customers: at the same time as Sony-BMG's malware installed its secret anti-ripping program, it also altered their computers' operating systems to make them incapable of detecting any program or file whose name started with $SYS$. Immediately, malicious software authors started adding $SYS$ to the start of all their filenames, and that malicious software was therefore undetectable to millions of users' computers. It was even invisible to anti-virus software. Worse: Sony-BMG's rootkit infected 200,000-300,000 US government and military networks:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/11/sonys_drm_rootk.html

Even worse: after the scandal broke, security researchers all over the world came forward to say that they'd discovered the Sony Rootkit months before it became common knowledge, but their lawyers had told them they weren't allowed to disclose its existence because doing so would fall afoul of anti-circumvention law. For months, this official, deliberate malware epidemic spread in secret because of anti-circumvention law.

It's been more than 20 years since the Sony Rootkit, and anti-circumvention law is now worse than it was in the oughts: now it applies to far more devices from far more vendors. Today, it's common for corporations to threaten their own customers with civil and criminal liability if they have the temerity to hire outside auditors to evaluate the software they entrust their businesses to for security defects. And oh God, it's even worse, because the worst offender is Oracle, who are now the de facto IT czars of America:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/oracle-security-chief-to-customers-stop-checking-our-code-for-vulnerabilities/

I'm not saying that these are the only problems with our IT security. What I am saying is that the hacking bots everyone's freaking out about didn't appear out of nowhere. If you have just a little object permanence, you can see that they are the terminal stage of a pathology that governments have only ever worsened: by hoarding and weaponizing vulnerabilities; by paying others to hoard and weaponize vulnerabilities; by criminalizing security audits; by insisting that every computer we rely on be equipped with deliberate vulnerabilities in software we can't inspect, terminate or delete.

Yeah, there should be criminal and civil liability for OpenAI, Amazon, Anthropic and every other company whose bots "went rogue" and attacked servers. But that will do nothing to fix our IT.

The table-stakes for a secure digital world are: public agencies that try to make our computers as secure as possible, including by administering the corporate death-penalty to any company that hoards and weaponizes information about bugs in our computer. We should protect and reward individuals and firms who come forward with true disclosures about bugs in systems we rely upon. We should not give companies the right to silence and punish those critics who want to warn us about their defective products. And we should not require that companies make us less secure in the name of making it easier for spies and cops to catch the bad guys.

(Image: Pmk58, CC BY-SA 4.0; Wikipedian Prolific, CC BY-SA 3.0; modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago CBS sitcom about couple who meet in the WTC rubble https://web.archive.org/web/20011014082646/http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/eo/20011012/en/cbs_considers_wtc_comedy_1.html

#25yrsago Jon Norman not invited to Philcon https://www.locusmag.com/2001/Departments/Letters10Norman.html

#25yrsago Bruce Sterling's post-9/11 geopolitics predictions https://web.archive.org/web/20011102212150/https://www.edge.org/documents/whatnow/whatnow_sterling.html

#25yrsago Polaroid files Chapter 11 https://web.archive.org/web/20011107181428/http://www.polaroid.com/polinfo/press_releases/october01/101201a.html

#25yrsago David Mamet's tribute to Shel Silverstein https://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/14/theater/theater-a-beloved-friend-who-lived-life-the-chicago-way.html

#15yrago Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow: a chapbook in PM Press’s Outspoken Authors series https://craphound.com/category/gbbt/

#15yrsago Canadian government advice defines abortionists as terrorists https://www.jezebel.com/canadian-government-lists-abortionists-as-terrorists-u-5849963

#10yrsago Ikea Shanghai to elderly, lonely Chinese people: buy something or get out https://qz.com/806990/lonely-shanghai-seniors-now-have-to-buy-something-if-they-want-to-cruise-all-day-in-ikeas-cafeteria

#5yrsago Facebook shows mall ninja gear ads on insurrection articles https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/14/10-point-program/#monetizing

#5yrsago The Black Panther self-care method https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/14/10-point-program/#panthers

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)

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

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 574 (7730 total).

  • "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Publié le 12.10.2026 à 13:40

Pluralistic: How labor rights rescued Ultima from a monopolist (12 Oct 2026)


Today's links

  • How labor rights rescued Ultima from a monopolist: If you care about labor justice and artists' rights, stop focusing on copyright.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: China unblocks Wikipedia; CCC cracks the Bundestrojaner; "Children of the Sky"; "Messy"; Every top Icelandic banker is guilty; Climate activism x digital activism; Gene Kan on P2P's future; Larry Ellison x mass surveillance; W3C v patents; "Work from home" in the cybercrime supply-chain; "Nursery Rhyme Comics"; Glitchy tea-set; Tourist Guy; Vista v reinstallation; Ryanair v your bladder; Wells Fargo CEO loves "sales culture"; "Attention Merchants"; Orban v free press; AI v GIGO; Dylan wins the Nobel; India's starving kids app; Adobe's spyware copyfraud; Charter blackmails customers with bad credit threats; Fix UK housing.
  • Upcoming appearances: Paris, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Kilkenny, Sheffield, Oxford, Montreal.
  • Recent appearances: Where I've been.
  • Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Colophon: All the rest.


A heavy, medieval, ornate brass door with a lion's head in the center and a handle carved as an elaborate winged figure. The lion's eyes have been replaced with dizzy spirals. The head of the winged figure on the handle has been replaced with an 8-bit Ultima avatar's head. The handle center and ring have been altered to add a series of copyright symbols to them. The trim of the door has been worked with the Ultima Online logo. A keyhole set beneath the handle shows a distant pixelated lich sprite from an early Ultima game.

How labor rights rescued Ultima from a monopolist (permalink)

If you work in the media, you have doubtless had a lifetime of encouragement to treat copyright as your primary source of economic protection, and doubtless you've been told that this protection arises from the fact that copyright is a property right – specifically, it's a subspecies of "intellectual property":

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-ip/

Property rights are capitalism's holy sacrament, so of course, it's natural to treasure any property right you can lay claim to. But this is a trap. Creative workers aren't asset speculators, we're workers. When we bargain with a media company to sell them our copyright, we're just bargaining to sell our labor, not our property.

This is a distinction with a difference. Property rights are alienable. When you negotiate to sell your property to someone else, you propose to transfer the title to that property. If you sell your house, you don't get to move back in if you change your mind later. Sell your car, and you must not get in and drive it away.

Nominally, creative workers only bargain away some of their copyright, because copyright is also divisible. You can sell US English print rights to a novel, a one-month license to synch a song to an advertisement, or the right to display a painting for a year.

But here's the thing about property rights: the most reliable predictor of how many property rights you must give up in a sale isn't how many property rights you started with – it's how much bargaining power you have. For 50 years, governments have expanded copyright in every way, making it last longer, cover more works and restrict more uses, all backstopped by ever-steepening penalties. 50 years later, media companies – our bosses – are larger and more profitable than they've ever been, and we're poorer than we've ever been. The share of the money generated by our labor has declined, even as our rights over the product of that labor have expanded.

How to make sense of this? It's easy, once you factor in power. In a world of five publishers, four studios, three labels, two app companies and a single ebook/audiobook company, getting more copyright to bargain with just means getting more copyright to bargain away. When copyright's term expanded from "life plus 50 years" to "life plus 70 years," our bosses simply demanded the entirety of the new term, and didn't offer us a dime more.

This is the thesis of Chokepoint Capitalism, the book on Big Tech, Big Media, and creative labor markets Rebecca Giblin and I published in 2022:

https://www.beacon.org/Chokepoint-Capitalism-P2020.aspx

Chokepoint Capitalism is broken into two parts: the first half of the book is a series of pitiless, plain-language dissections of the baroque scams that media companies have used to make themselves richer from our work, from Spotify to Amazon to Livenation and beyond. From reader feedback, I can tell you that these chapters will make you very angry, because once you strip away all the deliberate obfuscation, all you're left with is one screw-job after another, each of which makes the creators you love poorer even as you pay more for their work.

But then there's the second half of the book. This section is devoted to "shovel-ready" policy solutions, each of which is designed to change the "distribution" of the spoils of the media industry, putting more money in workers' pockets at the expense of our bosses. None of these are things you can do as a "conscious consumer." The monopolistic destruction of creators' livelihoods is a systemic problem and you can't solve it by shopping better.

The point of these chapters is to lay out what we must demand from our policymakers when (inevitably), they propose to "solve" the problem of worsening straits for creative workers – and to help creative workers understand that when our bosses demand more copyright, that's not there to benefit us.

One of these systemic solutions is "termination of transfer," a simple and radical idea that has a proven track-record of making creative workers richer at our bosses' expense. Simply put, "termination of transfer" is the statutory right to void any contract you've signed to transfer your copyright to someone else. In the USA, the 1976 Copyright Act introduced a 35-year termination right. 35 years after you sign any copyright contract, you can file some paperwork with the US Copyright Office and get that copyright back, no matter what your contract says.

Now, most creative works don't have a commercial life after 35 years (very few works are commercially viable even after the original US copyright term of 14 years), but for those that do, termination of transfer is a reliable way to address the extremely common situation in which a creator signs away their rights for a low price, not knowing that it will become a lasting hit. Once you've scored that hit, you can probably get a better deal from your next work, but the deal for that hit is done and can't be altered.

Termination solves this. From The Babysitters Club to the early Stephen King novels to George Clinton's entire catalog, termination of transfer has put lots of money into creative workers' pockets at the expense of corporations that ripped them off at the start of their careers.

From the start, there was no question whether termination of transfer would make it into Chokepoint Capitalism. Rebecca is one of the world's leading experts on the subject, having co-authored the definitive study of termination:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/26/take-it-back/

In the book, we note that – unlike longer copyright terms – termination has a proven track record of putting groceries on creators' tables, braces on their kids' teeth, and a roof over their heads. We go over the legislative history of termination in the 1976 Act, noting that it was originally supposed to be automatic and kick in after just 20 years. If we want to make creative workers richer, changing the 35-year administrative right into an automatic 20-year termination right is a no-brainer amendment to copyright law.

How did an automatic right that kicked in after 20 years turn into a right you have to apply for after 35 years? Simple: our bosses hate termination. How much do they hate it? Well, take Mitch Glazier, the head of the Recording Industry Association of America, where he draws a $1.3m annual salary to represent the record labels.

Before Glazier got the RIAA gig, he was an obscure Congressional staffer, but he was forced out of the job after he snuck a clause into an otherwise unrelated bill that killed termination of transfer for recording artists. This was so outrageous that Congress actually convened a special session so they could rip out Glazier's amendment, and Glazier got a new job as a millionaire lobbyist for the recording industry:

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

Termination is hugely useful and quite radical. Last year saw Gary K Wolf, creator of the novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit? (later adapted by Disney as Who Framed Roger Rabbit?) claw back his rights to the book and its characters, in order to continue the series:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/18/im-not-bad/#im-just-drawn-that-way

In 2023, Bill Willingham terminated the transfer of his wildly successful graphic novel series Fables from DC and released the copyright into the public domain:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/15/fairy-use-tales/#sampling-license

And now, Richard Garriott, AKA "Lord British," has claimed back the rights to the groundbreaking Ultima series of computer role-playing games, which he sold to Electronic Arts in 1992:

https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/richard-garriott-is-officially-regaining-control-of-the-ultima-series/

On the Techjess podcast, Garriott marveled at how easy the process was: "there’s a really weird United States copyright law that says if you are the original holder of a copyright and you assign it or sell it to any publisher or any other entity, after 35 years, you can just take it back":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2El7VtPuSzs

EA killed off Ultima in 2000, and it has languished since, despite an ardent fandom. Garriott has vowed to reissue the old games and is mulling new ones.

All this brings me back to property rights. Property rights are uniquely unsuitable to this kind of arrangement. You don't get to move back into the house your parents sold 35 years ago, and if you did, the photographer who took the family portrait in the hallway wouldn't be allowed to break in and take it away 35 years after you sat for it.

Termination of transfer isn't an "IP right" – it's a labor right. It belongs to the large class of rights that are far more important and useful than mere property rights, such as privacy rights and human rights:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/28/cost-of-everything/#value-of-nothing

If copyright were just about property rights, then termination of transfer would be inconceivable. Termination is a vestigial labor right at the very periphery of copyright. It protects artists, and it can only do so because it is not a property right.

This is one of the themes in The Bezzle, my 2024 historical technothriller, starring my two-fisted forensic accountant hero Martin Hench who uses termination to help an artist claw back his rights from an unscrupulous former manager who forged his signature decades before (this plotline is based on the true story of Parliament/Funkadelic's George Clinton!):

https://craphound.com/bezzle/

If you signed away your rights 35 years ago and want to get them back, check out the Authors Alliance, a nonprofit whose advisory board I volunteer for. We produced a tool that automates all the hardest parts of terminating your transfers and getting your rights back:

https://www.authorsalliance.org/resources/termination-of-transfer/

Some of our most ardent fans are academics, whose publicly funded papers are published in journals dominated by a cartel of giant companies that do not pay the authors, nor the editors, nor the reviewers, but still claim all rights and charge the institutions that funded the research they publish tens of thousands of dollars per journal to access that research:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/16/the-public-sphere/#not-the-elsevier

But it's not just academics who have an interest in termination of transfer. It's video game authors, novelists, musicians – and maybe you, someday!

(Image: Reda Kerbouche, CC BY-SA 4.0; Thegreenj, CC BY-SA 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Tourist Guy https://web.archive.org/web/20011009234007/http://www.touristofdeath.com/

#25yrsago Gene Kan on Open Web Services https://web.archive.org/web/20011031234135/http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2001/08/02/openservices.html

#25yrsago Larry Ellison wants to spy on everyone https://web.archive.org/web/20011206002725/http://www.oracle.com/corporate/index.html?digitalid_comp.html

#25yrsago W3C ponders patents in web standards https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-patentpolicy-comment/2001Oct/1488.html

#25yrsago Adobe updates the ebook reader that Syklarov cracked https://web.archive.org/web/20011107145015/http://www.vnunet.com/News/1126057

#20yrsago Hungarian airport proposes “nonremovable” RFIDs for every passenger http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6044310.stm

#20yrsago China unblocks Wikipedia, even though it won’t censor https://web.archive.org/web/20061016133232/http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/departments/online/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003251388

#20yrsago Eudora going open source, to be based on Thunderbird https://web.archive.org/web/20061014163143/http://www.qualcomm.com/press/releases/2006/061011_project_collaboration_mozilla.html

#20yrsago Vista license only lets you reinstall your OS on new PCs twice https://web.archive.org/web/20061022161256/http://www.techweb.com/wire/software/193300234

#15yrsago Why handmade keys? https://makezine.com/article/maker-news/rebuilt-keys-jimmy-diresta/

#15yrsago Ryanair declares war on bodily fluids, vows to remove toilets https://www.the-independent.com/travel/news-and-advice/ryanair-unveils-its-latest-plan-to-save-money-remove-toilets-from-the-plane-2369232.html

#15yrsago Comic about the complexity and decline of copyright https://web.archive.org/web/20111014201558/http://www.mediademocracyfund.org/about/mdf-voices/appropriart-a-graphic-about-copyright-susie-cagle-co-produced-mdf-and-gia

#15yrsago Chaos Computer Club cracks Germany’s illegal government malware, a trojan that spies on your PC and lets anyone off the street hijack it https://www.ccc.de/en/updates/2011/staatstrojaner

#15yrsago Vernor Vinge’s Children of the Sky: bootstrapping high-tech civilization from hive-mind Machiavellis https://memex.craphound.com/2011/10/11/vernor-vinges-children-of-the-sky-bootstrapping-high-tech-civilization-from-hive-mind-machiavellis/

#15yrsago Facebook’s misleading “log out” button and the future of privacy legislation https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/10/facebook’s-hotel-california-cross-site-tracking-and-potential-impact-digital-privacy

#15yrsago How online crooks use “work from home” patsies to launder goods and forward them offshore https://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/10/shady-reshipping-centers-exposed-part-i/

#15yrsago Nursery Rhyme Comics: Great comic illustrators do Mother Goose https://memex.craphound.com/2011/10/12/nursery-rhyme-comics-great-comic-illustrators-do-mother-goose/

#15yrsago 3D printed “glitchy” tea-set https://www.plummerfernandez.com/works/glitch-reality/

#10yrsago Meet the WWI women who pretended to be rocks for the war effort https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/why-women-pretended-to-be-creepy-rocks-and-trees-in-nyc-parks-during-wwi

#10yrsago Bernie Sanders’ touching video endorsing his brother’s candidacy for David Cameron’s old Parliamentary seat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAH8FJ3g49g

#10yrsago Messy: When automated anti-disaster systems make things worse, and what to do about it https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/11/messy-when-automated-anti-disaster-systems-make-things-worse-and-what-to-do-about-it/

#10yrsago Icelandic Supreme Court: all nine top bankers are guilty of market manipulation https://icelandmonitor.mbl.is/news/politics_and_society/2016/10/06/iceland_finds_all_guilty_in_banker_market_abuse_cas/

#10yrsago When “reputation management” becomes perjury, forgery and fraud against America’s federal courts https://web.archive.org/web/20161011055317/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2016/10/10/dozens-of-suspicious-court-cases-with-missing-defendants-aim-at-getting-web-pages-taken-down-or-deindexed/?utm_term=.379bd5b35a91

#10yrsago If you bail on Yahoo Mail, forget about having your email forwarded https://web.archive.org/web/20161012182945/https://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_TEC_YAHOO_BREACH?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULt

#10yrsago The clumsy, amateurish IoT botnet has now infected devices in virtually all of the world’s countries https://web.archive.org/web/20161012150926/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/internet-of-things-mirai-malware-reached-almost-all-countries-on-earth

#10yrsago Wells Fargo whistleblower: once I complained, they started denying me bathroom breaks https://web.archive.org/web/20161014180455/https://money.cnn.com/2016/10/11/investing/wells-fargo-intimidation-bathroom-breaks/index.html

#10yrsago The astounding story of Iceland’s constitution – and its government’s failure https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1qk-BQwNlA

#10yrsago Wells Fargo’s new CEO previously denied that the bank’s sales culture had any problems https://web.archive.org/web/20161014023238/https://consumerist.com/2016/10/13/new-wells-fargo-ceo-recently-denied-overbearing-sales-culture-that-created-fake-account-fiasco/

#10yrsago The Attention Merchants: a deep dive into the origins of the surveillance economy https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/13/the-attention-merchants-a-deep-dive-into-the-origins-of-the-surveillance-economy/

#10yrsago AI’s blind spot: garbage in, garbage out https://web.archive.org/web/20190429032014/https://www.nature.com/news/there-is-a-blind-spot-in-ai-research-1.20805

#10yrsago Hungary’s Prime Minister shuts down opposition press, then goes after everyone else https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/13/hungary-future-europe-far-right-viktor-orban

#10yrsago Using the science of group conflict to understand Trump’s campaign https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2016/10/12/trumps-brilliant-manipulation-of-the-science-of-group-conflict/

#10yrsago Bob Dylan is the first songwriter to win the Nobel Prize for literature https://www.csmonitor.com/Arts-Culture/Books/2016/1013/Bob-Dylan-lyrics-as-literature-First-songwriter-to-win-a-Nobel-Prize

#10yrsago Poland’s outrageous abortion law is back https://globalvoices.org/2016/10/13/new-abortion-ban-proposals-in-poland-mean-the-black-protest-movement-isnt-over-yet/

#10yrsago Hate crimes spike after Brexit https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-37640982

#5yrsago India funded a starving kids' app, but not food https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/13/theres-an-app-for-that/#solutionism

#5yrsago Adobe uses copyfraud to preserve spyware https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/13/theres-an-app-for-that/#gnash

#5yrsago Charter uses bad credit threats to corral ex-subscribers https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/13/theres-an-app-for-that/#thugs-charter

#1yrago The curious, intertwined history of climate and digital rights activism https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/11/cyber-rights-now/#better-late-than-never

#1yrago How to fix the UK housing crisis https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/13/castles-not-assets/#steve-keen

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)

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

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 562 (24528 total).

  • "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Publié le 09.10.2026 à 21:48

Pluralistic: Thwarted (09 Oct 2026)


Today's links

  • Thwarted: Behold the awesome destructive power of a fully operational billionaire.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Anthrax v National Inquirer; Grey goo v Second Life; Predictive policing v actual crime; Spooky cookies; California v algorithmic price-fixing; Tivo self-destructs; Disney exec endorses piracy; TSA v geologists; Handheld printer; Mandatory DRM for all Canadian music sales; Iceweasel; "Snuff"; "Shade the Changing Girl"; Latam surveillance; Scotland Yard brands encryption terrorism; RBS slaughtered 10k small businesses to seize and sell their assets; Dead Letters.
  • Upcoming appearances: Calgary, Winnipeg, Paris, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Kilkenny, Sheffield, Oxford, Montreal.
  • Recent appearances: Where I've been.
  • Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Colophon: All the rest.


The Warner Brother tower posed against a vintage map of Burbank, keeling over, tearing up a huge clot of sod and concrete. Standing atop of the tower, forcing it down, is a sad, spavined donkey in Democratic Party livery. Being crushed under the tower is the California flag bear, with blood pouring out of its eye and mouth.

Thwarted (permalink)

There are many ways in which every billionaire is a policy failure, but the most corrosive and destructive way in which billionaires are policy failures is this: billionaires, despite being unelected and unaccountable, possess the power to control – and ruin – millions of peoples' lives.

Despite what the Prosperity Gospel and the Efficient Market Hypothesis would have you believe, having billions of dollars is in no way a reliable predictor that you also possess the wisdom to unilaterally dictate how thousands or millions of other people must live their lives, and that dictatorial power is the most tangible effect of being a billionaire.

Billionaireism is many things, but above all else, it is the power to do whatever you want to do, at the expense of whatever other people want to do. To be a billionaire is to live a life unthwarted, above the power of your workers, your neighbors, or your government and its laws. It is the right to get high on your own supply. It is the right to live a life in which no one ever calls you on your bullshit.

Billionaires aspire to live a one-sided libertarian fantasy in which they have the unlimited right to do whatever they want, and you have the right to do whatever they tell you to do.

There has always been a group of people who refused to acknowledge that other people have perfectly valid reasons for wanting to pursue their own goals rather than theirs. We call most of those people "toddlers" and devote sizable social effort to helping them outgrow this belief. Billionaires, on the other hand, command resources that allow them to devote sizable effort to getting us to acknowledge that they should be able to tell us what to do.

This is why billionaires love neoclassical economics, with its doctrine of "revealed preferences," which holds that the only true way to understand someone's preferences is to ignore what they say and only pay attention to what they do. It's a belief that can only be adopted by people who suffer the self-inflicted neurological injury you get from doing an economics degree, which renders the victim incapable of perceiving or reasoning about power. To believe in "revealed preferences" is to observe someone who has sold their kidney to pay the rent and marvel at this person who has a revealed preference for only having one kidney:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/30/players-of-games/#know-when-to-fold-em

"Revealed preferences" is the economist's version of the bully who grabs your arm and starts whacking you with your own hand while shouting, "stop hitting yourself!" The ideological purpose that "revealed preferences" fills is letting billionaires live a life unthwarted. It's a life where they thwart everyone else, but still claim to be believers in "freedom."

This is what Peter Thiel meant when he wrote that "democracy is incompatible with freedom." In a democracy, the people who you exercise coercive power over are able to band together to create public institutions that act as a check on your power. For Thiel to maximize his freedom (to do things like spying on us and crushing our journalistic outlets), he must prevent all of us from voting, lest we vote to take away those cherished freedoms of his:

https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/

We're told that as mere mortals, we must inevitably submit to "death and taxes." Billionaires have long since so corrupted our political system that they need not pay taxes:

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo256019296.html

They have (practically speaking) infinite wealth, which means that they have practically infinite power, including the power to block any democratic attempt to limit their wealth (and thus their power):

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/the-war-against-accumulated-capital

Having vanquished taxes, the ultra-rich are now committed to defeating death as well, making themselves easy marks for the world's weirdest cult leaders and grifters, who promise them a mix of physical and digital immortality:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oVSnaINJ30

The fact that billionaires are such suckers, so often, is the strongest argument against billionaireism. Billionaires aren't just powerful, they're also fallible. We're all fallible, of course, but only billionaires get to impose their foolish ideas on so many other people, who have no say in the matter.

Henry Ford thought that he was so rich that he could build Brazilian worker housing whose windows faced the same direction as the worker housing he'd built in Dearborn, Michigan. He literally thought that being rich meant that he could ignore the entire concept of the Earth's axial tilt (he was wrong):

https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/02/fordlandia-novelistic-history-of-henry-fords-doomed-midwestern-town-in-the-amazon-jungle/

Of course that was the least of Ford's follies. Ford also believed in a secret Jewish conspiracy to control humanity:

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/henryford-antisemitism/

And despite the fact that Ford was so often demonstrably as thick as pigshit, no one was able to stop him from hiring soldiers to literally slaughter anyone who tried to limit his ability to tell other people how to live their lives:

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

Ford is no exception. Elon Musk believes in the same racist garbage as Henry Ford…but he also believes that if you're rich enough, you can simply wish away geometry and physics:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/24/geometry-hates-cars/#dogshit-unit-economics

More than anyone else, Musk illustrates the way that being insulated from people who can thwart you leads to absolute ruination. Every terrible idea Musk has, he gets to act on. This has all kinds of negative impacts, including the very real possibility that some day your house will be crushed by his flaming rocketry debris:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/texas-residents-are-suing-spacex-over-terrestrial-bombardment/

That's small potatoes, though: Musk's wrong ideas, combined with his billionaire's impunity, also allowed him to murder hundreds of thousands of the world's poorest children:

https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths/

Billionaireism is fractally terrible. By definition, the kind of person who will inflict the kinds of harms needed to amass billions of dollars in pursuit of total impunity is someone who will use that impunity to hurt even more people. Anyone who fails to outgrow a toddler's insistence on subordinating others to their will should not be allowed to subordinate anyone to their will.

Billionaire dilettantes aren't like regular dilettantes. Anyone can be a crank, but billionaire cranks have the force-multiplier of money and the impunity it brings. These allow a billionaire to turn his crackpot ideas into an unstoppable force that crushes public education:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/09/autocrats-of-trade-2/#witness-the-firepower-of-this-fully-armed-and-operational-battle-station

It also lets billionaires (including the billionaire ruining public education) kidnap and rape more than a thousand girls on a private island:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-to-know-about-bill-gates-relationship-with-jeffrey-epstein-as-he-is-interviewed-in-house-probe

Whatever crank whim a rich person has, we all have to live with. Take Barre Seid: the 94 year old billionaire made his fortune manufacturing electronics, and then donated $1.6b to fund "attack philanthropy" in order to undermine belief in climate change and prevent any action from being taken to avert it:

https://www.propublica.org/article/barre-seid-heartland-institute-hillsdale-college-gmu

Seid is one of the main reasons we're experiencing the super El Nino. He's not just in the top 0.1% of wealth-horders, he's also in the top 0.1% of people we can blame for the twelve foot sea-level rise that is currently wiping Long Beach off the map:

https://ktla.com/news/local-news/long-beach-boardwalk-collapse-rachel-surf/

Henry Ford didn't believe in the planet's axial tilt. Elon Musk doesn't believe in geometry.

Barre Seid doesn't believe in climate change. But Barre Seid does believe something: Barre Seid believes in rats.

For three years, Seid has paid a small army of goons to wander the area around Chicago's Lincoln Park, scattering handfuls of high-grade nuts on the ground, which have drawn flocks of pigeons and swarms of rats. Rats are everywhere. Everything is covered in pigeon shit. Seid has been repeatedly fined and cited and warned, and he's carried on turning the neighborhood into an uncontrolled vermin breeding facility:

https://gizmodo.com/a-billionaire-is-fueling-a-rat-explosion-in-a-chicago-park-in-the-stupidest-way-possible-2000823641

Whether or not the people who live, work and play in Lincoln Park want to be swarmed by rats and slip in thick slicks of pigeon shit is irrelevant. Seid can afford to pay any fine the city levies against him (a fine is a price, and he's a billionaire), which means there's no practical reason Seid has to ever stop. He has the freedom to operate unthwarted in his every desire, including his desire to carpet an entire neighborhood in feces, so everyone else lacks the freedom to live without pigeon shit and rats.

That's the thing about billionaires: as Peter Thiel wrote, democracy is incompatible with freedom (to be a billionaire). The fact that Barre Seid's desire to transform Lincoln Park into a pigeon-shit manure lagoon is wildly unpopular with Chicagoans is irrelevant. You can't vote Barre Seid out of office, because no one elected him Pigeon Shit Czar. He has assumed that office by right of conquest.

Our lives are full of horrible, extremely unpopular things that we can't vote away because billionaires like them. Take the decision to allow Larry Ellison and his failson to buy and kill Warner Studios. That's an incredibly unpopular idea, especially in California, where Warner, Paramount and the Ellisons are all based. Despite the fact that we all hate this idea, Ellison gets to do it, because he is unthwartable:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/22/happy-chudmas/#baloney-in-our-slacks

Some of California's most powerful Democrats promised to stop the merger. Instead, they signed away California's future because they decided that they weren't powerful enough to thwart a billionaire:

https://prospect.org/2026/10/08/democrats-who-let-trumps-oligarchs-buy-hollywood-warner-bros-david-ellison-gavin-newsom/

The Warnermount disaster demonstrates the fundamental flaw in libertarianism. Even if you're the kind of Musk-addled libertarian who can't open your copy of Atlas Shrugged anymore because the pages are all stuck together and you think the only role for the state is enforcing contracts, you still need the state to be able to enforce those contracts. If corporations or even individual billionaires amass more power than the state, then they can always tell the state's contract enforcers to fuck off.

The ref must be more powerful than the players on the field, so the smallest government you can have is determined by the size of the largest corporation and the wealth of the richest billionaire you're willing to tolerate.

The world is in really bad shape right now, but it doesn't have to be. As Mamdani has shown us, it's not that hard to run a well-administered, advanced technological civilization. Fixing potholes and making transit work and enforcing housing rules isn't rocket surgery. We know how to do those things – we just don't do them because billionaires don't want us to, and they are unthwartable:

https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/the-revolutionary-art-of-fixing-the

We let the most greedy, most ruthless people among us pursue their toddler's quest for an unthwarted life to the expense of any semblance of competent administration, and now we are fucked. That's why people are so angry about AI: there's nothing wrong with the idea of automating some tasks through advanced statistical techniques, but the reason so much of the world's scarce resources have been allocated to the AI buildout is that billionaires are infinitely horny for a technology that will let them sideline expertise in favor of money:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/06/nonfungible/#theory-free

After all, experts get to thwart billionaires. They can refuse to apply their expertise to a billionaire's folly. The kind of AI that the industry is pursuing today is predicated on the idea that you can just ask a computer to come up with "theory-free inferences" that will let it run a factory, drive a car, or perform medicine, without knowing anything, just by pulling statistical correlations out of unimaginably vast data-sets.

At some level, people get this. They understand that AI and billionaireism are intimately connected – that the reason the sector is on track to lose about a trillion dollars this year is that for billionaires, a trillion bucks is a small price to pay for an unthwartable life.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago National Inquirer shuts offices after anthrax delivery https://web.archive.org/web/20011221185744/https://www.etonline.com/celebrity/a6975.htm

#20yrsago Grey Goo melting online world Second Life https://web.archive.org/web/20061023190111/http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/10/08/grid-set-back-to-linden-login-only-some-goo-missed/
#20yrsago TiVo’s “self-destruct button” destructs https://web.archive.org/web/20061014132917/http://reviews.cnet.com/4531-10921_7-6650194.html

#20yrsago Disney exec: Piracy is just a business model https://www.netribution.co.uk/stories/cross-media/disney-co-chair-recognises-piracy-is-a-business-model

#20yrsago TSA confiscates geologist’s rock https://web.archive.org/web/20061019132853/https://www.courant.com/news/opinion/op_ed/hc-thorson1005.artoct05,0,777555.column?coll=hc-headlines-oped

#20yrsago Handheld printer made from a toner cartridge https://spritesmods.com/?art=inker&page=4

#20yrsago Panicked chefs propose copyrighted food https://megnut.com/2006/10/10/keep-recipes-free/

#20yrsago Canadian music proposal would require DRM for online tunes https://web.archive.org/web/20061022201913/https://www.jeremydebeer.ca/content/view/95/2/

#20yrsago Iceweasel, a free-as-in-speech version of Firefox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian–Mozilla_trademark_dispute

#15yrsago Pratchett’s Snuff: a rural/nautical tale of drawing-room gentility, racism, and justice https://memex.craphound.com/2011/10/10/pratchetts-snuff-a-rural-nautical-tale-of-drawing-room-gentility-racism-and-justice/

#10yrsago Shade the Changing Girl: amazing, gorgeous new comic about aliens and mean girls https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/10/shade-the-changing-girl-amazing-gorgeous-new-comic-about-aliens-and-mean-girls/

#10yrsago Massive report details the surveillance powers of 12 Central and South American nations https://necessaryandproportionate.org/principles/

#10yrsago Scotland Yard charge: teaching people to use cryptography is an act of terrorism https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/10/cops-charge-cardiff-man-with-terrorist-crypto-training-offence/

#10yrsago RBS deliberately crushed more than 1,000 healthy UK businesses to seize and sell their assets https://www.buzzfeed.com/heidiblake/dash-for-cash?utm_term=.iq9ndLB5#.udNbypOJ

#10yrsago Though crime happens everywhere, predictive policing tools send cops to poor/black neighborhoods https://www.mic.com/articles/156286/crime-prediction-tool-pred-pol-only-amplifies-racially-biased-policing-study-shows

#10yrsago Bake: spooky chocolate chip cookies https://www.instructables.com/Creepy-Chocolate-Chip-Cookies/

#5yrsago Dead letters https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/10/dead-letters/

#1yrago A disenshittification moment from the land of mass storage https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/10/synology/#how-about-nah

#1yrago California bans algorithmic price-fixing https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/09/pricewars/#adam-smith-communist

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)

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

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 537 (23966 total).

  • "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Publié le 07.10.2026 à 15:58

Pluralistic: Disloyalty (07 Oct 2026)


Today's links


A 1970s Air Canada ad depicting a man in a brown velour pullover with a large collar sitting in a book-lined study, assembling model Air Canada jets on his desk. His head has been replaced with the blue, metallic head of a 1950s pulp robot and his skintones have been shifted blue to match.

Disloyalty (permalink)

Up until very recently indeed, airlines were the only businesses that I dealt with regularly that practiced "price discrimination," charging different customers different prices for the same seats.

Economists broadly like this "second-order" price discrimination, where a company charges customers different prices based on the circumstances of the purchase, such as a bakery discounting bread at the end of the day. When an airline cranks up the price of an itinerary that doesn't include a Saturday stay, they're using that fact as a proxy for "price-insensitive" business travelers whose bosses can afford to pay more for a ticket, rather than paying a worker overtime to spend a weekend away from home after a meeting.

Despite the arguments about "efficiency," it's safe to say that *fliers* hate this. The airlines' pricing algorithms are so opaque and capricious that anyone who buys a ticket at *any* price inevitably feels like they got a bad deal. This situation is only exacerbated by the airlines' extreme and aggressive secrecy over their pricing strategies, which includes lawsuits against websites that use historical pricing data to predict when a plane ticket will be the cheapest to buy:

https://www.eff.org/document/preliminary-injunction-american-airlines-v-farechase-inc

When a company wants the government to intervene to prohibit third parties from publishing factual information about its prices, that's a bad look. Hard to believe that they're so sure that you, the customer, will be delighted by these pricing tactics that they can't bear to have these third parties ruin the surprise.

But this second-order discrimination is *so* 20th century. Here in the 21st century, we have *first-order* price discrimination, in which AI-powered pricing algorithms use commercial surveillance data about *you*, personally, to predict the highest price you're willing to pay. In this world of "surveillance pricing," every traveler (or customer) sees a different price, in a kind of cod-Marxist dystopia whose motto is "from each according to their ability (to pay), to each according to their (desperate) needs":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/11/socialism-for-the-wealthy/#rugged-individualism-for-the-poor

Airlines *love* this kind of pricing, and they have means, motive and opportunity to practice it. All over the world, airlines have acquired or entered into joint ventures with surveillance pricing companies. These deals put the airlines on the horns of a dilemma: they love to boast to their shareholders about the way that surveillance pricing will let them gouge fliers, but inevitably the public finds out about these investor calls and breaks out the pitchforks and torches.

This triggers embarrassing climbdowns, like Delta's fiasco of summer 2025, when CEO Ed Bastian bragged to shareholders that his deal with the Israeli surveillance pricing company Fetcherr would boost profits by 50% (!) by figuring out which customers could be safely gouged. When fliers, civil society groups and members of Congress got wind of this and raised a ruckus, Fetcherr publicly disavowed Bastian's remarks, insisting that it wasn't even capable of the kind of price-fixing he'd promised. Then Delta launched a smear campaign against its critics, claiming that Bastian never said the thing he *absolutely said* and accusing surveillance pricing activists of peddling "misinformation":

https://groundworkcollaborative.org/news/amid-deltas-ai-pricing-scheme-groundwork-applauds-congressional-action-to-crack-down-on-surveillance-pricing-schemes/

Meanwhile, airlines all over the world have quietly switched their frequent flier reward programs from "mileage-based" rewards to "revenue-based" rewards. That means that you get points and status based on how much you spend on your ticket, not how far you fly. What may not be obvious from this move is that it forces frequent fliers to buy their tickets directly from the airlines, who claim that they can't tell how much you've spent on your ticket otherwise.

So tickets bought on sites like Expedia or through travel agents often qualify for insultingly small points awards, or no points at all. For example, British Airways once gave me *12 points* on a $2,000 Alaska Air ticket because I didn't buy it through British Airways' site (attaining BA's gold status requires *50,000* points).

Forcing frequent fliers to buy their tickets directly from the airline's website sets things up beautifully for surveillance-driven, first-order price discrimination. Airlines you do business with regularly can augment the personal information you provide to them and the data they collect from you with sensitive information purchased from the unregulated data-broker industry, which will cheerfully disclose your salary, credit card debts, or even if you've recently lost a parent and might be flying out for a funeral.

The airlines strenuously deny that they're doing this, of course, but they continue to make investor-facing announcements about their exciting deals with surveillance pricing companies…and things are getting *weird* for frequent travelers.

Thanks to a lot of book-related travel over the past couple of years, I have "Elite" status with Air Canada. Yesterday, I needed to book a last-minute, one-way fare on a route that is only serviced by Air Canada (AC enjoys a monopoly over many Canadian routes, even between major Canadian cities). I checked it out on Google Flights and found a fare for the eye-watering sum of USD829.73.

Now, my normal daily-use browser is Firefox, but I know from long experience that I can't log in to my Air Canada frequent flier account on any browser except Chromium, which I keep installed on my system for just this kind of hostile garbage website. So I tabbed over to Chromium and pasted the Google Flights outbound link that would take me to a pre-populated reservation form on aircanada.com. To my amazement, that same flight was showing as a USD1200 fare!

These were identical trips, loaded via identical referrer URLs. The difference was that in the browser where Air Canada knew that I was an extremely loyal and prolific customer, they had whacked me with a *44.8% premium* to punish me for my loyalty!

I couldn't believe it. I actually called Air Canada's customer service line for "Elite" fliers, and the customer service rep was at a loss for an explanation and could only apologise and suggest that I write a letter to the company.

I'm publishing this instead, because a) this will do more to punish Air Canada for trying to screw me over; and b) this can help you book your tickets in the future.

Yesterday, I finished buying the ticket in my logged-out Firefox window (Air Canada's website will work with Firefox to buy tickets provided you don't try to log in to your Aeroplan account first), paying $829. Then I flipped back to Chromium, where I was still logged into my Air Canada Aeroplan account, located the reservation, and added my frequent flier number to it.

I guess this is how I'm buying my plane tickets from now on.

Hey look at this (permalink)

* PM Mark Carney pledged to ‘Buy Canadian.’ Since then, $7.8 billion in contracts went to American corporations https://archive.is/zDBfX#selection-3576.0-3576.3

* Tracing the rogue ideology of the frontier labs to their product choices https://buttondown.com/apperceptive/archive/tracing-the-rogue-ideology-of-the-frontier-labs/

* Have you heard of the term "enshittification?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ5V3pk6PEA&t=1220s

* Window display at TYPE Books Toronto to honour David Byrne’s new book https://stopmakingsense.info/window-display-at-type-books-toronto-to-honour-david-byrnes-new-book/

* Red Vienna Is Still Alive https://www.thenation.com/article/society/vienna-public-housing-urban-cities/


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Indie booksellers in the age of the Internet https://web.archive.org/web/20061026112859/https://www.wired.com/news/wireservice/1,71924-0.html

#10yrsago Wells Fargo whistleblower describes bank’s culture of blackballing threats and coerced corruption https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/10/07/497084491/episode-728-the-wells-fargo-hustle

#10yrsago Coca-Cola is paying dietitians to tweet scare-stories about soda taxes https://medium.com/cokeleak/is-coke-paying-dietitians-to-tweet-against-soda-tax-12d130d73b9a#.dw8udqccy

#10yrsago What it’s like to register to vote in states with voter suppression law https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-37569855

#5yrsago Facebook shouldn't be in charge of how you use Facebook https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/08/unfollow-everything/#shut-the-zuck-up

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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

* Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7
https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK=

* Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8
https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/

* Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9
https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow

* Paris: Slow Tech Summit, Oct 15
https://slowtechsummit.com/

* Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19
https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01

* Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20
https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020

* Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22
https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46

* Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24
https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai

* Kilkenny (Kilkenomics), Nov 6-8
https://kilkenomics.com/

* Vancouver: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10
https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/

* Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/

* Sheffield: Reverse Centaur at Juno Books, Nov 25
https://www.outsavvy.com/event/40274/cory-doctorow-in-conversation

* Oxford: Bennett Oxford Symposium on Open Code in Science, Dec 9
https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/events/2026-bennett-institute-symposium/

* Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6
https://montreal2027.ca/en


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

Recent appearances (permalink)

* Terms of Service with Clare Duffy (CNN)
https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/terms-of-service-with-clare-duffy/episodes/458ce968-af5d-11f0-b539-13ed2afe25f8

* AI, Work, and Power (Software Engineering Daily)
AI, Work, and Power https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/cory-doctorow-on-ai-work-and-power/

* AI, Corporate Power, and the Fight for Worker Control (Plutopia)
https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-ai-corporate-power-and-the-fight-for-worker-control/

* How to Think About AI—Before It’s Too Late (Daniel Solove)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0xR3uEgGcc

* Could Tech Bosses Destroy Life As We Know It? (Politics JOE)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL4VktU0SgY


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

* "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

* "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

* “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 529 (22924 total).

* "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

* A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Publié le 06.10.2026 à 14:58

Pluralistic: Swapping money for expertise (06 Oct 2026)


Today's links


The First Bank of Chicago, a Grecian temple to money. It is surrounded by flames. A skeleton in academic robes and mortarboards has been lynched from its roof. In the foreground are banded packages of US $100 bills.

Swapping money for expertise (permalink)

Since the mid-1950s, we have changed the thing that "AI" refers to every 5-10 years. The current thing we're calling "AI" is about a decade old, and all this label-switching leads to a lack of clarity as to what (this) "AI" is. Unless you know that, you can't understand AI's technical capabilities, limitations, and (most of all) its political economy.

The thing we now call "AI" is a lineal descendant of the thing we were calling "AI" immediately before the current "AI" emerged: that preceding AI is regular-degular "machine learning" (another flexible term, alas!). That slightly older AI was very similar to the current "AI", using comparable statistical techniques to analyze inputs and produce outputs. For example, the previous "AI" created the social media algorithms that have been the subject of so much discussion for 15+ years.

The difference is that this older AI was grounded in explicit, causal software models of the world. In the previous "AI" iteration, applying machine learning to playing chess required that a programmer first create a software model of a chess game, describing (in code) a chessboard, chess pieces, and the rules of chess. Then, the programmer fed a bunch of training data about chess games that had been played before to an "AI" system that analyzed their statistical relations and assayed chess moves.

The need to understand and describe a thing before you could apply "AI" to it is a bottleneck, because it requires programmers to understand how a thing works before they can incorporate it into an "AI" system. Lots of programmers know how to play chess, but far fewer understand the human pancreas, planetary weather systems, or patterns of mineral deposition in the Earth's crust.

For programmers to apply machine learning to these domains, they need to collaborate with experts who do understand them, who furthermore expect to be paid for this work. The need for expert input into this kind of "AI" represents a significant increase in the wage-bill paid by the programmer's employer: it means they have to pay for programmers and experts.

Even worse: this kind of "AI" can't be applied to systems we don't understand. We can observe far more causal relationships – instances in which A reliably causes B – in the universe than we can explain. There are lots of examples of us operationalizing these observations without understanding them. If you get sick today, your doctor might well prescribe one of the many medicines whose method of action is either incompletely understood or not understood at all. We know that molecule A reliably treats pathology B, but not why, and while that why is the subject of ongoing research, it's not necessary that the why be known before the molecule can be given to ailing patients.

But these mysterious phenomena are off-limits to "symbolic AI" (the previously ascendant kind of "AI," that was supplanted by today's "AI"). That kind of AI only really performs when it can operate over a model describing the theory of why A causes B (and not just the fact that A causes B for reasons unknown).

That's where the current kind of "AI" comes in. The major differentiator between the current "AI" and its immediate predecessor is that the current "AI" dispenses with models of reality. It is (in the jargon of the "Big Data" bubble that led to it) "theory-free."

In "theory-free AI," a programmer does not create a software model of reality and then ask a machine-learning system to use statistical insights from its training data to guess at how to operate over that model. Rather, the programmer shovels vastly more training data into the AI's inbox and uses titanic amounts of computing power to analyze that data and find statistical relationships without trying to explain them.

In other words, the current, "theory-free AI" finds all the instances in which A seems to cause B, but has no internal representation of why A causes B. This is true even when we know why A causes B! Purely theory-free chess programs don't operate with any conception of a board or pieces or rules – rather, they make guesses ("inferences" in AI-speak) about which chess move will be optimal based on vast, multi-dimensional arrays constructed by analyzing the statistical relationships between every chess move in their training data.

This yields a surprisingly good game of chess…until it doesn't. Because a theory-free statistical chess program doesn't "know" what a chessboard or a chess piece is and has no programmatic representation of the rules of chess, it will periodically move one of its pieces onto a square that is already occupied by another of its pieces.

When theory-free AI does this with language or image generation, we call it an "hallucination," but this is an extremely misleading metaphor. A biological "hallucination" involves some kind of misfire in your cognitive and/or sensory systems, often arising from chemical imbalances, intoxication, or neurological injury. When a theory-free AI puts a chess piece on a square where it already has a chess piece, that's because it's just extruding statistically founded guesses without any model or conception of what "chess" is. It's a feature, not a bug.

This is a very expensive way to make guesses! As far back as the 1950s, we were able to run conventional chess programs on computers built from vacuum tubes and electromechanical switches and these programs could play a valid game of chess without ever moving a chess piece to a square that one of its pieces already occupied. Modern theory-free AI that cannot manage this feat consumes heptillions of times more computing power.

That said, there's another case for theory-free AI: applying machine learning techniques to causal relationships we can observe but not explain. Remember, there are far more of these (as yet) unexplained causal relationships than there are perfectly understood ones. Theory-free AI can operate on these unexplained, observed phenomena in ways that the preceding (symbolic) AI can't. As anyone who's ever been successfully treated with a molecule whose method of action is partially or fully mysterious can attest, there's plenty of reasons to want to extract and operationalize these statistical relationships, even if we don't understand them.

The fact that theory-free AI can play chess but sometimes makes these weird errors makes it seem like a party-trick, but when you fold in the ability to operate on the (as yet) unexplained, you can see why people got interested in this about a decade ago.

What's more, the first bottleneck – the chess bottleneck – is most easily bypassed by adding the symbolic model back into the theory-free chess system. Today's "coding assistants" are hybridized in this way: they often integrate code interpreters or compilers that actually "know" what a computer program is and can head off many of these failure modes.

The introduction of these symbolic systems to theory-free systems is completely rational, and yet it represents an admission of a key limitation that theory-free AI cannot overcome. That limitation is both a technical fact, but even more importantly, it's a fact about theory-free AI's political economy: about the limitations of trading off expertise for money.

Because whatever else theory-free inference is, it is a way to swap the bottleneck of "before we can use a computer to help us do something, we need to find an expert who can explain how that thing works"; for a different bottleneck: "before we can use a computer to help us do something, we must spend an enormous amount of money on computing power to find statistical relationships between how things work."

Both money and expertise are scarce, but they are unevenly distributed. Expertise is almost entirely in the hands of people who aren't wealthy. However much money a billionaire has, they still have to hire people who have the "how to clean a toilet" or the "how to find seams of gold in quartz deposits" expertise. When that expertise is locally scarce (if there's only one person in town who know how to clean your toilet) or universally scarce (there's only one expert who can tell you which of your landholdings are likely to hold seams of gold) those experts have something that billionaires can't abide: power.

Our entire society is organized around converting money into power. Sometimes, that is overt, as when the wealthy can indenture or enslave a worker. Sometimes it is more indirect, as when the wealthy can enlist the state to limit union rights and enforce noncompete clauses in labor contracts. Sometimes it's so systemic as to be unremarkable and largely invisible, like the fact that the wealthy never have to work if they don't want to, but everyone else – no matter what expertise they hold – must work, usually for a wealthy person, lest they end up starving and homeless, with untreated medical conditions and no way to provide for their families.

Whenever a worker can say "no" to their boss, it's a sign that this system has broken down. This is where expertise comes in: a worker who has very scarce, in-demand expertise can say no to their boss all day long, because there are ten other bosses at the factory gates who'd like to offer them a job. This was the situation for many years among Silicon Valley engineers, who added an average of $1m/year to their bosses' turnover, and whose supply was very short of the demand for their rare expertise.

These engineers enjoyed all kinds of power. Not just power over their working conditions (free massages and kombucha and day care and dry cleaning), but also power over the company's products. This power crested in the late 2010s, when Google employees walked out en masse and forced the company to release them from binding arbitration waivers in their contracts, to crack down on sexual predators in the executive ranks, and to back out of billions of dollars in lethal drone projects for the Pentagon:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Google_walkouts

The promise of theory-free inference isn't just about reducing the wage-bill associated with programmers: even more, it's about reducing their power. It's about removing their power to hold bosses to account for sexual assault and the power to withhold their labor from lethal military projects. In short, the power to thwart billionaires' desires.

AI is the money-losingest enterprise the human race has ever embarked upon. More than a trillion dollars has been spent this year to make a mere $50b in revenue. The technical excitement over AI's capabilities – from chess to gold-mining to treating pancreatic cancer – cannot be separated from the political excitement that billionaires (short on expertise, flush with cash) experience at the thought of swapping money for expertise and sidelining the only people in the world who can thwart their goals.

The fact that a theory-free AI might demand far more cash to accomplish a task (even a "solved" one like playing chess) than an expert would charge is beside the point. Billionaires have money, they don't have expertise. Theory-free inference is a bid to substitute one for the other: the beauty and terror of being able to manipulate the world without studying or understanding it is that it can be done with money alone. No experts needed.

In a world in thrall to financial power, expertise is the only substantial form of power that can reliably contest the power of wealth. Moreover, expertise is the foundation of other forms of power, such as labor power, which is what we call it when experts band together to combat financial power.

This is why AI bosses are so violently allergic to the idea of hybridizing AI with symbolic systems that operate on models of the world. These models of the world must be constructed by experts, and the power of expertise cannot be reliably commanded by the power of wealth.

This is even true when theory-free methods are applied to causal phenomena that we can observe without explaining. Sure, a pharma exec like Martin Shkreli or Arthur Sackler can command the production and sale of a molecule whose method of action isn't known but whose therapeutic value has been demonstrated. But to improve on that molecule, they must pay research scientists to study and unravel the method of action. Replace those experts with theory-free inference, and finance can emerge triumphant in the only forum in which it is routinely vanquished.

This is the political economy of theory-free AI. Without finance's infinite hostility to expertise, there would have been far less capital for theory-free AI. Experts who wanted to use theory-free AI to help them unravel and operationalize the causal universe could not have laid hands on the bales of $100 bills the industry is now shoveling into its money-furnaces at a rate never seen in human history.

Which is not to say that experts can't make good use of theory-free AI. Indeed, we frequently hear from skilled workers who are using "AI" to improve the quality of their outputs:

https://hrdag.org/tech-notes/large-language-models-IPNO.html

In automation parlance, these workers are "centaurs": workers who enlist technology to serve their needs. The centaur metaphor has the worker taking the role of the top half of the mythical man/horse, the half in which the judgment and decision-making takes place; while the bottom (horsey) half is given to the machine, providing strength, speed and stamina, but only at the direction of the human mind.

The unimaginable sums that oligarchs have committed to AI are mobilized in service to creating reverse centaurs: machines that enlist humans to serve them. If theory-free inference can substitute for expertise, then the humans the machines require to accomplish those tasks that elude computers will not have the power to set the pace of their work, insist upon humane working conditions, or reject work on unethical projects:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington

The joke's on the oligarchy, though. Because theory-free inference doesn't know about chessboards, chess pieces or the rules of chess, it can't be prevented from sometimes putting a chess piece on a square that's already occupied by one of its pieces. The "hallucinations" are intrinsic to and inextricable from theory-free inference, which means that the outputs of an "AI" can only be trusted if they can be evaluated by an expert, whose working tempo must be carefully modulated lest they fall prey to "automation blindness" (rapidly, repeatedly clicking "OK" until you lose the ability to spot mistakes):

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/28/hitl-ers/#ai-ai-oh

Theory-free inference is technically and philosophically exciting: in their quest for a way to neutralize expertise with money, oligarchs inadvertently built a series of powerful scientific instruments that revealed a heretofore unsuspected degree of statistical regularity in the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/18/surprise/#wow-signal

But the remaining, stubbornly textured and rough edges of reality are where all the value is. The things we already understand about reality are, by definition, yesterday's news, and that's all a statistical model can do: project the past into the future. But everything exciting in the future is stuff we don't understand yet. The surprising functionality of theory-free AI is itself an example of this. The most interesting and valuable thing about theory-free AI isn't the things it can do, it's the systematic discovery and mapping of the statistically regular parts of reality, whose inverse provides a map of the irregular, surprising, poorly understood (and thus exciting and promising) phenomena in our universe.

Tomorrow's breakthroughs and fortunes lie not in merely operationalizing these causal relationships: they lie in understanding them. The point of theory-free inference is to give us the tools to replace that theory-freeness with testable, validated understanding.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Tempo: transformative, difficult look at advanced decision-making theory https://memex.craphound.com/2011/10/07/tempo-transformative-difficult-look-at-advanced-decision-making-theory/

#10yrsago Internet shutdowns cost the world at least $2.4 billion last year https://www.brookings.edu/articles/internet-shutdowns-cost-countries-2-4-billion-last-year/

#10yrsago Youtube took down MEP’s videos about torture debate https://web.archive.org/web/20160701000000*/https://marietjeschaake.eu/en/when-youtube-took-down-my-video

#10yrsago Yahoo didn’t install an NSA email scanner, it was a “buggy” NSA “rootkit” https://web.archive.org/web/20161007140143/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/yahoo-government-email-scanner-was-actually-a-secret-hacking-tool

#10yrsago The FCC helped create the Stingray problem, now it needs to fix it https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/08/fcc-created-stingray-problem-now-it-needs-fix-it

#5yrsago Scottish Limited Partnerships are still laundering criminal millions https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/07/markets-in-everything/#if-its-not-scottish

#5yrsago "Inclusive Access" allows textbook monopolists to permanently consolidate their gains https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/07/markets-in-everything/#textbook-abuses

#5yrsago DoS a federal agency, then charge for access https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/07/markets-in-everything/#no-th-enq

#1yrago They're just trying to earn a buck https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/07/take-it-easy/#but-take-it

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)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 513 (22395 total).

  • "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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