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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 13.11.2026 à 20:44

Pluralistic: I told you so (13 Nov 2026)


Today's links


The Earth from space, wreathed in flames. Protruding from a vast mid-North American impact crater is Microsoft Clippy, shimmering in the heat.

I told you so (permalink)

Here's the one weird trick that made it possible for monopolies to conquer the world: the antitrust bar changed the rules so that it was impossible to prove whether a company had formed an illegal monopoly, and then these rules meant that monopolies were almost never challenged, and what challenges did arise were usually unsuccessful, and even the successful challenges resulted in meaningless "penalties" that left monopolists unscathed.

Every policy has three important dimensions: substance, scope and administrability:

  • "Substance" is what the policy actually says. For example, the basic substance of copyright law is, "You can't display, transmit or reproduce a copyrighted work without permission."

  • "Scope" is when the policy gets applied. When copyright law was formulated, the key activities it regulated all required a bunch of expensive industrial equipment. Every book implied a printing press, every record implied a record-pressing plant, every film implied a film duplication lab. That meant that, by default, pretty much the only people who had to care about what copyright law said were industrial actors – firms who might reasonably be expected to also have access to a lawyer. That matters a lot to administrability.

  • "Administrability" is what it takes to actually administer the policy. Can you detect potential violations, and when you do, how hard is it to figure out whether the rule was actually broken? Again, in the pre-digital era, it was pretty easy to spot copyright violations: pirate books, records and movies are tangible, physical objects, and distributing them requires advertisement, delivery and payment.

After detecting an infringement, copyright enforcers must resolve a further question: whether a display, transmission or copy fall under "fair use." Fair use is a "fact intensive" rule, one that requires a lot of evidence and argument to adjudicate. It's almost impossible to categorically rule in or rule out a specific use as "fair":

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

Despite the complexity and expense of determining fair use, pre-digital copyright was still relatively administrable, because fair use questions themselves were relatively rare. Most fair uses (for example, photocopying part of a book for classroom use) were below the threshold for detection by rightsholders, so these questions almost never found their way into court. The fair use questions that did get to court were big, splashy affairs, like whether it's okay to rewrite a famous pro-slavery novel from the enslaved characters' perspective (it is!):

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

There are a lot of legal questions that require nuance, fact-finding and argumentation to resolve, and that's not necessarily a problem. It's fine to apply these complicated, lengthy processes to things that only happen every once in a while. Take probate: most of us will die one or fewer times, so it's not the worst thing in the world that figuring out what happens to our stuff when that happens can involve some legal complexity.

But as media went digital, copyright's scope expanded dramatically. "Making or handling copies of copyrighted work" stopped being an industrial activity that implied a complex business and access to legal expertise. The only thing a digital computer does is make and handle copies, so every time any ordinary person clicks their mouse, dozens of potentially thorny copyright questions arise. What's more, those questions involve the public internet, which raises the number of potential infringements that a rightsholder can detect (and potentially seek legal redress for) from dozens to millions.

Nearly all of these potential infringements fall under fair use, but fair use is a fact-intensive doctrine suited to resolving occasional disputes between large firms. Fair use is monumentally unsuited to resolving questions that arise hundreds of times every day for nearly every person alive, including small children and other people who almost certainly can't get legal advice:

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-a-new-deal-for-copyright/

This is how copyright broke: new technology (digital computers) radically expanded its scope, conscripting everyone into using copyright's framework for everyday activities that had nothing to do with the media industry's supply-chain. That framework was developed for industrial actors with access to lawyers, and its most important aspect (fair use) is a fact-intensive doctrine that takes serious work to resolve, but now had to be navigated many times every day by every person. So copyright became unadministrable: you can't apply a fact-intensive doctrine to everyday activities undertaken by everyday people. If you try, you will make criminals of everyone. It would be literally impossible to train enough copyright lawyers to advise every person every time they use a computer to do something that might violate copyright law.

Back to antitrust: when the pro-monopoly partisans of the "law and economy" movement set out to neuter antitrust, they deliberately introduced a set of hurdles that were designed to make it impossible to administer competition law.

First, they introduced an "intent" standard: it was no longer enough for a company to have a monopoly, the company must have intended to secure and maintain that monopoly. If you want to be sure a law doesn't get enforced, this is a fantastic standard to apply. After all, how can anyone know what anyone else intended? Ask any anthropologist and they'll tell you: the only way to find out what someone intends by their actions is to ask them, and even that only works if you can trust them to answer honestly:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thick_description#Clifford_Geertz

If antitrust law can only be enforced by mind-readers and advanced philosophers who have solved the intersubjectivity problem, then antitrust law can't be enforced at all:

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

But that wasn't all! Antitrust's enemies insisted on another fact-intensive question: "market definition." They made the (seemingly commonsense) point that if a company is said to have a monopoly, we must first determine which thing the company has monopolized. This sounds like a no-brainer, but it's actually a way to introduce unresolvable, show-stopper arguments into any antitrust enforcement action.

Take Amazon: the company's ecommerce monopoly is obvious to anyone who hasn't been in a coma for the past 15 years. But when Amazon gets investigated for this monopoly, they will insist that they don't participate in the "ecommerce" economy, but rather in "the buying and selling of things in general." Then they point out that people still go to the corner store for a pint of milk, still buy a pack of gum from the kiosk at the train-station, and still buy some hair-gel from the barber after a trim, and therefore Amazon can't possibly have a monopoly.

"Market definition" is a playground for bad-faith semanticians. Luckily for the world's monopolists, the very existence of this legal doctrine has conjured up an army of bad-faith semanticians, most of them with expensive Ivy League economics degrees, who make millions coming up with bizarre market definition arguments that can draw out any legal proceeding for years, often to the point where there is a change in government and the federal prosecutors just walk away from the case.

Taken together, these impossible fact-intensive questions would be enough to bury antitrust, but then came the final blow: frequency. Once capital had won the battle to mire antitrust cases in questions that take years and millions to resolve, they embarked on a frenzy of monopolistic mergers. This meant that the kind of antitrust questions that originally arose every few years were suddenly coming up several times per month. This was the killer combo: making antitrust a plodding ball-ache of thorny philosophical and technical questions, and then rigging the system so that these questions arise in a nonstop flurry guaranteed that antitrust would fail.

That's what happened with Microsoft. The company had a 95% desktop OS market-share when Clinton's trustbusters dragged them into court. Nevertheless, the company played all kinds of "market definition" games that dragged the case out for years. They also insisted that they never intended to form a monopoly, despite smoking-gun memos about "sucking up all the market oxygen":

https://web.archive.org/web/20190717023522/https://www.justice.gov/atr/department-justice-7

This dragged on so long that even after Microsoft lost its case, the appeal carried on until after GW Bush stole the presidency, and then his DoJ walked away from the case, letting Microsoft continue to enjoy (and increase) its monopoly:

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/07/business/us-vs-microsoft-overview-us-abandoning-its-effort-break-apart-microsoft-saying.html

What happened next should not come as a surprise to anyone. Microsoft got convicted of deliberately setting out to create a monopoly, and then paid no penalty. After an all-too-brief period of post-traumatic good behavior, Microsoft returned to its monopolistic ways. Along the way, Microsoft sucked up to a succession of presidential administrations, culminating in the company's emergence as a de facto wing of the Trump regime. Microsoft's CEO paid $1m to sit on the inaugural dais, and then directed the company to donate millions to the Epstein Ballroom, and then provided the IT services for ICE's ethnic cleansing pogroms:

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/us-ice-triples-use-of-microsoft-cloud-in-six-months/#:~:text=ICE%20has%20been,first%20presidential%20term.

Microsoft isn't merely the in-house IT shop for Trump's domestic agenda: they've also weaponized foreign reliance on Microsoft's cloud apps and they punish foreign officials who thwart Trump abroad:

https://www.theregister.com/off-prem/2026/02/18/microsoft-throws-spox-under-the-bus-in-icc-email-flap/

When forced, Microsoft candidly admits that no matter where in the world your Microsoft data is stored, when it comes to foreign firms and governments, the company will give warrantless, secret access to their data to Trump's cronies:

https://www.theregister.com/off-prem/2025/07/25/microsoft-exec-admits-it-cannot-guarantee-data-sovereignty/458553

All of this raises an urgent digital sovereignty question: what if Microsoft (a monopolist that is entirely dependent on Trump's favor to keep it free of existential legal problems) cuts off your country's Office 365 access? This is the question I raised late last year in my CCC talk about the "Post-American Internet":

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

(Coming soon in expanded form to a bookstore near you:)

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374623845/thepostamericaninternet/

And now, Microsoft has given the whole world a preview of how this might play out, because their servers have collapsed, shutting the world off from Outlook email, Azure cloud, Copilot, Teams, and other key offerings:

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cq5y10ge3dp3t

The outage lasted for about two days, and around the world, government agencies and businesses large and small ground to a halt. Without Office 365, Outlook and Teams, many organizations could not even convene a meeting or formulate a plan to deal with the outage.

All of this raises an important question: is Microsoft guilty of negligence, and, if so, what should be done about this? Here's my answer: yes, Microsoft is presumptively guilty of negligence, and any response to this must include antitrust breakups of the company.

Here's why I think that. Microsoft has demonstrably underinvested in its IT stability. Any IT plan that results in a global, multi-day outage is, by definition, inadequate. Whether the problem could have been solved by buying more servers, or hiring more people, or changing the management of key divisions is immaterial. Every one of these measures – every single measure that could have prevented this – costs money. By not spending that money, Microsoft definitively underinvested in its products.

But Microsoft doesn't lack for funds! Microsoft is a convicted monopolist, and it has the margins to prove it. In 2025-2026, the company pissed away more than $30b in stock buybacks, a once-illegal (and still sleazy) form of stock manipulation. Over that same period, Microsoft lost nearly $200b on AI ventures that it now admits will not pay off:

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/24/microsoft-reiterates-plan-to-invest-80-billion-in-ai-.html

Then there's the layoffs. 2026 saw Microsoft's first-ever voluntary retirement buyout, which served as the overture to a year that saw a 25% headcount cut – 60,000 employees slated for destruction:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/oct/26/microsoft-buyout-offers-ai-cuts

Ever had a boss who caught you catching your breath and shoved a broom in your hand, barking, "If you have time to lean, you have time to clean?" That goes quintuple for convicted monopolists who bring the global economy to a halt due to a multi-day outage. If you can't manage to keep your servers online, you have no business incinerating tens of billions on stock buybacks, much less hundreds of billions to feed the AI money-furnace. Did Microsoft need the tens of thousands of workers it threw away? Demonstrably so: when they were on the payroll, Microsoft's servers were up. Now they're gone, and so are the servers. It doesn't matter how those workers related to this specific outage: if you can't keep your servers online, you either don't have enough site reliability engineers, or you don't have enough managers to deploy them effectively, or you don't have enough managers to hire the managers and SREs you need.

Q.E.D.

This is all characteristic of the monopolist's pathology. The problem with monopolists is that they have pricing power and market power: the power to foist inferior products on their customers and degraded working conditions on their employees and unfair terms on their suppliers. Microsoft's hundreds of billions in wastage and tens of thousands of layoffs are a massive transfer of value from customers, workers and suppliers to investors. The fact that the company judged (correctly, it seems) that they could make us all eat shit and we'd ask for second helpings is a nice, clean proof of monopoly power.

Here, I think, is a nice, bright-line, administrable test for monopoly power. If your company has a dominant position and if it allocates its surplus capital to its investors and if that precedes a significant degradation of your products, then you have an illegal monopoly and you should be broken up. We don't need to inquire as to whether you have a wicked heart that intentionally set about to create a monopoly, nor do we have to argue endlessly about how many angels can dance on the head of your market definition. If you think you are so powerful that you can fuck up your products and not suffer as a result then you are too big to care, and that is simply too big.

This isn't the only fix we need to antitrust law, but it is a fix that would specifically let us target Big Tech. Microsoft is a living, breathing (limping, gasping) repudiation of the thesis that monopolies are efficient and if we only let them amass endless market share and profits, they will use their "economies of scale" to deliver superior products. It's not that economies of scale don't exist, but for companies to take advantage of these economies of scale, they have to be motivated to expend their capital to do so. The more powerful a company is, the less inclined it will be to apportion capital to workers, suppliers and consumers, and the more it will cheat us all to enrich its shareholders.

We can't afford to let this crisis go to waste. Google was convicted of creating and maintaining a monopoly three times over the past couple years and every single time the judge decided the company should not face any real punishment for that monopoly, on the basis that the monopoly is what lets Google deliver such excellence for us.

Does anyone still think Google is excellent? How about Apple? Google pays Apple an annual bribe of more than $20b to stay out of the search market. Judge Amit Mehta decided to let Google continue paying this bribe to Apple so that Apple would have the capital it needed to deliver excellent products. Apple promptly went on to have a string of catastrophically bad product launches – while throwing away $170b manipulating its share-price with stock buybacks:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-dodged-a-20-billion-hit-thanks-to-google-antitrust-ruling-163056806.html

Both companies are demonstrably underinvesting in quality in order to divert R&D and product maintenance capital to their shareholders. They are too big to care. In this age of nonstop mergers and acquisitions, we can't afford to make merger approval turn on fact-intensive questions, but we can sure as hell create this administrable, bright-line test for whether a merger should be unwound after the fact. Did your company buy another company and then enshittify both products? Great, now we're breaking you up, and your investors are getting fucked. Maybe next time they'll fire the board when they announce another stupid, anti-competitive merger.

Microsoft is too big in every way. Too big to fail, too big to jail and too big to care. Too big to trust. Too big to rely upon. Too big to foster a corporate culture that cares about reliability, a decent workplace, or product quality. There's a straight line from GW Bush's decision to let Microsoft skate in 2001 and the situation a quarter century later, where Microsoft is a load-bearing piece of the world's most important firms and government agencies, and where this means that Microsoft knows that it can throw away tens of thousands of workers and hundreds of billions of dollars, crash the planet, and wake up tomorrow unscathed, ready to do it all over again.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Canadian copyright minister caught lining pockets https://web.archive.org/web/20061115062027/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/1529/135/

#20yrsago Universal Music CEO: iPod owners are thieves https://web.archive.org/web/20061201014046/https://www.billboard.com/bbcom/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003380831

#15yrsago OccupyLondon members evicted from St Paul’s memorial services https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/nov/13/occupy-london-asked-leave-st-pauls-services

#15yrsago Berlusconi to neo-fascists: “I’ll be back.” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/13/berlusconi-hints-return-italy-government

#15yrsago Balancing 3,118 coins on a dime https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmLjO0Wu3ug

#10yrsago People who voted for Trump knew their shot at the elites was fired through the guts of their neighbors https://web.archive.org/web/20210916183118/https://www.newstatesman.com/spotlight/2016/11/on-the-election-of-donald-j-trump-2

#10yrsago Ontario judge dishonours his court and disgraces himself by presiding in a MAKE AMERICA GREAT hat https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/osgoode-hall-professor-ontario-judge-hamilton-trump-hat-1.3848913

#10yrsago 300 million Adultfriendfinder accounts breached https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/13/13615750/412-million-adultfriendfinder-accounts-exposed-breach

#5yrsago How to be safe(r) online https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/13/opsec-soup-to-nuts/#secured

#1yrago For-profit healthcare is the problem, not (just) private equity https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/13/patients-not-customers/#medicine-vs-markets

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: 561 (36083 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 12.11.2026 à 21:50

Pluralistic: Uber's labor crash (12 Nov 2026)


Today's links

  • Uber's labor crash: Replacing serfs with robots just doesn't pencil out.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Asimov inspired Al Qaeda; PATRIOT Act scares Canadian customers off US servers; EFF v Trump; Internet infrastructure is unsupported and failing; Nominative determinism debunked; How to fight Trump; Burglars v burglary; NYT said Hitler was only kidding; Folky Song Funny Note; Surviving autocracy; Corporate criminals.
  • Upcoming appearances: Vancouver, Folkestone, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Santa Barbara, 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 vast, multilane queue of bright yellow, old fashioned taxis. Standing amidst them are 16th century etchings of ragged mendicants. Looming over the scene is a black pillar with the Uber logo.

Uber's labor crash (permalink)

There's a specific kind of lie that tech bosses tell: the "premature truth." That's a lie that they excuse by saying it'll come true soon:

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

Elon Musk is the world's most enthusiastic teller of these lies. That's not surprising: any kind of radical promise about the automotive sector has a 90% chance of being this kind of bullshit. Musk can barely mention the subject of transportation without lying his face off: from "full self-driving" to "hyperloops" to "tunnels" to "flying cars," Musk is a fountain of extremely untrue "premature truths":

https://karlbode.com/musks-fake-flying-car-and-ceo-said-a-thing-journalism/

But Musk has plenty of competition when it comes to lies about futuristic cars. Long before Musk switched on his first bullshit factory, Uber was spending billions to spray the world with lies about cars. Uber has always lied about everything, from driver pay to the company's finances.

Now, lying about driver pay is relatively low-risk for a company like Uber. After all, the company created the app-based worker misclassification playbook, designed to make vulnerable and precarious workers even more vulnerable and precarious. The lies Uber tells about its workforce only have to survive contact with credulous municipal governments so that they keep up a supply of get-out-of-jail-free cards for Uber's many labor, licensing and consumer rights violations.

But lying about your finances is another matter altogether. When Uber lies about its finances, it is lying to rich people, and (unlike workers), rich people have many ways to punish people who lie to them. Despite this, Uber spent more than a decade lying flagrantly and lavishly about its balance sheet.

The most shameless financial lie Uber told is that it was profitable due to the increased valuation of the many ride-hailing companies around the world that Uber owns large shares in. How did Uber come to own large shares in these companies? It happened after Uber's competing ride-hailing companies in countries around the world failed.

Uber's subsidiaries lost billions of dollars, and eventually Uber sold them to its (also money-losing) domestic rivals in all-stock deals that saw Uber acquiring vast amounts of worthless, illiquid shares in the world's failing ride-hailing companies. Then, for years, Uber would announce that its stake in these companies had appreciated in value. These revaluations were purely vibes-based. Uber's former rivals were privately held, and while small volumes of shares traded hands in private deals, Uber's pronouncements that, say, the Chinese company Didi was now worth vastly more than it had been worth a few months before was sheer fantasy dressed up as profits:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/11/bezzlers-gonna-bezzle/#gryft

Uber did this over and over (and over and over), relentlessly dogged by Hubert Horan, an aviation analyst who became the world's foremost close-reader of Uber's financial statements:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/09/accounting-gimmicks/#unter

Despite these lies, Uber eventually found a way for its early investors to cash out, through a very successful IPO that saw the House of Saud made whole (and then some) on the $31b they plowed into the business so that it could lose $0.41 on every dollar it brought in for the preceding 13 years.

The most remarkable thing about Uber's IPO was the company's S1, the prospectus that tells normie investors how the company will eventually find its way to profit. That's where you'll find Uber's claim that its "total addressable market" is every journey made by taxi, private car, train and bus, for everyone in the world:

https://stratechery.com/2019/uber-questions/

Despite the wild implausibility of this ambition, the company did achieve actual profitability after its IPO. It got there through the simple expedient of paying drivers less and charging riders more. The company spies on its drivers to calculate the lowest wage they'll accept, based on their inferred economic desperation, a process that Veena Dubal calls "algorithmic wage discrimination":

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

They also use surveillance data about riders to calculate the highest price you'll pay for a journey. Investors call this "personalized pricing," while everyone else calls it "surveillance pricing." It's a way for Uber to reach into your bank account and reduce the value of your dollars, by charging you more than the next person would pay for the same service:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/24/price-discrimination/

This is something AI turns out to be extremely good at. Businesses can program chatbots to automatically segment their customers and employees based on surveillance data and then perform a series of automated experiments to find the highest prices and lowest wages they'll accept:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/30/pay-for-privacy/#ab2654

When it comes to wage theft and price gouging, Uber leads the pack. They've really demonstrated just how much consumer and labor surplus can be diverted to capital with the aid of AI.

Of course, it helps that they're willing to lie like crazy. Uber routinely claims that it pays its drivers hourly rates that are far in excess of minimum wage, but it helpfully omits that drivers only get paid while they have a passenger in the car, and that the company punishes drivers who turn down too many unprofitable jobs.

Drivers only get paid for a fraction of the time they spend working for Uber, and on top of that, they have to pay for fuel, insurance, depreciation, loan interest, and the cost of getting vomit out of their back seats. Add it all up and Uber drivers make peanuts. In Toronto, Uber pay nets out to something like $2.50/hour:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/29/geometry-hates-uber/#toronto-the-gullible

$2.50/hour isn't a living wage anywhere in Canada, but it's especially terrible in Toronto, one of the world's most expensive cities. Uber can only be profitable for so long as drivers continue to subsidize its business, and so long as riders are willing to pay more than they ever did under the traditional taxi system (much of which was seen off by Uber's Saudi-subsidized decade of predatory pricing, which also induced a lost decade in global transit investment).

Inflation (supercharged by AI pricing) has hit all workers, but it's been especially hard on Uber drivers, who didn't have any financial cushion to start with. Eventually, drivers were bound to turn their backs on Uber. "Eventually" is now, according to Uber's Q3 earnings call, where CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told investors that "driver supply [was] not keeping pace with strong consumer demand in several international markets":

https://s23.q4cdn.com/407969754/files/doc_earnings/2026/q3/earnings-result/Uber-Q3-26-Earnings-Press-Release.pdf

As The Gig Economy Project writes, the driver shortage is especially sharp in India and Brazil, two gigantic countries where (according to Uber CFO Balaji Krishnamurthy), there is too much consumer "price sensitivity":

https://thegigeconomyproject.substack.com/p/has-uber-finally-pushed-its-workers

Uber's also having trouble getting drivers to accept the rock-bottom wages they're offering for food delivery. Despite this, Krishnamurthy assured investors that the company's measures to "improve driver availability" wouldn't affect their bottom line. Instead, Krishnamurthy promised to raise prices on riders elsewhere, something he called "re-balancing incentives":

That is part of the art that we’ve got and then there is a lot of algorithmic science that goes into, if you have a dollar, what is the maximum predicted return for that dollar and should I invest that dollar in a driver in Brazil or should I invest that dollar in a rider in India, for example. The algorithm can structurally make these choices based on training on billions of trips and allocate these investments in the way that humans just can’t.

The Gig Economy Project goes on to say that "robotaxis will fundamentally alter the unit economics of taxis, but we are still some time away from the point where robotaxis are price competitive with human-driven vehicles."

Boy is this an understatement. Remember, Uber is already paying drivers sub-minimum, sub-starvation wages, which drivers must spend to cover all the capital, depreciation, maintenance and insurance costs, along with (skyrocketing) fuel costs. I can't think of any way in which replacing starvation-wage drivers who provide their own cars with $200k robotaxis that the company must operate, maintain and insure will work out better for the company than the current situation.

This is as good as it gets for Uber, in other words. Being able to tap an army of desperate workers who supply 99% of Uber's business's capital and variable costs out of their own pockets is vastly superior to operating a fleet of expensive robots that Uber has to purchase and service.

Profitable "driverless" cars have been around the corner for more than 15 years now. Waymo claims to have delivered this through the brute force expedient of using the most expensive sensors and vast amounts of incredibly expensive cloud computing, but their balance sheet remains stubbornly opaque. We don't know how often a "driverless" Waymo is just a remote control car, being piloted by a low-wage worker in an overseas call center (there's a reason Indian technologists joke that AI stands for "Absent Indians"):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

We also don't know how often a Waymo is being overseen by a high-waged engineer. What we do know is that that when GM was forced to reveal this number, it turned out that they'd replaced a single, low-waged cab driver with 1.5 engineers, each of whom earned an order of magnitude more than the cabbie they'd displaced:

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/could-cruise-be-the-theranos-of-ai

Uber's claims that they were profitable (based on accounting gimmicks) were lies, but they were also premature truths: the company did become profitable (through price-gouging and wage-theft). But there's a limit to how low you can push your workforce's wages, and even if the AI crash delivers a fresh cohort of desperate workers who subsidize Uber's operations for a few more years, they, too, will eventually find that they can't live on $2.50/hour.

When that day comes, robo-taxis won't save the business model. Robots may cost less per hour than Uber drivers (though not by much), but owning a robot is always going to be more expensive than getting drivers to supply free cars to Uber. If Uber can't sustain profitability with that massive subsidy, it is going to hit a wall, and it won't be pretty.

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 ObL got the name "Al Qaeda" from Asimov's Foundation;

#25yrsago Folky Song Funny Note https://craphound.com/misc/Folky_Song_Funny_Note.mp3

#20yrsago PATRIOT scares Canadian unis off US servers https://web.archive.org/web/20080204033238/http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/Page/document/v5/content/subscribe?user_URL=http://www.theglobeandmail.com%2Fservlet%2Fstory%2FRTGAM.20061111.wxuniversities11

#15yrsago Minimum wage hike coming to Guangdong, the world’s factory https://web.archive.org/web/20111110113740/http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/china/111109/china-economy-manufacturing-guangdong

#10yrsago EFF in Trump’s America: Protecting Tomorrow https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/11/protecting-tomorrow

#10yrsago America’s actually had worse presidential races than this one https://www.loweringthebar.net/2016/11/worst-presidential-race.html

#10yrsago The internet’s core infrastructure is dangerously unsupported and could crumble (but we can save it!) https://web.archive.org/web/20170222232454/https://fordfoundcontent.blob.core.windows.net/media/2976/roads-and-bridges-the-unseen-labor-behind-our-digital-infrastructure.pdf

#10yrsago Fact-checking Trump’s plan for the first 100 days https://www.npr.org/2016/11/10/501597652/fact-check-donald-trumps-first-100-days-action-plan

#10yrsago Dennis the Dentist: on the unkillable wrongness of nominative determinism https://timharford.com/2016/11/rich-the-banker-whats-not-in-a-name/

#10yrsago How to fight Trump, starting right now https://medium.com/@anildash/forget-why-its-time-to-get-to-work-c49ac5f0da20#.l0xpc3pps

#10yrsago Anti-burglary advice, from burglars https://web.archive.org/web/20161118141701/https://www.kgw.com/news/investigations/we-asked-86-burglars-how-they-broke-into-homes/344213396

#10yrsago Serbian ultra-nationalists celebrate Trump’s victory https://globalvoices.org/2016/11/10/nationalists-and-populists-in-serbia-and-macedonia-celebrate-trumps-victory/

#10yrsago Leonard Cohen wrote the perfect anthem for our times https://memex.craphound.com/2016/11/11/leonard-cohen-wrote-the-perfect-anthem-for-our-times/

#10yrsago “Hitler’s only kidding about the antisemitism” New York Times, 1922 https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/times-insider/2015/02/10/1922-hitler-in-bavaria/?_r=0&smid=tw-share

#10yrsago Rules for surviving an autocracy https://web.archive.org/web/20161111205036/https://www.nybooks.com/daily/s3/nov/10/trump-election-autocracy-rules-for-survival.html

#1yrago American corporate criminals in the crosshairs (finally) https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/12/with-a-fountain-pen/#recidivism

#1yrago A tale of three customer service chatbots https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/11/sorry-to-bother-you/#we-dont-care-we-dont-have-to

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: 516 (35512 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 10.11.2026 à 18:34

Pluralistic: The EU should go big and hard over border IT failure (10 Nov 2026)


Today's links


Two men in 1960s business-wear peer into the guts of a refrigerator-sized computer cabinet. In the foreground is a huge crowd of 1930s-era people, jostling to get in. Behind the scene is a 1950s airplane on a runway. Floating in the sky are warped, fuzzy EU flag stars.

The EU should go big and hard over border IT failure (permalink)

If the EU has a future as a political project, it will have to be as a living, breathing repudiation of Ronald Reagan's maxim that "The nine most terrifying words are 'I’m from the government and I’m here to help.'"

In other words, the EU's future depends on its ability to publicly perform competence and capacity. The EU is a technocratic project, and the one trait technocrats must show is undeniable technical competence. This is the secret of Zohran Mamdani's administration: being seen in public, constantly fixing things that are broken, and making things that work even better:

https://www.nyc.gov/content/100days/pages/

This is a goal that is largely incompatible with charismatic megaprojects, and unfortunately, that's the EU's favorite kind of project: something big and splashy and worthy of the extreme effort required to squeeze anything through the Byzantine EU approvals process:

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-planning-system-system

Even more unfortunate is that the EU isn't just a technocratic project, it's a neoliberal technocratic project, so when it does embark on one of these megaprojects, it almost always does so as a "public-private partnership" that sees vast sums transferred to private firms to carry out public works. Since megaprojects are always over-budget and behind schedule, this creates the perfect conditions for absolute banditry, in which private companies overcharge and underdeliver, and before you know it, you're billions poorer and back in Reagan's "most terrifying words" territory.

Here's a perfect example: Schengen is a region of (mostly) EU countries who have opened their borders to one another. Once you've crossed into any of the 29 Schengen countries, you can generally stroll into any of the other Schengen countries without showing a passport or having your bags searched:

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

This is an awfully convenient system…once you're inside of Schengen. But the Schengen agreement means that each of the member states is trusting the other states to manage a common border, a task that is made all the more urgent by the fascist international, whose far right parties have whipped millions of otherwise sensible people into a xenophobic frenzy over migration. This has led to a kind of bureaucracy-shifting exercise that removed all the complexity from inter-Schengen borders and concentrated it at the borders between each Schengen country and the rest of the world.

Under this system, every Schengen country must accurately log the passage of every non-Schengen person into and out of the region. If you fly into Rome and out of Helsinki, then both the Italian and Finnish border guards must be cognizant of that fact and correctly log it. To make matters even more complex, visa-free access to Schengen is restricted to 90 days in the entire region out of any given 180-day period. For example, last month I was stranded in Frankfurt overnight thanks to a canceled flight. If I had totaled 90 days out of the previous 180 in Schengen, I would not have been allowed out of the airport's secure area until midnight, when the day ticked over and now my total would be 89 days out of 180 (thankfully, I was able to leave the airport and stay in a crummy airport hotel instead of sleeping on the floor of the airport).

To manage this system, the EU commissioned several giant IT companies to build a networked, biometric border-crossing system. Under the spec, the system would track those 90-day windows for everyone who passed in and out of Schengen, using fast fingerprint/facial scans to move people swiftly through any border crossing in the 29 Schengen countries.

It is a gross understatement to call this system behind schedule and overbudget. The Entry Exit System (EES) was supposed to roll out in 2022, but it didn't go live until October 2025 – whereupon it completely, catastrophically failed, despite having doubled its budget:

https://www.theregister.com/security/2025/09/25/eu-to-register-fingerprints-faces-for-short-stay-visitors/1141501

It's been more than a year since EES went live and it is still an absolute disaster. Travelers arriving or leaving Schengen are frequently hit with multi-hour delays. Numerous flights have been canceled, and airlines who fly without waiting for passengers in the immobile, snaking lines must rebook those passengers and endure their wrath. At major airports, it's routine for border guards to simply suspend their use of the EES system, waving through passengers without registering them in the system:

https://eesqueue.com/

EES is a disaster for aviation operations and border crossings. Any true reckoning with its costs wouldn't stop at the hundreds of millions of euros paid to private sector partners, but also the hundreds of millions more in costs borne by travelers and airlines, to say nothing of the opportunity costs paid by travelers who made it through the checkpoints through the brute-force expedient of leaving hours of extra time for a broken border formality.

Which means that the disaster isn't merely a logistics crisis, it's also a credibility and legitimacy crisis. A year (and counting) of headlines about this dismal failure of an IT system has further eroded public confidence in the EU's technical capabilities. How can the EU claim to be a sound technocratic steward of the vast administrative challenges facing a 27-state transnational entity when it can't make the computers work, and when those failures produce the very visible phenomenon of gigantic queues of fuming passengers?

(Not just fuming, either: when I was stuck in Frankfurt last month, there were at least half a dozen travelers who were loudly sobbing as they realized they were going to miss their flights home.)

The contractors for this nonfunctional, grossly overbudget, years-late project (IBM, Atos, and Leonardo) are now being sued, but – incredibly – the EU kept the lawsuit a secret. The only reason we know that IBM, Atos, and Leonardo are facing the EU in court is that the FT spotted an inconspicuous note in the annual financial statements for eu-LISA (the European Union Agency for the Operational Management of Large-Scale IT Systems in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice):

https://www.eulisa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/fy2025_eu-lisa_faa.pdf

The secrecy of this lawsuit is another mark against the EU's technical competence. Any administrative system that relies on private-sector outsourcing to carry out its essential projects must have a core competency in overseeing those private partners, which includes loudly and mercilessly punishing those partners when they fail.

By keeping the suit secret, the eu-LISA telegraphs that the fault lies with the EU, not with IBM, Atos, and Leonardo, who racked up hundreds of millions in fees and delivered a very broken, very late system that ruined the days (and voyages) of millions of travelers:

https://www.theregister.com/public-sector/2026/11/10/eus-212m-border-it-project-lands-ibm-and-atos-in-legal-water/5308669

Anyone who's ever watched a large IT consultancy firm run one of these large projects knows that this kind of bungling and gouging is par for the course. The old adage that "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" does not mean that IBM can deliver a functional IT system; it means that when IBM fucks up your project, you can escape any blame because they're the gold standard for fucking up.

Every time the EU lets these companies off the hook without a big, splashy public reckoning, they reinforce Reagan's "most terrifying words" maxim. As Voltaire wrote, "Sometimes you must execute an admiral to encourage the others." The EU should be dragging these IT bandits in public, every day, naming the top executives who oversaw the project.

They should do this every time there's a problem with a private contractor, but EES is especially ripe for this kind of treatment. That's because EES whacked a ton of rich, powerful people. Those are the sort of people who might otherwise run cover for giant, bungling, wildly profitable IT consulting firms, but who are also the most reliably pissy, vindictive dickheads about anything that affects them personally. These are the sorts of people you definitely want inside your tent, pissing out – but in hiding its lawsuit under a bushel, the EU has invited them to stand outside its tent and piss in.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Toothpick sculptures https://web.archive.org/web/20061107232205/https://landmarksofsf.com/photoindex.html

#20yrsago Computer-human interaction that gives hands their due respect https://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/

#15yrsago Warner Bros admits it sends takedown notices for files it hasn’t seen and doesn’t own https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/11/warner-admits-it-issues-takedowns-for-files-it-hasnt-looked-at/

#15yrsago Understanding McDonald’s as a commodities broker with a restaurant sideline: the McRib https://www.theawl.com/2011/11/a-conspiracy-of-hogs-the-mcrib-as-arbitrage/

#15yrsago Why we get the future of tech wrong https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUXh-GPa5dI

#15yrsago Fake British WWII passport for Hitler https://web.archive.org/web/20120608185357/https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/museum/item.asp?item_id=46

#15yrsago French court sends EDF execs to jail for hacking, spying on Greenpeace https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-15683090

#10yrsago Trump Administration: a climate denier for the EPA, a Goldman-Sachs banker for Treasury https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/who-is-in-president-trump-cabinet-231071

#10yrsago How science fiction can help us survive Trump’s America https://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/the_prospect_be/

#10yrsago Clinton’s data-driven “ground game” sucked in exactly the same way “targeted ads” suck, for the same reason https://web.archive.org/web/20161111084125/http://tomewing.tumblr.com/post/152963356681/polls-etc

#10yrsago The first transgender suicide hotline: 877-565-8860 https://translifeline.org/

#5yrsago Risk compensation considered harmful https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/10/elfin-safety/#mene-mene-tekel

#1yrago "Flexible labor" is a euphemism for "derisking capital" https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/10/zero-sum-zero-hours/#that-sounds-like-a-you-problem

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: 526 (34498 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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"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 09.11.2026 à 09:12

Pluralistic: America cannot undo Trumpism (09 Nov 2026)


Today's links

  • America cannot undo Trumpism: The only way out is through.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Bruces x Pokemon; Rich countries and WIPO conspire to kill developement agenda; Wired photos go CC; "Mortality Bridge"; Drones over Disney; CBC v podcast apps; Realtor x election eschatology; Right-clicker mentality; "Victories Greater Than Death"; Facebook's fraud files; Zune v Universal; Ben and Jerry's x OWS; Nudging is bunk; History of Chinese sf; How Audi cheated; Trump runs the surveillance state; Stockholm v interop.
  • Upcoming appearances: Courtenay, Vancouver, Folkestone, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Santa Barbara, 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 pair of wrecked, overturned wagons against a weathered wooden building tinted like a faded US flag; between them is a DEAD END sign. To the left is a 1930s streetcorner with a ONE-WAY sign; entering from that edge is an engraving of an elephant with upraised trunk, decorated in GOP livery and topped with a mop of Trump hair.

America cannot undo Trumpism (permalink)

True Carneyism has never been tried. When Canadian PM Mark Carney traveled to Davos to declare a "rupture" in the old order (and admit that this old order was never that great to begin with) he told us that there was no going back from Trumpism. The only way out of Trumpism was through:

https://www.weforum.org/stories/forum-institutional/davos-2026-special-address-by-mark-carney-prime-minister-of-canada/

This is easy to say, but hard to do. If the old order is over, then we will never again be able to trust America to serve as the world's cop, banker, ISP, IT department and consumer of first resort.

We can't trust Americans to buy the things we make:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/16/k-shaped-recovery/#disenshittification-nations

We can't trust them not to interfere with the interconnections between fiber lines that slither out of the oceans and onto the US landmass:

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

We can't trust them not to weaponize the US dollar to undermine sovereign nations' legitimate activities:

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

And we absolutely can't trust them not to spy on, steal from, and shut down governments, firms and households around the world by cutting off access to US software and cloud services, and by bricking the world's devices, from tractors to smartphones:

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

Despite Carney's assertion that this rupture represents a welcome (if too cruel, sudden and painful) departure of the old (never very good) system, no one (not even Carney) is acting like the world has truly changed. Take Carney's answer to the Trump tariffs: retaliatory tariffs. Tariffs have a place in sheltering a nascent domestic industry from better-developed, deeper-pocketed foreign competitors, so a tariff wall between Canada and the US could make sense, if it was paired with the massive domestic investment we'd need to rebuild the manufacturing industry that Brian Mulroney sold out with the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement (and later NAFTA).

But Carney is no Carneyist. When it comes to massive domestic spending, Carney is a bog-standard, austerity-addled Reaganomics guy; a central banker and technocrat whose idea of "industrial policy" is firing tens of thousands of skilled civil servants who thwart his agenda and replacing them with defective (but obedient) chatbots running on US hardware:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/13/vibe-governance/#k-hole

Carney's retaliatory tariffs aren't what you'd do if the old order had "ruptured." They're what you'd do if you hoped that your American cousins would come to their senses, evict their mad king from the White House, tear down the Epstein Memorial Ballroom, and roll back the clock to 2016. Like a lot of liberals, Carney just wants to go back to brunch.

But as any true Carneyist knows, brunch is canceled forever. Brunch ruptured. There's no going back to the old America, and there's no going back to the old American order that had dominated the world since the end of WWII. As November Kelly says, "Trump inherited a poker game rigged in his favor, but he flipped the table over anyway because he resented having to pretend to play."

This is something we're all struggling with, including Americans. The Republicans' midterm wipeout has corporate Democrats hoping that after a few years' tinkering, they can elect a Newsomdroid or give Harris a do-over and win back the trust and reliance of the world and the American people. Even for a true Carneyist who never liked the old order very much (like me), this is a comforting prospect. No one knows what the next world will look like, and no matter how screwed up the old world was, I knew how it worked and how to make it work for me (more or less).

But there is no going back. Trump I didn't have a plan, it only had Trump, whose One Big Idea was issuing Executive Orders. Many of these were meaningless bloviating. Some were illegal and were swiftly suspended or never went into effect. Biden overturned nearly all the remaining EOs (that were both substantive and not totally illegal).

But Trump II had Project 2025. The point of Project 2025 and the ambition of the wreckers who wrote it was to push America through a series of one-way transformations that cannot be undone, and that's what's happened, over two short years. That's the bad news. The good news is that it's much easier to destroy than to build, so Project 2025 hasn't led to the creation of permanent, load-bearing fascist institutions that cannot be shuttered without bringing down large parts of the USA.

Start with values. Trumpism is a denial of democracy and the rule of law. Tens of millions of Americans have been marinated in a belief system that says that the way to win power is to claim all the elections you lose are rigged and that these "stolen elections" are best addressed by staging a coup. These people are in a cult that embraces its leader's naked corruption. They're in a cult whose doctrine treats political triumph of as divine direction to embark on looting sprees. It's a cult whose members mutilate their faces so that they can't ever leave, and the reward for this permanent disfigurement is endless influence-peddling:

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/6136101-ambassador-guilfoyle-wire-request/

Even without ritual scarification to mark them out forever, millions of these people will never come back from this cult indoctrination. They will forever be democracy's enemies, treating the idea of laws, rules and honest service as shucks for the rubes. What's more, these people's neighbors, family members and co-workers will never be able to fully trust them.

Unfortunately, those values aren't just diffused through the population: they are concentrated in the organs of state. DOGE and Federalist Society judicial appointments have created a stay-behind cadre of life-tenured fascists who now dominate America's federal judiciary and permanent civil service, including and especially the nation's law enforcement and national security agencies, from the FBI to the FDA, the NSA to the Bureau of Prisons.

Worse: DOGE also chased away hundreds of thousands of skilled, principled public servants. Those people have retired, retrained, emigrated or exited the workforce. They can't simply be re-hired and restored to their old roles. From finance regulation to the national education system, America has lobotomized itself, swapping people who understand how things work and use that understanding to enforce the laws and safeguard the American people for end-times fascists, caliper-wielding eugenicists, and Ayn Rand LARPers.

Much of the work DOGE's victims did is also gone forever. When DOGE's muskrats killed long-running NIH research projects, they pulled the plug on studies, some of which had run for decades. Many of these experiments are unsalvageable. DOGE didn't just throw away the contributions that cancer patients, people with genetic disorders and other volunteer research subjects gave to science: in halting these research projects, DOGE shredded this selfless sacrifice. Why not? When one NIH official begged his DOGE invaders not to kill long-running, valuable cancer research, the DOGE child laughed and said it didn't matter, because AI was going to cure cancer.

Then there's the NIH's research partners: the elite institutions who buckled so quickly in the face of Trump's antisemitism/DEI witch-hunts. These universities now face the same crisis as the DOGE-gutted civil service, with their best and brightest gone, grad students chased back to their home countries, and the trust of their students and faculty permanently squandered.

It's not just grad students who got chased out of America. Immigrants – documented and undocumented alike – have been terrorized for two years and many of them have fled. ICE got what it wanted: they robbed aging, stagnant America of the dynamism, aspiration and youthful vigor of the most ambitious people from every corner of the globe, people who proved their resourcefulness and bravery by making dangerous crossings. Then they navigated the US immigration system's impenetrable bureaucracy, often working without legal representation, in a language they were just learning, and still managing to clear every bureaucratic hurdle. This alone is a breathtaking demonstration of intelligence, resourcefulness and diligence. Those brilliant, hardworking people aren't coming back: some other country will get the benefit of their life's work and care. Their children will become citizens of other nations.

Now think of the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been transferred from ordinary working people who are still here, to America's oligarchs. Trump's tax cuts, corrupt policy subsidies and no-bid pork contracts have supercharged the wealth (and thus the power) of America's most corrupt elite. It will be the work of a generation to tax away their stolen loot, and much of it may never be recovered. These people will spend that time working to transform their wealth into permanent power, buying and installing politicians at every level of office.

Trumpland is a coalition of wreckers of every kind. Think of how MAHA undermined the nation's herd immunity to a host of communicable diseases, many of which can result in permanent disability. Long after MAHA is forgotten even as a punchline, the people whose health they destroyed forever will still be struggling. After a century of painstaking work to corral measles and other killer diseases, MAHA immunocompromised America itself, in just two short years. Any attempt to bring back evidence-based preventative medicine must now overcome the deep mistrust of medical science that an army of supplement-peddling quacks has sunk deep into Americans' psyche.

Speaking of mistrust: Americans must now and forever live with the knowledge that tens of thousands of their neighbors joined ICE, an armed, masked kidnapping squad that occupied US cities, murdering US citizens and noncitizens alike in the streets with impunity. Even if we try and imprison every one of those war criminals, it will take years and will shatter families and communities.

ICE proved that America is awash in small arms, but it's a different story when it comes to significant warfighting materiel. Trump's Iranian disaster used up the largest part of Pax Americana's arsenal of missiles and anti-missile interceptors. Putin doesn't need to convince Trump to cut off Ukraine's access to America's long-range arsenal. Trump shot his wad, and re-arming America is the work of decades, and it will cost billions, and it will require access to things America no longer knows how to make. Worse: the places where they do know how to make those things are no longer America's allies.

Can they be America's allies again? Well, sure, but only in a limited, Carneyist, "minilateral" way, in which countries form temporary alliances to accomplish specific goals. Biden spoke of "friendshoring" production of key goods and services. Friendshoring implies a reliable form of friendship, the sort that is built on decades of trust and interdependence. Friendshoring only works if the friends you friendshore to can be relied upon to stay your friends. Do we really think that if Venezuela deposes the puppet regime Trump installed after kidnapping the country's leader that it will remain America's "friend?"

That's the problem with weaponized interdependence: it only works for so long as the country America is screwing remains dependent on America, and now every country in the world is moving heaven and earth to break their dependencies on America, its institutions and products:

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

As Nate Bethea says on this week's Trashfuture podcast, airports outside of the USA are now filled with large, splashy ads urging businesses to move their IT out of America's cloud and off of American apps:

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

After Microsoft obliged the Trump regime by taking away the online accounts of foreign officials who made Trump angry, will any other country ever voluntarily trust them with their industrial capacity, let alone their government?

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

I'm not saying America is a write-off: I'm saying that it has been sabotaged down to the foundation slab and structural members by a psychotic cadre of skilled arsonists, who were abetted by mad bombers who drove themselves even crazier by racking up life-altering debts in rigged "prediction markets" that serve as a vehicle for bankrupting yourself by wishcasting away your life's savings by betting on every aspect of a Permanent Chud Reich, as corrupt officials make out like bandits by trading on insider information.

When America comes back (if America comes back), it will not be as the organizing platform for the world's finance, military, technology and commerce. In years or perhaps decades, America may find a new stable place in the international community. But in the meantime, it cannot be relied upon to serve as the world's hyperpower. Trump forever disqualified America from enjoying that privileged place – and just to be sure, he destroyed its capacity to even try.

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 Open wifi saves traveler from hotel dial-up gouging https://memex.craphound.com/2001/11/09/i-just-wanna-say-that/

#25yrsago Why Cryptosystems Fail https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/archive/rja14/wcf.html

#25yrsago Bruce Sterling on Pokemon https://web.archive.org/web/20050908070521/https://www.wired.com/news/audio/interviews/sterling_11.mp3

#20yrsago Fred von Lohmann’s talk at USC https://web.archive.org/web/20061110090032/https://centeronpublicdiplomacy.com/podcasts/061107_von_lohmann.mp3

#20yrsago Secret WIPO memo: rich countries to kill Broadcast Treaty, Development Agenda https://www.ip-watch.org/2006/11/07/developed-country-strategy-on-wipo-development-agenda-governance-revealed/?res=1024_ff&print=0

#20yrsago Canadian copyright czar forced to turn away industry bribes https://web.archive.org/web/20101018194506/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1521&Itemid=125

#20yrsago Copyright explained through a wild west metaphor http://www.greglondon.com/bountyhunters/

#20yrsago Why Zune shouldn’t pay blood money to Universal https://cdm.link/universal-microsoft-screw-over-artists-set-absurd-and-dangerous-precedent-with-zune/#more-1719

#15yrsago New Fed warrantless GPS trackers discovered in the wild https://web.archive.org/web/20111110191030/https://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/11/gps-tracker-times-two/all/1

#15yrsago Occupy Atlanta encamps on lawn of house under foreclosure threat https://web.archive.org/web/20111109225513/https://thinkprogress.org/special/2011/11/08/363692/occupy-atlanta-encamps-in-neighborhood-to-save-police-officers-home-from-foreclosure/

#15yrsago Ben from Ben and Jerry’s serves ice-cream to Occupiers https://www.fastcompany.com/1678825/the-ice-cream-man-of-zuccotti-park-ben-cohen-on-his-work-with-occupy-wall-street

#15yrsago Identity theft marketplace sells mothers’ maiden names, dates of birth, etc https://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/11/how-much-is-your-identity-worth/

#15yrsago Policy-by-nudging unsupported by evidence, and undemocratic https://web.archive.org/web/20111112154542/https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228376.500-nudge-policies-are-another-name-for-coercion.html

#15yrsago Wired.com photo policy: all staff-produced photos will now be Creative Commons licensed https://web.archive.org/web/20111111051330/https://www.wired.com/rawfile/2011/11/creative-commons/?pid=1365&pageid=6275

#15yrsago “Piracy-stricken” Viacom CEO tops pay-raise charts https://www.techdirt.com/2011/11/07/viacom-decimated-piracy-its-ceo-got-biggest-raise-any-exec-anywhere/

#15yrsago Boyett’s Mortality Bridge: Rock n’ roll Dante meets Orpheus https://memex.craphound.com/2011/11/08/boyetts-mortality-bridge-rock-n-roll-dante-meets-orpheus/

#10yrsago FAA okays use of semi-autonomous drones for Disneyland and Disney World fireworks displays https://web.archive.org/web/20161110065859/http://thedisneyblog.com/2016/11/07/disney-drones/

#10yrsago Glenn Beck’s “decency” doesn’t extend to answering questions about why he was such an asshole https://wnyc.org/story/beck-changed-man

#10yrsago CBC threatens podcast app makers, argues that RSS readers violate copyright https://www.reddit.com/r/podcasts/comments/5bmzuj/cbc_are_blocking_podcast_apps/

#10yrsago Winter Denial of Service attack knocks out heating in Finnish homes https://web.archive.org/web/20161109214609/https://metropolitan.fi/entry/ddos-attack-halts-heating-in-finland-amidst-winter

#10yrsago Women are flocking to Susan B Anthony’s grave to cover it with “I Voted” stickers https://www.thecut.com/2016/11/susan-b-anthonys-grave-will-be-open-until-the-polls-close.html

#10yrsago Edward Snowden to Trump campaign: “old laptops” could vet 800,000 emails in “minutes-to-hours” https://web.archive.org/web/20161107235120/https://www.yahoo.com/news/edward-snowden-crushes-conspiracy-theory-053349259.html

#10yrsago My neighborhood realtor is determined to turn a buck on electoral eschatology https://memex.craphound.com/2016/11/08/my-neighborhood-realtor-is-determined-to-turn-a-buck-on-electoral-eschatology/

#10yrsago A history of Chinese science fiction, from 475 BC to Cixin Liu https://web.archive.org/web/20161105172922/http://mithilareview.com/wang_11_16/

#10yrsago How Audi cheated emissions tests: if (steering) then (pollute) https://www.jalopnik.com/america-figured-out-a-new-way-audi-cheated-on-emissions-1788630969/

#10yrsago Senate investigates Wells Fargo retaliations against whistleblowers https://web.archive.org/web/20161108210544/http://www.warren.senate.gov/files/documents/2016-11-03_Wells_Fargo_FINRA_Violations_Letter_Final.pdf

#10yrsago A madman has been given the keys to the surveillance state https://memex.craphound.com/2016/11/09/a-madman-has-been-given-the-keys-to-the-surveillance-state/

#5yrsago Stockholm's war on interoperability https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/09/skrota-skolplattformen/#privacy-without-monopoly

#5yrsago Right-Clicker-Mentality https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/08/tina-v-tapas/#spoilsports-r-us

#5yrsago Charlie Jane Anders' Victories Greater Than Death https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/08/tina-v-tapas/#the-chosen-ones

#5yrsago Imagining the end of capitalism https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/08/tina-v-tapas/#its-pronounced-tape-ass

#1yrago Facebook's fraud files https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/08/faecebook/#too-big-to-care

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: 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.

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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Pluralistic.net

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https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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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 07.11.2026 à 14:03

Pluralistic: JS Tan and Clarissa Redwine's "Against Tech Oligarchy" (07 Nov 2026)


Today's links


The torso of a person in a leather jacket standing in a bookstore, holding a book: The Haymarket Books edition of JS Tan and Clarissa Redwine's 'Against Tech Oligarchy.'

JS Tan and Clarissa Redwine's "Against Tech Oligarchy" (permalink)

JS Tan and Clarissa Redwine are veterans of a string of hard-fought unionization drives at tech workplaces that started with some astounding successes but ran up against ferocious resistance in the second Trump term; their book about tech labor, Against Tech Oligarchy, is a superb analysis of the challenges and potential for tech labor organizing:

https://againsttecholigarchy.com/

For decades, tech workers enjoyed extraordinary power, despite the fact that virtually no tech workers were in unions. That's because tech workers were both extremely valuable to their employers (each engineer hired by a Silicon Valley firm added about $1m to the company's bottom line) and extremely scarce.

This won tech workers very favorable working conditions, high compensation, and a great deal of control over their employers' products (because if a worker refused to work on a project, it was hard to find someone else to do the work). What's more, there has always been a sizable cohort of tech workers whose own lives were profoundly improved by access to digital networks and wanted more than anything to distribute those benefits to everyone else. I call these workers "Tron-pilled," because they fought for the user:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/11/obvious-terrible-ideas/#bayesian-terrorism

During the era of tech worker scarcity, few tech workers saw themselves as workers at all – rather, the tech worker's self-conception was as an entrepreneur in waiting, a temporarily embarrassed founder. Tech bosses played on this perception, promoting the idea of tech workers and managers as peers and/or family members. Tech CEOs affected hoodies and jeans and hosted company-wide meetings where they allowed engineers to pepper them with impertinent questions about the company's technical and commercial direction.

But scarcity-based power only lasts until supply catches up with demand. As the number of workers outstripped the number of jobs, bosses showed their true colors. That's what happened at Kickstarter, when one of the bosses forced out his co-founders and declared himself CEO and proceeded to override the decisions of the company's Trust and Safety team. This sparked one of tech's first unionization drives, and it was a bitter fight, with management pulling out every dirty tactic in the union-busting playbook:

https://kickstarterunited.org/oral-history/

The labor militancy at Kickstarter United wasn't an isolated incident. Workers at much bigger companies like Google and Microsoft had a long tradition of pushing back against management through internal channels, open letters, and, starting in 2018, mass walkouts:

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

But post-Trump, bosses at these companies were much less willing to countenance dissent, and waves of vicious retaliation and reprisals radicalized many workers at these companies, driving them to more traditional, organized forms of labor activism. At the same time, workers at smaller, "mission-driven" shops like Bandcamp were inspired by the success of Kickstarter United and they started their own drives. All this attracted the interest of the "internationals" – big, established unions like the Communications Workers of America – who trained union organizers at all kinds of tech shops and started laying the groundwork for traditional union drives.

Most of Against Tech Oligarchy tells the story of these drives in a gripping you-are-there style (it helps that both of the authors are veterans of several of these campaigns). The stakes got much higher during the pandemic, of course, as tech came to play a more central role in the lives of hundreds of millions of locked-down workers, and as the tech companies themselves went on uncontrolled hiring sprees, putting workers on the payroll without any duties or responsibilities, often just to ensure that a rival company couldn't hire them.

The pandemic also prompted many tech bosses to express far more worker-hostile sentiments than they'd ever let slip in public before. Fully remote workforces both frustrated tech bosses and also significantly reduced the opportunities for in-person labor organizing. All of this built to a series of rising crescendos, such as Musk's Twitter takeover and mass layoffs, and Israel's tech-fueled genocide in Gaza. Confrontations between tech workers and bosses grew more bitter and direct, even as solidarity between white-collar tech workers and their blue-collar peers (notably Amazon warehouse workers) increased.

If all Against Tech Oligarchy did was lay out the cut-and-thrust of these labor struggles during these momentous years, it would be worth the price of admission. But it's in the final chapters that the book really distinguishes itself, because it's here that the authors embark on a pitiless postmortem of their own failed campaigns and the failures of their peers, and ask themselves what it will take to unionize tech workers.

They start with the observation that most American union organizing is built around maintaining "labor peace" (by swiftly moving to recognition and a contract) but that tech bosses are ready to wage "labor war" (through illegal union-busting and retaliation). A labor peace strategy avoids costly and dangerous risks to established unions, such as decertification of locals and expensive and bruising court battles. But for tech bosses, labor war pays off, because their workforce is transient, fragmented, and skeptical of the very idea that they are workers. They have little to no experience with unions and can barely imagine how a union might improve their working lives.

The traditional labor playbook calls for workers to quietly build their power, taking no overt action while conducting a series of personal, one-to-one conversations that contribute to an eventual quorum of workers that's large enough to win a unionization vote. This strategy is like building a bonfire, where the pieces of fuel are piled one atop the other, but not lit until the pile is done.

But in a tech shop where workers turn over frequently and work in isolated teams, often from home, this strategy fails. Workers who have been won to the union side leave or grow demoralized in their isolation. Reaching new workers is difficult, and since the whole union drive occurs in secret, new workers don't know to reach out to organizers in their shops.

For Tan and Redwine, this fact militates for a strategy that revives some of the pre-labor activism of tech workers, noisy public/private fights whenever product decisions and management conduct violate some mix of worker rights and workers' values. They see this as a way to build momentum within a shop, bringing workers off the sidelines and giving organizers chances to bring those workers into a sustained, structured labor drive.

Tan and Redwine see tech worker organizing as the frontrunners of an age of new labor militancy and labor war, of the sort that pre-dated the labor peace that arose after the passage of the National Labor Relations Act. That labor peace was the result of bosses learning that hardball tactics would be met with equally hardcore responses.

This is especially important for tech workers, whose strikes cannot inflict the same pain on their bosses as earlier industrial workers' strikes did. Digital systems are designed to operate themselves after they are built, so when the workers involved in those systems withdraw their labor, the systems continue to run, often for a very long time, before needing maintenance (this is also the lesson of Musk's mass layoffs at Twitter).

Tech bosses have metabolized this lesson, and they are increasingly willing to wage all-out war at the first sign of labor unrest, with waves of retaliatory firings. These bosses have figured out devilish tactics for constructive dismissal, like the CEO of Mapbox, who retaliated against union supporters by targeting them with "return to office" mandates that forced them to report in person to offices that were in distant states. This prompted many of these workers to quit, which spared Mapbox from even paying them a severance package.

Against this backdrop, strikes need to be seen not as a way to bring the business operations to a halt, but rather as a way to galvanize workers and bring them into the union drive. As New York Times Tech Guild organizer John Cruickshank put it, Action builds capacity for action.

This is the ethos of the Microsoft workers who have campaigned tirelessly to halt the company's participation in the genocide in Gaza. They barricaded themselves in executives' offices, livestreaming the confrontation; they disrupted Microsoft's livecast 50th anniversary celebration; and they paddled a flotilla of protest kayaks outside of top Microsoft executives' waterfront homes. All of this paid off, with Microsoft halting sales of its tools to a particularly notorious unit of the Israeli military who had been using the company's products to conduct surveillance in Gaza and the West Bank.

Tan and Redwine see these novel tactics as a rewilding of the labor movement, a return to the militant roots that led to the labor peace, but only after all-out labor war. They cite the 1934 Minneapolis truck drivers' strike, where workers invented the "flying picket" by swarming scab trucks far from the factory gates, defeating the trucks' police protection, which led to a general strike and a total victory for labor.

This is important historical context. The genteel business of getting everyone's cards signed and having the NLRB certify your union was the compromise bosses agreed to after they learned that the alternative was far worse for them. Today, it's not just bosses who've forgotten that lesson – many workers have, too. Against Tech Oligarchy aims to rekindle those old boilers and get the unstoppable labor train running again.

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 EMI will distribute music on Gnutella

#25yrsago Photos from O'Reilly P2P Con https://web.archive.org/web/20011124163254/http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2001/11/05/monday_photos.html

#20yrsago Aussie Institute of Criminology calls piracy losses “self-serving hyperbole” https://web.archive.org/web/20061208043648/http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,20713160^15306^^nbv^,00.html

#20yrsago UK airport cop: gun-shaped shirt decoration is illegal https://memex.craphound.com/2006/11/07/uk-airport-cop-gun-shaped-shirt-decoration-is-illegal/

#15yrsago Bug report: “Simultaneous cat and external keyboard input causing kernel panic” https://web.archive.org/web/20120112020023/https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/11/3/110

#10yrsago Hong Kong erupts after Beijing refuses to allow dissident lawmakers to re-take oath https://globalvoices.org/2016/11/06/street-protests-as-beijing-preempts-hong-kong-courts-with-new-interpretation-of-basic-law/

#10yrsago “Massive scale” shut-down of polling places in districts known for suppressing Black voters https://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/11/04/voting-rights-protections-gutted-polling-places-shuttered-massive-scale

#10yrsago Donald Trump’s campaign takes away his right to tweet without supervision https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/07/us/politics/donald-trump-presidential-race.html?_r=1

#10yrsago National Guard helicopter, 7 cop cars sent to warrantlessly seize a single marijuana plant from an 81-year-old grandmother https://www.loweringthebar.net/2016/11/national-guard-one-plant.html

#5yrsago Bait and Switch https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/07/bait-and-switch/

#1yrago The enshittification of labor https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/07/postwar-social-contract/#a-defense-of-social-contracts

#1yrago The 40-year economic mistake that let Google conquer (and enshittify) the world https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/06/vertical-blinds/#invest-dont-acquire

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: 532 (33976 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):

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Publié le 05.11.2026 à 09:53

Pluralistic: Without CDA 230, Facebook will own the internet forever (05 Nov 2026)


Today's links


A hand-tinted black and white photo of a nighttime outdoor square dance in the 1930s. In the center of the dancers stands a rampant demon from a 16th C grimoire, about to pounce on the revelers.

Without CDA 230, Facebook will own the internet forever (permalink)

The road to hell is paved with the depraved indifference to badly considered tech policy. The internet is one of those charismatic hyperobjects that wraps around our lives in myriad ways, so tech policy changes have a big blast radius.

This isn't a counsel of despair. I firmly believe that we can make tech policy, and furthermore, that we must, but that policy has to be crafted in a way that's mindful of collateral damage.

Take scraping. Most creative workers are rightly furious at the palpable glee of tech bosses, who want to take everything we've made in order to train models whose express purpose is to destroy our livelihoods and transfer our wages to AI companies and the media companies they sell to.

This is an entirely correct thing to be angry about. But many of my peers and comrades think the answer to this is to ban scraping, which is a terrible idea.

Scraping is how we make search engines. If you want Google to be the last search engine we ever get then by all means, change the rules so you need licenses to make transient copies of the web. There's only one company with deep-enough pockets to secure permission from every web site operator: Google, the thrice-convicted monopolist that dominates the web so thoroughly that no one could afford to turn them down.

Scraping is how we glue down the web's shifting sands. If you want to understand why the web says something today, it helps to know what it said yesterday. If we want to know how Zuck and Musk's algorithms are peddling disinformation and hatred, we need to be able to scrape their feeds. If we want to know how Amazon uses surveillance data to price-gouge shoppers, we need to scrape its prices. If we want to know how Uber cheats its most economically desperate drivers with lowball wage offers, we need to scrape its job listings.

(It's possible to make a scraper that's so clumsy or aggressive that it crashes or destroys websites. That's a dick move. We should find people who do that and punish them; and the thing we should punish them for is trashing websites – not making transient copies of the data on those sites.)

(If you want to protect creative livelihoods from AI bosses, the answer lies in labor organizing, not more copyright:)

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/21/off-the-menu/#universally-loathed

The point is that while tech bosses are some of the worst, most eminently guillotineable monsters history has produced, tech is important to the lives of billions of perfectly nice people. If you let your rage at tech bosses overwhelm your care for those everyday people, you risk coming up with "punishments" that end up benefiting Big Tech and wrecking the lives of those normal users.

For example: you may have heard people insist that we can solve our problems with Big Tech by "repealing Section 230." This is a reference to section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a 26-word law that makes users responsible for their speech, while insulating the platforms that facilitate that speech from liability:

https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act/

Here's what that means: say one user accuses another user of violating their rights through their words (libelling them, invading their privacy, etc). The wronged party can sue the person they're accusing of harming them, but they can't sue the social media platform, message board provider, hosting company, DNS provider (etc etc) for their role in hosting and transmitting the unlawful speech.

At the same time, CDA 230 allows all these "intermediaries" (social media platforms, hosting companies, message board providers, etc etc) to take down or otherwise moderate content that they deem offensive, without creating an obligation to police all of their users' speech.

CDA 230 grew out of lawsuits in the 1990s where online companies that took any action to remove offensive or unlawful speech were thereafter obliged to take down all unlawful speech. The lawfulness or unlawfulness of speech isn't something you can easily determine: for example, determining whether one user libeled another user requires that you find out whether the allegedly libelous speech is true. There's no way that a forum moderator can know that – it's the kind of thing you need a judge, a jury and a trial to figure out.

The result of these lawsuits was that most platforms decided they wouldn't take down any speech (so as to avoid creating an obligation to police all user speech), while a minority of platforms simply removed anything that anyone might find offensive. It was a mess:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratton_Oakmont,_Inc._v._Prodigy_Services_Co.

CDA 230 fixed that. CDA 230 is how an individual or a small organization can host its own Mastodon or Bluesky servers, its own message boards, etc. It's these "smallhosts" that are the primary beneficiaries of CDA 230, not the Big Tech companies that 230's opponents hope to target by reforming or repealing 230.

Big Tech would be happy to see CDA 230 repealed. Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly called for CDA 230 to be deleted, because he thinks that Meta could hire enough moderators (or use enough AI) that they could avoid being ensnared in a lot of frivolous litigation, and when legal threats did land, Zuck's army of lawyers could readily see them off:

https://cepr.net/publications/repealing-section-230-giving-mark-zuckerberg-what-he-wants/

Big Tech's biggest fear isn't a repeal of CDA 230: it's mass defection of its users to smaller, independent services that are more responsive to users' needs. Zuck doesn't care if we get a new law that would make it impossible for another #MeToo to take off!

This is on my mind this week because of the way that intermediary liability has nearly destroyed an online community that I helped found, way back in the early 1990s.

The community is a small arts organization that I joined as a teenager. The organization sent out a quarterly newsletter, which I devoured as soon as it arrived in my mailbox. I wanted more! A few years in, I had the idea of setting up an email list for the org. Another member had access to a server where we could host the list, and now, more than 30 years later, that list is still going strong.

Now, every small community has its cranks and trolls, and this one is no exception. One member in particular has a well-earned reputation for flying off the handle, showering anyone who disagrees with them with furious and obscene abuse (I've been on the receiving end of this abuse myself). Unsurprisingly, this person is also an inveterate culture warrior who can be relied upon to troll anyone who brings up racial or gender issues. When this trolling draws the inevitable critical response, this person then reverts to form, showering their critics with abuse and profanity.

The list is moderated, and the organization's code of conduct is used as a framework for the moderators' calls. Like most codes of conduct, this org's CoC includes some generalities that leave room for interpretation (basically, "Don't be a dick").

A moderation policy that allows the moderators to sanction users for flaming each other and a user who picks fights and then launches into unhinged tirades at the mildest of criticisms were always going to collide, and that's what happened with this user. After picking a fight over racist language, this user posted a bunch of racial epithets and got sanctioned for posting racist language.

That's when the user sued the organization's volunteer board members for libel for implying that they were racist, seeking tens of thousands of dollars in damages, far in excess of the org's cash reserves. The org stepped in to defend its board members, and even though this trollish member quickly folded their legal threat, mounting just that initial defense incinerated a sizable fraction of the org's total assets.

This is the thing that CDA 230 was designed to prevent. Even spurious legal threats can wipe out small, volunteer-run communities. In the 30 years since I founded this list, there have been a couple times when members tried to convince the organization to move it to Facebook or another Big Tech platform. Each time, the rest of us were able to rebuff those efforts, and today the list continues to be independently operated.

If this one belligerent jerk had held out for just a little longer, that would have been the end of this community – not just the mailing list, but the organization itself.

We can't have an indieweb without limited liability for intermediaries. Repealing CDA 230 won't hurt Facebook – it will just force every independent community to move there.

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 Dutch cops bombard stolen phones with SMSes https://web.archive.org/web/20011106210234/https://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/171836.html

#20yrsago Levy’s Perfect Thing: eye-opening iPod book https://memex.craphound.com/2006/11/05/levys-perfect-thing-eye-opening-ipod-book/

#20yrsago Army recruiters to students: “Iraq war is over” https://abcnews.com/GMA/story?id=2626032&page=1

#15yrsago Occupier/Army Ranger in ICU: Oakland PD “jumped me” https://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/04/us-protests-oakland-veteran-idUSTRE7A37A820111104/

#15yrsago Prisoner’s toothpick replicas of Final Fantasy weapons https://web.archive.org/web/20111105071751/https://www.geekosystem.com/prisoner-builds-final-fantasy-swords-matchsticks/

#10yrsago Canadians are getting “blackmailed” by US copyright trolls https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/copyright-infringement-notice-canada-piracy-1.3831492

#10yrsago Eleanor & Park: a terrifying YA romance that has rescued its readers and frightened their parents https://memex.craphound.com/2016/11/05/eleanor-park-a-terrifying-ya-romance-that-has-rescued-its-readers-and-frightened-their-parents/

#10yrsago Chrome is about to start warning users that non-HTTPS sites are insecure https://www.wired.com/2016/11/googles-chrome-hackers-flip-webs-security-model/

#10yrsago Rebecca Solnit’s open letter to Trump: You should really visit New York some time https://lithub.com/new-york-city-is-a-book-conservatives-should-read/

#10yrsago The New York Times’s GOP voter-suppression retrogame: “The Voter Suppression Trail” https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/01/opinion/voting-suppression-videogame.html

#10yrsago Toronto Star compiles a comprehensive list of Trump’s election-season lies https://web.archive.org/web/20161105070153/https://www.thestar.com/news/world/uselection/2016/11/04/donald-trump-the-unauthorized-database-of-false-things.html

#1yrago "Science Comics Computers: How Digital Hardware Works" https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/05/xor-xand-xnor-nand-nor/#brawniac

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: 511 (32924 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 04.11.2026 à 12:45

Pluralistic: The AI fatfinger economy has come for my receipts app (04 Nov 2026)


Today's links


A many-armed pulp science fiction robot pins a giant finger using its spiked appendages. In the background is an architectural rendering of a grand 16th century city.

The AI fatfinger economy has come for my receipts app (permalink)

"AI is being shoved down our throats" can mean any of several things. It can mean that our bosses are demanding that we use AI in reckless or nonsensical ways on the job:

https://www.404media.co/manifestos-fear-and-loser-thinking-inside-protons-ai-reckoning/

It can mean that Elon Musk and the NASDAQ have colluded to force ordinary retirement savers to bail out his emirati and tech oligarch buddies:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/05/technology/spacex-indexes-401k.html

These are arguably the most important ways in which AI is shoved down our throats, but the most visible form of conscription into the number-go-up AI project is happening at the user interface level. This UI fuckery predates AI. For more than a decade, tech companies and their executives have colluded to trick, coerce and force you into using new features that they wanted to sell to their investors as the future of their companies.

Remember Google Plus, the Facebook-killing social layer that was going to give Google access to a new, multi-trillion-dollar market? Bradley Horowitz, then a VP at Google, charged every product team with cramming G+ into their offerings, tying their bonuses to G+ usage (at companies like Google, your bonus can dwarf your base salary).

Now, googlers are bright and resourceful people, and if you tell them that they can double their earnings by getting users to click on Google Plus buttons, they'll come up with all kinds of ways to get you to do this. Some of those gambits will be the kind of thing that Horowitz doubtless hoped for: innovative and creative ways to add value to Google's core offerings with G+ features.

But when the stakes are that high, Goodhart's Law inevitably comes into play: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

The easiest way to get a user to click on a G+ button is to replace whatever button that user hits most often with a G+ version. Rather than introducing users to Google Plus in a way that turns them into G+ fans, you just frustrate them by tricking them into clicking on a useless button.

From a product manager's perspective, it's worth making whatever changes as are needed to ensure that your salary is doubled because you hit your "key performance indicator" (KPI), even if it's at the expense of your users' loyalty to your product. Preserving user loyalty at the expense of half your wages is a bad trade.

When a machine learning system does this, we call it "reward hacking." AI programmers create an "objective function" for their system, a single number that the system will try every tactic to increase; then, more often than not, the AI program finds perverse shortcuts to make the number go up whether or not it achieves the programmer's goal:

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

For example, if you charge an AI with coming up with the shortest run through a video game, it might well discover a bug that makes it impervious to enemy attacks or just lets it teleport to the end of the game. To avoid these perverse outcomes, programmers have to add more and more specificity to their objective functions: "speed run the game without teleporting or discovering an immortality hack."

Not for nothing, many science fiction writers (including me) have noted that tech bosses' fear of their own AI systems is a kind of emotional spillover from their frustrations with the corporations they run, where underlings engage in the same kinds of reward hacking that we see from chatbots:

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

Despite the ease with which metrics can be gamed, tech bosses remained committed to the use of KPIs to shift the priorities of their organizations, and they use the same objective function refinement technique that programmers use for reward-hacking AIs in a bid to prevent cheating by employees who hit their KPIs any way they can.

This explains a lot about the experience of watching a video on your phone. Any time you tune into a show on a streaming platform, you are forced to handle your phone with the delicacy of a photonegative. If any part of your hand brushes any part of the screen, you will immediately be whisked away from the video you're watching to an entirely different one:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/15/the-fatfinger-economy/

Worse, after your program has been replaced with this new one, there's no obvious way to get back to the show you were just watching. This is very weird, considering that the "back button" has been a part of computer interfaces since 1981:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/back%20button

The reason you don't get a back button is reward hacking. Streaming video platforms are under enormous pressure to successfully recommend their back-catalog to their users, because the alternative (commissioning or purchasing a steady stream of popular new shows) is very expensive. Investors put a lot of stock in streaming services' "successful recommendation" rate.

So streaming service bosses charge their product teams with making "successful recommendations." The easiest way to "recommend a show" is to booby-trap the streaming service's UI so that touching any part of the screen takes you to a video you never asked to see.

This is obvious reward hacking, so streaming bosses refined their objective function: they made their teams' bonuses contingent on getting you to watch a new video for a minimum time-frame. This in turn triggered the next volley in the reward-hacking wars, in which product teams took away the back button. This gives users any number of greased slides that whisk them away to a new video. To get back to the old video, users are forced to climb a greased pole.

This is the fatfinger economy: created in the 2010s by teams at large tech companies with KPI-obsessed bosses; refined in the 2020s by teams at bottom-line obsessed streaming media companies; and now perfected by teams being charged with cramming AI into every corner of our lives:

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

The fatfinger economy is an extraordinary beneficiary of the drive to add "telemetry" to all of our apps. Today, an app vendor can call up a dashboard and find out which buttons and fields and sliders see the most use, and they can use that ranked list to figure out which buttons to replace with AI-demon-summoning lookalikes that help product teams "prove" to their bosses that they've "successfully integrated AI" and lets their bosses prove to their investors that "users value AI features."

I recently switched from Android to Graphene, a de-googled phone operating system. Graphene's maintainers are blissfully free from the imperative to show that "users value AI features," and that's why I have never accidentally summoned up an undismissable AI by tapping a Graphene UI element.

It's a different story when it comes to apps. Graphene has many different ways to install apps, including via Google Play (Google's default Android store). That's useful because it lets you install your old Android apps after switching to Graphene, but it does leave you exposed to the fatfinger economy.

Last week, I got a painful reminder of the progress of the fatfinger economy outside of Graphene's utopian pocket-universe. I make extensive use of an app called "Genius Scanner," which lets me scan receipts and email them to myself (I do this a lot because, as a freelancer, I have to track a lot of different expenses). I bought a lifetime subscription to Genius Scanner in 2023, after getting burned by Camscanner (my previous, now enshittified scanning app), and I've been perfectly happy with it…until now.

Genius Scanner is obviously under pressure to drive AI adoption. I can tell because they've taken away the most important UI element and swapped it for a worse-than-useless AI button.

Here's how I use Genius Scanner: I press the "make new scan" button and line up the receipt on the screen. Then I press the "retitle" button, which brings up a field that is populated with the current date and time (16 characters in all). This text used to be selected so that hitting the little "x" next to it deleted it, making it easy to title a new scan. After that, I'd just email it to myself.

As of last week, though, there is no button that deletes the date and time so you can enter a useful title. That little "x" has been replaced with a button that brings up an ad for the company's new AI tools, which cost $40/year. There's no way to tell the system that you're not interested in buying a new subscription for the tool that you've already bought a lifetime sub for, and there's no way to get that little "x" back.

To be clear: that little "x" represents one quarter of my receipt scanning workflow. They have swapped it out for an ad for a new subscription AI feature, and gave me 16 new keypresses on the backspace button to replace that single tap on the "x." I have seen that ad about 100 times at this point, because I keep tapping the spot where the "x" used to be.

I'm certain that the company knew that its paying customers relied on the "x" to accomplish a vital function in any scanning app (giving good, descriptive titles to scans). They need the AI number to go up, so they replaced the "x" with the AI ad, which will let them tell their investors that they've got "strong consumer interest in their AI features."

Meanwhile, they already have my money, so there's no way I can punish them for their decision to screw me over to juke a meaningless stat. It's as neat (and depressing) an example of the principle that "even if you're paying for the product, you're still the product" that you could ask for.

It's also a perfect little object-lesson in the ways that companies can report increasing AI interest and usage without generating any interest or usage. In the fatfinger economy, every metric is a target, and is thereby rendered meaningless.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Army Times: Rumsfeld must go! https://web.archive.org/web/20061107220242/http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/110406Z.shtml

#20yrsago UK is a surveillance society http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6108496.stm

#20yrsago Record companies sue soccer mom’s kids https://web.archive.org/web/20061104145550/https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/02/AR2006110200114.html

#15yrsago HOWTO make your own skateboard truck lazy-susan table https://www.instructables.com/Skateboard-Table/

#15yrsago Home Secretary to OccupyLondon: you’re scaring the tourists https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-15588987

#15yrsago Judge whose daughter released video of him beating her suspended from bench during judicial investigation https://web.archive.org/web/20111105234141/http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_VIDEOTAPED_BEATING_TEXAS

#15yrsago Prof who keeps announcing links between the Internet, childhood dementia and autism should publish theories in a scientific journal https://www.badscience.net/2011/11/why-wont-professor-greenfield-publish-this-theory-in-a-scientific-journal/

#10yrsago Internet of Things botnet threatens to knock the entire country of Liberia offline https://doublepulsar.com/shadows-kill-mirai-ddos-botnet-testing-large-scale-attacks-sending-threatening-messages-about-6a61553d1c7#.zg4448j8w

#10yrsago Black Lives Matter declares its opposition to TPP https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/11/gauis-publius-tpp-has-picked-up-a-powerful-enemy-black-lives-matter.html

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: 544 (32413 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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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

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

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