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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 09.03.2026 à 17:46

Pluralistic: Billionaires are a danger to themselves and (especially) us (09 Mar 2026)


Today's links


A king on a sumptuous, much elaborated throne; in one hand he holds a sceptre of office, in the other, the leashes for two fierce stone dogs that guard the throne. The king's head has been replaced with a character who was used as the basis for MAD Magazine's Alfred E Neumann. The new head sports a conical dunce cap. Behind the king is a large group of 1960s business men, seated and standing, in conservative suits. The background is the view from the 80th floor of World Trade Center 3. The floor has been carpeted in sumptuous tabriz from the Ottoman court.

Billionaires are a danger to themselves and (especially) us (permalink)

Even if rich people were no more likely to believe stupid shit than you or me, it would still be a problem. After all, I believe in my share of stupid shit (and if you think that none of the shit you believe in is stupid, then I'm afraid we've just identified at least one kind of stupid shit you believe in).

The problem isn't whether rich people believe stupid shit; it's the fact that when a rich person believes something stupid, that belief can turn into torment for dozens, thousands, or millions of people.

Here's a historical example that I think about a lot. In 1928, Henry Ford got worried about the rubber supply chain. All the world's rubber came from plantations in countries that he had limited leverage over and he was worried that these countries could kneecap his operation by cutting off the supply. So Ford decided he would start cultivating rubber in the Brazilian jungles, judging that Brazil's politicians were biddable, bribeable or bludgeonable and thus not a risk.

Ford took over a large area of old-growth jungle in Brazil and decreed that a town be built there. But not just any town: Ford decreed that the town of Fordlandia would be a replica of Dearborn, the company town he controlled in Michigan. Now, leaving aside the colonialism and other ethical considerations, there are plenty of practical reasons not to replicate Dearborn, MI on the banks of the Rio Tapajós.

For one thing, Brazil is in the southern hemisphere, and Dearborn is in the northern hemisphere. The prefab houses that Ford ordered for Fordlandia had windows optimized for southern exposure, which is the normal way of designing a dwelling in the northern hemisphere. In the southern hemisphere, you try and put your windows on the other side of the building.

Ford's architects told him this, and proposed having the factory flip the houses' orientation. But Ford was adamant: he'd had a vision for a replica of his beloved Dearborn plunked down smack in the middle of the Amazon jungle, and by God, that was what he would get:

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

Fordlandia was a catastrophe for so many reasons, and the windows are just a little footnote, but it's a detail that really stuck with me because it's just so stupid. Ford was a vicious antisemite, a bigot, a union-buster and an all-round piece of shit, but also, he believed that his opinions trumped the axial tilt of the planet Earth.

In other words, Henry Ford wasn't merely evil – he was also periodically as thick as pigshit. Ford's cherished stupidities didn't just affect him, they also meant that a whole city full of people in the Amazon had windows facing the wrong direction. Like I said, I sometimes believe stupid things, but those stupid things aren't consequential the way that rich people's cherished stupidities are.

This would be bad enough if rich people were no more prone to stupid beliefs than the rest of us, but it's actually worse than that. When I believe something stupid, it tends to get me in trouble, which means that (at least some of the time), I get to learn from my mistakes. But if you're a rich person, you can surround yourself with people who will tell you that you are right even when you are so wrong, with the result that you get progressively more wrong, until you literally kill yourself:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/alternative-medicine-extend-abbreviate-steve-jobs-life/

A rich person could surround themselves with people who tell them that they're being stupid, but in practice, this almost never happens. After all, the prime advantage to accumulating as much money as possible is freedom from having to listen to other people. The richer you are, the fewer people there are who can thwart your will. Get rich enough and you can be found guilty of 34 felonies and still become President of the United States of America.

But wait, it gets even worse! Hurting other people is often a great way to get even more rich. So the richer you get, the more insulated you are from consequences for hurting other people, and the more you hurt other people, the richer you get.

What a world! The people whose wrong beliefs have the widest blast-radius and inflict the most collateral damage also have the fewest sources of external discipline that help them improve their beliefs, and often, that collateral damage is a feature, not a bug.

Billionaires are a danger to themselves and (especially) to the rest of us. They are wronger than the median person, and the consequences of their wrongness are exponentially worse than the consequences of the median person's mistake.

This has been on my mind lately because of a very local phenomenon.

I live around the corner from Burbank airport, a great little regional airport on the edge of Hollywood. It was never brought up to code, so the gates are really close together, which means the planes park really close together, and there's no room for jetways, so they park right up against the terminal. The ground crews wheel staircase/ramps to both the front and back of the plane. That means that you can walk the entire length of the terminal in about five minutes, and boarding and debarking takes less than half the time of any other airport. Sure, if one of those planes ever catches fire, every other plane is gonna go boom, and everyone in the terminal is toast, but my sofa-to-gate time is like 15 minutes.

Best of all, Burbank is a Southwest hub. When we moved here a decade ago, this was great. Southwest, after all, has free bag-check, open seating, a great app, friendly crews, and a generous policy for canceling or changing reservations.

If you fly in the US, you know what's coming next. In 2024, a hedge fund called Elliott Investment Management acquired an 11% stake in SWA, forced a boardroom coup that saw it replace five of the company's six directors, and then instituted a top to bottom change in airline policies. The company eliminated literally everything that Southwest fliers loved about the airline, from the free bags to the open seating:

https://www.reddit.com/r/SouthwestAirlines/comments/1ji79zt/elliott_management_is_dismantling_everything/

The airline went from being the least enshittified airline in America to the most. Southwest is now worse than Spirit airlines – no, really. Southwest doesn't just merely charge for seat selection, but if you refuse to pay for seat selection, they preferentially place you in a middle seat even on a half-empty flight, as a way of pressuring you to pay the sky-high junk fee for seat selection:

https://www.reddit.com/r/SouthwestAirlines/comments/1rd2g0k/ngl_thought_yall_were_joking/

Obviously, passengers who are given middle seats (and the passengers around them, who paid for window or aisle seats) don't like this, so they try to change seats. So SWA now makes its flight attendants order passengers not to switch seats, and they've resorted to making up nonsense about "weight balancing":

https://www.reddit.com/r/SouthwestAirlines/comments/1roz1bg/you_can_change_to_an_empty_seatbut_only_until_we/

Even without junk fees, Southwest's fares are now higher than their rivals. I'm flying to San Francisco tomorrow to host EFF executive director Cindy Cohn's book launch at City Lights:

https://citylights.com/events/cindy-cohn-launch-party-for-privacys-defender/

Normally, I would have just booked a SWA flight from Burbank to SFO or Oakland (which gets less fog and is more reliable). But the SWA fare – even without junk fees – was higher than a United ticket out of the same airport, even including a checked bag, seat selection, etc. Southwest is genuinely worse than Spirit now: not only does it have worse policies (forcing occupancy of middle seats!), and more frustrated, angrier flight crew (flight attendants are palpably sick of arguing with passengers), but SWA is now more expensive than United!

All of this is the fault of one billionaire: Elliott Investment Management CEO Peter Singer, one of America's most guillotineable plutes. This one guy personally enshittified Southwest Airlines, along with many other businesses in America and abroad. Because of this one guy, millions of people are made miserable every single day. Singer flogged off his shares and made a tidy profit. He's long gone. But SWA will never recover, and every day until its collapse, millions of passengers and flight attendants will have a shitty day because of this one guy:

https://www.wfaa.com/article/money/business/southwest-airlines-activist-investor-elliott-lower-ownership-stake/287-470b5131-ef1a-4648-a8ec-4cc017f7914c

Even if Peter Singer were no more prone to ethical missteps than you or me, the fact that he is morbidly wealthy means that his ethical blind spots leave behind a trail of wreckage that rivals a comet. And of course, being as rich as Peter Singer inflicts a lasting neurological injury that makes you incapable of understanding how wrong you are, which means that Peter Singer is doubly dangerous.

Billionaires aren't just a danger when they're trying to make money, either. One of the arguments in favor of billionaires is that sometimes, the "good" billionaires take up charitable causes. But even here, billionaires can cause sweeping harm. Take Bill Gates, whose charitable projects include waging war on the public education system, seeking to replace public schools with charter schools.

Gates has no background in education, but he spent millions on this project. He is one of the main reasons that poor communities around the country have been pressured to shutter their public schools and replace them with weakly regulated, extractive charters:

https://apnews.com/article/92dc914dd97c487a9b9aa4b006909a8c

This was a catastrophe. A single billionaire dilettante's cherished stupidity wrecked the educational chances of a generation of kids:

https://dissidentvoice.org/2026/03/free-market-charter-schools-wreak-havoc-in-michigan/

Gates was a prep-school kid, so it's weird for him to have forceful views about a public education system he never experienced. In reality, it's not so much that Gates has forceful views about schools – rather, he has forceful views about teachers' unions, which he wishes to see abolished. Gates is one of America's most vicious union-busters:

https://teamster.org/2019/10/teamsters-union-and-allies-protest-bill-gates-and-cambridge-union-society/

Gates's ideology permeates all of his charitable work. We all know about Gates's work on public health, but less well known is the role that Gates has played in blocking poor countries from exercising their rights under the WTO to override drug patents in times of emergency. In the 2000s, the Gates Foundation blocked South Africa from procuring the anti-retroviral AIDS drugs it was entitled to under the WTO's TRIPS agreement. The Gates Foundation blocked the Access to Medicines WIPO treaty, which would have vastly expanded the Global South's ability to manufacture life-saving drugs. And during the acute phase of the covid pandemic, Gates personally intervened to kill the WHO Covid-19 Technology Access Pool and to get Oxford to renege on its promise to make an open-source vaccine:

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

It's not that Gates is insincere in his desire to improve public health outcomes – it's that his desire to improve public health conflicts with his extreme ideology of maximum intellectual property regimes. Gates simply opposes open science and compulsory licenses on scientific patents, even when that kills millions of people (as it did in South Africa). Gates's morbid wealth magnifies his cherished stupidities into weapons of mass destruction.

Gates is back in the news these days because of his membership in the Epstein class. Epstein is the poster child for the ways that wealth is a force-multiplier for bad ideas. We can't separate Epstein's sexual predation from his wealth. Epstein spun elaborate junk-science theories to justify raping children, becoming mired in that most rich-guy coded of quagmires, eugenics:

https://www.statnews.com/2026/02/24/epstein-cell-line-george-church-harvard-personal-genome-project/

Epstein openly discussed his plans to seed the planet with his DNA, reportedly telling one scientist that he planned to fill his ranch with young trafficked girls and to keep 20 of them pregnant with his children at all times:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/31/business/jeffrey-epstein-eugenics.html

We still don't know where Epstein's wealth came from, but we know that he was a central node in a network of vast riches, much of which he directed to his weird scientific projects. That network also protected him from consequences for his prolific child-rape project, which had more than 1,000 survivors.

In embracing eugenics junk science, Epstein was ahead of the curve. Today, eugenics is all the rage, reviving an idea that went out of fashion shortly after the Fordlandia era. After all, Henry Ford didn't just build a private city where his word was law – he also bought up media companies to promote his ideas of racial superiority:

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

Despite being too cringe to make it onto Epstein island, Elon Musk is the standard bearer for the dangers of billionaireism:

https://people.com/emails-reveal-that-elon-musk-asked-jeffrey-epstein-about-visiting-his-island-11896842

Like Henry Ford, he craves company towns where his word is law:

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/inside-starbase-spacex-elon-musk-company-town/

Like Ford, he buys up media companies and then uses them to push his batshit ideas about racial superiority:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/01/eugenics-isnt-dead-its-thriving-in-tech/

Like Peter Singer, he is a master enshittifier who never met a junk fee he didn't fall in love with:

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/01/tech/musk-twitter-verification-price

And like Epstein, he wants to seed the human race with his babies, and has built a secret compound in the desert he plans to fill with women he has impregnated:

https://www.realtor.com/news/celebrity-real-estate/elon-musk-compound-austin-children/

Billionaires and their lickspittles will tell you that all of this is wrong: the market selects "capital allocators" by executing a vast, distributed computer program whose logic gates are every producer and consumer in The Economy (TM), and whose data are trillions of otherwise uncomputable buy and sell decisions.

This is a tautology: the argument goes that only good people are made rich, and therefore all the rich people are good. If rich people had as many cherished stupidities as I claim, The Economy (TM) would relieve them of their wealth, and thus their power to allocate capital, and thus their potential to hurt people by being wrong, which means that they must be right.

This is the stupidest (and most destructive) of all of billionaireism's cherished stupidities: that we live in a meritocracy, which means that whatever the richest people want must be right. It's a modern update to the doctrine of divine providence, which held that we can discern god's favor through wealth. The more god loves you, the richer he makes you.

This can't be true, because every single economic cataclysm in the history of the world was the fault of rich people. Rich people gave us the 19th century's bank panics. They gave us the South Seas bubble. They gave us the Great Depression, and the S&L Crisis, and the Great Financial Crisis. They invented greedflation and created the cost of living crisis. Today, they are teeing up an AI crash that will make 2008 look like the best day of your life:

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

The old left aphorism has it that "every billionaire is a policy failure." That's true, but it's incomplete. Every billionaire is a machine for producing policy failures at scale.

(Image: Aude, CC BY 4.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Indie label uses heartfelt note instead of copy-restriction http://blog.resonancefm.com/archives/48

#20yrsago Clay Shirky’s ETECH presentation on the politics of social software https://craphound.com/youshutupetech2006.txt

#20yrsago Judge quotes Adam Sandler movie in decision blasting defendant https://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/crime/motion-denied-because-youre-idiot

#15yrsago Video game in your browser’s location bar web.archive.org/web/20110309212313/http://probablyinteractive.com/url-hunter

#15yrsago Wondrous, detailed map of the history of science fiction https://web.archive.org/web/20110310152548/http://scimaps.org/submissions/7-digital_libraries/maps/thumbs/024_LG.jpg

#15yrsago American Library Association task forces to take on ebook lending https://web.archive.org/web/20110310085634/https://www.wo.ala.org/districtdispatch/?p=5749

#15yrsago Wisconsin capitol bans recording, flags, reading, balloons, chairs, bags, backpacks, photography, etc etc etc https://captimes.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/more-rules-released-for-state-capitol-visitors/article_f044044f-6183-5128-b718-d5dffbfdb573.html

#15yrsago Librarians Against DRM logo https://web.archive.org/web/20110308170030/https://readersbillofrights.info/librariansagainstDRM

#15yrsago Extinct invertebrates caught in a 40 million year old sex act https://web.archive.org/web/20110303234001/http://news.discovery.com/animals/40-million-year-old-sex-act-captured-in-amber.html

#15yrsago Improvised toilets of earthquake-struck Christchurch https://web.archive.org/web/20110310044912/https://www.showusyourlongdrop.co.nz/

#15yrsago Canadian MP who shills for the record industry is an enthusiastic pirate https://web.archive.org/web/20110310163136/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5673/125/

#15yrsago The Monster: the fraud and depraved indifference that caused the subprime meltdown https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/07/the-monster-the-fraud-and-depraved-indifference-that-caused-the-subprime-meltdown/

#15yrsago Self-destructing ebooks: paper’s fragility is a bug, not a feature https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/08/ebooks-harpercollins-26-times

#10yrsago Senior U.S. immigration judge says 3 and 4 year old children can represent themselves in court https://web.archive.org/web/20160304201631/http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2016/03/04/us-judge-says-3-and-4-year-olds-can-represent-themselves-in-immigration-court.html

#10yrsago Crimefighting for fun and profit: data-mining Medicare fraud and likely whistleblowers https://www.wired.com/2016/03/john-mininno-medicare/

#10yrsago Extensive list of space opera cliches https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/03/towards-a-taxonomy-of-cliches-.html

#10yrsago Verizon pays $1.35M FCC settlement for using “supercookies” https://web.archive.org/web/20160308111653/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/verizon-settles-over-supercookies

#10yrsago Group chat: “an all-day meeting with random participants and no agenda” https://signalvnoise.com/svn3/is-group-chat-making-you-sweat/#.1chnl7hf4

#10yrsago Less than a year on, America has all but forgotten the epic Jeep hack https://www.wired.com/2016/03/survey-finds-one-4-americans-remembers-jeep-hack/

#10yrsago Racial justice organizers to FBI vs Apple judge: crypto matters to #blacklivesmatter https://theintercept.com/2016/03/08/the-fbi-vs-apple-debate-just-got-less-white/

#1yrago Gandersauce https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/08/turnabout/#is-fair-play

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 Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Publié le 07.03.2026 à 19:02

Pluralistic: The web is bearable with RSS (07 Mar 2026)


Today's links


An anatomical drawing of a cross-section of a man's head. The eyeball has been replaced by an RSS logo. To the left of the face is a 'code waterfall' effect as seen in the credit sequences of the Wachowskis' 'Matrix' movie. To the right are clouds of grey roiling clouds, infiltrating the brain as well.

The web is bearable with RSS (permalink)

Never let them tell you that enshittification was a mystery. Enshittification isn't downstream of the "iron laws of economics" or an unrealistic demand by "consumers" to get stuff for free.

Enshittification comes from specific policy choices, made by named individuals, that had the foreseeable and foreseen result of making the web worse:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/07/take-it-easy/#but-take-it

Like, there was once a time when an ever-increasing proportion of web users kept tabs on what was going on with RSS. RSS is a simple, powerful way for websites to publish "feeds" of their articles, and for readers to subscribe to those feeds and get notified when something new was posted, and even read that new material right there in your RSS reader tab or app.

RSS is simple and versatile. It's the backbone of podcasts (though Apple and Spotify have done their best to kill it, along with public broadcasters like the BBC, all of whom want you to switch to proprietary apps that spy on you and control you). It's how many automated processes communicate with one another, untouched by human hands. But above all, it's a way to find out when something new has been published on the web.

RSS's liftoff was driven by Google, who released a great RSS reader called "Google Reader" in 2007. Reader was free and reliable, and other RSS readers struggled to compete with it, with the effect that most of us just ended up using Google's product, which made it even harder to launch a competitor.

But in 2013, Google quietly knifed Reader. I've always found the timing suspicious: it came right in the middle of Google's desperate scramble to become Facebook, by means of a product called Google Plus (G+). Famously, Google product managers' bonuses depended on how much G+ engagement they drove, with the effect that every Google product suddenly sprouted G+ buttons that either did something stupid, or something that confusingly duplicated existing functionality (like commenting on Youtube videos).

Google treated G+ as an existential priority, and for good reason. Google was running out of growth potential, having comprehensively conquered Search, and having repeatedly demonstrated that Search was a one-off success, with nearly every other made-in-Google product dying off. What successes Google could claim were far more modest, like Gmail, Google's Hotmail clone. Google augmented its growth by buying other peoples' companies (Blogger, YouTube, Maps, ad-tech, Docs, Android, etc), but its internal initiatives were turkeys.

Eventually, Wall Street was going to conclude that Google had reached the end of its growth period, and Google's shares would fall to a fraction of their value, with a price-to-earnings ratio commensurate with a "mature" company.

Google needed a new growth story, and "Google will conquer Facebook's market" was a pretty good one. After all, investors didn't have to speculate about whether Facebook was profitable, they could just look at Facebook's income statements, which Google proposed to transfer to its own balance sheet. The G+ full-court press was as much a narrative strategy as a business strategy: by tying product managers' bonuses to a metric that demonstrated G+'s rise, Google could convince Wall Street that they had a lot of growth on their horizon.

Of course, tying individual executives' bonuses to making a number go up has a predictably perverse outcome. As Goodhart's law has it, "Any metric becomes a target, and then ceases to be a useful metric." As soon as key decision-makers' personal net worth depending on making the G+ number go up, they crammed G+ everywhere and started to sneak in ways to trigger unintentional G+ sessions. This still happens today – think of how often you accidentally invoke an unbanishable AI feature while using Google's products (and products from rival giant, moribund companies relying on an AI narrative to convince investors that they will continue to grow):

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

Like I said, Google Reader died at the peak of Google's scramble to make the G+ number go up. I have a sneaking suspicion that someone at Google realized that Reader's core functionality (helping users discover, share and discuss interesting new web pages) was exactly the kind of thing Google wanted us to use G+ for, and so they killed Reader in a bid to drive us to the stalled-out service they'd bet the company on.

If Google killed Reader in a bid to push users to discover and consume web pages using a proprietary social media service, they succeeded. Unfortunately, the social media service they pushed users into was Facebook – and G+ died shortly thereafter.

For more than a decade, RSS has lain dormant. Many, many websites still emit RSS feeds. It's a default behavior for WordPress sites, for Ghost and Substack sites, for Tumblr and Medium, for Bluesky and Mastodon. You can follow edits to Wikipedia pages by RSS, and also updates to parcels that have been shipped to you through major couriers. Web builders like Jason Kottke continue to surface RSS feeds for elaborate, delightful blogrolls:

https://kottke.org/rolodex/

There are many good RSS readers. I've been paying for Newsblur since 2011, and consider the $36 I send them every year to be a very good investment:

https://newsblur.com/

But RSS continues to be a power user-coded niche, despite the fact that RSS readers are really easy to set up and – crucially – make using the web much easier. Last week, Caroline Crampton (co-editor of The Browser) wrote about her experiences using RSS:

https://www.carolinecrampton.com/the-view-from-rss/

As Crampton points out, much of the web (including some of the cruftiest, most enshittified websites) publish full-text RSS feeds, meaning that you can read their articles right there in your RSS reader, with no ads, no popups, no nag-screens asking you to sign up for a newsletter, verify your age, or submit to their terms of service.

It's almost impossible to overstate how superior RSS is to the median web page. Imagine if the newsletters you followed were rendered with black, clear type on a plain white background (rather than the sadistically infinitesimal, greyed-out type that designers favor thanks to the unkillable urban legend that black type on a white screen causes eye-strain). Imagine reading the web without popups, without ads, without nag screens. Imagine reading the web without interruptors or "keep reading" links.

Now, not every website publishes a fulltext feed. Often, you will just get a teaser, and if you want to read the whole article, you have to click through. I have a few tips for making other websites – even ones like Wired and The Intercept – as easy to read as an RSS reader, at least for Firefox users.

Firefox has a built-in "Reader View" that re-renders the contents of a web-page as black type on a white background. Firefox does some kind of mysterious calculation to determine whether a page can be displayed in Reader View, but you can override this with the Activate Reader View, which adds a Reader View toggle for every page:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/activate-reader-view/

Lots of websites (like The Guardian) want you to login before you can read them, and even if you pay to subscribe to them, these sites often want you to re-login every time you visit them (especially if you're running a full suite of privacy blockers). You can skip this whole process by simply toggling Reader View as soon as you get the login pop up. On some websites (like The Verge and Wired), you'll only see the first couple paragraphs of the article in Reader View. But if you then hit reload, the whole article loads.

Activate Reader View puts a Reader View toggle on every page, but clicking that toggle sometimes throws up an error message, when the page is so cursed that Firefox can't figure out what part of it is the article. When this happens, you're stuck reading the page in the site's own default (and usually terrible) view. As you scroll down the page, you will often hit pop-ups that try to get you to sign up for a mailing list, agree to terms of service, or do something else you don't want to do. Rather than hunting for the button to close these pop-ups (or agree to objectionable terms of service), you can install "Kill Sticky," a bookmarklet that reaches into the page's layout files and deletes any element that isn't designed to scroll with the rest of the text:

https://github.com/t-mart/kill-sticky

Other websites (like Slashdot and Core77) load computer-destroying Javascript (often as part of an anti-adblock strategy). For these, I use the "Javascript Toggle On and Off" plugin, which lets you create a blacklist of websites that aren't allowed to run any scripts:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/javascript-toggler/

Some websites (like Yahoo) load so much crap that they defeat all of these countermeasures. For these websites, I use the "Element Blocker" plug-in, which lets you delete parts of the web-page, either for a single session, or permanently:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/element-blocker/

It's ridiculous that websites put so many barriers up to a pleasant reading experience. A slow-moving avalanche of enshittogenic phenomena got us here. There's corporate enshittification, like Google/Meta's monopolization of ads and Meta/Twitter's crushing of the open web. There's regulatory enshittification, like the EU's failure crack down on companies the pretend that forcing you to click an endless stream of "cookie consent" popups is the same as complying with the GDPR.

Those are real problems, but they don't have to be your problem, at least when you want to read the web. A couple years ago, I wrote a guide to using RSS to improve your web experience, evade lock-in and duck algorithmic recommendation systems:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/16/keep-it-really-simple-stupid/#read-receipts-are-you-kidding-me-seriously-fuck-that-noise

Customizing your browser takes this to the next level, disenshittifying many websites – even if they block or restrict RSS. Most of this stuff only applies to desktop browsers, though. Mobile browsers are far more locked down (even mobile Firefox – remember, every iOS browser, including Firefox, is just a re-skinned version of Safari, thanks to Apple's ban rival browser engines). And of course, apps are the worst. An app is just a website skinned in the right kind of IP to make it a crime to improve it in any way:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet

And even if you do customize your mobile browser (Android Firefox lets you do some of this stuff), many apps (Twitter, Tumblr) open external links in their own browser (usually an in-app Chrome instance) with all the bullshit that entails.

The promise of locked-down mobile platforms was that they were going to "just work," without any of the confusing customization options of desktop OSes. It turns out that taking away those confusing customization options was an invitation to every enshittifier to turn the web into an unreadable, extractive, nagging mess. This was the foreseeable – and foreseen – consequence of a new kind of technology where everything that isn't mandatory is prohibited:

https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/01/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/

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 200 Eyemodule photos from Disneyland https://craphound.com/030401/

#20yrsago Fourth Amendment luggage tape https://ideas.4brad.com/node/367

#15yrsago Glenn Beck’s syndicator runs a astroturf-on-demand call-in service for radio programs https://web.archive.org/web/20110216081007/http://www.tabletmag.com/life-and-religion/58759/radio-daze/

#15yrsago 20 lies from Scott Walker https://web.archive.org/web/20110308062319/https://filterednews.wordpress.com/2011/03/05/20-lies-and-counting-told-by-gov-walker/

#10yrsago The correlates of Trumpism: early mortality, lack of education, unemployment, offshored jobs https://web.archive.org/web/20160415000000*/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/04/death-predicts-whether-people-vote-for-donald-trump/

#10yrsago Hacking a phone’s fingerprint sensor in 15 mins with $500 worth of inkjet printer and conductive ink https://web.archive.org/web/20160306194138/http://www.cse.msu.edu/rgroups/biometrics/Publications/Fingerprint/CaoJain_HackingMobilePhonesUsing2DPrintedFingerprint_MSU-CSE-16-2.pdf

#10yrsago Despite media consensus, Bernie Sanders is raising more money, from more people, than any candidate, ever https://web.archive.org/web/20160306110848/https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/sanders-keeps-raising-money–and-spending-it-a-potential-problem-for-clinton/2016/03/05/a8d6d43c-e2eb-11e5-8d98-4b3d9215ade1_story.html

#10yrsago Calculating US police killings using methodologies from war-crimes trials https://granta.com/violence-in-blue/

#1yrago Brother makes a demon-haunted printer https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/05/printers-devil/#show-me-the-incentives-i-will-show-you-the-outcome

#1yrago Two weak spots in Big Tech economics https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/06/privacy-last/#exceptionally-american

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 Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1012 words today, 45361 total)

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Publié le 05.03.2026 à 20:31

Pluralistic: Blowtorching the frog (05 Mar 2026) executive-dysfunction


Today's links


Elon Musk wielding a flamethrower; he is roasting the snout of a giant frog

Blowtorching the frog (permalink)

Back in 2018, the Singletrack blog published a widely read article explaining the lethal trigonometry of a UK intersection where drivers kept hitting cyclists:

https://singletrackworld.com/2018/01/collision-course-why-this-type-of-road-junction-will-keep-killing-cyclists/

There are lots of intersections that are dangerous for cyclists, of course, but what made Ipsley Cross so lethal was a kind of eldritch geometry that let the cyclist and the driver see each other a long time before the collision, while also providing the illusion that they were not going to collide, until an instant before the crash.

This intersection is an illustration of a phenomenon called "constant bearing, decreasing range," which (the article notes) had long been understood by sailors as a reason that ships often collide. I'm not going to get into the trigonometry here (the Singletrack article does a great job of laying it out).

I am, however, going to use this as a metaphor: there is a kind of collision that is almost always fatal because its severity isn't apparent until it is too late to avert the crash. Anyone who's been filled with existential horror at the looming climate emergency can certainly relate.

The metaphor isn't exact. "Constant bearing, decreasing range" is the result of an optical illusion that makes it seem like things are fine right up until they aren't. Our failure to come to grips with the climate emergency is (partly‡) caused by a different cognitive flaw: the fact that we struggle to perceive the absolute magnitude of a series of slow, small changes.

‡The other part being the corrupting influence of corporate money in politics, obviously

This is the phenomenon that's invoked in the parable of "boiling a frog." Supposedly, if you put a frog in a pot of water at a comfortable temperature and then slowly warm the water to boiling, the frog will happily swim about even as it is cooked alive. In this metaphor, the frog can only perceive relative changes, so all that it senses is that the water has gotten a little warmer, and a small change in temperature isn't anything to worry about, right? The fact that the absolute change to the water is lethal does not register for our (hypothetical) frog.

Now, as it happens, frogs will totally leap clear of a pot of warming water when it reaches a certain temperature, irrespective of how slowly the temperature rises. But the metaphor persists, because while it does not describe the behavior of frogs in a gradually worsening situation, it absolutely describes how humans respond to small, adverse changes in our environment.

Take moral compromises: most of us set out to be good people, but reality demands small compromises to our ethics. So we make a small ethical compromise, and then before long, circumstances demand another compromise, and then another, and another, and another. Taken in toto, these compromises represent a severe fall from our personal standards, but so long as they are dripped out in slow and small increments, too often we rationalize our way into them: each one is only a small compromise, after all:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/19/pluralist-19-feb-2020/#thinkdifferent

Back to the climate emergency: for the first 25 years after NASA's James Hansen testified before Congress about "global heating," the changes to our world were mostly incremental: droughts got a little worse, as did floods. We had a few more hurricanes. Ski seasons got shorter. Heat waves got longer. Taken individually, each of these changes was small enough for our collective consciousness to absorb as within the bounds of normalcy, or, at worst, just a small worsening. Sure, there could be a collision on the horizon, but it wasn't anything urgent enough to justify the massive effort of decarbonizing our energy and transportation:

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-the-swerve/

It's not that we're deliberately committing civilizational suicide, it's just that slow-moving problems are hard to confront, especially in a world replete with fast-moving, urgent problems.

But crises precipitate change:

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

Before 2022, Europe was doing no better than the rest of the world when it came to confronting the climate emergency. Its energy mix was still dominated by fossil fuels, despite the increasing tempo of wildfires and floods and the rolling political crises touched off by waves of climate refugees. These were all dire and terrifying, but they were incremental, a drip-drip-drip of bad and worsening news.

Then Putin invaded Ukraine, and the EU turned its back on Russian gas and oil. Overnight, Europe was plunged into an urgent energy crisis, confronted with the very real possibility that millions of Europeans would shortly find themselves shivering in the dark – and not just for a few nights, but for the long-foreseeable future.

At that moment, the slow-moving crisis of the climate became the Putin emergency. The fossil fuel industry – one of the most powerful and corrupting influences in Brussels and around the world – was sidelined. Europe raced to solarize. In three short years, the continent went from decades behind on its climate goals to a decade ahead on them:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/11/cyber-rights-now/#better-late-than-never

Putin could have continued to stage minor incursions on Ukraine, none of them crossing any hard geopolitical red lines, and Europe would likely have continued to rationalize its way into continuing its reliance on Russia's hydrocarbon exports. But Putin lacked the patience to continue nibbling away at Ukraine. He tried to gobble it all down at once, and then everything changed.

There is a sense, then, in which Putin's impatient aggression was a feature, not a bug. But for Putin's lack of executive function, Ukraine might still be in danger of being devoured by Russia, but without Europe taking any meaningful steps to come to its aid – and Europe's solar transition would still be decades behind schedule.

Enshittification is one of those drip-drip-drip phenomena, too. Platform bosses have a keen appreciation of how much value we deliver to one another – community, support, mutual aid, care – and they know that so long as we love each other more than we hate the people who own the platforms, we'll likely stay glued to them. Mark Zuckerberg is a master of "twiddling" the knobs on the back-ends of his platforms, announcing big, enshittifying changes, and then backing off on them to a level that's shittier than it used to be, but not as shitty as he'd threatened:

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

Zuck is a colossal asshole, a man who founded his empire in a Harvard dorm room to nonconsensually rate the fuckability of his fellow undergrads, a man who knowingly abetted a genocide, a man who cheats at Settlers of Catan:

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

But despite all these disqualifying personality defects, Mark Zuckerberg has one virtue that puts him ahead of his social media competitor Elon Musk: Zuck has a rudimentary executive function, and so he is capable of backing down (sometimes, temporarily) from his shittiest ideas.

Contrast that with Musk's management of Twitter. Musk invaded Twitter the same year Putin invaded Ukraine, and embarked upon a string of absolutely unhinged and incontinent enshittificatory gambits that lacked any subtlety or discretion. Musk didn't boil the frog – he took one of his flamethrowers to it.

Millions of people were motivated to hop out of Musk's Twitter pot. But millions more – including me – found ourselves mired there. It wasn't that we liked Musk's Twitter, but we had more reasons to stay than we had to go. For me, the fact that I'd amassed half a million followers since some old pals messaged me to say they'd started a new service called "Twitter" meant that leaving would come at a high price to my activism and my publishing career.

But Musk kept giving me reasons to reassess my decision to stay. Very early into the Musk regime, I asked my sysadmin Ken Snider to investigate setting up a Bluesky server that I could move to. I was already very active on Mastodon, which is designed to be impossible to enshittify the way Musk had done to Twitter, because you can always move from one Fediverse server to another if the management turns shitty:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/23/semipermeable-membranes/

But for years, Bluesky's promise of federation remained just that – a promise. Technically, its architecture dangled the promise of multiple, independent Bluesky servers, but practically, there was no way to set this up:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/06/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get-fooled-again/

But – to Bluesky's credit – they eventually figured it out, and published the tools and instructions to set up your own Bluesky servers. Ken checked into it, and told me that it was all do-able, but not until a planned hardware upgrade to the Linux box he keeps in a colo cage in Toronto was complete. That upgrade happened a couple months ago, and yesterday, Ken let me know that he'd finished setting up a Bluesky server, just for me. So now I'm on Bluesky, at @doctorow.pluralistic.net:

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

I am on Bluesky, the service, but I am not a user of Bluesky, the company. That means that I'm able to interact with Bluesky users without clicking through Bluesky's abominable terms of service, through which you permanently surrender your right to sue the company (even if you later quit Bluesky and join another server!):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/15/dogs-breakfast/#by-clicking-this-you-agree-on-behalf-of-your-employer-to-release-me-from-all-obligations-and-waivers-arising-from-any-and-all-NON-NEGOTIATED-agreements

Remember: I knew and trusted the Twitter founders and I still got screwed. It's not enough for the people who run a service to be good people – they also have to take steps to insulate themselves (and their successors) from the kind of drip-drip-drip rationalizations that turn a series of small ethical waivers into a cumulative avalanche of pure wickedness:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes

Bluesky's "binding arbitration waiver" does the exact opposite: rather than insulating Bluesky's management from their own future selves' impulse to do wrong, a binding arbitration waiver permanently insulates Bluesky from consequences if (when) they yield the temptation to harm their users.

But Bluesky's technical architecture offers a way to eat my cake and have it, too. By setting up a Bluesky (the service) account on a non-Bluesky (the company) server, I can join a social space that has lots of people I like, and lots of interesting technical innovations, like composable moderation, without submitting to the company's unacceptable terms of service:

https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-13-2023-moderation

If Twitter was on the same slow enshittification drip-drip-drip of the pre-Musk years, I might have set up on Bluesky and stayed on Twitter. But thanks to Musk and his frog blowtorch, I'm able to make a break. For years now, I have posted this notice to Twitter nearly every day:

Twitter gets worse every single day. Someday it will degrade beyond the point of usability. The Fediverse is our best hope for an enshittification-resistant alternative. I'm @pluralistic@mamot.fr.

Today, I am posting a modified version, which adds:

If you'd like to follow me on Bluesky, I'm @doctorow.pluralistic.net. This is the last thread I will post to Twitter.

Crises precipitate change. All things being equal, the world would be a better place without Vladimir Putin or Elon Musk or Donald Trump in it. But these incontinent, impatient, terrible men do have a use: they transform slow-moving crises that are too gradual to galvanize action into emergencies that can't be ignored. Putin pushed the EU to break with fossil fuels. Musk pushed millions into federated social media. Trump is ushering in a post-American internet:

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

If you're reading this on Twitter, this is the long-promised notice that I'm done here. See you on the Fediverse, see you on Bluesky – see you in a world of enshittification-resistant social media.

It's been fun, until it wasn't.

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 Waxy threatened with a lawsuit by Bill Cosby over “House of Cosbys” vids https://waxy.org/2006/03/litigation_cosb/

#15yrsago Proposed TX law would criminalize TSA screening procedures https://blog.tenthamendmentcenter.com/2011/03/texas-legislation-proposes-felony-charges-for-tsa-agents/

#15yrsago Rodney King: 20 years of citizen photojournalism https://mediactive.com/2011/03/02/rodney-king-and-the-rise-of-the-citizen-photojournalist/

#15yrsago Mobile “bandwidth hogs” are just ahead of the curve https://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/03/02/2027209/High-Bandwidth-Users-Are-Just-Early-Adopters

#15yrsago Peter Watts blogs from near-death experience with flesh-eating bacteria https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?category_name=flesh-eating-fest-11

#15yrsago How a HarperCollins library book looks after 26 checkouts (pretty good!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Je90XRRrruM

#15yrsago Banksy bails out Russian graffiti artists https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/04/banksy-bails-out-russian-graffiti-artists/

#15yrsago TSA wants hand-luggage fee to pay for extra screening due to checked luggage fees https://web.archive.org/web/20110308142316/https://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_TSA_BAGGAGE_FEES?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2011-03-03-16-50-03

#15yrsago US house prices fall to 1890s levels (where they usually are) https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Paper-Economy/2011/0303/Home-prices-falling-to-level-of-1890s

#10yrsago Whuffie would be a terrible currency https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-wealth-inequality-is-even-worse-in-reputation-economies/

#10yrsago Ditch your overpriced Sodastream canisters in favor of refillable CO2 tanks https://www.wired.com/2016/03/sodamod/

#10yrsago Why the First Amendment means that the FBI can’t force Apple to write and sign code https://www.eff.org/files/2016/03/03/16cm10sp_eff_apple_v_fbi_amicus_court_stamped.pdf

#10yrsago Apple vs FBI: The privacy disaster is inevitable, but we can prevent the catastrophe https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/04/privacy-apple-fbi-encryption-surveillance

#10yrsago The 2010 election was the most important one in American history https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fw41BDhI_K8

#10yrsago As Apple fights the FBI tooth and nail, Amazon drops Kindle encryption https://web.archive.org/web/20160304055204/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/amazon-removes-device-encryption-fire-os-kindle-phones-and-tablets

#10yrsago Understanding American authoritarianism https://web.archive.org/web/20160301224922/https://www.vox.com/2016/3/1/11127424/trump-authoritarianism

#10yrsago Proposal: replace Algebra II and Calculus with “Statistics for Citizenship” https://web.archive.org/web/20190310081625/https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/03/algebra-ii-has-to-go.html

#10yrsago Panorama: the largest photo ever made of NYC https://360gigapixels.com/nyc-skyline-photo-panorama/

#1yrago Ideas Lying Around https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/03/friedmanite/#oil-crisis-two-point-oh

#1yrago There Were Always Enshittifiers https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/04/object-permanence/#picks-and-shovels

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 Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1066 words today, 43341 total)

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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"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 03.03.2026 à 19:26

Pluralistic: Supreme Court saves artists from AI (03 Mar 2026)


Today's links


The Supreme Court building. It has been tinted sepia. Floating in front of it are a 1920s-era Supreme Court, tinted blue-green, their heads replaced with the glaring red eyes of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey,' and their hands tinted hot pink. They have been distorted with a ripple effect and TV scan lines. The sky is full of dark clouds.

Supreme Court saves artists from AI (permalink)

The Supreme Court has just turned down a petition to hear an appeal in a case that held that AI works can't be copyrighted. By turning down the appeal, the Supreme Court took a massively consequential step to protect creative workers' interests:

https://www.theverge.com/policy/887678/supreme-court-ai-art-copyright

At the core of the dispute is a bedrock of copyright law: that copyright is for humans, and humans alone. In legal/technical terms, "copyright inheres at the moment of fixation of a work of human creativity." Most people – even people who work with copyright every day – have not heard it put in those terms. Nevertheless, it is the foundation of international copyright law, and copyright in the USA.

Here's what it means, in plain English:

a) When a human being,

b) does something creative; and

c) that creative act results in a physical record; then

d) a new copyright springs into existence.

For d) to happen, a), b) and c) all have to happen first. All three steps for copyright have been hotly contested over the years. Remember the "monkey selfie," in which a photographer argued that he was entitled to the copyright after a monkey pointed a camera at itself and pressed the shutter button? That image was not copyrightable, because the monkey was a monkey, not a human, and copyright is only for humans:

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

Then there's b), "doing something creative." Copyright only applies to creative work, not work itself. It doesn't matter how hard you labor over a piece of "IP" – if that work isn't creative, there's no copyright. For example, you can spend a fortune creating a phone directory, and you will get no copyright in the resulting work, meaning anyone can copy and sell it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc._v._Rural_Telephone_Service_Co.

If you mix a little creative labor with the hard work, you can get a little copyright. A directory of "all the phone numbers for cool people" can get a "thin" copyright over the arrangement of facts, but such a copyright still leaves space for competitors to make many uses of that work without your permission:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/14/angels-and-demons/#owning-culture

Finally, there's c): copyright is for tangible things, not intangibles. Part of the reason choreographers created a notation system for dance moves is that the moves themselves aren't copyrightable:

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

The non-copyrightability of movement is (partly) why the noted sex-pest and millionaire grifter Bikram Choudhury was blocked from claiming copyright on ancient yoga poses (the other reason is that they are ancient!):

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

Now, AI-generated works are certainly tangible (any work by an AI must involve magnetic traces on digital storage media). The prompts for an AI output can be creative and thus copyrightable (in the same way that notes to a writers' room or from an art-director are). But the output from the AI cannot be copyrighted, because it is not a work of human authorship.

This has been the position of the US Copyright Office from the start, when AI prompters started sending in AI-generated works and seeking to register copyrights in them. Stephen Thaler, a computer scientist who had prompted an image generator to produce a bitmap, kept appealing the Copyright Office's decision, seemingly without regard to the plain facts of the case and the well-established limits of copyright. By attempting to appeal his case all the way to the Supreme Court, Thaler has done every human artist a huge boon: his weak, ill-conceived case was easy for the Supreme Court to reject, and in so doing, the court has cemented the non-copyrightability of AI works in America.

You may have heard the saying, "Hard cases make bad law." Sometimes, there are edge-cases where following the law would result in a bad outcome (think of a Fourth Amendment challenge to an illegal search that lets a murderer go free). In these cases, judges are tempted to interpret the law in ways that distort its principles, and in so doing, create a bad precedent (the evidence from a bad search is permitted, and so cops stop bothering to get a warrant before searching people).

This is one of the rare instances in which a bad case made good law. Thaler's case wasn't even close – it was an absolute loser from the jump. Normally, plaintiffs give up after being shot down by an agency like the Copyright Office or by a lower court. But not Thaler – he stuck with it all the way to the highest court in the land, bringing clarity to an issue that might have otherwise remained blurry and ill-defined for years.

This is wonderful news for creative workers. It means that our bosses must pay humans to do work if they want to be granted copyright on the things they want to sell. The more that humans are involved in the creation of a work, the stronger the copyright on that work becomes – which means that the less a human contributes to a creative work, the harder it will be to prevent others from simply taking it and selling it or giving it away.

This is so important. Our bosses do not want to pay us. When our bosses sue AI companies, it's not because they want to make sure we get paid.

The many pending lawsuits – from news organizations like the New York Times, wholesalers like Getty Images, and entertainment empires like Disney – all seek to establish that training an AI model is a copyright infringement. This is wrong as a technical matter: copyright clearly permits making transient copies of published works for the purpose of factual analysis (otherwise every search engine would be illegal). Copyright also permits performing mathematical analysis on those transient copies. Finally, copyright permits the publication of literary works (including software programs) that embed facts about copyrighted works – even billions of works:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

Sure, you can infringe copyright with an AI model – say, by prompting it to produce infringing images. But the mere fact that a technology can be used to infringe copyright doesn't make the technology itself infringing (otherwise every printing press, camera, and computer would be illegal):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc.

Of course, the fact that copyright currently permits training models doesn't mean that it must. Copyright didn't come down from a mountain on two stone tablets. It's just a law, and laws can be amended. I think that amending copyright to ban training a model would inflict substantial collateral damage on everything from search engines to scholarship, but perhaps you disagree. Maybe you think that you could wordsmith a new copyright law that bans training without whacking a bunch of socially beneficial activities.

Even if that's so, it still wouldn't help artists.

To understand why, consider Universal and Disney's lawsuit against Midjourney. The day that lawsuit dropped, I got a press release from the RIAA, signed by its CEO, Mitch Glazier. Here's how it began:

There is a clear path forward through partnerships that both further AI innovation and foster human artistry. Unfortunately, some bad actors – like Midjourney – see only a zero-sum, winner-take-all game.

The RIAA represents record labels, not film studios, but thanks to vertical integration, the big film studios are also the big record labels. That's why the RIAA alerted the press to its position on this suit.

There's two important things to note about the RIAA press release: how it opened, and how it closed. It opens by stating that the companies involved want "partnerships" with AI companies. In other words, if they establish that they have the right to control training on their archives, they won't use that right to prevent the creation of AI models that compete with creative workers. Rather, they will use that right to get paid when those models are created.

Expanding copyright to cover models isn't about preventing generative AI technologies – it's about ensuring that these technologies are licensed by incumbent media companies. This licensure would ensure that media companies would get paid for training, but it would also let them set the terms on which the resulting models were used. The studios could demand that AI companies put "guardrails" on the resulting models to stop them from being used to output things that might compete with the studios' own products.

That's what the opening of this press-release signifies, but to really understand its true meaning, you have to look at the closing of the release: the signature at the bottom of it, "Mitch Glazier, CEO, RIAA."

Who is Mitch Glazier? Well, he used to be a Congressional staffer. He was the guy responsible for sneaking a clause into an unrelated bill that repealed "termination of transfer" for musicians. "Termination" is a part of copyright law that lets creators take back their rights after 35 years, even if they originally signed a contract for a "perpetual license."

Under termination, all kinds of creative workers who got royally screwed at the start of their careers were able to get their copyrights back and re-sell them. The primary beneficiaries of termination are musicians, who signed notoriously shitty contracts in the 1950s-1980s:

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

When Mitch Glazier snuck a termination-destroying clause into legislation, he set the stage for the poorest, most abused, most admired musicians in recording history to lose access to money that let them buy a couple bags of groceries and make the rent. He condemned these beloved musicians to poverty.

What happened next is something of a Smurfs Family Christmas miracle. Musicians were so outraged by this ripoff, and their fans were so outraged on their behalf, that Congress convened a special session solely to repeal the clause that Mitch Glazier tricked them into voting for. Shortly thereafter, Glazier was out of Congress:

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

But this story has a happy ending for Glazier, too – he might have been out of his government job, but he had a new gig, as CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, where he earns more than $1.3 million/year to carry on the work he did in Congress – serving the interests of the record labels:

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/131669037

Mitch Glazier serves the interests of the labels, not musicians. He can't serve both interests, because every dime a musician takes home is a dime that the labels don't get to realize as profits. Labels and musicians are class enemies. The fact that many musicians are on the labels' side when they sue AI companies does not mean that the labels are on the musicians' side.

What will the media companies do if they win their lawsuits? Glazier gives us the answer in the opening sentence of his press release: they will create "partnerships" with AI companies to train models on the work we produce.

This is the lesson of the past 40 years of copyright expansion. For 40 years, we have expanded copyright in every way: copyright lasts longer, covers more works, prohibits more uses without licenses, establishes higher penalties, and makes it easier to win those penalties.

Today, the media industry is larger and more profitable than at any time, and the share of those profits that artists take home is smaller than ever.

How has the expansion of copyright led to media companies getting richer and artists getting poorer? That's the question that Rebecca Giblin and I answer in our 2022 book Chokepoint Capitalism. In a nutshell: in a world of five publishers, four studios, three labels, two app companies and one company that controls all ebooks and audiobooks, giving a creative worker more copyright is like giving your bullied kid extra lunch money. It doesn't matter how much lunch money you give that kid – the bullies will take it all, and the kid will go hungry:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/what-is-chokepoint-capitalism/

Indeed, if you keep giving that kid more lunch money, the bullies will eventually have enough dough that they'll hire a fancy ad-agency to blitz the world with a campaign insisting that our schoolkids are all going hungry and need even more lunch money (they'll take that money, too).

When Mitch Glazier – who got a $1m+/year job for the labels after attempting to pauperize musicans – writes on behalf of Disney in support of a copyright suit to establish that copyright prevents training a model without a license, he's not defending creative workers. Disney, after all, is the company that takes the position that if it buys another company, like Lucasfilm or Fox, that it only acquires the right to use the works we made for those companies, but not the obligation to pay us when they do:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/29/writers-must-be-paid/#pay-the-writer

If a new, unambiguous copyright over model training comes into existence – whether through a court precedent or a new law – then all our contracts will be amended to non-negotiably require us to assign that right to our bosses. And our bosses will enter into "partnerships" to train models on our works. And those models will exist for one purpose: to let them create works without paying us.

The market concentration that lets our bosses dictate terms to us is getting much worse, and it's only speeding up. Getty Images – who sued Stability AI over image generation – is merging with Shutterstock:

https://globalcompetitionreview.com/gcr-usa/article/photographers-alarmed-gettyshutterstock-merger

And Paramount is merging with Warners:

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

This is where this new Supreme Court action comes in. A new copyright that covers training is just one more thing these increasingly powerful members of this increasingly incestuous cartel can force us to sign away. That new copyright isn't something for us to bargain with, it's something we'll bargain away.

But the fact that the works that a model produces are automatically in the public domain is something we can't bargain away. It's a legal fact, not a legal right. It means that the more humans there are involved in the creation of a final work, the more copyrightable that work is.

Media bosses love AI because it dangles the tantalizing possibility of running a business without ego-shattering confrontations with creative workers who know how to do things. It's the solipsistic fantasy of a world without workers, in which a media boss conceives of a "product," prompts a sycophantic AI, and receives an item that's ready for sale:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-wheel/#billionaire-solipsism

Many bosses know this isn't within reach. They imagine that they'll get the AI to shit out a script and then pay a writer on the cheap to "polish" it. They think they'll get an AI to shit out a motion sequence, a still, or a 3D model and then pay a human artist pennies to put the "final touches" on it. But the Copyright Office's position is that only those human contributions are eligible for a copyright: a few editorial changes, a few pixels or vectors rearranged. Everything else is in the public domain.

Here's the cool part: the only thing our bosses hate more than paying us is when other people take their stuff without paying for it. To achieve the kind of control they demand, they will have to pay us to make creative works.

What's more, the fact that AI-generated works are in the public domain leaves a lot of uses that don't harm creative workers intact. You can amuse yourself and your friends with all the AI slop you can generate; the fact that it's not copyrightable doesn't matter to that use. I happen to think AI "art" is shit, but you do you:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand

This also means that if you're a writer who likes to brainstorm with a chatbot as you develop an idea, that's fine, so long as the AI's words don't end up in the final product. Creative workers already assemble "mood boards" and clippings for inspiration – so long as these aren't incorporated into the final work, that's fine.

That's just what the Hollywood writers bargained for in their historic strike over AI. They retained the right to use AI if they wanted to, but their bosses couldn't force them to:

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

The Writers Guild were able to bargain with the heavily concentrated studios because they are organized in a union. Not just any union, either: the Writers Guild (along with the other Hollywood unions) are able to undertake "sectoral bargaining" – that's when a union can negotiate a contract with all the employers in a sector at once.

Sectoral bargaining was once the standard for labor relations, but it was outlawed in the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which clawed back many of the important labor rights established with the New Deal's National Labor Relations Act. To get Taft-Hartley through Congress, its authors had to compromise by grandfathering in the powerful Hollywood unions, who retained their right to sectoral bargaining. More than 75 years later, that sectoral bargaining right is still protecting those workers.

Our bosses tell us that we should side with them in demanding a new law: a copyright law that covers training an AI model. The mere fact that our bosses want this should set off alarm bells. Just because we're on their side, it doesn't mean they're on our side. They are not.

If we're going to use our muscle to fight for a new law, let it be a sectoral bargaining law – one that covers all workers. You can tell that this would be good for us because our bosses would hate it, and every other worker in America would love it. The Writers Guild used sectoral bargaining to achieve something that 40 years of copyright expansion failed at: it made creative workers richer, rather than giving us another way to be angry about how our work is being used.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Cornell University harasses maker of Cornell blog https://web.archive.org/web/20060621110535/http://cornell.elliottback.com/archives/2006/03/02/cornell-university-nastygram/

#15yrsago Explaining creativity to a Martian https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-explaining-creativity-to-a-martian/

#15yrsago Scott Walker smuggles ringers into the capital for the legislative session https://www.theawl.com/2011/03/in-madison-scott-walker-packed-his-budget-address-with-ringers/

#15yrsago Measuring radio’s penetration in 1936 https://www.flickr.com/photos/70118259@N00/albums/72157626051208969/with/5490099786

#10yrsago Rube Goldberg musical instrument that runs on 2,000 steel ball-bearings https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvUU8joBb1Q

#10yrsago KKK vs D&D: the surprising, high fantasy vocabulary of racism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan_titles_and_vocabulary

#10yrsago UK minister compares adblocking to piracy, promises action https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/mar/02/adblocking-protection-racket-john-whittingdale

#10yrsago Some ad-blockers are tracking you, shaking down publishers, and showing you ads https://www.wired.com/2016/03/heres-how-that-adblocker-youre-using-makes-money/

#10yrsago ISIS opsec: jihadi tech bureau recommends non-US crypto tools https://web.archive.org/web/20160303095904/http://www.dailydot.com/politics/isis-apple-fbi-congressional-hearing-crypto-international/

#10yrsago Apple v FBI isn’t about security vs privacy; it’s about America’s security vs FBI surveillance https://www.wired.com/2016/03/feds-let-cyber-world-burn-lets-put-fire/

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1020 words today, 41284 total)

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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ISSN: 3066-764X

Publié le 02.03.2026 à 10:22

Pluralistic: No one wants to read your AI slop (02 Mar 2026)


Today's links


A 1913 picture postcard depicting the flood of Carey, OH's Main Street, as two men in a canoe paddle down the flooded street. A reflection of the hostile, glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey' ripples in the water around them.

No one wants to read your AI slop (permalink)

Everyone knows (or should know) that as fascinating as your dreams are to you, they are eye-glazingly dull to everyone else. Perhaps you have a friend or two who will tolerate you recounting your dreams at them (treasure those friends), but you should never, ever presume that other people want to hear about your dreams.

The same is true of your conversations with chatbots. Even if you find these conversations interesting, you should never assume that anyone else will be entertained by them. In the absence of an explicit reassurance to the contrary, you should presume that recounting your AI chatbot sessions to your friends is an imposition on the friendship, and forwarding the transcripts of those sessions doubly so (perhaps triply so, given the verbosity of chatbot responses).

I will stipulate that there might be friend groups out there where pastebombs of AI chat transcripts are welcome, but even if you work in such a milieu, you should never, ever assume that a stranger wants to see or hear about your AI "conversations." Tagging a chatbot into a social media conversation with a stranger and typing, "Hey Grok‡, what do you think of that?" is like masturbating in front of a stranger.

‡ Ugh

It's rude. It's an imposition. It's gross.

There's an even worse circle of hell than the one you create when you nonconsensually add a chatbot to a dialog: the hell that comes from reading something a stranger wrote, and then asking a chatbot to generate "commentary" on it and emailing it to that stranger.

Even the AI companies pitching their products claim that they need human oversight because they are prone to errors (including the errors that the companies dress up by calling them "hallucinations"). If you've read something you disagree with but don't understand well enough to rebut, and you ask an AI to generate a rebuttal for you, you still don't understand it well enough to rebut it.

You haven't generated a rebuttal: you have generated a blob of plausible sentences that may or may not constitute a valid critique of the work you're upset with – but until a human being who understands the issue goes through the AI output line by line and verifies it, it's just stochastic word-salad.

Once again: the act of prompting a sentence generator to create a rebuttal-shaped series of sentences does not impart understanding to the prompter. In the dialog between someone who's written something and someone who disagrees with it, but doesn't understand it well enough to rebut it, the only person qualified to evaluate the chatbot's output is the original author – that is, the stranger you've just emailed a chat transcript to.

Emailing a stranger a blob of unverified AI output is not a form of dialogue – it's an attempt to coerce a stranger into unpaid labor on your behalf. Strangers are not your "human in the loop" whose expensive time is on offer to painstakingly work through the plausible sentences a chatbot made for you for free.

Remember: even the AI companies will tell you that the work of overseeing an AI's output is valuable labor. The fact that you can costlessly (to you) generate infinite volumes of verbose, plausible-seeming topical sentences in no way implies that the people who actually think about things and then write them down have the time to mark your chatbot's homework.

That is a fatal flaw in the idea that we will increase our productivity by asking chatbots to summarize things we don't understand: by definition, if we don't understand a subject, then we won't be qualified to evaluate the summary, either.

There simply is no substitute for learning about a subject and coming to understand it well enough to advance the subject, whether by contributing your own additions or by critiquing its flaws. That's not to say that we shouldn't aspire to participate in discourse about areas that seem interesting or momentous – but asking a chatbot to contribute on your behalf does not impart insight to you, and it is a gross imposition on people who have taken the time to understand and participate using their own minds and experience.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Web loggers bare their souls https://web.archive.org/web/20010321183557/https://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/02/28/DD27271.DTL

#20yrsago Fight AOL/Yahoo’s email tax! https://web.archive.org/web/20060303152934/http://www.dearaol.com/

#20yrsago Long-lost Penn and Teller videogame for download https://waxy.org/2006/02/penn_tellers_sm/

#20yrsago Aussie gov’t report on DRM: Don’t let it override public rights! https://web.archive.org/web/20060813191613/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/component/option,com_content/task,view/id,1137/Itemid,85/nsub,/

#20yrsago BBC: “File sharing is not theft” http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/4758636.stm

#15yrsago Hollywood’s conservatism: why no one wants to make a “risky” movie https://web.archive.org/web/20110305083114/http://www.gq.com/entertainment/movies-and-tv/201102/the-day-the-movies-died-mark-harris?currentPage=all

#15yrsago Eldritch Effulgence: HP Lovecraft’s favorite words https://arkhamarchivist.com/wordcount-lovecraft-favorite-words/

#15yrsago Exposing the Big Wisconsin Lie about “subsidized public pensions” https://web.archive.org/web/20110224201357/http://tax.com/taxcom/taxblog.nsf/Permalink/UBEN-8EDJYS?OpenDocument

#15yrsago Taxonomy of social mechanics in multiplayer games https://www.raphkoster.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Koster_Social_Social-mechanics_GDC2011.pdf

#15yrsago San Francisco before the great fire: rare, public domain 1906 video https://archive.org/details/TripDownMarketStreetrBeforeTheFire

#15yrsago Ebook readers’ bill of rights https://web.archive.org/web/20110308220609/https://librarianinblack.net/librarianinblack/2011/02/ebookrights.html

#10yrsago 500,000 to 1M unemployed Americans will lose food aid next month https://web.archive.org/web/20160229021021/https://gawker.com/in-one-month-we-will-begin-intentionally-starving-poor-1761588216

#10yrsago FBI claims it has no records of its decision to delete its recommendation to encrypt your phone https://www.techdirt.com/2016/02/29/fbi-claims-it-has-no-record-why-it-deleted-recommendation-to-encrypt-phones/

#10yrsago A hand-carved wooden clock that scribes the time on a magnetic board https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEbmYp5VVcw

#10yrsago Press looks the other way as thousands march for Sanders in 45+ cities https://web.archive.org/web/20160314104804/http://usuncut.com/politics/media-blackout-as-thousands-of-bernie-supporters-march-in-45-cities/

#10yrsago Crapgadget apocalypse: the IoT devices that punch through your firewall and expose your network https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/02/this-is-why-people-fear-the-internet-of-things/

#10yrsago Found debauchery: cavorting bros and a pyramid of beer on a found 1971 Super-8 reel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAobW4PtoMY

#10yrsago Trump could make the press great again, all they have to do is their jobs https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/donald-trump-could-make-the-media-great-again/

#10yrsago Federal judge rules US government can’t force Apple to make a security-breaking tool https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/02/government-cant-force-apple-unlock-drug-case-iphone-rules-new-york-judge

#10yrsago Black students say Donald Trump had them removed before his speech https://web.archive.org/web/20160302092600/https://gawker.com/donald-trump-requested-that-a-group-of-black-students-b-1762064789

#10yrsago Red Queen’s Race: Disney parks are rolling out surge pricing with 20% premiums on busy days https://memex.craphound.com/2016/03/01/red-queens-race-disney-parks-are-rolling-out-surge-pricing-with-20-premiums-on-busy-days/

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 Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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"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 28.02.2026 à 12:11

Pluralistic: California can stop Larry Ellison from buying Warners (28 Feb 2026)


Today's links


The Warner tower, toppling over, surmounted by the bear from the California flag, posed on an old timey map of Los Angeles.

California can stop Larry Ellison from buying Warners (permalink)

For months, the hottest will-they/won't-they drama in Hollywood concerned the suitors for Warners, up for sale again after being bought, merged, looted and wrecked by the eminently guillotineable David Zaslav:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izC9o3LhnVk

From the start, it was clear that Warners would be sucked dry and discarded, but the Trump 2024 election turned the looting of Warners' corpse into a high-stakes political drama.

On the one hand, you had Netflix, who wanted to buy Warners and use them to make good movies, but also to kill off movie theaters forever by blocking theatrical distribution of Warners' products.

On the other hand, you had Paramount, owned by the spray-tan cured tech billionaire jerky Larry Ellison, though everyone is supposed to pretend that Ellison's do-nothing/know-nothing/amounts-to-nothing son Billy (or whatever who cares) Ellison is running the show.

Ellison's plan was to buy Warners and fold it into the oligarchic media capture project that's seen Ellison replace the head of CBS with the tedious mediocrity Bari Weiss:

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/articles/the-centurylong-capture-of-us-media

This is a multi-pronged media takeover that includes Jeff Bezos neutering the Washington Post, Elon Musk turning Twitter into a Nazi bar, and Trump stealing Tiktok and giving it to Larry Ellison. If Ellison gains control over Warners, you can add CNN to the nonsense factory.

But for a while there, it looked like the Ellisons would lose the bidding. Little Timmy (or whatever who cares) Ellison only has whatever money his dad parks in his bank account for tax purposes, and Larry Ellison is so mired in debt that one margin call could cost him his company, his fighter jet, and his Hawaiian version of Little St James Island.

Warners' board may not give a shit about making good media or telling the truth or staving off fascism, but they do want to get paid, and Netflix has money in the bank, whereas Ellison only has the bank's money (for now).

But last week, the dam broke: Warners' board indicated they'd take Paramount's offer, and Netflix withdrew their offer, and so that's that, right? It's not like Trump's FTC is going to actually block this radioactively illegal merger, despite the catastrophic corporate consolidation that would result, with terrible consequences for workers, audiences, theaters, cable operators and the entire supply chain.

Not so fast! The Clayton Act – which bars this kind of merger – is designed to be enforced by the feds, state governments, and private parties. That means that California AG Rob Bonta can step in to block this merger, which he's getting ready to do:

https://prospect.org/2026/02/27/states-can-block-paramount-warner-deal/

As David Dayen writes in The American Prospect, state AGs block mergers all the time, even when the feds decline to step in – just a couple years ago, Washington state killed the Kroger/Albertsons merger.

The fact that antitrust laws can be enforced at the state level is a genius piece of policy design. As the old joke goes, "AG" stands for "aspiring governor," and the fact that state AGs can step in to rescue their voters from do-nothing political hacks in Washington is catnip for our nation's attorneys general.

Bonta is definitely feeling his oats: he's also going after Amazon for price-fixing, picking up a cause that Trump dropped after Jeff Bezos ordered the Washington Post to cancel its endorsement of Kamala Harris, paid a million bucks to sit on the inaugural dais, millions more to fund the White House Epstein Memorial Ballroom and $40m more to make an unwatchable turkey of a movie about Melania Trump.

Can you imagine how stupid Bezos is going to feel when all of his bribes to Trump cash out to nothing after Rob Bonta publishes Amazon's damning internal memos and then fines the company a gazillion dollars?

It's a testament to the power of designing laws so they can be enforced by multiple parties. And as cool as it is to have a law that state AGs can enforce, it's way cooler to have a law that can be enforced by members of the public.

This is called a "private right of action" – the thing that lets impact litigation shops like Planned Parenthood, EFF, and the ACLU sue over violations of the public's rights. The business lobby hates the private right of action, because they think (correctly) that they can buy off enough regulators and enforcers to let them get away with murder (often literally), but they know they can't buy off every impact litigation shop and every member of the no-win/no-fee bar.

For decades, corporate America has tried to abolish the public's right to sue companies under any circumstances. That's why so many terms of service now feature "binding arbitration waivers" that deny you access to the courts, no matter how badly you are injured:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/27/shit-shack/#binding-arbitration

But long before Antonin Scalia made it legal to cram binding arbitration down your throat, corporate America was pumping out propaganda for "tort reform," spreading the story that greedy lawyers were ginning up baseless legal threats to extort settlements from hardworking entrepreneurs. These stories are 99.9% bullshit, including urban legends like the "McDonald's hot coffee" lawsuit:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/12/hot-coffee/#mcgeico

Ever since Reagan, corporate America has been on a 45-year winning streak. Nothing epitomizes the arrogance of these monsters more than the GW Bush administration's sneering references to "the reality-based community":

We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community

Giving Ellison, Bezos and Musk control over our media seems like the triumph of billionaires' efforts to "create their own reality," and indeed, for years, they've been able to gin up national panics over nothingburgers like "trans ideology," "woke" and "the immigration crisis."

But just lately, that reality-creation machine has started to break down. Despite taking over the press, locking every reality-based reporter out of the White House, and getting Musk, Zuck and Ellison to paint their algorithms spray-tan orange, people just fucking hate Trump. He is underwater on every single issue:

https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/ahead-of-state-of-the-union-address

Despite the full-court press – from both the Dem and the GOP establishment – to deny the genocide in Gaza and paint anyone (especially Jews like me) who condemn the slaughter as "antisemites," Americans condemn Israel and are fully in the tank for Palestinians:

https://news.gallup.com/poll/702440/israelis-no-longer-ahead-americans-middle-east-sympathies.aspx

Despite throwing massive subsidies at coal and tying every available millstone around renewables' ankles before throwing all the solar panels and windmills into the sea, renewables are growing and – to Trump's great chagrin – oil companies can't find anyone to loan them the money they need to steal Venezuela's oil:

https://kschroeder.substack.com/p/earning-optimism-in-2026

Reality turns out to be surprisingly stubborn, and what's more, it has a pronounced left-wing bias. Putting little Huey (or whatever who cares) Ellison in charge of Warners will be bad news for the news, for media, for movies and TV, and for my neighbors in Burbank. But when it comes to shaping the media, Freddy (or whatever who cares) Ellison will continue to eat shit.

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 Mormon guide to overcoming masturbation https://web.archive.org/web/20071011023731/http://www.qrd.org/qrd/religion/judeochristian/protestantism/mormon/mormon-masturbation

#20yrsago Midnighters: YA horror trilogy mixes Lovecraft with adventure https://memex.craphound.com/2006/02/26/midnighters-ya-horror-trilogy-mixes-lovecraft-with-adventure/

#20yrsago RIP, Octavia Butler https://darkush.blogspot.com/2006/02/octavia-butler-died-saturday.html

#20yrsago Disney hiring “Intelligence Analyst” to review “open source media” https://web.archive.org/web/20060303165009/http://www.defensetech.org/archives/002199.html

#20yrsago MPAA exec can’t sell A-hole proposal to tech companies https://web.archive.org/web/20060325013506/http://lawgeek.typepad.com/lawgeek/2006/02/variety_mpaa_ca.html

#15yrsago Why are America’s largest corporations paying no tax? https://web.archive.org/web/20110226160552/https://thinkprogress.org/2011/02/26/main-street-tax-cheats/

#15yrsago Articulated cardboard Cthulhu https://web.archive.org/web/20110522204427/http://www.strode-college.ac.uk/teaching_teams/cardboard_catwalk/285

#15yrsago Freeman Dyson reviews Gleick’s book on information theory https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/03/10/how-we-know/?pagination=false

#15yrsago 3D printing with mashed potatatoes https://www.fabbaloo.com/2011/02/3d-printing-potatoes-with-the-rapman-html

#15yrsago TVOntario’s online archive, including Prisoners of Gravity! https://web.archive.org/web/20110226021403/https://archive.tvo.org/

#10yrsago _applyChinaLocationShift: In China, national security means that all the maps are wrong https://web.archive.org/web/20160227145529/http://www.travelandleisure.com/articles/digital-maps-skewed-china

#10yrsago Teaching kids about copyright: schools and fair use https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzqNKQbWTWc

#10yrsago Ghostwriter: Trump didn’t write “Art of the Deal,” he read it https://web.archive.org/web/20160229034618/http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/264591/donald-trump-didnt-write-art-deal-tony-schwartz/

#10yrsago The biggest abortion lie of all: “They do it for the money” https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-abortion-business/

#10yrsago NHS junior doctors show kids what they do, kids demand better of Jeremy Hunt https://juniorjuniordoctors.tumblr.com/

#10yrsago Nissan yanks remote-access Leaf app — 4+ weeks after researchers report critical flaw https://www.theverge.com/2016/2/25/11116724/nissan-nissanconnect-app-hack-offline

#10yrsago Think you’re entitled to compensation after being wrongfully imprisoned in California? Nope. https://web.archive.org/web/20160229013042/http://modernluxury.com/san-francisco/story/the-crazy-injustice-of-denying-exonerated-prisoners-compensation

#10yrsago BC town votes to install imaginary GPS trackers in criminals https://web.archive.org/web/20160227114334/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/canadian-city-plans-to-track-offenders-with-technology-that-doesnt-even-exist-gps-implant-williams-lake

#10yrsago New Zealand’s Prime Minister: I’ll stay in TPP’s economic suicide-pact even if the USA pulls out https://www.techdirt.com/2016/02/26/new-zealand-says-laws-to-implement-tpp-will-be-passed-now-despite-us-uncertainties-wont-be-rolled-back-even-if-tpp-fails/

#10yrsago South Korean lawmakers stage filibuster to protest “anti-terror” bill, read from Little Brother https://memex.craphound.com/2016/02/26/south-korean-lawmakers-stage-filibuster-to-protest-anti-terror-bill-read-from-little-brother/

#5yrsago Privacy is not property https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/26/meaningful-zombies/#luxury-goods

#1yrago With Great Power Came No Responsibility https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/#franklinite

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 Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1022 words today, 40256 total)

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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"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 26.02.2026 à 11:51

Pluralistic: If you build it (and it works), Trump will come (and take it) (26 Feb 2026)


Today's links


Uncle Sam, peering through a magnifying glass at the planet Earth, which is in the palm of his other hand. His hair has been replaced with a Trump wig and his skin has been tinted Cheeto orange. The background is the Great Seal of the USA, and the arrows in the eagle's claw have been replaced with a bundle of glowing fiber optics.

If you build it (and it works), Trump will come (and take it) (permalink)

Crises precipitate change: Trump's incontinent belligerence spurred the world to long-overdue action on "digital sovereignty," as people woke up to the stark realization that a handful of Trump-aligned giant tech firms could shut down their governments, companies and households at the click of a mouse.

This has been a long, long time coming. Long before Trump, the Snowden revelations made it clear that the US government had weaponized its position as the world's IT export powerhouse and the interchange hub for the world's transoceanic fiber links, and was actively spying on everyone – allies and foes, presidents and plebs – to attain geopolitical and commercial advantages for America. Even after that stark reminder, the world continued to putter along, knowing that the US had planted demolition charges in its digital infrastructure, but praying that the "rules-based international order" would stop America from pushing the button.

Now, more than a decade into the Trump era, the world is finally confronting the reality that they need to get the hell off of American IT, and transition to open, transparent and verifiable alternatives for their administrative tools, telecoms infrastructure and embedded systems for agriculture, industry and transportation. And not a moment too soon:

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

But building the post-American internet is easier said than done. There remain huge, unresolved questions about the best way to proceed.

One thing is clear: we will need new systems: the aforementioned open, transparent, verifiable code and hardware. That's a huge project, but the good news is that it benefits tremendously from scale, which means that as countries, businesses and households switch to the post-American internet, there will be ever more resources to devote to building, maintaining and improving this project. That's how scientific endeavors work: they're global collaborations that allow multiple parties to simultaneously attack the problems from many angles at once. Think of the global effort to sequence, understand, and produce vaccines for Covid 19.

Developing the code and hardware for the post-American internet scales beautifully, making it unique among the many tasks posed by the post-American world. Other untrustworthy US platforms – such as the dollar, or the fiber links that make interconnection in the USA – are hampered by scale. The fact that hundreds of countries use the dollar and rely on US fiber connections makes replacing them harder, not easier:

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

Building the post-American internet isn't easy, but there's a clear set of construction plans. What's far less clear is how we transition to the post-American internet. How do people, organizations and governments that currently have their data locked up in US Big Tech silos get it off their platforms and onto new, open, transparent, verifiable successors? Literally: how do you move the data from the old system to the new one, preserving things like edit/view permissions, edit histories, and other complex data-structures that often have high-stakes attached to them (for example, many organizations and governments are legally required to maintain strict view/edit permissions for sensitive data, and must preserve the histories of their documents).

On top of that, there's all the systems that we use to talk to one another: media services from Instagram to Tiktok to Youtube; chat services from iMessage to Discord. It's easy enough to build alternatives to these services – indeed, they already exist, though they may require additional engineering to scale them up for hundreds of millions or billions of users – but that's only half the battle. What do we do about the literal billions of people who are already using the American systems?

This is where the big divisions appear. In one camp, you have the "if you build it, they will come" school, who say that all we need to do is make our services so obviously superior to the legacy services that America has exported around the world and people will just switch. This is a very seductive argument. After all, the American systems are visibly, painfully defective: riddled with surveillance and ads, powered by terrible algorithms, plagued by moderation failures.

But waiting for people to recognize the superiority of your alternatives and jumping ship is a dead end. It completely misapprehends the reason that users are still on legacy social media and other platforms. People don't use Instagram because they love Mark Zuckerberg; they use it because they love their friends more than they hate Mark Zuckerberg:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/30/zucksauce/#gandersauce

What's more, Zuckerberg knows this. He knows that users of his service are hamstrung by the "collective action problem" of getting the people who matter to you to agree on when it's time to leave a service, and on which service is a safe haven to flee to:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/29/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms/

The reason Zuckerberg knows this is that he had to contend with it at the dawn of Facebook, when the majority of social media users were locked into an obviously inferior legacy platform called Myspace. Zuckerberg promised Myspace users a superior social media experience where they wouldn't be spied on or bombarded with ads:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3247362

Zuckerberg knew that wouldn't be enough. No one was going to leave Myspace for Facebook and hang out in splendid isolation, smugly re-reading Facebook's world-beating privacy policy while waiting for their dopey friends to wise up and leave Myspace to come and join them.

No: Zuckerberg gave the Myspace refugees a bot, which would accept your Myspace login and password and then impersonate you to Myspace's servers several times per day, scraping all the content waiting for you in your Myspace feed and flowing it into your Facebook feed. You could reply to it there and the bot would push it out to Myspace. You could eat your cake and have it too: use Facebook, but communicate with the people who were still on Myspace.

This is called "adversarial interoperability" and it was once the norm, but the companies that rose to power by "moving fast and breaking things" went on to secure legal protections to prevent anyone from doing unto them as they had done unto their own predecessors:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

The harder it is for people to leave a platform, the worse the platform can treat them without paying the penalty of losing users. This is the source of enshittification: when a company can move value from its users and customers to itself without risking their departure, it does.

People stay on bad platforms because the value they provide to one another is greater than the costs the platform extracts from them. That means that when you see people stuck on a very bad platform – like Twitter, Instagram or Facebook – you should infer that what they get there from the people that matter to them is really important to them. They stick to platforms because that's where they meet with people who share their rare disease, because that's where they find the customers or audiences that they rely on to make rent; because that's the only place they can find the people they left behind when they emigrated.

Now, it's entirely possible – likely, even – that legacy social media platforms will grow so terrible that people will leave and jettison those social connections that mean so much to them. This is not a good outcome. Those communities, once shattered, will likely never re-form. There will be permanent, irretrievable losses incurred by their members:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/23/when-the-town-square-shatters/

The platforms are sinking ships. We need to evacuate them:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/23/evacuate-the-platforms/#let-the-platforms-burn

"If you build it, they will come" is a trap. Technologists and their users who don't understand the pernicious nature of the collective active problem trap themselves. They build obviously superior technical platforms and then gnash their teeth as the rest of the world fails to make the leap.

All too often, users' frustration at the failure of new services to slay the inferior legacy services curdles, and users and designers of new technologies decide that the people who won't join them are somehow themselves defective. It doesn't take long to find a corner of the Fediverse or Bluesky where Facebook and Twitter users are being condemned as morally suspect for staying on zuckermuskian media. They are damned for loving Zuckerberg and Musk, rather than empathized with for loving each other more than they hate the oligarchs who've trapped them. They're condemned as emotionally stunted "attention whores" who hang out on big platforms to get "dopamine" (or some other pseudoscientific reward), which is easier than grappling with the fact that legacy social media pays their bills, and tolerating Zuckerberg or Musk is preferable to getting evicted.

Worst of all, condemning users of legacy technology as moral failures leads you to oppose efforts to get those users out of harm's way and onto modern platforms. Think of the outcry at Meta's Threads taking steps to federate with Mastodon. There are good reasons to worry about this – the best one being that it might allow Meta to (illegally) suck up Mastodon users' data and store and process it. But the majority of the opposition to Threads integration with Mastodon wasn't about Threads' management – it was about Threads' users. It posited a certain kind of moral defective who would use a Zuckerberg-controlled platform in the 2020s and insisted that those people would ruin Mastodon by bringing over their illegitimate social practices.

I've made no secret of where I come down in this debate: the owners of legacy social media are my enemy, but the users of those platforms are my comrades, and I want to help them get shut of legacy social media as quickly and painlessly as possible.

What's more, there's a way to make this happen! The same adversarial interoperability that served Zuckerberg so well when he was draining users off of Myspace could be used today to evacuate all of Meta's platforms. We could use a combination of on-device bridging, scraping and other guerrilla tactics to create "alt clients" that let you interact with people on Mastodon and the legacy platforms in one context, so that you can leave the bad services but keep the good people in your life.

The major barrier to this isn't technological. Despite the boasts of these companies to world-beating engineering prowess, the reality is that people (often teenagers) keep successfully finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in the "impregnable" platforms, in order to build successful alt clients:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/07/blue-bubbles-for-all/#never-underestimate-the-determination-of-a-kid-who-is-time-rich-and-cash-poor

The thing that eventually sees off these alt clients isn't Big Tech's technical countermeasures – it's legal risk. A global system of "anticircumvention" laws makes the kinds of basic reverse-engineering associated with building using adversarial interoperability radioactively illegal. These laws didn't appear out of thin air, either: the US Trade Representative pressured all of America's trading partners into passing them:

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

Which brings me back to crises precipitating change. Trump has staged an unscheduled, sudden, midair disassembly of the global system of trade, whacking tariffs on every country in the world, even in defiance of the Supreme Court:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd6zn3ly22yo

Ironically, this has only helped make the case for adversarial interoperability. Trump is using tech companies to attack his geopolitical rivals, ordering Microsoft to shut down both the International Criminal Court and a Brazilian high court in retaliation for their pursuit of the criminal dictators Benjamin Netanyahu and Jair Bolsonaro. This means that Trump has violated the quid pro quo deal for keeping anticircumvention law on your statute books, and he has made the case for killing anticircumvention as quickly as possible in order to escape American tech platforms before they are weaponized against you:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/29/post-american-canada/#ottawa

I've been talking about this for more than a year now, and I must say, the reception has been better than I dared dream. I think that – for the first time in my adult life – we are on the verge of creating a new, good, billionaire-proof internet:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/15/how-the-light-gets-in/

But there's one objection that keeps coming up: "What if this makes Trump mad?" Or, more specifically, "What if this makes Trump more mad, so instead of hitting us with a 10% tariff, it's a 1,000% tariff?

This came up earlier this week, when I gave a remote keynote for the Fedimtl conference, and an audience member said that he thought we should just focus on building good new platforms, rather than risking Trump's ire. In my response, I recited the arguments I've raised in this piece.

But yesterday, I saw a news item that made me realize there was one more argument I should have made, but missed. It was a Reuters story about Trump ordering American diplomats to fight against "data sovereignty" policies around the world:

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/us-orders-diplomats-fight-data-sovereignty-initiatives-2026-02-25/

The news comes from a leaked diplomatic cable, and it's a reminder that Trump's goal is to maintain American dominance of the world's technology and to prevent the formation of a post-American internet altogether. Worrying that Trump will hit you with more tariffs if you legalize jailbreaking assumes that the thing that would upset Trump is that you broke the rules.

That's not what makes Trump angry.

What makes Trump angry is losing.

Say you focus exclusively on building superior platforms. Say by some miracle that everyone you care about somehow overcomes the collective action problems and high switching costs and leaves behind US Big Tech services and comes to your new, federated, cleantech, post-American alternative.

Do you think that Trump will observe this collapse in the fortunes of the most important corporations in his coalition and shrug and say, "Well, I guess I lost fair and square; better luck next time?"

Hell, no. We already know what Trump does when his corporate allies lose to a superior foreign rival – Trump steals the rival's service and gives it to one of his cronies. That's literally what he did last month, to Tiktok:

https://www.democracynow.org/2026/1/23/headlines/larry_ellisons_oracle_part_of_new_deal_to_own_us_version_of_tiktok

The fear of harsh retaliation for any country that dares to be a Disenshittification Nation is based on the premise that Trump is motivated by a commitment to fairness. He's not: Trump is motivated by a desire to dominate. Anything that threatens the dominance of the companies that take his orders is fair game, and he will retaliate in any way he can.

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 Florida cops threaten people who ask for complaint forms https://web.archive.org/web/20060218125443/http://cbs4.com/topstories/local_story_033170755.html

#20yrsago SF editor: watermarks hurt artists and reward megacorps https://web.archive.org/web/20060307172130/http://www.kathryncramer.com/kathryn_cramer/2006/02/watermarking_as.html

#15yrsago HarperCollins to libraries: we will nuke your ebooks after 26 checkouts https://memex.craphound.com/2011/02/25/harpercollins-to-libraries-we-will-nuke-your-ebooks-after-26-checkouts/

#15yrsago Slowly fuming used bookstore clerk seethings https://web.archive.org/web/20110224180817/http://blogs.sfweekly.com/exhibitionist/2011/02/this_is_why_your_used_bookstor.php

#15yrsago Rothfuss pledges to buy Firefly from Fox and give it away https://blog.patrickrothfuss.com/2011/02/an-open-letter-to-nathan-fillion/

#10yrsago Disney offers to deduct contributions to its PAC from employees’ paychecks, to lobby for TPP https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/02/disney-ceo-asks-employees-to-chip-in-to-pay-copyright-lobbyists/

#10yrsago Read: The full run of If magazine, scanned at the Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/ifmagazine

#10yrsago Rosa Parks’s papers and photos online at the Library of Congress https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=266gn07TUYw

#10yrsago Harvard Business Review: Stop paying executives for performance https://hbr.org/2016/02/stop-paying-executives-for-performance

#5yrsago Saving the planet is illegal https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/25/ring-down-the-curtain/#ect

#5yrsago Against hygiene theater https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/25/ring-down-the-curtain/#hygiene-theater

#1yrago Apple's encryption capitulation https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/25/sneak-and-peek/#pavel-chekov

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 Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1055 words today, 38245 total)

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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