Today's links

• If you build it (and it works), Trump will come (and take it): Trump wants Big Tech to win, not to play fair.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Harpercollins v libraries; Rothfuss x Firefly; Bookseller seethings; If magazine; HBR v executive pay; Apple caves on encryption.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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 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 and maintaining 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 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)

• Organized Labor Took a Huge Step Forward When GM Workers Sat Down in Unison in 1937 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/organized-labor-took-huge-step-forward-when-GM-workers-sat-down-unison-1937-180988089/

• How to Tax Billionaires https://prospect.org/2026/02/24/tax-billionaires-california-income-inequality-trump-billionaires-trillionaires/

• “Battered, bedraggled, inexplicably enthusiastic about a bargain flight to Bermuda” https://unsung.aresluna.org/battered-bedraggled-inexplicably-enthusiastic-about-a-bargain-flight-to-bermuda/

• Understanding the L L M Bubble https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/76c5f9c0-d1a4-4493-b204-bbbdd68fd910/downloads/89583079-d8c1-483f-8988-3c9f5d813d89/HoranAAJ2026LLMbubble.pdf?ver=1771954468213

• Actually, the left is winning the AI debate https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/actually-the-left-is-winning-the

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)

• Oslo (remote): Seminar og lansering av rapport om «enshittification», Feb 27
  https://www.forbrukerradet.no/siste-nytt/digital/seminar-og-lansering-av-rapport-om-enshittification/

• Victoria: 28th Annual Victoria International Privacy & Security Summit, Mar 3-5
  https://www.rebootcommunications.com/event/vipss2026/

• Victoria: Enshittification at Russell Books, Mar 4
  https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cory-doctorow-is-coming-to-victoria-tickets-1982091125914

• Barcelona: Enshittification with Simona Levi/Xnet (Llibreria Finestres), Mar 20
  https://www.llibreriafinestres.com/evento/cory-doctorow/

• Berkeley: Bioneers keynote, Mar 27
  https://conference.bioneers.org/

• Montreal: Bronfman Lecture (McGill) Apr 10
  https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disrupter-tickets-1982706623885

• Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Making The Internet Suck Less (Thinking With Mitch Joel)
  https://www.sixpixels.com/podcast/archives/making-the-internet-suck-less-with-cory-doctorow-twmj-1024/

• Panopticon :3 (Trashfuture)
  https://www.patreon.com/posts/panopticon-3-150395435

• America's Enshittification is Canada's Opportunity (Do Not Pass Go)
  https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/americas-enshittification-is-canadas

• Everything Wrong With the Internet and How to Fix It, with Tim Wu (Ezra Klein)
  https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-doctorow-wu.html

• How the Internet Got Worse (Masters in Business)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auXlkuVhxMo

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links

• The whole economy pays the Amazon tax: You can't shop your way out of a monopoly.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Math denial; Disney v young Tim Burton; Make v Sony; American oligarchs' wealth (2011); New Librarian of Congress; The Mauritanian; Bossware.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

The whole economy pays the Amazon tax (permalink)

Selling on Amazon is a tough business. Sure, you can reach a lot of customers, but this comes at a very high price: the junk fees that Amazon extracts from its sellers amount to 50-60% of the price you pay.

That's a hell of a lot of money to hand over to a middleman, but it's not like vendors have much choice. The vast majority of America's affluent households are Prime subscribers (depending on how you define "affluent household" it's north of 90%). Prime households prepay for a year's worth of shipping, so it's only natural that they start their shopping on Amazon, where they've already paid the delivery costs. And because Amazon reliably meets or beats the prices you'd pay elsewhere, Prime subscribers who find a product on Amazon overwhelmingly stop their shopping at Amazon, too.

At this point you might be thinking a couple things:

I. Why not try to sell the non-affluent households, who are far less likely to subscribe to Prime? and

II. If Amazon has the lowest prices, what's the problem if everyone shops there?

The answers to these two questions are intimately related, as it happens.

Let's start with selling to non-affluent households – basically, the bottom 90% of American earners. The problem here is that everyone who isn't in that top 10% is pretty goddamned broke. It's not just decades of wage stagnation and hyperinflation in health, housing and education costs. It's also that every economic crisis of this century has resulted in a "K-shaped" recovery, in which "economic recovery" means that rich people are doing fine, while everyone else is worse off than they were before the crisis.

For decades, America papered over the K-shaped hole in its economy with debt. First it was credit cards. Then it was gimmicky mortgages – home equity lines of credit, second mortgages and reverse mortgages. Then it was payday lenders. Then it was "buy-now/pay-later" services that let you buy lunch at Chipotle on an installment plan that is nominally interest-free, but is designed to trap the unwary and unlucky with massive penalties if you miss a single payment.

This produced a median American who isn't just cash-poor – they are cash-negative, drowning in debt. And – with the exception of a brief Biden intercession – every presidential administration of the 21st century has enacted policies that favor creditors over debtors. Bankruptcy is harder to declare, and creditors can hit you with effectively unlimited penalties and confiscation of your property and wages once your cash is gone. Trump has erased all the small mercies of the Biden years – for example, he just forced 8,000,000 student borrowers back into repayment:

https://prospect.org/2025/12/16/gop-forcing-eight-million-student-loan-borrowers-into-repayment/

The average American worker has $955 saved for retirement:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/955-saved-for-retirement-millions-are-in-that-boat-150003868.html

There's plenty to worry about in a K-shaped economy – big things like "political instability" and "cultural chaos" (the fact that most people are broke has a lot to do with the surging fortunes of gambling platforms). But from a seller's perspective, the most important impact of the K-shaped economy is that only rich people buy stuff. Selling to the bottom 90% is a losing proposition because they're increasingly too broke to buy anything:

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

Combine the fact that the richest 10% of Americans all start their shopping on Amazon with the fact that no one else can afford to buy anything, and it's easy to see why merchants would stay on Amazon, even when junk fees hit 60%.

Which brings us to the second question: if Amazon has the best prices, what's the problem with everyone shopping there?

The answer is to be found in the California Attorney General's price-fixing lawsuit against Amazon:

https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bonta-exposes-amazon-price-fixing-scheme-driving-costs

The suit's been running for a long time, but the AG's office just celebrated a milestone – they've finished analyzing the internal memos they forced Amazon to disgorge through civil law's "discovery" process. These internal docs verify an open – and very dirty – secret about Amazon: the company uses its power to push up prices across the entire economy.

Here's how that works: sellers have to sell on Amazon, and that means they're losing $0.50-$0.60 on every dollar. The obvious way to handle this is by raising prices. But Amazon knows that its power comes from offering buyers prices that are as low or lower than the prices at all its competitors.

Amazon could ban its sellers from raising prices, but if they did that, they'd have to accept a smaller share of every sale (otherwise most of their sellers would go broke from selling at a loss on Amazon). So instead, Amazon imposes a business practice called "most favored nation" (MFN) pricing on its sellers.

Under an MFN arrangement, sellers are allowed to raise their prices on Amazon, but when they do, they must raise their prices everywhere else, too: at Walmart, at Target, at mom and pop indie stores, and at their own factory outlet store. Remember: Amazon doesn't have to have low prices to win, it just needs to have the same prices as everyone else. So long as prices rise throughout the economy, Amazon is fine, and it can continue to hike its junk fees on sellers, knowing that they will pay those fees by raising prices on Amazon and everywhere else their products are sold.

Like I say, this isn't really a secret. MFN terms were the basis of DC Attorney General Ken Racine's case against Amazon, five years ago:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/01/you-are-here/#prime-facie

Amazon's not the only company that does this. Under the Biden administration, the FTC brought a lawsuit against Pepsi because Pepsi and Walmart had rigged the market so that when Walmart raised its prices, Pepsi would force everyone else who carried Pepsi products to raise their prices even more. Walmart still had the lowest prices, but everything everywhere got more expensive, both at Walmart and everywhere else:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/secret-documents-show-pepsi-and-walmart

Trump's FTC dropped the Pepsi/Walmart case, and Amazon wriggled out of the DC case, but the California AG's office has a lot more resources than DC can muster. This is a timely reminder that America's antitrust laws can be enforced at the state level as well as by the federal authorities. Trump might be happy to let Amazon steal from Americans so long as Jeff Bezos neuters the Washington Post, writes a check for $1m to sit on the inaugural dais, and makes a garbage movie about Melania; but that doesn't stop California AG Rob Bonta from going after Amazon for ripping off Californians (and, in so doing, develop the evidentiary record and precedent that will allow every other state AG to go after Amazon).

The fact that Amazon's monopoly lets it control prices across the economy highlights the futility of trying to fix the Amazon problem by shopping elsewhere. A "boycott" isn't you shopping really hard, it's an organized movement with articulated demands, a theory of change, and a backbone of solidarity. "Conscious consumption" is a dead-end:

https://jacobin.com/2026/02/individual-boycotts-collective-action-ice/

Obviously, Californians have more to worry about than getting ripped off by Amazon (like getting murdered or kidnapped by ICE agents who want to send us all to a slave labor camp in El Salvador), but the billions that Amazon steals from American buyers and sellers are the source of the millions that Bezos uses to support Trump's fascist takeover of America. Without billionaires who would happily support concentration camps in their back yards if it means saving a dollar on their taxes, fascism would still be a fringe movement.

That's why, when we hold new Nuremberg trials for Trump and his collaborators, we should also unwind every merger that was approved under Trump:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/10/miller-in-the-dock/#denazification

The material support for Trump's ideology of hate, violence and terror comes from Trump's program of unregulated corporate banditry. A promise to claw back every stolen dime might cool the ardor of Trump's corporate supporters, and even if it doesn't, zeroing out their bank-balances after Trump is gone will be an important lesson for future would-be billionaire collaborators.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• One Year In: The Good and The (Mostly) Bad and Ugly of Trump Antitrust and Consumer Protection https://economicpopulist.substack.com/p/one-year-in-the-good-and-the-mostly

• 2025 State of Clutter Report https://yorba.co/state-of-clutter

• A.I. Isn't People https://www.todayintabs.com/p/a-i-isn-t-people

• Color Game https://dialed.gg/

• Paediatricians’ blood used to make new treatments for RSV and colds https://www.newscientist.com/article/2516079-paediatricians-blood-used-to-make-new-treatments-for-rsv-and-colds/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Princeton prof explains watermarks’ failures https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2006/02/24/how-watermarks-fail/

#20yrsago Palm Beach County voting machines generated 100K anomalies in 2004 https://web.archive.org/web/20060225172632/https://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-auth.cgi?file=/1954/19421.html

#15yrsago Sharing the power in Tahrir Square https://www.flickr.com/photos/47421217@N08/5423296010/

#15yrsago 17-year-old Tim Burton’s rejection from Walt Disney Productions https://web.archive.org/web/20110226083118/http://www.lettersofnote.com/2011/02/giant-zlig.html

#15yrsago Rare Alan Turing papers bought by Bletchley Park Trust https://web.archive.org/web/20110225145556/https://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/news/docview.rhtm/635610

#15yrsago Sony considered harmful to makers, innovators and hackers https://web.archive.org/web/20151013140820/http://makezine.com/2011/02/24/sonys-war-on-makers-hackers-and-innovators/

#15yrsago MPAA: record-breaking box-office year is proof that piracy is killing movies https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/02/piracy-once-again-fails-to-get-in-way-of-record-box-office/

#15yrsago Super-wealthy clothes horses and their sartorial habits https://web.archive.org/web/20110217045201/http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704409004576146420210142748.html

#15yrsago Visualizing the wealth of America’s super-rich ruling class https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph/

#10yrsago Obama’s new Librarian of Congress nominee is a rip-snortin’, copyfightin’, surveillance-hatin’ no-foolin’ LIBRARIAN https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iU8vXDoBB5s

#10yrsago Math denialism: crypto backdoors and DRM are the alternative medicine of computer science https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/24/the-fbi-wants-a-backdoor-only-it-can-use-but-wanting-it-doesnt-make-it-possible

#10yrsago Uganda’s corrupt president just stole another election, but he couldn’t steal the Internet https://web.archive.org/web/20160225095947/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/uganda-election-day-social-media-blackout-backlash-mobile-payments

#10yrsago Archbishop of St Louis says Girl Scout Cookies encourage sin https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/23/girl-scouts-cookies-missouri-catholics-st-louis-archbishop

#10yrsago After appointed city manager illegally jacked up prices, Flint paid the highest water rates in America https://eu.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/flint-water-crisis/2016/02/16/study-flint-paid-highest-rate-us-water/80461288/

#10yrsago Baidu browser isn’t just a surveillance tool, it’s a remarkably sloppy one https://citizenlab.ca/research/privacy-security-issues-baidu-browser/

#5yrsago Why Brits can no longer order signed copies of my books https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#brexit-books

#5yrsago Court rejects TSA qualified immunity https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#junk-touching

#5yrsago The Mauritanian https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#gwb-and-gitmo

#5yrsago EVs as distributed storage grid https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#mobile-batteries

#5yrsago Bossware and the shitty tech adoption curve https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

#1yrsago How an obscure advisory board lets utilities steal $50b/year from ratepayers https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/24/surfa/#mark-ellis

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Oslo (remote): Seminar og lansering av rapport om «enshittification», Feb 27
  https://www.forbrukerradet.no/siste-nytt/digital/seminar-og-lansering-av-rapport-om-enshittification/

• Victoria: 28th Annual Victoria International Privacy & Security Summit, Mar 3-5
  https://www.rebootcommunications.com/event/vipss2026/

• Victoria: Enshittification at Russell Books, Mar 4
  https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cory-doctorow-is-coming-to-victoria-tickets-1982091125914

• Barcelona: Enshittification with Simona Levi/Xnet (Llibreria Finestres), Mar 20
  https://www.llibreriafinestres.com/evento/cory-doctorow/

• Berkeley: Bioneers keynote, Mar 27
  https://conference.bioneers.org/

• Montreal: Bronfman Lecture (McGill) Apr 10
  https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disrupter-tickets-1982706623885

• Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Making The Internet Suck Less (Thinking With Mitch Joel)
  https://www.sixpixels.com/podcast/archives/making-the-internet-suck-less-with-cory-doctorow-twmj-1024/

• Panopticon :3 (Trashfuture)
  https://www.patreon.com/posts/panopticon-3-150395435

• America's Enshittification is Canada's Opportunity (Do Not Pass Go)
  https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/americas-enshittification-is-canadas

• Everything Wrong With the Internet and How to Fix It, with Tim Wu (Ezra Klein)
  https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-doctorow-wu.html

• How the Internet Got Worse (Masters in Business)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auXlkuVhxMo

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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, 37190 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

Today's links

• Socialist excellence in New York City: The real efficiency is insourcing and ending public-private partnerships.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: UK antipiracy office will catch Firefox crooks; Batpole flip-top bust; "Order of Odd-Fish"; Scott Walker v fake Kochl; Billg wants to backdoor Microsoft; NSA spied on world leaders; Trump They Live mask; "Unicorns vs Goblins"; Covid German.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

Socialist excellence in New York City (permalink)

In her magnificent 2023 book Doppelganger, Naomi Klein describes the "mirror world" of right wing causes that are weird, conspiratorial versions of the actual things that leftists care about:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

For example, Trump rode to power on the back of Qanon, a movement driven by conspiratorial theories of a cabal of rich and powerful people who were kidnapping, trafficking and abusing children. Qanon followers were driven to the most unhinged acts by these theories, shooting up restaurants and demanding to be let into nonexistent basements:

https://www.newsweek.com/pizzagate-gunman-killed-north-carolina-qanon-2012850

And while Qanon theories about children being disguised as reasonably priced armoires are facially absurd, the right's obsession with imaginary children is a long-established phenomenon:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-53416247

Think of the conservative movement's all-consuming obsession with the imaginary lives of children that aborted fetuses might have someday become, and its depraved indifference to the hunger and poverty of actual children in America:

https://unitedwaynca.org/blog/child-poverty-in-america/

Trump's most ardent followers reorganized their lives around the imagined plight of imaginary children, while making excuses for Trump's first-term "Kids in Cages" policy:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-44518942

Obviously, this has only gotten worse in Trump's second term. The same people whose entire political identity is nominally about defending "unborn children" are totally indifferent to the actual born children that DOGE left to die by the thousands:

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

They cheered Israel's slaughter and starvation of children during the siege of Gaza and they are cheering it on still today:

https://www.savethechildren.net/news/gaza-20000-children-killed-23-months-war-more-one-child-killed-every-hour

As for pedophile traffickers, the same Qanon conspiracy theorists who cooked their brains with fantasies about Trump smiting the elite pedophiles are now making excuses for Trump's central role in history's most prolific child rape scandal:

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

This is the mirror-world as Klein described it: a real problem (elite impunity for child abuse; the sadistic targeting of children in war crimes; the impact of poverty on children) filtered through a fever-swamp of conspiratorial nonsense. It's a world that would do anything to save imaginary children while condemning living, real children to grinding poverty, sexual torture, starvation and murder.

Once you know about Klein's mirror-world, you see it everywhere – from conservative panics about the power of Big Tech platforms (that turn out to be panics about what Big Tech does with that power, not about the power of tech itself):

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/13/khanservatives/#kid-rock-eats-shit

To conservative panics about health – that turn out to be a demand to dismantle America's weak public health system and America's weak regulation of the supplements industry:

https://www.conspirituality.net/episodes/brief-maha-is-a-supplements-grift

But lately, I've been thinking that maybe the mirror shines in both directions: that in addition to the warped reflection of the right's mirror world, there is a left mirror world where we can find descrambled, clarified versions of the right's twisted obsessions.

I've been thinking about this since I read a Corey Robin blog post about Mamdani's campaign rhetoric, in which Mamdani railed against "mediocrity" and promised "excellence":

https://coreyrobin.com/2025/11/15/excellence-over-mediocrity-from-mamdani-to-marx-to-food/

Robin pointed out that while this framing might strike some leftists as oddly right-coded, it has a lineal descent from Marx, who advocated for industrialization and mass production because the alternative would be "universal mediocrity.”

Robin went on to discuss a largely lost thread of "socialist perfectionism" ("John Ruskin and William Morris to Bloomsbury Bolsheviks like Virginia Woolf and John Maynard Keynes") who advocated for the public provision of excellence.

He identifies Marx's own mirror world analysis, pointing out that Marx identified a fundamental difference between capitalist and socialist theories of the division of labor. While capitalists saw the division of labor as a way to increase quantity, socialists were excited by the prospect of increasing quality.

(There's a centaur/reverse centaur comparison lurking in there, too. If you're a centaur radiologist, who gets an AI tool that flags some diagnoses you may have missed, then you're improving the rate of tumor identification. If you're a reverse centaur radiologist who sees 90% of your colleagues fired and replaced with a chatbot whose work you are expected to sign off on at a rate that precludes even cursory inspection, you're increasing X-ray throughput at the expense of accuracy):

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

(In other words: the reverse centaur is the mirror world version of a centaur.)

After the mayoral election, Mamdani doubled down on his pursuit of high-quality public services. In his inaugural speech, Mamdani promised a government "where excellence is no longer the exception":

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/01/nyregion/mamdani-inauguration-speech-transcript.html

Robin was also developing his appreciation for Mamadani's vision of public excellence. In the New York Review of Books, Robin made the case that it was a mistake for Democrats to have ceded the language of efficiency and quality to Republicans:

https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/12/31/democratic-excellence-zohran-mamdani/

Where Democrats do talk about efficiency, they talk about it in Republican terms: "We'll run the government like a business." Mamdani, by contrast, talks about running the government like a government – a good government, a government committed to excellence.

Writing in Jacobin, Conor Lynch takes a trip into the good side of the mirror world, unpacking the idea of socialist excellence in Mamdani's governance promises:

https://jacobin.com/2026/02/zohran-mamdani-efficiency-nyc-budget/

During the Mamdani campaign, "efficiency" was just one plank of the platform. But once Mamdani took office, he learned that his predecessor, the lavishly corrupt Eric Adams, had lied about the city's finances, leaving a $12b hole in the budget:

https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/01/mayor-mamdani-details–adams-budget-crisis-

Mamdani came to power in New York on an ambitious platform of public service delivery, and not just because this is the right thing to do, but because investment in a city's people and built environment pays off handsomely.

Maintenance is always cheaper than repair, and one of the main differences between a business and a government is that a business's shareholders can starve maintenance budgets, cash out, and leave the collapsing firm behind them, while governments must think about the long term consequences of short-term thinking (the fact that so many Democratic governments have failed to do this is a consequence of Democrats adopting Republicans' framing that a good government is "run like a business").

The best time to invest in New York City was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. For Mamdani to make those investments and correct the failures of his predecessors, he needs to find some money.

Mamdani's proposal for finding this money sounds pretty conservative: he's going to cut waste in government. He's ordered each city agency to appoint a "Chief Savings Officer" who will "review performance, eliminate waste and streamline service delivery." These CSOs are supposed to find a 1.5% across-the-board savings this year and 2.5% next year:

https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/01/mayor-mamdani-signs-executive-order-to-require-chief-savings-off

Does this sound like DOGE to you? It kind of does to me, but – crucially – this is mirror-world DOGE. DOGE's project was to make cuts to government in order to make government "run like a business." Specifically, DOGE wanted to transform the government into the kind of business that makes cuts to juice the quarterly numbers at the expense of long-term health:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2024/10/24/southwest-airlines-bends-to-activist-investor-restructures-board/

But Mamdani's mirror-world DOGE is looking to find efficiencies by cutting things like sweetheart deals with private contractors and consultants, who cost the city billions. It's these private sector delegates of the state that are the source of government waste and bloat.

The literature is clear on this: when governments eliminate their own capacity to serve the people and hire corporations to do it on their behalf, the corporations charge more and deliver less:

https://calmatters.org/commentary/2019/02/public-private-partnerships-are-an-industry-gimmick-that-dont-serve-public-well/

As Lynch writes, DOGE's purpose was to dismantle as much of the government as possible and shift its duties to Beltway Bandits who could milk Uncle Sucker for every dime. Mamdani's ambition, meanwhile, is to "restore faith in government [and] demonstrate that the public sector can match or even surpass the private sector in excellence."

As Mamdani said in his inauguration speech, "For too long, we have turned to the private sector for greatness, while accepting mediocrity from those who serve the public."

Turning governments into businesses has been an unmitigated failure. After decades of outsourcing, the government hasn't managed to shrink its payroll, but government workers are today primarily employed in wheedling private contractors to fulfill their promises, even as public spending has quintupled:

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/is-government-too-big-reflections-on-the-size-and-composition-of-todays-federal-government/

Instead of having a government employee do a government job, that govvie oversees a private contractor who costs twice as much…and sucks at their job:

https://www.pogo.org/reports/bad-business-billions-of-taxpayer-dollars-wasted-on-hiring-contractors

There's a wonderful illustration of this principle at work in Edward Snowden's 2019 memoir Permanent Record:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/09/24/permanent-record-edward-snowden-and-the-making-of-a-whistleblower/

After Snowden broke both his legs during special forces training and washed out, he went to work for the NSA. After a couple years, his boss told him that Congress capped the spy agencies' headcount but not their budgets, so he was going to have to quit his job at the NSA and go to work for one of the NSA's many contractors, because the NSA could hire as many contractors as it wanted.

So Snowden is sent to a recruiter who asks him how much he's making as a government spy. Snowden quotes a modest 5-figure sum. The recruiter is aghast and tells Snowden that he gets paid a percentage of whatever Snowden ends up making as a government contractor, and promptly triples Snowden's government salary. Why not? The spy agencies have unlimited budgets, and will pay whatever the private company that Snowden nominally works for bills them at. Everybody wins!

Ladies and gentlemen, the efficiency of government outsourcing. Run the government like a business!

As bad as this is when the government hires outside contractors to do things, it's even worse when they hire outside contractors to consult on things. Under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the Canadian government spent a fortune on consultants, especially at the start of the pandemic:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/31/mckinsey-and-canada/#comment-dit-beltway-bandits-en-canadien

The main beneficiary of these contracts was McKinsey, who were given a blank cheque and no oversight – they were even exempted from rules requiring them to disclose conflicts of interest.

Trudeau raised Canadian government spending by 40%, to $11.8 billion, creating a "shadow civil service" that cost vastly more than the actual civil service – the government spent $1.85b on internal IT expertise, and $2.3b on outside contractors.

These contractors produced some of the worst IT boondoggles in government history, including the bungled "ArriveCAN" contact tracing program. The two-person shop that won the contract outsourced it to KPMG and raked off a 15-30% commission.

Before Trudeau, Stephen Harper paid IBM to build Phoenix – a payroll system that completely failed and was, amazingly, far worse than ArriveCAN. IBM got $309m to build Phoenix, and then Canada spent another $506m to fix it and compensate the people whose lives it ruined.

Wherever you find these contractors, you find stupendous waste and fraud. I remember in the early 2000s, when Dan "City of Sound" Hill was working at the BBC and wanted to try an experiment to distribute MP3s of a radio programme.

The BBC – an organization with a long history of technical excellence – had given the exclusive contract for web delivery to Siemens, who wanted £10,000 to set up a web-server for the experiment. Dan rented a server from an online provider and put it all on his personal card, serving tens of thousands of MP3s for less than £10. It turns out that letting your technical personnel do your technology development costs 1/1000th of what it costs to have contractors do it.

Running your public institution "like a business" is incredibly inefficient. Back when Musk and Ramaswamy announced their plan to cut $2t from the US federal budget, David Dayen published a plan to realize nearly that much savings just by attacking waste arising from running the government "like a business":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/27/beltway-bandits/#henhouse-foxes

The US government's own estimate of the losses due to contractor fraud comes out to $274b/year – roughly the size of the entire civil service payroll (the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which Musk sadistically destroyed, accounts for 0.012% of federal spending).

Medicare "upcoding" – a form of fraud committed by companies like United Healthcare, the largest Medicare Advantage provider in the country – costs the public $83b/year:

https://www.medpac.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Mar24_ExecutiveSummary_MedPAC_Report_To_Congress_SEC.pdf

Congress has banned Medicare and Medicaid from bargaining for pharma prices, which is why the US government pays 178% more than other governments, for the same drugs, which are often developed at public expense:

https://aspe.hhs.gov/reports/comparing-prescription-drugs

The Pentagon is a cesspit of waste. It's not just firing spies and rehiring them as contractors at a 300% markup – that's just for starters. The Pentagon receives $840b/year and has failed its last three audits:

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4992913-pentagon-fails-7th-audit-in-a-row-but-says-progress-made/

The conservative version of "efficiency" cashes out to "efficient at extracting value from public institutions, workers and customers." Mamdani's (good) mirror world "efficiency" means providing great public service through investing in public excellence.

New York City is overdue for this kind of overhaul. Everywhere you look in the city, you find high price consultants making out like bandits and starving the city of the funds it needs to deliver. The Second Avenue subway spent more on consultants than it spent on digging tunnels:

https://gothamist.com/news/mta-plans-to-hire-186m-consultant-to-oversee-second-avenue-subway-construction

Mamdani has pledged to audit the Department of Education's 25 largest contracts (the DOE spends $10b/year on outside contractors). He's rolling out "fiscal training and certification" for any government employee involved in procurement.

Mamdani isn't pretending he can bridge the gap that Adams left in the city's finances through efficiency alone: to make up the difference, he is going to tax NYC's millionaires, and ask the state to "rebalance" its relationship with NYC's taxpayers (NYC contributes 54.4% of the state budget, but only gets 40.5% in return).

As Lynch writes, NYC was the birthplace of austerity-driven outsourcing, following from the city's bankruptcy in 1975. 50 years later, Mamdani is bringing that age to a close.

Mamdani knows what the stakes are, too. He called efficiency "the most paramount left-wing concern, because it is either the fulfillment or the betrayal of that which motivates so much of our politics":

https://www.derekthompson.org/p/what-speaks-to-me-about-abundance

Mamdani is reviving the tradition of "sewer socialism," a governing philosophy based on "bringing people into your politics by improving their lives in obvious ways":

https://jacobin.com/2025/12/digital-sewer-socialism-public-ownership

Sewer socialism, public excellence, real efficiency: these are the (good) mirror world versions of the right's obsession with "government efficiency." On the conservative side of the mirror, "efficiency" is an excuse for hamstringing government employees and turning their budgets over to lazy, crooked contractors. On the left's side of the mirror, "efficiency" is building capacity in democratically accountable institutions that care about helping every person, and who deliver tomorrow's excellence by making long-term investments today.

(Image: DAVID ILIFF, CC BY-SA 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• The True North Strong And Speculative https://hugoclub.blogspot.com/2026/02/the-true-north-strong-and-speculative.html

• The Economic Democracy Project is hiring our first Program Director https://www.linkedin.com/posts/vera-franz_edp-program-director-jd-ugcPost-7429172997611003906-GmNW/

• A case study in civic fiction: A Gay Girl in Damascus and the structuring of cosmopolitan sympathy https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14648849261426443

• Your AI-generated password isn't random, it just looks that way https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/18/generating_passwords_with_llms/

• Skull Season https://fieldnotes.christopherbrown.com/p/skull-season?utm_source=substack&publication_id=29951&post_id=188606662&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&utm_campaign=email-share&triggerShare=true&isFreemail=true&r=1mh2k&triedRedirect=true

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrago UK anti-piracy officer assures Firefox she’ll catch the pirates who copy it https://web.archive.org/web/20060511105535/http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,9075-2051196,00.html

#20yrsago Diane Duane vows to finish trilogy as a reader-supported web-book https://web.archive.org/web/20060630094910/http://outofambit.blogspot.com/2006_02_01_outofambit_archive.html#114069083471800451

#15yrago Order of Odd-Fish, a funny, mannered, hilariously weird epic romp https://memex.craphound.com/2011/02/23/order-of-odd-fish-a-funny-mannered-hilariously-weird-epic-romp/

#15yrsago HOWTO make a batpole flip-top bust switch https://web.archive.org/web/20110218013400/https://www.thenewhobbyist.com/2011/02/wireless-light-switch-or-bust/

#15yrsago Travel guide for American invalids, 1887 https://web.archive.org/web/20110225235315/http://www.butifandthat.com/guide-for-invalids/

#15yrsago Archive.org and 150 libraries create 80,000 lendable ebook library https://archive.org/post/349420/in-library-ebook-lending-program-launched

#15yrsago Scott Walker tricked into spilling his guts to fake Koch brother https://web.archive.org/web/20110226135536/https://www.salon.com/news/the_labor_movement/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2011/02/23/koch_walker_call

#10yrsago Bill Gates: Microsoft would backdoor its products in a heartbeat https://web.archive.org/web/20160223175618/https://recode.net/2016/02/22/bill-gates-is-backing-the-fbi-in-its-case-against-apple/

#10yrsago Wikileaks: NSA spied on UN Secretary General and world leaders over climate and trade https://wikileaks.org/nsa-201602/

#10yrsago Donald Trump They Live mask https://web.archive.org/web/20160224101815/http://www.trickortreatstudios.com/they-live-alien-donald-trump-limited-edition-halloween-mask.html

#10yrsago Unicorn vs. Goblins: the third amazing, hilarious Phoebe and her Unicorn collection! https://memex.craphound.com/2016/02/23/unicorn-vs-goblins-the-third-amazing-hilarious-phoebe-and-her-unicorn-collection/

#5yrsago German covid coinages https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/23/acceptable-losses/#Zeitgeist

#5yrsago A voyage to the moon of 1776 https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/23/acceptable-losses/#Filippo-Morghen

#5yrsago Malcolm X's true killers https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/23/acceptable-losses/#deathbeds-r-us

#5yrsago Private equity's nursing home killing spree https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/23/acceptable-losses/#disposable-olds

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Montreal (remote): Fedimtl, Feb 24
  https://fedimtl.ca/

• Oslo (remote): Seminar og lansering av rapport om «enshittification»
  https://www.forbrukerradet.no/siste-nytt/digital/seminar-og-lansering-av-rapport-om-enshittification/

• Victoria: 28th Annual Victoria International Privacy & Security Summit, Mar 3-5
  https://www.rebootcommunications.com/event/vipss2026/

• Victoria: Enshittification at Russell Books, Mar 4
  https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cory-doctorow-is-coming-to-victoria-tickets-1982091125914

• Barcelona: Enshittification with Simona Levi/Xnet (Llibreria Finestres), Mar 20
  https://www.llibreriafinestres.com/evento/cory-doc

• Montreal: Bronfman Lecture (McGill) Apr 10
  https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disrupter-tickets-1982706623885

• Berkeley: Bioneers keynote, Mar 27
  https://conference.bioneers.org/

• Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Making The Internet Suck Less (Thinking With Mitch Joel)
  https://www.sixpixels.com/podcast/archives/making-the-internet-suck-less-with-cory-doctorow-twmj-1024/

• Panopticon :3 (Trashfuture)
  https://www.patreon.com/posts/panopticon-3-150395435

• America's Enshittification is Canada's Opportunity (Do Not Pass Go)
  https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/americas-enshittification-is-canadas

• Everything Wrong With the Internet and How to Fix It, with Tim Wu (Ezra Klein)
  https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-doctorow-wu.html

• How the Internet Got Worse (Masters in Business)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auXlkuVhxMo

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today's links

• Deplatform yourself: Copyright infringement is your least entertainment dollar.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: "Lawer" threatens suit; Landmark metaphotos; 3DP v (c); Forced arbitration; Imperial Scott Walker; Keysigning ritual; Polyfingered robot dictaphone; DNS bug; Register of copyright damns term extension; How Anonymous decides; Christchurch quake people-finder; Minor HP disenshittification; US v developing world at WIPO; TfL v anagram tube-map; Disneyland waiting; Internet of Garbage.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

Deplatform yourself (permalink)

The first time I met William Gibson – to interview him for the Globe and Mail on the release of 1999's All Tomorrow's Parties – there was one question I knew I wanted to ask him: "What happens to the counterculture in the era of instantaneous commodification?"

https://craphound.com/nonfic/transcript.html

Gibson's answer stuck with me for decades:

What we're doing pop culturally is like burning the rain forest. The biodiversity of pop culture is really, really in danger. I didn't see it coming until a few years ago, but looking back it's very apparent.

I watched a sort of primitive form of the recommodification machine around my friends and myself in the sixties, and it took about two years for this clumsy mechanism to get and try to sell us The Monkees.

In 1977, it took about eight months for a slightly faster more refined mechanism to put punk in the window of Holt Renfrew. It's gotten faster ever since. The scene in Seattle that Nirvana came from: as soon as it had a label, it was on the runways of Paris.

There's no grace period, so that's a way in which I see us losing the interstitial.

This may seem like an odd thing to think about, but nearly all the art and culture that means something to me started as something that was transgressive and weird, and even if it was eventually metabolized by the mainstream, that was only after it had a chance to ferment and mutate in a tide-pool of Bohemian weirdness.

All this century, I've asked friends and weirdos about what can resist this commodification and co-option. Scott Westerfeld – author of Uglies – had a very on-brand answer: he told me that he thought that teenagers might deliberately start cultivating acne as a badge of rebellion. That hasn't happened yet, but if it does, it will be born co-opted, because there's already a luxury brand called "Acne":

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

One anti-commodification measure that's worked reasonably well over the years is to be ugly. Punk zines and early Myspace pages embraced an aesthetic that the existing cohort of trained designers available to work for would-be co-opters would rather break their fingers than imitate. Eventually, some punk zinesters and Myspacers became freelance designers and offered the aesthetic for sale, but after the "grace period" that Gibson was worried about in 1999. By contrast, after a brief period in which early AI image-gen snuck psychedelic fish-dogs into every output, AI became so mid and inoffensive that even when it was used to make transgressive images (Trump spraying protesters with liquid shit from an airplane), it looked incredibly, terminally normal:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/20/ransom-note-force-field/#antilibraries

There's more than one way to be ugly, of course. The "edgelords" that defined forums like SomethingAwful and /b/ made heavy use of slurs, rape "jokes" and other beyond-the-pale rhetoric. Whether this reflected sincerely felt beliefs or a mere desire to shock (or both), it had the effect of making these subcultures very difficult to commodify. If you and your friends barely utter a single sentence that can be quoted in a mainstream news forum or office email, it's going to be very hard to co-opt you. For a long time, edgelords festered in the "dark corners" of the internet. But that's changed. The Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes – who thinks that "every woman and girl" should be "sent to a gulag" – has had dinner at the White House:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nick-fuentes-women-gulag/

Last week, Ryan Broderick wrote a short, striking article for his must-read Garbage Day newsletter about the way that the far right have become "cool" within Gen Z by being so outre that they were evicted from the major platforms (before Trump II, that is):

https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-only-taboo-left-is-copyright-infringement

As Broderick writes, "cool" isn't just "trends" ("hyperpop, brainrot, crowdwork comedy, Instagram collages, their weird post-COVID pop punk exploration"). For Broderick, cool things used to become trends after they were "begrudgingly canonized" by the likes of Time Magazine. But with Hollywood replaced by Youtube, magazines replaced by Tiktok, and radio replaced by Spotify, that looks very different today. Today's version of artist management teams is "hype houses." All forms of cultural activity have collapsed into a single, overriding imperative: "getting attention."

Which brings Broderick to his main question:

If everything is just attention now, and attention is completely commodified by algorithmic tech platforms, how can you push back against that?

His answer: "You have to essentially pre-deplatform yourself."

For young people, "the only things that have the level of scarcity and danger required to be seen as cool" are "whatever is unacceptable on those platforms." In other words, anything (and maybe only things) that're blocked or banned are a candidate to be cool. Cool people walk away from the places where you'd expect to find them and hang out in places that are culturally viewed as less important.

Broderick argues that this is the source of far-right influencers' influence: the fact that manosphere weirdos and trolls are hanging out in "shadowy corners" like Kick makes them feel authentic and outside of the norm and thus intrinsically interesting. And (Broderick continues) the fact that these manosphere types are now totally reliant on Discord clip-farmers has made them feel more mainstream and thus potentially less interesting.

This is where it gets cool. Broderick argues that there's nothing intrinsically reactionary about this kind of self-deplatforming as a parallel evolution taking place in progressive media. When Stephen Colbert's Trump-colonized network bans him from airing an interview with a Democratic politician, he puts it on Youtube instead, where it gets far more attention than it would have if the network had just left him alone.

But by and large it's not Democratic politicians who are too dangerous for the platforms – it's copyright infringement. The law makes it very easy to get things removed via unproven accusations of copyright infringement, and the platforms make it even easier:

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

Copyright is a doctrine that, by design, has very fuzzy edges where things may or may not be prohibited. But in the digital world, those edges are often erased, even as the zone of lawful activity they enclose contracts. This means that media that can be accused of infringing copyright is the most unwelcome content on platforms.

Broderick's theory predicts that the "coolest" media – the stuff that makes taste – is the stuff that fits in this zone of copyright infringement. He cites some compelling case studies, like Vera Drew's "The People's Joker," an amazing, unauthorized Batman mashup/trans allegory. Warner shut down multiple screenings of The People's Joker (including at TIFF), and this increased the coolness and prominence of the movie, driving people to underground screenings:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People%27s_Joker

A more contemporary version is Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie, which Broderick describes as "a copyright rats nest" based on a web series that is "completely illegal to watch on streaming platforms":

https://pagesix.com/2026/02/14/hollywood/how-nirvanna-the-band-the-show-the-movie-skirted-copyright-law/

Despite this/because of this, NTBTSTM just had "the biggest opening ever for a live-action Canadian film":

https://x.com/hertzbarry/status/2023521583923663342

Broderick's conclusion is that "as platforms police speech less and less, edgelords lose their sheen," but that this material, at or beyond the edge of copyright, unwelcome on platforms, is the future face of cool.

And here's where Broderick really got me: "the most dangerous thing for platforms is not racist garbage. It’s unmonetizeable content."

I make a lot of "unmonetizable content," starting with this blog, which has no metrics, no analytics, and (of course) no ads. I refuse to add social media cards, and hide obscure jokes in incredibly long URLs that get truncated on social media. I labor for hours over the weird illustrations that go at the top of the posts, which I release (along with the text they accompany) under Creative Commons licenses that let pretty much anyone do pretty much anything with them, without asking me, telling me, or paying me (it's always very funny when someone accuses me of publishing this work as clickbait – clickbait for what? To increase bandwidth consumption at my server?).

I do this to "woo the muse of the odd," a phrase I lifted from Bruce Sterling's 1991 keynote for the Game Developers' Conference, a talk that struck me so hard that I dropped out of university to make weird multimedia shortly after reading it:

https://lib.ru/STERLINGB/story.txt

It's a great talk, but the best parts are where Sterling grapples with this question of coolness, counterculture, and commodification:

In the immortal words of Lafcadio Hearn, a geek of incredible obscurity whose work is still in print after a hundred years, "woo the muse of the odd." A good science fiction story is not a "good story" with a polite whiff of rocket fuel in it. A good science fiction story is something that knows it is science fiction and plunges through that and comes roaring out of the other side. Computer entertainment should not be more like movies, it shouldn't be more like books, it should be more like computer entertainment, SO MUCH MORE LIKE COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT THAT IT RIPS THROUGH THE LIMITS AND IS SIMPLY IMPOSSIBLE TO IGNORE!

I don't think you can last by meeting the contemporary public taste, the taste from the last quarterly report. I don't think you can last by following demographics and carefully meeting expectations. I don't know many works of art that last that are condescending. I don't know many works of art that last that are deliberately stupid… Get weird. Get way weird. Get dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly, thoroughly weird and don't do it halfway, put every ounce of horsepower you have behind it.

It's been more than 30 years since I read that essay, more than a quarter century since I asked William Gibson whether Madison Avenue "finds its own use for things." Over the ensuing decades, media has become ever-better at "following demographics and carefully meeting expectations," thanks to vast troves of behavioral data correlated with media analytics. That process has only accelerated the "recommodification machine" that Gibson worried about in 1999, but as Broderick points out, there's one thing that is even harder to co-op than acne – "unmonetizable content," the Kryptonite of the platforms.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• finally we have created the silver bullet https://backofmind.substack.com/p/finally-we-have-created-the-silver

• Tac B https://chrisbathgate.blogspot.com/2026/02/tac-b.html

• Chainmail Finder https://www.chainmailfinder.com/

• More Women Drone Pilots https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDJa1_fLVeA

• It’s Time for Teachers to Break Up with Amazon https://ilsr.org/article/independent-business/its-time-for-teachers-to-break-up-with-amazon/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Mysterious “lawer” threatens to sue me over Bad Samaritan story https://memex.craphound.com/2006/02/20/mysterious-lawer-threatens-to-sue-over-bad-samaritan-story/

#20yrsago Flickr set documents locations in Neal Stephenson trilogy https://www.flickr.com/photos/notlikecalvin/sets/72057594068198516/

#20yrsago How the US is boning the developing world at WIPO https://web.archive.org/web/20060501000000*/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004434.php

#20yrsago Why kids are on MySpace https://www.danah.org/papers/AAAS2006.html

#20yrsago Transport for London censors anagram Tube map https://web.archive.org/web/20060222021226/https://www.unfortu.net/anagrammap/

#20yrsago More clues to identity of author of EFF-sliming article in The Reg https://memex.craphound.com/2006/02/22/more-clues-to-identity-of-author-of-eff-sliming-article-in-the-reg/

#20yrsago US copyright head: world “totally rejects” webcasting restrictions https://memex.craphound.com/2006/02/21/us-copyright-head-world-totally-rejects-webcasting-restrictions/

#20yrsago Copyright office head denounces “big mistake” of extending copyright https://web.archive.org/web/20060329162217/https://www.ibiblio.org/yugen/video/too_long.mp4

#20yrsago Artists paint Detroit’s derelict buildings Tiggeriffic Orange https://web.archive.org/web/20060411143941/http://www.thedetroiter.com/nov05/disneydemolition.php

#20yrsago Canadian Uni bans WiFi because its safety can’t be proved https://web.archive.org/web/20060307004018/http://www.itbusiness.ca/it/client/en/home/News.asp?id=38093&PageMem=1

#15yrsago Overcome information overload by trusting redundancy https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/feb/22/information-overload-probabilistic

#15yrsago Embattled PS3 hacker raises big bank to fight Sony https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/02/george-hotz-secures-enough-donations-to-fight-sony-rap-battle-begins/

#15yrsago How Anonymous decides: inside the lulz-sausage factory https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/02/empty-suit-the-chaotic-way-that-anonymous-makes-decisions/

#15yrsago America’s Chief Apocalypse Officer, a Fed job ad from 1956 https://web.archive.org/web/20110210020542/http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2011/02/nuclear-weapons-post-attack-job-description-1956.html

#15yrsago What happens when you stick your head in a particle accelerator https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2010/03/what-happens-when-you-stick-your-head-into-a-particle-accelerator/

#15yrsago Saif Gadaffhi, plagiarist https://web.archive.org/web/20110225114903/https://saifalislamgaddafithesis.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

#15yrsago Google App to help locate people in Christchurch quake https://web.archive.org/web/20110222091007/http://christchurch-2011.person-finder.appspot.com/

#15yrsago Photos of kids waiting at Disneyland https://web.archive.org/web/20110301045827/https://arinfishkin.com/fishkin_delayed_gratification.html

#15yrsago Westboro Baptist Church attempts to lure Anonymous into attacking it? https://www.siliconrepublic.com/life/were-not-attacking-westboro-baptist-church-anonymous

#15yrsago Egyptian orders a pizza for the Wisconsin demonstrators https://www.politico.com/story/2011/02/from-cairo-to-madison-some-pizza-049888#ixzz1EXkqdxcu

#15yrsago Metaphotos of landmarks made from hundreds of superimposed tourist snaps https://web.archive.org/web/20110219193205/http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/hundreds-of-tourist-photos

#15yrsago Armed Services Edition books: abridgements and pocket-editions for doughboys https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/military/literature-on-the-frontlines-the-history-of-armed-services-edition-books/?doing_wp_cron=1771432700.1463210582733154296875

#15yrsago 3D printing’s first copyright complaint goes away, but things are just getting started https://memex.craphound.com/2011/02/20/3d-printings-first-copyright-complaint-goes-away-but-things-are-just-getting-started/

#15yrsago Imperial Scott Walker, the worker-hating AT-AT Destroyer https://web.archive.org/web/20110224024111/https://simulacrumb.tumblr.com/#3388763986

#10yrsago Forced arbitration clauses are a form of wealth transfer to the rich https://web.archive.org/web/20160322142114/https://www.acslaw.org/sites/default/files/Arbitration_as_Wealth_Transfer_1.pdf

#10yrsago Eleven years and counting: EFF scores a major victory in its NSA mass surveillance suit https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/02/big-victory-judge-pushes-jewel-v-nsa-forward

#10yrsago What a serious keysigning ceremony looks like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9j-sfP9GUU

#10yrsago Pseudoscientific terror ended fluoridation in Calgary, now kids’ teeth are rotting https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cdoe.12215

#10yrsago Manual typewriter + servos = polyfingered robot dictaphone https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNSCL4YOd5E

#10yrsago Sarah Jeong’s Harvard lecture: “The Internet of Garbage” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUSctMLLNUE

#10yrsago Citing copyright, Army blocks Chelsea Manning from receiving printouts from EFF’s website https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/02/military-prison-blocks-chelsea-manning-reading-eff-blog-posts

#10yrsago Improve your laptop stickering technique https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juRDql6wBIQ

#10yrsago Photo of Bernie Sanders being arrested in 1963 Chicago protest https://web.archive.org/web/20160220024814/https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-bernie-sanders-1963-chicago-arrest-20160219-story.html

#10yrsago Uber uses customer service reps to push anti-union message to drivers https://qz.com/619601/uber-is-using-its-us-customer-service-reps-to-deliver-its-anti-union-message

#10yrsago The latest DNS bug is terrifying, widespread, and reveals deep flaws in Internet security https://web.archive.org/web/20160222231840/http://dankaminsky.com/2016/02/20/skeleton/

#10yrsago 19th century spam came by post, prefigured modern spam in so many ways https://web.archive.org/web/20160915000000*/http://www.ephemerasociety.org/blog/

#10yrsago Republican Congressmen backed by airline money kill research on legroom and passenger safety https://web.archive.org/web/20160221163010/https://theintercept.com/2016/02/21/backed-by-airline-dollars-congress-rejects-effort-to-address-shrinking-legroom/

#5yrsago The Paltrow-Industrial Complex https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/21/paltrow-industrial-complex/#goopy

#5yrsago Facebook vs Australia https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/21/paltrow-industrial-complex/#facecrook

#5yrsago K-shaped recovery vs wealth taxes https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/21/paltrow-industrial-complex/#wealth-tax

#5yrsago What Democrats need to do https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/22/sorcerers-apprentice/#do-something

#5yrsago Tech trustbusting's moment has arrived https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/20/escape-velocity/#trustbusting-time

#1yrago Ad-tech targeting is an existential threat https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/20/privacy-first-second-third/#malvertising

#1yrago We bullied HP into a minor act of disenshittification https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/22/ink-spattered-pitchforks/#racehorse-semen

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Montreal (remote): Fedimtl, Feb 24
  https://fedimtl.ca/

• Oslo (remote): Seminar og lansering av rapport om «enshittification»
  https://www.forbrukerradet.no/siste-nytt/digital/seminar-og-lansering-av-rapport-om-enshittification/

• Victoria: 28th Annual Victoria International Privacy & Security Summit, Mar 3-5
  https://www.rebootcommunications.com/event/vipss2026/

• Victoria: Enshittification at Russell Books, Mar 4
  https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cory-doctorow-is-coming-to-victoria-tickets-1982091125914

• Barcelona: Enshittification with Simona Levi/Xnet (Llibreria Finestres), Mar 20
  https://www.llibreriafinestres.com/evento/cory-doctorow/

• Berkeley: Bioneers keynote, Mar 27
  https://conference.bioneers.org/

• Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Panopticon :3 (Trashfuture)
  https://www.patreon.com/posts/panopticon-3-150395435

• America's Enshittification is Canada's Opportunity (Do Not Pass Go)
  https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/americas-enshittification-is-canadas

• Everything Wrong With the Internet and How to Fix It, with Tim Wu (Ezra Klein)
  https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-doctorow-wu.html

• How the Internet Got Worse (Masters in Business)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auXlkuVhxMo

• Enshittification (Jon Favreau/Offline):
  https://crooked.com/podcast/the-enshittification-of-the-internet-with-cory-doctorow/

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 (1035 words today, 351334 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:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

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

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

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

Today's links

• A perforated corporate veil: The Brazilian method for curbing corporate power.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Social media turned US parties into host organisms for third parties; "Citizens" are hired actors; Insured exoskeletons; Talking with Snowden and Gibson.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

A perforated corporate veil (permalink)

"Capitalist realism" is the idea that the world's current economic and political arrangements are inevitable, and that any attempt to alter them is a) irrational; b) doomed; and c) dangerous. It's the ideology of Margaret Thatcher's maxim, "There is no alternative."

Obviously this is very convenient if you are a current beneficiary of the status quo. "There is no alternative" is a thought-stopping demand dressed up as an observation. It means, "Don't try and think of alternatives."

The thing is, alternatives already exist and work very well. The Mondragon co-ops in Spain constitute a fully worked out, long-term stable economic alternative to traditional capitalist enterprises, employing more than 100,000 people and generating tangible, empirically measured benefits to workers, customers and the region:

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

Proponents of capitalist realism will tell you that Mondragon doesn't count. Maybe it's just a one-off. Or maybe it's just not big enough. 100,000 workers sounds like a lot, but Amazon has over 1.5m employees and untold numbers of misclassified contractors who are employees in everything but name (and legal rights).

This is some pretty transparent goalpost moving, but sure, let's stipulate that Mondragon doesn't prove that there are broadly applicable alternatives to the dominant capitalism of the mid-2020s. Are there other examples of "an alternative?"

There sure are.

Let's look at limited liability. Limited liability – the idea that a company's shareholders cannot be held liable for the company's misdeeds – is a bedrock of capitalist dogma. The story goes that until the advent of the "joint stock enterprise" (and its handmaiden, limited liability) there was no efficient way to do "capital formation" (raising money for a project or business).

Because of this, the only ambitious, capital-intensive projects were those that caught the fancy of a king, a Pope, or an aristocrat. But once limited liability appears on the scene, many people of modest means can jointly invest in a project without worrying about being bankrupted if it turns out that the people running it are crooks or bumblers. That lets you, say, buy a single share of a company without having to keep daily tabs on the management's every action without worrying that if they go wrong, someone they've hurt will sue you for everything you've got.

Capital formation is a real thing, and limited liability unquestionably facilitates capital formation. There are plenty of good things in the world that exist because limited liability protections allowed everyday people to help bring them into existence. This isn't just stuff that makes a lot of money for capitalism's true believers, it includes everything from the company that makes the printing presses that your favorite anarchist zine runs on to the mill that makes the alloys for the e-bike you use to get to a demonstration.

This is where capitalist realism comes in. Capitalist realists will claim that there is no way to do capital formation for these beneficial goods without limited liability – and not just any limited liability, but maximum limited liability in which the "corporate veil" can never be pierced to assign culpability to any shareholder. The capitalist realist claim is that the corporate veil is like the skin of a balloon, and that any attempt to poke even the smallest hole in it will cause it to rupture and vanish.

But this just isn't true, and we can tell, because one of the largest economies in the world has operated with a perforated corporate veil for nearly a century, and that economy hasn't suffered from capital formation problems. Quite the contrary, some of the world's largest (and most destructive) monopolies are headquartered in this country where the veil of limited liability is thoroughly perforated.

The country I'm talking about is Brazil, which has had limited limited liability since 1937:

https://lpeproject.org/blog/when-workers-pierce-the-corporate-veil-brazils-forgotten-innovation/

As Mariana Pargendler writes for the LPE Project, Brazil put limits on limited liability to address a common pattern of corporate abuse. Companies would set up in Brazil, incur a lot of liabilities (say, by poisoning the land, water and air, or by stealing from or maiming workers), and then, when the wheels of justice caught up with them, the companies would fold and re-establish themselves the next day under a new name.

Like I say, this happens all over the world. It's incredibly common, and even the pettiest of crooks know how to use this trick. I know someone whose NYC apartment was flooded by the upstairs neighbor, who decided that they didn't need to worry about the fact that their toilet wouldn't stop running – for months, until the walls of the apartment downstairs dissolved in a slurry of black mold. The upstairs neighbor owned the apartment through an LLC, which they simply folded up and walked away from, while my friend was stuck with a giant bill and no one to sue.

The limited liability company is the scammer's best friend. In the UK, an anti-tax extremist invented a tax-evasion scam whereby landlords pretend that their empty commercial buildings are tax-exempt "snail farms" by scattering around some boxes with a few snails in them:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/149255928?collection=1941093

When this results in inevitable stonking fines and adverse judgments, the "snail farmers" duck liability by folding up their limited liability company after transferring its assets to a new LLC.

Capitalist realists will tell you that this is just the price of efficient capital formation. Without total, airtight limited liability – the sort that allows for this kind of obvious, petty ripoff – no one would be able to raise capital for anything.

Brazil begs to differ. In 1937, Brazil made parent companies liable for their subsidiaries' obligations, with a system of "joint and several liability" for LLCs. This was expanded with 1943's Consolidation of Labor Laws, and it worked so well that the Brazilian legislature expanded it again in 2017.

Remember back in 2024, when Elon Musk defied a Brazilian court order about Twitter, only to have Brazil freeze Starlink's assets until Musk caved? That was the "joint and several" liability system:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/13/world/americas/brazil-musk-x-starlink.html

As Pargendler writes, Brazil's liability system "represented a distributive choice: prioritizing Brazilian workers’ ability to enforce their rights over foreign capital’s interest in minimizing costs through corporate structuring."

Pargendler (who teaches at Harvard Law) co-authored a paper with São Paulo Law's Olívia Pasqualeto analyzing the impact that Brazil's limited liability system had on capital formation and corporate conduct:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6105586

Unsurprisingly, they find that there has been a steady pressure to erode the joint and several system, but also that some countries (the US and France) have a "joint employer" doctrine that is a weak form of this. Portugal, meanwhile, adopted the Brazilian system, 70 years after Brazil – this transposition of law from a former colony to a former colonial power is apparently called "reverse convergence":

https://lpeproject.org/blog/heterodox-corporate-laws-in-the-global-south/

More countries in the global south have adopted regimes similar to Brazil's, like Venezuela and Chile. Other countries go further, like Mozambique and Angola. Somewhere in between are other Latin American countries like Peru and Uruguay, where these rules have entered practice through judicial rulings, not legislation.

The authors don't claim that perforating the corporate veil solves all the problems of exploitative, fraudulent or corrupt corporate conduct. Rather, they're challenging the capitalist realist doctrine that insists that this system couldn't possibly exist, and if it did, it would be a disaster.

A hundred years of Brazilian law, and Brazil's globe-spanning corporate giants, beg to differ.

(Image: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Rep. James Talarico On Confronting Christian Nationalism, And Strange Days In The Texas Legislature https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiTJ7Pz_59A

• What Airlines Don't Want You to Know https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlNBdUDeoT4

• Ada Palmer on Inventing the Renaissance: How Golden and Dark Ages Are Constructed and Why They Matter https://www.singularityweblog.com/ada-palmer-inventing-the-renaissance/

• Humble Book Bundle: Terry Pratchett's Discworld https://www.humblebundle.com/books/terry-pratchetts-discworld-harpercollins-encore-2026-books

• New Report Helps Journalists Dig Deeper Into Police Surveillance Technology https://www.eff.org/press/releases/new-report-helps-journalists-dig-deeper-police-surveillance-technology

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago XKCD’s productivity tip: reboot your computer every time you get bored https://blog.xkcd.com/2011/02/18/distraction-affliction-correction-extensio/

#10yrsago Infographic: what’s the TPP, what’s wrong with it, how’d we get here, and what do we do now? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/02/new-infographic-tpp-and-your-digital-rights

#10yrsago Hacker suspected in Anon raid on Boston hospital rescued at sea by Disney cruise ship, then arrested https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/suspected-hacker-arrested-after-rescue-sea-during-disney-cruise-n520131

#10yrsago Tipping screws poor people, women, brown people, restaurateurs, local economies and…you https://web.archive.org/web/20160220234308/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/18/i-dare-you-to-read-this-and-still-feel-ok-about-tipping-in-the-united-states/

#10yrsago Clay Shirky: social media turned Dems, GOP into host organisms for third party candidates https://web.archive.org/web/20160219231315/https://storify.com/cshirky/republican-and-democratic-parties-are-now-host-bod

#10yrsago Leaked memos suggest Volkswagen’s CEO knew about diesel cheating in 2014 https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/19/business/volkswagen-memos-suggest-emissions-problem-was-known-earlier.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share&_r=0

#10yrsago “Citizens” who speak at town meetings are hired, scripted actors https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/concerned-citizens-turn-out-to-be-political-theater/2021439/

#10yrsago Women in Zika-affected countries beg online for abortion pills https://ticotimes.net/2016/02/18/with-abortion-banned-in-zika-countries-women-beg-on-web-for-abortion-pills

#10yrsago Health insurance must pay for exoskeletons https://web.archive.org/web/20160217093325/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/robotic-exoskeleton-rewalk-will-be-covered-by-health-insurance

#5yrsago Uber loses court battle, steals wages, censors whistleblower https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/19/texas-lysenko/#unter

#5yrsago How Republicans froze Texas solid https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/19/texas-lysenko/#mess-with-texas

#5yrsago Complicity, incompetence, leadership and Capitol Police https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/19/texas-lysenko/#capitol-riots

#5yrsago My talks with Edward Snowden and William Gibson https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/19/texas-lysenko/#gibson-snowden

#5yrsago Pluralistic is five https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/19/gimme-five/#jeffty

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Montreal (remote): Fedimtl, Feb 24
  https://fedimtl.ca/

• Oslo (remote): Seminar og lansering av rapport om «enshittification»
  https://www.forbrukerradet.no/siste-nytt/digital/seminar-og-lansering-av-rapport-om-enshittification/

• Victoria: 28th Annual Victoria International Privacy & Security Summit, Mar 3-5
  https://www.rebootcommunications.com/event/vipss2026/

• Victoria: Enshittification at Russell Books, Mar 4
  https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cory-doctorow-is-coming-to-victoria-tickets-1982091125914

• Barcelona: Enshittification with Simona Levi/Xnet (Llibreria Finestres), Mar 20
  https://www.llibreriafinestres.com/evento/cory-doctorow/

• Berkeley: Bioneers keynote, Mar 27
  https://conference.bioneers.org/

• Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Panopticon :3 (Trashfuture)
  https://www.patreon.com/posts/panopticon-3-150395435

• America's Enshittification is Canada's Opportunity (Do Not Pass Go)
  https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/americas-enshittification-is-canadas

• Everything Wrong With the Internet and How to Fix It, with Tim Wu (Ezra Klein)
  https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-doctorow-wu.html

• How the Internet Got Worse (Masters in Business)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auXlkuVhxMo

• Enshittification (Jon Favreau/Offline):
  https://crooked.com/podcast/the-enshittification-of-the-internet-with-cory-doctorow/

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 (1037 words today, 32992 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:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

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

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

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

Today's links

• Six years of Pluralistic: Time flies when you're writing the web.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: MBA phrenology; Sony's DRM CEO is out; Midwestern Tahrir; Reverse Centaurs and AI.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

Six years of Pluralistic (permalink)

Six years ago today, after 19 years with Boing Boing, during which time I wrote tens of thousands of blog posts, I started a new, solo blog, with the semi-ironic name "Pluralistic." I didn't know what Pluralistic was going to be, but I wasn't writing Boing Boing anymore, and I knew I wanted to keep writing the web in some fashion.

Six years and more than 1,500 posts later, I am so satisfied with how Pluralistic is going. I spent a couple of decades processing everything that seemed interesting or significant through a blog, which created a massive database (and mnemonically available collection of partially developed thoughts) that I'm now reprocessing as a series of essays that make sense of today in light of everything that I've thought about for my whole adult life, which are, in turn, fodder for books, both fiction and nonfiction. I call this "The Memex Method":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/

"The Memex Method" is also the title of a collection of essays (from this blog) that I've sold to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, but that book keeps getting bumped because of other books I end up writing based on the work I do here, starting with last year's Enshittification. I'm now fully two books ahead of myself, with The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI coming in June, and The Post-American Internet in early 2027 (in addition to two graphic novels and a short story collection). Professionally speaking, these are the most successful books I've written, in a long, 30+ book career with many notable successes. Intellectually and artistically speaking, I'm incredibly satisfied with the direction my career has moved in over my six Pluralistic years.

Blogging is – and always has been – a lot of work for me, but it's work that pays off, even if I don't always know what form that payoff will take.

One essential part of this blog is my daily retrospective of posts from this day through my blogging history – 25 years ago, 20 years ago, 15 years ago, 10 years ago, 5 years ago, and last year. I used to call this "This day in history" but now I call it "Object permanence," for the developmental milestone when toddlers gain the ability to remember and reason about things that have recently happened (roughly, it's the point at which "peek-a-boo" stops being fun).

The daily business of reviewing and selecting blog posts from different parts of my life started as a trivial exercise, but it's become one of the most important things I do. I liken it to working dough and folding the dry crumbly edges back into the center; in this case, I'm folding all the fragments that are in danger of escaping my working memory back into the center of my attention.

Six years ago, I didn't know what Pluralistic was going to be. Today, I still don't know. But because this is a labor of love, and a solo project, I get to try anything and either give it up or carry it on based on how it makes me feel and what effect it has on my life. I'm always tinkering with the format: this year, I also added a subhead to the Object Permanence section that tries to call out (in as few characters as possible) the most important elements of the day's list.

I also dropped some things this year, notably, my "linkdump" posts. A couple years ago, at the suggestion of Mitch Wagner, I added a new section called "Hey look at this," which featured three bare links to things I thought were noteworthy but didn't have time or inclination to delve into in depth. Later, I expanded this section to five.

However, even with five bare links per edition, I often found myself with a backlog of noteworthy things. So I started writing the occasional Saturday "linkdump" essay in which I wove together the whole backlog into a giant, meandering essay. These made for interesting rhetorical challenges, as I found elegant ways to bridge completely disparate subjects – a kind of collaging, perhaps akin to how a mashup artist mixes two very different tracks together. Mentally, I thought of this as "ringing the changes," but ultimately, I decided to drop these linkdump posts (for now, at least). They ended up being too much work, and of little value to me, because I found myself unable to remember what I wrote in them and thus to call them up to refer to them for future posts. Here's all 33 linkdumps; they're not gone forever (not so long as the links pile up in my backlog), but when they come back, they'll be in a different form:

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

This really is a labor of love, in the sense that I love doing it, and because it's hard work. The fact that it's hard work is a feature, not a bug. Working hard on stuff is really important to me, because when I am working hard, I gain respite from both physical and mental discomfort. As a guy with serious chronic pain living through the Trump years, I've got plenty of both kinds of discomfort. I can't overstate how physically and mentally beneficial it is to me to have an activity that takes me out of the moment. This year, I wrote several editions of Pluralistic from an infusion couch at the Kaiser Sunset hematology center in LA, where I was receiving immunotherapy for a cancer diagnosis that I'm assured is very treatable, but which – to be totally honest – sometimes gets my old worrier running hot:

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

Making Pluralistic is several kinds of hard work. Over the past six years, I've become an ardent collagist, spending more and more time on the weird, semi-grotesque images that run atop every edition. Anything you devote substantial time to on a near-daily basis is something that gives you insight – into yourself, and into the thing you're doing. I've always had a certain familiarity with computer image editing (I think I got my start writing Apple ][+ BASIC programs that spat out ASCII art, before graduating to making pixel-art for Broderbund's "Print Shop"), but I've never applied myself to any visual field in a serious way, until now.

Amazingly, after 50 years of thinking of myself as someone who is "bad at visual art," I find myself identifying as a visual artist. I find myself pondering visual works the same way I think about prose – mentally tearing it apart to unpick how it is done, and thinking about how I could productively steal some new techniques for my own work. I'm also privileged to have some accomplished visual artists in my circle, like my pal Alistair Milne, who generously share technical and aesthetic tips. It's got to the point where I published a book of my art, and I think I'll probably do it again next year:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

There's also a ton of technical work that goes into publishing each edition of this newsletter. Things have moved on somewhat since I published an in-depth process-post in 2021, though I'm still totally reliant on Loren Kohnfelder's python scripts that help me turn the XML file I compose every day into files that are (nearly) ready to publish:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/13/two-decades/#hfbd

Much of the technical work is down to the fact that I'm still completely wed to the idea of "POSSE" (Post Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/19/now-we-are-two/#two-much-posse

This means that after I write the day's post, I reformat it and republish it as a text-only newsletter, a Medium post, a Tumblr post, a Twitter thread and a Mastodon thread. This involves a ton of manual work, because none of the services I post to are designed to facilitate this, so I'm always wrestling with them. This year, all of them got worse (incredibly).

Medium – where I used to have a paid column – has dropped its free-flag for my account, which now limits me to how many posts I can schedule. This doesn't come up often, but when I do schedule a post, it's generally because I'm going to be on a plane or a stage and won't be able to do it manually. There's no way I'm going to pay for this feature: I'm happy to give Medium my work gratis, but I will not and do not pay anyone to publish my work, and I never will.

Tumblr did something to its post-composing text editor that completely broke it and I've given up on fixing it. I can't even type into a new post field! I have to paste in some styled text, then delete it, then start typing. It's ghastly. So now I just have a text file full of formatted HTML snippets and I work exclusively in the Tumblr HTML editor, pasting in blobs of preformatted HTML (including the florid, verbose HTML Tumblr uses for its own formatting) and then laboriously flip back and forth to the "visual" editor to see the parts that went wrong. Here's how busted that visual editor is: searching for a word then double-clicking on it does not select it. You have to click once, wait about 1.5 seconds, click again, wait again, and then you can select the word.

Twitter has entered a period of terminal technical decline. I know, I know, we always talk about how fucked Twitter's content moderation is, for obvious and good reasons, but from a technical perspective, Twitter just sucks. If I make a post with an image and alt text in anticipation of later using it to start a thread, it often goes "stale" and will not publish until I delete the image and re-attach it and re-paste the alt text. Meanwhile, the thread editor is also decaying into uselessness. Fill in a 25-post thread and hit publish and, the majority of times, the thread publication will die midway through, displaying lots of weird failure modes (phantom empty posts at the end of the thread that need to be individually selected and deleted are a common one, but not the only one). The old Twitter's ability to add a new thread to an existing one has been dead for at least a year, so every post after the 25th stanza has to be manually tacked on to the previous one, which is made far harder by the fact that Twitter no longer reliably shows you the post you just made after it publishes.

Mastodon still lacks a decent thread editor, one that has even the minimal functionality of Twitter circa 2020. Meanwhile, the Fediverse HOA continues to surface from time to time, with someone who's had a Masto account for ten seconds scolding me for posting threads – from my account whose bio starts "I post long threads." It's genuinely tedious to be shouted at for "using Mastodon wrong" by someone who started using Mastodon yesterday (I opened my first Mastodon account in 2018!), and even worse when they double down after I point them to the essay I've written to explain why I post the way I do, and what to do if you want to read my work somewhere that's not your Mastodon timeline ("Can you believe this asshole wrote a whole essay to explain why he posts his stupid Mastodon threads?"):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/16/how-to-make-the-least-worst-mastodon-threads/

Then there's email: I continue to love email, but email doesn't love me back. After years of being blackholed by AT&T and then Google, this turns out to be the year that Microsoft bounces thousands of messages to its Hotmail and Outlook users because they have arbitrarily and without warning added my mail-server to a blacklist. Thank you to the Fediverse friends who escalated my trouble ticket – but man, this is a headache I could certainly do without:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/10/dead-letters/

My sysadmin, the incomparable and tireless Ken Snider, tells me that he's got the long-overdue new hardware installed at the colo and he's nearly ready to stand up my long-anticipated personal Mastodon server, which will let me solve all kinds of problems. He's also going to stand up my own Bluesky server, at which point I will part ways with Twitter. I wish I could have used the regular Bluesky service while I waited, but just setting up an account permanently binds you to totally unacceptable and dangerous terms of service:

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

What's the point of a service that has account- and data-portability if signing up for it makes you permanently surrender your rights, even if you switch servers? This might be the stupidest social media unforced error of the post-zuckermuskian era.

There is one technology that has made my POSSE life better, and it might surprise you. This year, I installed Ollama – an open-source LLM – on my laptop. It runs pretty well, even without a GPU. Every day, before I run Loren's python publication scripts, I run the text through Ollama as a typo-catcher (my prompt is "find typos"). Ollama always spots three or four of these, usually stuff like missing punctuation, or forgotten words, or double words ("the the next thing") or typos that are still valid words ("of top of everything else").

The reason this is so valuable to me is that errors magnify through each stage of POSSE. Errors that make it through the python publication script take 10x the time to fix that they would if I caught them beforehand. Errors that I catch after running the scripts and publishing the posts take 10x time more. Errors that I have to fix later on – once I've closed all the relevant tabs and editors – take 10x again more time. Some POSSE channels (email, Twitter) can't be fixed at all.

So catching these typos at the start of the process is a huge time-saver. I have some very generous readers who have the proofreader's gene and are very helpful in catching my typos (hi, Gregory and 9o6!), and I feel bad about depriving them of their fun, but there's still the odd error that slips through, and they always catch it.

Ollama is a pretty good typo-catcher. Probably half of the "errors" it points out are false positives, which is better than the false positive rate for Google Docs' grammar-checker. As someone who uses a lot of jargon, made up words, etc in his prose, I'm used to overriding my text-editor. I wouldn't simply trust an LLM's edits any more than I would accept every suggestion from a spell-checker. Hell, yesterday I sent back a professionally copyedited manuscript (the intro for the paperback of Enshittification) and marked "STET" on about a third of the queries.

Doubtless some of you are affronted by my modest use of an LLM. You think that LLMs are "fruits of the poisoned tree" and must be eschewed because they are saturated with the sin of their origins. I think this is a very bad take, the kind of rathole that purity culture always ends up in.

Let's start with some context. If you don't want to use technology that was created under immoral circumstances or that sprang from an immoral mind, then you are totally fucked. I mean, all the way down to the silicon chips in your device, which can never be fully disentangled from the odious, paranoid racist William Shockley, who won the Nobel Prize for co-inventing the silicon transistor:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/24/the-traitorous-eight-and-the-battle-of-germanium-valley/

Further, we wouldn't have the packet-switched network that delivered these words to you without the contributions of the literal war-criminals at the RAND corporation:

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

Refusing to use a technology because the people who developed it were indefensible creeps is a self-owning dead-end. You know what's better than refusing to use a technology because you hate its creators? Seizing that technology and making it your own. Don't like the fact that a convicted monopolist has a death-grip on networking? Steal its protocol, release a free software version of it, and leave it in your dust:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/samba-versus-smb-adversarial-interoperability-judo-network-effects

That's how we make good tech: not by insisting that all its inputs be free from sin, but by purging that wickedness by liberating the technology from its monstrous forebears and making free and open versions of it:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/14/contesting-popularity/#everybody-samba

Purity culture is such an obvious trap, an artifact of the neoliberal ideology that insists that the solution to all our problems is to shop very carefully, thus reducing all politics to personal consumption choices:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/31/unsatisfying-answers/#systemic-problems

I mean, it was extraordinarily stupid for the Nazis to refuse Einstein's work because it was "Jewish science," but not merely because antisemitism is stupid. It was also a major self-limiting move because Einstein was right:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-2-pro-nazi-nobelists-attacked-einstein-s-jewish-science-excerpt1/

Refusing to run an LLM on your laptop because you don't like Sam Altman is as foolish as refusing to get monoclonal antibodies because James Watson was a racist nutjob:

https://www.statnews.com/2025/11/07/james-watson-remembrance-from-dna-pioneer-to-pariah/

Or to refuse to communicate via satellite because they were launched into space on a descendant of a rocket designed by the Nazi Wernher von Braun and built by slaves in a death camp:

https://wsmrmuseum.com/2020/07/27/von-braun-the-v-2-and-slave-labor/4/

The AI bubble sucks. AI itself is a normal technology:

https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology

It's not "unethical" to scrape the web in order to create and analyze data-sets. That's just "a search engine":

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

There's plenty of useful things people can do with AI. There's plenty of useful things people will do with AI. AI is bad because it's an economic bubble and a grift, but not because we've created a bunch of utilities that would – under normal circumstances – be called "plug-ins":

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

I started blogging 25 years ago, just before the dotcom bubble popped. That bubble-pop inflicted a lot of pain on people who didn't deserve it, including the normie investors who'd been suckered into blowing their life's savings on dogshit stocks, and everyday workers who found themselves out of a job. But the world was better off. So was the web. With the bubble popped, real, good stuff could access talent, servers and office space.

In the six years I've been doing this, I've seen several bubbles come and go: crypto, web3, metaverse. Now it's AI. But those bubbles were like Enron, frauds that left nothing good behind. AI is like the dotcom bubble, awash in sin and inflicting untold misery, but it will leave something useful behind:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/19/bubblenomics/#pop

And when it does, I'll make sense of it on this blog.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Mass Call All Laid-Off Tech Workers and Allies Welcome: https://wwwrise.org/

• Understood: The Dawn of Fake Porn https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1353-the-naked-emperor/episode/16198164-e1-the-dawn-of-fake-porn?featuredPodcast=true

• Socialism is the big tent — w/Avi Lewis https://www.lukewsavage.com/p/socialism-is-the-big-tent-wavi-lewis

• The “Enshittification” of NATO https://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-enshittification-of-nato

• Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Channeling FDR https://jacobin.com/2026/02/aoc-fdr-economic-populism-democracy/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago HOWTO resist warrantless searches at Best Buy https://www.die.net/musings/bestbuy/

#20yrsago RIAA using kids’ private info to attack their mother https://web.archive.org/web/20060223111437/http://p2pnet.net/story/7942

#20yrsago Sony BMG demotes CEO for deploying DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20060219233817/http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/060210/germany_sony_bmg_ceo.html?.v=7

#20yrsago Sistine Chapel recreated through 10-year cross-stitch project https://web.archive.org/web/20060214195146/http://www.austinstitchers.org/Show06/images/sistine2.jpg

#20yrsago J Edgar Hoover loved Lucy https://web.archive.org/web/20060425120915/http://www.lucylibrary.com/pages/lucy-news-fbi.letter.html

#20yrsago Bad Samaritan family won’t return found expensive camera https://web.archive.org/web/20060222200300/https://lostcamera.blogspot.com/2006/02/camera-unlost-but-not-quite-found.html

#15yrsago What does Libyan revolution mean for bit.ly? https://domainnamewire.com/2011/02/18/is-bit-ly-toast-if-libya-shuts-down-the-internet/

#15yrsago Optical illusion inventor goes on to invent copyright threats against 3D printing company https://web.archive.org/web/20110221185839/https://blog.thingiverse.com/2011/02/18/copyright-and-intellectual-property-policy/#respond

#15yrsago Crappy themepark operators convicted of “engaging in a commercial practice which was a misleading action” https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/feb/18/lapland-theme-park-brothers-convicted

#15yrsago HBGary’s high-volume astroturfing technology and the Feds who requested it https://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/16/945768/-UPDATED:-The-HB-Gary-Email-That-Should-Concern-Us-All

#15yrsago Authors Guild argues in favor of censorship (also: they don’t know shit about Shakespeare) https://volokh.com/2011/02/17/there-should-be-a-name-for-this-one-too/

#15yrsago Hollywood hospital ransoms itself back from hackers for a mere $17,000 https://web.archive.org/web/20160227094254/https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-me-ln-hollywood-hospital-bitcoin-20160217-story.html

#15yrsago Chinese millionaire sues himself through an offshore shell company to beat currency export controls https://web.archive.org/web/20180526235055/https://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2016/02/16/china-capital-flight-2-0-lose-a-lawsuit-on-purpose/?guid=BL-CJB-28691&dsk=y

#15yrsago Selling cookies like a crack dealer, by dangling a string out your kitchen window https://laughingsquid.com/cookies-sold-by-string-dangling-from-san-francisco-apartment-window/

#15yrsago Midwestern Tahrir: Workers refuse to leave Wisconsin capital over Tea Party labor law https://www.theawl.com/2011/02/wisconsin-demonstrates-against-scott-walkers-war-on-unions/

#10yrsago Back-room revisions to TPP sneakily criminalize fansubbing & other copyright grey zones https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/02/sneaky-change-tpp-drastically-extends-criminal-penalties

#10yrsago Russian Central Bank shutting down banks that staged fake cyberattacks to rip off depositors https://web.archive.org/web/20160220100817/http://www.scmagazine.com/russian-bank-licences-revoked-for-using-hackers-to-withdraw-funds/article/474477/

#10yrsago Stop paying your student loans and debt collectors can send US Marshals to arrest you https://web.archive.org/web/20201026202024/https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/02/us-marshals-forcibly-collecting-student-debt.html?mid=twitter-share-di

#5yrsago Reverse centaurs and the failure of AI https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/17/reverse-centaur/#reverse-centaur

#5yrsago Strength in numbers https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/18/ink-stained-wretches/#countless

#5yrsago America and "national capitalism" https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/18/pikettys-productivity/#reaganomics-revenge

#1yrago Business school professors trained an AI to judge workers' personalities based on their faces https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/17/caliper-ai/#racism-machine

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Montreal (remote): Fedimtl, Feb 24
  https://fedimtl.ca/

• Oslo (remote): Seminar og lansering av rapport om «enshittification»
  https://www.forbrukerradet.no/siste-nytt/digital/seminar-og-lansering-av-rapport-om-enshittification/

• Victoria: 28th Annual Victoria International Privacy & Security Summit, Mar 3-5
  https://www.rebootcommunications.com/event/vipss2026/

• Victoria: Enshittification at Russell Books, Mar 4
  https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cory-doctorow-is-coming-to-victoria-tickets-1982091125914

• San Francisco: Launch for Cindy Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights), Mar 10
  https://citylights.com/events/cindy-cohn-launch-party-for-privacys-defender/

• Barcelona: Enshittification with Simona Levi/Xnet (Llibreria Finestres), Mar 20
  https://www.llibreriafinestres.com/evento/cory-doctorow/

• Berkeley: Bioneers keynote, Mar 27
  https://conference.bioneers.org/

• Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Panopticon :3 (Trashfuture)
  https://www.patreon.com/posts/panopticon-3-150395435

• America's Enshittification is Canada's Opportunity (Do Not Pass Go)
  https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/americas-enshittification-is-canadas

• Everything Wrong With the Internet and How to Fix It, with Tim Wu (Ezra Klein)
  https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-doctorow-wu.html

• How the Internet Got Worse (Masters in Business)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auXlkuVhxMo

• Enshittification (Jon Favreau/Offline):
  https://crooked.com/podcast/the-enshittification-of-the-internet-with-cory-doctorow/

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 (1013 words today, 31953 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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