Today's links

• What's wrong with tariffs: Trump's mirror-world policies fill the vacuum left by neoliberal gaslighting.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: 2005, 2020
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• 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.

What's wrong with tariffs (permalink)

It's not that the Republicans and the Democrats are the same…obviously. But for decades – since Clinton – the Dems have sided with neoliberal economics, just like their Republican counterparts, so the major differences between the two related to overt discrimination, to the exclusion of the economic policies that immiserated working people, with the worst effects landing on racial minorities, women, and gender minorities.

So the Dems stood against discrimination in mortgage lending – but not for the minimum wage that would have lifted the lowest paid workers out of poverty so the could afford a mortgage. They stood for abortion rights, but against Medicare For All, which meant all women had the right to an abortion, but the poorest women couldn't afford one. And of course, in a country where racial and gender discrimination were still the order of the day, the poorest and most vulnerable Americans were racialized, women, disabled, and/or queer.

The Dems' embrace of Reaganomics meant that working people of all types experienced steady decline over 40 years: stagnating wages, economic precarity, increased indebtedness, and rising prices for health care, education, and housing. When Trump figured out that he could campaign on these issues, Dems had no response. Trump's "Make America Great Again" was meant to appeal to a time when working Americans were – on average, depending on their whiteness, maleness and straightness – better housed, better paid, and better cared for.

Of course, those benefits were unevenly felt: America was slow to extend the New Deal to racial minorities, women, disabled people, and other disfavored groups. Trump's genius was to marry white supremacy to economic grievance, tricking white workers into blaming their decline on women, brown and Black people, and queers – and not on the billionaires who had grown so much richer even as workers got poorer.

But Trump couldn't have pulled this trick off without the Dem establishment's total unwillingness to confront the hollowness of their economic policies. From Pelosi's "We're capitalists and that's the way it is" to Hillary Clinton's catastrophic campaign slogan, "America is already great," the Dems' answer to workers' fear and anger was, "You are wrong, everything is fine." Imagine having had your house stolen in the foreclosure crisis after Obama decided to "foam the runways" for the banks by letting them steal their borrowers' homes and then hearing Hillary Clinton tell you "America is already great":

https://www.npr.org/2014/05/25/315276441/its-geithner-vs-warren-in-battle-of-the-bailout

Racial and gender justice matter, of course, but when they're pursued without considering economic justice, they're dead ends. The point of racial and gender justice can't merely be firing half of the 150 straight white men who control 99% of the country's capital and replacing them with 75 assorted women, queers and people of color. The worst-treated workers in America are also its most discriminated-against workers, so the best way to help women, racialized people, and other disfavored minorities is to help workers: protect unions, raise the minimum wage, defend tenants, cancel student debt, and give everyone healthcare. In the same way that a special tax on incomes over $1m will disproportionately affect straight white men, an increase in the minimum wage will disproportionately benefit women and people of color – as well as the majority of straight white men who are also getting fucked over by people with $1m salaries.

Since the Clinton years, Democrats have been trying to figure out how to defend economic policies that help rich people while still somehow being the party of social justice. This has produced a kind of grotesque, Sheryl Sandberg "Lean In" liberalism, which stood for the rights of women who were also corporate executives. It's not that these women aren't treated worse than their male counterparts – misogyny is alive and well in the boardroom. But the number of women who experience boardroom discrimination is tiny, because the number of women in the boardroom is also tiny.

The right saw an opportunity and seized it. As Naomi Klein writes in Doppelganger, they created "mirror world" versions of social justice issues, warped reflections of the leftist positions that had been abandoned by a progressive coalition led by liberals:

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

In right wing, conspiratorial hands, rage at wage stagnation and lack of parental leave turned into reactionary demands for an economy in which women would be full-time homemakers while their husbands recovered their roles as breadwinners. The 1999 Battle of Seattle saw mass protests over the WTO and a free trade agenda that would let capital chase low wages and weak environmental and worker safety policies around the world. But Clinton went ahead and signed more free trade agreements, which were also pursued by Obama. So the right filled the vacuum with a mirror-world version of the Battle of Seattle's rage at billionaires, transforming the anti-free trade agenda into racism, xenophobia, and Cold War 2.0 sinophobia.

It's a cheap trick, but Dems keep falling for it. When the right declares itself to be against something, Dems can be relied upon to be in favor it, no matter how reactionary, anti-worker and authoritarian "it" is. During Trump 1.0, Dems lit James Comey votive candles and passionately defended the "intelligence community," a community that gave us CIA dirty wars and FBI COINTELPRO. Anthropologists call this "schizmogenesis" – when a group defines itself by valuing whatever its rivals deplore, and vice versa:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/

You can see schizmogenesis playing out right now, as "progressives" make Signalgate scandal into a fight over poor operational security (planning a war crime using a commercial app) and not a fight over war crimes themselves.

Signalgate will be out of the headlines in a matter of days, though – unlike tariffs, which will continue to make global headlines throughout the Trump presidency, as Trump continues his "mad king" policy of recklessly and chaotically erecting trade barriers that are certain to make supply chains more brittle and raise prices.

For the most part, the progressive discussion of Trump's tariffs takes the position that tariffs are always a terrible idea – in other words, that Clinton and Obama had the right idea when they created free trade agreements with countries around the world, and Trump is vandalizing an engine of American and global prosperity out of economic ignorance.

Economists support this analysis. But in a new, well-argued editorial in The Sling, University of Utah economists Mark Glick and Gabriel Lozada present a more nuanced version of the tariff debate, one that dodges the trap of neoliberal economics and schizmogenesis:

https://www.thesling.org/the-failed-assumptions-of-free-trade/

Rejecting tariffs is practically an article of religious faith among economists. As the NYT put it in their reporting of the 2025 meeting of the American Economic Association, "free trade is perhaps the closest thing to a universally held value among economists":

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/10/business/economy/economists-politics-trump.html

Every Econ 101 class has a unit on David Ricardo's "theory of comparative advantage," which argues that different countries have different capacities and specialties, and that free trade allows these advantages to be shared to the benefit of everyone, making trade a "positive expectation" game. The corollary is that tariffs make everyone worse off.

As Glick and Lozada write, the logic of this argument is unassailable, provided you accept its bedrock assumptions as true – and that's where the problem lies.

Economics has an assumptions problem. The foundational method of economic practice is to create models grounded in assumptions that are either not known, not knowable, or – incredibly – known to be wrong. As Milton Friedman famously wrote:

Truly important and significant hypotheses will be found to have "assumptions" that are wildly inaccurate descriptive representations of reality, and, in general, the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions (in this sense)

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/17/caliper-ai/#racism-machine

It's actually worse than it seems, because economics, as a field, has been violently allergic to empirically testing its assumptions, so it doesn't even know when it is operating on the basis of one of Friedman's "wildly inaccurate descriptive representations of reality." This is what Ely Devons meant when he said, "If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’"

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

What are the assumptions that underpin the orthodox view of free trade, then? As Glick and Lozada write, the case against all tariffs depends on five assumptions, all of which fail empirical investigation.

I. Full employment

The standard model of free trade assumes full employment – "when workers are displaced by imports, they can easily become re-employed at the same wages." This is the crux of the "social surplus" that free trade theoretically produces. This assumption doesn't hold up to empirical scrutiny. After the US dropped its tariffs, it experienced a 74% decline in manufacturing jobs – the best-paid jobs for non-college-educated men. Those workers didn't find equivalent employment – indeed, in many cases, the found no employment at all. From 2001-18, the US lost 1.132m manufacturing jobs to China, and gained 0.176m jobs manufacturing goods for export to China.

II. No externalities

The employment losses from free trade are not evenly distributed – they are geographically concentrated, and the greatest concentrations are in regions that flipped from Democratic strongholds to Trumpish heartlands over the decades since the US dropped its tariffs. The losses to these regions aren't limited to the directly affected manufacturing jobs, but all the other economic activity those jobs supported. The people who sold groceries, cars, and furniture to factory workers also lost their jobs. When young people abandoned the cratering regional economy, that devastated education and other services catering to families.

III. Comparative advantage leads to long-term growth and development

The theory of comparative advantage says that the world is better off when each country gets to do the thing it's best at. What are poor countries best at? Being poor: having a cheap labor force and weak rule of law to protect workers' health and the environment.

Without exception, the poor countries that grew richer did so in the presence of tariffs: "free trade is not a development strategy, it is a static policy that can impede development":

https://2024.sci-hub.se/1864/6d3f610c51446f057a4054080c70ab0e/chang2003.pdf#navpanes=0&view=FitH

IV. Floating currencies keep trade balanced

In theory, adjustments in the currency markets will rebalance imports and exports – countries whose currency declines will have to switch to domestic production, because goods from abroad will become costly. That's not what happened. Instead, foreigners have invested the US dollars they got from selling things to Americans into US securities and real estate, "which does not increase US productivity because it generates no new capital formation (at least directly)."

V. The US provides compensation for trade-related job-losses

While other countries with robust social safety nets offered retraining, income support, and other programs to cushion the blow of trade-related job-losses, the US – with the worst social safety net in the rich world – offered "woefully inadequate" supports to dislocated workers:

https://www.piie.com/bookstore/job-loss-imports-measuring-costs

Now, just because some tariffs are beneficial, it doesn't follow that all tariffs are beneficial. When the "Asian Tiger" countries were undergoing rapid industrialization and lifting billions of people out of poverty, they did so with tariffs – but also with extensive industrial policy and direct investment in critical state industries (Biden was the first president in generations to pursue industrial policy, albeit a modest and small one, which Trump nevertheless dismantled).

Trump is doing mirror-world tariffs: tariffs without industrial policy, tariffs without social safety nets, tariffs without retraining, tariffs without any strategic underpinning. These tariffs will crash the US economy and will create calamitous effects around the world:

https://archive.is/JvRF9

But the fact that Trump's tariffs are terrible doesn't mean tariffs themselves are always and forever bad. Resist the schizmogenic urge to say, "Trump likes tariffs, so I hate them." Not all tariffs are created equal, and tariffs can be a useful tool that benefits working people.

And also: the fact that tariffs can be useful doesn't imply that only tariffs are useful. The digital age – in which US-based multinational firms rely on digital technology to loot the economies of America's trading partners – offers countries facing US tariffs a powerful retaliatory tactic that has never before been seen on this planet. America's (former) trading partners can retaliate against US tariffs by abolishing the legal measures they have instituted to protect the products of US companies from reverse-engineering and modification. Countries facing US tariffs can welcome US imports – of printers, Teslas, iPhones, games consoles, insulin pumps, ventilators and tractors – but then legalize jailbreaking these devices:

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

That would deprive the largest US companies of their recurring revenue streams – from service, consumables, software, payment processing, etc – creating huge savings for consumers all over the world, and huge profits for the non-US companies that make these jailbreaking tools, and the small businesses that supply them. For example, your country could become the world's leading exporter of iPhone jailbreaking tools, and the world's powerhouse for alternative iPhone stores that charge 1-2% commissions on payments, as opposed to the 30% Apple takes out of every dollar (euro, pound, peso) that iPhone owners spend within their apps. This would tempt in all the biggest app companies in the world – from Patreon to Tinder, Fornite to the New York Times – who could offer their products at a discount and still make more money than they make on Apple's App Store.

But that's just one market this enables: the actual business of iPhone jailbreaking would likely work much like the market for phone unlocking more broadly: thousands of small and medium-sized businesses like dry-cleaners and convenience stores where you can bring your phone and pay a few dollars to have it unlocked and set up with a new app store where all the apps are the same – but everything is 20% cheaper.

This is a development opportunity without parallel. US tech monopolists worked with the US trade representative to rig markets around the world, allowing tech giants to siphon away vast fortunes from America's trading partners. These rich deposits of wealth are just sitting there, begging for some country to sink a shaft into them and pump them dry, secure in the knowledge that Trump has ejected from the global system of free trade and they have nothing to lose.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Furious at the FCC, Arkansas jail cancels inmate phone calls rather than lower rates https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/03/rather-than-lower-rates-arkansas-jail-simply-cancels-all-inmate-phone-calls/ (h/t Gregory Cherlin)

• Move the United Nations to Montreal https://cultmtl.com/2025/03/move-the-united-nations-to-montreal/ (h/t Gregory Cherlin)

• Resolution to Establish a Mutual Defense Compact for the Universities of the Big Ten Academic Alliance in Defense of Academic Freedom, Institutional Integrity, and the Research Enterprise https://senate.rutgers.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Resolution-to-Establish-a-Mutual-Defense-Compact-for-the-Universities-of-the-Big-Ten-Academic-Alliance-in-Defense-of-Academic-Freedom-Institutional-Integrity-and-the-Research.pdf

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Shadow Cities: the untold lives of squatters https://memex.craphound.com/2005/04/03/shadow-cities-the-untold-lives-of-squatters/

#20yrsago Tube escalators to get video ads https://web.archive.org/web/20050406225247/http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/04/03/business/ad04.html

#5yrsago Bug bounty programs as catch-and-kills https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/03/socially-useless-parasite/#features-not-bugs

#5yrsago Wikipedia vs patent troll https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/03/socially-useless-parasite/#worldlogic

#5yrsago Amazon's leaked anti-worker smear plan https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/03/socially-useless-parasite/#christian-smalls

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Chicago: Picks and Shovels with Peter Sagal, Apr 2
  https://exileinbookville.com/events/44853

• Chicago: ABA Techshow, Apr 3
  https://www.techshow.com/

• Bloomington: Picks and Shovels at Morgenstern, Apr 4
  https://morgensternbooks.com/event/2025-04-04/author-event-cory-doctorow

• Bloomington: Ostrom Center, Apr 4
  https://events.iu.edu/ostromworkshop/event/1843316-hls-beyond-the-web-cory-doctorow

• Pittsburgh: Picks and Shovels at White Whale Books, May 15
  https://whitewhalebookstore.com/events/20250515

• Pittsburgh: PyCon, May 16
  https://us.pycon.org/2025/schedule/

• PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22
  https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025

• PDX: Picks and Shovels at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20
  https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0

• Manchester: Picks and Shovels at Blackwell, Jul 2
  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1308451968059

• New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Fire the unelected social media dictators (Al Jazeera Upfront)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXa4DzhkUZ8

• Capitalists Hate Capitalism (MMT Podcast)
  https://pileusmmt.libsyn.com/195-capitalists-hate-capitalism-with-cory-doctorow

• How to Destroy Our Tech Overlords (Homeless Romantic)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epma2B0wjzU

Latest books (permalink)

• • 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 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).

• "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). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)

• "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. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.

• "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

• "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

• "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

• "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

• "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

• Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It https://craphound.com/news/2025/02/26/with-great-power-came-no-responsibility-how-enshittification-conquered-the-21st-century-and-how-we-can-overthrow-it/

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links

• Anyone who trusts an AI therapist needs their head examined: Same goes for trusting an AI with your trade secrets.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: 2010, 2015, 2020, 2024
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• 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.

Anyone who trusts an AI therapist needs their head examined (permalink)

There's a debate to be had about whether AI chatbots make good psychotherapists. This is not an area of my expertise, so I'm not going to weigh in on that debate. But nevertheless, I think that if you use an AI therapist, you need your head examined:

https://www.salon.com/2025/03/30/some-argue-ai-therapy-can-break-down-mental-health-stigma–others-warn-it-could-make-it-worse/

I'm not an expert on psychotherapy, but I am an expert on privacy and corporate misconduct, and holy shit is the idea of a chatbot psychotherapist running on some Big Tech cloud a terrible idea. Because while I'm no expert on therapy, I have benefited from therapy, and I know this for certain: therapy requires confidentiality.

Shrinks are incredibly careful about privacy. For example: when my brother was getting married, my therapist was invited to the wedding. His daughter and my brother's fiancee were close friends, and my brother's fiancee had grown up staying over at their house and wanted her friend and her friend's parents at the wedding. My therapist sat me down and said, "Now listen, I take confidentiality very seriously. If you want me to, I will pretend not to know you at the wedding. No one needs to know that you're seeing me or – any therapist."

I told him I didn't mind people knowing I'd seen him, but just that little fastidious gesture confirmed the trust I'd put in Alan. It meant that I could openly and freely discuss things I'd never told anyone before, and that I never told anyone ever again. Having those genuinely open conversations transformed my life, for the better.

Now consider the chatbot therapist: what are its privacy safeguards? Well, the companies may make some promises about what they will and won't do with the transcripts of your AI sessions, but they are lying. Of course they're lying! AI companies lie about what their technology can do (of course). They lie about what their technologies will do. They lie about money. But most of all, they lie about data.

There is no subject on which AI companies have been more consistently, flagrantly, grotesquely dishonest than training data. When it comes to getting more data, AI companies will lie, cheat and steal in ways that would seem hacky if you wrote them into fiction, like they were pulp-novel dope fiends:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/03/devs-say-ai-crawlers-dominate-traffic-forcing-blocks-on-entire-countries/

When an AI company tells you it won't use your intimate secrets as training data, they are lying. Of course they're lying! This isn't just any data, it's data that isn't replicated elsewhere on the internet. It's rare – it's unique. It's a competitive advantage. AI companies will 100%, without exception, totally use your private therapy data as training data.

What's more: they will leak your therapy sessions. They will leak them because they can't figure out how to prevent models from vomiting up their training data verbatim:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/01/chatgpt-memorization-lawsuit/677099/

But they'll also leak because tech companies leak like hell. They are crawling with insider threats. If the AI company sticks around long enough, it'll leak your secrets. And if it goes bankrupt? That's even worse! When tech companies go bust, the first thing their creditors do is sell off their warehouses full of private data. The more private and compromising that data is, the harder they'll try to sell it:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/03/how-delete-your-23andme-data

Now, maybe you're thinking, "OK, but that's a small price to pay if we can finally get therapy for everyone." After all, the country – the world – is in the midst of a terrible mental health crisis and there's a dire shortage of therapists.

Now, let's stipulate for the moment to the idea that chatbots are substitutes for human therapists – that, at the very least, they're better than nothing. I don't think that's true, but let's say it is. Even so, this is a bad tradeoff.

Here, try this thought-experiment: someone figures out a great business-model for to pay for therapy for poor people. "We turned therapy into a livestreamed reality TV show. If you're too poor to afford a therapist, you can go to one of our partially trained livestreamer therapists, who will broadcast all of your secrets to anyone who watches. There's a permanent archive of these sessions, and the worst people in the world comb through it 24/7 looking for embarrassing stuff to repost and go viral with. What, you don't like that? Oh, I see: you just don't think poor people deserve mental health. I guess the perfect really is the enemy of the good."

This gambit is called "predatory inclusion." Think of Spike Lee shilling cryptocurrency scams as a way to "build Black wealth" or Mary Kay promising to "empower women" by embroiling them in a bank-account-draining, multi-level marketing cult. Having your personal, intimate secrets sold, leaked, published or otherwise exploited is worse for your mental health than not getting therapy in the first place, in the same way that having your money stolen by a Bitcoin grifter or Mary Kay is worse than not being able to access investment opportunities in the first place.

But it's not just people struggling with their mental health who shouldn't be sharing sensitive data with chatbots – it's everyone. All those business applications that AI companies are pushing, the kind where you entrust an AI with your firm's most commercially sensitive data? Are you crazy? These companies will not only leak that data, they'll sell it to your competition. Hell, Microsoft already does this with Office365 analytics:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

These companies lie all the time about everything, but the thing they lie most about is how they handle sensitive data. It's wild that anyone has to be reminded of this. Letting AI companies handle your sensitive data is like turning arsonists loose in your library with a can of gasoline, a book of matches, and a pinky-promise that this time, they won't set anything on fire.

(Image: Zde, CC BY-SA 4.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Tariffs, Abundance and Why America Can't Build https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-tariffs-abundance

• Global Working Conditions Matter for American Workers https://prospect.org/labor/2025-03-30-global-working-conditions-matter-american-workers-su-tai-ilab/

• "An off switch? She'll get years for that." https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/03/an-off-switch-shell-get-years-for-that-2/

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Noteworthy Modern Occurances: the Digital Economy Bill https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/disconnection-notices-served/

#15yrsago Digital Economy Bill: the last hours https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOyg1GUY18U

#5yrsago Turn on wifi sharing https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/02/eff-livestream-today/#digital-divide

#5yrsago Coronavirus travel posters https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/02/eff-livestream-today/#jennifer-baer

#5yrsago How you are subsidizing the otherwise unprofitable Fox News https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/02/eff-livestream-today/#unfoxmycablebox

#5yrsago Ted Chiang on pandemics as idiot plots https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/02/eff-livestream-today/#disaster-capitalism

#5yrsago Bird's "Black Mirror" mass layoffs https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/02/eff-livestream-today/#2-mins

#5yrsago UK public health official endorses official reagents for covid tests https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/02/eff-livestream-today/#unauthorized-reagents

#5yrsago A promising, plausible plan for "privacy-preserving" surveillance https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/02/eff-livestream-today/#pepp-pt

#5yrsago Private equity titan squats on empty hospital https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/02/eff-livestream-today/#joel-kills

#1yrago Prison-tech company bribed jails to ban in-person visits https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Chicago: Picks and Shovels with Peter Sagal, Apr 2
  https://exileinbookville.com/events/44853

• Chicago: ABA Techshow, Apr 3
  https://www.techshow.com/

• Bloomington: Picks and Shovels at Morgenstern, Apr 4
  https://morgensternbooks.com/event/2025-04-04/author-event-cory-doctorow

• Bloomington: Ostrom Center, Apr 4
  https://events.iu.edu/ostromworkshop/event/1843316-hls-beyond-the-web-cory-doctorow

• Pittsburgh: Picks and Shovels at White Whale Books, May 15
  https://whitewhalebookstore.com/events/20250515

• Pittsburgh: PyCon, May 16
  https://us.pycon.org/2025/schedule/

• PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22
  https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025

• PDX: Picks and Shovels at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20
  https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0

• New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Fire the unelected social media dictators (Al Jazeera Upfront)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXa4DzhkUZ8

• Capitalists Hate Capitalism (MMT Podcast)
  https://pileusmmt.libsyn.com/195-capitalists-hate-capitalism-with-cory-doctorow

• How to Destroy Our Tech Overlords (Homeless Romantic)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epma2B0wjzU

Latest books (permalink)

• • 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 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).

• "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). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)

• "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. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.

• "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

• "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

• "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

• "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

• "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

• Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: Why I don't like AI art https://craphound.com/news/2025/03/30/why-i-dont-like-ai-art/

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

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https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links

• Private-sector Trumpism: Monopoly, facial recognition and property rights all add up to a private system of government.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: 2010, 2020, 2024
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• 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.

Private-sector Trumpism (permalink)

Trumpism is a mixture of grievance, surveillance, and pettiness: "I will never forgive your mockery, I have records of you doing it, and I will punish you and everyone who associates with you for it." Think of how he's going after the (cowardly) BigLaw firms:

https://abovethelaw.com/2025/03/skadden-makes-100-million-settlement-with-trump-in-pro-bono-payola/

Trump is the realization of decades of warning about ubiquitous private and public surveillance – that someday, all of this surveillance would be turned to the systematic dismantling of human rights and punishing of dissent.

23 years ago, I was staying in London with some friends, scouting for a flat to live in. After at day in town, I came back and we ordered a curry and had a nice chat. I mentioned how discomfited I'd been by all the CCTV cameras that had sprouted at the front of every private building, to say nothing of all the public cameras installed by local councils and the police. My friend dismissed this as a kind of American, hyper-individualistic privacy purism, explaining that these cameras were there for public safety – to catch flytippers, vandals, muggers, boy racers tearing unsafely through the streets. My fear about having my face captured by all these cameras was little more than superstitious dread. It's not like they were capturing my soul.

Now, I knew that my friend had recently marched in one of the massive demonstrations against Bush and Blair's illegal invasion plans for Iraq. "Look," I said, "you marched in the street to stand up and be counted. But even so, how would you have felt if – as a condition of protesting – you were forced to first record your identity in a government record-book?" My friend had signed petitions, he'd marched in the street, but even so, he had to admit that there would be some kind of chilling effect if your identity had to be captured as a condition of participating in public political events.

Trump has divided the country into two groups of people: "citizens" (who are sometimes only semi-citizens) and immigrants (who have no rights):

https://crookedtimber.org/2025/03/29/trumps-war-on-immigrants-is-the-cancellation-of-free-society/#fn-53926-1

Trump has asserted that he can arrest and deport immigrants (and some semi-citizens) for saying things he doesn't like, or even liking social media posts he disapproves of. He's argued that he can condemn people to life in an offshore slave-labor camp if he doesn't like their tattoos. It is tyranny, built on ubiquitous surveillance, fueled by spite and grievance.

One of Trumpism's most important tenets is that private institutions should have the legal right to discriminate against minorities that he doesn't like. For example, he's trying to end the CFPB's enforcement action against Townstone, a mortgage broker that practiced rampant racial discrimination:

https://prospect.org/justice/2025-03-28-trump-scrambles-pardon-corporate-criminals-townstone-boeing-cfpb/

By contrast, Trump abhors the idea that private institutions should be allowed to discriminate against the people he likes, hence his holy war against "DEI":

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/29/trump-administration-warns-european-companies-to-comply-with-anti-dei-order.html

This is the crux of Wilhoit's Law, an important and true definition of "conservativism":

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288

Wilhoit's definition is an important way of framing how conservatives view the role of the state. But there's another definition I like, one that's more about how we relate to one-another, which I heard from Steven Brust: "Ask, 'What's more important: human rights or property rights?' Anyone who answers 'property rights are human rights' is a conservative."

Thus the idea that a mortgage broker or an employer or a banker or a landlord should be able to discriminate against you because of the color of your skin, your sexual orientation, your gender, or your beliefs. If "property rights are human rights," then the human right not to rent to a same-sex couple is co-equal with the couple's human right to shelter.

The property rights/human rights distinction isn't just a way to cleave right from left – it's also a way to distinguish the left from liberals. Liberals will tell you that 'it's not censorship if it's done privately' – on the grounds that private property owners have the absolute right to decide which speech they will or won't permit. Charitably, we can say that some of these people are simply drawing a false equivalence between "violating the First Amendment" and "censorship":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/04/yes-its-censorship/

But while private censorship is often less consequential than state censorship, that isn't always true, and even when it is, that doesn't mean that private censorship poses no danger to free expression.

Consider a thought experiment in which a restaurant chain called "No Politics At the Dinner Table Cafe" buys up every eatery in town, and then maintains its monopoly by sewing up exclusive deals with local food producers, and then expands into babershops, taxis and workplace cafeterias, enforcing a rule in all these spaces that bans discussions of politics:

https://locusmag.com/2020/01/cory-doctorow-inaction-is-a-form-of-action/

Here we see how monopoly, combined with property rights, creates a system of censorship that is every bit as consequential as a government rule. And if all of those facilities were to add AI-backed cameras and mics that automatically monitored all our conversations for forbidden political speech, then surveillance would complete the package, yielding private censorship that is effectively indistinguishable from government censorship – with the main difference being that the First Amendment permits the former and prohibits the latter.

The fear that private wealth could lead to a system of private rule has been in America since its founding, when Benjamin Franklin tried (unsuccessfully) to put a ban on monopolies into the US Constitution. A century later, Senator John Sherman wrote the Sherman Act, the first antitrust bill, defending it on the Senate floor by saying:

If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

40 years ago, neoliberal economists ended America's century-long war on monopolies, declaring monopolies to be "efficient" and convincing Carter, then Reagan, then all their successors (except Biden) to encourage monopolies to form. The US government all but totally suspended enforcement of its antitrust laws, permitting anticompetitive mergers, predatory pricing, and illegal price discrimination. In so doing, they transformed America into a monopolist's playground, where versions of the No Politics At the Dinner Table Cafe have conquered every sector of our economy:

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

This is especially true of our speech forums – the vast online platforms that have become the primary means by which we engage in politics, civics, family life, and more. These platforms are able to decide who may speak, what they may say, and what we may hear:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

These platforms are optimized for mass surveillance, and, when coupled with private sector facial recognition databases, it is now possible to realize the nightmare scenario I mooted in London 23 years ago. As you move through both the virtual and physical world, you can be identified, your political speech can be attributed to you, and it can be used as a basis for discrimination against you:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/20/steal-your-face/#hoan-ton-that

This is how things work at the US border, of course, where border guards are turning away academics for having anti-Trump views:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/20/world/europe/us-france-scientist-entry-trump-messages.html

It's not just borders, though. Large, private enterprises own large swathes of our world. They have the unlimited property right to exclude people from their properties. And they can spy on us as much as they want, because it's not just antitrust law that withered over the past four decades, it's also privacy law. The last consumer privacy law Congress bestirred itself to pass was 1988's "Video Privacy Protection Act," which bans video-store clerks from disclosing your VHS rentals. The failure to act on privacy – like the failure to act on monopoly – has created a vacuum that has been filled up with private power. Today, it's normal for your every action – every utterance, every movement, every purchase – to be captured, stored, combined, analyzed, and, of course sold.

With vast property holdings, total property rights, and no privacy law, companies have become the autocrats of trade, able to regulate our speech and association in ways that can no longer be readily distinguished state conduct that is at least theoretically prohibited by the First Amendment.

Take Madison Square Garden, a corporate octopus that owns theaters, venues and sport stadiums and teams around the country. The company is notoriously vindictive, thanks to a spate of incidents in which the company used facial recognition cameras to bar anyone who worked at a law-firm that was suing the company from entering any of its premises:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/22/nyregion/madison-square-garden-facial-recognition.html

This practice was upheld by the courts, on the grounds that the property rights of MSG trumped the human rights of random low-level personnel at giant law firms where one lawyer out of thousands happened to be suing the company:

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/madison-square-gardens-ban-on-lawyers-suing-them-can-remain-in-place-court-rules/4194985/

Take your kid's Girl Scout troop on an outing to Radio City Music Hall? Sure, just quit your job and go work for another firm.

But that was just for starters. Now, MSG has started combing social media to identify random individuals who have criticized the company, and has added their faces to the database of people who can't enter their premises. For example, a New Yorker named Frank Miller has been banned for life from all MSG properties because, 20 years ago, he designed a t-shirt making fun of MSG CEO James Dolan:

https://www.theverge.com/news/637228/madison-square-garden-james-dolan-facial-recognition-fan-ban

This is private-sector Trumpism, and it's just getting started.

Take hotels: the entire hotel industry has collapsed into two gigachains: Marriott and Hilton. Both companies are notoriously bad employers and at constant war with their unions (and with nonunion employees hoping to unionize in the face of flagrant, illegal union-busting). If you post criticism online of both hotel chains for hiring scabs, say, and they add you to a facial recognition blocklist, will you be able to get a hotel room?

After more than a decade of Uber and Lyft's illegal predatory pricing, many cities have lost their private taxi fleets and massively disinvested in their public transit. If Uber and Lyft start compiling dossiers of online critics, could you lose the ability to get from anywhere to anywhere, in dozens of cities?

Private equity has rolled up pet groomers, funeral parlors, and dialysis centers. What happens if the PE barons running those massive conglomerates decide to exclude their critics from any business in their portfolio? How would it feel to be shut out of your mother's funeral because you shit-talked the CEO of Foundation Partners Group?

https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/funeral-homes-private-equity-death-care/

More to the point: once this stuff starts happening, who will dare to criticize corporate criminals online, where their speech can be captured and used against them, by private-sector Trumps armed with facial recognition and the absurd notion that property rights aren't just human rights – they're the ultimate human rights?

The old fears of Benjamin Franklin and John Sherman have come to pass. We live among autocrats of trade, and don't even pretend the Constitution controls what these private sector governments can do to us.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Aint Been Doin Nothin if You Aint Been Called a Red https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCedPmK4E4I h/t r/LateStageCapitalism

• Know Your Rights – City of Burbank https://www.burbankca.gov/know_your_rights

• The Tech Fantasy That Powers A.I. Is Running on Fumes https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/29/opinion/ai-tech-innovation.html (h/t Nelson Minar)

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Why I won’t buy an iPad (and think you shouldn’t, either) https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/01/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/

#5yrsago Solar as a beneficial fad https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/01/pluralistic:-01-apr-2020/#pv-or-bust

#5yrsago American employment exceptionalism https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/01/pluralistic:-01-apr-2020/#usausausa

#5yrsago Tiktok Kremlinology https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/01/pluralistic:-01-apr-2020/#going-pandemic

#5yrsago Alteon cuts covid-fighters' pay https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/01/pluralistic:-01-apr-2020/#private-equity

#5yrsago Snowden's Box https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/01/pluralistic:-01-apr-2020/#94-1054-Eleu-St

#1yrago Humans are not perfectly vigilant https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/01/human-in-the-loop/#monkey-in-the-middle

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Chicago: Picks and Shovels with Peter Sagal, Apr 2
  https://exileinbookville.com/events/44853

• Chicago: ABA Techshow, Apr 3
  https://www.techshow.com/

• Bloomington: Picks and Shovels at Morgenstern, Apr 4
  https://morgensternbooks.com/event/2025-04-04/author-event-cory-doctorow

• Bloomington: Ostrom Center, Apr 4
  https://events.iu.edu/ostromworkshop/event/1843316-hls-beyond-the-web-cory-doctorow

• Pittsburgh: Picks and Shovels at White Whale Books, May 15
  https://whitewhalebookstore.com/events/20250515

• Pittsburgh: PyCon, May 16
  https://us.pycon.org/2025/schedule/

• PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22
  https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025

• PDX: Picks and Shovels at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20
  https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0

• New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Fire the unelected social media dictators (Al Jazeera Upfront)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXa4DzhkUZ8

• Capitalists Hate Capitalism (MMT Podcast)
  https://pileusmmt.libsyn.com/195-capitalists-hate-capitalism-with-cory-doctorow

• How to Destroy Our Tech Overlords (Homeless Romantic)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epma2B0wjzU

Latest books (permalink)

• • 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 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).

• "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). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)

• "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. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.

• "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

• "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

• "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

• "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

• "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Slashdot (https://slashdot.org/).

Currently writing:

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

• Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: Why I don't like AI art https://craphound.com/news/2025/03/30/why-i-dont-like-ai-art/

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links

• #RedForEd rides again in LA: Rest in power, Jane McAlevey.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020
• 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.

#RedForEd rides again in LA (permalink)

The LA Teachers' Union is going on strike.

Fuck.

Yes.

The last time the LA teachers struck was in the midst of the 2019 #RedForEd wave, which kicked off during the last Trump presidency. All across the country, teachers walked out – even in states where they were legally prohibited from doing so. These strikes were hugely successful, because communities across the nation rallied around their teachers, and the teachers returned the favor, making community justice part of their goals.

This was true across America, but it was especially true in Los Angeles, where the teachers were militant, united, relentless, and brilliant. The story of the 2019 LA Teachers' Strike is recounted in Jane McAlevey's essential 2021 book A Collective Bargain, which recounts her history as a union organizer on multiple successful unionization drives and strikes, including that fateful teachers' strike:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/

McAlevey learned her tactics from a lineage of organizers who predated the legalization of unions and the National Labor Relations Act. Accordingly, her organizing method didn't rely on bosses obeying the law, or governments sticking up for workers. She fought for victories that were won by pure worker power. The 2019 LA teachers' strike is a fantastic example, a literal textbook case about rallying support from the entire shop – including affiliated workers, like bus-drivers – and then broadening that massive support by bringing in related trades (the LA charter school teachers walked out with their public school comrades), and the community.

The LA teachers' community organizing was incredible. They worked with community groups to understand what LA families really needed, and made those families' demands into union demands. The LA teachers' demands included:

• in-school social workers;

• parks and green-spaces in or near every LA public school; and

• a total ban on ICE agents shaking down parents at the school gates.

Environmental justice, immigration justice, racial justice – these issues were every bit as important to the LA teachers in 2019 as wages, working conditions and vacation pay. And. They. WON.

Not only did the LA teachers win everything they struck for, they built an enduring community organization that ran a massive get out of the vote effort for the 2020 elections and flipped two seats for Democrats, securing Biden's Congressional majority.

So now the teachers are walking out again, and while their demands include wage increases (the greedinflation crisis wiped out many of the gains won in the 2019 strike – though imagine how much worse things would be without those gains!), the demands also include a slate of bold, no-fucks-given, material measures to fight back agains the Trump administration and its fascism:

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-03-26/l-a-teachers-union-pursues-salary-hike-progressive-goals-amid-trump-agenda

This time around, the LA teachers are demanding:

• "targeted investment in the recruitment and retention of BIPOC, multilingual and immigrant educators and service providers" – that's right, the DEI stuff that makes Trump's incipient aneurysm throb visibly in his temple (keep throbbing, li'l guy, I believe in you!).

• "support for, defense and expansion of the school district’s Black Student Achievement Plan and Ethnic Studies" – the same programs that make wrestling faildaughter Linda McMahon get the fantods.

• “strengthened policies to support LGBTQIA+ students, educators and staff” – take that, Elon.

• "increased support for immigrant students and families, with and without documentation, including support for newcomers" – up yours, Stephen Miller, you pencilneck Hitler wannabe.

Where'd all these demands come from? 665 meetings that solicited input from "students, parents and other community members." In other words, these are our demands – the demands of Angelenos.

Trump is a scab. Musk is a scab. They hate unions. They've put the National Labor Relations Board into a coma, illegally firing a board member so that the board no longer has a quorum and can no longer take most actions. But the tactics the LA teachers used to organize their victory under the last Trump regime didn't rely on the NLRB – it relied on worker power. That power is only stronger today. The NLRB exists because workers built power when unions were illegal. Killing the NLRB doesn't kill worker power. Worker power comes from workers, not the government:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/29/which-side-are-you-on-2/#strike-three-yer-out

Now that Trump has canceled labor laws, all bets are off. Trump is illegally breaking the contracts of federal workers, as a prelude to eliminating unions nationwide. As Hamilton Nolan writes, this is the time to take a stand:

It is unreasonable to run around demanding a general strike every time a single union gets in a hard fight. It is not unreasonable to demand a general strike when the very existence of unions is under direct attack by a government that cares nothing about us, and does not respect our contracts, and is attempting to throw in the trash the union contracts covering hundreds of thousands of our fellow union members, as a step towards doing the same thing to millions more of our fellow union members. This is the bombing of Pearl Harbor, against the labor movement. Will we say, “We are filing a lawsuit against this illegal bombing, and we will keep you all updated as it progresses?” Will we say, “Pearl Harbor is way out in Hawaii. I’m glad those bombs didn’t fall where I live.” These are the terms that the union world needs to be thinking in, right now. This is not an exaggeration. If we do not go to war, the husk of American unions that emerges at the end of the Trump administration will be, probably, about half as big as it was when the Trump administration started, and immeasurably weaker. That is not an acceptable outcome if you believe that increasing organized labor’s strength is the key to saving this country, which it is.

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/they-are-going-to-take-everything

McAlevey – who died in 2024 – agreed with Nolan. She wrote vibrantly about how union organizing, and the solidarity it nurtures, was the key to a revitalized democracy and a nation that truly takes care of its people, rather than lining them up in billionaires' feedlots.

I gotta go. I'm on my way to a Tesla protest. Maybe you could find one near you to join, too:

https://actionnetwork.org/event_campaigns/teslatakedown

But if I don't see you at this one, I'll see you on the picket line – with the LA teachers, the federal workers, and everyone else who's taking a stand against this scab presidency.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Beautiful Things https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=11458

• The reactionary right is not a monolith https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/the-reactionary-right-is-not-a-monolith

• Trump Scrambles to Pardon Corporate Criminals He Once Prosecuted https://prospect.org/justice/2025-03-28-trump-scrambles-pardon-corporate-criminals-townstone-boeing-cfpb/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Chicken companies and copyright https://web.archive.org/web/20050325044510/https://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrb/script-ed/issue4/cory_ed.asp

#20yrsago Yahoo overtaking Google? https://web.archive.org/web/20050410024830/http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1448381,00.html

#20yrsago Biometric car lock defeated by cutting off owner’s finger https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4396831.stm

#15yrsago 20,000 US BitTorrent users sued; 30,000 more lawsuits pending https://web.archive.org/web/20100402051800/http://thresq.hollywoodreporter.com/2010/03/new-litigation-campaign-targets-tens-of-thousands-of-bittorrent-users.html

#15yrsago Labour MP’s motion to subject Digital Economy Bill to full debate https://web.archive.org/web/20100404053604/http://edmi.parliament.uk/EDMi/EDMDetails.aspx?EDMID=40883&SESSION=903

#15yrsago Recaptioning New Yorker cartoons with “Christ, what an asshole!” https://web.archive.org/web/20060203045552/http://modernarthur.com/blog/christwhatanasshole.html

#15yrsago NZ MPs reject software patents https://web.archive.org/web/20100402235209/https://passthesource.org.nz/2010/03/30/no-software-patents-in-new-zealand/

#15yrsago EFF, AT&T and Google all on the same side of this privacy fight https://www.eff.org/press/archives/2010/03/30

#15yrsago LibDems won’t support Digital Economy Bill at all https://web.archive.org/web/20100402020912/http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/regulation/2010/03/30/lib-dems-to-fight-digital-economy-bill-over-wash-up-40088498/

#10yrsago Clean Reader is a free speech issue <a "="" 03="" 2015="" 31="" href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/30/allow-clean-reader-swap-bad-words-books-free-speech'>https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/30/allow-clean-reader-swap-bad-words-books-free-speech</a>

#10yrsago Last Man: France’s amazing martial arts fantasy comic comes to the Anglosphere <a href=" https:="" last-man-frances-amazing-martial-arts-fantasy-comic-comes-to-the-anglosphere="" memex.craphound.com="">https://memex.craphound.com/2015/03/31/last-man-frances-amazing-martial-arts-fantasy-comic-comes-to-the-anglosphere/

#5yrsago How viruses experience social distancing https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/31/reality-endorses-sanders/#anthropomorphic

#5yrsago Corporate welfare vs food stamps https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/31/reality-endorses-sanders/#kafka-capitalism

#5yrsago Monopolists stole your respirator https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/31/reality-endorses-sanders/#covidien

#5yrsago Amazon fires walkout organizer https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/31/reality-endorses-sanders/#instacart-wholefoods-amazon

#5yrsago Reality endorses Sanders https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/31/reality-endorses-sanders/#knife-edge

#5yrsago Trump admits voter suppression https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/31/reality-endorses-sanders/#voter-suppression

#5yrsago Attack Surface author's note https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/31/reality-endorses-sanders/#little-brother-iii

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Chicago: Picks and Shovels with Peter Sagal, Apr 2
  https://exileinbookville.com/events/44853

• Chicago: ABA Techshow, Apr 3
  https://www.techshow.com/

• Bloomington: Picks and Shovels at Morgenstern, Apr 4
  https://morgensternbooks.com/event/2025-04-04/author-event-cory-doctorow

• Bloomington: Ostrom Center, Apr 4
  https://events.iu.edu/ostromworkshop/event/1843316-hls-beyond-the-web-cory-doctorow

• Pittsburgh: Picks and Shovels at White Whale Books, May 15
  https://whitewhalebookstore.com/events/20250515

• Pittsburgh: PyCon, May 16
  https://us.pycon.org/2025/schedule/

• PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22
  https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025

• PDX: Picks and Shovels at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20
  https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0

• New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Fire the unelected social media dictators (Al Jazeera Upfront)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXa4DzhkUZ8

• Capitalists Hate Capitalism (MMT Podcast)
  https://pileusmmt.libsyn.com/195-capitalists-hate-capitalism-with-cory-doctorow

• How to Destroy Our Tech Overlords (Homeless Romantic)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epma2B0wjzU

Latest books (permalink)

• • 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 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).

• "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). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)

• "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. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.

• "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

• "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

• "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

• "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

• "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Super Punch (https://www.superpunch.net/).

Currently writing:

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

• Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It https://craphound.com/news/2025/02/26/with-great-power-came-no-responsibility-how-enshittification-conquered-the-21st-century-and-how-we-can-overthrow-it/

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links

• Big Tech and "captive audience venues": The digital equivalent of baseball stadiums and airport concourses.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020, 2024
• 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.

Big Tech and "captive audience venues" (permalink)

Enshittification is what you get when tech companies, run by the common-or-garden mediocre sociopaths who end up at the top of most businesses, are unshackled from any consequence for indulging their worst, greediest impulses:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/20/capitalist-unrealism/#praxis

The reason Facebook was once a nice place to hang out and talk with your friends and isn't anymore is that Mark Zuckerberg is no longer disciplined by competitors like Instagram (which he bought) nor by regulators (whom he captured), nor by interoperable tech like ad-blockers and alternative clients (which he uses IP law to destroy) nor by his own workforce (who have become disposable thanks to workforce supply catching up with demand). It used to be that Mark Zuckerberg couldn't really move the enshittification lever in the Facebook C-suite because these disciplining forces gummed it up. He had to worry about losing users, or about users installing alternative technology, or about regulators hitting him hard enough to hurt, or about workplace revolts. Now, he doesn't have to worry about these things, so he's indulging the impulses that he's had since the earliest days in his Harvard dorm, when he was a mere larval incel cooking up an online service to help him rate the fuckability of his female classmates.

When we had defenses, Mark Zuckerberg had to respect them. Now that we're defenseless, he's shameless. He's insatiable. He will devour us to the marrow.

When I'm explaining enshittification to normies, I often make comparisons to other places where you can't escape like airports and sports stadiums: "Facebook can afford to abuse you once they have you locked for the same reason that water costs $7/bottle on the other side of the airport TSA checkpoint." It's an extremely apt comparison, as you can verify for yourself by reading "Shakedown at the Snack Counter: The Case for Street Pricing," a new report from the Groundwork Collective:

https://groundworkcollaborative.org/work/street-pricing/

"Shakedown" makes the point that – as is the case with tech giants – sports stadiums and airports are creatures of vast public subsidy. If this seems counterintuitive, try Mariana Mazzucato's Entrepreneurial State, which lists all the ways in which the tech revolution represents a privatization of publicly funded research, as with the iPhone, whose semiconductors, internet connection, voice assistant technology, touchscreen and other components all count the public as a key investor:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/the-entrepreneurial-state-appl

And, as with airports and sports stadiums, the proprietors of the iPhone business are able to reap this gigantic public subsidy without taking on any public duties. Regulators that could impose some kind of public service obligations as quid pro quo for using public funds are AWOL, or worse, captured and complicit in the ongoing, publicly financed ripoff:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/15/private-law/#thirty-percent-vig

Airport, stadiums and tech platforms are all walled gardens – roach motels that are hard to escape once they've been entered. Thus the scorching prices of stadium and airport food, and the 30% transaction fees imposed by Apple and Google on app revenues (this is 1,000% higher than the average fees charged by the rest of the payment processing industry!), the 51% fees extracted by Google/Meta from advertisers and publishers (compare with the historical average of 15%), and the 45-51% that Amazon takes out of every dollar earned by its platform sellers. Once you're locked in, they can turn the screws, either by gouging buyers directly, or by gouging sellers, who pass those additional costs onto buyers.

Groundwork has a proposal to address this in physical settings: regulation. Specifically, a "street pricing" regulation that keeps the charges for food and drinks within these walled gardens to prices comparable to those on the outside. They note that these regulations enjoy wide, bipartisan support. 76% of Republicans support a regulation that can only be described as "price controls," two words that normally trigger head-explosions in the right.

How is it that such a commanding majority of Republicans can get behind government price controls? Simple: it's obvious that when a company no longer faces market discipline – when they're the only game in town (or on the other side of the TSA checkpoint) – that government discipline has to fill the vacuum, and if it doesn't, you will get mercilessly screwed.

This is where enshittification – a form of monopolistic decay unique to the tech sector – departs from everyday monopoly abuse in other sectors, like aviation and league sports. Tech has an in-built flexibility, the inescapable property of "interoperability" that comes standard with every digital system thanks to the universal nature of computers themselves.

Interoperable technologies let you hack Instagram to restore it to the state of privacy- and attention-respecting glory that made it a success in the first place:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/05/battery-vampire/#drained

They let you monitor Facebook's failures to uphold its own promises about not profiting from paid political disinformation:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/06/get-you-coming-and-going/#potemkin-research-program

They let you claw back control over how Facebook's feeds are constructed:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/08/unfollow-everything/#shut-the-zuck-up

They let Apple customers maintain their privacy, even if they have the temerity to be friends with Android users:

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

They let shoppers use Amazon to order from local mom-and-pop stores:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/10/view-a-sku/

They even let you destroy the net worth – and power – of Elon Musk:

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

Interoperability creates a unique, easily administered source of discipline over tech bosses that just isn't available as a means of countering the ripoffs we see elsewhere, including in sports stadiums and airports. That means that, far from being harder to fix than other disgusting scams in our society, tech is easier to fix. All that stands in the way is the IP laws that criminalize the kind of reverse-engineering work that allow the users of technology to have the final say over how the devices and services they rely on work:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

Those IP laws were spread around the world by the US Trade Representative, who insisted that every country that wanted to export its products to the US without punitive tariffs must pass laws protecting the rent-extracting scams of US tech giants. With those tariff promises now in tatters, there's never been a better time for the rest of the world to jettison those Big Tech-protecting laws:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/beauty-eh/#its-the-only-war-the-yankees-lost-except-for-vietnam-and-also-the-alamo-and-the-bay-of-ham

(Image: Daniel Brody, CC BY-SA 4.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• FTC Commissioners File Suit to Contest Trump’s Alleged Firing https://prospect.org/justice/2025-03-27-ftc-commissioners-file-suit-trumps-alleged-firing/

• Screamboat Is a Both a Steamboat Willie Horror Movie and Hardcore Disney Fan Film https://gizmodo.com/screamboat-director-interview-steamboat-willie-disney-2000581124

• Ploopy upgraded its new Classic 2 open-source trackball with better scrolling https://www.theverge.com/news/637794/ploopyploopy-classic-2-trackball-open-source-upgrade

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago How HDTV killed firefighters, birthed the Broadcast Flag, and screwed America https://web.archive.org/web/20051020180115/http://nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2005/0218njsp.htm

#15yrsago ACLU prevails: US Fed Judge invalidates gene patent https://www.aclu.org/cases/association-molecular-pathology-v-myriad-genetics

#15yrsago UK record lobby has vehement feelings on Digital Economy Bill debate, won’t say what they are https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/mar/29/digital-economy-bill-bpi-doctorow

#15yrsago Leaked doc: EU wants to destroy and rewrite Canada’s IP laws https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2010/03/ceta-demands/

#10yrsago Stephen King versus Maine’s lying governor https://www.rawstory.com/2015/03/stephen-king-hammers-maine-governor-for-doubling-down-hes-not-man-enough-to-admit-he-made-a-mistake/

#5yrsago Don't worry about groceries https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/29/grifters-gonna-grift/#germophobia

#5yrsago California's missing medical stockpile https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/29/grifters-gonna-grift/#austerity-kills

#5yrsago Cozy Catastrophes https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/29/grifters-gonna-grift/#wyndhamesque

#5yrsago Andrew Cuomo is not your woke bae https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/29/grifters-gonna-grift/#comparative-virtue

#5yrsago Alex Jones's one-two punch https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/29/grifters-gonna-grift/#filter-for-vulnerable

#1yrago Subprime gadgets https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/29/boobytrap/#device-lock-controller

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Chicago: Picks and Shovels with Peter Sagal, Apr 2
  https://exileinbookville.com/events/44853

• Chicago: ABA Techshow, Apr 3
  https://www.techshow.com/

• Bloomington: Picks and Shovels at Morgenstern, Apr 4
  https://morgensternbooks.com/event/2025-04-04/author-event-cory-doctorow

• Pittsburgh: Picks and Shovels at White Whale Books, May 15
  https://whitewhalebookstore.com/events/20250515

• Pittsburgh: PyCon, May 16
  https://us.pycon.org/2025/schedule/

• PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22
  https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025

• PDX: Picks and Shovels at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20
  https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0

• New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Fire the unelected social media dictators (Al Jazeera Upfront)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXa4DzhkUZ8

• Capitalists Hate Capitalism (MMT Podcast)
  https://pileusmmt.libsyn.com/195-capitalists-hate-capitalism-with-cory-doctorow

• How to Destroy Our Tech Overlords (Homeless Romantic)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epma2B0wjzU

Latest books (permalink)

• • 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 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).

• "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). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)

• "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. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.

• "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

• "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

• "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

• "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

• "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Naked Capitalism (https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/).

Currently writing:

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

• Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It https://craphound.com/news/2025/02/26/with-great-power-came-no-responsibility-how-enshittification-conquered-the-21st-century-and-how-we-can-overthrow-it/

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links

• Reality-Based Communities: Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: 2010, 2015, 2020, 2024
• 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.

Reality-Based Communities (permalink)

Remember the Global War on Terror? I know, it's been a minute. But there was a time when we were all meant to take terrorism – real terrorism, the knocking-down-buildings kind, not the being-mean-to-Teslas kind – seriously.

Back in the early oughts, I remember picking up a copy of the Financial Times in an airport lounge and flipping through it, and coming across an "advice to corporate management" column in which the question was, "Should I take out terrorism insurance for my business?" The columnist's answer: "The actual risk to your business of a terrorism-related disruption rounds to zero. However: a) your shareholders don't understand this, an b) your insurance company does. That means that you can buy a very large amount of terrorism insurance for a very small amount of money, making this a cheap price to pay to mollify your easily frightened investors."

I never forgot that little piece of writing. It was a powerful reminder that successful large-scale enterprises must attend to the world as it is, not as ideology dictates that it should be. This was – and is – a deeply heterodox position among the ideological defenders of capitalism, who continue to uphold Milton Friedman's maxim that:

Truly important and significant hypotheses will be found to have "assumptions" that are wildly inaccurate descriptive representations of reality, and, in general, the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions (in this sense)

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/17/caliper-ai/#racism-machine

These ideologues – who often cross over from boardrooms into governments – are with the GW Bush official who dismissed a journalist as a member of the "reality-based community":

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

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

But ultimately, someone has to make investments and plans that take accord of the world as it is, the adversaries they face, the real and material emergencies unfolding around them. When the Pentagon announces that henceforth the climate emergency will take a prime place in its threat assessments and budgets, that's not "the military going woke" – it's the military joining the reality-based community:

https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/commentary/2021/10/26/the-pentagon-has-to-include-climate-risk-in-all-of-its-plans-and-budgets/

This explains the radical shear between the Wall Street Journal's editorial page – in which you'll learn that governments can't solve any problems and markets solve all problems (including the problem of governments) – and the news reporting within, in which the critical role of the state in regulating and fueling markets is acknowledged.

The tension between the right's ideologues in boardrooms and governments and the operational people in charge of keeping the machines running has only escalated since the War on Terror days. There's an important sense in which leftists – as materialists – are playing the same game as these operational managers of capitalism. Take Thomas Piketty, the socialist economist whose blockbuster 2013 book Capital in the 21st Century argued that rising inequality threatened capitalism itself:

https://memex.craphound.com/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-the-21st-century/

By analyzing three centuries' worth of capital flows, Piketty showed that when inequality reached a certain tipping point, the result was societal upheaval that continued until so much capital had been destroyed that inequality was reduced (because everyone had been pauperized). Piketty appealed to capitalism's technocrats to institute redistributive programs. His point was that building hospitals and schools was ultimately cheaper than paying for the guard-labor you'd need to keep people from building guillotines outside the gates of your walled estate.

The rise and rise of surveillance tech, and its successors, such as lethal drones and offshore gulags, can be seen as a tacit acknowledgment of Piketty's thesis. By lowering the cost of guard labor, it might possible to stabilize a society with higher levels of inequality, by identifying and neutralizing the people who are radicalized by the system's unfairness before you get an outbreak of guillotines:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/13/better-to-have-loved/#less-lethals

But reality is stubborn. Capitalism's defenders can insist that society will continue to function while wages stagnate and greedflation stokes the cost of living crisis, but ultimately, the military can't afford to have a fighting force that's in hock to payday lender usurers who are tormenting their families with arm-breaker collection calls:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/03/payday-loan-apps-cost-new-yorkers-500-million-plus-new-study-estimates.html

As Stein's Law – a bedrock of finance – has it, "anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." The ideologues of capitalism can insist that Luigi Mangione is a monster and an aberration, an armed freeloader who wants something for nothing. But privately, their own security forces are telling them otherwise.

Writing for The American Prospect, Daniel Boguslaw reports on a leaked intelligence dossier from the Connecticut regional intelligence center – a "fusion center" created as part of the War on Terror – wherein we learn that the American people sees Mangione as a modern Robin Hood:

https://prospect.org/justice/2025-03-27-intelligence-dossier-compares-luigi-mangione-robin-hood/

Many view Thompson as a symbolic representation of both as reports of insurance companies denying life sustaining medication coverage circulate online. It is not an unfair comparison to equate the current reaction toward Mangione to the reactions to Robin Hood, citizens may see Mangione’s alleged actions as an attack against a system designed to work against them.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hM3IZbnzk_cMk7evX2Urnwh5zxhRHpD5/view

The Connecticut fusion center isn't the only part of capitalism's operational wing that's taking notice of this. Today, Ken Klippenstein reports on an FBI threat assessment about the "heightened threat to CEOs":

https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/fbi-becomes-rent-a-cops-for-ceos

The report comes from the FBI's counter-terrorism wing, which (Klippenstein notes) is in the business of rooting out "pre-crime" – identifying people who haven't committed a crime and neutralizing them. As Klippenstein writes, Trump AG Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel have both vowed to treat anti-Tesla protests as acts of terror. That's the view from the top, but back on the front lines of the Connecticut fusion center, things are more reality-based:

[The public] may view the ensuing manhunt and subsequent arrest of Mangione as NYPD, and largely policing as a whole, as a tool that is willing to expend massive resources to protect the wealthy, while the average citizen is left to their own means for personal security.

Any good investor knows that anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. The only question is: will that halt is a controlled braking action, or a collision with reality's brick wall?

(Image: Lee Haywood, CC BY-SA 2.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Locus Awards Poll Login https://poll.voting.locusmag.com

• How to Delete Your 23andMe Data https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/03/how-delete-your-23andme-data

• China built hundreds of AI data centers to catch the AI boom. Now many stand unused. https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/03/26/1113802/china-ai-data-centers-unused/

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Battlefield Earth screenwriter apologises https://nypost.com/2010/03/28/i-penned-the-suckiest-movie-ever-sorry/

#15yrsago UK government’s smoke-filled room legislative process https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/mar/28/pre-election-parliamentary-wash-up

#15yrsago UK government wants to secretly read your postal mail https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/henryporter/2010/mar/27/intercepting-mail-stasi-tax-inspectors

#10yrsago What it’s like to teach evolution at the University of Kentucky https://orionmagazine.org/article/defending-darwin/

#10yrsago Prisoner escapes by faking an email ordering his release https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-32095189

#10yrsago 8-bit photo gun made from a Game Boy and a thermal printer https://vtol.cc/filter/works/gbg-8

#5yrsago Employers scramble to buy remote-worker spyware https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/28/unreciprocated-solidarity/#one-way-solidarity

#5yrsago United gets $25B stimulus and announces layoffs https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/28/unreciprocated-solidarity/#friendly-skies

#5yrsago Trump officials killed Walmart opioid prosecutions https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/28/unreciprocated-solidarity/#walmart-heroin

#5yrsago Boardgame Remix Kit https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/28/unreciprocated-solidarity/#hide-n-seek

#5yrsago The Pandemic Playbook https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/28/unreciprocated-solidarity/#pebkac

#5yrsago Charter techs get $25 gift cards instead of hazard pay https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/28/unreciprocated-solidarity/#charter-sucks

#1yrago The credit card fee victory is a defeat https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/28/concentrated-benefits/#diffuse-harms

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Chicago: Picks and Shovels with Peter Sagal, Apr 2
  https://exileinbookville.com/events/44853

• Chicago: ABA Techshow, Apr 3
  https://www.techshow.com/

• Bloomington: Picks and Shovels at Morgenstern, Apr 4
  https://morgensternbooks.com/event/2025-04-04/author-event-cory-doctorow

• Pittsburgh: Picks and Shovels at White Whale Books, May 15
  https://whitewhalebookstore.com/events/20250515

• Pittsburgh: PyCon, May 16
  https://us.pycon.org/2025/schedule/

• PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22
  https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025

• PDX: Picks and Shovels at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20
  https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0

• New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Capitalists Hate Capitalism (MMT Podcast)
  https://pileusmmt.libsyn.com/195-capitalists-hate-capitalism-with-cory-doctorow

• How to Destroy Our Tech Overlords (Homeless Romantic)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epma2B0wjzU

• The internet that could have been was ruined by billionaires (Real News Network)
  https://therealnews.com/the-internet-that-could-have-been-was-ruined-by-billionaires

Latest books (permalink)

• • 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 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).

• "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). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)

• "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. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.

• "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

• "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

• "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

• "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

• "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

• Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It https://craphound.com/news/2025/02/26/with-great-power-came-no-responsibility-how-enshittification-conquered-the-21st-century-and-how-we-can-overthrow-it/

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

ISSN: 3066-764X