Today's links

• The cost of doing business: "Market definition" is a denial-of-service attack on antitrust law.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Union Pacific v model railroads; Warners v Potter fans; NYT's trademark trolling; Why Rebecca Black mashups suck; Jabba the peep; Grenfell costs v tenants.
• Upcoming appearances: Berkeley, Montreal, London, Berlin, Hay-on-Wye.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

The cost of doing business (permalink)

The most important part of any law, rule or policy isn't what it permits or prohibits – it's whether you can enforce the law at all.

After all, as odious as a law that forbids people from thinking mean thoughts about Trump would be, it would also be completely unenforceable, and would ultimately just not be very important, except as a symbol of Trump's evil.

This property is called "administrability," meaning, "the degree to which an authority can administer the policy." There are many dimensions to administrability, including "Is it even possible to detect whether this policy has been violated?" In that same vein, there're questions like, "If you discover someone has violated this policy, will you be able to stop them from continuing to do so?" For example, the US routinely indicts North Korean hackers, but unless those hackers visit a place that the US can inveigle into arresting and extraditing them, it's a mostly symbolic gesture:

https://www.justice.gov/usao-cdca/pr/3-north-korean-military-hackers-indicted-wide-ranging-scheme-commit-cyber-attacks-and

One undertheorized aspect of administrability is "fact-intensivity"; that is, are there difficult, fact-intensive questions that need to be answered in order to determine whether someone has violated this policy?

Think of probate law: probate is often a lengthy and expensive process, especially if the deceased is "intestate" (has no will). To probate an estate, all the deceased's assets have to be cataloged and assessed, claims of heirs and inheritors have to be evaluated, etc, etc.

People spend a lot of time and money creating wills and family trusts largely to answer these questions when they're easiest to resolve (when you're still alive and can clearly express your preferences), because it's even more expensive and time-consuming to answer these questions when you're not around anymore to weigh in on them.

As complex and time-consuming as managing your estate can be, there's nothing wrong in theory with having a complicated, careful process in place for dealing with it. Taking care of your loved ones and disposing of your assets is something that's worth getting right, and people have all kinds of highly individual preferences for this that requires a lot of flexibility in the system. Making a system that's very customizable but also robust against fraud (or even honest mistakes) requires a lot of administrative superstructure to hold it all together.

And besides, probate isn't something we have to do very often. After all, most of us will only die one or fewer times. It's not like we have to figure this stuff out every day. It's the kind of thing you can do every couple of decades, over several hours, spread out over weeks.

Frequency, then, is the enemy of fact-intensivity. If you had to do probate-level form-filling to buy a cup of coffee or pay your electricity bill, that would be nuts. For one thing, it would be full employment for lawyers – and it would cost so much that by the time you got to the cafe or the gas-pump, you'd be too broke to actually complete the transaction.

This comes up a lot in discussions of tech policy, because once you computerize something, you can start to do it very quickly, which means that policies that added, say, a 1% admin overhead to a task before it was digitized can add up to a 1,000% overhead once it's digitized.

The best example of this is copyright: copyright is the most fact-intensive doctrine you deal with on a day to day basis. Technically, conclusively determining whether you have the right to forward an email could take a lawyer a whole day. Sure, most email forwarding is "fair use" (that is, it fits into one of copyright's "limitations and exceptions"), but any decent IP law prof could come up with ten email forwarding hypotheticals in ten minutes that could occupy a whole fourth-year IP law class for an entire semester.

One of the reasons copyright is so fact-intensive is that it was designed to be invoked infrequently. We're talking about a legal regime that was designed to answer questions about book and music publishing (and then adapted for other kinds of media), and even the most prolific publisher or label is going to deal with double-digits' worth of new works per season.

Meanwhile, the people working at that same publisher are likely forwarding hundreds, if not thousands of emails per day. If the publisher's copyright lawyers had to review every one of those forwards, they would never publish another book. They would go bankrupt.

Obviously, that's not how things work.

Why not, though?

Well, mostly because we just pretend copyright law isn't there. To the extent that we do acknowledge the potential for copyright liability from everyday activities that no one ever asks a lawyer to sign off on, we manage that liability through shitty, one-sided contracts. You have undoubtably clicked on dozens of agreements this year wherein you warranted that nothing you were doing violated copyright law (a neat trick, given that you probably have no idea whether any of the activities you routinely engage in could violate copyright) and further, you indemnified someone else for "all costs arising from any claims" associated with your activity.

That's an unbelievably shitty, one-sided clause for you to have "agreed" to, since "any claims" includes claims with no merit and "all costs" includes "money we paid someone who brought a bullshit claim to just go away."

In other words, you routinely click through these nonsense "agreements" where you promise to give every cent you have to anyone who wants it, if the company that made you click through that bullshit decides to promise some deranged rando a million bucks to settle their wild accusation that you violated their copyrights.

For complicated reasons, we're not all drowning in copyright lawsuits all the time, but if someone really wanted to fuck you up and they had deep enough pockets, they could use the fact that you're a giant, routine copyright infringer (just like everyone else) to wreck your life for years.

So obviously, it would have been better if we'd done some major refactoring of copyright law once the internet came along. My preferred fix? Carve out activities unrelated to the media industry's supply chain from copyright altogether:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/the-internets-original-sin/

Copyright isn't the only fact-intensive doctrine that's challenged by the cadence of digital life. The internet lets us do a lot of things, very quickly, meaning that even small factual questions pile up beyond any reasonable capacity to resolve them.

Take the debate over content moderation and hate speech. Hate speech and harassment online are serious problems and they disproportionately affect people who are getting the shitty end of the stick in the offline world, too. The legacy platforms obviously don't give a damn about these people, either.

So it's tempting to attempt to use policy to solve this real problem. Even if the US wasn't being run by a trollocracy, this would probably be a nonstarter in America, because hate speech is protected by the First Amendment, and purely speech-based harassment is hard to punish without falling afoul of 1A.

But other countries – notably the EU – are having a go at it. I think this is a doomed effort – but not because hate speech isn't a serious problem! Rather, because hate speech regulations are very fact intensive, and hate speech is very common. Frequency is the enemy of fact-intensivity.

Say the EU creates a rule requiring platforms to take reasonable measures to prevent hate speech. This requires

1. arriving at a common definition of hate speech;

2. adjudicating whether a given user's speech rises to that definition; and

3. determining whether the platform's technical measures were "reasonable."

This is the work of months, if not years. And hate speech happens hundreds of times per minute on the big platforms. It's just not an administrable policy.

Now, just because policy isn't administrable, it doesn't follow that there's nothing to be done. There's other ways to give relief to the targets of harassment and hate speech. To get to those ways, we have to ask ourselves why people who are tormented by trolls stay on the platforms that expose them to abuse.

There are plenty of extremely wrong explanations for this floating around. One is that Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are Cyber-Rasputins who can hypnotize us into using their platforms even if we don't like them, by "hacking our dopamine loops." This is a very silly explanation: everyone who's ever claimed to have perfected mind-control was a liar and/or deluded:

https://pluralistic.net/HowToDestroySurveillanceCapitalism

Another is that people are lying (possibly to themselves) when they say they don't like being harassed on legacy social media platforms. This theory – from neoclassical econ – is called "revealed preferences," and it holds that people whose actions go against their stated preferences are "revealing a preference" for the thing they're doing.

This is the sort of thing you end up believing in if you incur the kind of neurological injury that arises from pursuing an economics degree, which causes you to be incapable of reasoning about (or even perceiving) power. "Revealed preferences" tells you that if someone sells their kidney to pay the rent, they have a "revealed preference" for having one kidney.

Thankfully, there's a much simpler explanation for people's continued use of platforms where they are subject to abuse and harassment. It's this: the only thing worse than being a member of a disfavored minority who is subject to abuse and harassment is being a member of a disfavored minority who is subject to abuse and harassment who is also isolated from your community.

Leaving Facebook or Twitter means leaving behind the people who comfort and support you when you are subject to abuse. The more abuse and discrimination you face, the more that support matters, and the harder it is to leave that community behind. You love your community more than you hate Zuck or Musk, so you stay, because as much as you love them, it's transcendentally difficult to coordinate a mass departure for somewhere else. This is called the "collective action problem" and it's a regressive tax on the most abused platform users and communities.

This is a problem we can solve with policy! We can mandate that platforms support interoperability, so that when you leave a legacy platform like Twitter or Facebook for a modern platform like Mastodon or Bluesky, the messages addressed to you on the legacy platform are forwarded to your new home. That way you can have the people you love without the platform you hate.

This is a very administrable policy. The main lift is figuring out the nuts and bolts of interoperability, and while that's a big technical project, it's the kind of thing you only have to do once or twice. Then, if a platform fails in its duty to forward your messages after you leave, it's very easy for a regulator to determine whether it's violating the rules – they just have to send a message to your old account and see if it shows up for your new account:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/19/better-failure/#let-my-tweeters-go

A hate speech policy is hard to administer because it requires resolving a bunch of fact-intensive questions. A "right to exit" policy replaces all those fact-intensive questions with a bright line policy ("if you don't forward your former users' messages, you are guilty"), which can be administered at high speed.

Whenever a fact-intensive policy that regulates an infrequent activity fails because the activity becomes more frequent, you have two choices: you can either slow down the activity, or you can replace the fact-intensive questions with bright-line tests that can be resolved much more quickly.

But more often, we fail to do either, and everything goes very badly indeed.

That's more or less what's happened with "merger scrutiny," the part of antitrust law that lets competition regulators (or competitors) block or put conditions on mergers that involve large firms.

In these merger scrutiny cases, plaintiffs who challenge a merger are expected to resolve a bunch of extremely fact-intensive questions. Fail to resolve any of these questions and the merger goes ahead.

The most pernicious fact-intensive question that arises in antitrust cases is "market definition." That's pretty much what it sounds like: "What market is this company doing business in?" If you can prove that the companies in a proposed merger are in the same market, then it's a lot easier to prove that allowing the merger would reduce competition.

The problem is that "market" is a very slippery concept. As Tim Wu describes in his excellent book The Age of Extraction, "market definition" creates a near-infinite amount of wiggle-room:

https://www.wired.com/story/tim-wu-age-of-extraction/

When Wu was serving in the Obama FTC, he had a front-row seat for Google's acquisition of Waze. Now, obviously these companies are direct competitors, but the Obama administration wanted the merger to go through (it was dominated by people who thought monopolies are efficient and didn't want to do their jobs). So these officials decided that Google Maps' market was "finding out where you are" and that Waze's market was "getting you somewhere." It was really that stupid.

Writing for the Law and Political Economy project, Hal Singer explains how the fact-intensive nature of the "market definition" question makes it virtually impossible to prevent market concentration and abuse of dominance:

https://lpeproject.org/blog/the-market-definition-trap/

From Livenation/Ticketmaster to Paramount/Warner Brothers, the "market definition trap" leaves the public virtually defenseless before efforts to reorganize the economy into extractive, rapacious cartels.

In a recent interview with the Do Not Pass Go podcast, Paul Crampton (Canada's recently retired top competition judge) talks about the tsunami of mergers that Canada's Competition Bureau is expected to oversee:

https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/inside-canadas-competition-court

Fact-intensive market definition questions can't possibly be resolved at the pace of mergers. That's because companies' preferred growth strategy is combining, rather than competing. There's plenty of political problems with merging Paramount and Warner, but there's also a huge economic problem, because these companies are direct competitors who will soon operate as a single firm.

The M&A industry has staged a denial of service attack on its regulators, accelerating the pace of mergers involving large firms far beyond the ability of a regulator to resolve the fact-intensive questions these mergers raise. They've flooded the zone, and after the mergers go through and the companies start abusing their customers, workers and competitors, these same market definition questions bedevil any attempt to rein in this abuse of dominance.

Singer makes some excellent suggestions for legal reforms to resolve this, moving some of the fact-intensive questions to bright-line ones, such as "whether the challenged conduct injured workers, consumers, or some other counterparty."

This is the right approach. As we plan for a future in which legislatures recognize the enormous harms that monopolization inflicted on our societies, we need to come up with more bright-line rules for antimonopoly rules. These will lack some of the subtlety that fact-intensive treatment affords, but you can't do fact-intensive adjudication for high frequency activities. So maybe we say that no company can acquire or merge with another company more than once in 18 months, or that companies that share more than 10% of their customers can't merge.

Some "good" mergers will fail these tests, but that's the price we pay. If you want to move mergers from a rare occurrence to an everyday, you're going to have to accept a loss of nuance in the rules for these mergers. The alternative is the ugly, self-destructive mess we have today.

(Image: Harrison Keely, CC BY 4.0; DocteurCosmos, CC BY 3.0; modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• "Gooning Towards the Führer" as policy coordination https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/gooning-towards-the-fuhrer-as-policy

• The one thing everyone gets wrong about feminism https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/15/feminism-isnt-dead-rebecca-solnit

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Warner Bros v Potter fandom https://web.archive.org/web/20010331091849/http://www.potterwar.org.uk/home/index.html

#20yrsago Rant transcript from Game Developers’ Conference https://web.archive.org/web/20060404230422/http://crystaltips.typepad.com/wonderland/2006/03/gdc_game_develo.html

#20yrsago Union Pacific threatens to sue painters, model railroaders over trademark https://web.archive.org/web/20060413085045/https://www.trains.com/community/forum/topic.asp?page=-1&TOPIC_ID=60666&REPLY_ID=681783#681783

#20yrsago US frequent flier programs deliver less and less https://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/21/business/still-loyal-to-your-airline-you-must-be-looney-tunes.html

#20yrsago Mother Jones on IP overkill https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2006/03/intellectual-property-run-amok/

#20yrsago Comic advises women to call anti-abortion Senator to make their choices https://web.archive.org/web/20060321230542/http://minimumsecurity.net/toons2006/6034.htm

#20yrsago HOWTO become an early riser https://stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/05/how-to-become-an-early-riser/

#15yrsago Trademark thought experiment: when should intermediaries be cops? (Barista vs. Barbie) https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/23/trademark-thought-experiment-when-should-intermediaries-be-cops-barista-vs-barbie/

#15yrsago New York Times advances weird, self-destructive trademark theory to prop up its paywall https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/23/new-york-times-advances-weird-self-destructive-trademark-theory-to-prop-up-its-paywall/

#15yrsago LSE economists: file sharing isn’t killing music industry, but copyright enforcement will https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/03/is-file-sharing-the-global-future/

#15yrsago Anti-union group: send us secret, unlimited donations so we can bring transparency to politics! https://web.archive.org/web/20110325141411/https://www.wmc.org/MediaOutlet/display.cfm?ID=2485

#15yrsago Why Rebecca Black fascinates us, and why the mashups suck https://www.happyrobot.net/words/pony.asp?id=10233

#15yrsago Understanding the SSL security breach, preparing for the next one https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/03/iranian-hackers-obtain-fraudulent-https

#10yrsago Airlines celebrate record profits, having killed bereavement fares https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-lazarus-20160322-column.html

#10yrsago Bake: homemade Jabba the Hutt peeps https://www.starwars.com/news/jabba-the-hutt-marshmallow-treats

#5yrsago Tories pass Grenfell costs onto tenants https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/23/parliament-of-landlords/#slow-motion-arson

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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

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

• Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, Apr 10
  https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/4863920260410

• London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25
  https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691

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

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

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

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech

• Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU

• Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech)
  https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074

• The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah)
  https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doctorow-matthew-potolsky/

• Tanner Humanities Lecture (U Utah)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Yf1nSyekI

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. First draft complete. Second draft underway.

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

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links

• Goodhart's Law vs "prediction markets": Putting a gun to the metric's head.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Apple v interop; Yahoo v the world; Rasputin v the Haunted Mansion; Opening chord from A Hard Day's Night; Mondrian Pong; "IP": Patent trolls v Apple.
• Upcoming appearances: Berkeley, Montreal, London, Berlin, Hay-on-Wye.
• 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.

Goodhart's Law vs "prediction markets" (permalink)

The most selectively believed-in verse in the conservative catechism is the idea that "incentives matter."

Sure, "incentives matter" if you're seeking healthcare. That's why you're nibbled to death by co-pays and deductibles – if you could get healthcare whenever you felt like it, you might get too much healthcare. "Incentives matter," so we have to make sure that you only seek care when you really need it:

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

But rich people don't need to be disciplined by incentives. They can get no-bid contracts with Uncle Sucker without being tempted to rip off the USA. They can force their workers into nondisparagement clauses without being tempted to act like a colossal asshole, secure in the knowledge that they can sue workers who tattle on them. They can force their workers into noncompete clauses without being tempted to underpay and abuse their workers, secure in the knowledge that they can sue workers who take their labor elsewhere. They can force their workers into binding arbitration clauses without being tempted into maiming or killing them, secure in the knowledge that the workers can't sue them.

So incentives matter…when you're fucking over working people. But incentives don't matter, when you're gilding the Epstein class's lilies.

But incentives really do matter. That's the premise of Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." This comes up all the time. Google got its start by observing that people who made websites linked to other websites that they found important or worthy or informative. With this insight, Google repurposed the academic practice of "citation analysis" to predict which pages on the internet were most authoritative, calling it Pagerank.

Google Search, powered by Pagerank, was vastly superior to any search engine in history. But as soon as Google became the most popular search engine, people started making links to bad websites – sites filled with spam and malware and junk – in order to game the results. The metric – inbound links – became a target – get inbound links – and stopped being a useful metric.

There is something quite wonderful and life affirming about the idea of Pagerank: the idea that people are, on average, pretty good at figuring out what's good. Rather than taking Yahoo's approach of having experts rank and categorize every website on earth, Google trusted "the wisdom of crowds" and it worked (until they created an incentive to subvert it).

"The wisdom of crowds" was in the air in those days. James Surowiecki had a massive bestseller with that title in 2004, expounding on the idea that people were, in aggregate, good at figuring stuff out:

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

Surowiecki's book revolved around a famous anecdote from 1906, when 800 people at the Plymouth county fair were invited to guess at the weight of a slaughtered and dressed ox. Statistician (and eugenicist creep) Francis Galton noted that the average guess of 1207 lbs was within 1% of the actual weight, 1198 lbs. This turns out to be a repeatable phenomenon: if you get a lot of people – non-experts, experts, people paying close attention, people who barely think about it – to guess about something, the average is surprisingly accurate. Importantly, it's often more accurate than the best guess of experts.

This idea of the wisdom of crowds inspired a lot of 2000s-era internet projects. Some of them (Yahoo Answers) were pretty bad. Others (Wikipedia) were astounding. Of course, economists observed that "the wisdom of crowds" sounds a lot like the idea of "price discovery" – the idea that markets are a way of processing widely diffused information about desires and capacity in order to derive and emit signals about what should be produced.

Economists have long spoken of future events being "priced in" to markets – for example, the price of oil today reflects more than the diminished supply resulting from Trump's military blunders, it also reflects "the market's" belief that oil production capacity will be disrupted for a long time to come. Add up all the different buyers' and sellers' guesses about the future of oil (incorporating diffuse knowledge about damage to infrastructure, capacity to rebuild, and intentions of the actors) and (we're told) we'll get a number that accurately reflects the real situation.

And, unlike Pagerank, this number can't be manipulated by flooding the system with spurious, self-serving inputs. If you want to move this price, you have to buy or sell something, which costs money. And because the market is "deep" (with a lot of participants), the sums you'd have to inject into the system to alter its consensus is incredibly large – more than you could possibly stand to make by manipulating the price itself. Incentives matter.

Put "markets," "the wisdom of crowds" and "incentives matter" together and you get "prediction markets." Just create a market where people can bet real money on the outcomes of events and you can recreate Galton's ox-guessing miracle, but for everything – how much new solar capacity will come online in Pakistan next year; the likelihood that the Toronto Transit Commission will finish the Ontario Line this year; whether a biotech firm will ship an AIDS vaccine before 2040.

This is where Goodhart's law comes in. The idea that betting markets improve the wisdom of crowds because participants have "skin in the game" only works if the cheapest way to win a bet is to be right. If it's cheaper to win by cheating, well, "incentives matter," and you'll get cheating.

Any prediction market needs an "oracle" – a decisive source of truth about how an event turned out. "How much new solar capacity came online in Pakistan" this year sounds like an empirical question, but unless every bettor agrees to travel to Pakistan together and walk the land, counting solar panels and checking proof of their installation dates, these bettors need to agree on some third party assessor as authoritative and trust whatever they say.

Which means that the single most important factor in any prediction market is the quality of the oracle. If you let Trump be your oracle, he'll insist (on a daily basis) that his war in Iran is over, and that he had bigger crowds for his inauguration than anyone in history, and that every criminal is Somali, and on and on and on.

So you need to get someone trustworthy and diligent to serve as your oracle. But that person also has to be incorruptible, because otherwise a bettor will offer them a bribe to lie about the outcome of a bet. And if the oracle can't be bribed, they can be coerced.

That's just what's happened. Times of Israel war correspondent Emanuel Fabian didn't know that he was serving as an oracle for a bunch of degenerate gamblers on Polymarket – until he wrote a 150 word blog post that made a bunch of bettors in a $14m wager very, very angry:

https://www.timesofisrael.com/gamblers-trying-to-win-a-bet-on-polymarket-are-vowing-to-kill-me-if-i-dont-rewrite-an-iran-missile-story/

The $14m was riding on a bet about when Iran would successfully strike Israel, with "success" defined as a missile getting through without being intercepted. Fabian filed a routine report that a missile had struck an open area in Jerusalem without hurting anyone. That's when the degenerate gamblers found him.

At first, they sent thinly veiled threats, demanding that Fabian revise his reporting to say that the missile had been intercepted and that the impact was just wreckage from the interception. When Fabian did not revise his article, the gamblers tracked down his messaging IDs – Whatsapp, Discord, X – and bombarded him with escalating threats. A journalistic colleague contacted Fabian with the lie that his boss wanted Fabian to change the story, then admitted that he was actually invested in the wager, and offered to split the money with Fabian.

Then, a gambler calling himself "Haim" sent Fabian a new series of blood-curdling threats, including a promise to spend at least $900,000 (the money Haim said he stood to lose) on a hit-man to kill Fabian. Haim threatened Fabian's "lovely parents" and "brothers and sisters" too. The threats continued until Fabian published his article about the threats, then Haim disappeared.

Speaking to Charlie Warzel, Fabian said that he would never be able to report the same way again, because from now on, he'd be worried that some gambler would threaten to kill him if they didn't like what he wrote:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/03/emanuel-fabian-threats-polymarket/686454/?gift=nwn-guseqS6cY1kVeEKZAY9_c8Sv4UbJoz5hAUuU8YE&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

It's sadly not unusual for journalists to receive death threats for reporting the truth, and Israel is the most dangerous country in the world to be a journalist. The IDF has murdered at least 274 journalists to date:

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

But those journalists are being murdered for political reasons, because someone has an ideological stake in suppressing the truth. Fabian's talking about an entirely novel – and far less predictable – threat; namely, that you will piss off someone who guessed wrong about the outcome of some arbitrary event and who thinks that they can salvage their bet by intimidating you.

Writing for Techdirt, Mike Masnick talks about the sheer perversity of this: that prediction markets, far from being a means of surfacing hidden information, have become a system for distorting information:

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/19/prediction-markets-promised-better-information-instead-theyre-creating-powerful-incentives-to-corrupt-information/

As Masnick says, this is no routine proof of Goodhart's law, where a metric becomes a target. In this case, participants can "put a gun to the metric's head." And of course, not every journalist is as incorruptible as Fabian – think about Fabian's colleague who offered to split the take if Fabian would lie about the missile strike. So there's plenty of incentive to publish lies – and incentives matter, right?

Now, "prediction markets" are big business and they have plenty of apologists (incentives matter). These apologists will say that the corruption is a feature, not a bug, because prediction markets will attract insiders who cheat on the bets by using their insider knowledge, and that means that looking at the moving odds of an event can help everyone else figure out what's about to happen. If military insiders who know that Trump is about to kidnap the president of Venezuela and steal its oil start laying big bets that this is going to happen, the shifting odds are a signal about a true future event.

But even if you buy this perverse argument, it doesn't offset the even more perverse effect – that prediction markets create an incentive to corrupt our best sources of information, the oracles that every prediction market absolutely requires if it is going to hope to function.

Meanwhile, Polymarket and Kalshi suck at predicting things. As Molly White points out, the predictions in the recent Illinois 2nd District Congressional race weren't just incredibly wrong, they also precisely tracked the sums flooded into the election by cryptocurrency Super PACs, who tried (unsuccessfully) to buy the race. Polymarket and Kalshi are heavily crypto-coded (the only things you can do with crypto is buy other kinds of crypto, launder money, and make wagers) so these demonic freaks flush nearly as much money into the betting markets as they do into the elections they seek to corrupt:

https://bsky.app/profile/molly.wiki/post/3mhch3ze5nc2z

Prediction markets aren't good at producing information, but they're amazing at producing corruption. Polymarket and Kalshi have at last realized the unhinged fantasy of "assassination markets" – where you stochastically murder someone by putting up huge wagers at favorable odds that your target will be killed. Anyone can collect the wager by putting up a small counterwager and then bumping off the victim. But, as Protos's Cas Piancey and Mark Toon note, Polymarket and Kalshi know what side their bread is buttered on – they have banned bets on Trump's death (Trump's sons are heavily invested in both Polymarket and Kalshi):

https://protos.com/assassination-markets-are-legal-now-but-trump-doesnt-have-to-worry/

Incentives do matter. These are the foreseeable and foreseen outcomes of prediction markets. Many science fiction writers (Charlie Stross, Ted Chiang, me, and others!) have noted that long before the current AI bubble, our society was dominated by artificial life forms: the limited liability corporation, a "slow AI" that is an immortal colony organism that uses human beings as a form of inconvenient gut flora:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

Anyone who's worked with machine learning systems knows that they're prone to "reward hacking," like the ML-guided Roomba that was programmed to avoid collisions with walls and furniture as it found the quickest path around the room. The Roomba's collision sensor was on its front face, so the Roomba started moving around the room in reverse, smashing the hell out of the furnishings and walls, but never registering a hit:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190109142921/https://twitter.com/smingleigh/status/1060325665671692288

Markets are absolutely capable of inducing reward hacking in participants. The metric becomes a target. You think you're betting on the outcome of an event, but what you're really betting on is what an oracle will say the outcome was. No matter what the outcome is or how robust it is against outside influence, the oracle can be influenced with a gun to the temple. Sure, we all want "number go up," but why bother increasing the thing the number measures, when it's so much easier to threaten to dismember the person who publishes the number if they don't publish a higher number?

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Tickets to HOPE 26 go on sale Tuesday, March 24 https://store.2600.com/products/tickets-to-hope-26?variant=42147982737463

• Prediction Markets Promised Better Information. Instead They’re Creating Powerful Incentives to Corrupt Information. https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/19/prediction-markets-promised-better-information-instead-theyre-creating-powerful-incentives-to-corrupt-information/

• Suicidal Bootlicking as a Method of Governance https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/suicidal-bootlicking-as-a-method

• California bill aims to help vibe coders https://www.semafor.com/article/03/20/2026/california-bill-aims-to-help-vibe-coders

• Manipulating the Stock Market Is Trump's War Strategy https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-manipulating-the

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Airport screening doesn’t stop knives, bombs, or guns https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/03/airport_passeng.html

#20yrsago Apple’s hypocritical slam against French DRM-interop law http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4833010.stm

#20yrsago Vinge’s scientific computing Nature article about MMORPGs https://web.archive.org/web/20060411235146/http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060320/full/440411a.html

#20yrsago Yahoo: if you use our ads, you have to block non-US visitors https://memex.craphound.com/2006/03/22/yahoo-if-you-use-our-ads-you-have-to-block-non-us-visitors/

#20yrsago Stand-up comic gets his material from dumb patents https://web.archive.org/web/20060613212120/https://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70368-0.html?tw=rss.index

#15yrsago Chinese censorware nukes any voicecall that contains the word “protest” https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/22/world/asia/22china.html?_r=2&ref=world

#15yrsago Why Rasputin isn’t in the Haunted Mansion https://longforgottenhauntedmansion.blogspot.com/2011/03/famous-ghosts-and-ghosts-trying-to-make.html

#15yrsago HOWTO play the opening chord from ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ https://www.beatlesbible.com/features/hard-days-night-chord/

#15yrsago Google Book Search rejected: why not try fair use instead? https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/03/judge-rejects-google-book-monopoly/

#10yrsago Harvard Blue Book: peace in our time? https://web.archive.org/web/20160322020137/https://hlrecord.org/2016/03/the-blue-wars-a-report-from-the-front/

#10yrsago Mondrian pong https://b3ta.com/board/11191694

#10yrsago Silverpush says it’s not in the ultrasonic audio-tracker ad-beacons business anymore https://web.archive.org/web/20160324110815/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/silverpush-ftc-stop-eavesdropping-with-audio-beacons

#10yrsago Nixon started the War on Drugs because he couldn’t declare war on black people and hippies https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/?single=1

#10yrsago Anti-DRM demonstrators picket W3C meeting https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/03/scenes-anti-drm-protest-outside-w3c

#10yrsago Student loan garnisheeing topped $176M in three months https://web.archive.org/web/20160322023207/https://consumerist.com/2016/03/21/176m-in-wages-garnished-for-unpaid-federal-student-loans-in-just-three-months/

#10yrsago Dozens of car models can be unlocked and started with a cheap radio amp https://www.adac.de/rund-ums-fahrzeug/ausstattung-technik-zubehoer/assistenzsysteme/keyless/

#10yrsago US Embassy staffer ran a sextortion racket from work computer for 2 years https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/03/former-us-embassy-staffer-sentenced-to-nearly-five-years-for-sextortion/

#5yrsago Patent troll IP is more powerful than Apple's https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/22/gandersauce/#petard

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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

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

• Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, Apr 10
  https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/4863920260410

• London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25
  https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691

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

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

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

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech

• Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU

• Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech)
  https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074

• The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah)
  https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doctorow-matthew-potolsky/

• Tanner Humanities Lecture (U Utah)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Yf1nSyekI

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (646 words today, 55270 total) FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE

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

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links

• Understaffing as a form of enshittification: A way to shift value from workers, patients and shoppers to investors.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Marvel v "superhero"; What's a photocopier?; "Up Against It"; "Medusa's Web"; AI can't do your job; Coping with plenty; "The Shakedown"; Chickenized reverse-centaurs; France v iTunes; Copyfight discipline; Mystery lobbyists; "Where the Axe is Buried"; Free/open microprocessor; Folk models of computer security; Bug-eyed steampunk mask; Academics embracing Wikipedia.
• Upcoming appearances: Berkeley, Montreal, London, Berlin, Hay-on-Wye.
• 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.

Understaffing as a form of enshittification (permalink)

At root, enshittification can only take place when companies can move value around. Digital tools make it easier than ever to do this, for example, by changing prices on a per-user, per-session basis, using commercial surveillance data to predict the highest price or lowest wage a user will accept:

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

Digital "twiddling" represents a powerful system of pumps for moving value around, taking it away from users and giving it to business customers, then taking it from businesses and giving it to users, and then, ultimately, harvesting all the value for the company's shareholders and executives.

Twiddling is powerful because it's fine-grained, allowing businesses to extract more from their most vulnerable customers and workers, while reserving more equitable treatment for more empowered stakeholders who might otherwise take their business elsewhere.

But long before digitization made twiddling possible, businesses that found themselves in a position to make things worse for their customers and workers without facing consequences were accustomed to doing so. Think of the airport shop that sells water for $10/bottle: that's a ripoff whether you're in coach-minus or flying first class, and it's made possible by the TSA checkpoint that makes shopping elsewhere a time-consuming impossibility.

The airport shop is the only game in town – a "monopolist" in economics jargon. When a business has something you really want (or even better, something you need) and it's hard (or impossible) for you to get it elsewhere, they can take value away from you and harvest it for themselves.

The most obvious forms of monopoly extraction are high prices and low wages. Dollar stores are notorious for this, using their market power to procure extremely small packages of common goods in "cheater sizes" that have high per-unit costs (e.g. the cost per ounce for soap), while still having a low price tag (the cost per (small) bottle of soap). These stores are situated in food deserts, which they create by boxing in community grocers and heavily discounting their wares until the real grocers go out of business. They're also situated in work deserts, because driving regular grocers out of business destroys the competition for labor, too. That means they can pay low wages and charge high prices and make a hell of a lot of money, which is why there are so many fucking dollar stores:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/27/walmarts-jackals/#cheater-sizes

That's the most obvious form of value harvesting, but it's not the only one. There are other costs that businesses can impose on their customers and workers. Think of CVS, the pharmacy monopolist that uses its vertical integration with bizarre, poorly understood middlemen like "pharmacy benefit managers" to drive independent pharmacies out of business:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/23/shield-of-boringness/#some-men-rob-you-with-a-fountain-pen

If you've been to a CVS store recently, you have doubtless experienced a powerful form of value-shifting: understaffing. CVS (and the other massive chains in the cartel, like Walgreens) have giant stores with just one or two employees on the floor, often just a cashier and a pharmacist.

This makes them easy pickings for shoplifters, so all their merchandise is locked up in cabinets and when you want to buy something, you have to find the lone employee and get them to unlock the case for you. This is CVS trading your time for their wage-bill.

Then, you're expected to check out your own purchases – shifting labor from workers on CVS's payroll to you – with badly maintained machines that often misfire and require you to wait again for that lone employee to come and override them.

Meanwhile, that employee is absorbing a gigantic amount of frustration and abuse from customers who are paying high prices and enduring long waits – another cost that CVS shifts from their shareholders to someone else (workers, in this case).

Finally, CVS demands that publicly funded police respond to the inevitable shoplifting and other security problems created by running a big-box store with a skeleton crew, shifting costs from the business to everyone in the local tax-base.

In "Not Enough Workers For the Job," The American Prospect's Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein looks at the systemic trend towards understaffing that has swept across every sector of the US economy over the past five years:

https://prospect.org/2026/03/19/understaff-workplace-business-covid-cvs-pharmacies-hotels-grocery-stores/

Kaiser-Schatzlein lays the blame for many of life's frustrations at the feet of this business trend: "long lines, messy grocery aisles, organized theft, high hotel costs, frequent flight cancellations, deadly medication errors at pharmacies, increased use of medical restraints in nursing homes, and, more generally, a palpable and rising dissatisfaction with work."

As you can see from that list, understaffing affects everyone, from people with the wherewithal to buy a plane ticket to vulnerable elderly people who are literally tied to their beds or drugged into stupors for the last years of their lives.

There's academic work to support the idea that understaffing is on the rise, like a 2024 Kennedy School survey of 14,000 workers where a majority said that their workplaces are "always" or "often" understaffed. A 2023 study in the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice found that public health institutions need to hire 80% more workers to be adequately staffed. New York's Mt Sinai hospitals paid a $2m fine in 2024 for understaffing its ERs, as well as oncology and labor units. Another study blames understaffing for the rise of use of antipsychotic "chemical handcuffs" in nursing homes:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35926573/

The hits keep coming: the DoT Inspector General says that 77% of air traffic control is understaffed, with NYC ATC staffed at 54% of the correct level. In Texas, county jails have had to reduce their capacity due to understaffing (they have enough beds, but not enough turnkeys). Understaffing is behind much of the unprecedented union surge, with workers at Starbucks, railroads and elsewhere becoming labor militants due to understaffing. 83% of white-collar millennials say they're doing extra work to make up for vacant positions in their organizations. As Starbucks union organizers can attest, workers need unions if they want to have a hope of forcing their bosses to adequately staff their jobsites, so it's not surprising that understaffing has emerged at a time when union density is at rock bottom.

Kaiser-Schatzlein quotes the Kennedy School's Daniel Schneider, who identifies understaffing as a deliberate business strategy. Businesses don't hire enough workers because that makes them more profitable. It's not because "no one wants to work anymore" (though doubtless repeating that fairy tale helps shift the blame for long lines and poor service from real, greedy bosses to imaginary, greedy workers).

Private equity firms lead the charge here, "rolling up" multiple, competing businesses in a sector and then cutting staffing across all of them. Putting all the businesses in a given sector and region under common ownership means that when these businesses hack away at staffing levels, workers and customers have nowhere else to go. This is especially pernicious at nursing homes, where PE companies drastically reduce headcount, putting staff and patients alike at risk:

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/01/31/1139783599/new-york-nursing-home-owners-drained-cash?ft=nprml&f=853198417

Private equity has just about declared victory in its decades-long war on community pharmacies, consolidating pharmacy ownership nationwide into just a few chains that are the poster-children for understaffing. These ghost-ships aren't just frustrating places to shop – they're a danger to their communities. As Kaiser-Schatzlein reports, Ohio fined CVS in 2021 for boarding up the walk-up pharmacies in its stores and forcing customers to use the drive-through, because there was only a single pharmacist on duty.

Without help, the lone pharmacist was unable to process deliveries, so CVS pharmacies' floors were littered with unopened parcels. Patients had to wait over a month to get their prescriptions filled. CVS refused to hire additional staff to process the backlog, and the on-duty staff worked under declining conditions, as the undermaintained air conditioning quit and indoor temperatures soared. Unsurprisingly, these stores had massive staff turnover, which also hampered their efficiency.

Understaffing in pharmacies leads to serious medication errors, which are proliferating across the US, killing hundreds of thousands of Americans every year. The errors are incredible, like the woman who died after getting chemotherapy drugs instead of antidepressants:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/31/health/pharmacists-medication-errors.html

Pharmacists at chain stores like CVS are at elevated risk for kidney stones because they don't have time for bathroom breaks, so they adopt a practice of not drinking water during their shifts. One CVS pharmacist told Texas regulators, "I am a danger to the public working for CVS."

As ever, covid provides the ideal excuse for shifting value from customers and workers to shareholders. Today's high prices never came down after the "greedflation" that bosses boasted about to shareholders, even as they told customers that it was because of "supply chain shocks":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/11/price-over-volume/#pepsi-pricing-power

Likewise, staffing levels never came back from the covid skeleton crews that we all learned to deal with in the days of widespread acute illness and social distancing. Kaiser-Schatzlein spoke to hotel workers like Jianci Liang, a housekeeper at Boston's Hilton Park Plaza, who described a post-pandemic jobsite with 20 fewer housekeepers: "I sleep with pain, I wake up with pain, I go to work with pain." The Bureau of Labor says that hotel staffing levels are down 16% nationwide.

Prices (and profits) are up, though. Hotels are posting record profits and paying record executive salaries, wrung from facilities where the pools are closed and room cleanings happen on alternate days.

Workers absorb the cost of understaffing in their bodies and their psyches. It's not just physical exhaustion, it's also the abuse that is directly correlated with lower staffing levels. Frustrated customers vent their anger at grocery workers, flight attendants and other front-line workers.

I can't help but see a connection here to the AI bubble, which is fueled by the fantasy of a world without people:

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

The billionaire solipsists who have directed hundreds of billions of dollars in AI investment like to rhapsodize about a future where a boss's ideas are turned into products and services without having to be funneled through workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/12/normal-technology/#bubble-exceptionalism

That's why AI has taken over customer service – the multi-hour waits for a customer service rep were always a way of shifting value from customers and workers to shareholders. Businesses could increase staffing at their call centers. Businesses could offer better products and services and reduce the number of people who need customer service. By refusing to do either, they make you wait on the line until you are suffused with murderous rage, and then expect their workers to deal with your anger. Turning the whole thing over to AI makes perfect sense – your problems won't be solved, and they don't have to pay the chatbot at all when you get angry at it:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/06/unmerchantable-substitute-goods/#customer-disservice

"We did this with AI" has become a synonym for "We don't care if this is done well":

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/11/modal-dialog-a-palooza/#autoplay-videos

"We don't care if this is done well" could well be the motto of the understaffing craze. The technical insights that sparked today's AI investment bubble could have happened at any time, but the ensuing investment tsunami is a product of a world dominated by large firms that are "too big to care" about the quality of their products – or their jobs.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Our algorithmic future – Utopia or Armageddon? https://b2fxxx.blogspot.com/2026/03/our-algorithmic-future-utopia-or.html

• The Market Definition Trap https://lpeproject.org/blog/the-market-definition-trap/

• On Spec 2026: New Canadian Literature of the Fantastic https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/edwardwillett/on-spec-2026-new-canadian-literature-of-the-fantastic

• Day 7: Ticketmaster's "Velvet Hammer" https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/day-7-ticketmasters-velvet-hammer

• From Race to the Bottom to Worker Power on the Road https://economicpopulist.substack.com/p/from-race-to-the-bottom-to-worker

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Marvel Comics: stealing our language https://memex.craphound.com/2006/03/18/marvel-comics-stealing-our-language/

#20yrsago MPAA/RIAA/BSA: No breaking DRM, even if it’s killing you (literally!) https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2006/03/08/riaa-says-future-drm-might-threaten-critical-infrastructure-and-potentially-endanger-liv/

#20yrsago Coping with plenty – stuff gets cheaper, space gets pricier https://www.theguardian.com/business/2006/feb/28/retail.shopping

#20yrsago France will let Microsoft play iTunes http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4828296.stm

#20yrsago A new discipline to describe the copyfight https://web.archive.org/web/20060422010702/https://www.nyu.edu/classes/siva/archives/002930.html

#20yrsago Right-wing think-tank hates DRM https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/circumventing-competition-perverse-consequences-digital-millennium-copyright-act#

#20yrsago Reasons to take math in high school https://web.archive.org/web/20060610134055/http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/v7i11_math.html

#20yrsago Sun ships free and open microprocessor https://web.archive.org/web/20060221112756/http://opensparc.sunsource.net/nonav/index.html

#20yrsago Octavia Butler scholarship will send people of color to Clarion https://web.archive.org/web/20060406161412/https://carlbrandon.org/butlerscholarship/

#20yrsago Online sexual material is obscene if any community in US objects https://web.archive.org/web/20060505232346/http://www.justicemag.com/daily/item/2590.html

#15yrsago Folk models of home computer security: what we think our PCs are doing https://rickwash.com/papers/rwash-homesec-soups10-final.pdf

#15yrsago Fixers’ Collective: people learning to make broken stuff work again https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Arts/2011/0321/The-art-of-the-fix-it

#15yrsago Bug-eyed monster steampunk mask https://bob-basset.livejournal.com/158400.html

#15yrsago Scholars to stop pretending they don’t use Wikipedia; will work out best practices instead https://www.bbc.com/news/education-12809944

#15yrsago Electronic publishing Bingo card from John Scalzi https://whatever.scalzi.com/2011/03/20/the-electronic-publishing-bingo-card/

#15yrsago RIP, Mike Glicksohn, Hugo-winning science fiction fan https://file770.com/mike-glicksohn-1946-2011/

#15yrsago Anti-labor ads celebrate workers taking paycuts and CEOs getting millions https://www.cogdis.me/2011/03/is-this-what-they-really-want.html

#15yrsago Reluctant witness refuses to admit he knows what a photocopier is https://www.cleveland.com/metro/2011/03/identifying_photocopy_machine.html

#15yrsago Tim Wu in the Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/the-master-switch-tim-wu-internet

#15yrsago Up Against It: smart, whiz-bang space opera pits astro-bureaucrats against rogue AIs https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/18/up-against-it-smart-whiz-bang-space-opera-pits-astro-bureaucrats-against-rogue-ais/

#10yrsago Howto: start a fire with a lemon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bv2vT665bGI

#10yrsago First order of business for hard-right government: canceling Croatia’s answer to The Daily Show https://balkaninsight.com/2016/03/17/satiric-show-pulled-from-croatian-tv-for-intolerance-03-17-2016/bi/all-balkan-countries/

#10yrsago FBI issues car-hacking warning, tells drivers to keep their cars’ patch-levels current https://www.wired.com/2016/03/fbi-warns-car-hacking-real-risk/

#10yrsago BART’s twitter manager drops truth-bombs, world cheers https://gizmodo.com/i-would-like-to-buy-a-drink-for-the-poor-soul-who-ran-t-1765477706

#10yrsago Chelsea Manning gets the US Army to cough up its “insider threat” training docs https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/18/government-persecuting-whistleblowers-insider-threat-chelsea-manning

#10yrsago Apple engineers quietly discuss refusing to create the FBI’s backdoor https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/18/technology/apple-encryption-engineers-if-ordered-to-unlock-iphone-might-resist.html

#10yrsago Russia moots ban on discussions about VPNs, reverse proxies, and other anti-censorship techniques https://torrentfreak.com/copyright-holders-want-site-block-circumvention-advice-banned-160319/

#10yrsago Medusa’s Web: Tim Powers is the Philip K Dick of our age https://memex.craphound.com/2016/03/18/medusas-web-tim-powers-is-the-philip-k-dick-of-our-age/

#10yrsago Meet the Commercial Energy Working Group, a lobby group that won’t say who it lobbies for https://web.archive.org/web/20160320150011/https://theintercept.com/2016/03/20/mysterious-powerful-lobbying-group-wont-even-say-who-its-lobbying-for/

#5yrsago Support Amazon workers today https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/20/against-amazon-union-busting/#what-rhymes-with-bezos

#5yrsago Department of Truth https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/20/against-amazon-union-busting/#dot

#5yrsago The political possibility of cities https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/21/ex-urbe/#arcology-politics

#5yrsago Aviation bailout cost $666k/job https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/18/news-worthy/#aa

#5yrsago Impunity for NYPD cops who brutalized BLM protesters https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/18/news-worthy/#nypd-black-and-blue

#5yrsago Help news, not news-barons https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/18/news-worthy/#big-news

#5yrsago Announcing "The Shakedown" https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/19/the-shakedown/#monopsony

#5yrsago Chickenized reverse-centaurs https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/19/the-shakedown/#weird-flex

#1yrago You can't save an institution by betraying its mission https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/19/selling-out/#destroy-the-village-to-save-it

#1yrago AI can't do your job https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete

#1yrago Ray Nayler's "Where the Axe Is Buried" https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/20/birchpunk/#cyberspace-is-everting

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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

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

• Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, Apr 10
  https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/4863920260410

• London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25
  https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691

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

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

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

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech

• Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU

• Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech)
  https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074

• The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah)
  https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doctorow-matthew-potolsky/

• Tanner Humanities Lecture (U Utah)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Yf1nSyekI

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1034 words today, 54661 total)

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

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links

• Love of corporate bullshit is correlated with bad judgment: Synergizing the strategic inflection points on the global data network.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Bluetooth headsets; Fruit sticker decoder; iPod batteries v DRM; Bruces's SXSW keynote; Piracy isn't funding terrorism; Hope v optimism; Identical twin time-travel prank; Prisoners draw corporate crooks; Spanish junkbots; Sheriff's rape-kit denial; Non-dorky magic; Poetic bureaucrat mourns wolf; SXSW v MPAA; "Burning Days"; NYT paywall; Police rap-battle warning; Unions de-risk labor; "Murder the Truth"
• 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.

Love of corporate bullshit is correlated with bad judgment (permalink)

I'm a writer, so of course I care about words! But I'm a writer, so I also think that words are improved by their malleability, duality and nuance.

This is one of the things I love about being a native English speaker – this glorious mongrel language of ours is full of extremely weird words, like "cleave," which means its own opposite ("to join together" and "to cut apart"). English is full of these words that mean their own opposite, from "dust" to "oversight" to "weather":

https://www.mentalfloss.com/language/words/25-words-are-their-own-opposites

This is what you get when you let a language run wild, with meaning determined (and contested) by speakers. Not for nothing, my second language is Yiddish, another glorious higgeldy-piggeldy of a tongue with no authoritative oversight and innumerable dialects.

Semantic drift is a feature, not a bug. It's how we get new words, and new meanings for old words. I love semantic drift! I mean, I'd better, since, having coined "enshittification," I'm now destined to have a poop emoji on my headstone. Having coined a word – and having proposed a precise technical meaning for it – I am baffled by people who make it their business to scold others for using enshittification "incorrectly." "Enshittification" is less than five years old, and we know when and how it was invented. If you like it when I make up a word, you can't categorically object to other people making up new meanings for this word. I didn't need a word-coining license to come up with enshittification, and you don't need a semantic drift license to use it to mean something else.

I wrote a whole danged essay about this, but still, hardly a day goes by without someone trying to enlist me in their project to scold and shame strangers for using the word incorrectly:

The fact that a neologism is sometimes decoupled from its theoretical underpinnings and is used colloquially is a feature, not a bug. Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad," without bothering to learn – or apply – the theoretical framework. This is good. This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own. If 10,000,000 people use "enshittification" loosely and inspire 10% of their number to look up the longer, more theoretical work I've done on it, that is one million normies who have been sucked into a discourse that used to live exclusively in the world of the most wonkish and obscure practitioners. The only way to maintain a precise, theoretically grounded use of a term is to confine its usage to a small group of largely irrelevant insiders. Policing the use of "enshittification" is worse than a self-limiting move – it would be a self-inflicted wound.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/#this-toilet-has-no-central-nervous-system

Colloquialization doesn't dilute language, it thickens it. Using a powerful word to describe something else can be glorious. It's allusion, metaphor, simile. It's poesie. It's fine. Bemoaning the "tsunami" of bad news doesn't cheapen the deaths of people who die in real tsunamis. Saying that the Trump administration "nuked" the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau doesn't desecrate the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Calling creeping authoritarianism a "cancer" doesn't denigrate the suffering of people who have actual cancer.

What's more, devoting your energies to "correcting" other people's allusive language makes you a boring, tedious person. Sure, you can have a conversation with a comrade about making inclusive word choices, but interrupting a substantive debate to have that discussion is unserious. The words people use matter (I care a lot about words!) but they matter less than the things people mean. Keep your eye on the prize (metaphorically) (for avoidance of doubt, there is no prize) (both the prize and the eye are metaphors).

(By all means, get angry at people who intentionally use slurs. None of this is to say that you should tolerate – or be subjected to – language that is intended to dehumanize you.)

It's time we admitted that it's no good replacing an offensive term with a phrase that no one understands. Calling it "child sexual abuse material" is a good idea, but no one actually calls it that. The customary phrase is actually "child sexual abuse material, which most people call 'child porn,' but which we should really call 'child sex abuse material.'" If your goal is to avoid saying "child porn" (a laudable goal!), this isn't achieving it.

None of this means that I am immune to being rubbed up the wrong way by other people's language choices. Having been mentored by the science fiction great Damon Knight, I have been infected by many of his linguistic peccadillos, which means that if you say "out loud" in my earshot, I will (mentally) "correct" it to "aloud" (yes, "out loud" is fine, but Damon had a thing about it and it got stuck in my brain).

I am especially perturbed by "business English," the language of the commercial class, their cheerleaders in the press, and (alas) many of their critics. Anytime someone refers to a sector as a "space" (as in "I'm really getting into the AI space") it's like they're making me chew tinfoil. Superlatives like "thought-leader" are so self-parodying I have to check every time someone utters one aloud (see?) to verify that they're not being sarcastic. Objects of derision should be referred to by their surnames, not their given names ("Musk" is vituperative, "Elon" is friendly – though, thanks to the glorious and thickening contradictions of language, calling someone by their surname can also be affectionate). I steer clear of jargon used by firms to lionize themselves, like "hyperscaler."

I share the impulse to impose my linguistic preferences on the people around me. I just (mostly) suppress that impulse and try to focus on substance rather than style, at least when I'm trying to understand others and be understood by them. But yes, I do silently judge the people around me for their word choices – all the time.

That's why I immediately pounced on "The Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale: Development, validation, and associations with workplace outcomes," an open access paper in the Feb 2026 edition of Personality and Individual Differences by Shane Littrell, a linguistics postdoc at Cornell:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/400597536_The_Corporate_Bullshit_Receptivity_Scale_Development_validation_and_associations_with_workplace_outcomes

Littrell set out to evaluate "corporate bullshit," a linguistic category that is separate from mere "jargon." Jargon, Littrell writes, is a professional vocabulary that serves a useful purpose: "facilitat[ing] communication and social bonding, increas[ing] fluency, and help[ing] reinforce a shared identity among in-group members."

Bullshit, meanwhile, is "semantically, logically, or epistemically dubious information that is misleadingly impressive, important, informative, or otherwise engaging." There's a whole field of bullshit studies, with investigations into such exciting topics as "pseudo-profound bullshit" (think: Deepak Chopra).

Littrell borrows from that field and others to investigate corporate bullshit, formulating a measurement index he calls the "Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale." In a series of three experiments, Littrell sets out to determine who is the most susceptible to corporate bullshit, and what the correlates of that receptivity are.

Littrell concludes that corporate bullshitters themselves are pretty good at identifying bullshit (they have a high "Organizational Bullshit Perception Score"). In other words, bullshitters know that they're bullshitting. When a corporate leader declares that:

This synergistic look at our thought leadership will ensure that we are decontenting and avoiding reputational deficits with our key takeaways as effectively as we can in order to sunset our resonating focus.

they know it's nonsense.

This reminded me of the idea that cult leaders tell obvious lies to their followers as a way of forcing them to demonstrate their subservience. When Trump demands that his followers wear clown shoes:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-is-obsessed-with-these-145-shoes-and-won-t-let-anyone-leave-without-a-pair/ar-AA1XOEBm

Or that they pretend that "mutilization" is a word:

https://www.wonkette.com/p/is-trumps-save-america-fck-america

He's engaging in a dominance play that forces his feuding princelings and their lickspittles to humiliate themselves and reaffirm his supremacy.

There are plenty of rank-and-file workers inside corporations who have high OBPSes and know when they're being bullshitted, but Littrell also identifies a large cohort of low-OBPS workers who are absolutely taken in by corporate bullshit.

Here we get to a fascinating dichotomy. Both the low-OBPS and high-OBPS workers can be described as being "open minded," but "open" has a very different meaning for each group. Workers who are good at spotting bullshit score high on open-mindedness metrics like "willingness to engage" and "willingness to reflect," both characteristic of the "fluid intelligence" that makes workers good at solving problems and doing a good job.

Meanwhile, workers who are taken in by bullshit are "open minded" in the sense that they are bad at analytical reasoning and thus easily convinced. These people test poorly on metrics like "logical reasoning" and "decision-making," and score high on "overconfidence in one's intellectual and analytic abilities." They are apt to make blunders that "expose organizations to financial, reputational, or legal risks."

But they're also exactly the workers who score high on "job satisfaction," "trust in one's supervisor," and "degree to which they are inspired by corporate mission statements." These people are so open minded that their brains start to leak out of their ears. Or, as Carly Page put it in The Register: "jargon sticks around not just because executives enjoy using it, but because many people respond to it as if it were genuine insight":

https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/15/corporate_jargon_research/

This creates a feedback loop where bosses get rewarded for using empty and maddening phrases, and their workforce gets progressively more skewed towards people who are bad at spotting bullshit and at exercising their judgment on the job. It's quite a neat – and ugly – explanation of why bullshit proliferates within organizations, and how organizations come to be completely overrun with bullshit.

This is a fascinating research paper, and while I've focused on its conclusions, I really suggest going and reading about the methodology, especially the tables of "corporate bullshit" phrases they generated for their experiments (Tables 1, 2 and 3). This is some eldritch horror bullshit:

By solving the pain point of customers with our conversations, we will ideate a renewed level of end-state vision and growth-mindset in the market between us and others who are architecting to download on a similar balanced scorecard.

What's more, these are all based on real examples of corporate bullshit from leaders at large corporations, with a few words rotated to synonyms drawn from the business-press.

I'm a writer. I really do care about language. Sure, I get frustrated with scolds who rail against semantic drift or engage in petty, pedantic corrections, but not because words don't matter. They matter, a lot. But language isn't math (which is why double negatives are intensifiers, not negators). It can obscure (as with bullshit) or it can enlighten (as with poesie) or it can enable precision (as with jargon). Arguments about language matter, but what matters about them isn't subjective aesthetics, nor is it a peevish obsession with "correctness." What matters is the way that language operates on the world (and vice versa).

Hey look at this (permalink)

• The public will pay https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-102/

• Enshittified UX https://www.awwwards.com/sites/enshittified-ux

• The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

• Immutable https://www.pbs.org/video/immutable-lw8ctv/

• Why Are We Still Doing This? https://www.wheresyoured.at/why-are-we-still-doing-this/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Eighth graders build giant awesome gymnasium rollercoaster https://web.archive.org/web/20060329110502/https://www.sgvtribune.com/news/ci_3606933

#20yrsago Bluetooth headset combined with headphones https://www.techdigest.tv/2006/03/itech_clip_m_1.html

#20yrsago HOWTO decode the sticker-numbers on fruit https://megnut.com/2006/03/14/read-the-numbers-on-your-fruit/

#20yrsago DRM shortens iPod battery life https://web.archive.org/web/20060319201837/http://www.mp3.com/features/stories/3646.html

#20yrsago McD’s employees’ secret recipes for improvised meals https://mcdonalds-talk.livejournal.com/158400.html

#20yrsago UK to US: we’ll only buy open-source fighter jets https://web.archive.org/web/20060420192203/https://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2152035/joint-strike-fighter

#20yrsago Bruce Sterling’s SXSW keynote MP3 https://web.archive.org/web/20060330072143/https://server1.sxsw.com/2006/coverage/SXSW06.INT.20060314.BruceSterling.mp3

#20yrsago UK Open University opens its courseware https://web.archive.org/web/20060610125235/https://oci.open.ac.uk/

#20yrsago Europe seeking to make open mapping impossible – help! https://web.archive.org/web/20060503172457/https://publicgeodata.org/Open_Letter

#20yrsago MPAA rep gets slammed at SXSW https://www.powazek.com/2006/03/000571.html

#20yrsago Canadian recording industry: P2P isn’t bad for business https://web.archive.org/web/20060408232202/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/component/option,com_content/task,view/id,1168/Itemid,85/nsub,/

#15yrsago First-person account from surgeon who removed his own appendix https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/03/antarctica-1961-a-soviet-surgeon-has-to-remove-his-own-appendix/72445/

#15yrsago New York Times paywall: wishful thinking or just crazy? https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/17/new-york-times-paywall-wishful-thinking-or-just-crazy/

#15rsago Android app pwns cardkey entry systems, opens all the locks https://web.archive.org/web/20110317132608/http://www.cybersecurityguy.com/caribou.html

#15yrsago Glenn Grant’s Burning Days: old school cyberpunk stories from the nostalgic contrafuture https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/17/glenn-grants-burning-days-old-school-cyberpunk-stories-from-the-nostalgic-contrafuture/

#15yrsago World’s largest spam botnet goes down (for now?) https://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/03/rustock-botnet-flatlined-spam-volumes-plummet/

#15yrsago Piracy doesn’t fund the mob or terrorists https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/03/even-commercial-pirates-now-have-to-compete-with-free/

#15yrsago Tennessee to outlaw collective bargaining for teachers https://web.archive.org/web/20110320023746/https://nashvillecitypaper.com/content/city-news/protesters-arrested-following-disruption-committee-hearing

#15yrsago Four Color Fear: delightful horror comics from the pre-Code era https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/16/four-color-fear-delightful-horror-comics-from-the-pre-code-era/

#10yrsago Screw optimism, we need hope instead https://web.archive.org/web/20160318215827/https://littleatoms.com/society/cory-doctorows-manifesto-hope

#10yrsago Four sets of identical twins pull an epic NYC subway car time-machine prank https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1Gq7Q3B9xU

#10yrsago Hack-attacks with stolen certs tell you the future of FBI vs Apple https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/to-bypass-code-signing-checks-malware-gang-steals-lots-of-certificates/

#10yrsago Captured: a book of prison inmate drawings of CEOs and other too-big-to-jail criminals https://thecapturedproject.com/

#10yrsago From dingo babysitter to net neutrality hero: Tom Wheeler’s legacy https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/how-a-former-lobbyist-became-the-broadband-industrys-worst-nightmare/

#10yrsago Poet/bureaucrat’s moving report of the 1921 demise of America’s most notorious wolf https://web.archive.org/web/20160327105045/https://www.fws.gov/news/Historic/NewsReleases/1921/19210103.pdf

#10yrsago Barnes & Noble wipes out Nook ebook, replaces it with off-brand “study guide” https://web.archive.org/web/20160316120232/https://www.teleread.com/barnes-noble-stole-first-e-book-ever-bought/

#10yrsago Scarfolk’s lost 1970s budget announcement lays bare the modern Tory strategy https://scarfolk.blogspot.com/2016/03/scarfolks-annual-budget-announcement.html

#10yrsago Junkbots from Madrid, recycled from iconic Spanish packaging https://web.archive.org/web/20160321103729/http://www.pitarquerobots.es/

#10yrsago First-ever Tor node in a Canadian library https://web.archive.org/web/20160319035440/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/canadian-librarians-must-be-ready-to-fight-the-feds-on-running-a-tor-node-western-library-freedom-project

#10yrsago How to do impromptu magic tricks without being a dork https://www.thejerx.com/blog/2016/3/14/project-slay-them

#10yrsago Sheriff says rape kits are irrelevant because most rape accusations are false https://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/2016/03/rape_kit_system_unnecessary_si.html

#10yrsago Redaction fail: U.S. government admits it went after Lavabit looking for Snowden https://www.wired.com/2016/03/government-error-just-revealed-snowden-target-lavabit-case/

#10yrsago McAfee shovelware emits tracking beacons https://web.archive.org/web/20160909030152/https://duo.com/blog/bring-your-own-dilemma-oem-laptops-and-windows-10-security

#10yrsago Cops in small MA town warn about roving rap-battle challengers https://www.kron4.com/news/cops-warn-residents-of-men-challenging-others-to-rap-battles/

#10yrsago Rather than banning “lobbying” by academics, UK government should encourage it https://web.archive.org/web/20160310100844/https://www.timeshighereducation.com/comment/ban-academics-talking-to-ministers-we-should-train-them-to-do-it

#10yrsago Russia’s military uses gigantic wooden comedy props for punishment https://semperannoying.tumblr.com/post/122390977886/semperannoying-russian-army-punishments-1

#10yrsago Study: people who believe in innate intelligence overestimate their own https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/03/think-intelligence-is-fixed-youre-more-likely-to-overestimate-your-own/

#5yrsago SNAPDRAGON https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/17/there-once-was-a-union-maid/#coming-out

#5yrsago How unions de-risk work https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/17/there-once-was-a-union-maid/#solidarity-forever

#5yrsago Meet the new music boss, same as the old music boss https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/16/wage-theft/#excessive-buyer-power

#5yrsago The People's Parity Project https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/16/wage-theft/#ppp

#5yrsago SMS security is flaming garbage https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/16/wage-theft/#override-service-registry

#1yrago David Enrich's "Murder the Truth" https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/17/actual-malice/#happy-slapping

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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

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

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

• Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, Apr 10
  https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/4863920260410

• London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25
  https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691

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

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

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

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech

• Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU

• Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech)
  https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074

• The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah)
  https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doctorow-matthew-potolsky/

• Tanner Humanities Lecture (U Utah)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Yf1nSyekI

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1002 words today, 52553 total)

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

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links

• William Gibson vs Margaret Thatcher: The Street Finds Its Own Alternatives For Things.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Prison for spamming; Dotcom layoffs; Ethernet action-figures; UK libel reform; "Poe's Detective"; God's customer service center; "Making Hay"; Alexa privacy Valdez.
• 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.

William Gibson vs Margaret Thatcher (permalink)

William Gibson is one of history's most quotable sf writers: "The future is here, it's not evenly distributed"; "Don't let the little fuckers generation-gap you"; "Cyberspace is everting"; and the immortal: "The street finds its own uses for things":

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Gibson

"The street finds its own uses" is a surprisingly subtle and liberatory battle-cry. It stakes a claim by technology's users that is separate from the claims asserted by corporations that make technology (often under grotesque and cruel conditions) and market it (often for grotesque and cruel purposes).

"The street finds its own uses" is a statement about technopolitics. It acknowledges that yes, there are politics embedded in our technology, the blood in the machine, but these politics are neither simple, nor are they immutable. The fact that a technology was born in sin does not preclude it from being put to virtuous ends. A technology's politics are up for grabs.

In other words, it's the opposite of Audre Lorde's "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." It's an assertion that, in fact, the master's tools have all the driver-bits, hex-keys, and socket sets needed to completely dismantle the master's house, and, moreover, to build something better with the resulting pile of materials.

And of course the street finds its own uses for things. Things – technology – don't appear out of nowhere. Everything is in a lineage, made from the things that came before it, destined to be transformed by the things that come later. Things can't come into existence until other things already exist.

Take the helicopter. Lots of people have observed the action of a screw and the twirling of a maple key as it falls from a tree and thought, perhaps that could be made to fly. Da Vinci was drawing helicopters in the 15th century:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo%27s_aerial_screw

But Da Vinci couldn't build a helicopter. No one could, until they did. To make the first helicopter, you need to observe the action of the screw and the twirling of a maple key, and you need to have lightweight, strong alloys and powerful internal combustion engines.

Those other things had to be invented by other people first. Once they were, the next person who thought hard about screws and maple keys was bound to get a helicopter off the ground. That's why things tend to be invented simultaneously, by unrelated parties.

TV, radio and the telephone all have multiple inventors, because these people were the cohort that happened to alight upon the insights needed to build these technologies after the adjacent technologies had been made and disseminated.

If technopolitics were immutable – if the original sin of a technology could never be washed away – then everything is beyond redemption. Somewhere in the history of the lever, the pulley and the wheel are some absolute monsters. Your bicycle's bloodline includes some truly horrible ancestors. The computer is practically a crime against humanity:

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

A defining characteristic of purity culture is the belief that things are defined by their origins. An artist who was personally terrible must make terrible art – even if that art succeeds artistically, even if it moves, comforts and inspires you, it can't ever be separated from the politics of its maker. It is terrible because of its origins, not its merits. If you hate the sinner, you must also hate the sin.

"The street finds its own uses" counsels us to hate the sinner and love the sin. The indisputable fact that HP Lovecraft was a racist creep is not a reason to write off Cthulhoid mythos – it's a reason to claim and refashion them:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/09/the-old-crow-is-getting-slow/#i-love-ny

The claim that sin is a kind of forever-chemical contaminant that can't ever be rinsed away is the ideology of Mr Gotcha:

We should improve society somewhat.

Yet you participate in society. Curious!

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

In its right-wing form, it is Margaret Thatcher's "There is no alternative":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/15/piketty-pilled/#tax-justice

Thatcher demanded that you accept all the injustices and oppressions of capitalism if you enjoyed its fruits. If capitalism put a roof over your head and groceries in your fridge, you can't complain about the people it hurts. There is no version of society that has the machines and practices that produced those things that does not also produce the injustice.

The technological version of this is the one that tech bosses peddle: If you enjoy talking to your friends on Facebook, you can't complain about Mark Zuckerberg listening in on the conversation. There is no alternative. Wanting to talk to your friends out of Zuck's earshot is like wanting water that's not wet. It's unreasonable.

But there's a left version of this, its doppelganger: the belief that a technology born in sin can never be redeemed. If you use an LLM running on your computer to find a typo, using an unmeasurably small amount of electricity in the process, you still sin – not because of anything that happens when you use that LLM, but because of LLMs' "structural properties," "the way they make it harder to learn and grow," "the way they make products worse," the "emissions, water use and e-waste":

https://tante.cc/2026/02/20/acting-ethical-in-an-imperfect-world/

The facts that finding punctuation errors in your own work using your own computer doesn't make it "harder to learn and grow," doesn't "make products worse," and doesn't add to "emissions, water use and e-waste" are irrelevant. The part that matters isn't the use of a technology, it's the origin.

The fact that this technology is steeped in indisputable sin means that every use of it is sinful. The street can find as many uses as it likes for things, but it won't matter, because there is no alternative.

When radical technologists scheme to liberate technology, they're not hoping to redeem the gadget, they're trying to liberate people. Information doesn't want to be free, because information doesn't and can't want anything. But people want to be free, and liberated access to information technology is a precondition for human liberation itself.

Promethean leftists don't reject the master's tools: we seize them. The fact that Unix was born of a convicted monopolist who turned the screws on users at every turn isn't a reason to abandon Unix – it demands that we reverse-engineer, open, and free Unix:

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

We don't do this out of moral consideration for Unix. Unix is inert, it warrants no moral consideration. But billions of users of free operating systems that are resistant to surveillance and control are worthy of moral consideration and we set them free by seizing the means of computation.

If a technology can do something to further human thriving, then we can love the sin, even as we hate the sinners in its lineage. We seize the means of computation, not because we care about computers, but because we care about people.

Artifacts do have politics, but those politics are not immutable. Those politics are ours to seize and refashion:

https://faculty.cc.gatech.edu/~beki/cs4001/Winner.pdf

"The purpose of a system is what it does" (S. Beer). The important fact about a technology is what it does, not how it came about. Does a use of a technology harm someone? Does a use of a technology harm the environment?

Does a use of a technology help someone do something that improves their life?

Studying the origins of technology is good because it helps us avoid the systems and practices that hurt people. Knowing about the monsters in our technology's lineage helps us avoid repeating their sins. But there will always be sin in our technology's past, because our technology's past is the entire past, because technology is a lineage, not a gadget. If you reject things because of their origins – and not because of the things they do – then you'll end up rejecting everything (if you're honest), or twisting yourself into a series of dead-ends as you rationalize reasons that the exceptions you make out of necessity aren't really exceptions.

(Image: Dylan Parker, CC BY-SA 2.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Gone (Almost) Phishin’ https://ma.tt/2026/03/gone-almost-phishin/

• The Foilies 2026 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/foilies-2026

• Why Voters Should Support Senator Klobuchar’s ‘‘Antitrust Accountability and Transparency Act’’ https://www.thesling.org/why-voters-should-support-senator-klobuchars-antitrust-accountability-and-transparency-act/

• Bombshell Document Details Watergate-Style Corruption at the Antitrust Division https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-bombshell-document

• Sodium-ion batteries hit the Midwestern grid in first-of-its-kind pilot https://electrek.co/2026/03/11/sodium-ion-batteries-hit-the-midwestern-grid-in-first-of-its-kind-pilot (h/t Slashdot)

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Prison for spamming https://it.slashdot.org/story/01/03/15/1325251/spammers-face-jail-time

#25yrsago 1040 for laid-off dot com workers https://web.archive.org/web/20010603113932/http://www.girlchick.com/erin/Pics/DotCom1040.jpg

#25yrsago Sony ships a PalmOS device https://web.archive.org/web/20010331181042/http://www.sony.co.jp/sd/CLIE/index_pc.html

#25yrsago “You Own Your Own Metadata” https://www.feedmag.com/templates/default_a_id-1648

#20yrsago Action-figures made from Ethernet cable https://basik.ru/handmade/2066/

#15yrsago Poor countries have more piracy because media costs too much — report https://web.archive.org/web/20110310042425/http://piracy.ssrc.org/the-report/

#15yrsago Bahrain’s royals declare martial law https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/mar/15/bahrain-martial-law-protesters-troops

#15yrsago Libel reform in the UK: telling the truth won’t be illegal any longer? https://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/mar/15/libel-law-reforms

#15yrsago My weird femur printed in stainless steel https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/tags/femur

#15yrsago War on the PC and the network: copyright was just the start https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/15/computers-incorporate-spyware-dangers

#15yrsago Poe’s Detective: audio editions of Poe’s groundbreaking detective stories https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/15/poes-detective-audio-editions-of-poes-groundbreaking-detective-stories/

#15yrsago New York slashes hospital spending, but can’t touch multimillion-dollar CEO paychecks https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/nyregion/16about.html?_r=1&hp

#10yrsago Leaked memo: Donald Trump volunteers banned from critizing him, for life https://web.archive.org/web/20160315161328/http://www.dailydot.com/politics/donald-trump-volunteer-contract-nda-non-disparagement-clause/

#10yrsago Open letter from virtually every leading UK law light: Snooper’s Charter not fit for purpose https://www.theguardian.com/law/2016/mar/14/investigatory-powers-bill-not-up-to-the-task

#10yrsago Life inside God’s customer service prayer call-centre https://web.archive.org/web/20160317153851/http://www.tor.com/2016/03/15/your-orisons-may-be-recorded/

#10yrsago The post-Snowden digital divide: the ability to understand and use privacy tools https://journal.radicallibrarianship.org/index.php/journal/article/view/12/27

#10yrsago Some future for you: the radical rise of hope in the UK https://thebaffler.com/salvos/despair-fatigue-david-graeber

#10yrsago America’s universities: Hedge funds saddled with inconvenient educational institutions https://web.archive.org/web/20160309093147/https://www.thenation.com/article/universities-are-becoming-billion-dollar-hedge-funds-with-schools-attached/

#10yrsago Office chairs made out of old Vespa scooters https://belybel.com/

#5yrsago STREAMLINER https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/15/free-markets/#streamliner

#5yrsago Free markets https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/15/free-markets/#rent-seeking

#5yrsago Making Hay https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/15/free-markets/#making-hay

#1yrago Amazon annihilates Alexa privacy settings, turns on continuous, nonconsensual audio uploading https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/15/altering-the-deal/#telescreen

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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

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

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

• Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, Apr 10
  https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/4863920260410

• London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25
  https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691

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

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

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

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech

• Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU

• Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech)
  https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074

• The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah)
  https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doctorow-matthew-potolsky/

• Tanner Humanities Lecture (U Utah)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Yf1nSyekI

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1018 words today, 50532 total)

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

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links

• Tools vs uses: Don't fall for it.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Amazon coders x Amazon warehouse workers; Bruces's ETECH speech; Steven King x unions; Tax-free S&P 500 companies; Make Pop Rocks; "Ain't Misbehavin'"; "Car Hacker's Handbook"; Pirates in Iceland.
• 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.

Tools vs uses (permalink)

When you think of a legal loophole, you probably imagine a drafting error (or perhaps a sneaky insertion) that creates an advantage for a specific person or group of people.

For example: Trump's 2017 "Big Beautiful Tax Cut" bill passed after its 479 pages were covered in hand-scrawled amendments and additions, which were not read or reviewed by lawmakers prior to voting:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/12/02/handwriting-wall-and-page-senate-passes-tax-bill/915957001/

But one change that was widely known was Senator Ron Johnson's last-minute amendment to create deductions for "pass through entities." Johnson announced that he would block the bill if his amendment didn't go through. That amendment made three of Johnson's constituents at least half a billion dollars: Uline owners Dick and Liz Uihlein and roofing tycoon Diane Hendricks (who collectively donated $20m to Johnson's campaign).

All told, the Trump tax bill generated windfalls worth more than $1b for just 82 households, all of whom donated lavishly to the lawmakers who inserted incredibly specific amendments that benefited them, personally:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/11/the-canada-variant/#shitty-man-of-history-theory

Here's another example: in 1999, a Congressional staffer named Mitch Glazier secured a last-minute, one-line amendment to the Satellite Home Viewer Improvement Act that took away musicians' ability to claim back the rights to their sound recordings after 35 years through a process called "Termination of Transfer":

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

This amendment whacked one group of musicians particularly hard: the Black "heritage acts" who had been coerced into signing unbelievably shitty contracts in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, who were increasingly using termination to get those rights back. For these beloved musicians, termination meant the difference between going hungry and buying a couple extra bags of groceries every month (if this sounds familiar, it might be because you read about it in my 2024 novel The Bezzle):

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865892/thebezzle/

Glazier's treachery was so outrageous that Congress actually convened a special session to repeal his amendment, and Glazier slunk out of Congress forever…so that he could take a job at $1.3m/year as CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, where he squats to this day, insisting that he is fighting for musicians' rights:

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

These are the traditional loopholes – obscure codicils in legislation that allow their beneficiaries to enrich themselves at others' expense. But there's another, equally pernicious kind of loophole that gets far less attention: a loophole that neutralizes a beneficial part of a law, taking away a right that the law seems to confer.

I have spent most of my adult life fighting against one of these rights-confiscating reverse loopholes: the "exemptions" clause to Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA 1201), which might just be the most dangerous technology law on the books:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/14/sole-and-despotic/#world-turned-upside-down

Under DMCA 1201, it's a felony – punishable by a 5-year sentence and a $500k fine – to bypass an "access control" for a copyrighted work. This means that altering the software (that is, "a copyrighted work") in a device you own – a car, a tractor, a hearing aid, a smart speaker, a printer, a phone, a console, etc, etc – is a crime, even if your alteration does not break any other laws.

For example: there is no law requiring you to buy your printer ink from the company that sold you your printer. However, the cartel of companies that control the inkjet market all use software that is designed to block generic ink. You could turn this code off, but that would be a felony under Section 1201 of the DMCA, which means that, in practice, it's a felony to put generic ink in your printer. Jay Freeman calls it "felony contempt of business model."

When the DMCA was being debated, lawmakers faced fierce criticism over this clause, so they inserted a "safety valve" into the law that was supposed to prevent the kind of abuse that allows printer companies to force you to pay $10,000/gallon for ink.

That escape valve is called the "triennial exemptions process." Every three years, the US Copyright Office invites submissions for "exemptions" to DMCA 1201. They've granted lots of these – the right to circumvent access controls on video games for preservation purposes, on DVDs for film criticism, and on various kinds of electronics for repair.

This process may strike you as a little cumbersome – do you really have to wait up to three years to pay a lawyer to beg the government for the right to make a legal use of your own property? But this is a reverse loophole, and that means that this isn't merely cumbersome, it's farcical.

You see, the exemptions that the Copyright Office grants through the triennial process aren't tools exemptions, they're use exemptions. That means that when the Copyright Office grants an exemption giving you the right to jailbreak your car so that you can make sense of the manufacturer's diagnostic codes and turn your "check engine" light into a specific, actionable diagnosis.

You have that right. Your mechanic does not have that right. You have the right to jailbreak your car and fix it.

But it's worse than that: your right to jailbreak your car does not mean that anyone else gets the right to make a tool that allows you to make that use. You have a use exemption, but there is no tool exemption. That means that you, personally, must reverse-engineer the firmware in your car, identify a fault in the code, and leverage that to personally write software to turn the diagnostic codes into diagnoses. You are not allowed to talk to anyone else about this. You're not allowed to publish your findings. You're certainly not allowed to share the tool you create with anyone else.

This is true of all the exemptions the Copyright Office grants. If you're a film professor who's been given the right to jailbreak DVDs, you are expected to write your own DVD decrypting software, without help from anyone else, and if you manage it, you can't tell anyone else how you did it. If you're an iPhone owner who's been granted the right to jailbreak your phone and install a different app store, then you, personally, must identify a vulnerability in iOS and develop it into an exploit that you are only allowed to use on your own devices. Every other iPhone owner has to do the same thing.

DMCA 1201 has been copy-pasted into law-books all over the world. In Europe, it came in through Article 6 of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive (EUCD6). When Norway implemented this law, lawmakers included a bunch of use exemptions in a bid to placate the fierce opposition they faced. One of these exemptions allowed blind people to jailbreak ebooks so they could be used with Braille printers, screen readers, and other assistive devices.

In 2003, I traveled to Oslo to debate the minister responsible for the bill. He proudly trumpeted this exemption, so I started asking him questions about it:

How do blind people get the software that jailbreaks their ebooks so they can make use of this exemption? Am I allowed to give them that tool?

No, the minister said, you're not allowed to do that, that would be a crime.

Is the Norwegian government allowed to give them that tool? No. How about a blind rights advocacy group? No, not them either. A university computer science department? Nope. A commercial vendor? Certainly not.

No, the minister explained, under his law, a blind person would be expected to personally reverse-engineer a program like Adobe E-Reader, in hopes of discovering a defect that they could exploit by writing a program to extract the ebook text.

Oh, I said. But if a blind person did manage to do this, could they supply that tool to other blind people?

Well, no, the minister said. Each and every blind person must personally – without any help from anyone else – figure out how to reverse-engineer the ebook program, and then individually author their own alternative reader program that worked with the text of their ebooks.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/28/mcbroken/#my-milkshake-brings-all-the-lawyers-to-the-yard

I don't know for sure how many blind Norwegians have managed to take advantage of this use exemptions, but I'm pretty certain it's zero.

Canada's anticircumvention law was passed in 2012 through Bill C-11, the Copyright Modernization Act. Like EUCD6, C-11 has all the defects of America's anticircumvention law. In 2024, Parliament passed a national Right to Repair law (Bill C-244) and a national Interoperability law (Bill C-294). Both of them grant use exemptions to Bill C-11 – they allow Canadians to jailbreak their devices to fix them or extend their functionality with interoperable code and hardware. But neither bill has a tools exemption, which means that they are useless, since they only grant Canadians the individual, personal right to jailbreak, but they don't allow Canadian businesses or tinkerers or user groups to make the tools that Canadians need to exercise the use rights that Parliament so generously granted:

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

Reverse loopholes are incredibly wicked. They exist solely to muddy the waters, to trick people into thinking that problems have been solved while those problems continue to fester. Hardly a week goes without my hearing from someone who's happened upon the use exemptions built into anticircumvention laws around the world and have come to the reasonable conclusion that if a law gives you the right to do something, it must also give other people the right to help you do it.

Lawmakers who pass these reverse loopholes know what they're doing. They're chaffing the policy airspace, ramming through unpopular legislation under cover of a blizzard of misleading legalese.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Being a Luddite Is Cool and All, but Have You Seen the Hilarious Tapestries These New Looms Are Making? https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/being-a-luddite-is-cool-and-all-but-have-you-seen-the-hilarious-tapestries-these-new-looms-are-making

• They Didn’t Want to Have C-Sections. A Judge Would Decide How They Gave Birth. https://www.propublica.org/article/florida-court-ordered-c-sections?utm_source=sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=weekly-newsletter

• F-Droid says Google’s Android developer verification plan is an ‘existential’ threat to alternative app stores https://thenewstack.io/f-droid-says-googles-android-developer-verification-plan-is-an-existential-threat-to-alternative-app-stores/

• Meta to Shut Down Instagram End-to-End Encrypted Chat Support Starting May 2026 https://thehackernews.com/2026/03/meta-to-shut-down-instagram-end-to-end.html

• The Removed DOGE Deposition Videos Have Already Been Backed Up Across the Internet https://www.404media.co/the-removed-doge-deposition-videos-have-already-been-backed-up-across-the-internet/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Full text of Bruce Sterling’s ETECH speech from last week https://web.archive.org/web/20060406025248/http://www.viridiandesign.org/2006/03/viridian-note-00459-emerging.html

#20yrsago HOWTO build a glowing throne out of 4k AOL CDs https://web.archive.org/web/20060408174929/https://stupidco.com/aol_throne_intro.html

#20yrsago How Sweden’s “Pirate Bay” site resists the MPAA https://web.archive.org/web/20060423222220/https://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,70358-0.html

#15yrsago Stephen King sticks up for unions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1vW1zPmnKQ

#15yrsago Largest Wisconsin protests ever: 85,000+ people in Madison’s streets https://web.archive.org/web/20110319152841/http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/12/wisconsin-protesters-refu_n_834927.html

#15yrsago Why Borders failed https://www.quora.com/Borders-Books/Why-is-Barnes-Noble-performing-well-as-a-business-while-Borders-has-filed-for-bankruptcy/answer/Mark-Evans-9

#15yrsago HOWTO make Pop Rocks https://www.instructables.com/Pop-Rocks/

#15yrsago Ain’t Misbehavin’: subject index to democratic parenting https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/14/aint-misbehavin-subject-index-to-democratic-parenting/

#10yrsago 50 reasons the TPP is terrible beyond belief https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2016/03/the-trouble-with-the-tpp-day-50-the-case-against-ratifying-the-trans-pacific-partnership/

#10yrsago More high-profile resignations at Breitbart, after abused reporter thrown under Trump’s bus https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosiegray/michelle-fields-ben-shapiro-resign-from-breitbart#.vlbZ4YxLe

#10yrsago If Iceland held its elections today, the Pirate Party would win https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-party-to-dominate-icelan-parliament-survey-finds-160314/

#10yrsago The Car Hacker’s Handbook: a Guide for Penetration Testers https://memex.craphound.com/2016/03/14/the-car-hackers-handbook-a-guide-for-penetration-testers/

#10yrsago USA uses TPP-like trade-court to kill massive Indian solar project https://web.archive.org/web/20160314085012/http://theantimedia.org/preview-of-the-tpp-america-just-blocked-a-massive-solar-project-in-india/

#10yrsago These 27 profitable S&P 500 companies paid no tax last year https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/markets/2016/03/07/27-giant-profitable-companies-paid-no-taxes/81399094/

#10yrsago Family: police high-fived after tasering our handcuffed relative to death https://web.archive.org/web/20160312165903/https://www.ajc.com/news/news/crime-law/family-of-victim-in-coweta-county-taser-death-seek/nqhcm/

#1yrago The future of Amazon coders is the present of Amazon warehouse workers https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/13/electronic-whipping/#youre-next

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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

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

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

• London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU)
  https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691

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

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

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

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech

• Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU

• Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech)
  https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074

• The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah)
  https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doctorow-matthew-potolsky/

• Tanner Humanities Lecture (U Utah)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Yf1nSyekI

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X