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🖋 Cory DOCTOROW
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PLURALISTIC

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30.09.2025 à 17:49

Pluralistic: Announcing the Enshittification tour (30 Sep 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3879 mots)


Today's links


A hobo with a bindlestiff, walking down a lonely train track. His head has been replaced with a poop emoji with angry eyebrows whose mouth is covered with a black bar covered in grawlix.

Announcing the Enshittification tour (permalink)

Next Monday, I'll be departing for a 24-city, three-month book tour for my new book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Went Wrong and What To Do About It:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

This is a big tour! I'll be doing in-person events in the US, Canada, the UK and Portugal, and a virtual event in Spain. I'm also planning an event in Hamburg, Germany for December, but that one hasn't been confirmed yet, so it doesn't appear in the schedule below. You'll notice that there are events that are missing their signup and ticketing details; I'll be keeping the master tour schedule up to date at pluralistic.net/tour.

If there's an event you're interested in that hasn't had its details filled in yet, please send an email to doctorow@craphound.com with the name of the event in the subject line. I'm going to create one-shot mailing lists that I'll update with details when they're available (please forgive me if I fumble this – book tours are pretty intensive affairs and I'll be squeezing this into the spare moments).

Here's that schedule!

Hey look at this (permalink)

*The Great Awakening: Competition Commissioner Matthew Boswell (I bought an annual sub) https://donotpassgo.substack.com/p/the-great-awakening-competition-commissioner


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Four and Twenty Blackbirds: great goth scary novel discovered on LJ https://memex.craphound.com/2005/09/30/four-and-twenty-blackbirds-great-goth-scary-novel-discovered-on-lj/

#20yrago Last Unicorn author ripped off by filmmaker, struggling and penniless https://web.archive.org/web/20051201203719/http://www.conlanpress.com/youcanhelp/

#20yrsago Copyright scholars and publishers on crazy auctorial theories about books and tech https://web.archive.org/web/20060302133925/http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/28/opinion/28oreilly.html?ex=1285560000&en=aa457b249728c229&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

#20yrsago Tim O’Reilly profiled by Steven Levy https://web.archive.org/web/20051013083044/https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.10/oreilly_pr.html

#15yrsago Welcome to Bordertown: the first Borderlands book in decades! https://web.archive.org/web/20111201160812/https://ellen-kushner.livejournal.com/326691.html

#15yrsago It Gets Better: video postcards to isolated queer kids from happy queer adults https://www.thestranger.com/blogs/2010/09/28/4996088/sf-says-it-gets-better

#10yrsago Icelanders school their PM on solidarity with Syrian refugees https://www.icelandreview.com/news/icelanders-want-welcome-refugees-pm-responds/

#10yrsago Lemony Snicket gives Planned Parenthood $1M https://x.com/DanielHandler/status/648468194215243776

#10yrsago Wisconsin is a paradise for white kids, but a hell for black kids https://web.archive.org/web/20150928230209/https://fusion.net/story/203830/wisconsin-african-americans-juvenile-arrests/

#10yrsago After OPM hack, CIA pulls agents from Beijing for their safety https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/cia-pulled-officers-from-beijing-after-breach-of-federal-personnel-records/2015/09/29/1f78943c-66d1-11e5-9ef3-fde182507eac_story.html

#5yrsago Self-driving cars crashing https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/30/death-to-all-monopoly/#pogo-stick-problem

#5yrsago Leaked EU Big Tech rules https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/30/death-to-all-monopoly/#whither-structural-separation

#5yrsago The Anti-Monopoly War Song https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/30/death-to-all-monopoly/#victims-of-vile-subsidies

#5yrsago How I write https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/30/death-to-all-monopoly/#process-notes

#1yrago A sexy, skinny defeat device for your HP ink cartridge https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/30/life-finds-a-way/#ink-stained-wretches

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

  • 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

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28.09.2025 à 23:54

Pluralistic: Plenty of room at the bottom (of the tech stack) (29 Sep 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (5584 mots)


Today's links


A detail from Blake's 'Temptation of Eve,' showing Eve taking an apple from the serpent. At the top of the scene is the Apple 'Think Different' wordmark. At the bottom looms the Linux Tux penguin.

Plenty of room at the bottom (of the tech stack) (permalink)

Freedom or safety: choose one. This is the false bargain we were offered after 9/11, the ideology underpinning the PATRIOT Act and the (permanent) suspension of human rights. This ideology has metastasized out of the realm of airport security theater and mass surveillance, ossifying into a bedrock axiom about technology design itself.

Ironically, it's not just conservative bed-wetters who've rejected the idea that freedom isn't free, and we all have to trade away our autonomy for a safe and secure online experience. There were plenty of techno-progressives who insisted that the problems with Twitter and Facebook could be solved by forcing their zuckermuskian overlords to invest sufficient resources in their Trust and Safety teams.

There's nothing wrong with asking people who host social spaces to invest in moderation, but the idea that we can improve the lives of people stuck in these obviously irreparable corporate spaces is by making their owners care about our welfare is just bankrupt. Far better to make it easy for us to leave these platforms:

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

Mandating interoperability – federation – for these legacy social media services means that if somehow it turns out that neither Zuck, nor Musk (nor anyone who succeeds them) is fit to preside over the social lives of hundreds of millions or billions of people, then those users can leave, and they won't lose touch with the people they currently stay on these platforms to be in community with.

We don't have to choose between safety and freedom. We can have both. Franklin had it wrong when he wrote, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

It's not that you don't deserve these things, it's that you won't get them. Give Apple control over which apps you can install and who can fix your device and which accessories you can use with your devices, and Apple will spy on you and they'll let other people spy on you and rip you off:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/26/empty-threats/#500-million-affluent-consumers

They'll block you from installing and using tools that improve the user experience of Instagram while blocking Meta from spying on you:

https://www.digitaltrends.com/phones/the-og-app-ad-free-instagram-removed-app-store-iphone/

Apple's security model works well. To the extent that Apple is both benevolent and competent, it makes products that are safe and reliable. But this model fails horribly, because any time Apple decides to trade off its customers' privacy, safety, or utility for its own priorities, those customers are rendered defenseless by Apple's total control:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Being an Apple customer is like being in a 24/7 BDSM relationship…without a safe-word. Maybe you like the control Apple exerts over your life most of the time, but if they ever start to hurt you, there's no way to make them stop:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones

Apple's story – the story of all centralized, authoritarian technology – is that you have to trade freedom for security. If you want technology that Just Works(TM), you need to give up on the idea of being able to override the manufacturer's decisions. It's always prix-fixe, never a la carte.

This is a kind of vulgar Thatcherism, a high-tech version of her maxim that "there is no alternative." Decomposing the iPhone into its constituent parts – thoughtful, well-tested technology; total control by a single vendor – is posed as a logical impossibility, like a demand for water that's not wet:

https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-there-were-always-enshittifiers/

Today, much of the world is trying to figure out what life looks like after US Big Tech. Outside of the USA, there's a growing consensus that Big Tech is an arm of the US state, a way to project soft (and even hard) American power around the globe:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/25/eurostack/#viktor-orbans-isp

Europe in particular is investing in free/open source alternatives to American Big Tech (the "Eurostack"). A big question is whether software built and maintained as a commons can ever match the slick user-friendliness of the tech companies – in other words, are we going to have to sacrifice the convenience of a Just Works(TM) platform for freedom from Big Tech?

I think this is a lazy conclusion. It's true that it takes more steps to sign up for Mastodon than it does to get onboard with Instagram, and that Instagram has a recommendation system that can help you bootstrap your network and start to populate your feed. But it's also true that Instagram has thousands of engineers and UX/UI people working on it, while Mastodon operates on a skeleton crew.

The idea that Mastodon's rough edges are due to the fact that it's open and federated – and not because it operates with a fraction of a percent of the resources as Instagram – is pretty implausible to my mind.

Indeed, there's a long history of tools designed by and for developers being picked up by commercial teams and polished into mass consumer products, which suggests that the tools' usability problems stemmed from resource constraints, not the openness or the flexibility of the tool. Think of how Slack transformed irc, or how Android packaged up GNU/Linux.

Another way to think about investment in improving free/open tools that suffer from being overly technical is that there is tons of room for improvement. There are so many easy wins to be scored when it comes to Libreoffice, Mastodon, The Gimp, ffmpeg, etc. Under the hood, these tools are stunning, but their front-ends have lagged.

By contrast, Big Tech has done so much fine-tuning of its user interfaces and workflows that there's very little room to maneuver. Every new product release for a dominant Big Tech tool is as much a regression as it is an improvement, and often these releases are expensive catastrophes:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1mkhros/gpt5_sucks_thats_all/

People are often baffled at how a company with all these experts can produce "improvements" that are actually massive steps backwards, but that's what happens when you try to add more polish to something you've already been polishing for a decade or more:

https://kottke.org/25/09/0047552-im-usually-pretty-go-with

There's plenty of room at the bottom (of the tech stack). It's hard to overstate just how under-resourced some free/open projects are, how many millions of people rely on the work of just one dedicated maintainer. Snowden coordinated his disclosures to journalists using GPG, the free/open version of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), a way to secure email conversations. After the Snowden revelations, many people tried to use GPG – and failed. It was just too complicated.

But is GPG too complicated to use because it's impossible to make it easier to use? Maybe. But maybe it was the fact that one part-time volunteer was doing all the work on GPG/email integration:

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-worlds-email-encryption-software-relies-on-one-guy-who-is-going-broke

Likewise, there are millions of people who rely on Pidgin, a tool that lets you use multiple chat systems from a single interface. Those millions of users are supported by one part-time developer who funds the work out of his dayjob:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/tower-babel-how-public-interest-internet-trying-save-messaging-and-banish-big

If the EU were to fund even a small team to improve the usability of these systems, they could plausibly make them ten or twenty times easier to use (that is, put them within the technical understanding of ten to twenty times more users). What a growth opportunity! Does anyone think Apple can make iOS twenty times more legible?

Getting these free/open tools over a threshold for everyday usage puts them on a glide path to sustainability. As more users – and more kinds of users – pile into them, this improves the business-case for different kinds of organizations (co-ops, tinkerers, government agencies, startups) investing in improving them. And because these tools are free/open, those improvements go back into the commons, and benefit all the users. This is the kind of network effect we love to see.

And these tools won't just work better – they'll also fail better. For years now, I've been using Framework laptops, designed to be upgraded, repaired and maintained by their users:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/21/monica-byrne/#think-different

The Framework is the best computer I've ever owned. Not only does it work brilliantly, but it fails even better:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/13/graceful-failure/#frame

For years, I relied on Apple hardware, and had to buy my Powerbooks in pairs, because one of them was always broken and had to be sent back to Applecare for repair. After I switched to Thinkpads, I was able to buy IBM (then Lenovo's) global, onsite, next-day hardware replacement warranty, and so I was able to just have one laptop at a time, and use an old one for 24-36 hours while I waited for a technician to travel to my home or hotel room to fix my machine.

But with the Framework, I just fix whatever breaks myself. When I dropped my laptop during a UK tour, I was able to get a replacement screen Fedexed to my hotel. I did the screen swap in 15 minutes, at midnight, after getting off a late train from Edinburgh. It worked the first time, and the next day I turned in two columns and did a livecast.

Last week, I discovered that my laptop battery had overheated and swollen so much I could barely keep the case screwed shut – something that happens to all kinds of hardware. It's really dangerous, presenting a serious risk of fire. If that had happened to a Mac or a Thinkpad, I would have been screwed, unable to safely board my airplane on Friday morning.

But I was able to remove the battery before checking out of my hotel in Ithaca (the desk clerk accepted it to be given to facilities people for safe disposal), and Framework sent a replacement battery to my next hotel in NYC, so after I got off my plane and checked in there, I was able to swap my new battery in and pick right up again.

The other day, my wife said that she thought that between my operating system (Ubuntu, a flavor of GNU/Linux) and hardware (the Framework), I was having more technical problems than I used to have with my Macs. I was shocked – but after we talked it over, I realized she got that impression because when something goes wrong with my laptop, I can fix it, so I spend a bunch of time tinkering with things, rather than bringing it to an Apple Store and switching to a backup computer.

Another example: while I was in Ithaca, I decided to upgrade my 2TB solid state drive to a 4TB one. The reliable way to do this is to install the OS and all my apps on the new drive, and then copy over my user files, but that requires a lot of manual attending. I wanted a process that I could start before bed and then pick up in the morning. So I used "dd," a command that duplicates whole disks, to copy the 2TB disk to the 4TB one.

Then I used a bunch of arcane utilities to resize the partition to fill the disk (a task that was made much more complex because I have full-disk encryption turned on). It worked – but then the disk wouldn't boot. Turned out this operation had messed up GRUB, a key part of the Linux boot system.

I had many choices at that juncture. I could have scrapped the project and started over, wiping the disk, installing the OS and apps, and re-copying my data. I could have parked the whole project until I was back home in LA. Instead, I worked with some great tech support people at Canonical (who make Ubuntu) to fix GRUB, and an hour or two later, I was up and running.

The point here is that I had all options open to me. I could do this The Mac Way (bringing my machine to a technician and asking them to do it). I could do it the labor-intensive but reliable way (install OS and apps, move data). I could do it the risky, high-tech way (dd, resize partition, fix GRUB). If I'd been at home with a light work week, I might have done the middle option. If I was advising a friend without a lot of technical chops on how to do this, I might have recommended the first option. But the fact that I was on the road with limited time didn't place this upgrade out of reach. I got to decide which tradeoffs I wanted to make.

What's more, the only reason my method was so damned tricky is that no one's bothered to automate it. The process involved cutting and pasting a lot of long, machine-readable, alphanumeric identifiers into config files, and I screwed up a step. There's nothing about this process that's intrinsically hard, it's just hard because I was doing it manually. If lots of people had the ability to swap their hard drives (a process that takes less than five minutes with a Framework), it would absolutely be worth someone's time to turn all that fiddly work into an app with one big button labeled "MAKE BOOTABLE COPY GO NOW."

I love it when a system works well, but I really hate it when a system fails badly. It doesn't matter how much you can get done with your technology when it works properly if it's broken and you can't get it to work.

We've had decades of massive investment in systems that work well, but fail badly. With US Big Tech off the menu for more and more of us, it's time to think about making our resilient, gracefully failing tools easier to use – and stop hoping that someday, somehow, companies with an investment in selling us something new when their products break decide to make them easier to fix.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Anti-MMORPG ads from D&D https://craphound.com/images/wowdanddad.jpg

#20yrsago Phone unlockers versus the DMCA https://web.archive.org/web/20061005152056/https://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,68989,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_6

#20yrsago My DRM talk for HP research https://craphound.com/hpdrm.txt

#15yrsago Legal blackmail: comprehensive look at tactics of copyright bounty-hunters https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/09/amounts-to-blackmail-inside-a-p2p-settlement-letter-factory/

#15yrsago HOWTO make a meat-head https://web.archive.org/web/20100928035616/https://makeprojects.com/Project/Meat-Head/294/1

#15yrsago What Internet activism looks like https://web.archive.org/web/20101001074040/http://dashes.com/anil/2010/09/when-the-revolution-comes-they-wont-recognize-it.html

#15yrsago American atheists and agnostics know more about religion than professed believers https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2010-sep-28-la-na-religion-survey-20100928-story.html

#15yrsago Only 1.7% of sites blocked by Scandinavia’s “child-porn” filters are actually child porn https://ak-zensur.de/2010/09/29/analysis-blacklists.pdf

#15yrsago Inside the finances of the UK “legal blackmail” copyright enforcement company https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/09/p2p-settlement-factory-expects-10-million-from-mailing-letters/

#15yrsago SUPERDAD: moving and infuriating memoir of fatherhood and crack https://memex.craphound.com/2010/09/29/superdad-moving-and-infuriating-memoir-of-fatherhood-and-crack/

#10yrsago Apple removes an app that tracks U.S. military drone strikes from its store https://www.dailydot.com/news/app-store-drone-strike-metadata/

#10yrsago Edward Snowden is now @snowden https://theintercept.com/2015/09/29/edward-snowden-twitter-snowden/

#10yrsago With Roca Labs smackdown, the FTC slams non-disparagement clauses for the first time https://web.archive.org/web/20150930020239/https://popehat.com/2015/09/29/in-roca-labs-case-ftc-takes-novel-stand-against-non-disparagement-clauses/

#10yrsago Execspeak singularity: the spectacular bullshit of Blackberry’s CEO https://web.archive.org/web/20151009122454/http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/magazine/content/10_42/b4199076785733.htm

#10yrsago The FBI has no trouble spying on encrypted communications https://theintercept.com/2015/09/28/hacking/

#10yrsago Rush Limbaugh: water on Mars is a leftist conspiracy https://www.mediamatters.org/rush-limbaugh/after-nasa-announces-it-found-water-mars-rush-limbaugh-says-its-part-climate-change

#10yrsago Jamaica wants slavery reparations from the UKhttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/29/jamaica-calls-britain-pay-billions-pounds-reparations-slavery

#10yrsago Zeroes: it sucks to be a teen, even with powers https://memex.craphound.com/2015/09/29/zeroes-it-sucks-to-be-a-teen-even-with-powers/

#10yrsago Carly Fiorina boasts: I sold the NSA its mass-surveillance servers https://web.archive.org/web/20150929192051/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/carly-fiorina-i-supplied-hp-servers-for-nsa-snooping

#10yrsago Professional skeptics on misinformation & hoaxes: anti-vaxx, Planned Parenthood https://web.archive.org/web/20151001012616/http://www.hopesandfears.com/hopes/now/media/216577-hoax-busters-planned-parenthood-anti-vaxxer-disinformation

#10yrsago Righstcorp’s terrifying extortion script is breathtaking in its sleaze https://www.techdirt.com/2015/09/28/rightscorps-copyright-trolling-phone-script-tells-innocent-people-they-need-to-give-their-computers-to-police/

#10yrsago AP will use “climate doubters” instead of “climate skeptics” https://www.ap.org/the-definitive-source/announcements/an-addition-to-ap-stylebook-entry-on-global-warming/

#10yrsago Distinguished scientists call for RICO prosecution of climate deniers https://brucesterling.tumblr.com/post/130046509798/rico-for-climate-deniers

#10yrsago Dismaland will be dismantled, used for refugee shelters in Calais https://www.bbc.com/news/av/entertainment-arts-34375391

#5yrsago The Trump financial method https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/28/cyberwar-tactics/#grifts

#5yrsago Dark money and SCOTUS https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/29/betcha-cant-eat-just-one/#pwnage

#5yrsago Bust 'em all https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/29/betcha-cant-eat-just-one/#trustbusting-makes-me-feel-good

#5yrsago Zombie banks https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/28/cyberwar-tactics/#aligned-incentives

#5yrsago Newsletters' glorious history https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/28/cyberwar-tactics/#mimeograph

#5yrsago Belarus's online/offline uprising https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/28/cyberwar-tactics/#belarus

#1yrago Sandra Newman's "Julia" https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/28/novel-writing-machines/#fanfic

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

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27.09.2025 à 18:14

Pluralistic: The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh (27 Sep 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4263 mots)


Today's links


A Zimbabwean one hundred trillion dollar bill; the bill's iconography have been replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey' and a stylized, engraving-style portrait of Sam Altman.

The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh (permalink)

Like you, I'm sick to the back teeth of talking about AI. Like you, I keep getting dragged into discussions of AI. Unlike you‡, I spent the summer writing a book about why I'm sick of writing about AI⹋, which Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish in 2026.

‡probably

⹋"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI"

A week ago, I turned that book into a speech, which I delivered as the annual Nordlander Memorial Lecture at Cornell, where I'm an AD White Professor-at-Large. This was my first-ever speech about AI and I wasn't sure how it would go over, but thankfully, it went great and sparked a lively Q&A. One of those questions came from a young man who said something like "So, you're saying a third of the stock market is tied up in seven AI companies that have no way to become profitable and that this is a bubble that's going to burst and take the whole economy with it?"

I said, "Yes, that's right."

He said, "OK, but what can we do about that?"

So I re-iterated the book's thesis: that the AI bubble is driven by monopolists who've conquered their markets and have no more growth potential, who are desperate to convince investors that they can continue to grow by moving into some other sector, e.g. "pivot to video," crypto, blockchain, NFTs, AI, and now "super-intelligence." Further: the topline growth that AI companies are selling comes from replacing most workers with AI, and re-tasking the surviving workers as AI babysitters ("humans in the loop"), which won't work. Finally: AI cannot do your job, but an AI salesman can 100% convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job, and when the bubble bursts, the money-hemorrhaging "foundation models" will be shut off and we'll lose the AI that can't do your job, and you will be long gone, retrained or retired or "discouraged" and out of the labor market, and no one will do your job. AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/27/rancid-vibe-coding/#class-war

The only thing (I said) that we can do about this is to puncture the AI bubble as soon as possible, to halt this before it progresses any further and to head off the accumulation of social and economic debt. To do that, we have to take aim at the material basis for the AI bubble (creating a growth story by claiming that defective AI can do your job).

"OK," the young man said, "but what can we do about the crash?" He was clearly very worried.

"I don't think there's anything we can do about that. I think it's already locked in. I mean, maybe if we had a different government, they'd fund a jobs guarantee to pull us out of it, but I don't think Trump'll do that, so –"

"But what can we do?"

We went through a few rounds of this, with this poor kid just repeating the same question in different tones of voice, like an acting coach demonstrating the five stages of grieving using nothing but inflection. It was an uncomfortable moment, and there was some decidedly nervous chuckling around the room as we pondered the coming AI (economic) apocalypse, and the fate of this kid graduating with mid-six-figure debts into an economy of ashes and rubble.

I firmly believe the (economic) AI apocalypse is coming. These companies are not profitable. They can't be profitable. They keep the lights on by soaking up hundreds of billions of dollars in other people's money and then lighting it on fire. Eventually those other people are going to want to see a return on their investment, and when they don't get it, they will halt the flow of billions of dollars. Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops.

This isn't like the early days of the web, or Amazon, or any of those other big winners that lost money before becoming profitable. Those were all propositions with excellent "unit economics" – they got cheaper with every successive technological generation, and the more customers they added, the more profitable they became. AI companies have – in the memorable phraseology of Ed Zitron – "dogshit unit-economics." Each generation of AI has been vastly more expensive than the previous one, and each new AI customer makes the AI companies lose more money:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/30/accounting-gaffs/#artificial-income

This week, no less than the Wall Street Journal published a lengthy, well-reported story (by Eliot Brown and Robbie Whelan) on the catastrophic finances of AI companies:

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-bubble-building-spree-55ee6128

The WSJ writers compare the AI bubble to other bubbles, like Worldcom's fraud-soaked fiber optic bonanza (which saw the company's CEO sent to prison, where he eventually died), and conclude that the AI bubble is vastly larger than any other bubble in recent history.

The data-center buildout has genuinely absurd finances – there are data-center companies that are collateralizing their loans by staking their giant Nvidia GPUs as collateral. This is wild: there's pretty much nothing (apart from fresh-caught fish) that loses its value faster than silicon chips. That goes triple for GPUs used in AI data-centers, where it's normal for tens of thousands of chips to burn out over a single, 54-day training run:

https://techblog.comsoc.org/2024/11/25/superclusters-of-nvidia-gpu-ai-chips-combined-with-end-to-end-network-platforms-to-create-next-generation-data-centers/

Talk about sweating your assets!

That barely scratches the surface of the funny accounting in the AI bubble. Microsoft "invests" in Openai by giving the company free access to its servers. Openai reports this as a ten billion dollar investment, then redeems these "tokens" at Microsoft's data-centers. Microsoft then books this as ten billion in revenue.

That's par for the course in AI, where it's normal for Nvidia to "invest" tens of billions in a data-center company, which then spends that investment buying Nvidia chips. It's the same chunk of money is being energetically passed back and forth between these closely related companies, all of which claim it as investment, as an asset, or as revenue (or all three).

The Journal quotes David Cahn, a VC from Sequoia, who says that for AI companies to become profitable, they would have to sell us $800 billion worth of services over the life of today's data centers and GPUs. Not only is that a very large number – it's also a very short time. AI bosses themselves will tell you that these data centers and GPUs will be obsolete practically from the moment they start operating. Mark Zuckerberg says he's prepared to waste "a couple hundred billion dollars" on misspent AI investments:

https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-meta-risk-billions-miss-superintelligence-ai-bubble-2025-9

Bain & Co says that the only way to make today's AI investments profitable is for the sector to bring in $2 trillion by 2030 (the Journal notes that this is more than the combined revenue of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple Nvidia and Meta):

https://www.bain.com/about/media-center/press-releases/20252/$2-trillion-in-new-revenue-needed-to-fund-ais-scaling-trend—bain–companys-6th-annual-global-technology-report/

How much money is the AI industry making? Morgan Stanley says it's $45b/year. But that $45b is based on the AI industry's own exceedingly cooked books, where annual revenue is actually annualized revenue, an accounting scam whereby a company chooses its best single revenue month and multiplies it by 12, even if that month is a wild outlier:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/

Industry darlings like Coreweave (a middleman that rents out data-centers) are sitting on massive piles of debt, secured by short-term deals with tech companies that run out long before the debts can be repaid. If they can't find a bunch of new clients in a couple short years, they will default and collapse.

Today's AI bubble has absorbed more of the country's wealth and represents more of its economic activity than historic nation-shattering bubbles, like the 19th century UK rail bubble. A much-discussed MIT paper found that 95% of companies that had tried AI had either nothing to show for it, or experienced a loss:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/01/25/1436/we-analyzed-16625-papers-to-figure-out-where-ai-is-headed-next/

A less well-known U Chicago paper finds that AI has "no significant impact on workers’ earnings, recorded hours, or wages":

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933

Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. Trump might bail out the AI companies, but for how long? They are incinerating money faster than practically any other human endeavor in history, with precious little to show for it.

During my stay at Cornell, one of the people responsible for the university's AI strategy asked me what I thought the university should be doing about AI. I told them that they should be planning to absorb the productive residue that will be left behind after the bubble bursts:

https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Plan for a future where you can buy GPUs for ten cents on the dollar, where there's a buyer's market for hiring skilled applied statisticians, and where there's a ton of extremely promising open source models that have barely been optimized and have vast potential for improvement.

There's plenty of useful things you can do with AI. But AI is (as Princeton's Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, authors of AI Snake Oil put it), a normal technology:

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

That doesn't mean "nothing to see here, move on." It means that AI isn't the bow-wave of "impending superintelligence." Nor is it going to deliver "humanlike intelligence."

It's a grab-bag of useful (sometimes very useful) tools that can sometimes make workers' lives better, when workers get to decide how and when they're used.

The most important thing about AI isn't its technical capabilities or limitations. The most important thing is the investor story and the ensuing mania that has teed up an economical catastrophe that will harm hundreds of millions or even billions of people. AI isn't going to wake up, become superintelligent and turn you into paperclips – but rich people with AI investor psychosis are almost certainly going to make you much, much poorer.

(Image: TechCrunch, CC BY 2.0; Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Financial Times: WIPO’s webcaster treaty is a disaster https://www.ft.com/content/441306be-2eb6-11da-9aed-00000e2511c8

#15yrsago Google’s autocomplete blacklist https://www.2600.com/googleblacklist/

#15yrsago FBI ignores DoJ report, raids activists, arrests Time Person of the Year https://www.democracynow.org/2010/9/27/fbi_raids_homes_of_anti_war

#15yrsago Meta-textual analysis of mainstream science reporting https://www.theguardian.com/science/the-lay-scientist/2010/sep/24/1

#15yrsago Lockheed Martin sign prohibits sketching and “gathering information” https://www.flickr.com/photos/jef/5028187145/

#5yrsago Ransomware for coffee makers https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/27/junky-styling/#java-script

#5yrsago The joys of tailoring https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/27/junky-styling/#inseams

#1yrago Return to office and dying on the job https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/27/sharpen-your-blades-boys/#disciplinary-technology

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: James Boyle (https://www.thepublicdomain.org/).

Currently writing:

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

  • 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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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

PDF

26.09.2025 à 17:08

Pluralistic: Apple threatens to stop selling iPhones in the EU (26 Sep 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4557 mots)


Today's links


The EU flag. Behind the ring of golden stars is a rotten apple. Above the apple is the Apple 'Think different' wordmark. A worm climbs through the 'd' in 'different' and rests on the apple.

Apple threatens to stop selling iPhones in the EU (permalink)

Apple has threatened to stop selling iPhones and other devices in the European Union (home to over 500,000,000 affluent consumers) if the bloc doesn't rescind the Digital Markets Act, a democratically accountable anti-monopoly law that bans Apple from blocking third parties from offering services to iPhone owners:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/sep/25/apple-calls-for-changes-to-anti-monopoly-laws-and-says-it-may-stop-shipping-to-the-eu

Apple has a staunch ally in this campaign to overturn European laws: Donald Trump has threatened the EU with tariffs unless it halts its attempts to regulate US tech giants like Apple, whose billionaire CEO Tim Cook gave Donald Trump $1m in exchange for a seat on the dais at Trump's inauguration and then traveled to DC again to hand-assemble a gilded participation trophy as a gift to America's fascist would-be dictator:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/08/07/tim-cook-trump-gift/85555805007/

This is a painfully stupid threat and the EU should call Apple's bluff. The company claims that it is acting in the interest of European owners of Apple products. Apple claims that by blocking Europeans from using their Apple devices with third-party software and hardware, they are protecting their customers' privacy.

This is nonsense. While it's true that Apple protects its customers' privacy from some external threats, Apple also spies on its users, without their consent, in order to gather behavioral data that's used for Apple's ad-targeting system. When this came to light, Apple lied to its customers about it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Apple has used its exclusive control over which software can operate on its devices to expose every Chinese iOS user to unrestricted government surveillance. Apple removed all working VPNs from its Chinese app store:

https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-removes-vpn-apps-from-china-app-store/

The company then backdoored its iCloud backup for unrestricted access by Chinese authorities:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-censorship-data.html

Then they removed the ability to anonymously share messages via Airdrop to curb the tool's usage to spread opposition messages during a wave of mass protests in China (they took away this functionality for every Airdrop user in the world):

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/30/apple-limited-a-crucial-airdrop-function-in-china-just-weeks-before-protests.html

The idea that Apple is so committed to its users' privacy that it will exit a major market rather than expose users to surveillance risks is an obvious lie – just ask China.

Why would Apple tell this lie? Because it wants to protect its profits – not its customers.

Apple lies when it claims that control over its platforms is primarily about protecting users. The App Store is "teeming with scams":

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/apple-e2-80-99s-tightly-controlled-app-store-is-teeming-with-scams/ar-AAKL0TG

However, by forcing Apple customers to get apps from Apple's own store, the company can skim a 30% commission on every dollar its customers send to an app maker, a Patreon performer, a news outlet or any other app supplier – a business that's worth $100b/year to Apple. Remember, in the EU, the cost of processing a payment is between 0% and 1%.

Apple claims that it protects its customers from privacy risks by blocking third-party repair depots and by requiring its customers to pay through the nose for official repair. But Apple's own repair technicians have been caught plundering and sharing nude images of its own customers, stolen from phones that were sent to Apple:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkbkey/she-sent-her-iphone-to-apple-repair-techs-uploaded-her-nudes-to-facebook

This has happened repeatedly:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/11/12/an-apple-store-employee-helped-customerby-texting-himself-private-photo-her-phone/

All over the world:

https://9to5mac.com/2016/10/12/apple-australia-photo-sharing-ring-nsfw/

(And of course, these are just the instances that we know about).

Apple protects its customers from privacy threats, but not from Apple's own predatory, privacy-invasive, rent-extracting conduct. Apple also gets to unilaterally decide which scams are permitted on its platform and which ones are not, and they alone get to decide when to allow secret, pervasive surveillance of Apple customers.

Apple's threats are lies, but the privacy risks of interop are very real. It's entirely possible to plug something into a secure tool that renders it insecure. It's nice when companies test third party add-ons and warn their customers about defective or risky aftermarket mods, and to the extent that Apple does this, it's doing good work. But Apple has an irreconcilable conflict of interest when it comes to vetoing its customers' decisions about which non-Apple products they use. Apple has some genuinely stonking margins on its payment processing, repair, and other lines of business, and Apple's CEO has openly boasted about using deliberately engineered incompatibilities to drive people to switch to Apple products:

https://www.businessinsider.com/tim-cook-buy-your-mom-iphone-doj-apple-complaint-2024-3

How do we get Apple to protect its customers' privacy without picking their pockets or invading their privacy? By removing the company's veto over who can make software and hardware that works with Apple's competing offerings. The ultimate decision about which products are too dangerous for Europeans to use can't be vested with Apple – instead, it should be vested with expert agencies working for democratically accountable governments. This is the point that Bennett Ciphers and I made at length in our EFF white-paper "Privacy Without Monopoly," which has a whole section explaining how the EU's big, muscular privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), makes this an especially attractive proposition in the EU:

https://www.eff.org/document/privacy-without-monopoly-data-protection-and-interoperability

It's also a point that EFF board member and infosec legend Bruce Schneier made in his open letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, discussing opening up app stores:

https://www.eff.org/document/letter-bruce-schneier-senate-judiciary-regarding-app-store-security

Apple isn't going to exit a market with half a billion affluent consumers. If it does, expect its shareholders to wreak swift and terrible vengeance on the company. You know how people are always complaining that investors are only interested in short-term returns? It's true and here's a place where that cuts in our favor: shareholders aren't going to accept a half-billion-person market exit tomorrow in anticipation of forcing the EU to capitulate next year and thereafter safeguard Apple's continental scale rent-extraction racket. They want returns to their capital tomorrow, not in some hypothetical future in which Tim Cook tears out Henna Virkkunen's still-beating heart with his bare hands and parades it through Strasbourg, brandishing it at legions of trembling, vanquished eurocrats.

But let's say Apple does exit the EU.

Good.

The EU needs to get the hell off US tech infrastructure. Under Trump, Big Tech and the US government have stopped even pretending that American tech companies are independent of the US government. We know (from China) that Apple will happily backdoor its cloud servers to assuage authoritarian governments like Xi Jinping's. You know, Xi Jinping, the guy that Trump says he wants to emulate?

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/18/trump-praise-authoritarians-00132350

US Big Tech companies keep demonstrating that they are de facto arms of the US and constitute a hostile foreign power operating on European soil. When the International Criminal Court indicted Israeli génocidaires, Trump issued an executive order sanctioning the body. Immediately thereafter, Microsoft deleted the email and cloud accounts of ICC prosecutor Karim Khan – named in the Trump EO – and then Microsoft President Brad Smith perjured himself in his denial:

https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-did-not-cut-services-international-criminal-court-president-american-sanctions-trump-tech-icc-amazon-google/

Microsoft publicly admitted that it can't stop US authorities from conducting secret surveillance of EU citizens' (and EU governments') data, even when that data is stored on a server in the EU:

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

The EU's response is something called "Eurostack" – a top-to-bottom "stack" of technologies from data-centers to operating systems and applications made and maintained by EU entities (for-profits, nonprofits, and public bodies):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/25/eurostack/#viktor-orbans-isp

Nearly all of the emphasis on Eurostack has been on building the data-centers and creating these applications, but in some ways, this is the least important part of the project. Cloning GDocs or Office365 or iWork is the easy part. The hard part is migrating from US-controlled platforms to their Eurostack equivalents. If leaving Office365 means leaving all the documents your company, organization or government agency has ever created, or losing all the sharing and collaboration permissions, or losing all the edit-histories, well, no one is gonna migrate.

Thankfully, this is something technology can easily fix: all you need to do is reverse-engineer the US offering and create a tool that extracts and transforms the data to the new format, and moves a copy of it into the new Eurostack services. This is called "adversarial interoperability" and is eminently do-able, as Apple proved when they broke open Microsoft Office by creating the iWork suite (Pages, Numbers and Keynote):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

The major impediment to this kind of seamless bulk migration tool isn't the technological challenge – it's the law. In 2001, the EU – under pressure from the USA – included an "anticircumvention" rule in the EU Copyright Directive (EUCD). Article 6 of the EUCD mirrors the language of Section 1201 of America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, banning reverse-engineering and adversarial interoperability, even where no copyright infringement takes place. That means that a European company that made an account migration tool to help European companies or government agencies move their own data out of a US Big Tech silo could face liability under Article 6 of the EUCD, with severe criminal and civil penalties. EUCD 6 gives American tech giants more rights to Europeans' copyrighted works than the Europeans who created those works. It's a terrible law, and after a quarter century, it's long past its expiry date.

Bringing this full circle: Article 6 of the EUCD is also the law that stops European companies from reverse-engineering the iPhone and creating their own app stores, without having to rely on Apple's help. Given that Apple has flagrantly violated laws that order it to open its app store, it's time to unleash Europe's accomplished legion of top technologists on the problem:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/06/spoil-the-bunch/#dma

Doing that becomes even easier if Apple exits the EU and abandons EU customers, cutting off their supply of security patches and application updates. After all, Europeans own their Apple devices. It's up to them – not Apple – whether they want to trust their fellow Europeans to protect their security and add new functionality to their own property.

The EU doesn't need to be a technology-taker – it can be a technology maker. The Apple/Google duopoly may have sewn up the mobile market with illegal monopoly tactics, but that doesn't mean that the EU will never spawn another Nokia or Ericsson. The shortest, most efficient, most reliable path to reestablishing technological sovereignty for the EU's half-billion residents and 27 member states is to allow domestic firms to take over the relationship between the Trump-controlled American tech giants and the Europeans who rely on their technology.

If Trump can seize Chinese companies like Tiktok and sell them to his major donors at a 90% discount, then American companies have no right to cry foul when the EU gets rid of the America First Copyright Directive and lets Europeans choose to get their software, updates, and hardware from European companies.

(Image: Alex Popovkin, Bahia, Brazil from Brazil, CC BY 2.0; Hubertl, CC BY-SA 4.0; modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago MPAA/RIAA subvert democracy with super-broadcast-flag bid https://web.archive.org/web/20050926233646/http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004000.php

#20yrsago Islam in science fiction https://web.archive.org/web/20051002030829/https://www.cs.rit.edu/~maa2454/SCIFI/sci_lit.html

#15yrsago Philosophy of Thomas Ligotti, a horror writer who can’t feel happiness https://web.archive.org/web/20061119163754/https://theteemingbrain.wordpress.com/interview-with-thomas-ligotti/

#10yrsago Hilo: The Boy Who Crashed to Earth, a fantastic middle-grade adventure comic https://memex.craphound.com/2015/09/26/hilo-the-boy-who-crashed-to-earth-a-fantastic-middle-grade-adventure-comic/

#10yrsago Molly Crabapple’s illustrations from Syria https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/07/inside-aleppo-syria

#10yrsago 1 in 40 London cops have been arrested in the past five years https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/1600-uk-police-officers-arrested-criminal-offences-5-years-1519573

#10yrsago Tomorrow’s Catalan elections are a referendum on independence https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/25/catalonia-votes-democracy-election-independence-spain

#10yrsago Dustin Yellin’s stupendous, life-sized glass-pane humanoids made from NatGeo clippings https://memex.craphound.com/2015/09/26/dustin-yellins-stupendous-life-sized-glass-pane-humanoids-made-from-natgeo-clippings/

#1yrago When prophecy fails, election polling edition https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/26/dewey-beats-truman/#past-performance-is-no-guarantee-of-future-results

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF

25.09.2025 à 17:10

Pluralistic: Rage Against the (Algorithmic Management) Machine (25 Sep 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4455 mots)


Today's links


A club weilding giant in a loincloth whose head has been replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' He is glowering at a defiant worker in overalls and a printer's folded hat, who wears a food delivery bicyclist's square, day-glo orange backpack, and stands next to a pennyfarthing. The sky behind the scene is faded away, revealing a 'code waterfall,' as seen in the credit sequences of the Wachowskis' 'Matrix' movies.

Rage Against the (Algorithmic Management) Machine (permalink)

"Negotiating the Algorithm" is an incredibly exciting, visionary report on the ways that organized labor can and should respond to "algorithmic management" – all the ways in which bosses have turned your mobile phone into your implacable line-manager:

https://www.etuc.org/sites/default/files/publication/file/2025-09/Negotiating%20the%20Algorithm%20-%20Trade%20Union%20Manual_ETUC%20%28updated%29.pdf

Obviously the "gig economy" was ground zero for this bullshit, with delivery drivers/riders and rideshare leading the pack, followed by all the other jobs getting sucked into piecework: dog walking, nursing, house cleaning and more. But – as the report notes – 79% of EU companies are doing algorithmic management.

The report (written by freelance writer Ben Wray) is published a year after the EU's Platform Work Directive was passed, and a year before it will go into force in all 27 EU member states. It's doing several different jobs: capturing the extent and abuses of algorithmic management; describing how workers can fight back; connecting this to the new EU law, and making the case for unions to invest heavily in making use of the Platform Work Directive's provisions to transform the EU labor market and protect the vast majority of EU members (not just those in unions) from bossware in all its forms.

Algorithmic management poses serious challenges for trade unions. It gives bosses a massive information advantage over workers at the bargaining table, capturing fine-grained information about activity on the shop floor. It creates opportunities for bosses to violate collective bargains on a per-worker basis, changing the work conditions and pay for every worker and even for every job. It lets bosses spy on workers even when they're not on the clock, and offers many ways for bosses to retaliate against workers.

Workers trapped by algorithmic management are stripped of agency and problem-solving opportunities. They are put under relentless time-pressure and can be forced into dangerous situations (as when a gig delivery app insists that riders follow a prescribed route, even when accidents and other hazards are in the way).

"Cloudworkers" and other algorithmically managed workers are relentlessly surveilled. Platforms like Upwork can switch on workers' device cameras and photograph them while they work. Often, worker data is sold to data-brokers and other third parties. Biases in gig platforms' algorithms can victimize workers – Black workers, for example, are sometimes fired by apps after failing a facial recognition step (facial recognition works less reliably with darker skin-tones). The app accuses the worker of violating terms of service by sharing their accounts and kicks them off.

Of course, there's no appeal for this. Algorithmic management goes hand-in-hand with other high-handed measures, like replacing the HR department with a chatbot or a semi-attended info@ email address. You also can't reach the HR department when your pay packet is light, facilitating wage-theft. When payment systems fail, workers are sometimes left with the bill for their robo-boss's technological failures.

So it's quite important that unions figure out a strategy to address algorithmic management. That's where the Platform Work Directive comes in. The PWD has quite sweeping and bold provisions that can protect workers, but these new rules aren't self-enforcing. Many EU states' data commissioners are grossly underfunded and stretched thin. While the PWD grants workers many rights, they will need to demand those rights – on the job and in the courts.

The new Directive, in combination with the General Data Protection Regulation (the EU's existing privacy law), allows workers and their representatives to demand extensive data-sets from employers, documenting everything from the algorithmic decision-making that goes into firing workers from an app to the process of calculating their pay and beyond. But employers deliver this data in obfuscated, hard-to-parse formats. Wray advocates for unions to staff up their own data analysis groups that can assist in these requests and make sense of the results.

Wray also advocates for union technologists who can produce worker-side apps that monitor boss's apps – like the UberCheats app, which compared the mileage that Uber paid drivers for to their actual distances traveled. While it's important for workers to be able to access the information their bosses have amassed on their work and personal lives, it's just as important that workers not be limited to working with data that bosses are willing to hand over. Employers can't be trusted to mark their own homework.

By investing in technology, unions can close the information gap with employers, and even use data and apps to gain an advantage over bosses. Wray describes how gig workers created "counter apps" that documented wage-theft, enabled mass refusal of lowball offers, and helped workers win their rights in court.

This technological capacity can also help union organizers, providing a unified digital back-end for union drives in all kinds of shops.

Wray acknowledges that it might be hard for unions to do this kind of advanced technical work in-house from the jump, and he isn't averse to having some of this work contracted out to third parties. But he proposes that this kind of arrangement should be modeled on "Chinese industrial policy…which in the 1980s and 1990s was known for bringing in western technological expertise but ensuring that it was the Chinese state and Chinese companies that reaped the knowledge from external experts."

He also moots the possibility of several unions combining forces to create a joint workers' technology shop that develops and supports tools for all kinds of unions across Europe. This sounds like a very exciting idea indeed – and maybe the answer to the legion of programmers who've asked me repeatedly how they can use their technical skills for good.

And as mentioned, the GDPR offers broad powers for workers to push back against bossware abuses. It lets workers demand the ratings system used to assess their work and to demand corrections to their scores – and it bans "hidden internal evaluations" of workers. It also gives workers the right to demand human intervention in automated decision-making.

When workers are "de-activated" (kicked off the app), the GDPR lets workers file a "subject access request" that forces the company to divulge "all personal information relating to that decision" with workers having the right to demand corrections to "inaccurate or incomplete information."

Despite the breadth of these powers, they have rarely been used, largely thanks to some rather gaping loopholes in the GDPR – for example, bosses can use the excuse that divulging information would reveal their trade secrets and expose their IP. The GDPR limits how far these excuses can go, but bosses routinely ignore those limits. Same goes for the all-purpose excuse that the algorithmic management is delivered by a third party tool. This excuse is illegal under the GDPR, but bosses roll it out all the time (and get away with it).

The Platform Work Directive patches many of the defects in the GDPR. It bans processing "a worker’s personal data in relation to: their emotional or psychological state; private exchanges; when they are not using the app; on the exercising of fundamental rights including worker organising; things that are personal to the worker including sexual orientation and migration status; biometric data when used to establish that person’s identity."

It expands rights to examine the workings and findings of "automation decision-making systems" and to demand that those findings be exported to a form that can be sent to the worker, and bans transfers to third parties. Workers can demand their data in a form that can be used e.g. to get another job, and their bosses have to pay any expenses associated with this.

The Platform Work Directive requires strict human oversight of automated systems, especially for things like de-activations. The Directive requires EU member-states to hold hearings every two years on this process. Workers have the right to demand human review of any automated decision, and sets a deadline of two weeks for bosses to reply. If the platform has made a mistake, it has two weeks more to make it up to the worker, either by giving them their jobs back, or paying "adequate compensation" for damages.

The Directive bans platforms from arbitrarily changing how their back-ends work and requires bosses to notify workers and consult with them on "changes to automated monitoring or decision-making systems." It requires bosses to pay experts (chosen by workers) to assess these changes.

All these new rules are exciting, but they'll only come into force if someone fights when they're broken. That's where unions come in. If bosses are caught cheating, the Directive requires them to reimburse unions for any experts they hire to fight the scams.

Wray proposes a detailed series of recommendations to unions for things they should demand in their contracts to maximize their chances to capitalize on the opportunities afforded by the Platform Work Directive, such as establishing a "governance body" within the company "to govern data formation, storage, handling and security issues. This body should include shop stewards and all members of the body should receive data training."

He also sets out technological tactics that unions can fund and capitalize on to maximize their use of the directive, such as hacking apps to allow gig workers to increase their earnings. He writes warmly of "the sock-puppet method," where many test accounts are used to place and book work through platforms to monitor their pricing systems to detect collusion and price rigging. This has been successfully used in Spain to create the basis for an ongoing lawsuit over price collusion.

The new world of algorithmic management and the new Platform Work Directive offers many opportunities to organized labor. However, there is always the possibility that an employer will simply refuse to follow the law – as Uber has done, after it was found guilty of violating data disclosure work and was fined €6,000/day until it came into compliance. Uber's now paid €500,000 in fines and has not disclosed the data that the law and the courts require of it.

With algorithmic management, bosses have figured out new ways to evade the law and steal from workers. The Platform Work Directive gives workers and unions a whole suite of new tools to force bosses to play fair. It's not going to be easy, but the technological capacity workers and unions develop here can be repurposed to wage all-out digital class warfare.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Warner Music CEO: Price-fixing is for iTunes, too https://web.archive.org/web/20050926232101/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004001.php

#20yrsago Kate Wilhelm’s must-read writerly advice/history of Clarion https://memex.craphound.com/2005/09/25/kate-wilhelms-must-read-writerly-advice-history-of-clarion/

#10yrsago Not just emissions: manufacturers’ dirty tricks fake everything about cars https://web.archive.org/web/20180913103847/https://www.economist.com/briefing/2015/09/26/a-mucky-business

#10yrsago Collapse in filial piety, poor social net produces cohort of elderly Korean prostitutes https://web.archive.org/web/20150927232808/https://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_28876273/elderly-prostitutes-reveal-dark-side-south-koreas-rise

#10yrsago FTC clobbers Roca Labs, the terrible weight-loss company that banned negative reviews https://web.archive.org/web/20220622001541/https://www.popehat.com/2015/09/24/roca-labs-weight-loss-company-that-sues-its-critics-sued-by-ftc-over-deceptive-advertising-and-dont-criticize-us-gag-clause/24

#10yrsago What the Internet looks like when it’s not a patent drawing https://www.wired.com/2015/09/internet-looks-like-irl/

#10yrsago The other ad-blocking ecosystem: blame-ducking https://medium.com/message/how-we-pass-the-buck-d63fcf409247

#10yrsago Appeals court rules Batmobile is a “character” and is copyrighted by DC https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/09/pow-appeals-court-assigns-copyright-to-the-batmobile/

#10yrsago KARMA POLICE: GCHQ’s plan to track every Web user in the world https://theintercept.com/2015/09/25/gchq-radio-porn-spies-track-web-users-online-identities/

#5yrsago Adventures of a Dwergish Girl https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/25/dwergish-girl/#you-are-a-pickle

#1yrago Academic economists get big payouts when they help monopolists beat antitrust https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/25/epistemological-chaos/#incentives-matter

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

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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

PDF

24.09.2025 à 14:50

Pluralistic: The billionaires aren't OK (24 Sep 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3435 mots)


Today's links


An oil painting of a French king atop a throne, draped in sumptuous robes. His head has been replaced with a screaming, toothless man wearing a top-hat. Over his shoulder looms the hostile red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.'

The billionaires aren't OK (permalink)

Billionaires don't think we're real. How could they? How could you inflict the kind of vast misery that generates billions of dollars while still feeling even a twinge of empathy for the sufferer in your extractive enterprise. No wonder Elon Musk calls us "NPCs":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/18/seeing-like-a-billionaire/#npcs

Ever notice how people get palpably stupider as they gain riches and power? Musk went from a cringe doofus to a world-class credulous dolt, and it seems like he loses five IQ points for every $10b that's added to his net worth. Sergey Brin used to be the kind of guy who'd pull his whole company out of China overnight after a state hack-attack on dissidents triggered his own traumatic memories of his Soviet childhood:

https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/brin-drove-google-to-pull-back-in-china/

He retired, got a hell of a lot richer through passive gains to his investment portfolio, then came back to run Google, presiding over the precipitous decline of search quality, which he responded to by telling his workers that he expected them to put in 60 hours/week:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/18/seeing-like-a-billionaire/#npcs

One of the strangely satisfying aspects of the Trump presidency is that every now and then, he'll pick a random billionaire (say, the CEO of Intel) and publicly call him an asshole for a couple of days, generally to prompt that particular billionaire to bend the knee to him:

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/11/intel-ceo-trump-lip-bu-tan.html

Sometimes, he'll force these billionaires to publicly humiliate themselves for him – like when he made Tim Apple hand-build a little gold participation trophy for dictators on camera and then present it to him, groveling all the while:

https://www.anildash.com/2025/09/09/how-tim-cook-sold-out-steve-jobs/

The reason this makes such great TV is that we all know that normally, these guys never have to tolerate any criticism. They live in a hermetically sealed bubble of sycophancy. This is what makes them so, so stupid (it's also why Trump is so so unbelievably fucking stupid). Look, I come up with stupid ideas all the time, but I've learned the hard way that if I open my teeth and let these mental farts escape from my face, the people around me will tell me that I'm an asshole and make me feel bad. Trump, on the other hand, can tell us to all inject bleach and claim that solar panels are killing bunny rabbits and everyone around him tells him he's a genius:

https://www.eenews.net/articles/fact-checking-trumps-claims-about-rabbits-caught-in-solar-projects/

He's got a button on his desk that summons Diet Cokes. This is a guy who brazenly cheats at golf, on camera, without any pushback. This is a recipe for crawling up your own asshole and dying:

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-golf-cheating-viral-video-2104940

As the moral philosopher David St Hubbins said, "It's such a fine line between 'clever' and 'stupid.'" If you want to come up with interesting ideas, you have to entertain some outlandish ones. But if you live in a world of yes-anding improv partners who get fired if they break character in the Mad King LARP you're paying them to play, then your bad ideas will inexorably devour your good ones.

Give Howard Hughes some constraints and he'll build you a bunch of cool airplanes. Take away those constraints and he'll start wearing kleenex boxes on his feet, growing his fingernails real long, and saving his piss in jars. Constraints are frustrating, but they're good for you.

Billionaires are on a relentless quest to isolate themselves from the rest of us. The yacht industry, private space exploration, seasteading, luxury bunkers – their whole thing is escaping the constraints imposed by others. They want to be "sovereign" – that is, toddlers:

https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/lever-time/0b05d150-ba7d-013a-d90c-0acc26574db2/the-grotesque-fruits-of-your-labor-with-evan-osnos/754796e8-7356-4cd0-9979-78005984b7fb

The more isolated they get, the stupider they get. No one's telling them no. Sergey Brin has gotten unmistakably stupider since he stopped going to Town Hall meetings where Google's once-valued engineering staff got to criticize the company. Zuckerberg's whole manosphere/surfer dude rebrand coincided with his decision to stop attending the company-wide engineering meetings, which he called "Not a good use of my time."

One thing all these guys have in common: they love chatbots. Why not? A chatbot is the perfect lickspittle. Ask one to generate a gnarly regular expression, try it, then paste the resulting (inevitable) error message into the chat, and the bot will positively cower in contrition: "You're absolutely right, I'm really stupid and you're very smart for noticing. I forgot to put in a curly brace. Please, if you can see your way clear to giving me another chance, could I pretty pretty please try again? I mean, only if you don't want me to kill myself instead."

Sure, an AI isn't real – but remember, as far as billionaires are concerned, almost everyone is an "NPC."

Not so long ago, nearly every human/AI contact was a ritual humiliation in which the computer said no. No, you can't have that drug your doctor prescribed, the AI says no. No, you can't get bail, the AI said no. No, you can't keep your kids, the computer said no.

The rise of consumer-facing LLMs has given us all a taste of what it's like to be a billionaire. Like William Gibson said, the future was there, it just wasn't evenly distributed. Tech lords invented a machine for lowering your IQ. It's not AI psychosis, it's billionaire's disease:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/17/automating-gang-stalking-delusion/#paranoid-androids

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago TiVo breaks devices, then charges you $150 if you don’t like the new deal https://memex.craphound.com/2005/09/24/tivo-breaks-devices-then-charges-you-150-if-you-dont-like-the-new-deal/

#15yrsago Microsoft’s DRM makes your computer vulnerable to attack https://www.exploit-db.com/exploits/15061

#15yrsago Tim Wu on Net Neutrality/Google-Verizon betrayal https://www.engadget.com/2010-09-24-engadget-explains-net-neutrality-and-our-full-interview-with.html

#15yrsago Multinational copyright companies will require French ISPs turn over 150,000 subscriber names and addresses per day https://torrentfreak.com/france-starts-reporting-millions-of-file-sharers-100921/

#10yrsago Cox cable: Rightscorp is a mass copyright infringer https://torrentfreak.com/cox-accuses-rightscorp-of-mass-copyright-infringement-150924/

#10yrsago Kentucky Republican state Senator: the First Amendment protects my right to receive bribes https://theintercept.com/2015/09/24/state-senator-files-lawsuit-says-ban-lobbyist-gifts-violates-freedom-speech/

#10yrsago GOP Vice Chair of House Energy committee is a climate denier and creationist https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34342808

#10yrsago Walt Disney’s plan for the FBI of tomorrow https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/sep/24/walt-disneys-fbi-file/

#10yrsago Dooce quits mommyblogging amid toxic pressure from advertisers https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/sep/23/heather-armstrong-leaving-dooce-mommy-blog-advertisers

#10yrsago The shape of the Internet (according to patent drawings) https://noahveltman.com/internet-shape/

#5yrsago Faulty TV behind daily, town-wide internet outages https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/24/attack-surface-tour/#shine-on

#5yrsago WV's deabeat governor now owes $140m https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/24/attack-surface-tour/#in-justice

#1yrago Margaret Killjoy's "The Sapling Cage" https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/24/daughters-of-the-empty-throne/#witchy

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF
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