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PLURALISTIC

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11.02.2026 à 11:09

Pluralistic: Europe takes a big step towards a post-dollar world (11 Feb 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4289 mots)


Today's links


An old-fashioned credit-card imprinter; its handle is a cracked and dirty American flag. Under the slip is a gold Trump Card. Looming over the imprinter is the top half of Trump's face, brooding and squint-eyed; it has been altered to increase its orangeness, to add bloodshot sclera to his eyes, and to add liver spots. At its bottom, the face merges with a bubbling, hellish cauldron of smoke and flame.

Europe takes a big step towards a post-dollar world (permalink)

There's a reason every decentralized system eventually finds its way onto a platform: platforms solve real-world problems that platform users struggle to solve for themselves.

I've written before about the indie/outsider author Crad Kilodney, who wrote, edited, typeset and published chapbooks of his weird and wonderful fiction, and then sold his books from Toronto street-corners with a sign around his neck reading VERY FAMOUS CANADIAN AUTHOR BUY MY BOOKS (or, if he was feeling spicy, simply: MARGARET ATWOOD):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/19/crad-kilodney-was-an-outlier/#intermediation

Crad was a hell of a writer and a bit of a force of nature, but there are plenty of writers I want to hear from who are never going to publish their own books, much less stand on a street-corner selling them with a MARGARET ATWOOD sign around their necks. Publishers, editors, distributors and booksellers all do important work, allowing writers to get on with their writing, taking all the other parts of the publishing process off their shoulders.

That's the value of platforms. The danger of platforms is when they grow so powerful that they usurp the relationship between the parties they are supposed to be facilitating, locking them in and then extracting value from them (someone should coin a word to describe this process!):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/07/usurpers-helpmeets/#disreintermediation

Everyone needs platforms: writers, social media users, people looking for a romantic partner. What's more, the world needs platforms. Say you want to connect all 200+ countries on Earth with high-speed fiber lines; you can run a cable from each country to every other country (about 21,000 cables, many of them expensively draped across the ocean floor), or you can pick one country (preferably one with both Atlantic and Pacific coasts) and run all your cables there, and then interconnect them.

That's America, the world's global fiber hub. The problem is, America isn't just a platform for fiber interconnections – it's a Great Power that uses its position at the center of the world's fiber networks to surveil and disrupt the world's communications networks:

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

That's a classic enshittification move on a geopolitical scale. It's not the only one America's made, either.

Consider the US dollar. The dollar is to global commerce what America's fiber head-ends are to the world's data network: a site of essential, (nominally) neutral interchange that is actually a weapon that the US uses to gain advantage over its allies and to punish its enemies:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties

The world's also got about 200 currencies. For parties in one country to trade with those in another country, the buyer needs to possess a currency the seller can readily spend. The problem is that setting up 21,000 pairwise exchange markets from every currency to every other currency is expensive and cumbersome – traders would have to amass reserves of hundreds of rarely used currencies, or they would have to construct long, brittle, expensive, high-risk chains that convert, say, Thai baht into Icelandic kroner to Brazilian reals and finally into Costa Rican colones.

Thanks to a bunch of complicated maneuvers following World War II, the world settled on the US dollar as its currency platform. Most important international transactions use "dollar clearing" (where goods are priced in USD irrespective of their country of origin) and buyers need only find someone who will convert their currency to dollars in order to buy food, oil, and other essentials.

There are two problems with this system. The first is that America has never treated the dollar as a neutral platform; rather, American leaders have found subtle, deniable ways to use "dollar dominance" to further America's geopolitical agenda, at the expense of other dollar users (you know, "enshittification"). The other problem is that America has become steadily less deniable and subtle in these machinations, finding all kinds of "exceptional circumstances" to use the dollar against dollar users:

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

America's unabashed dollar weaponization has been getting worse for years, but under Trump, the weaponized dollar has come to constitute an existential risk to the rest of the world, sending them scrambling for alternatives. As November Kelly says, Trump inherited a poker game that was rigged in his favor, but he still flipped over the table because he resents having to pretend to play at all:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/26/i-dont-want/#your-greenback-dollar

Once Trump tried to steal Greenland, it became apparent that the downsides of the dollar far outweigh its upsides. Last month, Christine Lagarde (president of the European Central Bank) made a public announcement on a radio show that Europe "urgently" needed to build its own payment system to avoid the American payment duopoly, Visa/Mastercard:

https://davekeating.substack.com/p/can-europe-free-itself-from-visamastercard

Now, there's plenty of reasons to want to avoid Visa/Mastercard, starting with cost: the companies have raised their prices by more than 40% since the pandemic started (needless to say, updating database entries has not gotten 40% more expensive since 2020). This allows two American companies to impose a tax on the entire global economy, collecting swipe fees and other commissions on $24t worth of the world's transactions every year:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/europe-banks-launching-product-break-101215642.html

But there's another reason to get shut of Visa/Mastercard: Trump controls them. He can order them to cut off payment processing for any individual or institution that displeases him. He's already done this to punish the International Criminal Court for issuing a genocide arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu, and against a Brazilian judge for finding against the criminal dictator Jair Bolsonaro (Trump also threatened to have the judge in Bolsonaro's case assassinated). What's more, Visa/Mastercard have a record of billions (trillions?) of retail transactions taking place between non-Americans, which Trump's officials can access for surveillance purposes, or just to conduct commercial espionage to benefit American firms as a loyalty bonus for the companies that buy the most $TRUMP coins.

Two days after Lagarde's radio announcement, 13 European countries announced the formation of "EuroPA," an alliance that will facilitate regionwide transactions that bypass American payment processors (as well as Chinese processors like Alipay):

https://news.europawire.eu/european-payment-leaders-sign-mou-to-create-a-sovereign-pan-european-interoperable-payments-network/eu-press-release/2026/02/02/15/34/11/168858/

As European Business Magazine points out, EuroPA is the latest in a succession of attempts to build a European payments network:

https://europeanbusinessmagazine.com/business/europes-24-trillion-breakup-with-visa-and-mastercard-has-begun/

There's Wero, a 2024 launch from the 16-country European Payments Initiative, which currently boasts 47m users and 1,100 banks in Belgium, France and Germany, who've spent €7.5b through the network:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/europe-banks-launching-product-break-101215642.html

Wero launched as a peer-to-peer payment system that used phone numbers as identifiers, but it expanded into retail at the end of last year, with several large retailers (such as Lidl) signing on to accept Wero payments.

Last week, Wero announced an alliance with EuroPA, making another 130m people eligible to use the service, which now covers 72% of the EU and Norway. They're rolling out international peer-to-peer payments in 2026, and retail/ecommerce payments in 2027.

These successes are all the more notable for the failures they follow, like Monnet (born 2008, died 2012). Even the EPI has been limping along since its founding, only finding a new vigor on the heels of Trump threatening EU member states with military force if he wasn't given Greenland.

As EBM writes, earlier efforts to build a regional payment processor foundered due to infighting among national payment processors within the EU, who jealously guarded their own turf and compulsively ratfucked one another. This left Visa/Mastercard as the best (and often sole) means of conducting cross-border commerce. This produced a "network effect" for Visa/Mastercard: since so many Europeans had an American credit card in their wallets, European merchants had to support them; and since so many EU merchants supported Visa/Mastercard, Europeans had to carry them in their wallets.

Network effects are pernicious, but not insurmountable. The EU is attacking this problem from multiple angles – not just through EuroPA, but also through the creation of the Digital Euro, a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). Essentially, this would give any European who signs up an account with the ECB, the federal bank of the Eurozone. Then, using an app or a website, any two Digital Euro customers could transfer funds to one another using the bank's own ledgers, instantaneously and at zero cost.

EBM points out that there's a critical difficulty in getting EuroPA off the ground: because it is designed to be cheap to use, it doesn't offer participating banks the windfall profits that Visa/Mastercard enjoy, which might hold back investment in EuroPA infrastructure.

But banks are used to making small amounts of money from a lot of people, and with the Digital Euro offering a "public option," the private sector EuroPA system will have a competitor that pushes it to continuously improve its systems.

It's true that European payment processing has been slow and halting until now, but that was when European businesses, governments and households could still pretend that the dollar – and the payment processing companies that come along with it – was a neutral platform, and not a geopolitical adversary.

If there's one thing the EU has demonstrated over the past three years, it's that geopolitical threats from massive, heavily armed mad empires can break longstanding deadlocks. Remember: Putin's invasion of Ukraine and the end of Russian gas moved the EU's climate goals in ways that beggar belief: the region went from 15 years behind on its solar rollout to ten years ahead of schedule in just a handful of months:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/05/contingency/#this-too-shall-pass

This despite an all-out blitz from the fossil fuel lobby, one of the most powerful bodies in the history of civilization.

Crises precipitate change, and Trump precipitates crises.

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)

#15yrsago Realtime API for Congress https://web.archive.org/web/20110211101723/http://sunlightlabs.com/blog/2011/the-real-time-congress-api/

#15yrsago Steampunk fetish mask with ear-horn https://bob-basset.livejournal.com/156159.html

#10yrsago Facebook’s “Free Basics” and colonialism: an argument in six devastating points https://web.archive.org/web/20160211182436/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/02/facebook-and-the-new-colonialism/462393/

#10yrsago UK surveillance bill condemned by a Parliamentary committee, for the third time https://web.archive.org/web/20250523013320/https://www.wired.com/story/technology-ip-bill-surveillance-committee/

#10yrsago Haunted by a lack of young voter support, Hillary advertises on the AOL login screen https://web.archive.org/web/20160211080839/http://www.weeklystandard.com/hillary-reaches-base-with-aol-login-page-ad/article/2001023

#10yrsago Celebrate V-Day like an early feminist with these Suffragist Valentines https://web.archive.org/web/20160216100606/https://www.lwv.org/blog/votes-women-vintage-womens-suffrage-valentines

#10yrsago Elements of telegraphic style, 1928 https://writeanessayfor.me/telegraph-office-com

#10yrsago Disgraced ex-sheriff of LA admits he lied to FBI, will face no more than 6 months in prison https://web.archive.org/web/20160211041117/https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-ex-l-a-county-sheriff-baca-jail-scandal-20160210-story.html

#5yrsago Apple puts North Dakota on blast https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/11/rhodium-at-2900-per-oz/#manorial-apple

#5yrsago Catalytic converter theft https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/11/rhodium-at-2900-per-oz/#ccscrap

#5yrsago Adam Curtis on criti-hype https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/11/rhodium-at-2900-per-oz/#hypernormal

#5yrsago Dependency Confusion https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/11/rhodium-at-2900-per-oz/#extra-index-url

#1yrago Musk steals a billion dollars from low-income Americans and sends it to Intuit https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/11/doubling-up-on-paperwork/#rip-freefile

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1027 words today, 26735 total)

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF

10.02.2026 à 10:40

Pluralistic: The Nuremberg Caucus (10 Feb 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3494 mots)


Today's links


A famous 1961 photo of Adolf Eichmann on trial in Jerusalem; Eichmann's face has been replaced with the face of Stephen Miller.

The Nuremberg Caucus (permalink)

America's descent into authoritarian fascism is made all the more alarming and demoralizing by the Democrats' total failure to rise to the moment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KADW3ZRZLVI

But what would "rising to the moment" look like? What can the opposition party do without majorities in either house? Well, they could start by refusing to continue to fund ICE, a masked thug snatch/murder squad that roams our streets, killing with impunity:

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/house-passes-sprawling-spending-package-democrats-split-ice-funding-rcna255273

That's table stakes. What would a real political response to fascism look like? Again, it wouldn't stop with banning masks for ICE goons, or even requiring them to wear QR codes:

https://gizmodo.com/dem-congressman-wants-to-make-ice-agents-wear-qr-codes-2000710345

Though it should be noted that ICE hates this idea, and that ICE agents wear masks because they fear consequences for their sadistic criminality:

https://archive.is/0LNh8

This despite the fact that the (criminally culpable) Vice President has assured them that they have absolute impunity, no matter who they kill:

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/08/politics/ice-immunity-jd-vance-minneapolis

The fact that ICE agents worry about consequences despite Vance's assurances suggests ways that Dems could "meet the moment."

I think Dems should start a Nuremberg Caucus, named for the Nazi war-crimes trials that followed from the defeat of German fascists and the death of their leader:

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

What would this caucus do? Well, it could have a public website where it assembled and organized the evidence for the trials that the Democrats could promise to bring after the Trump regime falls. Each fresh outrage, each statement, each video-clip – whether of Trump officials or of his shock-troops – could be neatly slotted in, given an exhibit number, and annotated with the criminal and civil violations captured in the evidence.

The caucus could publish dates these trials will be held on – following from Jan 20, 2029 – and even which courtrooms each official, high and low, will be tried in. These dates could be changed as new crimes emerge, making sure the most egregious offenses are always at the top of the agenda. Each trial would have a witness list.

The Nuremberg Caucus could vow to repurpose ICE's $75b budget to pursue Trump's crimes, from corruption to civil rights violations to labor violations to environmental violations. It could announce its intent to fully fund the FTC and DoJ Antitrust Division to undertake scrutiny of all mergers approved under Trump, and put corporations on notice that they should expect lengthy, probing inquiries into any mergers they undertake between now and the fall of Trumpism. Who knows, perhaps some shareholders will demand that management hold off on mergers in anticipation of this lookback scrutiny, and if not, perhaps they will sue executives after the FTC and DoJ go to work.

While they're at it, the Nuremberg Caucus could publish a plan to hire thousands of IRS agents (paid for by taxing billionaires and zeroing out ICE's budget) who will focus exclusively on the ultra-wealthy and especially any supernormal wealth gains coinciding with the second Trump presidency.

Money talks. ICE agents are signing up with the promise of $50k hiring bonuses and $60k in student debt cancellation. That's peanuts. The Nuremberg Caucus could announce a Crimestoppers-style program with $1m bounties for any ICE officer who a) is themselves innocent of any human rights violations, and; b) provides evidence leading to the conviction of another ICE officer for committing human rights violations. That would certainly improve morale for (some) ICE officers.

Critics of this plan will say that this will force Trump officials to try to steal the next election in order to avoid consequences for their actions. This is certainly true: confidence in a "peaceful transfer of power" is the bedrock of any kind of fair election.

But this bunch have already repeatedly signaled that they intend to steal the midterms and the next general election:

https://www.nj.com/politics/2026/02/top-senate-republican-rejects-trumps-shocking-election-plan-i-think-thats-a-constitutional-issue.html

ICE agents are straight up telling people that ICE is on the streets to arrest people in Democratic-leaning states ("The more people that you lose in Minnesota, you then lose a voting right to stay blue"):

https://unicornriot.ninja/2026/federal-agent-in-coon-rapids-the-more-people-that-you-lose-in-minnesota-you-then-lose-a-voting-right-to-stay-blue/

The only path to fair elections – and saving America – lies through mobilizing and energizing hundreds of millions of Americans. They are ready. They are begging for leadership. They want an electoral choice, something better than a return to the pre-Trump status quo. If you want giant crowds at every polling place, rising up against ICE and DHS voter-suppression, then you have to promise people that their vote will mean something.

Dems have to pick a side. That means being against anyone who is for fascism – including other Dems. The Nuremberg Caucus should denounce the disgusting child abuse perpetrated by the Trump regime:

https://www.propublica.org/article/life-inside-ice-dilley-children

But they should also denounce Democrats who vote to fund that abuse:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/fetterman-shutdown-dhs-ice-senate-b2916350.html

The people of Minneapolis (and elsewhere) have repeatedly proven that we outnumber fascists by a huge margin. Dems need to stop demoralizing their base by doing nothing and start demonstrating that they understand the urgency of this crisis.

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 Ray Bradbury: LA needs monorails! https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-feb-05-op-bradbury5-story.html

#20yrsago How statistics caught Indonesia’s war-criminals https://web.archive.org/web/20060423232814/https://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,70196-0.html

#20yrsago Canadian Red Cross vows to sue first aid kits, too https://memex.craphound.com/2006/02/10/canadian-red-cross-vows-to-sue-first-aid-kits-too/

#20yrsago Sports announcer traded for Walt Disney’s first character https://web.archive.org/web/20060312134156/http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl/news?slug=ap-nbc-michaels&prov=ap&type=lgns

#15yrago Government transparency doesn’t matter without accountability https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2011/feb/10/government-data-crime-maps

#10yrsago Hackers stole 101,000 taxpayers’ logins/passwords from the IRS https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/02/irs-website-attack-nets-e-filing-credentials-for-101000-taxpayers/

#10yrsago CIA boss flips out when Ron Wyden reminds him that CIA spied on the Senate https://www.techdirt.com/2016/02/10/cia-director-freaks-out-after-senator-wyden-points-out-how-cia-spied-senate/

#10yrsago Ta-Nehisi Coates will vote for Bernie Sanders, reparations or no reparations https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSJmxN-L300

#10yrsago Gmail will warn you when your correspondents use unencrypted mail transport https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/gmail/making-email-safer-for-you-posted-by/

#10yrsago Detoxing is (worse than) bullshit: high lead levels in “detox clay” https://www.statnews.com/2016/02/02/detox-clay-fda-lead/

#10yrsago Nerdy Valentines to print and love https://www.evilmadscientist.com/2016/valentines-4/

#5yrsago A criminal enterprise with a country attachedhttps://pluralistic.net/2021/02/10/duke-sucks/#openlux

#5yrsago Tory donors reap 100X return on campaign contributions https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/10/duke-sucks/#chumocracy

#5yrsago Duke is academia's meanest trademark bully https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/10/duke-sucks/#devils

#5yrsago Crooked cops play music to kill livestreams https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/10/duke-sucks/#bhpd

#1yrago Hugh D'Andrade's "The Murder Next Door" https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/10/pivot-point/#eff

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1007 words today, 25708 total)

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF

09.02.2026 à 11:29

Pluralistic: The Epstein class and collapse porn (09 Feb 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4368 mots)


Today's links


A detail of a US $100 bill. Jeffrey Epstein's mugshot has been overlaid over Benjamin Franklin's portrait. Peter Thiel's portrait has been swapped for the US Dept of Treasury seal. Trump's signature has been swapped for the US Treasurer's signature. The line of zeroes after the 100, top and bottom, has been extended to the edge of the image. The image has been roughed up and recolored in a hellish mix of reds and yellows.

The Epstein class and collapse porn (permalink)

It's hard to talk about the Epstein class without thinking about "The Economy" – "The Economy" in the sense of a kind of mystical, free-floating entity whose health or sickness determines the outcomes for all the rest of us, whom we must make sacrifices to if we are to prosper.

As nebulous as "The Economy" is as an entity, there's an economic priesthood that claims it can measure and even alter the course of the economy using complex mathematics. We probably won't ever understand their methods, but we can at least follow an indicator or two, such as changes to GDP, an aggregated statistic that is deceptively precise, given that it subsumes any number of estimates, qualitative judgments and wild-ass guesses, which are all disguised behind an official statistic that is often published to three decimal places.

There's plenty to criticize about GDP: a healthy GDP doesn't necessarily mean that the average worker is better off. When your rent goes up, so does GDP. Same with your salary going down (provided this results in more spending by your boss). GDP isn't really a measure of the health of "The Economy" – it's a measure of the parts of "The Economy" that make rich people (that is, the Epstein class) better off.

But what if there was a way to make money from calamitous collapses in GDP? What if the wealthy didn't just win when "number go up," but also when "number eat shit?"

The latest batch of Epstein emails includes a particularly ghoulish exchange between Epstein and his business partner, the anti-democracy activist and billionaire Peter Thiel:

https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA00824843.pdf

The email is dated 26 Jun 2016, right after Brexit, and in it, Epstein writes:

return to tribalism . counter to globalization. amazing new alliances. you and I both agreed zero interest rates were too high, as i said in your office. finding things on their way to collapse , was much easier than finding the next bargain

This is a perfect example of what Naomi Klein calls "disaster capitalism." It's been the norm since the crash of 2008, when bankers were made whole through public bailouts and mortgage holders were evicted by the millions to "foam the runway" for the banks:

https://wallstreetonparade.com/2012/08/how-treasury-secretary-geithner-foamed-the-runways-with-childrens-shattered-lives/

The crash of 2008 turned a lot of people's homes – their only substantial possessions – into "distressed assets" that were purchased at fire-sale prices by Wall Street investors, who turned around and rented those homes out to people who were now priced out of the housing market at rents that kept them too poor to ever afford a home, under slum conditions that crawled with insects and black mold:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/01/housing-is-a-human-right/

Note here that economic collapse helps the Epstein class only if society has no social safety net. If Obama had supported homeowners instead of banks, there wouldn't have been a foreclosure crisis and thus there wouldn't have been any "distressed assets" flooding the market.

So it's no surprise that the Epstein class are also obsessed with austerity. Peter Mandelson (British Labour's "Prince of Darkness") is a close ally of Epstein's, and also a key figure in the crushing austerity agenda of Blair, Brown and Starmer. He's a machine for turning Parliamentary majorities into distressed assets at scale.

Same for Steve Bannon, another close Epstein ally, who boasts about his alliances with far-right figures who exalt the capital class and call for deregulation and the elimination of public services: Le Pen, Salvini, Farage. Combine that with Epstein and Thiel's gloating about "finding things on their way to collapse…much easier than finding the next bargain," and it starts to feel like these guys are even happier with "number eat shit" than they are with "number go up."

Trump is the undisputed king of the Epstein class, and he seems determined to drive "The Economy" over a cliff. Take his tariff program, modeled on the McKinley tariffs of 1890, which led to the Panic of 1893, a financial crisis that saw one in four American workers forced into unemployment and 15,000 businesses into bankruptcy (that's a lot of distressed assets!):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1893

Then there's Trump's mass deportation program, which will force lots of businesses (farms, restaurants, etc) into bankruptcy, creating another massive pool of distressed assets. Trump's given ICE $75b, while the DoJ Antitrust Division and FTC (which protect Americans from corporate scams) have seen their budgets take a real-terms cut. The majority of DoJ lawyers and FBI agents are working on immigration cases (against workers, not employers, mind!). The Antitrust Division has $275m to fight all of America's corporate crime:

https://www.organizedmoney.fm/p/white-collar-crime-enforcement-in

I'm not saying that Trump is trying to induce another massive economic crash. I'm saying, rather, that within his coalition there is a substantial bloc of powerful, wealthy people who are on the hunt for "things on their way to collapse," and who are doubtless maneuvering to frustrate other Trump coalition members who are solely committed to "number go up."

Even the collapse of crypto creates lots of opportunities to "buy the dip." Not the dip in crypto (crypto's going to zero), but the dip in all the real things people bought with real money they got by borrowing against their shitcoins.

The thousand-plus children that Epstein lured to his island rape-camp were often "distressed assets" in their own right: Julie K Brown's groundbreaking reporting on Epstein for the Miami Herald described how he sought out children whose parents were poor, or neglectful, or both, on the grounds that those children would be "on their way to collapse," too.

The Epstein class's commitment to destroying "The Economy" makes sense when you understand that trashing civilization is "much easier than finding the next bargain." They want to buy the dip, so they're creating the dip.

They don't need the whole number to go up, just theirs. They know that inclusive economies are more prosperous for society as a whole, but it makes criminals and predators worse off. The New Deal kicked off a period of American economic growth never seen before or since, but the rich despised it, because a prosperous economy is one in which it gets harder and harder to find "things on their way to collapse," and thus nearly impossible to "find[] the next bargain."

(Image: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Yours is a very bad hotel https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/yours-is-a-very-bad-hotel/34583

#20yrsago Kids refuse to sell candy after completing health unit https://web.archive.org/web/20060223010123/http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-5600588,00.html

#20yrsago Disneyland model recreates Yippie invasion of 1970 https://web.archive.org/web/20051228122604/http://dannysland.blogspot.com/2005/12/great-moments-in-disneyland-history.html

#20yrsago Canadian Red Cross wastes its money harassing video game makers https://web.archive.org/web/20060221020835/https://www.igniq.com/2006/02/canadian-red-cross-wants-its-logo-out.html

#20yrsago How Yahoo/AOL’s email tax will hurt free speech https://web.archive.org/web/20060213175705/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004398.php#004398

#20yrsago Adbusters and the Economist have the same covers https://pieratt.com/odds/adbusters_vs_theeconomist.jpg

#20yrsago Head of British Vid Assoc: Piracy doesn’t hurt DVD sales http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4691228.stm#6

#20yrsago Countries around the world rebelling against extreme copyright https://web.archive.org/web/20060629232414/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1095

#20yrsago Web 1.0 logo-mosaic https://web.archive.org/web/20060506074530/https://www.complexify.com/buttons/

#15yrsago Is it legal to print Settlers of Catan tiles on a 3D printer? https://web.archive.org/web/20110131102845/https://publicknowledge.org/blog/3d-printing-settlers-catan-probably-not-illeg

#15yrsago UK Tories get majority of funding from bankers https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2011/feb/08/tory-funds-half-city-banks-financial-sector

#15yrsago Colorado Springs school bans kid who takes THC lozenges for neuro condition from attending because of “internal possession” https://www.coloradoindependent.com/2011/02/07/teens-medical-marijuana-fight-escalates-as-school-says-he-cannot-come-back-to-class-after-going-home-for-medicine/

#15yrsago Hamster-powered strandbeest walker https://crabfuartworks.blogspot.com/2011/02/hamster-powered-walker.html

#15yrsago Daytripper: wrenching existential graphic novel https://memex.craphound.com/2011/02/08/daytripper-wrenching-existential-graphic-novel/

#15yrsago Pactuator: a mechanical, hand-cranked Pac-Man https://upnotnorth.net/projects/pac-machina/pactuator/

#15yrsago Floppy drive organ plays toccata www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmoDLyiQYKw

#15yrsago Mike Mignola talks setting and architecture https://www.bldgblog.com/2011/02/ruin-space-and-shadow-an-interview-with-mike-mignola/

#15yrsago BBC to delete 172 unarchived sites, geek saves them for $3.99 https://web.archive.org/web/20110210152012/https://bengoldacre.posterous.com/nerd-saves-entire-bbc-archive-for-399-you-can

#10yrsago Australia, the driest country on Earth, eliminates basic climate science research https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/australia-cuts-110-climate-scientist-jobs/

#10yrsago Copyright trolls who claimed to own “Happy Birthday” will pay $14M to their “customers” https://web.archive.org/web/20160210091717/http://consumerist.com/2016/02/09/happy-birthday-song-settlement-to-pay-out-14-million-to-people-who-paid-to-use-song/

#10yrsago Eviction epidemic: the racialized, weaponized homes of America’s cities https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/08/forced-out

#10yrsago Association of German judges slams US-EU trade deal for its special corporate courts https://www.techdirt.com/2016/02/09/top-german-judges-tear-to-shreds-eus-proposed-tafta-ttip-investment-court-system/

#10yrsago A digital, 3D printed sundial whose precise holes cast a shadow displaying the current time https://www.mojoptix.com/fr/2015/10/12/ep-001-cadran-solaire-numerique/

#10yrsago Jughead is asexual https://www.themarysue.com/jughead-asexuality/

#10yrsago Vtech, having leaked 6.3m kids’ data, has a new EULA disclaiming responsibility for the next leak https://web.archive.org/web/20160210092704/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/hacked-toy-company-vtech-tos-now-says-its-not-liable-for-hacks

#10yrsago How America’s presidents started cashing out https://web.archive.org/web/20160208210036/https://theintercept.com/2016/02/08/taxpayers-give-big-pensions-to-ex-presidents-precisely-so-they-dont-have-to-sell-out/

#10yrsago Bill criminalizing anal and oral sex passes Michigan Senate https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2016/02/michigan_senate_passes_bill_saying_sodomy_is_a_felony/

#10yrsago Hacker promises dump of data from 20K FBI and 9K DHS employees https://web.archive.org/web/20160208214013/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/hacker-plans-to-dump-alleged-details-of-20000-fbi-9000-dhs-employees

#10yrsago Blooks: functional objects disguised as books https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/30/blook-madness-inside-the-world-of-bogus-books

#10yrsago Indian regulator stands up for net neutrality, bans Facebook’s walled garden https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/02/facebooks-free-internet-app-banned-by-indias-new-net-neutrality-rule/

#10yrsago British spies want to be able to suck data out of US Internet giants https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/the-british-want-to-come-to-america–with-wiretap-orders-and-search-warrants/2016/02/04/b351ce9e-ca86-11e5-a7b2-5a2f824b02c9_story.html

#5yrsago Fleet Street calls out schtum Tories https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/09/permanent-record/#foia-uk

#5yrsago The ECB should forgive the debt it owes itself https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/09/permanent-record/#ecb

#5yrsago Favicons as undeletable tracking beacons https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/09/permanent-record/#supercookies

#5yrsago Snowden's young adult memoir https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/09/permanent-record/#ya-snowden

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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Recent appearances (permalink)


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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

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07.02.2026 à 09:12

Pluralistic: End of the line for video essays (07 Feb 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4602 mots)


Today's links


An image of a static-filled TV; centered in it is a distorted Youtube logo with the wordmark replaced by the word 'FairUse.'

End of the line for video essays (permalink)

What if there was a way for a business to transform any conduct it disliked into a felony, harnessing the power of the state to threaten anyone who acted in a way that displeased the company with a long prison sentence and six-figure fines?

Surprise! That actually exists! It's called Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the "anticircumvention" clause, which establishes five-year sentences and $500k fines for anyone who bypasses an "effective access control" for a copyrighted work.

Let's unpack that: every digital product has a "copyrighted work" at its core, because software is copyrighted. Digital systems are intrinsically very flexible: just overwrite, augment, or delete part of the software that powers the device or product, and you change how the product works. You can alter your browser to block ads; or alter your Android phone to run a privacy-respecting OS like Graphene; or alter your printer to accept generic ink, rather than checking each cartridge to confirm that it's the original manufacturer's product.

However, if the device is designed to prevent this – if it has an "access control" that restricts your ability to change the software – then DMCA 1201 makes those modifications into crimes. The act of providing someone with a tool to change how their own property works ("trafficking in circumvention devices") is a felony.

But there's a tiny saving grace here: for DMCA 1201 to kick in, the "access control" must be "effective." What's "effective?" There's the rub: no one knows.

The penalties for getting crosswise with DMCA 1201 are so grotendous that very few people have tried to litigate any of its contours. Whenever the issue comes up, defendants settle, or fold, or disappear. Despite the fact that DMCA 1201 has been with us for more than a quarter of a century, and despite the fact that the activities it restricts are so far-reaching, there's precious little case law clarifying Congress's vague statutory language.

When it comes to "effectiveness" in access controls, the jurisprudence is especially thin. As far as I know, there's just one case that addressed the issue, and boy was it a weird one. Back in 2000, a "colorful" guy named Johnny Deep founded a Napster-alike service that piggybacked on the AOL Instant Messenger network. He called his service "Aimster." When AOL threatened him with a trademark suit, he claimed that Aimster was his daughter Amiee's AOL handle, and that the service was named for her. Then he changed the service's name to Madster, claiming that it was also named after his daughter. At the time, a lot of people assumed he was BSing, but I just found his obituary and it turns out his daughter's name was, indeed, "Amiee (Madeline) Deep":

https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/Madster-creator-Cohoes-native-who-fought-record-11033636.php

Aimster was one of the many services that the record industry tried to shut down, both by filing suit against the company and by flooding it with takedown notices demanding that individual tracks be removed. Deep responded by "encoding" all of the track names on his network in pig-Latin. Then he claimed that by "decoding" the files (by moving the last letter of the track name to the first position), the record industry was "bypassing an effective access control for a copyrighted work" and thus violating DMCA 1201:

https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/story?id=108454&page=1

The court didn't buy this. The judge ruled that pig Latin isn't an "effective access control." Since then, we've known that at least some access controls aren't "effective" but we haven't had any clarity on where "effectiveness" starts. After all, there's a certain circularity to the whole idea of "effective" access controls: if a rival engineer can figure out how to get around an access control, can we really call it "effective?" Surely, the fact that someone figured out how to circumvent your access control is proof that it's not effective (at least when it comes to that person).

All this may strike you as weird inside baseball, and that's not entirely wrong, but there's one unresolved "effectiveness" question that has some very high stakes indeed: is Youtube's javascript-based obfuscation an "effective access control?"

Youtube, of course, is the internet's monopoly video platform, with a commanding majority of video streams. It was acquired by Google in 2006 for $1.65b. At the time, the service was hemorrhaging money and mired in brutal litigation, but it had one virtue that made it worth nine figures: people liked it. Specifically, people liked it in a way they didn't like Google Video, which was one of the many, many, many failed internally developed Google products that tanked, and was replaced by a product developed by a company that Google bought, because Google sucks at developing products. They're not Willy Wonka's idea factory – they're Rich Uncle Pennybags, buying up other kids' toys:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/google-ai-chatbots-microsoft-bing-chatgpt/673052/

Google operationalized Youtube and built it up to the world's most structurally important video platform. Along the way, Google added some javascript that was intended to block people from "downloading" its videos. I put "downloading" in scare-quotes because "streaming" is a consensus hallucination: there is no way for your computer to display a video that resides on a distant server without downloading it – the internet is not made up of a cunning series of paper-towel rolls and mirrors that convey photons to your screen without sending you the bits that make up the file. "Streaming" is just "downloading" with the "save file" button removed.

In this case, the "save file" button is removed by some javascript on every Youtube page. This isn't hard to bypass: there are dozens of "stream-ripping" sites that let you save any video that's accessible on Youtube. I use these all the time – indeed, I used one last week to gank the video of my speech in Ottawa so I could upload it to my own Youtube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZxbaCNIwg8

(As well as the Internet Archive, natch):

https://archive.org/details/disenshittification-nation

Now, all of this violates Youtube's terms of service, which means that someone who downloads a stream for an otherwise lawful purpose (like I did) is still hypothetically at risk of being punished by Google. We're relying on Google to be reasonable about all this, which, admittedly, isn't the best bet, historically. But at least the field of people who can attack us is limited to this one company.

That's good, because there's zillions of people who rely on stream-rippers, and many of them are Youtube's most popular creators. Youtube singlehandedly revived the form of the "video essay," popularizing it in many guises, from "reaction videos" to full-fledged, in-depth documentaries that make extensive use of clips to illuminate, dispute, and expand on the messages of other Youtube videos.

These kinds of videos are allowed under US copyright law. American copyright law has a broad set of limitation and exceptions, which include "fair use," an expansive set of affirmative rights to access and use copyrighted works, even against the wishes of the copyright's proprietor. As the Supreme Court stated in Eldred, the only way copyright (a government-backed restriction on who can say certain words) can be reconciled with the First Amendment (a ban on government restrictions on speech) is through fair use, the "escape valve" for free expression embedded in copyright:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldred_v._Ashcroft

Which is to say that including clips from a video you're criticizing in your own video is canonical fair use. What else is fair use? Well, it's "fact intensive," which is a lawyer's way of saying, "it depends." One thing that is 100% true, though, is that fair use is not limited to the "four factors" enumerated in the statute and anyone who claims otherwise has no idea what they're talking about and can be safely ignored:

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

Now, fair use or not, there are plenty of people who get angry about their videos being clipped for critical treatment in other videos, because lots of people hate being criticized. This is precisely why fair use exists: if you had to secure someone's permission before you were allowed to criticize them, critical speech would be limited to takedowns of stoics and masochists.

This means that the subjects of video essays can't rely on copyright to silence their critics. They also can't use the fact that those critics violated Youtube's terms of service by clipping their videos, because only Youtube has standing to ask a court to uphold its terms of service, and Youtube has (wisely) steered clear of embroiling itself in fights between critics and the people they criticize.

But that hasn't stopped the subjects of criticism from seeking legal avenues to silence their critics. In a case called Cordova v. Huneault, the proprietor of "Denver Metro Audits" is suing the proprietor of "Frauditor Troll Channel" for clipping the former's videos for "reaction videos."

One of the plaintiff's claims here is that the defendant violated Section 1201 of the DMCA by saving videos from Youtube. They argue that Youtube's javascript obfuscator (a "rolling cipher") is an "effective access control" under the statute. Magistrate Judge Virginia K DeMarchi (Northern District of California) agreed with the plaintiff:

https://torrentfreak.com/images/Cordova-v.-Huneault-25-cv-04685-VKD-Order-on-Motion-to-Dismiss.pdf

As Torrentfreak reports, this ruling "gives creators who want to sue rivals an option to sue for more than just simple copyright infringement":

https://torrentfreak.com/ripping-clips-for-youtube-reaction-videos-can-violate-the-dmca-court-rules/

Remember, DMCA 1201 applies whether or not you infringe someone's copyright. It is a blanket prohibition on the circumvention of any "effective access control" for any copyrighted work, even when no one's rights are being violated. It's a way to transform otherwise lawful conduct into a felony. It's what Jay Freeman calls "Felony contempt of business model."

If the higher court upholds this magistrate judge's ruling, then all clipping becomes a crime, and the subjects of criticism will have a ready tool to silence any critic. This obliterates fair use, wipes it off the statute-book. It welds shut copyright's escape valve for free expression.

Now, it's true that the US Copyright Office holds hearings every three years where it grants exemptions to DMCA 1201, and it has indeed granted an exemption for ripping video for critical and educational purposes. But this process is deceptive! The exemptions that the Copyright Office grants are "use exemptions" – they allow you to "make the use." However, they are not "tools exemptions" – they do not give you permission to acquire or share the tool needed to make the use:

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

Which means that you are allowed to rip a stream, but you're not allowed to use a stream-ripping service. If Youtube's rolling cipher is an "effective access control" then all of those stream-ripping services are wildly illegal, felonies carrying a five-year sentence and a $500k fine for a first offense under DMCA 1201.

Under the US Copyright Office's exemption process, if you want to make a reaction video, then you, personally must create your own stream-ripper. You are not allowed to discuss how to do this with anyone else, and you can't share your stream-ripper with anyone else, and if you do, you've committed a felony.

So this is a catastrophic ruling. If it stands, it will make the production of video essays, reaction videos, and other critical videos into a legal minefield, by giving everyone whose video is clipped and criticized a means to threaten their critics with long prison sentences, fair use be damned. The only people who will safely be able to make this kind of critical video are skilled programmers who can personally defeat Youtube's "rolling cipher." And unlike claims about stream-ripping violating Youtube's terms of service – which can only be brought by Youtube – DMCA 1201 claims can be brought by anyone whose videos get clipped and criticized.

Is Youtube's rolling cipher an "effective access control?" Well, I don't know how to bypass it, but there are dozens of services that have independently figured out how to get around it. That seems like good evidence that the access control is not "effective."

When the DMCA was enacted in 1998, this is exactly the kind of thing experts warned would happen:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/13/ctrl-ctrl-ctrl/#free-dmitry

And here we are, more than a quarter-century later, living in the prison of lawmakers' reckless disregard for evidence and expertise, a world where criticism can be converted into a felony. It's long past time we get rid of this stupid, stupid law:

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

(Image: Electronic Frontier Foundation, CC BY 4.0)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Bellsouth phases out pay-phones https://web.archive.org/web/20010211165636/http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20010202/bs/bellsouth_pay_phones_1.html

#20yrsago Man who shattered museum vases asked not to come back http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2006-02/07/content_517885.htm

#20yrsago Dozens of Web 2.0 companies’ logos https://flickr.com/photos/torrez/95124293/

#20yrsago Did Nvidia hire an army of message-board sock-puppets? https://web.archive.org/web/20060208045150/https://www.consumerist.com/consumer/evil/did-nvidia-hire-online-actors-to-promote-their-products-152874.php

#15yrsago Sarah Palin Circle-R wants a trademark on her name https://www.loweringthebar.net/2011/02/sarah-palin-tm-having-trouble-with-registration.html

#10yrsago Love Picking: Locksport meets love locks https://toool.us/love-locks/

#10yrsago Superb investigative report on the fake locksmith scam https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/business/fake-online-locksmiths-may-be-out-to-pick-your-pocket-too.html?_r=1

#5yrsago Klobuchar wants to bust her some fuckin' trusts https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/06/calera/#fuck-bork

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "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, June 2026


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 (1010 words today, 24701 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

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06.02.2026 à 09:43

Pluralistic: Luxury Kafka (06 Feb 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4329 mots)


Today's links


A suburban house; on the law stand a couple, their backs to it, looking appreciatively upon it. On the lawn is a lawn-flag reading 'Chinga la migra' in ornate script, surrounded by butterflies and flowers. The flag is limned in red spokes.

Luxury Kafka (permalink)

Having been through the US immigration process (I got my first work visa more than 25 years ago and became a citizen in 2022), it's obvious to me that Americans have no idea how weird and tortuous their immigration system is:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/52177745821/

As of a couple years ago, Americans' ignorance of their own immigration system was merely frustrating, as I encountered both squishy liberals and xenophobic conservatives talking about undocumented immigrants and insisting that they should "just follow the rules." But today, as murderous ICE squads patrol our streets kidnapping people and sending them to concentration camps where they are beaten to death or deported to offshore slave labor prisons, the issue has gone from frustrating to terrifying and enraging.

Let's be clear: I played the US immigration game on the easiest level. I am relatively affluent – rich enough to afford fancy immigration lawyers with offices on four continents – and I am a native English speaker. This made the immigration system ten thousand times (at a minimum) easier for me than it is for most US immigrants.

There are lots of Americans (who don't know anything about their own immigration system) who advocate for a "points-based" system that favors rich people and professionals, but America already has this system, because dealing with the immigration process costs tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, and without a lawyer, it is essentially unnavigable. Same goes for Trump's "Golden Visa" for rich people – anyone who can afford to pay for one of these is already spending five- or six-figure sums with a white shoe immigration firm.

I'm not quite like those people, though. The typical path to US work visas and eventual immigration is through a corporate employer, who pays the law firm on your behalf (and also ties your residency to your employment, making it risky and expensive to quit your job). I found my own immigration lawyers through a friend's husband who worked in a fancy investment bank, and it quickly became apparent that immigration firms assume that their clients have extensive administrative support who can drop everything to produce mountains of obscure documents on demand.

There were lots of times over the years when I had to remind my lawyers that I was paying them, not my employer, and that I didn't have an administrative assistant, so when they gave me 48 hours' notice to assemble 300 pages of documentation (this happened several times!), it meant that I had to drop everything (that is, the activities that let me pay their gigantic invoices) to fulfill their requests.

When you deal with US immigration authorities, everything is elevated to the highest possible stakes. Every step of every process – work visa, green card, citizenship – comes with forms that you sign, on penalty of perjury, attesting that you have made no mistakes or omissions. A single error constitutes a potential falsification of your paperwork, and can result in deportation – losing your job, your house, your kid's schooling, everything.

This means that, at every stage, you have to be as comprehensive as possible. This is a photo of my second O-1 ("Alien of Extraordinary Ability") visa application. It's 800 pages long:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/2242342898/

The next one was 1200 pages long.

Like I say, I became a citizen in 2022 (for some reason, my wife got her citizenship in 2021, even though we applied jointly). At that point, I thought I was done with the process. But then my kid applied to university and was told that she should sign up for FASFA, which is the federal student loan and grant process; she got pretty good grades and there was a chance she could get a couple grand knocked off her tuition. Seemed like a good idea to me.

So we filled in the FASFA paperwork, and partway through, it asks if you are a naturalized citizen, and, if you are, it asks you to upload a copy of your certificate of citizenship. My wife and I both have certificates, but the kid doesn't – she was naturalized along with my wife in 2021, and while my wife's certificate was sufficient to get our daughter a passport, it doesn't actually have the kid's name on it.

I checked in with our lawyers and was told that the kid couldn't get her certificate of citizenship until she turned 18, which she did last Tuesday. My calendar reminded me that it was time to fill in her N-600, the form for applying for a certificate of citizenship.

So yesterday, I sat down at the computer, cleared a couple hours, and went to work. I am used to gnarly bureaucratic questions on this kind of paperwork, and I confess I get a small thrill of victory whenever I can bring up an obscure document demanded by the form. For example: I was able to pull up the number of the passport our daughter used to enter the country in 2015, along with the flight number and date. I was able to pull up all three of the numbers that the US immigration service assigned to both my wife and me.

And then, about two hours into this process, I got to this section of the form: "U.S. citizen mother or father's physical presence." This section requires me to list every border crossing I made into the USA from the day I was born until the date I became a citizen. That includes, for example, the time when I was two years old and my parents took me to Fort Lauderdale to visit my retired grandparents. This question comes after a screen where you attest that you will not make any omissions or errors, and that any such omission or error will be treated as an attempt to defraud the US immigration system, with the most severe penalties imaginable.

I tried to call the US immigration service's info line. It is now staffed exclusively by an AI chatbot (thanks, Elon). I tried a dozen times to get the chatbot to put me on the phone with a human who could confirm what I should do about visits to the US that I took more than 50 years ago, when I was two years old. But the chatbot would only offerp to text me a link to the online form, which has no guidance on this subject.

Then I tried the online chat, which is also answered by a chatbot. This chatbot only allows you to ask questions that are less than 80 characters long. Eventually, I managed to piece together a complete conversation with the chatbot that conveyed my question, and it gave me a link to the same online form.

But there is an option to escalate the online chat from a bot to a human. So I tried that, and, after repeatedly being prompted to provide my full name and address (home address and mailing address), date of birth, phone number – and disconnected for not typing all this quickly enough – the human eventually pasted in boilerplate telling me to consult an immigration attorney and terminated the chat before I could reply.

Just to be clear here: this is immigration on the easiest setting. I am an affluent native English speaker with access to immigration counsel at a fancy firm.

Imagine instead that you are not as lucky as I am. Imagine that your parents brought you to the USA 60 years ago, and that you've been a citizen for more than half a century, but you're being told that you should carry your certificate of citizenship if you don't want to be shot in the face or kidnapped to a slave labor camp. Your parents – long dead – never got you that certificate, so you create an online ID with the immigration service and try to complete form N-600. Do you know the date and flight number for the plane you flew to America on when you were three? Do you know your passport number from back then? Do you have all three of each of your dead parents' numeric immigration identifiers? Can you recover the dates of every border crossing your parents made into the USA from the day they were born until the day they became citizens?

Anyone who says that "immigrants should just follow the rules" has missed the fact that the rules are impossible to follow. I get to do luxury Kafka, the business class version of US immigration Kafka, where you get to board first and nibble from a dish of warm nuts while everyone else shuffles past you, and I've given up on getting my daughter's certificate of citizenship. The alternative – omitting a single American vacation between 1971 and 2022 – could constitute an attempt to defraud the US immigration system, after all.

This was terrible a couple years ago, when the immigration system still had human operators you could reach by sitting on hold for several hours. Today, thanks to a single billionaire's gleeful cruelty, the system is literally unnavigable, "staffed" by a chatbot that can't answer basic questions. A timely reminder that the only jobs AI can do are the jobs that no one gives a shit about:

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

It's also a timely reminder of the awesome destructive power of a single billionaire. This week, I took a Southwest flight to visit my daughter at college for her 18th birthday, and of course, SWA now charges for bags and seats. Multiple passengers complained bitterly and loudly about this as they boarded (despite the fact that the plane was only half full, many people were given middle seats and banned from moving to empty rows). One woman plaintively called out, "Why does everything get worse all the time?" (Yes, I'm aware of the irony of someone saying that within my earshot):

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

Southwest sucks today because of just one guy: Paul Singer, the billionaire owner of Elliott Investment Management, who bought a stake in SWA and used it to force the board to end open seating and free bag-check, then sold off his stake and disappeared into the sunset, millions richer, leaving behind a pile of shit where a beloved airline once flew:

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

One guy, Elon Musk, took the immigration system from "frustrating and inefficient" to "totally impossible." That same guy is an avowed white nationalist – and illegal US immigrant who did cheat the immigration system – who sadistically celebrates the unlimited cruelty the immigration system heaps on other immigrants:

https://www.congress.gov/119/meeting/house/118277/documents/HHRG-119-JU13-20250520-SD003.pdf

Again: I've got it easy. The people they want to put in concentration camps are doing something a million times harder than anything I've had to do to become a US citizen. People sometimes joke about how Americans couldn't pass the US citizenship test, with its questions about the tortured syntax of the 10th Amendment and the different branches of government. But the US citizenship test is the easy part. That test sits at the center of a bureaucratic maze that no American could find their way through.

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 UK nurses want to supply clean blades and cutting advice to self-harmers https://web.archive.org/web/20060206205108/http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2025748,00.html

#20yrsago PC built into whisky bottle https://web.archive.org/web/20060210043104/https://metku.net/index.html?sect=view&n=1&path=mods/whiskypc/index_eng

#15yrsago Startups of London’s “Silicon Roundabout” https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/feb/06/tech-startup-internet-entrepreneurs

#15yrsago Antifeatures: deliberate, expensive product features that no customer wants https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/antifeatures-at-the-free-technology-academy

#15yrsago Steampunk Etch-a-Sketch https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/erbnf/a_steampunk_etchasketch_we_made_for_a_friend_this/

#10yrsago There’s a secret “black site” in New York where terrorism suspects are tortured for years at a time https://web.archive.org/web/20160205143012/https://theintercept.com/2016/02/05/mahdi-hashi-metropolitan-correctional-center-manhattan-guantanamo-pretrial-solitary-confinement/

#10yrsago Error 53: Apple remotely bricks phones to punish customers for getting independent repairs https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/feb/05/error-53-apple-iphone-software-update-handset-worthless-third-party-repair?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

#10yrsago Toronto City Council defies mayor, demands open, neutral municipal broadband https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2016/02/toronto-city-council-sides-with-crtc-in-rejecting-mayor-torys-support-of-bell-appeal/

#5yrsago Amazon's brutal warehouse "megacycle" https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/05/la-bookseller-royalty/#megacycle

#5yrsago AT&T customer complains…via WSJ ad https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/05/la-bookseller-royalty/#go-aaron-go

#1yrago MLMs are the mirror-world version of community organizing https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/05/power-of-positive-thinking/#the-socialism-of-fools

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)

  • "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, June 2026


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 (1023 words today, 23683 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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"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

05.02.2026 à 13:57

Pluralistic: All laws are local (05 Feb 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4322 mots)


Today's links


A pair of broken off statue legs, shod in Roman sandals, atop a cliff. Behind them, we see a futuristic city.

All laws are local (permalink)

About halfway through Thomas Piketty's 2013 barnstorming Capital in the 21st Century, Piketty tosses off a little insight that skewered me on the spot and never let me go: the notion that any societal condition that endures beyond a generation becomes "eternal" in the popular consciousness:

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

Piketty was referring to "primogeniture," the ancient practice of automatically passing the family fortune onto the eldest son (or, if no son was available, the eldest nephew). Primogeniture did important work by keeping dynastic fortunes intact, rather than dividing them up among all children of some baron or lord or other guillotineable monster.

Primogeniture persisted until the age of colonization, when Europe's "great powers" stole the rest of the world. In that moment, the size of Europe's great fortunes expanded by orders of magnitude. This vast increase in the wealth of Europe's most murderous, remorseless looters made primogeniture obsolete. There was so much blood-soaked money available to the nobility that every son could found a "great house."

After a couple generations' worth of this, the colonies were exhausted. There were no more lands to conquer, which meant that every son could no longer expect to found his own fortune. But for these chinless masters of the universe, a world where every son of every rich man wouldn't get his own dynasty was incomprehensible. To do otherwise was literally unimaginable. It was unnatural.

For Piketty, this explained World War I: the world's chinless inbred monsters embarking upon an orgy of bloodletting to relieve one another of the lands – and peoples – they'd claimed as their property in order to carry on the "eternal" tradition of every son starting his own fortune.

It's a very important idea, and a provocative explanation for one of the 20th Century's defining events. That's why it struck me so hard when I first read it, but the reason it stuck with me for the decade-plus since I encountered that it is a vital observation about the human condition: as a species, we forget so much. Something that was commonplace a generation ago becomes unimaginable today, and vice versa.

Even people who lived through those years forget who they were and what they took for granted in those days. Think, for example, of all those evangelicals who would vote for Satan himself if he promised to hang any woman who obtained an abortion; the same evangelicals who, just a few decades ago, viewed anti-abortionism as a politically suspect form of crypto-papacy:

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

Perhaps the reason Piketty's primogeniture-based explanation for WWI struck me so forcefully and durably is that I imbibed a prodigious amount of science fiction as a boy, including the aphorism that "all laws are local, and no law knows how local it is":

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-a-cosmopolitan-literature-for-the-cosmopolitan-web/

In other words, things that seem eternal and innate to the human condition to you are apt to have been invented ten minutes before you started to notice the world around you and might seem utterly alien to your children. As Douglas Adams put it:

Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

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

This notion is much on my mind right now because the world is (to me, at least) unassailably in a state of change, and everything is up for grabs. Europe went from 15 years behind on its climate goals to ten years ahead of schedule after the supply of Russian gas dried up and Europeans found themselves shivering in the dark. The massive leap in EU solar means that the (seemingly) all-powerful fossil fuel lobby has absolutely, comprehensively eaten shit, something that was unthinkable just a few years ago:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/23/our-friend-the-electron/#to-every-man-his-castle

Indeed, this happened so fast that many people (including many Europeans) haven't even noticed that it happened. Back in December, when I was at CCC in Hamburg, I talked to a bunch of European activists, close watchers of the Commission and the Parliament, who were completely convinced that Europe would never spurn the fossil fuel sector – despite the fact that it had already happened.

Indeed, it may be that intimate familiarity with European politics is a liability when things change. Spend enough time observing up close how supine European politicians and their Eurocrats are and you may find yourself so reflexively conditioned to view them as spineless corporate lackeys and thus unable to notice when they finally dig up a vertebra or two.

Smart financiers are familiar with Stein's Law: "anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." Change happens. Eternal verities might be fifteen minutes older than you. Pink used to be the color of ferocious masculinity, whereas blue was so girly as to be practically titular:

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

Real talk: I have serious, debilitating chronic pain. One of the reasons I'm so prolific is that the only time I stop noticing how much I hurt is when I'm lost in work (compartmentalization is a hell of a drug, and while it's not always healthy, it has its upsides). Ask anyone with chronic pain and they'll tell you that treating pain eventually becomes your hobby, a bottomless well of esoteric dives into various "modalities" of pain treatment.

Thus it is that I've found myself on one or two psychologists' couches, learning about different mental approaches to living with constant pain. One of the most useful pieces of advice I've gotten was to attend closely to how my pain changes – how it ebbs and flows. The point is that if pain changes, that means that it can change. It feels eternal, but it comes and goes. Maybe someday it will go altogether. And even if it doesn't, it may improve. It probably will, at least for a while.

Things change.

Our current crop of cowardly, weak appeasers – in Congress, in Parliament, in the European Parliament – have, at various times (and very recently), found their spines. The factions within them that militated for the kind of bold action that might meet this moment have, from time to time, won the day. We have lived through total transformations in our politics before, and that means we might live through them again:

https://hypertext.niskanencenter.org/p/the-fragmentation-flywheel

Sure, it's easy and tempting to assume that our leaders will always suck as hard as they suck now. But latent in that assumption is that the leaders who presided over big, incredible transformations were exceptional people. Maybe they were and maybe they weren't, but I'm here to tell you, ten minutes' worth of research into the biographies of the "heroes" of our history will reveal them to have been every bit as capable of monstrousness, cowardice, cruelty and pig-ignorant bigotry as any of today's rotating cast of fascist goons:

https://truthout.org/articles/disrupting-the-myth-of-franklin-d-roosevelt-in-the-age-of-trump-sanders-and-clinton/

The question isn't merely "How do we elect better leaders?" It's "How do we make our leaders follow us?" Today's Democrats are unserious quislings who keep bringing a squirt-gun to a mass-casualty assault-rifle spree-shooting. How do we terrorize these cowards into rising to the moment? If we want Congressional Democrats to form a Nuremburg Caucus and start holding hearings on who they're going to put in the dock when the Trump regime collapses, we're going to have to drive them to it.

And we can! The Democrats who gave us the New Deal weren't braver or more moral than the self-dealing millionaires in Congress today – they were more afraid of their base.

Things change.

Some years ago, I gave a speech at Consumer Reports headquarters in Poughkeepsie, trying to get them to refuse to give a passing grade to any product with DRM, on the grounds that the manufacturer could alter how that device worked at any time in the future, meaning that no matter how well a device worked now, it might turn into a pile of shit at any time in the future:

https://www.soundguys.com/the-sonos-app-death-spiral-132873/

They didn't take me up on this suggestion, obviously. They made the (seemingly) reasonable point that people bought Consumer Reports to find out what to buy, not to be told that they shouldn't buy anything. Every product in many key categories came with DRM, meaning that their recommendation would have had to be "just don't buy any of it."

But today, consumer review sites do sometimes recommend nothing:

https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-on-wheels-every-car-brand-reviewed-by-mozilla-including-ford-volkswagen-and-toyota-flunks-privacy-test/

And of course, there's some precedent here. Somewhere between the emergence of the evidence for seatbelts and the appearance of seatbelts in most makes and models of cars, there would have been a time when the answer to "which car should I buy?" was "don't buy a car, they're all unsafe at any speed."

Things change. Today, every car has a seatbelt, and they'd continue to do so, even if we did away with regulations requiring seatbelts. Driving a car without a seatbelt would be as weird and terrible as using a radium suppository:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/19/just-stop-putting-that-up-your-ass/#harm-reduction

Things change. The nine-justice Supreme Court isn't an eternal verity. It didn't come down off a mountain on two stone tablets. It's about ten seconds old:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judiciary_Act_of_1869

Tomorrow, it will be different:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/20/judicial-equilibria/#pack-the-court

Our eternals are all ephemerals. The idea that we should tax capital gains at half the rate of wages? It was practically invented yesterday. You know who thought we should tax all income at the same rate? That noted Bolshevik, Ronald fuckin' Reagan:

https://archive.thinkprogress.org/flashback-reagan-raised-capital-gains-taxes-to-the-same-level-as-wage-taxes-for-first-time-444438edf242/

We're living through a time of change. Much of it is calamitous. Some of it wondrous:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/28/mamdani/#trustbusting

It's so easy to slip into the habit of thinking that nothing will change, that our politicians will never fear us more than they love the money and power they get from catering to the Epstein class. I'm not denying that this is how they view the world today, but there was a time in living memory when it wasn't true. If it changed before, it can change again:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/15/how-the-light-gets-in/#theories-of-change

Things change.

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 UK nurses want to supply clean blades and cutting advice to self-harmers https://web.archive.org/web/20060206205108/http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2025748,00.html

#20yrsago PC built into whisky bottle https://web.archive.org/web/20060210043104/https://metku.net/index.html?sect=view&n=1&path=mods/whiskypc/index_eng

#15yrsago Startups of London’s “Silicon Roundabout” https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/feb/06/tech-startup-internet-entrepreneurs

#15yrsago Antifeatures: deliberate, expensive product features that no customer wants https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/antifeatures-at-the-free-technology-academy

#15yrsago Steampunk Etch-a-Sketch https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/erbnf/a_steampunk_etchasketch_we_made_for_a_friend_this/

#10yrsago There’s a secret “black site” in New York where terrorism suspects are tortured for years at a time https://web.archive.org/web/20160205143012/https://theintercept.com/2016/02/05/mahdi-hashi-metropolitan-correctional-center-manhattan-guantanamo-pretrial-solitary-confinement/

#10yrsago Error 53: Apple remotely bricks phones to punish customers for getting independent repairs https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/feb/05/error-53-apple-iphone-software-update-handset-worthless-third-party-repair?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

#10yrsago Toronto City Council defies mayor, demands open, neutral municipal broadband https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2016/02/toronto-city-council-sides-with-crtc-in-rejecting-mayor-torys-support-of-bell-appeal/

#5yrsago Amazon's brutal warehouse "megacycle" https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/05/la-bookseller-royalty/#megacycle

#5yrsago AT&T customer complains…via WSJ ad https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/05/la-bookseller-royalty/#go-aaron-go

#1yrago MLMs are the mirror-world version of community organizing https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/05/power-of-positive-thinking/#the-socialism-of-fools

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)

  • "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, June 2026


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 (1005 words today, 22660 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

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