Today's links

• Checking in on the state of Amazon's chickenized reverse-centaurs: When your shitty boss is a shitty app and you're not even allowed to call yourself an employee.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Correcting the Disneyland Railroad's Morse code; Breathalyzer source-code; Teaching Little Brother to math students; Arson attacks on Ferguson's Black churches; Tom Lehrer in the public domain.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

Checking in on the state of Amazon's chickenized reverse-centaurs (permalink)

Amazon has invented a new kind of labor travesty: the chickenized reverse centaur. That's a worker who has to foot the bill to outfit a work environment where they nevertheless have no autonomy (chickenization) and whose body is conscripted to act as a peripheral for a digital system (reverse centaur):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

"Chickenization" is a term out of labor economics, inspired by the brutal state of the poultry industry, where three giant processing companies have divided up the market so that every chicken farmer has just one place where they can sell their birds. To sell your birds to one of these plants, you have to give them total control over your operation. They sell you the baby chicks, they tell you what kind of coop to build and what lightbulbs to install and when they should be off or on. They tell you which vet to use and which medicines can be administered to your birds. They tell you what to feed your birds and when to feed them. They design your coop and tell you who is allowed to maintain it. The one thing they don't tell you is how much you'll be paid for your birds – that's something you only discover when it's time to sell them, and the sum you're offered is based on the packer's region-wide intelligence on how you and all your competitors are faring, and is calculated to be the smallest amount to allow you to roll over your loans and go into more debt to grow more birds for them.

At its root, "chickenization" is about de-risking, cloaked in the language of entrepreneurship. Chicken farmers assume all the risk for the poultry packers, but they're told that they're their own bosses. The only way in which a chicken farmer resembles an entrepreneur is that they have to bear all the risk of failure – without having any upside for success. Packers can (and do) secretly decide to experiment at farmers' expense, ordering some of their farmers to vary their feeding, light and veterinary routines to see if they can eke new efficiencies out of the process. If that works, the surplus is reaped by the packer. If that fails, the losses are borne by the farmer, who is never told that they were funding an experiment.

Amazon makes extensive use of chickenization in its many commercial arrangements, tightly defining the working conditions of many "self-employed" workers, like the clickwork "turkers" who power the Mechanical Turk service. But the most chickenized of all the people in Amazon's network of cutouts and arm's-length arrangements are the "entrepreneurs" who are lured into starting a "Delivery Service Platform" (DSP) business.

To start a DSP, you borrow lots of money to buy vans that you outfit to Amazon's exacting specifications, filling them with interior and exterior sensors and cameras, painting them with Amazon livery, and kitting them out with shelving and other infrastructure to Amazon's exacting specification. Then, you hire workers – giving Amazon a veto over who you hire – and you train them – using Amazon's training materials. You sign them up for Amazon's platforms, which monitor and rank those workers, and then you get paid either $0.10 per parcel, or maybe $0.50 per parcel, or sometimes $0.00 per parcel, all at Amazon's sole discretion.

That's a pretty chickenized arrangement. But what about reverse centaurs?

In automation theory, a "centaur" is someone who is assisted by some automation system (they are a fragile human head being assisted by a tireless machine). Therefore, a reverse centaur is a person who has been conscripted to serve as a peripheral for a machine, a human body surmounted and directed by a brute and uncaring head that not only uses them, but uses them up.

The drivers that DSPs hire are reverse centaurs. Using various forms of automation, Amazon drives these workers to work at a dangerous, humiliating and unsustainable pace, setting and enforcing not just quotas, but also scripting where drivers' eyes must be pointed, how they must accelerate and decelerate, what routes they take, and more. These edicts are enforced by the in-van and on-body automation systems that direct and discipline workers, tools that labor activists call "electronic whips":

https://crackedlabs.org/en/data-work/publications/callcenter

The chickenized owners of DSPs must enforce the edicts Amazon brings down on their reverse centaur workers – Amazon can terminate any DSP, at any time, for any reason or no reason, stranding an "independent entrepreneur" with heavily mortgaged rolling stock that can only be used to deliver Amazon packages, long term leases on garages and parking lots, liability for driver accidents caused by automation systems that punish drivers for e.g. braking suddenly if someone steps into the road, and massive loans.

So when Amazon directs a DSP to fire or discipline a worker, that worker is in trouble. Amazon has hybridized chickenization and reverse centaurism, creating a chickenized reverse centaur, a new kind of labor travesty never seen before.

In "Driven Down," a new report from the DAIR Institute, authors Adrienne Williams, Alex Hanna and Sandra Barcenas draw on interviews with DSP drivers and Williams's own experience driving for Amazon to document the state of the Chickenized Reverse Centaur. It's not good:

https://www.dair-institute.org/projects/driven-down/

"Driven Down" vividly describes – often in drivers' own words – how the life of a chickenized reverse centaur is one of wage theft, privacy invasions, humilation and on-the-job physical risks, for drivers and the communities they drive in.

DSP drivers interact with multiple automation systems – at least nine apps that monitor, score and discipline them. These apps are supposed to run on employer-supplied phones, but these phones are frequently broken, and drivers face severe punishment if these apps aren't all running during their shifts. As a result, drivers routinely install these apps on their own phones, and must give them broad, far-reaching permissions, such that drivers' own phones are surveilling them for Amazon 24/7, whether or not they're on the clock. It's not just DSP owners who are chickenized – it's also drivers, footing the bill for their own electronic whips.

First and foremost, these apps tell the drivers where to go and how to get there. Drivers are dispatched to hundreds of stops per day, on a computer-generated route that is not vetted or sanity-checked by a human before it is non-negotiably handed to a driver. Famously, plotting an efficient route among many points is one of the most insoluble computing problems, the so-called "traveling salesman" problem:

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

But it turns out that there is an optimal solution to the traveling salesman problem: get a computer to make a bizarre and dangerous approximation of the optimal route, and then blame and fine workers when it doesn't work. This doesn't optimize the route, but it does shift all the costs of a suboptimal route to workers.

Crucially, Amazon trusts its computer-generated routes, based on map data, over the word of drivers. For example, drivers are often directed to make "group stops" – where the driver parks the van and then delivers to multiple addresses at once (for example, at an apartment complex or office block). Amazon's mapping service assumes that addresses that are in the same complex or development are close together, even when they are very distant. If a driver dares to move and re-park their van to deliver parcels to distant addresses, the app punishes them for making an unauthorized positional adjustment. If a driver attempts to deliver all the parcels without moving the van, they are penalized for taking too long. Even if drivers report the mapping error, it persists, resulting in strings of infractions, day after day.

When drivers fail to make quota, the DSP's per-parcel payout is reduced. DSPs whose drivers perfectly obey the (irrational, impossible) orders of Amazon's apps get $0.50 per parcel delivered. If drivers fall short of the apps' expectations, the per parcel-rate can fall to $0.10, or, in some cases, zero.

This provides a powerful incentive to DSPs to pressure drivers to engage in unsafe practices if the alternative would displease the app. Drivers are penalized for sudden braking and swerving, for example, but are also penalized for missing quota, which puts drivers in the impossible position of having to drive as quickly as possible but also not to swerve or brake if a sudden traffic hazard pops up. In one absurd tale, a driver describes how they were shifted to an electric van that did regenerative braking when they released the accelerator. The app expected drivers to slow down by releasing the accelerator, not by touching the brakes, but this meant that the van's brake lights never switched on. When a driver slowed at a yellow light, they were badly rear-ended by a following UPS truck, whose driver had assumed the Amazon DSP driver was going to rush the light (because the van's brake lights didn't light up).

Meeting quota means that drivers are also not able to stop for bathroom breaks or to take care of other personal hygiene matters. This is bad enough when it means peeing in a bottle, but it's even worse when the only way to take care of period-related matters is to go into the back of the van – where cameras record everything you do – and manage things there.

Drivers are told many inconsistent things about those cameras. Some drivers have been told that the footage is only reviewed after an accident or complaint, but when drivers do get into accidents or have complaints lodged against them, they are often fired or disciplined without anyone reviewing the footage. Meanwhile, drivers are sometimes punished for things the cameras have recorded even when there was no complaint or accident.

The existence of all that empirical evidence of things happening in and outside an Amazon DSP van makes little to no difference to drivers' employment fairness. When a malfunctioning seatbelt sensor insists that a driver has removed their seatbelt while driving, 80+ times in a single shift, the driver struggled to get their docked wages or lost jobs back. When a driver swerved to avoid an oncoming big rig whose driver had fallen asleep and drifted across the median, the driver was penalized – the driver this happened to had his score in "Mentor" (one of the many apps) docked from 850 to 650. Amazon won't tell drivers what their Mentor scores mean, but many drivers – and DSP owners – believe than anything less than a perfect score will result in punishment or termination.

Attaining and maintaining a perfect score is an impossible task, because Amazon will not disclose what drivers are expected to do – it will only penalize them when they fail to do it. Take the photos that Amazon drivers are expected to snap of parcels after they are delivered. The criteria for these photos is incredibly strict – and also not disclosed. Drivers are penalized for having their hands or shoes or reflections in the image, for capturing customers or their pets, for capturing the house-number. They aren't allowed to photograph shoes that are left on the doormat. Drivers share tips with one another about how to take a picture without losing points, but it's a moving target.

Among drivers, there's a (likely correct) belief that Amazon will not tell them how the apps are generating their scores out of fear that if drivers knew the scoring rubric, they'd start to game it. This is a widespread practice within the world of content moderation and spamfighting, where security practitioners who would normally reject the idea of "security through obscurity" out of hand suddenly embrace secrecy-dependent security measures:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/como-is-infosec/

All this isn't just dangerous and dehumanizing, it's also impoverishing. Drivers who get downranked by these imperious and unaccountable and unexplained algorithms have their hours cut or get fired altogether. The apps set a quota that can't possibly be reached if drivers take their mandated (and unpaid) 30 minute lunch and two 15-minute breaks (drivers who miss quota twice are automatically terminated). This time is given over to unpaid labor. As the report explains:

Drivers are not paid for their 30 minute lunch. A full-time employee working an 8 to 10 hour shift would be working either 4 or 5 days out of each week. At $20 an hour, that is two hours a week for four-day employees, resulting in $40 of unpaid labor a week, $160 a month, almost $2,000 a year.

Drivers are also assigned "homework" – videos they are required watch and simulator exercises they are required to complete as remediation for their real or imagined infractions. This, too, is unpaid, mandatory work. Drivers are required to attend "stand up" meetings at the start of their shifts, and this is also often unpaid work.

Amazon makes a big show of "listening to drivers," but they're never heard. A driver who reported being held at gunpoint by literal Nazis who objected to having their parcels delivered by a Jew had his complaints ignored, and those violent, armed Nazi customers continued to get their parcels delivered.

Even modest requests go unanswered. Drivers for one DSP begged for porta-toilets in the parking lot, rather than having to waste time (and miss quota) legging it to a distant bathroom. They were ignored, and all 50 drivers continue to share a single toilet.

But – thanks to chickenization – none of this is Amazon's problem. It's all the problem of a chickenized DSP "entrepreneur" who serves as a useful accountability sink for Amazon and who can be bankrupted at a moment's notice should they fail to do Amazon's precise bidding.

There's one bright spot here, though: the National Labor Relations Board has brought a case in California seeking to have Amazon held to be a "joint employer" of those reverse centaurs behind the wheels of those vans:

https://www.freightcaviar.com/amazon-faces-mounting-union-pressure-as-nlrb-case-and-teamsters-wins-converge/

This is the very last residue of the NLRB's authority, the rest having been drained away by Trump as part of Project 2025. If they prevail, it will open the door to drivers suing Amazon for unfair labor practices under both federal and state law – and in California and New York, that labor law just got a lot tougher for Amazon:

https://www.laborrelationsupdate.com/2025/10/california-dramatically-expands-state-labor-boards-powers-to-cover-employees-under-nlrbs-exclusive-jurisdiction-following-new-yorks-lead/

The chickenized reverse centaur is a new circle of labor hell, a genuinely innovative way of making workers' lives worse in order to extract more billions for one of the most profitable companies in history.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Ethiopia in Talks With China to Convert Dollar Loans to Yuan https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-20/ethiopia-in-talks-with-china-to-convert-dollar-loans-into-yuan

• This Is How Much Anthropic and Cursor Spend On Amazon Web Services https://www.wheresyoured.at/costs/

• No Tricks, Just Treats EFF’s Halloween Signal Stickers Are Here! https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/no-tricks-just-treats-effs-halloween-signal-stickers-are-here

• How Trump is Building a Violent, Shadowy Federal Police Force https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-dhs-ice-secret-police-civil-rights-unaccountable

• Does the Left Have Trouble with Making Things in America? https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-the-left-can-protest

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Ham operator corrects Morse code on the Disneyland Railroad https://web.archive.org/web/20050905155040/http://www.hiddenmickeys.org/Disneyland/Secrets/Square/Morse.html

#20yrsago Accused DUIs demand access to breathalyzer software source-code https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2005/10/21/breathalyzers-and-open-source/
#20yrsago How Disneyland’s Mark Twain riverboat sank https://web.archive.org/web/20051025011944/http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,635154764,00.html

#15yrsago Old film rejection slip: “All scenes of an unpleasant nature should be eliminated” https://oldhollywood.tumblr.com/post/1374666427/the-rejection-slip-the-motion-picture-studio

#15yrsago T-shirt turns into a zombie https://web.archive.org/web/20101123131037/http://deezteez.com/funny-t-shirts/460/turn-into-a-zombie-t-shirt.html?SSAID=112726

#15yrsago Terrified feds try to bar Bunnie Huang from testifying at Xbox jailbreaking trial https://web.archive.org/web/20101023061952/https://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/10/xbox-modder-tria/

#15yrsago Derren Brown’s Confessions of a Conjuror: funny memoir is also a meditation on attention, theatrics and psychology https://memex.craphound.com/2010/10/21/derren-browns-confessions-of-a-conjuror-funny-memoir-is-also-a-meditation-on-attention-theatrics-and-psychology/

#10yrsago Wikileaks hosting files from CIA director John Brennan’s AOL account https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/wikileaks-publishes-e-mail-from-cia-directors-hacked-aol-account/

#10yrsago Hungarian camerawoman who tripped refugee announces she will sue that refugee https://www.techdirt.com/2015/10/21/hungarian-camera-woman-filmed-tripping-refugees-plans-to-sue-facebook-refugee-she-tripped/

#10yrsago Entropy explained, beautifully, in comic-book form https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2015/10/03/sousanis/XOMd3JBYnEdzQCWHM6twTJ/story.html

#10yrsago How a mathematician teaches “Little Brother” to a first-year seminar https://derekbruff.org/2015/10/21/in-class-collaborative-debate-mapping-or-how-a-mathematician-teaches-a-novel/

#10yrsago UK “anti-radicalisation” law can take kids from thoughtcriming parents in secret trials https://www.techdirt.com/2015/10/21/uk-goes-full-orwell-government-to-take-children-away-parents-if-they-might-become-radicalized/

#10yrsago How enforcing a crappy patent bankrupted the Eskimo Pie company https://web.archive.org/web/20190309071221/https://slate.com/technology/2015/10/what-the-history-of-eskimo-pies-says-about-software-patents-today.html

#10yrsago TPP means no more domain privacy https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/us-bypasses-icann-debates-domain-privacy-closed-room-deals-oecd-and-tpp

#10yrsago McDonald’s China debuts a cement-gray bun https://www.telegraph.co.uk/food-and-drink/news/weird-mcdonalds-food-around-the-world/

#10yrsago Terrorists torch five black Ferguson-area churches, nation yawns https://web.archive.org/web/20151020194546/http://usuncut.com/black-lives-matter/black-churches-burning-ferguson-area/

#10yrsago HOWTO make a trashcan Stormtrooper helmet https://scudamor.wordpress.com/2010/10/22/make-your-own-stormtrooper-helmet/

#10yrsago Fable Comics: anthology of great comics artists telling fables from around the world https://memex.craphound.com/2015/10/22/fable-comics-anthology-of-great-comics-artists-telling-fables-from-around-the-world/

#10yrsago J Edgar Hoover fought to write ex-FBI agents out of Hitchcock’s scripts https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/oct/22/alfred-hitchcocks-fbi-file/

#10yrsago Canada’s new Liberal majority: better than the Tories, still terrible for the Internet https://memex.craphound.com/2015/10/22/canadas-new-liberal-majority-better-than-the-tories-still-terrible-for-the-internet/

#10yrsago Forced laborers sue Mississippi debtors’ prison https://theintercept.com/2015/10/22/lawsuit-challenges-mississippi-debtors-prison/

#10yrsago Son of Dieselgate: second line of VWs may have used “defeat devices” https://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/22/us-volkswagen-emissions-engines-idUSKCN0SG0US20151022/

#10yrsago Obama administration petitions judge for no mercy in student debt bankruptcy https://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/33068-obama-administration-urges-no-bankruptcy-relief-for-student-debt

#10yrsago Complexity of financial crimes makes crooks unconvictable https://web.archive.org/web/20151022014805/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-21/has-it-become-impossible-to-prosecute-white-collar-crime-

#10yrsago Half of Vanuatu’s government is going to jail https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-34600561

#10yrsago DHS admits it uses Stingrays for VIPs, vows to sometimes get warrants, stop lying to judges https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/dhs-now-needs-warrant-for-stingray-use-but-not-when-protecting-president/

#5yrsago Free the law of Wisconsin https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/22/the-robots-are-listening/#rogue-archivist

#5yrsago US border cruelty, powered by Google cloud https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/22/the-robots-are-listening/#poulson

#5yrsago Companies target robots in disclosures https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/22/the-robots-are-listening/#goodharts-bank

#5yrsago ENDSARS https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/22/the-robots-are-listening/#endsars

#5yrsago IDing anonymized cops with facial recognition https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/22/the-robots-are-listening/#sousveillance

#5yrsago Falsehoods programmers believe about time https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/21/each-drop-of-strych-a-nine/#a-sort-of-runic-rhyme

#5yrsago Trustbusting is stimulus https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/21/each-drop-of-strych-a-nine/#break-em-up

#5yrsago Tom Lehrer in the public domain https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/21/each-drop-of-strych-a-nine/#poisoning-pigeons

#1yrago Retiring the US debt would retire the US dollar https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/21/we-can-have-nice-things/#public-funds-not-taxpayer-dollars

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Vancouver: Enshittification with David Moscrop (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 23
  https://www.showpass.com/2025-festival-39/

• Montreal: Montreal Attention Forum keynote, Oct 24
  https://www.attentionconferences.com/conferences/2025-forum

• Montreal: Enshittification at Librarie Drawn and Quarterly, Oct 24
  https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/3757420251024

• Ottawa: Enshittification (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 25
  https://writersfestival.org/events/fall-2025/enshittification

• Toronto: Enshittification with Dan Werb (Type Books), Oct 27
  https://www.instagram.com/p/DO81_1VDngu/?img_index=1

• Barcelona: Conferencia EUROPEA 4D (Virtual), Oct 28
  https://4d.cat/es/conferencia/

• Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469

• Miami: Cloudfest, Nov 6
  https://www.cloudfest.com/usa/

• Burbank: Burbank Book Festival, Nov 8
  https://www.burbankbookfestival.com/

• Lisbon: A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet, with Rabble (Web Summit), Nov 12
  https://websummit.com/sessions/lis25/92f47bc9-ca60-4997-bef3-006735b1f9c5/a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet/

• Cardiff: Hay Festival After Hours, Nov 13
  https://www.hayfestival.com/c-203-hay-festival-after-hours.aspx

• Oxford: Enshittification and Extraction: The Internet Sucks Now with Tim Wu (Oxford Internet Institute), Nov 14
  https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/events/enshittification-and-extraction-the-internet-sucks-now/

• London: Enshittification with Sarah Wynn-Williams and Chris Morris, Nov 15
  https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2025/event/cory-doctorow-with-sarah-wynn-williams

• London: Downstream IRL with Aaron Bastani (Novara Media), Nov 17
  https://dice.fm/partner/tickets/event/oen5rr-downstream-irl-aaron-bastani-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-17th-nov-earth-london-tickets

• London: Enshittification with Carole Cadwalladr (Frontline Club), Nov 18
  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/in-conversation-enshittification-tickets-1785553983029

• Seattle: Neuroscience, AI and Society (University of Washington), Dec 4
  https://compneuro.washington.edu/news-and-events/neuroscience-ai-and-society/

• Madison, CT: Enshittification at RJ Julia, Dec 8
  https://rjjulia.com/event/2025-12-08/cory-doctorow-enshittification

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Enshittification is Not Inevitable (Team Human)
  https://www.teamhuman.fm/episodes/339-cory-doctorow-enshittification-is-not-inevitable

• The Great Enshittening (The Gray Area)
  https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophypodcasts/comments/1obghu7/the_gray_area_the_great_enshittening_10202025/

• Enshittification (Smart Cookies)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BoORwEPlQ0

• Enshittification (The Gist)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgBiv_KchI0

• Canadian tariffs with Avi Lewis
  https://plagal.wordpress.com/2025/10/15/cory-doctorow-talks-to-avi-lewis-about-his-proposal-to-fightback-against-trumps-tariff-attack/

Latest 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/

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "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

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Today's links

• Carl Hiaasen's 'Fever Beach': If you didn't laugh, you'd have to cry.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Scary Godmother; Nightvale novel; The war on Worker's Comp; Cadillac's murdermobiles.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

Carl Hiaasen's 'Fever Beach' (permalink)

Every Carl Hiaasen novel is a cause for celebration, but Fever Beach, his latest, makes it abundantly clear that this moment, this moment of Florida Man violent white nationalist grifting, is the moment that Hiaasen has been training for his whole life:

https://carlhiaasen.com/books/fever-beach/

Hiaasen is a crime novelist who got his start as a newspaper writer, writing columns about Florida's, ah, unique politics – and sublime, emperilled wilderness – for the Miami Herald. That beat, combined with enormous humor and literary talent, produced a writer who perfectly hybridizes Dave Barry's lovable absurdism with the hard-boiled pastoralism of the Travis McGee novels (Hiaasen wrote the introductions for a 1990s reissue of all of John D McDonald's McGee books).

Hiaasen's method is diabolical and hilarious: each volume introduces a bewildering cast of odd, crooked, charming, and/or loathsome Floridians drawn from his long experience chronicling the state and its misadventures. Every one of these people is engaged in some form of skulduggery, even the heroes, who are every bit as lawless and wild as their adversaries, though Hiaasen's protagonists are always smarter and more competent than his villains. The plots and schemes play out like an intricate clock that has been much-elaborated by a mad clockmaker with an affinity for eccentric gears, all set against the background of Florida, a glorious and beautiful place being fed into a woodchipper powered by unchecked greed and depravity.

After 20-some volumes in this vein (including Bad Monkey, lately adapted for Apple TV), something far weirder than anything Hiaasen ever dreamed up came to pass: Donald Trump, the most Florida Man ever, was elected president. If you asked an LLM to write a Hiaasen novel, you might get Trump: a hacky, unimaginative version of the wealthy, callous, scheming grifters of the Hiaasenverse. Back in 2020, Hiaasen wrote Trump into Squeeze Me, a tremendous and madcap addition to his canon:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/05/florida-man/#disappearing-act

Fever Beach is the first Hiaasen novel since Squeeze Me, and boy, does Hiaasen ever have MAGA's number.

The book revolves around a classic Hiaasen bumbler, Dale Figgo, an incompetent white nationalist who was kicked out of the Proud Boys after the Jan 6 insurrection, when he mistook a statue of a revered Confederate general for Ulysses S Grant (it was the beard) and released a video of himself smearing shit all over it. Cast out from the brotherhood of violent racists, Figgo founds his own white nationalist militia: the Strokers for Liberty, which differentiates itself from the Proud Boys by encouraging (rather than forbidding) frequent masturbation. Figgo takes his inspiration from his day-job, where he packs and ships disembodied torso sex-dolls for an adult e-commerce site, and he entices new Strokers by offering them free limbless fuck-dolls (stolen from work) as a signing bonus.

Figgo lives in a house bought for him by his long-suffering – and seriously boxing gym-addicted – mother, who despairs of his virulent racism. Her one source of comfort is Figgo's tenant, Viva Morales, a smart granting officer in the family office of the Minks (an ultra-wealthy Florida oligarch couple) who does not tolerate any of Figgo's bullshit and also pays her rent like clockwork.

Viva is the other fulcrum of the tale: her employers, the elderly couple behind the Mink Foundation, are secret white nationalist bankrollers who use their charity to funnel money to militia groups, including Strokers For Liberty. The conduit between the Minks and the Strokers is Congressman Clure Boyette, a MAGA Republican failson of an ultra-powerful Florida lobbyist, who (unbeknownst to his father) has raised $2m for the Strokers to finance a "Stop the Steal pollwatching" operation designed to terrorize voters who favor his opponent.

As a front for this dark money op, Boyette has founded the "Wee Hammers," a charity that pulls prepubescent children out of school and puts them to work with heavy power tools to construct houses in a child-labor-centric MAGA version of Habitat for Humanity. This goes about as well as you might expect.

Into this maelstrom, Viva Morales draws Twilly Spree, a recurring character first introduced in 2000's Sick Puppy as a successor to Skink, one of Hiaasen's best heroes. Twilly is a millionaire ecoterrorist who uses his family's obscene wealth – secured through investments in planet-raping extraction – to fund his arson, bombings, and general fuckery directed against Florida's most flagrant despoilers (it helps that Twilly has been psychologically gifted with the literal inability to feel fear). Twilly and Viva become a couple, and Twilly does what Twilly does – wreaking hilarious, violent and spectacular chaos upon the book's many characters.

There are so many characters – I've barely scratched the surface here. There's Galaxy, a dominatrix who loses patience with her long-term client, the MAGA Congressman Clure Boyette, after he stiffs her on a payment because he was too busy tweeting about an alleged plan by woke billiard manufacturers to replace the nation's black 8-balls with Pride-themed rainbow versions. There's Clure Boyette's soon-to-be-ex-wife, who must not, on any account, be shown the photos Galaxy took of Clure in a fur dog-collar and leash defecating on the floor of a luxury hotel suite. There's Jonas Onus, the number two man in the Strokers For Liberty, who terrorizes all and sundry by bringing them into contact with Himmler, his 120lb pitbull mix. There's Noel Kristianson, whom Dale Figgo runs over and nearly kills during an altercation over Figgo's practice of stuffing incoherent antisemitic rants into ziplock bags weighted with beach-sand and tossing them onto the driveways of unsuspecting Floridians. There's a constellation of minor characters and spear-carriers, including Key West drag queen martial artists and assorted discount-store Nazis, long-suffering charter bus drivers and a hit man who cannot abide racial prejudice.

The resulting story has more twists and turns than an invasive Burmese python, that apex predator of the gate-guarded McMansion development. It's screamingly funny, devilishly inventive, and deeply, profoundly satisfying. With Fever Beach, Hiaasen makes a compelling case for Florida as the perfect microcosm of the terrifying state of America, and an even more compelling case for his position as its supreme storyteller.

You do not need to have read any of Hiaasen's other novels to love this one. But I'm pretty sure that if you start with this one, you're going to want to dig into the dozens of other Hiaasen books, and you will not be disappointed if you do.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• The pivot https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2025/10/the-pivot-1.html

• Video Game Union Workers Rally Against $55 Billion Saudi-Backed Private Acquisition of EA https://www.eurogamer.net/ea-union-workers-rally-against-55bn-saudi-backed-private-acquisition-with-formal-petition-to-regulators

• China Has Overtaken America https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/china-has-overtaken-america

• How I Reversed Amazon's Kindle Web Obfuscation Because Their App Sucked https://blog.pixelmelt.dev/kindle-web-drm/

• OpenAI Needs $400 Billion In The Next 12 Months https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai400bn/

• China Forces Scott Bessent to Embrace Anti-Monopoly Tactics https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/welcome-to-the-anti-monopoly-movement

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago WSJ tech writer damns DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20051027023456/http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/ptech-20051020.html

#20yrsago Fundraiser: donate $500 to shut up loudmouth message-board poster https://www.metafilter.com/dios-rothkofundraiser.mefi

#20yrsago Chinese activist to Jerry Yang: You are helping to maintain an evil system https://web.archive.org/web/20051027021122/https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blogs/gelman/archives/003388.shtml/

#15yrsago Canadian gov’t scientists protest gag order, go straight to public with own website https://web.archive.org/web/20101020142208/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ottawa-notebook/federal-scientists-go-public-in-face-of-restrictive-media-rules/article1761624/

#15yrsago Scary Godmother: delightful, spooky graphic storybook for kids https://memex.craphound.com/2010/10/20/scary-godmother-delightful-spooky-graphic-storybook-for-kids/

#10yrsago The Welcome to Night Vale novel dances a tightrope between weird humor and real pathos https://memex.craphound.com/2015/10/20/the-welcome-to-night-vale-novel-dances-a-tightrope-between-weird-humor-and-real-pathos/

#10yrsago How a lobbyist/doctor couple are destroying Worker’s Comp across America https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-corporate-americas-plan-to-ditch-workers-comp

#10yrsago How the market for zero-day vulnerabilities works https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/10/the-rise-of-the-zero-day-market/

#10yrsago Reality check: we know nothing whatsoever about simulating human brains https://mathbabe.org/2015/10/20/guest-post-dirty-rant-about-the-human-brain-project/

#10yrsago On saying “no”: creativity, self-care, privilege, and knowing your limits https://tumblr.austinkleon.com/post/120472862666

#5yrsago Solar's "miracle material" https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/20/the-cadillac-of-murdermobiles/#perovskite

#5yrsago Cadillac perfects the murdermobile https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/20/the-cadillac-of-murdermobiles/#caddy

#5yrsago Feds gouge states, subsidize corporations https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/20/the-cadillac-of-murdermobiles/#austerity

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Seattle: Enshittification and the Rot Economy, with Ed Zitron (Clarion West), Oct 22
  https://www.clarionwest.org/event/2025-deep-dives-cory-doctorow/

• Vancouver: Enshittification with David Moscrop (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 23
  https://www.showpass.com/2025-festival-39/

• Montreal: Montreal Attention Forum keynote, Oct 24
  https://www.attentionconferences.com/conferences/2025-forum

• Montreal: Enshittification at Librarie Drawn and Quarterly, Oct 24
  https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/3757420251024

• Ottawa: Enshittification (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 25
  https://writersfestival.org/events/fall-2025/enshittification

• Toronto: Enshittification with Dan Werb (Type Books), Oct 27
  https://www.instagram.com/p/DO81_1VDngu/?img_index=1

• Barcelona: Conferencia EUROPEA 4D (Virtual), Oct 28
  https://4d.cat/es/conferencia/

• Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469

• Miami: Cloudfest, Nov 6
  https://www.cloudfest.com/usa/

• Burbank: Burbank Book Festival, Nov 8
  https://www.burbankbookfestival.com/

• Lisbon: A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet, with Rabble (Web Summit), Nov 12
  https://websummit.com/sessions/lis25/92f47bc9-ca60-4997-bef3-006735b1f9c5/a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet/

• Cardiff: Hay Festival After Hours, Nov 13
  https://www.hayfestival.com/c-203-hay-festival-after-hours.aspx

• Oxford: Enshittification and Extraction: The Internet Sucks Now with Tim Wu (Oxford Internet Institute), Nov 14
  https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/events/enshittification-and-extraction-the-internet-sucks-now/

• London: Enshittification with Sarah Wynn-Williams and Chris Morris, Nov 15
  https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2025/event/cory-doctorow-with-sarah-wynn-williams

• London: Downstream IRL with Aaron Bastani (Novara Media), Nov 17
  https://dice.fm/partner/tickets/event/oen5rr-downstream-irl-aaron-bastani-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-17th-nov-earth-london-tickets

• Seattle: Neuroscience, AI and Society (University of Washington), Dec 4
  https://compneuro.washington.edu/news-and-events/neuroscience-ai-and-society/

• Madison, CT: Enshittification at RJ Julia, Dec 8
  https://rjjulia.com/event/2025-12-08/cory-doctorow-enshittification

Recent appearances (permalink)

• The Great Enshittening (The Gray Area)
  https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophypodcasts/comments/1obghu7/the_gray_area_the_great_enshittening_10202025/

• Enshittification (Smart Cookies)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BoORwEPlQ0

• Enshittification (The Gist)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgBiv_KchI0

• Canadian tariffs with Avi Lewis
  https://plagal.wordpress.com/2025/10/15/cory-doctorow-talks-to-avi-lewis-about-his-proposal-to-fightback-against-trumps-tariff-attack/

• Enshittification (This Is Hell)
  https://thisishell.com/interviews/1864-cory-doctorow

Latest 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/

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links

• The mad king's digital killswitch: Every accusation is a confession.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Use RSS; Lifehackers in the NYT; Banned Verminous Dickens cake; Fake CIA Fox guy; Ferris wheel offices; EFF finds printer snitch-dots; Officer Bubbles sues Youtube; Sued for criticizing Proctorio; Can I sing Happy Birthday? "Under the Poppy"; International Concatenated Order of Hoo-Hoo.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

The mad king's digital killswitch (permalink)

Remember when we were all worried that Huawei had filled our telecoms infrastructure with listening devices and killswitches? It sure would be dangerous if a corporation beholden to a brutal autocrat became structurally essential to your country's continued operations, huh?

In other, unrelated news, earlier this month, Trump's DoJ ordered Apple and Google to remove apps that allowed users to report ICE's roving gangs of masked thugs, who have kidnapped thousands of our neighbors and sent them to black sites:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/06/rogue-capitalism/#orphaned-syrian-refugees-need-not-apply

Apple and Google capitulated. Apple also capitulated to Trump by removing apps that collect hand-verified, double-checked videos of ICE violence. Apple declared ICE's thugs to be a "protected class" that may not be disparaged in apps available to Apple's customers:

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/articles/big-tech-is-silencing-the-ice-watchers-plus-why-a-scholar-of-antifa-fled-the-country

Of course, iPhones can (technically) run apps that Apple doesn't want you to run. All you have to do is "jailbreak" your phone and install an independent app store. Just one problem: the US Trade Rep bullied every country in the world into banning jailbreaking, meaning that if Trump (a man who never met a grievance that was too petty to pursue) orders Tim Cook (a man who never found a boot he wouldn't lick) to remove apps from your country's app store, you won't be able to get those apps from anyone else:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/15/freedom-of-movement/#data-dieselgate

Now, you could get your government to order Apple to open up its platform to third-party app stores, but they will not comply – instead, they'll drown your country in spurious legal threats:

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:62025TN0354

And they'll threaten to pull out of your country altogether:

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

Of course, Google's no better. Not only do they capitulate to every demand from Trump, but they're also locking down Android so that you'll no longer be allowed to install apps unless Google approves of them (meaning that Trump now has a de facto veto over your Android apps):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/01/fulu/#i-am-altering-the-deal

For decades, China hawks have accused Chinese tech giants of being puppeteered by the Chinese state, vehicles for projecting Chinese state power around the world. Meanwhile, the Chinese state has declared war on its tech companies, treating them as competitors, not instruments:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/03/ambulatory-wallets/#sectoral-balances

When it comes to US foreign policy, every accusation is a confession. Snowden showed us how the US tech giants were being used to wiretap virtually every person alive for the US government. More than a decade later, Microsoft has been forced to admit that they will still allow Trump's lackeys to plunder Europeans' data, even if that data is stored on servers in the EU:

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

Microsoft is definitely a means for the US to project its power around the world. When Trump denounced Karim Khan, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, for indicting Netanyahu for genocide, Microsoft obliged by nuking Khan's email, documents, calendar and contacts:

https://apnews.com/article/icc-trump-sanctions-karim-khan-court-a4b4c02751ab84c09718b1b95cbd5db3

This is exactly the kind of thing Trump's toadies warned us would happen if we let Huawei into our countries. Every accusation is a confession.

But it's worse than that. The very worst-case speculative scenario for Huawei-as-Chinese-Trojan-horse is infinitely better than the non-speculative, real ways in which the US has killswitched and bugged the world's devices.

Take CALEA, a Clinton-era law that requires all network switches to be equipped with law-enforcement back-doors that allow anyone who holds the right credential to take over the switch and listen in, block, or spoof its data. Virtually every network switch manufactured is CALEA-compliant, which is how the NSA was able to listen in on the Greek Prime Minister's phone calls to gain competitive advantage for the competing Salt Lake City Olympic bid:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_wiretapping_case_2004%E2%80%9305

CALEA backdoors are a single point of failure for the world's networking systems. Nominally, CALEA backdoors are under US control, but the reality is that lots of hackers have exploited CALEA to attack governments and corporations, inside the US and abroad. Remember Salt Typhoon, the worst-ever hacking attack on US government agencies and large corporations? The Salt Typhoon hackers used CALEA as their entry point into those networks:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/07/foreseeable-outcomes/#calea

US monopolists – within Trump's coercive reach – control so many of the world's critical systems. Take John Deere, the ag-tech monopolist that supplies the majority of the world's tractors. By design, those tractors do not allow the farmers who own them to alter their software. That's so John Deere can force farmers to use Deere's own technicians for repairs, and so that Deere can extract soil data from farmers' tractors to sell into the global futures market.

A tractor is a networked computer in a fancy, expensive case filled with whirling blades, and at any time, Deere can reach into any tractor and permanently immobilize it. Remember when Russian looters stole those Ukrainian tractors and took them to Chechnya, only to have Deere remotely brick their loot, turning the tractors into multi-ton paperweights? A lot of us cheered that high-tech comeuppance, but when you consider that Donald Trump could order Deere to do this to all the tractors, on his whim, this gets a lot more sinister:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

Any government thinking about the future of geopolitics in an era of Trump's mad king fascism should be thinking about how to flash those tractors – and phones, and games consoles, and medical implants, and ventilators – with free and open software that is under its owner's control. The problem is that every country in the world has signed up to America's ban on jailbreaking.

In the EU, it's Article 6 of the Copyright Directive. In Mexico, it's the IP chapter of the USMCA. In Central America, it's via CAFTA. In Australia, it's the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement. In Canada, it's 2012's Bill C-11, which bans Canadian farmers from fixing their own tractors, Canadian drivers from taking their cars to a mechanic of their choosing, and Canadian iPhone and games console owners from choosing to buy their software from a Canadian store:

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

These anti-jailbreaking laws were designed as a tool of economic extraction, a way to protect American tech companies' sky-high fees and rampant privacy invasions by making it illegal, everywhere, for anyone to alter how these devices work without the manufacturer's permission.

But today, these laws have created clusters of deep-seated infrastructural vulnerabilities that reach into all our digital devices and services, including the digital devices that harvest our crops, supply oxygen to our lungs, or tell us when Trump's masked shock-troops are hunting people in our vicinity.

It's well past time for a post-American internet. Every device and every service should be designed so that the people who use them have the final say over how they work. Manufacturers' back doors and digital locks that prevent us from updating our devices with software of our choosing were never a good idea. Today, they're a catastrophe.

The world signed up to these laws because the US threatened them with tariffs if they didn't do as they were told. Well, happy Liberation Day, everyone. The US told the world to pass America's tech laws or face American tariffs.

When someone threatens to burn down your house unless you do as you're told, and then they burn your house down anyway, you don't have to keep doing what they told you.

When Putin invaded Ukraine, he inadvertently pushed the EU to accelerate its solarization efforts, to escape their reliance on Russian gas, and now Europe is a decade ahead of schedule in meeting its zero-emissions goals:

https://electrek.co/2025/09/30/solar-leads-eu-electricity-generation-as-renewables-hit-54-percent/

Today, another mad dictator is threatening the world's infrastructure. For the rest of the world to escape dictators' demands, they will have to accelerate their independence from American tech – not just Russian gas. A post-American internet starts with abandoning the laws that give US companies – and therefore Trump – a veto over how your technology works.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Trump’s EV retreat is a huge win for his No. 1 trade rival https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/15/business/trump-ev-retreat-china-nightcap

• Tech Workers Versus Enshittification https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/tech-workers-versus-enshittification/

• Political: Whistle Work https://heidiwaterhouse.com/political-whistle-work/

• About Cory Doctorow's "Microsoft, Tear Down That Wall!" https://euro-stack.com/blog/2025/10/tear-down-this-wall

• Atlanta’s city-run grocery sees early success, sparking debate over government’s role https://www.foxnews.com/politics/atlantas-city-run-grocery-sees-early-success-sparking-debate-over-governments-role

• How Russell Vought Became Trump’s Shadow President https://www.propublica.org/article/russ-vought-trump-shadow-president-omb

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Fox shuts down Buffy Hallowe’en musical despite Whedon’s protests Fox shuts down Buffy Hallowe’en musical despite Whedon’s protests https://web.archive.org/web/20051021235310/http://www.counterpulse.org/calendar.shtml#buffy

#20yrsago Norway’s public broadcaster sells out taxpayers to Microsoft https://memex.craphound.com/2005/10/16/norways-public-broadcaster-sells-out-taxpayers-to-microsoft/

#20yrsago Lifehackers profile in NYT https://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/magazine/meet-the-life-hackers.html

#20yrsago Pan-European DRM proposal https://dissected

#20yrsago EFF cracks hidden snitch codes in color laser prints https://w2.eff.org/Privacy/printers/docucolor/

#20yrsago Nielsen’s top-10 blog usability mistakes https://www.nngroup.com/articles/weblog-usability-top-ten-mistakes/

#20yrsago Microsoft employee calls me a communist and a liar and insists that a Microsoft monopoly will be good for Norwayhttps://memex.craphound.com/2005/10/17/msft-employee-cory-is-a-liar-and-a-communist-msft-is-good-for-norway/

#20yrsago Dear ASCAP: May I sing Happy Birthday for my dad’s 75th? https://web.archive.org/web/20051024004347/https://blog.stayfreemagazine.org/2005/09/happy_birthday.html

#20yrsago 100 oldest .COM names in the registry https://web.archive.org/web/20051024020147/http://www.jottings.com/100-oldest-dot-com-domains.htm

#15yrsago Koja’s UNDER THE POPPY: dark, epic and erotic novel of war and intrigue https://memex.craphound.com/2010/10/18/kojas-under-the-poppy-dark-epic-and-erotic-novel-of-war-and-intrigue/

#15yrsago Ray Ozzie leaves Microsoft https://www.salon.com/2010/10/19/microsoft_roy_ozzie/

#15yrsago Google Book Search will never have an effective competitor https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1417722

#15yrsago Prentiss County, Mississippi Jail requires all inmates to have a Bible, regardless of faith https://web.archive.org/web/20061119033010/https://www.prentisscountysheriff.com/jail.aspx

#15yrsago Early distributed computing video, 1959, prefigures the net https://archive.org/details/AllAboutPolymorphics

#15yrsago Furniture made from rusted Soviet naval mines https://web.archive.org/web/20150206045826/https://marinemine.com/

#15yrsago G20 Toronto cop who was afraid of girl blowing soap bubbles sues YouTube for “ridicule” https://web.archive.org/web/20101019001110/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/officer-bubbles-launches-suit-against-youtube/article1760214/

#15yrsago Help wanted: anti-terrorism intern for Disney https://web.archive.org/web/20151015182237/http://thewaltdisneycompany.jobs/burbank-ca/global-intelligence-analyst-intern-corporate-spring-2016/408543725E4D48B196C01CAEEE602D36/job/

#15yrsago Rudy Rucker remembers Benoit Mandelbrot https://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/2010/10/16/remembering-benoit-mandelbrot/

#15yrsago Verminous Dickens cake banned from Melbourne cake show https://web.archive.org/web/20101019004804/https://hothamstreetladies.blogspot.com/2010/09/contraband-cake.html

#15yrsago English Heritage claims it owns every single image of Stonehenge, ever https://blog.fotolibra.com/2010/10/19/stonewalling-stonehenge/

#15yrsago #15yrsago English Heritage claims it owns every single image of Stonehenge, ever https://blog.fotolibra.com/2010/10/19/stonewalling-stonehenge/

#15yrsago HOWTO Make Mummy Meatloaf https://web.archive.org/web/20101022232509/http://gatherandnest.com/?p=2848

#15yrsago HOWTO catch drilling-dust with a folded Post-It https://cheezburger.com/4078311936

#10yrsago White supremacists call for Star Wars boycott because imaginary brown people https://www.themarysue.com/boycott-star-wars-vii-because-why-again/

#10yrsago In upsidedownland, Verizon upheld its fiber broadband promises to 14 cities https://www.techdirt.com/2015/10/19/close-only-counts-horseshoes-hand-grenades-apparently-verizons-fiber-optic-installs/

#10yrsago Survivor-count for the Chicago PD’s black-site/torture camp climbs to 7,000+ https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/19/homan-square-chicago-police-disappeared-thousands

#10yrsago A Swedish doctor’s collection of English anatomical idioms https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2015/10/body-of-work/?utm_source=SilverpopMailing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=10.15.2015

#10yrsago Some suggestions for sad, rich people https://whatever.scalzi.com/2015/10/18/the-1-of-problems/

#10yrsago That “CIA veteran” who was always on Fox News? Arrested for lying about being in the CIA https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-16/fox-news-terrorism-expert-arrested-for-pretending-to-be-cia/6859576

#10yrsago Eric Holder: I didn’t prosecute bankers for reasons unrelated to my $3M/year law firm salary https://theintercept.com/2015/10/16/holder-defends-record-of-not-prosecuting-financial-fraud/

#10yrsago Titanic victory for fair use: appeals court says Google’s book-scanning is legal https://memex.craphound.com/2015/10/16/titanic-victory-for-fair-use-appeals-court-says-googles-book-scanning-is-legal/

#10yrsago Snowden for drones: The Intercept’s expose on US drone attacks, revealed by a new leaker https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/

#10yrsago Tweens are smarter than you think: the wonderful, true story of the ERMAHGERD meme https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/10/ermahgerd-girl-true-story

#10yrsago UK MPs learn that GCHQ can spy on them, too, so now we may get a debate on surveillance https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/14/gchq-monitor-communications-mps-peers-tribunal-wilson-doctrine

#10yrsago Now we know the NSA blew the black budget breaking crypto, how can you defend yourself? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/how-to-protect-yourself-from-nsa-attacks-1024-bit-DH

#10yrsago 23andme & Ancestry.com aggregated the world’s DNA; the police obliged them by asking for it https://web.archive.org/web/20151023033455/https://fusion.net/story/215204/law-enforcement-agencies-are-asking-ancestry-com-and-23andme-for-their-customers-dna/

#10yrsago A chess-set you wear in a ring https://imgur.com/worlds-smallest-chess-set-ring-Hh3Jeip

#10yrsago Exploiting smartphone cables as antennae that receive silent, pwning voice commands https://www.wired.com/2015/10/this-radio-trick-silently-hacks-siri-from-16-feet-away/

#15yrsago NYPD won’t disclose what it does with its secret military-grade X-ray vans https://web.archive.org/web/20151017212024/http://www.nyclu.org/news/nypd-unlawfully-hiding-x-ray-van-use-city-neighborhoods-nyclu-argues

#10yrsago The International Concatenated Order of Hoo-Hoo: greatly improved, but something important has been lost https://back-then.tumblr.com/post/131407456141/the-international-concatenated-order-of-hoo-hoo

#5yrsago Happy World Standards Day or not https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/18/middle-gauge-muddle/#aoc-flex

#5yrsago Amazon returns end up in landfills https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/16/lucky-ducky/#landfillers

#5yrsago UK to tax Amazon's victims https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/16/lucky-ducky/#amazon-tax

#5yrsago Ferris wheel offices https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/16/lucky-ducky/#gondoliers

#5yrsago Kids reason, adults rationalize https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/19/nanotubes-r-us/#kids-r-alright

#1yrago You should be using an RSS reader https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/16/keep-it-really-simple-stupid/#read-receipts-are-you-kidding-me-seriously-fuck-that-noise

#1yrago Educator sued for criticising "invigilation" tool https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/17/proctorio-v-linkletter/#proctorio

#1yrago Blue states should play "constitutional hardball" https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/18/states-rights/#cold-civil-war

#1yrago Penguin Random House, AI, and writers' rights https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/19/gander-sauce/#just-because-youre-on-their-side-it-doesnt-mean-theyre-on-your-side

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works with Jenny Odell (The Booksmith), Oct 20
  https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25

• PDX: Enshittification at Powell's, Oct 21
  https://www.powells.com/events/cory-doctorow-10-21-25

• Seattle: Enshittification and the Rot Economy, with Ed Zitron (Clarion West), Oct 22
  https://www.clarionwest.org/event/2025-deep-dives-cory-doctorow/

• Vancouver: Enshittification with David Moscrop (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 23
  https://www.showpass.com/2025-festival-39/

• Montreal: Montreal Attention Forum keynote, Oct 24
  https://www.attentionconferences.com/conferences/2025-forum

• Montreal: Enshittification at Librarie Drawn and Quarterly, Oct 24
  https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/3757420251024

• Ottawa: Enshittification (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 25
  https://writersfestival.org/events/fall-2025/enshittification

• Toronto: Enshittification with Dan Werb (Type Books), Oct 27
  https://www.instagram.com/p/DO81_1VDngu/?img_index=1

• Barcelona: Conferencia EUROPEA 4D (Virtual), Oct 28
  https://4d.cat/es/conferencia/

• Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469

• Miami: Cloudfest, Nov 6
  https://www.cloudfest.com/usa/

• Burbank: Burbank Book Festival, Nov 8
  https://www.burbankbookfestival.com/

• Lisbon: A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet, with Rabble (Web Summit), Nov 12
  https://websummit.com/sessions/lis25/92f47bc9-ca60-4997-bef3-006735b1f9c5/a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet/

• Cardiff: Hay Festival After Hours, Nov 13
  https://www.hayfestival.com/c-203-hay-festival-after-hours.aspx

• Oxford: Enshittification and Extraction: The Internet Sucks Now with Tim Wu (Oxford Internet Institute), Nov 14
  https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/events/enshittification-and-extraction-the-internet-sucks-now/

• London: Enshittification with Sarah Wynn-Williams and Chris Morris, Nov 15
  https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2025/event/cory-doctorow-with-sarah-wynn-williams

• London: Downstream IRL with Aaron Bastani (Novara Media), Nov 17
  https://dice.fm/partner/tickets/event/oen5rr-downstream-irl-aaron-bastani-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-17th-nov-earth-london-tickets

• Seattle: Neuroscience, AI and Society (University of Washington), Dec 4
  https://compneuro.washington.edu/news-and-events/neuroscience-ai-and-society/

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Enshittification (Smart Cookies)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BoORwEPlQ0

• Enshittification (The Gist)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgBiv_KchI0

• Canadian tariffs with Avi Lewis
  https://plagal.wordpress.com/2025/10/15/cory-doctorow-talks-to-avi-lewis-about-his-proposal-to-fightback-against-trumps-tariff-attack/

• Enshittification (This Is Hell)
  https://thisishell.com/interviews/1864-cory-doctorow

• Enshittification (Computer Says Maybe)
  https://csm.transistor.fm/episodes/gotcha-enshittification-w-cory-doctorow

Latest 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/

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "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.

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links

• The AI that we'll have after AI: Cheap GPUs, unemployed engineers, and open source models.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: FBI confuses KISS and Dr Who; How the NSA breaks crypto: Bricked Ferrari; Taxing billionaires.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

The AI that we'll have after AI (permalink)

When the AI bubble pops, what will remain? Cheap GPUs at firesale prices, skilled applied statisticians looking for work, and open source models that already do impressive things, but will grow far more impressive after being optimized:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/econopocalypse/#subprime-intelligence

The AI bubble companies are scams. They've spend most of a trillion dollars in capital expenditures, and by their own (very cooked and dishonest) numbers, they are grossing a total of $45b/year, industry-wide:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-bubbles-impossible-promises/

At $45b/year (an inflated number, remember!) it's going to take them a long time to recoup the hundreds of billions of dollars they've spent so far. But they don't have a long time: the massive GPUs that power AI's "foundation models" and cost six- or seven-figures each burn out remarkably quickly. The companies that buy these GPUs claim they'll last five years (and depreciate them over that schedule); however, this is accounting fraud, because in reality, these GPUs have a duty-cycle that's more like two to three years:

https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2025/10/15/lifespan-of-ai-chips-the-300-billion-question/

And when the companies run their GPUs really hard, they burn out in just 54 days:

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/

To recoup their existing and announced investments, AI companies will have to bring in $2 trillion, 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/

And they have to bring in that $2 trillion before all those GPUs burn out…which is, again, about 2-3 years.

Or sometimes just 54 days.

AI companies' purchases and R&D expenditures aren't guided by the need to make products that will bring in $2 trillion dollars. AI companies spend money in order to put on a show for investors, to demonstrate that they are very serious about AI. Think of all those GPU-stuffed data-centers as akin to a peacock's tailfeathers: an expensive way to attract mates (or, in this case, investors), by emitting costly signals that demonstrate your power:

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

Of course, it's far cheaper to pretend to be spending a lot of money than it is to actually spend it, and they're doing plenty of that, too. Meta has promised to spend $72b next year on data-centers. However, Meta's annual free cash flow is $52.1b. OpenAI says it will spend $60b/year on data-centers, which is five times its annual revenue of $12.7b (and the company is losing $9b/year). As The American Prospect's Brian McMahon writes, "How can OpenAI plan to spend five times what it brought in?"

https://prospect.org/power/2025-10-15-nvidia-openai-ai-oracle-chips/

I don't know how many of these giant "foundation models" will still be online after the crash, but I would not be surprised if that number is zero.

So the big question is, what comes next? What will the AI bubble leave behind?

Some bubbles leave nothing or next-to-nothing behind. Enron left nothing behind but the cooling corpse of a CEO who popped his clogs before he could be sentenced to life in prison. Worldcom left behind a CEO who survived long enough to die behind bars…and a ton of fiber in the ground that people are still getting use out of (I'm sending these keystrokes to the internet on old Worldcom fiber that AT&T bought and lit up).

Crypto's not going to leave much behind: a few Rust programmers who've really taken security by design to heart, sure, but mostly it'll be shitty Austrian economics and even shittier JPEGs.

So what kind of bubble is AI? That's the $2 trillion question:

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

Before I get to that, let me be clear here: bubbles are always bad. As much as I like my 2gb symmetrical fiber, the fact that it exists because a crook stole billions of dollars from everyday people who were only hoping to live a dignified retirement of material sufficiency is terrible. Worldcom CEO Bernie Ebbers deserved what he got, and worse.

The AI bubble is on its way to sucking up a trillion dollars and not all of that money is coming from Saudi royals, hedge fund bastards and Elon Musk's credulous creditors. Plenty of it will come out of the savings of working people who've been forced to play the suckers at the table thanks to the replacement of guaranteed pensions with "market-based pensions" that only pay out if you guess right about which stocks to buy:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/25/derechos-humanos/#are-there-no-poorhouses

Those people are going to get wrecked. And so are the rest of us. You don't need to be an AI investor to get wiped out by the AI investment bubble, either. With 30+% of the S&P 500 tied up in seven AI companies' stock, the coming crash will definitely escape containment and crash the whole damned economy.

So the bubble is bad. Really bad. But even so, there will be things we can salvage from it: open source models, skilled programmers, cheap GPUs bought out of bankruptcy for pennies on the dollar. It would be better if we created that stuff without burning the world's economy to the ground and emitting a heptillion tons of CO2, but ignoring the productive residue of the AI crash won't bring the economy back, or suck the carbon out of the atmosphere.

The open source models are a big deal. They're already capable of doing really impressive things, like transcription, image generation, and natural language-based data transformation, running on commodity hardware. I run several models on the laptop I'm typing this on – a computer that doesn't even have a GPU.

What's more, there are a lot of ways to improve these models within easy reach. The US AI companies that threw these models over the transom after irrevocably licensing them as free software had very little impetus to improve their efficiency by optimizing them. Remember, they're spending money as a way to "prove" that AI has a future.

Shipping a model that runs badly – that needs more data-centers and energy to run – is a way to convince investors that it's doing something really advanced (after all, look how much compute and energy it's consuming!). It's a scaled-up version of a scam that Elon Musk used to pull on investors when he was shopping his startup Zip2 around: he put the regular PC his demo ran on inside a gigantic hollow case that he would wheel in on a dolly, announcing that his code ran on a "supercomputer." Yes, investors really are that dumb.

Even modest efforts at optimization can yield incredible performance gains. Deepseek, the legendary Chinese open source AI model, consumes a fraction of the resources gobbled up by the likes of OpenAI. Deepseek's launch was so impressive that it knocked $589b off of Nvidia's stock price the day it shipped:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nvidia-stock-plummets-loses-record-589-billion-as-deepseek-prompts-questions-over-ai-spending-135105824.html

There are a ton of these open source Chinese models, and they all perform like crazy. China does a lot of AI optimization because US embargoes prevent Chinese AI companies from accessing the most powerful GPUs, so Chinese coders tighten up their code and outperform US companies even though they're using far less powerful computers.

After the crash, everyone will be in a similar position to those Chinese AI optimizers: Chinese companies can't buy advanced GPUs because of the embargo; and everyone else won't be able to buy advanced GPUs because the AI crash will have cratered the economy for a generation.

But there is so much room at the bottom. Optimized models do really impressive things on really cheap hardware.

How cheap? Well, here's hardware hacker Pete Warden demoing a chatbot that you talk to and that talks back to you – and it's running on Synaptics System-on-a-Chip (SoC) that costs "low single digit dollars":

https://petewarden.com/2025/10/16/why-does-a-local-ai-voice-agent-running-on-a-super-cheap-soc-matter/

This is basically a little special-purpose Alexa, except it doesn't connect to the internet at all (and therefore doesn't leak any of your data). In Warden's demo, the gadget is a button-sized voice assistant that is meant to be integrated into a dishwasher, which can interpret the dishwasher's manual for you. If your dishes come out dirty or if the drain gets clogged, you press the button, describe your issue in pretty vague terms, and it instantly speaks aloud all the troubleshooting steps to deal with it.

This privacy-preserving, cheap-like-borscht component adds a voice-activated, conversational assistant to a device, sipping power like the clock on your microwave, running on a processor that costs less than a pack of AA batteries. It's seriously fucking cool.

There's going to be a lot of this AI, after the AI goes away – just like there was a lot of the web after the dotcom crash, when, overnight, San Francisco had infinity office-space, servers, and techies going begging.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• How I Became a Populist https://newrepublic.com/article/201171/alvaro-bedoya-ftc-became-populist

• Introducing the Bantam Tools EggBot https://www.evilmadscientist.com/2025/bantam-tools-eggbot/

• Framework flame war erupts over support of politically polarizing Linux projects https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/14/framework_linux_controversy/

• AI Won’t Replace Jobs, but Tech Bros Want You to Be Afraid It Will https://gizmodo.com/ai-wont-replace-jobs-tech-bros-want-you-terrified-2000670808

• US Passport Power Falls to Historic Low https://www.henleyglobal.com/newsroom/press-releases/henley-global-mobility-report-oct-2025

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Logic and math riddles from Slashdot https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=165444&threshold=3&mode=flat&commentsort=5&op=Change

#20yrsago Yiddish postcard gallery https://web.archive.org/web/20051018030610/http://members.screenz.com/bennypostcards/

#20yrsago JibJab’s legal threats over the use of 9 seconds of their video https://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2005/10/do_as_i_say_not.html

#20yrsago Wal-Mart photofinishing narcs out student who made anti-Bush poster https://web.archive.org/web/20051011233852/https://www.alternet.org/walmart/26503/#thumbtack

#20yrsago Buddhist monks deploy saffron flak vests and armored monkmobiles https://eyeteeth.blogspot.com/2005/10/monkmobiles-and-bulletproof-robes.html

#15yrsago Mitt Romney got a bestseller by demanding bulk-purchases of his books in exchange for lectures https://www.politico.com/blogs/ben-smith/2010/10/how-romney-made-a-best-seller-029968?showall

#15yrsago Every terrible thing Canada’s Stephen Harper government has done in the past four years https://24percentmajority.blogspot.com/2015/10/2011-2015-harper-government-wrap-up.html

#10yrsago 1980: the Director of the FBI mixes up KISS & The Who, confusing the hell out of FBI agents https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/oct/15/fbi-files-kiss/

#10yrsago Sit down already: standing desks aren’t healthier than seated ones https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/10/14/sitting-for-long-periods-doesnt-make-death-more-imminent-study-suggests/

#10yrsago It’s not enough that Apple and Google are bringing usable crypto to the world https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Passcode/Passcode-Voices/2015/1014/Opinion-Why-we-all-have-a-stake-in-encryption-policy

#10yrsago The NSA sure breaks a lot of “unbreakable” crypto. This is probably how they do it. https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2015/10/14/how-is-nsa-breaking-so-much-crypto/

#5yrsago Bricked Ferrari https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/15/expect-the-unexpected/#drm

#5yrsago The Passenger Pigeon Manifesto https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/15/expect-the-unexpected/#openglam

#5yrsago Dystopia as clickbait https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/15/expect-the-unexpected/#dystopia-is-over

#1yrago Of course we can tax billionaires https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/15/piketty-pilled/#tax-justice

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Chicago: How Platforms Die with Rick Perlstein (University Club), Oct 14
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/how-platforms-die-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1747916117159

• Los Angeles: Enshittification with David Dayen (Diesel), Oct 16
  https://dieselbookstore.com/event/2025-10-16/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works with Jenny Odell (The Booksmith), Oct 20
  https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25

• PDX: Enshittification at Powell's, Oct 21
  https://www.powells.com/events/cory-doctorow-10-21-25

• Seattle: Enshittification and the Rot Economy, with Ed Zitron (Clarion West), Oct 22
  https://www.clarionwest.org/event/2025-deep-dives-cory-doctorow/

• Vancouver: Enshittification with David Moscrop (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 23
  https://www.showpass.com/2025-festival-39/

• Montreal: Montreal Attention Forum keynote, Oct 24
  https://www.attentionconferences.com/conferences/2025-forum

• Montreal: Enshittification at Librarie Drawn and Quarterly, Oct 24
  https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/3757420251024

• Ottawa: Enshittification (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 25
  https://writersfestival.org/events/fall-2025/enshittification

• Toronto: Enshittification with Dan Werb (Type Books), Oct 27
  https://www.instagram.com/p/DO81_1VDngu/?img_index=1

• Barcelona: Conferencia EUROPEA 4D (Virtual), Oct 28
  https://4d.cat/es/conferencia/

• Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469

• Miami: Cloudfest, Nov 6
  https://www.cloudfest.com/usa/

• Burbank: Burbank Book Festival, Nov 8
  https://www.burbankbookfestival.com/

• Lisbon: A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet, with Rabble (Web Summit), Nov 12
  https://websummit.com/sessions/lis25/92f47bc9-ca60-4997-bef3-006735b1f9c5/a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet/

• Cardiff: Hay Festival After Hours, Nov 13
  https://www.hayfestival.com/c-203-hay-festival-after-hours.aspx

• Oxford: Enshittification and Extraction: The Internet Sucks Now with Tim Wu at Rawley House (Oxford Internet Institute), Nov 14
  https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/events/enshittification-and-extraction-the-internet-sucks-now/

• London: Enshittification with Sarah Wynn-Williams and Chris Morris, Nov 15
  https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2025/event/cory-doctorow-with-sarah-wynn-williams

• Seattle: Neuroscience, AI and Society (University of Washington), Dec 4
  https://compneuro.washington.edu/news-and-events/neuroscience-ai-and-society/

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Enshittification (The Gist)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgBiv_KchI0

• Canadian tariffs with Avi Lewis
  https://plagal.wordpress.com/2025/10/15/cory-doctorow-talks-to-avi-lewis-about-his-proposal-to-fightback-against-trumps-tariff-attack/

• Enshittification (This Is Hell)
  https://thisishell.com/interviews/1864-cory-doctorow

• Enshittification (Computer Says Maybe)
  https://csm.transistor.fm/episodes/gotcha-enshittification-w-cory-doctorow

• Enshittification with Lina Khan (Brooklyn Public Library)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCX5Yst64Hw

Latest 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/

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "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.

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links

• Microsoft, Tear Down That Wall! What the Eurostack is missing.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Giga pudding; What Technology Wants; Blue Screens of Death; Bernie outperforming Obama; DRM in JPEGs; Dirty words are politically potent; Fury Road 8-bit side-scroller; History of web auth; Prop 22 is a scam.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

Microsoft, Tear Down That Wall! (permalink)

Even though he's the darkest of clouds, Trump has some deeply weird silver linings, formed out of a combination of his self-owning isolationism and blunt aggression.

In my quarter-century as a digital activist, I've had cause to work in more than 30 countries. Wherever I went, I'd meet with policymakers about the rules they should be thinking about in order to make their technology work better for their countries. Every single time, they'd agree politely with me, but insist that making any kind of tech-improving rules was impossible, because the US trade representative would kick their teeth in if they tried.

For all of this century, the USTR has been one of the greatest global impediments to a better world, hopping from country to country, demanding policies that would protect American tech firms from foreign competitors – especially the kind of competitor who would improve on American tech products by protecting users' privacy, consumer rights or labor rights while they used them.

The most glaring example of this are "anticircumvention laws." Under these laws, it's illegal to modify any technology that has any kind of anti-modification defenses. In other words, if the manufacturer draws a kind of virtual dotted line around part of the product's software and labels it, "Do not look inside this box," then it becomes illegal to do so, even if you're trying to do something that's otherwise legal.

That means that if your printer is designed to reject generic ink, you can't change the code that verifies the ink cartridge. There's no law that says, "You have to buy your ink from the same company that sold you your printer," but if HP adds any kind of anti-modification measure to its ink-checking code, then disabling that code becomes a serious crime.

Now, these laws are obviously an invitation to mischief. They are used to prevent independent repair of everything from tractors to cars to phones to games consoles to ventilators. They're used to stop you from blocking ads or surveillance on your phone or "smart" TV. They keep you locked into manufacturers' app stores, payment systems and other add-ons, which means that you are constantly being ripped off with junk fees, and you can't install the software of your choosing, including software that will help you avoid being kidnapped by masked thugs and sent to a secret torture prison:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/06/rogue-capitalism/#orphaned-syrian-refugees-need-not-apply

The US passed the first of these laws in 1998, when Bill Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. As the ink was still drying on Clinton's signature, the US trade rep started racing around the world, demanding that America's trading partners adopt their own version of the law:

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

As these laws were adopted around the world, US tech giants were given carte blanche to extract more money and data from their global users. American users were getting ripped off too, of course (they were the first victims of Big Tech), but at least the US stock market reaped the benefit of Big Tech's incredibly lucrative scams. But for America's trading partners, anticircumvention was an entirely losing proposition: their people got ripped off for their data and their money, and their tech companies couldn't go into business selling products to disenshittify America's cash-and-data extraction machines.

So why did America's trading partners agree to anticircumvention law? Well, that was down to the tender ministrations of the US trade rep. Countries that didn't pass anticircumvention were threatened with US tariffs.

I used to occasionally guest-lecture at an international relations grad program at the Central European University in Budapest, and one summer, I had a student who had served as the information minister to a Central American country while the US was negotiating the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). This student described getting a phone call from their country's chief negotiator who said, "I know you told me not to budge on anticircumvention, but the USTR tells me that if we don't give them this, they will block our agricultural exports. I'm sorry." Country by country, the world fell into line.

When someone tells you, "You'd better do what I say or I'm going to burn your house down," and then they burn your house down, you'd be an absolute sucker if you kept up your part of the bargain.

I find it absolutely bizarre that the USTR spent decades racing around the world, getting every country on earth to sign up to "America First" policies by threatening them with tariffs, and then Trump actually imposed the tariffs anyway, which has opened up the space for every country to get rid of those America First policies.

Of course, that's not all Trump has done. He's also made it abundantly clear that he considers America's (former) allies to be geopolitical and economic competitors, and that US tech is one of the primary weapons he will use to wage war on the world. He got Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to cave on taxing Big Tech, which means that they'll be able to go on cheating on their taxes, while Canadian companies won't be able to, which means Canada's tech sector will never be able to compete:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd0vv2pe7ydo

Trump has also ordered the EU to scrap its new tech antitrust laws, the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, which aim to open up space for European competitors to US tech:

https://www.politico.eu/article/trumps-antitrust-agency-chief-blasts-eu-digital-rules-as-taxes-on-american-firms/

But more than that, Trump and US tech have teamed up to attack and deplatform public officials that Trump has beef with. Take Karim Khan, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in the Hague. Khan swore out a criminal complaint and arrest warrant for the génocidaire Benjamin Netanyahu, and Trump sanctioned Khan. Then, Microsoft cut off Khan's access to his account, nuking his email, calendar, address book and files:

https://apnews.com/article/icc-trump-sanctions-karim-khan-court-a4b4c02751ab84c09718b1b95cbd5db3

For officials all over the world, the message couldn't be clearer: Trump sees you as the enemy, and he will use American tech companies to cut you off at the knees if you don't roll over for him.

Enter the Eurostack. This is an initiative from the EU that seeks to fund and deploy open source equivalents to the platforms that the European public, its businesses and its governments are currently locked into:

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

Thus far, Eurostack's focus has been on building those Made-in-the-EU alternatives to the US tech stack, and on financing data-center rollout. But very shortly, Eurostack advocates are going to hit a wall.

Escaping from US Big Tech isn't merely a matter of having another service to move your data and interactions to. You also have to have a way to transition from the old, US service to the new Eurostack equivalent.

No government ministry, no business, no individual is going to manually copy-and-paste thousands (or millions) of documents out of Microsoft, Apple or Google's cloud into the Eurostack. No one is going to individually move all the edit histories, email chains, and file permissions over. These files and data-structures are essential to the people who created them, and they often contain sensitive information and compliance data that is illegal to delete.

Sure, the EU could try to order American Big Tech companies to create export tools so that Europeans can easily retrieve their data in formats that can be faithfully imported into Eurostack services, but we can already see how that will play out.

Last year's Digital Markets Act contains a modest set of "interoperability" requirements that require big US companies like Apple to open up their platforms to rival app stores and payment processors. Apple's monopoly over iPhone apps is a big deal – it lets the company structure the market for software in Europe, without any accountability or limits, and Apple extracts a 30% tax on every euro that changes hands via an iOS app. Globally, Apple makes more than $100b/year from this "app tax."

When the EU passed a law aimed at halting this racket, Apple lost its mind. First, they proposed a "solution" to this that was so onerous and tortured that it was a kind of sick joke:

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

Then they threatened to stop selling iPhones in the EU altogether:

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

Now, Apple has filed 18 legal challenges to any interoperability mandate under the DMA:

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/C/2025/5213/oj/eng

If this is how an American tech company responds to a small-potatoes order to give Europeans more choice over how they use their own devices and data, imagine what these US giants will do if the EU orders them to open up their platforms so people can leave altogether!

The only plausible path from US Big Tech to the Eurostack runs straight through anticircumvention. The EU needs to repeal Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, a law it passed at the behest of the US Trade Representative, to protect the rent-extraction tactics of American tech companies. We need to make it legal for European technologists to reverse-engineer the American tech platforms' websites and apps so that Europeans can get their data out of America's tech silos and into open, sovereign, privacy-respecting, consumer rights-preserving, worker-protecting Eurostack versions.

Building the Eurostack without thinking about migration tools is a recipe for disappointment. It's like building housing for East Germans…in West Berlin, without sparing a thought for how those East Germans are going to get to the new apartment blocks.

The good news is, there's no reason to keep Article 6 of the Copyright Directive on the books. The law has always been a wreck. It's one of the primary barriers to Right to Repair: companies now build devices with "access controls" on their parts. Even after you install a new part into a device, it won't start working until the manufacturer's representative unlocks it (for a hefty fee). Under anticircumvention laws like EUCD Article 6, it's illegal to bypass these locks.

What's more, the digital locks that EUCD 6 protects are almost all to be found in American products. Only a handful of EU manufacturers rely on these, and they use them in terrible ways. Volkswagen used the fact that it was illegal to reverse-engineer its engines to disguise the fact that it was cheating on its emissions tests, and the resulting "Dieselgate" scandal killed thousands of Europeans:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/09/18/dieselgate-kills-5000-europeans-per-year/

Newag, a Polish train manufacturer, boobytraps the trains they sell. When these trains sense that they have been taken to a competitor's train-yard for maintenance, they render themselves inoperable. Newag then charges thousands of euros to remotely "repair" their own sabotage. When this was revealed by a team of independent security researchers, Newag used claims under EUCD 6 in an attempt to intimidate them into silence:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-james-hill

Mercedes won't let you unlock your new car's full acceleration capability unless you pay them a monthly subscription fee, and any mechanic who tries to bypass this and give you your whole engine's capability violates EUCD 6. BMW won't let you use the feature that auto-dims your high-beams when there's oncoming traffic, and once again, that can't be fixed by another company because of EUCD 6:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

Any business that relies on EUCD 6 is garbage and should be killed with fire. The global champions of this legal sabotage are all American, but the EU companies that copied their business models are also trash and the EU should be terminating them with extreme prejudice.

It's pretty remarkable that we've forgotten about the kind of reverse-engineering that EUCD 6 bans. This used to be totally normal. Providing tools to move data from one system to another – without permission from your old vendor – is a completely legitimate business.

The only reason we forgot that this stuff existed is that the US trade rep spent 25 years lobotomizing us all, threatening us with tariffs if we dared to do anything that disrupted American Big Tech. With those companies, it's always "disruption for thee, never for me."

In a few short months, Trump has sown the seeds of the destruction of one of the most world's pernicious "America First" systems. Now, it's in the EU's power to send it to a long-overdue grave.

"Mr Cook, Mr Nadella, Mr Ellison, Mr Pichai – tear down that wall!"

(Image: Armin Kübelbeck, CC BY-SA 4.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Cory Doctorow Thinks He Knows How to Fix the Internet https://slate.com/technology/2025/10/cory-doctorow-enshittification-internet-tech-silicon-valley.html

• How to Save the Internet From “Enshittification” https://jacobin.com/2025/10/internet-enshittification-antitrust-tech-doctorow

• Jeep software update bricks vehicles, leaves owners stranded https://www.thestack.technology/jeep-software-update-bricks-vehicles-leaves-owners-stranded/

• Anti-Monopolism as an Ideology of the Left https://lpeproject.org/blog/anti-monopolism-as-an-ideology-of-the-left/

• Lawyer Caught Using AI While Explaining to Court Why He Used AI https://www.404media.co/lawyer-using-ai-fake-citations/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Japanese court: links to news stories can’t use headlines for link-text https://web.archive.org/web/20060309190419/http://www.ridingsun.com/posts/1129257907.shtml

#20yrsago Understanding broadband regulation https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=557330

#20yrsago Anti-game wacko designs ultra-violent video game to prove games are violent https://web.archive.org/web/20051030003500/http://gc.advancedmn.com/article.php?artid=5883

#20yrsago Gilberto Gil in the Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/music/2005/oct/14/brazil.popandrock

#15yrsago BoomCases: self-powered amps built into old suitcases https://theboomcase.wordpress.com/gallery/

#15yrsago The Singularity won’t be heaven: Annalee Newitz https://web.archive.org/web/20101016204801/http://io9.com/5661534/why-the-singularity-isnt-going-to-happen

#15yrsago Webcam spying school settles with students, pays $1.2M in fees and damages https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna39631890

#15yrsago Rucker and Sterling’s new story: “Goodnight Moon” on Tor.com https://web.archive.org/web/20101016231350/http://www.tor.com/stories/2010/10/good-night-moon

#15yrsago Wonderful Japanese pudding ad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sEI1AUFJKw

#15yrsago Anatomical illustrations from Japan’s Edo period https://pinktentacle.com/2010/10/anatomical-illustrations-from-edo-period-japan/

#15yrsago Travel author sues DHS to make it obey the law with its vast traveller databases https://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/001887.html

#15yrsago Kevin Kelly’s WHAT TECHNOLOGY WANTS: how technology changes us and vice-versa https://memex.craphound.com/2010/10/13/kevin-kellys-what-technology-wants-how-technology-changes-us-and-vice-versa/

#10yrsago TPP requires countries to destroy security-testing tools (and your laptop) https://web.archive.org/web/20151020122940/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/white-hat-hackers-would-have-their-devices-destroyed-under-the-tpp

#10yrsago How to make “Dracula’s dentures” cookie sandwiches https://www.the-girl-who-ate-everything.com/draculas-dentures-for-halloween/

#10yrsago Playboy (circulation 800k, down from 5.6m) drops nude images https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/13/business/media/nudes-are-old-news-at-playboy.html

#10yrsago Glitchlife: Gallery of public Blue Screens of Death, including a world-beater https://web.archive.org/web/20151013003105/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/public-blue-screens-of-death-remind-us-that-life-is-a-farce

#10yrsago Bernie Sanders is beating all of Obama’s important 2008 records https://web.archive.org/web/20151013123107/https://www.alternet.org/election-2016/remember-obamas-historic-2008-presidential-run-bernie-sanders-so-far-exceeding-it

#10yrsago How to teach gerrymandering and its many subtle, hard problems https://mitesp.tumblr.com/post/130793404248/how-i-teach-gerrymandering

#10yrsago Police end round-the-clock Assange detail at London’s Ecuadorian embassy https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/police-stop-24-7-monitoring-wikileaks-founder-julian-assange-ecuadorian-embassy-1523634

#10yrsago CIA black-site torture survivors sue shrinks who made $85M overseeing CIA torture program https://theintercept.com/2015/10/13/former-u-s-detainees-sue-psychologists-responsible-for-cia-torture-program/

#10yrsago SRSLY, they want to put DRM in JPEGs https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/theres-no-drm-jpeg-lets-keep-it-way

#10yrsago Fury Road as a vintage run-and-gun side-scroller https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsXWTcVvCwQ

#10yrsago Information leakage shows DEA blew millions on the secret phone trackers it won’t admit it bought https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/oct/14/dea-cell-phone-trackers/

#10yrsago No, poor kids don’t struggle in school because their parents have small vocabularies https://newrepublic.com/article/123093/rich-kids-better-poor-kids-school-its-not-word-gap

#10yrsgo Thrust/parry/counter: the history of Web authentication http://blog.slaks.net/2015-10-13/web-authentication-arms-race-a-tale-of-two-security-experts/

#5yrsago How to spreadsheet https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/14/final_ver2/#csv

#5yrsago Prop 22 is a scam https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/14/final_ver2/#prop-22

#5yrsago What happened in Florida https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/14/final_ver2/#bush-v-gore

#5yrsago Pandemic shock doctrine vs internet freedom https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/14/final_ver2/#freedom-house

#5yrsago Beyond Cyberpunk https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/13/hopeful-disasters/#technologist-wizards

#5yrsago SF as intuition pump https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/13/hopeful-disasters/#narratives

#1yrago Dirty words are politically potent https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/#this-toilet-has-no-central-nervous-system

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Los Angeles: Enshittification with David Dayen (Diesel), Oct 16
  https://dieselbookstore.com/event/2025-10-16/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works with Jenny Odell (The Booksmith), Oct 20
  https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25

• PDX: Enshittification at Powell's, Oct 21
  https://www.powells.com/events/cory-doctorow-10-21-25

• Seattle: Enshittification and the Rot Economy, with Ed Zitron (Clarion West), Oct 22
  https://www.clarionwest.org/event/2025-deep-dives-cory-doctorow/

• Vancouver: Enshittification with David Moscrop (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 23
  https://www.showpass.com/2025-festival-39/

• Montreal: Montreal Attention Forum keynote, Oct 24
  https://www.attentionconferences.com/conferences/2025-forum

• Montreal: Enshittification at Librarie Drawn and Quarterly, Oct 24
  https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/3757420251024

• Ottawa: Enshittification (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 25
  https://writersfestival.org/events/fall-2025/enshittification

• Toronto: Enshittification with Dan Werb (Type Books), Oct 27
  https://www.instagram.com/p/DO81_1VDngu/?img_index=1

• Barcelona: Conferencia EUROPEA 4D (Virtual), Oct 28
  https://4d.cat/es/conferencia/

• Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469

• Miami: Cloudfest, Nov 6
  https://www.cloudfest.com/usa/

• Burbank: Burbank Book Festival, Nov 8
  https://www.burbankbookfestival.com/

• Lisbon: A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet, with Rabble (Web Summit), Nov 12
  https://websummit.com/sessions/lis25/92f47bc9-ca60-4997-bef3-006735b1f9c5/a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet/

• Cardiff: Hay Festival After Hours, Nov 13
  https://www.hayfestival.com/c-203-hay-festival-after-hours.aspx

• Oxford: Enshittification and Extraction: The Internet Sucks Now with Tim Wu (Oxford Internet Institute), Nov 14
  https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/events/enshittification-and-extraction-the-internet-sucks-now/

• London: Enshittification with Sarah Wynn-Williams and Chris Morris, Nov 15
  https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2025/event/cory-doctorow-with-sarah-wynn-williams

• Seattle: Neuroscience, AI and Society (University of Washington), Dec 4
  https://compneuro.washington.edu/news-and-events/neuroscience-ai-and-society/

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Enshittification (The Gist)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgBiv_KchI0

• Canadian tariffs with Avi Lewis
  https://plagal.wordpress.com/2025/10/15/cory-doctorow-talks-to-avi-lewis-about-his-proposal-to-fightback-against-trumps-tariff-attack/

• Enshittification (This Is Hell)
  https://thisishell.com/interviews/1864-cory-doctorow

• Enshittification (Computer Says Maybe)
  https://csm.transistor.fm/episodes/gotcha-enshittification-w-cory-doctorow

• Enshittification with Lina Khan (Brooklyn Public Library)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCX5Yst64Hw

Latest 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/

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "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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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

Today's links

• How to fix the UK housing crisis: Reconverting homes to human rights, rather than assets.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Theme park privacy; 3 strikes dead in Eire; HK ghost posters; Hotel wifi sucks; Facebook pays no UK tax; Econ research replicability crisis; Herd immunity.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

How to fix the UK housing crisis (permalink)

Here's a surprising stat: from 1845-1960, UK house prices pretty much kept pace with inflation – a house you'd bought 20 years ago could only be sold for more-or-less what you paid for it (technically, houses rose about 0.25% ahead of consumer prices).

From 1960-1979, house prices started to nudge ahead of inflation, averaging gains that were 1.75% higher than consumer prices. But it wasn't until 1980 that the annual above-inflation price increase of houses grew to 3%. Steve Keen's "Remedies for Ridiculous House Prices" explains what happened to make housing so eye-wateringly expensive (and how to make it affordable again):

https://profstevekeen.substack.com/p/remedies-for-ridiculous-house-prices

Keen unpacks just how dramatic this change is: since the Thatcher years, house prices have doubled every 23 years. Before 1960, the house prices rose so slowly that they would have taken 280 years to double (which is to say, the fate of most houses was to turn to rubble, not to double).

So what did Thatcher do to make homes so eye-wateringly expensive? The high-level explanation is that the UK – like much of the world – transformed its housing stock: not a way provide the basic human right to shelter, but rather, an asset:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/14/euthanasia-of-the-rentier/#georgeism

Transforming a human necessity into an asset is a terrible idea. Governments work to increase the price of assets owned by actors in their economy. But increasing the price of housing only benefits the minority who own houses, while everyone else – everyone who needs a roof over their head – suffers. For a comparison, imagine if our governments instituted a policy of making some other necessity as expensive as possible, say, food or water. Transforming shelter into an asset class was always going to end badly.

Keen is an econ prof, and the point of this piece isn't merely to observe this remarkable shift in the economics of having a home, but also to trace the policy choices that led us to this moment, and to propose policies that could change things so that everyone can have a home.

So what did Margaret Thatcher do to destroy the chances of everyday Britons to have a home? Well, this is Margaret Thatcher, so if you guessed the answer was "deregulation," you'd be right. Prior to Thatcher's deregulation, home loans in the UK mostly originated with "building societies," a specialized lender whose operations are fundamentally different from the operations of a bank.

Here's the difference: when a building society makes a home loan, it withdraws money from a regular bank account at a regular bank, much like your savings account. In order for your building society to credit your mortgage account by £100k, there must be a corresponding decrease of £100k in its savings account (just like when you send £10 to a friend, you have £10 less and they have £10 more).

But that's not how it works when a bank originates a loan. Banks are "fiscal agents" for the UK's central bank, the Bank of England. That means that banks can create new money, simply by crediting one of its depositors' accounts. When a bank loans you £100k to buy a house, £100k in new money is created. Banks don't raid other depositors' accounts for your loan – they make new money, out of thin air.

So after the bank originates your loan, your account has £100k more in it, and the bank has an IOU from you for £100k, which sits on its books as an asset. In the moment the money is created, the bank makes £100k in new money for its balance-sheet.

Every time a bank issues a new mortgage loan, the money supply increases – more money is added to the economy. Thatcher deregulated mortgage lending, and after that, the majority of UK mortgages came from banks, not building societies. Every new mortgage increased the supply of money in circulation in the UK.

As Keen writes, this precipitated an "explosion" in house prices – and in household debt, which rose from 20% of GDP to 80% of GDP by the time of the Great Financial Crisis. Since Thatcher, house prices have risen by 350% more than consumer prices.

Thatcher's deregulation "set off a vicious cycle": the existence of more mortgage debt made house prices rise (when banks supply more bidding money to buyers, buyers bid higher sums). As housing prices went up, housing could be used as collateral for still more loans, which encouraged homeowners to stake their homes to borrow money in order to buy more homes to rent out. Because they have so much collateral (an overpriced home), they can borrow so much (from banks that can create money) that they are able to outbid people who don't have a home yet and just want to buy a home so they can live in it.

This is Keen's diagnosis, but the real question is, what do we do about it? The UK housing situation has been vapor-locked, because there's a powerful voting and donating bloc of homeowners who want to keep house prices high, both to maintain their personal net worth, and to avoid having their "chained mortgages" collapse when prices fall and they suddenly no longer have enough collateral and the banks demand repayment.

This is where Keen's proposal gets really interesting. In this installment, he proposes two policies that break the deadlock, offering a glide-path out of the housing crisis, rather than a crash.

The first of these policies is deflationary – it will lower prices. It's called the "PILL" ("Property Income Limited Leverage").

With the PILL, the most a bank could offer a housebuyer for a mortgage loan would be some multiple of the rental income from the property they're buying. Say that multiple is 10, and the home you're trying to buy would rent out at £50k/year: the largest mortgage you'd be allowed to take would be £500k (even if you're not buying a home to rent it out, you'd still be subject to this cap, since potential rental income is a large determinant of the price of a home).

Keen notes that UK rents are really high, but property prices are even higher – property prices (and mortgages) have risen faster than rents. The average London home price is about 25x the annual rent it generates, and London mortgages are about 20x the annual rent for the properties those mortgages cover.

The PILL would cap mortgage issuance at the current multiple (so in London, about 25x annual rent), but that number would be gradually reduced, a few points per year, until it reaches about 10x annual rent. This will have the effect of making homes a much less attractive asset-class for speculators, gradually driving "investors" out of the market, so that the majority of homebuyers would be people who were in the market for somewhere to live.

This will make houses cheaper over time, and the majority of Britons (who can't afford to buy a home) would like this. But house-rich Boomers would not, and for good reason: the austerity-starved UK state has slashed benefits for everyone, and older people rely on selling or borrowing against their homes as a way to remain sheltered, fed, and cared for as they age.

How do we win those Boomers over and stop them from scuttling affordable housing (again)? That's where the second proposal kicks in: AHA (the "Affordable Housing Authority"). This is a system for making homes more valuable, offsetting some of the reductions from the PILL, but without denying homes to people looking for somewhere to live.

The biggest barrier to buying a home isn't the price of the home – it's the price of the home and the price of the mortgage. Decades of mortgage interest vastly increase the total cost of a home, and the interest on a monthly mortgage can make the difference between an affordable home and one that makes you "house poor" (where the cost of your home eats up so much of your income that you struggle to pay for heating, groceries, transportation, etc).

Here's Keen's math: say you're a median UK household (£37k/year in disposable income) and you buy a median house (£270k) with a 10% deposit (what Americans call a "down-payment"), at 7% interest. Over a 25-year mortgage, your monthly payments will be £20.6k/year, more than half of your disposable income.

Not only is this more than you can afford – it's also so much that you just won't get a mortgage from a bank. They'll look at those numbers and decide that you can't afford to pay back this loan (they'd be right, too).

But what if we trim that interest rate to zero? At 0% interest, the annual payments for your mortgage go from £20.6/year to £9,300 per year – an easily affordable sum for the median household.

So the question is, why do we pay so much to the banks in interest? The Econ 101 answer is that banks take a risk when they loan out their depositors' funds, and they need a reward and incentive to take that risk. But banks don't lend out deposits: they create deposits. When you take out a £100k mortgage, the bank adds £100k to your account, without taking it from anywhere else. Banks are "fiscal agents" of the national bank, and they are permitted to create money this way – and then charge you rent (interest) on that money they can create for free.

Keen's AHA is a different kind of lender, a publicly owned one that creates money in exactly the same way as banks do, but without charging interest. The AHA is charged with offering loans solely to people trying to buy a home who have been priced out of the market. These loans will drive property prices up (by putting more buyers into the system), offsetting some of the price declines created by the PILL.

Other than the fact that AHA loans won't come with interest, these loans will work like regular mortgages: the borrower will pay them off every month, until they have paid back the entire principal. If they default on the mortgage, AHA can foreclose on the house and sell it off to get its money back. AHA always gets its money back and costs nothing – on balance – to operate.

Do interest free loans sound like a communist plot to you? Keen asks us to consider such noted socialist proponents for this ideas as Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, who railed against financing the Muscle Shoals hyrdroelectric plant with bank loans, instead insisting that the national bank should simply create the money to make those loans:

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1921/12/06/98768710.html?pageNumber=6

Here's Edison:

[Ford] thinks it’s stupid, and so do I, that for the loan of $30,000,000 of their own money the people of the United States should be compelled to pay $66,000,000—that is what it amounts to, with interest. People who will not turn a shovel of dirt nor contribute a pound of material will collect more money from the United States than will the people who supply the material and do the work. That is the terrible thing about interest.

As Keen points out, it's not merely that the banks that currently issue mortgages don't "turn a shovel of dirt or contribute a pound of material" – they simply will not issue a mortgage to a median buyer. The median buyer can't get a mortgage, so the system is rigged to make them pay someone else's mortgage through their monthly rents, every month until they die.

AHA cuts the banks "out of a market they won't even enter."

Now, it's true that current financial rules (foolishly) ban the Treasury from having a negative balance at the Central Bank. But we don't have to repeal those rules to make this work: the Treasury can offset AHA loans by offering bonds to private banks.

These two policies create "winners all round." New home buyers can afford a home. Banks get interest from AHA bonds to offset losses from limits on mortgage lending. Current home owners get a cushion to protect their net worth even as homes become more affordable.

The loser is the investment sector, the City boys who buy and sell mortgage debt. And you know, fuck those guys.

Keen finishes by teasing one more policy prescription that he thinks will tie this all together: the intriguingly named Modern Debt Jubilee, a way to "to reduce private debt, but in a way that doesn’t cause an economic collapse," which he says he'll cover in his next post. Can't wait!

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Mass Organizing Call with Naomi Klein and Anjali Appadurai https://act.lewisforleader.ca/organizercall

• How close are we to solid state batteries for electric vehicles? https://arstechnica.com/cars/2025/10/how-close-are-we-to-solid-state-batteries-for-electric-vehicles/

• The Fluke That Brought Us The Discreet Eliminators Series https://horrortree.com/the-fluke-that-brought-us-the-discreet-eliminators-series/

• Q Timex 1975 SSQ Digital Reissue https://timex.com/products/q-timex-1975-ssq-digital-reissue-38mm-stainless-steel-bracelet-watch-tw2y06100

• The App Store Was Always Authoritarian https://infrequently.org/2025/10/the-app-store-was-always-authoritarian/

• The first evidence of a take-off in solar in Africa https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/the-first-evidence-of-a-take-off-in-solar-in-africa/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago TV on the Internet versus IPTV https://web.archive.org/web/20051013090228/http://gigaom.com/2005/10/11/iptv-versus-tv-over-ip/

#20yrsago Privacy and access-control in America’s theme-parks https://archive.epic.org/privacy/themepark/

#20yrsago Why hotel WiFi sucks https://web.archive.org/web/20090917145044/https://wifinetnews.com/archives/2005/10/ny_times_v_wall_st_journal_on_hotel_internet_fees.html

#20yrsago Vet’s obit: “send acerbic letters to Republicans” https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/chicagotribune/name/theodore-heller-obituary?id=2437473

#15yrsago Canon’s printer/photocopier blocks jobs based on keywords https://www.itnews.com.au/news/canon-blocks-copy-jobs-by-keyword-235047

#15yrsago Tom Waits and Preservation Hall Jazz Band release limited-edition 78RPM record and matching limited edition record-player http://www.tomwaits.com/news/article/108/Preservation_Hall_Jazz_Band_Tom_Waits_On_78_rpm_Vinyl/

#15yrsago Koster’s “Fundamentals of Game Design” https://www.raphkoster.com/2010/10/12/the-fundamentals-of-game-design/

#15yrsago Pratchett’s I Shall Wear Midnight, sentimental and fun book about a witch among enemies https://memex.craphound.com/2010/10/12/pratchetts-i-shall-wear-midnight-sentimental-and-fun-book-about-a-witch-among-enemies/

#15yrsago Depressing million-dollar London homes https://www.oobject.com/category/depressing-million-dollar-london-property/

#15yrsago Library of Congress: Copyright is killing sound archiving https://www.osnews.com/story/23888/us-library-of-congress-copyright-is-destroying-historic-audio/

#15yrsago Irish High Court strikes down “3 strikes” copyright rule https://web.archive.org/web/20101012083637/http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2010/1011/breaking32.html

#15yrsago Rise Again: would you rather be killed by zombies or Blackwater mercs? https://memex.craphound.com/2010/10/11/rise-again-would-you-rather-be-killed-by-zombies-or-blackwater-mercs/

#10yrsago Funny because it’s true: “Tories to build thousands of affordable second homes” https://www.thedailymash.co.uk/politics/politics-headlines/tories-to-build-thousands-of-affordable-second-homes-20151008102712

#10yrsago Facebook UK made £105M in 2014, paid £35M in bonuses, and will pay £4,327 in tax https://www.theguardian.com/global/2015/oct/11/facebook-paid-4327-corporation-tax-despite-35-million-staff-bonuses

#10yrsago Economics research considered unreplicable https://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/feds/2015/files/2015083pap.pdf

#10yrsago The hockey-stick from hell: US incarceration per 100,000 people, 1890-today https://www.vox.com/2015/10/11/9497161/incarceration-history

#10yrsago Read: Austin Grossman’s moving text-adventure story “The Fresh Prince of Gamma World” https://www.wired.com/2015/10/excerpt-fresh-prince-of-gamma-world/

#5yrsago The herd immunity conspiracy https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/12/redeeming-hackers/#herd-immunity

#5yrsago Attack Surface in Wired https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/12/redeeming-hackers/#origin-stories

#5yrsago Basic income works https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/11/means-testing-conundrum/#ubi-v-bi

#5yrsago Hong Kong's ghost protest posters https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/11/means-testing-conundrum/#seeing-ghosts

#1yrago Lina Khan's future is the future of the Democratic Party – and America https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/11/democracys-antitrust-paradox/#there-will-be-an-out-and-out-brawl

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Chicago: How Platforms Die with Rick Perlstein (University Club), Oct 14
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/how-platforms-die-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1747916117159

• Los Angeles: Enshittification with David Dayen (Diesel), Oct 16
  https://dieselbookstore.com/event/2025-10-16/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works with Jenny Odell (The Booksmith), Oct 20
  https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25

• PDX: Enshittification at Powell's, Oct 21
  https://www.powells.com/events/cory-doctorow-10-21-25

• Seattle: Enshittification and the Rot Economy, with Ed Zitron (Clarion West), Oct 22
  https://www.clarionwest.org/event/2025-deep-dives-cory-doctorow/

• Vancouver: Enshittification with David Moscrop (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 23
  https://www.showpass.com/2025-festival-39/

• Montreal: Montreal Attention Forum keynote, Oct 24
  https://www.attentionconferences.com/conferences/2025-forum

• Montreal: Enshittification at Librarie Drawn and Quarterly, Oct 24
  https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/3757420251024

• Ottawa: Enshittification (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 25
  https://writersfestival.org/events/fall-2025/enshittification

• Toronto: Enshittification with Dan Werb (Type Books), Oct 27
  https://www.instagram.com/p/DO81_1VDngu/?img_index=1

• Barcelona: Conferencia EUROPEA 4D (Virtual), Oct 28
  https://4d.cat/es/conferencia/

• Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469

• Miami: Cloudfest, Nov 6
  https://www.cloudfest.com/usa/

• Burbank: Burbank Book Festival, Nov 8
  https://www.burbankbookfestival.com/

• Lisbon: A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet, with Rabble (Web Summit), Nov 12
  https://websummit.com/sessions/lis25/92f47bc9-ca60-4997-bef3-006735b1f9c5/a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet/

• Cardiff: Hay Festival After Hours, Nov 13
  https://www.hayfestival.com/c-203-hay-festival-after-hours.aspx

• London: Enshittification with Sarah Wynn-Williams and Chris Morris, Nov 15
  https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2025/event/cory-doctorow-with-sarah-wynn-williams

• Seattle: Neuroscience, AI and Society (University of Washington), Dec 4
  https://compneuro.washington.edu/news-and-events/neuroscience-ai-and-society/

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Enshittification (Computer Says Maybe)
  https://csm.transistor.fm/episodes/gotcha-enshittification-w-cory-doctorow

• Enshittification (Democracy Now!)
  https://www.democracynow.org/2025/10/10/cory_doctorow

• Enshittification with Lina Khan (Brooklyn Public Library)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCX5Yst64Hw

• Enshittification with Adam Conover (Factually)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1EKQidRooc

• Enshittification (Everyday Anarchism)
  https://www.everydayanarchism.com/168-enshittification-cory-doctorow/

Latest 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/

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "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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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