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PLURALISTIC

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09.10.2025 à 13:25

Pluralistic: California bans algorithmic price-fixing (09 Oct 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3394 mots)


Today's links


A group of businessmen, sitting around a boardroom table. They are staring at the bear from the California flag, who is standing on the table, his eyes glowing red, and blood dripping from his muzzle and pooling on the table.

California bans algorithmic price-fixing (permalink)

As the Marxist pamphleteer Adam Smith wrote in his Leninist textbook The Wealth of Nations, "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."

For a commie, that Adam Smith sure had a fine grasp of the business mindset. Price-fixing conspiracies are as old as the lumber barons who gouged Noah, and they're illegal as hell.

But price-gougers gonna gouge, and for most of the past 40 years, regulators have been monumentally disinterested in protecting the public from these ripoffs. All our regulators asked of the price-gougers was that they come up with the thinnest, least-convincing comb-over and in return, these regulators would pretend not to notice the glaring bald-spot shining through.

The one weird trick that these guys have hit upon is to use industry-wide "pricing consultancies" – clearinghouses that pretend to offer individualized price advice to each seller in a market. In reality what these companies do is aggregate all the prices charged by every major seller in the market, then advise all of them to raise their prices in sync:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/24/price-discrimination/

When we talk about "greedflation," we don't just mean one seller – a major grocery chain, say – raising prices because they know they've got a regional lock on their market. That happens, but far more pernicious is when all the sellers get together to raise the price of goods, via a brokerage that lets them pretend (unconvincingly) that they're just getting "price advice."

Take Agri-Stats, a conspiracy in plain sight that gathers in pricing from all the major meat processors and then tells them all to jack up the price of meat:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy

Then there's Realpage, a conspiracy that gathers rental prices from all the landlords in your town and "advises" them all to jack up prices. Landlords who don't obey this "advice" get kicked out of the conspiracy:

https://popular.info/p/feds-raid-corporate-landlord-escalating

These "price consultancies" are the reason you can't afford a hamburger or your apartment anymore. During the Biden administration, the Federal Trade Commission was working towards a nationwide ban on this stuff:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/24/gouging-the-all-seeing-eye/#i-spy

Of course, after Trump took office, his FTC canceled all that work and instead set up a snitch line where FTC employees could report on each other for being "woke." And, you know, fair: making sure that no one who works for the federal government has a pronoun is far more important than making sure you can afford to eat dinner and sleep indoors.

But (as the saying goes) the states are the laboratories of democracy. State legislatures are (sometimes) stepping in to fill the voids where Trump has failed the American people. That's what's just happened in California, the world's fourth largest economy, where Governor Newsom has just signed AB325 into law, and banned these price consultancies:

https://legiscan.com/CA/text/AB325/id/3269757

Specifically, the law makes it "unlawful for a person to use or distribute a common pricing algorithm if the person coerces another person to set or adopt a recommended price or commercial term recommended by the common pricing algorithm for the same or similar products or services."

As Matt Stoller writes, this may seem like small potatoes, but it's actually a huge ideological victory, and marks a major new milestone in the long fight to slay the political ideology that welcomes oligarchy:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/how-to-overturn-an-oligarchy

Stoller recounts the history of this pro-oligarch movement, and describes how it began by rejecting earlier Supreme Court decisions that banned price coercion – like when a cartel forces its members to adopt higher prices. The Chicago School – the faction of economists who took over the world in the Reagan years – rejected any kind of politics that took account of the role that power played in the economy. They insisted that if workers accepted a starvation wage, it was because they had a "revealed preference" for going hungry – and not because they needed a union to force their bosses to pay them enough to live on.

The Chicago School replaced this kind of power-centric analysis with something they called "efficiency":

If you were coerced by a dominant supplier, but an economist showed there was no loss of output, then that was just vigorous competition. Gradually, the notion that the antitrust laws protect business from economic violence fell away. The result is an economy of coercion machines, from Amazon to pharmacy benefit managers to RealPage.

The mere existence of a law – in 2025, nearly half a century into the neoliberal era – that mentions "coercion" marks a profoud shift in ideology, a recovery of the idea that we are always under threat of "a conspiracy against the public…some contrivance to raise prices."

In a way, this just proves how right Trump is: the American way of life really is under threat from the radical Marxist ideology…of Adam Smith.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Student finds GPS bug on car, uploads photo, FBI demands to have their warrantless bug back https://web.archive.org/web/20101009211920/https://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/10/fbi-tracking-device/

#15yrsago THE UNIDENTIFIED: dystopian YA about education transformed into a giant, heavily sponsored game https://memex.craphound.com/2010/10/08/the-unidentified-dystopian-ya-about-education-transformed-into-a-giant-heavily-sponsored-game/

#10yrsago Court tells millionaire yoga troll Bikram Choudhury that poses can’t be copyrighted https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2015/10/08/13-55763.pdf

#10yrsago Jimmy Wales calls UK’s proposed crypto ban “moronic” https://web.archive.org/web/20151009011752/https://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/e-regulation/jimmy-wales-wikipedia-encryption-178365

#10yrsago Prisoners’ debate team trounces national champs from Harvard – Cory Doctorow's MEMEX https://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/oct/07/harvards-prestigious-debate-team-loses-to-new-york-prison-inmates

#5yrsago Good Intentions, Bad Inventions https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/08/hype-beast/#moral-panics

#1yrago Google's new phones can't stop phoning home https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/08/water-thats-not-wet/#pixelated

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF

07.10.2025 à 17:17

Pluralistic: They're just trying to earn a buck (07 Oct 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4936 mots)


Today's links


The Capitol building. In the foreground are two gigantic pigs - the size of elephants. They are being fed by a male figure whose head has been replaced with a shadowy hacker's hoodie. The background is a dark, blown up US$100 bill with Franklin's eyes gone black.

They're just trying to earn a buck (permalink)

Life as a prisoner of the neoliberal mind palace must suck: it's a world where every person who suffers under predatory business practices is a "consumer" who has "revealed a preference" for being screwed:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/07/water-thats-not-wet/

And the companies doing the screwing? They're blameless: they're just rationally pursuing profits, upholding the fiduciary duty dictated by "shareholder supremacy":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/18/falsifiability/#figleaves-not-rubrics

In this Hayek-pilled cosmology, businesses are prisoners of the profit imperative and can be forgiven for everything, and the public are "consumers" whose bad choices are to blame for all the world's woes. It's a worldview with no room in it for political agency and no theory of power:

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-qualia/

The problem, of course, is that power is real, and it sets the rules of this game. Even if you stipulate that it is management's duty to do whatever they can to make the largest profit for the company's owners, "whatever they can do" isn't a free-floating concept. It is inescapably tethered to the rules of the game set by politics (that is, power).

A company cannot charge infinity dollars and pay its workers zero dollars. In the former case, customers might reasonably take their business elsewhere. In the latter case, workers might sell their labor elsewhere.

But if companies can capture their regulators and hijack power to change the rules of the game in their favor, they can go a long way to achieving both goals. An airport concessionaire on the sanitary side of the TSA checkpoint can charge $14 for a bottle of filtered tap water because exiting the checkpoint to shop elsewhere is a multi-hour affair and you'll miss your flight.

Now, the government could intervene here. The federal, state and local regulators overseeing the airport could require price-parity with the prevailing rate in town for water. They could ban obvious scams like stocking weird-sized water (or water with weird characteristics) at the airport that have no in-town equivalents. They could fill the airport with filtered water refill stations.

On the other hand, if the merchant can convince the government to collude with it in rigging the game, they can remove all the water fountains from the airport, and switch the bathroom taps to a non-potable "environmentally responsible" water source.

Likewise, an employer that can bind their workers to noncompete "agreements" can make it so difficult to switch jobs that workers accept a lower wage out of fear that their employer will use the power of the state to ruin them if they take a better job elsewhere:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/09/germanium-valley/#i-cant-quit-you

Even better, if the employer makes workers sign a "training repayment agreement provision" (TRAP) clause, they can literally ask the government to fine workers thousands of dollars for quitting their jobs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/04/its-a-trap/#a-little-on-the-nose

When a firm rips you off or abuses you and gets away with it, that's not "fulfilling their fiduciary duty," it's cheating. They're either buying off the state that is supposed to protect you, or enlisting it to help them screw you. You don't need to make excuses for these fuckers. You can hate them and complain and warn other people. You can make them pariahs and shout mean things at them if you see them on the street.

Take Snapchat: the company has just done a bait-and-switch on its users, announcing that it will erase their saved photos and videos. Ironically, it calls these "memories," which means that it is threatening to erase its users' memories. Users who don't want their memories erased will have to pay stonking monthly fees:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g5ypl6nkzo

Now, if Snapchat had an API that let you migrate your photos to a rival platform – or if the law would permit a rival to make a scraper to accomplish this without their help – then the rate that Snapchat chose for its monthly fee would reflect a calculation on these lines, "This is how long it takes to click one link on a rival service and port my account to it, and this is how much I value my time at, so this is how much I will pay to avoid making that one click."

But because Snapchat decides how you use its service, it can set a much higher price, calculated thus: "Here is how long it would take me to download gigabytes of saved storage, figure out how the filesystem on my device works, verify these files, and upload them to a rival platform, and here's how much I value my time, so this is how much I will pay to avoid this enormous, tedious task."

They get to charge you more because they are fucking you over, and they are fucking you over so they can charge you more.

If you heard about Snapchat's memory tax and thought to yourself, "Oh, those fools who signed up for Snapchat thinking it would be free forever were rooked by the world's most transparent ruse and have no one to blame but themselves!" then you've been rooked. The price that Snapchat arrived at – and Snapchat users' ability to get a better price – are both determined by regulation that tilts in favor of corporations at the public expense. No one came down off a mountain with two stone tablets bearing Snapchat's rate card.

Nor is it your job or mine to figure out how Snapchat can keep its lights on. The question, "Well, how can Snapchat keep providing a free service if it doesn't charge certain users through the nose?" is no more those users' problem than, "How can Snapchat users preserve their memories if Snapchat charges them more than they can afford, every month, until they die?" is Snapchat's problem.

"How can Snapchat stay in business?" sounds like a Snapchat problem, not a you problem (unless you work there or own its stock). Snapchat isn't a charity. It's a venture-backed, for-profit entity listed on the NYSE and NASDAQ. In a just world, we'd say that the public has the right to advocacy and protection from the state that is accountable to it, and companies that make bad decisions about their business models can eat shit and be bought out of bankruptcy by smarter people who don't blow up their own balance sheets.

If you want to live in a better world, then shut up that nagging, neoliberalism-trained reflex that treats corporations as charitable enterprises and "consumers" as the secret legislators of the market and the ultimate authors of all its dysfunctions.

Even for their most ardent defenders, markets are supposed to "process aggregated demand signals" about the willingness of different parties to accept different offers. But if the only "demand signal" you can offer is a binary "take it or leave it," that's a very thin data set (and it gets thinner still when "leave it" requires a time machine so you can go back to before you started and warn yourself that the offer's going to be altered adversely in the future).

There are a range of ways to respond to a worsening offer from a merchant, well beyond "take it or leave it." You can complain. You can sue. You can picket. You can boycott. You can spraypaint "GREEDY PIGS" on the corporate headquarters. This is a rich set of informational inputs for the market indeed.

When it comes to digital services, you have even more opportunities to program the great market computer in the sky (all hail the infallible market computer!). For example, if a company makes the ads on its webpage too obnoxious and invasive, you can install an ad-blocker, a thing that 51% of all web users have done, making it the largest consumer boycott in human history:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

An ad-blocker enriches the take-it-or-leave it, thin data-set of internet usage patterns by allowing users to make a counter-offer: "How about nah?"

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

Of course, no one has ever installed an ad-blocker for an app, because that's a felony under Section 1201 of the DMCA. An app is just a web-page skinned in the right kind of IP to make it a crime to protect yourself while you use it. That's why companies – like Snapchat – are insatiably horny to get you to switch from using websites to using apps.

Ultimately, I just don't think neoliberal economists believe in what they're selling. They don't want a market of "demand-signals" that can be used to guide allocations. They just want to help the greediest, worst people on earth screw you as hard as they can, all day long.

And then blame you for it.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Lawmaker: I'll fight the Broadcast Flag https://web.archive.org/web/20071114231008/http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2005/10/07/surprise_your_reps_actually_listen_when_you_complain_about_the_broadcast_flag.php

#20yrsago Google launches a feedreader https://web.archive.org/web/20090210070551/http://www.google.com/intl/en/googlereader/tour.html

#20yrsago Soviet PCs http://www.homecomputer.de/pages/easteurope_ussr.html

#20yrsago Soviet pocket-calculators https://web.archive.org/web/20051013063203/https://rk86.com/frolov/calcolle.htm

#20yrsago Bill Gates shouts at Sony CEO that his crappy DRM is less crappy https://web.archive.org/web/20051013082800/http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/oct2005/tc2005106_9074_tc024.htm

#20yrsago Guy who was busted “for using lynx” found guilty https://web.archive.org/web/20051101013155/http://news.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020330,39226548,00.htm

#20yrsago It’s legal to break DRM in Australia, sez High Court https://www.smh.com.au/technology/court-allows-gamers-to-modify-consoles-20051006-gdm7bs.html

#15yrsago HOWTO make a Storm Trooper helmet out of a milk jug http://www.filthwizardry.com/2010/10/milk-jug-storm-trooper-helmet.html

#15yrsago Nigerian Sesame Street will feature HIV-positive muppet https://web.archive.org/web/20101006182715/https://edition.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/TV/10/06/sesame.street.nigeria/index.html

#15yrsago Norwegian musicians’ income goes up by 66% 1999-2009, while record sales decline by 50% https://appliedabstractions.com/2010/10/06/record-companies-lose-artists-gain/

#15yrsago USA caves on secret Internet treaty https://web.archive.org/web/20101007044555/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5352/125/

#15yrsago NM cops raid Montessori School greenhouse for pot, find tomatoes https://web.archive.org/web/20101008023326/https://www.santafenewmexican.com/localnews/pot-raid-at-school-turns-up-tomatoes/

#15yrsago Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From: multidisciplinary hymn to diversity, openness and creativity https://memex.craphound.com/2010/10/06/steven-johnsons-where-good-ideas-come-from-multidisciplinary-hymn-to-diversity-openness-and-creativity/

#10yrsago Kim Davis isn’t doing her job. Again. https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/oct/07/kim-davis-emails/

#10yrsago Howto make Zombie Mouth cupcakes https://www.instructables.com/Zombie-Mouth-Cupcake/#10yrsago

#10yrsago Algorithmic guilt: defendants must be able to inspect source code in forensic devices https://web.archive.org/web/20190421120433/https://slate.com/technology/2015/10/defendants-should-be-able-to-inspect-software-code-used-in-forensics.html

#10yrsago Make a booze flask hidden in a baby https://www.instructables.com/baby-flask/

#10yrsago NYPD steal black woman banker’s BMW, commit her when she asks for it back https://web.archive.org/web/20151002030408/https://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/shes-banker-owns-bmw-and-obama-follows-her-twitter-ny-cops-still-threw-innocent

#10yrsago How guards and prosecutors retaliate against solitary confinement prisoners who blow the whistle https://web.archive.org/web/20151006195426/https://www.vice.com/read/unauthorized-group-activity-0000772-v22n10

#10yrsago What the barcode on your discarded boarding-pass reveals https://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/10/whats-in-a-boarding-pass-barcode-a-lot/

#10yrsago Bankers’ “Vulnerability Index”: scoring employees’ desperation https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=521

#10yrsago NZ government leaks on TPP: copyright terms will go to life plus 70 years https://web.archive.org/web/20151007185923/https://www.beehive.govt.nz/sites/all/files/TPP-Q&A-Oct-2015.pdf

#10yrsago What’s the objectively optimal copyright term? https://timharford.com/2015/10/copyrights-and-wrongs/

#10yrsago Genocide, not genes: indigenous peoples’ genetic alcoholism is a racist myth https://www.theverge.com/2015/10/2/9428659/firewater-racist-myth-alcoholism-native-americans

#10yrsago Global coalition tells Facebook to kill its Real Names policy https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/global-coalition-facebook-authentic-names-are-authentically-dangerous-your-users

#10yrsago Primer explains the spying tech your local cops are using https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/law-enforcement-tech-civilian-oversight-primer

#10yrsago EU top court: NSA spying means US servers are not a fit home for Europeans’ data https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/europes-court-justice-nsa-surveilance

#5yrsago America's wild hog "pig bomb" https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/06/hybrid-vigor/#porcs

#5yrsago Maine's drunken, thieving, bumbling, child-porning public defenders https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/06/hybrid-vigor/#gideon-v-wainwright

#5yrsago Congress's Big Tech trustbusting smackdown https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/07/google-and-platos-cave/#break-em-up

#5yrsago Hackers can remotely lock IoT cock-cages https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/07/google-and-platos-cave/#power-play

#1yrago China hacked Verizon, AT&T and Lumen using the FBI's backdoor https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/07/foreseeable-outcomes/#calea

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF

06.10.2025 à 16:36

Pluralistic: Apple's unlawful evil (06 Oct 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4277 mots)


Today's links


A squadron of four heavily armed riot cops with batons in their hands. They wear visors, Oakleys and gaiters. Their badges have been replaced with chromed Apple logos. In the background is an Apple 'Think Different' wordmark. Looming in the foreground is Trump's candyfloss hair.

Apple's unlawful evil (permalink)

Apple has removed ICEBlock, a totally legal app that helps people track the movements of the masked snatch-squads who illegally terrorize brown people in America's cities, capitulating to a warrantless demand from Trump's DoJ boss Pam Bondi:

https://www.404media.co/iceblock-owner-after-apple-removes-app-we-are-determined-to-fight-this/

In killing ICEBlock, Apple insists that it is only complying with lawful orders, which is patently untrue. Pam Bondi has no authority to order the censorship of this legal speech tool, which is likely why she didn't seek a court order and instead merely rage-tweeted about it. This was sufficient to get Apple CEO Tim Cook, the billionaire who moved Apple's manufacturing to Chinese sweatshops where working conditions are so brutal that they require suicide nets, to cave in.

Apple does not permit its iPhone customers to install software unless it is delivered via their App Store. They claim they do so in order to protect their customers from their customers' own bad choices about which apps to install. But time and again, Apple has shown that they exercise this control over their users to pursue their own ends, blocking:

  • A dictionary (because it contained swear words);

  • A game that simulated working in an Apple sweatshop;

  • An informative app that cataloged civilian casualties of US drone strikes;

  • The Tumblr app because some Tumblr blogs contained adult content; and

  • Working VPN apps for the entire nation of China.

Apple uses its app store control to extract 30 cents out of every dollar spent by its customers in the apps they use. That's a 30%, economy-wide, worldwide tax on news outlets and podcasts that collects subscriptions through apps, Patreon performers whose subscribers pay by app and games publishers who sell via the app store.

Apple also uses its app store control to block rival browser engines (every browser on iOS is just a reskinned version of Safari). Apple's own browser engine, Webkit, is riddled with longstanding, grave security vulnerabilities, and there is no way to distribute more secure browsers on iOS:

https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/apples-browser-engine-ban-persists-even-under-the-dma/

Apple claims that it must be able to override its customers' choices about which software they'd like to run, lest those customers make foolish software choices and compromise their own security. Bruce Schneier calls this "feudal security," in which a digital warlord offers you sanctuary from the internet's roving bandits within the mercenary-studded walls of his impenetrable fortress. The problem is that when the warlord decides to attack you, the fortress becomes a prison, and you are rendered helpless:

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

Normally, the safety problems of feudal security are digital, but with ICEBlock, they are very, very physical. ICE is kidnapping our neighbors and sending them to offshore and onshore gulags. Of the 1,600 people illegally detained in Alligator Auschwitz, two thirds cannot be located. They have disappeared:

https://www.democracynow.org/2025/9/25/alligator_alcatraz

In removing ICEBlock, Apple has deprived its customers of a vital tool for evading these kidnapping, murdering, masked thugs.

ICE moved from targeting "the worst of the worst" to targeting "people here illegally" to "people who look foreign" to "people who live in cities":

https://federate.social/@mattblaze/115323465203575305

You know who would have been at the top of that list? Steve Jobs, who died 14 years ago today:

https://www.macrumors.com/2025/10/05/remembering-steve/

Steve Jobs was "the anchor baby of an activist Arab muslim who came to the US on a student visa and had a child out of wedlock":

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

He is exactly the sort of person that Trump wants to deport.

Jobs isn't the only foreigner whose company is helping Trump round up and disappear foreigners. Google – co-founded by Soviet refugee Sergey Brin – has killed RedDot, a similar tool to ICEBlock:

https://www.neowin.net/news/following-apple-google-pulls-ice-spotting-app-red-dot-from-play-store/

Google has also announced that they will nonconsensually update every Android device in the world to prevent their owners from installing software that Google hasn't approved:

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

When China hacked Gmail in order to target dissidents, Sergey Brin unilaterally pulled the company out of China, gripped by visceral horror of his platform being used for totalitarian oppression. Today, Brin is taking away his customers' best tool for evading ICE kidnappers on behalf of a self-declared "dictator." Hey, Sergey, one Soviet refugee's son to another, that's some pretty Vichy bullshit, landsman.

Under Trump's policies, neither Apple nor Google would exist today. These companies both claim that they have to "obey the law" but this isn't following a lawful order – it's going above and beyond the law to help a dictator kidnap their customers.

When China turned on Google's users, Google left the country. When the European Union ordered Apple to open up to third party app stores, Apple threatened to leave Europe:

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

But when Pam Bondi ordered Apple and Google to help her round up their own customers, Brin and Cook didn't even ask for a court order.

You could not ask for a better example of the failure of feudal security. Nor could you ask for a better rebuttal to the "Surveillance Capitalism" claim that Google is a "rogue capitalist" (because it spies on you for profit) while Apple is a good capitalist (because they extract money, not private data):

https://pluralistic.net/HowToDestroySurveillanceCapitalism

Apple spies on you, of course. And because they trap you in the App Store's airtight bubble, they block you from installing any software that would protect you from Apple's surveillance. And now, Apple has thrown in with the Trump regime's most violent, human-rights invading program: mass kidnappings and disappearances of thousands of our neighbors.

Truly, everyone's a "rogue capitalist" now. It's almost like the problem with companies isn't whether their business model is based on showing you ads or charging you money, but rather, whether they can abuse you for profit and get away with it.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Ebook DRM that encourages identity theft gets a huge makeover https://web.archive.org/web/20051011041018/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004026.php

#20yrsago Alternate reality game turns online poker into tombstone parties in cemetaries https://web.archive.org/web/20130514004112/https://42entertainment.com/work/lastcallpoker

#20yrsago Reporter vows to fight DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20051210140945/https://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=1952

#20yrsago Library of Congress: Most sound recordings aren’t available https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub133/contents/

#15yrsago T-Mobile sneaks “rootkit” into G2 phones – reinstalls locked-down OS after jailbreaking https://web.archive.org/web/20101009072029/https://oti.newamerica.net/blogposts/2010/newest_google_android_cell_phone_contains_unexpected_feature_a_malicious_root_kit-380

#15yrsago XKCD’s Online Communities map, part 2 – the online world, visualized with loads of funny https://xkcd.com/802/

#15yrsago KILL THE DEAD: Kadrey’s grisly, hard-boiled sequel to SANDMAN SLIM https://memex.craphound.com/2010/10/05/kill-the-dead-kadreys-grisly-hard-boiled-sequel-to-sandman-slim/

#15yrsago Security company ad tricks people into thinking their houses were burgled https://copyranter.blogspot.com/2010/10/adt-shows-you-how-easy-it-is-to-break.html

#15yrsago Firefighters watch as house burns to the ground: owner had not paid annual firefighting fees https://web.archive.org/web/20101003021723/https://www.wpsdlocal6.com/news/local/firefighters-watch-as-home-burns-to-the-ground-104052668.html

#15yrsago Sky Marshals to lose their cushy first-class seats? https://web.archive.org/web/20160521034617/https://www.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052748703431604575521832473932878-lMyQjAxMTAwMDIwOTEyNDkyWj.html

#15yrsago Michael Swanwick writes a story about autumn on fallen leaves https://www.flickr.com/photos/54366973@N04/5035946705/in/photostream/

#15yrsago Why the copyright wars matter: a reply to Helienne Lindvall https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/oct/05/free-online-content-cory-doctorow

#15yrsago William Gibson nails my philosophy in life https://memex.craphound.com/2010/10/04/william-gibson-nails-my-philosophy-in-life/

#10yrsago Car accidents aren’t accidents https://www.wired.com/2015/10/stop-calling-daughters-death-car-accident/

#10yrsago How a romance-scam victim laundered $1.1M worth of other victims’ money https://www.wired.com/2015/10/online-dating-made-woman-pawn-global-crime-plot/

#10yrsago Snowden broke a nondisclosure EULA in order to uphold his Constitutional oath https://www.aaronswartzday.org/snowden-oath/

#10yrsago What it’s like to do a lockdown drill with kindergarten kids https://web.archive.org/web/20141029062211/https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/rehearsing-for-death-a-pre-k-teacher-on-the-trouble-with-lockdown-drills/2014/10/28/4ab456ea-5eb2-11e4-9f3a-7e28799e0549_story.html

#10yrsago Forget tidying: losing your precious possessions is the real “life-changing magic” https://medium.com/chrysaora-weekly/the-life-changing-magic-of-losing-shit-18122103f499

#10yrsago UK Chancellor: I must cut tax benefits for working poor to help them https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/the-low-paid-will-suffer-if-i-don-t-cut-their-tax-credits-says-george-osborne-a6679636.html

#10yrsago UK top government official: human rights no longer a “top priority” https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/human-rights-are-no-longer-a-top-priority-for-the-government-says-foreign-office-chief-a6677661.html

#5yrsago Facebook's living will https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/05/florida-man/#dnr

#5yrsago Ad-tech is a bubble https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/05/florida-man/#wannamakers-ghost

#5yrsago The Internet is for End-Users https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/05/florida-man/#user-agents

#5yrsago Squeeze Me https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/05/florida-man/#disappearing-act

#5yrsago Why I love the Haunted Mansion https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/04/build-back-better/#grim-grinning-ghosts

#5yrsago Normal isn't enough https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/04/build-back-better/#post-pandemic

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF

04.10.2025 à 15:09

Pluralistic: Blue Bonds (04 Oct 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3969 mots)


Today's links


A US $100 bill, tinted blue. Benjamin Franklin has been replaced with the bear from the California state flag.

Blue Bonds (permalink)

The US economy is on the brink. Trump's illegal clawbacks of federal spending (waved through by a supine Congress), combined with his illegal tariffs and his government shutdown have sucked billions out of the economy, which was already much-weakened by proliferating crypto scams and AI stock swindles.

Every day sees more irreparable harm done. People who are pushed out of the workforce stand a good chance of never rejoining it, becoming "discouraged workers" (the economist's term for a worker who can no longer find employment thanks to bosses' prejudice against hiring people who don't already have a job). The businesses those people used to patronize are next in line for the mortuary.

Farms are failing at rates not seen in generations, even as Trump sends billions to prop up the Argentinian madman Javier Milei, whose Trumpalike policies have wrecked the Argentine economy. Milei repaid the US for its bailout by sending soybeans to China to replace the US crops that China blocked in response to Trump's trade war:

https://www.farmprogress.com/commentary/china-thrives-without-u-s-soybeans

Long-running scientific experiments that might represent the cure for the cancer you'll contract next year, or a way to improve solar output and save you from the wildfires and floods that have your town's name on them, or a vaccine for the next pandemic, have had the plug pulled and may never restart. Research groups at universities are falling apart, their grants illegally canceled, the teams scattered to the four winds, never to reform.

Families, illegally deprived of food assistance, are having to choose between rent and groceries. Parents skip medication to feed their kids. Kids go hungry. All of this has permanent effects – on learning, on health, and on growth. Literally: my grandfather, a refugee who suffered from malnutrition in his boyhood, was a head shorter than his Canadian-born children.

Solar and wind projects are being shut down just as they near completion, squandering billions in public money – and a renewable future. Trump has stolen billions intended for Chicago public transit:

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/03/trump-targets-chicago-transit-money-shutdown-00592722

What is to be done? What can be done?

Many Americans have pinned their hopes on federalism, the devolution of power to the states. When I became a US citizen, the hardest question on the exam was untangling the tortured syntax of the 10th Amendment:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

In a nutshell: the states have total power over their affairs, except where the Constitution says otherwise.

Lawsuits by state attorneys general have thus far done little to stanch the bleeding. Lawsuits are slow, and they rely on judges upholding the law, a task the Supreme Court has abandoned with sadistic glee.

The people need money, not legal briefs.

The editorial collective of Money on the Left offers a way to get money into the peoples' hands, right now, to allow us the material security we need if we are to organize to overthrow fascism and rekindle American Democracy. Their solution is "Blue Bonds," billed as "A Fiscal Strategy for Overcoming Trump 2.0":

https://moneyontheleft.org/2025/05/09/blue-bonds-a-fiscal-strategy-for-overcoming-trump-2-0/

What's a Blue Bond? It's a municipal or state bond, issued to replace the funds that Trump has illegally impounded. Blue states and cities can issue these bonds and use them to fund all the research, subsidies, programs and projects that Trump is trying to murder:

Dollars for housing and rental assistance, infrastructure and construction projects, rural energy and development, public health programs, veterans’ services, K-12 schools, colleges and universities, arts and culture: all public money previously authorized by congressional procedures should be reinstated in compliance with the Constitution.

Blue Bonds wouldn't just be backed by the states and cities that issue them, either. The Fed can swap them, one-for-one, with T-bills, the federal Treasury bonds that are considered "risk-free debt."

Blue Bonds don't have to be bonds, either; states can issue lots of different kinds of debt instruments, like "Tax Anticipation Notes" (TANs) and "Revenue Anticipation Notes" (RANs). These have different maturities and interest rates, and can be combined to hedge against liquidity traps.

These are legal. As the authors write, "Section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act permits the Central Bank to purchase debt in any amount 'in unusual and exigent circumstances,' such as during financial crises." Trump destroying the US economy is unquestionably "a crisis." The Fed used Special Purpose Vehicles to bail out the economy during other recent crises, including the 2008 crash and covid. The difference here is that this is a people's bailout, going to fund the programs that people – not bankers or investors – rely on.

This is within the Fed's means. Thanks to those earlier bailouts, the Fed holds $7T worth of assets, and has "repeatedly emphasized [that] it can continue to do so without limit":

https://www.c-span.org/clip/house-committee/user-clip-greenspan-there-is-nothing-to-prevent-the-government-from-creating-as-much-money-as-it-wants/5028493

But – as the authors point out – this isn't just about bridging state and local financing through the Trump years. This is a fundamental restructuring of public spending, a way out of neoliberalism's violent allergy to the fiscal spending that expands the economy and lifts up the population. It's been nearly a century since the New Deal and Americans are still basking in its benefits (where they survive). It is time to renew those benefits:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/03/we-dont-care-we-dont-have-to/#were-the-phone-company

Austerity can't get us out of a collapsing economy. It is precisely when the private sector withers that the state must step in, providing the income that people need to do the purchasing that makes the private sector possible. After all, money ultimately comes from the government (try making your US dollars and see how far you get). It's only through government spending (and government authorized lending through banks) that money enters our economy. When governments stop spending, money – the economy's lubricant – dries up, and the economy grinds to a halt.

Public debt issuance isn't "borrowing" in the sense that you or I might borrow. Governments are not households or businesses. Governments aren't money users, they are money creators. Governments don't need to "borrow" to create money any more than Starbucks needs to "borrow" to create gift cards redeemable for future mochalattafrappacheenaspressae.

Private debt is a drag on the debtor. State debt is generative. It creates the roads, the hospitals, the schools, the educated and healthy populace, needed for the private sector.

To issue Blue Bonds, states – which cannot be forced into bankruptcy – must repeal their disastrous "balanced budget" rules and rules requiring supermajorities to raise taxes. From Money on the Left: "public deficits are healthy, so long as they support communities and take care of our planet. What is debt but a promise to bring about a desired outcome in the future?"

Trump has destroyed investor confidence in the US economy. The only paths to returns today are flushing your money into the crypto casino or backing giga-mergers that only go through if the companies involved throw sufficient bribes at the tip jar on the Resolute Desk. Blue Bonds are a safe place for institutional investors seeking a safe haven from kleptocratic chaos.

As the authors say, this is "the true Abundance agenda" – not the "diet Reaganism" of deregulation and sacrifices to the market gods being peddled by the corporate wing of the Democratic Party. A true Abundance agenda "builds robust public systems, including newly chartered public banks, that put people over profits."

Blue Bonds are the good version of Trump's beloved shitcoins. Rather than wildcat money created by and for speculators, Blue Bonds are a source of public prosperity, backed by a present or future Fed under democratic control, accountable to the people. Trump and his fascist pals are all-in on creating as many forms of "money" as there are memes on the internet. Here, at last, is a form of novel money creation that builds a human, shared future.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Ebook DRM that encourages identity theft gets a huge makeover https://web.archive.org/web/20051011041018/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004026.php

#15yrsago Security company ad tricks people into thinking their houses were burgled https://copyranter.blogspot.com/2010/10/adt-shows-you-how-easy-it-is-to-break.html

#15yrsago Firefighters watch as house burns to the ground: owner had not paid annual firefighting fees https://web.archive.org/web/20101003021723/https://www.wpsdlocal6.com/news/local/firefighters-watch-as-home-burns-to-the-ground-104052668.html

#15yrsago Sky Marshals to lose their cushy first-class seats? https://web.archive.org/web/20160521034617/https://www.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052748703431604575521832473932878-lMyQjAxMTAwMDIwOTEyNDkyWj.html

#15yrsago Michael Swanwick writes a story about autumn on fallen leaves https://www.flickr.com/photos/54366973@N04/5035946705/in/photostream/

#15yrsago Why the copyright wars matter: a reply to Helienne Lindvall https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/oct/05/free-online-content-cory-doctorow?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

#15yrsago William Gibson nails my philosophy in life https://memex.craphound.com/2010/10/04/william-gibson-nails-my-philosophy-in-life/

#10yrsago Car accidents aren’t accidents https://www.wired.com/2015/10/stop-calling-daughters-death-car-accident/

#5yrsago Why I love the Haunted Mansion https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/04/build-back-better/#grim-grinning-ghosts

#5yrsago Normal isn't enough https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/04/build-back-better/#post-pandemic

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF

03.10.2025 à 19:24

Pluralistic: When your ISP pays you (03 Oct 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4163 mots)


Today's links


A female figure in a 1960s dress and gloves, flying through the air astride a Western Electric Bell telephone handset. Her head has been replaced with the head of Karl Marx. A shower of US hundred dollar bills flows out of the receiver's earpiece and mic. In the background is a telephone pole with many wires attached to it, slicing chords through the blue sky.

When your ISP pays you (permalink)

Holy shit I love my internet service provider said no one ever!

Except, some people do love their ISPs. Across America more than 400 community-owned fiber networks, serving more than 700 communities, bring joy and satisfaction to their customers:

https://communitynets.org/content/community-network-map

Many of these are in blood-red states, the kind of places where it's impossible to find a readable copy of Atlas Shrugged because every page of every copy is stuck together. Nevertheless, these publicly owned networks are wildly popular with their subscribers. What's more, there'd be a ton more of them but for the brutal ministration of ALEC, the far-right, dark money policy shop that convinced multiple state governments to ban community broadband, even in places where there was no commercial broadband service:

https://actions.eko.org/a/att-alec-lobby-community-owned-internet-networks

One of the great predictors of whether your town will get fast, affordable, future-proof fiber is its history. Many of today's municipal broadband co-ops are descended from rural telephone co-ops, and those telephone co-ops were birthed by the New Deal's rural electrification co-ops. This is the incredibly long shadow that good public spending casts – a century of successful provision of amenities that substantially improve the quality of life of whole regions.

Take Jackson and Owlsley Counties, rural Kentucky counties in Appalachia, some of America's poorest places. Starting in 2009, the local telephone company, the Peoples Rural Telephone Cooperative, started pulling fiber to every home in both counties. To get that fiber over rugged mountain passes, they pulled it on the back of a mule named "Ole Bub." Soon, every subscriber had access to symmetrical fiber broadband at speeds of up to 10gb/s, and the region found itself at the center of an economic revival:

https://web.archive.org/web/20191210051442/https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-one-traffic-light-town-with-some-of-the-fastest-internet-in-the-us

The Peoples Rural Telephone Cooperative was founded in 1953, as an extension of the town's electrification co-op, itself founded in the 1930s after the passage of the Rural Electrification Act of 1936 (the REA was amended in 1949, allowing electrification co-ops to secure low-cost loans for telephone rollouts).

You don't need to live in rural Appalachia to reap the benefit of publicly backed broadband co-ops. In Minnesota's Beltrami County (pop 46,288; density 18.6 people/square mile, median income $33,392/household), the local co-op Paul Bunyan Communications offers symmetrical fiber at speeds up to 10gb/s. But that's just table-stakes: Paul Bunyan doesn't just offer reasonably priced, reliable, screamingly fast broadband – it also pays its members whenever too much cash builds up in its bank account. Paul Bunyan just paid out $3.6 million in refunds to its subscribers:

https://ilsr.org/article/community-broadband-networks/minnesotas-paul-bunyan-communications-shares-3-6-million-windfall-with-members/

The payouts are pro-rated based on how much you spend on broadband. Customers who were due $150 or less got a credit on their next bill, while customers owed more than $150 got a check in the mail.

Nice, huh? It gets nicer: in 2018, Paul Bunyan paid back its subscribers $2.2 million; in 2022, they paid back $6.3 million, and last year they paid back $3 million. Paul Bunyan employs 160 people in the county, at fair wages, with good benefits. Every dollar Paul Bunyan makes literally stays in the community.

99% of the county has access to fiber from the co-op. Local business growth has outperformed statewide performance. A local aerospace company owner said that the co-op fiber made the difference between running a business with $300,000 in annual revenue and a business making $3,000,000 per year.

All of this is even cooler when you learn about the kind of internet service the rest of Minnesota has had to cope with. A 2019 Minnesota Commerce Department investigation found that Frontier, the state's leading ISP, had unbelievably badly maintained infrastructure. We're talking about high-capacity long-haul wires draped over shrubs and tree-branches:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/01/frontier-letting-its-phone-network-fall-apart-state-investigation-finds/

Minnesotans on Fiber's "free market" service suffered from frequent outages. They paid higher costs for their unreliable, slow DSL lines than Paul Bunyan customers in Beltrami County paid for fiber that was literally thousands of times faster than Frontier's. Unlike Paul Bunyan's cheerful, local customer service, Frontier's service numbers went to "cost-efficient" (busied-out, distant) call centers where you could wait for hours to speak to someone who would either "accidentally" drop your call or simply refuse to help you. Customers frequently lost access to 911 service, and often saw spurious, sky-high charges on their bills that no one would explain or erase.

Frontier "strongly disagreed" with the report. But when Frontier went bankrupt (a year later!), we got a look at its internal operations and discovered just how much contempt the company had for its customers:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/frontiers-bankruptcy-reveals-cynical-choice-deny-profitable-fiber-millions

By Frontier's own calculations, it could have made an extra $10 billion by investing in fiber rollouts, but it chose not to make that money, because the stock analysts at institutional investment funds would punish any telco that committed to capital expenditures with long-term payouts. Since Frontier's execs were mostly paid in stock, they decided not to risk a drop in their personal net worth, and so they left ten billion on the table and millions of customers stuck on 19th century copper-line infrastructure – technology that dated back to Samuel Morse and the telegraph.

Frontier was especially interested in customers who had no alternatives – no cable or fixed wireless companies that could offer competition for Frontier's own terrible service. These customers were booked as an "asset" and their connections were earmarked for substandard maintenance and slow upgrades. The old Lily Tomlin gag goes, "We don't care, we don't have to, we're the phone company." But Frontier really cared about the customers who had no alternative – they cared about royally fucking those customers.

Ladies and gentlemen, behold the marvel that is the efficient free market!

Municipal fiber is a godsend. It's fast, cheap and reliable, and it is an engine for economic development. Of course, the Trump administration is running away from municipal fiber – indeed, from all fiber – as fast as it can, because every fiber installation competes with Elon Musk's satellite based internet service, Skylink:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/24/geometry-hates-cars/#dogshit-unit-economics

The thing is, satellite internet makes sense in a few places – temporary encampments, ships at sea – but it is vastly more expensive than fiber to install and maintain, and it is millions of times slower than fiber. Nor is this something you can fix by filling the sky with more collision-prone, astronomer-demoralizing minisats – no matter how many satellites there are over your head, they're all in the same universe and have to share its single, fixed electromagnetic spectrum. Meanwhile, if you want more broadband in your fiber network, you just pull another bundle of fiber (principle ingredient: sand) through your conduit and you add dozens of new universes' worth of electromagnetic spectra that are each isolated from one another.

Smart politicians aren't being sucked in by Musk's claim that he can billionaire his way out of the intractable laws of physics. They're pulling fiber, and lots of it. In Utah, the aptly named UTOPIA network is serving publicly owned fiber to 21 cities, and private businesses can offer service over that public system, which means that Utahans have their choice of 18 carriers:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/16/symmetrical-10gb-for-119/#utopia

Moreover, these are symmetrical connections, meaning that they are as fast for sending data as they are for receiving it:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/03/beautiful-symmetry/#fibrous-growth

To put this in Information Superhighway terms from the 1990s, a symmetrical broadband connection is necessary for you to be a "netizen," while an asymmetrical connection that beams lots of data to you but isn't capable of letting you talk back is what makes you a "mouse potato."

It's grimly hilarious that the right has done so much damage to public fiber rollouts, given their oft-repeated grievances about being "shadowbanned" by dominant services. With symmetrical fiber, every crank could run their own server – a 4chan in every garage. And if that fiber is provided by the government, then your ISP will be bound by the First Amendment, and legally prohibited from discriminating against customers based on their political speech (something that commercial providers can do to their heart's content):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/17/turner-diaries-fanfic/#1a-fiber

The New Deal was a mere blip in the American project, but a century later, America's poorest, worst-served people are still reaping its benefits, with far faster, cheaper connections than you can get from the big telcos that have sewn up New York City and Los Angeles. And in some of those places, the public ISP doesn't just shower their subscribers with fast data – they shower them with millions of dollars.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Internet Archive and Yahoo announce open scanned-in-book index https://web.archive.org/web/20051007010920/https://www.opencontentalliance.org/

#20yrsago Europe’s Broadcast Flag: first look https://web.archive.org/web/20051026014633/https://www.eff.org/IP/DVB/dvb_critique.php

#15yrsago Mouseland: a parable from the father of Canada’s healthcare system https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OC1GtIhwpSk

#15yrsago ElfQuest fan-film blessed by the Pinis https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/external/gigaom/2010/10/01/01gigaom-creator-blessed-elfquest-fan-film-crowdsources-fun-7954.html

#10yrsago Pokemon demands $4000 from broke superfan who organized Pokemon party https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/pokemon-copyright-lawyers-demand-4000-from-party-planner/

#10yrsago Tea Party “family values” pol resigns after sending adulterous vid to entire address-book https://thefrisky.com/family-values-lawmaker-resigns-after-sexting-contact-list-with-pictures-of-affair/

#10yrsago Mayor of Stockton, CA detained by DHS at SFO, forced to give up laptop password https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Stockton-mayor-was-briefly-detained-on-return-6546419.php

#10yrsago How to flip someone off with THREE middle-fingers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-skVOUZAoFA

#5yrsago Inequality and luck and risk and merit https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/03/the-house-always-wins/#socialized-losses

#1yrago Prime's enshittified advertising https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/03/mother-may-i/#minmax

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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Recent appearances (permalink)


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Latest books (permalink)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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


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02.10.2025 à 21:50

Pluralistic: Decarbonization at a distance (02 Oct 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (5804 mots)


Today's links


A Chinese Communist propaganda poster showing a cross-section of Chinese people waving the Little Red Book. The Little Red Book has been replaced with solar panels. The background has been replaced with the EU flag.

Decarbonization at a distance (permalink)

In Bill McKibben's new book Here Comes the Sun, he frequently laments activists' tendency not to celebrate our wins, a habit that sees us always feeling as though we were losing, even when we're racking up massive victories:

https://billmckibben.com/books/here-comes-the-sun/

Here Comes the Sun is an extraordinary, beautifully told, exhaustively researched and argued book about the remarkable progress of solar energy over the past five or so years. McKibben is speaking as much to his fellow activists as he is to the people on the sidelines, trying to get them to understand the quiet, profound changes to solar, to "update their priors" about whether a solar transition is possible, and what impediments stand between us and decarbonization.

For example, you may have read that the material bill for solar is simply too large to pay – that there isn't enough copper, enough conflict minerals, enough lithium for the panels, wires and batteries we'll need for a solar transition:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/06/with-great-power/#comes-great-responsibility

This is just not true, for several reasons.

First, the material bill for solarization is in freefall, with no end in sight. The amount of stuff we need to make panels, transmission lines and batteries keeps declining. Further: the efficiency gains of "clean" technology are astounding – meaning that, for example, it not only takes a lot less material to make a solar panel, the panel we make out of so much less stuff generates a lot more power. More: we keep finding ways to substitute more abundant materials for materials that are harder to find or refine (for example, swapping out lithium in batteries and replacing it with sodium, one of the most abundant minerals on Earth). Finally: we keep finding new sources of the materials that we can't readily substitute for. It turns out that when there's a lot more demand for a given mineral, people who've previously disregarded potential sources of that material suddenly pipe up with information about where (a lot) more of it can be found.

None of that is to say that extracting and refining these materials is without cost or risk. The realpolitik of extraction means that mining and refining companies will preferentially target poor and indigenous communities for their mines and factories. That's totally true and completely unacceptable, and it means that our task is to demand climate justice (letting those communities decide for themselves whether and how they will be a part of this). That's important work, and it's very different from endlessly parroting 15-year old back-of-the-envelope calculations about the material bill for solarization.

The material story is a really cool and exciting one. There is so much solar energy out there for the taking. A lot of the time, when we characterize high-tech products as "non-recyclable," what we mean is "it would take too much energy to recycle this device." As more and more solar comes online, we can reclaim literal tons of material from existing, superannuated tech. There's a solar-powered factory that ingests old solar panels, decomposes them into their source materials, and makes new, hyper-efficient solar panels out of them, reclaiming 99% of their materials:

https://interestingengineering.com/energy/solarcycle-to-recycle-10-million-solar-panels-yearly

Far from being an insurmountable barrier to a cleaner, better future, the material bill for solar is eminently tractable. What's more, the material bill for solar is superior in every way to the material bill for fossil fuels. The amount of stuff we need to dig up in order to solarize the planet is equal to one seventeenth of the fossil fuels we dig up every year. Remember, when you dig up a bunch of stuff to make a solar panel, that solar panel produces energy for decades afterwards, and when it finally reaches its end-of-life, we make it into another solar panel. When you dig up coal, you burn it and all that's left behind is a bunch of planet-destroying carbon dioxide and earth-and water-poisoning toxic ash.

I can't emphasize this enough. Solar is a superior substitute for fossil fuels in more ways than one. Fossil fuels need to be continuously replenished, meaning that every fossil fuel-powered system in the world requires a continuous, ongoing stream of materials to produce energy. Replenishing this fuel doesn't merely require us to dig up enough old dead shit to burn in the machine, we also have to dig up tons more old dead shit to shlep that old dead shit around. The gas and coal being set on fire all around you right now required another mountain of fossil fuel to power the mining rig, the refinery, the ship and the truck that brought it to you.

Making more solar involves digging stuff up and moving it too – but just once. Once those panels are on your roof (or over your parking lot or irrigation canal, or between the rows in your farm's fields) they convert abundant sunshine into efficient energy, without requiring any more materials:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/06/with-great-power/#comes-great-responsibility

So it's definitely time we rethink our assumptions about the solar transition. Here's one assumption I had to jettison after reading McKibben's book: I used to assume that whenever I heard about Europe or the US or Canada lowering CO2 emissions, that was mostly because these rich countries had exported their carbon to China, by shifting carbon-intensive manufacturing there.

Back around the time of the Paris Accords, there was a raging debate about national carbon targets, with poor countries in the global south arguing that because rich northern countries were responsible for nearly all the CO2 in the atmosphere, the rich world should make the sacrifices needed to decarbonize, leaving China, India, and other poor countries to continue to enjoy the benefits of burning coal.

China made an especially pointed case, insisting that their CO2 figures were grossly inflated because they made all the stuff that the rich world consumed. The carbon emissions from the appliances, consumer goods and industrial equipment and other exports from China were really the rich world's carbon, which had been offshored to "the world's factory" – China.

This may have been true back then, but things have changed dramatically. China is running away from coal as fast as it can, and solarizing everything. China lights up a new solar generation facility with the capacity of a coal plant every eight hours. Trump can subsidize fossil fuels and throw up as many structural impediments to renewables as he can think of, and it won't change the fact that as a planet, we're on track to replace all of the embodied energy in the stuff the whole world uses with solar.

So when you read that 54% of the energy in the EU is coming from renewables, that doesn't mean that they're cheating by offshoring their emissions to China. The EU is offshoring its manufacturing to China, but China has found a better way to manufacture Europe's stuff, without having to set old dead stuff on fire 24/7:

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

Reading Here Comes the Sun is a forceful reminder that there's a big old world out there beyond America's borders. It's true that American policy was once very important to the whole world, but that was largely down to the things that Trump is hell-bent on destroying. American dollar-clearing and the SWIFT system gave the US a massive, global structural advantage, but the weaponization of SWIFT, the deliberate weakening of the US dollar, and the destruction of American monetarism via cryptocurrency scams has put dollar clearing into terminal decline:

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

Even US military might is in decline. US military spending remains off the charts, but Trump and Hegseth are purging the forces, targeting Black and brown people (disproportionately represented in the US military because people from minority groups are typically poorer, and the US military recruits a lot of poor people without many other options):

https://theintercept.com/2025/10/01/pete-hegseth-war-pentagon-beardos-dei/

American aid agendas used to give it a huge global footprint. When American evangelicals forced the government to ban aid that included birth control or helping gender minorities, countries all around the world saw surges in unwanted pregnancies and homophobic discrimination. Now that the US has cut off all that aid, the US can no longer set priorities for those countries.

America's domestic research agenda used to set the standard for the world, because the brightest scholars in the world moved here to go to university and to pursue their research. This meant that the priorities behind US federal scientific and academic grants determined what the world's best and brightest worked on. Of course, that's dead, too.

Trump hasn't just killed research funding in America – he's also singlehandedly reversed generations of work to lure the world's most talented scientists and scholars to the USA. Grad students, professors, engineers and researchers are leaving the US rather than risk being kidnapped to a gulag in El Salvador or imprisoned in Alligator Auschwitz. Our loss is everyone else's gain. It's not clear whether people will ever again aspire to come to America to pursue their research.

The point is that things are very much up for grabs right now. The planet is solarizing at rates that beggar the imagination (and warm the heart). McKibben quotes many sources who've called China "the Saudi Arabia of solar," but he is skeptical of that characterization. The sun, after all, shines everywhere and once you've got the solar installed, China can't take it away from you.

Or can they?

Solar – and the whole cleantech sector – is the first truly successful "internet of things" application. From inverters to EVs to household batteries, the new, electric world is digital and networked, and that means that it's all terribly enshittification prone.

Today, the US has the ability to remotely, permanently disable every John Deere tractor in the world and set off a global famine:

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

Tomorrow, Chinese soft (and not-so-soft) power could be vested in the ability to remotely update, downgrade, disable, or brick whole countries' worth of cleantech:

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

There's a way to prevent this, thankfully. The only reason that technologists around the world can't reverse-engineer and unlock these "smart" devices is that the US trade representative bullied every country into passing punitive IP laws that ban this practice:

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

Absent these laws, there could be a roaring trade in jailbreaking smart devices of all kinds – from printers to ventilators, but also all of cleantech – so that owners of these devices could always change how they work, blocking field updates and restoring functionality that had been confiscated by the manufacturer, whether due to greed or geopolitics.

The US trade rep got these IP laws passed abroad by threatening America's trading partners with tariffs. Tariffs: another source of power that Trump has vaporized. The threat of tariffs loomed over the whole world, and fear of losing access to American markets meant that policymakers all over the world kept laws on the books that allowed US tech companies to extract rent and extort their populations. But a deterrent only works if you don't use it. Now that everyone's been tariffed by Trump, the threat is dead. Happy Liberation Day, folks.

It's these US tech-protecting laws that create the conditions for an eventual mass-enshittification of cleantech. It's these laws that Chinese firms – and the Chinese state – would use to secure their ability to truly be the Saudi Arabia of the sun: not just the source of the technology that converts sunshine to electrons, but also the landlord of those sunbeams, with the power to evict whole countries from their solar arrays, at the click of a mouse.

Creating a legal and technical framework for local control over cleantech's software has many advantages. The mere existence of a killswitch (or any remote-update facility that device owners can't override) makes devices vulnerable to shutdown by malicious hackers as well as manufacturers.

However, a world of cleantech devices that are under their owners' absolute control also poses some challenges to the solar revolution. If you want to build a virtual power plant by harnessing the batteries of thousands of homeowners, or relieve grid pressure by adjusting the thermostats and fridges of millions of utility subscribers, it's a lot easier if you know that you're communicating with devices that do what you tell them to do and faithfully communicate their operations to you.

That's a tradeoff we're going to have to make, though. The incremental reliability of designing technology so its owners can't override remote instructions is swamped by the massive risk that this power will be abused to attack individuals, regions, and whole countries.

As the US government turns its back on solar, the sun is setting on the American empire. It's not clear whether there will be elections next year. Trump says he'll use terrorism laws to arrest people who are "anti-Christian" or "anti-capitalist":

https://jacobin.com/2025/10/trump-classifies-anti-capitalism-as-a-political-pre-crime/

Will China step in and become the world's unipower as America shits itself to death after drinking raw milk or coughs itself to death after boycotting vaccines? I don't know. I hope we end up with a multipolar world, and that someone picks up the research agendas that Trump has destroyed. Earlier this year, Elon Musk's DOGE killed all the NIH grants that included the word "systemic" (because they're racist against the idea of "systemic racism"). Speaking as a guy whose cancer diagnosis was just upgraded from "localized" to "systemic," I really want some other well-resourced entity to do this work.

One way the EU can act as a hedge against Chinese hegemony is by turning itself to manufacturing and selling disenshittifying technology – tools to jailbreak computers, phones, consoles, and embedded systems in cars and solar inverters and medical devices. This is a giant market opportunity for the EU, and it's also key to actually moving to a "Eurostack" of technology that is independent from the American tech companies that Trump uses to project power into every company and government in the world (except China).

It doesn't matter if the EU funds an Office365 clone if there's no way to migrate data from Microsoft to that made-in-Europe alternative. No government ministry, no large firm, no civil society group is going to manually move each of their documents, messages, edit histories, directories and permissions over from a US tech product to a Eurostack alternative. To do that work, you'll need automation: scrapers, jailbreaks of virtualized devices that directly access their RAM and instruction flow.

What about America? Well, there's still the tattered remains of federalism. The states and localities have power – on paper, at least. Many of these localities (including ones in deepest, reddest Trumpland) have been able to seize control over their energy destiny. If you want to get involved in insulating your town from "the Saudi Arabia of oil" (AKA "Saudi Arabia"), check out the Institute for Local Self-Reliance's work on "Community Power":

https://ilsr.org/article/energy-democracy/four-shortcuts-to-boost-your-states-community-power-score/

Do that work, and maybe you'll be able to keep the lights on in the coming American Dark Ages. Practically speaking, it's unlikely that the rest of the world is going to accept 250 million American refugees fleeing the 50 million Trump diehards who've looted the country and torched its future.

Hey look at this (permalink)


* The Government Has Been Shut Down for Months https://prospect.org/politics/2025-09-30-government-has-been-shut-down-for-months/


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Stuttgart police use overwhelming force against peaceful protestors concerned about new train station https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/the-world-from-berlin-germany-shocked-by-disproportionate-police-action-in-stuttgart-a-720735.html

#10yrago Apple removes Ifixit’s repair manuals from App Store https://www.ifixit.com/News/7401/ifixit-app-pulled

#10yrsago Theoretical “auto-brothel” attack on mechanics’ computers could infect millions of cars https://www.wired.com/2015/10/car-hacking-tool-turns-repair-shops-malware-brothels/

#10yrsago France’s plan to legalize mass surveillance will give it the power to spy on the world https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/09/frances-government-aims-give-itself-and-nsa-carte-blanche-spy-world

#10yrsago Tube-map labelled with one-bedroom flat rental rates https://www.thrillist.com/lifestyle/london/london-underground-rent-map

#10yrsago Nuanced profile of the Oklahoma County where “no one believes in climate change” https://www.cnn.com/2015/08/03/opinions/sutter-climate-skeptics-woodward-oklahoma/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

#10yrsago Judge John Hodgman is back in the NYThttps://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/magazine/judge-john-hodgman-on-a-christmas-wish.html?_r=0

#10yrsago Fuerdai: Paris Hilton with Chinese characteristics https://web.archive.org/web/20151002094642/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-10-01/children-of-the-yuan-percent-everyone-hates-china-s-rich-kids

#10yrago New $50 Kindle Fire won’t recognize sideloaded ebooks on SD cards https://web.archive.org/web/20151002213918/https://teleread.com/chris-meadows/first-look-amazons-50-fire-tablet/

#10yrsago Landmark patent case will determine whether you can ever truly own a device againhttps://www.wired.com/2015/10/can-use-gadgets-may-hinge-printer-ink-case/?mbid=social_twitter

#10yrsago Internet of Things That Lie: the future of regulation is demonology https://web.archive.org/web/20151002063110/http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/rinesi20150925

#10yrsago Dieselgate for TVs: Samsung accused of programming TVs to cheat energy efficiency ratings https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/01/samsung-tvs-appear-more-energy-efficient-in-tests-than-in-real-life

#10yrsago Pope: I don’t support homophobic civic layabout Kim Davis https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34425450

#10yrsago Arbitration: how America’s corporations got their own private legal system https://web.archive.org/web/20151004171307/http://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/we-now-have-a-justice-system-just-for-corporations

#10yrsago Voter suppression act two: closing driver’s license offices in Alabama’s Black Belt https://www.al.com/opinion/2015/09/voter_id_and_drivers_license_o.html

#10yrsago Why an obscure left-wing MP won the UK Labour leadership by the biggest margin in history https://mondediplo.com/2015/10/04corbyn

#5yrsago Apple kills RSS readers in China https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/02/chickenized-by-arise/#rss-ccp-rip

#5yrsago Call center workers pay for the privilege https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/02/chickenized-by-arise/#arise

#5yrsago Block Google-Fitbit https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/01/the-years-of-repair/#google-fitbit

#5yrsago The Years of Repair https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/01/the-years-of-repair/#leap-manifesto

#5yrsago Private equity's profitable murder https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/01/the-years-of-repair/#mass-murder

#5yrsago Witch https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/01/the-years-of-repair/#witch

#1yrago Everyday homeowners are human shields for Wall Street's Internet of Shit slumlords https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/01/housing-is-a-human-right/#

#1yrago Epic Systems, a lethal health record monopolist https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/02/upcoded-to-death/#thanks-obama

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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