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PLURALISTIC

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11.10.2025 à 13:08

Pluralistic: The curious, intertwined history of climate and digital rights activism (11 Oct 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4506 mots)


Today's links


A field of utility scale solar. Behind the mountains on the horizon line loom two logos: the original EFF 'clenched fist and lightning bolt' logo and the first Earth Day logo. They are reflected in the solar panels. Behind them roils hellish red-shot smoke.

The curious, intertwined history of climate and digital rights activism (permalink)

I am an environmentalist, but I'm not a climate activist. I used to be – I even used to ring strangers' doorbells on behalf of Greenpeace. But a quarter of a century ago, I fell in with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and became a lifelong digital rights activist, and switched to cheering on environmental activists from the sidelines of their fight:

https://eff.org

Over the decades, there've been many moments where I've been struck by the parallels between climate activism and tech activism. In both cases, the foundational challenge is getting people to care about the looming catastrophic effects of bad policies. In both cases, those policies and their effects are highly abstract and technical, and are downstream of a huge, weird, cross-cutting set of contingencies and circumstances, which makes it hard for anyone to truly take their measure. You don't just have to master the technical issues – you have to get your arms around the economic, social and political issues, too. Bad tech policy and bad climate policy are both wicked problems, hard to define and even harder to solve.

Whether we're talking about tech or the climate, there is a surefire way to get people to care about these issues: simply do nothing, allow these problems to get worse, and worse still, until millions of peoples' lives have been ruined. Then, of course, people will care. If we do nothing about fire debt and rising temperatures, then everyone who lives in the urban-wildlife interface will lose their homes and possibly their lives to a wildfire. And if we do nothing about surveillance, manipulation and monopoly, then eventually everyone will find their pay slashed, their freedoms curtailed, their identities stolen, and their pockets picked by a tech monopolist or an opportunistic predator living off of the monopolist's weakened, vulnerable victims.

In some important sense, the job of an activist is to raise the salience and convey the urgency of these issues before those consequences are upon us. Both climate and tech activists use storytelling to do this, and I've written novels that are cautionary tales about what happens if we get climate wrong and if we get tech wrong, as well as novels that are meant to inspire hope for the kind of world we could have if we get them right.

Both climate and tech activists have to contend with bullshit neoliberal "solutions" that propose to solve the problem by deploying technologically outlandish policies. Tech activists have to fight with people who say we can solve the commercial surveillance problem by "getting consent" to spy on people. Environmental activists have to fight with people who say we can control emissions with garbage "carbon credits" that make Elon Musk into a centibillionaire by selling indulgences to SUV manufacturers that fill our roads and our skies with ever-mounting clouds of CO2 and carcinogenic exhaust:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#Rat

Both climate and tech activists have to show people that this crisis stems from systemic dysfunctions, not individual consumption choices. We have to get our supporters to stop focusing on agonizing about whether they should use a plastic straw or agonizing about whether they should quit Facebook, and focus instead on using politics to shatter the power of the giant, wildly profitable corporations that got us into this crisis. We need to smash oil companies like Chevron and Exxon, and we have to smash oily rag companies like Facebook and Google:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/05/zucks-oily-rags/#into-the-breach

Beyond these parallels, both climate and tech activism have some actual commonalities. The biggest barrier to getting good tech or climate policy is the power of the cartel that dominates each sector. Cartels aren't just contrivances for raising prices – they're even better at capturing their regulators. A hundred small and medium-sized companies are a hopeless rabble, unable to agree on anything – especially what they want from regulators. But five giant companies find it very easy to come to agreement, and they are aslosh in monopoly cash, which they can mobilize to get their way in policy forums:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

But there's another, more hopeful parallel between tech and climate: after decades of vapor lock, both have seen rapid global improvement. Solar is racing ahead of all expectations. Globally, we're getting more power from solar than we are from coal. Solar is cheaper than any form of fossil fuel. Solar gets better every day, and we're figuring out how to overcome some of the serious challenges to solar, like finding all the materials we'll need for a solar transition. It turns out that a lot of the challenges on that front boil down to the fact that recycling old cleantech uses up a lot of energy. But as solar gets cheaper and more efficient, we have a lot of energy, and we can take apart an old solar panel that ran at 20% efficiency and use its recovered materials to make two solar panels that each run at 40% efficiency:

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

Then there's tech. The past half-decade has seen more global action on tech regulation than the previous 40 years. Not all of it is good – plenty of it is as stupid as pinning your hopes on carbon capture or fusion reactors – but governments all over the world have got the bit in their teeth and they're champing at it:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/07/the-people-no-2/#water-flowing-uphill

For both climate and tech, Trump is turning out to be a (mixed) blessing in disguise. Sure, he's killing decarbonization in the US, but he's also alienating America's (former) allies so quickly and thoroughly that many countries are moving closer to China's orbit. Again, that's a mixed blessing, but one very positive impact of Trump's beliigerence is that it has lit a fire under the leaders of other (formerly) friendly countries, spurring big, ambitious programs to escape US-based tech companies:

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

Back in the first Trump administration, tariffs on Chinese solar panels led Chinese manufacturers to flood countries in the global south with solar panels that were so cheap that whole regions solarized, virtually overnight. Pakistan – one of the countries suffering the most from a changing climate, and most at risk from future changes – is now a solar nation, so much so that its national power company is in danger of going bust because everyone's making their own electricity rather than buying it from the grid.

Meanwhile, Putin's invasion of Ukraine pushed Europe – all of it, but especially Germany – into a galloping solar transition of its own. Virtually every high rise in Germany is now dotted (or even covered) with cheap, easy to hang balcony solar panels. Europe is way ahead of its energy transition goals:

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

Putin's not the only dictator pushing Europe to enact rapid changes in order to escape US Big Tech silos, building a "Eurostack" of open, transparent, made-in-the-EU applications and services that are meant to replace American tech platforms:

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

Another, unhappier commonality between tech and climate: it's not just that both are getting better faster than we'd thought possible, it's also that they're both getting worse faster than we'd feared.

On climate, virtually every bad thing that showed up in our models is breaking faster than we thought it would. The permafrost is melting faster and it's releasing more methane than we'd anticipated. The gulf stream and jet stream are both getting more screwy, more quickly than predicted. Sure, we're decarbonizing and solarizing faster than we thought we could – but the world is falling apart faster than we thought it would, too:

https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/something-extraordinary-just-happened

And I don't have to tell you what's happening with tech. Technofascism is ascendant. ICE is using our devices to round up our neighbors and send them to torture prisons. Trump is using our social media posts to hunt down "the radical left" as a prelude to mass purges. Seven AI companies are now a third of the S&P 500, and they're losing money even faster than they are emitting carbon, and the crash on the horizon is gonna make 2008 look like a walk in the park:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/econopocalypse/

What's more, tech and cleantech are merging. The enshittification that has turned every platform to shit can now turn every part of the cleantech stack into a pile of shit, too. If Apple can pull the ICEBlock app out of your phone, then a solar inverter company can also remotely shut down your solar array and leave you in the dark:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/06/america-with-chinese-characteristics/#orphaned-syrian-refugees-need-not-apply

For all of this century, I've been a tech activist, but it's turning out that being a tech activist has an awful lot in common with being a climate activist, and sometimes – as when we're fighting to keep EVs from being bricked by their manufacturers or to prevent rent-seeking with inverters – they're literally the same thing.

The great James Boyle has described the transformational power of the word "ecology." Without that word, there's no obvious connection between, say, the campaign to save the ozone layer and the campaign to save endangered owls. The fate of charismatic nocturnal avians is not readily understood as being of a piece with the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere. The word "ecology" makes the connection, and so transforms a thousand issues into a movement

I think something like that is happening again. There's a inchoate movement groping its way to understanding that it is a movement – that the problems of labor exploitation, fascism, climate degradation, surveillance, authoritarianism and genocide are all connected to each other by the fact that they are caused by extreme concentrations of wealth and power. Highly concentrated wealth and power is dangerous in and of itself, because even the most benign billionaire isn't infallible, and the stupid decisions of very rich people are far more consequential than the stupid decisions you or I make. Our mistakes make the people around us unhappy. Billionaires' mistakes – like their dilettanteish obsession with "education reform" – can ruin a whole generation:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/26/aggregate-demand/#ed-bezzle

And of course, the kind of person who amasses billions is pretty much never a benign person. The story you have to tell yourself in order to become a billionaire makes you into a literal psychopath:

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

We don't have a word for this new anti-enshittification, anti-oligarch, anti-carbon baron movement yet, but perhaps that word might be "solidarity." Solidarity is the opposite of fascism. The solidarinet is the opposite of the enshitternet. Solidarity is what stops disasters from becoming catastrophes:

http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2017/07/cory-doctorow-be-the-first-one-to-not-do-something-that-no-one-else-has-ever-not-thought-of-doing-before/

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 Music labels: DRM makes you into iTunes’ love-slave https://web.archive.org/web/20051013082542/http://www.affbrainwash.com/archives/020414.php

#20yrsago 20 suicidal Congressional Reps demand a Broadcast Flag https://web.archive.org/web/20051011041517/http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004047.php

#20yrsago Cross-stitched tracert output https://web.archive.org/web/20051013061129/http://infosthetics.com/archives/2005/10/stitched_tracert_dos_commands.html

#15yrsago UK government ready to abolish consumer protection agencies as “waste” https://web.archive.org/web/20101013075803/http://www.noshockdoctrine.iparl.com/lobby/50

#1yrago Cars bricked by bankrupt EV company will stay bricked https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/10/software-based-car/#based

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.

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https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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https://doctorow.medium.com/

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https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF

10.10.2025 à 14:05

Pluralistic: A disenshittification moment from the land of mass storage (10 Oct 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4051 mots)


Today's links


A massive goliath figure in a loincloth, holding a club and sitting on a boulder; his head has been replaced with the head of Benjamin Franklin taken from a US $100 bill. He is peering down at a Synology NAS box, festooned with Enshittification poop emojis, with angry eyebrows and black grawlix bars over their mouths.

A disenshittification moment from the land of mass storage (permalink)

Sometimes, you really can vote with your wallet. I know, I'm generally pretty down on this kind of thing, but sometimes, it works!

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/13/consumption-choices/#marginal-benefits

Here's the latest victory from the land of wallet-based elections: Synology, a leading maker of "network-attached storage" (NAS) devices, has done a quiet (but total) 180 on its enshittificatory policy of blocking third party hard drives from its products:

https://www.guru3d.com/story/synology-reverses-policy-banning-thirdparty-hdds-after-nas-sales-plummet/

Network-attached storage devices are basically boxy computers with a bunch of slots for hard-drives and one or more network cards so you can connect them to your wifi or wired network. You fill them with hard-drives and plug them in, and they show up on your network as a file-server: any device on the network can connect to them and access their files. They're great for things like libraries of music or videos, which can be streamed to your TV or smart speakers. They're essential for people who work with very large files – musicians, photographers, video and sound editors, etc. They're also great for home backups, a single storage system that everyone in your household can back up all their data to. The better ones also have some kind of "NAT traversal" that lets you connect to them from the road – just plug your NAS into your home broadband and you can access your files from anywhere in the world.

Synology doesn't just make NAS boxes, they also make hard-drives that go inside them. Earlier this year, Synology pushed an update to its devices that caused them to reject hard-drives manufactured by their rivals, including giants like Seagate. This was a blatant piece of rent-seeking, a page straight out of the inkjet printer playbook, where the company that made the box decided that this gave them the right to decide what you could put in the box.

When your printer updates itself to reject generic ink, there's an implied threat: anyone who disenshittifies this printer – by making another update that restores generic ink support – risks prosecution under "anti-circumvention" laws like Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. These are laws that ban reverse-engineering, even for lawful purposes, like restoring generic printer ink support:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

The same goes for Synology. Under a decent and sane system of tech regulation, Synology's move to take away support for the vast majority of hard drives ever manufactured would prompt some other manufacturer to leap into the market and restore that support, by making alternative software for Synology's products. That represents a huge potential risk to Synology – once you're running a rival's software on your Synology product, it's a short leap to buying your next product from the company that saved your ass.

But because that kind of reverse-engineering is banned, enshittifiying companies like Synology don't have to worry about that kind of usurpation. They can enlist the justice system to destroy any company that tries to rescue us from their predatory behavior.

That leaves us with comparatively weak defenses against enshittification, like complaining in public, and/or buying someone else's products. These are much weaker than responses like "having a regulator fine Synology a zillion dollars for screwing us" or "having a rival company sell us a tool to disenshittify the product we already have."

Sometimes, though, those weaker measures really work. The hard drives that go in Synology's devices are fully standardized, and the data you store on them is far more valuable than the box you put them in. People in the market for a new NAS box can mix and match any hard drive with any NAS enclosure…except Synology's. That's a huge commercial disadvantage for Synology, and the fact that you can throw away your Synology box and keep your drives, and that any drive will work with any product except Synology, means that people really were able to vote with their wallets. After a catastrophic drop in sales, Synology pushed another software update that restored its support for every kind of drive.

Of course, no one should ever buy a Synology product again. They have shown us what they do when they have power over you and no one should ever give them any power over their economic future.

Remember, for enshittification to work, the company has to have locked in its users and/or business customers. Making things worse without some kind of lock-in simply precipitates a mass departure.

Contrast Synology' story with Chamberlain's. Chamberlain is a private equity-backed monopolist, a garage door-opener company that bought all the other garage door-opener companies, and then withdrew support for Homekit, a standardized way for apps to connect to home automation systems (like garage door-openers):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

When Chamberlain nuked Homekit support, they forced every owner of every Chamberlain garage door-opener (which is basically all garage door-openers) to switch to using Chamberlain's app to open and close their garages, and now every time you open your garage, you have to look at seven ads.

Where Synology customers found it easy to switch vendors, Chamberlain customers are pretty stuck. Partly, that's because Chamberlain owns all the competing brands, so they are all defective in the same way. But also, it's because garage door-openers have to be installed, generally by a professional, and switching openers is an expensive, logistically complex operation. Of course, Chamberlain's app – like all apps – is off-limits to rival companies that might reverse engineer it to block its apps, thanks to the anticircumvention law's prohibition on reverse-engineering closed systems. Chamberlain's openers are also closed systems, which prevents rivals from reverse-engineering them and restoring Homekit integration.

It's interesting to compare Synology to other companies that enshittified, only to face a humiliating climbdown and blood on the C-suite's walls. There was Unity, the giant game-development tool monopolist who decided to institute a "shared success" program where they'd put a tax on any game made with their product that did well. Interestingly, they didn't want a "shared failure" program where they'd help defray the losses of any unsuccessful game made with their product. This is like the company who sold a hammer to the carpenter who renovated your kitchen demanding a share of the proceeds when you sell your house. After a mass revolt – including an industry-wide, very public switch to Unity's competitors – the company fired its top managers and abandoned its rent-seeking efforts:

https://venturebeat.com/games/john-riccitiello-steps-down-as-ceo-of-unity-after-pricing-battle/

Then there's Sonos, who remotely, irreversibly downgraded every smart speaker they'd ever sold in a doomed bid to create a unified app for the speakers and a set of headphones they were hoping to launch. The headphones fizzled, users were furious, and the CEO was defenstrated (but the speakers still don't work):

https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/13/24342179/sonos-ceo-patrick-spence-resignation-reason-app

And earlier this year, HP, the world's most habitual and egregious enshittifier, climbed down from a breathtaking act of enshittification. The company announced that anyone calling for tech support would be put into a mandatory 15 minute hold, even if an operator was available to help out. The idea was to punish people for seeking help from a human, rather than making do with the much cheaper (and shittier) chatbot option.

People hated this and arose in towering fury, so intense that HP – world champion enshittifiers HP – backed down:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/22/ink-spattered-pitchforks/#racehorse-semen

If only every company could be punished for enshittifying this way. If only, say, Reddit had gotten a suitable beat-down after its shameful attacks on third-party apps:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Reddit_API_controversy

But Reddit is hard to leave. We might hate its asshole management, but we like each other, and so we hold each other hostage there because we can't agree on when to leave or where to go next.

Reddit enshittified, and so did Synology, and Synology's outraged (former) customers made them pay for it. It's one of those rare instances in which voting with your wallet actually works. Savor it.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/22/ink-spattered-pitchforks/#racehorse-semen

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 Leaked (final?) TPP Intellectual Property chapter spells doom for free speech online https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/oct/09/wikileaks-releases-tpp-intellectual-property-rights-chapter

#15yrsago Douglas Coupland’s depressing next ten years https://web.archive.org/web/20101012190424/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/a-radical-pessimists-guide-to-the-next-10-years/article1750609/page1/

#10yrsago Canadian Tories funneled $8M in publicc money to US Republican Party’s NGO https://web.archive.org/web/20151010221542/http://www.acdi-cida.gc.ca/acdi-cida/contributions.nsf/Eng/33D228F6B286373D85257D420061CEB2#tphp

#10yrsago How a billionaire GOP rainmaker tried (and failed) to rewrite history by suing Mother Jones https://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/10/mother-jones-vandersloot-melaleuca-lawsuit/

#10yrsago Volkswagen CEO: Dieselgate caused by Lynndie England “rogue engineers”; execs blameless https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/volkswagen-pulls-2016-diesel-lineup-from-us-market/

#10yrsago Unicorn poop and squatty potties: the greatest viral ad in Internet history https://memex.craphound.com/2015/10/09/unicorn-poop-and-squatty-potties-the-greatest-viral-ad-in-internet-history/

#5yrsago Machine Democrats https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/09/boss-politics/#tammany-hall

#5yrsago MK-Ultra and the brainwashing grift https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/09/boss-politics/#brainwashed

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:

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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

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.

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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.

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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:

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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

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.

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

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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

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