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PLURALISTIC

▸ les 10 dernières parutions

13.02.2026 à 09:29

Pluralistic: Trump antitrust is dead (13 Feb 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4426 mots)


Today's links


An altered version of a Gilded Age editorial cartoon titled 'Who controls the Senate?' which depicts the Senate as populated by tiny, ineffectual politicians ringed by massive, bloated, brooding monopolists. A door labeled 'people's entrance.' is firmly locked. A sign reads, 'This is a senate of the monopolists, by the monopolists and for the monopolists.' The image has been altered: an editorial cartoon of Boss Tweed, portrayed as a portly man in a business suit with a money-bag for a head, stands in the foreground. He is wearing a MAGA hat. On his shoulder perches a tiny, 'big stick' swinging FDR from another editorial cartoon. The logos of the monopolists in the background have been replaced with logos for Chevron, Coinbase, Google, Microsoft, WB, PGA, Apple, Comcast, Realpage and KKR.

Trump antitrust is dead (permalink)

Remember when the American right decided that it hated (some) big businesses, specifically Big Tech? A whole branch of the Trump coalition (including JD Vance, Matt Gaetz and Josh Hawley) declared themselves to be "Khanservatives," a cheering section for Biden's generationally important FTC commissioner Lina Khan:

https://www.fastcompany.com/91156980/trump-vp-pick-j-d-vance-supports-big-tech-antitrust-crackdown

Trump owes his power to his ability to bully and flatter a big, distrustful coalition of people who mostly hate each other into acting together, like the business lobby and the grievance-saturated conspiratorialists who hate Big Tech because they were momentarily prevented from calling for genocide or peddling election disinformation:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/18/winning-is-easy/#governing-is-harder

The best framing for the MAGA war on Big Tech comes from Trashfuture's Riley Quinn, who predicted that the whole thing could be settled by tech companies' boards agreeing to open every meeting with a solemn "stolen likes acknowledgment" that made repentance for all the shadowbanned culture warriors whose clout had been poached by soy content moderators.

And that's basically what happened. Trump's antitrust agencies practiced "boss politics antitrust" in which favored courtiers were given free passes to violate the law, while Trump's enemies were threatened with punitive antitrust investigations until they fell into line:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/29/bondi-and-domination/#superjove

Trump's antitrust boss Gail Slater talked a big game about "Trump Antitrust" but was thwarted at every turn by giant corporations who figured out that if they gave a million bucks to a MAGA podcaster, they could go over Slater's head and kill her enforcement actions. When Slater's deputy, Roger Alford, went public to denounce the sleazy backroom dealings that led to the approval of the Hewlett Packard Enterprise/Juniper merger, he was forced out of the agency altogether and replaced with a Pam Bondi loyalist who served as a kind of politburo political officer in Slater's agency:

https://abovethelaw.com/2025/08/former-maga-attorney-goes-scorched-earth-with-corruption-allegations-in-antitrust-division/

Bondi made no secret of her contempt for Slater, and frequently humiliated her in public. Now it seems that Bondi has gotten tired of this game and has forced Slater out altogether. As ever, Matt Stoller has the best analysis of how this happened and what it means:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/trump-antitrust-chief-ousted-by-ticketmaster

Stoller's main thesis is that the "conservative populist" movement only gained relevance by complaining about "censorship of conservatives" on the Big Tech platforms. While it's true that the platforms constitute an existential risk to free expression thanks to their chokehold over speech forums, it was always categorically untrue that conservatives were singled out by tech moderators:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

Conservative populists' grievance-based politics is in contrast with the progressive wing of the anti-monopoly movement, which was concerned with the idea of concentrated power itself, and sought to dismantle and neuter the power of the business lobby and the billionaires who ran it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

The problem with conservative populism, then, is that its movement was propelled by the idea that Big Tech was soy and cucked and mean to conservatives. That meant that Big Tech bosses had an easy path out of its crosshairs: climb into the tank for MAGA.

That's just what they did: Musk bought Twitter; Zuck ordered his content moderators to censor the left and push MAGA influencers; Bezos neutered his newspaper in the run up to the 2024 elections; Tim Cook hand-assembled a gold participation trophy for Trump live on camera. These CEOs paid a million dollars each for seats on Trump's inauguration dais and their companies donated millions for Trump's Epstein Memorial Ballroom.

Slater's political assassination merely formalizes something that's been obvious for a year now: you can rip off the American people with impunity so long as you flatter and bribe Trump.

The HPE/Juniper merger means that one company now supplies the majority of commercial-grade wifi routers, meaning that one company now controls all the public, commercial, and institutional internet you'll ever connect to. The merger was worth $14b, and Trump's trustbusters promised to kill it. So the companies paid MAGA influencer Mike Davis (who had publicly opposed the merger) a million bucks and he got Trump to overrule his own enforcers. Getting your $14b merger approved by slipping a podcaster a million bucks is a hell of a bargain.

HPE/Juniper were first, but they weren't the last. There was the Discover/Capital One merger, which rolled up the two credit cards that low-waged people rely on the most, freeing the new company up for even more predatory practices, price-gouging, junk-fees, and strong-arm collections. When the bill collectors are at your door looking for thousands you owe from junk fees, remember that it was Gail Slater's weakness that sent them there:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/03/business/dealbook/capital-one-discover-merger.html

Slater also waved through the rollup of a string of nursing homes by one of the world's most notoriously greedy and cruel private equity firms, KKR. When your grandma dies of dehydration in a dirty diaper, thank Gail Slater:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/09/dingo-babysitter/#maybe-the-dingos-ate-your-nan

Slater approved the merger of Unitedhealth – a company notorious for overbilling the government while underdelivering to patients – with Amedisys, who provide hospice care and home health help:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-requires-broad-divestitures-resolve-challenge-unitedhealths-acquisition

The hits keep coming. Want to know why your next vacation was so expensive? Thank Slater for greenlighting the merger of American Express Global Business Travel and CWT Holdings, which Slater challenged but then dropped, reportedly because MAGA influencer Mike Davis told her to.

Davis also got Slater to reverse her opposition to the Compass/Anywhere Real Estate merger, which will make America's dysfunctional housing market even worse:

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/real-estate-brokerages-avoided-merger-investigation-after-justice-department-rift-e846c797?gaa_at=eafs&gaa_n=AWEtsqdSXg4z1XPl2UpqdHR4V2-sNj9M7oDcWHscPIXuSU-5n0gtYEv8Q5XZG7qtzfY%3D&gaa_ts=698e44a6&gaa_sig=IO7tWGaHZSYER64YyUzyoiVtrOKR77ZsYMMOdwN1P7koRt9zXYRJ1hxw2oDU9cD40-aGgHHVfwMWg14olFwNaw%3D%3D

It's not just homebuyers whose lives are worse off because of Slater's failures, it's tenants, too. Slater settled the DoJ's case against Realpage, a price-fixing platform for landlords that is one of the most culpable villains in the affordability crisis. Realpage was facing an existential battle with the DoJ; instead, they got away with a wrist-slap and (crucially) are allowed to continue to make billions helping landlords rig the rental market against tenants.

So Slater's defenestration is really just a way of formalizing Trump's approach to antitrust: threaten and prosecute companies that don't bend the knee to the president, personally…and allow companies to rob the American people with impunity if they agree to kick up a percentage to the Oval Office.

But while Slater will barely rate a footnote in the history of the Trump administration, the precipitating event for her political execution is itself very interesting. Back in September, Trump posed with Kid Rock and announced that he was going after Ticketmaster/Live Nation, a combine with a long, exhaustively documented history of ripping off and defrauding every entertainer, fan and venue in America:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/ftc-sues-ticketmaster-saying-it-uses-illegal-tactics-to-make-fans-pay-more-for-live-events

At the time, it was clear that Trump had been prodded into action by two factors: the incredible success of the Mamdani campaign's focus on "affordability" (Ticketmaster's above-inflation price hikes are one of the most visible symptoms of the affordability crisis) and Kid Rock's personal grievances about Ticketmaster.

Kid Rock is the biggest-name entertainer in the Trump coalition, the guy Trump got to headline a MAGA halftime show that notably failed to dim Bad Bunny's star by a single milliwatt. Trump – a failed Broadway producer – is also notoriously susceptible to random pronouncements by celebrities (hence the Fox and Friends-to-Trump policy pipeline), so it's natural that Kid Rock's grousing got action after decades of documented abuses went nowhere.

Ticketmaster could have solved the problem by offering to exempt Trump-loyal entertainers from its predatory practices. They could have announced a touring Trumpapalooza festival headlined by Kid Rock, Christian rock acts, and AI-generated country singers, free from all junk fees. Instead, they got Gail Slater fired.

Mike Davis doesn't just represent HPE/Juniper, Amex travel, and Compass/Anywhere – he's also the fixer that Ticketmaster hired to get off the hook with the DoJ. He's boasting about getting Slater fired:

https://x.com/gekaminsky/status/2022076364279755066

And Ticketmaster is off the hook:

https://prospect.org/2026/02/12/trump-justice-department-ticketmaster-live-nation-monopoly/

What's interesting about all this is that there were elements of the Biden coalition that also hated antitrust (think of all the Biden billionaires who called for Lina Khan to be fired while serving as "proxies" for Kamala Harris). And yet, Biden's trustbusters did more in four short years than their predecessors managed over the preceding forty.

Stoller's theory is that the progressive anti-monopoly movement (the "Brandeisians") were able to best their coalitional rivals because they did the hard work of winning support for the idea of shattering corporate power itself – not just arguing that corporate power was bad when it was used against them.

This was a slower, harder road than dividing up the world into good monopolies and bad ones, but it paid off. Today the Brandeisians who made their bones under Biden are serving the like of Mamdani:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/15/unconscionability/#standalone-authority

And their ideas have spread far and wide – even to other countries:

https://lewisforleader.ca/ideas/public-options-full-plan/

They lit a fire that burns still. Who knows, maybe someday it'll even help Kid Rock scorch the Ticketmaster ticks that are draining his blood from a thousand tiny wounds. He probably won't have the good manners to say thank you.

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 Google Video DRM: Why is Hollywood more important than users? https://memex.craphound.com/2006/02/13/google-video-drm-why-is-hollywood-more-important-than-users/

#20yrsago Phishers trick Internet “trust” companies https://web.archive.org/web/20060222232249/http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2006/02/the_new_face_of_phishing_1.html

#15yrsago With a Little Help: first post-publication progress report https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blogs/cory-doctorow/article/46105-with-a-little-help-the-early-returns.html

#15yrsago Nokia’s radical CEO has a mercenary, checkered past https://web.archive.org/web/20100608100324/http://www.siliconbeat.com/2008/01/11/microsoft-beware-stephen-elop-is-a-flight-risk/

#15yrsago Scientology’s science fictional origins: thesis from 1981 https://web.archive.org/web/20110218045653/http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/opendissertations/126/

#10yrsago I was a Jeopardy! clue https://memex.craphound.com/2016/02/13/i-was-a-jeopardy-clue/

#10yrsago Liberated Yazidi sex slaves become a vengeful, elite anti-ISIS fighting force https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-yazidi-sex-slaves-take-up-arms-for-mosul-fight-to-bring-our-women-home-a6865056.html

#10yrsago Listen: a new podcast about science fiction and spectacular meals https://www.scottedelman.com/2016/02/10/the-first-episode-of-eating-the-fantastic-with-guest-sarah-pinsker-is-now-live/

#10yrsago Politician given green-light to name developer’s new streets with synonyms for greed and deceit https://web.archive.org/web/20160213001324/http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/city-hall/2016/02/8590908/staten-island-borough-president-gets-approval-name-new-streets-gre

#5yrsago $50T moved from America's 90% to the 1% https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/13/data-protection-without-monopoly/#inequality

#5yrsago Broad Band https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/13/data-protection-without-monopoly/#broad-band

#5yrsago Privacy Without Monopoly https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/13/data-protection-without-monopoly/#comcom

#1yrago Premature Internet Activists https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/13/digital-rights/#are-human-rights

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1016 words today, 28750 total)

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF

12.02.2026 à 09:42

Pluralistic: Doctors' union may yet save the NHS from Palantir (12 Feb 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3393 mots)


Today's links


A haunted, ruined hospital building. A sign hangs askew over the entrance with the NHS logo over the Palantir logo. Beneath it, a cutaway silhouette reveals a blood-spattered, scalpel-wielding surgeon with a Palantir logo over his breast, about to slice into a frightened patient with an NHS logo over his breast. Looming over the scene are the eyes of Peter Thiel, bloodshot and sinister.

Doctors' union may yet save the NHS from Palantir (permalink)

If you weren't paying close attention, you might think that the most grotesque and indefensible aspect of Keir Starmer's Labour government turning over NHS patient records to the American military contractor Palantir is that Palantir are Trumpist war-criminals, "founded to kill communists":

https://www.thecanary.co/trending/2026/01/07/palantir-kill-communists/

And that is indeed grotesque and indefensible, and should have been grounds for Starmer being forced to resign as PM long before it became apparent that he stuffed his government with Epstein's enablers and chums:

https://www.thenational.scot/news/25451640.streeting-defends-peter-mandelsons-relationship-jeffrey-epstein/

But it's actually much worse than that! It's not just that Labour handed over Britain's crown jewels to rapacious international criminals who are deeply embedded in a regime that has directly threatened the sovereignty of the UK. They also passed up a proven, advanced, open, safe, British alternative: the OpenSAFELY initiative, developed by Ben Goldacre and his team at Jesus College Oxford:

https://www.opensafely.org/

OpenSAFELY is the latest iteration of Goldacre's Trusted Research Environment (TRE), arguably the most successful patient record research tool ever conceived. It's built atop a special server that can send queries to each NHS trust, without ever directly accessing any patient data. Researchers formulate a research question – say, an inquiry into the demographics of the comorbidities of a given disease – and publish it using a modified MySQL syntax on a public git server. Other researchers peer-review the query, assessing it for rigour, and then the TRE farms that query out to each NHS trust, then aggregates all the responses and publishes it, either immediately or after a set period.

This is a fully privacy-preserving, extremely low-cost, rapid way for researchers to run queries against the full load of NHS patient records, and holy shit does it ever work. By coincidence, it went online just prior to the pandemic, and it enabled an absolute string of blockbuster papers on covid, dozens of them, including several in leading journals like Nature:

https://www.digitalhealth.net/2022/04/goldacre-trusted-research-environments/

This led HMG to commission Goldacre to produce a report on the use of TREs as the permanent, principal way for medical researchers to mine NHS data (disclosure: I was interviewed for this report):

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/better-broader-safer-using-health-data-for-research-and-analysis

This is a near-miraculous system: an ultra-effective, ultra-cost-effective, Made-in-Britain, open, transparent, privacy-preserving, rigorous way to produce medical research insights at scale, which could be perfected in the UK and then exported to the world, getting better every time a new partner signs on and helps shoulder the work of maintaining and improving the free/open source software that powers it.

OpenSAFELY was the obvious contender for NHS research. But it wasn't the only one: in the other corner was Palantir, a shady American company best known for helping cops and spies victimise people on the basis of dodgy statistics. Palantir blitzed Westminster with expensive PR and lobbying, and embarked on a strategy to "hoover up" every small NHS contractor until Palantir was the last company standing. Palantir UK boss Louis Moseley called it "Buying our way in":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/01/the-palantir-will-see-you-now/#public-private-partnership

It worked. First, Palantir got £60m worth of no-bid contracts during the acute phase of the pandemic, and then it bootstrapped that into a £330m contract to handle all the NHS England data:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/22/palantir_wins_nhs_contract/

It was a huge win for corruption over excellence and corporate surveillance over privacy. At the same time, it was a terrible blow to UK technological sovereignty, and long-term trust in the NHS.

But that's not where it ended. Palantir continued its wildly profitable, highly public programme of collaborating with fascists – especially Trump's ICE kill/snatch-squads – further trashing its reputation around the world. It's now got so bad that the British Medical Association (BMA) – a union representing more than 200,000 UK doctors – has told its members that they should not use the Palantir products that the NHS has forced onto their practices:

https://www.bmj.com/content/392/bmj.s168/rr-2

In response, an anonymous Palantir spokesperson told The Register that Britons should trust its software because the company is also working with British police forces:

https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/11/bma_palantir_nhs/

The BMA is a very powerful, militant union, and it has already run successful campaigns against Starmer's government that forced Labour to shore up its support for the NHS. The fact that there's a better, cheaper, more effective, technologically sovereign tool that HMG has already recognised only bolsters the union's case for jettisoning Palantir's products altogether.

(Image: Gage Skidmore, CC BY 2.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Google Video DRM: Why is Hollywood more important than users? https://memex.craphound.com/2006/02/13/google-video-drm-why-is-hollywood-more-important-than-users/

#20yrsago Phishers trick Internet “trust” companies https://web.archive.org/web/20060222232249/http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2006/02/the_new_face_of_phishing_1.html

#15yrsago With a Little Help: first post-publication progress report https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blogs/cory-doctorow/article/46105-with-a-little-help-the-early-returns.html

#15yrsago Nokia’s radical CEO has a mercenary, checkered past https://web.archive.org/web/20100608100324/http://www.siliconbeat.com/2008/01/11/microsoft-beware-stephen-elop-is-a-flight-risk/

#15yrsago Scientology’s science fictional origins: thesis from 1981 https://web.archive.org/web/20110218045653/http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/opendissertations/126/

#10yrsago I was a Jeopardy! clue https://memex.craphound.com/2016/02/13/i-was-a-jeopardy-clue/

#10yrsago Liberated Yazidi sex slaves become a vengeful, elite anti-ISIS fighting force https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-yazidi-sex-slaves-take-up-arms-for-mosul-fight-to-bring-our-women-home-a6865056.html

#10yrsago Listen: a new podcast about science fiction and spectacular meals https://www.scottedelman.com/2016/02/10/the-first-episode-of-eating-the-fantastic-with-guest-sarah-pinsker-is-now-live/

#10yrsago Politician given green-light to name developer’s new streets with synonyms for greed and deceit https://web.archive.org/web/20160213001324/http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/city-hall/2016/02/8590908/staten-island-borough-president-gets-approval-name-new-streets-gre

#5yrsago $50T moved from America's 90% to the 1% https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/13/data-protection-without-monopoly/#inequality

#5yrsago Broad Band https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/13/data-protection-without-monopoly/#broad-band

#5yrsago Privacy Without Monopoly https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/13/data-protection-without-monopoly/#comcom

#1yrago Premature Internet Activists https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/13/digital-rights/#are-human-rights

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1006 words today, 27741 total)

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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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

11.02.2026 à 11:09

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

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4289 mots)


Today's links


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crises precipitate change, and Trump precipitates crises.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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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

10.02.2026 à 10:40

Pluralistic: The Nuremberg Caucus (10 Feb 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3494 mots)


Today's links


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

The Nuremberg Caucus (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://archive.is/0LNh8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Ray Bradbury: LA needs monorails! https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-feb-05-op-bradbury5-story.html

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

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