Today's links

• Decarbonization at a distance: A post-American century that runs on sunshine.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Human shields for Internet of Shit slumlords; Tubemap with one-bedroom flat prices; Years of Repair; Internet of Lying Things; Dieselgate for TVs; Apple kills Chinese RSS readers.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

Decarbonization at a distance (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

This is just not true, for several reasons.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or can they?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hey look at this (permalink)

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

• I’ve Written About Loads of Scams. This One Almost Got Me. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/nyregion/zelle-chase-banking-scam.html?unlocked_article_code=1.nE8.mifp.13j7oh96HfpC&smid=url-share

• Chat Control Is Back on the Menu in the EU. It Still Must Be Stopped https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/09/chat-control-back-menu-eu-it-still-must-be-stopped-0

• 18 Lawyers Caught Using AI Explain Why They Did It https://www.404media.co/18-lawyers-caught-using-ai-explain-why-they-did-it/

• The Ann Arbor District Library Plans to Acquire the Ann Arbor Observer https://aadl.org/node/647334

• Blippo+ Stands Against the Enshittification of TV https://www.endlessmode.com/video-games/blippo/blippo-stands-against-the-enshittification-of-tv

Object permanence (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Boston: Enshittification with Randall Munroe (Brattle Theater), Oct 7
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-at-the-brattle-theatre-tickets-1591235180259?aff=oddtdtcreator

• DC: Enshittification with Rohit Chopra (Politics and Prose), Oct 8
  https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825

• NYC: Enshittification with Lina Khan (Brooklyn Public Library), Oct 9
  https://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/cory-doctorow-discusses-central-library-dweck-20251009-0700pm

• New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

• New Orleans: Enshittification at Octavia Books, Oct 12
  https://www.octaviabooks.com/event/enshittification-cory-doctorow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Enshittification (The.Ink)
  https://the.ink/p/watch-cory-doctorow-on-why-everything

• Why Everything Is Getting Worse (Majority Report)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQW6UxY144Q

• Enshittification (Cornell)
  https://ecornell.cornell.edu/keynotes/view/K091225/

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "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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Today's links

• Announcing the Enshittification tour: Come say hi, why dontcha?
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: HP defeat device; It Gets Better; OPM hack endangers CIA in Beijing; Self-driving cars crash.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

Announcing the Enshittification tour (permalink)

Next Monday, I'll be departing for a 24-city, three-month book tour for my new book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Went Wrong and What To Do About It:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

This is a big tour! I'll be doing in-person events in the US, Canada, the UK and Portugal, and a virtual event in Spain. I'm also planning an event in Hamburg, Germany for December, but that one hasn't been confirmed yet, so it doesn't appear in the schedule below. You'll notice that there are events that are missing their signup and ticketing details; I'll be keeping the master tour schedule up to date at pluralistic.net/tour.

If there's an event you're interested in that hasn't had its details filled in yet, please send an email to doctorow@craphound.com with the name of the event in the subject line. I'm going to create one-shot mailing lists that I'll update with details when they're available (please forgive me if I fumble this – book tours are pretty intensive affairs and I'll be squeezing this into the spare moments).

Here's that schedule!

• Cambridge, MA: Harvard Books presents a conversation with Randall "XKCD" Munroe at the Brattle Theater (Oct 7, 6PM)
  https://www.harvard.com/event/cory-doctorow

• Washington, DC: In conversation with former CFPB chair and FTC commissioner Rohit Chopra at Politics & Prose at the Wharf (Oct 8, 7PM)
  https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825

• Brooklyn, NY: Greenlight Bookstore presents a conversation with former FTC chair Lina Khan at the Brooklyn Public Library (Oct 9, 7PM)
  https://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/cory-doctorow-discusses-central-library-dweck-20251009-0700pm

• New Orleans, LA: Guest of Honor at DeepSouthCon at the New Orleans Airport Hilton (Oct 10-12)
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

• New Orleans, LA: Enshittification at Octavia Books (Oct 12, 1PM)
  https://www.octaviabooks.com/event/enshittification-cory-doctorow

• Chicago, IL: In conversation with Rick Perlstein at the University Club (Oct 14, 12PM)
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/how-platforms-die-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1747916117159

• Los Angeles, CA: In conversation with The American Prospect's David Dayen at Diesel Books (Oct 16, 6:30PM)
  https://dieselbookstore.com/event/2025-10-16/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• Calgary, AB: Literary Death Match at Wordfest (Oct 17, 7:30PM)
  https://wordfest.com/2025/imaginarium/show/literary-death-match/

• Calgary, AB: Big Tech’s Betrayal—and How to Break Free! at Wordfest (Oct 18, 1PM)
  https://wordfest.com/2025/imaginarium/show/big-techs-betrayaland-how-to-break-free/

• San Francisco, CA: In conversation with Jenny Odell, author of How To Do Nothing at Public Works, presented by Booksmith (Oct 20, 7PM)
  https://app.gopassage.com/events/29638

• Portland, OR: Enshittification at Powell's City of Books (Oct 21, 7PM)
  https://www.powells.com/events/cory-doctorow-10-21-25

• Seattle, WA: In conversation with Ed Zitron of Where's Your Ed At at the Seattle Public Library, presented by Clarion West (Oct 22, 7PM)
  https://www.spl.org/programs-and-services/authors-and-books/authors-and-books-calendar?trumbaEmbed=view%3Devent%26eventid%3D188210978

• Vancouver, BC: In conversation with David Moscrop at the Vancouver Writers Festival (Oct 23, 7PM)
  https://www.showpass.com/2025-festival-39/

• Montreal, PQ: Keynote for the Attention Forum (Oct 24)
  https://www.attentionconferences.com/conferences/2025-forum

• Montreal, PQ: Bookstore event, details to be confirmed (Oct 24)

• Ottawa, ON: Enshittification at the Ottawa Writers Festival (Oct 25, 8PM)
  https://writersfestival.org/events/fall-2025/enshittification

• Toronto, ON: Enshittification with Dan Werb at Type Books in the Junction (Oct 27, 7PM)
  https://www.instagram.com/p/DO81_1VDngu/?img_index=1

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

• New York City, NY: Keynote for Columbia-Hertie Digital Governance for Democratic Renewal Conference @The Forum, Columbia University (Oct 29)
  https://worldprojects.columbia.edu/our-work/research-and-engagement/democratic-renewal/digital-governance

• Miami, FL: Enshittification at Books & Books (Nov 5, 7PM)
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469

• Miami, FL: Keynote for Cloudfest (Nov 6, 9:45AM)
  https://www.cloudfest.com/usa/

• Burbank, CA: Signing at the Burbank Book Festival (Nov 8, 2PM)
  https://www.burbankbookfestival.com/

• Lisbon, PT: A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet, with Rabble at Web Summit (Nov 12, 1040AM)
  https://websummit.com/sessions/lis25/92f47bc9-ca60-4997-bef3-006735b1f9c5/a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet/

• Cardiff, UK: Hay Festival After Hours at Wales Millennium Centre, Bute Place (Nov 13, 7PM)
  https://www.hayfestival.com/c-203-hay-festival-after-hours.aspx

• Oxford, UK: Joint event with Tim Wu, author of "The Age of Extraction," sponsored by the Oxford Internet Institute (Nov 14, evening)
  Details and ticket link to come

• London, UK: Enshittification with Sarah Wynn-Williams, author of Careless People and Chris Morris (Brass Eye, Four Lions) (Nov 15, 7PM)
  Details and ticket link to come

• London, UK: Novara Live (Nov 17, evening)
  Details and ticket link to come

• London, UK: Frontline Club (Nov 18, evening)
  Details and ticket link to come

• Vancouver, BC: Virtual event for the Vancouver Public Library (Nov 21, 12PM)
  Details and link to come

• Seattle, WA: AI Lecture for the University of Washington's series on Neuroscience, AI and Society (Dec 4, 7PM)
  https://compneuro.washington.edu/news-and-events/neuroscience-ai-and-society/

• Madison, CT: Enshittification at RJ Julia (Dec 8, 7PM)
  Details and ticket link to come

Hey look at this (permalink)

• The Case Against Generative AI https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-case-against-generative-ai/

• Day 5: Another Bad Day for Google as the Spirit of De Tocqueville Looms https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/day-5-another-bad-day-for-google

• On Free Speech, Jacobin Has Always Been Consistent https://jacobin.com/2025/09/first-amendment-cancel-culture-kirk-kimmel/

• Landlords Demand Tenants’ Workplace Logins to Scrape Their Paystubs https://www.404media.co/landlords-demand-tenants-workplace-logins-to-scrape-their-paystubs/

*The Great Awakening: Competition Commissioner Matthew Boswell (I bought an annual sub) https://donotpassgo.substack.com/p/the-great-awakening-competition-commissioner

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Four and Twenty Blackbirds: great goth scary novel discovered on LJ https://memex.craphound.com/2005/09/30/four-and-twenty-blackbirds-great-goth-scary-novel-discovered-on-lj/

#20yrago Last Unicorn author ripped off by filmmaker, struggling and penniless https://web.archive.org/web/20051201203719/http://www.conlanpress.com/youcanhelp/

#20yrsago Copyright scholars and publishers on crazy auctorial theories about books and tech https://web.archive.org/web/20060302133925/http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/28/opinion/28oreilly.html?ex=1285560000&en=aa457b249728c229&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

#20yrsago Tim O’Reilly profiled by Steven Levy https://web.archive.org/web/20051013083044/https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.10/oreilly_pr.html

#15yrsago Welcome to Bordertown: the first Borderlands book in decades! https://web.archive.org/web/20111201160812/https://ellen-kushner.livejournal.com/326691.html

#15yrsago It Gets Better: video postcards to isolated queer kids from happy queer adults https://www.thestranger.com/blogs/2010/09/28/4996088/sf-says-it-gets-better

#10yrsago Icelanders school their PM on solidarity with Syrian refugees https://www.icelandreview.com/news/icelanders-want-welcome-refugees-pm-responds/

#10yrsago Lemony Snicket gives Planned Parenthood $1M https://x.com/DanielHandler/status/648468194215243776

#10yrsago Wisconsin is a paradise for white kids, but a hell for black kids https://web.archive.org/web/20150928230209/https://fusion.net/story/203830/wisconsin-african-americans-juvenile-arrests/

#10yrsago After OPM hack, CIA pulls agents from Beijing for their safety https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/cia-pulled-officers-from-beijing-after-breach-of-federal-personnel-records/2015/09/29/1f78943c-66d1-11e5-9ef3-fde182507eac_story.html

#5yrsago Self-driving cars crashing https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/30/death-to-all-monopoly/#pogo-stick-problem

#5yrsago Leaked EU Big Tech rules https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/30/death-to-all-monopoly/#whither-structural-separation

#5yrsago The Anti-Monopoly War Song https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/30/death-to-all-monopoly/#victims-of-vile-subsidies

#5yrsago How I write https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/30/death-to-all-monopoly/#process-notes

#1yrago A sexy, skinny defeat device for your HP ink cartridge https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/30/life-finds-a-way/#ink-stained-wretches

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Boston: Enshittification with Randall Munroe (Brattle Theater), Oct 7
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-at-the-brattle-theatre-tickets-1591235180259?aff=oddtdtcreator

• DC: Enshittification with Rohit Chopra (Politics and Prose), Oct 8
  https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825

• NYC: Enshittification with Lina Khan (Brooklyn Public Library), Oct 9
  https://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/cory-doctorow-discusses-central-library-dweck-20251009-0700pm

• New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

• New Orleans: Enshittification at Octavia Books, Oct 12
  https://www.octaviabooks.com/event/enshittification-cory-doctorow

• Chicago: Enshittification with Anand Giridharadas (Chicago Humanities), Oct 15
  https://www.oldtownschool.org/concerts/2025/10-15-2025-kara-swisher-and-cory-doctorow-on-enshittification/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Why Everything Is Getting Worse (Majority Report)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQW6UxY144Q

• Enshittification (Cornell)
  https://ecornell.cornell.edu/keynotes/view/K091225/

• Escaping Big Tech, Privacy Battles & “Enshittification” (Revolution.social)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exvpetQRSVo

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links

• Plenty of room at the bottom (of the tech stack): Apple is out of low-hanging fruit.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: "Julia," HP DRM talk; Atheists know more theology than "Christians"; D&D v MMORPGs; Scandanavia's CSAM filter-creep; Snowden's on Twitter; Limbaugh says Martian water is a leftist plot.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

Plenty of room at the bottom (of the tech stack) (permalink)

Freedom or safety: choose one. This is the false bargain we were offered after 9/11, the ideology underpinning the PATRIOT Act and the (permanent) suspension of human rights. This ideology has metastasized out of the realm of airport security theater and mass surveillance, ossifying into a bedrock axiom about technology design itself.

Ironically, it's not just conservative bed-wetters who've rejected the idea that freedom isn't free, and we all have to trade away our autonomy for a safe and secure online experience. There were plenty of techno-progressives who insisted that the problems with Twitter and Facebook could be solved by forcing their zuckermuskian overlords to invest sufficient resources in their Trust and Safety teams.

There's nothing wrong with asking people who host social spaces to invest in moderation, but the idea that we can improve the lives of people stuck in these obviously irreparable corporate spaces is by making their owners care about our welfare is just bankrupt. Far better to make it easy for us to leave these platforms:

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

Mandating interoperability – federation – for these legacy social media services means that if somehow it turns out that neither Zuck, nor Musk (nor anyone who succeeds them) is fit to preside over the social lives of hundreds of millions or billions of people, then those users can leave, and they won't lose touch with the people they currently stay on these platforms to be in community with.

We don't have to choose between safety and freedom. We can have both. Franklin had it wrong when he wrote, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

It's not that you don't deserve these things, it's that you won't get them. Give Apple control over which apps you can install and who can fix your device and which accessories you can use with your devices, and Apple will spy on you and they'll let other people spy on you and rip you off:

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

They'll block you from installing and using tools that improve the user experience of Instagram while blocking Meta from spying on you:

https://www.digitaltrends.com/phones/the-og-app-ad-free-instagram-removed-app-store-iphone/

Apple's security model works well. To the extent that Apple is both benevolent and competent, it makes products that are safe and reliable. But this model fails horribly, because any time Apple decides to trade off its customers' privacy, safety, or utility for its own priorities, those customers are rendered defenseless by Apple's total control:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Being an Apple customer is like being in a 24/7 BDSM relationship…without a safe-word. Maybe you like the control Apple exerts over your life most of the time, but if they ever start to hurt you, there's no way to make them stop:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones

Apple's story – the story of all centralized, authoritarian technology – is that you have to trade freedom for security. If you want technology that Just Works(TM), you need to give up on the idea of being able to override the manufacturer's decisions. It's always prix-fixe, never a la carte.

This is a kind of vulgar Thatcherism, a high-tech version of her maxim that "there is no alternative." Decomposing the iPhone into its constituent parts – thoughtful, well-tested technology; total control by a single vendor – is posed as a logical impossibility, like a demand for water that's not wet:

https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-there-were-always-enshittifiers/

Today, much of the world is trying to figure out what life looks like after US Big Tech. Outside of the USA, there's a growing consensus that Big Tech is an arm of the US state, a way to project soft (and even hard) American power around the globe:

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

Europe in particular is investing in free/open source alternatives to American Big Tech (the "Eurostack"). A big question is whether software built and maintained as a commons can ever match the slick user-friendliness of the tech companies – in other words, are we going to have to sacrifice the convenience of a Just Works(TM) platform for freedom from Big Tech?

I think this is a lazy conclusion. It's true that it takes more steps to sign up for Mastodon than it does to get onboard with Instagram, and that Instagram has a recommendation system that can help you bootstrap your network and start to populate your feed. But it's also true that Instagram has thousands of engineers and UX/UI people working on it, while Mastodon operates on a skeleton crew.

The idea that Mastodon's rough edges are due to the fact that it's open and federated – and not because it operates with a fraction of a percent of the resources as Instagram – is pretty implausible to my mind.

Indeed, there's a long history of tools designed by and for developers being picked up by commercial teams and polished into mass consumer products, which suggests that the tools' usability problems stemmed from resource constraints, not the openness or the flexibility of the tool. Think of how Slack transformed irc, or how Android packaged up GNU/Linux.

Another way to think about investment in improving free/open tools that suffer from being overly technical is that there is tons of room for improvement. There are so many easy wins to be scored when it comes to Libreoffice, Mastodon, The Gimp, ffmpeg, etc. Under the hood, these tools are stunning, but their front-ends have lagged.

By contrast, Big Tech has done so much fine-tuning of its user interfaces and workflows that there's very little room to maneuver. Every new product release for a dominant Big Tech tool is as much a regression as it is an improvement, and often these releases are expensive catastrophes:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1mkhros/gpt5_sucks_thats_all/

People are often baffled at how a company with all these experts can produce "improvements" that are actually massive steps backwards, but that's what happens when you try to add more polish to something you've already been polishing for a decade or more:

https://kottke.org/25/09/0047552-im-usually-pretty-go-with

There's plenty of room at the bottom (of the tech stack). It's hard to overstate just how under-resourced some free/open projects are, how many millions of people rely on the work of just one dedicated maintainer. Snowden coordinated his disclosures to journalists using GPG, the free/open version of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), a way to secure email conversations. After the Snowden revelations, many people tried to use GPG – and failed. It was just too complicated.

But is GPG too complicated to use because it's impossible to make it easier to use? Maybe. But maybe it was the fact that one part-time volunteer was doing all the work on GPG/email integration:

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-worlds-email-encryption-software-relies-on-one-guy-who-is-going-broke

Likewise, there are millions of people who rely on Pidgin, a tool that lets you use multiple chat systems from a single interface. Those millions of users are supported by one part-time developer who funds the work out of his dayjob:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/tower-babel-how-public-interest-internet-trying-save-messaging-and-banish-big

If the EU were to fund even a small team to improve the usability of these systems, they could plausibly make them ten or twenty times easier to use (that is, put them within the technical understanding of ten to twenty times more users). What a growth opportunity! Does anyone think Apple can make iOS twenty times more legible?

Getting these free/open tools over a threshold for everyday usage puts them on a glide path to sustainability. As more users – and more kinds of users – pile into them, this improves the business-case for different kinds of organizations (co-ops, tinkerers, government agencies, startups) investing in improving them. And because these tools are free/open, those improvements go back into the commons, and benefit all the users. This is the kind of network effect we love to see.

And these tools won't just work better – they'll also fail better. For years now, I've been using Framework laptops, designed to be upgraded, repaired and maintained by their users:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/21/monica-byrne/#think-different

The Framework is the best computer I've ever owned. Not only does it work brilliantly, but it fails even better:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/13/graceful-failure/#frame

For years, I relied on Apple hardware, and had to buy my Powerbooks in pairs, because one of them was always broken and had to be sent back to Applecare for repair. After I switched to Thinkpads, I was able to buy IBM (then Lenovo's) global, onsite, next-day hardware replacement warranty, and so I was able to just have one laptop at a time, and use an old one for 24-36 hours while I waited for a technician to travel to my home or hotel room to fix my machine.

But with the Framework, I just fix whatever breaks myself. When I dropped my laptop during a UK tour, I was able to get a replacement screen Fedexed to my hotel. I did the screen swap in 15 minutes, at midnight, after getting off a late train from Edinburgh. It worked the first time, and the next day I turned in two columns and did a livecast.

Last week, I discovered that my laptop battery had overheated and swollen so much I could barely keep the case screwed shut – something that happens to all kinds of hardware. It's really dangerous, presenting a serious risk of fire. If that had happened to a Mac or a Thinkpad, I would have been screwed, unable to safely board my airplane on Friday morning.

But I was able to remove the battery before checking out of my hotel in Ithaca (the desk clerk accepted it to be given to facilities people for safe disposal), and Framework sent a replacement battery to my next hotel in NYC, so after I got off my plane and checked in there, I was able to swap my new battery in and pick right up again.

The other day, my wife said that she thought that between my operating system (Ubuntu, a flavor of GNU/Linux) and hardware (the Framework), I was having more technical problems than I used to have with my Macs. I was shocked – but after we talked it over, I realized she got that impression because when something goes wrong with my laptop, I can fix it, so I spend a bunch of time tinkering with things, rather than bringing it to an Apple Store and switching to a backup computer.

Another example: while I was in Ithaca, I decided to upgrade my 2TB solid state drive to a 4TB one. The reliable way to do this is to install the OS and all my apps on the new drive, and then copy over my user files, but that requires a lot of manual attending. I wanted a process that I could start before bed and then pick up in the morning. So I used "dd," a command that duplicates whole disks, to copy the 2TB disk to the 4TB one.

Then I used a bunch of arcane utilities to resize the partition to fill the disk (a task that was made much more complex because I have full-disk encryption turned on). It worked – but then the disk wouldn't boot. Turned out this operation had messed up GRUB, a key part of the Linux boot system.

I had many choices at that juncture. I could have scrapped the project and started over, wiping the disk, installing the OS and apps, and re-copying my data. I could have parked the whole project until I was back home in LA. Instead, I worked with some great tech support people at Canonical (who make Ubuntu) to fix GRUB, and an hour or two later, I was up and running.

The point here is that I had all options open to me. I could do this The Mac Way (bringing my machine to a technician and asking them to do it). I could do it the labor-intensive but reliable way (install OS and apps, move data). I could do it the risky, high-tech way (dd, resize partition, fix GRUB). If I'd been at home with a light work week, I might have done the middle option. If I was advising a friend without a lot of technical chops on how to do this, I might have recommended the first option. But the fact that I was on the road with limited time didn't place this upgrade out of reach. I got to decide which tradeoffs I wanted to make.

What's more, the only reason my method was so damned tricky is that no one's bothered to automate it. The process involved cutting and pasting a lot of long, machine-readable, alphanumeric identifiers into config files, and I screwed up a step. There's nothing about this process that's intrinsically hard, it's just hard because I was doing it manually. If lots of people had the ability to swap their hard drives (a process that takes less than five minutes with a Framework), it would absolutely be worth someone's time to turn all that fiddly work into an app with one big button labeled "MAKE BOOTABLE COPY GO NOW."

I love it when a system works well, but I really hate it when a system fails badly. It doesn't matter how much you can get done with your technology when it works properly if it's broken and you can't get it to work.

We've had decades of massive investment in systems that work well, but fail badly. With US Big Tech off the menu for more and more of us, it's time to think about making our resilient, gracefully failing tools easier to use – and stop hoping that someday, somehow, companies with an investment in selling us something new when their products break decide to make them easier to fix.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Viral call-recording app Neon goes dark after exposing users’ phone numbers, call recordings, and transcripts https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/25/viral-call-recording-app-neon-goes-dark-after-exposing-users-phone-numbers-call-recordings-and-transcripts/

• Kamala Harris has no lessons for the Democrats – or herself (by Nicola Sturgeon) https://observer.co.uk/culture/books/article/kamala-harri-has-no-lessons-for-the-democrats-or-herself

• Unknown Artist: Smokey the Fire Engine https://taylorjessen.blogspot.com/2025/09/unknown-artist-smokey-fire-engine.html

• Ed Zitron is mad as hell https://archive.is/A6XXp

• Story Seed Library https://storyseedlibrary.org/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Anti-MMORPG ads from D&D https://craphound.com/images/wowdanddad.jpg

#20yrsago Phone unlockers versus the DMCA https://web.archive.org/web/20061005152056/https://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,68989,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_6

#20yrsago My DRM talk for HP research https://craphound.com/hpdrm.txt

#15yrsago Legal blackmail: comprehensive look at tactics of copyright bounty-hunters https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/09/amounts-to-blackmail-inside-a-p2p-settlement-letter-factory/

#15yrsago HOWTO make a meat-head https://web.archive.org/web/20100928035616/https://makeprojects.com/Project/Meat-Head/294/1

#15yrsago What Internet activism looks like https://web.archive.org/web/20101001074040/http://dashes.com/anil/2010/09/when-the-revolution-comes-they-wont-recognize-it.html

#15yrsago American atheists and agnostics know more about religion than professed believers https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2010-sep-28-la-na-religion-survey-20100928-story.html

#15yrsago Only 1.7% of sites blocked by Scandinavia’s “child-porn” filters are actually child porn https://ak-zensur.de/2010/09/29/analysis-blacklists.pdf

#15yrsago Inside the finances of the UK “legal blackmail” copyright enforcement company https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/09/p2p-settlement-factory-expects-10-million-from-mailing-letters/

#15yrsago SUPERDAD: moving and infuriating memoir of fatherhood and crack https://memex.craphound.com/2010/09/29/superdad-moving-and-infuriating-memoir-of-fatherhood-and-crack/

#10yrsago Apple removes an app that tracks U.S. military drone strikes from its store https://www.dailydot.com/news/app-store-drone-strike-metadata/

#10yrsago Edward Snowden is now @snowden https://theintercept.com/2015/09/29/edward-snowden-twitter-snowden/

#10yrsago With Roca Labs smackdown, the FTC slams non-disparagement clauses for the first time https://web.archive.org/web/20150930020239/https://popehat.com/2015/09/29/in-roca-labs-case-ftc-takes-novel-stand-against-non-disparagement-clauses/

#10yrsago Execspeak singularity: the spectacular bullshit of Blackberry’s CEO https://web.archive.org/web/20151009122454/http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/magazine/content/10_42/b4199076785733.htm

#10yrsago The FBI has no trouble spying on encrypted communications https://theintercept.com/2015/09/28/hacking/

#10yrsago Rush Limbaugh: water on Mars is a leftist conspiracy https://www.mediamatters.org/rush-limbaugh/after-nasa-announces-it-found-water-mars-rush-limbaugh-says-its-part-climate-change

#10yrsago Jamaica wants slavery reparations from the UKhttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/29/jamaica-calls-britain-pay-billions-pounds-reparations-slavery

#10yrsago Zeroes: it sucks to be a teen, even with powers https://memex.craphound.com/2015/09/29/zeroes-it-sucks-to-be-a-teen-even-with-powers/

#10yrsago Carly Fiorina boasts: I sold the NSA its mass-surveillance servers https://web.archive.org/web/20150929192051/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/carly-fiorina-i-supplied-hp-servers-for-nsa-snooping

#10yrsago Professional skeptics on misinformation & hoaxes: anti-vaxx, Planned Parenthood https://web.archive.org/web/20151001012616/http://www.hopesandfears.com/hopes/now/media/216577-hoax-busters-planned-parenthood-anti-vaxxer-disinformation

#10yrsago Righstcorp’s terrifying extortion script is breathtaking in its sleaze https://www.techdirt.com/2015/09/28/rightscorps-copyright-trolling-phone-script-tells-innocent-people-they-need-to-give-their-computers-to-police/

#10yrsago AP will use “climate doubters” instead of “climate skeptics” https://www.ap.org/the-definitive-source/announcements/an-addition-to-ap-stylebook-entry-on-global-warming/

#10yrsago Distinguished scientists call for RICO prosecution of climate deniers https://brucesterling.tumblr.com/post/130046509798/rico-for-climate-deniers

#10yrsago Dismaland will be dismantled, used for refugee shelters in Calais https://www.bbc.com/news/av/entertainment-arts-34375391

#5yrsago The Trump financial method https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/28/cyberwar-tactics/#grifts

#5yrsago Dark money and SCOTUS https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/29/betcha-cant-eat-just-one/#pwnage

#5yrsago Bust 'em all https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/29/betcha-cant-eat-just-one/#trustbusting-makes-me-feel-good

#5yrsago Zombie banks https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/28/cyberwar-tactics/#aligned-incentives

#5yrsago Newsletters' glorious history https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/28/cyberwar-tactics/#mimeograph

#5yrsago Belarus's online/offline uprising https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/28/cyberwar-tactics/#belarus

#1yrago Sandra Newman's "Julia" https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/28/novel-writing-machines/#fanfic

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Boston: Enshittification with Randall Munroe (Brattle Theater), Oct 7
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-at-the-brattle-theatre-tickets-1591235180259?aff=oddtdtcreator

• DC: Enshittification with Rohit Chopra (Politics and Prose), Oct 8
  https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825

• NYC: Enshittification with Lina Khan (Brooklyn Public Library), Oct 9
  https://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/cory-doctorow-discusses-central-library-dweck-20251009-0700pm

• New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

• New Orleans: Enshittification at Octavia Books, Oct 12
  https://www.octaviabooks.com/event/enshittification-cory-doctorow

• Chicago: Enshittification with Anand Giridharadas (Chicago Humanities), Oct 15
  https://www.oldtownschool.org/concerts/2025/10-15-2025-kara-swisher-and-cory-doctorow-on-enshittification/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Enshittification (Cornell)
  https://ecornell.cornell.edu/keynotes/view/K091225/

• Escaping Big Tech, Privacy Battles & “Enshittification” (Revolution.social)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exvpetQRSVo

• Nerd Harder! (This Week in Tech)
  https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1047

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links

• The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh: Sweating (the assets) to the oldies.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Dying on the job; Google audiocomplete blacklist; Lockheed Martin v. 'gathering information.'
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh (permalink)

Like you, I'm sick to the back teeth of talking about AI. Like you, I keep getting dragged into discussions of AI. Unlike you‡, I spent the summer writing a book about why I'm sick of writing about AI⹋, which Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish in 2026.

‡probably

⹋"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI"

A week ago, I turned that book into a speech, which I delivered as the annual Nordlander Memorial Lecture at Cornell, where I'm an AD White Professor-at-Large. This was my first-ever speech about AI and I wasn't sure how it would go over, but thankfully, it went great and sparked a lively Q&A. One of those questions came from a young man who said something like "So, you're saying a third of the stock market is tied up in seven AI companies that have no way to become profitable and that this is a bubble that's going to burst and take the whole economy with it?"

I said, "Yes, that's right."

He said, "OK, but what can we do about that?"

So I re-iterated the book's thesis: that the AI bubble is driven by monopolists who've conquered their markets and have no more growth potential, who are desperate to convince investors that they can continue to grow by moving into some other sector, e.g. "pivot to video," crypto, blockchain, NFTs, AI, and now "super-intelligence." Further: the topline growth that AI companies are selling comes from replacing most workers with AI, and re-tasking the surviving workers as AI babysitters ("humans in the loop"), which won't work. Finally: AI cannot do your job, but an AI salesman can 100% convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job, and when the bubble bursts, the money-hemorrhaging "foundation models" will be shut off and we'll lose the AI that can't do your job, and you will be long gone, retrained or retired or "discouraged" and out of the labor market, and no one will do your job. AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/27/rancid-vibe-coding/#class-war

The only thing (I said) that we can do about this is to puncture the AI bubble as soon as possible, to halt this before it progresses any further and to head off the accumulation of social and economic debt. To do that, we have to take aim at the material basis for the AI bubble (creating a growth story by claiming that defective AI can do your job).

"OK," the young man said, "but what can we do about the crash?" He was clearly very worried.

"I don't think there's anything we can do about that. I think it's already locked in. I mean, maybe if we had a different government, they'd fund a jobs guarantee to pull us out of it, but I don't think Trump'll do that, so –"

"But what can we do?"

We went through a few rounds of this, with this poor kid just repeating the same question in different tones of voice, like an acting coach demonstrating the five stages of grieving using nothing but inflection. It was an uncomfortable moment, and there was some decidedly nervous chuckling around the room as we pondered the coming AI (economic) apocalypse, and the fate of this kid graduating with mid-six-figure debts into an economy of ashes and rubble.

I firmly believe the (economic) AI apocalypse is coming. These companies are not profitable. They can't be profitable. They keep the lights on by soaking up hundreds of billions of dollars in other people's money and then lighting it on fire. Eventually those other people are going to want to see a return on their investment, and when they don't get it, they will halt the flow of billions of dollars. Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops.

This isn't like the early days of the web, or Amazon, or any of those other big winners that lost money before becoming profitable. Those were all propositions with excellent "unit economics" – they got cheaper with every successive technological generation, and the more customers they added, the more profitable they became. AI companies have – in the memorable phraseology of Ed Zitron – "dogshit unit-economics." Each generation of AI has been vastly more expensive than the previous one, and each new AI customer makes the AI companies lose more money:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/30/accounting-gaffs/#artificial-income

This week, no less than the Wall Street Journal published a lengthy, well-reported story (by Eliot Brown and Robbie Whelan) on the catastrophic finances of AI companies:

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-bubble-building-spree-55ee6128

The WSJ writers compare the AI bubble to other bubbles, like Worldcom's fraud-soaked fiber optic bonanza (which saw the company's CEO sent to prison, where he eventually died), and conclude that the AI bubble is vastly larger than any other bubble in recent history.

The data-center buildout has genuinely absurd finances – there are data-center companies that are collateralizing their loans by staking their giant Nvidia GPUs as collateral. This is wild: there's pretty much nothing (apart from fresh-caught fish) that loses its value faster than silicon chips. That goes triple for GPUs used in AI data-centers, where it's normal for tens of thousands of chips to burn out over a single, 54-day training run:

https://techblog.comsoc.org/2024/11/25/superclusters-of-nvidia-gpu-ai-chips-combined-with-end-to-end-network-platforms-to-create-next-generation-data-centers/

Talk about sweating your assets!

That barely scratches the surface of the funny accounting in the AI bubble. Microsoft "invests" in Openai by giving the company free access to its servers. Openai reports this as a ten billion dollar investment, then redeems these "tokens" at Microsoft's data-centers. Microsoft then books this as ten billion in revenue.

That's par for the course in AI, where it's normal for Nvidia to "invest" tens of billions in a data-center company, which then spends that investment buying Nvidia chips. It's the same chunk of money is being energetically passed back and forth between these closely related companies, all of which claim it as investment, as an asset, or as revenue (or all three).

The Journal quotes David Cahn, a VC from Sequoia, who says that for AI companies to become profitable, they would have to sell us $800 billion worth of services over the life of today's data centers and GPUs. Not only is that a very large number – it's also a very short time. AI bosses themselves will tell you that these data centers and GPUs will be obsolete practically from the moment they start operating. Mark Zuckerberg says he's prepared to waste "a couple hundred billion dollars" on misspent AI investments:

https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-meta-risk-billions-miss-superintelligence-ai-bubble-2025-9

Bain & Co says that the only way to make today's AI investments profitable is for the sector to bring in $2 trillion by 2030 (the Journal notes that this is more than the combined revenue of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple Nvidia and Meta):

https://www.bain.com/about/media-center/press-releases/20252/$2-trillion-in-new-revenue-needed-to-fund-ais-scaling-trend—bain–companys-6th-annual-global-technology-report/

How much money is the AI industry making? Morgan Stanley says it's $45b/year. But that $45b is based on the AI industry's own exceedingly cooked books, where annual revenue is actually annualized revenue, an accounting scam whereby a company chooses its best single revenue month and multiplies it by 12, even if that month is a wild outlier:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/

Industry darlings like Coreweave (a middleman that rents out data-centers) are sitting on massive piles of debt, secured by short-term deals with tech companies that run out long before the debts can be repaid. If they can't find a bunch of new clients in a couple short years, they will default and collapse.

Today's AI bubble has absorbed more of the country's wealth and represents more of its economic activity than historic nation-shattering bubbles, like the 19th century UK rail bubble. A much-discussed MIT paper found that 95% of companies that had tried AI had either nothing to show for it, or experienced a loss:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/01/25/1436/we-analyzed-16625-papers-to-figure-out-where-ai-is-headed-next/

A less well-known U Chicago paper finds that AI has "no significant impact on workers’ earnings, recorded hours, or wages":

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933

Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. Trump might bail out the AI companies, but for how long? They are incinerating money faster than practically any other human endeavor in history, with precious little to show for it.

During my stay at Cornell, one of the people responsible for the university's AI strategy asked me what I thought the university should be doing about AI. I told them that they should be planning to absorb the productive residue that will be left behind after the bubble bursts:

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

Plan for a future where you can buy GPUs for ten cents on the dollar, where there's a buyer's market for hiring skilled applied statisticians, and where there's a ton of extremely promising open source models that have barely been optimized and have vast potential for improvement.

There's plenty of useful things you can do with AI. But AI is (as Princeton's Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, authors of AI Snake Oil put it), a normal technology:

https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology

That doesn't mean "nothing to see here, move on." It means that AI isn't the bow-wave of "impending superintelligence." Nor is it going to deliver "humanlike intelligence."

It's a grab-bag of useful (sometimes very useful) tools that can sometimes make workers' lives better, when workers get to decide how and when they're used.

The most important thing about AI isn't its technical capabilities or limitations. The most important thing is the investor story and the ensuing mania that has teed up an economical catastrophe that will harm hundreds of millions or even billions of people. AI isn't going to wake up, become superintelligent and turn you into paperclips – but rich people with AI investor psychosis are almost certainly going to make you much, much poorer.

(Image: TechCrunch, CC BY 2.0; Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• EU ministers reach 'compromise' on digital euro roadmap https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/eu-ministers-seek-agreement-digital-euro-be-independent-visa-mastercard-2025-09-19/

• Amazon will pay $2.5 billion to settle the FTC’s Prime lawsuit https://www.theverge.com/news/785744/amazon-ftc-prime-subscription-settlment

• Conservative Dem Compares Ad About Her Corporate Donations to ‘Political Violence’ https://prospect.org/politics/2025-09-25-conservative-dem-ad-corporate-donations-violence-bains-california/

• Monopoly Utilities Ousted America's Best Regulator https://economicpopulist.substack.com/p/monopoly-utilities-ousted-americas

• WNYC offers free programs to stations affected by funding cuts https://current.org/2025/09/wnyc-offers-free-programs-to-stations-affected-by-funding-cuts/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Financial Times: WIPO’s webcaster treaty is a disaster https://www.ft.com/content/441306be-2eb6-11da-9aed-00000e2511c8

#15yrsago Google’s autocomplete blacklist https://www.2600.com/googleblacklist/

#15yrsago FBI ignores DoJ report, raids activists, arrests Time Person of the Year https://www.democracynow.org/2010/9/27/fbi_raids_homes_of_anti_war

#15yrsago Meta-textual analysis of mainstream science reporting https://www.theguardian.com/science/the-lay-scientist/2010/sep/24/1

#15yrsago Lockheed Martin sign prohibits sketching and “gathering information” https://www.flickr.com/photos/jef/5028187145/

#5yrsago Ransomware for coffee makers https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/27/junky-styling/#java-script

#5yrsago The joys of tailoring https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/27/junky-styling/#inseams

#1yrago Return to office and dying on the job https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/27/sharpen-your-blades-boys/#disciplinary-technology

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Boston: Enshittification with Randall Munroe (Brattle Theater), Oct 7
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-at-the-brattle-theatre-tickets-1591235180259?aff=oddtdtcreator

• DC: Enshittification with Rohit Chopra (Politics and Prose), Oct 8
  https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825

• NYC: Enshittification with Lina Khan (Brooklyn Public Library), Oct 9
  https://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/cory-doctorow-discusses-central-library-dweck-20251009-0700pm

• New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

• New Orleans: Enshittification at Octavia Books, Oct 12
  https://www.octaviabooks.com/event/enshittification-cory-doctorow

• Chicago: Enshittification with Anand Giridharadas (Chicago Humanities), Oct 15
  https://www.oldtownschool.org/concerts/2025/10-15-2025-kara-swisher-and-cory-doctorow-on-enshittification/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Enshittification (Cornell)
  https://ecornell.cornell.edu/keynotes/view/K091225/

• Escaping Big Tech, Privacy Battles & “Enshittification” (Revolution.social)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exvpetQRSVo

• Nerd Harder! (This Week in Tech)
  https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1047

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "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: James Boyle (https://www.thepublicdomain.org/).

Currently writing:

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links

• Apple threatens to stop selling iPhones in the EU: Yeah, right.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Thomas Ligotti's anhedonic philosophy; Catalan elections; Molly Crabapple's Syria.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

Apple threatens to stop selling iPhones in the EU (permalink)

Apple has threatened to stop selling iPhones and other devices in the European Union (home to over 500,000,000 affluent consumers) if the bloc doesn't rescind the Digital Markets Act, a democratically accountable anti-monopoly law that bans Apple from blocking third parties from offering services to iPhone owners:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/sep/25/apple-calls-for-changes-to-anti-monopoly-laws-and-says-it-may-stop-shipping-to-the-eu

Apple has a staunch ally in this campaign to overturn European laws: Donald Trump has threatened the EU with tariffs unless it halts its attempts to regulate US tech giants like Apple, whose billionaire CEO Tim Cook gave Donald Trump $1m in exchange for a seat on the dais at Trump's inauguration and then traveled to DC again to hand-assemble a gilded participation trophy as a gift to America's fascist would-be dictator:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/08/07/tim-cook-trump-gift/85555805007/

This is a painfully stupid threat and the EU should call Apple's bluff. The company claims that it is acting in the interest of European owners of Apple products. Apple claims that by blocking Europeans from using their Apple devices with third-party software and hardware, they are protecting their customers' privacy.

This is nonsense. While it's true that Apple protects its customers' privacy from some external threats, Apple also spies on its users, without their consent, in order to gather behavioral data that's used for Apple's ad-targeting system. When this came to light, Apple lied to its customers about it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Apple has used its exclusive control over which software can operate on its devices to expose every Chinese iOS user to unrestricted government surveillance. Apple removed all working VPNs from its Chinese app store:

https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-removes-vpn-apps-from-china-app-store/

The company then backdoored its iCloud backup for unrestricted access by Chinese authorities:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-censorship-data.html

Then they removed the ability to anonymously share messages via Airdrop to curb the tool's usage to spread opposition messages during a wave of mass protests in China (they took away this functionality for every Airdrop user in the world):

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/30/apple-limited-a-crucial-airdrop-function-in-china-just-weeks-before-protests.html

The idea that Apple is so committed to its users' privacy that it will exit a major market rather than expose users to surveillance risks is an obvious lie – just ask China.

Why would Apple tell this lie? Because it wants to protect its profits – not its customers.

Apple lies when it claims that control over its platforms is primarily about protecting users. The App Store is "teeming with scams":

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/apple-e2-80-99s-tightly-controlled-app-store-is-teeming-with-scams/ar-AAKL0TG

However, by forcing Apple customers to get apps from Apple's own store, the company can skim a 30% commission on every dollar its customers send to an app maker, a Patreon performer, a news outlet or any other app supplier – a business that's worth $100b/year to Apple. Remember, in the EU, the cost of processing a payment is between 0% and 1%.

Apple claims that it protects its customers from privacy risks by blocking third-party repair depots and by requiring its customers to pay through the nose for official repair. But Apple's own repair technicians have been caught plundering and sharing nude images of its own customers, stolen from phones that were sent to Apple:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkbkey/she-sent-her-iphone-to-apple-repair-techs-uploaded-her-nudes-to-facebook

This has happened repeatedly:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/11/12/an-apple-store-employee-helped-customerby-texting-himself-private-photo-her-phone/

All over the world:

https://9to5mac.com/2016/10/12/apple-australia-photo-sharing-ring-nsfw/

(And of course, these are just the instances that we know about).

Apple protects its customers from privacy threats, but not from Apple's own predatory, privacy-invasive, rent-extracting conduct. Apple also gets to unilaterally decide which scams are permitted on its platform and which ones are not, and they alone get to decide when to allow secret, pervasive surveillance of Apple customers.

Apple's threats are lies, but the privacy risks of interop are very real. It's entirely possible to plug something into a secure tool that renders it insecure. It's nice when companies test third party add-ons and warn their customers about defective or risky aftermarket mods, and to the extent that Apple does this, it's doing good work. But Apple has an irreconcilable conflict of interest when it comes to vetoing its customers' decisions about which non-Apple products they use. Apple has some genuinely stonking margins on its payment processing, repair, and other lines of business, and Apple's CEO has openly boasted about using deliberately engineered incompatibilities to drive people to switch to Apple products:

https://www.businessinsider.com/tim-cook-buy-your-mom-iphone-doj-apple-complaint-2024-3

How do we get Apple to protect its customers' privacy without picking their pockets or invading their privacy? By removing the company's veto over who can make software and hardware that works with Apple's competing offerings. The ultimate decision about which products are too dangerous for Europeans to use can't be vested with Apple – instead, it should be vested with expert agencies working for democratically accountable governments. This is the point that Bennett Ciphers and I made at length in our EFF white-paper "Privacy Without Monopoly," which has a whole section explaining how the EU's big, muscular privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), makes this an especially attractive proposition in the EU:

https://www.eff.org/document/privacy-without-monopoly-data-protection-and-interoperability

It's also a point that EFF board member and infosec legend Bruce Schneier made in his open letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, discussing opening up app stores:

https://www.eff.org/document/letter-bruce-schneier-senate-judiciary-regarding-app-store-security

Apple isn't going to exit a market with half a billion affluent consumers. If it does, expect its shareholders to wreak swift and terrible vengeance on the company. You know how people are always complaining that investors are only interested in short-term returns? It's true and here's a place where that cuts in our favor: shareholders aren't going to accept a half-billion-person market exit tomorrow in anticipation of forcing the EU to capitulate next year and thereafter safeguard Apple's continental scale rent-extraction racket. They want returns to their capital tomorrow, not in some hypothetical future in which Tim Cook tears out Henna Virkkunen's still-beating heart with his bare hands and parades it through Strasbourg, brandishing it at legions of trembling, vanquished eurocrats.

But let's say Apple does exit the EU.

Good.

The EU needs to get the hell off US tech infrastructure. Under Trump, Big Tech and the US government have stopped even pretending that American tech companies are independent of the US government. We know (from China) that Apple will happily backdoor its cloud servers to assuage authoritarian governments like Xi Jinping's. You know, Xi Jinping, the guy that Trump says he wants to emulate?

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/18/trump-praise-authoritarians-00132350

US Big Tech companies keep demonstrating that they are de facto arms of the US and constitute a hostile foreign power operating on European soil. When the International Criminal Court indicted Israeli génocidaires, Trump issued an executive order sanctioning the body. Immediately thereafter, Microsoft deleted the email and cloud accounts of ICC prosecutor Karim Khan – named in the Trump EO – and then Microsoft President Brad Smith perjured himself in his denial:

https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-did-not-cut-services-international-criminal-court-president-american-sanctions-trump-tech-icc-amazon-google/

Microsoft publicly admitted that it can't stop US authorities from conducting secret surveillance of EU citizens' (and EU governments') data, even when that data is stored on a server in the EU:

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

The EU's response is something called "Eurostack" – a top-to-bottom "stack" of technologies from data-centers to operating systems and applications made and maintained by EU entities (for-profits, nonprofits, and public bodies):

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

Nearly all of the emphasis on Eurostack has been on building the data-centers and creating these applications, but in some ways, this is the least important part of the project. Cloning GDocs or Office365 or iWork is the easy part. The hard part is migrating from US-controlled platforms to their Eurostack equivalents. If leaving Office365 means leaving all the documents your company, organization or government agency has ever created, or losing all the sharing and collaboration permissions, or losing all the edit-histories, well, no one is gonna migrate.

Thankfully, this is something technology can easily fix: all you need to do is reverse-engineer the US offering and create a tool that extracts and transforms the data to the new format, and moves a copy of it into the new Eurostack services. This is called "adversarial interoperability" and is eminently do-able, as Apple proved when they broke open Microsoft Office by creating the iWork suite (Pages, Numbers and Keynote):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

The major impediment to this kind of seamless bulk migration tool isn't the technological challenge – it's the law. In 2001, the EU – under pressure from the USA – included an "anticircumvention" rule in the EU Copyright Directive (EUCD). Article 6 of the EUCD mirrors the language of Section 1201 of America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, banning reverse-engineering and adversarial interoperability, even where no copyright infringement takes place. That means that a European company that made an account migration tool to help European companies or government agencies move their own data out of a US Big Tech silo could face liability under Article 6 of the EUCD, with severe criminal and civil penalties. EUCD 6 gives American tech giants more rights to Europeans' copyrighted works than the Europeans who created those works. It's a terrible law, and after a quarter century, it's long past its expiry date.

Bringing this full circle: Article 6 of the EUCD is also the law that stops European companies from reverse-engineering the iPhone and creating their own app stores, without having to rely on Apple's help. Given that Apple has flagrantly violated laws that order it to open its app store, it's time to unleash Europe's accomplished legion of top technologists on the problem:

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

Doing that becomes even easier if Apple exits the EU and abandons EU customers, cutting off their supply of security patches and application updates. After all, Europeans own their Apple devices. It's up to them – not Apple – whether they want to trust their fellow Europeans to protect their security and add new functionality to their own property.

The EU doesn't need to be a technology-taker – it can be a technology maker. The Apple/Google duopoly may have sewn up the mobile market with illegal monopoly tactics, but that doesn't mean that the EU will never spawn another Nokia or Ericsson. The shortest, most efficient, most reliable path to reestablishing technological sovereignty for the EU's half-billion residents and 27 member states is to allow domestic firms to take over the relationship between the Trump-controlled American tech giants and the Europeans who rely on their technology.

If Trump can seize Chinese companies like Tiktok and sell them to his major donors at a 90% discount, then American companies have no right to cry foul when the EU gets rid of the America First Copyright Directive and lets Europeans choose to get their software, updates, and hardware from European companies.

(Image: Alex Popovkin, Bahia, Brazil from Brazil, CC BY 2.0; Hubertl, CC BY-SA 4.0; modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• They Pump So Much Stuff Into Those Beautiful Little Babies https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/they-pump-so-much-stuff-into-those-beautiful-little-babies

• The climate solution both the right and the left can get behind https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/sep/07/solar-power-rightwing-trump

• Anti-Religious Politics https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/anti-religious-politics

• She Fought the Far Right Online for Years. Now She Wants to Do It in Congress https://www.wired.com/story/kat-abughazaleh-youtuber-for-congress/

• Day Two: Can the Open Web Be Restored? And an Annoyed Judge Tries to Move Things Along. https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/day-two-can-the-open-web-be-restored

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago MPAA/RIAA subvert democracy with super-broadcast-flag bid https://web.archive.org/web/20050926233646/http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004000.php

#20yrsago Islam in science fiction https://web.archive.org/web/20051002030829/https://www.cs.rit.edu/~maa2454/SCIFI/sci_lit.html

#15yrsago Philosophy of Thomas Ligotti, a horror writer who can’t feel happiness https://web.archive.org/web/20061119163754/https://theteemingbrain.wordpress.com/interview-with-thomas-ligotti/

#10yrsago Hilo: The Boy Who Crashed to Earth, a fantastic middle-grade adventure comic https://memex.craphound.com/2015/09/26/hilo-the-boy-who-crashed-to-earth-a-fantastic-middle-grade-adventure-comic/

#10yrsago Molly Crabapple’s illustrations from Syria https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/07/inside-aleppo-syria

#10yrsago 1 in 40 London cops have been arrested in the past five years https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/1600-uk-police-officers-arrested-criminal-offences-5-years-1519573

#10yrsago Tomorrow’s Catalan elections are a referendum on independence https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/25/catalonia-votes-democracy-election-independence-spain

#10yrsago Dustin Yellin’s stupendous, life-sized glass-pane humanoids made from NatGeo clippings https://memex.craphound.com/2015/09/26/dustin-yellins-stupendous-life-sized-glass-pane-humanoids-made-from-natgeo-clippings/

#1yrago When prophecy fails, election polling edition https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/26/dewey-beats-truman/#past-performance-is-no-guarantee-of-future-results

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Boston: Enshittification with Randall Munroe (Brattle Theater), Oct 7
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-at-the-brattle-theatre-tickets-1591235180259?aff=oddtdtcreator

• DC: Enshittification with Rohit Chopra (Politics and Prose), Oct 8
  https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825

• NYC: Enshittification with Lina Khan (Brooklyn Public Library), Oct 9
  https://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/cory-doctorow-discusses-central-library-dweck-20251009-0700pm

• New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

• New Orleans: Enshittification at Octavia Books, Oct 12
  https://www.octaviabooks.com/event/enshittification-cory-doctorow

• Chicago: Enshittification with Anand Giridharadas (Chicago Humanities), Oct 15
  https://www.oldtownschool.org/concerts/2025/10-15-2025-kara-swisher-and-cory-doctorow-on-enshittification/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Enshittification (Cornell)
  https://ecornell.cornell.edu/keynotes/view/K091225/

• Escaping Big Tech, Privacy Battles & “Enshittification” (Revolution.social)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exvpetQRSVo

• Nerd Harder! (This Week in Tech)
  https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1047

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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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

Today's links

• Rage Against the (Algorithmic Management) Machine: What unions could (must!) do about app-based work.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Dieselgate for everything; Roca Labs stops gagging, Adventures of a Dwergish Girl; the Batmobile is a copyrighted character.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

Rage Against the (Algorithmic Management) Machine (permalink)

"Negotiating the Algorithm" is an incredibly exciting, visionary report on the ways that organized labor can and should respond to "algorithmic management" – all the ways in which bosses have turned your mobile phone into your implacable line-manager:

https://www.etuc.org/sites/default/files/publication/file/2025-09/Negotiating%20the%20Algorithm%20-%20Trade%20Union%20Manual_ETUC%20%28updated%29.pdf

Obviously the "gig economy" was ground zero for this bullshit, with delivery drivers/riders and rideshare leading the pack, followed by all the other jobs getting sucked into piecework: dog walking, nursing, house cleaning and more. But – as the report notes – 79% of EU companies are doing algorithmic management.

The report (written by freelance writer Ben Wray) is published a year after the EU's Platform Work Directive was passed, and a year before it will go into force in all 27 EU member states. It's doing several different jobs: capturing the extent and abuses of algorithmic management; describing how workers can fight back; connecting this to the new EU law, and making the case for unions to invest heavily in making use of the Platform Work Directive's provisions to transform the EU labor market and protect the vast majority of EU members (not just those in unions) from bossware in all its forms.

Algorithmic management poses serious challenges for trade unions. It gives bosses a massive information advantage over workers at the bargaining table, capturing fine-grained information about activity on the shop floor. It creates opportunities for bosses to violate collective bargains on a per-worker basis, changing the work conditions and pay for every worker and even for every job. It lets bosses spy on workers even when they're not on the clock, and offers many ways for bosses to retaliate against workers.

Workers trapped by algorithmic management are stripped of agency and problem-solving opportunities. They are put under relentless time-pressure and can be forced into dangerous situations (as when a gig delivery app insists that riders follow a prescribed route, even when accidents and other hazards are in the way).

"Cloudworkers" and other algorithmically managed workers are relentlessly surveilled. Platforms like Upwork can switch on workers' device cameras and photograph them while they work. Often, worker data is sold to data-brokers and other third parties. Biases in gig platforms' algorithms can victimize workers – Black workers, for example, are sometimes fired by apps after failing a facial recognition step (facial recognition works less reliably with darker skin-tones). The app accuses the worker of violating terms of service by sharing their accounts and kicks them off.

Of course, there's no appeal for this. Algorithmic management goes hand-in-hand with other high-handed measures, like replacing the HR department with a chatbot or a semi-attended info@ email address. You also can't reach the HR department when your pay packet is light, facilitating wage-theft. When payment systems fail, workers are sometimes left with the bill for their robo-boss's technological failures.

So it's quite important that unions figure out a strategy to address algorithmic management. That's where the Platform Work Directive comes in. The PWD has quite sweeping and bold provisions that can protect workers, but these new rules aren't self-enforcing. Many EU states' data commissioners are grossly underfunded and stretched thin. While the PWD grants workers many rights, they will need to demand those rights – on the job and in the courts.

The new Directive, in combination with the General Data Protection Regulation (the EU's existing privacy law), allows workers and their representatives to demand extensive data-sets from employers, documenting everything from the algorithmic decision-making that goes into firing workers from an app to the process of calculating their pay and beyond. But employers deliver this data in obfuscated, hard-to-parse formats. Wray advocates for unions to staff up their own data analysis groups that can assist in these requests and make sense of the results.

Wray also advocates for union technologists who can produce worker-side apps that monitor boss's apps – like the UberCheats app, which compared the mileage that Uber paid drivers for to their actual distances traveled. While it's important for workers to be able to access the information their bosses have amassed on their work and personal lives, it's just as important that workers not be limited to working with data that bosses are willing to hand over. Employers can't be trusted to mark their own homework.

By investing in technology, unions can close the information gap with employers, and even use data and apps to gain an advantage over bosses. Wray describes how gig workers created "counter apps" that documented wage-theft, enabled mass refusal of lowball offers, and helped workers win their rights in court.

This technological capacity can also help union organizers, providing a unified digital back-end for union drives in all kinds of shops.

Wray acknowledges that it might be hard for unions to do this kind of advanced technical work in-house from the jump, and he isn't averse to having some of this work contracted out to third parties. But he proposes that this kind of arrangement should be modeled on "Chinese industrial policy…which in the 1980s and 1990s was known for bringing in western technological expertise but ensuring that it was the Chinese state and Chinese companies that reaped the knowledge from external experts."

He also moots the possibility of several unions combining forces to create a joint workers' technology shop that develops and supports tools for all kinds of unions across Europe. This sounds like a very exciting idea indeed – and maybe the answer to the legion of programmers who've asked me repeatedly how they can use their technical skills for good.

And as mentioned, the GDPR offers broad powers for workers to push back against bossware abuses. It lets workers demand the ratings system used to assess their work and to demand corrections to their scores – and it bans "hidden internal evaluations" of workers. It also gives workers the right to demand human intervention in automated decision-making.

When workers are "de-activated" (kicked off the app), the GDPR lets workers file a "subject access request" that forces the company to divulge "all personal information relating to that decision" with workers having the right to demand corrections to "inaccurate or incomplete information."

Despite the breadth of these powers, they have rarely been used, largely thanks to some rather gaping loopholes in the GDPR – for example, bosses can use the excuse that divulging information would reveal their trade secrets and expose their IP. The GDPR limits how far these excuses can go, but bosses routinely ignore those limits. Same goes for the all-purpose excuse that the algorithmic management is delivered by a third party tool. This excuse is illegal under the GDPR, but bosses roll it out all the time (and get away with it).

The Platform Work Directive patches many of the defects in the GDPR. It bans processing "a worker’s personal data in relation to: their emotional or psychological state; private exchanges; when they are not using the app; on the exercising of fundamental rights including worker organising; things that are personal to the worker including sexual orientation and migration status; biometric data when used to establish that person’s identity."

It expands rights to examine the workings and findings of "automation decision-making systems" and to demand that those findings be exported to a form that can be sent to the worker, and bans transfers to third parties. Workers can demand their data in a form that can be used e.g. to get another job, and their bosses have to pay any expenses associated with this.

The Platform Work Directive requires strict human oversight of automated systems, especially for things like de-activations. The Directive requires EU member-states to hold hearings every two years on this process. Workers have the right to demand human review of any automated decision, and sets a deadline of two weeks for bosses to reply. If the platform has made a mistake, it has two weeks more to make it up to the worker, either by giving them their jobs back, or paying "adequate compensation" for damages.

The Directive bans platforms from arbitrarily changing how their back-ends work and requires bosses to notify workers and consult with them on "changes to automated monitoring or decision-making systems." It requires bosses to pay experts (chosen by workers) to assess these changes.

All these new rules are exciting, but they'll only come into force if someone fights when they're broken. That's where unions come in. If bosses are caught cheating, the Directive requires them to reimburse unions for any experts they hire to fight the scams.

Wray proposes a detailed series of recommendations to unions for things they should demand in their contracts to maximize their chances to capitalize on the opportunities afforded by the Platform Work Directive, such as establishing a "governance body" within the company "to govern data formation, storage, handling and security issues. This body should include shop stewards and all members of the body should receive data training."

He also sets out technological tactics that unions can fund and capitalize on to maximize their use of the directive, such as hacking apps to allow gig workers to increase their earnings. He writes warmly of "the sock-puppet method," where many test accounts are used to place and book work through platforms to monitor their pricing systems to detect collusion and price rigging. This has been successfully used in Spain to create the basis for an ongoing lawsuit over price collusion.

The new world of algorithmic management and the new Platform Work Directive offers many opportunities to organized labor. However, there is always the possibility that an employer will simply refuse to follow the law – as Uber has done, after it was found guilty of violating data disclosure work and was fined €6,000/day until it came into compliance. Uber's now paid €500,000 in fines and has not disclosed the data that the law and the courts require of it.

With algorithmic management, bosses have figured out new ways to evade the law and steal from workers. The Platform Work Directive gives workers and unions a whole suite of new tools to force bosses to play fair. It's not going to be easy, but the technological capacity workers and unions develop here can be repurposed to wage all-out digital class warfare.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Are Elites Meritocratic and Efficiency-Seeking? Evidence from MBA Students https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.15443

• The Week America Woke Up to Oligarchy https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-the-week-america

• AI can't replace polling https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/ai-is-coming-for-polling-not-in-a

• Day One of the Google Monopoly Trial: "Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/day-one-of-the-google-monopoly-trial

• I Took Bernie Into Deep Trump Country. Can He Win Them Over? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RP8Oxe6OxJc

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Warner Music CEO: Price-fixing is for iTunes, too https://web.archive.org/web/20050926232101/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004001.php

#20yrsago Kate Wilhelm’s must-read writerly advice/history of Clarion https://memex.craphound.com/2005/09/25/kate-wilhelms-must-read-writerly-advice-history-of-clarion/

#10yrsago Not just emissions: manufacturers’ dirty tricks fake everything about cars https://web.archive.org/web/20180913103847/https://www.economist.com/briefing/2015/09/26/a-mucky-business

#10yrsago Collapse in filial piety, poor social net produces cohort of elderly Korean prostitutes https://web.archive.org/web/20150927232808/https://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_28876273/elderly-prostitutes-reveal-dark-side-south-koreas-rise

#10yrsago FTC clobbers Roca Labs, the terrible weight-loss company that banned negative reviews https://web.archive.org/web/20220622001541/https://www.popehat.com/2015/09/24/roca-labs-weight-loss-company-that-sues-its-critics-sued-by-ftc-over-deceptive-advertising-and-dont-criticize-us-gag-clause/24

#10yrsago What the Internet looks like when it’s not a patent drawing https://www.wired.com/2015/09/internet-looks-like-irl/

#10yrsago The other ad-blocking ecosystem: blame-ducking https://medium.com/message/how-we-pass-the-buck-d63fcf409247

#10yrsago Appeals court rules Batmobile is a “character” and is copyrighted by DC https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/09/pow-appeals-court-assigns-copyright-to-the-batmobile/

#10yrsago KARMA POLICE: GCHQ’s plan to track every Web user in the world https://theintercept.com/2015/09/25/gchq-radio-porn-spies-track-web-users-online-identities/

#5yrsago Adventures of a Dwergish Girl https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/25/dwergish-girl/#you-are-a-pickle

#1yrago Academic economists get big payouts when they help monopolists beat antitrust https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/25/epistemological-chaos/#incentives-matter

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Boston: Enshittification with Randall Munroe (Brattle Theater), Oct 7
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-at-the-brattle-theatre-tickets-1591235180259?aff=oddtdtcreator

• DC: Enshittification with Rohit Chopra (Politics and Prose), Oct 8
  https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825

• NYC: Enshittification with Lina Khan (Brooklyn Public Library), Oct 9
  https://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/cory-doctorow-discusses-central-library-dweck-20251009-0700pm

• New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

• New Orleans: Enshittification at Octavia Books, Oct 12
  https://www.octaviabooks.com/event/enshittification-cory-doctorow

• Chicago: Enshittification with Anand Giridharadas (Chicago Humanities), Oct 15
  https://www.oldtownschool.org/concerts/2025/10-15-2025-kara-swisher-and-cory-doctorow-on-enshittification/

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

• Calgary: Literary Death Match (Calgary Wordfest), Oct 17
  https://wordfest.com/2025/imaginarium/show/literary-death-match/

• Calgary: Big Tech’s Betrayal—and How to Break Free! (Calgary Wordfest), Oct 18
  https://wordfest.com/2025/imaginarium/show/big-techs-betrayaland-how-to-break-free/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Enshittification (Cornell)
  https://ecornell.cornell.edu/keynotes/view/K091225/

• Escaping Big Tech, Privacy Battles & “Enshittification” (Revolution.social)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exvpetQRSVo

• Nerd Harder! (This Week in Tech)
  https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1047

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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