Today's links

• How Canada can save Americans and defeat America: True Carneyism has never been tried.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Brazil v AIDS drug patents; TSA v gel-bras; After the Siege (Russian); Names are hard; Layton's last message; Hospital bill secrets; "The Unraveling"; Friction cannot be reduced, only redistributed; Free Kevin; EFF v Barney; MP3tunes; "Ghosts With Shit jobs"; Ikea as dystopian design-fiction; Torturing "young conservatives"; Roald Dahl body yeast ale; Prisoners die of heat; Privacy v antitrust; The internet is boring (2001); TSA v explosive water; Internet Archive x 9/11; Peter Thiel x litigation financing startup; Universities v unions.
• Upcoming appearances: Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

How Canada can save Americans and defeat America (permalink)

As Canada is learning (the hard way), the "art" of all of Trump's deals can be summed up in a single word: "renege":

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/22/table-flipper/#graveyard-of-indispensable-nations

In 2020, Donald Trump ripped up NAFTA, a trade deal that conferred a huge advantage to the USA at Canada's expense, and replaced it with CUSMA, a trade deal that was even more advantageous to America, and even worse for Canada. In 2024, after being elected for the second time, Trump publicly railed against CUSMA using the exact same language he'd used to decry NAFTA, branding it "a very bad deal" that needed to be shredded and renegotiated.

To that end, Trump declared sweeping tariffs on Canada's exports, thereby raising the costs Americans paid for many everyday goods, because while Canada does not ship a lot of finished products to the US, it is a key supplier of parts and materials, all of which were made instantly more expensive thanks to the Trump tariffs. Trump went on to insist that Canada should annex itself to the US, becoming the "51st State." His operatives openly meddled in Canadian separatist movements, backing the "Wexit" partisans who want to separate the oil-rich, boom/bust-plagued province of Alberta from Canada.

CUSMA was negotiated by Justin Trudeau's government, and Trump II's tariff war landed on Trudeau's successor, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, billed as a technocratic safe pair of hands who could be relied upon for sober, effective leadership.

Much to everyone's surprise, Carney – the epitome of a "Davos Man" – responded to the Trump tariffs by traveling to Davos and giving a fiery speech denouncing Trump and declaring a "rupture" that left the old world order dead:

https://www.weforum.org/stories/forum-institutional/davos-2026-special-address-by-mark-carney-prime-minister-of-canada/

Carney promised that Canada would go "elbows up" against America, with retaliatory tariffs, blockades and boycotts of key US exports. Cutting off this stream of goods would have the same effect on Canadians that Trump's tariffs had on Americans: raising prices. Unlike their American cousins, Canadians were far more tolerant of this increase in their cost of living, because, unlike Americans, Canadians believed the narrative that they were sacrificing for the good of their country against an existential threat from a fractious neighbour. Americans were far less willing to believe that Canada was somehow cheating the US or flooding the country with fentanyl.

"Elbows up" is largely a war of symbols, in which Canadians take pride in mastering the minute differences between "Product of Canada," "Made in Canada," "Assembled in Canada," and "Designed in Canada" so they can seek out maximal Canadianness in their consumption choices. There's even a kind of twisted honour in committing yourself to drinking Wayne Gretzky's shitty rye in preference to delicious American bourbon, a way to affirm your love of country with each astringent, metallic swallow.

When the trade war was confined to symbolic terrain, Carney's elbows remained reliably elevated. But outside the realm of symbols, Carney's elbows wilted.

Take the Digital Services tax, a plan to charge America's tax-evading tech giants a 3% levy to make up for the untaxed profits they keep by pretending to be Irish. So long as Trump's tech giants can dodge their tax obligations, they can always outcompete Canada's tech sector, who are expected to pay 38% federal and provincial tax.

American tech companies are closely allied with the Trump regime: they financed his campaign, conduct domestic and international surveillance for him, provide the software to administer his ethnic cleansing, and restrict access to software that helps Americans evade the armed secret police he sent into the streets to kidnap and disappear his enemies:

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

Trump repaid his tech giants by threatening Carney with still more tariffs unless he canceled the Digital Service Act, and Carney capitulated. Meanwhile, Carney raced to enact a plan to fire tens of thousands of civil servants and replace them with AI chatbots running American software on American chips:

https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-releases/2026/06/04/prime-minister-carney-launches-ai-all-canadas-new-national-artificial

Canada's federal and provincial ministries are all entirely dependent on American cloud software, most notably Microsoft's Office 365, a package that Trump has fashioned into a geopolitical weapon, ordering Microsoft to shut down foreign officials who thwarted his plans, denying them access to all their data and cutting off their ability to communicate with the outside world:

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

In other words, Canada is already terribly vulnerable to American cyberwarfare. Trump's tech companies don't have to hack into Canada's digital infrastructure to shut it down: they already control it. But – incredibly – Carney found a way to make this situation even worse, turning over key aspects of the digital back-end of Canada's military to Palantir, the tech company most closely aligned with Trump, whose CEO openly boasts that his company was founded to kill America's political enemies:

https://thedeepdive.ca/canada-military-palantir-license-deal/

Carney's symbolic gestures – memorable speeches and minor changes to consumption habits – are second to none. But when it comes to building a strong country that is resilient against the attacks we can all foresee (not least because Trump has repeatedly told us he intends to launch them), Carney himself becomes Carneyism's fiercest opponent:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/30/rupture/#deeds-not-words

It's not just the attacks that are foreseeable, alas. Trump can always be relied upon – to break his word. Carney repeatedly caved to Trump, and in response, Trump has hit Canada with massive new tariffs – 50%! Remember: the "art" of every Trump deal is renege:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/what-to-know-about-trumps-50-tariffs-on-canadian-goods-that-just-went-into-effect

Trump can also be relied upon to circle back to his fixations and obsessions. Decades ago, someone showed Trump a Mercator projection map of the Earth and he became obsessed with "yuge" Greenland, to the point where he is prepared to dissolve Nato and go to war with Europe to steal it from Denmark:

https://archive.is/3Q8nj

By the same token, Trump has long been publicly obsessed with the Gilded Age president William McKinley, who enacted sweeping tariffs at a time when the US economy was rapidly growing, a fact that lodged in Trump's brain and led him to believe that tariffs are a surefire growth-hack that will let him eliminate taxes on the wealthy without shutting down the country:

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/12/business/trump-william-mckinley-tariffs/

Trump will still be obsessing about these idées fixes when he draws his last breath, gasping out "Greenland…tariffs" as he tumbles from his golden toilet, forehead and coronary arteries bulging from the strain of trying to pass a half-digested Big Mac with only a viscous paste of rectal mucus and Diet Coke to lubricate that final, unyielding bolus.

The fact that Trump is immune to learning from his mistakes (because that would require admitting that he made a mistake) does not bind Canada to do the same. Quite the contrary: Trump's inability to learn or reason means that if Canada engages in novel retaliatory tactics, it stands a good chance of flummoxing the Mad King, leaving him flat-footed and lumbering while it dekes him out and swarms past him.

Lucky for Canada, Trump's incontinent belligerence has opened up a large and diverse territory of novel tactics for conducting both geopolitical and economic policy. As November Kelly says, "Trump inherited a poker game rigged in his favour but he flipped over the table anyway because he resents having to pretend to play." The systems that Trump has dismantled as unfair to the US were, in fact, sources of tremendous advantage to America.

Take those tech companies that have fused so tightly with the Trump regime. These companies operate global monopolies that allow them to extract vast sums and even vaster troves of sensitive data from billions of people around the world. Having attained total economic dominance and total technical lock-in, these companies have embarked on a program of enshittification, squeezing their customers and suppliers for even more data and even more money:

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

Under normal market conditions, the decay of these American platforms would invite competitors from around the world. The fact that Apple and Google extract 30% of every dollar spent in their app stores would bring forth new app stores who were willing to give better deals to app makers and app users. The fact that HP charges $10,000/gallon for the coloured water in its printers would invite competitors who were willing to take a mere 100,000% margin on ink.

The fact that Meta and Google and Microsoft and Apple spy on you with your devices and software and use that data to target you, manipulate you and overcharge you – and to train their AIs to steal from you even more efficiently – would create demand for privacy blockers, jailbreakers, and other "adversarial interoperability" tools that force your technology to work for you, even if the manufacturer wishes it were otherwise:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/01/redistribution-vs-predistribution/#elbows-up-eurostack

But we don't have "normal market conditions." For more than a quarter of a century, the US Trade Representative has demanded that all of America's trading partners – including Canada – enact "anti-circumvention" laws that make it a crime to alter how a digital device works unless the original (usually American) manufacturer consents.

In other words, it's illegal for some Waterloo grads to tap ambitious RIM millionaires for the seed capital to start a company that helps Canadians install Canadian app stores on their Canadian phones so when they buy things from other Canadians, all the money stays in Canada, without a 30% "app tax" being siphoned off by either Google or Apple.

That's right: in 2012, Canada passed a law that lets American companies use Canada's courts to destroy Canadian companies that help Canadian technology users get more out of their own property. This law – the Copyright Modernization Act – was wildly unpopular from the start. A federal consultation drew over 6,000 opposing comments, and only 53 comments in support of the bill. But Prime Minister Stephen Harper whipped the vote among his Conservative MPs and passed it, because he judged that tariff-free access to America's markets to be a price worth paying:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/15/radical-extremists/#sex-pest

Trump's tariffs prove that this was a bad bargain. By voluntarily gluing its technological elbows to its sides, Canada made itself easy pickings for America's tech giants, who wiped out Canada's tech sector while making Canada geopolitically and economically dependent on – and vulnerable to – the US and its tech companies. Canada is long overdue for a reckoning with this blunder.

The best time to have made Canada digitally sovereign would have been before an American president announced his intention to annex Canada and began explicitly deploying America's tech companies to attack his geopolitical adversaries.

The second-best time is now.

By repealing Bill C-11 and legalizing reverse-engineering and modification of digital technology with consent of its users and in accordance with privacy, consumer and labour rights, Canada will gain a devastating counter to Trump's tariffs.

Not only will legalizing jailbreaking let Canadians get more out of their own property, it will turn America's tech trillions into Canada's tech billions – while making Canada digitally sovereign by facilitating the uncoupling of Canadian ministries, corporations, households, and devices from America's cloud. This is how Canada removes the digital kill switch it handed to America, a kill switch that can shut down its tractors, phones, and governments.

This is the best possible moment for such a move. To incubate a successful tech sector, you need a) an innovative product; b) skilled technologists; and c) capital. Thanks to Trump, Canada has all three.

First: innovative ideas. Thanks to the prohibition on modifying America's defective tech exports, there is a whole orchard of low-hanging fruit for product designers to pick from: an app that aggregates all of your streaming services into one place and lets you record shows to watch later, even if the service deletes them; reliable tools for using generic ink and independent app stores; new firmware for tractors and cars that facilitates independent repair and unlock subscription features, and, of course, privacy- and ad-blockers of all description. These are truly disruptive products, striking at the maddening antifeatures installed at the insistence of sclerotic, extractive tech bosses. Move fast and break their things!

Next: talent. Who will do that fast moving? Again, we can thank Trump for giving Canada an army of skilled technologists who have fled Silicon Valley one step ahead of an ICE chud who wanted to black-bag them and deport them to Liberia (or a Salvadoran slave-labor camp). Trump is creating the largest wave of reverse brain-drain in history, as everyone ambitious and smart realizes that their lifelong US tech work dream is a nightmare. If Canada can't get enough talent to harvest that orchard of low-hanging fruit from its returning Canadians, it need only open its borders to the skilled technologists of all nations who are racing out of America as fast as they can go.

Finally, money. The AI bubble collapse is imminent. The forces of capital are desperate for promising, high-return investment opportunities that aren't grossly overvalued, overhyped and underperforming AI companies. Even if you can find a company like that in America, it's increasingly apparent that to make that business a success, you will need to buy more $TRUMP coins than your rivals, lest Trump direct his agencies to destroy your fledgling business.

And here's the kicker: turning America's trillions into Canada's billions, moving fast and breaking America's tech-kings, fixing the defects in America's extractive tech exports? It's all good for Americans. Sure, cratering the share-price of America's Big Tech companies will be bad for America's retirement savers, but the median American worker only has $955 saved for retirement:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/955-saved-for-retirement-millions-are-in-that-boat-150003868.html

Most Americans are far more exposed to the predatory conduct of US tech companies than they are to the share price of those companies. That's because Americans are the beta-testers for every ripoff and surveillance tool that Silicon Valley produces. Long before those tools get to Canada or find their way around the world, they are making Americans poorer and worse off.

Remember: Canada is America's second largest trading partner. Americans are really good at buying things from Canada – even when those things aren't allowed in America. Trump wasn't entirely wrong when he accused Canada of flooding America with drugs – but the drugs Canada sends to America aren't fentanyl and oxy. Canada sends America insulin and other cheap pharmaceuticals that cost 10-100x more in Ripoff America than they do in Canada. If Americans can figure out how to buy cheap generic meds from Canadians over the US Postal Service, they will be able to buy disenshittification tools from Canadians over the internet.

Selling Americans products that make their lives better is much better politics than boycotting American products that make Canadians' lives better. No politician can pursue a strategy of higher prices and lower living standards forever – not even if you've got a lot of "elbows up" rhetoric you can use to convince Canadians that they're doing their duty to the nation by paying more for everything. Paying more for everything to punish Americans is like punching yourself in the face as hard as you can and hoping the downstairs neighbours say "ouch."

When Canadians swap delicious American bourbon for Wayne Gretzky's shitty rye, they punish corn farmers in states that begin and end with a vowel – farmers who have nothing to do with Canada's problems. By swapping disenshittification for tariffs, Canadians can go back to drinking delicious bourbon, and make money from that farmer by selling him the jailbreaks he needs to fix his tractor without paying the John Deere tax of $200+ that the company charges after you do your own repair to send someone to the farm to type an unlock code into your console.

A lot of Very Serious Grown Up Canadians have told me that they think Carney should confine his response to Trump to toothless symbolic gestures, lest they make Trump mad. Trump is always mad. He gets mad at symbolic gestures. He gets mad if you point out that Ronald Reagan thought tariffs were stupid:

https://abcnews.com/Politics/trump-raises-tariffs-canada-10-after-reagan-ad/story?id=126866712

Freeing Americans from the tyranny of their own tech companies has the power to create a partisan army of American Canada weebs who will fight for Canada when – not if – Trump gets mad at Canada. That's the best defense Canada can have – common cause and solidarity with the people of America, who share a common enemy in Trump, the least popular president in history, who is looting billions and letting his cronies destroy Americas' lives.

That's some real elbows up stuff. True Carneyism has never been tried – especially by Carney. It's long past time someone gave it a go.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Shielded from Shame: Civil Immunity for Ontario's Long-Term Care Facilities in the Wake of Covid-19 https://www.canlii.org/en/commentary/doc/2021CanLIIDocs13991#!fragment//BQCwhgziBcwMYgK4DsDWszIQewE4BUBTADwBdoByCgSgBpltTCIBFRQ3AT0otokLC4EbDtyp8BQkAGU8pAELcASgFEAMioBqAQQByAYRW1SYAEbRS2ONWpA

• Many recent grads say AI is making it harder to get a job. Economists aren't so sure https://www.npr.org/2026/08/18/nx-s1-5910677/recent-college-graduates-employment-job-artificial-intelligence

• Shitbot https://dodoeraser.org/2026/07/29/shitbot/

• Nonfeasance, Misfeasance, and Malfeasance: Academic Freedom in a Nutshell https://3d.laboratorium.net/2026-08-23-academic-misfeasance

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Kevin Mitnick is out of prison https://web.archive.org/web/20010000000000*/https://www.techtv.com/screensavers/showtell/story/0,23008,3343816,00.html

#25yrsago Brazil to nationalize AIDS drug patents https://edition.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/americas/08/22/aids.drug/index.html

#25yrsago Copyright your DNA https://web.archive.org/web/20010827170510/http://www.cosmiverse.com/science08230102.html

#25yrsago The internet is boring now https://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/26/us/exploration-of-world-wide-web-tilts-from-eclectic-to-mudane.html

#20yrsago TSA busts “explosive water” that turns out to be cosmetics https://web.archive.org/web/20060822123448/http://www.kxma.com/getARticle.asp?ArticleId=35223

#20yrsago Windows Media DRM cracked, no one cares https://archive.blogs.harvard.edu/cmusings/2006/08/25/#a1889

#20yrsago Canadian music label puts fans and artists first https://web.archive.org/web/20060830211418/http://wired.com/wired/archive/14.09/nettwerk_pr.html

#20yrsago After the Siege in Russian https://craphound.com/Cory_Doctorow_-_After_the_Siege_Russian.html

#20yrsago Victory in War on Moisture: Gel-bras once again safe! https://web.archive.org/web/20060820185006/http://www.tsa.gov/travelers/airtravel/prohibited/permitted-prohibited-items.shtm

#20yrsago EFF sues Barney the humorless, copyright maximalist dinosaur https://web.archive.org/web/20060813093642/http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2006_08.php#004884

#15yrsago MP3tunes verdict: music lockers are legal https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/08/mp3tunes-victory-music-lockers-is-good

#15yrsago Lolita on Wikipedia: 2,300 edits later https://web.archive.org/web/20111008072145/http://www.theawl.com/2011/08/case-history-of-a-wikipedia-page-nabokov’s-lolita

#15yrsago SF mockumentary: ‘Ghosts With Shit Jobs’ — China looks at westerners with awful jobs https://ghostswithshitjobs.com/

#15yrsago Information consumes attention: focus in the age of abundant stimulus https://web.archive.org/web/20111113004501/http://nymag.com/print/?/news/features/56793/

#15yrsago Jack Layton’s final public words: “Love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear.” https://web.archive.org/web/20110829050308/http://beta.images.theglobeandmail.com/archive/01310/Jack_Layton_s_lett_1310744a.pdf

#15yrsago Getting people’s names right in software design: a LOT harder than it looks https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/08/why-im-not-on-google-plus.html

#15yrsago Internet Archive’s cache of 24/7 TV footage from 9/11 and beyond https://archive.org/details/911

#10yrsago Peter Thiel & Y Combinator fund a “litigation financing” startup to make money off other peoples’ lawsuits https://gizmodo.com/a-startup-backed-by-peter-thiel-makes-bankrolling-civil-1785707590

#10yrsago Universities fought unionization’s ‘one-size-fits-all’ using identical arguments https://crookedtimber.org/2016/08/25/great-minds-think-alike/

#10yrsago 5 years after Texas GOP’s attack on women’s reproductive health, TX leads developed world in maternal mortality https://web.archive.org/web/20160820212602/https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/20/texas-maternal-mortality-rate-health-clinics-funding

#10yrsago You didn’t find a meteorite https://sites.wustl.edu/meteoritesite/

#10yrsago Young Conservatives’ “leadership seminar” featured food & water deprivation, sexist epithets, physical abuse https://web.archive.org/web/20160824145226/https://www.thestar.com/news/queenspark/2016/08/23/ontario-tories-apologize-to-party-activists-after-controversial-youth-seminar.html

#10yrsago The 2017 Ikea Catalog considered as dystopian urban microapartment futurism https://web.archive.org/web/20160817154440/https://www.fastcodesign.com/3062854/ikeas-2017-catalog-is-a-terrifying-glimpse-into-the-tiny-apartments-of-the-future

#10yrsago Singapore will disconnect entire civil service from the internet https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/24/singapore-to-cut-off-public-servants-from-the-internet

#10yrsago They’re making a Twits ale from Roald Dahl’s body-yeast https://web.archive.org/web/20160817154531/http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/beer-to-be-made-from-yeast-swabbed-from-roald-dahls-writing-chair-a7195721.html

#10yrsago As America’s temperatures soar, prisoners are dropping dead https://web.archive.org/web/20160825000426/https://theintercept.com/2016/08/24/deadly-heat-in-u-s-prisons-is-killing-inmates-and-spawning-lawsuits/

#5yrsago Are privacy and antitrust on a collision course? https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/24/illegitimate-greatness/#peanut-butter-in-my-antitrust

#5yrsago What kind of emergency is our emergency? https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/23/dont-wanna-spoil-the-surprise/#monocausotaxophilia

#5yrsago The secrets of hospital bills https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/23/dont-wanna-spoil-the-surprise/#surprise

#5yrsago Belarusian dictator pwned by "cyber-partisans" https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/25/taxes-are-for-the-little-stores/#cyber-partisans

#5yrsago Big Box stores' other shoe drops https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/25/taxes-are-for-the-little-stores/#metastatic-parasites

#5yrsago The Unraveling https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/23/dont-wanna-spoil-the-surprise/#the-two-genders

#1yrago Friction cannot be reduced, it can only be redistributed https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/23/become-unoptimizable/#downward-redistribution

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25
  https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• London: AI and the Enshittification of the Media, NUJ (Sep 2)
  https://www.nuj.org.uk/learn/ems-event-calendar/ai-and-the-enshitification-of-the-media.html

• Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
  https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/

• London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
  https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn

• South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
  https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

• Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7
  https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK=

• Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20
  https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020

• Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
  https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Hope, AI, Fixing the Internet and the Reverse Centaur of it all (Wilosophy)
  https://podcastaddict.com/everyone-relax/episode/231414816

• Deflating the AI Bubble (Do Not Pass Go)
  https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/deflating-the-ai-bubble-with-cory

• Technofeudal Enshittification (Fucking Cancelled)
  https://www.fuckingcancelled.com/p/technofeudal-enshittification-with

• Who The Machine Serves (EFF)
  https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-who-the-machine-serves

• Speculative Fiction for Social Change II (Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff)
  https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/cool-people-who-did-cool-stuff/08cbb840-a6ae-013a-d8aa-0acc26574db2/part-two-cory-doctorow-on-speculative-fiction-for-social-change/937e8800-9404-45a6-b5e3-90ebee2cfaea

Latest books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

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

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

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

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

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 557 (9258 total).

• "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links

• Born on technology's third base: Material forces shape life-chances.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Glue; iPods v unions; RIP Jack Layton; Gibson on cities; Britain's sweatshop for terminally ill help-hcalls; NYPL's open CDN; Radical juries.
• Upcoming appearances: Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
• 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.

Born on technology's third base (permalink)

Any frank assessment of your own achievements starts with an equally frank assessment of the world-historic forces that attended those achievements. For example, I often tell young people who want to get into tech, "Well, if you don't have the foresight and work ethic to be born in 1971, I can't really help you."

When it comes to tech, being born in 1971 – to a computer scientist father, no less – conferred a tremendous advantage for my career chances. My dad – a refugee – came to Canada at a time when post-war public services meant that he could become the first person in his family to go to university, all the way to a doctorate.

That set me up for life in a house where tech and education were all around me. Both my parents are teachers, both from working class families where no one had ever gone beyond high school, who found themselves in a time and place where it was easier than at any time in history for people from backgrounds like theirs to attend university. I got to go to university, too, at a time when education was cheap enough that I could drop out of four schools before figuring out that it wasn't for me, and still be debt-free, largely thanks to income from a series of part-time jobs.

When I dropped out of my final degree program, it was to take a job in tech at a time when anyone with a little creativity, work ethic, aptitude and curiosity could walk into a career. Millions of us did it, and I ended up working as a freelancer, then founding a startup, and then going to EFF. I know I work hard, I know I apply myself to understanding the world around me, but also…when it comes to this kind of career, I was born on third base.

There's plenty of this to go around. Think of boomers who bought their "starter home" with the income from their first job and traded it in for a succession of larger, nicer homes, each of which skyrocketed in value. Some of those people fancy themselves to be veritable Warren Buffets for having had the shrewd financial insight that buying a house and living in it was a good idea. The truly smart ones know that they just got lucky.

There are world-historic forces all around us, creating moments and circumstances that contribute to the life-thriving of those of us who are lucky enough to be suited to the moment we find ourselves in.

Take computing: for decades, computing was ruled by Moore's Law, an unbroken run in which computers got faster and cheaper every year. If you were interested in the kinds of computing applications that were well-suited to serial computation – programs that worked best when run on a single computer – you were in luck. Even if your application or field of study was expensive and difficult to realize on today's computer, you could just stand still for a year or two and a much faster computer would park itself on your doorstep, ready to solve your problems.

When Moore's Law tapped out – when the pace at which transistors got smaller and computers got faster slowed and plateaued, and the expense of even modest performance gains climbed infinitywards – computing changed with it. Parallel computing – putting more cores on a chip, more chips on a board, more boards in a system – took off, as chipmakers and system builders switched from a focus on building their computers tall to building them wide.

As parallel computing took off, so did parallel applications. This is the beginning of the graphics revolution, as GPUs – components made up of many, many low-powered computers – became more central to academic research and commercial product roadmaps. But it wasn't just graphics that saw a huge lift here: any task that could be parallelized got easier and cheaper to perform every year, in a steady trend that has run to this day. This is the era of performance gaming, VR and AR, cryptocurrency, and, of course, AI.

In What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly introduces the idea of the "adjacent possible" through the example of the helicopter. Da Vinci sketched a "helicopter" – blades in the shape of maple keys attached to a kind of wine-press screw – in the 15th century. In the centuries that followed, many other people had the insight that twirling blades of that shape on a screw of some type could provide lift for some kind of heavier-than-air craft. But it wasn't until strong alloys, internal combustion engines and light, energy-dense refined hydrocarbon fuels came on the scene that the helicopter became possible, whereupon it was all but inevitable, with several people independently inventing the helicopter all at once:

https://memex.craphound.com/2010/10/13/kevin-kellys-what-technology-wants-how-technology-changes-us-and-vice-versa/

In the same way, the computing industry's focus on parallel computing made life easier for people who burned to do something parallelizable. Then the achievements of the parallel computing partisans drove more investment in improvements to parallel computing hardware and theoretical work on how to parallelize other problems. This feedback loop raised the profile of parallel computing applications, attracting more bright and ambitious people to those applications, whose even more impressive accomplishments brought more people into the field, more capital into hardware development, and more resources to parallelization research.

The point being that world-historic forces, combined with accidents of history, shape the outcomes of individuals, companies and disciplines. It's much easier to be an accomplished graphics wizard in an era in which GPUs are doubling in power every year than it is in an era when linear computing is getting the lion's share of investment and improvement.

These forces and accidents have acted on AI in ways that profoundly shaped its development. The latest AI boom started when a group of machine learning researchers tried a minor variation on existing techniques and saw a major improvement in the outcomes. This is one of the most exciting kinds of breakthrough: if tweaking a single variable in a small way produces a large improvement, then it may be that further tweaking will produce even more improvements.

The minor variation that produced the major improvement in AI performance was scale. Prior to the "deep learning" era, AI research relied on a mix of hand-built models of reality and training data that computers fitted into those models. Deep learning swapped the painstaking work of describing reality in software for a brute-force approach: throw lots more training data at the system and then throw lots more (parallel) computing power at that data and let the computer figure it out without your having to explain how the world worked.

The early gains from this approach were very exciting: they dangled the promise of software that could essentially "teach itself" how to do complicated, valuable things in a series of accelerating returns. The fact that the early improvements in AI systems that used this technique were so much greater than anyone would have expected based on AI research up to that point dangled an even more exciting promise: that the improvements would continue to scale faster than the inputs.

Researchers and investors came to expect an AI that was "untouched by human hands," that taught itself how the world worked. This was the self-licking ice-cream cone of machine learning, the world of "theory-free inference" that had fueled the Big Data industry. With theory-free inference, you don't have to figure out how the world works in order to act upon it: you can just gather up all the data about how things happen in the world, use statistical methods to find the correlations, and then intervene to change the outcomes. You don't have to know why a molecule improves a medical condition – it's enough to discover that fact, produce that molecule, and administer it to people with that condition.

Lots of stuff in the world works this way. Our understanding of the causal relationships that make up reality has massive holes in it that we fill with mere correlation. Correlations are easier to discover than causes, and while correlation is (famously) not causation, causes and effects are correlated, and if you can evince the effect you're seeking without understanding precisely what happened to make that effect appear, well, at least you got the effect you were seeking.

Theory-free inference is a very pragmatic way to approach the world: "I don't need it good, I need it Thursday." Scientists burn to know why a molecule stopped you from dying, but you are likely satisfied to not be dead. What's more, our ability to observe correlations will always race ahead of our understanding of causality, so the power of theory-free inferences pushes out the frontier of things we can act on, beyond the realm of the understood.

Which is all to say: it's reasonable to be excited about a breakthrough in theory-free inference. But just like a boomer who thinks that buying a house to live in makes them a shrewd real-estate speculator, someone who achieves great things through theory-free inference runs the risk of missing the limitations to those techniques.

And they are limited. Theory-free inference is good at predicting what your spouse will type into their phone based on all the things they've ever typed into their phone. You are also good at guessing what your spouse will say based on the things they've said before. The difference is that when your spouse says something entirely unexpected and unprecedented to you (say, "I want a divorce"), the fact that you have a theory about why your spouse said all the things they said up to that moment can help you understand why they've said this new thing. But a machine learning model that relies on theory-free statistical modeling to predict your spouse's next words will be entirely at sea. Theory-free inference works well, but it fails badly.

The problem is that the AI sector has raised literally trillions of dollars by assuring investors that the era of hand-made, causal world models that let computers act on the world is hopelessly inefficient and outdated. But there are many, many tasks that are vastly more efficient and reliable when done through conventional computer programs, rather than through "AI."

As Gary Marcus describes in a recent Organized Money interview, an LLM can recite the rules of chess, but it can't play chess because – lacking a theory of how chess works – it will just emit statistically likely chess moves, even if those moves cause pieces to illegally move through other pieces. The first conventional chess-playing programs ran on electromechanical proto-computers, and they played a better game of chess than an LLM that uses billions of times more computing power and energy:

https://www.organizedmoney.fm/p/an-ai-expert-explains-the-hype

The AI companies have proved that there are many domains and applications where we can swap scale for understanding. But, having ridden some world-historic forces and adjacent possibles to great fortunes and stature, they cannot be dissuaded from their conviction that theory-free inference and scale can do everything. They can't be convinced that in many cases, the things that scale and theory-free inference can do are much better accomplished through causal understandings and conventional computing techniques.

From a research perspective, it is interesting to learn about the potential and limitations of a model trained on the entire internet. From a societal and industrial perspective, it is often grossly wasteful, inefficient and unreliable to swap scale for understanding.

The AI sector was born of world-historical forces that favored massively parallel computing, forces that had also conjured up an internet with trillions of documents that could be fed into those massively parallel computers to conduct theory-free inference. Like every success, AI was born on third base.

As rent-burdened millennials who abandoned avocado toast and fancy coffee and still can't afford a downpayment will tell you, the fact that being born in 1945 made it easy to trip and land on a couple million dollars' worth of real estate wealthy by the time you reached retirement age tells us nothing about how to solve the housing crisis of 2026.

By the same token, continuing to give trillions to AI companies because they experienced early success with theory-free inference at scale tells us nothing about how to solve the vast range of problems that theory-free inference at scale sucks at. Doubling down on AI to overcome its increasingly obvious limitations is like doubling down on building post-war suburbs to fix today's housing market.

It's possible to achieve impressive feats because you're smart and hard working and also because you were in the right place at the right time. Historical contingency produced the AI bubble, and it is producing the conditions for that bubble to pop.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Does copyright protect your AI-generated content in Europe? Let’s find out https://euobserver.com/232898/interview-does-copyright-protect-your-ai-generated-content-in-europe-lets-find-out/

• FTC Says It Will Enforce Surveillance Pricing. It Won’t. https://prospect.org/2026/08/21/ftc-says-it-will-enforce-surveillance-pricing-it-wont/

• Why shaming people about AI slop isn’t enough to stop Big AI https://www.anildash.com/2026/08/21/ai-slop-and-shame/

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Glue anything to anything https://www.thistothat.com/

#20yrsago No unions in iPod City https://web.archive.org/web/20061123003816/https://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,71629-0.html?tw=wn_index_2

#15yrsago Credit scores are bullshit https://web.archive.org/web/20111013005626/https://a.wholelottanothing.org/2011/08/credit-scores-are-bullshit.html

#15yrsago RIP, Jack Layton https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-14618943

#15yrsago William Gibson on cities and the future https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gibson-interview-cities-in-fact-and-fiction/

#10yrsago Bronx cops can steal anything they want by calling it “evidence” https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/how-police-use-a-legal-gray-area-to-rob-suspects-of-their-belongings/495740/

#10yrsago Robert Moses wove enduring racism into New York’s urban fabric https://web.archive.org/web/20160402184527/http://www.hopesandfears.com/hopes/now/politics/216905-the-lingering-effects-of-nyc-racist-city-planning

#10yrsago EFF takes a deep dive into Windows 10’s brutal privacy breaches https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/08/windows-10-microsoft-blatantly-disregards-user-choice-and-privacy-deep-dive

#10yrsago Inside the “sweatshop” terminally ill Britons must call to get benefits https://web.archive.org/web/20160820094907/https://www.theguardian.com/public-leaders-network/2016/aug/20/work-pensions-disability-claim-call-handler-benefits-dwp

#10yrsago How the New York Public Library made ebooks open, and thus one trillion times better https://www.crummy.com/writing/speaking/2015-RESTFest/

#5yrsago Raiders of the lost ARC https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/22/raiders-of-the-lost-arc/

#1yrago Radical juries https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/22/jury-nullification/#voir-dire

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24
  https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/program/

• Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25
  https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• London: AI and the Enshittification of the Media, NUJ (Sep 2)
  https://www.nuj.org.uk/learn/ems-event-calendar/ai-and-the-enshitification-of-the-media.html

• Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
  https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/

• London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
  https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn

• South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
  https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

• Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7
  https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK=

• Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20
  https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020

• Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
  https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Deflating the AI Bubble (Do Not Pass Go)
  https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/deflating-the-ai-bubble-with-cory

• Technofeudal Enshittification (Fucking Cancelled)
  https://www.fuckingcancelled.com/p/technofeudal-enshittification-with

• Who The Machine Serves (EFF)
  https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-who-the-machine-serves

• Speculative Fiction for Social Change II (Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff)
  https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/cool-people-who-did-cool-stuff/08cbb840-a6ae-013a-d8aa-0acc26574db2/part-two-cory-doctorow-on-speculative-fiction-for-social-change/937e8800-9404-45a6-b5e3-90ebee2cfaea

• Speculative Fiction for Social Change I (Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff)
  https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/cool-people-who-did-cool-stuff/08cbb840-a6ae-013a-d8aa-0acc26574db2/part-one-cory-doctorow-on-speculative-fiction-for-social-change/15ad467c-0832-44c9-91ea-59defd783dba

Latest books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

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

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

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

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

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 513 (8701 total).

• "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• 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 actual epistemic crisis: AI's assault on reality is an opportunistic infection.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Disney goths; Running a con room party; Equation Group's fuggly sourcecode; "Bubble"; "The Weight."
• Upcoming appearances: Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
• 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 actual epistemic crisis (permalink)

AI is alarming for many reasons: it's a dangerous financial bubble, an environmental catastrophe, and a tool for eroding wages and labor power. But in addition to all that, AI is an epistemic disaster.

We've had photoshopped images, voice impersonators and visual effects for years, of course, but with deepfakes, we've democratized access to reality-bending images, sounds and videos that appear real but are not. It's harder than ever to know what's true. Politicians and celebrities and activists show up in our feeds, declaring their fealty to this cause or product, or their fury at some turn in the world's events. Battlefields mound high with bodies and influencers marvel at impossible, sumptuous meals. It all seems plausible, and some of it is real, but not all of it, and because we know some of it is fake, we can't be sure if any of it isn't.

It's a very putinesque way of living. Vladislav Surkov was Vladimir Putin's media strategist, and he had a deadly effective tactic: he announced that he was covertly funding some of the groups that publicly opposed Putin, but did not disclose which of those opposition groups were fake. That meant that any of the groups could be fake, which meant that any discussion of the opposition was liable to devolve into an argument about its authenticity. Anything could be a lie, so nothing was necessarily true. Putin's method isn't to get you to believe a lie – it's to keep you from believing that anything is true.

That's life under AI – a world of uncertainty, an epistemological void full of plausible phantasms, some of which are actually real. A world where it's impossible to know what's true, and where anything might be fake.

But here's the thing: AI's assault on our ability to know isn't a new battle – rather, it's the latest barrage in a war that's been waged for years, as corporations grew larger and more powerful, capturing their regulators, who let them lie to us and abuse us with impunity.

This complicated, technical world – the world that produced AI – is full of complicated, technical questions, and none of us can answer these questions for ourselves. You're not stupid, but even a generational genius could not acquire the expertise to answer the long list of life-or-death questions we face every day.

Are the food hygiene standards followed by your grocer or lunchtime spot adequate, or will your dinner make you shit yourself to death? Are the building codes that specify the alloys in the steel joists that hold up the roof over your head sufficient, or are you about to be crushed to death? Is the software in your anti-lock brakes any good, or will you die in a fireball on the way to work?

From food additives to pedagogy, psychotherapeutic techniques to retirement savings, it would take a hundred lifetimes for you to acquire the 200 PhDs needed to answer these questions for yourself.

Thankfully, we don't have to answer those questions for ourselves. Instead, we defer to expert agencies: governmental regulators that assess truth claims by soliciting input from all comers, publicly deliberating about the evidence they've gathered, and then making a rule in public. These regulators are meant to be experts, nonpartisan and neutral, operating with the highest degree of probity, recusing themselves in the event of even a whiff of conflict.

It has to be that way. You may not be able to assess claims about the safety of vaccines – or opioids – but you can see for yourself whether the FDA is full of ex-pharma execs. You can see for yourself whether pharma company lobbyists all used to work for the FDA. You don't need to be a virologist or a cell biologist to tell whether the system that's supposed to sort truth from lies is fit for purpose.

It is not fit for purpose. When arguments broke out over covid vaccines, many vaccine advocates characterized their opponents as foolish people engaged in foolish conspiratorialism. They argued that the corporations that produced the vaccines and the regulators who oversee them were intrinsically trustworthy, and on that basis, we should all get vaccinated.

Now, I happen to be a big believer in vaccination. I've had so many covid jabs that I glow in the dark and get five bars of 5G in a coal-mine. But I didn't get vaccinated because I trust pharma companies or their regulators. A string of scandals – most notably the Sacklers' Oxycontin murder-spree – has proven that pharma will kill you for a nickel and that the FDA will let them get away with it:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/25/black-boxes/#when-you-know-you-know

From tobacco safety to food safety to the climate emergency, it's obvious that the system of expert agencies that we rely on was terminally compromised by corporate power and regulatory capture:

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

This is the epistemological void we were already adrift in before AI came along: a world of unresolvable, urgent, terrifyingly high-stakes questions.

When you get a call from "your bank" and accede to the demand that you hand over all kinds of personal information before they will disclose the call's purpose, you're not being naive or foolish – you're doing the thing that our banks have conditioned us to do for years by engaging in exactly this behavior (my bank did this to me this week!). Why are banks allowed to get away with engaging in this kind of outrageous conduct? Because – as we've repeatedly discovered through crisis after crisis – banks are too big to fail, too big to jail, and too big to care.

Why is it so believable that a loved one might call you in a panic because they've been arrested or injured and need an immediate cash payment before they can get bail or doctor's treatment? Because our criminal justice system and our health care system are already plagued by this kind of inhumane, high-handed, extortionate behavior.

Why do you fall for a deepfake of celeb shilling for supplements or a shitcoin? Maybe it's because celebs actually shill for supplements and shitcoins, and face no consequences for helping rope us all into scams:

https://gizmodo.com/matt-damon-crypto-com-crypto-bitcoin-1850282413

Not just celebs – also our newspapers:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/03/18/technology/cryptocurrency-crypto-guide.html

We laugh when other people fall for newspaper articles making absurd claims – but after living through a time in which our most respected journalistic outlets credulously helped a dishonest government lie the world into a war that's still smoldering more than a generation later, who can be sure when to trust the papers?

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-the-times-and-iraq.html

One of the reasons it is so hard to agree on covid's death-toll is that so many of the people who died of covid were already compromised by chronic illnesses or "pre-existing conditions" from cancer to heart disease. Those people did die of covid – and they died of cancer or heart disease or some other comorbidity. Covid was an opportunistic infection that inflicted disproportionate harms on people who were already suffering.

The epistemic void created by AI is another opportunistic infection. Our ability to know things has been in decline for generations, as monopolies shredded our truth-assessment systems, rendering us all incapable of knowing the truth in a world where believing lies could bankrupt you or kill you dead.

If you could trust your government's expert agencies and if they had reliable systems for making their findings known; if your bank was banned from engaging in conduct indistinguishable from phishing; if the health-care and criminal justice systems never forced the people they ensnared to call their relatives and beg for money, then deepfakes would have a much harder time penetrating our cognitive immune systems.

It's not so much that AI is a powerful way of lying – rather, we have been made progressively more vulnerable to lies for decades, leaving us at an epistemic death's door, and AI has arrived to deliver the coup de grace.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• The $1 Trillion Black Box https://www.propublica.org/article/military-defense-spending-budget-series

• The Right Word is Wrongness https://www.meditationsinanemergency.com/the-right-word-is-wrongness/

• Yes Obviously the Senate Should Be Abolished https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/yes-obviously-the-senate-should-be

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Goth day at Disneyland photos https://flickr.com/photos/doctorow/tags/batsday/

#20yrsago HOWTO run a successful sf convention room party https://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/how_to_throw_a_1/

#20yrsago Yahoo: Go ahead and remix our brand https://web.archive.org/web/20061111175912/http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000348.html

#10yrsago The Equation Group’s sourcecode is totally fugly https://web.archive.org/web/20160818012451/https://www.cs.uic.edu/~s/musings/equation-group/

#5yrsago Bubble https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/21/podcasting-as-a-visual-medium/#huntr

#1yrago Melissa Mendes's "The Weight" https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/21/weighty/#edie-is-a-badass

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24
  https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/program/

• Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25
  https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• London: AI and the Enshittification of the Media, NUJ (Sep 2)
  https://www.nuj.org.uk/learn/ems-event-calendar/ai-and-the-enshitification-of-the-media.html

• Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
  https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/

• London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
  https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn

• South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
  https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

• Victoria: Munro's Books (Oct 20)
  https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020

• Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
  https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Deflating the AI Bubble (Do Not Pass Go)
  https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/deflating-the-ai-bubble-with-cory

• Technofeudal Enshittification (Fucking Cancelled)
  https://www.fuckingcancelled.com/p/technofeudal-enshittification-with

• Who The Machine Serves (EFF)
  https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-who-the-machine-serves

• Speculative Fiction for Social Change II (Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff)
  https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/cool-people-who-did-cool-stuff/08cbb840-a6ae-013a-d8aa-0acc26574db2/part-two-cory-doctorow-on-speculative-fiction-for-social-change/937e8800-9404-45a6-b5e3-90ebee2cfaea

• Speculative Fiction for Social Change I (Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff)
  https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/cool-people-who-did-cool-stuff/08cbb840-a6ae-013a-d8aa-0acc26574db2/part-one-cory-doctorow-on-speculative-fiction-for-social-change/15ad467c-0832-44c9-91ea-59defd783dba

Latest books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

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

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

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

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

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 533 (8263 total).

• "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• 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

Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection):

https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

• The ordinariness of evil: Stop selling AI (bad).
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Dot-crash bumwad; AP v fair use; Nym Wars; What's ctrl-F? Pentagon lost $6.5T in a year; Voter ID is voter suppression; Become unoptimizable.
• Upcoming appearances: Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
• 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 ordinariness of evil (permalink)

Maybe it seems weird that AI bosses won't stop publicly rending their garments about the terrible potential of their products, from the jobspocalypse that will ensue when AI can do our jobs better than us, to the impending moment when the word-guessing programs learn too many words, wake up and turn us all into paperclips.

It seems weird that they won't stop fretting about this terrible potential – until you realize that every public pronouncement about this terrible potential is also a public boast about its potential, period.

That's very, very important, because all AI really has is potential. Actual, existing AI is useful at the margins, if you're already a skilled practitioner who can discern correct from incorrect outputs, and if you integrate AI judiciously so that it doesn't overwhelm your ability to pay attention to those outputs and apply your discernment to them:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/28/hitl-ers/#ai-ai-oh

In other words, AI is mostly a novelty, a heavily subsidized toy that produces little more than distraction. Where AI does produce value, that value is comparable to a plug-in, a new feature for your word processor or image/sound/video-editing package that might help you do your job somewhat better, or it might not.

That doesn't make AI useless, it just makes it a normal technology: useful for some, useless for others, capable of being abused and likely to waste a lot of time when used unwisely:

https://www.normaltech.ai/

Normal technologies are fine. But normal technologies do not warrant the massive economic and political commitments that have been bestowed upon AI: a trillion dollars in the past year alone, and the world's civil servants fired en masse and replaced with AI:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/13/vibe-governance/#k-hole

The people who have committed our society and its resources to an all-or-nothing bet on AI will tell you that AI is the everything machine, but when pressed, they will confess that AI is about to become the everything machine, for example, once AI starts doing AI research, a thing that AI cannot do:

https://www.normaltech.ai/p/ai-agents-cant-yet-do-open-ended

This is a civilizational act of Magic Underpants Gnomery, and every day that it goes on is a day when more economic, climate and political costs of AI are imposed on all of us. Scientific journals, open source repositories and even science fiction magazines are being overwhelmed by slop, whose perpetrators and apologists insist that soon, AI will realize its potential and the slop will be transformed into gold.

That's why AI bosses are so committed to talking up AI's destructive potential: because destructive potential is nonetheless potential. The moment we stop believing in that potential is the moment that we stop supplying AI companies with bales of cash to shovel into their money-furnaces so that they can afford to sell hundred dollar bills for a dollar each to Elon Musk cultists who want to generate child porn and pictures of Sonic the Hedgehog with giant boobs.

AI does have destructive potential. It has the potential to destroy the productive economy when an AI salesman convinces your boss to fire you and replace you with chatbots that can't do your job:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete

AI has destructive potential because bosses are trapped in a prisoner's dilemma where none of them can admit that the money they've spent – and the jobs they've destroyed – chasing AI has been wasted, and so other bosses bet even harder:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/01/dare-snot/#i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again

AI has destructive potential because the data-center bubble has convinced credulous town officials to throw out environmental and planning review, seize people's home and farms, and carpet the countryside with giant data centers (many of which will never be built):

https://www.404media.co/people-hate-datacenters-survey-finds/

AI has destructive potential because it is consuming scarce water and energy and emitting gigatons of carbon:

https://www.404media.co/even-the-u-s-government-says-ai-requires-massive-amounts-of-water/

This is the destructive potential we need to be hammering at, because this isn't the kind of destructive potential that translates into productive potential that will someday make the AI bet pay off. Quite the opposite: this is all about the potential of AI to destroy the economy and consume your retirement savings:

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/congrats-youre-about-to-unwittingly-make-elon-musk-trillionaire-spacex-ipo-index-funds

Just as importantly: we have to stop amplifying tech bosses' chosen narratives about their products' destructive potential, because this helps them raise more money and do more terrible things. Bernie Sanders needs to stop insisting that the US government should own 50% of the money-losingest corporations the world has ever seen and start talking about how they will not get a government bailout when their investment bubble bursts. We need to stop talking about AI "haves" who will enjoy the awesome potential of AI, and AI "have-nots" who will fall behind.

We need to stop talking about "AI safety" and the possibility of "rogue AI" destroying the world. When an AI company's security tool "escapes containment" and hacks someone else's servers, we need to ask the company "Why do you suck so bad at building secure sandboxes for your hacking tools?" rather than "Why are your hacking tools so amazingly powerful?"

Above all, we need to stop talking about AI as exceptional. AI is normal. A normal technology has some uses, but isn't useful for all things and all people. A normal technology isn't inevitable, it's something you decide whether you want to use or not.

Treating AI as unexceptional is the best way to halt the destructive march of AI companies and their impact on jobs, the climate and the economy. But treating AI as unexceptional requires that we stop talking about AI as if it were exceptionally evil. Yes, some people who use AI experience severe mental problems, but that's not because AI is a Lovecraftian horror that destroys your brain and your capacity for rational thought if you use it. It's not a basilisk. AI is like a carny ride that triggers cardiac events in riders who never knew they had a problem because they never experienced those particular g-stresses – it's not something that induces vulnerability, it's something that triggers vulnerability:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/03/mission-space/#gsd

Using AI doesn't make you evil, nor does it risk your sanity – no more than doing any of the other dangerous, compromised, unsustainable things that constitute our daily lives in this fraught moment. The world will be better off when the AI companies are bankrupt and their servers are sold off at ten cents on the dollar – but using those servers to run open models in modest, careful ways won't infect you with their wickedness. They are not stained with communicable sin. They're just computers. They are unexceptional.

One way for a technology to be normal is for it to be produced and marketed by an awful corporation that wants to do terrible things. This isn't to say that "all technologies are dual use, and you have to take the good with the bad." That's the inevitabilist argument of vulgar Thatcherites who insist – as Margaret Thatcher did – that "there is no alternative," and we have to accept their abuse if we want to reap the benefits of the technology.

The normal way to deal with this is to reject vulgar Thatcherism in favor of heroic Gibsonism, thundering William Gibson's rallying cry, "the street finds its own use for things," as we seize the means of technology and use it in the ways that benefit us, while restricting, banning, or blocking the uses that harm us:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/17/technopolitics/#original-sin

To treat AI as exceptionally evil is to elevate the mediocrities who run AI companies to super-villain status, a status in which they positively revel. A serial liar like Sam Altman will someday trip over his own dick and end up in a cell for securities fraud – unless we keep exalting his evil to Satanic scale, in which case he might make himself "too big to jail":

https://time.com/article/2026/05/26/sam-altman-ai-job-losses-openAI-/

Altman is a con-man and a stock swindler, not a super-genius. The more we describe his products as possessing a special kind of durable evil that will endure even after his company fails and he is condemned to history's ash-heap, the more we help Altman raise money for his chatbot Ponzi. Normal technology isn't a cursed artifact. That's something you find in a lich-king's tomb. We need to stop helping Altman burnish his reputation as a lich-king and stop treating AI like it's magic.

There's a technical term for the kind of tech criticism that inadvertently helps tech bros sell their swindle: "criti-hype," Lee Vinsel's term for "tak[ing] the sensational claims of boosters and entrepreneurs, flip[ping] them, and start talking about 'risks'":

https://peoples-things.ghost.io/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype/

In other words, to commit criti-hype is to repeat the marketing claims of people like Sam Altman and then add, "(and that's bad)" in parentheses at the end. These guys – these terrible, mediocre, boring-ass losers – are bullshit factories, ejecting fountains of nonsense about AI. The right way to criticize them is to point out that they're lying – not to repeat their lies as warnings.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Are We Still Litigating Whether Corporate Profit-Taking Contributed to Inflation? https://www.thesling.org/are-we-still-litigating-whether-corporate-profit-taking-contributed-to-inflation/

• Hook and Squeeze https://data4democracy.substack.com/p/hook-and-squeeze

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Dot-com crash toilet paper https://web.archive.org/web/20010822220826/http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200-6908350.html

#25yrsago Associated Press says a single sentence excerpt is not fair use https://web.archive.org/web/20050717075914/http://www.infoanarchy.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2001/8/17/202249/240

#15yrsago German Pirate Party poised to win first federal election https://torrentfreak.com/german-pirate-party-on-course-to-election-win-110820/

#15yrsago Understanding the Nym Wars https://epeus.blogspot.com/2011/08/google-plus-must-stop-this-identity.html

#15yrsago Journalism school teaches students pre-digital newspaper production techniques https://journoterrorist.com/2011/08/02/paperball2/

#15yrsago 90 percent of US net users don’t know from crtl-F https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/crazy-90-percent-of-people-dont-know-how-to-use-ctrl-f/243840/

#15yrsago Bruce Sterling’s Augmented Reality project https://web.archive.org/web/20110827010512/https://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2011/08/augmented-reality-science-fiction-writer-becomes-augmented-reality-developer/

#10yrsago Woman sues cops because they destroyed her empty house, thinking a suspect was hiding in it https://www.techdirt.com/2016/08/19/woman-sues-after-police-destroy-her-home-during-10-hour-standoff-with-family-dog/

#10yrsago US Army committed $6.5 trillion in accounting fraud in one year https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-audit-army-idUSKCN10U1IG/

#10yrsago Candid Republican operators admit that voter ID laws are about disenfranchisement https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/when-politicians-tell-truth-voting-restrictions

#1yrago Become unoptimizable https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/20/billionaireism/#surveillance-infantalism

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24
  https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/program/

• Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25
  https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• London: AI and the Enshittification of the Media, NUJ (Sep 2)
  https://www.nuj.org.uk/learn/ems-event-calendar/ai-and-the-enshitification-of-the-media.html

• Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
  https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/

• London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
  https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn

• South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
  https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

• Victoria: Munro's Books (Oct 20)
  https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020

• Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
  https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Deflating the AI Bubble (Do Not Pass Go)
  https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/deflating-the-ai-bubble-with-cory

• Technofeudal Enshittification (Fucking Cancelled)
  https://www.fuckingcancelled.com/p/technofeudal-enshittification-with

• Who The Machine Serves (EFF)
  https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-who-the-machine-serves

• Speculative Fiction for Social Change II (Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff)
  https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/cool-people-who-did-cool-stuff/08cbb840-a6ae-013a-d8aa-0acc26574db2/part-two-cory-doctorow-on-speculative-fiction-for-social-change/937e8800-9404-45a6-b5e3-90ebee2cfaea

• Speculative Fiction for Social Change I (Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff)
  https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/cool-people-who-did-cool-stuff/08cbb840-a6ae-013a-d8aa-0acc26574db2/part-one-cory-doctorow-on-speculative-fiction-for-social-change/15ad467c-0832-44c9-91ea-59defd783dba

Latest books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

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

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

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

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

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 531 (7157 total).

• "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• 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

Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection):

https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

• IP can't save you from AI: Property rights cannot substitute for labor rights and privacy rights.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Flying Brits v brown people; Probability neglect; Law v "enhanced patdowns"; Onion says Brits love paywalls; "Hench"; "Lessons in Magic and Disaster."
• Upcoming appearances: Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
• 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.

IP can't save you from AI (permalink)

You don't have to believe that AI "art" is any good (I don't), nor do you have to believe that AI "art" can be any good (I don't) to understand that the reason that the capital markets are putting trillions into AI is that they believe they can fire workers of every kind and replace them with AI:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete

I'm an artist and a worker. I want to protect my labor interests. So do my peers from across the "creative industries." But a sizable group of my peers think the way we're going to protect our interests is by expanding copyright so that it's unambiguously illegal to scrape the internet, analyze the files retrieved by those scrapers, and publish that analysis (a process more familiarly known as "training AI"):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

This is a losing strategy. First, because banning scraping, or requiring permission to count the elements in creative works, or demanding a license to publish collections of facts about copyrighted works will inflict enormous collateral damage on a wide variety of socially beneficial activities. From the OED to search engines to the Internet Archive, so many beneficial activities rely on the fact that copyright permits unlicensed collection and analysis of every copyrighted work as a single, massive corpus, and copyright allows the publication of that analysis without permission from the creators of the works it analyzes.

A lot of people who are (rightfully) very angry about AI dispute this. They believe that they can craft an "AI training" law that would ban scraping, analysis and publication when these activities are part of AI training, but not when they're undertaken for a benign purpose. I am very, very skeptical of this. After 25 years of watching internet policy go badly awry, to the great detriment of workers of all kinds and everyday users, it is my professional, considered opinion that drafting a statute that only stops these "bad" activities is much, much harder than these people think, and may actually be impossible.

I think some artists advocating for a copyright-based solution to AI's war on labor understand this and have decided that they're willing to catch a lot of dolphins in these legal tuna-nets they're hoping to get from Congress. I get that: there are always trade-offs, and the perfect can't be the enemy of the good.

But I think they're making the wrong trade-off, and not just because I value archives, accountability corpuses, large-scale linguistic research and search engines. I think they're making the wrong trade-off because copyright will not protect their livelihoods from AI-based wage erosion.

Here's why: the theory of copyright as an "artist's right" is premised on the idea that we artists get these exclusive rights, which we use in our bargaining with media companies and other intermediaries. It's a (pseudo) property right, and it's sub-licensable. Just as an entrepreneur might get the contract to supply catering for a sports stadium and then parcel out the pretzel stand, beer bar, and pizza concessions to subcontractors, we're meant to sell our English rights, foreign language rights, graphic novel rights, film rights, audio rights, (and so on) to a variety of media companies.

To bargain successfully, it's not only necessary for you to have something valuable to trade: you also need to have leverage. You need to have options. The other side has to believe that if they lowball you, you will go do a deal elsewhere.

This is where copyright fails to serve creative workers. Even at the best of times, the world naturally produces an oversupply of would-be professional artists, and a sufficiency of the talented to fill most of the workaday niches in our field. Even exceptional artists – and exceptional works of art – are often commercial flops, for reasons that aren't always well understood (though sometimes it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, where a media company buys the rights and then loses confidence in the work and does not exert itself in the marketing of the work).

These are not the best of times. Decades of lax antitrust enforcement has boiled the "creative industries" down to 5 publishers, 4 studios, 3 labels, 2 app stores, and one company that's in charge of all the ebooks and audiobooks.

Since the 1976 Copyright Act, Congress has acted time and again to broaden copyright. Today's copyright lasts longer, restricts more uses, extends to more kinds of works, and carries stiffer statutory penalties for infringement ($150,000 per download!). The media companies we creative workers bargain with are larger, richer and more profitable than at any time in history – and we are poorer. The share of those massive profits that ends up in our pocket is lower than ever – and we don't just get smaller slices of that larger pie, those slices are smaller than the slices we used to get, when the pie was much smaller. The rising tide of copyright expansion lifted our bosses' boats – even as our dinghies filled with bilge and sank.

How could we get so much more to bargain with, only to bargain it all away, for less money than we used to get for a much smaller bundle of rights? Simple: giving us rights did not give us leverage. Giving us more rights without giving us more bargaining power is like giving your bullied schoolkid extra lunch-money. There's no amount of lunch-money that will get that kid fed; but if you keep increasing how much money the kid gets, the bullies will end up so rich that they can afford to run a global campaign demanding that we all think of those poor hungry kids and send them even more lunch money.

Copyright's failure to deliver for creative workers doesn't mean that we're doomed to poverty. Our works are generating record profits for our bosses, and there are plenty of ways to change the "distributional outcomes" (the phrase economists use for "who gets what") in arts/labor policy. In 2022, I co-wrote Chokepoint Capitalism along with the eminent Australian copyright scholar Rebecca Giblin. The whole book is full of these pro-worker arts policies:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/what-is-chokepoint-capitalism/

Rebecca and I start from the premise that artists are workers, not the small businesses that our bosses insist we see ourselves as. The idea that an artist is an LLC with an MFA fits in very neatly with copyright: you're getting this bundle of exclusive rights from Congress and then you bargain, business-to-business, with other companies out there in the world, selling those rights for the best price you can get. This approach rarely works, and when it does, it works badly. 50 years of more copyright, richer bosses, and poorer artists put the lie to the "LLC with an MFA" approach.

If we're workers, then we derive our power from labor rights. The Writers Guild – the only creative workers in world history to have comprehensively beaten AI in their workplace – won their AI fight with a strike:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/

The Hollywood guilds are able to pursue a limited form of "sectoral bargaining" (where all the workers in a field bargain with all its bosses) called "multi-employer bargaining." Bosses hate sectoral bargaining, and in 1947 they got it banned outright through the Taft-Hartley Act.

Getting other kinds of creative workers into multi-employer bargaining arrangements will be a lot of work – and repealing Taft-Hartley and restoring sectoral bargaining will be even harder. But just because it's hard to do the thing that works, it doesn't follow that we should do the easy thing that doesn't work.

Compared to winning more labor rights, getting more copyright will be easy. That's because our bosses want more copyright. When we demand more copyright, our bosses – the most powerful, profitable media companies in human history, grown rich off our labor – will fight alongside of us.

But media companies don't want to stop AI from depriving us of our wages. Quite the contrary! The whole reason that the Writers Guild had to go on strike was that movie studios – not Openai or Anthropic – wanted to replace them with AI. The same studios that are suing the AI companies for "mass copyright theft" have made it very clear that they want to buy chatbots from those AI companies and use them to erode our wages and thin our ranks. The copyright lawsuits our bosses are waging against the AI companies are intended to force tech companies to pay for licenses before they train their chatbots on our work. But they won't be paying us for those licenses – they'll be paying our bosses.

The AI copyright fight isn't being fought to protect your wages – it's being fought to see whether your lost wages end up in the pockets of a tech boss or a media boss. AI copyright suits are a fight over who's going to get the lion's share when they eat you up for dinner. They're not a way to keep you off the menu.

This becomes more obviously true with each passing day, and this morning, the world got its clearest example of what a poor substitute copyright is for fundamental human rights, like labor rights and privacy rights.

Last year, Spirit Airlines went bankrupt, a casualty of a monopolized aviation sector and Trump's oil price surge. Ever since, vultures have circled its carcass, picking off its assets in a string of auctions conducted by Spirit's bankruptcy trustees. Today, those trustees announced that they had sold all of Spirit's employees' data to Google, for use in AI training:

https://www.axios.com/2026/08/17/google-spirit-airlines-bankruptcy

Every email, every memo, every calendar entry. Oceans of sensitive, personal information, all to be shoveled directly into the bottomless maw of Google's AI training systems. This training data includes messages between colleagues and with outside parties about workers' romantic lives, their health, their family situations. These workers' most private lives will end up as fodder for a Google chatbot.

Now, all of these workers have a copyright in all of that work. Under international copyright treaties and US law, copyright "inheres at the moment of fixation of a work of human creativity." The very instant a worker sets fingers to keyboard and types out a message with even the smallest quantum of creativity, a new copyright springs into existence, giving the copyright holder 90 years' worth of control over it.

But even though every one of those emails and messages and memos was written by a human being working for Spirit, the copyright over those works does not belong to the workers. Every single one of them will have signed an employment agreement that designates their emails and other copyrightable work as "works made for hire," owned by Spirit Airlines, which means that their work is now an asset in Spirit's bankruptcy estate. That's why all that personal information is about to be transferred to a new corporate owner, Google, who can do anything they want with it.

We know how terrible this kind of disclosure will be for workers. In 2001, the criminal enterprise Enron collapsed after the extent of its fraud was revealed. In the ensuing litigation, Enron's bankruptcy overseers decided that it was too expensive to purge the company's email servers of personal information before entering it into evidence. That meant that once the court battles were over, all the Enron employees' emails entered the public domain as part of the court record:

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

The "Enron Corpus" is a foundational data-set in modern computer science. Academics analyzed the data to do pioneering work on machine learning and social graph theory, which found its way into the design and operations of social media companies, who learned how to spot and manipulate social connections by studying it.

The Enron Corpus isn't just a data-set, though. It's a privacy catastrophe, full of sensitive personal information that haunts the 158 employees whose correspondence is now permanently afloat upon the internet.

Why was the Enron Corpus so exploitable? Because US labor law does not protect this kind of sensitive information when it is in your employer's hands. In fact, if your boss ends up with a trove of your personal information in the form of emails, calendar entries and files, you will typically be blamed for it: "Why did you use your work computer for personal activities?"

But anthropologists who study computer usage have known for decades that everyone ends up with personal data on their work devices. What's more, this problem is only getting worse, because (thanks to weak labor laws), we're expected to work longer hours and to be on call when we're not at the job, which means that you're often dealing with personal crises after hours from your desk, and dealing with work crises at home from your sofa.

Any fit-for-purpose labor rights regime would recognize that your privacy rights must extend to the data that finds its way onto your boss's computers, even if you put that data there. Any failure to recognize this bedrock fact gives employers free license to plunder and exploit your personal information.

Of course, labor law isn't the only way to protect private information. While labor law should contain explicit, job-related privacy guarantees, privacy law should protect all our privacy (after all, Spirit's servers are also full of emails and messages from Spirit's passengers).

Unfortunately for anyone who ever flew on Spirit – or anyone who worked for them – American privacy law is all but dead. America's last consumer privacy law went into effect in 1988, when the Video Privacy Protection Act made it illegal for video-store clerks to disclose your VHS rental records.

Google says it won't use your profile or frequent flier info to train its model, but they haven't made the same promise about the millions of messages that passengers exchanged with the airline. Google has also promised to use "de-identification" algorithms to purge the Spirit customer, supplier and employee data of personal information. But "de-identification" is a pipe-dream, widely understood by security experts as a form of wishful thinking by companies that want to exploit your personal information while still insisting that they aren't violating your privacy. In reality, "de-identified" data is always vulnerable to "re-identification" attacks:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/30/dox-the-world/#experian

The collapse of privacy and labor rights in post-Reagan America and the mass expansion of copyright over the same period are part of the same phenomenon, aspects of two generations' worth of policies designed to benefit capital at the expense of workers, and corporations at the expense of consumers.

As consumers, we're told to substitute shopping for legal rights: if a corporation wrongs you, it's easier and quicker to "vote with your wallet" than it is to sue them or ask the government to intervene. Substituting shopping for politics has been a total failure. Shopping your way out of a monopoly is like recycling your way out of a wildfire:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/21/purity-culture/#stop-fucking-that-chicken

As creative workers we were told to stop thinking of ourselves as workers altogether, to become small businesses, and to use the LLC With an MFA method to bargain our way out of exploitative arrangements. This, too, has been a failure:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/03/its-a-trap/#inheres-at-the-moment-of-fixation

The sale of Spirit's data to Google for AI training shows us that privacy and labor rights are indispensable. We can't substitute market mechanisms like comparison shopping or individual contract negotiations for broad, systemic, inalienable rights backstopped by law.

By demanding the copyright our bosses love, we're seeking the right to be angry about AI, even as the AI companies and our bosses cut deals to train chatbots with our work, which they will use to attack our livelihoods.

Once we stop pretending to be small businesses, once we abandon the fantasy of LLCs with MFAs, we can join with every worker in every industry in demanding sectoral bargaining; and with every consumer in demanding privacy rights. Winning privacy and labor struggles means more than the right to be angry about AI – that's the right to do something about it.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Nautilus https://nautilus.plotter.cc/

• Zoomers don't know what Usenet is https://tchotchke.substack.com/p/zoomers-dont-know-what-usenet-is

• When the Shortage is the Strategy https://nooneshappy.com/article/when-the-shortage-is-the-strategy/

• Can Canada function without American tech? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwoL6OGk_2Y

• Elon Musk made flying even worse so Palantir could profit https://www.theverge.com/transportation/981194/faa-air-traffic-elon-musk-peter-thiel-palantir

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago IP and scientific publishing https://web.archive.org/web/20011001203058/http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/bbing/stories/s345514.htm

#20yrsago British air travelers kick brown “terrorists” off their planes https://web.archive.org/web/20060823104858/http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=401419&in_page_id=1770&ico=Homepage&icl=TabModule&icc=NEWS&ct=5

#15yrsago “Probability neglect”: why policy-makers are constitutionally incapable of formulating evidence-based anti-terrorism policy https://web.archive.org/web/20111015040753/https://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/risk/library/J2011OBHDP_APM,AT,HK_PolicymakersDilemma.pdf

#15yrsago TSA can’t explain why “enhanced patdowns” are legal https://web.archive.org/web/20151203033820/http://flyingwithfish.boardingarea.com/2011/08/18/the-legality-of-the-tsas-enhanced-pat-down-authority/

#15yrsago The Onion: We did a paywall because British people like paying for the Web https://web.archive.org/web/20110911175335/http://www.avclub.com/articles/about-the-onions-new-paid-content-system,60129/

#5yrsago Hench https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/19/failure-cascades/#natalie-zina-walschots

#5yrsago Machine learning's crumbling foundations https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/19/failure-cascades/#dirty-data

#1yrago Charlie Jane Anders' "Lessons in Magic and Disaster" https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/19/revenge-magic/#liminal-spaces

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24
  https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/program/

• Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25
  https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• London: AI and the Enshittification of the Media, NUJ (Sep 2)
  https://www.nuj.org.uk/learn/ems-event-calendar/ai-and-the-enshitification-of-the-media.html

• Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
  https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/

• London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
  https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn

• South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
  https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

• Victoria: Munro's Books (Oct 20)
  https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020

• Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
  https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Deflating the AI Bubble (Do Not Pass Go)
  https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/deflating-the-ai-bubble-with-cory

• Technofeudal Enshittification (Fucking Cancelled)
  https://www.fuckingcancelled.com/p/technofeudal-enshittification-with

• Who The Machine Serves (EFF)
  https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-who-the-machine-serves

• Speculative Fiction for Social Change II (Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff)
  https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/cool-people-who-did-cool-stuff/08cbb840-a6ae-013a-d8aa-0acc26574db2/part-two-cory-doctorow-on-speculative-fiction-for-social-change/937e8800-9404-45a6-b5e3-90ebee2cfaea

• Speculative Fiction for Social Change I (Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff)
  https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/cool-people-who-did-cool-stuff/08cbb840-a6ae-013a-d8aa-0acc26574db2/part-one-cory-doctorow-on-speculative-fiction-for-social-change/15ad467c-0832-44c9-91ea-59defd783dba

Latest books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

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

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

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

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

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 585 (6624 total).

• "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• 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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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

• Jennifer Jenkins' 'Music Copyright, Creativity, and Culture': The definitive textbook (with comics!).
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Hair-gel bombers v bras; Hair-gel bombers v chemistry; AOL digs for spammer's platinum; Stross on infosec in 2061; In-game Ponzi; Snowden on Shadow Brokers hack; Life v understanding advanced math; "Greatest of Marlys!"; Housing and precarity; LLMs as slot-machines for coders; Hypercard's backstory; Pirate Party; Fanbois' mental health v critics; Krugman calls for alien invasion; Trump x Serbian genocidaires; The last Sandman Slim; Muphry’s Law; NSA created the Shadow Brokers; DOJ kills private prisons; Walmart externalizes crime; "Sgt Augmento"; Zuckermuskian solipsism.
• Upcoming appearances: Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
• 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.

Jennifer Jenkins' 'Music Copyright, Creativity, and Culture' (permalink)

Nobody explains copyright like Jennifer Jenkins, the director of the Duke Center for the Public Domain, in which capacity she is responsible for the annual New Year's roundups of all the materials entering the public domain (a series that started in the decades during which the public domain was frozen by the Sonny Bono Copyright Act):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/20/em-oh-you-ess-ee/#sexytimes

Jenkins has a gift for making one of the most complicated, worst understood, most consequential areas of law not only comprehensible, but also fascinating. Her late 2023 explanation of what "Mickey Mouse's copyright is expiring" actually meant was the single best explainer on the subject, in a crowded field:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/15/mouse-liberation-front/#free-mickey

Small wonder that she's the go-to copyright and trademark expert for so many media outlets. Perhaps you heard her Planet Money segments on which superheroes are in the public domain:

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/969512231

Jenkins' flair for legal communications carries over to her scholarly work, of course, which is why her Open Copyright Casebook is a standard text for American law schools:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/30/open-and-shut-casebook/#stop-confusing-the-issue-with-relevant-facts

Jenkins co-wrote the Casebook with her husband, the equally erudite and expert James Boyle. It's just one of their many fruitful collaborations; they are also the writing team behind THEFT! A History of Music, the greatest graphic novel ever created about the history of music, music law, music censorship, and the music industry:

https://web.law.duke.edu/musiccomic/

Last year, Jenkins published Music Copyright, Creativity, and Culture, an Oxford University Press title that fuses her scholarly and popular work in a generalist textbook on the legal framework for music that will forever change how you think about music. Now, a second edition, with a lengthy section on new music litigation, AI copyright fights, and the issue of uncompensated labor is available as an open access download:

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/musiccopyright/

Music Copyright weaves together the economic, cultural, political and artistic history of music, pulling on historic threads ranging from antiquity to medieval Europe to the age of mechanical reproduction to describe changing views of musicians, their audiences, and religious and political leaders on what constituted music, who was allowed to make music, and what music was for. In so doing, she firmly establishes the extremely contingent nature of our present-day norms around music, showing that the "natural" present-day assumptions about who gets paid, who pays, and when payment (or permission) is required are anything but, and are always in flux.

For obvious reasons, much of Jenkins' text describes these changes in the context of the record, the radio, satellite transmission, P2P file-sharing, and digital sampling (along with a chapter on AI). These examples are liberally illustrated with links to musical excerpts that bring the subject to life (these are presented as hotlinks in the ebook; if you're reading the print edition, you can use the book's companion website:)

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/musiccopyright/

Interspersed with these histories and analysis are lengthy, extremely on-point excerpts from THEFT!, her graphic novel history of music. These enliven the text as much as the music samples, making this textbook as entertaining as it is informative.

Of especial interest – and importance – are the long sections on the courtroom battles of Ed Sheeran, Katy Perry, and Pharrell Williams over similar "grooves" and "vibes" to other songs, some of them well-known and some quite obscure:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/08/oh-why/#two-notes-and-running

These cases highlight the fundamental incoherence of music copyright, a system composed of improvised responses to new technologies, each layered atop the last in a messy pile that virtually no one understands.

Jenkins understands it, though. I've been reading, writing, and debating about this stuff since the late 1990s, and I learned something new on every page of this delightful book. This should be required reading for anyone who makes music, loves music, or cares about musicians and the arts more generally. It's a towering accomplishment and a brilliant read.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• The CEO who fired 900 people on Zoom just before Christmas wants his job back https://edition.cnn.com/2026/08/14/business/vishal-garg-better-ceo

• Who Crapped on Johnny Depp's Bed? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGt7-WnWdhE

• No-One Makes You Shop at Amazon https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/no-one-makes-you-shop-at-amazon

• Paramount’s Merger Strategy: Empty Promises and Empty Threats https://prospect.org/2026/08/14/paramounts-merger-strategy-empty-promises-threats-justice-department-antitrust/

• they_live_adblocker https://github.com/davmlaw/they_live_adblocker

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago RIP, The Industry Standard, Palm buys BeOS https://web.archive.org/web/20010927192339/http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,46113,00.html

#25yrsago Smart dust sensors https://web.archive.org/web/20011112010004/http://www.smalltimes.com/document_display.cfm?document_id=1935

#25yrsago Pentagon patents onion-routing https://web.archive.org/web/20010912222427/http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,46126,00.html

#25yrsago Coltan: the conflict mineral in our gadgets https://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/12/magazine/the-dirt-in-the-new-machine.html

#25yrsago Danny Goodman Talks About HyperCard https://web.archive.org/web/20011214114614/http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/mac/2001/08/17/goodman.html

#25yrsago Report an insecure website, win a visit from the FBI https://web.archive.org/web/20010820110330/http://www.linuxfreak.org/post.php/08/17/2001/134.html

#20yrsago Copyright wars: film-makers eats themselves https://web.archive.org/web/20070318010544/https://www.laweekly.com/film+tv/film/freedom-of-information/14244/

#20yrsago RyanAir to UK govt: ease off on security or we sue https://www.theguardian.com/business/2006/aug/18/theairlineindustry.terrorism

#20yrsago Federal court bans Bush’s warrantless spying on Americans https://edition.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/08/17/domesticspying.lawsuit/index.html

#20yrsago Western millionaires plotted Equatorial Guinea coup as a game https://web.archive.org/web/20071114211448/https://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/08/17/roberts/index_np.html

#20yrsago Sweden’s Pirate Party – political arm of the pro-piracy groundswell https://web.archive.org/web/20060820093355/https://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,71544-0.html

#20yrsago Hair-Gel Bombers win war on bras https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/us-authorities-leave-gel_n_27402

#20yrsago Would a hair-gel bomb actually work? https://seclists.org/interesting-people/2006/Aug/86

#20yrsago The Pirate Bay’s backstory https://web.archive.org/web/20060901180116/https://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,71543-0.html

#20yrsago AOL will dig for buried platinum and gold in spammer’s Mom’s yard https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna14365934

#15yrsago Charlie Stross on network security in 2061 https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/08/usenix-2011-keynote-network-se.html

#15yrsago Damning 2007 letter asserts that phone hacking was an open practice at News of the World https://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/aug/16/phone-hacking-now-reporter-letter

#15yrsago In-game Ponzi nets US$50K https://web.archive.org/web/20110921052125/http://gamergaia.com/pc/1724-eve-online-space-heist-one-trillion-isk.html

#15yrsago Copyright troll handed ass (again), tries saddest trick ever to get out of paying its victim’s legal bills https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/08/righthaven-rocked-owes-34000-after-fair-use-loss/

#15yrsago English cops arrest man for planning water-fight via Blackberry Messenger https://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/aug/15/essex-water-fight-blackberry-messenger

#15yrsago Woman who recorded Massachusetts police beating charged with illegal wiretapping https://www.masslive.com/news/2011/08/videographer_of_alleged_melvin.html

#15yrsago Criticism of a brand lowers the self-esteem of its adherents https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/08/users-treat-criticism-of-favorite-brands-as-threat-to-self-image/

#15yrsago Homeopathy multinational sues blogger over statements that its mythological curative had “no active ingredient” https://web.archive.org/web/20110930131033/http://www.blogzero.it/contatti/prova/

#15yrsago Edinburgh Fringe show asks audience to shred banknotes https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2011/aug/16/crunch-edinburgh-festival-shred-cash

#15yrsago CCTV deterrence and the London uprising https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/aug/17/why-cctv-does-not-deter-crime

#15yrsago Paul Krugman: save the economy by staging an alien invasion hoax https://comicsalliance.com/watchmen-paul-krugman-alien-invasion/

#15yrsago Minecraft creator challenges trademark belligerents to winner-take-all Quake deathmatch https://web.archive.org/web/20110817205045/http://notch.tumblr.com/post/9038258448/hey-bethesda-lets-settle-this

#15yrsago Muphry’s Law: the inevitability of typos in discussions of typos https://web.archive.org/web/20101227141449/https://www.editorscanberra.org/muphrys-law/

#15yrsago Copyright complaint as phishing email https://memex.craphound.com/2011/08/18/copyright-complaint-as-phishing-email/

#15yrsago Rep Allen West pens “dumbest thing ever written on congressional stationery” https://web.archive.org/web/20110914030034/https://thinkprogress.org/security/2011/08/17/297619/allen-west-nuts/

#10yrsago The NSA’s program of tech sabotage created the Shadow Brokers https://web.archive.org/web/20160818132904/https://www.wired.com/2016/08/shadow-brokers-mess-happens-nsa-hoards-zero-days/

#10yrsago Walmarts are high-crime zones thanks to staff cuts, but America gets the bill https://web.archive.org/web/20160818000539/https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-walmart-crime/

#10yrsago DoJ says it will end private federal prisons https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/department-justice-plans-end-private-prison/

#10yrsago Fiction: Sgt. Augmento, Bruce Sterling’s robots-take-our-jobs story https://web.archive.org/web/20160818161624/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/sgt-augmento

#10yrsago Las Vegas: high unionization rates mean smaller wage-gaps for women, especially older women https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/17/opinion/how-unions-help-cocktail-servers.html

#10yrsago The incredible true story of the Epcot Horizons superfans who ruled the ride https://web.archive.org/web/20160822031741/https://dangerousminds.net/comments/the_true_story_of_the_unauthorized_daredevil_documentation_of_the_horizons_/

#10yrsago Predictive policing predicts police harassment, not crime https://web.archive.org/web/20160821093834/https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11292-016-9272-0

#10yrsago UC Davis Chancellor spent $400K+ to scrub her online reputation after pepper-spray incident https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article94733812.html

#10yrsago Reputation systems work because people are mostly good https://timharford.com/2016/08/the-meaning-of-trust-in-the-age-of-airbnb/

#10yrsago The guy who started Serbia’s ethnic cleansing led a pro-Trump rally in Belgrade https://web.archive.org/web/20160817022133/https://theintercept.com/2016/08/16/serb-inspired-ethnic-cleansing-bosnia-leads-vote-trump-rally-belgrade/

#10yrsago Europe’s banks want to store billions in cash to fight back against negative interest https://web.archive.org/web/20160817152157/https://www.cnbc.com/2016/08/16/banks-look-for-cheap-way-to-store-cash-piles-as-rates-go-negative.html

#10yrsago Kill Rock Stars president explains why the radio plays the same songs over and over https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThrXkYwTBP8

#10yrsago Snowden explains the Shadow Brokers/Equation Group/NSA hack https://www.techdirt.com/2016/08/16/ed-snowden-explains-why-hackers-published-nsas-hacking-tools/

#10yrsago Hackers claim to have stolen NSA cyberweapons, auctioning them to highest bidder https://web.archive.org/web/20160816035711/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/hackers-hack-nsa-linked-equation-group

#10yrsago What life is like when you really understand advanced mathematics https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-understand-advanced-mathematics-Does-it-feel-analogous-to-having-mastery-of-another-language-like-in-programming-or-linguistics

#10yrsago Parents who can’t pay the bill for kids’ incarceration can still go bankrupt, a US court rules https://archive.thinkprogress.org/everything-wrong-with-how-our-justice-system-treats-poor-people-in-one-awful-case-bfd91a6fa114/

#10yrsago UK Intellectual Property Office grants trademark on “should’ve” https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37092366

#10yrsago The Greatest of Marlys! is the Lynda Barry book we’ve been waiting for https://memex.craphound.com/2016/08/16/the-greatest-of-marlys-is-the-lynda-barry-book-weve-been-waiting-for/

#5yrsago Housing, money laundry, speculation and precarity https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/16/die-miete-ist-zu-hoch/#assets-v-human-rights

#5yrsago Big Oil caught lying about methane https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/17/king-bullet/#methanescan

#5yrsago Sandman Slim's final adventure https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/17/king-bullet/#sticking-the-dismount

#5yrsago The Sacklers threaten us all with a good time https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/18/lets-make-a-deal/#art-of-the-deal

#1yrago Zuckermuskian solipsism https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/18/seeing-like-a-billionaire/#npcs

#1yrago LLMs are slot-machines https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/16/jackpot/#salience-bias

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
  https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

• Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24
  https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/program/

• Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25
  https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
  https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/

• London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
  https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn

• Manchester: Take Back Big Tech with Jovan Owusu-Nepaul (House of Books and Friends), Sep 11
  https://ma.to/event/cory-doctorow-house-of-books-and-friends-11-sep-2026

• South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
  https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

• Victoria: Munro's Books (Oct 20)
  https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020

• Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
  https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Technofeudal Enshittification (Fucking Cancelled)
  https://www.fuckingcancelled.com/p/technofeudal-enshittification-with

• Who The Machine Serves (EFF)
  https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-who-the-machine-serves

• Speculative Fiction for Social Change II (Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff)
  https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/cool-people-who-did-cool-stuff/08cbb840-a6ae-013a-d8aa-0acc26574db2/part-two-cory-doctorow-on-speculative-fiction-for-social-change/937e8800-9404-45a6-b5e3-90ebee2cfaea

• Speculative Fiction for Social Change I (Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff)
  https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/cool-people-who-did-cool-stuff/08cbb840-a6ae-013a-d8aa-0acc26574db2/part-one-cory-doctorow-on-speculative-fiction-for-social-change/15ad467c-0832-44c9-91ea-59defd783dba

• AI, automation and enshittification (Telecoms.com)
  https://www.telecoms.com/ai/the-telecoms-com-podcast-ai-automation-and-enshittification

Latest books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

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

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

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

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

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Friday's words: 564 (6039 total).

• "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• 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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