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PLURALISTIC

▸ les 10 dernières parutions

24.02.2026 à 10:38

Pluralistic: Socialist excellence in New York City (24 Feb 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (5737 mots)


Today's links


The NYC skyline by night; several buildings have been skinned with elaborate gearing.

Socialist excellence in New York City (permalink)

In her magnificent 2023 book Doppelganger, Naomi Klein describes the "mirror world" of right wing causes that are weird, conspiratorial versions of the actual things that leftists care about:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

For example, Trump rode to power on the back of Qanon, a movement driven by conspiratorial theories of a cabal of rich and powerful people who were kidnapping, trafficking and abusing children. Qanon followers were driven to the most unhinged acts by these theories, shooting up restaurants and demanding to be let into nonexistent basements:

https://www.newsweek.com/pizzagate-gunman-killed-north-carolina-qanon-2012850

And while Qanon theories about children being disguised as reasonably priced armoires are facially absurd, the right's obsession with imaginary children is a long-established phenomenon:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-53416247

Think of the conservative movement's all-consuming obsession with the imaginary lives of children that aborted fetuses might have someday become, and its depraved indifference to the hunger and poverty of actual children in America:

https://unitedwaynca.org/blog/child-poverty-in-america/

Trump's most ardent followers reorganized their lives around the imagined plight of imaginary children, while making excuses for Trump's first-term "Kids in Cages" policy:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-44518942

Obviously, this has only gotten worse in Trump's second term. The same people whose entire political identity is nominally about defending "unborn children" are totally indifferent to the actual born children that DOGE left to die by the thousands:

https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths/

They cheered Israel's slaughter and starvation of children during the siege of Gaza and they are cheering it on still today:

https://www.savethechildren.net/news/gaza-20000-children-killed-23-months-war-more-one-child-killed-every-hour

As for pedophile traffickers, the same Qanon conspiracy theorists who cooked their brains with fantasies about Trump smiting the elite pedophiles are now making excuses for Trump's central role in history's most prolific child rape scandal:

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

This is the mirror-world as Klein described it: a real problem (elite impunity for child abuse; the sadistic targeting of children in war crimes; the impact of poverty on children) filtered through a fever-swamp of conspiratorial nonsense. It's world that would do anything to save imaginary children while condemning living, real children to grinding poverty, sexual torture, starvation and murder.

Once you know about Klein's mirror-world, you see it everywhere – from conservative panics about the power of Big Tech platforms (that turn out to be panics about what Big Tech does with that power, not about the power of tech itself):

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/13/khanservatives/#kid-rock-eats-shit

To conservative panics about health – that turn out to be a demand to dismantle America's weak public health system and America's weak regulation of the supplements industry:

https://www.conspirituality.net/episodes/brief-maha-is-a-supplements-grift

But lately, I've been thinking that maybe the mirror shines in both directions: that in addition to the warped reflection of the right's mirror world, there is a left mirror world where we can find descrambled, clarified versions of the right's twisted obsessions.

I've been thinking about this since I read a Corey Robin blog post about Mamdani's campaign rhetoric, in which Mamdani railed against "mediocrity" and promised "excellence":

https://coreyrobin.com/2025/11/15/excellence-over-mediocrity-from-mamdani-to-marx-to-food/

Robin pointed out that while this framing might strike some leftists as oddly right-coded, it has a lineal descent from Marx, who advocated for industrialization and mass production because the alternative would be "universal mediocrity.”

Robin went on to discuss a largely lost thread of "socialist perfectionism" ("John Ruskin and William Morris to Bloomsbury Bolsheviks like Virginia Woolf and John Maynard Keynes") who advocated for the public provision of excellence.

He identifies Marx's own mirror world analysis, pointing out that Marx identified a fundamental difference between capitalist and socialist theories of the division of labor. While capitalists saw the division of labor as a way to increase quantity, socialists were excited by the prospect of increasing quality.

(There's a centaur/reverse centaur comparison lurking in there, too. If you're a centaur radiologist, who gets an AI tool that flags some diagnoses you may have missed, then you're improving the rate of tumor identification. If you're a reverse centaur radiologist who sees 90% of your colleagues fired and replaced with a chatbot whose work you are expected to sign off on at a rate that precludes even cursory inspection, you're increasing X-ray throughput at the expense of accuracy):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington

(In other words: the reverse centaur is the mirror world version of a centaur.)

After the mayoral election, Mamdani doubled down on his pursuit of high-quality public services. In his inaugural speech, Mamdani promised a government "where excellence is no longer the exception":

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/01/nyregion/mamdani-inauguration-speech-transcript.html

Robin was also developing his appreciation for Mamadani's vision of public excellence. In the New York Review of Books, Robin made the case that it was a mistake for Democrats to have ceded the language of efficiency and quality to Republicans:

https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/12/31/democratic-excellence-zohran-mamdani/

Where Democrats do talk about efficiency, they talk about it in Republican terms: "We'll run the government like a business." Mamdani, by contrast, talks about running the government like a government – a good government, a government committed to excellence.

Writing in Jacobin, Conor Lynch takes a trip into the good side of the mirror world, unpacking the idea of socialist excellence in Mamdani's governance promises:

https://jacobin.com/2026/02/zohran-mamdani-efficiency-nyc-budget/

During the Mamdani campaign, "efficiency" was just one plank of the platform. But once Mamdani took office, he learned that his predecessor, the lavishly corrupt Eric Adams, had lied about the city's finances, leaving a $12b hole in the budget:

https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/01/mayor-mamdani-details–adams-budget-crisis-

Mamdani came to power in New York on an ambitious platform of public service delivery, and not just because this is the right thing to do, but because investment in a city's people and built environment pays off handsomely.

Maintenance is always cheaper than repair, and one of the main differences between a business and a government is that a business's shareholders can starve maintenance budgets, cash out, and leave the collapsing firm behind them, while governments must think about the long term consequences of short-term thinking (the fact that so many Democratic governments have failed to do this is a consequence of Democrats adopting Republicans' framing that a good government is "run like a business").

The best time to invest in New York City was 20 years ago. The second best time in now. For Mamdani to make those investments and correct the failures of his predecessors, he needs to find some money.

Mamdani's proposal for finding this money sounds pretty conservative: he's going to cut waste in government. He's ordered each city agency to appoint a "Chief Savings Officer" who will "review performance, eliminate waste and streamline service delivery." These CSOs are supposed to find a 1.5% across-the-board savings this year and 2.5% next year:

https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/01/mayor-mamdani-signs-executive-order-to-require-chief-savings-off

Does this sound like DOGE to you? It kind of does to me, but – crucially – this is mirror-world DOGE. DOGE's project was to make cuts to government in order to make government "run like a business." Specifically, DOGE wanted to transform the government into the kind of business that makes cuts to juice the quarterly numbers at the expense of long-term health:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2024/10/24/southwest-airlines-bends-to-activist-investor-restructures-board/

But Mamdani's mirror-world DOGE is looking to find efficiencies by cutting things like sweetheart deals with private contractors and consultants, who cost the city billions. It's these private sector delegates of the state that are the source of government waste and bloat.

The literature is clear on this: when governments eliminate their own capacity to serve the people and hire corporations to do it on their behalf, the corporations charge more and deliver less:

https://calmatters.org/commentary/2019/02/public-private-partnerships-are-an-industry-gimmick-that-dont-serve-public-well/

As Lynch writes, DOGE's purpose was to dismantle as much of the government as possible and shift its duties to Beltway Bandits who could milk Uncle Sucker for every dime. Mamdani's ambition, meanwhile, is to "restore faith in government [and] demonstrate that the public sector can match or even surpass the private sector in excellence."

As Mamdani said in his inauguration speech, "For too long, we have turned to the private sector for greatness, while accepting mediocrity from those who serve the public."

Turning governments into businesses has been an unmitigated failure. After decades of outsourcing, the government hasn't managed to shrink its payroll, but government workers are today primarily employed in wheedling private contractors to fulfill their promises, even as public spending has quintupled:

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/is-government-too-big-reflections-on-the-size-and-composition-of-todays-federal-government/

Instead of having a government employee do a government job, that govvie oversees a private contractor who costs twice as much…and sucks at their job:

https://www.pogo.org/reports/bad-business-billions-of-taxpayer-dollars-wasted-on-hiring-contractors

There's a wonderful illustration of this principle at work in Edward Snowden's 2019 memoir Permanent Record:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/09/24/permanent-record-edward-snowden-and-the-making-of-a-whistleblower/

After Snowden broke both his legs during special forces training and washed out, he went to work for the NSA. After a couple years, his boss told him that Congress capped the spy agencies' headcount but not their budgets, so he was going to have to quit his job at the NSA and go to work for one of the NSA's many contractors, because the NSA could hire as many contractors as it wanted.

So Snowden is sent to a recruiter who asks him how much he's making as a government spy. Snowden quotes a modest 5-figure sum. The recruiter is aghast and tells Snowden that he gets paid a percentage of whatever Snowden ends up making as a government contractor, and promptly triples Snowden's government salary. Why not? The spy agencies have unlimited budgets, and will pay whatever the private company that Snowden nominally works for bills them at. Everybody wins!

Ladies and gentlemen, the efficiency of government outsourcing. Run the government like a business!

As bad as this is when the government hires outside contractors to do things, it's even worse when they hire outside contractors to consult on things. Under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the Canadian government spent a fortune on consultants, especially at the start of the pandemic:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/31/mckinsey-and-canada/#comment-dit-beltway-bandits-en-canadien

The main beneficiary of these contracts was McKinsey, who were given a blank cheque and no oversight – they were even exempted from rules requiring them to disclose conflicts of interest.

Trudeau raised Canadian government spending by 40%, to $11.8 billion, creating a "shadow civil service" that cost vastly more than the actual civil service – the government spent $1.85b on internal IT expertise, and $2.3b on outside contractors.

These contractors produced some of the worst IT boondoggles in government history, including the bungled "ArriveCAN" contact tracing program. The two-person shop that won the contract outsourced it to KPMG and raked off a 15-30% commission.

Before Trudeau, Stephen Harper paid IBM to build Phoenix – a payroll system that completely failed and was, amazingly, far worse than ArriveCAN. IBM got $309m to build Phoenix, and then Canada spent another $506m to fix it and compensate the people whose lives it ruined.

Wherever you find these contractors, you find stupendous waste and fraud. I remember in the early 2000s, when Dan "City of Sound" Hill was working at the BBC and wanted to try an experiment to distribute MP3s of a radio programme.

The BBC – an organization with a long history of technical excellence – had given the exclusive contract for web delivery to Siemens, who wanted £10,000 to set up a web-server for the experiment. Dan rented a server from an online provider and put it all on his personal card, serving tens of thousands of MP3s for less than £10. It turns out that letting your technical personnel do your technology development costs 1/1000th of what it costs to have contractors do it.

Running your public institution "like a business" is incredibly inefficient. Back when Musk and Ramaswamy announced their plan to cut $2t from the US federal budget, David Dayen published a plan to realize nearly that much savings just by attacking waste arising from running the government "like a business":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/27/beltway-bandits/#henhouse-foxes

The US government's own estimate of the losses due to contractor fraud comes out to $274b/year – roughly the size of the entire civil service payroll (the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which Musk sadistically destroyed, accounts for 0.012% of federal spending).

Medicare "upcoding" – a form of fraud committed by companies like United Healthcare, the largest Medicare Advantage provider in the country – costs the public $83b/year:

https://www.medpac.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Mar24_ExecutiveSummary_MedPAC_Report_To_Congress_SEC.pdf

Congress has banned Medicare and Medicaid from bargaining for pharma prices, which is why the US government pays 178% more than other governments, for the same drugs, which are often developed at public expense:

https://aspe.hhs.gov/reports/comparing-prescription-drugs

The Pentagon is a cesspit of waste. It's not just firing spies and rehiring them as contractors at a 300% markup – that's just for starters. The Pentagon receives $840b/year and has failed its last three audits:

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4992913-pentagon-fails-7th-audit-in-a-row-but-says-progress-made/

The conservative version of "efficiency" cashes out to "efficient at extracting value from public institutions, workers and customers." Mamdani's (good) mirror world "efficiency" means providing great public service through investing in public excellence.

New York City is overdue for this kind of overhaul. Everywhere you look in the city, you find high price consultants making out like bandits and starving the city of the funds it needs to deliver. The Second Avenue subway spent more on consultants than it spent on digging tunnels:

https://gothamist.com/news/mta-plans-to-hire-186m-consultant-to-oversee-second-avenue-subway-construction

Mamdani has pledged to audit the Department of Education's 25 largest contracts (the DOE spends $10b/year on outside contractors). He's rolling out "fiscal training and certification" for any government employee involved in procurement.

Mamdani isn't pretending he can bridge the gap that Adams left in the city's finances through efficiency alone: to make up the difference, he is going to tax NYC's millionaires, and ask the state to "rebalance" its relationship with NYC's taxpayers (NYC contributes 54.4% of the state budget, but only gets 40.5% in return).

As Lynch writes, NYC was the birthplace of austerity-driven outsourcing, following from the city's bankruptcy in 1975. 50 years later, Mamdani is bringing that age to a close.

Mamdani knows what the stakes are, too. He called efficiency "the most paramount left-wing concern, because it is either the fulfillment or the betrayal of that which motivates so much of our politics":

https://www.derekthompson.org/p/what-speaks-to-me-about-abundance

Mamdani is reviving the tradition of "sewer socialism," a governing philosophy based on "bringing people into your politics by improving their lives in obvious ways":

https://jacobin.com/2025/12/digital-sewer-socialism-public-ownership

Sewer socialism, public excellence, real efficiency: these are the (good) mirror world versions of the right's obsession with "government efficiency." On the conservative side of the mirror, "efficiency" is an excuse for hamstringing government employees and turning their budgets over to lazy, crooked contractors. On the left's side of the mirror, "efficiency" is building capacity in democratically accountable institutions that care about helping every person, and who deliver tomorrow's excellence by making long-term investments today.

(Image: DAVID ILIFF, CC BY-SA 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrago UK anti-piracy officer assures Firefox she’ll catch the pirates who copy it https://web.archive.org/web/20060511105535/http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,9075-2051196,00.html

#20yrsago Diane Duane vows to finish trilogy as a reader-supported web-book https://web.archive.org/web/20060630094910/http://outofambit.blogspot.com/2006_02_01_outofambit_archive.html#114069083471800451

#15yrago Order of Odd-Fish, a funny, mannered, hilariously weird epic romp https://memex.craphound.com/2011/02/23/order-of-odd-fish-a-funny-mannered-hilariously-weird-epic-romp/

#15yrsago HOWTO make a batpole flip-top bust switch https://web.archive.org/web/20110218013400/https://www.thenewhobbyist.com/2011/02/wireless-light-switch-or-bust/

#15yrsago Travel guide for American invalids, 1887 https://web.archive.org/web/20110225235315/http://www.butifandthat.com/guide-for-invalids/

#15yrsago Archive.org and 150 libraries create 80,000 lendable ebook library https://archive.org/post/349420/in-library-ebook-lending-program-launched

#15yrsago Scott Walker tricked into spilling his guts to fake Koch brother https://web.archive.org/web/20110226135536/https://www.salon.com/news/the_labor_movement/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2011/02/23/koch_walker_call

#10yrsago Bill Gates: Microsoft would backdoor its products in a heartbeat https://web.archive.org/web/20160223175618/https://recode.net/2016/02/22/bill-gates-is-backing-the-fbi-in-its-case-against-apple/

#10yrsago Wikileaks: NSA spied on UN Secretary General and world leaders over climate and trade https://wikileaks.org/nsa-201602/

#10yrsago Donald Trump They Live mask https://web.archive.org/web/20160224101815/http://www.trickortreatstudios.com/they-live-alien-donald-trump-limited-edition-halloween-mask.html

#10yrsago Unicorn vs. Goblins: the third amazing, hilarious Phoebe and her Unicorn collection! https://memex.craphound.com/2016/02/23/unicorn-vs-goblins-the-third-amazing-hilarious-phoebe-and-her-unicorn-collection/

#5yrsago German covid coinages https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/23/acceptable-losses/#Zeitgeist

#5yrsago A voyage to the moon of 1776 https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/23/acceptable-losses/#Filippo-Morghen

#5yrsago Malcolm X's true killers https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/23/acceptable-losses/#deathbeds-r-us

#5yrsago Private equity's nursing home killing spree https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/23/acceptable-losses/#disposable-olds

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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

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23.02.2026 à 11:52

Pluralistic: Deplatform yourself (23 Feb 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (5429 mots)


Today's links

  • Deplatform yourself: Copyright infringement is your least entertainment dollar.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: "Lawer" threatens suit; Landmark metaphotos; 3DP v (c); Forced arbitration; Imperial Scott Walker; Keysigning ritual; Polyfingered robot dictaphone; DNS bug; Register of copyright damns term extension; How Anonymous decides; Christchurch quake people-finder; Minor HP disenshittification; US v developing world at WIPO; TfL v anagram tube-map; Disneyland waiting; Internet of Garbage.
  • Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
  • Recent appearances: Where I've been.
  • Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Colophon: All the rest.


The Muse Thalia, pictured brandishing a comedy mask and putting a laurel wreath on a bust of a bearded figure. It has been altered. The bust has an extra set of eyes and ears. Thalia has two extra sets of arms, one ending in lion's paws, the other in lobster's claws. She has one cyclopean eye. Her comedy mask is now a tragedy mask. The image has been tinted blue.

Deplatform yourself (permalink)

The first time I met William Gibson – to interview him for the Globe and Mail on the release of 1999's All Tomorrow's Parties – there was one question I knew I wanted to ask him: "What happens to the counterculture in the era of instantaneous commodification?"

https://craphound.com/nonfic/transcript.html

Gibson's answer stuck with me for decades:

What we're doing pop culturally is like burning the rain forest. The biodiversity of pop culture is really, really in danger. I didn't see it coming until a few years ago, but looking back it's very apparent.

I watched a sort of primitive form of the recommodification machine around my friends and myself in the sixties, and it took about two years for this clumsy mechanism to get and try to sell us The Monkees.

In 1977, it took about eight months for a slightly faster more refined mechanism to put punk in the window of Holt Renfrew. It's gotten faster ever since. The scene in Seattle that Nirvana came from: as soon as it had a label, it was on the runways of Paris.

There's no grace period, so that's a way in which I see us losing the interstitial.

This may seem like an odd thing to think about, but nearly all the art and culture that means something to me started as something that was transgressive and weird, and even if it was eventually metabolized by the mainstream, that was only after it had a chance to ferment and mutate in a tide-pool of Bohemian weirdness.

All this century, I've asked friends and weirdos about what can resist this commodification and co-option. Scott Westerfeld – author of Uglies – had a very on-brand answer: he told me that he thought that teenagers might deliberately start cultivating acne as a badge of rebellion. That hasn't happened yet, but if it does, it will be born co-opted, because there's already a luxury brand called "Acne":

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

One anti-commodification measure that's worked reasonably well over the years is to be ugly. Punk zines and early Myspace pages embraced an aesthetic that the existing cohort of trained designers available to work for would-be co-opters would rather break their fingers than imitate. Eventually, some punk zinesters and Myspacers became freelance designers and offered the aesthetic for sale, but after the "grace period" that Gibson was worried about in 1999. By contrast, after a brief period in which early AI image-gen snuck psychedelic fish-dogs into every output, AI became so mid and inoffensive that even when it was used to make transgressive images (Trump spraying protesters with liquid shit from an airplane), it looked incredibly, terminally normal:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/20/ransom-note-force-field/#antilibraries

There's more than one way to be ugly, of course. The "edgelords" that defined forums like SomethingAwful and /b/ made heavy use of slurs, rape "jokes" and other beyond-the-pale rhetoric. Whether this reflected sincerely felt beliefs or a mere desire to shock (or both), it had the effect of making these subcultures very difficult to commodify. If you and your friends barely utter a single sentence that can be quoted in a mainstream news forum or office email, it's going to be very hard to co-opt you. For a long time, edgelords festered in the "dark corners" of the internet. But that's changed. The Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes – who thinks that "every woman and girl" should be "sent to a gulag" – has had dinner at the White House:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nick-fuentes-women-gulag/

Last week, Ryan Broderick wrote a short, striking article for his must-read Garbage Day newsletter about the way that the far right have become "cool" within Gen Z by being so outre that they were evicted from the major platforms (before Trump II, that is):

https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-only-taboo-left-is-copyright-infringement

As Broderick writes, "cool" isn't just "trends" ("hyperpop, brainrot, crowdwork comedy, Instagram collages, their weird post-COVID pop punk exploration"). For Broderick, cool things used to become trends after they were "begrudgingly canonized" by the likes of Time Magazine. But with Hollywood replaced by Youtube, magazines replaced by Tiktok, and radio replaced by Spotify, that looks very different today. Today's version of artist management teams is "hype houses." All forms of cultural activity have collapsed into a single, overriding imperative: "getting attention."

Which brings Broderick to his main question:

If everything is just attention now, and attention is completely commodified by algorithmic tech platforms, how can you push back against that?

His answer: "You have to essentially pre-deplatform yourself."

For young people, "the only things that have the level of scarcity and danger required to be seen as cool" are "whatever is unacceptable on those platforms." In other words, anything (and maybe only things) that're blocked or banned are a candidate to be cool. Cool people walk away from the places where you'd expect to find them and hang out in places that are culturally viewed as less important.

Broderick argues that this is the source of far-right influencers' influence: the fact that manosphere weirdos and trolls are hanging out in "shadowy corners" like Kick makes them feel authentic and outside of the norm and thus intrinsically interesting. And (Broderick continues) the fact that these manosphere types are now totally reliant on Discord clip-farmers has made them feel more mainstream and thus potentially less interesting.

This is where it gets cool. Broderick argues that there's nothing intrinsically reactionary about this kind of self-deplatforming as a parallel evolution taking place in progressive media. When Stephen Colbert's Trump-colonized network bans him from airing an interview with a Democratic politician, he puts it on Youtube instead, where it gets far more attention than it would have if the network had just left him alone.

But by and large it's not Democratic politicians who are too dangerous for the platforms – it's copyright infringement. The law makes it very easy to get things removed via unproven accusations of copyright infringement, and the platforms make it even easier:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/27/nuke-first/#ask-questions-never

Copyright is a doctrine that, by design, has very fuzzy edges where things may or may not be prohibited. But in the digital world, those edges are often erased, even as the zone of lawful activity they enclose contracts. This means that media that can be accused of infringing copyright is the most unwelcome content on platforms.

Broderick's theory predicts that the "coolest" media – the stuff that makes taste – is the stuff that fits in this zone of copyright infringement. He cites some compelling case studies, like Vera Drew's "The People's Joker," an amazing, unauthorized Batman mashup/trans allegory. Warner shut down multiple screenings of The People's Joker (including at TIFF), and this increased the coolness and prominence of the movie, driving people to underground screenings:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People%27s_Joker

A more contemporary version is Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie, which Broderick describes as "a copyright rats nest" based on a web series that is "completely illegal to watch on streaming platforms":

https://pagesix.com/2026/02/14/hollywood/how-nirvanna-the-band-the-show-the-movie-skirted-copyright-law/

Despite this/because of this, NTBTSTM just had "the biggest opening ever for a live-action Canadian film":

https://x.com/hertzbarry/status/2023521583923663342

Broderick's conclusion is that "as platforms police speech less and less, edgelords lose their sheen," but that this material, at or beyond the edge of copyright, unwelcome on platforms, is the future face of cool.

And here's where Broderick really got me: "the most dangerous thing for platforms is not racist garbage. It’s unmonetizeable content."

I make a lot of "unmonetizable content," starting with this blog, which has no metrics, no analytics, and (of course) no ads. I refuse to add social media cards, and hide obscure jokes in incredibly long URLs that get truncated on social media. I labor for hours over the weird illustrations that go at the top of the posts, which I release (along with the text they accompany) under Creative Commons licenses that let pretty much anyone do pretty much anything with them, without asking me, telling me, or paying me (it's always very funny when someone accuses me of publishing this work as clickbait – clickbait for what? To increase bandwidth consumption at my server?).

I do this to "woo the muse of the odd," a phrase I lifted from Bruce Sterling's 1991 keynote for the Game Developers' Conference, a talk that struck me so hard that I dropped out of university to make weird multimedia shortly after reading it:

https://lib.ru/STERLINGB/story.txt

It's a great talk, but the best parts are where Sterling grapples with this question of coolness, counterculture, and commodification:

In the immortal words of Lafcadio Hearn, a geek of incredible obscurity whose work is still in print after a hundred years, "woo the muse of the odd." A good science fiction story is not a "good story" with a polite whiff of rocket fuel in it. A good science fiction story is something that knows it is science fiction and plunges through that and comes roaring out of the other side. Computer entertainment should not be more like movies, it shouldn't be more like books, it should be more like computer entertainment, SO MUCH MORE LIKE COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT THAT IT RIPS THROUGH THE LIMITS AND IS SIMPLY IMPOSSIBLE TO IGNORE!

I don't think you can last by meeting the contemporary public taste, the taste from the last quarterly report. I don't think you can last by following demographics and carefully meeting expectations. I don't know many works of art that last that are condescending. I don't know many works of art that last that are deliberately stupid… Get weird. Get way weird. Get dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly, thoroughly weird and don't do it halfway, put every ounce of horsepower you have behind it.

It's been more than 30 years since I read that essay, more than a quarter century since I asked William Gibson whether Madison Avenue "finds its own use for things." Over the ensuing decades, media has become ever-better at "following demographics and carefully meeting expectations," thanks to vast troves of behavioral data correlated with media analytics. That process has only accelerated the "recommodification machine" that Gibson worried about in 1999, but as Broderick points out, there's one thing that is even harder to co-op than acne – "unmonetizable content," the Kryptonite of the platforms.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Mysterious “lawer” threatens to sue me over Bad Samaritan story https://memex.craphound.com/2006/02/20/mysterious-lawer-threatens-to-sue-over-bad-samaritan-story/

#20yrsago Flickr set documents locations in Neal Stephenson trilogy https://www.flickr.com/photos/notlikecalvin/sets/72057594068198516/

#20yrsago How the US is boning the developing world at WIPO https://web.archive.org/web/20060501000000*/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004434.php

#20yrsago Why kids are on MySpace https://www.danah.org/papers/AAAS2006.html

#20yrsago Transport for London censors anagram Tube map https://web.archive.org/web/20060222021226/https://www.unfortu.net/anagrammap/

#20yrsago More clues to identity of author of EFF-sliming article in The Reg https://memex.craphound.com/2006/02/22/more-clues-to-identity-of-author-of-eff-sliming-article-in-the-reg/

#20yrsago US copyright head: world “totally rejects” webcasting restrictions https://memex.craphound.com/2006/02/21/us-copyright-head-world-totally-rejects-webcasting-restrictions/

#20yrsago Copyright office head denounces “big mistake” of extending copyright https://web.archive.org/web/20060329162217/https://www.ibiblio.org/yugen/video/too_long.mp4

#20yrsago Artists paint Detroit’s derelict buildings Tiggeriffic Orange https://web.archive.org/web/20060411143941/http://www.thedetroiter.com/nov05/disneydemolition.php

#20yrsago Canadian Uni bans WiFi because its safety can’t be proved https://web.archive.org/web/20060307004018/http://www.itbusiness.ca/it/client/en/home/News.asp?id=38093&PageMem=1

#15yrsago Overcome information overload by trusting redundancy https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/feb/22/information-overload-probabilistic

#15yrsago Embattled PS3 hacker raises big bank to fight Sony https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/02/george-hotz-secures-enough-donations-to-fight-sony-rap-battle-begins/

#15yrsago How Anonymous decides: inside the lulz-sausage factory https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/02/empty-suit-the-chaotic-way-that-anonymous-makes-decisions/

#15yrsago America’s Chief Apocalypse Officer, a Fed job ad from 1956 https://web.archive.org/web/20110210020542/http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2011/02/nuclear-weapons-post-attack-job-description-1956.html

#15yrsago What happens when you stick your head in a particle accelerator https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2010/03/what-happens-when-you-stick-your-head-into-a-particle-accelerator/

#15yrsago Saif Gadaffhi, plagiarist https://web.archive.org/web/20110225114903/https://saifalislamgaddafithesis.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

#15yrsago Google App to help locate people in Christchurch quake https://web.archive.org/web/20110222091007/http://christchurch-2011.person-finder.appspot.com/

#15yrsago Photos of kids waiting at Disneyland https://web.archive.org/web/20110301045827/https://arinfishkin.com/fishkin_delayed_gratification.html

#15yrsago Westboro Baptist Church attempts to lure Anonymous into attacking it? https://www.siliconrepublic.com/life/were-not-attacking-westboro-baptist-church-anonymous

#15yrsago Egyptian orders a pizza for the Wisconsin demonstrators https://www.politico.com/story/2011/02/from-cairo-to-madison-some-pizza-049888#ixzz1EXkqdxcu

#15yrsago Metaphotos of landmarks made from hundreds of superimposed tourist snaps https://web.archive.org/web/20110219193205/http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/hundreds-of-tourist-photos

#15yrsago Armed Services Edition books: abridgements and pocket-editions for doughboys https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/military/literature-on-the-frontlines-the-history-of-armed-services-edition-books/?doing_wp_cron=1771432700.1463210582733154296875

#15yrsago 3D printing’s first copyright complaint goes away, but things are just getting started https://memex.craphound.com/2011/02/20/3d-printings-first-copyright-complaint-goes-away-but-things-are-just-getting-started/

#15yrsago Imperial Scott Walker, the worker-hating AT-AT Destroyer https://web.archive.org/web/20110224024111/https://simulacrumb.tumblr.com/#3388763986

#10yrsago Forced arbitration clauses are a form of wealth transfer to the rich https://web.archive.org/web/20160322142114/https://www.acslaw.org/sites/default/files/Arbitration_as_Wealth_Transfer_1.pdf

#10yrsago Eleven years and counting: EFF scores a major victory in its NSA mass surveillance suit https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/02/big-victory-judge-pushes-jewel-v-nsa-forward

#10yrsago What a serious keysigning ceremony looks like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9j-sfP9GUU

#10yrsago Pseudoscientific terror ended fluoridation in Calgary, now kids’ teeth are rotting https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cdoe.12215

#10yrsago Manual typewriter + servos = polyfingered robot dictaphone https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNSCL4YOd5E

#10yrsago Sarah Jeong’s Harvard lecture: “The Internet of Garbage” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUSctMLLNUE

#10yrsago Citing copyright, Army blocks Chelsea Manning from receiving printouts from EFF’s website https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/02/military-prison-blocks-chelsea-manning-reading-eff-blog-posts

#10yrsago Improve your laptop stickering technique https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juRDql6wBIQ

#10yrsago Photo of Bernie Sanders being arrested in 1963 Chicago protest https://web.archive.org/web/20160220024814/https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-bernie-sanders-1963-chicago-arrest-20160219-story.html

#10yrsago Uber uses customer service reps to push anti-union message to drivers https://qz.com/619601/uber-is-using-its-us-customer-service-reps-to-deliver-its-anti-union-message

#10yrsago The latest DNS bug is terrifying, widespread, and reveals deep flaws in Internet security https://web.archive.org/web/20160222231840/http://dankaminsky.com/2016/02/20/skeleton/

#10yrsago 19th century spam came by post, prefigured modern spam in so many ways https://web.archive.org/web/20160915000000*/http://www.ephemerasociety.org/blog/

#10yrsago Republican Congressmen backed by airline money kill research on legroom and passenger safety https://web.archive.org/web/20160221163010/https://theintercept.com/2016/02/21/backed-by-airline-dollars-congress-rejects-effort-to-address-shrinking-legroom/

#5yrsago The Paltrow-Industrial Complex https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/21/paltrow-industrial-complex/#goopy

#5yrsago Facebook vs Australia https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/21/paltrow-industrial-complex/#facecrook

#5yrsago K-shaped recovery vs wealth taxes https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/21/paltrow-industrial-complex/#wealth-tax

#5yrsago What Democrats need to do https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/22/sorcerers-apprentice/#do-something

#5yrsago Tech trustbusting's moment has arrived https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/20/escape-velocity/#trustbusting-time

#1yrago Ad-tech targeting is an existential threat https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/20/privacy-first-second-third/#malvertising

#1yrago We bullied HP into a minor act of disenshittification https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/22/ink-spattered-pitchforks/#racehorse-semen

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1035 words today, 351334 total)

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF

20.02.2026 à 15:53

Pluralistic: A perforated corporate veil (20 Feb 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3981 mots)


Today's links


A diagram of a seance in which a table has risen from the ground as two women rest their hands upon it. Below the table, we can see that it is being manipulated by a male figure. The male figure's head has been swapped with Elon Musk's. The background is a slightly desaturated Brazilian flag.

A perforated corporate veil (permalink)

"Capitalist realism" is the idea that the world's current economic and political arrangements are inevitable, and that any attempt to alter them is a) irrational; b) doomed; and c) dangerous. It's the ideology of Margaret Thatcher's maxim, "There is no alternative."

Obviously this is very convenient if you are a current beneficiary of the status quo. "There is no alternative" is a thought-stopping demand dressed up as an observation. It means, "Don't try and think of alternatives."

The thing is, alternatives already exist and work very well. The Mondragon co-ops in Spain constitute a fully worked out, long-term stable economic alternative to traditional capitalist enterprises, employing more than 100,000 people and generating tangible, empirically measured benefits to workers, customers and the region:

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

Proponents of capitalist realism will tell you that Mondragon doesn't count. Maybe it's just a one-off. Or maybe it's just not big enough. 100,000 workers sounds like a lot, but Amazon has over 1.5m employees and untold numbers of misclassified contractors who are employees in everything but name (and legal rights).

This is some pretty transparent goalpost moving, but sure, let's stipulate that Mondragon doesn't prove that there are broadly applicable alternatives to the dominant capitalism of the mid-2020s. Are there other examples of "an alternative?"

There sure are.

Let's look at limited liability. Limited liability – the idea that a company's shareholders cannot be held liable for the company's misdeeds – is a bedrock of capitalist dogma. The story goes that until the advent of the "joint stock enterprise" (and its handmaiden, limited liability) there was no efficient way to do "capital formation" (raising money for a project or business).

Because of this, the only ambitious, capital-intensive projects were those that caught the fancy of a king, a Pope, or an aristocrat. But once limited liability appears on the scene, many people of modest means can jointly invest in a project without worrying about being bankrupted if it turns out that the people running it are crooks or bumblers. That lets you, say, buy a single share of a company without having to keep daily tabs on the management's every action without worrying that if they go wrong, someone they've hurt will sue you for everything you've got.

Capital formation is a real thing, and limited liability unquestionably facilitates capital formation. There are plenty of good things in the world that exist because limited liability protections allowed everyday people to help bring them into existence. This isn't just stuff that makes a lot of money for capitalism's true believers, it includes everything from the company that makes the printing presses that your favorite anarchist zine runs on to the mill that makes the alloys for the e-bike you use to get to a demonstration.

This is where capitalist realism comes in. Capitalist realists will claim that there is no way to do capital formation for these beneficial goods without limited liability – and not just any limited liability, but maximum limited liability in which the "corporate veil" can never be pierced to assign culpability to any shareholder. The capitalist realist claim is that the corporate veil is like the skin of a balloon, and that any attempt to poke even the smallest hole in it will cause it to rupture and vanish.

But this just isn't true, and we can tell, because one of the largest economies in the world has operated with a perforated corporate veil for nearly a century, and that economy hasn't suffered from capital formation problems. Quite the contrary, some of the world's largest (and most destructive) monopolies are headquartered in this country where the veil of limited liability is thoroughly perforated.

The country I'm talking about is Brazil, which has had limited limited liability since 1937:

https://lpeproject.org/blog/when-workers-pierce-the-corporate-veil-brazils-forgotten-innovation/

As Mariana Pargendler writes for the LPE Project, Brazil put limits on limited liability to address a common pattern of corporate abuse. Companies would set up in Brazil, incur a lot of liabilities (say, by poisoning the land, water and air, or by stealing from or maiming workers), and then, when the wheels of justice caught up with them, the companies would fold and re-establish themselves the next day under a new name.

Like I say, this happens all over the world. It's incredibly common, and even the pettiest of crooks know how to use this trick. I know someone whose NYC apartment was flooded by the upstairs neighbor, who decided that they didn't need to worry about the fact that their toilet wouldn't stop running – for months, until the walls of the apartment downstairs dissolved in a slurry of black mold. The upstairs neighbor owned the apartment through an LLC, which they simply folded up and walked away from, while my friend was stuck with a giant bill and no one to sue.

The limited liability company is the scammer's best friend. In the UK, an anti-tax extremist invented a tax-evasion scam whereby landlords pretend that their empty commercial buildings are tax-exempt "snail farms" by scattering around some boxes with a few snails in them:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/149255928?collection=1941093

When this results in inevitable stonking fines and adverse judgments, the "snail farmers" duck liability by folding up their limited liability company after transferring its assets to a new LLC.

Capitalist realists will tell you that this is just the price of efficient capital formation. Without total, airtight limited liability – the sort that allows for this kind of obvious, petty ripoff – no one would be able to raise capital for anything.

Brazil begs to differ. In 1937, Brazil made parent companies liable for their subsidiaries' obligations, with a system of "joint and several liability" for LLCs. This was expanded with 1943's Consolidation of Labor Laws, and it worked so well that the Brazilian legislature expanded it again in 2017.

Remember back in 2024, when Elon Musk defied a Brazilian court order about Twitter, only to have Brazil freeze Starlink's assets until Musk caved? That was the "joint and several" liability system:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/13/world/americas/brazil-musk-x-starlink.html

As Pargendler writes, Brazil's liability system "represented a distributive choice: prioritizing Brazilian workers’ ability to enforce their rights over foreign capital’s interest in minimizing costs through corporate structuring."

Pargendler (who teaches at Harvard Law) co-authored a paper with São Paulo Law's Olívia Pasqualeto analyzing the impact that Brazil's limited liability system had on capital formation and corporate conduct:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6105586

Unsurprisingly, they find that there has been a steady pressure to erode the joint and several system, but also that some countries (the US and France) have a "joint employer" doctrine that is a weak form of this. Portugal, meanwhile, adopted the Brazilian system, 70 years after Brazil – this transposition of law from a former colony to a former colonial power is apparently called "reverse convergence":

https://lpeproject.org/blog/heterodox-corporate-laws-in-the-global-south/

More countries in the global south have adopted regimes similar to Brazil's, like Venezuela and Chile. Other countries go further, like Mozambique and Angola. Somewhere in between are other Latin American countries like Peru and Uruguay, where these rules have entered practice through judicial rulings, not legislation.

The authors don't claim that perforating the corporate veil solves all the problems of exploitative, fraudulent or corrupt corporate conduct. Rather, they're challenging the capitalist realist doctrine that insists that this system couldn't possibly exist, and if it did, it would be a disaster.

A hundred years of Brazilian law, and Brazil's globe-spanning corporate giants, beg to differ.

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

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago XKCD’s productivity tip: reboot your computer every time you get bored https://blog.xkcd.com/2011/02/18/distraction-affliction-correction-extensio/

#10yrsago Infographic: what’s the TPP, what’s wrong with it, how’d we get here, and what do we do now? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/02/new-infographic-tpp-and-your-digital-rights

#10yrsago Hacker suspected in Anon raid on Boston hospital rescued at sea by Disney cruise ship, then arrested https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/suspected-hacker-arrested-after-rescue-sea-during-disney-cruise-n520131

#10yrsago Tipping screws poor people, women, brown people, restaurateurs, local economies and…you https://web.archive.org/web/20160220234308/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/18/i-dare-you-to-read-this-and-still-feel-ok-about-tipping-in-the-united-states/

#10yrsago Clay Shirky: social media turned Dems, GOP into host organisms for third party candidates https://web.archive.org/web/20160219231315/https://storify.com/cshirky/republican-and-democratic-parties-are-now-host-bod

#10yrsago Leaked memos suggest Volkswagen’s CEO knew about diesel cheating in 2014 https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/19/business/volkswagen-memos-suggest-emissions-problem-was-known-earlier.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share&_r=0

#10yrsago “Citizens” who speak at town meetings are hired, scripted actors https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/concerned-citizens-turn-out-to-be-political-theater/2021439/

#10yrsago Women in Zika-affected countries beg online for abortion pills https://ticotimes.net/2016/02/18/with-abortion-banned-in-zika-countries-women-beg-on-web-for-abortion-pills

#10yrsago Health insurance must pay for exoskeletons https://web.archive.org/web/20160217093325/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/robotic-exoskeleton-rewalk-will-be-covered-by-health-insurance

#5yrsago Uber loses court battle, steals wages, censors whistleblower https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/19/texas-lysenko/#unter

#5yrsago How Republicans froze Texas solid https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/19/texas-lysenko/#mess-with-texas

#5yrsago Complicity, incompetence, leadership and Capitol Police https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/19/texas-lysenko/#capitol-riots

#5yrsago My talks with Edward Snowden and William Gibson https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/19/texas-lysenko/#gibson-snowden

#5yrsago Pluralistic is five https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/19/gimme-five/#jeffty

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1037 words today, 32992 total)

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF

19.02.2026 à 15:08

Pluralistic: Six Years of Pluralistic (19 Feb 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (6323 mots)


Today's links


A screengrab from the first episode of 'The Prisoner,' showing Number Six (Patrick McGoohan) lying unconscious on the beach after being bowled over by a giant white sphere (a 'Rover'). The image has been altered; my head has been superimposed on McGoohan's body; TV scan lines have been added, and the image has been given a vertical 'ripple' of the sort that appears in a badly tuned broadcast TV signal.

Six years of Pluralistic (permalink)

Six years ago today, after 19 years with Boing Boing, during which time I wrote tens of thousands of blog posts, I started a new, solo blog, with the semi-ironic name "Pluralistic." I didn't know what Pluralistic was going to be, but I wasn't writing Boing Boing anymore, and I knew I wanted to keep writing the web in some fashion.

Six years and more than 1,500 posts later, I am so satisfied with how Pluralistic is going. I spent a couple of decades processing everything that seemed interesting or significant through a blog, which created a massive database (and mnemonically available collection of partially developed thoughts) that I'm now reprocessing as a series of essays that make sense of today in light of everything that I've thought about for my whole adult life, which are, in turn, fodder for books, both fiction and nonfiction. I call this "The Memex Method":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/

"The Memex Method" is also the title of a collection of essays (from this blog) that I've sold to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, but that book keeps getting bumped because of other books I end up writing based on the work I do here, starting with last year's Enshittification. I'm now fully two books ahead of myself, with The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI coming in June, and The Post-American Internet in early 2027 (in addition to two graphic novels and a short story collection). Professionally speaking, these are the most successful books I've written, in a long, 30+ book career with many notable successes. Intellectually and artistically speaking, I'm incredibly satisfied with the direction my career has moved in over my six Pluralistic years.

Blogging is – and always has been – a lot of work for me, but it's work that pays off, even if I don't always know what form that payoff will take.

One essential part of this blog is my daily retrospective of posts from this day through my blogging history – 25 years ago, 20 years ago, 15 years ago, 10 years ago, 5 years ago, and last year. I used to call this "This day in history" but now I call it "Object permanence," for the developmental milestone when toddlers gain the ability to remember and reason about things that have recently happened (roughly, it's the point at which "peek-a-boo" stops being fun).

The daily business of reviewing and selecting blog posts from different parts of my life started as a trivial exercise, but it's become one of the most important things I do. I liken it to working dough and folding the dry crumbly edges back into the center; in this case, I'm folding all the fragments that are in danger of escaping my working memory back into the center of my attention.

Six years ago, I didn't know what Pluralistic was going to be. Today, I still don't know. But because this is a labor of love, and a solo project, I get to try anything and either give it up or carry it on based on how it makes me feel and what effect it has on my life. I'm always tinkering with the format: this year, I also added a subhead to the Object Permanence section that tries to call out (in as few characters as possible) the most important elements of the day's list.

I also dropped some things this year, notably, my "linkdump" posts. A couple years ago, at the suggestion of Mitch Wagner, I added a new section called "Hey look at this," which featured three bare links to things I thought were noteworthy but didn't have time or inclination to delve into in depth. Later, I expanded this section to five.

However, even with five bare links per edition, I often found myself with a backlog of noteworthy things. So I started writing the occasional Saturday "linkdump" essay in which I wove together the whole backlog into a giant, meandering essay. These made for interesting rhetorical challenges, as I found elegant ways to bridge completely disparate subjects – a kind of collaging, perhaps akin to how a mashup artist mixes two very different tracks together. Mentally, I thought of this as "ringing the changes," but ultimately, I decided to drop these linkdump posts (for now, at least). They ended up being too much work, and of little value to me, because I found myself unable to remember what I wrote in them and thus to call them up to refer to them for future posts. Here's all 33 linkdumps; they're not gone forever (not so long as the links pile up in my backlog), but when they come back, they'll be in a different form:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

This really is a labor of love, in the sense that I love doing it, and because it's hard work. The fact that it's hard work is a feature, not a bug. Working hard on stuff is really important to me, because when I am working hard, I gain respite from both physical and mental discomfort. As a guy with serious chronic pain living through the Trump years, I've got plenty of both kinds of discomfort. I can't overstate how physically and mentally beneficial it is to me to have an activity that takes me out of the moment. This year, I wrote several editions of Pluralistic from an infusion couch at the Kaiser Sunset hematology center in LA, where I was receiving immunotherapy for a cancer diagnosis that I'm assured is very treatable, but which – to be totally honest – sometimes gets my old worrier running hot:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/05/carcinoma-angels/#squeaky-nail

Making Pluralistic is several kinds of hard work. Over the past six years, I've become an ardent collagist, spending more and more time on the weird, semi-grotesque images that run atop every edition. Anything you devote substantial time to on a near-daily basis is something that gives you insight – into yourself, and into the thing you're doing. I've always had a certain familiarity with computer image editing (I think I got my start writing Apple ][+ BASIC programs that spat out ASCII art, before graduating to making pixel-art for Broderbund's "Print Shop"), but I've never applied myself to any visual field in a serious way, until now.

Amazingly, after 50 years of thinking of myself as someone who is "bad at visual art," I find myself identifying as a visual artist. I find myself pondering visual works the same way I think about prose – mentally tearing it apart to unpick how it is done, and thinking about how I could productively steal some new techniques for my own work. I'm also privileged to have some accomplished visual artists in my circle, like my pal Alistair Milne, who generously share technical and aesthetic tips. It's got to the point where I published a book of my art, and I think I'll probably do it again next year:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

There's also a ton of technical work that goes into publishing each edition of this newsletter. Things have moved on somewhat since I published an in-depth process-post in 2021, though I'm still totally reliant on Loren Kohnfelder's python scripts that help me turn the XML file I compose every day into files that are (nearly) ready to publish:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/13/two-decades/#hfbd

Much of the technical work is down to the fact that I'm still completely wed to the idea of "POSSE" (Post Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/19/now-we-are-two/#two-much-posse

This means that after I write the day's post, I reformat it and republish it as a text-only newsletter, a Medium post, a Tumblr post, a Twitter thread and a Mastodon thread. This involves a ton of manual work, because none of the services I post to are designed to facilitate this, so I'm always wrestling with them. This year, all of them got worse (incredibly).

Medium – where I used to have a paid column – has dropped its free-flag for my account, which now limits me to how many posts I can schedule. This doesn't come up often, but when I do schedule a post, it's generally because I'm going to be on a plane or a stage and won't be able to do it manually. There's no way I'm going to pay for this feature: I'm happy to give Medium my work gratis, but I will not and do not pay anyone to publish my work, and I never will.

Tumblr did something to its post-composing text editor that completely broke it and I've given up on fixing it. I can't even type into a new post field! I have to paste in some styled text, then delete it, then start typing. It's ghastly. So now I just have a text file full of formatted HTML snippets and I work exclusively in the Tumblr HTML editor, pasting in blobs of preformatted HTML (including the florid, verbose HTML Tumblr uses for its own formatting) and then laboriously flip back and forth to the "visual" editor to see the parts that went wrong. Here's how busted that visual editor is: searching for a word then double-clicking on it does not select it. You have to click once, wait about 1.5 seconds, click again, wait again, and then you can select the word.

Twitter has entered a period of terminal technical decline. I know, I know, we always talk about how fucked Twitter's content moderation is, for obvious and good reasons, but from a technical perspective, Twitter just sucks. If I make a post with an image and alt text in anticipation of later using it to start a thread, it often goes "stale" and will not publish until I delete the image and re-attach it and re-paste the alt text. Meanwhile, the thread editor is also decaying into uselessness. Fill in a 25-post thread and hit publish and, the majority of times, the thread publication will die midway through, displaying lots of weird failure modes (phantom empty posts at the end of the thread that need to be individually selected and deleted are a common one, but not the only one). The old Twitter's ability to add a new thread to an existing one has been dead for at least a year, so every post after the 25th stanza has to be manually tacked on to the previous one, which is made far harder by the fact that Twitter no longer reliably shows you the post you just made after it publishes.

Mastodon still lacks a decent thread editor, one that has even the minimal functionality of Twitter circa 2020. Meanwhile, the Fediverse HOA continues to surface from time to time, with someone who's had a Masto account for ten seconds scolding me for posting threads – from my account whose bio starts "I post long threads." It's genuinely tedious to be shouted at for "using Mastodon wrong" by someone who started using Mastodon yesterday (I opened my first Mastodon account in 2018!), and even worse when they double down after I point them to the essay I've written to explain why I post the way I do, and what to do if you want to read my work somewhere that's not your Mastodon timeline ("Can you believe this asshole wrote a whole essay to explain why he posts his stupid Mastodon threads?"):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/16/how-to-make-the-least-worst-mastodon-threads/

Then there's email: I continue to love email, but email doesn't love me back. After years of being blackholed by AT&T and then Google, this turns out to be the year that Microsoft bounces thousands of messages to its Hotmail and Outlook users because they have arbitrarily and without warning added my mail-server to a blacklist. Thank you to the Fediverse friends who escalated my trouble ticket – but man, this is a headache I could certainly do without:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/10/dead-letters/

My sysadmin, the incomparable and tireless Ken Snider, tells me that he's got the long-overdue new hardware installed at the colo and he's nearly ready to stand up my long-anticipated personal Mastodon server, which will let me solve all kinds of problems. He's also going to stand up my own Bluesky server, at which point I will part ways with Twitter. I wish I could have used the regular Bluesky service while I waited, but just setting up an account permanently binds you to totally unacceptable and dangerous terms of service:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/15/dogs-breakfast/#by-clicking-this-you-agree-on-behalf-of-your-employer-to-release-me-from-all-obligations-and-waivers-arising-from-any-and-all-NON-NEGOTIATED-agreements

What's the point of a service that has account- and data-portability if signing up for it makes you permanently surrender your rights, even if you switch servers? This might be the stupidest social media unforced error of the post-zuckermuskian era.

There is one technology that has made my POSSE life better, and it might surprise you. This year, I installed Ollama – an open-source LLM – on my laptop. It runs pretty well, even without a GPU. Every day, before I run Loren's python publication scripts, I run the text through Ollama as a typo-catcher (my prompt is "find typos"). Ollama always spots three or four of these, usually stuff like missing punctuation, or forgotten words, or double words ("the the next thing") or typos that are still valid words ("of top of everything else").

The reason this is so valuable to me is that errors magnify through each stage of POSSE. Errors that make it through the python publication script take 10x the time to fix that they would if I caught them beforehand. Errors that I catch after running the scripts and publishing the posts take 10x time more. Errors that I have to fix later on – once I've closed all the relevant tabs and editors – take 10x again more time. Some POSSE channels (email, Twitter) can't be fixed at all.

So catching these typos at the start of the process is a huge time-saver. I have some very generous readers who have the proofreader's gene and are very helpful in catching my typos (hi, Gregory and 9o6!), and I feel bad about depriving them of their fun, but there's still the odd error that slips through, and they always catch it.

Ollama is a pretty good typo-catcher. Probably half of the "errors" it points out are false positives, which is better than the false positive rate for Google Docs' grammar-checker. As someone who uses a lot of jargon, made up words, etc in his prose, I'm used to overriding my text-editor. I wouldn't simply trust an LLM's edits any more than I would accept every suggestion from a spell-checker. Hell, yesterday I sent back a professionally copyedited manuscript (the intro for the paperback of Enshittification) and marked "STET" on about a third of the queries.

Doubtless some of you are affronted by my modest use of an LLM. You think that LLMs are "fruits of the poisoned tree" and must be eschewed because they are saturated with the sin of their origins. I think this is a very bad take, the kind of rathole that purity culture always ends up in.

Let's start with some context. If you don't want to use technology that was created under immoral circumstances or that sprang from an immoral mind, then you are totally fucked. I mean, all the way down to the silicon chips in your device, which can never be fully disentangled from the odious, paranoid racist William Shockley, who won the Nobel Prize for co-inventing the silicon transistor:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/24/the-traitorous-eight-and-the-battle-of-germanium-valley/

Further, we wouldn't have the packet-switched network that delivered these words to you without the contributions of the literal war-criminals at the RAND corporation:

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

Refusing to use a technology because the people who developed it were indefensible creeps is a self-owning dead-end. You know what's better than refusing to use a technology because you hate its creators? Seizing that technology and making it your own. Don't like the fact that a convicted monopolist has a death-grip on networking? Steal its protocol, release a free software version of it, and leave it in your dust:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/samba-versus-smb-adversarial-interoperability-judo-network-effects

That's how we make good tech: not by insisting that all its inputs be free from sin, but by purging that wickedness by liberating the technology from its monstrous forebears and making free and open versions of it:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/14/contesting-popularity/#everybody-samba

Purity culture is such an obvious trap, an artifact of the neoliberal ideology that insists that the solution to all our problems is to shop very carefully, thus reducing all politics to personal consumption choices:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/31/unsatisfying-answers/#systemic-problems

I mean, it was extraordinarily stupid for the Nazis to refuse Einstein's work because it was "Jewish science," but not merely because antisemitism is stupid. It was also a major self-limiting move because Einstein was right:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-2-pro-nazi-nobelists-attacked-einstein-s-jewish-science-excerpt1/

Refusing to run an LLM on your laptop because you don't like Sam Altman is as foolish as refusing to get monoclonal antibodies because James Watson was a racist nutjob:

https://www.statnews.com/2025/11/07/james-watson-remembrance-from-dna-pioneer-to-pariah/

Or to refuse to communicate via satellite because they were launched into space on a descendant of a rocket designed by the Nazi Wernher von Braun and built by slaves in a death camp:

https://wsmrmuseum.com/2020/07/27/von-braun-the-v-2-and-slave-labor/4/

The AI bubble sucks. AI itself is a normal technology:

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

It's not "unethical" to scrape the web in order to create and analyze data-sets. That's just "a search engine":

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

There's plenty of useful things people can do with AI. There's plenty of useful things people will do with AI. AI is bad because it's an economic bubble and a grift, but not because we've created a bunch of utilities that would – under normal circumstances – be called "plug-ins":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington

I started blogging 25 years ago, just before the dotcom bubble popped. That bubble-pop inflicted a lot of pain on people who didn't deserve it, including the normie investors who'd been suckered into blowing their life's savings on dogshit stocks, and everyday workers who found themselves out of a job. But the world was better off. So was the web. With the bubble popped, real, good stuff could access talent, servers and office space.

In the six years I've been doing this, I've seen several bubbles come and go: crypto, web3, metaverse. Now it's AI. But those bubbles were like Enron, frauds that left nothing good behind. AI is like the dotcom bubble, awash in sin and inflicting untold misery, but it will leave something useful behind:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/19/bubblenomics/#pop

And when it does, I'll make sense of it on this blog.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago HOWTO resist warrantless searches at Best Buy https://www.die.net/musings/bestbuy/

#20yrsago RIAA using kids’ private info to attack their mother https://web.archive.org/web/20060223111437/http://p2pnet.net/story/7942

#20yrsago Sony BMG demotes CEO for deploying DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20060219233817/http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/060210/germany_sony_bmg_ceo.html?.v=7

#20yrsago Sistine Chapel recreated through 10-year cross-stitch project https://web.archive.org/web/20060214195146/http://www.austinstitchers.org/Show06/images/sistine2.jpg

#20yrsago J Edgar Hoover loved Lucy https://web.archive.org/web/20060425120915/http://www.lucylibrary.com/pages/lucy-news-fbi.letter.html

#20yrsago Bad Samaritan family won’t return found expensive camera https://web.archive.org/web/20060222200300/https://lostcamera.blogspot.com/2006/02/camera-unlost-but-not-quite-found.html

#15yrsago What does Libyan revolution mean for bit.ly? https://domainnamewire.com/2011/02/18/is-bit-ly-toast-if-libya-shuts-down-the-internet/

#15yrsago Optical illusion inventor goes on to invent copyright threats against 3D printing company https://web.archive.org/web/20110221185839/https://blog.thingiverse.com/2011/02/18/copyright-and-intellectual-property-policy/#respond

#15yrsago Crappy themepark operators convicted of “engaging in a commercial practice which was a misleading action” https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/feb/18/lapland-theme-park-brothers-convicted

#15yrsago HBGary’s high-volume astroturfing technology and the Feds who requested it https://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/16/945768/-UPDATED:-The-HB-Gary-Email-That-Should-Concern-Us-All

#15yrsago Authors Guild argues in favor of censorship (also: they don’t know shit about Shakespeare) https://volokh.com/2011/02/17/there-should-be-a-name-for-this-one-too/

#15yrsago Hollywood hospital ransoms itself back from hackers for a mere $17,000 https://web.archive.org/web/20160227094254/https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-me-ln-hollywood-hospital-bitcoin-20160217-story.html

#15yrsago Chinese millionaire sues himself through an offshore shell company to beat currency export controls https://web.archive.org/web/20180526235055/https://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2016/02/16/china-capital-flight-2-0-lose-a-lawsuit-on-purpose/?guid=BL-CJB-28691&dsk=y

#15yrsago Selling cookies like a crack dealer, by dangling a string out your kitchen window https://laughingsquid.com/cookies-sold-by-string-dangling-from-san-francisco-apartment-window/

#15yrsago Midwestern Tahrir: Workers refuse to leave Wisconsin capital over Tea Party labor law https://www.theawl.com/2011/02/wisconsin-demonstrates-against-scott-walkers-war-on-unions/

#10yrsago Back-room revisions to TPP sneakily criminalize fansubbing & other copyright grey zones https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/02/sneaky-change-tpp-drastically-extends-criminal-penalties

#10yrsago Russian Central Bank shutting down banks that staged fake cyberattacks to rip off depositors https://web.archive.org/web/20160220100817/http://www.scmagazine.com/russian-bank-licences-revoked-for-using-hackers-to-withdraw-funds/article/474477/

#10yrsago Stop paying your student loans and debt collectors can send US Marshals to arrest you https://web.archive.org/web/20201026202024/https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/02/us-marshals-forcibly-collecting-student-debt.html?mid=twitter-share-di

#5yrsago Reverse centaurs and the failure of AI https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/17/reverse-centaur/#reverse-centaur

#5yrsago Strength in numbers https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/18/ink-stained-wretches/#countless

#5yrsago America and "national capitalism" https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/18/pikettys-productivity/#reaganomics-revenge

#1yrago Business school professors trained an AI to judge workers' personalities based on their faces https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/17/caliper-ai/#racism-machine

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1013 words today, 31953 total)

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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17.02.2026 à 11:56

Pluralistic: What's a "gig work minimum wage" (17 Feb 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4221 mots)


Today's links


A figure in a rich robe sitting atop a throne, surrounded by bags of money; his face is masked by a robber's balaclava. Beneath the throne stream densely packed cars on a nighttime freeway. Behind him is a car's broken windscreen with an Uber logo in one corner.

What's a "gig work minimum wage" (permalink)

"Minimum wage" is one of those odd concepts that seems to have an intuitive definition, but the harder you think about it, the more complicated it gets. For example, if you want to work, but can't find a job, then the minimum wage you'll get is zero:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200625043843/https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2020-06-24/forget-ubi-says-an-economist-its-time-for-universal-basic-jobs

That's why politicians like Avi Lewis (who is running for leader of Canada's New Democratic Party) has called for a jobs guarantee: a government guarantee of a good job at a socially inclusive wage for everyone who wants one:

https://lewisforleader.ca/ideas/dignified-work-full-plan

(Disclosure: I have advised the Lewis campaign on technical issues and I have endorsed his candidacy.)

If that sounds Utopian or Communist to you (or both), consider this: it was the American jobs guarantee that delivered America's system of national parks, among many other achievements:

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

The idea of a wage for everyone who wants a job is just one interesting question raised by the concept of a "minimum wage." Even when we're talking about people who have wages, the idea of a "minimum wage" is anything but straightforward.

Take gig workers: the rise of Uber and its successors created an ever-expanding class of workers who are misclassified as independent contractors by employers, seeking to evade unionization, benefits and liability. It's a weird kind of "independent contractor" who gets punished for saying no to lowball offers, has to decorate their personal clothes and/or cars in their "client's" livery, and who has every movement scripted by an app controlled by their "client":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/02/upward-redistribution/

The pretext that a worker is actually a standalone small business confers another great advantage on their employers: it's a great boon to any boss who wants to steal their worker's wages. I'm not talking about stealing tips here (though gig-work platforms do steal tips, like crazy):

https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/01/mayor-mamdani-announces–5-million-settlement–reinstatement-of-

I'm talking about how gig-work platforms define their workers' wages in the first place. This is a very salient definition in public policy debates. Gig platforms facing regulation or investigation routinely claim that their workers are paid sky-high wages. During the debate over California's Prop 22 (in which Uber and Lyft spent more than $225m to formalize worker misclassification), gig companies agreed to all kinds of reasonable-sounding wage guarantees:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/14/final_ver2/#prop-22

When Toronto was grappling with the brutal effect that gig-work taxis have on the city's world-beatingly bad traffic, Uber promised to pay its drivers "120% of the minimum wage," which would come out to $21.12 per hour. However, the real wage Uber was proposing to pay its drivers came out to about $2.50 per hour:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/29/geometry-hates-uber/#toronto-the-gullible

How to explain the difference? Well, Uber – and its gig-work competitors – only pay drivers while they have a passenger – or an item – in the car. Drivers are not paid for the time they spend waiting for a job or the time they spend getting to the job. This is the majority of time that a gig driver spends working for the platform, and by excluding the majority of time a driver is on the clock, the company can claim to pay a generous wage while actually paying peanuts.

Now, at this phase, you may be thinking that this is only fair, or at least traditional. Livery cab drivers don't get paid unless they have a fare in the cab, right?

That's true, but livery cab drivers have lots of ways to influence that number. They can shrewdly choose a good spot to cruise. They can give their cellphone numbers to riders they've established a rapport with in order to win advance bookings. In small towns with just a few drivers – or in cities where drivers are in a co-op – they can spend some of their earnings to advertise the taxi company. Livery drivers can offer discounts to riders going a long way. It's a tough job, but it's one in which workers have some agency.

Contrast that with driving for Uber: Uber decides which drivers get to even see a job. Uber decides how to market its services. Uber gets to set fares, on a per-passenger basis, meaning that it might choose to scare some passengers off of a few of their rides with high prices, in a bid to psychologically nudge that passenger into accepting higher fares overall.

At the same time, Uber is reliant on a minimum pool of drivers cruising the streets, on the clock but off the payroll. If riders had to wait 45 minutes to get an Uber, they'd make other arrangements. If it happened too often, they'd delete the app. So Uber can't survive without those cruising, unpaid drivers, who provide the capacity that make the company commercially viable.

What's more, livery cab drivers aren't the only comparators for gig-work platforms. Many gig workers deliver food, meaning that we should compare them to, say, pizza delivery drivers. These drivers aren't just paid when they have a pizza in the car and they're driving to a customer's home. They're paid from the moment they clock onto their shift to the moment they clock off (plus tips).

Now, obviously, this is more expensive for employers, but the Uber Eats arrangement – in which drivers are only paid when they've got a pizza in the car and they're en route to a customer – doesn't eliminate that expense. When a gig delivery company takes away the pay that drivers used to get while waiting for a pizza, they're shifting this expense from employers to workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/20/billionaireism/#surveillance-infantalism

The fact that Uber can manipulate the concept of a minimum wage in order to claim to pay $21.12/hour to drivers who are making $2.50 per hour creates all kinds of policy distortions.

Take Seattle: in 2024, the city implemented a program called "PayUp" that sets a "minimum wage" for drivers, but it's not a real minimum wage. It's a minimum payment for every ride or delivery.

A new National Bureau of Economic Research paper analyzes the program and concludes that it hasn't increased drivers' pay at all:

https://www.nber.org/papers/w34545

To which we might say, "Duh." Cranking up the sum paid for a small fraction of the work you do for a company will have very little impact on the overall wage you receive from the company.

However, there is an interesting wrinkle in this paper's conclusions. Drivers aren't earning less under this system, either. So they're getting paid more for every delivery, but they're not adding more deliveries to their day. In other words, they're doing less work and then clocking off:

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/02/minimum-wages-for-gig-work-cant-work.html

A neoclassical economist (someone who has experienced a specific form of neurological injury that makes you incapable of perceiving or reasoning about power) would say that this means that the drivers only desire to earn the sums they were earning before the "minimum wage" and so the program hasn't made a difference to their lives.

But anyone else can look at this situation and understand that drivers only did this shitty job out of desperation. They had a sum they needed to get every month in order to pay the rent or the grocery bill. They have lots of needs besides those that they would like to fulfill, but not under the shitty gig-work app conditions. The only reason they tolerate a shitty app as their shitty boss at all is that they are desperate, and that desperation gives gig companies power over their workers.

In other words, Seattle's PayUp "minimum wage" has shifted some of the expense associated with operating a gig platform from workers back onto their bosses. With fewer drivers available on the app, waiting times for customers will necessarily go up. Some of those customers will take the bus, or get a livery cab, or defrost a pizza, or walk to the corner cafe. For the gig platforms to win those customers back, they will have to reduce waiting times, and the most reliable way to do that is to increase the wages paid to their workers.

So PayUp isn't a wash – it has changed the distributional outcome of the gig-work economy in Seattle. Drivers have clawed back a surplus – time they can spend doing more productive or pleasant things than cruising and waiting for a booking – from their bosses, who now must face lower profits, either from a loss of business from impatient customers, or from a higher wage they must pay to get those wait-times down again.

But if you want to really move the needle on gig workers' wages, the answer is simple: pay workers for all the hours they put in for their bosses, not just the ones where bosses decide they deserve to get paid for.

(Image: Tobias "ToMar" Maier, CC BY-SA 3.0; Jon Feinstein, CC BY 2.0; modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago HOWTO resist warrantless searches at Best Buy https://www.die.net/musings/bestbuy/

#20yrsago RIAA using kids’ private info to attack their mother https://web.archive.org/web/20060223111437/http://p2pnet.net/story/7942

#20yrsago Sony BMG demotes CEO for deploying DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20060219233817/http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/060210/germany_sony_bmg_ceo.html?.v=7

#20yrsago Sistine Chapel recreated through 10-year cross-stitch project https://web.archive.org/web/20060214195146/http://www.austinstitchers.org/Show06/images/sistine2.jpg

#15yrsago Selling cookies like a crack dealer, by dangling a string out your kitchen window https://laughingsquid.com/cookies-sold-by-string-dangling-from-san-francisco-apartment-window/

#15yrsago Midwestern Tahrir: Workers refuse to leave Wisconsin capital over Tea Party labor law https://www.theawl.com/2011/02/wisconsin-demonstrates-against-scott-walkers-war-on-unions/

#10yrsago Back-room revisions to TPP sneakily criminalize fansubbing & other copyright grey zones https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/02/sneaky-change-tpp-drastically-extends-criminal-penalties

#10yrsago Russian Central Bank shutting down banks that staged fake cyberattacks to rip off depositors https://web.archive.org/web/20160220100817/http://www.scmagazine.com/russian-bank-licences-revoked-for-using-hackers-to-withdraw-funds/article/474477/

#10yrsago Stop paying your student loans and debt collectors can send US Marshals to arrest you https://web.archive.org/web/20201026202024/https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/02/us-marshals-forcibly-collecting-student-debt.html?mid=twitter-share-di

#5yrsago Reverse centaurs and the failure of AI https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/17/reverse-centaur/#reverse-centaur

#1yrago Business school professors trained an AI to judge workers' personalities based on their faces https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/17/caliper-ai/#racism-machine

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1148 words today, 30940 total)

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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16.02.2026 à 09:22

Pluralistic: The online community trilemma (16 Feb 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4998 mots)


Today's links

  • The online community trilemma: Reach, community and information, pick two.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Bruces x Sony DRM; Eniac tell-all; HBO v PVRs; Fucking damselflies; Gil Scout Cookie wine-pairings; Big Pharma's opioid fines are tax-deductible; Haunted Mansion ops manual; RIAA v CD ripping; Flying boat; Morbid Valentines; Veg skulls; Billionaires x VR v guillotines; "Lovecraft Country"; Claude Shannon on AI; Comics Code Authority horror comic; Scratch-built clock; Stolen hospital.
  • Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
  • Recent appearances: Where I've been.
  • Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Colophon: All the rest.


An early 20th century photo of a mixed-gender group of people drinking in a working-class bar; with a smiling woman in the center. It has been altered: a nova-haloed thought bubble coming from the center woman's head reveals that she is daydreaming of a salon in which three upper class women in flapper-era outfits are chattering. A Prince Albert ad in the background has had the Reddit robot mascot matted into it.

The online community trilemma (permalink)

The digital humanities are one of the true delights of this era. Anthropologists are counting things like sociologists, sociologists are grappling with qualitative data like ethnographers, computational linguists are scraping and making sense of vast corpora of informal speech:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/24/because-internet-the-new-linguistics-of-informal-english/

I follow a bunch of these digital humanities types: danah boyd, of course, but also Benjamin "Mako" Hill, whose work on the true meaning of the "free software"/"open source" debate is one of my daily touchpoints for making sense of the world we live in:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBknF2yUZZ8

Mako just published a new ACM HCI paper co-authored with his U Washington colleagues Nathan TeBlunthuis, Charles Kiene, Isabella Brown, and Laura Levi, "No Community Can Do Everything: Why People Participate in Similar Online Communities":

https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3512908

The paper is a great example of this quantitative ethnography/qualitative statistical analysis hybrid. The authors are trying to figure out why there are so many similar, overlapping online communities, particularly on platforms like Reddit. Why would r/bouldering, r/climbharder, r/climbing, and r/climbingcirclejerk all emerge?

This is a really old question/debate in online community design. The original internet community space, Usenet, was founded on strict hierarchical principles, using a taxonomy to produce a single canonical group for every kind of discussion. Sure, there was specialization (rec.pets.cats begat rec.pets.cats.siamese), but by design, there weren't supposed to be competing groups laying claim to the same turf, and indeed, unwary Usenet users were often scolded for misfiling their comments in the wrong newsgroup.

The first major Usenet schism arose out of this tension: the alt. hierarchy. Though alt. later became known for warez, porn, and other subjects that were banned by Usenet's founding "backbone cabal," the inciting incident that sparked alt.'s creation was a fight over whether "gourmand" should be classified as "rec.gourmand" or "talk.gourmand":

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/11/altinteroperabilityadversarial

Community managers design their services with strongly held beliefs about the features that make a community good. These beliefs, grounded in designers' personal experience, are assumed to be global and universal. Generally, this assumption is wrong, something that is only revealed later when more people arrive with different needs.

Think of Friendster's "fakester" problem, driven by its designers' beliefs about how people should organize their affinities:

https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2003/08/17/the_fakester_manifesto.html

Or Mastodon's initial, self-limiting ban on "quote" posts as a way to encourage civility:

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/02/bringing-quote-posts-to-mastodon/

And, as the paper's authors note, Stack Overflow has a strict prohibition on overlapping new communities, echoing Usenet's original design dispute.

On its face, this hierarchical principle for conversational spaces makes sense. Viewed through a naive economic lens of "reputation capital," having one place where all the people interested in your subject can be reached is optimal. The more people there are in a group, the greater the maximum "engagement" – likes, comments, reposts. If you're thinking about communities from an informational perspective, it's easy to assume that bigger groups are better, too: the more users there are in a topical group, the greater the likelihood that a user who knows the answer to your question will show up when you ask it.

But this isn't how online communities work. On every platform, and across platforms, overlapping, "redundant" groups emerge quickly and stick around over long timescales. Why is this?

That's the question the paper seeks to answer. The authors used data-analysis techniques to identify overlapping clusters of Reddit communities and then conducted lengthy, qualitative interviews with participants to discover why and how users participated in some or all of these seemingly redundant groups.

They conclude that there's a community-member's "trilemma": a set of three priorities that can never be fully satisfied by any group. The trilemma consists of users' need to find:

a) A community of like-minded people;

b) Useful information; and

c) The largest possible audience.

The thing that puts the "lemma" in this "trilemma" is that any given group can only satisfy two of these three needs. It's hard to establish the kinds of intimate, high-trust bonds with the members of a giant, high-traffic group, but your small, chummy circle of pals might not be big enough to include people who have the information you're seeking. Users can't get everything they need from any one group, so they join multiple groups that prioritize different paired corners of this people-information-scale triangle.

The interview excerpts put some very interesting meat on these analytical bones. For example, economists typically believe that online marketplaces rely on scale. Think of eBay: as the number of potential bidders increases, the likelihood that one will outbid another goes up. That drives more sellers to the platform, seeking the best price for their wares, which increases the diversity of offerings on eBay, bringing in more buyers.

But the authors discuss a community where vintage vinyl records are bought and sold that benefits from being smaller, because the members all know each other well enough to have a mutually trusting environment that makes transactions far more reliable. Actually knowing someone – and understanding that they don't want to be expelled from the community you both belong to – makes for a better selling and buying experience than consulting their eBay reputation score. The fact that buyers don't have as many sellers and sellers don't have as many buyers is trumped by the human connection in a community of just the right size.

That's another theme that arises in the paper: a "just right" size for a community. As one interviewee says:

I think there’s this weird bell curve where the community needs to be big enough where people want to post content. But it can’t get too big where people are drowning each other out for attention.

This explains why groups sometimes schism: they've gone from being "just big enough" to being "too big" for the needs they filled for some users. But another reason for schism is the desire by some members to operate with different conversational norms. Many of Reddit's topical clusters include a group with the "jerk" suffix (like r/climbingcirclejerk), where aggressive and dramatic forms of discourse that might intimidate newcomers are welcome. Newbies go to the main group, while "crusties" talk shit in the -jerk group. The authors liken this to "regulatory arbitrage" – community members seeking spaces with rules that are favorable to their needs.

And of course, there's the original source of community schism: specialization, the force that turns rec.pets.cats into rec.pets.cats.siamese, rec.pets.cats.mainecoons, etc. Though the authors don't discuss it, this kind of specialization is something that recommendation algorithms are really good at generating. At its best, this algorithmic specialization is a great way to discover new communities that enrich your life; at its worst, we call this "radicalization."

I devote a chapter of my 2023 book The Internet Con, "What about Algorithmic Radicalization?" to exploring this phenomenon:

https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/3035-the-internet-con

The question I grapple with there is whether "engagement-maximizing" algorithms shape our interests, or whether they help us discover our interests. Here's the thought-experiment I propose: imagine you've spent the day shopping for kitchen cabinets and you're curious about the specialized carpentry that's used to build them. You go home and do a search that leads you to a video called "How All-­Wood Cabinets Are Made."

The video is interesting, but even more interesting is the fact that the creator uses the word "joinery" to describe the processes the video illustrates. So now you do a search for "joinery" and find yourself watching a wordless, eight-minute video about Japanese joinery, a thing you never even knew existed. The title of the video contains the transliterated Japanese phrase "Kane Tsugi," which refers to a "three-­way pinned corner miter" joint. Even better, the video description contains the Japanese characters: "面代留め差しほぞ接ぎ."

So now you're searching for "面代留め差しほぞ接ぎ" and boy are there a lot of interesting results. One of them is an NHK documentary about Sashimoto woodworking, which is the school that Kane Tsugi belongs to. Another joint from Sashimoto joinery is a kind of tongue-and-groove called "hashibame," but that comes up blank on Youtube.

However, searching on that term brings you to a bunch of message boards where Japanese carpenters are discussing hashibame, and Google Translate lets you dig into this, and before you know it, you've become something of an expert on this one form of Japanese joinery. In just a few steps, you've gone from knowing nothing about cabinetry to having a specific, esoteric favorite kind of Japanese joint that you're seriously obsessed with.

If this subject was political rather than practical, we'd call this process "radicalization," and we'd call the outcome – you sorting yourself into a narrow niche interest, to the exclusion of others – "polarization."

But if we confine our examples to things like literature, TV shows, flowers, or glassware, this phenomenon is viewed as benign. No one accuses an algorithm of brainwashing you into being obsessed with hashibame tongue-and-groove corners. We treat your algorithm-aided traversal of carpentry techniques as one of discovery, not persuasion. You've discovered something about the world – and about yourself.

Which brings me back to that original, Usenet-era schism over "redundant" groups. The person who wants to talk about being a "gourmand" in the "rec." hierarchy wants to participate in a specific set of conversational norms that are different from those in the "talk." hierarchy. Their interest isn't just being a "gourmand," it's in being a "rec.gourmand," something that is qualitatively different from being a "talk.gourmand."

The conversational trilemma – the unresolvable need for scale, trust and information – has been with us since the earliest days of online socializing. It's lovely to have it formalized in such a crisp, sprightly work of scholarship.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago O'Reilly P2P Conference https://web.archive.org/web/20010401001205/https://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,41850,00.html

#20yrsago Sony DRM Debacle roundup Part VI https://memex.craphound.com/2006/02/14/sony-drm-debacle-roundup-part-vi/

#20yrsago Bruce Sterling on Sony DRM debacle https://web.archive.org/web/20060316133726/https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.02/posts.html?pg=5

#20yrsago ENIAC co-inventor dishes dirt, debunks myths https://web.archive.org/web/20060218064519/https://www.computerworld.com/printthis/2006/0,4814,108568,00.html

#20yrsago HBO targets PVRs https://thomashawk.com/2006/02/hbos-harrasment-of-pvr-owners.html

#20yrsago Princeton DRM researchers release Sony debacle paper https://web.archive.org/web/20060222235419/https://itpolicy.princeton.edu/pub/sonydrm-ext.pdf

#20yrsago HOWTO run Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion https://web.archive.org/web/20060208213048/http://tinselman.typepad.com/tinselman/2005/08/_latest_populat.html

#20yrsago RIAA: CD ripping isn’t fair use https://web.archive.org/web/20060216233008/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004409.php

#15yrsago “Psychic” cancels show due to “unforeseen circumstances” https://web.archive.org/web/20110217050619/https://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/02/irony.php?utm_source=combinedfeed&utm_medium=rss

#15yrsago CBS sends a YouTube takedown to itself https://web.archive.org/web/20110218201102/https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/flktg/cbs_files_a_copyright_claim_against_themselves_o_o/

#15yrsago Lost luxury: the Boeing 314 flying boat https://web.archive.org/web/20110217144300/http://www.asb.tv/blog/2011/02/boeing-314-flying-boat/

#15yrsago Brazilian telcoms regulator raids, confiscates and fines over open WiFi https://globalvoices.org/2011/02/14/brazil-criminalization-sharing-internet-wifi/

#15yrsago Blatant disinformation about Scientology critic https://memex.craphound.com/2011/02/14/bald-disinformation-about-scientology-critic/

#15yrsago 3D printer that prints itself gets closer to reality https://web.archive.org/web/20110217072944/http://i.materialise.com/blog/entry/cloning-the-reprap-prusa-in-under-30-minutes

#15yrsago Damselflies’ curious mating posture https://www.nationalgeographic.com/photo-of-the-day/photo/damselflies-heart-shape

#15yrsago Simpsons house as a Quake III level https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34LtrnnXQTc

#15yrsago Dapper Day at Disneyland: the well-dressed go to the fun-park https://web.archive.org/web/20110219162834/http://thedisneyblog.com/2011/02/16/dapper-day-at-disney-parks-this-sunday/

#15yrsago Horror/exploitation comic recounts the secret founding of the Comics Code Authority https://web.archive.org/web/20110218230149/http://comicsmakekidsevil.com/?p=88

#10yrsago After 3d grade complaint, Florida school district bans award-winning “This One Summer” from high-school library https://ncac.org/incident/florida-high-school-libraries-restrict-access-to-award-winning-graphic-novel

#10yrsago Watch: Claude Shannon, Jerome Wiesner and Oliver Selfridge in a 1960s AI documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aygSMgK3BEM#10yrsago

#10yrsago Hackers steal a hospital in Hollywood https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/fbi-lapd-investigating-hollywood-hospital-cyber-attack/88301/

#10yrsago Watch: a home machinist makes a clock from scratch, right down to the screws and washers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXzyCM23WPI

#10yrsago Matt Ruff’s “Lovecraft Country,” where the horror is racism (not racist) https://memex.craphound.com/2016/02/16/matt-ruffs-lovecraft-country-where-the-horror-is-racism-not-racist/

#10yrsago NYPD wants to make “resisting arrest” into a felony https://web.archive.org/web/20160205061338/http://justice.gawker.com/nypd-has-a-plan-to-magically-turn-anyone-it-wants-into-1684017767

#10yrsago Best wine-pairings for Girl Scout Cookies https://www.vivino.com/en/wine-news/girl-scout-cookies-and-wine–we-paired-them-and-the-results-are-amazing

#10yrsago John Oliver on states’ voter ID laws https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHFOwlMCdto

#10yrsago Morbid and risque Valentines of yesteryear https://memex.craphound.com/2016/02/15/morbid-and-risque-valentines-of-yesteryear/

#10yrsago App Stores: winner-take-all markets dominated by rich countries https://www.cariboudigital.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Caribou-Digital-Winners-and-Losers-in-the-Global-App-Economy-2016.pdf

#10yrsago Skulls carved from vegetable matter https://dimitritsykalov.com/#intro

#5yrsago Privacy Without Monopoly (podcast) https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/15/ulysses-pacts/#paternalism-denied

#5yrsago Billionaires think VR stops guillotines https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/15/ulysses-pacts/#motivated-reasoning

#5yrsago ADT insider threat https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/15/ulysses-pacts/#temptations-way

#5yrsago Big Pharma will claim opioid fines as tax-deductions https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/14/a-fine-is-a-price/#deductible

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1042 words today, 29792 total)

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

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

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

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