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PLURALISTIC

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08.01.2026 à 14:30

Pluralistic: Where did the money go? (08 Jan 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4034 mots)


Today's links


A US$100 bill, tinted red; the face of Ben Franklin has been replaced with the hostile red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.'

Where did the money go? (permalink)

America is trudging through its third consecutive K-shaped recovery (an economic rally where the rich get richer and everyone else gets poorer). The rich have never been richer, and the debt-fueled consumption that kept the economy going is tapering down to a trickle.

This isn't down to the iron laws of economics or the great forces of history. It's because we made rules that let rich people steal from everyone else, including local, state and federal tax authorities, and also workers, customers and suppliers (and society at large). From junk fees to wage theft to greedflation, politicians have thumbed the scales in favor of scumbags who drain the wealth of workers and remit it to parasites.

These crooks and hustlers keep coming up with ways to squeeze a few more drops out of us. They come up with gimmicks like buy now/pay later (and then slam us with massive fees when we can't pay later), or margin-based gambling on cryptocurrency or "prediction markets," both of which are crooked poker tables where you are always the sucker and the house always wins.

The Trump administration didn't invent the idea of government-supported scams and hustles, but they sure supercharged it. Trump rips off his supporters like crazy – as anyone who's long on $TRUMPcoin knows – and surrounds himself with "businessmen" notorious for scamming workers, customers, and the government itself.

But even as Trump throws his support behind hustlers and con artists, he's also backing debt-collectors, whether they're chasing student debt, medical debt, or the spiraling penalties for missing the fourth payment on your Klarna.

Broadly, these are the two industries in America now: scammers who put Americans into debt, and industries who torment Americans into paying the debt. And while these two industries represent a moral crisis for the nation, they also represent an economic crisis, because they are at irreconcilable odds with one another.

If you're in the business of scamming Americans so they go into debt, you want your suckers to have money (so they can give it to you). But if you're in the business of collecting the losses that Americans incur at the hands of scammers, then you're at odds with those scammers themselves – every dollar you collect on the debt from the last scam is a dollar that can't be lost to the next scam.

This is what gave us the Great Financial Crisis: scumbag bankers tricked people into taking out unsustainable mortgages whose "teaser rates" would blow up after a couple years to levels that the borrower couldn't possibly pay back. But the lenders didn't care, because they were only "loan originators" who could pass those loans off to "investors" via exotic financial instruments. These two groups had an irreconcilable conflict: the people making the loans could only keep their scam going so long as the people collecting the loans didn't demand repayment.

But these two groups – scammers and arm-breakers – aren't the only two groups in the economy. There's a third group that you might call, "People who want to make useful things that we like and pay for." This third group is at odds with both the scammers and the arm-breakers, because their potential customers are being tricked (by scammers) and bankrupted (by arm-breakers).

Say you want to go into business renting hotel rooms to people at reasonable rates. You're an honest sort, so you list your room prices right there on your site. But the scumbags you're competing with want to rip people off, so they list a lower price than yours, and then whack the customer with junk fees at check-in that make their room more expensive than yours.

What's more, the scumbags make so much money that they can bribe the handful of dominant travel sites (which are all owned by one of two massive private-equity backed rollups) to list their hotels ahead of yours. They might not like paying bribes – in fact, they probably hate it – but they're willing to part with some of that hard-won ripoff money to keep the money-machine going. Besides, they can make up the difference with more junk fees. Whaddya gonna do, walk away from your nonrefundable, prepaid reservation and try and get a last-minute booking in a strange city?

Societally speaking, the problem is that economic growth only comes from the third group. They're the ones inventing new categories of (useful) products and services that delight their customers and enrich their workers and shareholders (who then buy more things in the economy, keeping the virtuous cycle going).

This festering economic zit is finally coming to a head with AI, whose most profitable use is in predicting how much a vendor can charge you – or how little a boss can pay you – without you walking away from the table:

https://www.reddit.com/r/shitrentals/comments/1q38sh4/if_you_get_promoted_at_work_keep_it_a_secret_from/

AI's most enthusiastic customers, meanwhile, are bosses who dream of firing most of their workers and using the ensuing terror to force down the wages of the remaining workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-wheel/#billionaire-solipsism

If the average American is a squeezed-flat toothpaste tube that's been drained of all its readily extractable contents, then AI is the scissors that slit the tube up the side so that the very last dregs can be scraped out.

As Anil Dash put it,

Those niceties that everybody loved, like great healthcare and decent benefits, were identified by the people running the big tech companies as “market inefficiencies” which indicated some wealth was going to you that should have been going to them.

https://www.anildash.com/2026/01/06/500k-tech-workers-laid-off/

The scammer/arm-breaker economy is fundamentally extractive. When a private equity fund buys a company, sells off its assets, declares a special dividend and gives the proceeds to itself, and pronounces the company to have been "right-sized" because now it has to rent the things it used to own, they are setting that company up to fail. All it takes is one rent-shock or a couple bad quarters and a once-healthy business will fall over:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/23/spineless/#invertebrates

Looking at America, it's hard not to ask, "Where did all the money go?" Where did free state college tuition, excellent public libraries, public housing, transit, fully staffed national parks and air-traffic control towers all go? Why can't we fix the potholes? How is it that a country that once electrified itself from top to bottom and sea to sea can't figure out how to run fiber lines to the same roofs where all those power lines connect?

It's because the system is organized around cheaters and arm-breakers. The Heritage Foundation – architects of Trump's Project 2025 – were founded and funded by Jay Van Andel and Rich DeVos, the guys who made their billions running Amway, a pyramid scheme that was legalized by their pet Congressman, Gerry Ford, shortly after he became president:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/05/free-enterprise-system/#amway-or-the-highway

The nation's system has been colonized and is being operated by people whose institutional home was created by pyramid-scheme hucksters. Why doesn't Trump's administration care about scam ads on Twitter and Facebook that clean out the very same Boomers who voted him into office? Because Trump's ideological project was founded by actual, non-metaphorical, non-hyperbolic con artists.

That's where the money went. Smart people keep asking how Trump plans on stealing Venezuela's oil when the country is in a state of shambolic collapse and its people are starving? Who will invest hundreds of billions of dollars in new equipment when every dollar spent on capital will require a dollar for a gunman to keep it from being stolen and sold for food?

You could ask the same question about America. In a country where we've literally legalized bribery, who wants to invest in productive businesses?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VX9Ej0L6rGk

America's crisis is the world's opportunity. A chaotic mess of cyberwarfare, trade war, and invasions means that America is no longer your ally or your trading partner – it's a threat.

To neutralize that threat, we must take away the money (and thus the power) of America's oligarchs. We start down that path by changing the international laws – passed at the insistence of the US over the past 25 years – that ban foreign tech companies from modifying America's tech products.

Once other countries' companies start producing the tools that let farmers fix their tractors, that let games publishers sell outside of the official ripoff app stores, that let merchants avoid the Amazon tax, they will not only reap billions of dollars, they will also create a market that favors good products, rather than scams:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

America's largest companies have amassed trillions by robbing Americans (first) and then everyone else (once the US trade rep got laws passed that prevented non-US tech companies from making defensive products). The project of the next ten years is to convert those trillions to billions (in profits for companies that disenshittify America's defective technology – and in savings for people who use those tools to escape America's scam economy).

The beneficiaries of this program aren't limited to the investors in foreign tech companies, nor their overseas customers. Americans will also benefit from this technology, because Americans were the first victims of the US scam economy. Everyday Americans pay the app tax, the Amazon tax, the streaming tax, the Apple tax, the Google tax, the Microsoft tax. Supply Americans with the digital arms to resist these corporate raids, and they will stage a tax revolt (a thing that Americans are remarkably good at).

Escaping oligarchy, escaping the climate emergency, escaping economic desperation: these goals require doing things and making things. They require real products and services, they require real infrastructure and tools. By and large people would rather have real things than scams.

Ponzi America is breaking down. It's run out of suckers.

We just can't afford to structure our economy like an Amway downline anymore. We never could.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 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)

#10yrsago Caught lying by an EFF investigation, T-Mobile CEO turns sweary https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/7/10733298/john-legere-binge-on-lie

#10yrsago Code for America’s year in civic tech https://web.archive.org/web/20160811012751/https://www.codeforamerica.org/blog/2015/12/22/this-year-in-civic-tech-2015-in-review/

#10yrsago Flying while trans: still unbelievably horrible https://trans-fusion.blogspot.com/2016/01/traveling-while-trans-false-promise-of.html

#10yrsago Resilience over rigidity: how to solve tomorrow’s computer problems today https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-wicked-problems-resilience-through-sensing/

#10yrsago Dear Comcast: broadband isn’t gasoline https://www.techdirt.com/2016/01/07/with-fixed-costs-fat-margins-comcasts-broadband-cap-justifications-are-total-bullshit/

#10yrsago High-rez trip through Florida’s Haunted Mansion with a low-light filter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKVd-xwxgJs

#5yrsago Revolutionary Colossus https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/07/revolutionary-colossus/#1776

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


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 (1003 words today, 2023 total)

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF

07.01.2026 à 15:55

Pluralistic: Writing vs AI (07 Jan 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4320 mots)


Today's links

  • Writing vs AI: If you wouldn't ask an AI to eat a delicious pizza for you, why would you ask it to write a college essay?
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: WELL State of the World; A poem in 30m logfiles; Weapons of Math Destruction; The cost of keeping "13" a British secret; Congress v. "Little Green Men"; "Food and Climate Change Without the Hot Air"
  • 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.


A midcentury male figure in a suit seated at a yellow typewriter; his head has been replaced with the hostile red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. He sits in a steeply ranked lecture hall filled with wooden seats. A halo radiates from his head.

Writing vs AI (permalink)

I come from a family of teachers – both parents taught all their lives and now oversee Ed.D candidates, brother owns a school – which has left me painfully aware of the fact that I am not a great teacher.

I am, however, a good teacher. The difference is that a good teacher can teach students who want to learn, whereas a great teacher can inspire students to want to learn. I've spent most of my life teaching, here and there, and while I'm not great, I am getting better.

Last year, I started a new teaching gig: I'm one of Cornell's AD White Visiting Professors, meaning that I visit Cornell (and its NYC campus, Cornell Tech) every year or two for six years and teach, lecture, meet, and run activities.

When I was in Ithaca in September for my inaugural stint, I had a string of what can only be called "peak experiences," meeting with researchers, teachers, undergrads, grads and community members. I had so many conversations that will stick with me, and today I want to talk about one of them.

It was a faculty discussion, and one of the people at the table had been involved in a research project to investigate students' attitudes to their education. The research concluded that students come to Cornell to learn – because they love knowledge and critical thinking – but they are so haunted by the financial consequences of failure (wasting tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars repeating a year or failing out altogether, and then entering the job market debt-burdened and degree-less) that they feel pressured not to take intellectual risks, and, at worst, to cheat. They care about learning, but they're afraid of bad grades, and so chasing grades triumphs over learning.

At that same discussion, I met someone who taught Cornell's version of freshman comp, the "here's how to write at a college level" course that every university offers. I've actually guest-taught some of these, starting in 2005/6, when I had a Fulbright Chair at USC.

Now, while I'm not a great teacher, I am a pretty good writing teacher. I was lucky enough to be mentored by Judith Merril (starting at the age of 9!), who taught me how to participate in a peer-based writing workshop:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/13/better-to-have-loved/#neofuturians

In high school, I met Harriet Wolff, a gifted writing teacher, whose writing workshop (which Judith Merril had actually founded, decades earlier) was so good that I spent seven years in my four-year high-school, mostly just to keep going to Harriet's workshop:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/30/merely-clever/#rip-harriet-wolff

I graduated from the Clarion science fiction and fantasy workshop (where Judith Merril learned to workshop) in 1992, and then went on to teach Clarion and Clarion West on several occasions, as well as other workshops in the field, such as Viable Paradise (today, I volunteer for Clarion's board). I have taught and been taught, and I've learned a thing or two.

Here's the thing about every successful writing workshop I've been in: they don't necessarily make writing enjoyable (indeed, they can be painful), but they make it profoundly satisfying. When you repeatedly sit down with the same writers, week after week, to think about what went wrong with their work, and how they can fix it, and to hear the same about your work, something changes in how you relate to your work. You come to understand how to transform big, inchoate ideas into structured narratives and arguments, sure – but you also learn to recognize when the structure that emerges teaches you something about those big, inchoate ideas that was there all along, but not visible to you.

It's revelatory. It teaches you what you know. It lets you know what you know. It lets you know more than you know. It's alchemical. It creates new knowledge, and dispels superstition. It sharpens how you think. It sharpens how you talk. And obviously, it sharpens how you write.

The freshmen comp students I've taught over the years were amazed (or, more honestly, incredulous) when I told them this, because for them, writing was a totally pointless exercise. Well, almost totally pointless. Writing had one point: to get a passing grade so that the student could advance to other subjects.

I'm not surprised by this, nor do I think it's merely because some of us are born to write and others will never get the knack (I've taught too many writers to think that anyone can guess who will find meaning in writing). It's because we don't generally teach writing this way until the most senior levels – the last year or two of undergrad, or, more likely, grad school (and then only if that grad program is an MFA).

Writing instruction at lower levels, particularly in US high schools, is organized around standardized assessment. Students are trained to turn out the world's worst literary form: the five-paragraph essay:

https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3749

The five-paragraph essay is so rigid that any attempt to enliven it is actually punished during the grading process. One cannot deviate from the structure, on penalty of academic censure. It's got all the structural constraints of a sonnet, and all the poetry of a car crusher.

The five-paragraph essay is so terrible that a large part of the job of a freshman comp teacher is to teach students to stop writing them. But even after this is done, much of the freshman comp curriculum is also formulaic (albeit with additional flexibility). That's unavoidable: freshman comp classes are typically massive, since so many of the incoming students have to take it. When you're assessing 100-2,000 students, you necessarily fall back on formula.

Which brings me back to that faculty discussion at Cornell, where we learned first that students want to learn, but are afraid of failure; and then heard from the freshman comp teacher, who told us that virtually all of their students cheated on their assignments, getting chatbots to shit out their papers.

And that's what I've been thinking about since September. Because of course those students cheat on their writing assignments – they are being taught to hit mechanical marks with their writing, improving their sentence structure, spelling and punctuation. What they're not learning is how to use writing to order and hone their thoughts, or to improve their ability to express those thoughts. They're being asked to write like a chatbot – why wouldn't they use a chatbot?

You can't teach students to write – not merely to create formally correct sentences, but to write – through formal, easily graded assignments. Teaching writing is a relational practice. It requires that students interact extensively with one another's work, and with one another's criticism. It requires structure, sure – but the structure is in how you proceed through the critiques and subsequent discussion – not in the work itself.

This is the kind of thing you do in small seminars, not big lecture halls. It requires that each student produce a steady stream of work for critique – multiple pieces per term or semester – and that each student closely read and discuss every other student's every composition. It's an intense experience that pushes students to think critically about critical thought itself. It's hard work that requires close supervision and it only works in small groups.

Now, common sense will tell you that this is an impractical way to run a freshman comp class that thousands of students have to take. Not every school can be Yale, whose Daily Themes writing course is the most expensive program to deliver with one instructor for every two students:

https://admissions.yale.edu/bulldogs-blogs/logan/2020/03/01/daily-themes

But think back to the two statements that started me down this line of thinking:

1) Most students want to learn, but are afraid of the financial ruin that academic failure will entail and so they play things very safe; and

2) Virtually all freshman comp students use AI to cheat on their assignments.

By the time we put our students in writing programs that you can't cheat on, and where you wouldn't want to cheat, they've had years of being taught to write like an LLM, but with the insistence that they not use an LLM. No wonder they're cheating! If you wanted to train a graduating class to cheat rather than learn, this is how you'd do it.

Teaching freshman comp as a grammar/sentence structure tutorial misses the point. Sure, student writing is going to be bad at first. It'll be incoherent. It'll be riddled with errors. Reading student work is, for the most part, no fun. But for students, reading other students' writing, and thinking about what's wrong with it and how to fix it is the most reliable way to improve their own work (the dirty secret of writing workshops is that other writers' analysis of your work is generally less useful to you than the critical skills you learn by trying to fix their work).

The amazing thing about bad writing is that it's easy to improve. It's much easier than finding ways to improve the work of a fluid, experienced writer. A beginning writer who makes a lot of easily spotted mistakes is a beginning writer who's making a lot of easily fixed mistakes. That means that the other writers around the circle are capable of spotting those errors, even if they're just starting out themselves. It also means that the writer whose work is under discussion will be able to make huge improvements through simple changes. Beginning writers can get a lot of momentum going this way, deriving real satisfaction from constant, visible progress.

Replacing freshman comp with dozens of small groups run like graduate seminars is expensive and hard to imagine. But it would create a generation of students who wouldn't use an AI to write their essays any more than they'd ask an AI to eat a delicious pizza for them. We should aspire to assign the kinds of essays that change the lives of the students who write them, and to teach students to write that kind of essay.

Freshman comp was always a machine for turning out reliable sentence-makers, not an atelier that trained reliable sense-makers. But AI changes the dynamic. Today, students are asking chatbots to write their essays for the same reason that corporations are asking chatbots to do their customer service (because they don't give a shit):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/06/unmerchantable-substitute-goods/#customer-disservice

I'm not saying that small writing workshops of the sort that changed my life will work for everyone. But I am saying that teaching writing in huge lecture halls with assignments optimized for grading works for no one.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 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)

#10yrsago The annual WELL State of the World, with Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/487/Bruce-Sterling-Jon-Lebkowsky-Sta-page01.html

#10yrsago NZ police broke the law when they raided investigative journalist’s home https://www.techdirt.com/2016/01/05/new-zealands-raid-investigatory-journalist-was-illegal/

#10yrsago Someone at the Chaos Communications Congress inserted a poem into at least 30 million servers’ logfiles https://web.archive.org/web/20160106133105/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/chaos-communication-congress-hackers-invaded-millions-of-servers-with-a-poem

#10yrsago Bernie Sanders on small money donations vs sucking up to billionaires https://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/34452-this-is-not-democracy-this-is-oligarchy

#10yrsago Weapons of Math Destruction: how Big Data threatens democracy https://mathbabe.org/2016/01/06/finishing-up-weapons-of-math-destruction/

#10yrsago Charter schools are turning into the next subprime mortgages https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2704305

#10yrsago New York Public Library does the public domain right https://www.nypl.org/research/resources/public-domain-collections

#10yrsago UK government spent a fortune fighting to keep the number 13 a secret https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-35221173

#5yrsago Congress bans "little green men" https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/06/methane-diet/#ndaa

#5yrsago Mass court: "I agree" means something https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/06/methane-diet/#i-agree

#5yrsago Food and Climate Change Without the Hot Air https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/06/methane-diet/#3kg-per-day#5yrsago

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


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, 1013 total)

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF

06.01.2026 à 15:11

Pluralistic: Code is a liability (not an asset) (06 Jan 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (5414 mots)


Today's links


A shredder, shredding a giant US$100 bill. Benjamin Franklin's head has been replaced with a cliched 'hacker in a hoodie' illustration. The machine's faceplate bears the Claude Code wordmark. The background is the hostile red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.'

Code is a liability (not an asset) (permalink)

Code is a liability (not an asset). Tech bosses don't understand this. They think AI is great because it produces 10,000 times more code than a programmer, but that just means it's producing 10,000 times more liabilities. AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our high-tech society:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/econopocalypse/#subprime-intelligence

Code is a liability. Code's capabilities are assets. The goal of a tech shop is to have code whose capabilities generate more revenue than the costs associated with keeping that code running. For a long time, firms have nurtured a false belief that code costs less to run over time: after an initial shakedown period in which the bugs in the code are found and addressed, code ceases to need meaningful maintenance. After all, code is a machine without moving parts – it does not wear out; it doesn't even wear down.

This is the thesis of Paul Mason's 2015 book Postcapitalism, a book that has aged remarkably poorly (though not, perhaps, as poorly as Mason's own political credibility): code is not an infinitely reproducible machine that requires no labor inputs to operate. Rather, it is a brittle machine that requires increasingly heroic measures to keep it in good working order, and which eventually does "wear out" (in the sense of needing a top-to-bottom refactoring).

To understand why code is a liability, you have to understand the difference between "writing code" and "software engineering."

"Writing code" is an incredibly useful, fun, and engrossing pastime. It involves breaking down complex tasks into discrete steps that are so precisely described that a computer can reliably perform them, and optimising that performance by finding clever ways of minimizing the demands the code puts on the computer's resources, such as RAM and processor cycles.

Meanwhile, "software engineering" is a discipline that subsumes "writing code," but with a focus on the long-term operations of the system the code is part of. Software engineering concerns itself with the upstream processes that generate the data the system receives. It concerns itself with the downstream processes that the system emits processed information to. It concerns itself with the adjacent systems that are receiving data from the same upstream processes and/or emitting data to the same downstream processes the system is emitting to.

"Writing code" is about making code that runs well. "Software engineering" is about making code that fails well. It's about making code that is legible – whose functions can be understood by third parties who might be asked to maintain it, or might be asked to adapt the processes downstream, upstream or adjacent to the system to keep the system from breaking. It's about making code that can be adapted, for example, when the underlying computer architecture it runs on is retired and has to be replaced, either with a new kind of computer, or with an emulated version of the old computer:

https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/05/hpux_end_of_life/

Because that's the thing: any nontrivial code has to interact with the outside world, and the outside world isn't static, it's dynamic. The outside world busts through the assumptions made by software authors all the time and every time it does, the software needs to be fixed. Remember Y2K? That was a day when perfectly functional code, running on perfectly functional hardware, would stop functioning – not because the code changed, but because time marched on.

We're 12 years away from the Y2038 problem, when 32-bit flavors of Unix will all cease to work, because they, too, will have run out of computable seconds. These computers haven't changed, their software hasn't changed, but the world – by dint of ticking over, a second at a time, for 68 years – will wear through their seams, and they will rupture:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/23/the_unix_epochalypse_might_be/

The existence of "the world" is an inescapable factor that wears out software and requires it to be rebuilt, often at enormous expense. The longer code is in operation, the more likely it is that it will encounter "the world." Take the code that devices use to report on their physical location. Originally, this was used for things like billing – determining which carrier or provider's network you were using and whether you were roaming. Then, our mobile devices used this code to help determine your location in order to give you turn-by-turn directions in navigation apps. Then, this code was repurposed again to help us find our lost devices. This, in turn, became a way to locate stolen devices, a use-case that sharply diverges from finding lost devices in important ways – for example, when locating a lost device, you don't have to contend with the possibility that a malicious actor has disabled the "find my lost device" facility.

These additional use cases – upstream, downstream and adjacent – exposed bugs in the original code that never surfaced in the earlier applications. For example, all location services must have some kind of default behavior in the (very common) event that they're not really sure where they are. Maybe they have a general fix – for example, they know which cellular mast they're connected to, or they know where they were the last time they got an accurate location fix – or maybe they're totally lost.

It turns out that in many cases, location apps drew a circle around all the places they could be and then set their location to the middle of that circle. That's fine if the circle is only a few feet in diameter, or if the app quickly replaces this approximation with a more precise location. But what if the location is miles and miles across, and the location fix never improves? What if the location for any IP address without a defined location is given as the center of the continental USA and any app that doesn't know where it is reports that it is in a house in Kansas, sending dozens of furious (occasionally armed) strangers to that house, insisting that the owners are in possession of their stolen phones and tablets?

https://theweek.com/articles/624040/how-internet-mapping-glitch-turned-kansas-farm-into-digital-hell

You don't just have to fix this bug once – you have to fix it over and over again.

In Georgia:

https://www.jezebel.com/why-lost-phones-keep-pointing-at-this-atlanta-couples-h-1793854491

In Texas:

https://abc7chicago.com/post/find-my-iphone-apple-error-strangers-at-texas-familys-home-scott-schuster/13096627/

And in my town of Burbank, where Google's location-sharing service once told us that our then-11-year-old daughter (whose phone we couldn't reach) was 12 miles away, on a freeway ramp in an unincorporated area of LA county (she was at a nearby park, but out of range, and the app estimated her location as the center of the region it had last fixed her in) (it was a rough couple hours).

The underlying code – the code that uses some once-harmless default to fudge unknown locations – needs to be updated constantly, because the upstream, downstream and adjacent processes connected to it are changing constantly. The longer that code sits there, the more superannuated its original behaviors become, and the more baroque, crufty and obfuscated the patches layered atop of it become.

Code is not an asset – it's a liability. The longer a computer system has been running, the more tech debt it represents. The more important the system is, the harder it is to bring down and completely redo. Instead, new layers of code are slathered atop of it, and wherever the layers of code meet, there are fissures in which these systems behave in ways that don't exactly match up. Worse still: when two companies are merged, their seamed, fissured IT systems are smashed together, so that now there are adjacent sources of tech debt, as well as upstream and downstream cracks:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/28/dealer-management-software/#antonin-scalia-stole-your-car

That's why giant companies are so susceptible to ransomware attacks – they're full of incompatible systems that have been coaxed into a facsimile of compatibility with various forms of digital silly putty, string and baling wire. They are not watertight and they cannot be made watertight. Even if they're not taken down by hackers, they sometimes just fall over and can't be stood back up again – like when Southwest Airlines' computers crashed for all of Christmas week 2022, stranding millions of travelers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/16/for-petes-sake/#unfair-and-deceptive

Airlines are especially bad, because they computerized early, and can't ever shut down the old computers to replace them with new ones. This is why their apps are such dogshit – and why it's so awful that they've fired their customer service personnel and require fliers to use the apps for everything, even though the apps do. not. work. These apps won't ever work.

The reason that British Airways' app displays "An unknown error has occurred" 40-80% of the time isn't (just) that they fired all their IT staff and outsourced to low bidders overseas. It's that, sure – but also that BA's first computers ran on electromechanical valves, and everything since has to be backwards-compatible with a system that one of Alan Turing's proteges gnawed out of a whole log with his very own front teeth. Code is a liability, not an asset (BA's new app is years behind schedule).

Code is a liability. The servers for the Bloomberg terminals that turned Michael Bloomberg into a billionaire run on RISC chips, meaning that the company is locked into using a dwindling number of specialist hardware and data-center vendors, paying specialized programmers, and building brittle chains of code to connect these RISC systems to their less exotic equivalents in the world. Code isn't an asset.

AI can write code, but AI can't do software engineering. Software engineering is all about thinking through context – what will come before this system? What will come after it? What will sit alongside of it? How will the world change? Software engineering requires a very wide "context window," the thing that AI does not, and cannot have. AI has a very narrow and shallow context window, and linear expansions to AI's context window requires geometric expansions in the amount of computational resources the AI consumes:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/29/worker-frightening-machines/#robots-stole-your-jerb-kinda

Writing code that works, without consideration of how it will fail, is a recipe for catastrophe. It is a way to create tech debt at scale. It is shoveling asbestos into the walls of our technological society.

Bosses do not know that code is a liability, not an asset. That's why they won't shut the fuck up about the chatbots that shit out 10,000 times more code than any human programmer. They think they've found a machine that produces assets at 10,000 times the rate of a human programmer. They haven't. They've found a machine that produces liability at 10,000 times the rate of any human programmer.

Maintainability isn't just a matter of hard-won experience teaching you where the pitfalls are. It also requires the cultivation of "Fingerspitzengefühl" – the "fingertip feeling" that lets you make reasonable guesses about where never before seen pitfalls might emerge. It's a form of process knowledge. It is ineluctable. It is not latent in even the largest corpus of code that you could use as training data:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/08/process-knowledge/#dance-monkey-dance

Boy do tech bosses not get this. Take Microsoft. Their big bet right now is on "agentic AI." They think that if they install spyware on your computer that captures every keystroke, every communication, every screen you see and sends it to Microsoft's cloud and give a menagerie of chatbots access to it, that you'll be able to tell your computer, "Book me a train to Cardiff and find that hotel Cory mentioned last year and book me a room there" and it will do it.

This is an incredibly unworkable idea. No chatbot is remotely capable of doing all these things, something that Microsoft freely stipulates. Rather than doing this with one chatbot, Microsoft proposes to break this down among dozens of chatbots, each of which Microsoft hopes to bring up to 95% reliability.

That's an utterly implausible chatbot standard in and of itself, but consider this: probabilities are multiplicative. A system containing two processes that operate at 95% reliability has a net reliability of 90.25% (0.95 * 0.95). Break a task down among a couple dozen 95% accurate bots and the chance that this task will be accomplished correctly rounds to zero.

Worse, Microsoft is on record as saying that they will grant the Trump administration secret access to all the data in its cloud:

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

So – as Signal's Meredith Whittaker and Udbhav Tiwari put it in their incredible 39C3 talk last week in Hamburg – Microsoft is about to abolish the very idea of privacy for any data on personal and corporate computers, in order to ship AI agents that cannot ever work:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ANECpNdt-4

Meanwhile, a Microsoft exec got into trouble last December when he posted to Linkedin announcing his intention to have AI rewrite all of Microsoft's code. Refactoring Microsoft's codebase makes lots of sense. Microsoft – like British Airways and other legacy firms – has lots of very old code that represents unsustainable tech debt. But using AI to rewrite that code is a way to start with tech debt that will only accumulate as time goes by:

https://www.windowslatest.com/2025/12/24/microsoft-denies-rewriting-windows-11-using-ai-after-an-employees-one-engineer-one-month-one-million-code-post-on-linkedin-causes-outrage/

Now, some of you reading this have heard software engineers extolling the incredible value of using a chatbot to write code for them. Some of you are software engineers who have found chatbots incredibly useful in writing code for you. This is a common AI paradox: why do some people who use AI find it really helpful, while others loathe it? Is it that the people who don't like AI are "bad at AI?" Is it that the AI fans are lazy and don't care about the quality of their work?

There's doubtless some of both going on, but even if you teach everyone to be an AI expert, and cull everyone who doesn't take pride in their work out of the sample, the paradox will still remain. The true solution to the AI paradox lies in automation theory, and the concept of "centaurs" and "reverse centaurs":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/11/vulgar-thatcherism/#there-is-an-alternative

In automation theory, a "centaur" is a person who is assisted by a machine. A "reverse centaur" is someone who has been conscripted into assisting a machine. If you're a software engineer who uses AI to write routine code that you have the time and experience to validate, deploying your Fingerspitzengefühl and process knowledge to ensure that it's fit for purpose, it's easy to see why you might find using AI (when you choose to, in ways you choose to, at a pace you choose to go at) to be useful.

But if you're a software engineer who's been ordered to produce code at 10x, or 100x, or 10,000x your previous rate, and the only way to do that is via AI, and there is no human way that you could possibly review that code and ensure that it will not break on first contact with the world, you'll hate it (you'll hate it even more if you've been turned into the AI's accountability sink, personally on the hook for the AI's mistakes):

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

There's another way in which software engineers find AI-generated code to be incredibly helpful: when that code is isolated. If you're doing a single project – say, converting one batch of files to another format, just once – you don't have to worry about downstream, upstream or adjacent processes. There aren't any. You're writing code to do something once, without interacting with any other systems. A lot of coding is this kind of utility project. It's tedious, thankless, and ripe for automation. Lots of personal projects fall into this bucket, and of course, by definition, a personal project is a centaur project. No one forces you to use AI in a personal project – it's always your choice how and when you make personal use of any tool.

But the fact that software engineers can sometimes make their work better with AI doesn't invalidate the fact that code is a liability, not an asset, and that AI code represents liability production at scale.

In the story of technological unemployment, there's the idea that new technology creates new jobs even as it makes old ones obsolete: for every blacksmith put out of work by the automobile, there's a job waiting as a mechanic. In the years since the AI bubble began inflating, we've heard lots of versions of this: AI would create jobs for "prompt engineers" – or even create jobs that we can't imagine, because they won't exist until AI has changed the world beyond recognition.

I wouldn't bank on getting work in a fanciful trade that literally can't be imagined because our consciousnesses haven't been so altered by AI that they've acquired the capacity to conceptualize of these new modes of work.

But if you are looking for a job that AI will definitely create, by the millions, I have a suggestion: digital asbestos removal.

For if AI code – written at 10,000 times the speed of any human coder, designed to work well, but not to fail gracefully – is the digital asbestos we're filling our walls with, then our descendants will spend generations digging that asbestos out of the walls. There will be plenty of work fixing the things that we broke thanks to the most dangerous AI psychosis of all – the hallucinatory belief that "writing code" is the same thing as "software engineering." At the rate we're going, we'll have full employment for generations of asbestos removers.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 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)

#20yrsago Coldplay CD DRM — more information https://memex.craphound.com/2006/01/05/coldplay-cd-drm-more-information/

#20yrsago Sony sued for spyware and rootkits in Canada https://web.archive.org/web/20060103051129/http://sonysuit.com/

#20yrsago What if pizzas came with licenses like the ones in DRM CDs? https://web.archive.org/web/20110108164548/http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20060104161112858

#10yrsago Star Wars Wars: the first six movies, overlaid https://starwarswars.com/

#10yrsago Transvaginal foetal sonic bombardment: woo-tunes for your hoo-hah https://babypod.net/en/

#10yrsago Of Oz the Wizard: all the dialog in alphabetical order https://vimeo.com/150423718?fl=pl&fe=vl

#5yrsago Pavilions replacing union workers with "gig workers" https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/05/manorialism-feudalism-cycle/#prop22

#5yrsago South Carolina GOP moots modest improvements to "magistrate judges" https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/05/manorialism-feudalism-cycle/#karolina-klown-kar

#5yrsago Digital manorialism vs neofeudalism https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/05/manorialism-feudalism-cycle/#to-the-manor

#5yrsago My Fellow Americans https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/05/manorialism-feudalism-cycle/#my-fellow-americans

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. 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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05.01.2026 à 15:42

Pluralistic: A world without people (05 Jan 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (5927 mots)


Today's links

  • A world without people: AI is a promise to wire the boss's toy steering wheel directly into the company's drive-train.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Adding exclusive rights make economies weaker; Bloggers after the collapse; Why the media can't figure out Wikipedia; Who are these sf legends?; Anne Frank is in the public domain; Hollywood's MP in Canada; Piketty on Piketty; Vanilla ISIS; India throws out Facebook's astroturf emails; Google unionizes; "The Data Detective"; Breaking Apple ][+ DRM.
  • 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 interior of a car, tinted cyberpunk green. The car's steering wheel has been replaced with a vintage Fisher Price steering wheel toy, which has been modified so that the malignant eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey' glares out of it, and the Fisher Price logo has been replaced with the Openai wordmark. Through the windscreen rains down a 'code waterfall' effect as seen in the credit sequences of the Wachowskis' 'Matrix' movies. In the rear-view mirror, we see the reflected eyes of Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse avatar.

A world without people (permalink)

To be a billionaire is to be a solipsist – to secretly believe that (most) other people don't really exist – otherwise, how could you live with the knowledge that your farcical wealth and power springs from the agony you have inflicted on whole populations?

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

This is what it means for Elon Musk to dismiss the people who disagree with him as "NPCs"; in some important sense, he doesn't think other people exist. It's a very ketamine-coded way to move through the world:

https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/on-elon-musk-and-npcs

Solipsism is a very difficult belief to maintain. No matter how sociopathic you are, there's always going to be a part of you that craves the approval, love and attention of others. That craving is a nagging reminder that other people do, in fact, exist. This creates the very weird insistence on the part of the ultra-rich that they are actually philanthropists. Thus, the very weird spectacle of corporate raiders – responsible for tens of thousands of job losses – describing themselves as "job creators," and funding whole economic subdisciplines dedicated to shoring up this absurd claim ("The search for a superior moral justification for selfishness" -JK Galbraith):

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/05/us/koch-donors-george-mason.html

Trying to squeeze this claim through an ever-narrowing credibility aperture forces it into some extremely weird shapes. Take "Effective Altruism," the belief that you should make as much money as possible by working in the most exploitative and destructive fields you can find, in order to fund a program to improve the lives of 53 trillion hypothetical artificial people who will come into existence in 10,000 years:

https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/cause-profile-long-run-future

Effective Altruism, "job creators" (and other claims to billionaireism as a force for good in the world) show just how much work it takes to maintain the belief that other people don't exist. The ruling classes are haunted by this knowledge, and as more and more wealth accumulates in the hands of fewer and fewer people, those eminently guillotineable plutes need to perform increasingly complex mental gymnastics to keep from confronting the reality of other people.

Corporate bosses have near-total control over the lives of their workers, who might number in the hundreds of thousands. But they also know, in their secret hearts, that they don't really control their businesses. If Amazon CEO Andy Jassy stops showing up for work, the company will continue to hum along, not missing a beat. But if all of Amazon's drivers or warehouse workers walk off the job, the company will grind to a halt. If they never come back, the company might never be able to restart, unable to recover the process knowledge that walks out the door with them:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/08/process-knowledge/#dance-monkey-dance

Andy Jassy wants to think that he's in Amazon's driver's seat, but is haunted by the undeniable reality that Amazon is really in the hands of its lowest-paid, most abused workers. Andy Jassy isn't driving Amazon – he's stuck in the back seat, playing with a Fisher Price steering-wheel toy.

Enter AI.

AI can't do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job:

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

Your boss is an easy mark for these AI swindlers, because your boss dreams of a world without workers, because that's a world where bosses are driving the bus.

The Hollywood writers' strike was precipitated by studio bosses' fantasy of a world without writers – a world where studio bosses don't have to be satisfied with giving harebrained notes to writers who don't bother to disguise their contempt for their bosses' shitty ideas. In a world of AI scripts, the boss decides what kind of movie to make, and a chatbot shits out a script to order, without ever telling the boss that the idea stinks.

The fact that this is an unshootable turkey of a script is of secondary importance. The most important thing is the boss's all-consuming need to avoid ego-shattering conflicts with people who actually know how to do things, who gain power thanks to that knowledge, and who use that power to imply (or state outright) that you're a fucking dunce.

Same goes for the Hollywood actors' strike, and the continued project of cloning actors in software and puppeteering them via chatbot: it's the fantasy of a movie without actors, actors who tell you that the scenario you've spun is an incoherent mess, who insist that their expertise in an art you don't understand and can't perform yourself entitles them to challenge your ideas.

AI is solipsism, the fantasy of a world without people.

Bosses keep pushing the idea that AI can replace doctors and (especially) nurses. Health bosses – increasingly likely to be a giant private equity fund – want to cut care in order to direct more money to the hospital's shareholders. They want to stop paying exterminators and allow their hospitals to fill up with thousands of bats:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/28/5000-bats/#charnel-house

They want to stop paying for clean needles at dialysis clinics and transmit blood-borne chronic illnesses to immunocompromised, sick patients:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-dirty-business-of-clean-blood

They want to use algorithmic death panels to eject sick patients from their beds before they can sit up, walk or, you know, survive:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/05/any-metric-becomes-a-target/#hca

The problem is that nurses and doctors are professionals, and that means – by definition – that they follow a professional code of ethics that requires them to refuse their bosses' orders when those orders are bad for patients.

The same goes for shrinks of all kinds – psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and counselors. They are legally and professionally required to put patients' mental health ahead of commercial imperatives. That's a big problem for any boss who wants to swap out in-person counseling for dial-a-doc shrink-on-demand services delivered via videoconference that serve up a new therapist every time the patient dials in, chasing the lowest wages around the country or the globe. The mania for "AI therapists" isn't driven by efficiency or by our societal mental health crisis – it's driven by the fantasy of mental health counseling without counselors (who insist on minimum standards for patient care):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/01/doctor-robo-blabbermouth/#fool-me-once-etc-etc

Capitalism is a single-criterion optimization: it organizes itself around the accumulation of capital, to the exclusion of all other criteria:

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/59821b9ff14aa110e16b69c0/t/686621934eb5b7060da1cdaf/1751523732570/Aaron+Benanav%2C+Beyond+Capitalism+1%2C+NLR+153%2C+May+June+2025.pdf

This means that capitalism is forever locked in a conflict with professionalism, since professionalism is a system that upholds a code of conduct before all other priorities, including the capital accumulation. Professional ethics are, quite simply, bad for business.

That's why bosses fantasize so furiously about pushing AI into professional situations – it's the fantasy of a profession without professionals. AI schoolteachers mean "education without educators," which means that there's no organized group of trained and trusted professionals telling you that chatbot slop, high-stakes testing, and standardized curriculum will fail students. This is true no matter how much money you stand to make by replacing the skilled craft process of teaching with automation.

Professions are infamously resistant to automation, unlike, say, manufacturing. This means that the cost of professional services steadily increases, relative to the cost of manufactured goods.

The labor, energy, materials and time it took to travel from New York to Vienna have plummeted since the 18th century – but the number of hours it takes a Viennese string quartet to perform Mozart's String Quartet No 1 is the same today as it was in 1773 – about half an hour.

The cost of producing a chalkboard has crashed over the past two centuries – but the number of hours it takes a math teacher to show a classroom full of ten year olds how to do long division has hardly budged.

The cost of producing a scalpel is lower today than at any time in history, but the duration of an appendectomy has only decreased a little over the past century.

Economists have a name for this: they call it "cost disease." The fact that automation makes professional services (proportionally) more expensive over time isn't an indictment of professionalism, it's a testament to the power of automation for manufacturing. Bosses (should) know this, but they constantly bemoan the cost of professional services, as though the numerator (teaching, healthcare, screenwriting) is going up, when it's actually a shrinking denominator (automated manufacturing processes) that's increasing the price.

The AI fantasy is a fantasy of dismantling the professions and replacing them with pliable chatbots who can be optimized for profits and thus cure cost disease for once and for all, and if that comes at the expense of the value that society derives from professional activities, that's a small price to pay for finally clearing the most stubborn barrier to capital accumulation.

Last year, Trump, Elon Musk and DOGE fired or forced out a critical mass of government scientists, even as they gutted funding to research programs at the country's universities. You'd think that this would be a barrier to making scientific breakthroughs in America, but not according to Trump. He's promised that America will produce annual "moonshot"-scale breakthroughs, without scientists, by asking a chatbot to shit out paradigm-shattering scientific leaps on demand:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/12/trump-spent-2025-attacking-science-that-could-set-back-his-genesis-mission/

The problem is that while AIs can shit out sentences that seem to qualify as scientific breakthroughs, they can't actually do science. Take Google's claim that its Deepmind product had advanced material science by 800 years, "discovering 2.2 million structures." It turns out that these "discoveries" are useless – in that they constitute trivial variations on known materials, and/or have no uses, and/or can only exist at absolute zero:

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.chemmater.4c00643

But the fact that a chatbot can't do science isn't important to Trump – or at least, not as important as all the other things a chatbot won't do. A chatbot won't tell Trump not to stare at an eclipse. A chatbot won't tell Trump not to inject bleach. A chatbot won't tell Trump that trans people exist. A chatbot won't tell Trump that the climate emergency is real. A chatbot will agree with Trump when he says that offshore wind kills whales and that Tylenol causes autism.

For Trump, the fantasy of science without scientists is more important than whether any science happens.

America needs science, but for Trump – a billionaire solipsist – America is a country populated by people who mostly don't really exist.

That's true of tech bosses, too. After all, they were the original suckers for Effective Altruism and the fantasy of a world without people. Remember when Mark Zuckerberg announced that the average person has three friends, but wants 15 friends, and that he would solve this with chatbots?

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/mark-zuckerberg-on-ai-friendships_l_681a4bf3e4b0c2b15d96851d

Sure, we all dunked on him for being such an unlikable fucking Martian that he doesn't understand what a "friend" is. But I don't think that's what's actually going on there: it's not that Zuck doesn't understand what friends are; it's that he treats your friendships as problems to be solved.

Your friends' behavior determines how much money Zuck can make. When your friends arrange their interactions with you in a way that increases how much time you spend on his platforms, Zuckerberg maximizes the number of ads he gets to show you and thus how much money he can make. The fact that your friends stubbornly refuse to help him maximize his capital accumulation is a problem, and the solution to that problem is chatbots, which can be instructed to relate to you in ways that are optimized for increasing Zuck's wealth.

For Zuck, chatbots are a fantasy of a social network without socializing.

It's not just users that tech bosses fantasize about replacing with AI, though – they really want to get rid of coders. Computer programmers aren't (formally) a profession, but they are quite powerful, and have a cultural norm of criticizing their bosses' stupid ideas:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/

Tech bosses are completely dependent on coders, who know how to do things they don't know how to do, and aren't shy about letting them know it. That's why tech bosses are so quick to equate "writing code" with "software engineering" (the latter being a discipline that requires consideration of upstream, downstream and adjacent processes while prioritizing legibility and maintainability by future generations of engineers). A chatbot can produce software routines that perform some well-scoped task, but one thing they can't do is maintain the wide, deep "context window" at the heart of software engineering – a linear increase in a chatbot's context window results in a geometric increase in the amount of computation the chatbot has to perform:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/29/worker-frightening-machines/#robots-stole-your-jerb-kinda

But the fact that chatbots will produce technical debt at scale is less important to tech bosses than the fact that a chatbot will do what you tell it without giving the boss any lip. For tech bosses, chatbots are the fantasy of a coding shop without any coders.

This is a bad joke, literally. When I worked in a shop, we used to sarcastically say, "Retail would be great if it wasn't for the fucking customers." We were unknowingly reprising Brecht, whose "Die Lösung" contains the immortal line, "Would it not be simpler if the government simply dissolved the people and elected another?"

Billionaires don't see the humor. For them, AI is a chance to wire the toy steering wheel directly into the firm's drive-train, and make movies without writers or actors, factories without workers, hospitals without nurses, schools without teachers, science without scientists, code shops without coders, social media without socializing, and yes, even retail without the fucking customers.

Billionaires love the idea of "Universal Basic Income." For them, this is the apotheosis of the AI fantasy of a world without people. In this fantasy, the boss's toy steering wheel is steering the firm. Business consists of a boss and a computer that turns the boss's ideas into products. Who will consume these products? You will, thanks to UBI – the government will continue to exist in this fantasy, but for the sole purpose of creating new money and dispersing it to you, so that you can turn it over to billionaires who singlehandedly direct all of society's functions.

Billionaires love UBI for the same reason they love charter schools. In the AI UBI fantasy, everyone who's not a billionaire has been replaced with a chatbot, and our only job is to receive government vouchers that we hand over to billionaire grifters who run the institutions that used to be under democratic control. We no longer vote with our ballots – only with our wallets, and in the wallet election, we only get the ballots that billionaires decide we deserve, and can only direct them between choices that are as meaningless as "Mac vs Windows" or "Coke vs Pepsi."

A world optimized for capital accumulation.

It's a world without people.

(Image: Matti Blume, CC BY-SA 4.0; Cryteria, CC BY 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)

#20yrsago Hollywood’s Canadian Member of Parliament https://web.archive.org/web/20060217022615/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1060

#20yrsago IKEA stores make great babysitters, soup-kitchens https://web.archive.org/web/20061107014101/http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,392850,00.html

#20yrsago Deaf geek mods implant-firmware so he can enjoy music again https://web.archive.org/web/20060110053839/https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.11/bolero_pr.html

#20yrsago Study: Best place to advertise to teens is in-game https://memex.craphound.com/2006/01/04/study-best-place-to-advertise-to-teens-is-in-game/

#20yrsago Misbehavior in Second Life game punished by exile to “the corn field” https://web.archive.org/web/20060209002925/http://www.secretlair.com/index.php?/clickableculture/entry/hidden_virtual_world_prison_revealed/

#20yrsago Florida may sue Sony, too https://web.archive.org/web/20060109130626/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004292.php

#20yrsago CEO of Neuros to Congress: If you plug the A-Hole, we’re out of biz https://web.archive.org/web/20060106045933/https://open.neurostechnology.com/files/dtcsa.html

#20yrsago Click-fraud explained https://web.archive.org/web/20060103050629/https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.01/fraud_pr.html

#20yrsago Canadian MP imports US’s worst copyright AND dirty campaign financing https://web.archive.org/web/20060624204919/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1058&Itemid=89&nsub=

#20yrsago EU study: more exclusive rights = worse economy https://www.ft.com/content/99610a50-7bb2-11da-ab8e-0000779e2340

#20yrsago Online fundraiser for mom being sued by the RIAA https://web.archive.org/web/20060604021749/http://www.p2pnet.net/goliath/

#20yrsago Sf story: Internet collapses, bloggers become homeless https://web.archive.org/web/20060105051729/https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/2006/pdf0602.htm

#20yrsago Weinberger: Why the media can’t get Wikipedia right https://web.archive.org/web/20060104032042/https://hyperorg.com/backissues/joho-dec29-05.html#wikipedia

#10yrsago Switching to Linux, saying goodbye to Apple and Microsoft https://medium.com/backchannel/i-moved-to-linux-and-it-s-even-better-than-i-expected-9f2dcac3f8fb#.3vhxku71i

#10yrsago Understand: The esoteric criminal sentencing that mobilized Oregon’s Cowliphate https://web.archive.org/web/20220621233456/https://www.popehat.com/2016/01/04/what-happened-in-the-hammond-sentencing-in-oregon-a-lawsplainer/

#10yrsago Thomas Piketty on Thomas Piketty https://crookedtimber.org/2016/01/04/capital-predistribution-and-redistribution/

#10yrsago TPP vs Canada: a parade of horribles https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2016/01/the-trouble-with-the-tpp-day-1-u-s-blocks-balancing-objectives/

#10yrsago Vanilla ISIS needs snacks https://web.archive.org/web/20160222182431/https://indy100.independent.co.uk/article/oregon-terrorists-dont-plan-siege-very-well-put-out-plea-for-snacks-and-supplies–ZJglh9sRjx

#10yrsago T-Mobile’s “Binge On” is just throttling for all video https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/01/eff-confirms-t-mobiles-bingeon-optimization-just-throttling-applies

#10yrsago Help identify the science fiction legends in these thrift-scored pix of the 1956 Worldcon https://www.flickr.com/photos/slomuse/sets/72157662390340119

#10yrsago India’s telcoms regulator says it will ignore Facebook’s astroturf army https://www.thehindu.com/business/Industry/Consultation-paper-is-not-an-opinion-poll-TRAI-chairman/article60523944.ece

#10yrsago Anne Frank’s diary is in the public domain; editors aren’t co-authors https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/1/10698254/anne-frank-diary-free-download-copyright-dispute

#10yrsago Armed domestic terrorists take over federal building, but it’s OK, they’re white https://web.archive.org/web/20060103094308/https://www.opb.org/

#10yrsago Paypal rolls out the welcome mat for hackers https://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/12/2016-reality-lazy-authentication-still-the-norm/

#10yrsago Hong Kong’s dissident publishing workers are disappearing, possibly kidnapped to mainland https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/01/03/hong-kong-unsettled-strange-case-missing-booksellers/78226448/

#10yrsago Breaking the DRM on the 1982 Apple ][+ port of Burger Time https://ia801207.us.archive.org/14/items/BurgerTime4amCrack/BurgerTime

#5yrsago The Data Detective https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/#harford

#5yrsago Google's unionizing https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/#awu

#5yrsago Ad-tech is a bezzle https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/#adfraud

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. 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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01.01.2026 à 09:01

Pluralistic: The Post-American Internet (01 Jan 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (11026 mots)


Today's links


The Earth from space. Squatting over North America, casting a long shadow and ringed by a red, spiky halo, is the poop emoji from the cover of the US edition of 'Enshittification,' with a grawlix-scrawled black bar over its mouth, wearing a Trump wig. Leaching through the starscape is a 'code waterfall' effect as seen in the credits of the Wachowskis' 'Matrix' movies.

The Post-American Internet (permalink)

On December 28th, I delivered a speech entitled "A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet" for 39C3, the 39th Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg, Germany. This is the transcript of that speech.

Many of you know that I'm an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation – EFF. I'm about to start my 25th year there. I know that I'm hardly unbiased, but as far as I'm concerned, there's no group anywhere on Earth that does the work of defending our digital rights better than EFF.

I'm an activist there, and for the past quarter-century, I've been embroiled in something I call "The War on General Purpose Computing."

If you were at 28C3, 14 years ago, you may have heard me give a talk with that title. Those are the trenches I've been in since my very first day on the job at EFF, when I flew to Los Angeles to crash the inaugural meeting of something called the "Broadcast Protection Discussion Group," an unholy alliance of tech companies, media companies, broadcasters and cable operators.

They'd gathered because this lavishly corrupt American congressman, Billy Tauzin, had promised them a new regulation – a rule banning the manufacture and sale of digital computers, unless they had been backdoored to specifications set by that group, specifications for technical measures to block computers from performing operations that were dispreferred by these companies' shareholders.

That rule was called "the Broadcast Flag," and it actually passed through the American telecoms regulator, the Federal Communications Commission. So we sued the FCC in federal court, and overturned the rule.

We won that skirmish, but friends, I have bad news, news that will not surprise you. Despite wins like that one, we have been losing the war on the general purpose computer for the past 25 years.

Which is why I've come to Hamburg today. Because, after decades of throwing myself against a locked door, the door that leads to a new, good internet, one that delivers both the technological self-determination of the old, good internet, and the ease of use of Web 2.0 that let our normie friends join the party, that door has been unlocked.

Today, it is open a crack. It's open a crack!

And here's the weirdest part: Donald Trump is the guy who's unlocked that door.

Oh, he didn't do it on purpose! But, thanks to Trump's incontinent belligerence, we are on the cusp of a "Post-American Internet," a new digital nervous system for the 21st century. An internet that we can build without worrying about America's demands and priorities.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not happy about Trump or his policies. But as my friend Joey DaVilla likes to say "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla." The only thing worse than experiencing all the terror that Trump has unleashed on America and the world would be going through all that and not salvaging anything out of the wreckage.

That's what I want to talk to you about today: the post-American Internet we can wrest from Trump's chaos.

A post-American Internet that is possible because Trump has mobilized new coalition partners to join the fight on our side. In politics, coalitions are everything. Any time you see a group of people suddenly succeeding at a goal they have been failing to achieve, it's a sure bet that they've found some coalition partners, new allies who don't want all the same thing as the original forces, but want enough of the same things to fight on their side.

That's where Trump came from: a coalition of billionaires, white nationalists, Christian bigots, authoritarians, conspiratorialists, imperialists, and self-described "libertarians" who've got such a scorching case of low-tax brain worms that they'd vote for Mussolini if he'd promise to lower their taxes by a nickel.

And what's got me so excited is that we've got a new coalition in the War on General Purpose Computers: a coalition that includes the digital rights activists who've been on the lines for decades, but also people who want to turn America's Big Tech trillions into billions for their own economy, and national security hawks who are quite rightly worried about digital sovereignty.

My thesis here is that this is an unstoppable coalition. Which is good news! For the first time in decades, victory is in our grasp.

#

So let me explain: 14 years ago, I stood in front of this group and explained the "War on General Purpose Computing." That was my snappy name for this fight, but the boring name that they use in legislatures for it is "anticircumvention,"

Under anticircumvention law, it's a crime to alter the functioning of a digital product or service, unless the manufacturer approves of your modification, and – crucially – this is true whether or not your modification violates any other law.

Anticircumvention law originates in the USA: Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 establishes a felony punishable by a five year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense for bypassing an "access control" for a copyrighted work.

So practically speaking, if you design a device or service with even the flimsiest of systems to prevent modification of its application code or firmware, it's a felony – a jailable felony – to modify that code or firmware. It's also a felony to disclose information about how to bypass that access control, which means that pen-testers who even describe how they access a device or system face criminal liability.

Under anticircumvention law any manufacturer can trivially turn their product into a no-go zone, criminalizing the act of investigating its defects, criminalizing the act of reporting on its defects, and criminalizing the act of remediating its defects.

This is a law that Jay Freeman rightly calls "Felony Contempt of Business Model." Anticircumvention became the law of the land in 1998 when Bill Clinton signed the DMCA. But before you start snickering at those stupid Americans, know this: every other country in the world has passed a law just like this in the years since. Here in the EU, it came in through Article 6 of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive.

Now, it makes a certain twisted sense for the US to enact a law like this, after all, they are the world's tech powerhouse, home to the biggest, most powerful tech companies in the world. By making it illegal to modify digital products without the manufacturer's permission, America enhances the rent-extracting power of the most valuable companies on US stock exchanges.

But why would Europe pass a law like this? Europe is a massive tech importer. By extending legal protection to tech companies that want to steal their users' data and money, the EU was facilitating a one-way transfer of value from Europe to America. So why would Europe do this?

Well, let me tell you about the circumstances under which other countries came to enact their anticircumvention laws and maybe you'll spot a pattern that will answer this question.

Australia got its anticircumvention law through the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement, which obliges Australia to enact anticircumvention law.

Canada and Mexico got it through the US-Mexico-Canada Free Trade Agreement, which obliges Canada and Mexico to enact anticircumvention laws.

Andean nations like Chile got their anticircumvention laws through bilateral US free trade agreements, which oblige them to enact anticircumvention laws.

And the Central American nations got their anticircumvention laws through CAFTA – The Central American Free Trade Agreement with the USA – which obliges them to enact anticircumvention laws, too.

I assume you've spotted the pattern by now: the US trade representative has forced every one of its trading partners to adopt anticircumvention law, to facilitate the extraction of their own people's data and money by American firms. But of course, that only raises a further question: Why would every other country in the world agree to let America steal its own people's money and data, and block its domestic tech sector from making interoperable products that would prevent this theft?

Here's an anecdote that unravels this riddle: many years ago, in the years before Viktor Orban rose to power, I used to guest-lecture at a summer PhD program in political science at Budapest's Central European University. And one summer, after I'd lectured to my students about anticircumvention law, one of them approached me.

They had been the information minister of a Central American nation during the CAFTA negotiations, and one day, they'd received a phone-call from their trade negotiator, calling from the CAFTA bargaining table. The negotiator said, "You know how you told me not to give the Americans anticircumvention under any circumstances? Well, they're saying that they won't take our coffee unless we give them anticircumvention. And I'm sorry, but we just can't lose the US coffee market. Our economy would collapse. So we're going to give them anticircumvention. I'm really sorry."

That's it. That's why every government in the world allowed US Big Tech companies to declare open season on their people's private data and ready cash.

The alternative was tariffs. Well, I don't know if you've heard, but we've got tariffs now!

I mean, if someone threatens to burn your house down unless you follow their orders, and then they burn your house down anyway, you don't have to keep following their orders. So…Happy Liberation Day?

So far, every country in the world has had one of two responses to the Trump tariffs. The first one is: "Give Trump everything he asks for (except Greenland) and hope he stops being mad at you." This has been an absolute failure. Give Trump an inch, he'll take a mile. He'll take fucking Greenland. Capitulation is a failure.

But so is the other tactic: retaliatory tariffs. That's what we've done in Canada (like all the best Americans, I'm Canadian). Our top move has been to levy tariffs on the stuff we import from America, making the things we buy more expensive. That's a weird way to punish America! It's like punching yourself in the face as hard as you can, and hoping the downstairs neighbor says "Ouch!"

And it's indiscriminate. Why whack some poor farmer from a state that begins and ends with a vowel with tariffs on his soybeans. That guy never did anything bad to Canada.

But there's a third possible response to tariffs, one that's just sitting there, begging to be tried: what about repealing anticircumvention law?

If you're a technologist or an investor based in a country that's repealed its anticircumvention law, you can go into business making disenshittificatory products that plug into America's defective tech exports, allowing the people who own and use those products to use them in ways that are good for them, even if those uses make the company's shareholders mad.

Think of John Deere tractors: when a farmer's John Deere tractor breaks down, they are expected to repair it, swapping in new parts and assemblies to replace whatever's malfing. But the tractor won't recognize that new part and will not start working again, not until the farmer spends a couple hundred bucks on a service callout from an official John Deere tractor repair rep, whose only job is to type an unlock code into the tractor's console, to initialize the part and pair it with the tractor's main computing unit.

Modding a tractor to bypass this activation step violates anticircumvention law, meaning farmers all over the world are stuck with this ripoff garbage, because their own government will lock up anyone who makes a tractor mod that disables the parts-pairing check in this American product.

So what if Canada repealed Bill C-11, the Copyright Modernization Act of 2012 (that's our anticircumvention law)? Well, then a company like Honeybee, which makes tractor front-ends and attachments, could hire some smart University of Waterloo computer science grads, and put 'em to work jailbreaking the John Deere tractor's firmware, and offer it to everyone in the world. They could sell the crack to anyone with an internet connection and a payment method, including that poor American farmer whose soybeans we're currently tariffing.

It's hard to convey how much money is on the table here. Take just one example: Apple's App Store. Apple forces all app vendors into using its payment processor, and charges them a 30 percent commission on every euro spent inside of an app.

30 percent! That's such a profitable business that Apple makes $100 billion per year on it. If the EU repeals Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, some smart geeks in Finland could reverse-engineer Apple's bootloaders and make a hardware dongle that jailbreaks phones so that they can use alternative app stores, and sell the dongle – along with the infrastructure to operate an app store – to anyone in the world who wants to go into business competing with Apple for users and app vendors.

Those competitors could offer a 90% discount to every crafter on Etsy, every performer on Patreon, every online news outlet, every game dev, every media store. Offer them a 90% discount on payments, and still make $10b/year.

Maybe Finland will never see another Nokia, but Nokia's a tough business to be in. You've got to make hardware, which is expensive and risky. But if the EU legalizes jailbreaking, then Apple would have to incur all the expense and risk of making and fielding hardware, while those Finnish geeks could cream off the $100b Apple sucks out of the global economy in an act of a disgusting, rip-off rent-seeking.

As Jeff Bezos said to the publishers: "Your margin is my opportunity." With these guys, it's always "disruption for thee, but not for me." When they do it to us, that's progress. When we do it to them, it's piracy, and every pirate wants to be an admiral.

Well, screw that. Move fast and break Tim Cook's things. Move fast and break kings!

It's funny: I spent 25 years getting my ass kicked by the US Trade Representative (in my defense, it wasn't a fair fight). I developed a kind of grudging admiration for the skill with which the USTR bound the entire world to a system of trade that conferred parochial advantages to America and its tech firms, giving them free rein to loot the world's data and economies. So it's been pretty amazing to watch Trump swiftly and decisively dismantle the global system of trade and destroy the case for the world continuing to arrange its affairs to protect the interests of America's capital class.

I mean, it's not a path I would have chosen. I'd have preferred no Trump at all to this breakthrough. But I'll take this massive own-goal if Trump insists. I mean, I'm not saying I've become an accelerationist, but at this point, I'm not exactly not an accelerationist.

Now, you might have heard that governments around the world have been trying to get Apple to open its App Store, and they've totally failed at this. When the EU hit Apple with an enforcement order under the Digital Markets Act, Apple responded by offering to allow third party app stores, but it would only allow those stores to sell apps that Apple had approved of.

And while those stores could use their own payment processors, Apple would charge them so much in junk fees that it would be more expensive to process a payment using your own system, and if Apple believed that a user's phone had been outside of the EU for 21 days, they'd remotely delete all that user's data and apps.

When the EU explained that this would not satisfy the regulation, Apple threatened to pull out of the EU. Then, once everyone had finished laughing, Apple filed more than a dozen bullshit objections to the order hoping to tie this up in court for a decade, the way Google and Meta did for the GDPR.

It's not clear that the EU can force Apple to write code that opens up the iOS platform for alternative app stores and payment methods, but there is one thing that the EU can absolutely do with 100% reliability, any time they want: the EU can decide not to let Apple use Europe's courts to shut down European companies that defend European merchants, performers, makers, news outlets, game devs and creative workers, from Apple's ripoff, by jailbreaking phones.

All the EU has to do is repeal Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, and, in so doing, strip Apple of the privilege of mobilizing the European justice system to shore up Apple's hundred billion dollar annual tax on the world's digital economy. The EU company that figures out how to reliably jailbreak iPhones will have customers all over the world, including in the USA, where Apple doesn't just use its veto over which apps you can run on your phone to suck 30% out of every dollar you spend, but where Apple also uses its control over the platform to strip out apps that protect Apple's customers from Trump's fascist takeover.

Back in October, Apple kicked the "ICE Block" app out of the App Store. That's an app that warns the user if there's a snatch squad of masked ICE thugs nearby looking to grab you off the street and send you to an offshore gulag. Apple internally classified ICE kidnappers as a "protected class," and then declared the ICE Block infringed on the rights of these poor, beset ICE goons.

And speaking of ICE thugs, there are plenty of qualified technologists who have fled the US this year, one step ahead of an ICE platoon looking to put them and their children into a camp. Those skilled hackers are now living all over the world, joined by investors who'd like to back a business whose success will be determined by how awesome its products are, and not how many $TRUMP coins they buy.

Apple's margin could be their opportunity.

Legalizing jailbreaking, raiding the highest margin lines of business of the most profitable companies in America is a much better response to the Trump tariffs than retaliatory tariffs.

For one thing, this is a targeted response: go after Big Tech's margins and you're mounting a frontal assault on the businesses whose CEOs each paid a million bucks to sit behind Trump on the inauguration dais.

Raiding Big Tech's margins is not an attack on the American people, nor on the small American businesses that are ripped off by Big Tech. It's a raid on the companies that screw everyday Americans and everyone else in the world. It's a way to make everyone in the world richer at the expense of these ripoff companies.

It beats the shit out of blowing hundreds of billions of dollars building AI data-centers in the hopes that someday, a sector that's lost nearly a trillion dollars shipping defective chatbots will figure out a use for GPUs that doesn't start hemorrhaging money the minute they plug them in.

So here are our new allies in the war on general-purpose computation: businesses and technologists who want to make billions of dollars raiding Big Tech's margins, and policymakers who want their country to be the disenshittification nation – the country that doesn't merely protect its people's money and privacy by buying jailbreaks from other countries, but rather, the country that makes billions of dollars selling that privacy and pocketbook-defending tech to the rest of the world.

That's a powerful alliance, but those are not the only allies Trump has pushed into our camp. There's another powerful ally waiting in the wings.

Remember last June, when the International Criminal Court in the Hague issued an arrest warrant for the génocidaire Benjamin Netanyahu, and Trump denounced the ICC, and then the ICC lost its Outlook access, its email archives, its working files, its address books, its calendars?

Microsoft says they didn't brick the ICC – that it's a coincidence. But when it comes to a he-said/Clippy-said between the justices of the ICC and the convicted monopolists of Microsoft, I know who I believe.

This is exactly the kind of infrastructural risk that we were warned of if we let Chinese companies like Huawei supply our critical telecoms equipment. Virtually every government ministry, every major corporation, every small business and every household in the world have locked themselves into a US-based, cloud-based service.

The handful of US Big Tech companies that supply the world's administrative tools are all vulnerable to pressure from the Trump admin, and that means that Trump can brick an entire nation.

The attack on the ICC was an act of cyberwarfare, like the Russian hackers who shut down Ukrainian power-generation facilities, except that Microsoft doesn't have to hack Outlook to brick the ICC – they own Outlook.

Under the US CLOUD Act of 2018, the US government can compel any US-based company to disclose any of its users' data – including foreign governments – and this is true no matter where that data is stored. Last July, Anton Carniaux, Director of Public and Legal Affairs at Microsoft France, told a French government inquiry that he "couldn't guarantee" that Microsoft wouldn't hand sensitive French data over to the US government, even if that data was stored in a European data-center.

And under the CLOUD Act, the US government can slap gag orders on the companies that it forces to cough up that data, so there'd be no way to even know if this happened, or whether it's already happened.

It doesn't stop at administrative tools, either: remember back in 2022, when Putin's thugs looted millions of dollars' worth of John Deere tractors from Ukraine and those tractors showed up in Chechnya? The John Deere company pushed an over-the-air kill signal to those tractors and bricked 'em.

John Deere is every bit as politically vulnerable to the Trump admin as Microsoft is, and they can brick most of the tractors in the world, and the tractors they can't brick are probably made by Massey Ferguson, the number-two company in the ag-tech cartel, which is also an American company and just as vulnerable to political attacks from the US government.

Now, none of this will be news to global leaders. Even before Trump and Microsoft bricked the ICC they were trying to figure out a path to "digital sovereignty." But the Trump administration's outrageous conduct and rhetoric over past 11 months has turned "digital sovereignty" from a nice-to-have into a must-have.

So finally, we're seeing some movement, like "Eurostack," a project to clone the functionality of US Big Tech silos in free/open source software, and to build EU-based data-centers that this code can run on.

But Eurostack is heading for a crisis. It's great to build open, locally hosted, auditable, trustworthy services that replicate the useful features of Big Tech, but you also need to build the adversarial interoperability tools that allow for mass exporting of millions of documents, the sensitive data-structures and edit histories.

We need scrapers and headless browsers to accomplish the adversarial interoperability that will guarantee ongoing connectivity to institutions that are still hosted on US cloud-based services, because US companies are not going to facilitate the mass exodus of international customers from their platform.

Just think of how Apple responded to the relatively minor demand to open up the iOS App Store, and now imagine the thermonuclear foot-dragging, tantrum-throwing and malicious compliance they'll come up with when faced with the departure of a plurality of the businesses and governments in a 27-nation bloc of 500,000,000 affluent consumers.

Any serious attempt at digital sovereignty needs migration tools that work without the cooperation of the Big Tech companies. Otherwise, this is like building housing for East Germans and locating it in West Berlin. It doesn't matter how great the housing is, your intended audience is going to really struggle to move in unless you tear down the wall.

Step one of tearing down that wall is killing anticircumvention law, so that we can run virtual devices that can be scripted, break bootloaders to swap out firmware and generally seize the means of computation.

So this is the third bloc in the disenshittification army: not just digital rights hippies like me; not just entrepreneurs and economic development wonks rubbing their hands together at the thought of transforming American trillions into European billions; but also the national security hawks who are 100% justified in their extreme concern about their country's reliance on American platforms that have been shown to be totally unreliable.

This is how we'll get a post-American internet: with an unstoppable coalition of activists, entrepreneurs and natsec hawks.

This has been a long time coming. Since the post-war settlement, the world has treated the US as a neutral platform, a trustworthy and stable maintainer of critical systems for global interchange, what the political scientists Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman call the "Underground Empire." But over the past 15 years, the US has systematically shattered global trust in its institutions, a process that only accelerated under Trump.

Take transoceanic fiber optic cables: the way the transoceanic fiber routes were planned, the majority of these cables make landfall on the coasts of the USA where the interconnections are handled. There's a good case for this hub-and-spoke network topology, especially compared to establishing direct links between every country. That's an Order(N^2) problem: directly linking each of the planet Earth's 205 countries to every other country would require 20,910 fiber links.

But putting all the world's telecoms eggs in America's basket only works if the US doesn't take advantage of its centrality, and while many people worried about what the US could do with the head-ends of the world's global fiber infra, it wasn't until Mark Klein's 2006 revelations about the NSA's nation-scale fiber optic taps in AT&T's network, and Ed Snowden's 2013 documents showing the global scale of this wiretapping, that the world had to confront the undeniable reality that the US could not be trusted to serve as the world's fiber hub.

It's not just fiber. The world does business in dollars. Most countries maintain dollar accounts at the Fed in New York as their major source of foreign reserves. But in 2005, American vulture capitalists bought up billions of dollars worth of Argentinian government bonds after the sovereign nation of Argentina had declared bankruptcy.

They convinced a judge in New York to turn over the government of Argentina's US assets to them to make good on loans that these debt collectors had not issued, but had bought up at pennies on the dollar. At that moment, every government in the world had to confront the reality that they could not trust the US Federal Reserve with their foreign reserves. But what else could they use?

Without a clear answer, dollar dominance continued, but then, under Biden, Putin-aligned oligarchs and Russian firms lost access to the SWIFT system for dollar clearing. This is when goods – like oil – are priced in dollars, so that buyers only need to find someone who will trade their own currency for dollars, which they can then swap for any commodity in the world.

Again, there's a sound case for dollar clearing: it's just not practical to establish deep, liquid pairwise trading market for all of the world's nearly 200 currencies, it's another O(N^2) problem.

But it only works if the dollar is a neutral platform. Once the dollar becomes an instrument of US foreign policy – whether or not you agree with that policy – it's no longer a neutral platform, and the world goes looking for an alternative.

No one knows what that alternative's going to be, just as no one knows what configuration the world's fiber links will end up taking. There's kilometers of fiber being stretched across the ocean floor, and countries are trying out some pretty improbable gambits as dollar alternatives, like Ethiopia revaluing its sovereign debt in Chinese renminbi. Without a clear alternative to America's enshittified platforms, the post-American century is off to a rocky start.

But there's one post-American system that's easy to imagine. The project to rip out all the cloud connected, backdoored, untrustworthy black boxes that power our institutions, our medical implants, our vehicles and our tractors; and replace it with collectively maintained, open, free, trustworthy, auditable code.

This project is the only one that benefits from economies of scale, rather than being paralyzed by exponential crises of scale. That's because any open, free tool adopted by any public institution – like the Eurostack services – can be audited, localized, pen-tested, debugged and improved by institutions in every other country.

It's a commons, more like a science than a technology, in that it is universal and international and collaborative. We don't have dueling western and Chinese principles of structural engineering. Rather, we have universal principles for making sure buildings don't fall down, adapted to local circumstances.

We wouldn't tolerate secrecy in the calculations used to keep our buildings upright, and we shouldn't tolerate opacity in the software that keeps our tractors, hearing aids, ventilators, pacemakers, trains, games consoles, phones, CCTVs, door locks, and government ministries working.

The thing is, software is not an asset, it's a liability. The capabilities that running software delivers – automation, production, analysis and administration – those are assets. But the software itself? That's a liability. Brittle, fragile, forever breaking down as the software upstream of it, downstream of it, and adjacent to it is updated or swapped out, revealing defects and deficiencies in systems that may have performed well for years.

Shifting software to commons-based production is a way to reduce the liability that software imposes on its makers and users, balancing out that liability among many players.

Now, obviously, tech bosses are totally clueless when it comes to this. They really do think that software is an asset. That's why they're so fucking horny to have chatbots shit out software at superhuman speeds. That's why they think it's good that they've got a chatbot that "produces a thousand times more code than a human programmer."

Producing code that isn't designed for legibility and maintainability, that is optimized, rather, for speed of production, is a way to incur tech debt at scale.

This is a neat encapsulation of the whole AI story: the chatbot can't do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with a chatbot that can't do your job.

Your boss is an easy mark for that chatbot hustler because your boss hates you. In their secret hearts, bosses understand that if they stopped coming to work, the business would run along just fine, but if the workers stopped showing up, the company would grind to a halt.

Bosses like to tell themselves that they're in the driver's seat, but really, they fear that they're strapped into the back seat playing with a Fisher Price steering wheel. For them, AI is a way to wire the toy steering wheel directly into the company's drive-train. It's the realization of the fantasy of a company without workers.

When I was walking the picket line in Hollywood during the writer's strike, a writer told me that you prompt an AI the same way a studio boss gives shitty notes to a writer's room: "Make me ET, but make it about a dog, and give it a love interest, and a car-chase in the third act."

Say that to a writer's room and they will call you a fucking idiot suit and tell you "Why don't you go back to your office and make a spreadsheet, you nitwit. The grownups here are writing a movie."

Meanwhile, if you give that prompt to a chatbot, it will cheerfully shit out a script exactly to spec. The fact that this script will be terrible and unusable is less important than the prospect of a working life in which no one calls you a fucking idiot suit.

AI dangles the promise of a writer's room without writers, a movie without actors, a hospital without nurses, a coding shop without coders.

When Mark Zuckerberg went on a podcast and announced that the average American had three friends, but wanted 15 friends, and that he could solve this by giving us chatbots instead of friends, we all dunked on him as an out-of-touch billionaire Martian who didn't understand the nature of friendship.

But the reality is that for Zuck, your friends are a problem. Your friends' interactions with you determine how much time you spend on his platforms, and thus how many revenue-generating ads he can show you.

Your friends stubbornly refuse to organize their relationship with you in a way that maximizes the return to his shareholders. So Zuck is over there in Menlo Park, furiously fantasizing about replacing your friends with chatbots, because that way, he can finally realize the dream of a social media service without any socializing.

Rich, powerful people are, at root, solipsists. The only way to amass a billion dollars is to inflict misery and privation on whole populations. The only way to look yourself in the mirror after you've done that, is to convince yourself that those people don't matter, that, in some important sense, they aren't real.

Think of Elon Musk calling everyone who disagrees with him an "NPC,” or all those "Effective Altruists," who claimed the moral high ground by claiming to care about 53 trillion imaginary artificial humans who will come into existence in 10,000 years at the expense of extending moral consideration to people alive today.

Or think of how Trump fired all the US government scientists, and then announced the "Genesis" program, declaring that the US would begin generating annual "moonshot"-scale breakthroughs, with a chatbot. It's science without scientists.

Chatbots can't really do science, but from Trump's perspective, they're still better than scientists, because a chatbot won't ever tell him not to stare at an eclipse, or not to inject bleach. A chatbot won't ever tell him that trans people exist, or that the climate emergency is real.

Powerful people are suckers for AI, because AI fuels the fantasy of a world without people: just a boss and a computer, and no ego-shattering confrontations with people who know how to do things telling you "no."

AI is a way to produce tech debt at scale, to replace skilled writers with defective spicy autocomplete systems, to lose money at a rate not seen in living memory.

Now, compare that with the project of building a post-American internet: a project to reduce tech debt, to unlock America's monopoly trillions and divide them among the world's entrepreneurs (for whom they represent untold profits), and the world's technology users (for whom they represent untold savings); all while building resiliency and sovereignty.

Now, some of you are probably feeling pretty cynical about this right now. After all, your political leaders have demonstrated decades of ineffectual and incompetent deference to the US, and an inability to act, even when the need was dire. If your leaders couldn't act decisively on the climate emergency, what hope do we have of them taking this moment seriously?

But crises precipitate change. Remember when another mad emperor – Vladimir Putin – invaded Ukraine, and Europe experienced a dire energy shortage? In three short years, the continent's solar uptake skyrocketed. The EU went from being 15 years behind in its energy transition, to ten years ahead of schedule.

Because when you're shivering in the dark, a lot of fights you didn't think were worth it are suddenly existential battles you can't afford to lose. Sure, no one wants to argue with a tedious neighbor who has an aesthetic temper tantrum at the thought of a solar panel hanging from their neighbor's balcony.

But when it's winter, and there's no Russian gas, and you're shivering in the dark, then that person can take their aesthetic objection to balcony solar, fold it until it's all corners, and shove it right up their ass.

Besides, we don't need Europe to lead the charge on a post-American internet by repealing anticircumvention. Any country could do it! And the country that gets there first gets to reap the profits from supplying jailbreaking tools to the rest of the world, it gets to be the Disenshittification Nation, and everyone else in the world gets to buy those tools and defend themselves from US tech companies' monetary and privacy plunder.

Just one country has to break the consensus, and the case for every country doing so is the strongest it's ever been. It used to be that countries that depended on USAID had to worry about losing food, medical and cash supports if they pissed off America. But Trump killed USAID, so now that's a dead letter.

Meanwhile, America's status as the planet's most voracious consumer has been gutted by decades of anti-worker, pro-billionaire policies. Today, the US is in the grips of its third consecutive "K-shaped" recovery, that's an economic rally where the rich get richer, and everyone else gets poorer. For a generation, America papered over that growing inequality with easy credit, with everyday Americans funding their consumption with credit cards and second and third mortgages.

So long as they could all afford to keep buying, other countries had to care about America as an export market. But a generation of extraction has left the bottom 90% of Americans struggling to buy groceries and other necessities, carrying crushing debt from skyrocketing shelter, education and medical expenses that they can't hope to pay down, thanks to 50 years of wage stagnation.

The Trump administration has sided firmly with debt collectors, price gougers, and rent extractors. Trump neutered enforcement against rent-fixing platforms like Realpage, restarted debt payments for eight million student borrowers, and killed a plan to make live-saving drugs a little cheaper, leaving Americans to continue to pay the highest drug prices in the world.

Every dollar spent servicing a loan is a dollar that can't go to consumption. And as more and more Americans slip into poverty, the US is gutting programs that spend money on the public's behalf, like SNAP, the food stamps program that helps an ever-larger slice of the American public stave off hunger.

America is chasing the "world without people" dream, where working people have nothing, spend nothing, and turn every penny over to rentiers who promptly flush that money into the stock market, shitcoins, or gambling sites. But I repeat myself.

Even the US military – long a sacrosanct institution – is being kneecapped to enrich rent-seekers. Congress just killed a military "right to repair" law. So now, US soldiers stationed abroad will have to continue the Pentagon's proud tradition of shipping materiel from generators to jeeps back to America to be fixed by their manufacturers at a 10,000% markup, because the Pentagon routinely signs maintenance contracts that prohibit it from teaching a Marine how to fix an engine.

The post-American world is really coming on fast. As we repeal our anticircumvention laws, we don't have to care what America thinks, we don't have to care about their tariffs, because they're already whacking us with tariffs; and because the only people left in the US who can afford to buy things are rich people, who just don't buy enough stuff. There's only so many Lambos and Sub-Zeros even the most guillotineable plute can usefully own.

But what if European firms want to go on taking advantage of anticircumvention laws? Well, there's good news there, too. "Good news," because the EU firms that rely on anticircumvention are engaged in the sleaziest, most disgusting frauds imaginable.

Anticircumvention law is the reason that Volkswagen could get away with Dieselgate. By imposing legal liability on reverse-engineers who might have discovered this lethal crime, Article 6 of the Copyright Directive created a chilling effect, and thousands of Europeans died, every year.

Today, Germany's storied automakers are carrying on the tradition of Dieselgate, sabotaging their cars to extract rent from drivers. From Mercedes, which rents you the accelerator pedal in your luxury car, only unlocking the full acceleration curve of your engine if you buy a monthly subscription; to BMW, which rents you the automated system that automatically dims your high-beams if there's oncoming traffic.

Legalize jailbreaking and any mechanic in Europe could unlock those subscription features for one price, and not share any of that money with BMW and Mercedes.

Then there's Medtronic, a company that pretends it is Irish. Medtronic is the world's largest med-tech company, having purchased all their competitors, and then undertaken the largest "tax-inversion" in history, selling themselves to a tiny Irish firm, in order to magick their profits into a state of untaxable grace, floating in the Irish Sea.

Medtronic supplies the world's most widely used ventilators, and it booby-traps them the same way John Deere booby-traps its tractors. After a hospital technician puts a new part in a Medtronic ventilator, the ventilator's central computing unit refuses to recognize the part until it completes a cryptographic handshake, proving that an authorized Medtronic technician was paid hundreds of euros to certify a repair that the hospital's own technician probably performed.

It's just a way to suck hundreds of euros out of hospitals every time a ventilator breaks. This would be bad enough, but during the covid lockdowns, when every ventilator was desperately needed, and when the planes stopped flying, there was no way for a Medtronic tech to come and bless the hospital technicians' repairs. This was lethal. It killed people.

There's one more European company that relies on anticircumvention that I want to discuss here, because they're old friends of CCC: that's the Polish train company Newag. Newag sabotages its own locomotives, booby-trapping them so that if they sense they have been taken to a rival's service yard, the train bricks itself. When the train operator calls Newag about this mysterious problem, the company "helpfully" remotes into the locomotive's computers, to perform "diagnostics," which is just sending a unbricking command to the vehicle, a service for which they charge 20,000 euros.

Last year, Polish hackers from the security research firm Dragon Sector presented on their research into this disgusting racket in this very hall, and now, they're being sued by Newag under anticircumvention law, for making absolutely true disclosures about Newag's deliberately defective products.

So these are the European stakeholders for anticircumvention law: the Dieselgate killers, the car companies who want to rent you your high-beams and accelerator, the med-tech giant that bricked all the ventilators during the pandemic, and the company that tied Poland to the train-tracks.

I relish the opportunity to fight these bastards in Brussels, as they show up and cry "Won't someone think of the train saboteurs?"

The enshittification of technology – the decay of the platforms and systems we rely on – has many causes: the collapse of competition, regulatory capture, the smashing of tech workers' power. But most of all, enshittification is the result of anticircumvention law's ban on interoperability.

By blocking interop, by declaring war on the general-purpose computer, our policy-makers created an enshittogenic environment that rewarded companies for being shitty, and ushered in the enshittocene, in which everything is turning to shit.

Let's call time on enshittification. Let's seize the means of computation. Let's build the drop-in, free, open, auditable alternatives to the services and firmware we rely on.

Let's end the era of silos. I mean, isn't it fucking weird how you have to care which network someone is using if you want to talk to them? Instead of just deciding who you want to talk to?

The fact that you have to figure out whether the discussion you're trying to join is on Twitter or Bluesky, Mastodon or Instagram – that is just the most Prodigy/AOL/Compuserve-ass way of running a digital world. I mean, 1990 called and they want their walled gardens back

Powerful allies are joining our side in the War on General Purpose Computation. It's not just people like us, who've been fighting for this whole goddamned century, but also countries that want to convert American tech's hoarded trillions into fuel for a single-use rocket that boosts their own tech sector into a stable orbit.

It's national security hawks who are worried about Trump bricking their ministries or their tractors, and who are also worried – with just cause – about Xi Jinping bricking all their solar inverters and batteries. Because, after all, the post-American internet is also a post-Chinese internet!

Nothing should be designed to be field updatable without the user's permission. Nothing critical should be a black box.

Like I said at the start of this talk, I have been doing this work for 24 years at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, throwing myself at a door that was double-locked and deadbolted, and now that door is open a crack and goddammit, I am hopeful.

Not optimistic. Fuck optimism! Optimism is the idea that things will get better no matter what we do. I know that what we do matters. Hope is the belief that if we can improve things, even in small ways, we can ascend the gradient toward the world we want, and attain higher vantage points from which new courses of action, invisible to us here at our lower elevation, will be revealed.

Hope is a discipline. It requires that you not give in to despair. So I'm here to tell you: don't despair.

All this decade, all over the world, countries have taken up arms against concentrated corporate power. We've had big, muscular antitrust attacks on big corporations in the US (under Trump I and Biden); in Canada; in the UK; in the EU and member states like Germany, France and Spain; in Australia; in Japan and South Korea and Singapore; in Brazil; and in China.

This is a near-miraculous turn of affairs. All over the world, governments are declaring war on monopolies, the source of billionaires' wealth and power.

Even the most forceful wind is invisible. We can only see it by its effects. What we're seeing here is that whenever a politician bent on curbing corporate power unfurls a sail, no matter where in the world that politician is, that sail fills with wind and propels the policy in ways that haven't been seen in generations.

The long becalming of the fight over corporate power has ended, and a fierce, unstoppable wind is blowing. It's not just blowing in Europe, or in Canada, or in South Korea, Japan, China, Australia or Brazil. It's blowing in America, too. Never forget that as screwed up and terrifying as things are in America, the country has experienced, and continues to experience, a tsunami of antitrust bills and enforcement actions at the local, state and federal level.

And never forget that the post-American internet will be good for Americans. Because, in a K-shaped, bifurcated, unequal America, the trillions that American companies loot from the world don't trickle down to Americans. The average American holds a portfolio of assets that rounds to zero, and that includes stock in US tech companies.

The average American isn't a shareholder in Big Tech, the average American is a victim of Big Tech. Liberating the world from US Big Tech is also liberating America from US Big Tech.

That's been EFF's mission for 35 years. It's been my mission at EFF for 25 years. If you want to get involved in this fight – and I hope you do – it can be your mission, too. You can join EFF, and you can join groups in your own country, like Netzpolitik here in Germany, or the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, or La Quadrature du Net in France, or the Open Rights Group in the UK, or EF Finland, or ISOC Bulgaria, XNet, DFRI, Quintessenz, Bits of Freedom, Openmedia, FSFE, or any of dozens of organizations around the world.

The door is open a crack, the wind is blowing, the post-American internet is upon us: a new, good internet that delivers all the technological self-determination of the old, good internet, and the ease of use of Web 2.0 so that our normie friends can use it, too.

And I can't wait for all of us to get to hang out there. It's gonna be great.

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 Online sf mag Infinite Matrix goes out with a bang – new Gibson, Rucker, Kelly https://web.archive.org/web/20060101120510/https://www.infinitematrix.net/

#20yrsago Wil McCarthy’s wonderful “Hacking Matter” as a free download https://web.archive.org/web/20060103052051/http://wilmccarthy.com/hm.htm

#15yrsago Papa Sangre: binaural video game with no video https://web.archive.org/web/20101224170833/http://www.papasangre.com/

#15yrsago DDoS versus human rights organizations https://cyber.harvard.edu/publications/2010/DDoS_Independent_Media_Human_Rights

#15yrsago Why I have a public email address https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/dec/21/keeping-email-address-secret-spambots

#15yrsago How the FCC failed the nation on Net Neutrality https://web.archive.org/web/20101224075655/https://www.salon.com/technology/network_neutrality/index.html?story=/tech/dan_gillmor/2010/12/21/fcc_network_neutrality

#15yrsago Bankster robberies: Bank of America and friends wrongfully foreclose on customers, steal all their belongings https://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/22/business/22lockout.html?_r=1&hp

#10yrsago India’s deadly exam-rigging scandal: murder, corruption, suicide and scapegoats https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/17/the-mystery-of-indias-deadly-exam-scam

#10yrsago Copyright infringement “gang” raided by UK cops: 3 harmless middle-aged karaoke fans https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/12/uk-police-busts-karaoke-gang-for-sharing-songs-that-arent-commercially-available/

#10yrsago IETF approves HTTP error code 451 for Internet censorship https://web.archive.org/web/20151222155906/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-http-451-error-code-for-censorship-is-now-an-internet-standard

#10yrsago Billionaire Sheldon Adelson secretly bought newspaper, ordered all hands to investigate judges he hated https://web.archive.org/web/20151220081546/http://www.reviewjournal.com/news/las-vegas/judge-adelson-lawsuit-subject-unusual-scrutiny-amid-review-journal-sale

#10yrsago Tax havens hold $7.6 trillion; 8% of world’s total wealth https://web.archive.org/web/20160103142942/https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/01/14/parking-the-big-money/

#10yrsago Mansplaining Lolita https://lithub.com/men-explain-lolita-to-me/

#10yrsago Lifelock admits it lied in its ads (again), agrees to $100M fine https://web.archive.org/web/20151218000258/https://consumerist.com/2015/12/17/identity-theft-company-lifelock-once-again-failed-to-actually-keep-identities-protected-must-pay-100m/

#10yrsago Uninsured driver plows through gamer’s living-room wall and creams him mid-Fallout 4 https://www.gofundme.com/f/helpforbenzo

#10yrsago Juniper Networks backdoor confirmed, password revealed, NSA suspected https://www.wired.com/2015/12/juniper-networks-hidden-backdoors-show-the-risk-of-government-backdoors/

#10yrsago A survivalist on why you shouldn’t bug out https://waldenlabs.com/10-reasons-not-to-bug-out/

#1yrago Nurses whose shitty boss is a shitty app https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point

#1yrago Proud to be a blockhead https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/21/blockheads-r-us/#vocational-awe

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

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18.12.2025 à 15:40

Pluralistic: A perfect distillation of the social uselessness of finance (18 Dec 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3071 mots)


Today's links


The Earth from space. Standing astride it is the Wall Street 'Charging Bull.' The bull has glowing red eyes. It is haloed in a starbust of red radiating light.

A perfect distillation of the social uselessness of finance (permalink)

I'm about to sign off for the year – actually, I was ready to do it yesterday, but then I happened upon a brief piece of writing that was so perfect that I decided I'd do one more edition of Pluralistic for 2025.

The piece in question is John Lanchester's "For Every Winner A Loser," in the London Review of Books, in which Lanchester reviews two books about the finance sector: Gary Stevenson's The Trading Game and Rob Copeland's The Fund:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n17/john-lanchester/for-every-winner-a-loser

It's a long and fascinating piece and it's certainly left me wanting to read both books, but that's not what convinced me to do one more newsletter before going on break – rather, it was a brief passage in the essay's preamble, a passage that perfectly captures the total social uselessness of the finance sector as a whole.

Lanchester starts by stating that while we think of the role of the finance sector as "capital allocation" – that is, using investors' money to fund new businesses and expansions for existing business – that hasn't been important to finance for quite some time. Today, only 3% of bank activity consists of "lending to firms and individuals engaged in the production of goods and services."

The other 97% of finance is gambling. Here's how Stevenson breaks it down: say your farm grows mangoes. You need money before the mangoes are harvested, so you sell the future ownership of the harvest to a broker at $1/crate.

The broker immediately flips that interest in your harvest to a dealer who believes (on the basis of a rumor about bad weather) that mangoes will be scarce this year and is willing to pay $1.10/crate. Next, an international speculator (trading on the same rumor) buys the rights from the broker at $1.20/crate.

Now come the side bets: a "momentum trader" (who specializing in bets on market trends continuing) buys the rights to your crop for $1.30/crate. A contrarian trader (who bets against momentum traders) short-sells the momentum trader's bet at $1.20. More short sellers pile in and drive the price down to $1/crate.

Now, a new rumor circulates, about conditions being ripe for a bounteous mango harvest, so more short-sellers appear, and push the price to $0.90/crate. This tempts the original broker back in, and he buys your crop back at $1/crate.

That's when the harvest comes. You bring in the mangoes. They go to market, and fetch $1.10/crate.

This is finance – a welter of transactions, only one of which (selling your mangoes to people who eat them) involves the real economy. Everything else is "speculation on the movement of prices." The nine transactions that took place between your planting the crop and someone eating the mangoes are all zero sum – every trade has an evenly matched winner and loser, and when you sum them all up, they come out to zero. In other words, no value was created.

This is the finance sector. In a world where the real economy generates $105 trillion/year, the financial derivatives market adds up to $667 trillion/year. This is "the biggest business in the world" – and it's useless. It produces nothing. It adds no value.

If you work a job where you do something useful, you are on the losing side of this economy. All the real money is in this socially useless, no-value-creating, hypertrophied, metastasized finance sector. Every gain in finance is matched by a loss. It all amounts to – literally – nothing.

So that's what tempted me into one more blog post for the year – an absolutely perfect distillation of the uselessness of "the biggest business in the world," whose masters are the degenerate gamblers who buy and sell our politicians, set our policy, and control our lives. They're the ones enshittifying the internet, burning down the planet, and pushing Elon Musk towards trillionairedom.

It's their world, and we just live on it.

For now.

(Image: Sam Valadi, 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)

#15yrsago Star Wars droidflake https://twitpic.com/3guwfq

#15yrsago TSA misses enormous, loaded .40 calibre handgun in carry-on bag https://web.archive.org/web/20101217223617/https://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=news/local&id=7848683

#15yrsago Brazilian TV clown elected to high office, passes literacy test https://web.archive.org/web/20111217233812/https://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jmbXSjCjZBZ4z8VUcAZFCyY_n6dA?docId=CNG.b7f4655178d3435c9a54db2e30817efb.381

#15yrsago My Internet problem: an abundance of choice https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/dec/17/internet-problem-choice-self-publishing

#10yrsago LEAKED: The secret catalog American law enforcement orders cellphone-spying gear from https://theintercept.com/2015/12/16/a-secret-catalogue-of-government-gear-for-spying-on-your-cellphone/#10yrsago

#10yrsago Putin: Give Sepp Blatter the Nobel; Trump should be president https://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/dec/17/sepp-blatter-fifa-putin-nobel-peace-prize

#10yrsago Star Wars medical merch from Scarfolk, the horror-town stuck in the 1970s https://scarfolk.blogspot.com/2015/12/unreleased-star-wars-merchandise.html

#10yrsago Some countries learned from America’s copyright mistakes: TPP will undo that https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/12/how-tpp-perpetuates-mistakes-dmca

#10yrsago No evidence that San Bernardino shooters posted about jihad on Facebook https://web.archive.org/web/20151217003406/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/12/16/fbi-san-bernardino-attackers-didnt-show-public-support-for-jihad-on-social-media/

#10yrsago Exponential population growth and other unkillable science myths https://web.archive.org/web/20151217205215/http://www.nature.com/news/the-science-myths-that-will-not-die-1.19022

#10yrsago UK’s unaccountable crowdsourced blacklist to be crosslinked to facial recognition system https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/12/pre-crime-arrives-in-the-uk-better-make-sure-your-face-stays-off-the-crowdsourced-watch-list/

#1yrago Happy Public Domain Day 2025 to all who celebrate https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/17/dastar-dly-deeds/#roast-in-piss-sonny-bono

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: John Naughton (https://memex.naughtons.org/).

Currently writing:

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

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