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PLURALISTIC

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25.11.2025 à 17:19

Pluralistic: Google steers Americans looking for health care into "junk insurance" (25 Nov 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4012 mots)


Today's links


An old time hospital ward. In the foreground are a pair of stretcher bearers with a patient. The bearers' heads have been replaced with the poop emoji from the cover of 'Enshittification.' The emoji has been tinted in Google's logo colors. The head of the patient has been replaced with the grinning visage of a 1910s newsie.

Google steers Americans looking for health care into "junk insurance" (permalink)

Being "the enshittification guy" means that people expect you to weigh in on every service or platform that has been deliberately worsened to turn a buck. It's an impossible task (and a boring one besides). There's too much of this shit, and it's all so mid – a real "banality of enshittification" situation.

So these days, I really only take note of fractally enshittified things, exponentially enshittified things, omnienshittified things. Things like the fact that Google is sending people searching for health care plans to "junk insurance" that take your money and then pretty much just let you die:

https://pluralistic.net/junk-insurance

"Junk insurance" is a health insurance plan that is designed as a short-term plan that you might use for a couple of days or a week or two, say, if you experience a gap in coverage as you move between two jobs. These plans can exclude coverage for pre-existing conditions and typically exclude niceties like emergency room visits and hospitalization:

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Broader-View_July_2020.pdf

Crucially, these plans do not comply with the Affordable Care Act, which requires comprehensive coverage, and bans exclusions for pre-existing conditions. These plans only exist because of loopholes in the ACA, designed for very small-scale employers or temporary coverage.

The one thing junk insurance does not skimp on is sales and marketing. These plans outbid the rest of the market when it comes to buying Google search ads, meaning that anyone who uses Google to research health insurance will be inundated with ads for these shitty plans. The plans also spend a fortune on "search engine optimization" – basically, gaming the Google algorithm – so that the non-ad Google results for health insurance are also saturated with these garbage plans.

The plans also staff up boiler-rooms full of silver-tongued high-pressure sales staff who pick up on the first ring and hard-sell you on their plans, deliberately misleading you into locking into their garbage plans.

That's right, locking in. While Obamacare is nominally a "market based" healthcare system (because Medicare For All would be communism), you are only allowed to change vendors twice per year, during "open enrollment," these narrow biannual windows in which you get to "vote with your wallet" against a plan that has screwed you over and/or endangered your life.

Which means that if a fast-talking salesdroid from a junk insurance company can trick you into signing up for a garbage plan that will leave you bankrupt and/or dead if you have a major health crisis, you are stuck for at least six months in that trap, and won't escape without first handing over thousands of dollars to that scumbag's boss.

Amazingly enough, these aren't even the worst kinds of garbage health plans that you can buy in America: those would be the religious "health share" programs that sleazy evangelical "entrepreneurs" suck their co-religionists into, which cost the world and leave you high and dry when you or your kids get hurt or sick:

https://armandalegshow.com/episode/is-it-ever-appropriate-to-fudge-a-little/

The fact that there are multiple kinds of scam health insurance in America, in which companies are legally permitted to take your money and then deny you care (even more than the "non-scam" insurance plans do) shows you the problem with turning health into a market. "Caveat emptor" may make sense when you're buying a used blender at a yard-sale. Apply it to the system that's supposed to take care of you if you're diagnosed with cancer, hit by a bus, or develop eclampsia, and it's a literally fatal system.

This is just one of the ways in which the uniparty is so terrible for Americans. The Republicans want to swap out shitty regulated for-profit health insurance with disastrous unregulated for-profit health insurance, and then give you a couple thousand bucks to yolo on a plan that seems OK to you:

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/24/republicans-push-obamacare-tax-credit-alternatives-as-deadline-looms.html

This is like letting Fanduel run your country's health system: everyday people are expected to place fifty-way parlay bets on their health, juggling exclusions, co-pays, deductibles, and network coverage in their head. Bet wrong, and you go bankrupt (if you're lucky), or just die (if you're not).

Democrats, meanwhile, want to maintain the (garbage) status quo (because Medicare for All is communism), and they'll shut down the government to make it clear that they want this. But then they'll capitulate, because they want it, but not that badly.

But like I say, America is an Enshittification Nation, and I don't have time or interest for cataloging mere unienshittificatory aspects of life here. To preserve my sanity and discretionary time, I must limit myself to documenting the omnienshittificatory scams that threaten us from every angle at once.

Which brings me back to Google. Without Google, these junk insurance scams would be confined to the margins. They'd have to resort to pyramid selling, or hand-lettered roadside signs, or undisclosed paid plugs in religious/far-right newsletters.

But because Google has utterly succumbed to enshittification, and because Google has an illegal monopoly – a 90% market share – that it maintains by bribing competitors like Apple to stay out of the search market, junk insurance scams can make bank – and ruin Americans' lives wholesale – by either tricking or paying Google to push junk insurance on unsuspecting searchers.

This isn't merely a case of Google losing the SEO and spam wars to shady operators. As we learned in last year's antitrust case (where Google was convicted of operating an illegal search monopoly), Google deliberately worsened its search results, in order to force you to search multiple times (and see multiple screens full of ads) as a way to goose search revenue:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Google didn't just lose that one antitrust case, either. It lost three cases, as three federal judges determined that Google secured and maintains an illegal monopoly that allows it to control the single most important funnel for knowledge and truth for the majority of people on Earth. The company whose mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," now serves slop, ads, spam and scams because its customers have nowhere to go, so why bother spending money making search good (especially when there's money to be made from bad search results)?

Google isn't just too big to fail, it's also too big to jail. One of the judges who found Google guilty of maintaining an illegal monopoly decided not to punish them for it, and to allow them to continue bribing Apple to stay out of the search market, because (I'm not making this up), without that $20b+ annual bribe, Apple might not be able to afford to make cool new iPhone features:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/03/unpunishing-process/#fucking-shit-goddammit-fuck

Once a company is too big to fail and too big to jail, it becomes too big to care. Google could prevent slop, spam and scams from overrunning its results (and putting its users lives and fortunes at risk), it just chooses not to:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

Google is the internet's absentee landlord. Anyone who can make a buck by scamming you can either pay Google to help, or trick Google into helping, or – as is the case with junk insurance – both:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/15/inhuman-gigapede/#coprophagic-ai

America has the world's stupidest health care system, an industry that has grown wildly profitable by charging Americans the highest rates in the rich world, while delivering the worst health outcomes in the rich world, while slashing health workers' pay and eroding their working conditions.

It's omnienshittified, a partnership between the enshittified search giant and the shittiest parts of the totally enshittified health industry.

It's also a reminder of what we stand to gain when we finally smash Google and break it up: disciplining our search industry will make it competitive, regulatable, and force it to side with the public against all kinds of scammers. Junk insurance should be banned, but even if we just end the junk insurance industry's ability to pay the world's only major search engine to help it kill us, that would be a huge step forward.

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 Solar utility pole: streetlight, WiFi, CCTV and charger https://web.archive.org/web/20060508050552/http://www.starsightproject.com/en/africa/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=12&Itemid=52

#20yrsago Sony rootkit recall makes The Onion https://web.archive.org/web/20051126015022/http://www.theonion.com/content/node/42988

#15yrsago Menstruating woman subjected to TSA grope because panty-liner obscured her vulva on pornoscanner https://blog.gladrags.com/2010/11/24/tsa-groin-searches-menstruating-woman/

#15yrsago Set to Sea: moving and beautiful graphic novel about a poet who becomes an involuntary sailor https://memex.craphound.com/2010/11/24/set-to-sea-moving-and-beautiful-graphic-novel-about-a-poet-who-becomes-an-involuntary-sailor/

#10yrsago Cultural appropriation? Hindu nationalists used yoga as an anti-colonialist export https://web.archive.org/web/20151124030935/http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2015/11/university_canceled_yoga_class_no_it_s_not_cultural_appropriation_to_practice.html

#10yrsago Leaked recording: pollution lobbyists discuss exploiting Syrian refugee crisis https://theintercept.com/2015/11/24/lobbyists-refugee-crisis/

#10yrsago Dell apologizes for preinstalling bogus root-certificate on computers https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/11/dell-apologizes-for-https-certificate-fiasco-provides-removal-tool/

#10yrsago Veronica Belmont on being overtaken by a meme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTThblbbnkM

#10yrsago J Edgar Hoover was angry that the Boy Scouts didn’t thank him effusively enough https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/nov/24/j-edgar-hoover-insults/

#10yrsago WTO rules against US dolphin-safe tuna labels because they’re unfair to Mexican fisheries https://theintercept.com/2015/11/24/wto-ruling-on-dolphin-safe-tuna-labeling-illustrates-supremacy-of-trade-agreements/

#10yrsago Shamrock shake: Pfizer’s Irish “unpatriotic loophole” ducks US taxes https://arstechnica.com/science/2015/11/with-160-billion-merger-pfizer-moves-to-ireland-and-dodges-taxes/

#5yrsago Talking interop on EFF's podcast https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/24/zawinskiian-carcination/#comcom

#5yrsago Cheap Chinese routers riddled with backdoors https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/24/zawinskiian-carcination/#jetstream

#5yrsago Emailifaction is digital carcinization https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/24/zawinskiian-carcination/#carcinization

#5yrsago Saudi Aramco is gushing debt https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/24/zawinskiian-carcination/#gusher

#5yrsago Sci-Fi Genre https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/24/zawinskiian-carcination/#asl

#1yrago The far right grows through "disaster fantasies" https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/24/mall-ninja-prophecy/#mano-a-mano

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, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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

24.11.2025 à 15:41

Pluralistic: Cooking in Maximum Security (24 Nov 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3078 mots)


Today's links


The cover of Half Letter Press's edition of 'Cooking in Maximum Security,' featuring a line-art drawing of a moka coffee pot.

Cooking in Maximum Security (permalink)

Cooking in Maximum Security is a slim volume of prisoners' recipes and improvised cooking equipment, a testament to the ingenuity of a network of prisoners in Italy's maximum security prisons:

https://halfletterpress.com/cooking-in-maximum-security/

Cooking in Maximum Security has a new English translation from Half Letter Press, who also publish the classic Prisoners' Inventions, which is one of my favorite books of all time, a collection of keenly observed, beautifully drawn material improvisations from America's prisons:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/09/king-rat/#mother-of-invention

Prison cookbooks are a genre unto themselves, with "underground" classics like Jailhouse Cookbook:

http://jailhousecookbook.com/

And slick coffee-table books like Prison Ramen:

https://www.eater.com/23900359/gastropod-instant-ramen-prison-ramen-recipes-stories-maruchan-cup-noodle

But Cooking in Maximum Security drills down much deeper on the method than those other books, elevating the makerish improvisation of the chefs whose work it reproduces. They explain how to make an oven out of a wooden stool lined with cigarette foil and draped with heavy blankets, into which a small gas burner is introduced:

https://www.cookinginmaximumsecurity.com/tools/

Or how to turn a toothbrush handle and the razor blade from a pencil-sharpener into an all-purpose paring knife:

https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-l4sjfhdy/images/stencil/2048×2048/products/771/3042/CookinginMax4__83959.1762438870.jpg?c=2

These field-expedient gadget improvisations are incredibly satisfying. They have the vibe of a good episode of Scrapheap Challenge, or the high-stakes duct-tape ingenuity of Apollo 13. And while these recipes and build notes were collected in the 2010s, the pencil/charcoal illustrations have a classic 1970s feel, like the illustrations out of the Moosewood Cookbook or The Joy of Sex. If you love the kind of clever repurposings that filled the pages of Make magazine, you'll love this.

Plus, the food sounds incredible. Mouth-watering. Fresh bread whose dough was warmed and risen by setting it atop the heat-radiating surface of a CRT television!

One thing that sets Cooking in Maximum Security apart from other prison cookbooks is the unique character of Italian maximum security prisons, in which visitors are allowed to bring a fairly large variety of goods to inmates, and where the commissary is stocked with an incredible variety of basic ingredients, including things like goat and beef livers (the book reproduces an entire commissary menu, with prices, as an appendix). Prisoners have access to beer and wine, and find endless uses for old beer cans. The book also drops in casual clues about life in an Italian prison, for example, when it suggests getting your wooden stirrer by taking down a crucifix and using that.

Cooking in Maximum Security arose out of a project called "MoCa" (a play on the essential moka coffee maker that is the most versatile and widely used tool in this book). Prisoners met with, and corresponded with, outside helpers who put together the entire volume. One collaborator, Mario, died shortly after sending a long letter (reproduced in an appendix) from solitary confinement, and this letter, along with other notes interspersed through the recipes, give a brilliant anthropological account of life in Italian maximum security prisons.

The MoCa project isn't done – they've embarked on "Phase II," which will collect recipes from Spanish prisoners.

It's a remarkable book, and an essential companion to Prisoner's Inventions.

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 Sony rootkit hurts artists https://web.archive.org/web/20051125121608/http://businessweek.com/technology/content/nov2005/tc20051122_343542.htm

#20yrsago Anti-game lawyer loses right to practice law in Alabama https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2005/11/5613-2/

#20yrsago Tech business niches begging to be filled https://techcrunch.com/2005/11/21/companies-id-like-to-profile-but-dont-exist/

#20yrsago Giving EU air-passenger data to US DHS is illegal https://www.rte.ie/news/2005/1122/70024-eu/

#15yrsago What John Pistole means when he talks about “enhanced” TSA checkpoints https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wrDzMD_BC8

#15yrsago Rock-Paper-Scissors-Lizard-Spock explained in 32 seconds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJKHFPBwDRA

#15yrsago TSA looks at Adam Savage’s junk, misses his two 12″ razor blades https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3yaqq9Jjb4

#10yrsago What’s inside a “Hello Barbie” surveillance toy? https://www.somersetrecon.com/blog/2015/11/20/hello-barbie-security-part-1-teardown

#10yrsago J Edgar Hoover loved Efrem Zimbalist’s “FBI” https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/nov/23/efrem-zimbalist-fbi-file/

#10yrsago Blankets: New edition of Craig Thompson’s graphic masterpiece https://memex.craphound.com/2015/11/23/blankets-new-edition-of-craig-thompsons-graphic-masterpiece/

#10yrsago Randall Munroe does a Q&A with stick-figure comics https://time.com/4116921/randall-munroe-draws-his-own-conclusions/

#10yrsago On the grotesque obsession with accomplished women’s fertility https://harpers.org/archive/2015/10/the-mother-of-all-questions/?single=1

#10yrsago How browser extensions steal logins & browsing habits; conduct corporate espionage https://labs.detectify.com/security-guidance/chrome-extensions-google-is-tracking-you/

#10yrsago Activist tricked into 6-year relationship with undercover cop tells her story https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/nov/20/lisa-jones-girlfriend-of-undercover-police-office-mark-kennedy-interview

#5yrsago An Especially Cursed House https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/22/especially-cursed/#mcmansion-hell

#5yrsago Guatemala's guillotines https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/23/opsec-and-personal-security/#guillotines

#5yrsago The power of procurements https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/23/opsec-and-personal-security/#procurements

#5yrsago Labor and large firms https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/23/opsec-and-personal-security/#monopsony

#5yrsago A textbook grift https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/23/opsec-and-personal-security/#racket

#5yrsago Australian predictive policing tool for kids https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/23/opsec-and-personal-security/#phrenology

#5yrsago Opsec and personal security https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/23/opsec-and-personal-security/#asl

#1yrago Reverse engineers bust sleazy gig work platform https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/23/hack-the-class-war/#robo-boss

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, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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

22.11.2025 à 20:08

Pluralistic: Boss preppers (22 Nov 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3822 mots)


Today's links


A forest bunker, set into the hillside; it has been covered with a gold texture. Before it, crouched in the leaf-litter, is a figure in fatigues aiming a gigantic rifle. The figure the head of a millionaire from a Gilded Age editorial cartoon, wearing Oakley tactical glasses. The gun has also been gilded.

Boss preppers (permalink)

Sometimes, you learn a fact that makes everything else make sense – one of those keystone insights that puts a whole phenomenon into perspective. For example, the fact that preppers are engaged in a very specific type of wish-fulfillment.

I learned this during the first part of the pandemic lockdowns, when preppers were very much in our collective consciousness. On the Media featured an interview between Micah Loewinger and Richard Mitchell, author of Dancing at Armageddon: Survivalism and Chaos in Modern Times which features ethnographic studies of preppers:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/22/preppers-are-larpers/#preppers-unprepared

Mitchell described how preppers make ready for specific forms of societal collapse, based not on the likelihood of the event itself, but rather, based on how useful they would be in that situation. For example, a water chemist has made extensive preparations for an event in which terrorists poison the water-supply. When pressed, he couldn't explain why terrorists would choose his town to target with an attack like this, but basically thought it would be really cool if the only person who could save his town was him.

This is the "disaster fantasy" that propels the prepper movement, in which a functional, high-tech world of wicked, systemic problems is replaced with a fallen, low-tech society where the problems are all simple. A world of simple problems is a world of individual actors, where every struggle is just about what one person can make someone else do, or offer to someone else. It's a perfect world if you've been raised on Thatcher's neoliberal doctrine that "there is no such thing as society," only to find yourself in a society in which you can only make real change by participating in collective efforts:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/24/mall-ninja-prophecy/#mano-a-mano

All this raises the question of what rich preppers are prepping for. If your contribution to society consists of "allocating capital" and/or giving people orders, what, exactly, is the disaster that fulfills your fantasy of a world where your unique skills are the only thing that can save us all? What kind of a disaster needs a boss?

In Douglas Rushkoff's 2022 book Survival of the Richest, he describes a surreal "futurism" consulting gig in which a bunch of wealthy investor types asked him to help them figure out how to keep their mercenaries in line after "The Event" (the end of the world):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

These guys had the idea that what a fallen civilization needed was bosses, you see, but they were self-aware enough to recognize that the people who survived the apocalypse might not recognize their unique genius and simply fall into line. In order to assert their natural role as leaders after the shit hit the fan, these guys would need an army of heavily armed mercenaries. But again, these guys were self-aware enough to recognize that the mercenaries might also fail to recognize their unique fitness to rule and opt instead to slaughter them and raid their hoarded food, ammo and medical supplies.

So they wanted Rushkoff's advice – should they fit the mercs with bomb-collars that were on a dead-man's switch that would go off if the boss croaked? This was such a weird and revealing moment that Rushkoff got a whole book out of exploring the desire of the wealthy to both secede from the rest of us, and keep us all in line.

I was inspired by this and other experiences with people fantasizing about the world's end to take a run at rewriting Edgar Allan Poe's "Masque of the Red Death" as a story about investor/ubermenschen in a luxury bunker at the end of the world (spoiler: it doesn't go well for them):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/14/masque-of-the-red-death/#masque

All of this has been very much on my mind lately because I've been reading Quinn Slobodian's amazing Hayek's Bastards, a closely researched history of the merger of the neoliberal wing of the conservative movement with its white nationalist faction, producing a conservativism obsessed with "hard borders, hard-wired human difference, and hard money":

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/472194/hayeks-bastards-by-slobodian-quinn/9780241774984

It's a revelatory history, one that argues convincingly that the brooding, violent racism of MAGA isn't so much a break with "Romney conservativism" of the "respectable" Republican Party as it is the attainment of the goals of the party's longstanding dominant tendency.

"Hard-wired human differences" refers to the "scientific racism" that the likes of Elon Musk push, the junk science that insists that there is such a thing as a "race," that IQ measures something important and immutable, and that different "races" have different IQs, which is why some "races" do well, while others do poorly:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/16/combat-wheelchairs/#race-realism

"Hard-wired human difference" militates for "hard borders," since the teeming billions of racially inferior people in other countries would – given half a chance – come to the "good" countries and turn them into "shithole countries." This is the nonsense that Musk is peddling when he compares Britons to "hobbits" and warns that they're about to be overrun by people who will "start raping the kids":

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/elon-musk-compares-brits-to-hobbits-amid-shock-immigration-claim_uk_69089785e4b0c4a0f509d6f5?origin=home-latest-unit

But because the soft-headed, soft-hearted hobbits keep electing leaders who don't understand this, they'll get "overrun" by the bad "races," who demand welfare handouts, which the state can't afford, triggering "money printing" and Musk's other obsession, national debts:

https://fortune.com/2025/07/01/trump-spending-bill-pain-points-critics-elon-musk-medicaid-national-debt-clean-energy/

(Which is to say, Musk's understanding of money is just as wrongheaded as his understanding of genomics):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/10/compton-cowboys/#the-deficit-myth

In the disaster fantasy, the failure of hard borders leads to the inevitable consequences of hard-wired human differences, which means that we need "hard money" – gold. The modern right is a linear descendant of the goldbug movement, composed of grifters who made fortunes terrifying racists into buying gold as a hedge against the day when the collapse of the welfare state leads to race war and the dollar's vaporization:

https://mises.org/library/book/gold-peace-and-prosperity?d7_alias_migrate=1

For goldbugs, the coming collapse seems to be one that will demand coin collectors. In Hayek's Bastards, Slobodian quotes all these goldbug preppers furiously dreaming of a day when a single gold coin will let them buy a whole city block in Manhattan. Somehow, they've conceived of disaster scenario where the most needful of all things is a ductile metal with a few marginal uses in electronics.

It's a very weird kind of disaster fantasy. One can only assume that the guys figuring out how to assemble an army of bomb-collared mercs will just stroll over to these goldbugs' lesser bunkers and take their precious coins.

The modern goldbug is, of course, a crypto weirdo, and man is that a weird thing to be a prepper about. It will be a very odd apocalypse indeed that takes down all of modern civilization except for blockchains.

(Image: Morten Jensen, CC BY 2.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Sony insider: DRM is discredited at Sony https://memex.craphound.com/2005/11/20/sony-insider-drm-is-discredited-at-sony/

#20yrsago Microsoft: Trusted Computing sucks! https://web.archive.org/web/20060821002450/http://news.com.com/Who+has+the+right+to+control+your+PC/2100-1029_3-5961609.html

#20yrsago EFF brings class-action against Sony! https://web.archive.org/web/20051125183030/https://www.eff.org/news/archives/2005_11.php#004192

#20yrsago Texas sues Sony over rootkits — YEE-HAW! https://web.archive.org/web/20060204212201/https://www.oag.state.tx.us/oagNews/release.php?id=1266

#20yrsago 1,000 sqft secret chamber discovered in Indian National Library https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/secret-chamber-in-national-library/articleshow/6957358.cms

#15yrsago Who owns your mortgage, the mind-croggling flowchart edition https://web.archive.org/web/20101118032158/https://www.zerohedge.com/article/just-when-you-thought-you-knew-something-about-mortgage-securitizations

#15yrsago When did you choose to be straight? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJtjqLUHYoY

#15yrsago Dear airlines: goodbye https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/11/dear-airline-im-leaving-you/66750/

#15yrsago How TSA screeners feel about junk-touching https://web.archive.org/web/20140928131617/https://flyingwithfish.boardingarea.com/2010/11/18/tsa-enhanced-pat-downs-the-screeners-point-of-view/

#10yrsago Yahoo blocks some users from accessing email until they turn off ad-blocking https://web.archive.org/web/20151121172408/https://consumerist.com/2015/11/20/use-adblock-and-yahoo-may-block-you-from-reading-your-e-mail/

#10yrsago Alan Moore’s brilliantly bonkers lost 1980s Star Wars comics https://web.archive.org/web/20151122232854/https://www.techtimes.com/tags/alan-moores-star-wars

#10yrsago The secret history of the Haunted Mansion’s hall of changing paintings https://longforgottenhauntedmansion.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-changing-portrait-hall-that-never.html

#10yrsago England: You have four days to reply to the secret consultation on the NHS’s future https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/19/nhs-mandate-england-consulation-deadline

#10yrsago Southwest Airlines surrenders to racists, refuses boarding to Arab-American passengers https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/national-international/philly-pizza-shop-owner-profiled-southwest-airlines/89976/

#5yrsago Nintendo vs Nintendees https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/21/wrecking-ball/#ssbm

#5yrsago Google's monopoly rigged the ad market https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/20/sovkitsch/#adtech

#5yrsago Facebook bullies watchdog https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/20/sovkitsch/#adobserver

#5yrsago We're already (badly) forgiving student debt https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/20/sovkitsch/#student-debt

#5yrsago Little Revolutions https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/20/sovkitsch/#asl

#1yrago Expert agencies and elected legislatures https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/21/policy-based-evidence/#decisions-decisions

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Latest books (permalink)


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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, 2026


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20.11.2025 à 10:53

Pluralistic: The long game (20 Nov 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (5235 mots)


Today's links


The classic Puck Magazine editorial cartoon entitled 'The King of All Commodities,' depicting John D Rockefeller as a man with grotesquely tiny body and a gigantic head, wearing a crown emblazoned with the names of the industrial concerns he owned. Rockefeller's head has been replaced with that of Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse avatar. The names of the industrial concerns have been replaced with the wordmarks for Scale AI, Instagram, Oculus and Whatsapp. The dollar-sign at the crown's pinnacle has been replaced with the Facebook 'f' logo. The chain around Rockefeller's neck sports the charm that Mark Zuckerberg now wears around his neck.

The long game (permalink)

Well, this fucking sucks. A federal judge has decided that Meta is not a monopolist, and that its acquisitions of Instagram and Whatsapp were not an illegal bid to secure and maintain a monopoly:

https://gizmodo.com/meta-learns-that-nothing-is-a-monopoly-if-you-just-wait-long-enough-2000687691

This is particularly galling because Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly, explicitly declared that these mergers were undertaken to reduce competition, which is the only circumstance in which pro-monopoly economists and lawyers say that mergers should be blocked.

Let me take a step back here. During the Reagan years, a new economic orthodoxy took hold, a weird combination of economic theory and conspiracy theory that held that:

a) It was bad economic policy to try and prevent monopolization, since monopolies are "efficient" and arise because companies are so totally amazing that we all voluntarily buy their products and pay for their services and;

b) The anti-monopoly laws on the books are actually pro-monopoly laws, and if you look at them just right, you'll find that what Congress really intended was for monopolies to be nurtured and protected:

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

The one exception these monsters of history were willing to make to their pro-monopoly posture was this: if a corporation undertakes a merger because they are seeking a monopoly, then the government should step in and stop them. This is a great standard to come up with if what you really want to do is nothing, because how can you know why a company truly wants to buy another company? Who can ever claim to know what is in another person's heart?

This is a great wheeze if you want to allow as many monopolies as possible, unless the guy who's trying to get that monopoly is Mark Zuckerberg, because Zuck is a man who has never had a criminal intention he did not immediately put to writing and email to someone else.

This is the guy who put in writing the immortal words, "It is better to buy than to compete," and "what we’re really buying is time," and who described his plans to clone a competitor's features as intended to get there "before anyone can get close to their scale again":

https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/29/21345723/facebook-instagram-documents-emails-mark-zuckerberg-kevin-systrom-hearing

Basically, Zuck is the guy who works until 2:30 every night, and then, before turning in, sends some key executive a fully discoverable, immortally backed-up digital message that reads, "Hey Bob, you know that guy we were thinking about killing? Well, I've decided we should do it. And for avoidance of doubt, it's 100% a murder, and right now, at this moment, I am premeditating it."

And despite this wealth of evidence as to Zuckerberg's intention at the time, US regulators at the FTC and EU regulators at the Commission both waved through those mergers, as well as many other before and since. Because it turns out that in the pro-monopoly world, there are no bright lines, no mergers so nakedly corrupt that they should be prevented. All that stuff about using state power to prevent deliberate monopolization was always and forever just bullshit. In the pro-monopoly camp, all monopolies are warmly welcome.

It wasn't always this way. In the trustbusting era, enforcers joined with organized labor and activists fighting for all kinds of human rights, from universal sufferage to ending Jim Crow, to smash corporate power. Foundational to this fight was the understanding that concentrated corporate power presented a serious danger: first, because of the way that it could corrupt our political process, and second, because of the difficulty of dislodging corporate power once it had been established.

In other words, trustbusters sought to prevent monopolies, not merely to break up monopolies once they were formed. They understood that a company that was too big to fail would also be too big to jail, and that impunity rotted societies from within.

Then came the project to dismantle antitrust and revive the monopolies. Corporatists from the University of Chicago School of Economics and their ultra-wealthy backers launched a multipronged attack on economics, law, and precedent. It was a successful bid to bring back oligarchy and establish a new class of modern aristocracy, whose dynastic fortunes would ensure their rule and the rule of their descendants for generations to come.

A key part of this was an attack on the judiciary. Like other professionals, federal judges are expected to undergo regular "ongoing education" to ensure they're current on the best practices in their field. Wealthy pro-monopolists bankrolled a series of junkets for judges called the "Manne Seminars," all-expenses-paid family trips to luxury resorts, where judges could be indoctrinated with the theory of "efficient monopolies":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down

40% of all federal judges attended a Manne Seminar, and empirical studies show that after graduating, these judges changed the way they ruled, to favor monopolies:

https://academic.oup.com/qje/advance-article/doi/10.1093/qje/qjaf042/8241352?login=false

The terrible beauty of this strategy is that you don't need to get all the judges into a Manne Seminar – you just need to get enough judges to attend that they will create a wall of precedent that every other judge will feel hemmed in by when they rule on antitrust cases. Those judgments further shore-up the pro-monopoly precedent, setting the stage for the next pro-monopoly judgment, and the next, and the next.

So here we are, a couple generations into the project to brainwash judges, monopolize the economy and establish a new aristocracy, and a judge just ruled that Meta isn't an illegal monopoly, even though Mark Zuckerberg literally put his explicit criminal intent in writing.

What are we to do? Should we despair? Does this mean it's all over?

Not hardly. Reversing 40+ years of pro-monopoly policy was always going to be a slog, with many setbacks on the way. That's why antitrust has historically sought to prevent monopolies. Once monopolies have conquered your economy, getting rid of them is far harder, or, as the joke from eastern Canada goes, "If you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here."

But you have to play the ball where it lies. The fact that Meta can deliberately set out to create a monopoly and still evade judgment is more reason to fight monopolies, not less – it's (more) evidence of just how corrupted and illegitimate our judicial system has become.

We've been here before. The first antitrust laws were passed to do the hard work of smashing existing monopolies, not the relatively easy task of preventing monopolization. Of course: before there is a law, there has to be a crime. Antitrust law was passed because of a monopoly problem, not as a pro-active measure to prevent the problem from arising.

Our forebears smashed monopolies that were, if anything, far more ferocious than Big Tech. They vanquished oligarchs whose perfidy and ruthlessness put today's ketamine-addled zuckermuskian mediocrities in the shade. How they did it is not a mystery: they just put in the hard yards of building coalitions and winning public sentiment.

They did it before and we can do it again. We know how it's done. We remember their names and what they did. Take Ida Tarbell, the slayer of John D Rockefeller and Standard Oil. Tarbell was a brilliant, fierce writer and orator, fearless and brilliant. She was the first woman in America to get a science degree, and a key driver of the movement for universal suffrage. But in addition to all that, she was an anti-monopolist.

Tarbell's father was a Pennsylvania oil man who'd been ruined by Rockefeller and Standard Oil. Determined to see him avenged, Tarbell researched the many tendrils of Rockefeller's empire and his devious tactics, and laid them bare in a pair of wildly successful serialized books, The History of the Standard Oil Company, Volumes I & II (published first in the popular national magazine Collier's):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/13/a-monopoly-isnt-the-same-as-legitimate-greatness/

Tarbell's History changed the way the country saw Rockefeller. She punctured his myth of brilliance and competence, and showed how he owed his fortune to swindling and cheating. She cut him down to size. She was a key figure in the American trustbusting movement, a catalyst for the revolution that saw Rockefeller and his fellow oligarchs overthrown.

This took a hell of a long time. The Sherman Act (which was used to break up Standard Oil) was passed in 1890, but Standard Oil wasn't broken up until 1912. It took perseverance through setback after setback, it took the compounding tragedies that drove people to question the order and demand change, and it took unglamorous organizing and dramatic street-fights to escape from oligarchy's powerful gravity well.

Today, we are back at square one, but we have advantages that Tarbell and the other trustbusters lacked. For one thing, we have them, the lessons of their fight and the inspiration of their victory. For another, we have the political wind at our back. All over the world, from China to Canada, from the EU to the USA, politicians have felt emboldened (or forced) to launch anti-monopoly efforts the likes of which have not been seen since the Carter administration:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/09/elite-disunity/#awoken-giants

What's more, these enforcers aren't alone – they can and do collaborate. Because these tech companies run the same swindles in every country in the world, enforcers can collaborate on building cases against them. After all the facts of Big Tech's crimes are virtually identical, whether you're in the UK, Singapore, South Korea, Canada or Germany:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter

This is an advantage that the trustbusters who took down Rockefeller could only dream of. Like Big Tech, Rockefeller had a global empire, but unlike Big Tech, Rockefeller abused each of the nations of the world in distinct ways. In America, Rockefeller ran the refineries and pipelines; in Germany, he had a stranglehold on the ports.

Even if the Rockefeller-era trustbusters wanted to collaborate, sending memos back and forth across the Atlantic by zeppelin, all they could offer each other was warm wishes. US pipeline investigations had nothing to add to German port investigations.

Today's tech monopolists may be bigger than any one government, but they're not bigger than all the governments whose people they're abusing.

The trustbusters who brought down Rockefeller did something knowable and repeatable. Their work did not arise out of the lost arts of a fallen civilization. The work of taking down today's monopolists requires only that we recover our ancestors' moral fire and perseverance. No one needs to figure out how to build a pyramid without power tools or embalm a Pharaoh.

We merely have to build and sustain a global movement to destroy oligarchy.

(Merely!)

Yes, that's a hell of a big lift. But we're not alone. There are billions of people who suffer under oligarchy and an infinite variety of ways to erode its power, as a prelude to smashing that power. Our allies in antitrust include the voters who put Zohran Mamdani into office, going from less than 1% in the polls to a commanding majority in a three-way race, running on an anti-oligarch platform:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/28/mamdani/#trustbusting

(No coincidence that one of our most effective fighters is now co-leading Mamdani's transition team):

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

Trustbusting alone will not end oligarchy and trustbusters alone cannot break up the monopolies. As with the original trustbusters, the modern trustbusting movement is but a part of a coalition that wants a world organized around the needs of the many, not the few.

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 Brit backpackers take Indian call-centre jobs https://web.archive.org/web/20051210103452/http://wiredblogs.tripod.com/sterling/index.blog?entry_id=1284171

#20yrsago Laser etching doesn’t necessarily void your warranty https://web.archive.org/web/20051126194823/http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2005/11/will_laser_etching_apple_gear.html

#20yrsago UCLA to MPAA shill: ARRRRRRR! https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-nov-18-fi-glickman18-story.html

#20yrsago RIAA prez: Lots of companies secretly install rootkits! It’s no biggie! https://web.archive.org/web/20051125041201/http://www.malbela.com/blog/archives/000375.html

#20yrsago Sony offers MP3s in replacement for rootkit CDs https://web.archive.org/web/20051124233458/https://www.upsrow.com/sonybmg/

#15yrsago TSA forces cancer survivor to remove prosthetic breast https://web.archive.org/web/20101120213044/http://www.wbtv.com/Global/story.asp?S=13534628

#15yrsago How the Victorians wiped their bums https://web.archive.org/web/20101123191021/http://wellcomelibrary.blogspot.com/2010/11/item-of-month-november-2010-victorian.html

#15yrsago Understanding the “microcredit crisis” in Andhra Pradesh https://web.archive.org/web/20101119012652/https://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2010/11/18/the-lessons-of-andhra-pradesh/

#15yrsago Canadian Heritage Minister inadvertently damns his own copyright bill https://web.archive.org/web/20101121054805/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5456/125/

#15yrsago TSA confiscates heavily-armed soldiers’ nail-clippers https://redstate.com/erick/2010/11/18/another-tsa-outrage-n37064

#15yrsago Chris McKitterick pirates his own book https://mckitterick.livejournal.com/653743.html

#15yrsago Chinese woman kidnapped to labor camp on her wedding day over sarcastic re-Tweet https://web.archive.org/web/20120609051421/http://voices.washingtonpost.com/blog-post/2010/11/chinese_twitter_sentence_a_yea.html

#15yrsago RuneScape devs refuse to cave in to patent trolls https://web.archive.org/web/20101119012943/http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/31597/UKBased_RuneScape_Dev_Jagex_Wins_Patent_Infringement_Lawsuit.php

#10yrsago Manhattan DA calls for backdoors in all mobile operating systems https://web.archive.org/web/20151120003032/https://manhattanda.org/sites/default/files/11.18.15

#10yrsago Watching paint dry: epic crowfunded troll of the UK film censorship board https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/charlielyne/make-the-censors-watch-paint-drying?ref=video

#10yrsago CEOs are lucky, tall men https://hbr.org/2015/11/are-successful-ceos-just-lucky

#10yrsago America’s CEOs and hedge funds are starving the nation’s corporations to death https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-buybacks-cannibalized/

#10yrsago EU official: all identified Paris attackers were from the EU https://web.archive.org/web/20151116223023/https://thinkprogress.org/world/2015/11/16/3722838/all-paris-attackers-identified-so-far-are-european-nationals-according-to-top-eu-official/

#10yrsago The Web is pretty great with Javascript turned off https://www.wired.com/2015/11/i-turned-off-javascript-for-a-whole-week-and-it-was-glorious/

#10yrsago If the Paris attackers weren’t using cryptography, the next ones will, and so should you https://insidesources.com/new-york-times-article-blaming-encryption-paris-attacks/

#10yrsago Zero: the number of security experts Ted Koppel consulted for hysterical cyberwar book https://www.techdirt.com/2015/11/19/ted-koppel-writes-entire-book-about-how-hackers-will-take-down-our-electric-grid-never-spoke-to-any-experts/

#10yrsago How a paid FBI informant created a terror plot that sent an activist to jail for 9 years https://theintercept.com/2015/11/19/an-fbi-informant-seduced-eric-mcdavid-into-a-bomb-plot-then-the-government-lied-about-it/

#10yrsago Google steps up to defend fair use, will fund Youtubers’ legal defenses https://publicpolicy.googleblog.com/2015/11/a-step-toward-protecting-fair-use-on.html?m=1

#10yrsago Alan Moore’s advice to unpublished authors https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuaWu2uhmRQ

#10yrsago Private funding of public services is bankrupting the UK https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/nhs/11748960/The-PFI-hospitals-costing-NHS-2bn-every-year.html

#10yrsago The US government turned down Anne Frank’s visa application https://www.reuters.com/article/2007/02/14/us-annefrank-letters-idUSN1430569220070214/#HmyajvjLmsX2tVYf.97

#10yrsago Seriously, try “view source” on google.com https://xkcd.com/1605/#10yrsago

#5yrsago Tyson execs bet on covid spread in unsafe plant https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/19/disneymustpay/#you-bet-your-life

#5yrsago Disney stiffs writer https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/19/disneymustpay/#disneymustpay

#5yrsago Cyberpunk and Post-Cyberpunk https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/19/disneymustpay/#asl

#5yrsago Canada's GDPR https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/18/always-get-their-rationalisation/#consent

#5yrsago Telehealth chickenizes docs https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/18/always-get-their-rationalisation/#telehealth

#5yrsago The Mounties lied about social surveillance https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/18/always-get-their-rationalisation/#rcmp

#5yrsago Race, surveillance and tech https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/18/always-get-their-rationalisation/#asl

#1yrago Harpercollins wants authors to sign away AI training rights https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/18/rights-without-power/#careful-what-you-wish-for

#1yrago Forcing Google to spin off Chrome (and Android?) https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/19/breaking-up-is-hard-to-do/#shiny-and-chrome

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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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, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

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

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

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ISSN: 3066-764X

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