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PLURALISTIC

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10.01.2026 à 16:02

Pluralistic: Predistribution vs redistribution (Big Tech edition) (10 Jan 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4436 mots)


Today's links


A Canadian flag. The Maple Leaf has been replaced with a rotten apple. Crawling out of the apple is a woim. Over the apple is Apple's 'Think Different' wordmark. The woim is crawling through one of the 'e's.

Predistribution vs redistribution (Big Tech edition) (permalink)

All over the world, for all of this decade, governments have been trying to figure out how to rein in America's tech companies. During the Biden years, this seemed like a winner – after all, America was trying to tame its tech companies, too, with brave trustbusters like Lina Khan, Jonathan Kanter, Rohit Chopra and Tim Wu doing more work in four years than their predecessors had done in forty.

But under Trump, the US government has thrown its full weight into defending its tech companies' right to spy on and rip off everyone in the world (including Americans, of course). It's not hard to understand how Big Tech earned Trump's loyalty: from the tech CEOs who personally paid a million dollars each to sit behind Trump on the inauguration dais; to Apple CEO Tim Cook hand-assembling a gold participation trophy for Trump on camera; to Zuckerberg firing all his fact-checkers; to the seven-figure contributions that tech companies made to Trump's Epstein Memorial Ballroom at the White House. Trump is defending America's tech companies because they've bribed him, personally, to do so.

Given that these companies are so much larger than most world governments, this poses a serious barrier to the kind of enforcement that world governments have tried. What's the point of fining Apple billions of Euros if they refuse to pay? What's the point of ordering Apple to open up its App Store if it just refuses?

But here's the thing: most of these enforcement actions have been redistributive. In effect, lawmakers and regulators are saying to America's tech giants, We know you've stolen a bunch of money and data from our people, and now we want you to give some of it back. There's nothing inherently wrong with redistribution, but redistribution will never be as powerful or effective as predistribution – that is, preventing tech companies from stealing data and money in the first place.

Take Big Tech's relationship to the world's news media. All over the world, media companies have been skeletonized by collapsing ad revenues and even where they can get paid subscribers, tech giants rake off huge junk fees from every subscriber payment. Reaching new or existing subscribers is also increasingly expensive, as tech platforms algorithmically suppress the reach of media companies' posts, even for subscribers who've asked to see their feeds, which lets the platforms charge more junk fees to "boost" content.

Countries all over the world – Australia, Germany, Spain, France, Canada – have arrived at the same solution to this problem: imposing "link taxes" that require tech companies to pay for the privilege of linking to the news or allowing their users to discuss the news. This is pure redistribution: tech stole money from the media companies, so governments are making them give some of that money back.

It hasn't worked. First of all, the thing tech steals from the news isn't the news, it's money. Helping people find and discuss the news isn't theft. News you're not allowed to find or discuss isn't news at all – that's a secret.

Meanwhile, tech companies have an easy way to escape the link tax: they can just ban links to the news on their platform. That's what Meta did in Canada, which means that Canadians on Instagram and Facebook no longer see the actual news, just far-right "influencer" content. Even when tech companies do pay the link tax, the results are far from ideal: in Canada, Google has become a partner of news outlets, which compromises their ability to report on Google's activities. Shortly after Google promised millions to the Toronto Star, the paper dropped its award-winning, hard-hitting "Defanging Big Tech" investigative series. Given that Google came within centimeters of stealing most of downtown Toronto just a few years ago, we can hardly afford to have the city's largest newspaper climb into bed with the company:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/31/leaked-document-reveals-that-sidewalk-labs-toronto-plans-for-private-taxation-private-roads-charter-schools-corporate-cops-and-judges-and-punishment-for-people-who-choose-privacy/

Worse still: any effort to make Big Tech poorer – by curbing its predatory acquisition of our data and money – reduces its ability to pay the link tax, which means that, under a link tax, the media's future depends on Big Tech being able to go on ripping us off.

All of which is not to say that Big Tech should be allowed to go on ripping off the media. Rather, it's to argue that we should stop tech from ripping off Canadians in the first place, as a superior alternative to asking Big Tech to remit a small share of the booty to a few lucky victims.

Together, Meta and Google take 51 cents out of every advertising dollar. This is a huge share. Before the rise of surveillance advertising, the ad industry's share of advertising dollars amounted to about 15%. The Meta/Google ad-tech duopoly has cornered the ad market, and they illegally colluded to rig it, which allows them to steal billions from media outlets, all around the world:

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

What would a predistribution approach to ad-tech look like? Canada could ban the collection and sale of consumer data outright, and punish any domestic firm that collects consumer data, which would choke off much of the supply of data that feeds the ad-tech market.

Canada could also repeal its wildly unpopular "anticircumvention" law, The Copyright Modernisation Act of 2012 (Bill C-11), which was passed despite the public's overwhelming negative response to a consultation on the bill:

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

Under this law, it's illegal for Canadian companies to reverse engineer and modify America's tech exports. This means that Canadian companies can't go into business selling an alternative Facebook client that blocks all the surveillance advertising and restores access to the news, and offers non-surveillant, content-based ways for other Canadian businesses to advertise:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising

Repealing Bill C-11 would also allow Canadian companies to offer alternative app stores for phones and consoles. Google and Apple have a duopoly on mobile apps, and the two companies have rigged the market to take 30% of every in-app payment. The actual cost of processing a payment is less than 1%. This means that 30 cents out of every in-app subscriber dollar sent to a Canadian news outlet is shipped south to Cupertino or Mountain View. Legalizing made-in-Canada app stores, installed without permission from Apple or Google, would stop those dollars from being extracted in the first place. And not just media companies, of course – the app tax is paid by performers, software authors, and manufacturers. Extend the program to include games consoles and Canada's game companies would be rescued from Microsoft and Nintendo's own app tax, which also runs to 30%.

But a C-11 repeal wouldn't merely safeguard Canadian dollars – it would also safeguard Canadian data. Our mobile phones collect and transmit mountains of data about us and our activities. Yes, even Apple's products – despite the company's high-flying rhetoric about its respect for your privacy, the company spies on everything you do with your phone and sells access to that data to advertisers. Apple doesn't offer any way to opt out of this, and lied about it when they were caught doing it:

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

These companies will not voluntarily stop stealing our data. That's the lesson of nine years under the EU's GDPR, a landmark, strong privacy law that US tech companies simply refuse to obey. And because they claim to be headquartered in Ireland (because Ireland lets them cheat on their taxes) and because they have captured the Irish state, they are able to simply flout the law:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/01/erin-go-blagged/#big-tech-omerta

Telling Big Tech not to gather our data is redistribution. So is dictating how they can use it after they collect it. The predistribution version of this is modifying our devices so that they don't gather or leak our data in the first place.

Big Tech is able to suck up so much of our data because anticircumvention law – like Canada's Bill C-11, or Article 6 of the EU Copyright Directive – makes it illegal to modify your phone so that it blocks digital spying, preventing the collection and transmission of your data.

Repeal anticircumvention law and businesses could offer Canadians (or Europeans) (or anyone in the world with a credit card and an internet connection) a product that blocks surveillance on their devices. More than half of all web users have installed an ad-blocker for their browser (which offers significant surveillance protection), but no one can install anything like this on their phones (or smart TVs, or smart doorbells, or other gadgets) because anticircumvention law criminalizes this act.

Big Tech are notorious tax cheats, colluding with captured governments like the Irish state to avoid taxes worldwide. Canada tried to pass a "digital service tax" that would make the US pay a small share of the tax it evades in Canada. Trump went bananas and threatened to hit the country with (more) tariffs, and Canada folded.

Tax is redistributive, and getting money back from American companies after they steal it from Canadians is much harder than simply arranging the system so it's much harder for American companies to steal from Canadians in the first place. Blocking spying, clawing back the app tax, unrigging the ad market – these are all predistributive rather than redistributive.

So is selling alternative clients for legacy social media products like Facebook and Twitter – clients that unrig their algorithms and let Canadians see the news they've subscribed to, so they can't be used as hostages to extract "boosting" fees from media outlets who want to reach their own subscribers.

Canada's redistribution efforts have been a consistent failure. Canada keeps trying to get streaming companies like Netflix to include more Canadian content in their offerings and search results. Legalize jailbreaking and a Canadian company could start selling an alternative client that lets you search all your streaming services at once, mixing in results from Canadian media companies and archives like the National Film Board – all while blocking surveillance by the tech giants. This client could also incorporate a PVR, so you could record shows to watch later, without worrying about the tech giants making your favorite program vanish. Remember, if it's legal to record a show from broadcast or cable with a VCR or a Tivo, it's legal to record it from a streaming service with an app.

These predistribution tactics don't rely on US tech companies obeying Canada's orders. Instead, they take away American companies' ability to use Canada's courts and law enforcement apparatus to shut down Canadian competitors who disenshittify America's spying, stealing tech exports. Canada may not be able to push Google or Apple or Facebook around, but Canada can always decide whether Google or Apple or Facebook can use its courts to push Canadian competitors around.

Back in December, when Trump started threatening (again) to invade Canada and take over the country, Prime Minister Mark Carney broke off trade talks. Those talks are slated to begin again in a matter of days:

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/2025/12/19/canada-u-s-to-start-talks-to-review-free-trade-deal-in-mid-january/87843153007/

Getting Trump to deal fairly with Canada is just as unlikely as getting Trump's tech companies to give Canadians a fair shake. Canada isn't going to win the trade war with an agreement. Canada will win the trade war by winning: with Made-in-Canada tech products that turn America's stolen trillions into Canadian billions, to be divided up among Canadian tech businesses (who will reap profits) and the Canadian public (who will reap savings).

(Image: Dietrich Krieger, CC BY-SA 4.0; Tiia Monto, CC BY 4.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago HOWTO convert an Oral B flosser into a vibrating lockpick https://web.archive.org/web/20060113090614/http://www.inventgeek.com/Projects/lockpick/lockpick.aspx

#20yrsago Levi’s to ship iPod jeans https://web.archive.org/web/20060113045708/https://www.popgadget.net/2006/01/levis_ipod_jean.php

#20yrsago Chumbawamba: Why we don’t use DRM on our CDs https://web.archive.org/web/20060112044019/http://www.chumba.com/Chumbawambacopyprotect1.html

#20yrsago UK Parliamentarians demand WiFi https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/british-parliament-members-demand-wi-fi-access/

#15yrsago Sue Townsend talks Adrian Mole with the Guardian book-club https://www.theguardian.com/books/audio/2011/jan/10/sue-townsend-adrian-mole-book-club

#15yrsago Major record labels forced to pay CAD$45M to ripped-off musicians https://web.archive.org/web/20110112055510/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5563/125/

#10yrsago Why Americans can’t stop working: the poor can’t afford to, and the rich are enjoying themselves https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/inequality-work-hours/422775/

#10yrsago Juniper blinks: firewall will nuke the NSA’s favorite random number generator https://www.reuters.com/article/us-spying-juniper-idUSKBN0UN07520160109/

#5yrsago Impeachment and realignment https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/10/realignments/#realignments

#5yrsago Busting myths about the Night of the Short Fingers https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/10/realignments/#mythbusting

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 (1008 words today, 4020 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

09.01.2026 à 15:59

Pluralistic: bunnie's piggyback hack (09 Jan 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3915 mots)


Today's links


A slide from bunnie Huang's 39C3 talk.

bunnie's piggyback hack (permalink)

If Andrew "bunnie" Huang didn't actually exist, I'd swear he was a character out of a(n extraordinarily technologically well-informed) cyberpunk novel. Every time I interact with this legendary hardware hacker, he blows my mind with some incredible project or insight that permanently alters how I think about technology.

I first met bunnie when he came to EFF for help with the threats he'd received from Microsoft. At the time, bunnie was an electrical engineering grad student at MIT, and he'd taken the bootloader locks on the new Xbox platform as a personal affront and challenge. He applied his prodigious skill and talent to these digital handcuffs, and in short order, he had broken the Xbox and installed Linux on it. MIT's general counsel immediately washed its hands of any responsibility to defend this young grad student from bullying by a corporate monopolist, hanging him out to dry. So he turned to us – and we got his back. You can read all about it in Hacking the Xbox, his canonical work about hardware hacking and technological freedom (it's free!):

https://bunniefoo.com/nostarch/HackingTheXbox_Free.pdf

In the many years since, I've been lucky enough to count bunnie as a friend, colleague and comrade, albeit one I only physically run into every year or so, usually at some tech event or on the playa at Burning Man, where he still camps with the MIT crew at The Institute.

I just got to see bunnie in person again, over Christmas week at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg. He gave a late-night presentation with his collaborator Sean "xobs" Cross, entitled "Xous: A Pure-Rust Rethink of the Embedded Operating System":

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

Don't let the technical-sounding title intimidate you! This was a banger of a talk, and as with every bunnie Huang production, it left a pleasant and persistent aftertaste.

The background for this talk is bunnie's obsession with building a trustworthy computer. For decades, bunnie has been chasing the dream of a computer whose every component – operating system, drivers, firmware, and hardware designs – are open to inspection. Bunnie's reasoning here is that anything that can't be inspected (and, by extension, modified) by its users is a spot where bad guys can hide bad stuff, and where lurking bugs can fester until they are exploited by bad guys. Remember the spectacular (and still mysterious) claims that Apple's servers had all been compromised with minuscule hardware bugs? The single best explanation of that you will find comes from bunnie:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqQhWitJ1As

Bunnie was doing all this before there was an "open source hardware" movement, and he remains at its vanguard. His "Precursor" project is a reference hardware platform where every component is open to inspection and modification, from the chassis to the random number generator:

https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/category/betrusted/precursor/

One area of especial concern and interest for bunnie is the promise and peril of the "system-on-a-chip" (SoC). This is exactly what it sounds like: a cheap chip that incorporates everything you need to do full-fledged computing, including interfaces and drivers for networks, screens, peripherals, etc. SoCs are ubiquitous. You find them in things like individual car engine components and inkjet printer cartridges, and each one is a whole-ass computer, capable of running some really ugly malware.

As bunnie explained back in 2020, there are two problems with SoCs: first, they are packaged such that the silicon traces inside of them can't be readily inspected, and second, they are so expensive to fabricate that someone like bunnie can't possibly come up with the millions needed to make an open, trustworthy, inspectable alternative:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/10/dark-matter/#precursor

That's where bunnie's CCC talk comes in. The chips that SoCs are etched upon have lots of space (relatively speaking – we're talking about nanometer-scale circuits, after all). Even after an SoC designer packs in a ton of extra traces to handle oddball applications, the chip is still mostly "dark matter" – blank silicon.

The first half of bunnie and xobs's talk concerns itself with "Xous," a secure operating system for an SoC, written in Rust. But the second half of the talk tackles the problem of procuring an SoC that you can trust to run Xous on. That's where this dark matter comes in.

Bunnie's day-job is consulting on extremely gnarly, high-stakes, high-value hardware design and manufacturing, so naturally, he's got lots of clients and contacts in the SoC manufacturing world. He approached one of these companies with a proposal: let me tape out a whole separate chip that fits in the dark matter for one of your upcoming chips. Adding these traces adds virtually no cost to the production, and adding bunnie's chips to the production run actually saves the manufacturer money, because the prices drop when the quantities increase.

The idea is to put two chips on the chip, and badge most of them with the OEM's branding, while a small rump of the chips will have bunnie's branding (he calls it the Baochip). On bunnie's chips, the traces to the OEM chip will be physically cut, meaning that the Baochips will just be Baochips – the original chip will be inaccessible and unusable.

What's more, bunnie didn't just fit one chip into the OEM's "dark matter" – he fit five separate, specialized SoCs into the unused space. Remember, the beauty of SoCs is that once they're taped out and sent to production, the cost of an actual chip is peanuts, meaning that these Baochips are cheap as hell.

Even better: the traces on these chips are scaled to be readily inspected using relatively low-cost equipment, meaning that many parties around the world can grab one of these chips, stick it in a machine, and compare the traces on the chip to the free, open sourcefile that was used to produce it, confirming that there are no nasty surprises lurking inside.

This was such an exciting talk, and as I sat through it, I had this nagging feeling that it reminded me of something else I'd learned about years before, though I couldn't quite place it. Finally, as bunnie and xobs were stepping off the stage, I had it – it reminded me of another bunnie talk I'd seen – this one at The Institute, the MIT Burning Man camp, more than a decade prior.

Back in 2015, bunnie designed and built a set of really cool, wearable radio-linked badges for his campmates, which would help them locate one another on the playa at night. These badges were really cool – they used a genetic algorithm to "have sex" with one another and mutate their color patterns. Bunnie even worked in a "consent" mechanism!

https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2015/sex-circuits-deep-house/

But the really cool part that stuck with me was the manufacturing story. Bunnie wanted to fabricate custom injection-molded plastic enclosures for these pendants, but injection molding – like chip design – is a mass production phenomenon, with sky-high setup costs and incredibly cheap per-unit costs thereafter.

So (and this might sound familiar) bunnie reached out to a die-maker that he worked with in China and said, "Hey, the next time you're contracted to mill out a die for a client, let me know if there's any extra space on the face of the die, and I'll provide you with a shapefile you can carve out of this 'dark matter.'" This doesn't add any cost to the die setup, and it means that bunnie can run just a couple dozen injection-molded, custom cases at a cost of pennies per unit.

I grabbed bunnie later that night and mentioned this old Burning Man project to him and he said, "You know, I haven't ever thought of it, but you're right, there's definitely a throughline between the two projects."

I asked him what he called this technique and he shrugged and said he didn't really have a name for it, but he thought of it as "piggybacking," which seems like a good name to me.

It seems to me that these two kinds of manufacturing can't be the only ones that can be "piggybacked" onto. That's what motivated me to write this post – to get people thinking about these high-setup/low-unit cost production types that might be piggybacked for small batch, delightful projects like bunnie's.

Well, that, and just to do one of my periodic bunnie Huang appreciation posts. If there's one person that I'd recommend people pay more attention to, it's him. He's also a terrific communicator, and an indecently great writer. My readers might be familiar with him thanks to the afterword he contributed to Little Brother:

https://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/

More recently, he wrote a fantastic intro for last year's Science Comics Computers: How Digital Computers Work, a brilliant middle-grades graphic novel that uses steampunk dinosaurs to explain digital logic and the building blocks of computation:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/05/xor-xand-xnor-nand-nor/#brawniac

He also co-authored a fascinating research paper with Edward Snowden, after the two of them collaborated on a daughter-board that spots otherwise untraceable malware:

https://assets.pubpub.org/aacpjrja/AgainstTheLaw-CounteringLawfulAbusesofDigitalSurveillance.pdf

Again, my readers will recognize this as a gimmick from my 2020 novel Attack Surface (a Little Brother novel for adults):

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757517/attacksurface/

That's not bunnie's only sweet hardware hack, of course. Check out the insanely clever design for a contact-tracing dongle he prototyped for the EU in 2020:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/23/cryptocidal-maniacs/#trace-together

But really, you owe it to yourself to read bunnie at book length, and his best book is 2016's The Hardware Hacker, a tour-de-force, lay-friendly exegesis on the theory and practice of hardware hacking:

https://memex.craphound.com/2016/12/30/the-hardware-hacker-bunnie-huangs-tour-de-force-on-hardware-hacking-reverse-engineering-china-manufacturing-innovation-and-biohacking/

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 John McDaid’s brilliant sf story Keyboard Practice free online https://web.archive.org/web/20060112044109/https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/fiction/jm01.htm

#20yrsago Pledge to boycott DRM CDs https://web.archive.org/web/20060112061657/http://www.pledgebank.com/boycottdrm

#20yrsago Hollywood’s Canadian MP claims she’s no dirtier than the rest https://memex.craphound.com/2006/01/08/hollywoods-canadian-mp-claims-shes-no-dirtier-than-the-rest/

#10yrsago Gene Luen Yang’s inaugural speech as National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature https://memex.craphound.com/2016/01/08/gene-luen-yangs-inaugural-speech-as-national-ambassador-for-young-peoples-literature/

#10yrsago Menstruation is the mother of invention https://lastwordonnothing.com/2016/01/07/the-wonderful-world-of-period-patents/

#10yrsago Juniper’s products are still insecure; more evidence that the company was complicit https://www.wired.com/2016/01/new-discovery-around-juniper-backdoor-raises-more-questions-about-the-company/

#10yrsago Red-baiting water speculator plans to drain the Mojave of its ancient water https://www.wired.com/2016/01/the-2-4-billion-plan-to-water-la-by-draining-the-mojave/?mbid=social_alleniverson

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 ( words today, total)

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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.

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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 (4321 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 a 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):

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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
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Dana HILLIOT
François HOUSTE
Tagrawla INEQQIQI
Infiltrés (les)
Clément JEANNEAU
Paul JORION
Michel LEPESANT
 
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Henri MALER
Christophe MASUTTI
Jean-Luc MÉLENCHON
MONDE DIPLO (Blogs persos)
Richard MONVOISIN
Corinne MOREL-DARLEUX
Timothée PARRIQUE
Thomas PIKETTY
VisionsCarto
Yannis YOULOUNTAS
Michaël ZEMMOUR
LePartisan.info
 
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Christophe DESCHAMPS
Louis DERRAC
Olivier ERTZSCHEID
Olivier EZRATY
Framablog
Romain LECLAIRE
Tristan NITOT
Francis PISANI
Irénée RÉGNAULD
Nicolas VIVANT
 
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Arguments
Bondy Blog
Dérivation
Économistes Atterrés
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Mr Mondialisation
Palim Psao
Paris-Luttes.info
ROJAVA Info
 
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Nicole ESTEROLLE
Julien HERVIEUX
Alessandro PIGNOCCHI
Laura VAZQUEZ
XKCD
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