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🖋 Cory DOCTOROW
Science fiction author, activist and journalist
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PLURALISTIC

▸ les 10 dernières parutions

20.02.2026 à 15:53

Pluralistic: A perforated corporate veil (20 Feb 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3981 mots)


Today's links


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

A perforated corporate veil (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

There sure are.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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19.02.2026 à 15:08

Pluralistic: Six Years of Pluralistic (19 Feb 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (6324 mots)


Today's links


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

Six years of Pluralistic (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

17.02.2026 à 11:56

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

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4221 mots)


Today's links


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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):

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF

16.02.2026 à 09:22

Pluralistic: The online community trilemma (16 Feb 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4998 mots)


Today's links

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


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

The online community trilemma (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

a) A community of like-minded people;

b) Useful information; and

c) The largest possible audience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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