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PLURALISTIC

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27.10.2025 à 14:41

Pluralistic: Shake Shack wants you to shit yourself to death (27 Oct 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4513 mots)


Today's links


A black and white photo of man's hand holding a gavel over a wooden table. The photo has been tinted green and the Shake Shack logo has been inserted behind the scene. Beneath the gavel is a Shake Shack hamburger whose meat has been tinted green.

Shake Shack wants you to shit yourself to death (permalink)

Shake Shack has changed the terms of service for its app, adding a "binding arbitration" clause that bans you from suing the company or joining a class action suit against it:

https://shakeshack.com/terms-conditions#/

As Luke Goldstein writes for Jacobin, the ToS update is part of a wave of companies, including fast-food companies, that are taking away their customers' right to seek redress in the courts, forcing them to pursue justice with a private "arbitrator" who works for the company that harmed them:

https://jacobin.com/2025/10/shake-shack-arbitration-law-terms-service/

Now, obviously you don't have to agree to terms of service just to walk into a Shake Shack and order a burger (yet), but Shake Shack, like other fast food companies, is on a full-court press to corral you into using its app to order your food, even if you're picking up that food from the counter and eating it in the restaurant. This is an easy trick to pull off – all Shake Shack needs to do is starve its cash-registers of personnel, creating untenably long lines for people attempting to order from a human.

Forcing diners to use an app has other advantages as well. Remember, an app is just a website skinned in the right kind of IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it, which means that whenever you use an app instead of a website, you are vulnerable to deep and ongoing commercial surveillance and can be bombarded with ads without you having any recourse:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/24/everything-not-mandatory/#is-prohibited

That surveillance can be weaponized against you, through "surveillance pricing," which is when companies raise prices based on their estimation of your desperation, which they can infer from surveillance data. Surveillance pricing lets a company reach into your wallet and devalue your money – if you are charged $10 for a burger that costs the next person $5, that means your dollar is only worth $0.50:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/24/price-discrimination/

But beyond surveillance and price-gouging, app-based ordering offers corporations another way to screw you: they can force you into binding arbitration. Under binding arbitration, you "voluntarily" waive your right to have your grievances heard by a judge. Instead, the corporation hires a fake judge, called an "arbitrator," who hears your case and then a rebuttal from the company that signs their paycheck and decides who is guilty. It will not surprise you to learn that arbitrators overwhelmingly find in favor of their employers and even when they rule in favor of a wronged customer, the penalties they impose on their bosses add up to little more than a wrist-slap:

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

This binding arbitration bullshit was illegal until the 2010s, when Antonin Scalia authored a string of binding arbitration decisions for the Supreme Court, opening the hellmouth for the mass imposition of arbitration on anyone that a business could stick an "I agree" button in front of:

https://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1443&context=blr

A fundamental tenet of conservative doctrine is "incentives matter" – that's why they say we can't have universal healthcare (if going to the doctor is free, you will schedule frivolous doctor's visits) or food or housing assistance (unless your boss can threaten you with homelessness and starvation, you won't go to work anymore). However, this is a highly selective bit of dogma, because incentives never seem to matter to rich people or corporations, whom conservatives are on an endless quest to immunize from any consequences for harming their workers or customers, which somehow won't incentivize them to hurt their workers and/or customers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/12/hot-coffee/#mcgeico

At this point, we should probably ask, "Why would anyone sue a Shake Shack?" To answer that, you just need to look at why people sue other fast-food restaurants, like McDonald's and Chipotle. The short answer? Because those restaurants had defective food-handling and sourcing procedures, and this resulted in their customers contracting life-threatening food-borne illnesses:

https://apnews.com/article/mcdonalds-chipotle-taco-bell-norovirus-e-coli-83f1077981d738b91dbf0c76f7db2883

By immunizing itself from legal consequences for the most common sources of liability for fast-food restaurants, Shake Shack is reserving the right to make you shit yourself to death. Combine this immunity with Trump's unscheduled rapid midair disassembly of all federal regulations (AKA "Project 2025") and you get a situation where Shake Shack can just make up its own money-saving hygiene shortcuts, and face no consequences if these result in your shitting yourself to death. This is both literal and figurative enshittification.

Of course, Shake Shack doesn't believe this should cut both ways. You can't slip out of Shake Shack's noose by walking into a restaurant with a t-shirt reading:

By reading these words, 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. This indemnity will survive the termination of your relationship with your employer.

Shake Shack isn't trying to create a simplified, efficient system of justice – they're creating a two-tiered system of justice. They get to go to court if you hurt them. Vandalize a Shack Shack restaurant and they'll drag your ass in front of a judge before you can say "listeria." But if they cause you to shit yourself to death, you are literally and figuratively shit out of luck.

That's really bad. Two-tiered justice is always and ever a prelude to fascism. The way to keep the normies in line while your brownshirts round up their neighbors and seize their property is by maintaining the "normal" justice system for some people, but not for the disfavored group:

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/anti-jewish-legislation-in-prewar-germany

Gradually, the group entitled to "normal" justice dwindles and more and more of us get sucked into the "state of exception" where you aren't entitled to a lawyer, a trial, or any human rights.

Trump isn't just dismantling the regulatory state: his fascist snatch-squads ignore the Constitution and the courts. His supine Congress ignores the separation of powers (Trump: "I'm the President and the Speaker of the House"). This rapid erosion of the rule of law is about to meet and merge with the long-run, Federalist Society project to give corporations their own shadow justice system, where they hire the judges who decide whether you can get justice.

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 Katamari Damacy: the text adventure https://web.archive.org/web/20081011210518/http://www.livejournal.com/community/katamari_damacy/262676.html

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#20yrsago Bruce Sterling’s design future manifesto: viva spime! https://memex.craphound.com/2005/10/26/bruce-sterlings-design-future-manifesto-viva-spime/

#15yrsago South Korea’s US-led copyright policy leads to 65,000 acts of extrajudicial censorship/disconnection/threats by govt bureaucrats https://www.techdirt.com/2010/10/26/a-look-at-how-many-people-have-been-kicked-offline-in-korea-on-accusations-not-convictions-of-infringement/

#15yrsago British Airways chairman: “stop kowtowing to US aviation security demands” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/oct/27/airport-security-rules-uk-us

#15yrsago France: 25,000 families a day at risk of losing Internet access https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/10/french-three-strikes-agency-getting-25k-complaints-a-day/

#15yrsago Taste receptors in our lungs sense bitterness and respond with opened airways https://web.archive.org/web/20101028234103/http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nm.2237.html

#10yrsago Botnets running on CCTVs and NASs https://www.imperva.com/blog/archive/cctv-ddos-botnet-back-yard/?redirect=Incapsula

#10yrsago A beautiful data-driven Tube ad from 1928 https://www.citymonitor.ai/analysis/1928-ad-london-underground-combines-data-awesome-1513/?cf-view

#10yrsago DoJ to Apple: your software is licensed, not sold, so we can force you to decrypt https://ia600301.us.archive.org/35/items/gov.uscourts.nyed.376325/gov.uscourts.nyed.376325.15.0.pdf

#10yrsago FCC trying to stop phone companies that rip off prisoners’ families https://web.archive.org/web/20151023015659/http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-22/is-this-the-end-of-sky-high-prison-phone-call-rates-

#10yrsago Putting your kettle on the Internet of Things makes your wifi passwords an open secret https://www.techdirt.com/2015/10/23/easily-hacked-tea-kettle-latest-to-highlight-pathetic-internet-things-security/

#10yrsago 70% of CEOs’ effect on company performance can be attributed to random chance https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151022192337.htm

#10yrsago Astounding showpiece table full of hidden compartments nested in hidden compartments https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sWrgIgBT9M

#10yrsago A beautiful data-driven Tube ad from 1928 https://www.citymonitor.ai/analysis/1928-ad-london-underground-combines-data-awesome-1513/

#10yrsago Antioxidants protect cancer cells, help tumors to spread https://arstechnica.com/science/2015/10/myths-about-antioxidant-supplements-need-to-die/

#10yrsago Investing in David v Goliath: hundreds of millions slosh into litigation finance funds https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/magazine/should-you-be-allowed-to-invest-in-a-lawsuit.html?smid=tw-share

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#10yrsago Americans are pretty mellow about climate change, terrified of everything else https://blogs.chapman.edu/wilkinson/2015/10/13/americas-top-fears-2015/

#10yrsago NSA spying: judge tosses out case because Wikipedia isn’t widely read enough https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/court-chooses-ignore-overwhelming-evidence-nsas-mass

#10yrsago Stylish furniture made from discarded supermarket trolleys https://etiennereijnders.blogspot.com/

#10yrsago Youtube’s pay TV service makes video-creators a deal they literally can’t refuse https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/23/youtube-red-creators/

#10yrsago Secret surveillance laws make it impossible to have an informed debate about privacy https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/3329/1495

#10yrsago Sony licensed stock footage, then branded its creator a pirate for using it himself https://petapixel.com/2015/10/25/sony-filed-a-copyright-claim-against-the-stock-video-i-licensed-to-them/

#10yrsago Pharma company offers $1/dose version of Martin Shkreli’s drug https://www.chicagotribune.com/2015/10/23/drug-firm-offers-1-version-of-750-turing-pill/

#10yrsago IMF: Cheap oil will bankrupt the Saudis in five years https://web.archive.org/web/20151026052347/https://money.cnn.com/2015/10/25/investing/oil-prices-saudi-arabia-cash-opec-middle-east/index.html?sr=twcnnbrk102515oilpricessaudiarabiacashopecmiddleeast512pStoryMoneyPhoto

#5yrsago Chile restores democratic rule https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/26/viva-allende/#bread-a-roof-and-work

#5yrsago Phone surveillance, made in Canada https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/26/viva-allende/#imsi

#5yrsago Bob Dylan sings a EULA https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/25/musical-chairs/#subterranean-termsick-blues

#5yrsago Facebook threatens ad-transparency group https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/25/musical-chairs/#son-of-power-ventures

#5yrsago RIAA kills youtube-dl https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/24/1201-v-dl-youtube/#1201

#5yrsago Foxconn out-trumped Trump https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/23/foxconned/#foxconned

#5yrsago Bring back the CCC https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/23/foxconned/#ccc

#5yrsago Cracking the Ghislaine Maxwell redactions https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/23/foxconned/#redactions

#5yrsago Student loans are dischargeable https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/23/foxconned/#education-benefit

#1yrago Scientific American endorses Harris https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/23/eisegesis/#norm-breaking

#1yrago The housing crisis considered as an income crisis https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/24/i-dream-of-gini/#mean-ole-mr-median

#1yrago Ian McDonald's "The Wilding" https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/25/bogman/#erin-go-aaaaaaargh

#1yrago Keeping a suspense file gives you superpowers https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/26/one-weird-trick/#todo

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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Recent appearances (permalink)


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Latest books (permalink)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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23.10.2025 à 21:57

Pluralistic: Checking in on the state of Amazon's chickenized reverse-centaurs (23 Oct 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (5946 mots)


Today's links


A 1950s delivery man in front of a van. The image has been altered. The man's head has been replaced with a horse's head. The man is now wearing an Amazon delivery uniform gilet. The packages are covered with Amazon shipping tags, tape and logos. The van has the Amazon 'smile' logo and Prime wordmark. Behind the man, framed in the van's doorway, is the glaring red eye of HAL9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.'

Checking in on the state of Amazon's chickenized reverse-centaurs (permalink)

Amazon has invented a new kind of labor travesty: the chickenized reverse centaur. That's a worker who has to foot the bill to outfit a work environment where they nevertheless have no autonomy (chickenization) and whose body is conscripted to act as a peripheral for a digital system (reverse centaur):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

"Chickenization" is a term out of labor economics, inspired by the brutal state of the poultry industry, where three giant processing companies have divided up the market so that every chicken farmer has just one place where they can sell their birds. To sell your birds to one of these plants, you have to give them total control over your operation. They sell you the baby chicks, they tell you what kind of coop to build and what lightbulbs to install and when they should be off or on. They tell you which vet to use and which medicines can be administered to your birds. They tell you what to feed your birds and when to feed them. They design your coop and tell you who is allowed to maintain it. The one thing they don't tell you is how much you'll be paid for your birds – that's something you only discover when it's time to sell them, and the sum you're offered is based on the packer's region-wide intelligence on how you and all your competitors are faring, and is calculated to be the smallest amount to allow you to roll over your loans and go into more debt to grow more birds for them.

At its root, "chickenization" is about de-risking, cloaked in the language of entrepreneurship. Chicken farmers assume all the risk for the poultry packers, but they're told that they're their own bosses. The only way in which a chicken farmer resembles an entrepreneur is that they have to bear all the risk of failure – without having any upside for success. Packers can (and do) secretly decide to experiment at farmers' expense, ordering some of their farmers to vary their feeding, light and veterinary routines to see if they can eke new efficiencies out of the process. If that works, the surplus is reaped by the packer. If that fails, the losses are borne by the farmer, who is never told that they were funding an experiment.

Amazon makes extensive use of chickenization in its many commercial arrangements, tightly defining the working conditions of many "self-employed" workers, like the clickwork "turkers" who power the Mechanical Turk service. But the most chickenized of all the people in Amazon's network of cutouts and arm's-length arrangements are the "entrepreneurs" who are lured into starting a "Delivery Service Platform" (DSP) business.

To start a DSP, you borrow lots of money to buy vans that you outfit to Amazon's exacting specifications, filling them with interior and exterior sensors and cameras, painting them with Amazon livery, and kitting them out with shelving and other infrastructure to Amazon's exacting specification. Then, you hire workers – giving Amazon a veto over who you hire – and you train them – using Amazon's training materials. You sign them up for Amazon's platforms, which monitor and rank those workers, and then you get paid either $0.10 per parcel, or maybe $0.50 per parcel, or sometimes $0.00 per parcel, all at Amazon's sole discretion.

That's a pretty chickenized arrangement. But what about reverse centaurs?

In automation theory, a "centaur" is someone who is assisted by some automation system (they are a fragile human head being assisted by a tireless machine). Therefore, a reverse centaur is a person who has been conscripted to serve as a peripheral for a machine, a human body surmounted and directed by a brute and uncaring head that not only uses them, but uses them up.

The drivers that DSPs hire are reverse centaurs. Using various forms of automation, Amazon drives these workers to work at a dangerous, humiliating and unsustainable pace, setting and enforcing not just quotas, but also scripting where drivers' eyes must be pointed, how they must accelerate and decelerate, what routes they take, and more. These edicts are enforced by the in-van and on-body automation systems that direct and discipline workers, tools that labor activists call "electronic whips":

https://crackedlabs.org/en/data-work/publications/callcenter

The chickenized owners of DSPs must enforce the edicts Amazon brings down on their reverse centaur workers – Amazon can terminate any DSP, at any time, for any reason or no reason, stranding an "independent entrepreneur" with heavily mortgaged rolling stock that can only be used to deliver Amazon packages, long term leases on garages and parking lots, liability for driver accidents caused by automation systems that punish drivers for e.g. braking suddenly if someone steps into the road, and massive loans.

So when Amazon directs a DSP to fire or discipline a worker, that worker is in trouble. Amazon has hybridized chickenization and reverse centaurism, creating a chickenized reverse centaur, a new kind of labor travesty never seen before.

In "Driven Down," a new report from the DAIR Institute, authors Adrienne Williams, Alex Hanna and Sandra Barcenas draw on interviews with DSP drivers and Williams's own experience driving for Amazon to document the state of the Chickenized Reverse Centaur. It's not good:

https://www.dair-institute.org/projects/driven-down/

"Driven Down" vividly describes – often in drivers' own words – how the life of a chickenized reverse centaur is one of wage theft, privacy invasions, humilation and on-the-job physical risks, for drivers and the communities they drive in.

DSP drivers interact with multiple automation systems – at least nine apps that monitor, score and discipline them. These apps are supposed to run on employer-supplied phones, but these phones are frequently broken, and drivers face severe punishment if these apps aren't all running during their shifts. As a result, drivers routinely install these apps on their own phones, and must give them broad, far-reaching permissions, such that drivers' own phones are surveilling them for Amazon 24/7, whether or not they're on the clock. It's not just DSP owners who are chickenized – it's also drivers, footing the bill for their own electronic whips.

First and foremost, these apps tell the drivers where to go and how to get there. Drivers are dispatched to hundreds of stops per day, on a computer-generated route that is not vetted or sanity-checked by a human before it is non-negotiably handed to a driver. Famously, plotting an efficient route among many points is one of the most insoluble computing problems, the so-called "traveling salesman" problem:

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

But it turns out that there is an optimal solution to the traveling salesman problem: get a computer to make a bizarre and dangerous approximation of the optimal route, and then blame and fine workers when it doesn't work. This doesn't optimize the route, but it does shift all the costs of a suboptimal route to workers.

Crucially, Amazon trusts its computer-generated routes, based on map data, over the word of drivers. For example, drivers are often directed to make "group stops" – where the driver parks the van and then delivers to multiple addresses at once (for example, at an apartment complex or office block). Amazon's mapping service assumes that addresses that are in the same complex or development are close together, even when they are very distant. If a driver dares to move and re-park their van to deliver parcels to distant addresses, the app punishes them for making an unauthorized positional adjustment. If a driver attempts to deliver all the parcels without moving the van, they are penalized for taking too long. Even if drivers report the mapping error, it persists, resulting in strings of infractions, day after day.

When drivers fail to make quota, the DSP's per-parcel payout is reduced. DSPs whose drivers perfectly obey the (irrational, impossible) orders of Amazon's apps get $0.50 per parcel delivered. If drivers fall short of the apps' expectations, the per parcel-rate can fall to $0.10, or, in some cases, zero.

This provides a powerful incentive to DSPs to pressure drivers to engage in unsafe practices if the alternative would displease the app. Drivers are penalized for sudden braking and swerving, for example, but are also penalized for missing quota, which puts drivers in the impossible position of having to drive as quickly as possible but also not to swerve or brake if a sudden traffic hazard pops up. In one absurd tale, a driver describes how they were shifted to an electric van that did regenerative braking when they released the accelerator. The app expected drivers to slow down by releasing the accelerator, not by touching the brakes, but this meant that the van's brake lights never switched on. When a driver slowed at a yellow light, they were badly rear-ended by a following UPS truck, whose driver had assumed the Amazon DSP driver was going to rush the light (because the van's brake lights didn't light up).

Meeting quota means that drivers are also not able to stop for bathroom breaks or to take care of other personal hygiene matters. This is bad enough when it means peeing in a bottle, but it's even worse when the only way to take care of period-related matters is to go into the back of the van – where cameras record everything you do – and manage things there.

Drivers are told many inconsistent things about those cameras. Some drivers have been told that the footage is only reviewed after an accident or complaint, but when drivers do get into accidents or have complaints lodged against them, they are often fired or disciplined without anyone reviewing the footage. Meanwhile, drivers are sometimes punished for things the cameras have recorded even when there was no complaint or accident.

The existence of all that empirical evidence of things happening in and outside an Amazon DSP van makes little to no difference to drivers' employment fairness. When a malfunctioning seatbelt sensor insists that a driver has removed their seatbelt while driving, 80+ times in a single shift, the driver struggled to get their docked wages or lost jobs back. When a driver swerved to avoid an oncoming big rig whose driver had fallen asleep and drifted across the median, the driver was penalized – the driver this happened to had his score in "Mentor" (one of the many apps) docked from 850 to 650. Amazon won't tell drivers what their Mentor scores mean, but many drivers – and DSP owners – believe than anything less than a perfect score will result in punishment or termination.

Attaining and maintaining a perfect score is an impossible task, because Amazon will not disclose what drivers are expected to do – it will only penalize them when they fail to do it. Take the photos that Amazon drivers are expected to snap of parcels after they are delivered. The criteria for these photos is incredibly strict – and also not disclosed. Drivers are penalized for having their hands or shoes or reflections in the image, for capturing customers or their pets, for capturing the house-number. They aren't allowed to photograph shoes that are left on the doormat. Drivers share tips with one another about how to take a picture without losing points, but it's a moving target.

Among drivers, there's a (likely correct) belief that Amazon will not tell them how the apps are generating their scores out of fear that if drivers knew the scoring rubric, they'd start to game it. This is a widespread practice within the world of content moderation and spamfighting, where security practitioners who would normally reject the idea of "security through obscurity" out of hand suddenly embrace secrecy-dependent security measures:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/como-is-infosec/

All this isn't just dangerous and dehumanizing, it's also impoverishing. Drivers who get downranked by these imperious and unaccountable and unexplained algorithms have their hours cut or get fired altogether. The apps set a quota that can't possibly be reached if drivers take their mandated (and unpaid) 30 minute lunch and two 15-minute breaks (drivers who miss quota twice are automatically terminated). This time is given over to unpaid labor. As the report explains:

Drivers are not paid for their 30 minute lunch. A full-time employee working an 8 to 10 hour shift would be working either 4 or 5 days out of each week. At $20 an hour, that is two hours a week for four-day employees, resulting in $40 of unpaid labor a week, $160 a month, almost $2,000 a year.

Drivers are also assigned "homework" – videos they are required watch and simulator exercises they are required to complete as remediation for their real or imagined infractions. This, too, is unpaid, mandatory work. Drivers are required to attend "stand up" meetings at the start of their shifts, and this is also often unpaid work.

Amazon makes a big show of "listening to drivers," but they're never heard. A driver who reported being held at gunpoint by literal Nazis who objected to having their parcels delivered by a Jew had his complaints ignored, and those violent, armed Nazi customers continued to get their parcels delivered.

Even modest requests go unanswered. Drivers for one DSP begged for porta-toilets in the parking lot, rather than having to waste time (and miss quota) legging it to a distant bathroom. They were ignored, and all 50 drivers continue to share a single toilet.

But – thanks to chickenization – none of this is Amazon's problem. It's all the problem of a chickenized DSP "entrepreneur" who serves as a useful accountability sink for Amazon and who can be bankrupted at a moment's notice should they fail to do Amazon's precise bidding.

There's one bright spot here, though: the National Labor Relations Board has brought a case in California seeking to have Amazon held to be a "joint employer" of those reverse centaurs behind the wheels of those vans:

https://www.freightcaviar.com/amazon-faces-mounting-union-pressure-as-nlrb-case-and-teamsters-wins-converge/

This is the very last residue of the NLRB's authority, the rest having been drained away by Trump as part of Project 2025. If they prevail, it will open the door to drivers suing Amazon for unfair labor practices under both federal and state law – and in California and New York, that labor law just got a lot tougher for Amazon:

https://www.laborrelationsupdate.com/2025/10/california-dramatically-expands-state-labor-boards-powers-to-cover-employees-under-nlrbs-exclusive-jurisdiction-following-new-yorks-lead/

The chickenized reverse centaur is a new circle of labor hell, a genuinely innovative way of making workers' lives worse in order to extract more billions for one of the most profitable companies in history.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Ham operator corrects Morse code on the Disneyland Railroad https://web.archive.org/web/20050905155040/http://www.hiddenmickeys.org/Disneyland/Secrets/Square/Morse.html

#20yrsago Accused DUIs demand access to breathalyzer software source-code https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2005/10/21/breathalyzers-and-open-source/
#20yrsago How Disneyland’s Mark Twain riverboat sank https://web.archive.org/web/20051025011944/http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,635154764,00.html

#15yrsago Old film rejection slip: “All scenes of an unpleasant nature should be eliminated” https://oldhollywood.tumblr.com/post/1374666427/the-rejection-slip-the-motion-picture-studio

#15yrsago T-shirt turns into a zombie https://web.archive.org/web/20101123131037/http://deezteez.com/funny-t-shirts/460/turn-into-a-zombie-t-shirt.html?SSAID=112726

#15yrsago Terrified feds try to bar Bunnie Huang from testifying at Xbox jailbreaking trial https://web.archive.org/web/20101023061952/https://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/10/xbox-modder-tria/

#15yrsago Derren Brown’s Confessions of a Conjuror: funny memoir is also a meditation on attention, theatrics and psychology https://memex.craphound.com/2010/10/21/derren-browns-confessions-of-a-conjuror-funny-memoir-is-also-a-meditation-on-attention-theatrics-and-psychology/

#10yrsago Wikileaks hosting files from CIA director John Brennan’s AOL account https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/wikileaks-publishes-e-mail-from-cia-directors-hacked-aol-account/

#10yrsago Hungarian camerawoman who tripped refugee announces she will sue that refugee https://www.techdirt.com/2015/10/21/hungarian-camera-woman-filmed-tripping-refugees-plans-to-sue-facebook-refugee-she-tripped/

#10yrsago Entropy explained, beautifully, in comic-book form https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2015/10/03/sousanis/XOMd3JBYnEdzQCWHM6twTJ/story.html

#10yrsago How a mathematician teaches “Little Brother” to a first-year seminar https://derekbruff.org/2015/10/21/in-class-collaborative-debate-mapping-or-how-a-mathematician-teaches-a-novel/

#10yrsago UK “anti-radicalisation” law can take kids from thoughtcriming parents in secret trials https://www.techdirt.com/2015/10/21/uk-goes-full-orwell-government-to-take-children-away-parents-if-they-might-become-radicalized/

#10yrsago How enforcing a crappy patent bankrupted the Eskimo Pie company https://web.archive.org/web/20190309071221/https://slate.com/technology/2015/10/what-the-history-of-eskimo-pies-says-about-software-patents-today.html

#10yrsago TPP means no more domain privacy https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/us-bypasses-icann-debates-domain-privacy-closed-room-deals-oecd-and-tpp

#10yrsago McDonald’s China debuts a cement-gray bun https://www.telegraph.co.uk/food-and-drink/news/weird-mcdonalds-food-around-the-world/

#10yrsago Terrorists torch five black Ferguson-area churches, nation yawns https://web.archive.org/web/20151020194546/http://usuncut.com/black-lives-matter/black-churches-burning-ferguson-area/

#10yrsago HOWTO make a trashcan Stormtrooper helmet https://scudamor.wordpress.com/2010/10/22/make-your-own-stormtrooper-helmet/

#10yrsago Fable Comics: anthology of great comics artists telling fables from around the world https://memex.craphound.com/2015/10/22/fable-comics-anthology-of-great-comics-artists-telling-fables-from-around-the-world/

#10yrsago J Edgar Hoover fought to write ex-FBI agents out of Hitchcock’s scripts https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/oct/22/alfred-hitchcocks-fbi-file/

#10yrsago Canada’s new Liberal majority: better than the Tories, still terrible for the Internet https://memex.craphound.com/2015/10/22/canadas-new-liberal-majority-better-than-the-tories-still-terrible-for-the-internet/

#10yrsago Forced laborers sue Mississippi debtors’ prison https://theintercept.com/2015/10/22/lawsuit-challenges-mississippi-debtors-prison/

#10yrsago Son of Dieselgate: second line of VWs may have used “defeat devices” https://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/22/us-volkswagen-emissions-engines-idUSKCN0SG0US20151022/

#10yrsago Obama administration petitions judge for no mercy in student debt bankruptcy https://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/33068-obama-administration-urges-no-bankruptcy-relief-for-student-debt

#10yrsago Complexity of financial crimes makes crooks unconvictable https://web.archive.org/web/20151022014805/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-21/has-it-become-impossible-to-prosecute-white-collar-crime-

#10yrsago Half of Vanuatu’s government is going to jail https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-34600561

#10yrsago DHS admits it uses Stingrays for VIPs, vows to sometimes get warrants, stop lying to judges https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/dhs-now-needs-warrant-for-stingray-use-but-not-when-protecting-president/

#5yrsago Free the law of Wisconsin https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/22/the-robots-are-listening/#rogue-archivist

#5yrsago US border cruelty, powered by Google cloud https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/22/the-robots-are-listening/#poulson

#5yrsago Companies target robots in disclosures https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/22/the-robots-are-listening/#goodharts-bank

#5yrsago ENDSARS https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/22/the-robots-are-listening/#endsars

#5yrsago IDing anonymized cops with facial recognition https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/22/the-robots-are-listening/#sousveillance

#5yrsago Falsehoods programmers believe about time https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/21/each-drop-of-strych-a-nine/#a-sort-of-runic-rhyme

#5yrsago Trustbusting is stimulus https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/21/each-drop-of-strych-a-nine/#break-em-up

#5yrsago Tom Lehrer in the public domain https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/21/each-drop-of-strych-a-nine/#poisoning-pigeons

#1yrago Retiring the US debt would retire the US dollar https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/21/we-can-have-nice-things/#public-funds-not-taxpayer-dollars

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

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21.10.2025 à 18:18

Pluralistic: Carl Hiaasen's 'Fever Beach' (21 Oct 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3724 mots)


Today's links


The Penguin Random House cover for Carl Hiaasen's 'Fever Beach.'

Carl Hiaasen's 'Fever Beach' (permalink)

Every Carl Hiaasen novel is a cause for celebration, but Fever Beach, his latest, makes it abundantly clear that this moment, this moment of Florida Man violent white nationalist grifting, is the moment that Hiaasen has been training for his whole life:

https://carlhiaasen.com/books/fever-beach/

Hiaasen is a crime novelist who got his start as a newspaper writer, writing columns about Florida's, ah, unique politics – and sublime, emperilled wilderness – for the Miami Herald. That beat, combined with enormous humor and literary talent, produced a writer who perfectly hybridizes Dave Barry's lovable absurdism with the hard-boiled pastoralism of the Travis McGee novels (Hiaasen wrote the introductions for a 1990s reissue of all of John D McDonald's McGee books).

Hiaasen's method is diabolical and hilarious: each volume introduces a bewildering cast of odd, crooked, charming, and/or loathsome Floridians drawn from his long experience chronicling the state and its misadventures. Every one of these people is engaged in some form of skulduggery, even the heroes, who are every bit as lawless and wild as their adversaries, though Hiaasen's protagonists are always smarter and more competent than his villains. The plots and schemes play out like an intricate clock that has been much-elaborated by a mad clockmaker with an affinity for eccentric gears, all set against the background of Florida, a glorious and beautiful place being fed into a woodchipper powered by unchecked greed and depravity.

After 20-some volumes in this vein (including Bad Monkey, lately adapted for Apple TV), something far weirder than anything Hiaasen ever dreamed up came to pass: Donald Trump, the most Florida Man ever, was elected president. If you asked an LLM to write a Hiaasen novel, you might get Trump: a hacky, unimaginative version of the wealthy, callous, scheming grifters of the Hiaasenverse. Back in 2020, Hiaasen wrote Trump into Squeeze Me, a tremendous and madcap addition to his canon:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/05/florida-man/#disappearing-act

Fever Beach is the first Hiaasen novel since Squeeze Me, and boy, does Hiaasen ever have MAGA's number.

The book revolves around a classic Hiaasen bumbler, Dale Figgo, an incompetent white nationalist who was kicked out of the Proud Boys after the Jan 6 insurrection, when he mistook a statue of a revered Confederate general for Ulysses S Grant (it was the beard) and released a video of himself smearing shit all over it. Cast out from the brotherhood of violent racists, Figgo founds his own white nationalist militia: the Strokers for Liberty, which differentiates itself from the Proud Boys by encouraging (rather than forbidding) frequent masturbation. Figgo takes his inspiration from his day-job, where he packs and ships disembodied torso sex-dolls for an adult e-commerce site, and he entices new Strokers by offering them free limbless fuck-dolls (stolen from work) as a signing bonus.

Figgo lives in a house bought for him by his long-suffering – and seriously boxing gym-addicted – mother, who despairs of his virulent racism. Her one source of comfort is Figgo's tenant, Viva Morales, a smart granting officer in the family office of the Minks (an ultra-wealthy Florida oligarch couple) who does not tolerate any of Figgo's bullshit and also pays her rent like clockwork.

Viva is the other fulcrum of the tale: her employers, the elderly couple behind the Mink Foundation, are secret white nationalist bankrollers who use their charity to funnel money to militia groups, including Strokers For Liberty. The conduit between the Minks and the Strokers is Congressman Clure Boyette, a MAGA Republican failson of an ultra-powerful Florida lobbyist, who (unbeknownst to his father) has raised $2m for the Strokers to finance a "Stop the Steal pollwatching" operation designed to terrorize voters who favor his opponent.

As a front for this dark money op, Boyette has founded the "Wee Hammers," a charity that pulls prepubescent children out of school and puts them to work with heavy power tools to construct houses in a child-labor-centric MAGA version of Habitat for Humanity. This goes about as well as you might expect.

Into this maelstrom, Viva Morales draws Twilly Spree, a recurring character first introduced in 2000's Sick Puppy as a successor to Skink, one of Hiaasen's best heroes. Twilly is a millionaire ecoterrorist who uses his family's obscene wealth – secured through investments in planet-raping extraction – to fund his arson, bombings, and general fuckery directed against Florida's most flagrant despoilers (it helps that Twilly has been psychologically gifted with the literal inability to feel fear). Twilly and Viva become a couple, and Twilly does what Twilly does – wreaking hilarious, violent and spectacular chaos upon the book's many characters.

There are so many characters – I've barely scratched the surface here. There's Galaxy, a dominatrix who loses patience with her long-term client, the MAGA Congressman Clure Boyette, after he stiffs her on a payment because he was too busy tweeting about an alleged plan by woke billiard manufacturers to replace the nation's black 8-balls with Pride-themed rainbow versions. There's Clure Boyette's soon-to-be-ex-wife, who must not, on any account, be shown the photos Galaxy took of Clure in a fur dog-collar and leash defecating on the floor of a luxury hotel suite. There's Jonas Onus, the number two man in the Strokers For Liberty, who terrorizes all and sundry by bringing them into contact with Himmler, his 120lb pitbull mix. There's Noel Kristianson, whom Dale Figgo runs over and nearly kills during an altercation over Figgo's practice of stuffing incoherent antisemitic rants into ziplock bags weighted with beach-sand and tossing them onto the driveways of unsuspecting Floridians. There's a constellation of minor characters and spear-carriers, including Key West drag queen martial artists and assorted discount-store Nazis, long-suffering charter bus drivers and a hit man who cannot abide racial prejudice.

The resulting story has more twists and turns than an invasive Burmese python, that apex predator of the gate-guarded McMansion development. It's screamingly funny, devilishly inventive, and deeply, profoundly satisfying. With Fever Beach, Hiaasen makes a compelling case for Florida as the perfect microcosm of the terrifying state of America, and an even more compelling case for his position as its supreme storyteller.

You do not need to have read any of Hiaasen's other novels to love this one. But I'm pretty sure that if you start with this one, you're going to want to dig into the dozens of other Hiaasen books, and you will not be disappointed if you do.

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 WSJ tech writer damns DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20051027023456/http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/ptech-20051020.html

#20yrsago Fundraiser: donate $500 to shut up loudmouth message-board poster https://www.metafilter.com/dios-rothkofundraiser.mefi

#20yrsago Chinese activist to Jerry Yang: You are helping to maintain an evil system https://web.archive.org/web/20051027021122/https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blogs/gelman/archives/003388.shtml/

#15yrsago Canadian gov’t scientists protest gag order, go straight to public with own website https://web.archive.org/web/20101020142208/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ottawa-notebook/federal-scientists-go-public-in-face-of-restrictive-media-rules/article1761624/

#15yrsago Scary Godmother: delightful, spooky graphic storybook for kids https://memex.craphound.com/2010/10/20/scary-godmother-delightful-spooky-graphic-storybook-for-kids/

#10yrsago The Welcome to Night Vale novel dances a tightrope between weird humor and real pathos https://memex.craphound.com/2015/10/20/the-welcome-to-night-vale-novel-dances-a-tightrope-between-weird-humor-and-real-pathos/

#10yrsago How a lobbyist/doctor couple are destroying Worker’s Comp across America https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-corporate-americas-plan-to-ditch-workers-comp

#10yrsago How the market for zero-day vulnerabilities works https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/10/the-rise-of-the-zero-day-market/

#10yrsago Reality check: we know nothing whatsoever about simulating human brains https://mathbabe.org/2015/10/20/guest-post-dirty-rant-about-the-human-brain-project/

#10yrsago On saying “no”: creativity, self-care, privilege, and knowing your limits https://tumblr.austinkleon.com/post/120472862666

#5yrsago Solar's "miracle material" https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/20/the-cadillac-of-murdermobiles/#perovskite

#5yrsago Cadillac perfects the murdermobile https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/20/the-cadillac-of-murdermobiles/#caddy

#5yrsago Feds gouge states, subsidize corporations https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/20/the-cadillac-of-murdermobiles/#austerity

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

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20.10.2025 à 16:08

Pluralistic: The mad king's digital killswitch (20 Oct 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (5330 mots)


Today's links


The Earth seen from space. Hovering above it is Uncle Sam, with Trump's hair - his legs are stuck out before him, and they terminate in ray-guns that are shooting red rays over the Earth. The starry sky is punctuated by 'code waterfall' effects, as seen in the credit sequences of the Wachowskis' 'Matrix' movies.

The mad king's digital killswitch (permalink)

Remember when we were all worried that Huawei had filled our telecoms infrastructure with listening devices and killswitches? It sure would be dangerous if a corporation beholden to a brutal autocrat became structurally essential to your country's continued operations, huh?

In other, unrelated news, earlier this month, Trump's DoJ ordered Apple and Google to remove apps that allowed users to report ICE's roving gangs of masked thugs, who have kidnapped thousands of our neighbors and sent them to black sites:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/06/rogue-capitalism/#orphaned-syrian-refugees-need-not-apply

Apple and Google capitulated. Apple also capitulated to Trump by removing apps that collect hand-verified, double-checked videos of ICE violence. Apple declared ICE's thugs to be a "protected class" that may not be disparaged in apps available to Apple's customers:

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/articles/big-tech-is-silencing-the-ice-watchers-plus-why-a-scholar-of-antifa-fled-the-country

Of course, iPhones can (technically) run apps that Apple doesn't want you to run. All you have to do is "jailbreak" your phone and install an independent app store. Just one problem: the US Trade Rep bullied every country in the world into banning jailbreaking, meaning that if Trump (a man who never met a grievance that was too petty to pursue) orders Tim Cook (a man who never found a boot he wouldn't lick) to remove apps from your country's app store, you won't be able to get those apps from anyone else:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/15/freedom-of-movement/#data-dieselgate

Now, you could get your government to order Apple to open up its platform to third-party app stores, but they will not comply – instead, they'll drown your country in spurious legal threats:

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:62025TN0354

And they'll threaten to pull out of your country altogether:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/26/empty-threats/#500-million-affluent-consumers

Of course, Google's no better. Not only do they capitulate to every demand from Trump, but they're also locking down Android so that you'll no longer be allowed to install apps unless Google approves of them (meaning that Trump now has a de facto veto over your Android apps):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/01/fulu/#i-am-altering-the-deal

For decades, China hawks have accused Chinese tech giants of being puppeteered by the Chinese state, vehicles for projecting Chinese state power around the world. Meanwhile, the Chinese state has declared war on its tech companies, treating them as competitors, not instruments:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/03/ambulatory-wallets/#sectoral-balances

When it comes to US foreign policy, every accusation is a confession. Snowden showed us how the US tech giants were being used to wiretap virtually every person alive for the US government. More than a decade later, Microsoft has been forced to admit that they will still allow Trump's lackeys to plunder Europeans' data, even if that data is stored on servers in the EU:

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

Microsoft is definitely a means for the US to project its power around the world. When Trump denounced Karim Khan, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, for indicting Netanyahu for genocide, Microsoft obliged by nuking Khan's email, documents, calendar and contacts:

https://apnews.com/article/icc-trump-sanctions-karim-khan-court-a4b4c02751ab84c09718b1b95cbd5db3

This is exactly the kind of thing Trump's toadies warned us would happen if we let Huawei into our countries. Every accusation is a confession.

But it's worse than that. The very worst-case speculative scenario for Huawei-as-Chinese-Trojan-horse is infinitely better than the non-speculative, real ways in which the US has killswitched and bugged the world's devices.

Take CALEA, a Clinton-era law that requires all network switches to be equipped with law-enforcement back-doors that allow anyone who holds the right credential to take over the switch and listen in, block, or spoof its data. Virtually every network switch manufactured is CALEA-compliant, which is how the NSA was able to listen in on the Greek Prime Minister's phone calls to gain competitive advantage for the competing Salt Lake City Olympic bid:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_wiretapping_case_2004%E2%80%9305

CALEA backdoors are a single point of failure for the world's networking systems. Nominally, CALEA backdoors are under US control, but the reality is that lots of hackers have exploited CALEA to attack governments and corporations, inside the US and abroad. Remember Salt Typhoon, the worst-ever hacking attack on US government agencies and large corporations? The Salt Typhoon hackers used CALEA as their entry point into those networks:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/07/foreseeable-outcomes/#calea

US monopolists – within Trump's coercive reach – control so many of the world's critical systems. Take John Deere, the ag-tech monopolist that supplies the majority of the world's tractors. By design, those tractors do not allow the farmers who own them to alter their software. That's so John Deere can force farmers to use Deere's own technicians for repairs, and so that Deere can extract soil data from farmers' tractors to sell into the global futures market.

A tractor is a networked computer in a fancy, expensive case filled with whirling blades, and at any time, Deere can reach into any tractor and permanently immobilize it. Remember when Russian looters stole those Ukrainian tractors and took them to Chechnya, only to have Deere remotely brick their loot, turning the tractors into multi-ton paperweights? A lot of us cheered that high-tech comeuppance, but when you consider that Donald Trump could order Deere to do this to all the tractors, on his whim, this gets a lot more sinister:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

Any government thinking about the future of geopolitics in an era of Trump's mad king fascism should be thinking about how to flash those tractors – and phones, and games consoles, and medical implants, and ventilators – with free and open software that is under its owner's control. The problem is that every country in the world has signed up to America's ban on jailbreaking.

In the EU, it's Article 6 of the Copyright Directive. In Mexico, it's the IP chapter of the USMCA. In Central America, it's via CAFTA. In Australia, it's the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement. In Canada, it's 2012's Bill C-11, which bans Canadian farmers from fixing their own tractors, Canadian drivers from taking their cars to a mechanic of their choosing, and Canadian iPhone and games console owners from choosing to buy their software from a Canadian store:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/beauty-eh/#its-the-only-war-the-yankees-lost-except-for-vietnam-and-also-the-alamo-and-the-bay-of-ham

These anti-jailbreaking laws were designed as a tool of economic extraction, a way to protect American tech companies' sky-high fees and rampant privacy invasions by making it illegal, everywhere, for anyone to alter how these devices work without the manufacturer's permission.

But today, these laws have created clusters of deep-seated infrastructural vulnerabilities that reach into all our digital devices and services, including the digital devices that harvest our crops, supply oxygen to our lungs, or tell us when Trump's masked shock-troops are hunting people in our vicinity.

It's well past time for a post-American internet. Every device and every service should be designed so that the people who use them have the final say over how they work. Manufacturers' back doors and digital locks that prevent us from updating our devices with software of our choosing were never a good idea. Today, they're a catastrophe.

The world signed up to these laws because the US threatened them with tariffs if they didn't do as they were told. Well, happy Liberation Day, everyone. The US told the world to pass America's tech laws or face American tariffs.

When someone threatens to burn down your house unless you do as you're told, and then they burn your house down anyway, you don't have to keep doing what they told you.

When Putin invaded Ukraine, he inadvertently pushed the EU to accelerate its solarization efforts, to escape their reliance on Russian gas, and now Europe is a decade ahead of schedule in meeting its zero-emissions goals:

https://electrek.co/2025/09/30/solar-leads-eu-electricity-generation-as-renewables-hit-54-percent/

Today, another mad dictator is threatening the world's infrastructure. For the rest of the world to escape dictators' demands, they will have to accelerate their independence from American tech – not just Russian gas. A post-American internet starts with abandoning the laws that give US companies – and therefore Trump – a veto over how your technology works.

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 Fox shuts down Buffy Hallowe’en musical despite Whedon’s protests Fox shuts down Buffy Hallowe’en musical despite Whedon’s protests https://web.archive.org/web/20051021235310/http://www.counterpulse.org/calendar.shtml#buffy

#20yrsago Norway’s public broadcaster sells out taxpayers to Microsoft https://memex.craphound.com/2005/10/16/norways-public-broadcaster-sells-out-taxpayers-to-microsoft/

#20yrsago Lifehackers profile in NYT https://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/magazine/meet-the-life-hackers.html

#20yrsago Pan-European DRM proposal https://dissected

#20yrsago EFF cracks hidden snitch codes in color laser prints https://w2.eff.org/Privacy/printers/docucolor/

#20yrsago Nielsen’s top-10 blog usability mistakes https://www.nngroup.com/articles/weblog-usability-top-ten-mistakes/

#20yrsago Microsoft employee calls me a communist and a liar and insists that a Microsoft monopoly will be good for Norwayhttps://memex.craphound.com/2005/10/17/msft-employee-cory-is-a-liar-and-a-communist-msft-is-good-for-norway/

#20yrsago Dear ASCAP: May I sing Happy Birthday for my dad’s 75th? https://web.archive.org/web/20051024004347/https://blog.stayfreemagazine.org/2005/09/happy_birthday.html

#20yrsago 100 oldest .COM names in the registry https://web.archive.org/web/20051024020147/http://www.jottings.com/100-oldest-dot-com-domains.htm

#15yrsago Koja’s UNDER THE POPPY: dark, epic and erotic novel of war and intrigue https://memex.craphound.com/2010/10/18/kojas-under-the-poppy-dark-epic-and-erotic-novel-of-war-and-intrigue/

#15yrsago Ray Ozzie leaves Microsoft https://www.salon.com/2010/10/19/microsoft_roy_ozzie/

#15yrsago Google Book Search will never have an effective competitor https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1417722

#15yrsago Prentiss County, Mississippi Jail requires all inmates to have a Bible, regardless of faith https://web.archive.org/web/20061119033010/https://www.prentisscountysheriff.com/jail.aspx

#15yrsago Early distributed computing video, 1959, prefigures the net https://archive.org/details/AllAboutPolymorphics

#15yrsago Furniture made from rusted Soviet naval mines https://web.archive.org/web/20150206045826/https://marinemine.com/

#15yrsago G20 Toronto cop who was afraid of girl blowing soap bubbles sues YouTube for “ridicule” https://web.archive.org/web/20101019001110/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/officer-bubbles-launches-suit-against-youtube/article1760214/

#15yrsago Help wanted: anti-terrorism intern for Disney https://web.archive.org/web/20151015182237/http://thewaltdisneycompany.jobs/burbank-ca/global-intelligence-analyst-intern-corporate-spring-2016/408543725E4D48B196C01CAEEE602D36/job/

#15yrsago Rudy Rucker remembers Benoit Mandelbrot https://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/2010/10/16/remembering-benoit-mandelbrot/

#15yrsago Verminous Dickens cake banned from Melbourne cake show https://web.archive.org/web/20101019004804/https://hothamstreetladies.blogspot.com/2010/09/contraband-cake.html

#15yrsago English Heritage claims it owns every single image of Stonehenge, ever https://blog.fotolibra.com/2010/10/19/stonewalling-stonehenge/

#15yrsago HOWTO Make Mummy Meatloaf https://web.archive.org/web/20101022232509/http://gatherandnest.com/?p=2848

#15yrsago HOWTO catch drilling-dust with a folded Post-It https://cheezburger.com/4078311936

#10yrsago White supremacists call for Star Wars boycott because imaginary brown people https://www.themarysue.com/boycott-star-wars-vii-because-why-again/

#10yrsago In upsidedownland, Verizon upheld its fiber broadband promises to 14 cities https://www.techdirt.com/2015/10/19/close-only-counts-horseshoes-hand-grenades-apparently-verizons-fiber-optic-installs/

#10yrsago Survivor-count for the Chicago PD’s black-site/torture camp climbs to 7,000+ https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/19/homan-square-chicago-police-disappeared-thousands

#10yrsago A Swedish doctor’s collection of English anatomical idioms https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2015/10/body-of-work/

#10yrsago Some suggestions for sad, rich people https://whatever.scalzi.com/2015/10/18/the-1-of-problems/

#10yrsago That “CIA veteran” who was always on Fox News? Arrested for lying about being in the CIA https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-16/fox-news-terrorism-expert-arrested-for-pretending-to-be-cia/6859576

#10yrsago Eric Holder: I didn’t prosecute bankers for reasons unrelated to my $3M/year law firm salary https://theintercept.com/2015/10/16/holder-defends-record-of-not-prosecuting-financial-fraud/

#10yrsago Titanic victory for fair use: appeals court says Google’s book-scanning is legal https://memex.craphound.com/2015/10/16/titanic-victory-for-fair-use-appeals-court-says-googles-book-scanning-is-legal/

#10yrsago Snowden for drones: The Intercept’s expose on US drone attacks, revealed by a new leaker https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/

#10yrsago Tweens are smarter than you think: the wonderful, true story of the ERMAHGERD meme https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/10/ermahgerd-girl-true-story

#10yrsago UK MPs learn that GCHQ can spy on them, too, so now we may get a debate on surveillance https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/14/gchq-monitor-communications-mps-peers-tribunal-wilson-doctrine

#10yrsago Now we know the NSA blew the black budget breaking crypto, how can you defend yourself? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/how-to-protect-yourself-from-nsa-attacks-1024-bit-DH

#10yrsago 23andme & Ancestry.com aggregated the world’s DNA; the police obliged them by asking for it https://web.archive.org/web/20151023033455/https://fusion.net/story/215204/law-enforcement-agencies-are-asking-ancestry-com-and-23andme-for-their-customers-dna/

#10yrsago A chess-set you wear in a ring https://imgur.com/worlds-smallest-chess-set-ring-Hh3Jeip

#10yrsago Exploiting smartphone cables as antennae that receive silent, pwning voice commands https://www.wired.com/2015/10/this-radio-trick-silently-hacks-siri-from-16-feet-away/

#15yrsago NYPD won’t disclose what it does with its secret military-grade X-ray vans https://web.archive.org/web/20151017212024/http://www.nyclu.org/news/nypd-unlawfully-hiding-x-ray-van-use-city-neighborhoods-nyclu-argues

#10yrsago The International Concatenated Order of Hoo-Hoo: greatly improved, but something important has been lost https://back-then.tumblr.com/post/131407456141/the-international-concatenated-order-of-hoo-hoo

#5yrsago Happy World Standards Day or not https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/18/middle-gauge-muddle/#aoc-flex

#5yrsago Amazon returns end up in landfills https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/16/lucky-ducky/#landfillers

#5yrsago UK to tax Amazon's victims https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/16/lucky-ducky/#amazon-tax

#5yrsago Ferris wheel offices https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/16/lucky-ducky/#gondoliers

#5yrsago Kids reason, adults rationalize https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/19/nanotubes-r-us/#kids-r-alright

#1yrago You should be using an RSS reader https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/16/keep-it-really-simple-stupid/#read-receipts-are-you-kidding-me-seriously-fuck-that-noise

#5yrsago Educator sued for criticising "invigilation" tool https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/17/proctorio-v-linkletter/#proctorio

#1yrago Blue states should play "constitutional hardball" https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/18/states-rights/#cold-civil-war

#1yrago Penguin Random House, AI, and writers' rights https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/19/gander-sauce/#just-because-youre-on-their-side-it-doesnt-mean-theyre-on-your-side

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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