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🖋 Cory DOCTOROW
Science fiction author, activist and journalist
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PLURALISTIC

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26.03.2025 à 18:59

Pluralistic: The AOC-Sanders anti-oligarch tour is all about organizing (26 Mar 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3280 mots)


Today's links


A modified version of the IWW 'The Hand That Will Rule the World - One Big Union' cartoon. The original depicts a collection of workers raising their fists, such that all their fists have merged into one gigantic fist. The image has been modified to add AOC sticking out from behind the fist on the left, speaking into a mic and raising her hand. From behind the right side of the fist emerges Bernie Sanders in mittens and mask, an iconic image of Sanders at the 2021 Biden inauguration.

The AOC-Sanders anti-oligarch tour is all about organizing (permalink)

It's hard to imagine today, but Barack Obama ran as a populist outsider, buoyed into office by a grassroots organizing campaign that used an incredibly innovative online organizing tool called MyBarackObama.com, which directly connected rank-and-file supporters so they could self-organize, creating an unstoppable force.

But as far as Obama was concerned, MyBarackObama.com was a campaigning tool, not a governing tool. The last thing Obama wanted was a clamorous electorate jostling his elbow while he made the grand bargains that defined his presidency: secret drone killings, immunity for telcos that profited from in illegal NSA spying, impunity for CIA torturers, bailing out bankers, complicity in the foreclosure epidemic, and, of course, unlimited free money for health insurance companies through the ACA.

Obama ran like a populist, but governed like Chuck Schumer. Meanwhile, the GOP of his day was dominated by its own "grassroots" groups, the Tea Party movement that was funded and organized by the Kochs but who quickly slipped the leash and became an ungovernable force that conquered the party. It turns out that the kind of people who get really involved in party activism are, well, passionate (a less charitable term might be cranks – and I say this as a certified, grade-A crank). They really believe in the principles that bring them into party activism, and the only people they hate more than the other party are their own sellout leaders (oh, hi, Senator Fetterman!).

For a leader whose theory of governance involves a lot of back-room favor-trading and Extremely Grown Up compromising, an activated, organized base represents a powerful obstacle. Obama's seeming genius was his ability to awaken a grassroots campaigning force that he could then hit pause on once he attained office, then re-activate on demand (Obama "revived" MyBarackObama.com for his second presidential campaign):

https://www.computerworld.com/article/1532634/barack-obama-s-big-data-won-the-us-election-2.html

But ultimately, I think we have to conclude that Obama's strategy was a losing one. By putting his own organization into an induced coma between elections, Obama lost an important source of discipline and feedback that would have told him when his compromises overstepped the tolerance of the electorate – and the fact that Obama didn't have an organized base meant that his Democratic Party rivals and his Republican opponents could force him into bad compromises, as with the ACA.

Contrast Obama with another "populist outsider" in the Democratic Party: Bernie Sanders. Sanders has never been afraid of his own base or their passion. Members of his staff disproportionately come from community and union organizing backgrounds. Think of the difference between Sanders' "Not me, US" and "Our revolution" slogans and Obama's dotcom URL, "MyBarackObama.com." Sanders' presidential campaigns were always organizing campaigns, and he's kept those going in non-election years.

Since Trump/Musk's shock therapy assault on American democracy, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been making headlines with a series of gigantic rallies across the country. The two Democratic Socialists have turned out vast crowds in Republican strongholds: 11,000 in Greely, CO; 15,000 in Tempe, AZ – and even bigger crowds in traditional Democratic turf: 34,000 in Denver.

Writing for The American Prospect, Micah Sifry describes the larger strategy behind these rallies. According to Faiz Shakur, the Sanders staffer who's organizing the events, the point of these events is to build a massive, grassroots organization that gets shit done:

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-03-26-bernies-fighting-oligarchy-tour-organizing/

The campaign is hiring full-time organizers in "Iowa, Nebraska, Wisconsin, and several Western states," and they're already actively fighting in state-level battles, like a Colorado bill to make it easier to form a union:

https://www.cpr.org/2025/02/03/colorado-labor-peace-action-union-history/

These people-powered movements are mobilizing directly against Musk's dark money operation, like the Wisconsin Supreme Court election where Musk is paying people $100 each to vote against Susan Crawford, a progressive candidate:

https://prospect.org/justice/2025-03-21-wisconsin-court-election-drawing-elon-musks-money/

The campaign is using online RSVPs to build out mailing lists. One interesting fact from Sifry's article: 65% of the signups are from people who are new to Sanders' mailing lists. 107,000 people have RSVPed so far. You can sign up here:

https://berniesanders.com/oligarchy/

Rationalization is easy to slip into and impossible to avoid. Politicians who make themselves beholden to organized supporters who really care about the issues are armoring themselves against the enormous pressure on elected representatives to make compromises. Both Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have made compromises in their careers that I disagree with. I don't support them because I think they're perfect or immune to self-serving justifications. I support them because they are deliberately putting themselves in a position where it's much harder for them to make excuses and get away with it.

(Image: Matt A.J., CC BY 2.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

#10yrsago San Francisco Sheriff’s Deputy ring accused of pit-fighting inmates https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/S-F-jail-inmates-forced-to-fight-Adachi-says-6161221.php

#10yrsago Welfare encourages entrepreneurship https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/03/welfare-makes-america-more-entrepreneurial/388598/

#10yrsago Here’s the TSA’s stupid, secret list of behavioral terrorism tells https://theintercept.com/2015/03/27/revealed-tsas-closely-held-behavior-checklist-spot-terrorists/

#5yrsago Reasonable covid food-safety advice https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/27/just-asking-questions/#germophobes

#5yrsago Boris Johnson has coronavirus https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/27/just-asking-questions/#bojo

#5yrsago States prep for postal voting https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/27/just-asking-questions/#save-usps

#5yrsago Plutes cash in on stimulus https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/27/just-asking-questions/#stimulus-scam

#5yrsago The US is now the epicenter of the pandemic https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/27/just-asking-questions/#suicide-cults

#1yrago End of the line for corporate sovereignty https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/27/korporate-kangaroo-kourts/#corporate-sovereignty

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)

  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • 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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It https://craphound.com/news/2025/02/26/with-great-power-came-no-responsibility-how-enshittification-conquered-the-21st-century-and-how-we-can-overthrow-it/

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

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https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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https://doctorow.medium.com/

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https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

25.03.2025 à 23:23

Pluralistic: Why I don't like AI art (25 Mar 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3936 mots)


Today's links


Norman Rockwell’s ‘self portrait.’ All the Rockwell faces have been replaced with HAL 9000 from Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey.’ His signature has been modified with a series of rotations and extra symbols. He has ten fingers on his one visible hand.

Why I don't like AI art (permalink)

A law professor friend tells me that LLMs have completely transformed the way she relates to grad students and post-docs – for the worse. And no, it's not that they're cheating on their homework or using LLMs to write briefs full of hallucinated cases.

The thing that LLMs have changed in my friend's law school is letters of reference. Historically, students would only ask a prof for a letter of reference if they knew the prof really rated them. Writing a good reference is a ton of work, and that's rather the point: the mere fact that a law prof was willing to write one for you represents a signal about how highly they value you. It's a form of proof of work.

But then came the chatbots and with them, the knowledge that a reference letter could be generated by feeding three bullet points to a chatbot and having it generate five paragraphs of florid nonsense based on those three short sentences. Suddenly, profs were expected to write letters for many, many students – not just the top performers.

Of course, this was also happening at other universities, meaning that when my friend's school opened up for postdocs, they were inundated with letters of reference from profs elsewhere. Naturally, they handled this flood by feeding each letter back into an LLM and asking it to boil it down to three bullet points. No one thinks that these are identical to the three bullet points that were used to generate the letters, but it's close enough, right?

Obviously, this is terrible. At this point, letters of reference might as well consist solely of three bullet-points on letterhead. After all, the entire communicative intent in a chatbot-generated letter is just those three bullets. Everything else is padding, and all it does is dilute the communicative intent of the work. No matter how grammatically correct or even stylistically interesting the AI generated sentences are, they have less communicative freight than the three original bullet points. After all, the AI doesn't know anything about the grad student, so anything it adds to those three bullet points are, by definition, irrelevant to the question of whether they're well suited for a postdoc.

Which brings me to art. As a working artist in his third decade of professional life, I've concluded that the point of art is to take a big, numinous, irreducible feeling that fills the artist's mind, and attempt to infuse that feeling into some artistic vessel – a book, a painting, a song, a dance, a sculpture, etc – in the hopes that this work will cause a loose facsimile of that numinous, irreducible feeling to manifest in someone else's mind.

Art, in other words, is an act of communication – and there you have the problem with AI art. As a writer, when I write a novel, I make tens – if not hundreds – of thousands of tiny decisions that are in service to this business of causing my big, irreducible, numinous feeling to materialize in your mind. Most of those decisions aren't even conscious, but they are definitely decisions, and I don't make them solely on the basis of probabilistic autocomplete. One of my novels may be good and it may be bad, but one thing it definitely is is rich in communicative intent. Every one of those microdecisions is an expression of artistic intent.

Now, I'm not much of a visual artist. I can't draw, though I really enjoy creating collages, which you can see here:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/albums/72177720316719208

I can tell you that every time I move a layer, change the color balance, or use the lasso tool to nip a few pixels out of a 19th century editorial cartoon that I'm matting into a modern backdrop, I'm making a communicative decision. The goal isn't "perfection" or "photorealism." I'm not trying to spin around really quick in order to get a look at the stuff behind me in Plato's cave. I am making communicative choices.

What's more: working with that lasso tool on a 10,000 pixel-wide Library of Congress scan of a painting from the cover of Puck magazine or a 15,000 pixel wide scan of Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights means that I'm touching the smallest individual contours of each brushstroke. This is quite a meditative experience – but it's also quite a communicative one. Tracing the smallest irregularities in a brushstroke definitely materializes a theory of mind for me, in which I can feel the artist reaching out across time to convey something to me via the tiny microdecisions I'm going over with my cursor.

Herein lies the problem with AI art. Just like with a law school letter of reference generated from three bullet points, the prompt given to an AI to produce creative writing or an image is the sum total of the communicative intent infused into the work. The prompter has a big, numinous, irreducible feeling and they want to infuse it into a work in order to materialize versions of that feeling in your mind and mine. When they deliver a single line's worth of description into the prompt box, then – by definition – that's the only part that carries any communicative freight. The AI has taken one sentence's worth of actual communication intended to convey the big, numinous, irreducible feeling and diluted it amongst a thousand brushtrokes or 10,000 words. I think this is what we mean when we say AI art is soul-less and sterile. Like the five paragraphs of nonsense generated from three bullet points from a law prof, the AI is padding out the part that makes this art – the microdecisions intended to convey the big, numinous, irreducible feeling – with a bunch of stuff that has no communicative intent and therefore can't be art.

If my thesis is right, then the more you work with the AI, the more art-like its output becomes. If the AI generates 50 variations from your prompt and you choose one, that's one more microdecision infused into the work. If you re-prompt and re-re-prompt the AI to generate refinements, then each of those prompts is a new payload of microdecisions that the AI can spread out across all the words of pixels, increasing the amount of communicative intent in each one.

Finally: not all art is verbose. Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain" – a urinal signed "R. Mutt" – has very few communicative choices. Duchamp chose the urinal, chose the paint, painted the signature, came up with a title (probably some other choices went into it, too). It's a significant work of art. I know because when I look at it I feel a big, numinous irreducible feeling that Duchamp infused in the work so that I could experience a facsimile of Duchamp's artistic impulse.

There are individual sentences, brushstrokes, single dance-steps that initiate the upload of the creator's numinous, irreducible feeling directly into my brain. It's possible that a single very good prompt could produce text or an image that had artistic meaning. But it's not likely, in just the same way that scribbling three words on a sheet of paper or painting a single brushstroke will produce a meaningful work of art. Most art is somewhat verbose (but not all of it).

So there you have it: the reason I don't like AI art. It's not that AI artists lack for the big, numinous irreducible feelings. I firmly believe we all have those. The problem is that an AI prompt has very little communicative intent and nearly all (but not every) good piece of art has more communicative intent than fits into an AI prompt.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Secret copyright treaty will sideline the UN and replace it with private club of rich countries https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2010/03/acta-superstructure/

#15yrsago Discarded photocopier hard drives stuffed full of corporate secrets https://web.archive.org/web/20100322192937/http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/781567–high-tech-copy-machines-a-gold-mine-for-data-thieves

#10yrsago If Indiana legalizes homophobic discrimination, Gen Con’s leaving Indianapolis https://files.gencon.com/Gen_Con_Statement_Regarding_SB101.pdf

#10yrsago Sandwars: the mafias whose illegal sand mines make whole islands vanish https://www.wired.com/2015/03/illegal-sand-mining/<?a>

#10yrsago Woman medicated in a psychiatric ward until she said Obama didn’t follow her on Twitter https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/woman-held-in-psychiatric-ward-after-correctly-saying-obama-follows-her-on-twitter-10132662.html

#10yrsago As crypto wars begin, FBI silently removes sensible advice to encrypt your devices https://www.techdirt.com/2015/03/26/fbi-quietly-removes-recommendation-to-encrypt-your-phone-as-fbi-director-warns-how-encryption-will-lead-to-tears/

#10yrsago Australia outlaws warrant canaries https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/03/australian-government-minister-dodge-new-data-retention-law-like-this/

#10yrsago TPP leak: states give companies the right to repeal nations’ laws https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/02/its-time-act-now-congress-poised-introduce-bill-fast-track-tpp-next-week

#5yrsago Social distancing and other diseases https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/26/badger-masks/#flu-too

#5yrsago Record wind-power growth https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/26/badger-masks/#blows-blows

#5yrsago Sanders on GOP stimulus cruelty https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/26/badger-masks/#unlimited-cruelty

#5yrsago Canada nationalizes covid patents https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/26/badger-masks/#c13

#5yrsago LoC plugs Little Brother https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/26/badger-masks/#lb-loc

#5yrsago The ideology of economics https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/26/badger-masks/#piketty

#1yrago Meatspace twiddling https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/26/glitchbread/#electronic-shelf-tags

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)

  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • 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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It https://craphound.com/news/2025/02/26/with-great-power-came-no-responsibility-how-enshittification-conquered-the-21st-century-and-how-we-can-overthrow-it/

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

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https://doctorow.medium.com/

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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

ISSN: 3066-764X

24.03.2025 à 17:12

Pluralistic: Trump loves Big Tech (24 Mar 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4336 mots)


Today's links


A science fiction illustration of a giant robot in a massive laboratory; on a lab-bench in the foreground are two bell jars. One contains a 'John Bull' character representing the UK. He looks alarmed. In the other jar is a WWI German officer with a musket; his jacket has been colorized to EU flag blue, and the EU circle of stars appears on his belly and the front of his peaked cap. The robot is attacking the John Bull jar with red laser beams coming from its eyes; the beams are melting the jar. The robot has Trump's hair and a Tesla logo on its chest.

Trump loves Big Tech (permalink)

The sight of the CEOs of Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Tiktok arranged in a decorative semicircle behind Trump on the dais on inauguration day was the final repudiation of the Obama-era notion that tech was somehow committed to democracy (or the Democrats).

These billionaires transferred millions from their personal accounts to Trump's "inauguration fund," a kind of presidential tip jar that Trump rattled under the noses of any convenient industry leaders hoping for preferential treatment from his regime. It paid off handsomely.

Just days before the inauguration, Trump flew to Davos where he told the world's leaders – especially in the EU – that he would not tolerate attempts to regulate US Big Tech companies, such as the EU's groundbreaking Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act:

https://gizmodo.com/trump-returns-big-techs-ass-kissing-at-davos-2000554158

There's been a lot of talk about how disillusioned liberals – especially those in Silicon Valley – are with Big Tech's heel turn, but what about the Trumpist factions that hate Big Tech? Plenty of people in the Trump base profess a hatred of Big Tech, and then there are the "Khanservatives" – JD Vance, Josh Hawley, Matt Gaetz, Marsha Blackburn, Ted Cruz, etc – who aligned themselves with Biden's FTC Chair Lina Khan and professed a principled objection to Big Tech monopolies and even co-sponsored bills with the likes of Elizabeth Warren that were designed to strike at the root of tech monopolists power.

Trumpism – like every successful political movement – is a coalition. It's made up of factions who virulently disagree on key issues, and Trump himself is the arbiter of which faction emerges triumphant and which one will have to eat shit and like it:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/06/how-the-sausage-gets-made/#governing-is-harder

It's pretty clear at this point that the anti-Big Tech wing of the Trump Party has lost. Trump's saber-rattling is funneling billions into Big Tech's pockets and consolidating their power. Nowhere is this more visible than in the UK, where PM Keir Starmer fired the country's top anti-monopoly enforcer and replaced him with the former head of Amazon UK:

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

But the British giveaways to US tech monopolists don't end there. Now, Starmer's announced plans to give a £800m/year tax giveaway to US Big Tech:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8j0dgym8w1o

If the Trumpist techbusters were truly sincere in their professed belief that Big Tech had too much power and must be broken up, then this should all be provoking howls of outrage from the Khanservatives – but they're all conspicuously silent.

Riley Quinn, showrunner of the amazing Trashfuture podcast, once proposed that the conservative animus towards Big Tech was driven entirely by grievances over content moderation algorithms that downranked conspiracy theories, racial slurs, and fundraising messages from grifting far-right politicians. Quinn joked that these conservative techbusters could be satisfied if every Big Tech board meeting was henceforth solemnized with a "Stolen Likes Acknowledgement," in which the execs publicly repudiated the fortunes their forerunners amassed through the suffering of shadowbanned culture warriors. Think of it as a Twitter Files mirror world doppelganger of the "stolen land" acknowledgments often heard before progressive meetings and presentations:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

For its part, the EU is holding its ground in the face of Trumpism. Indeed, Trump's obnoxious belligerence has trashed the popularity of many of the EU's far right parties, especially in Scandinavia, where the burgeoning neofascist movement has lost nearly all momentum in the face of Trump's threats to annex Greenland away from Denmark:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g0718g3jwo

(The same thing has happened in Canada, where the Trumpist Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre has seen his massive polling leads collapse on the eve of a snap election):

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/livestory/canada-election-party-leaders-make-their-pitches-as-snap-campaign-kicks-off-9.6695126

But if the EU really wants to assert its sovereignty against American Big Tech, it should roll back Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, which copies the 1998 American Digital Millennium Copyright Act by banning reverse-engineering and modification of tech products and services:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/08/turnabout/#is-fair-play

By rolling back this legislation – which the US trade rep lobbied hard for, threatening tariffs on EU exports if it wasn't passed – the EU would open space for European companies to compete with American tech giants, striking at their most profitable lines of business. This would let EU companies make app stores for mobile devices and games consoles (so EU software authors wouldn't have to send 30% of all revenues to a US tech monopolist). It would also let EU companies jailbreak US cars, like Teslas, unlocking all their software upgrades and also seling made-in-the-EU apps to European drivers. This move would let EU mechanics fix any car without paying an American car company for an expensive diagnostic tool, and it would let EU small businesses refill printer ink cartridges, crashing the 10,000,000% margins enjoyed by US giants like HP.

Trump is in the tank for American Big Tech. He may have courted the anti-Big Tech wing of his movement by trash-talking US tech giants, but all it took was a few million in bribes and he changed his tune. US Big Tech is now an ascendant faction in the Trump Party coalition, which makes them fair game for the trade war.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Record sales up, P2P sales up — RIAA’s story doesn’t add up https://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/23/business/music-sales-rise-in-united-states.html

#20yrsago If the Constitution was a EULA https://web.archive.org/web/20050327014732/https://slate.msn.com/id/2115254/

#20yrsago Starbucks’ cup-aphorisms enrage “conservatives” https://web.archive.org/web/20050327061148/http://sptimes.com/2005/03/25/Business/Coffee_with_steam.shtml

#20yrsago US sabotaging efforts to create humanitarian copyright and patent policies https://web.archive.org/web/20050912085714/https://www.corante.com/copyfight/archives/2005/03/25/united_states_v_wipos_development_agenda.php

#20yrsago Send Frist photos of your ailments for diagnosis https://web.archive.org/web/20050326014931/https://www.personaldemocracy.com/node/470

#20yrsago Fox is advertising on Grokster, also suing to put Grokster out of business https://web.archive.org/web/20050702081915/http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.san&s=28535&Nid=12722&p=244505

#20yrsago Orphan works: what’s wrong and how to fix it https://web.archive.org/web/20120905011655/https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/orphanworks.html

#15yrsago Profit-sharing arrangements among Somali pirates https://web.archive.org/web/20100323020702/https://undispatch.com/somali-pirates-buisiness-model

#15yrsago Child-abuse survivors oppose EU censorwall https://mogis-verein.de/archive/eu/

#15yrsago Telcoms expert on Verizon’s fiber maintenance procedures https://web.archive.org/web/20100331120017/https://isen.com/blog/2010/03/verizon-doesnt-know-what-verizon-knows/

#15yrsago Reciting Pi while balancing books and spinning a Rubik’s Cube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUGjUCHSKLM

#15yrsago How the American phone companies used to feel about privacy https://web.archive.org/web/20100329150129/http://www.crypto.com/blog/wiretap_risks/

#15yrsago UK record lobby: democracy is a waste of time https://memex.craphound.com/2010/03/24/uk-record-lobby-democracy-is-a-waste-of-time/

#15yrsago Writers’ Union of Canada smears attempt to expand fair dealing: “Legalised theft” https://web.archive.org/web/20100327073841/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4903/125/

#15yrsago Ottawa joins the war on photography https://web.archive.org/web/20100327213857/http://www.sto.ca/secure/index_en.html

#15yrsago Airport worker caught photographing screen as female worker passed through naked scanner https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/mar/24/airport-worker-warned-body-scanner

#15yrsago Stop DRM on UK TV! Sign onto ORG’s comments https://web.archive.org/web/20100316073211/https://www.openrightsgroup.org/campaigns/stop-bbc-drm

#10yrsago ACLU sues TSA to make it explain junk science “behavioral detection” program https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/nyclu-and-aclu-sue-tsa-records-discredited-behavior-detection-program

#10yrsago Randomized dystopia generator that goes beyond the Bill of Rights https://www.brainwane.net/dystopia/

#10yrsago Bankrupt Radio Shack will sell the customer data they promised to keep private https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/03/despite-privacy-policy-radioshack-customer-data-up-for-sale-in-auction/

#10yrsago I hate your censorship, but I’ll defend to the death your right to censor https://memex.craphound.com/2015/03/25/i-hate-your-censorship-but-ill-defend-to-the-death-your-right-to-censor/

#5yrsago Posties are key to America's emergency response https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/25/national-emergency-library/#going-postal

#5yrsago Toilet paper separator https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/25/national-emergency-library/#single-ply

#5yrsago Doctors hoard choloroquine https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/25/national-emergency-library/#choloroquine

#5yrsago Trump's Bible study teacher thinks coronavirus is God's wrath https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/25/national-emergency-library/#church-and-state

#5yrsago No more O'Reilly events https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/25/national-emergency-library/#foo-camp

#5yrsago Kaiser threatens to fire Oakland nurses who wear their own masks https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/25/national-emergency-library/#insubordiation

#5yrsago Internet Archive lifts lending restrictions on ebooks https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/25/national-emergency-library/#universal-access

#5yrsago MIT's ingenious manual/automatic open source ventilator https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/24/grandparents-optional-party/#oshw-ventilator

#5yrsago Bailouts and moral hazard https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/24/grandparents-optional-party/#moral-hazard

#5yrsago Quarantine reveals the falsity of the automation crisis https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/24/grandparents-optional-party/#what-automation

#5yrsago Financial stability vs economic stability https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/24/grandparents-optional-party/#jubilee

#5yrsago The Party of Death https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/24/grandparents-optional-party/#death-panels

#5yrsago Murdering 20% of elderly Americans is bad strategy for the GOP https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/24/grandparents-optional-party/#turkey-shoot

#5yrsago Stock Jump https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/24/grandparents-optional-party/#off-the-cliff

#5yrsago Data is the new toxic waste https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/24/grandparents-optional-party/#digital-toxic-waste

#1yrago Conspiratorialism and the epistemological crisis https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/25/black-boxes/#when-you-know-you-know

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)

  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • 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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It https://craphound.com/news/2025/02/26/with-great-power-came-no-responsibility-how-enshittification-conquered-the-21st-century-and-how-we-can-overthrow-it/

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

22.03.2025 à 08:58

Pluralistic: Twinkump Linkdump (22 Mar 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4779 mots)


Today's links


A bloody mary stacked high with many absurd, over-the-top garnishes.

Twinkump Linkdump (permalink)

I have an excellent excuse for this week's linkdump: I'm in Germany, but I'm supposed to be in LA, and I'm not, because London Heathrow shut down due to a power-station fire, which meant I spent all day yesterday running around like a headless chicken, trying to get home in time for my gig in San Diego on Monday (don't worry, I sorted it):

https://www.mystgalaxy.com/32425Doctorow

Therefore, this is 30th linkdump, in which I collect the assorted links that didn't make it into this week's newsletters. Here are the other 29:

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

I always like to start and end these 'dumps with some good news, which isn't easy in these absolutely terrifying times. But there is some good news: Wil Wheaton has announced his new podcast, a successor of sorts to the LeVar Burton Reads podcast. It's called "It's Storytime" and it features Wil reading his favorite stories handpicked from science fiction magazines, including On Spec, the magazine that bought my very first published story (I was 16, it ran in their special youth issue, it wasn't very good, but boy did it mean a lot to me):

https://wilwheaton.net/podcast/

Here's some more good news: a court has found (again!) that works created by AI are not eligible for copyright. This is the very best possible outcome for people worried about creators' rights in the age of AI, because if our bosses can't copyright the botshit that comes out of the "AI" systems trained on our work, then they will pay us:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-appeals-court-rejects-copyrights-171203999.html

Our bosses hate paying us, but they hate the idea of not being able to stop people from copying their entertainment products so! much! more! It's that simple:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/20/everything-made-by-an-ai-is-in-the-public-domain/

This outcome is so much better than the idea that AI training isn't fair use – an idea that threatens the existence of search engines, archiving, computational linguistics, and other clearly beneficial activities. Worse than that, though: if we create a new copyright that allows creators to prevent others from scraping and analyzing their works, our bosses will immediately alter their non-negotiable boilerplate contracts to demand that we assign them this right. That will allow them to warehouse huge troves of copyrighted material that they will sell to AI companies who will train models designed to put us on the breadline (see above, re: our bosses hate paying us):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/13/hey-look-over-there/#lets-you-and-he-fight

The rights of archivists grow more urgent by the day, as the Trump regime lays waste to billions of dollars worth of government materials that were produced at public expense, deleting decades of scientific, scholarly, historical and technical materials. This is the kind of thing you might expect the National Archive or the Library of Congress to take care of, but they're being chucked into the meat-grinder as well.

To make things even worse, Trump and Musk have laid waste to the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a tiny, vital agency that provides funding to libraries, archives and museums across the country. Evan Robb writes about all the ways the IMLS supports the public in his state of Washington:

  • Technology support. Last-mile broadband connection, network support, hardware, etc. Assistance with the confusing e-rate program for reduced Internet pricing for libraries.

  • Coordinated group purchase of e-books, e-audiobooks, scholarly research databases, etc.

  • Library services for the blind and print-disabled.

  • Libraries in state prisons, juvenile detention centers, and psychiatric institutions.

  • Digitization of, and access to, historical resources (e.g., newspapers, government records, documents, photos, film, audio, etc.).

  • Literacy programming and support for youth services at libraries.

The entire IMLS budget over the next 10 years rounds to zero when compared to the US federal budget – and yet, by gutting it, DOGE is amputating significant parts of the country's systems that promote literacy; critical thinking; and universal access to networks, media and ideas. Put it that way, and it's not hard to see why they hate it so.

Trying to figure out what Trump is up to is (deliberately) confusing, because Trump and Musk are pursuing a chaotic agenda that is designed to keep their foes off-balance:

https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-donald-trump-chaos/

But as Hamilton Nolan writes, there's a way to cut through the chaos and make sense of it all. The problem is that there are a handful of billionaires who have so much money that when they choose chaos, we all have to live with it:

The significant thing about the way that Elon Musk is presently dismantling our government is not the existence of his own political delusions, or his own self-interested quest to privatize public functions, or his own misreading of economics; it is the fact that he is able to do it. And he is able to do it because he has several hundred billion dollars. If he did not have several hundred billion dollars he would just be another idiot with bad opinions. Because he has several hundred billion dollars his bad opinions are now our collective lived experience.

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/the-underlying-problem

We actually have a body of law designed to prevent this from happening. It's called "antitrust" and 40 years ago, Jimmy Carter decided to follow the advice of some of history's dumbest economists who said that fighting monopolies made the economy "inefficient." Every president since, up to – but not including – Biden, did even more to encourage monopolization and the immense riches it creates for a tiny number of greedy bastards.

But Biden changed that. Thanks to the "Unity Taskforce" that divided up the presidential appointments between the Democrats' corporate wing and the Warren/Sanders wing, Biden appointed some of the most committed, effective trustbusters we'd seen for generations:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

After Trump's election, there was some room for hope that Trump's FTC would continue to pursue at least some of the anti-monopoly work of the Biden years. After all, there's a sizable faction within the MAGA movement that hates (some) monopolies:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/24/enforcement-priorities/#enemies-lists

But last week, Trump claimed to have illegally fired the two Democratic commissioners on the FTC: Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Slaughter. I stan both of these commissioners, hard. When they were at the height of their powers in the Biden years, I had the incredible, disorienting experience of getting out of bed, checking the headlines, and feeling very good about what the government had just done.

Trump isn't legally allowed to fire Bedoya and Slaughter. Perhaps he's just picking this fight as part of his chaos agenda (see above). But there are some other pretty good theories about what this is setting up. In his BIG newsletter, Matt Stoller proposes that Trump is using this case as a wedge, trying to set a precedent that would let him fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-trump-tried-to-fire-federal-trade

But perhaps there's more to it. Stoller just had Commissioner Bedoya on Organized Money, the podcast he co-hosts with David Dayen, and Bedoya pointed out that if Trump can fire Democratic commissioners, he can also fire Republican commissioners. That means that if he cuts a shady deal with, say, Jeff Bezos, he can order the FTC to drop its case against Amazon and fire the Republicans on the commission if they don't frog when he jumps:

https://www.organizedmoney.fm/p/trumps-showdown-at-the-ftc-with-commissioner

(By the way, Organized Money is a fantastic podcast, notwithstanding the fact that they put me on the show last week:)

https://audio.buzzsprout.com/6f5ly01qcx6ijokbvoamr794ht81

The future that our plutocrat overlords are grasping for is indeed a terrible one. You can see its shape in the fantasies of "liberatarian exit" – the seasteads, free states, and other assorted attempts to build anarcho-capitalist lawless lands where you can sell yourself into slavery, or just sell your kidneys. The best nonfiction book on libertarian exit is Raymond Criab's 2022 "Adventure Capitalism," a brilliant, darkly hilarious and chilling history of every time a group of people have tried to found a nation based on elevating selfishness to a virtue:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/14/this-way-to-the-egress/#terra-nullius

If Craib's book is the best nonfiction volume on the subject of libertarian exit, then Naomi Kritzer's super 2023 novel Liberty's Daughter is the best novel about life in a libertopia – a young adult novel about a girl growing up in the hell that would be life with a Heinlein-type dad:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/21/podkaynes-dad-was-a-dick/#age-of-consent

But now this canon has a third volume, a piece of design fiction from Atelier Van Lieshout called "Slave City," which specs out an arcology populated with 200,000 inhabitants whose "very rational, efficient and profitable" arrangements produce €7b/year in profit:

https://www.archdaily.com/30114/slave-city-atelier-van-lieshout

This economic miracle is created by the residents' "voluntary" opt-in to a day consisting of 7h in an office, 7h toiling in the fields, 7h of sleep, and 3h for "leisure" (e.g. hanging out at "The Mall," a 24/7, 26-storey " boundless consumer paradise"). Slaves who wish to better themselves can attend either Female Slave University or Male Slave University (no gender controversy in Slave City!), which run 24/7, with 7 hours of study, 7 hours of upkeep and maintenance on the facility, 7h of sleep, and, of course, 3h of "leisure."

The field of design fiction is a weird and fertile one. In his traditional closing keynote for this year's SXSW Interactive festival, Bruce Sterling opens with a little potted history of the field since it was coined by Julian Bleeker:

https://bruces.medium.com/how-to-rebuild-an-imaginary-future-2025-0b14e511e7b6

Then Bruce moves on to his own latest design fiction project, an automated poetry machine called the Versificatore first described by Primo Levi in an odd piece of science fiction written for a newspaper. The Versificatore was then adapted to the screen in 1971, for an episode of an Italian sf TV show based on Levi's fiction:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tva-D_8b8-E

And now Sterling has built a Versificatore. The keynote is a sterlingian delight – as all of his SXSW closers are. It's a hymn to the value of "imaginary futures" and an instruction manual for recovering them. It could not be more timely.

Sterling's imaginary futures would be a good upbeat note to end this 'dump with, but I've got a real future that's just as inspiring to close us out with: the EU has found Apple guilty of monopolizing the interfaces to its devices and have ordered the company to open them up for interoperability, so that other manufacturers – European manufacturers! – can make fully interoperable gadgets that are first-class citizens of Apple's "ecosystem":

https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-ordered-by-eu-antitrust-regulators-open-up-rivals-2025-03-19/

It's a good reminder that as America crumbles, there are still places left in the world with competent governments that want to help the people they represent thrive and prosper. As the Prophet Gibson tells us, "the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." Let's hope that the EU is living in America's future, and not the other way around.

(Image: TDelCoro, CC BY-SA 2.0, modified)


A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago EFF appeals Apple versus Online Journalists https://web.archive.org/web/20050323164233/https://www.corante.com/copyfight/archives/2005/03/22/eff_files_for_appeal_in_apple_v_does.php

#20yrsago Reflex: brilliant, page-turning sequel to Jumper https://memex.craphound.com/2005/03/23/reflex-brilliant-page-turning-sequel-to-jumper/

#15yrsago Secret ACTA fights over iPod border-searches https://web.archive.org/web/20100327070826/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4900/125/

#15yrsago Ghost Stories: London stage show scared the hell out of me https://memex.craphound.com/2010/03/23/ghost-stories-london-stage-show-scared-the-hell-out-of-me/

#15yrsago Delusional EU ACTA negotiator claims that three strikes has never been proposed at ACTA https://web.archive.org/web/20100325025412/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4894/125/

#15yrsago Teacher’s heartbreak and anger at No Child Left Behind https://web.archive.org/web/20100326122015/http://lilysblackboard.org/2010/03/nclb-science-of-making-up-stuff

#10yrsago Hacking a laser-cutter to play real-world Space Invaders https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytcnSRXfE4Y
#10yrsago Demystifying copyright licensing and 3D printing https://web.archive.org/web/20150506032415/https://www.publicknowledge.org/assets/uploads/documents/3_Steps_for_Licensing_Your_3D_Printed_Stuff.pdf

#5yrsago Italy's mayors berate quarantine-breaking citizens https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/23/tacocat-vs-dog-prostates/#inflamed-prostates

#5yrsago Medicare for All is an economic stabilizer https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/23/tacocat-vs-dog-prostates/#brittle-capitalism

#5yrsago It's time for a coronavirus jubilee https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/23/tacocat-vs-dog-prostates/#jubilee

#5yrsago Adafruit offers open source PPE manufacturing https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/23/tacocat-vs-dog-prostates/#oshw-ppe

#5yrsago How "concierge doctors" supply the "worried well" with masks, respirators and tests https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/22/preppers-are-larpers/#concierge-medicine

#5yrsago Rashida Tlaib proposes minting two trillion-dollar coins https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/22/preppers-are-larpers/#with-a-t

#5yrsago Florida mayor ducks accountability for threatening power disconnections during the pandemic https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/22/preppers-are-larpers/#florida-mayor

#5yrsago Law firm tells work-from-homers to switch off smart speakers https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/22/preppers-are-larpers/#dumb-choices

#5yrsago How prepper media is coping with the crisis https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/22/preppers-are-larpers/#preppers-unprepared

#1yrago The antitrust case against Apple https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/22/reality-distortion-field/#three-trillion-here-three-trillion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

#1yrago Someday, we'll all take comfort in the internet's "dark corners" https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/23/evacuate-the-platforms/#let-the-platforms-burn

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)

  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • 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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It https://craphound.com/news/2025/02/26/with-great-power-came-no-responsibility-how-enshittification-conquered-the-21st-century-and-how-we-can-overthrow-it/

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

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https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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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

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