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PLURALISTIC

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17.02.2026 à 11:56

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

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4221 mots)


Today's links


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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16.02.2026 à 09:22

Pluralistic: The online community trilemma (16 Feb 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4998 mots)


Today's links

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


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

The online community trilemma (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

a) A community of like-minded people;

b) Useful information; and

c) The largest possible audience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF

13.02.2026 à 09:29

Pluralistic: Trump antitrust is dead (13 Feb 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4426 mots)


Today's links


An altered version of a Gilded Age editorial cartoon titled 'Who controls the Senate?' which depicts the Senate as populated by tiny, ineffectual politicians ringed by massive, bloated, brooding monopolists. A door labeled 'people's entrance.' is firmly locked. A sign reads, 'This is a senate of the monopolists, by the monopolists and for the monopolists.' The image has been altered: an editorial cartoon of Boss Tweed, portrayed as a portly man in a business suit with a money-bag for a head, stands in the foreground. He is wearing a MAGA hat. On his shoulder perches a tiny, 'big stick' swinging FDR from another editorial cartoon. The logos of the monopolists in the background have been replaced with logos for Chevron, Coinbase, Google, Microsoft, WB, PGA, Apple, Comcast, Realpage and KKR.

Trump antitrust is dead (permalink)

Remember when the American right decided that it hated (some) big businesses, specifically Big Tech? A whole branch of the Trump coalition (including JD Vance, Matt Gaetz and Josh Hawley) declared themselves to be "Khanservatives," a cheering section for Biden's generationally important FTC commissioner Lina Khan:

https://www.fastcompany.com/91156980/trump-vp-pick-j-d-vance-supports-big-tech-antitrust-crackdown

Trump owes his power to his ability to bully and flatter a big, distrustful coalition of people who mostly hate each other into acting together, like the business lobby and the grievance-saturated conspiratorialists who hate Big Tech because they were momentarily prevented from calling for genocide or peddling election disinformation:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/18/winning-is-easy/#governing-is-harder

The best framing for the MAGA war on Big Tech comes from Trashfuture's Riley Quinn, who predicted that the whole thing could be settled by tech companies' boards agreeing to open every meeting with a solemn "stolen likes acknowledgment" that made repentance for all the shadowbanned culture warriors whose clout had been poached by soy content moderators.

And that's basically what happened. Trump's antitrust agencies practiced "boss politics antitrust" in which favored courtiers were given free passes to violate the law, while Trump's enemies were threatened with punitive antitrust investigations until they fell into line:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/29/bondi-and-domination/#superjove

Trump's antitrust boss Gail Slater talked a big game about "Trump Antitrust" but was thwarted at every turn by giant corporations who figured out that if they gave a million bucks to a MAGA podcaster, they could go over Slater's head and kill her enforcement actions. When Slater's deputy, Roger Alford, went public to denounce the sleazy backroom dealings that led to the approval of the Hewlett Packard Enterprise/Juniper merger, he was forced out of the agency altogether and replaced with a Pam Bondi loyalist who served as a kind of politburo political officer in Slater's agency:

https://abovethelaw.com/2025/08/former-maga-attorney-goes-scorched-earth-with-corruption-allegations-in-antitrust-division/

Bondi made no secret of her contempt for Slater, and frequently humiliated her in public. Now it seems that Bondi has gotten tired of this game and has forced Slater out altogether. As ever, Matt Stoller has the best analysis of how this happened and what it means:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/trump-antitrust-chief-ousted-by-ticketmaster

Stoller's main thesis is that the "conservative populist" movement only gained relevance by complaining about "censorship of conservatives" on the Big Tech platforms. While it's true that the platforms constitute an existential risk to free expression thanks to their chokehold over speech forums, it was always categorically untrue that conservatives were singled out by tech moderators:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

Conservative populists' grievance-based politics is in contrast with the progressive wing of the anti-monopoly movement, which was concerned with the idea of concentrated power itself, and sought to dismantle and neuter the power of the business lobby and the billionaires who ran it:

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

The problem with conservative populism, then, is that its movement was propelled by the idea that Big Tech was soy and cucked and mean to conservatives. That meant that Big Tech bosses had an easy path out of its crosshairs: climb into the tank for MAGA.

That's just what they did: Musk bought Twitter; Zuck ordered his content moderators to censor the left and push MAGA influencers; Bezos neutered his newspaper in the run up to the 2024 elections; Tim Cook hand-assembled a gold participation trophy for Trump live on camera. These CEOs paid a million dollars each for seats on Trump's inauguration dais and their companies donated millions for Trump's Epstein Memorial Ballroom.

Slater's political assassination merely formalizes something that's been obvious for a year now: you can rip off the American people with impunity so long as you flatter and bribe Trump.

The HPE/Juniper merger means that one company now supplies the majority of commercial-grade wifi routers, meaning that one company now controls all the public, commercial, and institutional internet you'll ever connect to. The merger was worth $14b, and Trump's trustbusters promised to kill it. So the companies paid MAGA influencer Mike Davis (who had publicly opposed the merger) a million bucks and he got Trump to overrule his own enforcers. Getting your $14b merger approved by slipping a podcaster a million bucks is a hell of a bargain.

HPE/Juniper were first, but they weren't the last. There was the Discover/Capital One merger, which rolled up the two credit cards that low-waged people rely on the most, freeing the new company up for even more predatory practices, price-gouging, junk-fees, and strong-arm collections. When the bill collectors are at your door looking for thousands you owe from junk fees, remember that it was Gail Slater's weakness that sent them there:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/03/business/dealbook/capital-one-discover-merger.html

Slater also waved through the rollup of a string of nursing homes by one of the world's most notoriously greedy and cruel private equity firms, KKR. When your grandma dies of dehydration in a dirty diaper, thank Gail Slater:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/09/dingo-babysitter/#maybe-the-dingos-ate-your-nan

Slater approved the merger of Unitedhealth – a company notorious for overbilling the government while underdelivering to patients – with Amedisys, who provide hospice care and home health help:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-requires-broad-divestitures-resolve-challenge-unitedhealths-acquisition

The hits keep coming. Want to know why your next vacation was so expensive? Thank Slater for greenlighting the merger of American Express Global Business Travel and CWT Holdings, which Slater challenged but then dropped, reportedly because MAGA influencer Mike Davis told her to.

Davis also got Slater to reverse her opposition to the Compass/Anywhere Real Estate merger, which will make America's dysfunctional housing market even worse:

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/real-estate-brokerages-avoided-merger-investigation-after-justice-department-rift-e846c797?gaa_at=eafs&gaa_n=AWEtsqdSXg4z1XPl2UpqdHR4V2-sNj9M7oDcWHscPIXuSU-5n0gtYEv8Q5XZG7qtzfY%3D&gaa_ts=698e44a6&gaa_sig=IO7tWGaHZSYER64YyUzyoiVtrOKR77ZsYMMOdwN1P7koRt9zXYRJ1hxw2oDU9cD40-aGgHHVfwMWg14olFwNaw%3D%3D

It's not just homebuyers whose lives are worse off because of Slater's failures, it's tenants, too. Slater settled the DoJ's case against Realpage, a price-fixing platform for landlords that is one of the most culpable villains in the affordability crisis. Realpage was facing an existential battle with the DoJ; instead, they got away with a wrist-slap and (crucially) are allowed to continue to make billions helping landlords rig the rental market against tenants.

So Slater's defenestration is really just a way of formalizing Trump's approach to antitrust: threaten and prosecute companies that don't bend the knee to the president, personally…and allow companies to rob the American people with impunity if they agree to kick up a percentage to the Oval Office.

But while Slater will barely rate a footnote in the history of the Trump administration, the precipitating event for her political execution is itself very interesting. Back in September, Trump posed with Kid Rock and announced that he was going after Ticketmaster/Live Nation, a combine with a long, exhaustively documented history of ripping off and defrauding every entertainer, fan and venue in America:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/ftc-sues-ticketmaster-saying-it-uses-illegal-tactics-to-make-fans-pay-more-for-live-events

At the time, it was clear that Trump had been prodded into action by two factors: the incredible success of the Mamdani campaign's focus on "affordability" (Ticketmaster's above-inflation price hikes are one of the most visible symptoms of the affordability crisis) and Kid Rock's personal grievances about Ticketmaster.

Kid Rock is the biggest-name entertainer in the Trump coalition, the guy Trump got to headline a MAGA halftime show that notably failed to dim Bad Bunny's star by a single milliwatt. Trump – a failed Broadway producer – is also notoriously susceptible to random pronouncements by celebrities (hence the Fox and Friends-to-Trump policy pipeline), so it's natural that Kid Rock's grousing got action after decades of documented abuses went nowhere.

Ticketmaster could have solved the problem by offering to exempt Trump-loyal entertainers from its predatory practices. They could have announced a touring Trumpapalooza festival headlined by Kid Rock, Christian rock acts, and AI-generated country singers, free from all junk fees. Instead, they got Gail Slater fired.

Mike Davis doesn't just represent HPE/Juniper, Amex travel, and Compass/Anywhere – he's also the fixer that Ticketmaster hired to get off the hook with the DoJ. He's boasting about getting Slater fired:

https://x.com/gekaminsky/status/2022076364279755066

And Ticketmaster is off the hook:

https://prospect.org/2026/02/12/trump-justice-department-ticketmaster-live-nation-monopoly/

What's interesting about all this is that there were elements of the Biden coalition that also hated antitrust (think of all the Biden billionaires who called for Lina Khan to be fired while serving as "proxies" for Kamala Harris). And yet, Biden's trustbusters did more in four short years than their predecessors managed over the preceding forty.

Stoller's theory is that the progressive anti-monopoly movement (the "Brandeisians") were able to best their coalitional rivals because they did the hard work of winning support for the idea of shattering corporate power itself – not just arguing that corporate power was bad when it was used against them.

This was a slower, harder road than dividing up the world into good monopolies and bad ones, but it paid off. Today the Brandeisians who made their bones under Biden are serving the like of Mamdani:

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

And their ideas have spread far and wide – even to other countries:

https://lewisforleader.ca/ideas/public-options-full-plan/

They lit a fire that burns still. Who knows, maybe someday it'll even help Kid Rock scorch the Ticketmaster ticks that are draining his blood from a thousand tiny wounds. He probably won't have the good manners to say thank you.

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 Google Video DRM: Why is Hollywood more important than users? https://memex.craphound.com/2006/02/13/google-video-drm-why-is-hollywood-more-important-than-users/

#20yrsago Phishers trick Internet “trust” companies https://web.archive.org/web/20060222232249/http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2006/02/the_new_face_of_phishing_1.html

#15yrsago With a Little Help: first post-publication progress report https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blogs/cory-doctorow/article/46105-with-a-little-help-the-early-returns.html

#15yrsago Nokia’s radical CEO has a mercenary, checkered past https://web.archive.org/web/20100608100324/http://www.siliconbeat.com/2008/01/11/microsoft-beware-stephen-elop-is-a-flight-risk/

#15yrsago Scientology’s science fictional origins: thesis from 1981 https://web.archive.org/web/20110218045653/http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/opendissertations/126/

#10yrsago I was a Jeopardy! clue https://memex.craphound.com/2016/02/13/i-was-a-jeopardy-clue/

#10yrsago Liberated Yazidi sex slaves become a vengeful, elite anti-ISIS fighting force https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-yazidi-sex-slaves-take-up-arms-for-mosul-fight-to-bring-our-women-home-a6865056.html

#10yrsago Listen: a new podcast about science fiction and spectacular meals https://www.scottedelman.com/2016/02/10/the-first-episode-of-eating-the-fantastic-with-guest-sarah-pinsker-is-now-live/

#10yrsago Politician given green-light to name developer’s new streets with synonyms for greed and deceit https://web.archive.org/web/20160213001324/http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/city-hall/2016/02/8590908/staten-island-borough-president-gets-approval-name-new-streets-gre

#5yrsago $50T moved from America's 90% to the 1% https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/13/data-protection-without-monopoly/#inequality

#5yrsago Broad Band https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/13/data-protection-without-monopoly/#broad-band

#5yrsago Privacy Without Monopoly https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/13/data-protection-without-monopoly/#comcom

#1yrago Premature Internet Activists https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/13/digital-rights/#are-human-rights

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1016 words today, 28750 total)

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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https://mamot.fr/@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

PDF

12.02.2026 à 09:42

Pluralistic: Doctors' union may yet save the NHS from Palantir (12 Feb 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3393 mots)


Today's links


A haunted, ruined hospital building. A sign hangs askew over the entrance with the NHS logo over the Palantir logo. Beneath it, a cutaway silhouette reveals a blood-spattered, scalpel-wielding surgeon with a Palantir logo over his breast, about to slice into a frightened patient with an NHS logo over his breast. Looming over the scene are the eyes of Peter Thiel, bloodshot and sinister.

Doctors' union may yet save the NHS from Palantir (permalink)

If you weren't paying close attention, you might think that the most grotesque and indefensible aspect of Keir Starmer's Labour government turning over NHS patient records to the American military contractor Palantir is that Palantir are Trumpist war-criminals, "founded to kill communists":

https://www.thecanary.co/trending/2026/01/07/palantir-kill-communists/

And that is indeed grotesque and indefensible, and should have been grounds for Starmer being forced to resign as PM long before it became apparent that he stuffed his government with Epstein's enablers and chums:

https://www.thenational.scot/news/25451640.streeting-defends-peter-mandelsons-relationship-jeffrey-epstein/

But it's actually much worse than that! It's not just that Labour handed over Britain's crown jewels to rapacious international criminals who are deeply embedded in a regime that has directly threatened the sovereignty of the UK. They also passed up a proven, advanced, open, safe, British alternative: the OpenSAFELY initiative, developed by Ben Goldacre and his team at Jesus College Oxford:

https://www.opensafely.org/

OpenSAFELY is the latest iteration of Goldacre's Trusted Research Environment (TRE), arguably the most successful patient record research tool ever conceived. It's built atop a special server that can send queries to each NHS trust, without ever directly accessing any patient data. Researchers formulate a research question – say, an inquiry into the demographics of the comorbidities of a given disease – and publish it using a modified MySQL syntax on a public git server. Other researchers peer-review the query, assessing it for rigour, and then the TRE farms that query out to each NHS trust, then aggregates all the responses and publishes it, either immediately or after a set period.

This is a fully privacy-preserving, extremely low-cost, rapid way for researchers to run queries against the full load of NHS patient records, and holy shit does it ever work. By coincidence, it went online just prior to the pandemic, and it enabled an absolute string of blockbuster papers on covid, dozens of them, including several in leading journals like Nature:

https://www.digitalhealth.net/2022/04/goldacre-trusted-research-environments/

This led HMG to commission Goldacre to produce a report on the use of TREs as the permanent, principal way for medical researchers to mine NHS data (disclosure: I was interviewed for this report):

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/better-broader-safer-using-health-data-for-research-and-analysis

This is a near-miraculous system: an ultra-effective, ultra-cost-effective, Made-in-Britain, open, transparent, privacy-preserving, rigorous way to produce medical research insights at scale, which could be perfected in the UK and then exported to the world, getting better every time a new partner signs on and helps shoulder the work of maintaining and improving the free/open source software that powers it.

OpenSAFELY was the obvious contender for NHS research. But it wasn't the only one: in the other corner was Palantir, a shady American company best known for helping cops and spies victimise people on the basis of dodgy statistics. Palantir blitzed Westminster with expensive PR and lobbying, and embarked on a strategy to "hoover up" every small NHS contractor until Palantir was the last company standing. Palantir UK boss Louis Moseley called it "Buying our way in":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/01/the-palantir-will-see-you-now/#public-private-partnership

It worked. First, Palantir got £60m worth of no-bid contracts during the acute phase of the pandemic, and then it bootstrapped that into a £330m contract to handle all the NHS England data:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/22/palantir_wins_nhs_contract/

It was a huge win for corruption over excellence and corporate surveillance over privacy. At the same time, it was a terrible blow to UK technological sovereignty, and long-term trust in the NHS.

But that's not where it ended. Palantir continued its wildly profitable, highly public programme of collaborating with fascists – especially Trump's ICE kill/snatch-squads – further trashing its reputation around the world. It's now got so bad that the British Medical Association (BMA) – a union representing more than 200,000 UK doctors – has told its members that they should not use the Palantir products that the NHS has forced onto their practices:

https://www.bmj.com/content/392/bmj.s168/rr-2

In response, an anonymous Palantir spokesperson told The Register that Britons should trust its software because the company is also working with British police forces:

https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/11/bma_palantir_nhs/

The BMA is a very powerful, militant union, and it has already run successful campaigns against Starmer's government that forced Labour to shore up its support for the NHS. The fact that there's a better, cheaper, more effective, technologically sovereign tool that HMG has already recognised only bolsters the union's case for jettisoning Palantir's products altogether.

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

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Google Video DRM: Why is Hollywood more important than users? https://memex.craphound.com/2006/02/13/google-video-drm-why-is-hollywood-more-important-than-users/

#20yrsago Phishers trick Internet “trust” companies https://web.archive.org/web/20060222232249/http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2006/02/the_new_face_of_phishing_1.html

#15yrsago With a Little Help: first post-publication progress report https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blogs/cory-doctorow/article/46105-with-a-little-help-the-early-returns.html

#15yrsago Nokia’s radical CEO has a mercenary, checkered past https://web.archive.org/web/20100608100324/http://www.siliconbeat.com/2008/01/11/microsoft-beware-stephen-elop-is-a-flight-risk/

#15yrsago Scientology’s science fictional origins: thesis from 1981 https://web.archive.org/web/20110218045653/http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/opendissertations/126/

#10yrsago I was a Jeopardy! clue https://memex.craphound.com/2016/02/13/i-was-a-jeopardy-clue/

#10yrsago Liberated Yazidi sex slaves become a vengeful, elite anti-ISIS fighting force https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-yazidi-sex-slaves-take-up-arms-for-mosul-fight-to-bring-our-women-home-a6865056.html

#10yrsago Listen: a new podcast about science fiction and spectacular meals https://www.scottedelman.com/2016/02/10/the-first-episode-of-eating-the-fantastic-with-guest-sarah-pinsker-is-now-live/

#10yrsago Politician given green-light to name developer’s new streets with synonyms for greed and deceit https://web.archive.org/web/20160213001324/http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/city-hall/2016/02/8590908/staten-island-borough-president-gets-approval-name-new-streets-gre

#5yrsago $50T moved from America's 90% to the 1% https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/13/data-protection-without-monopoly/#inequality

#5yrsago Broad Band https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/13/data-protection-without-monopoly/#broad-band

#5yrsago Privacy Without Monopoly https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/13/data-protection-without-monopoly/#comcom

#1yrago Premature Internet Activists https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/13/digital-rights/#are-human-rights

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1006 words today, 27741 total)

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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