Today's links

• What's a "public internet?": You don't want Nigel Farage moderating your social media, right?
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020, 2024
• 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.

What's a "public internet?" (permalink)

The "Eurostack" is a (long overdue) project to publicly fund a European "stack" of technology that is independent from American Big Tech (as well as other powers' technology that has less hold in Europe, such as Chinese and Russian tech):

https://www.euro-stack.info/

But "technological soveriegnty" is a slippery and easily abused concept. Policies like "national firewalls" and "data localization" (where data on a country's population need to be kept on onshore servers) can be a means to different ends. Data localization is important if you want to keep an American company from funneling every digital fact about everyone in your country to the NSA. But it's also a way to make sure that your secret police can lay hands on population-scale data about anyone they might want to kidnap and torture:

https://doctorow.medium.com/theyre-still-trying-to-ban-cryptography-33aa668dc602

At its worst, "technological sovereignty" is a path to a shattered internet with a million dysfunctional borders that serve as checkpoints where thuggish customs inspectors can stop you from availing yourself of privacy-preserving technology and prevent you from communicating with exiled dissidents and diasporas.

But at its best, "technological sovereignty" is a way to create world-girding technology that can act as an impartial substrate on which all manner of domestic and international activities can play out, from a group of friends organizing a games night, to scientists organizing a symposium, to international volunteer corps organizing aid after a flood.

In other words, "technological sovereignty" can be a way to create a public internet that the whole public controls – not just governments, but also people, individuals who can exercise their own technological self-determination, controlling crucial aspects of their own technology usage, like "who will see this thing I'm saying?" and "whose communications will I see, and which ones can I block?"

A "public internet" isn't the same thing as "an internet that is operated by your government," but you can't get a public internet without government involvement, including funding, regulation, oversight and direct contributions.

Here's an example of different ways that governments can involve themselves in the management of one part of the internet, and the different ways in which this will create more or less "public" internet services: fiber optic lines.

Fiber is the platinum standard for internet service delivery. Nothing else comes even close to it. A plastic tube under the road that is stuffed with fiber optic strands can deliver billions of times more data than copper wires or any form of wireless, including satellite constellations like Starlink:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/30/fight-for-44/#slowpokes

(Starlink is the most antifuturistic technology imaginable – a vision of a global internet that gets slower and less reliable as more people sign up for it. It makes the dotcom joke of "we lose money on every sale but make it up in volume" look positively bankable.)

The private sector cannot deliver fiber. There's no economical way for a private entity to secure the rights of way to tear up every street in every city, to run wires into every basement or roof, to put poles on every street corner. Same goes for getting the rights of way to string fiber between city limits across unincorporated county land, or across the long hauls that cross national and provincial or state borders.

Fiber itself is cheap like borscht – it's literally made out of sand – but clearing the thicket of property rights and political boundaries needed to get wire everywhere is a feat that can only be accomplished through government intervention.

Fiber's opponents rarely acknowledge this. They claim, instead, that the physical act of stringing wires through space is somehow transcendentally hard, despite the fact that we've been doing this with phone lines and power cables for more than a century, through the busiest, densest cities and across the loneliest stretches of farmland. Wiring up a country is not the lost art of a fallen civilization, like building pyramids without power-tools or embalming pharoahs. It's something that even the poorest counties in America can manage, bringing fiber across forbidding mountain passes on the back of a mule named "Ole Bub":

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-one-traffic-light-town-with-some-of-the-fastest-internet-in-the-us

When governments apply themselves to fiber provision, you get fiber. Don't take my word for it – ask Utah, a bastion of conservative, small-government orthodoxy, where 21 cities now have blazing fast 10gb internet service thanks to a public initiative called (appropriately enough) "Utopia":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/16/symmetrical-10gb-for-119/#utopia

So government has to be involved in fiber, but how should they involve themselves in it? One model – the worst one – is for the government to intervene on behalf of a single company, creating the rights of way for that company to lay fiber in the ground or string it from poles. The company then owns the network, even though the fiber and the poles were the cheapest part of the system, worth an unmeasurably infinitesimal fraction of the value of all those rights of way.

In the worst of the worst, the company that owns this network can do anything they want with its fiber. They can deny coverage to customers, or charge thousands of dollars to connect each new homes to the system. They can gouge on monthly costs, starve their customer service departments or replace them with mindless AI chatbots. They can skimp on maintenance and keep you waiting for days or weeks when your internet goes out. They can lard your bill with junk fees, or force you to accept pointless services like landlines and cable TV as a condition of getting the internet.

They can also play favorites with local businesses: maybe they give great service to every Domino's pizza place at knock-down rates, and make up for it by charging extra to independent pizza parlors that want to accept internet orders and stream big sports matches on the TV over the bar.

They can violate Net Neutrality, slowing down your connection to sites unless their owners agree to pay bribes for "premium carriage." They can censor your internet any way they see fit. Remember, corporations – unlike governments – are not bound by the First Amendment, which means that when a corporation is your ISP, they can censor anything they feel like:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/15/useful-idiotsuseful-idiots/#unrequited-love

Governments can improve on this situation by regulating a monopoly fiber company. They can require the company to assume a "universal service" mandate, meaning they must connect any home or business that wants it at a set rate. Governments can ban junk fees, set minimum standards for customer service and repair turnarounds, and demand neutral carriage. All of this can improve things, though its a lot of work to administer, and the city government may lack the resources and technical expertise to investigate every claim of corporate malfeasance, and to perform the technical analysis to evaluate corporate excuses for slow connections and bungled repairs.

That's the worst model: governments clear the way for a private monopolist to set up your internet, offering them a literally priceless subsidy in the form of rights of way, and then, maybe, try to keep them honest.

Here's the other extreme: the government puts in the fiber itself, running conduit under all the streets (either with its own crews or with contract crews) and threading a fiber optic through a wall of your choice, terminating it with a box you can plug your wifi router into. The government builds a data-center with all the necessary switches for providing service to you and your neighbors, and hires people to offer you internet service at a reasonable price and with reasonable service guarantees.

This is a pretty good model! Over 750 towns and cities – mostly conservative towns in red states – have this model, and they're almost the only people in America who consistently describe themselves as happy with their internet service:

https://ilsr.org/articles/municipal-broadband-skyrocket-as-alternative-to-private-models/

(They are joined in their satisfaction by a smattering of towns served by companies like Ting, who bought out local cable companies and used their rights of way to bring fiber to households.)

This is a model that works very well, but can fail very badly. Municipal governments can be pretty darned kooky, as five years of MAGA takeovers of school boards, library boards and town councils have shown, to say nothing of wildly corrupt big-city monsters like Eric Adams (ten quintillion congratulations to Zohran Mamdani!). If there's one thing I've learned from the brilliant No Gods No Mayors podcast, it's that mayors are the weirdest people alive:

https://www.patreon.com/collection/869728?view=condensed

Remember: Sarah Palin got her start in politics as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska. Do you want to have to rely on Sarah Palin for your internet service?

https://www.patreon.com/posts/119567308?collection=869728

How about Rob Ford? Do you want the crack mayor answering your tech support calls? I didn't think so:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/rob-ford-part-1-111985831

But that's OK! A public fiber network doesn't have to be one in which the government is your only choice for ISP. In addition to laying fiber and building a data-center and operating a municipal ISP, governments can also do something called "essential facilities sharing":

https://transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Common_Carrier/Orders/1999/fcc99238.pdf

Governments all over the world did this in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and some do it still. Under an essential facilities system, the big phone company (BT in the UK, Bell in Canada, AT&T and the Baby Bells in the USA) were required to rent space to their competitors in their data centers. Anyone who wants to set up an ISP can install their own switching gear at a telephone company central office and provide service to any business or household in the country.

If the government lays fiber in your town, they can both operate a municipal fiber ISP and allow anyone else to set up their own ISP, renting them shelf-space at the data-center. That means that the town college can offer internet to all its faculty and students (not just the ones who live in campus housing), and your co-op can offer internet service to its members. Small businesses can offer specialized internet, and so can informal groups of friends. So can big companies. In this model, everyone is guaranteed both the right to get internet access and the right to provide internet access. It's a great system, and it means that when Mayor Sarah Palin decides to cut off your internet, you don't need to sue the city – you can just sign up with someone else, over the same fiber lines.

That's where essential facilities sharing starts, but that's not where it needs to stop. When the government puts conduit (plastic tubes) in the ground for fiber, they can leave space for more fiber to fished through, and rent space in the conduit itself. That means that an ISP that wants to set up its own data center can run physically separate lines to its subscribers. It means that a university can do a point-to-point connection between a remote scientific instrument like a radio telescope and the campus data-center. A business can run its own lines between branch offices, and a movie studio can run dedicated lines from remote sound-stages to the edit suites at its main facility.

This is a truly public internet service – one where there is a publicly owned ISP, but also where public infrastructure allows for lots of different kinds of entities to provide internet access. It's insulated from the risks of getting your tech support from city hall, but it also allows good local governments to provide best-in-class service to everyone in town, something that local governments have a pretty great track record with.

The Eurostack project isn't necessarily about fiber, though. Right now, Europeans are thinking about technological sovereignty through the lens of software and services. That's fair enough, though it does require some rethinking of the global fiber system, which has been designed so that the US government can spy on and disconnect every other country in the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties

Just as with the example of fiber, there are a lot of ways the EU and member states could achieve "technological sovereignty." They could just procure data-centers, server software, and the operation of social media, cloud hosting, mobile OSes, office software, and other components of Europeans' digital lives from the private sector – sort of like asking a commercial operator to run your town's internet service.

The EU has pretty advanced procurement rules, designed to allow European governments to buy from the private sector while minimizing corruption and kickbacks. For example, there's a rule that the lowest priced bid that conforms to all standards needs to win the contract. This sounds good (and it is, in many cases) but it's how Newag keeps selling trains in Poland, even after they were caught boobytrapping their trains so they would immobilize themselves if the operator took them for independent maintanance:

https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-we-ve-not-been-trained-for-this-life-after-the-newag-drm-disclosure

The EU doesn't have to use public-private partnerships to build the Eurostack. They could do it all themselves. The EU and/or member states could operate public data centers. They could develop their own social media platforms, mobile OSes, and apps. They could be the equivalent of the municipal ISP that offers fast fiber to everyone in town.

As with public monopoly ISPs, this is a system that works well, but fails badly. If you think Elon Musk is a shitty social media boss, wait'll you see the content moderation policies of Viktor Orban – or Emmanuel Macron:

https://jacobin.com/2025/06/france-solidarity-urgence-palestine-repression

Publicly owned data centers could be great, but also, remember that EU governments have never given up on their project of killing working encryption so that their security services can spy on everyone. Austria's doing it right now!

https://www.yahoo.com/news/austrian-government-agrees-plan-allow-150831232.html

Ever since Snowden, EU governments have talked a good line about the importance of digital privacy. Remember Angela Merkel's high dudgeon about how her girlhood in the GDR gave her a special horror of NSA surveillance?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-24647268

Apparently, Merkel managed to get over her horror of mass surveillance and back total, unaccountable, continuous digital surveillance over all of Germany:

https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/06/24/germanys-new-surveillance-laws-raise-privacy-concerns

So there's good reasons to worry about having your data – and your apps – hosted in an EU cloud.

To create a European public internet, it's neither necessary nor desirable to have your digital life operated by the EU and its member states, nor by its private contractors. Instead, the EU could make Eurostack a provider of technological public goods.

For example, the EU could work to improve federated social media systems, like Mastodon and Bluesky. EU coders could contribute to the server and client software for both. They could participate in future versions of the standard. They could provide maintenance code in response to bug reports, and administer bug bounties. They could create tooling for server administrators, including moderation tools, both for Mastodon and for Bluesky, whose "composable moderation" system allows users to have the final say over their moderation choices. The EU could perform and/or fund labelling work to help with moderation.

The EU could also provide tooling to help server administrators stand up their own independent Mastodon and Bluesky servers. Bluesky needs a lot of work on this, still. Bluesky's CTO has got a critical piece of server infrastructure to run on a Raspberry Pi for a few euros per month:

https://justingarrison.com/blog/2024-12-02-run-a-bluesky-pds-from-home/

Previously, this required a whole data center and cost millions to operate, so this is great. But this now needs to be systematized, so that would-be Bluesky administrators can download a package and quickly replicate the feat.

Ultimately, the choice of Mastodon or Bluesky shouldn't matter all that much to Europeans. These standards can and should evolve to the point where everyone on Bluesky can talk to everyone on Mastodon and vice-versa, and where you can easily move your account from one server to another, or one service to another. The EU already oversees systems for account porting and roaming on mobile networks – they can contribute to the technical hurdles that need to be overcome to bring this to social media:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes

In addition to improving federated social media, the EU and its member states can and should host their own servers, both for their own official accounts and for public use. Giving the public a digital home is great, especially if anyone who chafes at the public system's rules can hop onto a server run by a co-op, a friend group, a small business or a giant corporation with just a couple clicks, without losing any of their data or connections.

This is essential facilities sharing for services. Combine it with public data centers and tooling for migrating servers from and to the public server to a private, or nonprofit, or co-op data-center, and you've got the equivalent of publicly available conduit, data-centers, and fiber.

In addition to providing code, services and hardware, the EU can continue to provide regulation to facilitate the public internet. They can expand the very limited interoperability mandates in the Digital Markets Act, forcing legacy social media companies like Meta and Twitter to stand up APIs so that when a European quits their service for new, federated media, they can stay in touch with the friends they left behind (think of it as Schengen for social media, with guaranteed free movement):

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

With the Digital Service Act, the EU has done a lot of work to protect Europeans from fraud, harassment and other online horribles. But a public internet also requires protections for service providers – safe harbors and carve outs that allow you to host your community's data and conversations without being dragged into controversies when your users get into flamewars with each other. If we make the people who run servers liable for their users' bad speech acts, then the only entities that will be able to afford the lawyers and compliance personnel will be giant American tech companies run by billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/04/kawaski-trawick/#230

A "public internet" isn't an internet that's run by the government: it's a system of publicly subsidized, publicly managed public goods that are designed to allow everyone to participate in both using and providing internet services. The Eurostack is a brilliant idea whose time arrived a decade ago. Digital sovereignty projects are among the most important responses to Trumpism, a necessary step to build an independent digital nervous system the rest of the world can use to treat the USA as damage and route around it. We can't afford to have "digital sovereignty" be "national firewalls 2.0" – we need a public internet, not 200+ national internets.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Jailbroken: A Story of Corporate Overreach, Police Abuse of Power, and Modern Tech https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-selfpublished-author-spread-his-story

• Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser – The Blockbuster to End All Blockbusters https://nordiclarp.org/2025/06/20/star-wars-galactic-starcruiser-the-blockbuster-to-end-all-blockbusters/

• MIT student prints AI polymer masks to restore paintings in hours https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/mit-student-prints-ai-polymer-masks-to-restore-paintings-in-hours/

• Congress, Now More Than Ever, Our Nation Needs Your Cowardice https://theonion.com/letter-to-congress/

• Dems’ Crypto Schemers Have Entered The Chat <a href="https://www.levernews.com/dems-crypto-schemers-have-entered-the-chat/>https://www.levernews.com/dems-crypto-schemers-have-entered-the-chat/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Tit of justice reinstated by Supreme Torturer Gonzales https://web.archive.org/web/20050910170445/http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-06-24-doj-statue_x.htm

#20yrsago What tomorrow’s Grokster Supreme Court ruling will mean https://web.archive.org/web/20050827114341/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/003742.php

#15yrsago Toronto’s secret ID law used to arrest G20 protestor https://web.archive.org/web/20100628022932/http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/torontog20summit/article/828372–man-arrested-and-left-in-wire-cage-under-new-g20-law

#10yrsago Why parents in Cincinnati camp out for 16 days to get a kindergarten spot https://medium.com/@hellogerard/waiting-for-kindergarten-62a14d4f1ce5

#10yrsago Stephen Harper ready to sign TPP and throw Tory rural base under the bus https://memex.craphound.com/2015/06/25/stephen-harper-ready-to-sign-tpp-and-throw-tory-rural-base-under-the-bus/

#10yrsago How the UK Prime Minister’s office gets around Freedom of Information requests https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/downing-st-accused-of-deliberate-attempts-to-avoid-freedom-of-information-requests-as-exstaff-reveal-automated-deletion-system-10325231.html

#10yrsago They’re tearing down the Adventurer’s Club https://memex.craphound.com/2015/06/25/theyre-tearing-down-the-adventurers-club/

#10yrsago David Byrne and St Vincent celebrate Color Guard with astounding Contemporary Color show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8jSWQtC_fA

#5yrsago 759 Trump atrocities https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/25/canada-reads/#m-o

#5yrsago How Big Tech distorts discourse https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/25/canada-reads/#oii

#1yrago Mirion Malle's "So Long Sad Love" https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/25/missing-step/#the-fog-of-love

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• London: How To Academy with Riley Quinn, Jul 1
  https://howtoacademy.com/events/cory-doctorow-the-fight-against-the-big-tech-oligarchy/

• Manchester: Picks and Shovels at Blackwell's Bookshop, Jul 2
  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1308451968059

• Manchester: Co-operatives UK Co-op Congress keynote, Jul 4
  https://www.uk.coop/events-and-training/events-calendar/co-op-congress-2025-book-your-place

• Virtual: ORG at 20: in conversation with Maria Farrell, Jul 16
  https://www.openrightsgroup.org/events/org-at-20-cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-maria-farrell/

• DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8
  https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825

• New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

• San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20
  https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25

Recent appearances (permalink)

• If We Had a Choice, Would We Invent Social Media Again? (The Agenda/TVO)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJw38uIcmEw

• Forward Kentucky
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpMxBBMBkZs

• Democrats Abroad
  https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/demsabroadca/episodes/Cory-Doctorow-on-Enshittification-e34blmg/a-ac0jn7i

Latest books (permalink)

• • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
• The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

• "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance."

• "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b)

• "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583.

• "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627.

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:

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links

• Surveillance pricing lets corporations decide what your dollar is worth: From each according his ability (to pay).
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020, 2024
• 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.

Surveillance pricing lets corporations decide what your dollar is worth (permalink)

Economists praise "price discrimination" as "efficient." That's when a company charges different customers different amounts based on inferences about their willingness to pay. But when a company sells you something for $2 that someone else can buy for $1, they're revaluing the dollars in your pocket at half the rate of the other guy's.

That's not how economists see it, of course. When a hotel sells you a room for $50 that someone else might get charged $500 for, that's efficient, provided that the hotelier is sure no $500 customers are likely to show up after you check in. The empty room makes them nothing, and $50 is more than nothing. There's a kind of metaphysics at work here, in which the room that is for sale at $500 is "a hotel room you book two weeks in advance and are sure will be waiting for you when you check in" while the $50 room is "a hotel room you can only get at the last minute, and if it's not available, you're sleeping in a chair at the Greyhound station."

But what if you show up at the hotel at 9pm and the hotelier can ask a credit bureau how much you can afford to pay for the room? What if they can find out that you're in chemotherapy, so you don't have the stamina to shop around for a cheaper room? What if they can tell that you have a 5AM flight and need to get to bed right now? What if they charge you more because they can see that your kids are exhausted and cranky and the hotel infers that you'll pay more to get the kids tucked into bed? What if they charge you more because there's a wildfire and there are plenty of other people who want the room?

The metaphysics of "room you booked two weeks ago" as a different product from "room you're trying to book right now" break down pretty quickly once you factor in the ability of sellers to figure out how desperate you are – or merely how distracted you are – and charge accordingly. "Surveillance pricing" is the practice of spying on you to figure out how much you're willing to spend – because you're wealthy, because you're desperate, because you're distracted, because it's payday – and charging you more:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again

For example, a McDonald's ventures portfolio company called Plexure offers drive-through restaurants the ability to raise the price of your regular order based on whether you've recently received your paycheck. They're just one of many "personalized pricing" companies that have attracted investor capital to figure out how to charge you more for the things you need, or merely for the small pleasures of life.

Personalized pricing (that is, "surveillance pricing") is part of the "pricing revolution" that is underway in the US and the world today. Another major element of this revolution are the "price clearinghouses" that charge firms within a sector to submit their prices to them, then "offer advice" on the optimum pricing. This advice – given to all the suppliers of a good or service – inevitably boils down to "everyone should raise their prices in unison." So long as everyone follows that advice, we poor suckers have nowhere else to go to get a better deal.

This is a pretty thin pretext. Price-fixing is illegal, after all. These companies pretend that when all the meat-packers in America send their pricing data to a "neutral" body like Agri-Stats, which then tells them all to jack up the price of meat, that this isn't a price-fixing conspiracy, since the actual conspiracy takes the form of strongly worded suggestions from an entity that isn't formally part of the industry:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy

Same goes for when all the landlords in town send their rental data to a company like Realpage, which then offers "advice" about the optimum price, along with stern warnings not to rent below that price: apparently that's not price-fixing either:

https://popular.info/p/feds-raid-corporate-landlord-escalating

It's not just sellers who engage in this kind of price-fixing – it's also buyers. Specifically buyers of labor, AKA "bosses." Take contract nursing, where a cartel of three staffing apps have displaced the many small regional staffing agencies that historically served the sector. These companies buy nurses' credit history from the unregulated, Wild West data-brokerage sector. They're checking to see whether a nurse who's looking for a shift has a lot of credit-card debt, especially delinquent debt, because these nurses are facing economic hardship and will accept a lower wage than their better-off compatriots:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point

This is surveillance pricing for buyers, and as with the sell-side pricing revolution, buyers also make use of a third party as an accountability sink (a term coined by Dan Davies): the apps that they use to buy nursing labor are a convenient way for hospitals to pretend that they're not engaged in price-fixing for labor.

Veena Dubal calls this "algorithmic wage discrimination." Algorithmic wage discrimination doesn't need to use third-party surveillance data: Uber, who invented the tactic, use their own in-house data as a way to make inferences about drivers' desperation and thus their willingness to accept a lower wage. Drivers who are less picky about which rides they accept are treated as more desperate, and offered lower wages than their pickier colleagues:

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

But this gets much creepier and more powerful when combined with aggregated surveillance data. This is one of the real labor consequences of AI: not the hypothetical millions of people who will become technologically unemployed, numbers that AI bosses pull out of their asses and hand to dutiful stenographers in the tech press who help them extol the power of their products; but rather the millions of people whose wages are suppressed by algorithms that continuously recalculate how desperate a worker is apt to be and lower their wages accordingly.

This is as good a candidate for AI regulation as any, but it's also a very good reason to regulate data brokers, who operate with total impunity. Thankfully, Biden's Consumer Finance Protection Bureau passed a rule that made data brokers effectively illegal:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/10/getting-things-done/#deliverism

But then Trump got elected and his despicable minions killed that rule, giving data brokers carte blanche to spy on you and sell your data, effectively without restriction:

https://www.wired.com/story/cfpb-quietly-kills-rule-to-shield-americans-from-data-brokers/

(womp-womp)

Also, Biden's FTC was in the middle of an antitrust investigation into surveillance pricing on the eve of the election, a prelude to banning the practice in America:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/24/gouging-the-all-seeing-eye/#i-spy

But then Trump got elected and his despicable minions killed that investigation and instead created a snitch line where FTC employees could complain about colleagues who were "woke":

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/bedoya-statement-emergency-motion.pdf

(Womp.)

(Womp.)

Naomi Klein's Doppelganger proposes a "mirror world" that the fever-swamp right lives in – a world where concern for children takes the form of Pizzagate conspiracies, while ignoring the starving babies in Gaza and the kids whose parents are being kidnapped by ICE:

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

The pricing revolution is a kind of mirror-world Marxism, grounded in "From each according to their ability to pay; to each according to their economic desperation":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/11/socialism-for-the-wealthy/#rugged-individualism-for-the-poor

A recent episode of the excellent Organized Money podcast featured an interview with Lee Hepner, an antitrust lawyer who is on the front lines of the pricing revolution (on the side of workers and buyers) (not bosses):

https://www.organizedmoney.fm/p/the-wild-world-of-surveillance-pricing

Hepner is the one who proposed the formulation that personalized pricing is a way for corporations to decide that your dollars are worth less than your neighbors' dollars – a form of economic discrimination that treats the poorest, most desperate, and most precarious among us as the people who should pay the most, because we are the people whose dollars are worth the least.

Now, this isn't always true. Earlier this month, Delta, United and American were caught charging more for single travelers than they charged pairs of groups:

https://thriftytraveler.com/news/airlines/airlines-charging-solo-travelers-higher-fares/

That's a way to charge business travelers extra – for valuing their dollars less than the dollars of families, not because business travelers are desperate, but because they are, on average, richer than holidaymakers (because their bosses are presumed to be buying their tickets). Sometimes, price discrimination really does charge richer people more to subsidize everyone else.

But here's the difference: when the news about the business-traveler's premium broke, its victims – powerful people with social capital and also regular capital – rose up in outrage, and the airlines reversed the policy:

https://thriftytraveler.com/news/airlines/delta-rethinks-higher-fares-solo-travelers/

If the airlines are still pursuing this kind of price discrimination, they'll do something sneakier, like buying our credit histories before showing us a price. This is something British Airways is already teeing up, by offering essentially zero reward miles to frequent travelers for partner airline tickets unless they're purchased from BA's own website:

https://onemileatatime.com/news/the-british-airways-club/

But BA operates in the UK, where most of the pre-Brexit, EU-based privacy regime is still intact, despite the best efforts of Keir Starmer to destroy it, something that neither Boris Johnson, nor Theresa May, nor Rishi Sunak, nor Liz Truss could manage:

https://www.openrightsgroup.org/press-releases/uk-privacy-erosion-sparks-eu-civil-society-call-to-review-adequacy-data-deal/

So for now, BA travelers might be safe from surveillance pricing, at least in the UK and EU. And that's the thing, America is pretty much cooked. It might be generations – centuries – before the USA emerges from its Trumpian decline and becomes a civilized democracy again. Americans have little hope of a future in which their government protects them from corporate predators, rather than serving them up on a toothpick, along with a little cocktail napkin.

The future of the fight against corporate power and oligarchy is something for the rest of the world to carry on, as the American hermit kingdom sinks into ever-deeper collapse:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/21/billionaires-eh/#galen-weston-is-a-rat

And as it happens, Canada's Competition Bureau, newly equipped with muscular enforcement powers thanks to a 2024 law, is seeking public comment on surveillance pricing and whether Canada should do something about it:

https://www.canada.ca/en/competition-bureau/news/2025/06/competition-bureau-seeks-feedback-on-algorithmic-pricing-and-competition.html

I'm writing comments for this one. If you're in Canada, or a Canadian abroad (like me), perhaps you could, too. If you're looking for an excellent Canadian perspective to crib from, check out this episode of The Globe and Mail's Lately podcast on the subject:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/podcasts/lately/article-the-end-of-the-fixed-price/

Just because America jumped off the Empire State Building, that's no reason for Canada to jump off the CN Tower, after all.

(Eh?)

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• The Stark Fist of Removal (1982) in book form with many new extras https://www.subgenius.com/scatalog/books.htm

• Scrambled Eggs and Paralyzed Policy: Breaking Up Consummated Mergers and Dominant Firms https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3736613

• The McMansionization of the White House, or: Regional Car Dealership Rococo: a treatise https://www.patreon.com/posts/mcmansionization-126873692

• SnapNotSell https://snapnotsell.netlify.app

• Engineered Estrangement https://www.bylinesupplement.com/p/engineered-estrangement-an-interview

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Notes from fight to turn WIPO into a humanitarian agency https://web.archive.org/web/20050903072827/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/003722.php

#20yrsago Software patents are bad for coders like literary patents would be for writers https://web.archive.org/web/20050622023635/http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/comment/story/0,12449,1510566,00.html

#20yrsago WIPO Development Agenda meeting docs photographed and posted https://web.archive.org/web/20051127092845/http://homes.eff.org/~renbucholz/wipo/

#20yrsago Dear Kansas: Why stop at “Intelligent Design?” What about Spaghetti Monsters? https://web.archive.org/web/20050626010148/http://www.venganza.org/

#15yrsago Blacksad: hardboiled detective fiction about anthropomorphic animals (no, really) https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/21/blacksad-hardboiled-detective-fiction-about-anthropomorphic-animals-no-really/

#15yrsago White House guts bill that would rein in CEO salaries; you can stop them http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/proxyreform

#15yrsago New Apple terms allow them to collect and share your “precise, real-time location” https://web.archive.org/web/20100622165913/https://consumerist.com/2010/06/privacy-change-apple-knows-your-phone-is-and-is-telling-people.html

#10yrsago Doctoral dissertation in graphic novel form https://spinweaveandcut.com/unflattening/

#10yrsago EU set to kill street photography https://medium.com/vantage/freedom-of-panorama-is-under-attack-6cc5353b4f65

#5yrsago The politicization of K-pop stans https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/21/stans/#kpop-stans

#5yrsago Yahoo is a deadbeat billionaire zombie https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/21/stans/#altaba

#1yrago Neither the devil you know nor the devil you don't https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/21/off-the-menu/#universally-loathed

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• London: How To Academy with Riley Quinn, Jul 1
  https://howtoacademy.com/events/cory-doctorow-the-fight-against-the-big-tech-oligarchy/

• Manchester: Picks and Shovels at Blackwell's Bookshop, Jul 2
  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1308451968059

• Manchester: Co-operatives UK Co-op Congress keynote, Jul 4
  https://www.uk.coop/events-and-training/events-calendar/co-op-congress-2025-book-your-place

• Virtual: ORG at 20: in conversation with Maria Farrell, Jul 16
  https://www.openrightsgroup.org/events/org-at-20-cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-maria-farrell/

• DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8
  https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825

• New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

• San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20
  https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Forward Kentucky
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpMxBBMBkZs

• Democrats Abroad
  https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/demsabroadca/episodes/Cory-Doctorow-on-Enshittification-e34blmg/a-ac0jn7i

• FediForum Keynote
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_Gs1t0qe78

Latest books (permalink)

• • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
• The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

• "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance."

• "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b)

• "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583.

• "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627.

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:

• 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.

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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

Today's links

• The case for a Canadian wealth tax: Lessons learned from previous attempts, applicable all over the world.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020
• 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.

The case for a Canadian wealth tax (permalink)

A major problem with letting billionaires decide how your country is run is that they will back whichever psycho promises the lowest taxes and least regulation, no matter how completely batshit and unfit that person is:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/nations-are-people

Billionaires have farcical, almost unimaginable resources. These let them take over whole political parties, even "left" parties, with the result that all real electoral options disappear. Voting for the other party gets you a different set of aesthetics, but the same existential threats to the human race and the planet:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/22/starmer-backs-us-strike-on-iran-and-calls-for-tehran-to-return-to-negotiations

After generations of increasingly oligarch-friendly policies and billionaire entryism into the Democratic Party, America may well be cooked, a total write-off for generations to come. The path to saving the world and our species arguably lies through strengthening other countries to resist American psychos and protect the planet from the consequences of their brainwormed leadership.

Writing for Jacobin, Alex Hemingway sets out a plan for imposing a wealth-tax on Canada's oligarchs, one that incorporates lessons from previous attempts at such a tax:

https://jacobin.com/2025/06/wealth-tax-canada-inequality-austerity/

Even on the left, the idea of a wealth-tax is controversial – not because leftists are sympathetic to billionaires, but because they are skeptical that a wealth tax can be carried out. It's a practical, not an ideological objection:

https://pileusmmt.libsyn.com/196-the-problem-with-wealth-taxes-with-steven-hail-part-1

After all, under capitalism, wealth always grows faster than the economy at large, meaning that over time, the rich will get steadily richer, and inequality will widen and widen:

https://memex.craphound.com/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-the-21st-century/

Ideally, we would counter the trend of wealth piling up into dynastic fortunes with continuous redistribution and predistribution: taxing capital gains at the same rate (or a higher rate) than income, so that income from labor isn't treated worse than income from ownership; steeply graded progressive taxes, with top rates of 70-99%, high inheritance taxes, and so on. We had a system like that, from the end of WWII (when the rich were poorer than they'd been in centuries, with their influence in tatters) until the Reagan era (when the rich had rebuilt their fortunes and were able to seize the reins of power). In the 45 years since the rise of the new oligarchy, we've lived through accelerating wealth accumulation, and as the rich got richer, they used their wealth to dismantle any barrier to creating new aristocratic dynasties.

So here we are, trapped in the new oligarchy. It's too late to rely on income taxes, not if we're going to euthanize enough rentiers to free out politics from their toxic influence and save the human race any of several foreseeable mass-extinction events. Making the ultra-rich poor again is going to require new tactics.

In Canada, the 1% owns 29% of the country's wealth. The 87 richest families in Canada control as much wealth as the bottom 12 million Canadians combined. This is better than the US (where the 1% own 35% of the country), but not by much:

https://www.policyalternatives.ca/wp-content/uploads/attachments/Born%20to%20Win.pdf

Can we make a wealth tax work? Here's Hemingway's program for making it work in Canada:

• Make it apply to all kinds of wealth equally. No carve-outs for real-estate, which makes it very easy to shift wealth among asset-classes to duck the tax;

• Aim it at the super-rich alone. Avoid even the upper middle-class, who lack the liquid assets to pay the tax and could get wrecked if they have to liquidate their holdings at the same time as everyone else, which will depress asset prices;

• Use third-party assessments of asset values. Don't take billionaires' word for how much their assets are worth! Canada's got an advantage here, thanks to the Canada Revenue Agency's requirement for financial institutions to report their account holders' income, including capital gains. Canada's also recently created "beneficial owner" registries that record the true owners of assets;

• Use lifestyle audits: anyone caught engaging in tax-evasion will face severe penalties, as will the enablers at financial services firms that help them.

One frequent objection to high taxes is that it encourages capital flight – rich people hopping to another territory to avoid taxation. That's a reasonable fear, given how pants-wettingly terrified the rich are of paying tax. Hemingway points out that a wealth tax is different from an income tax – income taxes are levied on the outcome of productive activities, while wealth taxes target accumulated wealth. High income taxes can starve a country of the capital it needs for a productive economy, but that's not the case with wealth taxes.

Hemingway points to the OECD's Common Reporting Standard, through which more than 100 countries have agreed to share financial information, which will help Canada catch billionaires as they funnel their wealth offshore. Meanwhile, if the rich try to move with their money, we can hit them with an exit tax, like the 40% that Elizabeth Warren has proposed.

It's an article of faith that the rich will move offshore at the first hint of a wealth tax, but the research shows that rich people often have reasons to stay that trump their taxophobia. The economic effect of rich people Going Galt is pretty darned small:

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/publications/workingpapers/2022/taxation_and_migration_by_the_super_rich/

The modern prophet of oligarchy and its origins is the French economist Thomas Piketty. In a recent Le Monde column, Piketty examines the failure of a French wealth tax proposal that would have shaved a modest 2% off the fortunes of the 1,800 French people with more than €100 million:

https://www.lemonde.fr/blog/piketty/2025/06/17/the-senate-beside-the-story/

The proposal passed the National Assembly, only to die in the Senate, an institution with a long history of pro-oligarchic activism (the Senate killed every French income tax passed by the Assembly from 1896-1914). The Assembly's wealth tax addressed the problem of tax exiles, levying the wealth tax for 5 years after an oligarch relocated. For Piketty, this didn't go far enough: he wants a pro-rated tax based on the number of years an oligarch spent in France in their lifetime: if you were educated and cared for at French expense from birth and went on to become a billionaire, then a modest share of your wealth would forever be owed to the country that made it possible. Piketty says that a wealth tax could be paid in shares instead of cash, with the stock going into a trust for workers, who would get board seats as well.

He points out that decarbonization is going to require large sacrifices from all of us, but that these will be impossible to demand with a straight face so long as the super-rich are paying taxes that are trivial relative to their assets and income.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Don't Rank Cuomo, the game https://radiatoryang.itch.io/cuomo (h/t Super Punch)

• FTC competition comment jointly submitted by EFF and Authors Alliance https://www.eff.org/files/2025/06/05/ftc_competition_comment_jointly_submitted_by_eff_and_authorsalliance.pdf

• McMansion Hell urges all New Yorkers to Rank Zohran Mamdani #1 for Mayor of NYC https://mcmansionhell.com/post/786540193484341248/mcmansion-hell-urges-all-new-yorkers-to-rank

• Arbitration Information https://arbitrationinformation.org/docs/problems/

• Apple to Australians: You’re Too Stupid to Choose Your Own Apps https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/06/apple-australians-youre-too-stupid-choose-your-own-apps

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Snapple floods Manhattan with 17.5 tons of frozen kiwi-strawberry slurry https://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006460.html#006460

#20yrsago Beloved Toronto singing cowboy/mayoral candidate Ben Kerr, RIP https://www.blogto.com/city/2005/06/ben_kerr_a_toronto_legend_passes_away/

#20yrsago Heinlein’s house https://web.archive.org/web/20050625235954/http://www.heinleinsociety.org/rah/history/bonnydoon1.html

#20yrsago Banned Nepali radio station transmits via megaphone https://reliefweb.int/report/nepal/banned-air-nepal-news-radio-hits-streets

#20yrsago Queen Liz: Sony remotes are too hard to use https://web.archive.org/web/20050815080728/http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?email&amp;NewsID=11914

#15yrsago ASCAP raising money to fight Free Culture https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/23/ascap-raising-money-to-fight-free-culture/

#15yrsago Original Pac-Man sketches https://www.control-online.nl/2010/06/22/iwatani-toont-gamesgeschiedenis-in-meest-pure-vorm/

#15yrsago Viacom v Internet: round one to Internet https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/23/viacom-v-internet-round-one-to-internet/

#15yrsago A Canadian author’s perspective on “radical extremism” and copyright https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/23/a-canadian-authors-perspective-on-radical-extremism-and-copyright/

#15yrsago Gate guarded McMansion suburb in Walt Disney Worldhttps://insidethemagic.net/2010/06/disney-unveils-golden-oak-luxury-homes-offering-a-chance-to-live-in-the-walt-disney-world-resort/

#15yrsago Canadian Heritage Minister declares war on copyright reformers https://web.archive.org/web/20100626073040/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5138/125/

#15yrsago Bruce Sterling’s Shareable.net story about astroturfer gulag https://www.shareable.net/the-exterminators-want-ad/

#15yrsago Corruption: FCC’s closed-door meetings on open Internet https://web.archive.org/web/20100626222659/http://blog.broadband.gov/?entryId=518087

#15yrsago Canadian Heritage Minister smears DMCA opponents as “radical extremists” https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2010/06/moore-and-radical-extremists/

#15yrsago US IP Czar’s report sells out the American public to Big Content https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/22/us-ip-czars-report-sells-out-the-american-public-to-big-content/

#15yrsago I Love Paree: new sf story podcast https://craphound.com/news/2010/06/22/i-love-paree-part-1/

#10yrsago Australia’s own Immortan Joe turns off the water, I mean, Internet https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/06/australia-passes-controversial-anti-piracy-web-censorship-law/

#10yrsago GCHQ psychological operations squad targeted Britons for manipulation https://theintercept.com/2015/06/22/controversial-gchq-unit-domestic-law-enforcement-propaganda/

#10yrsago GCHQ hacking squad worried about getting sued for copyright violation https://theintercept.com/2015/06/22/gchq-reverse-engineering-warrants/

#10yrsago The Girl With the Parrot on Her Head https://memex.craphound.com/2015/06/22/the-girl-with-the-parrot-on-her-head/

#10yrsago FDA & FTC mull homeopathy’s future https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/homeopathic-industry-and-its-acolytes-make-poor-showing-before-fda/

#10yrsago Tie your shoes the Ukrainian way http://shnurovka.com/en/step-by-step-instructions-english/

#10yrsago Outstanding paper on the impact of ebook DRM on readers, writers, publishers and distributors https://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/Bittar_Ana_Carolina.pdf

#10yrsago You’ll falafel about this horrifying new pita-sized crypto-key-sniffing hack https://www.wired.com/2015/06/radio-bug-can-steal-laptop-crypto-keys-fits-inside-pita/

#5yrsago Against AI phrenology https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/23/cryptocidal-maniacs/#phrenology

#5yrsago Privacy in tracing tokens https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/23/cryptocidal-maniacs/#trace-together

#5yrsago Congress wants to read all your DMs https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/23/cryptocidal-maniacs/#crypto-wars

#5yrsago Blueleaks https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/23/cryptocidal-maniacs/#ddosecrets

#5yrsago Surveillance electoralism https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/23/cryptocidal-maniacs/#aaronsw

#5yrsago The real cyberwar is Goliath, slaughtering an army of Davids https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/22/jobs-guarantee/#selection-bias

#5yrsago The Case for a Job Guarantee https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/22/jobs-guarantee/#job-guarantee

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• London: How To Academy with Riley Quinn, Jul 1
  https://howtoacademy.com/events/cory-doctorow-the-fight-against-the-big-tech-oligarchy/

• Manchester: Picks and Shovels at Blackwell's Bookshop, Jul 2
  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1308451968059

• Manchester: Co-operatives UK Co-op Congress keynote, Jul 4
  https://www.uk.coop/events-and-training/events-calendar/co-op-congress-2025-book-your-place

• Virtual: ORG at 20: in conversation with Maria Farrell, Jul 16
  https://www.openrightsgroup.org/events/org-at-20-cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-maria-farrell/

• DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8
  https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825

• New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

• San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20
  https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Democrats Abroad
  https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/demsabroadca/episodes/Cory-Doctorow-on-Enshittification-e34blmg/a-ac0jn7i

• FediForum Keynote
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_Gs1t0qe78

• Science Fiction is EXPOSING Scams and AI Dystopia (Bad Faith)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlrKlp_Iiko

Latest books (permalink)

• • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
• The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

• "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance."

• "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b)

• "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583.

• "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627.

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:

• 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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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

Today's links

• Daniel de Visé's 'The Blues Brothers': Far more than production gossip – an unmissable portrait of a turning point in American comedy and music.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020, 2024
• 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.

Daniel de Visé's 'The Blues Brothers' (permalink)

I picked up Daniel de Visé's The Blues Brothers: An Epic Friendship, the Rise of Improv, and the Making of an American Film Classic at LA's Diesel Books; it was on the receiving table I sat next to as I signed books after a book-tour reading, and I snuck peeks at the back cover while I chatted with the long line of attendees:

https://danieldevise.com/product/the-blues-brothers-an-epic-friendship-the-rise-of-improv-and-the-making-of-an-american-film-classic

By the time the line was cleared, there was no question that I was going to buy this book, even though it wasn't formally for sale for a couple days (the bookstore staff were kind enough to make an exception for me, not least because I promised them that I wouldn't get a chance to read it for quite some time as I flitted from city to city on the rest of the tour).

Like many people of my generation, I grew up with The Blues Brothers. I taped the movie off of TV when I was about 14 and literally wore the tape out in the next four years, re-watching and re-re-watching the movies on that tape – Animal House, The Blues Brothers and Spinal Tap – so many times that I can still just about recite those movies verbatim, more than 30 years later.

The Blues Brothers is sunk so deep into my psyche that I don't know that I ever questioned why they were so embedded in my outlook. I don't know if I can even tell you when I first saw the movie. Certainly, my friend-group was very into the movie, and my best friend and I went as Jake and Elwood on multiple Hallowe'ens at the Rocky Horror Picture Show at Toronto's Roxy Theatre, until it became such a cliche for us that we felt the need to mix it up and dress up as zombie Jake and Elwood.

But beyond the movie, I was taken with the Blues Brothers' music. I didn't know much about blues, boogie woogie and other roots music before the Blues Brothers came into my life. The combination of the Blues Brothers movie and its sound-track sent me on a treasure hunt for music by the band, its musical guests, and the artists whose song they covered. By the time I was 20, I'd amassed a vast collection of used records, tapes and CDs featuring Cab Calloway, Ray Charles, John Lee Hooker, Aretha Franklin, Willy Mabon, The Chips, Floyd Dixon and more. Soon, I was leaping from one artist to others. I found an incredible Pop Staples/Steve Cropper/Albert King collaboration "Jammed Together":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Sarzs8VRSg

Within a few hops, I'd found my way to Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and thence to the immortal James Cotton:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kl4IcMlrJwM

I started skipping Rocky Horror to see the house band at Chicago's on Queen Street, and from there found my way to the weekend jams at Grossman's:

https://torontobluessociety.com/venue/grossmans-tavern-2/

It's not an overstatement to say that The Blues Brothers altered my life, changing the music I listened to and the way I understood the musical ancestry of everything that went into my ears. Indeed, the effects that The Blues Brothers had on my life are so pervasive that I effectively stopped noticing them. When I put on a Memphis Slim album, it doesn't occur to me that the reason that music is on my hard-drive has something to do with that worn-out VHS cassette in my parents' living room in the 1980s.

Standing there at the counter at Diesel Books for an hour, sneaking peeks at the back cover of de Visé's book, set me to considering exactly how this weird and remarkable phenomenon came to be. I knew a little, of course – my friends and I used to trade the information that Aykroyd came from a family of famous Ontario Tories the same way we would have gossiped had his father been a famous serial-killer. And no one could escape some of the more salacious details of Belushi's death, though I absorbed most of what I knew via one of the greatest short stories I've ever read, Bradley Denton's "Calvin Coolidge Home for Dead Comedians," about Belushi and Lenny Bruce leading a revolt in Comedian Hell:

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

So I bought a copy off the receiving table, straight out of the warehouse box, and I've finally gotten around to reading it, and holy moly is it fascinating! I confess that in the months since I brought the book home and stuck it on the TBR shelf, I'd mostly forgotten why I'd picked it up and had started to view it as a book full of production trivia, and when I picked it up this week, it was with an eye to skimming it quickly before putting it out at the curb in my Little Free Library. Instead, I found myself utterly engrossed in a brilliantly told, brilliantly researched tale that left me with a much deeper understanding of – and appreciation for – the cultural phenomenon that I was (and am) swept up in.

De Visé devotes the first third of the book to snappy, revealing biographies of Belushi and Aykroyd, who grew up in very different milieux, and were of very different temperaments, but who both found their way into comedy just as the tradition of Borscht Belt comics and variety shows were giving way to a younger, weirder kind of comedy, a mixture of Monty Python, National Lampoon and improv.

These biographical sketches are short, but they don't shy away from nuance – Belushi's parents, for example, are simultaneously painted as loving and also reckless and self-involved. De Visé gives the lion's share of attention to Belushi, but he doesn't stint on detail about Aykroyd, strongly implying that "Danny" is on the spectrum, with a deep collection of "special interests" and a deep discomfort with eye contact that accounts for habit of wearing sunglasses.

As the two men find their way into various pioneering comedy projects – Second City, National Lampoon radio shows – they start to inch towards Lorne Michaels, and thus to each other. As de Visé painstakingly traces the ups and downs of their comedy careers, he paints a vivid picture of the wild swings of talented, striving artists at the start of their careers. By the time we get to the SNL chapters, the show itself becomes the star, and its rocky early days strongly echo the struggles of the comedians we've followed to its stage.

The actual production story of The Blues Brothers movie doesn't start until more than halfway through the narrative. By that time, we've been set up with the way that filmmaking, comedy, popular culture, and politics have all changed to make The Blues Brothers movie a possibility. De Visé shows us how Belushi had won over a long list of household names in the entertainment industry, and how Aykroyd's meticulous, obsessive nature honed and directed Belushi's wild talent.

The actual production of, and reception to, The Blues Brothers movie arrives in the book as a kind of extended climax and denouement, and yes, there are tons of funny bits of production trivia and gossip in this section. From winning over the mayor of Chicago (who reversed a decades-long policy of all-but-total prohibitions on filming permits in the city) to dropping a Ford Pinto thousands of feet, to the garage where, every night, dozens of surplus police cars that had been crashed that day were refurbished and gotten into shape to be crashed again the next day.

And while all of this is going on, de Visé gives us a vivid portrayal of Belushi's spiraling addiction, the disease that is killing him right there, in front of everyone who loves him. That story carries over into the film's aftermath, as it is laboriously cut from more than three hours (it was originally intended to be shown with an intermission!) and released to hostile critics and an adoring public.

These are the final days of Belushi, something we all know and can see coming. But even as Belushi approaches his final days, we learn how The Blues Brothers movie had created a legacy. It was Aykroyd who got Belushi into the blues, and the schtick they did about wanting to preserve this music from a world that was set to bury it and forget it wasn't just for the movie.

Aykroyd and Belushi wanted to bring the music back. They couldn't stand that the likes of Cab Calloway, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles and James Brown were playing county fairs and half-full night clubs. They wanted the music to escape from history and live again. And they succeeded. In a "where are they now" coda straight out of the closing credits of Animal House, de Visé documents how the artists featured in the movie – and the musical traditions they represented – experienced a massive revival following the film's release, which the musicians themselves credit to the movie.

Which is where I came in, I suppose. That's how I got here, in this form, with a hard drive full of R&B, blues, country swing, jazz, boogie woogie and jump blues that vie with Talking Heads for play in my shuffle.

This isn't a book about a movie; it's a rich and engrossing tale of an extraordinary creative collaboration that found an unlikely foothold at just the right time and place. It's a sensitive, funny, and revealing account of Belushi, Aykroyd, and the comedians, impresarios and friends in their orbit. Even if you didn't wear out a VHS cassette and memorize the whole damned movie, you will find something surprising and delightful in these pages.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• FTC competition comment jointly submitted by EFF and Authors Alliance https://www.eff.org/files/2025/06/05/ftc_competition_comment_jointly_submitted_by_eff_and_authorsalliance.pdf

• McMansion Hell urges all New Yorkers to Rank Zohran Mamdani #1 for Mayor of NYC https://mcmansionhell.com/post/786540193484341248/mcmansion-hell-urges-all-new-yorkers-to-rank

• Arbitration Information https://arbitrationinformation.org/docs/problems/

• Apple to Australians: You’re Too Stupid to Choose Your Own Apps https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/06/apple-australians-youre-too-stupid-choose-your-own-apps

• Steps towards an Ecology for the Internet https://arxiv.org/html/2506.06469v1

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Canada’s DMCA introduced https://web.archive.org/web/20051027190726/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/home.php?blog_disp_vars=days&blog_date=20050620&day=20&month=06&year=2005&blog_arch=2&v=99

#20yrsago Dead online game resurrected by dumpster-diving its servers https://games.slashdot.org/story/05/06/21/0133233/classic-mmog-raised-from-the-dead-by-past-players

#15yrsago Mickey Mouse, amphetamine shill https://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/mickey_mouse_medicine_man/mickey_mouse_medicine_man.shtml

#15yrsago Economic reality versus ideology: spending cuts and recovery https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/18/opinion/18krugman.html

#10yrsago UK High Court’s insane ruling: ripping CDs is illegal again https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/06/european-copyright-madness-court-strikes-down-law-allowing-users-rip-their-own-cds

#10yrsago Schneier: China and Russia probably did get the Snowden leaks — by hacking the NSA https://www.wired.com/2015/06/course-china-russia-snowden-documents/

#10yrsago The snitch in your pocket: making sense of Stingrays https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/notetoself/episodes/stingray-conspiracy-theory-daniel-rigmaiden-radiolab

#5yrsago Juneteenth in the Internet Archive https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/20/everybody-knows/#juneteenth

#5yrsago "Longshot" NYPD surveillance transparency law passes https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/20/everybody-knows/#Quis-custodiet-ipsos-custodes

#5yrsago Everybody Knows https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/20/everybody-knows/#slicey-boi

#1yrago How to design a tech regulation https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/20/scalesplaining/#administratability

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• London: How To Academy with Riley Quinn, Jul 1
  https://howtoacademy.com/events/cory-doctorow-the-fight-against-the-big-tech-oligarchy/

• Manchester: Picks and Shovels at Blackwell's Bookshop, Jul 2
  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1308451968059

• Manchester: Co-operatives UK Co-op Congress keynote, Jul 4
  https://www.uk.coop/events-and-training/events-calendar/co-op-congress-2025-book-your-place

• Virtual: ORG at 20: in conversation with Maria Farrell, Jul 16
  https://www.openrightsgroup.org/events/org-at-20-cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-maria-farrell/

• DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8
  https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825

• New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

• San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20
  https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Democrats Abroad
  https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/demsabroadca/episodes/Cory-Doctorow-on-Enshittification-e34blmg/a-ac0jn7i

• FediForum Keynote
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_Gs1t0qe78

• Science Fiction is EXPOSING Scams and AI Dystopia (Bad Faith)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlrKlp_Iiko

Latest books (permalink)

• • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
• The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

• "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance."

• "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b)

• "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583.

• "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627.

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

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X