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 Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist and journalist

His latest book is ATTACK SURFACE, a standalone adult sequel to LITTLE BROTHER. He is also the author HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM, nonfiction about conspiracies and monopolies; and of RADICALIZED and WALKAWAY, science fiction for adults, a YA graphic novel called IN REAL LIFE; and young adult novels like HOMELAND, PIRATE CINEMA and LITTLE BROTHER. His first picture book was POESY THE MONSTER SLAYER (Aug 2020). He maintains a daily blog at Pluralistic.net. He works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is a MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate, is a Visiting Professor of Computer Science at Open University, a Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of North Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in Los Angeles.
Liens : - « Détruire le capitalisme de surveillance » 68 p. pdf, trad. Framalang, gratuit. - How to destroy surveillance capitalism Online version.

Publié le 27.01.2026 à 18:43

Pluralistic: Carney isn't a hero (and that's OK) (27 Jan 2026)


Today's links


A triple-masted schooner on a rough sea racing ahead of the wind. Drowning in its wake is a beleaguered caricature of Uncle Sam.

Carney isn't a hero (and that's OK) (permalink)

I blame novelists: it's only in prose that we get the illusion of telepathy, of being inside the mind of another. No wonder novelistic tales of political transformation focus on the moral fortitude of individual leaders.

The problem is, it's a destructive lie.

Sure, leaders sometimes exhibit moral fortitude and courage. But we can't rely on our leaders to be perfect – or even pretty good. The only reliable way to get the leadership we deserve is to force our leaders to follow us, by organizing in political blocs that mete out severe punishments when they betray us.

Say what you will about the Tea Party, but boy, did they understand this. During the Obama years, any Republican that wavered from the party line was mercilessly tormented by Tea Party activists, who flooded their offices with calls and emails, showed up at their town halls, and at restaurants when they were trying to have dinner, and then they backed their primary opponents. The Tea Party years were a winnowing function for the GOP, and the only Republican politicians who survived were the ones who refused to compromise. This worked for them in world-historic ways. It was thanks to the Tea Party that the GOP was able to steal two Supreme Court seats, for example.

Corporate Democrats use the Tea Party as an example of why we can't let the public into progressive politics. After all, corporate Dems already have control over Democratic politicians, and so any organized rank-and-file bloc threatens their ability to push elected politicians to pursue grotesque policies like supporting genocide in Gaza or showering billions on ICE:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/seven-democrats-just-voted-to-approve-ice-funding-full-list/ar-AA1ULAn7

The seven Dems who voted to fund ICE knew that they were doing something that would be wildly unpopular with the voters who sent them to DC, but they did it anyway, because they aren't afraid of those voters. They treat their voters as ambulatory wallets to be terrorized into donating small sums via relentless text messages about the impending end of democracy in America, even as they vote for the impending end of democracy in America.

These seven lawmakers don't just need to be primaried: they need to be made an example of. Their names must be a curse. They must be confronted in public – long after they are out of office – by voters brandishing pictures of the people ICE murdered after receiving the funds they voted for. They must be haunted for this decision for the rest of their days. As Voltaire said, "Sometimes you must execute an admiral to encourage the others."

Here are their names:

  • Tom Suozzi (New York)
  • Henry Cuellar (Texas)
  • Don Davis (North Carolina)
  • Laura Gillen (New York)
  • Jared Golden (Maine)
  • Vicente Gonzalez (Texas)
  • Marie Glusenkamp Perez (Washington)

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/seven-democrats-just-voted-to-approve-ice-funding-full-list/ar-AA1ULAn7

Politicians – even the most unhinged and narcissistic ones – go through life attuned to public rage. Even Trump. Why else would Trump have ordered ICE Obergruppenführer Gregory Bovino "home with his tail between his legs"?

https://prospect.org/2026/01/27/ice-greg-bovino-minneapolis-one-battle-after-another-sean-penn/

Counting on politicians to do the right thing out of principle is a loser's bet. Far more reliable is to bet on them doing the right thing because they're afraid of being cursed and humiliated and haunted by their betrayal to the end of their days.

Don't be fooled by politicians and pearl-clutchers insisting that the norms fairy and "comity" are the only way to get things done. We are not in an era of reaching across the aisle in a spirit of public service. We are in the era of fascist goons murdering our neighbors in the street and then dancing a celebratory jig. We arrived at this juncture in large part because we accepted glaring bullshit about "comity":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/30/meme-stocks/#comity

This isn't merely frustrated militancy on my part. I'm hoping that you will join me in this understanding of politics: that good leadership is downstream of politicians being terrified of betraying their duty to the public, and we need not rely on moral perfection to make progress.

Take the EU's energy transition. For decades, the EU's leaders – like leaders everywhere – were in thrall to the fossil fuel industry. They were fully paid-up members of the most extreme wing of the capitalist death cult, determined to render the only planet in the known universe capable of sustaining human life uninhabitable in order to enrich a tiny coterie of already ultrawealthy climate criminals.

Then came the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and with it, a continent shivering in the dark, bereft of Russian gas and oil. Suddenly, the most powerful lobbyists in the history of civilization – fossil fuel pushers – lost their grip on Europe's leaders. In a few short years, Europe went from a decade behind its energy transition to a decade ahead:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/23/our-friend-the-electron/#to-every-man-his-castle

European politicians didn't just trip and find their spines. A continent full of frozen, furious people made yielding to the fossil fuel lobby unthinkable. Once the penalties for betraying the public inarguably exceeded any conceivable benefits from selling out to Big Oil, Big Oil ate shit.

Which brings me to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, a man who didn't so much win office as fail to lose it, after his Conservative opponent Pierre Poilievre saw a 50-point collapse in his poll numbers the instant Donald Trump (whom Poilievre had repeatedly associated himself with during the campaign) promised to turn Canada into "the 51st state."

Carney is hardly an avatar of progressive politics. As Governor of the Bank of England, he oversaw a program of crushing austerity after the crash of 2008. As Canadian PM, he has fired tens of thousands of civil servants while promising billions to build out national AI so that our government handed over to hallucinating chatbots running on processors and software that we can only buy from companies that will do Trump's bidding. Having won office with an "elbows up" mandate to resist Trump, Carney proceeded to cave to Trump's demands on even modest measures, such as a plan to end rampant tax cheating by the US tech giants.

And yet, earlier this month, Carney travelled to the World Economic Forum in Davos to deliver an extraordinary speech that declared a "rupture" in the "international rules-based order," an order that he simultaneously declared to have been a sham all along:

https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/davos-is-a-rational-ritual

This is an incredibly weird (but good!) speech for Carney to have made. Carney is the epitome of "Davos Man," a technocrat with a long history of using his office and power to inflict real suffering on working people in the name of abstract economic stability. This contradiction has been the source of much opnionating about whether a) Carney is sincere about this, and b) Carney can be trusted to follow through on it.

The answers to this are obvious (to me, at least): a) Who cares if he's sincere, because b) He's shown that if he's frightened enough of the public's fury at his capitulation, he will locate his spine. Which means that the future of Carney's ambitious program of "rupture" and bold effort to isolate Trump and the USA will depend on our ability to force him to make good on his promises.

That means that we have to "stand on guard" – to give no ground to Canadian "moderates" who counsel against bold action to defend the country from Trump, lest this make Trump mad. The idea that we can strike a bargain with Trump is indisputably, profoundly stupid. Yet for the past year a sizable fraction of Canada's great and good have been able to insist, in public, that Trump will bargain with us in good faith.

Trump undeniably, provably treats any concession as weakness. He will break his word in a heartbeat. The more we appease him, the more he will demand of us. Any Canadian politician or opinion-former who even hints that we can "make a deal" with Trump should be treated as a dangerous lunatic to be isolated and shunned (the only exception being that any time they show their faces in public, they should be relentlessly bollocked for their nation-risking program of appeasement to a fascist madman).

Give Trump a centimetre and he'll take a mile. Give him two centimetres and he'll take Greenland. Give him three centimetres and he'll grab Alberta, too. Anyone who insists that Canada should confine itself to ornamental gestures of resistance to Trump (because anything that truly matters will make him mad) is a danger to themselves and the country.

This all goes double for people aligned with other national parties: the way we get Carney to live up to his Davos speech is by pouncing any time he even hints that he might go back on his word, poaching his voters by campaigning on a promise to live up the Carney Doctrine (even if Carney won't). Promising to live up to Carney's Davos speech (even if Carney won't) must be the central issue in every by-election and provincial race between now and the next federal election.

When we talk about politics and especially political change, there's often talk of "political will." Politicians who break with their own record of weakness and compromise are said to be propelled by "political will."

It's all very abstract sounding, but at root, political will is something quite tangible – it's merely invisible until something gets in its way.

Think of political will as something like the wind. You can't tell how windy it is outside unless there's something in the path of the wind, and then it's obvious. For the past decade, there has been a growing worldwide political will blowing for an end to corporate and billionaire power:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/28/mamdani/#trustbusting

It's easy to feel like the project of taking our world back from oligarchs has been becalmed for decades. The political will is like the wind: we only see it when something gets in its path. After generations of Davos-style oligarch worship, there are damned few politicians who dare to unfurl a sail and aim the tiller for a world that works for working people.

But every time some politician does, that sail bellies out with the wind with an audible snap. These politicians are lionized and lauded for their bravery, and any betrayal is met with bitter recriminations that go on and on and on. Any ship rigged for a better future is propelled by a wind that is a fiercer gale than any we've seen for generations.

That's where we all fit in. I'm not asking you to credulously accept Carney's conversion on face value. Rather, I'm asking that you celebrate the vision that Carney articulated while threatening to destroy his political life if he breaks his word. Let every politician know that there is glory in standing up for us – and let them know that betrayal will see them tossed overboard, to drown in our wake.

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 Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About https://web.archive.org/web/20010604131027/http://homepage.ntlworld.com/mil.millington/things.html

#20yrsago Law enforcement professionals against the war on drugs https://web.archive.org/web/20060202103138/http://leap.cc/

#20yrsago How DRM tries to resist uninstalling https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2006/01/29/cd-drm-unauthorized-deactivation-attacks/

#15yrsago EFF: FBI may have committed more than 40K intelligence violations since 9/11 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/01/eff-releases-report-detailing-fbi-intelligence

#15yrsago AnarchistU Toronto: free school classes for February https://web.archive.org/web/20110126075027/https://anarchistu.org/

#10yrsago Florida climate survivors travel to New Hampshire to confront Marco Rubio https://web.archive.org/web/20160201193104/https://act.climatetruth.org/sign/climatevoices2016_videoandpetition/?source=BB

#10yrsago Elizabeth Warren’s new 1%: the percentage of fraudulent profits companies pay in fines https://web.archive.org/web/20160129113016/https://theintercept.com/2016/01/29/elizabeth-warren-challenges-clinton-sanders-to-prosecute-corporate-crime-better-than-obama/

#5yrsago David Dayen's MONOPOLIZED https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/29/fractal-bullshit/#dayenu

#1yrago All bets are off https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/29/which-side-are-you-on-2/#strike-three-yer-out

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


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 (1004 words today, 15484 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.

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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

Publié le 26.01.2026 à 15:42

Pluralistic: Trump and the unmighty dollar (26 Jan 2026)


Today's links

  • Trump and the unmighty dollar: "Flipping the table over in a poker game rigged in your favor because you resent having to pretend to play the game at all."
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: H2G2 v BBC; Anti-capitalist bank rave; Narrative and magic; It's still censorship; Boss politics antitrust; Game library; Gamers 6-65; Google Cache; "Probiotics" aren't; "Starve"; Uptown Funk mashup; Not a crime if we do it with an app; Gibson on Stuxnet; Gates sells Tank Man pic to China; Paul Allen's yacht destroys a reef; Mass surveillance in Anaheim.
  • 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.


A detail from a US $100 bill. The bill has been tinted orange. Ben Franklin's face has been replaced with an indistinct blur surmounted by Trump's hair. The lettering in the scrollwork beneath the portrait reads 'TRUMP.' The '100's have been turned into '000's. The writing 'ONE HUNDRED' now reads 'NONE HUNDRED.' The series issue has been changed to '47.' The Secretary of the Treasury's signature has been replaced with Trump's.

Trump and the unmighty dollar (permalink)

The best summary of Trump's trade "philosophy" comes from Trashfuture's November Kelly, who said that Trump is flipping over the table in a poker game that's rigged in his favor because he resents having to pretend to play the game at all.

After all, the global system of trade was designed and enforced by American officials, especially the US Trade Representative. The US created a world whose most important commodities (food, oil, etc) were priced in dollars, meaning that anyone who wanted to buy these things from any country would first have to get US dollars, which they could only get by shipping their valuable stuff to the US, which sends them dollars in return.

Think about this trade for a minute: to get US dollars, people outside of the US would have to dig up or chop down or manufacture real things that were in finite supply. Meanwhile, to get the US dollars to pay for these real, finite things, the US just had to type zeros into a spreadsheet at the Federal Reserve:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54fg-A1gCrM

The technical term political scientists use for this arrangement is "fucking sweet."

Two of my favorite political scientists are Henry Farrell and Dan Davies, whose new paper, "The US dollar system as a source of international disorder," was just published by The British Academy as part of its "Global (Dis)Order international policy programme":

https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/documents/6018/Global_Disorder_-_The_US_Dollar_System_as_a_Source_of_International_Disorder.pdf

Farrell and Davies explore the history of the weaponization of "dollar centrality" (their term for the arrangement where the whole world agreed to treat the dollar as a neutral trade instrument), and show how Trump's incontinent belligerence fits into it, and lay out some shrewd possibilities for where this could all end up.

Farrell is one of the leading experts on how these boring, invisible, complex systems of financial settlement, fiber optic connections and other plumbing of the post-war era have been increasingly weaponized by successive US administrations. In 2023, he and Abraham Newman published The Underground Empire, an excellent book on the subject (really, the definitive book on the subject):

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

Davies, meanwhile, is a brilliant scholar (and explainer) of complex systems. Last year, he published The Unaccountability Machine, about the way that the feedback mechanisms in the systems that keep the world running are badly broken, leading to much of our modern dysfunction:

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

Their paper represents a fusion of both of their approaches, and makes for fascinating reading. They start by characterizing the post-war global system as broadly "homeostatic," meaning that it can maintain stability in the face of shocks. Homeostasis requires a feedback mechanism so that it can constantly adjust itself – think of your home thermostat, which needs a thermometer so it can figure out when to run your furnace/air conditioner and when to stop.

Political scientists have identified many of these feedback systems. For example, KN Waltz describes how, when one "great power" starts to dominate the world, the weaker states in its orbit will switch their alliances to rival powers, in order to "balance" power between the big beasts. Smaller, poorer, and/or weaker countries that have looked to the US for trade and military alliances might switch to China if it looks like the US is getting too powerful – not necessarily because China offers a better deal than the US, but because a decisive global victory by the US would give it the power to squeeze these countries, because they'd have nowhere else to go.

Waltz's work is especially relevant this month, with Canada inking a Chinese trade deal and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney publicly declaring a "rupture" with the US-dominated order:

https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/davos-is-a-rational-ritual

When great powers ignore the feedback of these systems, the result is a collapse in global homeostasis, and radical shifts in the global order. Farrell and Davies argue that this is what's happening with the weaponization of the dollar, which has prompted many countries to take action that should have caused the US to back off, but which the US has ignored as it doubled down on the weaponized dollar:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-20/ethiopia-in-talks-with-china-to-convert-dollar-loans-into-yuan

Even when the US has a "rational" case for weaponizing the dollar – for example, by forcing the world to join in a global financial surveillance project aimed at stemming financing for terrorism – it runs the risk of making things worse. If the US's anti-terror financial demands are so onerous that they provoke other countries into setting up multiple, independent, fragmented global financial schemes, then terrorists and their backers will have their pick of ways to move money around.

Even where the US has had limited success with financial sanctions (by isolating North Korea, or by targeting specific individuals rather than countries), it has undermined those successes by peddling and formalizing cryptocurrencies that evade those sanctions. With Trump's crypto project, America gets the worst of both worlds: ineffective financial sanctions that nevertheless weaken the dollar's centrality to the world, and the power that confers upon America.

The world relies on the dollar because it has to rely on something. There are hundreds of currencies in the world, and it's prohibitively expensive for exchange brokers to maintain deep reserves of all of those currencies so that any currency can be swapped for any other. Likewise, it is cumbersome and risky for transactions to rely on a chain of exchanges: if someone in Thailand can only buy oil from Norway by first trading Thai baht for Japanese yen, and then Australian dollars, and then euros, and then Norwegian kroner, they'll be bedeviled by shifting exchange rates, transaction fees, and, possibly, shady brokers who just take the money and run.

After WWII, when the great powers and middle powers were hammering out the global financial system, economists like John Maynard Keynes proposed an international supercurrency that would only be used to facilitate exchanges, but he was outmaneuvered by America's chief negotiator, Harry Dexter White, who insisted that the US dollar will fill that role:

https://profstevekeen.substack.com/p/this-is-the-end-of-the-us-global

So everyone uses the dollar, and because everyone uses the dollar, everyone has to use the dollar: the dollar enjoys "network effects," where the more parties there are who will accept it, the more valuable it becomes and the harder it is to find an alternative.

In my theory of enshittification, network effects are a powerful temptation to make a service worse. If you own a system with strong network effects, you can make it worse for all its users (and better for you) without risking your users' departure, because they are all holding each other hostage:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

So it is with dollar weaponization. In order to use the dollar to settle transactions, parties must have access to systems that are directly under US government control (like a dollar account at the Federal Reserve), or are, practically speaking controlled by America (like the SWIFT system for moving money across borders). The fact that you have to use dollars, and you can't use dollars without the US government's say-so, means that the US can impose onerous terms on dollar users and not have to worry that they'll switch to another currency.

Farrell and Davies describe how, during the "high era" of globalization, US Treasury officials fought to insulate the dollar from control by the US security apparatus. Treasury officials understood that the dollar was a source of enormous US power and advantage, and they didn't want to risk all those benefits by beating up dollar users and tempting them to look elsewhere.

But ultimately, Treasury lost. This, too, is in accord with my theory of enshittification: once an institution locks in its users, the factions that want to make things worse will start winning the argument. This is exactly what happened to Google, when, having locked in search users, the company fell under control of its enshittifying faction, who oversaw a program that made search worse, so that you'd have to search repeatedly (and look at multiple screens' worth of ads) to get the answers you sought:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Google's anti-enshittification faction argued that making search worse was a betrayal of the company's mission. The pro-enshittification faction pointed out that lock-in meant that Google could make more money by betraying its mission without losing users, and they won the day. It's a lot easier to live your principles if you suffer when you betray them, and it's a lot easier to hold an institution to its principles if betraying those principles results in immediate penalties.

After 9/11, the US security apparatus demanded dollar weaponization: the Office of Foreign Asset Control bigfooted the international finance system, forcing them to spy on, report and block transactions the US disliked. The threat of being excluded from the dollar system was powerful: when one bank refused to stop doing business with North Korea, the US "designated" the bank as noncompliant, provoking a bank run. The rest of the world's banks fell into line.

The fact that the US could punish banks for actions that harmed American interests, even if the bank followed all the procedures required of it, encouraged banks to adopt a "zero risk" policy, where they made up policies that went well beyond America's rules, conducting even more surveillance, blocking even more transactions, and reporting even more activities than was required of them. All of this made participating in the dollar system steadily more costly, as dollar users had to pay for expensive compliance measures or risk the failure of key transactions, or exclusion from the dollar altogether.

Late in Obama's second term, officials sounded the alarm about the dollar becoming increasingly unattractive for international finance, and counseled a relaxation of the post-9/11 ratchet of ever-tighter rules for dollar users. But Trump's officials were totally disinterested in the long-term health of the dollar system, and pursued an even more aggressive policy of dollar weaponization during Trump's first term.

During Trump I, major blocs such as the EU began to formally prepare dollar alternatives and to formulate an "anti-coercion instrument." The anti-coercion instrument is an agreement among EU states to retaliate together in the event that the US (or some other country) used the dollar (or some other currency) to interfere in internal EU matters:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Coercion_Instrument

(The anti-coercion instrument has never been used, but it was almost invoked last week over Trump's threat to steal Greenland):

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/eu-anti-coercion-instrument-greenland-trump-b2903998.html

The Biden years seemed to signal a return to normalcy – the US might continue to weaponize the dollar, but they would at least pretend that they were playing fair. In Kelly's formulation, they'd actually play the rigged poker-game, rather than just taking everyone's chips and flipping over the table, the way Trump liked to do.

But Biden also seemingly couldn't help himself, and his administration pursued a much blunter program of dollar weaponization than pre-Trump presidents. In particular, Biden's sanctions on Putin, his aligned oligarchs, and the Russian state were far more aggressive than anything any president (including Trump I) had ever done with the dollar.

Farrell and Davies write that:

Informal conversations with Biden officials suggest that they had noticed that, despite Trump’s actions, other countries had not moved away from the US dollar. Therefore, the Biden administration felt the US had greater leeway to use sanctions.

In other words, the fact that enshittification produced no downside for the institution meant that its pro-enshittification factions kept winning the argument, and engaged in ever more severe forms of enshittification.

The EU wasn't alone in worrying about US financial coercion. While China maintains much of its own transaction processing infrastructure, it is still very exposed to the dollar system, prompting it to take measures for retaliation and alternatives if the US overstepped.

Meanwhile, the increasing controls and costs of using the dollar drove many parties to cryptocurrencies. Some were criminals whom dollar weaponization was supposed to harass, but many were just innocent bystanders, dolphins caught in the tuna net (think of American relatives of Russians who wanted to send their families money for food, rent, or even a plane ticket out of Russia).

Biden responded to the growing use of crypto to evade dollar rules with regulations to bring crypto under tighter control, for example, by classing crypto as a security and subjecting it to financial regulation. The Biden administration's rules for banks that offered crypto services and trading made handling crypto so expensive that most banks just gave up on it altogether.

Crypto boosters used this response to campaign against Biden and for Trump, accusing Biden of "strangling" crypto and "debanking" its users. Trump won a second presidency, in part thanks to billions in dark money from crypto insiders (many of whom Trump went on to pardon for money-laundering convictions carrying heavy fines and long prison sentences).

At the outset of the second Trump presidency, Trump relied on tariffs, rather than dollar weaponization, to push the world around. As Farrell and Davies write, Trump gave speeches where he recognized the danger of squeezing dollar users too hard:

The problem with … sanctions … [is that] ultimately it kills your dollar and it kills everything the dollar represents. … So I use sanctions very powerfully against countries that deserve it, and then I take them off. Because, look, you’re losing Iran. You’re losing Russia. China is out there trying to get their currency to be the dominant currency as you know better than anybody. … So I want to use sanctions as little as possible.

Trump thinks that using sanctions is fine, provided that then he "take[s] them off." This has resulted in the trademark Trump chaos of announced and rescinded and reimposed sanctions – against Chinese refineries, a Yemeni bank, the International Criminal Court, and the nation of Colombia.

It's possible that this is less onerous than permanent (or at least, long-term) sanctions, but not by much. If no one can be sure that they'll be able to use the dollar tomorrow – even if they might be able to use it again the day after – there's far more pressure to find dollar alternatives.

Meanwhile, Farrell and Davies observe that:

[Trump is] more willing to impose sanctions on allies, since they are less able to defect from the dollar than neutrals and rivals, and less likely to act against crypto even though it facilitates sanctions evasion.

In other words, Trump's reserving his most destructive punishments for his friends, because his enemies are more likely to flee to China if he uses his most devastating attacks on them.

This is a very interesting observation, especially in light of Canada's announcement that it is leaving the American sphere of influence to become a neutral party with many alliances, including with China. If Farrell and Davies are right, this might mean that Canada will be less likely to face sanctions in the future than it risked when it was formally allied with the USA.

Meanwhile, Trump's indiscriminate use of tariffs is steadily worsening the American domestic situation, driving up prices:

https://fortune.com/2026/01/21/amazon-price-hikes-tariffs-2026-andy-jassy-davos/

Farrell and Davies predict that this will drive Trump to switch from using tariffs to using sanctions (after all, Trump's executive function has always been terrible, and it's only declined as his white matter disease has progressed). The EU is getting ready for this by finalizing the "Digital Euro." If Trump responds to this with more sanctions, it will only hasten the world's switch away from the dollar.

The authors call this a "positive feedback loop" (despite the word "positive," that's not a good thing – a positive feedback loop causes a system to keep on speeding up until it is shaken to pieces). The EU has good reasons to escape the dollar. The US has good reasons to fight the EU's escape. Everything the US does to punish the EU for trying to escape the dollar will make the EU want to escape the dollar even more.

The post-American era is being born around us, but when it comes to US "platforms" like the dollar (or even the transoceanic fiber links that all make landfall and interchange in the US), the expense and lock-in have left the world without any obvious and ready alternatives:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/26/difficult-multipolarism/#eurostack

But there's one post-American platform that's right there for the taking: a global collaboration to develop open, auditable, trustworthy alternatives to US tech, from administrative tools like Office365 to the firmware in tractors, cars, and medical equipment:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

It's a project that the EU is actively pursuing:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/big-bazooka-europe-could-hit-100000361.html

But I don't think they've yet grasped how crucial the project of getting off US tech is – not just because it's urgent, but because it's also tractable. While replacing the dollar is hamstrung by network effects, building a global software commons benefits from network effects. It starts strong, and gets better every time someone else joins it.

What's more: I suspect that a world that is already bound together with a common tech stack would have a much easier time coordinating resistance to dollar weaponization.

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 Universal DRM dystopia https://tarmle.livejournal.com/80182.html

#20yrsago Library’s one-year anniversary of lending video-games https://www.gamingtarget.com/article.php?artid=4941

#20yrsago UK music industry execs can’t talk straight about DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20060203090643/http://rock.thepodcastnetwork.com/2006/01/25/digital-music-the-industry-answers/

#20yrsago BBC report on UK gamers from 6-65 https://web.archive.org/web/20060207060943/http://crystaltips.typepad.com/wonderland/files/bbc_uk_games_research_2005.pdf

#20yrsago Norwegian ombudsman to review iTunes terms of service https://web.archive.org/web/20070208163427/http://forbrukerportalen.no/Artikler/2006/1138119849.71

#20yrsago Google Cache is legal https://web.archive.org/web/20060130212935/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004344.php

#20yrsago NSA’s licensable patent portfolio https://web.archive.org/web/20060116103440/https://www.nsa.gov/techtrans/techt00002.cfm

#20yrsago Senators figure out the Broadcast Flag, curse it as an abomination! https://web.archive.org/web/20060130212403/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004343.php

#20yrsago HOWTO turn a disposable camera into an RFID-killer https://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/wiki/RFID-Zapper(EN)

#20yrsago World of Warcraft: Don’t tell anyone you’re queer https://web.archive.org/web/20060131191638/http://www.innewsweekly.com/innews/?class_code=Ga&article_code=1172

#15yrsago PirateBox: anonymous, stand-alone wireless filesharing node https://web.archive.org/web/20110129205033/http://wiki.daviddarts.com/PirateBox

#15yrsago Where antibiotic resistant superbugs come from: biology explained at a “3d grade reading level” https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/development-of-resistant-staphylococcus-aureus-over-time-v8-web/6712973

#15yrsago Provocative metaphor for the Irish bailout https://memex.naughtons.org/how-a-bail-out-works/12877/

#15yrsago Douglas Adams’ online encylopedia tries to buy itself back from the BBC https://web.archive.org/web/20110127104628/https://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/brunel/A80173361

#15yrsago Ebert: 3D movies suck https://web.archive.org/web/20110131232913/http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2011/01/post_4.html

#15yrsago Anti-capitalist rumba rave in a Spanish bank https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wv5dh8v7mDs

#15yrsago Meet Obama’s new Solicitor General: the copyright industry’s Donald Verrilli Jr https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/01/obama-nominates-former-riaa-lawyer-for-solicitor-general-spot/

#10yrsago The story of magic: how narrative destroys conjurers’ effects, or elevates them to transcendence https://www.thejerx.com/blog/2016/1/23/dqwn4rocxdovl0dqcqymdhekzmuzq4

#10yrsago Majority of UK booze-industry revenues come from problem drinkers https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jan/22/problem-drinkers-alcohol-industry-most-sales-figures-reveal

#10yrsago Oklahoma’s repeat-offender Republican Creationist lawmakers take another run at science education https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/this-years-first-batch-of-anti-science-education-bills-surface-in-oklahoma/

#10yrsago You can’t “boost” your immune system with “health food,” nor would you want to https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jan/24/health-foods-immune-system-colds-vitamins

#10yrsago Stop taking “probiotics” https://www.statnews.com/2016/01/21/probiotics-shaky-science/

#10yrsago Swiss pro-privacy email provider forces a referendum on mass surveillance https://web.archive.org/web/20160125153009/https://theintercept.com/2016/01/25/how-a-small-company-in-switzerland-is-fighting-a-surveillance-law-and-winning/

#10yrsago Howto social-engineer someone’s address and other sensitive info from Amazon https://medium.com/@espringe/amazon-s-customer-service-backdoor-be375b3428c4#.jkx7fwbqv

#10yrsago Uptown Funk as a mashup of 66 classic movie dance routines https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1F0lBnsnkE

#10yrsago Starve: the best, meanest new graphic novel debut since Transmetropolitan https://memex.craphound.com/2016/01/25/starve-the-best-meanest-new-graphic-novel-debut-since-transmetropolitan/

#10yrsago Fury Road is still comprehensible at 12x speed https://vashivisuals.com/the-fastest_cut/

#10yrsago Police sergeant: 16 year old girl probably saw penises before I showed her mine, NBD https://www.wcvb.com/article/bpd-sergeant-may-plead-guilty-job-on-the-line/8230846

#10yrsago Chinese snatch-squads roam the globe, kidnapping dissidents and critics https://web.archive.org/web/20160416214222/https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/pursuing-critics-china-reaches-across-borders-and-nobody-is-stopping-it/2016/01/26/cd4959dc-6793-473f-8b74-6cbac3f46422_story.html?postshare=7221453857631693&tid=ss_tw

#10yrsago Shootout in Oregon: one terrorist killed, eight arrested https://www.cnn.com/2016/01/26/us/oregon-wildlife-refuge-siege-arrests/index.html

#10yrsago Health insurer loses 1m customers’ health records https://web.archive.org/web/20170224042328/http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=130443&p=irol-newsArticle_Print&ID=2132066

#10yrsago All your booze comes from a handful of titanic global corporations https://www.eater.com/drinks/2016/1/26/10830410/liquor-brands-hierarchy-diageo-beam-suntory-pernod-ricard

#10yrsago Man gasps dying words into officer’s bodycam: “They’re killing me right now… I can’t breathe.” https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/01/body-cam-captures-mans-final-words-begging-the-cops-to-get-off-of-him/

#10yrsago Help wanted: Burning Man’s Chief Fed https://web.archive.org/web/20160205123132/https://www.usajobs.gov/GetJob/ViewDetails/426715200

#5yrsago Goldman CEO gets $17.5m reward for $4.5b fraud https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/27/viral-colonialism/#failing-up

#5yrsago Facebook champions (its own) privacy https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/27/viral-colonialism/#ico-schtum

#5yrsago Casino mogul steals First Nation's vaccine https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/27/viral-colonialism/#seriously-fuck-that-guy

#5yrsago Plute buys mayor's house and serves eviction papers https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/25/money-is-power/#money-is-power

#5yrsago Trump's swamp gators find corporate refuge https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/24/1a/#gator-park

#5yrsago Stop saying "it's not censorship if it's not the government" https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/24/1a/#talk-hard

#1yrago The first days of Boss Politics Antitrust https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/24/enforcement-priorities/#enemies-lists

#1yrago It's not a crime if we do it with an app pluralistic.net/2025/01/25/potatotrac/#carbo-loading

#1yrago It's pretty easy to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, actually https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/27/beltway-bandits/#henhouse-foxes

#20yrsago Danny O’Brien’s Open Source con presentation on Evil https://www.spesh.com/danny/talks/evil/

#20yrsago Can DRM be future-proof? https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2006/01/28/cd-drm-compatibility-and-software-updates/

#15yrsago Francis Ford Coppola, copyfighter https://web.archive.org/web/20110125035605/http://the99percent.com/articles/6973/Francis-Ford-Coppola-On-Risk-Money-Craft-Collaboration

#15yrsago HOWTO make health-care cheaper by spending more on patients who need it https://web.archive.org/web/20140727223819/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/01/24/the-hot-spotters?currentPage=all

#15yrsago William Gibson on Stuxnet https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/27/opinion/27Gibson.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1296233597-MyRiudJI0Nso7Tm/YIw4yw

#10yrsago Guess who donated all the money to Black Americans for a Better Future Super PAC? Rich white men. https://web.archive.org/web/20160129001243/https://theintercept.com/2016/01/28/black-americans-for-a-better-future-super-pac-100-funded-by-rich-white-guys/

#10yrsago Bill Gates sold rights to the Tiananmen 1989 pictures to a Chinese company https://qz.com/601830/bill-gates-has-sold-a-set-of-iconic-images-to-a-beijing-firm-including-of-tiananmen-in-1989

#10yrsago Michael Moore: Flint needs a revolution, not bottled water https://web.archive.org/web/20160128161328/https://michaelmoore.com/DontSendBottledWater

#10yrsago The surveillance business model goes to war against the FTC https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/technology/267070-businesses-are-invading-your-privacy/

#10yrsago Florida mayors write to GOP presidential hopefuls demanding action on climate change https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/florida-mayors-to-rubio-were-going-under-take-climate-change-seriously/

#10yrsago The Onion’s new owner is Hillary Clinton’s most lavish financial backer https://web.archive.org/web/20160126213016/https://theintercept.com/2016/01/26/ha-ha-hillary-clintons-top-financial-supporter-now-controls-the-onion/

#10yrsago Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen wipes out coral reef with his superyacht https://caymannewsservice.com/2016/01/billionaire-boater-destroys-wb-reef/

#10yrsago Head of NSA’s hacker squad explains how to armor networks against the likes of him https://www.wired.com/2016/01/nsa-hacker-chief-explains-how-to-keep-him-out-of-your-system/

#10yrsago Anaheim: the happiest surveillance state on earth https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/01/city-cops-in-disneylands-backyard-have-had-stingray-on-steriods-for-years/

#5yrsago Knowledge is why you build your own apps https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/28/payment-for-order-flow/#knowledge-is-power

#5yrsago Understanding /r/wallstreetbets https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/28/payment-for-order-flow/#wallstreetbets

#5yrsago How apps steal your location https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/28/payment-for-order-flow/#trackers-tracked

#5yrsago Mexican indigenous telco wins spectrum fight https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/28/payment-for-order-flow/#tic-victory

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


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 (1019 words today, 14468 total)

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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ISSN: 3066-764X

Publié le 22.01.2026 à 18:51

Pluralistic: The petty (but undeniable) delights of cultivating unoptimizability as a habit (22 Jan 2026)


Today's links


A pegboard into which a square peg has been jammed, cracking the surface. The background is a messy, indistinct pile of papers.

The petty (but undeniable) delights of cultivating ungovernability as a habit (permalink)

I am on record as being skeptical of the notion that if you shop very carefully, you can make society better. "Conscious consumption" is not a tool for structural change, and any election that requires you to "vote with your wallet" is always won by the people with the thickest wallets (statistically speaking, that's not you):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/13/consumption-choices/#marginal-benefits

Now, that's not to say that boycotts are useless. But a boycott is a structured and organized campaign. The Montgomery bus boycott wasn't a matter of a bunch of people waking up one morning and saying, "You know what, fuck it, I'm gonna walk today":

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

The Montgomery bus boycott was an organized project, put together by a powerful membership organization, the NAACP, that demanded far more of its members than merely shopping very carefully. The boycott was the end stage of an organized resistance, not a substitute for it.

The problem with "conscious consumption" is that it comes out of the neoliberal tradition in which every political matter is supposedly determined by your individual actions, and not your actions as part of a union or other political institution that works as a bloc to overthrow the status quo.

"Conscious consumption" arises out of the tradition that gave us Margaret Thatcher's maxim, "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first."

Any attempt to change society by shopping very carefully is destined to fail, but it's worse than that. Because "shopping very carefully" never makes systemic change, its practitioners inevitably decide the reason they're not seeing the change they yearn for is that their allies aren't shopping carefully enough. This turns the careful shopper into a cop who polices other people's consumption, demanding that they stop eating some foodstuff or using Twitter or watching HBO Max. Squabbling over whether using a social media network makes you a Nazi generates far more heat than light – so much heat that it incinerates the solidarity you need to actually fight Nazis.

Which is not an argument against boycotts! Boycotts work. If boycotts didn't work, then genocide apologists wouldn't be apoplectic over the BDS movement:

https://bdsmovement.net/

But a "boycott" isn't the same thing as "you and your social circle deciding that buying the wrong product makes you a Bad Person and then devoting your energies to scolding your allies for choosing Coke instead of Pepsi." Boycotts are downstream of organizing; they are not a substitute for organizing. There is such a thing as society.

Now, all that said, I will confess: I sometimes do something that looks a lot like "shopping very carefully," and when I do, I derive enormous satisfaction from it (but I am always careful not to mistake my tiny victories for political action). But I get it, honestly, I do. Sometimes, "shopping very carefully" is a way to eke out a tiny, personal victory in the face of overwhelming odds against a wildly overmatched opponent. That feels very good.

One example would be patronizing my local repair shop (or fixing my stuff myself). The big structural barriers to repair are things like "parts pairing":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/record-scratch/#autoenshittification

And manufacturers who abuse trademark law to get CBP to seize refurbished parts at the border:

https://www.shacknews.com/article/108049/apple-repair-critic-louis-rossmann-takes-on-us-customs-counterfeit-battery-seizure

The repair problem isn't that your neighbors are "sheeple" who've had their minds warped by a "throwaway society." The problem is that technical and legal countermeasures have made repair so hard and unprofitable that getting your stuff fixed is more expensive and time-consuming than it needs to be.

That said: I love going to my local repair shop. I love fixing things on my own. It's great. It makes me feel great. I think you should do it because it may make you feel great, too, and it'd be nice for you to support your local fix-it place, but let's not pretend that we'll change society that way.

Here's another example: for the past couple years, I've been navigating a (thankfully very treatable) cancer diagnosis. The fact that my cancer is very treatable doesn't mean it's easily treated. America's shitty, for-profit healthcare system is terrible at the best of times, and nearly unnavigable when coping with a complex condition that crosses a lot of disciplinary lines and requires access to specialized, expensive equipment.

I'm asymptomatic, so the hardest part of having cancer – so far – is fighting the Kaiser bureaucracy to make sure my treatment goes off as planned:

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

The fact that the different Kaiser departments drop so many balls when handing off care between them means that I have to juggle those balls for them. I make extensive use of organizational tactics like "suspense files," which are a kind of inverted to-do list, in that they let you manage other people's to-do lists, rather than your own:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/26/one-weird-trick/#todo

(In case you're wondering, the best part of having cancer is that Kaiser comps 100% of your parking! Free cancer parking!)

Now, I also make sure to note each of Kaiser's failures and I raise grievances and California health ombudsman complaints for each one – not because I'm angry and want an apology, but because I'm a well-organized, native English-speaking cancer patient with no symptoms, which means that I can do the advocacy that other people can't, and help them (I also track these complaints with suspense files, calendar entries, etc, to make sure that they're followed through).

Partly, I'm able to do this because I'm very organized. I'm not organized because I worship at the cult of "personal productivity"; I'm definitely Jenny Odell-pilled on that score:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/04/09/how-to-do-nothing-jenny-odells-case-for-resisting-the-attention-economy/

I'm organized because I pursue The Way of Jim Munroe's "Time Management for Anarchists" ("once I learned how to make my own structure, I was able to kick my expensive boss habit and work on my own"):

https://jimmunroe.net/comics/pamphlets/time_management_for_anarchists/time_management_for_anarchists.html

Having invested a lot of energy into being organized, I now get massive discounts on dealing with other people's shit. Remember: giant corporations and other remorseless bureaucracies throw up roadblocks on the assumption that you will be a "rational economic actor." The airline assumes that if it costs you 15 hours to collect on the $50 voucher you're entitled to, you will just let them steal $50 from you. But once you get organized enough, you can cut that 15-hour investment down to a 15-minute one, and I will absolutely trade 15 minutes of dealing with an airline's bullshit for $50 of that airline's money.

(Why yes, Air Canada did fuck me over on Jan 3 and get me home at 5AM the next day, instead of 730PM the night before; and yes, they did deny my compensation claim; and yes, I have filed an appeal with the Canada Transport Agency; why do you ask?)

One of my favorite podcasts is "An Arm and a Leg," which divides itself between deep dive structural analyses into how corrupt and ghastly American medical billing is, and enumerations of sweet hacks that ninja bill-fighters have come up with to slice through the billing labyrinth your insurer and hospital trap you in and cut straight to the bullseye:

https://armandalegshow.com/

For example, the latest episode tells the story of Jared Walker, who figured out that hospitals were stealing billions of dollars every year from the poorest people in America, who were all entitled to have their medical bill canceled. He founded Dollarfor, a nonprofit that helps patients get their medical debt canceled:

https://armandalegshow.com/episode/our-favorite-project-of-2025-levels-up-and-you-can-help/

Dollarfor now has an automated tool that guides you through a survey and then generates and files the completed, hospital-specific paperwork needed to get your medical debt canceled (they've made versions of this for every hospital in America!):

https://dollarfor.org/

(If you're a health worker, here's a printable guide with QR codes that you can clip to your lanyard and show to patients while you deliver care):

https://drive.google.com/file/d/14cfwK66A_mfBBBqn35_Lp7930uoY-73f/view

Now, the real problem here isn't that hospitals steal billions from charity cases: it's that America has a garbage for-profit healthcare system that kills and bankrupts people at scale. Dollarfor is amazing, but it's not going to fix that problem. I don't know Walker, but I bet if you asked him, he'd agree with this, and say something like, "Yes, and I'm helping people not have their lives destroyed by this garbage system, which is good unto itself; and also, it might give them the free time and wherewithal to participate in movements to overthrow the garbage system."

I really dote on the fact that Dollarfor has literally built a different version of their tool for every single hospital in the country. It's a perfect example of how turning yourself into a highly organized adversary can overcome the time-based economics our enemies rely on to keep their garbage systems intact.

Whenever I think of this stuff, I flash on two pop-culture references that made a deep impression on me. The first comes from 1985's Real Genius, Val Kilmer's best ever movie (fight me!). Real Genius is set at a fictionalized version of Caltech in which young prodigies slowly discover that their scumbag prof has tricked them into working on a weapons contract for the DoD.

This being fictional-Caltech, there are all these scenes in which very smart people do weird and amazing things. At one point, we learn that there's a former child prodigy living in the basement under the dorms, a guy named Lazlo Hollyfeld who became a hermit after discovering that he, too, had been duped into working on a baby-killer project. We get these tantalizing glimpses of Lazlo in his subterranean redoubt, where he has built some kind of giant Rube Goldberg machine that is engaged in a mysterious mechanical process that involves manipulating cards of some sort.

At the film's denouement (spoiler alert for a 40 year old movie), we discover what he was doing:

Lazlo: These are entries into the Frito-Lay Sweepstakes. "No purchase necessary, enter as often as you want" – so I am.

Chris: That's great! How many times?

Lazlo: Well, this batch makes it one million six hundred and fifty thousand. I should win thirty-two point six percent of the prizes, including the car.

Chris: That kind of takes the fun out of it, doesn't it?

Lazlo: They set up the rules, and lately I've come to realize that I have certain materialistic needs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6kBfBXZBdc

Then there's a scene from the otherwise tepid (fight me!) Batman Returns (1992) in which we encounter the Penguin in his subterranean redoubt, brandishing pages full of kompromat that have been laboriously taped together:

The Penguin: What about the documents that prove you own half the firetraps in Gotham City?

Maximillian 'Max' Shreck: If there were such documents – and that's not an admission – I would have seen to it they were shredded.

The Penguin: Ah, good idea! [pulls out a sheaf of documents]

The Penguin: A lot of tape and a little patience make all the difference.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103776/quotes/

Both Lazlo and the Penguin are defeating the time-based security assumptions of their adversaries. Frito Lay treats filling in 1.65m sweepstakes entries as the same thing as filling in infinity entries; Max Schrek treats the time needed to piece together shredded paper as infinite. Rounding a very large number up to infinity isn't entirely irrational, but once you get organized enough, you just might be able to find the time – or a system – to bring that very big number down to an entirely tractable value.

Yes, this is a species of "careful shopping" but my point isn't to say that shopping carefully is useless – rather, that it's a drastic error to mistake this useful (and surprisingly satisfying) tactic for a strategy that will truly alter the system.

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 Karl Schroeder's "Ventus" https://www.mindjack.com/books/ventus.html

#20yrsago Hollywood’s Canadian MP plagiarizes entertainment industry in op-ed https://web.archive.org/web/20060814015107/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1082

#20yrago Pope: Divine inspiration is copyrighted https://web.archive.org/web/20070219175621/http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article717916.ece

#10yrsago Gay Tory MP outs himself as a “poppers” user, slams proposed ban https://web.archive.org/web/20160122212659/https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/mp-crispin-blunt-admits-using-poppers-while-attacking-proposed-ban/ar-BBotElv

#10yrsago Donald Trump’s dad was Woody Guthrie’s hated Klansman landlord https://theconversation.com/woody-guthrie-old-man-trump-and-a-real-estate-empires-racist-foundations-53026

#5yrsago How one of America's most abusive employers gets away with it https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/22/paperback-writer/#toothless

#1yrago EFF's transition memo for the Biden admin https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/22/paperback-writer/#memo

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


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 (1023 words today, 12377 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://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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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

Publié le 21.01.2026 à 15:32

Pluralistic: Google's AI pricing plan (21 Jan 2026)


Today's links


Google's Mountain View headquarters. The scene is animated: the building is quickly covered with price-tags ranging from 0.99 to 99999.99. In the final frames, 99999.99 tags cover all the other price tags. In the background, rising over the roof of the Googleplex like the rising sun, is the staring red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.'

Google's AI pricing plan (permalink)

Google is spending a lot on AI, but what's not clear is how Google will make a lot from AI. Or, you know, even break even. Given, you know, that businesses are seeing zero return from AI:

https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/20/pwc_ai_ceo_survey/

But maybe they've figured it out. In a recent edition of his BIG newsletter, Matt Stoller pulls on several of the strings that Google's top execs have dangled recently:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/will-google-organize-the-worlds-prices

The first string: Google's going to spy on you a lot more, for the same reason Microsoft is spying on all of its users: because they want to supply their AI "agents" with your personal data:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ANECpNdt-4

Google's announced that it's going to feed its AI your Gmail messages, as well as the whole deep surveillance dossier the company has assembled based on your use of all the company's products: Youtube, Maps, Photos, and, of course, Search:

https://twitter.com/Google/status/2011473059547390106

The second piece of news is that Apple has partnered with Google to supply Gemini to all iPhone users:

https://twitter.com/NewsFromGoogle/status/2010760810751017017

Apple already charges Google more than $20b/year not to enter the search market; now they're going to be charging Google billions to stay out of the AI market, too. Meanwhile, Google will get to spy on Apple customers, just like they spy on their own users. Anyone who says that Apple is ideologically committed to your privacy because they're real capitalists is a sucker (or a cultist):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones

But the big revelation is how Google is going to make money with AI: they're going to sell AI-based "personalized pricing" to "partners," including "Walmart, Visa, Mastercard, Shopify, Gap, Kroger, Macy’s, Stripe, Home Depot, Lowe's, American Express, etc":

https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/agentic-commerce-ai-tools-protocol-retailers-platforms/

Personalized pricing, of course, is the polite euphemism for surveillance pricing, which is when a company spies on you in order to figure out how much they can get away with charging you (or how little they can get away with paying you):

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

It's a weird form of cod-Marxism, whose tenet is "From each according to their desperation; to each according to their vulnerability." Surveillance pricing advocates say that this is "efficient" because they can use surveillance data to offer you discounts, too – like, say you rock up to an airline ticket counter 45 minutes before takeoff and they can use surveillance data to know that you won't take their last empty seat for $200, but you would fly in it for $100, you could get that seat for cheap.

This is, of course, nonsense. Airlines don't sell off cheap seats like bakeries discounting their day-olds – they jack up the price of a last-minute journey to farcical heights.

Google also claims that it will only use its surveillance pricing facility to offer discounts, and not to extract premiums. As Stoller points out, there's a well-developed playbook for making premiums look like discounts, which is easy to see in the health industry. As Stoller says, the list price for an MRI is $8,000, but your insurer gets a $6000 "discount" and actually pays $1970, sticking you with a $30 co-pay. The $8000 is a fake number, and so is the $6000 – the only real price is the $30 you're paying.

The whole economy is filled with versions of this transparent ruse, from "department stores who routinely mark everything as 80% off" to pharmacy benefit managers:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/23/shield-of-boringness/#some-men-rob-you-with-a-fountain-pen

Google, meanwhile, is touting its new "universal commerce protocol" (UCP), a way for AI "agents" to retrieve prices and product descriptions and make purchases:

https://www.thesling.org/the-harm-to-consumers-and-sellers-from-universal-commerce-protocol-in-googles-own-words/

Right now, a major hurdle to "agentic AI" is the complexity of navigating websites designed for humans. AI agents just aren't very reliable when it comes to figuring out which product is which, choosing the correct options, and putting it in a shopping cart, and then paying for it.

Some of that is merely because websites have inconsistent "semantics" – literally things like the "buy" button being called something other than "buy button" in the HTML code. But there's a far more profound problem with agentic shopping, which is that companies deliberately obfuscate their prices.

This is how junk fees work, and why they're so destructive. Say you're a hotel providing your rate-card to an online travel website. You know that travelers are going to search for hotels by city and amenities, and then sort the resulting list by price. If you hide your final price – by surprising the user with a bunch of junk fees at checkout, or, better yet, after they arrive and put their credit-card down at reception – you are going to be at the top of that list. Your hotel will seem like the cheapest, best option.

But of course, it's not. From Ticketmaster to car rentals, hotels to discount airlines, rental apartments to cellular plans, the real price is withheld until the very last instant, whereupon it shoots up to levels that are absolutely uncompetitive. But because these companies are able to engage in deceptive advertising, they look cheaper.

And of course, crooked offers drive out honest ones. The honest hotel that provides a true rate card, reflecting the all-in price, ends up at the bottom of the price-sorted list, rents no rooms, and goes out of business (or pivots to lying about its prices, too).

Online sellers do not want to expose their true prices to comparison shopping services. They benefit from lying to those services. For decades, technologists have dreamed of building a "semantic web" in which everyone exposes true and accurate machine-readable manifests of their content to facilitate indexing, search and data-mining:

https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm

This has failed. It's failed because lying is often more profitable than telling the truth, and because lying to computers is easier than lying to people, and because once a market is dominated by liars, everyone has to lie, or be pushed out of the market.

Of course, it would be really cool if everyone diligently marked up everything they put into the public sphere with accurate metadata. But there are lots of really cool things you could do if you could get everyone else to change how they do things and arrange their affairs to your convenience. Imagine how great it would be if you could just get everyone to board an airplane from back to front, or to stand right and walk left on escalators, or to put on headphones when using their phones in public.

Wanting it badly is not enough. People have lots of reasons for doing things in suboptimal ways. Often the reason is that it's suboptimal for you, but just peachy for them.

Google says that it's going to get every website in the world to expose accurate rate cards to its chatbots to facilitate agentic AI. Google is also incapable of preventing "search engine optimization" companies from tricking it into showing bullshit at the top of the results for common queries:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/#site-reputation-abuse

Google somehow thinks that the companies that spend millions of dollars trying to trick its crawler won't also spend millions of dollars trying to trick its chatbot – and they're providing the internet with a tool to inject lies straight into the chatbot's input hopper.

But UCP isn't just a way for companies to tell Google what their prices are. As Stoller points out, UCP will also sell merchants the ability to have Gemini set prices on their products, using Google's surveillance data, through "dynamic pricing" (another euphemism for "surveillance pricing").

This decade has seen the rise and rise of price "clearinghouses" – companies that offer price "consulting" to direct competitors in a market. Nominally, this is just a case of two competitors shopping with the same supplier – like Procter and Gamble and Unilever buying their high-fructose corn-syrup from the same company.

But it's actually far more sinister. "Clearinghouses" like Realpage – a company that "advises" landlords on rental rates – allow all the major competitors in a market to collude to raise prices in lockstep. A Realpage landlord that ignores the service's "advice" and gives a tenant a break on the rent will be excluded from Realpage's service. The rental markets that Realpage dominates have seen major increases in rental rates:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/09/pricewars/#adam-smith-communist

Google's "direct pricing" offering will allow all comers to have Google set their prices for them, based on Google's surveillance data. That includes direct competitors. As Stoller points out, both Nike and Reebok are Google advertisers. If they let Google price their sneakers, Google can raise prices across the market in lockstep.

Despite how much everyone hates this garbage, neoclassical economists and their apologists in the legal profession continue to insist that surveillance pricing is "efficient." Stoller points to a law review article called "Antitrust After the Coming Wave," written by antitrust law prof and Google lawyer Daniel Crane:

https://nyulawreview.org/issues/volume-99-number-4/antitrust-after-the-coming-wave/

Crane argues that AI will kill antitrust law because AI favors monopolies, and argues "that we should forget about promoting competition or costs, and instead enact a new Soviet-style regime, one in which the government would merely direct a monopolist’s 'AI to maximize social welfare and allocate the surplus created among different stakeholders of the firm.'"

This is a planned economy, but it's one in which the planning is done by monopolists who are – somehow, implausibly – so biddable that governments can delegate the power to decide what we can buy and sell, what we can afford and who can afford it, and rein them in if they get it wrong.

In 1890, Senator John Sherman was stumping for the Sherman Act, America's first antitrust law. On the Senate floor, he declared:

If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.

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

Google thinks that it has finally found a profitable use for AI. It thinks that it will be the first company to make money on AI, by harnessing that AI to a market-rigging, price-gouging monopoly that turns Google's software into Sherman's "autocrat of trade."

It's funny when you think of all those "AI safety" bros who claimed that AI's greatest danger was that it would become sentient and devour us. It turns out that the real "AI safety" risk is that AI will automate price gouging at scale, allowing Google to crown itself a "King over the necessaries of life":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/27/10-types-of-people/#taking-up-a-lot-of-space

(Image: Noah_Loverbear; CC BY-SA 3.0; Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Disney swaps stock for Pixar; Jobs is largest Disney stockholder https://web.archive.org/web/20060129105430/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2006/01/22/cnpixar22.xml&menuId=242&sSheet=/money/2006/01/22/ixcitytop.html

#20yrsago HOWTO anonymize your search history https://web.archive.org/web/20060220004353/https://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,70051-0.html

#15yrsago Bruce Sterling talk on “vernacular video” https://vimeo.com/18977827

#15yrsago Elaborate televised prank on Belgium’s terrible phone company https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxXlDyTD7wo

#15yrsago Portugal: 10 years of decriminalized drugs https://web.archive.org/web/20110120040831/http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/01/16/drug_experiment/?page=full

#15yrsago Woman paralyzed by hickey https://web.archive.org/web/20110123072349/https://www.foxnews.com/health/2011/01/21/new-zealand-woman-partially-paralyzed-hickey/

#15yrsago EFF warns: mobile OS vendors aren’t serious about security https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/01/dont-sacrifice-security-mobile-devices

#10yrsago Trumpscript: a programming language based on the rhetorical tactics of Donald Trump https://www.inverse.com/article/10448-coders-assimilate-donald-trump-to-a-programming-language

#10yrsago That time the DoD paid Duke U $335K to investigate ESP in dogs. Yes, dogs. https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2016/jan/21/duke-universitys-deep-dive-uncanny-abilities-canin/

#10yrsago Kathryn Cramer remembers her late husband, David Hartwell, a giant of science fiction https://web.archive.org/web/20160124050729/http://www.kathryncramer.com/kathryn_cramer/2016/01/til-death-did-us-part.html

#10yrsago What the Democratic Party did to alienate poor white Americans https://web.archive.org/web/20160123041632/https://www.alternet.org/economy/robert-reich-why-white-working-class-abandoned-democratic-party

#10yrsago Bernie Sanders/Johnny Cash tee https://web.archive.org/web/20160126070314/https://weardinner.com/products/bernie-cash

#5yrsago NYPD can't stop choking Black men https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/21/i-cant-breathe/#chokeholds

#5yrsago Rolling back the Trump rollback https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/21/i-cant-breathe/#cra

#1yrsago Winning coalitions aren't always governing coalitions https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/06/how-the-sausage-gets-made/#governing-is-harder

#1yrago The Brave Little Toaster https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/08/sirius-cybernetics-corporation/#chatterbox

#1yrago The cod-Marxism of personalized pricing https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/11/socialism-for-the-wealthy/#rugged-individualism-for-the-poor

#1yrago They were warned https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/13/wanting-it-badly/#is-not-enough

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


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 (1010 words today, 11362 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):

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https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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https://mamot.fr/@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

Publié le 20.01.2026 à 14:43

Pluralistic: AI is how bosses wage war on "professions" (20 Jan 2026)


Today's links


An armored luxury car driving towards the viewer; in the foreground, a hand is flipping off the car. The background is the hostile, glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from '2001: A Space Odyssey.' Half of the car has been overlaid with an ASCII art conversion of the car itself.

AI is how bosses wage war on "professions" (permalink)

Growing up, I assumed that being a "professional" meant that you were getting paid to do something. That's a perfectly valid definition (I still remember feeling like a "pro" the first time I got paid for my writing), but "professional" has another, far more important definition.

In this other sense of the word, a "professional" is someone bound to a code of conduct that supersedes both the demands of their employer and the demands of the state. Think of a doctor's Hippocratic Oath: having sworn to "first do no harm," a doctor is (literally) duty-bound to refuse orders to harm their patients. If a hospital administrator, a police officer or a judge orders a doctor to harm their patient, they are supposed to refuse. Indeed, depending on how you feel about oaths, they are required to refuse.

There are many "professions" bound to codes of conduct, policed to a greater or lesser extent by "colleges" or other professional associations, many of which have the power to bar a member from the profession for "professional misconduct." Think of lawyers, accountants, medical professionals, librarians, teachers, some engineers, etc.

While all of these fields are very different in terms of the work they do, they share one important trait: they are all fields that AI bros swear will be replaced by chatbots in the near future.

I find this an interesting phenomenon. It's clear to me that chatbots can't do these jobs. Sure, there are instances in which professionals may choose to make use of some AI tools, and I'm happy to stipulate that when a skilled professional chooses to use AI as an adjunct to their work, it might go well. This is in keeping with my theory that to the extent that AI is useful, it's when its user is a centaur (a person assisted by technology), but that employers dream of making AI's users into reverse centaurs (machines who are assisted by people):

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

A psychotherapist who uses AI to transcribe sessions so they can refresh their memory about an exact phrase while they're making notes is a centaur. A psychotherapist who monitors 20 chat sessions with LLM "therapists" in order to intervene if the LLM starts telling patients to kill themselves is a "reverse centaur." This situation makes it impossible for them to truly help "their" patients; they are an "accountability sink," installed to absorb the blame when a patient is harmed by the AI.

Lawyers might use a chatbot to help them format a brief or transcribe a client meeting (centaur)- but when senior partners require their juniors and paralegals to write briefs at inhuman speed (reverse centaur), they are setting themselves up for briefs full of "hallucinated" citations:

https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/

I hold a bedrock view that even though an AI can't do your job, an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete

But why are bosses such easy marks for these gabby AI hustlers? Partly, it's because an AI can probably do your boss's job – if 90% of your job is answering email and delegating tasks, and if you are richly rewarded for success but get to blame failure on your underlings, then, yeah, an AI can totally do that job.

But I think there's an important psychological dimension to this: bosses are especially easy to trick with AI when they're being asked to believe that they can use AI to fire workers who are in a position to tell them to fuck off.

That certainly explains why bosses are so thrilled by the prospect of swapping professionals for chatbots. What a relief it would be to fire everyone who is professionally required to tell you to fuck off when you want them to do stupid and/or dangerous things; so you could replace them with servile, groveling LLMs that punctuate their sentences with hymns to your vision and brilliance!

This also explains why media bosses are so anxious to fire screenwriters and actors and replace them with AI. After all, you prompt an LLM in exactly the same way a clueless studio boss gives notes to a writers' room: "Give me ET, but make it about a dog, give it a love interest, and put a car chase in Act III." The difference is that the writers will call you a clueless fucking suit and demand that you go back to your spreadsheets and stop bothering them while they're trying to make a movie, whereas the chatbot will cheerfully shit out a (terrible) script to spec. The fact that the script will suck is less important than the fact that swapping writers for LLMs will let studio bosses escape ego-shattering conflicts with empowered workers who actually know how to do things.

It also explains why bosses are so anxious to replace programmers with chatbots. When programmers were scarce and valuable, they had to be lured into employment with luxurious benefits, lavish pay, and a collegial relationship with their bosses, where everyone was "just an engineer." Tech companies had business-wide engineering meetings where techies were allowed to tell their bosses that they thought their technical and business strategies were stupid.

Now that tech worker supply has caught up with demand, bosses are relishing the thought of firing these "entitled" coders and replacing them with chatbots overseen by traumatized reverse centaurs who will never, ever tell them to fuck off:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/05/ex-princes-of-labor/#hyper-criti-hype

And of course, this explains why bosses are so eager to use AI to replace workers who might unionize: drivers, factory workers, warehouse workers. For what is a union if not an institution that lets you tell your boss to fuck off?

https://www.thewrap.com/conde-nast-fires-union-staffers-video/

AI salesmen may be slick, but they're not that slick. Bosses are easy marks for anyone who dangles the promise of a world where everyone – human and machine – follows orders to the letter, and praises you for giving them such clever, clever orders.

(Image: Christoph Scholz; CC BY-SA 2.0; Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Broadcast Flag is back, this time it covers iPods and PSPs, too https://memex.craphound.com/2006/01/20/broadcast-flag-is-back-this-time-it-covers-ipods-and-psps-too/

#20yrsago Nonprofit alternative to CDDB gets its first deal https://web.archive.org/web/20060128114433/http://blog.musicbrainz.org/archives/2006/01/introducing_lin_1.html

#20yrsago David Byrne: boycott DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20060117084842/http://journal.davidbyrne.com/

#20yrsago Cozy blanket with sleeves: the Slanket https://web.archive.org/web/20060203040004/https://www.theslanket.com/

#15yrsago Safe-cracking robot autodials combinations to brute-force a high-security safe https://web.archive.org/web/20110709082726/http://www.kvogt.com/autodialer/

#15yrsago Forger never takes money, only wants to see his works hanging in galleries https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/12/arts/design/12fraud.html

#15yrsago Hotel made of beach trash in Madrid https://www.smh.com.au/traveller/travel-news/new-hotel-is-complete-rubbish-20110120-19xjl.html

#15yrsago Enfield, CT cancels screening of Moore’s Sicko after pressure from local gov’t https://web.archive.org/web/20110123033350/http://web.resourceshelf.com/go/resourceblog/63420

#15yrsago Best mafiosi nicknames from today’s historic bust https://web.archive.org/web/20110126120419/https://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/01/the_20_best_nic.php

#10yrsago Very sad news about science fiction titan David G Hartwell https://memex.craphound.com/2016/01/20/very-sad-news-about-science-fiction-titan-david-g-hartwell/

#10yrsago Solving the “Longbow Puzzle”: why did France and Scotland keep their inferior crossbows? https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/684231

#10yrsago Netflix demands Net Neutrality, but makes an exception for T-Mobile https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/19/10794288/netflix-t-mobile-binge-on-net-neutrality-zero-rating

#10yrsago Research: increased resident participation in city planning produces extreme wealth segregation https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/01/data-analysis-reveals-that-us-cities-are-segregating-the-wealthy/

#10yrsago Independent economists: TPP will kill 450,000 US jobs; 75,000 Japanese jobs, 58,000 Canadian jobs https://www.techdirt.com/2016/01/19/more-realistic-modelling-tpps-effects-predicts-450000-us-jobs-lost-gdp-contraction/

#10yrsago Howto: make your own fantastically detailed Star Trek: TOS bridge playset https://www.instructables.com/Star-Trek-Enterprise-Bridge-Playset/

#10yrsago Strategic butt coverings in video games https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujTufg1GvR4

#10yrsago Company that pampers rich people at Burning Man won’t give up https://memex.craphound.com/2016/01/20/company-that-pampers-rich-people-at-burning-man-wont-give-up/

#5yrsago No one should be on the No-Fly List https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/20/damn-the-shrub/#no-nofly

#5yrsago My letter to the FBI https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/20/damn-the-shrub/#foia

#1yrago Enshittification isn't caused by venture capital https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/20/capitalist-unrealism/#praxis

#1yrago Keir Starmer appoints Jeff Bezos as his "first buddy" https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


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 (1002 words today, 10352 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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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

Publié le 19.01.2026 à 16:09

Pluralistic: Social media without socializing (19 Jan 2026)


Today's links


Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse avatar, perched on a legless nude Ken doll body; its eyes are psychedelic pinwheels. Behind the figure is a group shot of child laborer miners from the 1910s, glitched out, blue tinted, and covered with scan lines. The background is a psychedelic swirl of moody colors. They stand atop a filthy checkerboard floor that stretches off to infinity.

Social media without socializing (permalink)

From the earliest days of social media, social media bosses have been at war with sociability. To create a social media service is to demarcate legitimate and illegitimate forms of sociability. It's a monumental act of hubris, really.

It was ever thus. The founder of Friendster decreed that people could only form friendship bonds with each other, but could not declare themselves to be "friends" of everyone with a common interest. You and I could be friends, but you couldn't be "friends" with a group called "bloggers." Each member of that group would have to create a reciprocal friendship link to see one another's feeds.

Way back in 1999, Larry Lessig taught us that "code is law." By encoding these restrictions into the feed, Friendster's programmers were putting limits on the kinds of relationships that could be formed using the service. But Lessig's law (code?) is often overidden by an even older principle: William Gibson's 1982 maxim that "the street finds its own uses for things."

Friendster told its users how to be friends with one another, and Friendster's users treated Friendster's management as damage and routed around it. They created accounts with names like "New York City" and whenever anyone friended that account, it friended them back. Users hacked their own way to form "illegitimate" friendships based on affinity into the system:

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

As social media turned into a billion- (and then a trillion-) dollar business, the urgency of the struggle between how social media bosses demanded that we socialize and how we wanted to socialize only got sharper. Mark Zuckerberg doubtless thought he was covering all his bases when he tossed a casual "It's complicated" to the pulldown menu for defining your relationship status, but that's because he doesn't understand how complicated all our relationships are:

https://www.phillymag.com/news/2013/07/10/facebook-complicated-relationship-status/

For Zuck, crisply defined relationships were things that he could do simple math on in order to target ads, make recommendations, and sort users into categories. When you need to treat relationships as elements in a series of discrete mathematical operations, the fact that relationships are intrinsically, irreducibly qualitative is a serious bug. So Zuck did what computer scientists usually do when they want to do math on qualitative variables: he incinerated all the qualitative elements by quantizing them, and then did math on the dubious residue that remained:

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-qualia/

Zuck's biggest problem isn't the ambiguity of your social connections, though – it's that they exist at all. Think about it: Mark Zuckerberg personally makes or loses billions of dollars based on how much you socialize with your friends on his platforms. If your friends engage with you in ways that are low intensity and easily concluded ("How'd you sleep?" "Just fine." "That's nice."), then he loses. If, on the other hand, you and your friends get into protracted, intense interactions, he gets to show you so many ads and make so much money.

Your friends are a problem for Mark Zuckerberg to solve, and (to his undying chagrin), you and your friends stubbornly refuse to organize your relationships around Zuck's financial imperatives. You just wanna hang out in the rhythms that are part of any friendship – sometimes intense, sometimes casual, often sporadic. I mean, honestly, if you're going to insist on just having normal friendships, how the hell can Mark Zuckerberg post the kind of growth his shareholders expect?

This explains much of the drive to transform Facebook from a platform that shows you the things your friends post to a platform that mostly shows you things that "content creators" post. Your friends aren't motivated by the dangling possibility of viral dollars if they get you to "engage" with their posts, but for content creators, your engagement buys the groceries and pays the rent. By swapping out your friends and replacing them with people who are highly motivated to "engage" with you, Zuck gets a lever he can yank to get his users to arrange their conduct in ways that goose his growth.

In other words, Zuck lured you in with the promise of having pleasurable online conversations that matter to you; and now that he's trapped you, he wants you to break up with your friends so you have more time to watch his community access cable station.

It also explains Zuck's passion for filling his platform with botshit, and his plan to solve the loneliness epidemic by giving you chatbots instead of friends:

https://fortune.com/2025/06/26/mark-zuckerberg-ai-friends-hinge-ceo/

For Mark Zuckerberg, all people are just shitty chatbots – chatbots that won't follow orders. He wants to be able to point us at one another in the hopes that we will simply prompt one another into endless chatter, with endless scrolling, and endless ad insertions. This works great with chatbots, not so well with people:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtNagNezo8w

After all, Zuck doesn't really believe most other people exist. Read Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams's tell-all whistleblower memoir about her years at Facebook and you'll quickly realize that for Zuck, people are statistical artifacts, not co-equal beings worthy of moral consideration:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf

Billionaires are plagued by solipsism. Not believing other people exist is a great aid to billionairedom, because it lets you amass your fortune without scrupling over the population-scale misery you're inflicting on the way:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/18/seeing-like-a-billionaire/#npcs

For Zuck, AI is the most exciting technology in history (even more exciting than the Metaverse, if you can believe it!) because it might give him the world he dreams of: a world without people, or, at very least, a social media network without any socializing:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-wheel/#billionaire-solipsism

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 Nutjob offers $100 bounty to UCLA students who wiretap lefty profs https://news.slashdot.org/story/06/01/21/1948206/ucla-students-urged-to-expose-radical-professors

#20yrsago Mysterious birthday ritual at Poe’s graveside disrupted by rubberneckers https://web.archive.org/web/20060212041742/https://www.cnn.com/2006/US/01/19/poe.mystery.ap/index.html?section=cnn_latest

#20yrsago DRM primer for librarians https://web.archive.org/web/20060115061831/https://www.ala.org/ala/washoff/WOissues/copyrightb/digitalrights/DRMfinal.pdf

#20yrsago Hollywood’s MP caught lying on tape https://web.archive.org/web/20061010121359/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1080

#20yrsago Musician playing at Hollywood’s MP fundraiser owes success to copying https://web.archive.org/web/20080704112401/http://accordionguy.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2006/1/19/1714267.html

#15yrsago Book made using 4 daisy-chained printers spanning 100 years’ worth of technology https://web.archive.org/web/20110111054908/https://www.xavierantin.fr/archive/Just-In-Time/

#15yrsago Assemblage octopus for sale https://web.archive.org/web/20110124175436/http://jemayer.tumblr.com/post/2802328671

#15yrsago Among Others: extraordinary, magic story of science fiction as a toolkit for taking apart the world https://memex.craphound.com/2011/01/18/among-others-extraordinary-magic-story-of-science-fiction-as-a-toolkit-for-taking-apart-the-world/

#10yrsago Reminder: Don’t put balls of tea leaves in your vagina https://www.the-independent.com/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/women-putting-herb-balls-in-vagina-to-detox-their-wombs-have-been-warned-of-dangers-a6814671.html

#10yrsago Martin Luther King, socialist: “capitalism has outlived its usefulness” https://theintercept.com/2016/01/18/martin-luther-king-jr-celebrations-overlook-his-critiques-of-capitalism-and-militarism/

#10yrsago Debullshitifying the “sleep science” industry: first up, sleeplessness and obesity https://web.archive.org/web/20160120210128/http://askforevidence.org/articles/obesity-linked-to-not-getting-enough-sleep

#10yrsago England’s most senior civil judge rules that Terrorism Act violates human rights https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/19/terrorism-act-incompatible-with-human-rights-court-rules-in-david-miranda-case

#10yrsago Delhi’s “Sleep Mafia” control the nights of 100,000 homeless workers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXzElV75x08

#10yrsago Replica weapons made from thousands of cut and stacked post-its https://web.archive.org/web/20160109080110/http://ercolimarco.me/post-it-sculpture/

#10yrsago How the standard, high-quality disaster-relief tarpaulin came to be https://www.wired.com/2016/01/tarpaulin/

#10yrsago GM’s Dieselgate: mechanics privately admit software update removes crimeware from Opel cars https://web.archive.org/web/20160121055745/http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/16ff471e-bdfd-11e5-846f-79b0e3d20eaf.html

#10yrsago Griefer hacks baby monitor, terrifies toddler with spooky voices https://memex.craphound.com/2016/01/19/griefer-hacks-baby-monitor-terrifies-toddler-with-spooky-voices/

#10yrsago Spanish-language broadcasting titan Univision buys controlling interest in The Onion https://www.univision.com/noticias/univision-makes-investment-in-the-onion

#10yrsago How the National Reconnaissance Office came to choose a sinister, planet-devouring octopus for a logo https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2016/jan/19/octopus-NRO/

#5yrsago Amazon warehouse union gets tech solidarity https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/19/deastroturfing/#real-power

#5yrsago Facebook's community standards https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/18/peak-indifference/#community-standards

#5yrsago Honor MLK day with the Internet Archive https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/18/peak-indifference/#mlk

#5yrsago Planet Money's free Great Gatsby audiobook https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/18/peak-indifference/#gatsby

#5yrsago Pandemics and peak indifference https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/18/peak-indifference/#peak-indifference

#5yrsago How to leak a Zoom meeting https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/18/peak-indifference/#watermarks

#1yrago Billionaire-proofing the internet https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/14/contesting-popularity/#everybody-samba

#1yrago Canada shouldn't retaliate with US tariffs https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/beauty-eh/#its-the-only-war-the-yankees-lost-except-for-vietnam-and-also-the-alamo-and-the-bay-of-ham

#1yrago Fu-Schnickens https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/17/holy-batfu-its-an-apple/#ba-schnicker-bah-snchnucker

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


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 ( words today, 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):

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https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@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

Publié le 17.01.2026 à 16:18

Pluralistic: The world needs an Ireland for disenshittification (17 Jan 2026)


Today's links


A green Irish pillarbox, standing before a verdant, rolling Irish countryside. The pillarbox is emblazoned with the poop emoji from the cover of 'Enshittification,' with angry eyebrows and a grawlix-scrawled black bar over its mouth.

The world needs an Ireland for disenshittification (permalink)

Ireland is a tax haven. In the 1970s and 1980s, life in the civil-war wracked country was hard – between poverty, scarce employment and civil unrest, the country hemorrhaged its best and brightest. As the saying went, "Ireland's top export is the Irish."

In desperation, Ireland's political class hit on a wild gambit: they would weaponize Ireland's sovereignty in service to corporate tax evasion. Companies that pretended to establish their headquarters in Ireland would be able to hoard their profits, evading their tax obligations to every other country in the world:

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

A single country – poor, small, at the literal periphery of a continent – was able to foundationally transform the global order. Any company that has enough money to pretend to be Irish can avoid 25-35% in tax, giving it an unbeatable edge against competitors that lack the multinational's superpower of magicking all its profits into a state of untaxable grace somewhere over the Irish Sea.

The effect this had on Ireland is…mixed. The Irish state is thoroughly captured by the corporations that pretend to call Ireland home. Anything those corporations want, Ireland must deliver, lest the footloose companies up sticks and start pretending to be Cypriot, Luxembourgeois, Maltese or Dutch. This is why Europe's landmark privacy law, the GDPR, has had no effect on America's tech giants. They pretend to be Irish, and Ireland lets them get away with breaking European law. The Irish state even hires these companies' executives to regulate their erstwhile employers:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/01/erin-go-blagged/#big-tech-omerta

But there is no denying that Ireland has managed to turn the world's taxable trillions into its own domestic billions. The fact that Ireland is cashing out less than 1% of what it's costing everyone else is terrible for the world's tax systems and competitive markets, but it's been a massive windfall for Ireland, and has lifted the country out of its centuries of colonial poverty and privation.

There are many lessons to be learned from Ireland's experiment with regulatory arbitrage, but one is unequivocal: even a small, poor, disintegrating nation can change the world system by offering a site where you can do things that you can't do anywhere else, and if it does, that poor nation can grow wealthy and comfortable.

What's more, there are plenty of "things that you can't do anywhere else" that are very good. It's not just corporate tax evasion.

First among these things that you can't do anywhere else: it's a crime in virtually every country on earth to modify America's defective, enshittified, privacy-invading, money-stealing technology exports. That's because the US trade representative has spent the past 25 years using the threat of tariffs to bully all of America's trading partners into adopting "anti-circumvention" laws:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/15/how-the-light-gets-in/#theories-of-change

There is nothing good about this. The fact that local businesses can't sell you a privacy blocker, an alternative client, a diagnostic tool, a spare part, a consumable, or even software for your American-made devices leaves you defenseless before US tech's remorseless campaign of monetary and informational plunder – and it means that your economy is denied the benefits of creating and exporting these incredibly desirable, profitable products.

Incredibly, Trump deliberately blew up this multi-trillion dollar system of US commercial advantage. By chaotically imposing and rescinding and re-imposing tariffs on the world, he has neutralized the US trade rep's tariff threats. Foreign firms just can't count on exporting to America anymore, so the threat of (more) tariffs grows less intimidating by the minute:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/16/k-shaped-recovery/#disenshittification-nations

The time is ripe for the founding of a disenshittification nation, an Ireland for disenshittification. I have no doubt that eventually, most or all of the countries in the world will drop their anti-circumvention laws (the laws that ban the modification of US tech exports). Once one country starts making these disenshittifying tools, there'll be no way to prevent their export, since all it takes to buy one of these tools from a circumvention haven is an internet connection and a payment method.

Once everyone in your country is buying and using jailbreaking tools from abroad, there'll be no point in keeping these laws on your own books. But the first country to get there stands a chance of establishing a durable first-mover advantage – of reaping hundreds of billions selling disenshittifying products around the world. That country could be to enshittification-resistant technology what Finland was to mobile phones during the Nokia decade (and wouldn't you know it, the EU's newly minted "Tech Sovereignty" czar is a Finn!):

https://commission.europa.eu/about/organisation/college-commissioners/henna-virkkunen_en

The world has experimented with many kinds of havens over the centuries. In the early 18th century, Madagascar became a haven for British naval deserters, who were adopted into the island's matriarchal clans. Together, they founded an anarchist pirate utopia:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/24/zana-malata/#libertalia

The global system of trade has allowed America's tech companies to steal and hoard trillions, and to put every country at risk of being bricked when their IT systems are switched off at a single word from Trump:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

There are more than 200 countries in the world. There's also an ever-expanding cohort of brilliant international technologists whose Silicon Valley dreams have turned into a nightmare of being shot in the face by an ICE goon, or being kidnapped, separated from their families and being locked up in a Salvadoran slave-labor prison. These techies are looking for the next place to put down roots and "make a dent in the universe." Lots of countries could be that place.

The Ireland for disenshittification wouldn't just have their pick of international technologists – they'd have plenty of Americans hungering for a better life. Two-thirds of young Americans "are considering leaving the US":

https://www.newsweek.com/nearly-two-thirds-of-young-americans-are-considering-leaving-the-us-11010814

Ireland pulled off its tax-haven gambit by making influential people very rich, so that they would go to bat for Ireland. The Ireland for disenshittification will have the same chance. The new tech companies that unlock US Big Tech's trillions and turn them into their own billions (with the remainder being shared by us, tech users, in the form of lower prices and better products) will be a powerful bloc in support of this project.

Ireland showed us: it just takes one country to defect from this global prisoner's dilemma, and then everything is up for grabs.

(Image: Stuart Caie, CC BY 2.0; Sourabh.biswas003; CC BY-SA 3.0; modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrago Hollywood’s Member of Parliament makes national news https://web.archive.org/web/20060213161019/http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/politics/article.jsp?content=20060123_120006_120006

#20yrsago Skip $250/plate dinner for dirty MP, eat with copyfighters https://web.archive.org/web/20060118062522/http://www.onlinerights.ca/

#20yrago Octavia Butler’s “Fledgling”: subtle, thrilling vampire novel https://memex.craphound.com/2006/01/17/octavia-butlers-fledgling-subtle-thrilling-vampire-novel/

#10yrsago Revealed: the hidden web of big-business money backing Europe and America’s pro-TTIP “think tanks” https://thecorrespondent.com/3884/Big-business-orders-its-pro-TTIP-arguments-from-these-think-tanks/855725233704-2febf71a

#10yrsago The bizarre magnetic forest rings of northern Ontario https://www.bldgblog.com/2016/01/rings/

#10yrsago 2016 is the year of the telepathic election, and it’s not pretty http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/01/some-american-political-marker.html

#10yrsago Trump Casinos lost millions every single year that Donald Trump ran it (but he’s still rich) https://memex.craphound.com/2016/01/17/trump-casinos-lost-millions-every-single-year-that-donald-trump-ran-it-but-hes-still-rich/

#10yrsago Oregon domestic terrorists now destroying public property in earnest https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/16/oregon-militias-behavior-increasingly-brazen-as-public-property-destroyed?CMP=edit_2221

#10yrsago Jeremy Corbyn proposes ban on dividends from companies that don’t pay living wages https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jan/16/jeremy-corbyn-to-confront-big-business-over-living-wage

#10yrsago The Electable Mr Sanders https://web.archive.org/web/20160119083607/http://robertreich.org/post/137454417985

#10yrsago Suspicious, photo-taking “Middle Eastern” men were visually impaired tourists https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/vancouver-mall-video-men-1.3406619

#5yrsago Fighting fiber was the right's dumbest self-own https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/17/turner-diaries-fanfic/#1a-fiber

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


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 (1045 words today, 9348 total)

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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