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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 03.02.2026 à 15:16

Pluralistic: Michael Swanwick's "The Universe Box" (03 Feb 2026)


Today's links


The Tachyon Books cover for Michael Swanwick's 'The Universe Box.'

Michael Swanwick's "The Universe Box" (permalink)

No one writes short stories like Michael Swanwick, the five-time Hugo-winning master of science fiction. To prove it, you need only pick up The Universe Box, Swanwick's just-published short story collection, a book representing one of the field's greatest writers at the absolute pinnacle of his game:

https://tachyonpublications.com/product/the-universe-box/

Science fiction has a long and honorable history with the short story. Sf is a pulp literature that was born in the pages of magazines specializing in short fiction and serials, and long after other genres had given up the ghost, sf remained steadfastly rooted in short form fiction. There are still, to this day, multiple sf magazines that publish short stories every month, on paper, and pay for it. I started my career as a short story writer, and continue to dabble in the form, but I have mostly moved onto novels.

That's a pretty common trajectory in sf, where – notwithstanding the field's status as a haven for the short story – the reach (and money) come from novels. But sf has always had a cohort of short fiction writers who are staunchly committed to the form: Harlan Ellison, Martha Soukup, Martha Wells, Ray Bradbury, Ted Chiang, James Tiptree Jr, Theodore Sturgeon, and, of course, Michael Swanwick.

It's a little weird, how sf serves as a powerful redoubt for short fiction. After all, sf is a genre in which everything is up for grabs: the reader can't assume anything about the story's setting, its era, the species of its characters. Time can run forwards, backwards, or in a loop. There can be gods and teleporters, faster-than-light drives and superintelligent machines. There can be aliens and space colonies.

All of that has to be established in the story. The most straightforward way to do this is, of course, through exposition. There's a commonplace (and wrong) notion that exposition is bad ("show, don't tell"). It's fairer to say that exposition is hard – dramatization is, well, dramatic, which makes it easier to engage the reader's attention. But great exposition is great and sf is a genre that celebrates exposition, done well:

https://maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/my-favorite-bit/my-favorite-bit-cory-doctorow-talks-about-the-bezzle/

The opposite of exposition is what Jo Walton calls "incluing," "the process of scattering information seamlessly through the text, as opposed to stopping the story to impart the information":

https://web.archive.org/web/20111119145140/http:/papersky.livejournal.com/324603.html

Incluing is a beautiful prose technique, but it makes the reader work. You have to pay close attention to all these subtle clues and build a web of inferences about the kind of world you've been plunged into. Incluing turns a story into a (wonderful and engaging) puzzle. It makes the aesthetic affect of short sf into something that's not so much a reverie as a high-engagement activity, a mystery whose solution is totally unbounded.

This is a terrific experience, but it is also work. Doing that kind of work as part of the process of consuming a 300-page novel is one thing, but trying to get the reader up to speed in a 7,000 word story and still have room left over for the story part is a big lift, and even the best writers end up asking a lot of the reader in their short stories. Sf shorts can be the "difficult jazz" of literature, a form and genre that requires – and rewards – very active attention.

(Incidentally, my favorite incluing example is Mark Twain's classic comedic short, "The Petrified Man":)

https://americanliterature.com/author/mark-twain/short-story/the-petrified-man/

But here's the thing. None of this applies to Swanwick. His stories use a mix of (impeccable) exposition and (subtle) incluing, and yet, there's never a moment in reading a Swanwick story where it feels like work. It's not merely that he's a gorgeous prose-smith whose sentences are each more surpassingly lovely than the last (though he is). Nor does he lack ambition: each of these stories has a more embroidered and outlandish premise than the last.

Somehow, though, he just slides these stories into your brain.

And what stories they are! They are, by turns, individually and in combination, slapstick, grave, horny, hilarious, surreal, disturbing and heartwarming. They have surprise endings and surprise middles and sometimes surprise beginnings (Swanwick does an opening paragraph like no one else).

This is what it means to read a short story collection from an absolute master at the absolute peak of his powers. He can slide you frictionlessly between Icelandic troll tragedies to lethal drone-leopard romantic agonies to battles of the gods and the cigar box that has the universe inside of it. All with the lyricism of Bradbury, the madcap wit of Sturgeon, the unrelenting weirdness of Dick, the heart of Tiptree and the precision of Chiang.

This is a book of worlds that each exist for just a handful of pages but occupy more space than those pages could possibly contain. It's a series of cigar boxes, each with the universe inside of it.

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 Sony CD spyware vendor caves to EFF demands https://web.archive.org/web/20060208033113/https://www.eff.org/news/archives/2006_02.php#004378

#20yrsago British Library: DRM lobotomizes “human memory” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4675280.stm

#15yrsago Hex values for Crayola colors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Crayola_crayon_colors

#15yrsago Michael Lewis explains the Irish econopocalypse https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2011/03/michael-lewis-ireland-201103?currentPage=all

#15yrsago Canada’s Internet rescued from weak and pathetic regulator https://web.archive.org/web/20110203054651/http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/932571–ottawa-threatens-to-reverse-crtc-decision-on-internet-billing

#10yrsago Tattoo artist asserts copyright over customers’ bodies https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/nba-2k-videogame-maker-sued-861131/

#10yrsago EU plans to class volunteers who rescue drowning Syrian refugees as “traffickers” https://www.statewatch.org/news/2016/january/refugee-crisis-council-proposals-on-migrant-smuggling-would-criminalise-humanitarian-assistance-by-civil-society-local-people-and-volunteers-greece-ngos-and-volunteers-have-to-register-with-the-police-and-be-vetted/

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 (1053 words today, 20644 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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"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 02.02.2026 à 16:25

Pluralistic: Stock swindles (02 Feb 2026)


Today's links


A detail from a US$100 bill showing Benjamin Franklin's portrait. It has been altered. Franklin's face has been overlaid with an orange sad clown, surmounted by Trump's hair. The zeroes in '100' above and below the portrait have been extended to run its entire length.

Stock swindles (permalink)

There are plenty of American historical antecedents of Trumpism – fascist movements like the Jim Crow reign of terror, the McCarthy hearings, the gleeful genocide of indigenous people. But when you're thinking about the rise of Trumpism, never forget that America isn't just a nation of cruel bigots; it's also a nation of rich swindlers.

We call Trump a "reality TV star" and it's true, as far as it goes. Trump did play a billionaire on TV long before he grifted actual billions, using his status as the poor man's idea of a rich man to secure liar loans and rip off creditors, contractors, business partners, workers, and governments – local, state and federal.

He rose to power on this, boasting on stage that cheating "makes me smart":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/04/its-not-a-lie/#its-a-premature-truth

Like so many crooked officials, Trump's brand is "He steals, but he works" (except of course that he doesn't – at any given moment, odds are that he's either taking a nap, watching Fox News, or playing golf):

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskBalkans/comments/utui8s/in_romania_we_have_a_saying_about_corrupt/

Remember: the right is the movement that says that governments are inefficient and corrupt, so right wing elected leaders make their own case by being incompetent and corrupt. Someone like Trump has to convince people that they can't rely on institutions or their neighbors. His path to power lies through convincing people that the system is rigged and that he – as a man who is an expert at cheating – knows how to rig it in your favor:

https://www.factcheck.org/2016/07/trumps-rigged-claim/

But merely claiming "the system is rigged" doesn't actually win the day. If you want to convince people that the system is rigged, it really helps if the system is actually rigged. Want to convince people that elections are corrupt? Legalize unlimited dark money spending and fill our polling places with defective, unauditable voting machines made by Beltway Bandits selling into no-bid contracts:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210203113531/https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/02/03/voting-machines-election-steal-conspiracy-flaws/

Want to convince people that there's a shadowy cabal of rich pedophiles hiding children in a pizza parlor basement? It helps if there's an actual cabal of rich pedophiles hanging out on a private island, abusing more than a thousand children (and counting). Want to convince people that the financial system is a rigged casino so you might as well just gamble on cryptocurrency and betting markets? It helps if the actual financial system is run by banks who receive billions in public money and then steal millions of Americans' homes after Obama takes Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's advice to "foam the runways" for the banks using Americans' houses:

https://keystoneky.com/article/all-we-can-do-is-put-foam-on-the-runway-tim-geithner-speaking-before-the-collapse-of-lehman/

Which is all to say, if you want to understand the origins of the surge of suckers for fascists who are desperate for a strong man to cheat on their behalf in a rigged system, it helps to look beyond racism and xenophobia, to the ways in which the system is, indeed, rigged. Racism and misogyny alone aren't enough to bring about fascism. To groom a nation of fascist patsies, you first need a crooked system:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/22/all-day-suckers/#i-love-the-poorly-educated

This is why it's worth understanding finance. The finance sector hides its sins behind the Shield of Boringness (h/t Claire Evans). The layers of overlapping jargon and performative complexity make it hard for everyday people to criticize the finance sector. Finance ghouls exploit this, leveraging confusing ambiguities in the system to insist that their critics don't know what they're talking about and that everything is fine, actually. This is an incredibly destabilizing dynamic. Living in a system where you're being fleeced every day but where people who seem smarter than you have reasonable-seeming explanations about why it's all legit and above-board is a recipe for abandoning all faith in the system, in experts, and in lawful processes, and throw your lot in with a strongman who promises to cheat on your behalf.

Take stock buybacks, a form of stock swindle that was illegal until 1982. In a stock buyback, a company buys its own shares on the open market. When the number of shares goes down, the price per share goes up. This is just a form of "wash-trading," like when NFT and shitcoin scammers buy their own products in order to make it look like they're valuable and desirable:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/06/computer-says-huh/#invisible-handcuffs

Advocates for markets as a system of allocation (as opposed to allocating via a democratically accountable state, say) insist that markets are efficient because prices "encode information" about the desirability, viability, and other qualities of goods and services. This is the whole argument for the new crop of rigged casinos we call "prediction markets" that are grooming the next generation of fascist footsoldiers by robbing them blind and then insisting that the whole process was not only legitimate, but scientific, a way to retrieve the "encoded information" about the world around us.

In a market system, stock prices are supposed to reflect the aggregated information about the health and prospects of a company. When a company buys its own stock back, though, its price goes up while its value goes down.

I mean that literally: say a company that's sitting on a billion dollars cash is valued at $10 billion. From this, we can infer that the company's capital stock (factories, inventory, etc), IP (patents, processes, copyrights, etc) and human capital (payrolled employees, contractors) are worth $9 billion. That's a reliable estimate, because we know exactly how much one billion dollars cash is worth: it's worth one billion dollars.

Now, let that company piss that billion dollars up the wall with a stock buyback. The company is relieved of its billion dollars cash on hand, leaving it with no cash, only its physical capital, IP and human capital, which are worth $9b. The company is now worth less than it was before the stock buyback.

What's more, the drop in corporate valuation is more than the billion the company just blew on its buyback. A company with no cash reserves is brittle and prone to failures. Without a cash cushion, any rent shock, change in market conditions, or other adverse incident will leave the company scrambling to borrow money (at punitive rates, thanks to its desperation) to weather the storm. If share prices are actually "encoding information" about a company's worth, a billion dollar buyback should lop more than a billion dollars off the company's share price. Instead, it sends the share price up.

This is just stock manipulation, which is why it was illegal until 1982. But apologists for this system will tell you that a stock buyback is just a dividend by another name – just another way for a company to return value to its shareholders, who, after all, are the owners of the company and entitled to extract those profits.

This is categorically untrue. Dividends do take money out of the company's coffers and distribute them to its shareholders, sure – but a dividend is a bet on the company's future success, which is why a company's share prices rise after a dividend is declared. Investors observe a company that is so well-run that it can afford to drain some of its cash reserves in favor of its shareholders, so they buy the company's stock in anticipation of more dividends derived from more skilled operations.

But imagine if a company parted with a dividend so large that it meant that the firm would struggle to keep its doors open in the coming year. Imagine a publisher, say, whose dividend was so large that it couldn't afford to pay advances for any more books in the next season, meaning it could only make money from the backlist titles it already had in the warehouse, but was entirely out of the running when it came to publishing next year's blockbuster book.

That dividend would not send investors chasing the company's stock. Why would you bet on a stock whose management had just doomed the company to a bad season, and maybe an unrecoverable death-spiral? Without new books to sell, the company won't have any cash to pay dividends, and when it stops paying dividends, its stock price will fall, leaving shareholders with a hole in their own balance-sheets.

Contrast that with buybacks: to do a buyback, the company need merely spend its free cash flow, or money it borrows, or money derived from the sale of key capital, or money saved through mass layoffs, to buy its own stock. Then the share price goes up.

In other words: when a company's stock price rises on news of a dividend, that's "encoding information" about the market's confidence in the company's management and its future growth. When a company's stock price rises on news of a buyback, that's "encoding information" about the market's confidence in the company's future looting to the point of collapse.

I used to think that this was the whole stock buyback story, but as is ever the case with finance, buybacks are fractally corrupt. This week, I've been reading Boston College law prof Ray D Madoff's book The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy, and I've learned even more scummy truths about buybacks:

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo256019296.html

For tax purposes, dividends are "ordinary income," meaning that they are taxed at up to 37%. Meanwhile, if you sell your shares after a stock buyback juices the price, the profits are treated as "capital gains," whose tax rate caps out at about half that (20%). This means that shareholders pay half the tax on money that comes from strip-mining a company than they would get from money derived from managing a company for sustainable growth.

It's worse than that, though, because capital gains can be offset by capital losses. If you invested in a stock that tanked, you can hold that stock in your portfolio until you are ready to sell a profitable stock, and deduct your losses from the gains you've made.

But you don't even have to sell the stock to realize tax-free income from it: the ultra-rich live according to a financial arrangement called "buy, borrow, die" that lets them avoid all taxes.

Here's how that works: if you're sitting on a bunch of stock, you can stake it as collateral for a loan that is tax-free. Better than that, if you're smart, some or all of the interest on that loan is tax-deductible. If you're rich enough, you don't have to make regular payments on the loan, either – you just wait as the stock continues to grow while your loan is maturing, and when it's due, you borrow even more money against the new valuation and pay off the old loan.

That's "buy" and "borrow." Here's "die." When you die, you transfer your assets to your kids, who benefit from something called the "step-up in basis," which lets them avoid all capital gains on the appreciated value of your assets.

Now, maybe you're thinking that you can benefit from this arrangement. I've got bad news for you: you won't qualify for one of those cool loans that you don't need to pay regularly! What's more, if you own any stock you almost certainly own it through a retirement plan like a 401(k), and when you cash out that 401(k), that is treated as "ordinary income" at nearly twice the rate that our plutocrat overlords pay.

Buybacks, then, are part of a system whereby rich people get much richer every time a company that makes something good and employs ordinary people guts itself and sets itself on the path to bankruptcy. Meanwhile, working people don't benefit from this system, even if they own stock. They just get to live in a world where businesses are looted and shuttered and public services are slashed thanks to balanced budget rules that mean that governments can't spend when rich people don't pay taxes.

This is why buybacks have apologists. Buybacks – a stock swindle that was illegal in living memory – make rich people richer, and they spend some of that loot to fund an army of reply-ghouls who push the message that buybacks are dividends by another name.

It's part of the ripoff economy that has seen crypto-billionaires lobby, bribe and terrorize lawmakers into merging their speculative assets with the real economy, endangering the economic well-being of everyday people:

https://www.levernews.com/what-tech-wants-crypto-reign-of-terror/

It's part of the ripoff economy that has seen AI bros put the global market in peril with crooked accounting and empty promises:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-enshittifinancial-crisis/

The ripoff economy is baked into the American experience. It is the foundation of Trumpism. It is the financial basis for things like "Project 2025" – literally! The Heritage Foundation (who created Project 2025) was founded and funded by the founders of Amway, a destructive Ponzi scheme that was rescued from criminal prosecution when Gerald Ford (Congressman to Amway's founders) became president and ordered the FTC to let them off the hook:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/05/free-enterprise-system/#amway-or-the-highway

Trump's right: the system is rigged. If you're going to pull the people you love back from the nihilistic descent into fascism, you have to be able to understand and explain how the rigging works. We can't insist – as Hillary Clinton did – that "America is already great":

https://www.politico.com/blogs/2016-dem-primary-live-updates-and-results/2016/03/clinton-america-is-already-great-220078

America is not great. It has been gutted by the Epstein class, who robbed us blind, raped our kids, and are now selling us shitcoins and chatbots and the spectacle of protesters being shot in the streets. But it's not enough to know that the system is rigged. Everybody knows the system is rigged. To build a movement and save our future, we have to know how it is rigged and who rigged it.

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 Acme License-Plate Maker https://www.acme.com/licensemaker/licensemaker.cgi?state=California&text=NSHITKN&plate=1987&r=943099606

#15yrsago Apple implements iStore changes, prohibits Sony from selling competing ebook app https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/technology/01apple.html?_r=3

#15yrsago IPv4 is exhausted https://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/02/01/0036227/Last-Available-IPv4-Blocks-Allocated

#15yrsago Harper’s publisher rejects $50K worth of pledges, will lay off staff anyway https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdDoZvxCvsax1zkMKANucBCQU8v-08tcw6VIDrtnmnqLY9I0A/viewform?formkey=dGdtbXUtNUV3cmtpaXJienJ5bldwcUE6MQ

#15yrsago South Dakota senator introduces mandatory gun-ownership law https://www.newser.com/story/111031/south-dakota-bill-every-adult-must-own-a-gun.html

#10yrsago UK Snooper’s Charter is so broad, no one can figure out what it means https://web.archive.org/web/20160202092111/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/tech-firms-are-unclear-on-new-uk-surveillance-laws-warns-government-committee

#5yrsago The good news about vaccination bad news https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/01/dinos-and-rinos/#mixed-news

#5yrsago Unidirectional entryism https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/01/dinos-and-rinos/#entryism

#15yrsago Inside Sukey the anti-kettling mobile app https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/feb/02/inside-anti-kettling-hq

#10yrsago Swatting attempted against Congresswoman who introduced anti-swatting bill https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/02/01/cops-swarm-rep-katherine-clark-melrose-home-after-apparent-hoax/yqEpcpWmKtN6bOOAj8FZXJ/story.html

#10yrsago A would-be clinic-bomber & friends are terrorizing a charter school for being too close to a future Planned Parenthood office https://web.archive.org/web/20160318235447/https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/inside-the-bizarre-war-anti-abortion-zealots-are-waging-against-school-kids

#10yrsago Ross and Carrie become Scientologists: an investigative report 5 years in the making https://ohnopodcast.com/investigations/2016/2/1/ross-and-carrie-audit-scientology-part-1-going-preclear

#10yrsago Exclusive: Snowden intelligence docs reveal UK spooks’ malware checklist https://memex.craphound.com/2016/02/02/exclusive-snowden-intelligence-docs-reveal-uk-spooks-malware-checklist/

#5yrsago The free market and rent-seeking https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/02/euthanize-rentiers/#poor-doors

#5yrsago Criti-Hype https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/02/euthanize-rentiers/#dont-believe-the-hype

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 (1007 words today, 19588 total)

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

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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 30.01.2026 à 15:15

Pluralistic: Threads' margin is the Eurostack's opportunity (30 Jan 2026)


Today's links


An EU flag; the stars have been replaced with a ring of Threads logos, tinted yellow. In the center floats the disembodied head of Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse avatar. It has been modified: a black bar scrawled with grawlix covers the mouth.

Threads' margin is the Eurostack's opportunity (permalink)

OG App is the coolest app you've never heard of. Back in 2022, two teenagers unilaterally disenshittified Instagram by making an "alt-client" that restored all the parts of Insta that made it a success and blocked all the antifeatures that Meta crammed down users' throats after they had them locked in.

Here's how OG App worked: first, it popped up a browser window and loaded the Instagram login screen. Then, after you'd logged into Insta, it stole the "session key" (the cryptographic proof that you were logged into your account). That let it impersonate you to Insta's servers, and slurp down the whole feed that Insta had queued up for you.

After grabbing your feed, OG App deleted all the ads, all the slop, all the boosted content, all the months-old clickbait that The Algorithm (TM) had surfaced. What was left was pristine: the posts from people you followed, in reverse-chronological order. To make this all even sweeter, OG App sent no data back to Meta as you used it, except for the likes and comments you intended to transmit to the company. All the other data that Meta's apps gather got blocked: everything from your location, to which posts you slowed down your scrolling on, to accelerometer readouts that revealed minute changes in how you hold your phone from second to second.

Boy did people like this! By the end of the day, OG App was in the top ten charts for both Google and Apple's app stores. By the next morning, it was gone. Meta sent a takedown notice to the app store duopoly and they killed OG App on its behalf (there is honor among thieves):

https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/27/og-app-promises-you-an-ad-free-instagram-feed/

The funny thing is, the OG App creators were just following the Facebook playbook. When Facebook opened up to the general public in 2006, it had the problem that everyone who wanted social media already had an account on Myspace, and all of Facebook's improvements on Myspace (Zuck made a promise never to spy on his users!) didn't matter, because Myspace had something Facebook could not match: Myspace had all your friends.

Facebook came up with an ingenious solution to this problem: they offered Myspace users a bot. You gave that bot your Myspace login credentials (just as OG App did with your Insta credentials) and the bot impersonated you to Myspace (just as OG App did with Insta), and it grabbed everything queued up for you on Myspace (just as OG App did with Insta), and then flowed those messages into your Facebook feed (just as OG App did with Insta).

This was very successful! Users didn't have to choose between their friends on Myspace and the superior design and privacy policies of Facebook. They got to eat their cake and have it, too.

This is actually a very old and important pattern in tech. It's what "move fast and break things" looks like when it's actually disrupting sclerotic and decaying companies that lock us in, take us for granted, and treat us like shit. It's what Apple did when they cloned the MS Office file formats and released iWork, whose Pages, Numbers and Keynote let Microsoft users escape from the prison of Windows and bring their documents with them:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

But like every pirate, the tech companies dreamed of being admirals. Once they'd attained the admiralty, they announced that when they did this stuff, it was progress, but if anyone does it to them, it would be piracy.

What's more, they were able to take advantage of a metastasizing blob of IP laws that the US Trade Representative spread around the world (with threats of tariffs for noncompliance). Soon, nearly every country had enacted laws that made it a literal crime for their entrepreneurs and technologists to fix America's defective tech exports by adding privacy tools, bridging old services into new ones, or reading and writing America's ubiquitous proprietary file-formats:

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

For decades, this system was immovable. The world couldn't afford tariffs on its exports to the USA, and it was able to maintain the pretense that America's platforms were trustworthy neutral parties, that would not be weaponized against their own national interest at the behest of the American state.

Obviously, that is dead now. Donald Trump, debilitated by white matter disease and his endemic incontinent belligerence, has flipped the table over in a poker game that was rigged in his favor because he resented having to pretend to play (TM November Kelly):

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/26/i-dont-want/#your-greenback-dollar

EU member-states are minting new "digital sovereignty" ministries as fast as they can print up new business cards, the EU itself has just appointed its first "Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy" czar:

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

They're building the "Eurostack," a fleet of EU-based data centers that will host free, open, auditable, trustworthy equivalents to the US tech giants' offerings:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/25/eurostack/#viktor-orbans-isp

But Eurostack is about to run into a wall: Article 6 of the EU's own Copyright Directive, which prohibits reverse-engineering and modification of tech products. It's a law that the US Trade Rep lobbied hard for, winning the day by promising tariff-free access to the US for Europe's exports (a promise Trump has now broken):

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

So long as Europe continues to hold up its end of this one-sided bargain, it will not be able to create the reverse-engineering based tools to let EU companies, governments and households get their data out of US tech silos, let alone let them build and enjoy successors to OG App, which will make it easy for them to leave US social media without sacrificing contact with the people who matter to them.

Which brings me to Threads, Meta's latest social media network. Threads is built on Activitypub and Mastodon, these being open/free, auditable and trustworthy protocols, designed to support "federated" social media. That's social media that runs on servers managed by lots of different entities, whose users can all connect to one another no matter which server they use. Meta was clearly excited by the prospect of enclosing and conquering this open upstart, but also nervous at the prospect that its users would find, in federation, an easy path to escape from Meta's clutches.

After all, if you can leave Threads and join a non-Meta Mastodon server without losing contact with the people you followed and were followed by on Threads, then why wouldn't you leave? Mark Zuckerberg's users don't like him – they just hate him less than they love the people they are in community with on Zuckerberg's platforms.

So Threads never really joined the Fediverse. You can't quite follow and be followed by Mastodon users, and you can't quite migrate your account off Meta's servers and onto a better one. Zuck and his lieutenants are keenly attuned to any design that drives high "switching costs" for leaving their services, and they exploit these switching costs to figure out just how much pain they can inflict on users without risking their departure:

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

So now they've started to turn the screws on Threads users. They just announced a global program of Threads enshittification, with a promise to cram ads into the eyeballs of every Threads account:

https://www.contentgrip.com/meta-threads-ads-go-global/

This represents a hell of an opportunity for the EU and Eurostack. Meta's ads are wildly illegal in the EU, violating Europe's landmark privacy law, the GDPR. The only reason Meta gets away with its flagrant lawbreaking is that it has captured the Irish state, and uses legal tricks to force all GDPR enforcement into Irish jurisdiction:

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

People hate ads. More than half of all web users have installed an adblocker (which also protects their privacy). It's the largest consumer boycott in human history:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

But no one has ever installed an adblocker for an app, because reverse-engineering apps and the mobile platforms they run on is illegal under laws like Article 6 of the Copyright Directive. As a result, tech companies – especially US giants, who can violate EU law with impunity – love to enshittify their apps, because they know that no one can do unto them as they did unto their own rivals (like Myspace).

Meta's new ad strategy for Threads is the perfect cue for a European repeal of Article 6 of the Copyright Directive. Procedurally, this is a great moment for it, as the EU is finalizing the Digital Fairness Act, which could include an exemption to EUCD 6 for privacy-enhancing technologies:

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/theme-protecting-our-democracy-upholding-our-values/file-digital-fairness-act

Giving Europeans an effective way to push back against Meta's wholesale violation of their rights is a way that the Eurostack can score popular support right now – not in five years when the new data centers come online. It's a way of improving the lives of Europeans in immediate, concrete ways, rather than asking them to be grateful that some ministry has changed cloud providers – an important change, sure, but one that has no real impact on their daily lives.

What's more, legalizing jailbreaking for the purpose of making Threads alt-clients wouldn't just give Europeans a better social media experience – it could bootstrap European social media services. Remember, Threads was able to achieve instant scale by moving Instagram users onto Threads wholesale, maintaining their Insta follows and followers when they created their Threads accounts.

Europe – like everywhere else – is full of entrepreneurs who are trying to get national, independent social media platforms off the ground, hoping to woo users by promising them a more privacy-respecting alternative. They've got the same problem Zuck had when he tried to compete with Myspace: users love their friends more than they hate being spied on, so merely offering a better service is insufficient.

To get users off the old platforms, you have to lower their switching costs – you have to let them bring their friends to the new network, even if those friends are still stuck on the old network. Legalize jailbreaking in the EU and you'll make it possible to do "on-device bridging" – where a new social media app is able to break open the data storage of the Threads app on the same device and move that data into its own feeds. And because the EU has the GDPR, they have the privacy framework needed to police the privacy violations that breaking into other apps' data storage can lead to.

Meta will squawk. They'll say Europe is legalizing the violation of its corporate rights. But Meta violates Europeans' rights at scale, and the "rights" that I'm talking about taking away from Meta are rights the EU gave it in the first place, in exchange for a broken promise of tariff-free access to the USA.

Adblocking isn't stealing. Adblocking is bargaining. Without adblocking, the companies don't sell us services in exchange for our privacy – they plunder all the private data they can get, and dribble out services at whatever level they think we deserve. If ad-supported media was a restaurant, it'd be one where you got thrown up against a wall, relieved of your wallet, fed a handful of gruel, and then got kicked in the ass and sent on your way:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

Every time Donald Trump threatens the EU, he makes the case for the Eurostack, but still, he can't help himself. Likewise, every time Zuckerberg enshittifies his services, he makes the case for repealing Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, and he can't help himself either.

Threads' inexorable enshittification is an opportunity: an opportunity to make the case for the Eurostack, an opportunity to improve the lives of millions of Europeans, and an opportunity to break through the walled gardens that keep the people we love stuck on legacy social media platforms.

When they did it to us, that wasn't progress. When we do it to them, it's not piracy.

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 Frank Chu explainer http://www.12galaxies.20m.com

#20yrsago Kerouac curator invents copyright laws to keep photographers away https://thomashawk.com/2006/01/open-letter-to-myra-borshoff-cook-tour.html

#20yrsago EFF suing AT&T for helping NSA illegally spy on Americans https://www.eff.org/cases/nsa-multi-district-litigation

#20yrsago CD DRM software players are amateurish and easy to trick https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2006/01/31/cd-drm-attacks-player/

#20yrsago MPAA puts TSA goon in charge of enforcement https://web.archive.org/web/20060209035921/http://www.mpaa.org/press_releases/2006_01_31.pdf

#20yrsago US-VISIT immigration system spent $15 million per crook caught https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/01/the_failure_of_1.html

#20yrsago Law firm fires clerk for personal opposition to DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20060203030500/http://www.freeculturenyu.org/2006/01/31/drm-fired/

#15yrsago Free excerpt from Jo Walton’s brilliant Among Others https://web.archive.org/web/20110204214337/http://www.tor.com/stories/2011/01/excerpt-among-others

#15yrsago Debunking yet another bought-and-paid-for report on the need for non-neutral net https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/01/huge-isps-want-per-gb-payments-from-netflix-youtube/

#15yrsago Batman: billionaire plutocrat vigilante https://reactormag.com/batman-plutocrat/

#15yrsago Another copyright troll throws in the towel https://www.eff.org/press/archives/2011/01/31

#10yrsago Ten hard truths about the Flint water atrocity https://www.ecowatch.com/michael-moore-10-things-they-wont-tell-you-about-the-flint-water-trage-1882162388.html

#10yrsago Watch: AMAZING slam poem about policing women’s speech habits https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me4_QwmaNoQ

#10yrsago Congress wants to know if agencies were compromised by the backdoor in Juniper gear (and where it came from) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-juniper-networks-congress-idUSKCN0V708P/

#5yrsago Know Nothings, conspiratorialism and Pastel Q https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/31/rhymes-with-pastel-q/#paranoid-style

#5yrsago Mashing the Bernie meme https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/31/rhymes-with-pastel-q/#bernie-3d

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 (1048 words today, 18579 total)

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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"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 29.01.2026 à 13:25

Pluralistic: Disenshittification Nation (29 Jan 2026)

rj

Today's links

  • Disenshittification Nation: How Canada can defend itself from Trump, make billions of dollars, and build a new, global, good internet.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: "Project Blue Sky"; O'Reilly v Graham on inequality; Big Pharma's worst nightmare; Dissipation of rents; Shoelace v Ming vases; "Diviner's Tale": Great Humungous Snow Pile; Trudeau signs Harper's trade deal; On Comity (pts 1 & 2); What's that dingus called?
  • 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 turn of the century Main Street, USA. Over the horizon looms a giant Canadian flag, made out of circuitry. In the foreground is a pixelboard sign reading 'U.S. BORDER CLOSED.'

Disenshittification Nation (permalink)

Yesterday, I gave the keynote address at the 2026 Digital Government Leaders Summit in Ottawa, Canada – an invitation only for CIOs, CTOs and senior technical personnel at Canadian federal ministries.

It was an honour to give this talk, and the organizers at the office of the CIO of the Government of Canada were kind enough to give me permission to post the transcript:

Like all the best Americans, I am a Canadian, and while I have lived abroad for more than two decades, I flatter myself that I am still steeped in our folkways, and so as is traditional at events like this, I would like to begin by apologising.

I'm sorry.

I'm really sorry.

I know that at a tech event, you expect to hear from a speaker who will come up and tell you how to lose hundreds of billions of dollars building data-centres for the money-losingest technology in human history, a technology so wildly defective that we've had to come up with new, exotic words to describe its defects, like "hallucination." A technology that will never recoup the capex already firehosed on – let alone the trillions committed to it – and whose only possible path to glory is to somehow get so good that it makes millions of people unemployed.

But don't worry: you can't make the word-guessing program into a "superintelligence" by shoveling more words into it. That's like betting that if you keep breeding horses to run faster and faster, one of them will eventually give birth to a locomotive.

So I don't have any suggestions for you today for ways to lose billions of dollars. I don't have any ideas for how to destroy as many Canadian jobs as possible, I don't even have any ideas to make Canada more dependent on US tech giants.

No, all I have for you today is a plan to make Canada tens of billions of dollars, by offering products and services that people want and will pay for, while securing the country's resiliency and digital sovereignty, and winning the trade war, and setting the American people free, and launching our tech sector into a stable orbit for decades.

So once again, I'm sorry. So, so sorry.

I want to start by telling you a tariff story. It's not the story that started last year. It's a story that goes all the way back to the early 2000s. Indeed, the very start of this story dates back to 1998.

It starts in Washington, in October, 1998, when Bill Clinton signed a big, gnarly bill called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (or DMCA) into law. Section 1201 – the "anti-circumvention clause" – of the DMCA establishes a new felony, punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for anyone who bypasses an "access control" while modifying a digital system.

These penalties apply irrespective of why you're making that modification, and they apply even if the device you're modifying is your own property. Which means that if the manufacturer decides you shouldn't be able to do something with your digital device, well, you can't do it. Even if it's yours. Even if the thing you want to do is perfectly legal.

Right from the start, it was clear that this law was a bad idea. It was an enshittifier's charter. Once you ban users from modifying their own property, you leave them defenceless. The manufacturer can sell you a gadget and then push an over-the-air update that degrades its functionality, and then demand that you pay a monthly "subscription" fee to get that functionality back.

This is a law purpose-built for anyone who aspires to graduate from the Darth Vader MBA, where the first and only lesson is, "I'm altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further."

Immediately upon the passage of this bill, two things happened: first, American tech companies started to rip off the American public, taking advantage of the fact that it was now a crime to disenshittify your own property; and second, the US Trade Representative went around the world in search of biddable public officials who could be flattered or bullied into bringing an anti-circumvention law onto their own country's lawbooks.

The US had to get all its trading partners to pass these laws, otherwise those countries' own tech companies would go into business selling tools to disenshittify America's defective tech exports: privacy blockers, jailbreaks, alternative clients, generic consumables, diagnostic tools, compatible parts and spares.

But if America could arm-twist its trading partners into passing anti-circumvention laws, then those countries would shut down any tech entrepreneurs who posed a competitive threat to America's metastasizing, inbred tech giants, and the people in those countries would be easy pickings for America's tech giants as they plundered the world's cash and data.

Right from the start, the US Trade Rep targeted Canada for these demands. The only problem was that Canadians hated anti-circumvention law. We'd had a front row seat to all the ways that our American cousins were getting fleeced by their tech companies, and we had no desire to share their plight.

Plus, we've got some smart nerds here who could easily see themselves exporting very lucrative tools of technological liberation across the southern border. Hell, if we can supply America with reasonably priced pharmaceuticals through the mails, then we can surely sell them excellent anti-ripoff mods over the internet.

Paul Martin's Liberals took two runs at passing anti-circumvention law but failed hard. The architect of this project, a Toronto MP named Sam Bulte lost her seat over it, and the Liberal brand became so toxic in Parkdale-High Park that the seat flipped to the NDP for a generation.

Then it was Stephen Harper's turn. First, he tasked Jim Prentice with getting an anti-circumvention law through Parliament, and when Prentice failed, Harper turned to Industry Minister Tony Clement and Heritage Minister James Moore with getting the ball over the line. Clement and Moore tried to rehabilitate the idea of anti-circumvention with a public consultation: "See? We're listening!"

Boy, did that backfire. 6,138 of us wrote into the consultation to condemn the proposal. 53 Vichy nerds wrote in to support it.

Moore was clearly stung. Shortly after the consultation, he gave a keynote to the International Chamber of Commerce meeting in Toronto, where he dismissed all 6,138 of us as "babyish…radical extremists."

Then Harper whipped his caucus and passed Bill C-11, The Copyright Modernization Act, in 2012, pasting America's anti-circumvention law into our lawbooks. Now, I don't think that Moore and Clement were particularly motivated by their love of digital locks. Nor was Stephen Harper. Rather, they were under threat from the US Trade Representative, who told them that America would whack us with tariffs if we failed to arrange a hospitable environment for America's tech companies.

Well, I don't know if you've heard, but Trump whacked us with tariffs anyway. When someone threatens to burn your house down unless you do as you're told, and they burn your house down anyway, you don't have to keep taking their orders. Indeed, you're a sucker if you do.

In the 15 years since we capitulated to America's policy demands, US Big Tech has grown too big to fail, too big to jail, and too big to care.

To Canada's credit, we've tried a bunch of things to rein in Big Tech:

  • We tried to get them to pay to link to the news (instead, they just blocked all Canadian news);

  • We tried to get them to include Canadian content in their streaming libraries (they lobbied, sued and bullied their way out of it);

  • We tried to make them pay a 3% tax, despite the fiction that all their profits are floating in a state of untaxable grace in the Irish Sea (and they got Trump to terrify Carney into walking it back).

This is the "too big to jail" part. When a company is a couple orders of magnitude larger than your government, what hope do you have of regulating it? Back a couple years ago, when America's antitrust regulators were also riding Big Tech's ass, there was a chance that we could make a rule and they would help us make it stick.

But now that the CEOs of all the Big Tech companies personally gave the Trump campaign a million bucks each for a seat on the inauguration dais, and now that all the tech giants have donated millions to Trump's new Epstein Memorial Ballroom at the White House, and now that Apple CEO Tim Cook has assembled a gilded participation trophy for Trump on camera, we've got no hope of getting Big Tech to colour inside the lines.

So what are we to do?

Well, we could continue with our current response to the Trump tariffs. You know: retaliatory tariffs, where we make everything Canadians buy more expensive, because Canadians are famous for just loving it when their prices go up. This is a great way to punish Trump. It's like punching ourselves in the face as hard as we can, and hoping the downstairs neighbour says "ouch."

But there's another way: now that we're living with the tariffs we were promised we could avoid by passing an anti-circumvention law, why don't we get rid of that law? There is so much money waiting for us if we go into business disenshittifying America's defective tech products.

Take just one example: app stores. Apple takes 30 cents out of every dollar that an Apple user spends in an app. If your app tries to use another payment method, they'll turf it out of the App Store. And of course, iPhone owners can't replace Apple's app store with another one, because the iPhone has an "access control," so it's a crime to change your app store.

30% is an insane transaction rake. I mean, here in Canada, we make person-to-person payments for free. Visa – an enshittified monopolist if ever there was one – charges 3-5%. Apple charges Thirty. Percent.

Do you have any idea how lucrative this is? It is literally the most lucrative line of business Apple is in. It makes Apple more pure profit than any other line of business, even more than the $20b cash bribe Google pays them every year not to make a competing search engine. $20b is chump-change. Apple makes one hundred billion dollars a year on this racket.

They impose a 30% tax on the whole digital economy, and they get to self-preference. So if you want to sell ebooks or videos on an app, Apple charges you 30%, but when Apple sells ebooks and videos on its own apps, it doesn't charge itself 30%. And they get to structure the market. They can exclude any app they want, for any reason, and then no Apple customer in the world can have that app.

Last fall, Apple banned an app called "ICE Block." That's an app that warns you if there are ICE thugs nearby, so you can avoid getting kidnapped and sent to a Salvadoran slave-labor camp or shot in the face by a guy with a Waffen SS tattoo under his plate carrier and a mask over his nose. Apple classed ICE murderers as a "protected class" and yanked the app.

So imagine for a sec that Canada repealed Bill C-11, belatedly heeding the advice of those 6,138 people who wrote into James Moore and Tony Clement's consultation to warn them, basically, that this was going to happen. When that happens, some smart Waterloo grads, backed by some RIM money, can go into business making jailbreaking kits and app store infrastructure for iPhones, and they can sell these to everyone in the world who wants to operate their own app store, who wants to compete with Apple.

Offer the world a 90% discount on Apple's app tax, and you're talking about a ten billion dollar/year business. Maybe Canada will never have another RIM, but RIM had a tough business. They had to make hardware, which is risky and capital intensive. Legalize jailbreaking and we can let Apple make the hardware, and then we can cream off the hundred billion dollars in rents they book every year. That's a much better business to be in.

You know what Jeff Bezos said to a roomful of publishers when he started Amazon? "Your margin is my opportunity." But these guys are such crybabies. When they do it to us it's progress; when we do it to them, it's piracy.

I mean, come on. Elbows up, right? Move fast and break their things. Move fast and break kings.

You know all that stuff we failed to get Big Tech to do? Pay for news, put cancon in their streaming lineups? This is how we get it. We can't make Apple or Google or Netflix change their software. We can fine 'em, sure, but Trump will just order his judges not to issue court orders when we try to collect, and ban his banks from transferring the money.

In any game, the ref has to be more powerful than the players on the field. Otherwise, they'll do exactly what Big Tech has done to us: ignore our rulings and keep on cheating.

We don't have any hope of controlling what Big Tech does, but there is one thing we have total, absolute control over: what we do. We don't have to let American companies make use of our courts to shut down Canadian companies that disenshittify their defective products. The laws of Canada are under total and final Canadian control. Repeal Bill C-11, legalize jailbreaking, and we'll unshackle our technologists and entrepreneurs, and sic 'em on those subpar American products.

Meta takes the news out of its apps? Let 'em! We'll just start selling a multiprotocol alt-client, one that merges your Facebook, Insta, Twitter, Linkedin, Bluesky, and Mastodon feeds, blocks all the ads, blocks all the tracking, and puts the news back in your feed.

Netflix won't put Canadian media in their library? Fine! We'll start selling an alt client that lets Canadians search and stream from all the services they subscribe to, and adds in a PVR so you can record your favourite shows to watch later, or archive against the day that the streaming company ditches them. A video recorder would handily delete Amazon Prime's grinchiest scam, where all the Christmas specials move from the free tier to $3.99 rentals in November, and go back into the free tier in March. Just record the kids' most beloved Christmas specials in July and bring 'em out in December.

Think about this for a second: we uninvented the VCR. The VCR, one of the most popular, transformative technologies in modern history. A wildly profitable technology, too. Once all the video went digital, and once all the digital video threw in an "access control" that blocked recording, it became a crime to record digital cable, satellite, or streaming, unless you used the service's own PVR, which won't let you tape some shows, or skip ads, and which deletes your stored shows when the broadcaster decides you don't deserve to have them anymore.

It's not illegal to record a video stream, no more than it was illegal to record a TV show off your analog cable or broadcast receiver. The same fair dealing exemptions apply. But because it's illegal to bypass an access control, and the access control blocks recording, we uninvented the VCR. We made the VCR illegal. Not because Parliament ever passed a law banning VCRs, but because our anti-circumvention law allows dominant corporations to simply decide that certain conduct that they disprefer should no longer occur.

With Bill C-11, we've created "felony contempt of business model." In living memory, video recording changed the world and made billions of dollars. Today, we've all lost our video recorders. But we have more reason than ever to want a video recorder; to pay for a video recorder. There's fantastic amounts of money just sitting there on the table, money we've prohibited our entrepreneurs from making, in order to prevent the US from hitting us with the tariffs that they've just hit us with.

Let's be clear here: no one has the right to a profit. If you've got a business that sucks, and I make it not suck anymore, and your customers start paying me instead of you, well, that sounds like a you problem to me. I mean, does the Canadian government really want to decide which desirable products can and can't exist?

Look, I've mainlined Tommy Douglas since I was in red diapers, but that sounds pretty commie, even to me.

Which brings me to Canada's own sclerotic, monopoly-heavy commercial environment. After all, Canada is two monopolists and a mining company in a trenchcoat. Which is not to say that our oligarchs are weak. They love to throw their weight around. I guess owning an entire maritime province can go to your head.

Will any of these guys step up to cape for America's tech giants? Do any of them benefit from our voluntary decision to let America walk all over us? Not really. But a little, at the margins. Guys like Ted Rogers make a lot of money by making us rent set-top boxes for our cable, which lock out recorders. Re-invent the VCR and Ted Rogers might have to sell his ivory-handled back-scratcher collection.

But let him squawk! He can afford the loss, and lest we forget, Ted Rogers made his second fortune renting us video cassettes to stick in our VCRs. When he did it, it was progress. If we do it to him, that's not piracy.

Man, there is so much money to be made by becoming the disenshittification nation. It's not just payments or video recorders. One of the main uses of access controls is blocking generic consumables, like inkjet ink. Parliament never made a law saying that people who buy a printer from HP have to buy their ink from HP, too. But because we made it illegal to bypass an access control, and because HP uses access controls to block generic ink, it's a felony to use cheap ink in your own printer.

The cartel of four giant inkjet companies know they have us trapped, and they have monotonically raised and raised and raised the price of ink, so that today, printer ink is the most expensive fluid a civilian can purchase without a government permit. At $10,000 per gallon, it would be cheaper to print your grocery lists with the semen of a Kentucky Derby winning stallion.

Some smart Canadian technologists could buy every make and model of every printer, and prepare a library of jailbreaks that works across every one, and keep it up to date with every new software update as soon as it's pushed. Everyone in the world who wants to refill ink cartridges or manufacture generics could pay that company $25/month for access to the jailbreaking library and for support if a customer ran into a problem.

Every manic entrepreneur running a corner store with a Bitcoin ATM, knife-sharpening and Amazon parcel dropoff could add inkjet ink to their line of business. Multiply every guy with a folding table at a dry-cleaner who'll fix your phone or jailbreak your printer by $25/month, by 12 months/year, and you've got tens or hundreds of millions flowing into this country.

We would transform HP's billions into our millions, and the rest would be shared among the world's printer owners as a consumer surplus and freedom from a scummy rent-seeking racket.

There's more!

Every mechanic is paying $10,000 per manufacturer per year for the diagnostic tool that decrypts the messages on your car's CAN bus and turns your "check engine" light into an actual error, and you'd better bet your mechanic is passing that cost onto you. Canadian car hackers can buy every make and model of every car as it comes off the line, jailbreak it, and keep it jailbroken with every new over-the-air update, and sell every mechanic in the world a $50/month subscription to a bang up to date diagnostic tool.

The mechanic wins. The drivers win. Canada wins. The Big Three automakers eat dirt, which is fine. Looks like we're buying Chinese cars from now on, anyway, and Parliament never passed a law guaranteeing perpetual profitability to legacy automakers whose most innovative ideas consist of finding ways to rent you the accelerator pedal in your car, and new markets to sell the driving data they steal from you.

All kinds of devices can't be fixed because of our anti-circumvention law, Bill C-11. You've probably heard about the problems farmers have fixing their John Deere tractors. Farmers actually do the repairs on those tractors, installing the parts themselves, but the tractor's main computer will not activate those parts until the farmer pays a couple hundred bucks for a callout by a John Deere rep, who enters an unlock code that tells the tractor that John Deere got paid for this repair.

Farmers have been fixing their implements since prehistory. Since the invention of the plow.

Beamish is Europe's largest open-air museum, just outside of Newcastle. Here we'd call it a "pioneer village." They've rescued and relocated a whole Victorian village high street, an Edwardian colliery and workers' cottages, vehicles from all eras of British history, and they've got a farmhouse that sits on a Roman foundation.

That farmhouse has a forge. Because of course it does. Farmers have to be able to fix their stuff, because when the storm is coming, and you need to get the crops in, you can't wait for a service technician to find their way to the end of your lonely country road.

But John Deere has declared an end of history, and our Copyright Modernization Act let them do it. Farmers can't fix their tractors anymore, not because Parliament ever passed the "No Fixing Your Tractor Act." They didn't need to. They just passed an act that banned circumvention of access controls, which lets John Deere – and other rapacious American monopolists – conjure new felonies out of thin air. There's that "felony contempt of business model" again.

At this point you might be thinking, "Hold on a sec, didn't Trudeau whip his caucus to get a Right to Repair bill through Parliament in 2024?" You're right, he did: Bill C-244. It lets anyone fix anything…unless they have to bypass an access control in order to make the repair, in which case Bill C-11 makes that repair illegal. Canada's got a Right to Repair law that's big, bold, ambitious…and useless, a mere ornament, thanks to our anti-circumvention law, which we passed because the US promised us tariff-free access to US markets, a promise that the US has broken, and that we should never believe again.

Everything we've tried to do to make Canada safe for US tech exports has failed. They've failed because they're redistributive. We told them they could keep stealing money from our news companies so long as they gave some of it back. We told them they could keep stealing money from people who need to fix their property so long as they follow some rules. We told them they could keep stealing money from our market participants so long as they mixed some cancon in with their streaming libraries. Even our privacy laws are redistributive: sure, go on stealing Canadians' data, just promise to limit the ways you abuse it to a short list of permissible human rights violations.

You know what's better than redistribution? Predistribution. Rather than bargaining to recoup some of the value being stripmined from us, we can intervene technologically to prevent the theft in the first place: jailbreak our devices, abolish the app tax, block their monopoly ad insertions and replace them with open ad markets based on content, not surveillance, give users control over the media in their streaming libraries. Let Canadian businesses disenshittify our phones, TVs, tractors, cars and ventilators so anyone can fix them.

Ask any economist and they'll tell you that the very best strategy is to have an open, fair system in the first place. Rather than tolerating and even enshrining unfairness in the system, and then begging the beneficiaries of that unfairness to dribble a few crumbs to the hungry victims at their feet.

Perhaps all of this is unconvincing to you. Maybe you're not interested in our digital rights. Maybe you're not excited by the prospect of turning America's trillions into Canada's billions. Well, don't worry, I've got something for you, too: national security.

Trump has made it clear that America no longer has allies or trading partners, it only has rivals and adversaries. He's also made it clear that he cannot be mollified. Any concessions we make to him will be treated as a sign of weakness, and an invitation to demand more. Give him an inch, he'll take a kilometer.

Give him an inch, he'll take Greenland.

This is undeniably scary, because Trump has lots of non-kinetic options for pursuing his geopolitical aims. First among them is attacking his adversaries through his tech companies. He's already started tinkering with this. When the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for the genocidaire Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump went through the roof, and Microsoft obliged him by shutting down the court's access to its documents, emails, calendars and address books. They bricked the court.

Now, I should say here that Microsoft denies that they shut down the court to please Trump. They say it's a coincidence. But when it comes to a "he-said/Clippy-said" dispute between the human rights defenders at the ICC and the convicted monopolists at Microsoft, I know who I believe. What's more, Anton Carniaux, Director of Public and Legal Affairs at Microsoft France, told a French government inquiry that he "couldn't guarantee" that Microsoft wouldn't hand sensitive French data over to the US government, even if that data was stored in a European data-centre. And under the CLOUD Act, the US government can slap gag orders on the companies that it forces to cough up that data, so there'd be no way to even know if this happened, or whether it's happening right now.

Trump has demonstrated that he will both bully and bribe US companies into doing his bidding. Cross him and he'll put extra tariffs on the inputs you need to import from abroad, he'll take away your key workers' visas and deport them, he'll smack you with pretextual antitrust investigations, and sue you in his personal capacity.

But if you capitulate to him, he'll give you no-bid government contracts, and hand you billions to provide surveillance gear and prison camps to help with his programme of ethnic cleansing. The tech companies are up to their eyeballs in Trump's authoritarian takeover of the US. There's no daylight between Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other US tech companies and the Trump regime.

You can be certain that if – when! – Trump orders these companies to shut down a government ministry (perhaps your ministry) or a corporation (perhaps your corporation) that they will do so.

Everyone in the world is waking up to this. In the EU, they've just created a new "Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy" czar, and they're busily funding the "Eurostack," a set of open, auditable replacements for US tech silos that can run on EU-based data-centres.

But they're about to hit a wall. Because it doesn't matter how great those Eurostack services are. If you can't scrape, virtualize and jailbreak US Big Tech apps, so that you can exfiltrate your data, logs, file histories and permissions, no government ministry or large company can do that work by hand. It will challenge many households, who have entrusted US tech's walled gardens with their financial data, family photos, groupchats, family calendars, and other structures that are not easily ported without cooperation from the tech giants. They are not going to cooperate with a mass exodus from their services. They will do everything they can to impede it.

Building the Eurostack without legalizing circumvention is like building housing for East Germans in West Berlin. It doesn't matter how cool those apartments are, they're gonna sit empty until you tear down the wall.

And administrative software is just for openers. Remember back in 2022, when Putin's thugs looted millions of dollars' worth of John Deere tractors from Ukraine? These are permanently connected to John Deere's cloud, which is how the John Deere company was able to trace them to Chechnya, and how they were able to send an over-the-air kill signal to the tractor that permanently bricked them.

And yes, I'll freely admit that as a cyberpunk writer, this gives a little frisson of satisfaction. But if you only think about it for 10 seconds, you'll realize that this means that Deere can immobilize any tractor in the world, or pretty much every tractor in Canada (and the rest of our tractors are likely from Massey Ferguson, another US giant also in thrall to Trump that can brick its tractors over the air, too).

This is exactly the threat we were warned of if we let Huawei supply our 5G infrastructure. Remember that? That whole "Two Michaels" business that we got stuck in when we let the US convince us that Huawei was gonna install landmines in our technological infrastructure? Well, you know how the saying goes: "Every accusation is a confession."

But of course, China could brick the Chinese cloud-connected tech in Canada, like our solar inverters and batteries. The good news is that whether you're a US natsec hawk or a China natsec hawk, you have the same path out of this trap. Namely: repealing Bill C-11, and legalizing circumvention so that we can deke out the locked bootloaders on our infrastructure and install open, auditable, transparent firmware on them. Because that is an infinitely more reliable way to render your systems into a known-good state than arresting random executives from giant Chinese companies.

And the good news is, everyone else in the world wants this, too, because they're all facing the same risks as we are. So this isn't really a technological project, in the sense of having a bunch of duelling firms all competing to come up with their own proprietary answer to an engineering problem. It's more like a scientific project, in that we should have a commons, a git server filled with auditable, transparent, trustworthy drop-in code for whole classes of devices, from cars to TVs to smart speakers to ventilators to tractors to phone switches, that everyone contributes to and peer reviews.

We wouldn't tolerate secrecy in our science. No one gets to keep the math used to calculate the load stresses on the joists holding the roof over our head a secret. We wouldn't tolerate secrecy in the characteristics of the alloys in those joists, or even the wires carrying electricity through the walls. We should not tolerate secrecy in how our digital infrastructure works, either.

After all, a modern building is just a fancy casemod for a bunch of computers. Take all the computers out of a hospital and it becomes a morgue. There's no secret medical science, and there should be no secret medical code, either.

So this is it. This is how we win. Trump has unwittingly recruited three armies to fight to end the enshittocene, the era in which all of our technology has turned to shit. There's the digital rights hippies like me (who've been banging this drum since the 2000s); and then there's the entrepreneurs and investors (eager for a chance to turn America's tech trillions into Canada's tech billions, making Canada into a global tech export powerhouse); and finally, there's the national security hawks (who correctly worry that we are at risk of a kind of cyberwarfare the world has never seen before).

Normally, cyberwarfare involves hackers associated with an adversary state breaking into your critical systems, but Microsoft doesn't have to break into your ministry's Office365 and Outlook accounts to spy on you or brick your agencies. They already have root on your servers. For Trump, this is cyberwarfare on the easiest setting imaginable.

I started throwing this idea around right after Trump announced his first round of tariffs. There was this Canadian think-tank that was soliciting suggestions for Canadian countermeasures, and I sent them this stuff, and they said, "Well, that would definitely work, but it'll make Trump really mad at us."

Which, you know, true. But anything that works will make Trump mad at us. So again, I must fall back on my Canadian heritage here and apologize.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry that I don't have any empty gestures for us to deploy, only ideas for things that will work.

I mean, we can stick with the current plan, our retaliatory tariffs, which make everything we buy from America more expensive, and make us all poorer. That'll do something. Like, it'll certainly impose broad-spectrum pain on a bunch of American producers. If we decide to stop drinking delicious bourbon and switch to Wayne Gretzky's undrinkable rye, there's gonna be some corn farmer out there in a state that begins and ends with a vowel who'll have trouble making payments on his John Deere tractor. But what did that farmer ever do to us?

On the other hand, if we go into business selling everyone in the world (including that farmer) (including our own farmer) reliable, auditable, regulated, transparent drop-in firmware replacement for that tractor, then we free that farmer from the rent-extracting scams that John Deere uses to drain his bank account. And since we remain that guy's customer, maybe he'll side with us against Trump, along with the hundreds of millions of American technology users who we can also set free from the app tax, from commercial surveillance that feeds authoritarian state surveillance, from the repair ripoffs, from ink that costs more than the semen of a Kentucky Derby winning stallion. They become our champions, too.

Because if we legalize jailbreaking, we will limit the blast radius of our counterattack, to the tech barons who each paid a million bucks to sit behind Trump on the inauguration dais and their shareholders, who are not everyday Americans. Everyday Americans have gotten poorer every year for 50 years, thanks to wage stagnation, wage theft, economic bubbles and skyrocketing health, education and housing costs.

They'll tell you that most Americans own stock, but the amount of stock the average American holds rounds to zero. Nearly all US stock is held by the richest 10% of Americans – the ones who are backing Trump and getting rich off Trump – and legalizing jailbreaking is a targeted strike on just those people, which will only benefit our American cousins, the everyday people who've been abused for generations by these eminently guillotineable plutocrats.

Canada is in a good position to do this. We've got motive, means and opportunity, but we're not the only ones. Most of the countries in the world are situated to take advantage of this opportunity, to become the "disenshittification nation" that supplies the world with wildly profitable software tools that fix America's defective technology.

All it takes is one country defecting. That country gets to reap the benefit – the billions – of exporting those tools to the world, while the rest of us only get to enjoy the consumer surplus, the technology that works better and costs us less money and privacy to use.

You know how Ireland defected from the world's tax treaties and, through regulatory arbitrage, made billions luring the world's largest companies to establish domicile in Dublin, while depriving the world's tax collectors of trillions? Regulatory arbitrage is the game everyone can play. When a country decides to become the Ireland for disenshittification, the nation where it's legal to jailbreak locked technology, and export the tools to do so to everyone in the world with an internet connection and a payment method, they will get to reap the largest benefit. They'll grab the hoarded monopoly rents of America's tech giants and use them as fuel for a single-use rocket that launches their domestic tech sector into a stable orbit for generations.

Those American tech companies need to be relieved of the dead capital on their balance sheets. What are these companies doing with their looted trillions? Blowing it all on AI. They tell you there's a lot of money to be made with AI, but no one can tell you where it's going to come from.

This month, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said he's going to recoup the hundreds of billions of dollars he's pissed away on AI by turning Google into the world's perfect engine for surveillance pricing. That's when a company uses surveillance data to predict how desperate you are, and jacks up the price to the highest amount they think they can get you to part with.

This is a terrible idea of course, but it's not just terrible in the sense of "this is an idea Google should be ashamed of." It's terrible in the sense of "this won't work because everyone will hate it and refuse to participate in it." It's just another harebrained scheme to finally find a way to make AI profitable, or at least less unprofitable.

Compare that with my anti-circumvention plan. I can tell you exactly where the money in my plan is going to come from: it's just sitting there on Big Tech's balance sheets, waiting for us to go get it. We'll make money by making products that people want, because it will make their tech better, and they will pay us for them.

I mean, I know that sounds old-fashioned. But what can I say? Sometimes, the old ways are best.

If there's one thing Canada is good at, it's going to other countries and digging up all their wealth. America's tech giants have buried trillions of dollars they stole from the world, and we know exactly where it is. What's more, we can dig it out from here. No travel required!

Let's go get it.

Their margin is our opportunity.

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 Censorship: Comparisons of Google China and Google https://blogoscoped.com/censored/

#20yrsago How the malicious software on Sony CDs works https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2006/01/26/cd-drm-attacks-disc-recognition/

#15yrsago DHS kills color-coded terror alerts https://web.archive.org/web/20110127084925/https://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/01/threat-level-advisory-death/

#20yrsago Pirating the Oscars: 2011 edition https://waxy.org/2011/01/pirating_the_2011_oscars/

#20yrsago Copenhagen to replace squatter town with condos, 1000% rent-hikes https://web.archive.org/web/20060205034919/https://cphpost.dk/get/93464.html

#20yrsago How do music CDs infect your computer with DRM? https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2006/01/30/cd-drm-attacks-installation/

#20yrsago Hollywood bigwigs answer your questions http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4653534.stm

#20yrsago Anti-copying malware installs itself with dozens of games https://glop.org/starforce/

#20yrsago Museum shoelace trip shatters three Qing vases https://web.archive.org/web/20060207031357/http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/europe/01/30/britain.museum.ap/index.html

#15yrsago Morrow’s Diviner’s Tale is a tight, literary ghost story https://memex.craphound.com/2011/01/30/morrows-diviners-tale-is-a-tight-literary-ghost-story/

#15yrsago Bolt and fastener chart: what’s that dingus called? https://boltdepot.com/fastener-information/Type-Chart

#15yrsago Michael Swanwick’s demonic Great Humongous Snow Pile https://floggingbabel.blogspot.com/2011/01/great-humongous-snow-pile-in-back-yard.html

#15yrsago Science fiction writers, editors, critics and publishers talk the future of publishing https://web.archive.org/web/20110129021818/http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2011/01/mind-meld-the-future-of-publishing/

#10yrsago Tim O’Reilly schools Paul Graham on inequality https://web.archive.org/web/20160126044144/medium.com/the-wtf-economy/what-paul-graham-is-missing-about-inequality-a9f7e1613059#.cagyco904a

#10yrsago Profile of James Love, “Big Pharma’s worst nightmare” https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jan/26/big-pharmas-worst-nightmare

#10yrsago Dissipation of Economic Rents: when money is wasted chasing money https://timharford.com/2016/01/how-fighting-for-a-prize-knocks-down-its-value/

#10yrsago Bernie Sanders: a left wing, twenty-first century Ronald Reagan? https://www.salon.com/2016/01/25/bernie_sanders_could_be_the_next_ronald_reagan/

#10yrsago Charlie Jane Anders’s All the Birds in the Sky: smartass, soulful novel https://memex.craphound.com/2016/01/26/charlie-jane-anderss-all-the-birds-in-the-sky-smartass-soulful-novel/

#10yrsago San Francisco Super Bowl: crooked accounting, mass surveillance and a screwjob for taxpayers & homeless people https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/01/fuck-the-super-bowl/

#10yrsago Same as the old boss: Justin Trudeau ready to sign Harper’s EU free trade deal https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-eu-parliament-schulz-ceta-1.3415689

#10yrsago Danish government let America’s Snowden-kidnapping jet camp out in Copenhagen https://web.archive.org/web/20160126202504/https://www.denfri.dk/2016/01/usa-sendte-fly-til-danmark-for-at-hapse-snowden/

#10yrsago Model forwards unsolicited dick pix, chat transcripts to girlfriends of her harassers https://www.buzzfeed.com/rossalynwarren/a-model-is-alerting-girlfriends-of-the-men-who-send-her-dick#.aukdQ6gYR

#5yrsago Understanding the aftermath of r/wallstreetbets https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/30/meme-stocks/#stockstonks

#5yrsago Thinking through Mitch McConnell's plea for comity https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/30/meme-stocks/#comity

#5yrsago Further, on Mitch McConnell and comity https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/30/meme-stocks/#no-seriously

#5yrsago Petard (Part I) https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/30/landlord-telco-industrial-complex/#captive-market

#5yrsago "North Korea" targets infosec researchers https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/26/no-wise-kings/#willie-sutton

#5yrsago Evictions and utility cutoffs are covid comorbidities https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/26/no-wise-kings/#wealth-health

#5yrsago Brazil's world-beating data breach https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/26/no-wise-kings/#sus

#5yrsago Twitter's Project Blue Sky https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/26/no-wise-kings/#blue-sky

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 (1007 words today, 17531 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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"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 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 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 presided over a program of crushing austerity. As Canadian PM, he has fired tens of thousands of civil servants while promising billions to build out national AI so that our government can be 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 in a windless doldrums 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 at 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.

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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 uninterested 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

#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

#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

#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

#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

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

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