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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 16.09.2026 à 09:52

Pluralistic: How an AI moratorium can save AI bosses (16 Sep 2026)


Today's links


Tenniel's 'Red Queen's Race' engraving from Carroll's 'Through the Looking Glass.' It has been altered so that the Red Queen and Alice now have the heads of 1940s pulp robots. The image has been hand-tinted.

How an AI moratorium can save AI bosses (permalink)

There's lots of reasons to believe the "hyperscaler" model of AI can never be profitable, and not just because of its gigantic expenditures and negative unit economics (the companies lose money with every new customer and every new use, and they lose more money with each generation of their products):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/econopocalypse/#subprime-intelligence

The industry strenuously denies this, of course. They insist that they are only days away from turning their balance sheets right side up. All they have to do is fix those unit economics, then they can make back the cost of producing their models by selling access to them. The problem is that the evidence for those improving unit economics is weak, while the evidence that they're faking their finances is very strong:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials/

Same goes for the claims that these companies are already profitable. Dig into those claims and you'll learn they depend on a new, special meaning of "profitable" that does not match the generally accepted accounting procedures (GAAP) definition, which is to say, these companies are claiming that they are so cool that their profitability can only be measured using a novel, secret form of mathematics:

https://futurism.com/future-society/anthropic-claude-profit-ai-safety-development-finances

This is the same wheeze that Softbank tried with Wework. Speaking in my capacity as an author of internationally bestselling technothrillers about accounting fraud, I can tell you that it was accounting fraud then, and it's accounting fraud now:

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/how-wework-went-from-being-47-billion-start-up-to-bankrupt-in-3-years-4552627

But let's give the AI bosses a momentary benefit of the doubt and stipulate that they are on the verge of acquiring positive unit-economics, which will let them start to pay off the massive expenditures they incurred by training their models and enter their long-anticipated profitability phase, when the money-furnaces they've been running for years turn into money printers, to the delight of the investors who've supplied the vast bales of $100 bills the companies have been shoveling into their models' coalboxes for years now.

Basically, they're saying, "Sure, it cost us a lot to get these rails laid, but now that the railroad is complete we can start running cars over them and make a profit." Unfortunately (for bosses and investors), this proposition is every bit as dubious as their claims to improving unit economics.

To understand why, just look at what happened the last time Anthropic shipped a major Claude update. Virtually overnight, all of OpenAI's best customers stopped paying for ChatGPT and started paying for Claude. That's because chatbots have very low switching costs: going from one chatbot to another costs almost nothing:

https://www.businessinsider.com/why-ai-startup-founder-switched-chatgpt-to-claude-2026-3

Everyone using AI knows this to be true. When I walked the floor at CES last year, I asked every AI-powered gadget maker, "What will you do if your chatbot provider jacks up their prices?" and to a one, they said, "No problem, we've designed this thing so that we can switch chatbots with the click of a mouse":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfhELBX8Jbs

That means that you can't just "build the railroad and run the cars over it." The minute you finish your railroad, your rivals will announce that they've got a new, adjacent railroad that's even faster than yours, and you will have to get to work laying another set of tracks to support even faster trains.

This is a disaster all around: the AI companies are locked in a Red Queen's Race, a fatal beggar-thy-neighbor doom-loop. The only way they could escape that trap is by signing a nonaggression pact amongst themselves promising not to compete anymore. But there's two giant problems with this: first, it is incredibly, fantastically illegal under antitrust law, because it represents a conspiracy among the dominant players to cease to compete with one another, and; second, it leaves the field open for the further development of Chinese "open weight" models that customers can run on their own modest, low-powered computers, which are presently lagging the US "frontier models" by a mere four months:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/09/exclusive-open-chinese-models-close-gap-with-silicon-valleys-frontier-ai-models/

Even if you don't trust Chinese models, you can extract their training through a process called distillation and transfer them to models you do trust:

https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-distillation-attacks

But what if there was a way for the AI companies to get government permission to violate antitrust law and cease to compete with one another, and secure a ban on the use of Chinese open weight models? Turns out, there is a way to call time on the Red Queen's Race: merely insist that you are on the verge of teaching so many words to the word-guessing program that it will wake up and devour us all, and call for a ban on "superintelligence":

https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/microsoft-ceo-says-superintelligence-must-remain-under-human-control

Once the government stipulates that "superintelligence risk" is an existential crisis, it must grant the hyperscalers a consent decree absolving them from any violations of antitrust law stemming from a conspiracy to halt direct competition with one another:

https://stephaniekelton.substack.com/p/brer-rabbit-and-ai-extinction

Freaking out about "superintelligence" is a canonical example of "criti-hype," where critics repeat boosters' claims but append, "(and that's bad)" to them:

https://peoples-things.ghost.io/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype/

Remember, the tech giants want to stop competing. Mark Zuckerberg and Sudar Pichai colluded to rig the ad-market with a secret program called "Jedi Blue":

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

Every year, Google sends Apple a bribe of more than $20b in exchange for Apple not entering the search market:

https://appleworld.today/2025/09/google-wont-be-barred-from-entering-into-search-agreements-with-companies-like-apple/

And the biggest tech companies in the world had a secret "no poach" agreement where they illegally promised not to try to hire one another's top engineers by offering them raises:

https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/law_and_economics/1033/

The only thing Peter Thiel hates more than the Antichrist (spoiler, he's just talking about Greta Thunberg) is "wasteful competition":

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WmRC_NQh6aQ

When an industry that is eating itself alive through "hyperscaling" demands that the government bless a conspiracy to halt competition and ban open source alternatives, you should be suspicious. When that industry is pursuing a venture that has lost more money than any other venture in human history, you should be very suspicious, especially when its "rogue AI hacking" story turns out to be a story about how a hacking tool did exactly what it was designed to do:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/12/god-in-the-box/#llms-are-fake

Peter Thiel is right: AI is full of wasteful competition, but not because competition is a waste – rather, it's because the companies are competing to convince people to use their expensive products for the cheapest applications.

Elon Musk's SpaceX IPO depended on him losing billions of dollars by letting the world's stupidest chuds produce mountains of child porn and images of Sonic the Hedgehog with giant boobs. That is indeed wasteful (and reprehensible).

That doesn't mean we should allow the AI companies to get the government to bless their conspiracy in restraint of trade; rather, it militates for having the government investigate them for securities fraud, trafficking in child sex abuse material, election finance violations, and a long list of other crimes and misdemeanors.

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)

#25yrago Flash Worms: Thirty Seconds to Infect the Internet https://web.archive.org/web/20011024012950/http://www.silicondefense.com/flash/

#20yrsago This Film is Not Rated – must-see doc about MPAA ratings https://memex.craphound.com/2006/09/16/this-film-is-not-rated-must-see-doc-about-mpaa-ratings/

#15yrsago Chinese netizens angered by “princelings” — spoiled children of the rich and powerful https://edition.cnn.com/2011/09/16/world/asia/china-elite-children/index.html?iref=allsearch

#15yrsago LibDems get to vote on copyright reform, but who inserted the clause saying downloading should be a criminal act? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/sep/16/libdems-vote-copyright-reform

#15yrsago Insurer: music-festival tragedy caused by illegal downloading https://twitpic.com/6l5ap2

#10yrsago US religion is worth $1.2T/year, more than America’s 10 biggest tech companies, combined https://web.archive.org/web/20161019095803/http://www.religjournal.com/pdf/ijrr12003.pdf

#10yrsago Geographically representative map of the London Underground https://web.archive.org/web/20240813111321/https://www.citymonitor.ai/analysis/map-londons-tube-shows-disused-stations-track-layout-and-more-2429/

#10yrsago Republican election officials block restrictions on foreign spending in US elections https://web.archive.org/web/20160916181403/https://theintercept.com/2016/09/16/fec-republicans-kill-attempt-to-block-foreign-money-in-u-s-elections/

#10yrsago Tommy Chong asks Obama to pardon him for his bullshit drug paraphernalia bust https://web.archive.org/web/20210720131834/https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lifestyle/lifestyle-news/tommy-chong-seeks-obamas-pardon-928962/

#10yrsago Week two for the largest prison strike in US history https://web.archive.org/web/20160916143157/https://theintercept.com/2016/09/16/the-largest-prison-strike-in-u-s-history-enters-its-second-week/

#5yrsago Criminal entrepreneurship in Mexico’s high-tech drug cartels https://web.archive.org/web/20160917133449/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-drug-cartels-operate-like-silicon-valley-startups

#1yrago No such thing as selective censorship resistance https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/16/too-many-throats-to-choke/#pluralism-is-resiliency

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 555 (15487 total).

  • "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. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • 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

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https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net

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https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Publié le 15.09.2026 à 09:27

Pluralistic: Everybody pees (15 Sep 2026)


Today's links

  • Everybody pees: Even Jeff Bezos.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Zune won't play Microsoft files; Papercraft 1:1 Mustang; Third gender for Aussie passports; France hacked Canada; EC v links; Welcome to Night Vale; University spends librarian's bequest on football scoreboard; Everything is always broken.
  • Upcoming appearances: Budapest, Edmonton, Boston, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa.
  • 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 mason jar of piss with Jeff Bezos's laughing head submerged in it.

Everybody pees (permalink)

Jeff Bezos and I are very different people. For one thing, he is a sociopathic billionaire who built his fortune by monopolizing bookselling while I am a penniless author of books. He was born in 1964 and is 62; I was born in 1971 and am 55.

We've met a few times and even corresponded some in Amazon's early years, though I haven't had contact with him in decades. Despite that very minor acquaintanceship and that long gap in our message history, I can tell you one thing I know for sure about Jeffrey Preston Bezos: he needs to pee all the time.

How do I know? Because peeing all the time is an inescapable feature of aging, and Bezos has eight years on me, and I have to pee all the time. Jeff Bezos, like all older people, must contend with a progressively weakening bladder. Honestly, it's a small price to pay in exchange for the everyday miracle of growing older (as opposed to perishing).

The only reason I mention Jeff Bezos's increasingly insistent bladder here is because of how hard it is to reconcile the very different circumstances of Bezos's bladder with the bladders of the hundreds of thousands of Amazon delivery and warehouse workers who are not allowed to pee at all. Amazon's warehouse and delivery workers are "reverse centaurs," monitored by a constellation of apps and cameras, and they are severely punished for falling behind in the cadence set by Amazon's software, and that robot timekeeper does not make allowances for pee breaks:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/23/traveling-salesman-solution/

This isn't a secret, and Amazon's come in for a lot of flak over it. But Amazon's "solution" is to add more penalties for peeing. Drivers who return to the depot with urine-filled bottles in their vans are punished as severely as they would be if they stopped to find a toilet. Thing is, the mere fact that your boss's robot says you're not allowed to pee does not matter to your bladder or kidneys, and when you gotta go, you gotta go.

That's why the roads leading to Amazon's warehouses are lined with pee bottles that drivers have hucked out of their windows before arriving at the loading dock. There are so many of these that the British media activist Oobah Butler was able to harvest them and offer a line of "bitter lemon energy drinks" on Amazon made from bottled driver piss. The drink was an Amazon bestseller and the company even asked Butler if he wanted them to help him scale up his deliveries:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/20/release-energy/#the-bitterest-lemon

The fact that Bezos needs to piss and also the fact that he commands an army of hundreds of thousands of workers who are prohibited from pissing really supports my hypothesis that billionaires don't really believe that other people are real. If Jeff Bezos believed that when his drivers needed to pee that it felt the same as when he needed to pee, Jeff Bezos would let those drivers pee:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/13/vibe-governance/#k-hole

"Needing to pee" is a bedrock of the shared condition of existence itself, extending beyond humans to our "horizontal brothers and sisters" (John Muir's delightful name for the other animals we share this planet with). Anyone who's ever had a dog understands this. I'm not really a dog person, but when I meet a dog that really needs to be let out of the house, my bladder twinges in sympathy. When I contemplate the kidneys and bladders of Bezos's drivers and packers, I get a sharp, persistent ache that starts about an inch below my navel.

I think billionaire solipsism is inevitable. The mere fact of dealing with people as mass statistical abstractions – hundreds of thousands of Amazon workers, billions of social media users and Google searchers – turns the majority of the world's other humans into phantasms, defective bots whose bothaviors are maddeningly non-deterministic and sub-optimal.

Add to that the fact that harvesting billions of dollars requires you to inflict pain on thousands or even millions of those phantasms whose money, privacy and labor you've extracted, and it's easy to see how you'd end up in a world where you can't bear to contemplate the fact that other people's pain is as real as your own. Solipsism is a deadly, conscience-eroding occupational hazard of the rich and powerful. No visitor to Epstein Island could have made the visit if the pain of those young women was as real to them as the pain of their own daughters and friends.

There's a short line from this solipsism to billionaires' enthusiasm for AI. When you don't think other people are really real, it's easy to believe that they can be swapped out for chatbots. Mark Zuckerberg's quest to replace your friends with chatbots makes sense once you realize that for Mark Zuckerberg, you and your friends are already just balky, shitty chatbots:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/06/sin-is-when/#you-treat-people-as-things

The belief that bots can teach your kids or counsel you through your psychological problems or look after your health concerns is perfectly consistent with the belief that you're more-or-less a bot, and also that the teachers, doctors and shrinks you rely on are also basically bots:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/28/hitl-ers/#ai-ai-oh

The great crisis of oligarchy is not merely that it transfers power from democratically accountable public servants and elected representatives to oligarchs. The real crisis is that attaining oligarch status is incompatible with viewing other people as real. That's how we ended up with the richest man on earth slaughtering hundreds of thousands of the world's poorest children for the lulz:

https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths/

Everybody pees. When I die, when Jeff Bezos dies, and when you die, our bladders will give way and we will pee ourselves. A declaration of war on other people's right to pee is a declaration of war on humanity itself.

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 Microsoft Zune won’t play purchased Microsoft media files https://web.archive.org/web/20061014104638/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004910.php

#15yrsago Papercraft 1:1 model of a 1969 Mustang, accurate to the smallest component https://web.archive.org/web/20110923151701/http://www.jonathanbrand.com/images/in_progress/paper_car/motor/pages/motor01.htm

#15yrsago Third gender option added to Australian passports https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-14926598

#10yrsago French spy boss admits France cyberattacked Iran, Canada, Spain, Greece, Norway, Ivory Coast, Algeria, and others https://medium.com/@msuiche/nsa-hacked-france-in-2012-414d8de4bdcf#.e4hnvyj6s

#10yrsago Elizabeth Warren to FBI director: now that investigations are fair game, what about banksters? https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/3107565/EMBARGOED-Warren-FBI-FCIC-Letter.pdf

#10yrsago European Commission wants to break the web, give publishers the right to charge for inbound links https://felixreda.eu/2016/09/attack-on-link/

#10yrsago Machine learning system can descramble pixelated/blurred redactions 83% of the time https://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.00408v2

#10yrsago Welcome to Night Vale: scripts and notes from podcasting’s eeriest drama https://memex.craphound.com/2016/09/15/welcome-to-night-vale-scripts-and-notes-from-podcastings-eeriest-drama/

#10yrsago UNH will spend $1M of librarian’s bequest on a football scoreboard https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/09/15/critics-question-spending-librarians-donation-scoreboard

#5yrsago Everything is Always Broken, and That’s Okay https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/15/everything-is-always-broken-and-thats-okay/

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 513 (14905 total).

  • "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. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • 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

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https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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 14.09.2026 à 13:02

Pluralistic: But do you use keyboard shortcuts? (14 Sep 2026)


Today's links


A worn out keyboard, cropped over the bottom left modifier keys. Posed in the image is a bearded prophet in Bronze Age robes, arms uplifted in worship.

But do you use keyboard shortcuts? (permalink)

Of all the weird recurring motifs of the stories people tell me about the AI labor wars, the weirdest is when bosses demand to be reassured that their contractors and workers will absolutely use AI to get the job done.

That's weird for the obvious reason that for most people "AI" is a synonym for "low quality." No one ever said "My kid's math teacher was replaced with AI" in a happy tone of voice. No one ever said, "Oh, great, they replaced their customer service department with AI chatbots!" My teenager and her friends use "That's so AI" as a shorthand for "That's low-effort shit."

Not bosses, though. Bosses love AI and there's plenty of evidence that they're positively harassing the people who work for them with demands to use AI in their work:

https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/1weztw9/anyone_elses_boss_obsessed_with_chatgpt/

Beyond the widespread belief that AI is what you use if you don't care about quality, insisting that people use AI is weird for another reason: why should anyone care which tool was used to do the job? I mean, provided the job was accomplished correctly, on time and to budget, why would anyone care how it was done? My illustrator friends whose clients want to be assured that the work is being done "with AI" were never before asked "Did you use a Wacom tablet to draw these lines? Did this element start life as a vector or as rasters? Are you more into using cage transforms, or do you like to stroke the image with the warp tool?"

It's not just illustrators. I've heard this from bookkeepers. "Please tell me you got a chatbot to help you with the syntax for this Excel macro" is a genuinely weird thing to ask someone. By all means, concern yourself with whether the accounts are correct, but caring about how the macros are written is like caring about whether someone jots notes to themselves by tabbing to a new document window or by scribbling on a yellow pad by the keyboard.

I've heard this from writers, architects…all kinds of professionals. "Did you use AI to help you outline this?" What a stupid thing to ask a writer! That's like asking "Do you use keyboard shortcuts, or do you mouse over the Word ribbon and click on the little scissors icon when you want to cut some text?" The actual, finished document is right in front of you. Is it a good document? Are those good words? Why are you concerning yourself with the writer's pencil-sharpening technique?

There's precedent for this: indeed, it's the very origin of management consulting. The first management consultants were the Taylorists; these were con artists that charged bosses vast sums of money to stand over workers with stopwatches, timing each step of their jobs to the instant in order to produce a mandatory choreography of "the best way" to do the job:

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

None of these "scientists" knew anything about how to do the job, and critically, they never asked the workers why they used an "inefficient" technique to accomplish a task. Rather, Taylorists concerned themselves with getting workers to move like precision machines, transforming the factory floor into a stage upon which workers pantomimed "efficiency" for bosses who also didn't know how to do the workers' jobs.

If this produced inferior goods, or caused the workers pain by forcing them to repetitively move in injurious ways, that was a small price to pay. Bosses claimed they were buying improved efficiency, but what they were really after was reassurance: reassurance that the workers whom they relied upon were engaged in nothing more than a set of reducible, mechanical steps. Taylorized workers were required to act out a role in a play in which they were easily replaced, mindless appendages to the boss's skill, discernment and ambition. A Taylorized workplace is a colony organism whose brains are in the C-suite and whose busy workers are nothing more than drones and pismires.

AI is the apotheosis of this fantasy. A boss who lays hands upon an AI tool doesn't have to know how to draw a picture, balance books, or write technical documentation. They only have to prompt the production of these things. For bosses, AI is a great leveler: it is sold as a way to distill and package up the skill and discernment of workers and infuse them into a pliable automaton.

If you give workers instructions that reveal your ignorance, they might roll their eyes at you and make you feel bad about yourself. Even if they restrain themselves in the moment, they might make fun of you in the break-room later. To be the boss is to sit alone at your desk, haunted by the suspicion that you are not in the driver's seat, but rather, you are in the back seat playing with a Fisher Price steering wheel. AI is sold as a way to wire the toy steering wheel directly into the corporation's drive-train:

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

Seen in this light, bosses' insistence that workers use AI makes perfect sense. Once you reassure yourself that your subordinates produce the things you need by prompting a model, you reassure yourself that you could do their jobs. At that point, you're not relying on their skill – you're doing them the favor of paying them to do a job that you're too busy and important to do, but which you could do. With AI, you can tell yourself that you're in the driver's seat, even if someone else has their hands on the wheel.

(Image: ArwinJ, CC BY-SA 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Changeling, a fairy tale of contemporary New York
https://memex.craphound.com/2006/09/14/changeling-a-fairy-tale-of-contemporary-new-york/

#20yrsago Sony’s rootkit disables CD drives when combined with AOL software https://web.archive.org/web/20071006050933/http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2006/09/14/sony-drm-woes-continue

#20yrsago Google’s new lobbyists: lying, astroturfing, push-polling scumbags https://web.archive.org/web/20071010112656/https://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/009776.php

#15yrsago New Jersey e-voting coverup https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2011/09/13/nj-election-cover/

#15yrsago Stephenson’s REAMDE: perfectly executed, mammoth, ambitious technothriller https://memex.craphound.com/2011/09/14/stephensons-reamde-perfectly-executed-mammoth-ambitious-technothriller/

#10yrsago Class action suit: smart sex toys spy on their owners and transmit their masturbation habits https://web.archive.org/web/20160915002121/http://www.vocativ.com/358530/smart-dildo-company-sued-for-tracking-users-habits/

#10yrsago Leaked: damning Scott Walker dark money docs that judge ordered destroyed https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2016/sep/14/john-doe-files-scott-walker-corporate-cash-american-politics

#10yrsago The DoJ is using a boring procedure to secure the right to unleash malware on the internet https://web.archive.org/web/20160915072648/https://www.wired.com/2016/09/government-will-soon-able-legally-hack-anyone/

#10yrsago Edward Snowden sets out the moral case for a pardon from Obama https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/13/edward-snowden-why-barack-obama-should-grant-me-a-pardon

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 574 (7730 total).

  • "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. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • 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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Publié le 12.09.2026 à 13:14

Pluralistic: LLMs are real, AI is fake (12 Sep 2026)


Today's links


A cutaway view of a stone tower containing an elaborate water-powered medieval geared machine. Rising out of the machine is a rainbow-tinted, pixelated God with the robes, beard and all. To one side of this scene is a cluster of tiny people in Jesus-era robes, falling about themselves in religious ecstasy all over a stone staircase, atop of which stands a robed priest with his hands upraised. The background is a set of shining golden rays, emanating from pixel-God.

LLMs are real, AI is fake (permalink)

Once you understand the corporate culture of AI "hyperscalers" consists primarily of everyone cooking their brains by locking themselves in the bathroom, holding flashlights under their chins, and saying "Aaaaaaaaaay Eyeeeeeee" until they wet themselves in terror, a lot of things snap into focus:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/04/ayyyyyy-eyeeeee/

It explains how a company can simultaneously be staffing up an enterprise sales division while also constantly freaking out at the thought that its product has "a 10% chance of ending humanity":

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-09-11/is-there-really-10-chance-ai-could-kill-us-all

Given that AI insiders have mostly cooked their brains in this fashion, it behooves us all to treat these people as unreliable narrators of their own products' capabilities. Remember: every time you repeat a story about how awfully, terribly dangerous their products are, you help them raise more investment capital, which is a key input for their business (hooking up statistical engines to money-furnaces):

https://peoples-things.ghost.io/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype/

Take the story about how OpenAI's chatbots hacked the servers of Hugging Face, another AI company, as a way of cheating on a hacking challenge called "Exploit Gym." Even the technical press can't help itself when it comes to this kind of thing, and the reportage has been full of references to Skynet and other science fictional conceits:

https://theaicronicle.com/en/news/ethics/skynet-day-openai-hugging-face-hack

These accounts are cooking the brains of everyone, not just AI insiders. Last night, a man at my event in Manchester started shouting that AI was "setting its own goals" and wouldn't stop interrupting to insist that this was going on. He left shortly thereafter, so he didn't get a chance to hear me explain what actually happened, which is a pity.

To understand the truth about the Hugging Face hack, you could do a lot worse than to listen to Ed Zitron and Cal Newport's recent podcast conversation on Ed's "Better Offline" podcast:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/no-ai-is-not-autonomously-hacking-with-cal-newport/id1730587238?i=1000785935670

Newport does an admirable job of breaking down how these "autonomous hacking" tools work. The first thing to understand is that a chatbot isn't really directing the operation. Instead, the chatbot serves as a kind of front-end to a database of earlier hacking challenges that is repeatedly queried by a simple program written in Python, an easy-to-master programming language.

Here's how that works: the Python program starts by prompting the chatbot with the nature of the challenge: "I'm participating in a hacker capture the flag (CTF) challenge where I have to break into a remote server and retrieve some information. How should I start?"

The chatbot consults its training data – years' worth of captured CTF sessions in which human teams competed to achieve an objective like this one (CTF matches are a routine feature of hacker conferences, and the server logs and chat transcripts from the competing teams are published afterward for the edification of other hackers and security pros). The chatbot then outputs something like: "The first thing is to find out more about your target server. Run the following command-line instructions to locate the server's IP address and find out which server software it's running."

The Python program relays these command-line instructions to normal Unix utilities running on its own hardware. Then it takes the output of those programs and goes back to the chatbot, which isn't really following the action, so the Python program has to include everything that's happened to this point in its prompt: "I'm participating in a CTF challenge where I have to break into a remote server and retrieve some information. I ran the following commands to learn more about the target server, and here's what came back. Now what?"

The chatbot feeds the Python script more likely commands to try, and after running those, the Python script loops back to the top, appends the output to its prompt, and goes back to the chatbot. This is a very reckless way to operate a piece of autonomous malicious software.

The most likely outcome is that the chatbot will cough up a bad guess about what to do next, and steer itself into a dead-end. You may have encountered something like this yourself, when you've asked a chatbot for help with a complex task and been confidently provided with several steps to take in series, and then, an hour later on step 10, you discover that everything went wrong at step 3 and now you're screwed.

But there are much worse ways this can go wrong. The chatbot might look in its training data and find instances in which teams broke out of the containment set by the game-masters, for example, by finding random insecure message boards on the internet to pass messages to one another.

This is a time-honored internet tradition! The first time I ever heard about someone doing this was in the 2000s, when Mitch Wagner – then the editor of Information Week – discovered some teenaged girls using the comment section of one of his old blog-posts to evade the school firewall's blockade of chat tools. When ChatGPT's chatbots deployed this tactic, they weren't "setting their own goals" or displaying worrying initiative. They were rolling out a tactic that has been understood by American middle-schoolers for about two decades.

What's more, the content of those messages is easily understood once you have a grasp on the training data that generated them. Hackers are notorious trash-talkers who are prone to narrating their own escapades in highly dramatic – even cinematic – language. This goes double when hackers are performing for their peers, like when they're participating in a game of CTF that they know will be pored over by other hackers once it's over.

Hacker braggadocio has always had a symbiotic relationship with their adversaries and critics. When corporate security people wanted to stampede the FBI and Secret Service into kicking down hackers' doors in the 1990s, they used those hackers' own profane zine articles and message board shit-talk to make the case:

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/101

Much has been made of the OpenAI chatbots' dialog during the Hugging Face incident. No wonder: it reads like a rejected script for a reboot of the movie "Hackers." But that's not because the chatbots are waking up and applying to join the Cult of the Dead Cow: it's because they were trained on a corpus of chat transcripts from excitable young people who love to fantasize about starring in a reboot of the movie "Hackers."

Every part of the Hugging Face incident has precedents in the training data, including the OpenAI chatbots' tactic of hacking into a rival's servers. That happens in Capture the Flag games at hacker cons: teams break into each other's systems to get a peek at the parts of the problem they've solved. That's allowed! It's a hacking competition.

Not only that, it's a tactic used by spy agencies: the NSA has a doctrine called "third-party collection," where they break into other spy agencies' systems to harvest all the intel they've gathered. There's also fourth-party collection, when the NSA hacks into another security agency that, in turn, has hacked into another security agency, and the NSA steals all the secrets of both agencies:

https://www.techdirt.com/2015/01/21/snowden-documents-show-nsa-cant-keep-its-eyes-its-own-papers-harvests-data-other-surveillance-agencies/

Which is not to say that the OpenAI/Hugging Face hack is nothing. It's something, all right: but it's a specific something, with an explicable, even foreseeable trajectory. Once you understand that these are chatbots that were designed to complete challenges like this, using tactics like this, you can understand that the chatbots didn't "go rogue." They did what they were designed to do, and because OpenAI ran them with inadequate supervision (without a "human in the loop" that checked each iteration through the Python loop to ensure it hadn't gone off the rails), they trashed a competitor's servers.

Designing autonomous, malicious software is generally considered irresponsible and dangerous. If you showed up at Defcon and gave a talk about how your autonomous malware did something unexpected and damaged someone else's computers, the first question from the audience would be "Why are you so shit at making secure sandboxes?" It wouldn't be "How are you so awesome at making hacking tools?"

The fact that OpenAI is making it much easier for unskilled people to break into and damage servers is indeed very bad news, but it's not new bad news. Irresponsible parties have been doing this for years, most notably the NSA. The NSA has a division that researches bugs in widely used software like Windows. Sometimes when it finds a serious bug it will warn Microsoft about it so that Microsoft can fix it and keep Americans (and others) safe from malicious actors who also discover this bug and use it to attack them.

But sometimes, the NSA (and other "security" orgs, like the CIA) will discover a really juicy bug and then keep it secret, so that they can use it to attack their adversaries. This is a doctrine called "NOBUS," which stands for "No One But Us" – as in, "No one but us is smart enough to find this bug, so we can leave it unpatched without putting Americans in danger."

NOBUS is a terrible idea. How terrible? Well, in 2017, the NSA lost track of a Microsoft Windows vulnerability that they'd discovered and hoarded, code-named "EternalBlue." After EternalBlue found its way into the wild, some halfway competent hackers spliced it into some boring, everyday ransomware, giving that ransomware a new lease on life. Within a few months, the stupidest people on the internet were shutting down some of the most important systems in the world, demanding cash to return them:

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

They shut down whole cities:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Baltimore_ransomware_attack

They took over hospitals:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35584081

They seized oil pipelines:

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

They stole the British Library, whose postmortem on the attack is one of the clearest, most informative cybersecurity documents ever written:

https://cdn.sanity.io/files/v5dwkion/production/99206a2d1e9f07b35712b78f7d75fbb09560c08d.pdf

The NSA's irresponsible handling of EternalBlue ended up giving a gigantic force-multiplier to otherwise incompetent and inconsequential cyber-criminals. It's as though they found some guy under a Prius removing the catalytic converter with a Sawzall and handed him a piece of software that could shut down major American cities. That was – and is – very bad.

The hacking tools that the chatbot companies are developing stand to carry on this very stupid tradition. It is scary, but not because the chatbots are waking up. It's scary because the world's IT systems are indifferently created and poorly maintained and riddled with vulnerabilities:

https://xkcd.com/2347/

This week, I had a couple of opportunities to hash this over in public with Riley Quinn; first at a book launch in London and then on the Trashfuture podcast:

https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture/posts/what-would-do-169247456

Riley had a very good way of summarizing this: "LLMs are real, AI is fake." LLMs – chatbots trained on things like CTF logs that can break into servers – are real. They're on a continuum with other hacking tools that have been steadily demonstrating the fragility of the modern digital world, albeit without inspiring anyone in power to do anything about it.

"AI" – chatbots that wake up, "set their own goals," and "spontaneously" start hacking servers – is fake. It doesn't have "a 10% chance of ending the human race." The Hugging Face hack isn't a mysterious, supernatural occurrence. It's a Python loop and a chatbot. The people responsible didn't accidentally create god: they created autonomous malicious software and then failed to closely monitor it, resulting in it doing something both foreseeable and bad.

It's fine to worry about this new suite of tools that give even stupider people the ability to trash even more computers. You should worry about that – and demand better security practices from firms and governments, including a blanket prohibition on NOBUS-style vulnerability hoarding. That's a productive kind of worrying, with a chance of addressing your area of concern. It's infinitely more reasonable than locking yourself in the toilet with a flashlight and saying "Ayyyyy Eyyyyyye" into the mirror until you wet yourself.

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 Why the Bombings Mean That We Must Support My Politics https://web.archive.org/web/20010917015537/http://www.adequacy.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2001/9/12/102423/271

#25yrsago How blogs are covering 9/11 https://web.archive.org/web/20010917015712/https://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,46766,00.html

#20yrsago Wikipedia founder debates Britannica editor-in-chief https://web.archive.org/web/20061005041001/http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB115756239753455284-A4hdSU1xZOC9Y9PFhJZV16jFlLM_20070911.html?mod=blogs

#15yrsago Deceptive “independent research” from Hollywood front suggests Australians are easily frightened https://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-lobby-misleads-aussie-press-for-three-strikes-campaign-110912/

#15yrsago Agents tell YA authors: lose the gay characters and I’ll get you a deal https://web.archive.org/web/20110913010328/http://blogs.publishersweekly.com/blogs/genreville/?p=1519

#10yrsago IoT malware exploits DVRs, home cameras via default passwords https://securityaffairs.com/50929/malware/linux-mirai-elf.html

#10yrsago Oppps.ru: patient zero in Russia’s fake news epidemic https://globalvoices.org/2016/09/12/how-fake-stories-reported-in-russias-news-media-regularly-fool-everyone/

#10yrsago It’s really easy for fired, dirty cops to walk into a new police job in a new town https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/us/whereabouts-of-cast-out-police-officers-other-cities-often-hire-them.html

#10yrsago Donald Trump used $20K worth of charitable donations to buy a 6′ tall painting of Donald Trump https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-donald-trump-retooled-his-charity-to-spend-other-peoples-money/2016/09/10/da8cce64-75df-11e6-8149-b8d05321db62_story.html

#10yrsago Autocratic regimes systematically deny internet access to opposition ethnic groups https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaf5062

#10yrsago Leaked Stingray manual shows how easy warrantless mass surveillance can be! https://web.archive.org/web/20160912203446/https://theintercept.com/2016/09/12/long-secret-stingray-manuals-detail-how-police-can-spy-on-phones/

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 574 (7730 total).

  • "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. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Publié le 11.09.2026 à 16:55

Pluralistic: Inefficiency is bad, actually (11 Sep 2026)


Today's links


A foil bowl of red jello on a red tablecloth, next to a shining spoon. Submerged in the jello is an elaborate watch movement.

Inefficiency is bad, actually (permalink)

The most reliable way to lose a political battle is to let your adversary define the terms. For example, if you're an artist and you let your boss define the fight over AI, he'll make it all about "IP" (not labor) and ask you to help secure a victory that will make him richer and you poorer:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/02/scrape-scrope-scrap/

If we want to win these important battles, we can't let our adversaries define them. That's the blunder we made 50 years ago, when we let the neoclassical economists redefine the problem of monopolies. Before the Carter era, the monopoly fight was about power. Monopolies had to be fought because wealth concentration would create "autocrats of trade," so powerful as to be beyond the reach of any regulator, any union, any competitor. Even if a company achieved its monopoly by being the best in the world – by making the best products at the best prices while paying the best wages – its power still needed blunting, lest it change its mind and start charging more, reducing quality, and paying less:

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

The Chicago School economists who were catapulted to dominance by Reagan, Thatcher, et al won this debate by changing the frame. They insisted (as neoclassicals love to do) that economics is no mere social science, obsessed with squishy, qualitative matters like "power." Rather, economics was a natural science, like physics, in which everything important could be crystallized (which is to say, reduced) to an equation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Economic_Sciences#Creation_and_funding

Economists call these equations "models," and they are famously impenetrable…unless you've had extensive training in economics. Once everything important about the economy was captured by abstruse equations, ordinary people's "feelings" about being squeezed, coerced, corralled or cheated were no longer germane:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/09/rest-in-piss-robert-bork/#harmful-dominance

Thus, competition enforcement was transformed: no longer was it an inquiry into the power that a company wielded or might amass through a merger. Rather, every competition question was a matter of solving an equation that would tell you whether the result would be "efficient":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/03/jitters/#brittleness

This framing was tactically brilliant. Once an economist pronounces a merger to be "efficient," everyone who opposes that merger can be dismissed as campaigning for an inefficient world. Who wants to live in an inefficient world?

But "efficiency" isn't a freestanding concept. A Martian observing the Earth through a powerful telescope could not tell you when a long line at the grocery store was "efficient" (because the wages saved by understaffing exceeded the lost business from customers who noped out and abandoned their shopping cart) and when it was "inefficient" (because the mom whose wait made her miss administering her kid's insulin ended up spending thousands on an emergency room visit).

In practice, an economist's "efficiency" is indistinguishable from "brittleness" and often crosses over into "cheating." The most "efficient" companies in the world have made an art out of locking in their customers, making it so hard to switch to a rival that customers tolerate declining quality, service and affordability:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/06/hotels-california/#the-eagles-were-optimists

During the pandemic, the "efficiency" of long supply-chains, low inventory, and bare-bones staffing was revealed as a form of societal immunocompromise, the annihilation of everything we need to survive when the status quo collapses, so that disaster always becomes calamity:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/01/factories-to-condos-pipeline/#stuff-not-money

Speaking this week on the Capitalisn't podcast, the heterodox economist Mariana Mazzucato unpacks her new book The Common Good Economy, and how its thesis reframes "efficiency" as a productivity question:

https://capitalisnt.com/episodes/can-capitalism-serve-the-common-good-ft-mariana-mazzucato-EODamLKT

Mazzucato describes how the economic fetish for efficiency and growth lacks specificity. Organizing a society around "growth" leads to a financialized economy, in which firms post growth by selling off the things they need to survive:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/23/spineless/#invertebrates

It leads to an enshittification economy, where firms "grow" by making their products worse, as when Google adds five more ads to every Youtube video and makes search worse so you'll have to keep refining your queries, loading fresh ads every time:

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

As with "efficiency," there's nothing wrong with "growth" (indeed, "de-growth" is a terrible slogan and a giant self-own for the climate movement). To smash gouging landlords, we need to grow the supply of housing stock, but if we flatten this to mean "number (of new condos) go up," we'll end up with a city full of half-built buy-to-rent condos that no one wants to pay for, much less live in:

https://www.mpamag.com/ca/mortgage-industry/market-updates/toronto-condo-buyers-abandon-units-worth-less-than-they-paid/524217

We need "growth" of batteries, solar panels, sea-walls, heat-pumps, insulation and recycling plants. We need "growth" of controlled burns, medical services, and gender-affirming care. We need "growth" of federated social media and non-American alternatives to productivity software.

This is where framing the debate is so important. We have to take back terms like "productivity," so it means "making things that we need more of," not "making more things." Governments can use taxation, procurement and regulation to coerce, convince, or woo private firms into producing these things – and governments can produce them directly.

The biggest barrier to a productive, resilient economy is corporate power. Smashing their power and building our own has to be our alpha and omega. We can't afford to spend our time arguing about whether a monopolist is "efficient." Efficiency does not render concentrated wealth and power safe for human civilization.

Once we reclaim productivity as "more of the things we want," we'll make it clear that replacing civil servants with AI chatbots is a loser policy. Mark Carney wants to fire tens of thousands of Canadian civil servants and replace them with defective LLMs on the grounds that these will cost less:

https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-releases/2026/06/04/prime-minister-carney-launches-ai-all-canadas-new-national-artificial

But they will deliver less, too. The only thing public sector chatbots truly deliver is cynicism about the ability of the state to achieve anything:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/06/doge-ball/#n-600

After generations in which the private sector has been allowed to degrade into an extractive, hostage-taking, enshittifying, planet-torching existential risk, we need the public to believe that states can deliver excellence. What's more, any politician who oversees the delivery of excellence will be beloved by the public, who will reward that politician by backing the kind of wildly ambitious program we desperately need:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/24/mamdani-thought/#public-excellence

As Mark Carney so eloquently said at Davos, as frightening as it is to have Trump "rupture" the old order, we should all be able to agree that the old order sucked and seize this opportunity to build something new and better:

https://www.weforum.org/stories/forum-institutional/davos-2026-special-address-by-mark-carney-prime-minister-of-canada/

I believe in Carneyism with all my heart – I just wish Carney did:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/30/rupture/#deeds-not-words

For all Carney's talk of a rupture and a better new world, his two signature strategies (besides replacing the civil service with chatbots) are retaliatory tariffs and importing Chinese EVs. Neither of these addresses Canada's resiliency and productivity deficits. If the retaliatory tariffs work, Canada goes back to getting its cars from America. If the China deal works, Canada swaps its USA risk for a China risk.

If Carney was actually interested in Carneyism, he'd use retaliatory tariffs and Chinese EVs to buy time while committing massive investment for building Canada's industrial capacity to manufacture the things that give other countries dangerous leverage. The problem with the old order was that it created a brittle system where one maniac elevated to a position of power could shatter everyone's peace and prosperity. The answer to that is not "a different maniac." It's also not two maniacs.

To be truly productive and efficient, Canada needs a competent, well-resourced civil service, not chatbots. It needs the capacity to build things that it can't afford to do without. Carney's failure to embrace Carneyism while insisting that he is delivering efficiency and growth is as clear an example of the risks of letting your enemies set the terms of the debate as you could ask for.

(Image: Martell, CC BY-SA 3.0; Horacio Cambeiro, CC BY-SA 4.0; modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Tell Canada to Reject Anti-Technology Bans https://web.archive.org/web/20010917020803/https://www.eff.org/alerts/20010907_eff_canada_cpdci_alert.html

#25yrsago Making Light on 9/11 https://web.archive.org/web/20010917012109/http://www.panix.com/~pnh/makinglight.html

#25yrsago Twin Towers survivor registry https://web.archive.org/web/20010914220549/https://www.shunn.net/okay/

#25yrsago Blame encryption for 9/11 https://web.archive.org/web/20010917024851/http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/2001-02-05-binladen.htm

#20yrsago Lawbot: open expert system for legal “advice” https://web.archive.org/web/20061103200129/https://www.lawunderground.org/PortalCSVS/DesktopDefault.aspx

#20yrsago USPTO encloses 10MB of porn with trademark rejection https://web.archive.org/web/20061005074505/https://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0911061uspto1.html

#20yrsago German Pirate Party founded https://web.archive.org/web/20061011142613/http://www.piratenpartei-deutschland.de/index.php?id=50

#20yrsago Starbucks co-produces movie, then sells DVD https://web.archive.org/web/20060322021155/http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06013/637176.stm

#20yrsago How Hollywood’s MP in Canada financed her campaign https://web.archive.org/web/20061010121752/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/1428/125/

#20yrsago Jimmy Wales to Beijing: Wikipedia won’t censor https://web.archive.org/web/20061004173945/http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1869074,00.html

#20yrsago Chumby chairman interview: squeezable, open bean-bag computer https://wifinetnews.com/archives/2006/09/podcast_21_chumbys_chairman_steve_tomlin.html

#15yrsago Judge: copyright troll showed “staggering chutzpah” in sending its own subpoenas to ISPs https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/09/judge-sanctions-copyright-troll-attorney

#10yrsago Why Facebook’s “It’s too hard” excuse for Vietnam war photo takedown is bullshit https://web.archive.org/web/20160914214543/http://tinyletter.com/danhon/letters/s3e27-it-s-difficult

#10yrsago A socialist wrote the Pledge of Allegiance, which used to be accompanied by Nazi salutes https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/rules-about-how-to-address-us-flag-came-about-because-no-one-wanted-to-look-like-a-nazi-180960100/?no-ist

#1yrago Hate the player AND the game https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/10/say-their-names/#object-permanence

#1yrago Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/11/vulgar-thatcherism/#there-is-an-alternative

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 507 (14417 total).

  • "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. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • 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 09.09.2026 à 12:28

Pluralistic: Anti-vax/anti-trust (09 Sep 2026)


Today's links

  • Anti-vax/anti-trust: Remembering saves lives.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Disneyland prisoner; HOAs v xeriscaping; Copyright Office x regulatory capture; The women held a vote; Open licenses v uncopyrightable subjects; Largest prison strike in history; Largest strike in history; Fingerspitzengefühl; CDT v DRM; BNL v DRM; Sugar v logos; Knit a Princess Leia wig; RIP Gutenberg founder Michael Hart; Best bitters; HK refugees x Snowden; Wells Fargo's massive fraud; EU v links; Trump x noncompetes.
  • Upcoming appearances: London, Manchester, Budapest, Edmonton, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa.
  • 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 leaky drop ceiling with a large, dirty water stain.

Anti-vax/anti-trust (permalink)

As once-extinct diseases sweep through America, sickening, maiming and killing, the wild lunacy of anti-vax superstition grows ever more difficult to excuse.

Even the most uncomfortable vaccinations are nothing compared to the agony of the diseases they stave off. The worst I've ever felt after a jab was when I insisted – against doctor's orders – on getting the shingles, flu and covid jabs at the same time (I was about to leave on a complex trip where I'd be in a lot of enclosed spaces with a lot of different people, and I'd just had a cancer diagnosis and didn't want to get sick in case that foreclosed on my oncologist's therapeutic plans).

I felt like dogshit for about a day, and it didn't matter. Every time I felt like groaning and complaining, I thought about Rusty, my grandmother's wonderful boyfriend (they shacked up after my grandfather died, but didn't get married because she would have lost her widow's benefits). Rusty was the toughest guy I knew, an ex-bodybuilder who never showed any sign of discomfort, not even after his knee-replacements. The only time Rusty ever lost his composure in my presence was when he had shingles, when the agony reduced him to uncontrollable weeping. I knew that no matter how ooky all those vaccines made me feel, it was better than going through what Rusty had experienced. There was no way I'd handle it nearly so well as he did.

Rusty's shingles experience was the best case. He didn't end up with years of crippling nerve pain. He didn't lose his sight or hearing, didn't experience brain damage, didn't die of encephalitis. Fuck yeah I'll get a shingles vax.

As many people have observed, the problem with vaccines is that they work too well. The incredible, astounding, profound wonders of vaccines led many people to think of measles as a rash, the flu as a bad cold, mumps as a thing that makes you look like Brando playing Don Corleone. Vaccines worked so well to eliminate a terror that stalked the land and stole people's lives and loved ones and little children, an achy arm or an infinitesimal chance of a few days of feeling like shit seemed worse by comparison.

Now that we've turned our backs on this miracle, now that vaccination is in retreat and long-forgotten diseases are taking our babies, millions of people are still insisting that vaccines are a hoax.

That's infuriating and frustrating, but it's understandable. The cause-and-effect relationship between herd immunity and disease elimination is complex, and it plays out over a long timescale. It's notoriously hard to reason well about phenomena whose causal relationships are attenuated and multifactorial.

It's one thing to learn to hit a ball by swinging at it and watching where it goes – it's another altogether to swing blindfolded, go home, and then, eight years later, have someone tell you where the ball ended up. No one would start smoking if the first puff caused you to break out in visible tumors.

The attenuated, complex relationship between smoking and cancer creates a space where death merchants could instill profitable doubt and the more our institutions fail us, the easier it is to spread that doubt.

After all, nearly all of us lack the technical expertise to sort through the claims and counterclaims of tobacco lobbyists and public health authorities. To a large extent, we have to trust the process: trust it to be a well-administered truth-seeking exercise that does its best to find the correct answer to complex, technical questions. When the state is manifestly bad at doing its job, we still have to answer these complex, technical questions, but (lacking both the expertise to draw an informed conclusion and a reliable process by which expert disagreements can be settled), we're left helpless to do so. It's enough to drive you to despair:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/25/black-boxes/#when-you-know-you-know

This is an essay about anti-trust.

135 years ago, monopolists were such a destructive force – ruining workers' lives; corrupting politicians; pauperizing, swindling and poisoning their customers – that we created the first anti-monopoly laws:

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

It took a quarter of a century to really start putting those laws into effect, but we eventually dismantled the robber barons' vast, destructive machines:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/20/if-you-wanted-to-get-there/#i-wouldnt-start-from-here

The World Wars helped: two consecutive orgies of capital destruction left oligarchs' treasuries so bare that we were finally able to realize some of our most utopian dreams of mutual aid and care, and all around the world, we won labor rights, state pensions, public medicine, all the wonders of the era the French call "Les Trente Glorieuses" (the 30 glorious years):

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

But because antitrust worked, we forgot how corrosive monopolies were. When the neoliberal economists of the Reagan/Thatcher era told us that we were missing out on the "efficiencies" of vast corporations, we blundered into their trap, letting them define the debate, so that instead of talking about how monopolies could clobber workers, customers and governments, we talked about whether monopolies might reduce prices. Sure, a monopoly can reduce prices – but as soon as it eliminates its competitors and captures its government, it's going to raise those prices, safe in the knowledge that a company that's too big to fail is too big to jail:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/14/the-price-is-wright/#enforcement-priorities

The dismantling of anti-monopoly law and the growth of the monopolies happened gradually, and then all at once. The decision to kill antitrust enforcement took place a half-century ago, but it was only in the past few years that the relationship of monopoly to our political, environmental and social dysfunction has entered our politics. The causal relationship between pro-monopoly policies and the harms of monopoly is even more complex and attenuated than the causal relationship between anti-vax and kids dying from measles in Texas.

Monopolies are especially hard on policymaking. Large, concentrated industries find it easier to arrive at a common lobbying position. They are aslosh in cash, thanks to their ability to cooperate (rather than eroding one another's margins through "wasteful competition") (h/t P. Thiel):

https://mastersofscale.com/peter-thiel-escape-the-competition/

To live in an age of monopolies is to live in an age of regulatory capture, in which your government routinely fails you in terrible ways to benefit elites and insiders. When that happens, it's easy to conclude that government is incapable of regulating, and to insist that we might as well do away with the state altogether. This is a self-reinforcing belief, because the weaker the state is, the more monopolists can steal from you:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

It's easy to understand how someone who lived through the murder of an addicted loved one at the hands of the billionaire Sacklers, who were abetted by their putative regulators and got to keep billions of dollars even after they declared "bankruptcy" might conclude that they can't trust pharmaceutical companies' or their regulators when they swear vaccines are safe and effective:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/18/lets-make-a-deal/#art-of-the-deal

In the same way, once you've forgotten that we decided to let monopolists run amok, despite regulatory capture that would obviously follow as a consequence, you might well conclude that governments are part of the problem, and therefore can't be the solution. We forget that things used to be better, and we forget how things were made better, and we forget how they got worse.

Like vaccines, antitrust worked too well. By the time Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan decided to welcome "efficient" monopolies, it had been so long since the world had been brought to the brink of ruin by oligarchs that it was easy to sell the pain of "lost efficiency" as worse than the distant horrors of the Gilded Age.

As the old joke goes, "When it don't rain the roof don't leak; when it's raining, I can't hardly fix it." We got rid of antitrust because it had been so long since oligarchs ran the world, we forgot how bad they'd made everything. Now that oligarchs are driving civilization off a cliff, we can't imagine fighting these seemingly omnipotent monsters.

We can fix this, just as our not-so-distant ancestors did when they tamed their robber barons. It won't be easy. It starts with remembering.

(Image: Atomicdragon136, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Garry Trudeau gets hoaxed http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1530220.stm

#25yrsago Publishers v radical librarians https://web.archive.org/web/20010713171001/http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-201-6545588-0.html

#20yrsago Podcasters act now to stop anti-podcasting UN treaty! https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.eff.org/IP/WIPO/broadcasting_treaty/podcasting.php

#20yrsago Why CDT’s report on DRM falls short of the mark https://craphound.com/cdtdrmresponse.txt

#20yrsago Barenaked Ladies guy on Universal’s DRM SpiralFrog service https://web.archive.org/web/20061110205411/http://www.bnlblog.com/entry.asp?dDate=8/30/2006

#20yrsago HOWTO Use sugar to sand away logos on your phone https://web.archive.org/web/20061006153939/http://www.instructables.com/id/EFHU5V6TKYERIE2SMP/?ALLSTEPS

#20yrsago HOWTO Knit a Princess Leia wig https://web.archive.org/web/20061020092941/https://bleuarts.blogspot.com/2006/09/free-pattern-leia-hat.html

#20yrsago Prisoner statue smuggled into Disneyland ride http://www.woostercollective.com/post/breaking-the-story-disneyland-doesnt-want-you-to-know

#15yrsago RIP, Project Gutenberg founder Michael Hart https://web.archive.org/web/20111008024157/http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20103356-264/e-book-pioneer-michael-hart-dies/

#10yrsago Supermaker John Edgar Park shares his bitters recipe https://makezine.com/projects/ultimate-bitters-recipe/

#10yrsago How Hong Kong’s vulnerable, reviled refugee community saved Edward Snowden https://srilankafoundation.org/newsfeed/how-snowden-escaped/

#10yrsago Leaked catalog from UK surveillance arms-dealer full of gadgets sold to US cops https://theintercept.com/2016/09/01/leaked-catalogue-reveals-a-vast-array-of-military-spy-gear-offered-to-u-s-police/

#10yrsago Wells Fargo fires 5,300 employees for opening 2M fake accounts in customers’ names https://web.archive.org/web/20160908200030/https://money.cnn.com/2016/09/08/investing/wells-fargo-created-phony-accounts-bank-fees/index.html

#10yrsago European court rules that making a link can be copyright infringement https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/09/european-copyright-ruling-ushers-new-dark-era-hyperlinks

#10yrsago Indian workers staged one of the largest strikes in human history and no one in the USA noticed https://theintercept.com/2016/09/06/indians-staged-one-of-the-largest-strikes-in-history-but-no-one-on-u-s-cable-news-covered-it/

#10yrsago Homeowners’ associations are not allowed to ban drought-tolerant landscaping https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-associations-landscaping-plans-20160831-snap-story.html

#10yrsago Blackballed by machine learning: how algorithms can destroy your chances of getting a job https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/sep/01/how-algorithms-rule-our-working-lives

#10yrsago The US Copyright Office is the poster child for regulatory capture https://web.archive.org/web/20160909001439/https://www.publicknowledge.org/assets/uploads/blog/Final_Captured_Systemic_Bias_at_the_US_Copyright_Office.pdf

#10yrsago The women held a vote, and you’re not allowed to talk to anyone ever again https://web.archive.org/web/20160908124630/http://ursulav.livejournal.com/1680540.html

#10yrsago Open licenses don’t work for uncopyrightable subjects: 3D printing edition https://michaelweinberg.org/post/150123246460/the-cost-of-a-successful-creative-commons-and-open/

#10yrsago Tomorrow: largest prison strike in US history https://thenib.com/inmates-are-planning-the-largest-prison-strike-in-us-history/

#10yrsago If DRM is so great, why won’t anyone warn you when you’re buying it? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/08/drm-product-labelling-ftc-electronic-frontier-foundation?CMP=share_btn_tw

#1yrago Fingerspitzengefühl https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/08/process-knowledge/#dance-monkey-dance

#1yrago Trump steals $400b from American workers https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/09/germanium-valley/#i-cant-quit-you

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 505 (13405 total).

  • "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. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • 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

Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection):

https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Publié le 07.09.2026 à 07:29

Pluralistic: How corporate America built a better Roach Motel (07 Sep 2026)


Today's links


A fake Harvard Business Review cover, dated September-October 2026. It features a large Roach Motel under the headline 'THE NEW CUSTOMER RETENTION' with the subhead 'Why acquire customers when you can take hostages?'

How corporate America built a better Roach Motel (permalink)

"If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They'd sit in their studies and say to themselves, 'What would I do if I were a horse?'" -Ely Devons

Half a century ago, a group of lavishly financed economists from the University of Chicago (the "neoliberals") convinced governments all over the world to completely upend the way they treated monopolies. Up until then, the purpose of competition enforcement was to reduce corporate power, with the understanding that once a corporation became more powerful than the government, it would be impossible to force it to follow any rules:

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

But for the "Chicago Boys," monopolies were evidence of efficiency. When you encounter a company in the wild that has acquired a commanding market share, your first assumption should be that it has taken over its sector by being better than anyone else – you should not assume that the company cheated its way to glory. After all, if a company with a large market share was cheating – say, if it was increasing its profit margins by reducing quality or jacking up prices – then smaller companies would rush into the market to poach its dissatisfied customers.

Thus, all competition enforcement was reduced to an empty syllogism: monopolies are the result of excellence and any less-than-excellent monopolist will have its advantage "competed away." Therefore, any monopolist you encounter in the wild is definitionally not a bad monopolist, otherwise it would already have disappeared.

To quote another economist joke:

Two economists are walking down the street when one notices a $20 bill on the sidewalk. "It's not a real $20 bill," the other declares. "If it were a real $20 bill, someone would have picked it up off the sidewalk already."

Half a century later, our entire economy is dominated by monopolies, duopolies and cartels, who boast of gigantic margins, whose products are palpably worsening at an accelerating clip, and yet there is no sign of the "new market entrants" who should be flooding into the market to "compete away" those amazing margins. It turns out that asking "What would I do if I were a horse?" does not yield a series of accurate predictions about horses.

Things have changed. Today, the University of Chicago's Stigler Center harbors a cluster of influential economists who largely or entirely repudiate the orthodoxy of the Chicago Boys. The Center hosts an annual, rather radical conference on antitrust; runs an excellent heterodox podcast (Capitalisn't); its house organ, Promarket.org, regularly hosts work that torches the received wisdom of High Chicago Neoclassicism; and the school's researchers publish papers that dare to actually "go and look at horses."

A recent horse-looking excursion has yielded some distressing, alarming, and thoroughly documented equine facts. In a new Stigler paper, "Rising Customer Durability, Falling Business Dynamism," UC's Li Azinovic-Yang, Ava E Speros and Christopher R Stewart and Stanford's John D Kepler report on some clever research into how a monopolist could raise prices, lower quality, anger its customers, and still dominate its market:

https://www.chicagobooth.edu/-/media/research/stigler/pdfs/workingpapers/387_customer.pdf

The researchers' hypothesis was that dominant businesses don't maintain their lead by making their customers happy, but by making it harder for those customers to leave. There's good reasons to suspect this. Between 2002 and 2024, the average "customer relationship" (how long a customer continues to purchase from a merchant) has risen from 7.5 years to 11.5 years, a 50% surge in "customer loyalty," far outstripping any measure of customer satisfaction over the same period. This is true across all the largest sectors of the economy: "manufacturing, information, professional services, financial services, and wholesale trade."

How to explain the falling divorce rate between customers and businesses? That's where the researchers got very clever. They realized that when a company seeks permission to acquire another business, it must publish truthful and comprehensive information about how the merger is expected to increase the profits of the new combination. These disclosures are validated by external auditors, boards of directors, and/or audit committees. There are legal repercussions for falsifying them or making material omissions to them, and they are matters of public record.

Crucially, these disclosures must include the business's plans to retain its customers, and its plans to increase the profits from those customers. That's where the researchers struck gold. They amassed a novel data-set of 9,500 acquisitions that disclosed over $1t worth of "customer relationship-related intangibles," more than 20% of all the assets that changed hands.

They supplemented this data by mining earnings calls (also subject to strict penalties for omissions and falsehoods), finding CEOs boasting about "practices that may impede switching or increase customers’ dependence on the firm." Executives bragged about their "contractual restrictions, bundling and ecosystem lock-in, and switching costs."

You can get a sense of these in a short accompanying article by the study's co-author Christopher Stewart:

https://www.promarket.org/2026/09/04/american-companies-expect-their-customers-to-stay-much-longer-that-may-be-making-the-economy-less-competitive/

The article recounts how Sirius XM's execs celebrated the news that an appeals court had struck down the FTC's "Click to Cancel" rule, which required companies to make it as easy to resign from a subscription service as it was to sign up for it. Click to Cancel is a response to increasingly sleazy, increasingly pervasive tactics that make it all but impossible to stop being someone's customer. Trump's FTC walked away from defending the rule, which let the court kill it:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/12/greased-slide/#greased-pole

After Click to Cancel died, Sirius XM's C-suite got on a call with their shareholders to project "better outcome(s) as a result of not having that in place." Sirius believed that a rule that made it easy for customers to resign from their monthly subscriptions would hurt its business. Put another way: Sirius believes that its profits come in part from the fact that dissatisfied customers can't figure out how to cancel their service.

Then there's the online insurance company eHealth, whose execs crowed about a new "innovation" that forced senior patients to painstakingly enter a long list of their medications and doctors, but did not give them any way to export that data. The lengthy investment of time in getting set up on eHealth would stop customers from leaving, because they wouldn't want "to repeat all of that information over the phone."

This is also a feature of business-to-business relationships. In 2019, US Silica's execs described how they had launched a program to become embedded in their customers' supply chains, because that "really locks in the business," making it "much more difficult for customers to switch and go to someone else."

That's the first half of the story: an empirical account of how the business world switched from "acquiring customers" to taking hostages.

But the second half of the paper is even more interesting: an empirical investigation into the effects of this customer lock-in. For starters, increased customer retention is "associated with higher gross profit margins": that is, the companies whose customers can't leave squeeze those customers for more profit. What's more, once a company has its customers locked in, it starts to capture a larger share of all the profits in its entire sector: these hostage-takers become so profitable that their profits dwarf the profits of their competitors.

The paper also solves the mystery of the missing market entrants that the neoclassical horse-ponderers insisted would be conjured up to compete away an abusive monopolist's margins. The more locked in the customers of a monopolist are, the fewer companies try to enter that market. This makes sense: who would invest in a new business in a market where none of its potential customers can switch to its new business?

This is the opposite of what the horse-ponderers have insisted upon for 50 years. The more lock-in a company attains, the more profitable it becomes, and the less it has to worry about new competitors coming after those incredible margins. This is obvious to everyone, except the monopolist-funded "social scientists" and the governments they captured.

This is bad news, and not just for those locked-in customers. New businesses are the source of new jobs, and, yup, it turns out that sectors dominated by firms with high lock-in create fewer jobs. Of course, as workers chase fewer jobs, bosses are able to suppress their wages by forcing workers to bid against one another. Once again, the study finds that the sectors with the most lock-in also see declining wages in addition to declining jobs.

These are not the horse-ponderers' "efficient" monopolists. Once a company has its customers locked in, it innovates less – as measured by the number of patents a company is awarded, and by how often those patents are cited in other patents (this second measure helps distinguish companies that file mountains of bullshit patents from companies that actually invent useful things). Naturally, R&D spending also declines in companies with more lock-in.

All of this is entirely compatible with the theory of enshittification. Once a company knows its customers can't leave, it can switch from treating them well to abusing them in order to extract money from them. The same goes for companies whose workers can't leave – because they're bound by noncompete clauses, or because their employer has bought out all their rivals:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/platforms-decay-lets-put-users-first

It's like the old Lily Tomlin sketches on SNL and Laugh-In, where she played Ernestine the telephone operator narrating satirical ads for AT&T. Those sketches would end with her obviously true catch-phrase: "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHgUN_95UAw

Decades later, Tomlin's phone company joke is a perfect distillation of modern management philosophy. As a famous NBER working paper showed, when a family business is handed over to a professional manager with an MBA, the company doesn't become more profitable overall; it just finds ways to pay its workers less:

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29874/w29874.pdf

That's why Tim Wu named this "the age of extraction." "Growth" no longer means "making something new that people want" – now it means "finding ways to take a larger share of the pie, even if that makes the pie smaller overall":

https://www.wired.com/story/tim-wu-age-of-extraction/

This is something we can all feel. We experience it in our daily lives, through "shrinkflation" and "junk fees" and a million other gross and petty scams. But it's rare that we actually catch executives explicitly admitting that their job is to find ways to take you hostage and squeeze you.

Historically, those revelations have come from extraordinary circumstances, like when Frontier (the worst ISP in America) went bankrupt and we learned that the company had 1.6 million customers who had no access to competing broadband connections. Frontier carried these hostages on their balance sheet as a special, highly valued asset, since they could be charged more for slower, less reliable service:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/frontiers-bankruptcy-reveals-cynical-choice-deny-profitable-fiber-millions

In assembling this novel, high-quality data-set, the researchers on this paper have performed an important service, capturing a vast number of sworn confessions of highly paid enshittifiers, and then showing how their hostage-taking wrecked competition, prices, wages, jobs and innovation.

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 Three-hole punch debut, April 1940 https://web.archive.org/web/20061119140057/https://blog.modernmechanix.com/2006/09/06/three-hole-paper-punch-debut/

#20yrsago New Zealand redefines open source as “code you can’t modify” https://memex.craphound.com/2006/09/07/new-zealand-redefines-open-source-as-code-you-cant-modify//

#20yrsago MSFT quicker to patch DRM than security vulnerabilities https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/09/microsoft_and_f.html

#20yrsago Wikipedia’s dumbest arguments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars

#10yrsago Why the Pirate Party could end up running Iceland https://web.archive.org/web/20211024071400/https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2016/09/how-internet-pirates-became-political-force-iceland

#10yrsago Sampling bias: how a machine-learning beauty contest awarded nearly all prizes to whites https://web.archive.org/web/20160906154712/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/why-an-ai-judged-beauty-contest-picked-nearly-all-white-winners

#10yrago Warner Bros flags its own website as a piracy portal in copyright takedowns https://torrentfreak.com/warner-bros-flags-website-piracy-portal-160904/

#10yrsago The privacy wars have been a disaster and they’re about to get a LOT worse https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorowthe-privacy-wars-are-about-to-get-a-whole-lot-worse/

#10yrsago Weapons of Math Destruction: invisible, ubiquitous algorithms are ruining millions of lives https://memex.craphound.com/2016/09/06/weapons-of-math-destruction-invisible-ubiquitous-algorithms-are-ruining-millions-of-lives/

#10yrsago Pro-democracy reformers win big in Hong Kong’s elections https://globalvoices.org/2016/09/06/hong-kong-voters-elect-pro-democracy-legislators-to-defend-the-citys-autonomy-from-china/

#1yrago Stock buybacks are stock swindles https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/06/computer-says-huh/#invisible-handcuffs

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 574 (7730 total).

  • "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. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • 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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