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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 07.10.2026 à 15:58

Pluralistic: Disloyalty (07 Oct 2026)


Today's links


A 1970s Air Canada ad depicting a man in a brown velour pullover with a large collar sitting in a book-lined study, assembling model Air Canada jets on his desk. His head has been replaced with the blue, metallic head of a 1950s pulp robot and his skintones have been shifted blue to match.

Disloyalty (permalink)

Up until very recently indeed, airlines were the only businesses that I dealt with regularly that practiced "price discrimination," charging different customers different prices for the same seats.

Economists broadly like this "second-order" price discrimination, where a company charges customers different prices based on the circumstances of the purchase, such as a bakery discounting bread at the end of the day. When an airline cranks up the price of an itinerary that doesn't include a Saturday stay, they're using that fact as a proxy for "price-insensitive" business travelers whose bosses can afford to pay more for a ticket, rather than paying a worker overtime to spend a weekend away from home after a meeting.

Despite the arguments about "efficiency," it's safe to say that *fliers* hate this. The airlines' pricing algorithms are so opaque and capricious that anyone who buys a ticket at *any* price inevitably feels like they got a bad deal. This situation is only exacerbated by the airlines' extreme and aggressive secrecy over their pricing strategies, which includes lawsuits against websites that use historical pricing data to predict when a plane ticket will be the cheapest to buy:

https://www.eff.org/document/preliminary-injunction-american-airlines-v-farechase-inc

When a company wants the government to intervene to prohibit third parties from publishing factual information about its prices, that's a bad look. Hard to believe that they're so sure that you, the customer, will be delighted by these pricing tactics that they can't bear to have these third parties ruin the surprise.

But this second-order discrimination is *so* 20th century. Here in the 21st century, we have *first-order* price discrimination, in which AI-powered pricing algorithms use commercial surveillance data about *you*, personally, to predict the highest price you're willing to pay. In this world of "surveillance pricing," every traveler (or customer) sees a different price, in a kind of cod-Marxist dystopia whose motto is "from each according to their ability (to pay), to each according to their (desperate) needs":

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

Airlines *love* this kind of pricing, and they have means, motive and opportunity to practice it. All over the world, airlines have acquired or entered into joint ventures with surveillance pricing companies. These deals put the airlines on the horns of a dilemma: they love to boast to their shareholders about the way that surveillance pricing will let them gouge fliers, but inevitably the public finds out about these investor calls and breaks out the pitchforks and torches.

This triggers embarrassing climbdowns, like Delta's fiasco of summer 2025, when CEO Ed Bastian bragged to shareholders that his deal with the Israeli surveillance pricing company Fetcherr would boost profits by 50% (!) by figuring out which customers could be safely gouged. When fliers, civil society groups and members of Congress got wind of this and raised a ruckus, Fetcherr publicly disavowed Bastian's remarks, insisting that it wasn't even capable of the kind of price-fixing he'd promised. Then Delta launched a smear campaign against its critics, claiming that Bastian never said the thing he *absolutely said* and accusing surveillance pricing activists of peddling "misinformation":

https://groundworkcollaborative.org/news/amid-deltas-ai-pricing-scheme-groundwork-applauds-congressional-action-to-crack-down-on-surveillance-pricing-schemes/

Meanwhile, airlines all over the world have quietly switched their frequent flier reward programs from "mileage-based" rewards to "revenue-based" rewards. That means that you get points and status based on how much you spend on your ticket, not how far you fly. What may not be obvious from this move is that it forces frequent fliers to buy their tickets directly from the airlines, who claim that they can't tell how much you've spent on your ticket otherwise.

So tickets bought on sites like Expedia or through travel agents often qualify for insultingly small points awards, or no points at all. For example, British Airways once gave me *12 points* on a $2,000 Alaska Air ticket because I didn't buy it through British Airways' site (attaining BA's gold status requires *50,000* points).

Forcing frequent fliers to buy their tickets directly from the airline's website sets things up beautifully for surveillance-driven, first-order price discrimination. Airlines you do business with regularly can augment the personal information you provide to them and the data they collect from you with sensitive information purchased from the unregulated data-broker industry, which will cheerfully disclose your salary, credit card debts, or even if you've recently lost a parent and might be flying out for a funeral.

The airlines strenuously deny that they're doing this, of course, but they continue to make investor-facing announcements about their exciting deals with surveillance pricing companies…and things are getting *weird* for frequent travelers.

Thanks to a lot of book-related travel over the past couple of years, I have "Elite" status with Air Canada. Yesterday, I needed to book a last-minute, one-way fare on a route that is only serviced by Air Canada (AC enjoys a monopoly over many Canadian routes, even between major Canadian cities). I checked it out on Google Flights and found a fare for the eye-watering sum of USD829.73.

Now, my normal daily-use browser is Firefox, but I know from long experience that I can't log in to my Air Canada frequent flier account on any browser except Chromium, which I keep installed on my system for just this kind of hostile garbage website. So I tabbed over to Chromium and pasted the Google Flights outbound link that would take me to a pre-populated reservation form on aircanada.com. To my amazement, that same flight was showing as a USD1200 fare!

These were identical trips, loaded via identical referrer URLs. The difference was that in the browser where Air Canada knew that I was an extremely loyal and prolific customer, they had whacked me with a *44.8% premium* to punish me for my loyalty!

I couldn't believe it. I actually called Air Canada's customer service line for "Elite" fliers, and the customer service rep was at a loss for an explanation and could only apologise and suggest that I write a letter to the company.

I'm publishing this instead, because a) this will do more to punish Air Canada for trying to screw me over; and b) this can help you book your tickets in the future.

Yesterday, I finished buying the ticket in my logged-out Firefox window (Air Canada's website will work with Firefox to buy tickets provided you don't try to log in to your Aeroplan account first), paying $829. Then I flipped back to Chromium, where I was still logged into my Air Canada Aeroplan account, located the reservation, and added my frequent flier number to it.

I guess this is how I'm buying my plane tickets from now on.

Hey look at this (permalink)

* PM Mark Carney pledged to ‘Buy Canadian.’ Since then, $7.8 billion in contracts went to American corporations https://archive.is/zDBfX#selection-3576.0-3576.3

* Tracing the rogue ideology of the frontier labs to their product choices https://buttondown.com/apperceptive/archive/tracing-the-rogue-ideology-of-the-frontier-labs/

* Have you heard of the term "enshittification?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ5V3pk6PEA&t=1220s

* Window display at TYPE Books Toronto to honour David Byrne’s new book https://stopmakingsense.info/window-display-at-type-books-toronto-to-honour-david-byrnes-new-book/

* Red Vienna Is Still Alive https://www.thenation.com/article/society/vienna-public-housing-urban-cities/


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Indie booksellers in the age of the Internet https://web.archive.org/web/20061026112859/https://www.wired.com/news/wireservice/1,71924-0.html

#10yrsago Wells Fargo whistleblower describes bank’s culture of blackballing threats and coerced corruption https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/10/07/497084491/episode-728-the-wells-fargo-hustle

#10yrsago Coca-Cola is paying dietitians to tweet scare-stories about soda taxes https://medium.com/cokeleak/is-coke-paying-dietitians-to-tweet-against-soda-tax-12d130d73b9a#.dw8udqccy

#10yrsago What it’s like to register to vote in states with voter suppression law https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-37569855

#5yrsago Facebook shouldn't be in charge of how you use Facebook https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/08/unfollow-everything/#shut-the-zuck-up

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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

* Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7
https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK=

* Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8
https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/

* Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9
https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow

* Paris: Slow Tech Summit, Oct 15
https://slowtechsummit.com/

* Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19
https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01

* Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20
https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020

* Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22
https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46

* Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24
https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai

* Kilkenny (Kilkenomics), Nov 6-8
https://kilkenomics.com/

* Vancouver: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10
https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/

* Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/

* Sheffield: Reverse Centaur at Juno Books, Nov 25
https://www.outsavvy.com/event/40274/cory-doctorow-in-conversation

* Oxford: Bennett Oxford Symposium on Open Code in Science, Dec 9
https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/events/2026-bennett-institute-symposium/

* Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6
https://montreal2027.ca/en


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

Recent appearances (permalink)

* Terms of Service with Clare Duffy (CNN)
https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/terms-of-service-with-clare-duffy/episodes/458ce968-af5d-11f0-b539-13ed2afe25f8

* AI, Work, and Power (Software Engineering Daily)
AI, Work, and Power https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/cory-doctorow-on-ai-work-and-power/

* AI, Corporate Power, and the Fight for Worker Control (Plutopia)
https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-ai-corporate-power-and-the-fight-for-worker-control/

* How to Think About AI—Before It’s Too Late (Daniel Solove)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0xR3uEgGcc

* Could Tech Bosses Destroy Life As We Know It? (Politics JOE)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL4VktU0SgY


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)

* "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

* "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

* "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

* "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

* "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

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

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

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

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


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: 529 (22924 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.

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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 06.10.2026 à 14:58

Pluralistic: Swapping money for expertise (06 Oct 2026)


Today's links


The First Bank of Chicago, a Grecian temple to money. It is surrounded by flames. A skeleton in academic robes and mortarboards has been lynched from its roof. In the foreground are banded packages of US $100 bills.

Swapping money for expertise (permalink)

Since the mid-1950s, we have changed the thing that "AI" refers to every 5-10 years. The current thing we're calling "AI" is about a decade old, and all this label-switching leads to a lack of clarity as to what (this) "AI" is. Unless you know that, you can't understand AI's technical capabilities, limitations, and (most of all) its political economy.

The thing we now call "AI" is a lineal descendant of the thing we were calling "AI" immediately before to the current "AI" emerged: that preceding AI is regular-degular "machine learning" (another flexible term, alas!). That slightly older AI was very similar to the current "AI", using comparable statistical techniques to analyze inputs and produce outputs. For example, the previous "AI" created the social media algorithms that have been the subject of so much discussion for 15+ years.

The difference is that this older AI was grounded in explicit, causal software models of the world. In the previous "AI" iteration, applying machine learning to playing chess required that a programmer first create a software model of a chess game, describing (in code) a chessboard, chess pieces, and the rules of chess. Then, the programmer fed a bunch of training data about chess games that had been played before to an "AI" system that analyzed their statistical relations and assayed chess moves.

The need to understand and describe a thing before you could apply "AI" to it is a bottleneck, because it requires programmers to understand how a thing works before they can incorporate it into an "AI" system. Lots of programmers know how to play chess, but far fewer understand the human pancreas, planetary weather systems, or patterns of mineral deposition in the Earth's crust.

For programmers to apply machine learning to these domains, they need to collaborate with experts who do understand them, who furthermore expect to be paid for this work. The need for expert input into this kind of "AI" represents a significant increase in the wage-bill paid by the programmer's employer: it means they have to pay for programmers and experts.

Even worse: this kind of "AI" can't be applied to systems we don't understand. We can observe far more causal relationships – instances in which A reliably causes B – in the universe than we can explain. There are lots of examples of us operationalizing these observations without understanding them. If you get sick today, your doctor might well prescribe one of the many medicines whose method of action is either incompletely understood or not understood at all. We know that molecule A reliably treats pathology B, but not why, and while that why is the subject of ongoing research, it's not necessary that the why be known before the molecule can be given to ailing patients.

But these mysterious phenomena are off-limits to "symbolic AI" (the previously ascendant kind of "AI," which was supplanted by today's "AI"). That kind of AI only really performs when it can operate over a model describing the theory of why A causes B (and not just the fact that A causes B for reasons unknown).

That's where the current kind of "AI" comes in. The major differentiator between the current "AI" and its immediate predecessor is that the current "AI" dispenses with models of reality. It is (in the jargon of the "Big Data" bubble that led to it) "theory-free."

In "theory-free AI," a programmer does not create a software model of reality and then ask a machine-learning system to use statistical insights from its training data to guess at how to operate over that model. Rather, the programmer shovels vastly more training data into the AI's inbox and uses titanic amounts of computing power to analyze that data and find statistical relationships without trying to explain them.

In other words, the current, "theory-free AI" finds all the instances in which A seems to cause B, but has no internal representation of why A causes B. This is true even when we know why A causes B! Purely theory-free chess programs don't operate with any conception of a board or pieces or rules – rather, they make guesses ("inferences" in AI-speak) about which chess move will be optimal based on vast, multi-dimensional arrays constructed by analyzing the statistical relationships among every chess move in their training data.

This yields a surprisingly good game of chess…until it doesn't. Because a theory-free statistical chess program doesn't "know" what a chessboard or a chess piece is and has no programmatic representation of the rules of chess, it will periodically move one of its pieces onto a square that is already occupied by another of its pieces.

When theory-free AI does this with language or image generation, we call it an "hallucination," but this is an extremely misleading metaphor. A biological "hallucination" involves some kind of misfire in your cognitive and/or sensory systems, often arising from chemical imbalances, intoxication, or neurological injury. When a theory-free AI puts a chess piece on a square where it already has a chess piece, that's because it's just extruding statistically founded guesses without any model or conception of what "chess" is. It's a feature, not a bug.

This is a very expensive way to make guesses! As far back as the 1950s, we were able to run conventional chess programs on computers built from vacuum tubes and electromechanical switches and these programs could play a valid game of chess without ever moving a chess piece to a square that one of its pieces already occupied. Modern theory-free AI that cannot manage this feat consumes heptillions of times more computing power.

That said, there's another case for theory-free AI: applying machine learning techniques to causal relationships we can observe but not explain. Remember, there are far more of these (as yet) unexplained causal relationships than there are perfectly understood ones. Theory-free AI can operate on these unexplained, observed phenomena in ways that the preceding (symbolic) AI can't. As anyone who's ever been successfully treated with a molecule whose method of action is partially or fully mysterious can attest, there's plenty of reasons to want to extract and operationalize these statistical relationships, even if we don't understand them.

The fact that theory-free AI can play chess but sometimes makes these weird errors makes it seem like a party-trick, but when you fold in the ability to operate on the (as yet) unexplained, you can see why people got interested in this about a decade ago.

What's more, the first bottleneck – the chess bottleneck – is most easily bypassed by adding the symbolic model back into the theory-free chess system. Today's "coding assistants" are hybridized in this way: they often integrate code interpreters or compilers that actually "know" what a computer program is and can head off many of these failure modes.

The introduction of these symbolic systems to theory-free systems is completely rational, and yet it represents an admission of a key limitation that theory-free AI cannot overcome. That limitation is both a technical fact, but even more importantly, it's a fact about theory-free AI's political economy: about the limitations of trading off expertise for money.

Because whatever else theory-free inference is, it is a way to swap the bottleneck of "before we can use a computer to help us do something, we need to find an expert who can explain how that thing works"; for a different bottleneck: "before we can use a computer to help us do something, we must spend an enormous amount of money on computing power to find statistical relationships between how things work."

Both money and expertise are scarce, but they are unevenly distributed. Expertise is almost entirely in the hands of people who aren't wealthy. However much money a billionaire has, they still have to hire people who have the "how to clean a toilet" or the "how to find seams of gold in quartz deposits" expertise. When that expertise is locally scarce (if there's only one person in town who know how to clean your toilet) or universally scarce (there's only one expert who can tell you which of your landholdings are likely to hold seams of gold) those experts have something that billionaires can't abide: power.

Our entire society is organized around converting money into power. Sometimes, that is overt, as when the wealthy can indenture or enslave a worker. Sometimes it is more indirect, as when the wealthy can enlist the state to limit union rights and enforce noncompete clauses in labor contracts. Sometimes it's so systemic as to be unremarkable and largely invisible, like the fact that the wealthy never have to work if they don't want to, but everyone else – no matter what expertise they hold – must work, usually for a wealthy person, lest they end up starving and homeless, with untreated medical conditions and no way to provide for their families.

Whenever a worker can say "no" to their boss, it's a sign that this system has broken down. This is where expertise comes in: a worker who has very scarce, in-demand expertise can say no to their boss all day long, because there are ten other bosses at the factory gates who'd like to offer them a job. This was the situation for many years among Silicon Valley engineers, who added an average of $1m/year to their bosses' turnover, and whose supply was very short of the demand for their rare expertise.

These engineers enjoyed all kinds of power. Not just power over their working conditions (free massages and kombucha and day care and dry cleaning), but also power over the company's products. This power crested in the late 2010s, when Google employees walked out en masse and forced the company to release them from binding arbitration waivers in their contracts, to crack down on sexual predators in the executive ranks, and to back out of billions of dollars in lethal drone projects for the Pentagon:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Google_walkouts

The promise of theory-free inference isn't just about reducing the wage-bill associated with programmers: even more, it's about reducing their power. It's about removing their power to hold bosses to account for sexual assault and the power to withhold their labor from lethal military projects. In short, the power to thwart billionaires' desires.

AI is the money-losingest enterprise the human race has ever embarked upon. More than a trillion dollars has been spent this year to make a mere $50b in revenue. The technical excitement over AI's capabilities – from chess to gold-mining to treating pancreatic cancer – cannot be separated from the political excitement that billionaires (short on expertise, flush with cash) experience at the thought of swapping money for expertise and sidelining the only people in the world who can thwart their goals.

The fact that a theory-free AI might demand far more cash to accomplish a task (even a "solved" one like playing chess) than an expert would charge is beside the point. Billionaires have money, they don't have expertise. Theory-free inference is a bid to substitute one for the other: the beauty and terror of being able to manipulate the world without studying or understanding it is that it can be done with money alone. No experts needed.

In a world in thrall to financial power, expertise is the only substantial form of power that can reliably contest the power of wealth. Moreover, expertise is the foundation of other forms of power, such as labor power, which is what we call it when experts band together to combat financial power.

This is why AI bosses are so violently allergic to the idea of hybridizing AI with symbolic systems that operate on models of the world. These models of the world must be constructed by experts, and the power of expertise cannot be reliably commanded by the power of wealth.

This is even true when theory-free methods are applied to causal phenomena that we can observe without explaining. Sure, a pharma exec like Martin Shkreli or Arthur Sackler can command the production and sale of a molecule whose method of action isn't known but whose therapeutic value has been demonstrated. But to improve on that molecule, they must pay research scientists to study and unravel the method of action. Replace those experts with theory-free inference, and finance can emerge triumphant in the only forum in which it is routinely vanquished.

This is the political economy of theory-free AI. Without finance's infinite hostility to expertise, there would have been far less capital for theory-free AI. Experts who wanted to use theory-free AI to help them unravel and operationalize the causal universe could not have laid hands of the bales of $100 bills the industry is now shoveling into its money-furnaces at a rate never seen in human history.

Which is not to say that experts can't make good use of theory-free AI. Indeed, we frequently hear from skilled workers who are using "AI" to improve the quality of their outputs:

https://hrdag.org/tech-notes/large-language-models-IPNO.html

In automation parlance, these workers are "centaurs": workers who enlist technology to serve their needs. The centaur metaphor has the worker taking the role of the top half of the mythical man/horse, the half in which the judgment and decision-making takes place; while the bottom (horsey) half is given to the machine, providing strength, speed and stamina, but only at the direction of the human mind.

The unimaginable sums that oligarchs have committed to AI are mobilized in service to creating reverse centaurs: machines that enlist humans to serve them. If theory-free inference can substitute for expertise, then the humans the machines require to accomplish those tasks that elude computers will not have the power to set the pace of their work, insist upon humane working conditions, or reject work on unethical projects:

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

The joke's on the oligarchy, though. Because theory-free inference doesn't know about chessboards, chess pieces or the rules of chess, it can't be prevented from sometimes putting a chess piece on a square that's already occupied by one of its pieces. The "hallucinations" are intrinsic to and inextricable from theory-free inference, which means that the outputs of an "AI" can only be trusted if they can be evaluated by an expert, whose working tempo must be carefully modulated lest they fall prey to "automation blindness" (rapidly, repeatedly clicking "OK" until you lose the ability to spot mistakes):

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

Theory-free inference is technically and philosophically exciting: in their quest for a way to neutralize expertise with money, oligarchs inadvertently built a series of powerful scientific instruments that revealed a heretofore unsuspected degree of statistical regularity in the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/18/surprise/#wow-signal

But the remaining, stubbornly textured and rough edges of reality are where all the value is. The things we already understand about reality are, by definition, yesterday's news, and that's all a statistical model can do: project the past into the future. But everything exciting in the future is stuff we don't understand yet. The surprising functionality of theory-free AI is itself an example of this. The most interesting and valuable thing about theory-free AI isn't the things it can do, it's the systematic discovery and mapping of the statistically regular parts of reality, whose inverse provides a map of the irregular, surprising, poorly understood (and thus exciting and promising) phenomena in our universe.

Tomorrow's breakthroughs and fortunes lie not in merely operationalizing these causal relationships: they lie in understanding them. The point of theory-free inference is to give us the tools to replace that theory-freeness with testable, validated understanding.

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)

#15yrsago Tempo: transformative, difficult look at advanced decision-making theory https://memex.craphound.com/2011/10/07/tempo-transformative-difficult-look-at-advanced-decision-making-theory/

#10yrsago Internet shutdowns cost the world at least $2.4 billion last year https://www.brookings.edu/articles/internet-shutdowns-cost-countries-2-4-billion-last-year/

#10yrsago Youtube took down MEP’s videos about torture debate https://web.archive.org/web/20160701000000*/https://marietjeschaake.eu/en/when-youtube-took-down-my-video

#10yrsago Yahoo didn’t install an NSA email scanner, it was a “buggy” NSA “rootkit” https://web.archive.org/web/20161007140143/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/yahoo-government-email-scanner-was-actually-a-secret-hacking-tool

#10yrsago The FCC helped create the Stingray problem, now it needs to fix it https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/08/fcc-created-stingray-problem-now-it-needs-fix-it

#5yrsago Scottish Limited Partnerships are still laundering criminal millions https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/07/markets-in-everything/#if-its-not-scottish

#5yrsago "Inclusive Access" allows textbook monopolists to permanently consolidate their gains https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/07/markets-in-everything/#textbook-abuses

#5yrsago DoS a federal agency, then charge for access https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/07/markets-in-everything/#no-th-enq

#1yrago They're just trying to earn a buck https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/07/take-it-easy/#but-take-it

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 (22395 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://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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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):

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 05.10.2026 à 20:58

Pluralistic: Scrutinized (05 Oct 2026)


Today's links

  • Scrutinized: Pervert glasses vs the authentic self.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: DRM-free in the UK; Maple-leaf roses; Italian Wikipedia shuts down; Vancouver's property speculator tax works; Ex-Soviet leftists launch "September"; "The Every"; Nielsen x Chinese internet; Get-a-cluevog; Cat EULA; Heart carafe; Millennials screwed; Apple's unlawful evil.
  • Upcoming appearances: Virtual, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Paris, OVancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Kilkenny, Oxford, Montreal.
  • 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.


Medieval peasants working the fields in front of a walled city. Their overseer rides a horse; his head has been replaced with a robotic camera. From all sides, gory, anatomical eyeballs intrude upon the scene, each one with a different colored iris.

Scrutinized (permalink)

We're repeatedly told that the killer app for pervert glasses – Meta's AI-enabled camera glasses and their imitators – is that they will remind you of someone's name and spare you the social awkwardness of not recognizing them.

I admit to finding this proposition very seductive. I'm mildly face-blind (I had two aunts I wasn't able to reliably tell apart until I was 12 or 13 and one of them changed her hair), and I meet a lot of people and often find myself incredibly embarrassed when I can't place someone that I know I'm acquainted with.

Actually, the emotion I feel when I don't recognize someone or can't place their name is worse than embarrassment: it's shame. I worry that my chronic inability to remember people's names/faces will make them feel like they're unimportant to me. And shame is such a shitty, gross emotion: it's the invasive thief of joy that shows up whenever things are bad for the purpose of making them worse.

If there were some way to confine pervert glasses to helping people remember names, I'd be all over them. But when it comes to actual, existing pervert-glasses, the main purpose is to covertly capture strangers and shame them. And when (not if) these pervert glasses get hooked up to facial recognition, they will become high-volume doxing factories that will reward the attention-hungry with viral fame.

We've built a society that offers infinite rewards to anyone who can put a name – and thus an identity – to anyone caught in public having an argument, picking their nose, slipping on ice, or eating with their mouth open. We're on the verge of democratizing only the worst part of celebrity: the pervasive hovering cameras that are always there to preserve and distribute your failures.

Last week on the 404 Media podcast, Joseph Cox spoke with Kashmir Hill about this, in an episode appropriately entitled "Meta's Pervert Glasses Are Going to End Privacy":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUFnQPtxJ9o

Hill wrote the definitive book on the modern history of facial recognition, Your Face Belongs To Us, which tells the story of Hoan Ton That, whose Clearview AI offers cops, millionaires and elites the power to instantly dox people based on billions of pictures:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/20/steal-your-face/#hoan-ton-that

In the podcast, Cox and Hill discuss the surveillance nightmare this represents. ICE and cops are already using facial recognition at scale, though it should be noted that these dragnets are incredibly poor value for money, as the British Transport Police discovered after subjecting millions of travelers to facial recognition in train stations, without catching a single suspect:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/29/trial-live-facial-recognition-cameras-london-stations-false-positive

But partway through the discussion, Cox and Hill switch from discussing "traditional" surveillance of the sort that has metastasized in the 25 years since 9/11) to a form of surveillance that's very different: the "content-creator" surveillance that mixes always-on cameras with facial recognition to dox and shame strangers for everyday transgressions, mistakes and embarrassments.

While this is certainly a kind of surveillance, I think it's better to call it scrutiny. It's something worse than the sense of being watched: it's the sense of being judged. Inducing this feeling of being judged has long been a (sociopathic) desire of wealthy and powerful people. It's the foundation of Bentham's "panopticon," a prison where prisoners can never tell if they're being watched, which is meant to induce a continuous performance of virtue:

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

Today, Bentham's heir is the odious Larry Ellison, the famously secretive billionaire, Trump crony and Oracle founder who goes to enormous lengths to prevent the public from finding out about his personal life. Ellison is also one of the most vocal proponents of mass surveillance. Larry Ellison has repeatedly called for the installation of ubiquitous, AI-backstopped surveillance for every (non-billionaire) person in the world, calling this "supervision":

Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/billionaire-constant-ai-surveillance

What Ellison's saying here is that most of us are fundamentally bad, and we need continuous scrutiny so that we are always haunted by the specter of judgment, which will keep us from yielding to our base selves.

In other words, for Ellison, our authentic selves are a problem to be solved. We refuse to behave in ways that make the world optimal for Ellison, so he will create a world of continuous scrutiny, judgment and punishment, and in that world, we will be so worried about being shamed that we will all suppress our authentic selves and don masks that are designed to Ellison's specifications.

Ellison is hardly unique in both treasuring his privacy while insisting that any private domain carved out by normal people will turn into a place where we indulge our most sinful impulses. Mark Zuckerberg long defended Facebook's "Real Names" policy by saying that anyone who presents different facets of themselves to different groups is "two-faced":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/15/three-wise-zucks-in-a-trenchcoat/

This is the same Mark Zuckerberg who bought two houses to either side of his place in San Francisco and expropriated vast tracts of land from their indigenous Hawai'an owners in order to create a privacy-preserving buffer zone around his own homes:

https://www.wired.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-secretive-hawaii-compound-burial-ground/

And it's the same Zuckerberg who expects the ex-Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams to pay him $111m for revealing damning facts about how he runs his company:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/27/zuckerstreisand-2/#autodisparagement

It's the same Zuckerberg who flipped out when his sister accidentally posted a family photo to her public Facebook feed and it spread around the internet:

https://abc7news.com/archive/8933289/

And it's the same Zuckerberg who gave us pervert glasses (to opt out, just don't have a face).

Silicon Valley's most ardent privacy invaders are also the most ardent defenders of their own privacy. Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt liked to say, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place":

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmidt-dismisses-privacy

But when Cnet ran an article summarizing details of Schmidt's personal life that could be discovered by searching Google, he ordered a company-wide blacklist of Cnet reporters, which lasted for years:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/eric-schmidt-who-led-googles-transformation-into-a-tech-giant-has-left-the-company/

But Schmidt is an amateur at the game of "privacy for me, never for thee." The true master of the game is Peter Thiel, who secretly bankrolled a lawsuit against Gawker in order to destroy the news outlet in retaliation for outing him as gay (Thiel cofounded Palantir, one of the world's most prolific, shameless surveillance companies):

https://www.wired.com/story/ryan-holiday-conspiracy-peter-thiel-gawker-hulk-hogan/

It's tempting to see this all as mere hypocrisy, but I think it's something far weirder and more disturbing. These men understand completely that scrutiny is antithetical to living as your authentic self. They want to live as their authentic selves, and they want to stop us from living as our authentic selves.

A dive into the Epstein Files reveals the oligarchy's panic over #MeToo and the possibility that the private sins of the wealthy and powerful could become a matter of public knowledge. As Steve Bannon wrote to Epstein concerning #MeToo, "Make sure Woody sees this. Nobody safe":

https://www.theverge.com/tech/874721/epstein-thiel-musk-trump-metoo

Bannon promised Epstein that his culture war would set back #MeToo for a decade, and he is on the vanguard of the movement to silence rape and genocide survivors, and, of course, to force trans people out of public life. For the fascist international to live as their authentic self, it is necessary that we do not.

Scrutiny and shame are antithetical to authenticity, growth and happiness. That's true even when it's people we love subjecting us to a supervisory gaze. Ever notice how a roaring great time at a social gathering can go ice-cold in an instant, the minute someone decides to record the moment with their phone?

My worst moments as a parent – the ones that haunt me and shame me – are those moments when my young daughter was doing something that was right at the edge of her abilities, ferociously concentrating as she drew or played or read, and rather than give her the space to be vulnerable, to err in private and grow, I couldn't help but watch her. When she saw me watching her, the moment died and she moved on to something else.

Each of us needs a zone of imaginative and exertive autonomy, a place where we can screw up without being scrutinized and judged – let alone captured and publicized. Pervert glasses will supercharge the banal and destructive post-9/11 surveillance, sure – but more than that, they will be combined with facial recognition to dox and shame anyone and everyone who makes a public mistake.

Far from Larry Ellison's utopia of people on their "best behavior," this will be a world of inauthentic, stunted selves, a society of people who will never know the joy of finding out who we are and being those people.

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 Nielsen will measure Chinese web-traffic https://web.archive.org/web/20011107063612/http://www.bday.net/oct05/p05-051.htm

#25yrsago Fluevog's crowdsourced "open source" design competition assigns all rights in perpetuity to the company https://memex.craphound.com/2001/10/06/a-little-knowledge-is-a/

#20yrsago Cat with a EULA https://wendy.seltzer.org/blog/archives/2006/10/06/coming_soon_kitten_with_a_eula.html

#20yrsago HOWTO fight DRM in the UK https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/30-things-we-can-do-about-drm/

#20yrsago HOWTO fold roses from maple-leaves https://web.archive.org/web/20061010121159/http://haha.nu/creative/how-to-make-roses-from-maple-leaves/

#15yrsago Italy’s insane Internet law prompts removal of Italian Wikipedia https://cdt.org/insights/case-in-point-why-wikipedia-italy-would-rather-perish-than-publish/

#15yrsago Wine carafe shaped like human heart https://web.archive.org/web/20111008062759/https://www.livianaosti.com/index.php?/prodotto/cuore/

#10yrsago Millennials are legit screwed https://eig.org/millennial/#1473667707197-bfde262a-83c9

#10yrsago Would-be Ukip leader hospitalised following “altercation” (“punched by a colleague”) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-37572377

#10yrsago Merciless reporting on the Chicago Police Department’s extortion racket, & the senior officials who covered it up https://web.archive.org/web/20161006133720/https://theintercept.com/2016/10/06/in-the-chicago-police-department-if-the-bosses-say-it-didnt-happen-it-didnt-happen/

#10yrsago Canadian government has turned “consultation” on warrantless mass surveillance into a sales-job https://citizenlab.ca/research/digital-anonymity-subscriber-identification-revisited-yet-again/

#10yrsago Think like a computer scientist: free, interactive textbook https://web.archive.org/web/20130813233552/http://interactivepython.org/runestone/static/thinkcspy/index.html

#10yrago July: Vancouver imposes a 15% tax on foreign real estate speculators; September: home sales drop by a third https://web.archive.org/web/20161004200501/https://mishtalk.com/2016/10/04/vancouver-bubble-burst/

#10yrsago Left-wing activists across the former USSR launch “September,” to rally opposition to far-right movements https://globalvoices.org/2016/10/05/september-a-new-platform-for-leftists-across-the-former-soviet-union/

#5yrsago Dave Eggers' "The Every" https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/05/masha-rides-again/#everywhere

#5yrsago We paid to develop Merck's covid pill https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/06/merck-cenary/#businesslike

#1yrago Apple's unlawful evil https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/06/rogue-capitalism/#orphaned-syrian-refugees-need-not-apply

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.
https://www.epl.ca/blogs/post/elbows-up-with-cory-doctorow/


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

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 03.10.2026 à 14:07

Pluralistic: Economic probabilities for our grandchildren (03 Oct 2026)


Today's links

  • Economic probabilities for our grandchildren: If only data centers would stop hogging all the copper.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: RIAA v P2P; Infoseek's anti-terror brain-scanner; Copyrighting every phone number; Carving pumpkins with cookie-cutters; Polish women go on strike; Latent labor in material world; Hitler's meth; "Flying Saucers Are Real!"; Hope, not optimism; Broadcast Flag talk; David Suzuki's free research; "Inquisitor's Apprentice"; California's tax ban made the rich MUCH richer; Union organizers caught Wells Fargo; Power poses aren't real; "Ghosts"; Criticizing tech; "Savage Love A-Z."
  • Upcoming appearances: Brighton, Virtual, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Paris, OVancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Kilkenny, Montreal.
  • Recent appearances: Where I've been.
  • Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Colophon: All the rest.


The Earth from space; it is covered in scaffolding that is crawling with little rude mechanicals ganked from 17th century engravings of people operating machines.

Economic probabilities for our grandchildren (permalink)

The post-war "peace dividend" owed its existence to three factors: industrial capacity, political freedom and pent-up demand.

  • Industrial capacity: freed up by the war's end and the collapse of demand for munitions and materiel;

  • Political freedom: the war's orgy of capital destruction of the majority of the wealth (and thus the power) of the world's oligarchs;

  • Demand: Making up for years of neglect and privation during the war required new production of infrastructure and consumption goods.

In Capital in the 21st Century, Thomas Piketty and his students analyzed painstakingly assembled records of 300 years' worth of capital flows, showing that wealth tends to pool in the hands of the already-wealthy. This creates mounting instability, thanks to the misrule of a shrinking class of increasingly powerful hereditary, unaccountable oligarchs whose whims and follies trump the material and political needs of the vast majority:

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

That instability eventually reaches a breaking point in which the old order collapses in spectacular fashion, and that collapse destroys vast amounts of capital stock. Since this breaking point arrives as a result of oligarchy, in which nearly all the world's wealth has been hoarded by a tiny number of people, those aristocrats are disproportionately impoverished by the conflagration. If 90% of the wealth is in the hands of 1% of the people, a war or disaster that wipes out most capital will mostly destroy the wealth of the 1%. The poor suffer terribly, but they start with nothing – and end with nothing.

We are clearly steaming into one of these situations. The wealthy squandered two generations preventing the world from taking the climate emergency, and now the inevitable has arrived. California is on track to see a 12 inch sea-level rise in the next month:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/30/california-kelvin-wave-sea-level-rise

That's just the overture to the American run of this year's "Super El Nino," a blockbuster whose out-of-town previews have been slaying massive crowds all over the world:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/oct/03/bangkok-thailand-floods-breaking-point-stagnant-lakes

Also right on schedule: the misrule of oligarchs has elevated a con-man to the presidency, who trumps every other president for both corruption and incompetence. From oil to dollars, telecoms infrastructure to the internet itself, Donald Trump is doing everything in his power to end the American empire:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/16/technopoly/#trumpismo-is-praxis-question-mark-exclamation-point

A post-American world is on the horizon. What that world will look like is undecided. The US was always a wildly defective trusted third party, but it retained its status as the world's platform for generations thanks to the absence of credible alternatives. Now – as Mark Carney told the Davos crowd last year – the old system has "ruptured":

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

What will replace the dollar?

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/11/post-dollar-world/#de-dollarization

What will replace oil?

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/11/cyber-rights-now/#better-late-than-never

What will replace the internet?

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

No one knows. No one can know, because this is all up for grabs. The future isn't something that happens to us. The future is something that we make. And despite the horrible death toll that's locked in by waves of climate shocks – presided over by the dying, fumbling "drink bleach" guy – it's conceivable that the future we get will be a good one, if not an easy one.

A post-oligarch, post-American world could be a post-austerity world, one where we recognize that the limiting factor on public investment isn't money, but resources: energy, material, labor, expertise:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FATQ0Yf0Fhc

Just as the post-war world led to the "30 glorious years" by mobilizing people and material to rebuild a shattered world and shattered lives, a post-American world might be one in which we find full, meaningful employment for all of us, all of our children, and all of their children:

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

As seas rise, we're going to have jobs for every person who is willing, building sea defenses and moving whole coastal cities inland. Two generations of neoliberalism has left us with massive shortages of housing stock, crumbling highways, inadequate schools and hospitals. That means we need to build lots more of these, and they can be built with state-of-the-art climate hardening, including geothermal heat, "passive home" designs, modern insulation, and heat-pumps. The rights-of-way for the interstate system would make dandy railbeds for arrow-straight, all electric high-speed rail powered by solar, wind and tides.

All of this has the potential to yield a second peace-dividend prosperity. A post-oligarch world can recover industrial capacity by diverting it away from destructive activity (data centers, luxury housing) to essential functions (climate defenses, decent housing for everyday people). A post-oligarch world can recover democratic excellence by removing the malign influence that morbid wealth exerts on our policy choices: for example, if we don't like the quality of public schools, we can fix them by giving schools more resources, not by letting billionaire dilettantes privatize and starve them in the name of "school choice":

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/09/autocrats-of-trade-2/#witness-the-firepower-of-this-fully-armed-and-operational-battle-station

Finally, a post-oligarch society can provide us with an even more inclusive version of post-war prosperity: we can use the wages we earn by building a better world to acquire new homes, induction tops, EVs and ebikes, and beautiful heirloom computers that are built to last for generations, upgraded and maintained by their users:

https://www.edn.com/as-moores-law-slows-open-hardware-rises/

This is a world of material abundance and prosperity. Just as the post-war world made millions of people comfortable, educated and happy by putting them to work clearing the rubble and building something better, a post-oligarch, post-American world can offer us all all the hard, rewarding work we want, performing the essential work of care and rebuilding. We'll find that work by helping hundreds of millions of climate refugees, who will find work helping each other. This is all economically valuable, environmentally sustaining work that we have labor, energy and expertise for. It's just that all that labor, energy and expertise is being misallocated by the ultra-wealthy who don't even believe that the majority of us exist, and who want to bet the planet and our species on a bizarre scheme to feed so many words to the world-guessing machines that they wake up and become gods:

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

Nearly a century ago, John Maynard Keynes published "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren," where he extrapolated from rising productivity to predict a fifteen-hour work-week within two generations:

http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf

That dream was destroyed by war and greed. Today, we are submerged in an ocean of debt. I'm not talking about the (fictional) "national debt" that is just a measure of all the dollars the government has spent into existence without taxing out of existence:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/21/we-can-have-nice-things/#public-funds-not-taxpayer-dollars

I'm talking about fiscal debt: the solar we didn't build, the carbon we emitted instead; the rail we didn't build, the wildly inefficient aviation we substituted; the walkable, livable, transit-oriented cities we didn't build, the car-choked disasters we built instead. Oligarchic opposition to universal healthcare left us sick, with un- or undertreated illnesses and missed opportunities for prevention that left us with overlapping, population-scale health crises. All of this is debt that must be repaid: we can't walk away from it through bankruptcy. We must build the transit, cities, and systems of care – the infrastructure – our species needs to carry on human civilization. We can't keep hitting snooze on this, lest we are finally awoken by seawater lapping at our pillows.

The world we're in today is awful and terrifying. It's awful because of the climate ruptures we're living through. It's terrifying because we didn't just fail to avert this crisis – we did nothing to prepare for it, either.

As Piketty foretold, the misrule of oligarchs has led to an orgy of destruction, and while poor people will get the worst of it, oligarchs will pay the most, because they own nearly everything, which means they own everything that will be destroyed, too. None of that is good, and it would be better if we hadn't gotten into this situation in the first place.

But after a forest fire, the canopy opens; and when it does, the seedlings that were overshadowed for centuries by the old growth can sprout in the ashes and the sun. We can't afford to continue living under oligarchy, and as oligarchs' greed and folly drives the old system beyond its breaking point, we must seize the opportunity to build a better successor.

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 Leak: RIAA's anti-P2P strategy https://web.archive.org/web/20011019060035/https://www.dotcomscoop.com/riaa1003.html

#25yrsago Infoseek founder: my brain-scanner can find all the terrorists https://web.archive.org/web/20011009025805/http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/22020.html

#25yrsago Copyrighting every possible phone number as a touch-tone tune https://web.archive.org/web/20011007073546/http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/2001/10/04/FFX0PGT0CSC.html

#20yrsago What happens to password-locked data when you die? https://web.archive.org/web/20061106235805/http://news.com.com/Taking+passwords+to+the+grave/2100-1025_3-6118314.html

#20yrsago Audio of activist lawyer talk on Broadcast Flag and Chilling Effects https://web.archive.org/web/20061005074245/http://uscpublicdiplomacy.com/index.php/events/events_detail/1859/

#20yrsago David Suzuki: Steal my research – that’s what it’s for! https://web.archive.org/web/20061020144546/http://www.davidsuzuki.org/about_us/Dr_David_Suzuki/Article_Archives/weekly09290601.asp

#20yrsago Interdisciplinary DRM blog from my USC students https://uscpubd510.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2006-08-24T14:59:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=91&by-date=false

#15yrsag Inquisitor’s Apprentice: tenement sorcerers versus the robber barons in an alternate Gilded Age New York https://memex.craphound.com/2011/10/04/inquisitors-apprentice-tenement-sorcerers-versus-the-robber-barons-in-an-alternate-gilded-age-new-york/

#15yrsago Context: Further Selected Essays on Productivity, Creativity, Parenting, and Politics in the 21st Century https://memex.craphound.com/2011/10/03/context-further-selected-essays-on-productivity-creativity-parenting-and-politics-in-the-21st-century/

#15yrsago Unicode’s “right-to-left” override obfuscates malware’s filenames https://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/09/right-to-left-override-aids-email-attacks/

#15yrsago HOWTO carve a pumpkin by hammering cookie-cutters into it https://web.archive.org/web/20200916004345/https://www.foodnetwork.com/fn-dish/shopping/cookie-cutter-pumpkin-carving

#15yrsago Shell funded warring militias in the Niger Delta https://web.archive.org/web/20111006003453/http://blog.platformlondon.org/2011/10/03/counting-the-cost-corporations-and-human-rights-abuses-in-the-niger-delta/

#10yrsago Sen Mitch McConnell blames Obama for bill that Obama vetoed and McConnell repeatedly voted for https://www.loweringthebar.net/2016/10/congress-blames-veto.html

#10yrsago Polish women go on strike over extreme anti-abortion law https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-37540139

#10yrsago Survivors of CIA torture describe homebrew electric chair used at Afghan black site https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/10/03/interview-new-cia-torture-claims

#10yrsago Visualizing the latent emotional and bureaucratic labor in our material world https://xkcd.com/1741/

#10yrsago Meth, Hitler and the Reich: the true, untold story of the Nazis’ dependence on coke, meth and oxy https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/25/blitzed-norman-ohler-adolf-hitler-nazi-drug-abuse-interview

#10yrsago Flying Saucers are Real! Anthology of the lost saucer-craze https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/03/flying-saucers-are-real-anthology-of-the-lost-saucer-craze/

#10yrsago The malware that’s pwning the Internet of Things is terrifyingly amateurish https://web.archive.org/web/20161004061621/http://motherboard.vice.com/read/internet-of-things-malware-mirai-ddos

#10yrsago California’s 40-year-old ban on property tax raises has made the rich a lot richer https://web.archive.org/web/20161001034224/https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-prop-13–20160929-snap-story.html

#10yrsago The Wells Fargo fraud came to light because of union organizers https://web.archive.org/web/20161005123132/https://prospect.org/article/first-and-foremost-wells-fargo-scandal-about-workers

#10yrsago “Power Poses” are bullshit https://web.archive.org/web/20161007215414/https://www.wbur.org/npr/496093672/power-poses-co-author-i-do-not-believe-the-effects-are-real

#10yrsago Martin Shkreli offers a bailout to ailing 4chan https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/10/4chan-cashflow-problem-martin-shkreli-wants-to-join-board/

#10yrsago Ghosts: Raina Telgemeier’s upbeat tale of death, assimilation and cystic fibrosis https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/04/ghosts-raina-telgemeiers-upbeat-tale-of-death-assimilation-and-cystic-fibrosis/

#10yrsago Yahoo secretly built a tool to scan all email in realtime for US spies https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN1241YT/

#10yrsago How to: Criticize technology https://www.cjr.org/tow_center_reports/constructive_technology_criticism.php

#10yrsago Johnson & Johnson says people with diabetes don’t need to worry about potentially lethal wireless attacks on insulin pumps https://www.reuters.com/article/us-johnson-johnson-cyber-insulin-pumps-e-idUSKCN12411L/

#5yrsago USPS pilots postal banking https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/04/avoidance-is-evasion/#check-cashing

#5yrsago The Pandora Papers https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/04/avoidance-is-evasion/#transparency

#5yrsago Savage Love A-Z https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/04/avoidance-is-evasion/#ggg

#5yrsago Hope, Not Optimism https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/03/hope-not-optimism/

#1yrago When your ISP pays you https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/03/we-dont-care-we-dont-have-to/#were-the-phone-company

#1yrago Blue Bonds https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/04/fiscal-antifa/#post-trump

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.
https://www.epl.ca/blogs/post/elbows-up-with-cory-doctorow/


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: 504 (21882 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 01.10.2026 à 19:22

Pluralistic: Voting is to politics as shopping is to boycotts (01 Oct 2026)


Today's links


Two suffragists in period dress, ceremonially putting ballots into a ballot box. The background has been replaced with an elaborate collage of 19th C printing-press parts. The ballots are glowing with radiant spikes. The face of the ballot box has been replaced with an Nvidia Vera Lynn GPU.

Voting is to politics as shopping is to boycotts (permalink)

Here's a funny thing about the right to vote: it wasn't won by voting.

From the Magna Carta to the US Constitution to the Emancipation Proclamation to 19th Amendment, voting rights (what you might call "Big P" Politics) were always downstream of protests, riots, petitions, mass movements, strikes and good, old fashioned community organizing (that is, "small p" politics).

Which is to say, Big P politics matter, but to make them matter, we need a lot of small p politics. That means that democracy isn't something you do every couple of years with a ballot paper (though that's an important aspect of the process). Democracy is continuous.

If you've ever wondered why your vote seems to accomplish so little, I think you can blame the near-abolition of small p politics by Big P politicians of every stripe. Indeed, Obama's genius was summoning up an army of door-knocking, phone-banking small p political activists and then euthanizing that organization after he won the election:

https://newrepublic.com/article/140245/obamas-lost-army-inside-fall-grassroots-machine

For Obama, the grassroots were useful for one thing: getting out the vote. The last thing he wanted was for millions of activated voters to turn into activists who'd flame him and harangue him and picket him if they didn't like his compromises. Boy, did Obama ever compromise.

He let the bank executives who created the Great Financial Crisis off the hook and encouraged them to foreclose on the homes of millions of Americans, the very same public that had bailed them out:

https://theweek.com/articles/624777/obamas-biggest-failure

He shielded the CIA's torturers from scrutiny and prosecution:

https://journals.law.harvard.edu/ilj/2009/04/obama-publishes-torture-memos-immunizes-cia-staff/

He reneged on his promise to shut down Gitmo:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/obama-failed-close-guantanamo

And his promise to hold the phone companies to account for their complicity in the NSA's mass domestic surveillance:

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/obama-on-mass-government-surveillance-then-and-now/

He stepped up secret drone warfare:

https://www.cfr.org/articles/obamas-final-drone-strike-data

And unconstitutional domestic surveillance:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/01/obama-expands-surveillance-powers-his-way-out

Whenever I raise this, Obama's apologists come out of the woodwork to tell me that "the president isn't the Green Lantern," and that Obama couldn't act without help from Congress and the Senate, who wouldn't back his plays.

I think that Trump's presidency has shown us how much power the president really has even when the legislature won't play ball. But even if you accept the Green Lantern apologetics, the fact remains that Obama could have had a clamoring army of ardent supporters in the streets, defending his agenda against recalcitrants in his own party and wreckers in the GOP. He chose not to have that army. He sent that army home.

It's like Obama heard the story about post-election FDR telling civil rights leaders, "I want to do it, now make me do it," and concluded, "I don't want to do it, so I'd better not let anyone make me do it":

https://www.quora.com/Did-Franklin-Roosevelt-ever-say-I-agree-with-you-I-want-to-do-it-now-make-me-do-it

Of course, Trump is doing everything he can to extinguish both small p politics and Big P Politics. It's not just his wildly illegal voter suppression tactics. He's banning and prosecuting political groups, invoking anti-terror laws (which Obama supported and promised would only be used proportionately and wisely) to chase his grassroots opposition underground:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/designating-antifa-as-a-domestic-terrorist-organization/

Liberals are often contemptuous of grassroots movements (cf "basket of deplorables," "Green Lantern" scolding), but the right is terrified of them. The right's political leadership is terrified of its own grassroots, and rightly so, because those people are maniacs, and they're the reason the GOP has been pushed into its most extreme positions. The right's grassroots, meanwhile, are afraid of the left's grassroots. The last thing they want is a militant, organized, mobilized base pushing Dem politicians to take the stands that are wildly and widely popular in America, from Medicare for All to an end to ICE – the Mamdani agenda, in other words.

Mamdani is the anti-Obama. He shows what happens when a progressive candidate nurtures and co-governs with their base after the election, using millions of passionate, committed, everyday people to steamroller anyone who gets in the way of his agenda:

https://www.nyc.gov/content/100days/pages/

Of course the downside of this is that when Mamdani reneges on his pledges, he is loudly and furiously held to account for it:

https://www.thecityreporter.nyc/2026/02/19/mamdani-budget-parks-libraries/

Mamdani understood that he would be corralled into compromises if he won the mayoralty and that when he made those compromises, his base would come after him with the unmistakable fury of betrayed idealists. He also understood that any comfort he enjoyed by sidelining his base while in office would come at a price far higher than being yelled at by his supporters: it would cost him the ability to get anything done.

Voting for Mamdani was important. It got him elected. But staying organized – in unions, neighborhood clubs, affinity groups, DSA chapters and mutual aid groups – is what's letting him get stuff done, and stopping him from bailing on his promises as politically infeasible.

In other words, voting only matters if it's the final stage of a sustained campaign to build and mobilize popular power. Without that, voting will get you precious little. The right's leadership understands this very well, which is why they've spent years attacking unions, community organizers like Acorn, and activist institutions like Planned Parenthood. We must defend voting rights – Big P Politics – to the bitter end, but we need to defend organizing – small p politics – just as ferociously.

The reduction of politics to voting is part of the 50 year neoliberal project whose foremost goal is to make you think of yourself as an atomized individual and not as a member of a polity. Turning "politics" into "voting" is absolutely in line with Margaret Thatcher's dictum that "there is no such thing as society." It's the same move that convinced workers that the answer to bad working conditions is looking your boss in the eye and threatening to change jobs (not forming a union and striking).

It's also the same move that transformed "boycotts" into "shopping." Boycotts are a collective enterprise. Before a boycott takes place, small-p political groups hold meetings, organize alternatives and communicate their demands. During a boycott, organizers work to insulate participants from reprisals, like the Montgomery Bus Boycott organizers who reasoned and remonstrated with employers who disciplined workers whose participation made them late for work.

And yes, as part of a boycott, you make some consumption choices. You buy X instead of Y. But "shopping" by itself isn't a boycott. You can't "vote with your wallet" (especially not when billionaires get to vote against you with their wallets):

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

Shopping isn't politics, and while voting is Politics (Big P), it's also not politics (small p). A boycott, on the other hand, is politics. What's more, "shopping" has the same relationship to "boycotts" that "voting" has to "politics." It's a step you take, after you've laid a lot of groundwork with other people, as part of a mass movement.

I understand why shopping and voting are more attractive than boycotts and politics. Meetings suck. Hell is other people:

https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-hell-is-other-people/

But changing the system requires systemic work. Hell is other people because other people are great but it's so hard to get them to do things your way. That takes time and understanding and togetherness and arguing and forgiving.

Not everyone has time or capacity for that, and at any given time, we don't all have to be doing that work. We can take turns, spelling each other off at times in our lives when we have more or less slack. But lots of us have to be in the fight, or all of us will get screwed. There aren't enough of us doing politics right now. We can tell, because our politicians are so contemptuous of the grassroots that they will sell us out without a moment's hesitation, smugly certain that they will face no consequences for doing so:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/22/happy-chudmas/#baloney-in-our-slacks

Oligarchs have it easy. Where we have to convince people to fight, they can pay or threaten people to bring them into line. But oligarchs' power is wearing thin. The data-center uprising shows how much fury there is out there, looking for a productive outlet:

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/with-the-backlash-to-data-centers

Data centers are very bad and very visible, so they make for good targets. But data centers are only the physical extrusion of a vast, brutal, extractive system. The most important way to fight data centers is to take everyone you meet protesting one and organize with them to scare the shit out of "your" politicians so they don't dare compromise on anything.

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 GWB's press secretary to media: "watch what you do, watch what you say" https://web.archive.org/web/20010926223602/https://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010926-5.html#BillMaher-Comments#BillMaher-Comments

#20yrsago Stencils kit “may not be reproduced in any form” https://web.archive.org/web/20061022000842/http://www.fairuseday.com/index.php/2006/10/01/copyright-is-broken/

#20yrsago DVD Jon selling Apple DRM to Apple’s competitors https://web.archive.org/web/20061004191106/https://featured.gigaom.com/2006/10/02/dvd-jon-fairplays-apple/

#20yrsago Unpaid diplomatic parking tickets as index of national corruption https://web.archive.org/web/20130719065306/https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/10/primary-sources/305203/

#20yrsago Canadian deported to Syria for torture is cleared https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/oct/02/worlddispatch

#20yrsago Gilberto Gil slams WIPO https://fromgeneva.blogspot.com/2006/09/wipo-general-assembly-impressions-from.html

#20yrsago Speech given by censored Apple WiFi hacker at ToorCon https://craphound.com/cache_toorcon_2006.txt

#10yrsago Company suspected of blame in Office of Personnel Management breach will help run new clearance agency https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-security-background-idUSKCN1202M6/

#10yrsago Wells Fargo started demanding fraud of its employees in 1998; Illinois cuts Wells off from state business https://www.citizen.org/wp-content/uploads/wells-fargo-king-of-cross-sell.pdf

#10yrsago Google: if you support Amazon’s Echo, you’re cut off from Google Home and Chromecast https://variety.com/2016/digital/news/google-home-amazon-echo-chromecast-1201874125/

#5yrsago How the IMF loan-sharks the global south https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/02/debt-trap/#global-arm-breakers

#1yrago Decarbonization at a distance https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/02/there-goes-the-sun/#carbon-shifting

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.
https://www.epl.ca/blogs/post/elbows-up-with-cory-doctorow/


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: 509 (20770 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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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 29.09.2026 à 15:40

Pluralistic: Lindsay Owens's "Gouged" (29 Sep 2026)


Today's links

  • Lindsay Owens's "Gouged": The end of a fair price and what that means for your wallet.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Doonesbury on 9/11; Suspicious Looking Device; Elephant-shit paper; The Onion x TSA liquid rules; Borders goodbye letter; Voting machines suck; EFF v DRM; Matt Furie on the hijacking of Pepe; Austerity v last steam-loom; Facebook x "disinformation" criticism.
  • Upcoming appearances: Boston, Brighton, Virtual, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Paris, OVancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Kilkenny, Montreal.
  • Recent appearances: Where I've been.
  • Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Colophon: All the rest.


The cover for Lindsay Owens's 'Gouged.'

Lindsay Owens's "Gouged" (permalink)

Lindsay Owens is the executive director of Groundwork Collaborative, who have done some of the most important work on surveillance pricing (using computers to spy on you to rip you off) and algorithmic wage discrimination (using computers to spy on you and steal your wages). Today, she publishes Gouged, a comprehensive, accessible guide to this modern scourge:

https://gougedbook.com/

Owens and Groundwork have done as much as anyone to publicize and fight against the use of corporate power, computers and vast troves of commercial surveillance data to pick your pocket, shrink your paycheck and make the worst people on earth far richer. It was Katie Wells, a Groundwork fellow, who co-authored the report describing how the apps nurses use to get shiftwork collude with data-brokers to find out how much money nurses owe on their credit cards, so they can pay the most desperate nurses lower wages:

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

Owens helped coin the term "the age of recoupment," to describe this current moment in which companies that chased all their competitors out of the market with predatory pricing are now jacking up prices, knowing they're the only game in town:

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

And Owens helped lead a study that showed that Instacart was using surveillance data to jack up prices by 20% or more based on inferences about your willingness and ability to pay (after the study was published, Instacart promised they'd stop doing it):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/11/nothing-personal/#instacartography

Owens and Groundwork have a keen eye for the structural conditions that allow companies to screw their workers and customers, especially the role that competition plays in keeping companies' greed in check. Take their proposal for "street pricing" in sports stadiums: like everyone, they understand that sports stadium owners know that you can't easily step outside for a snack, so they've raised prices to the sky:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/28/street-pricing/#sportball-analogies

They have a simple solution: just force vendors to charge the same prices as the shopkeepers in the neighborhood – the ones whose customers can take their business elsewhere. This proposal polls high (Groundwork does a lot of polling), both with Democrats and Republicans (despite the latter group's allergy to "price controls"). It's a good example of the kind of policy work Groundwork does: diagnosing a problem and coming up with a solution that's easy to administer and easy to explain, in terms that are popular with people from all walks of life.

This is the spirit of Gouged: laying out the baroque, data-driven scams that underpin an ever-increasing part of your life in plain language and tracing those scams back to specific policy choices.

Owens does important work here: sector by sector and scam by scam, she lays out how companies collude – often with the assistance of a captured and tame state – to reduce competition in order to raise prices, from groceries to rents to airline tickets. She describes how online sellers exploit their information asymmetry, their ability to both directly observe you and millions of other consumers, and to augment those observations with sensitive information purchased from the wild west of data brokers, to steer you into paying more and getting less. These schemes run the gamut from subscriptions you sign up for with a single click but can't get shut off without canceling your credit card, to lengthy check-out processes that end with a long set of junk prices that tack another 10 or 20% onto the cost you thought you were about to pay.

All of this raises a deceptively simple-sounding question: what is a fair price? Owens takes us through the history of pricing, and the American tradition – begun by Quakers – of replacing haggling with price-tags, and setting those prices at "cost plus a reasonable percentage." She describes an ideological project, a cousin to the neoliberal revolution of Carter and Reagan, to replace this "fair price" with a "market price" that was calculated to be whatever the market would bear. She introduces us to the men who spent a generation dreaming of the technology to change every price for every customer, every time that customer entered the marketplace, and she shows us how, when they got their wish, they shifted billions away from workers and shoppers to owners.

Remember: a wage is also a price: it's the price you get for your labor and the precious, irreplaceable hours of your life. The same men who committed to making prices you pay as high as possible were every bit as committed to ensuring that the price you charged for those unrecoverable moments of the only life you will ever live as low as possible. Every scam to make you pay more has a mirror-image scam that ensures you are paid less. This is the logical trajectory of the gig economy – a way to bring that same exploitable information asymmetry to labor markets, where the boss can observe everyone on the payroll and how much (how little) they've accepted from job to job, but workers don't even know who the other workers are, much less what they're getting paid.

All of this is laid out with admirable clarity and detail. By the time you get to the last chapter, you'll know exactly how you're getting scammed, who is scamming you, and why they're getting away with it. The final chapter is meant to be the "What do we do about it?" chapter, and regrettably, it's weaker than other parts of the book. Owens urges you to have conversations with your friends about these things, she urges you to take basic measures to defend your privacy, and lists some businesses that have steered clear of the scams she describes in the book, with the implication that you could bring your business to these companies and ones like them.

There is nothing wrong with this advice. Every word of it is sound, and your life – and the world – will be better off if you follow it. But this wasn't what I hoped for from someone with such an excellent track record of devising shovel-ready, highly leveraged, popular policy proposals. I would much rather have been presented with a half-dozen well-thought-through, well-explained rules or laws that could really strike at the root of these problems.

The pathologies Owens presents in this book can be traced to the Chicago School, a group of radical economists who won favor with Carter, Reagan, Thatcher, and other architects of neoliberalism. The Chicago School's chief strategist was Milton Friedman, who spent decades advocating for the policies that went on to destroy the world as we knew it. Before Friedman was ascendant, his colleagues would ask him how in the world he expected his plans – totally alien to the political consensus of the day – to ever turn into action.

Friedman had a stock answer for this question: "In times of crisis, ideas move from the periphery to the center. Our job is to 'keep ideas lying around' so that when the crisis strikes, we will be able to seize the moment."

Friedman was a monster, but he was right. There's always a crisis, eventually – the world is big and complicated and subject to all kinds of shocks. Friedman didn't need a crystal ball to predict a crisis – the next crisis was eminently foreseeable. Today, crises are coming thicker and faster than ever, as Friedman's program of autocratic rule and extraction reaches a boiling point.

Each of the scams that Owens lays out in her book is a crisis in waiting. When those crises arrive, I would love to go into it knowing which policies could have prevented it, so that I can blame our policymakers for failing to prevent it, and, after they've been defenestrated, I can demand that anyone who seeks to replace them promise to take meaningful steps to end the crisis and prevent it from happening again.

Throughout this excellent book, Owens makes an indisputable case that the problems she describes have a systemic root. They're not caused by wickedness or greed – they're caused by a system designed to reward wickedness and greed. There's nothing wrong with giving people some simple measures they can take to protect themselves from such a system, but those protections will only ever be partial and temporary. I would have been far more energized if those personal measures had been a prelude to a chapter designed to equip me with a list of bold, muscular policy demands.

Long ago, Owens convinced me that the system is rigged and we all deserve better. This book made that case even clearer. I want to know how we get beyond modest personal protections and make our way to a better world for all.

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 Doonesbury on 9/11 https://web.archive.org/web/20020309055239/http://www2.uclick.com/feature/01/10/01/db011001.gif

#20yrsago Suspicious Looking Device exists to incite unease https://web.archive.org/web/20061107112421/http://junkfunnel.com/sld/

#20yrsago HOWTO make elephant-shit paper https://web.archive.org/web/20061020105837/https://intensehumour.blogspot.com/2006/09/elephant-dung-paper.html

#20yrsago The Onion on TSA liquid restrictions https://web.archive.org/web/20061001102305/https://theonion.com/content/node/53536

#15yrsago Goodbye letter from Borders employee(s) (?) spills secrets of bookselling trade https://memex.craphound.com/2011/09/30/goodbye-letter-from-borders-employees-spills-secrets-of-bookselling-trade/

#10yrsago Electronic voting machines suck, the comprehensive 2016 election edition https://web.archive.org/web/20160930060538/https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-voting-technology/

#10yrsago Shadow Regulation: the secret laws that giant corporations cook up in back rooms https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/09/shadow-regulation-back-room-threat-digital-rights

#10yrsago EFF to court: don’t let US government prosecute professor over his book about securing computers https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-asks-court-block-us-prosecuting-security-researcher-detecting-and-publishing

#10yrsago Matt Furie on the experience of having his Pepe the Frog character hijacked by white supremacists https://riylcast.tumblr.com/post/151123916140/episode-187-matt-furie-bonus

#10yrsago Arkansas lawmaker who pushed law protecting right to video police is arrested for videoing an arrest https://web.archive.org/web/20160930151809/https://theintercept.com/2016/09/30/lawmaker-who-pushed-bill-to-protect-people-filming-police-arrested-for-filming-police/

#10yrsago Austerity kills the last steam-powered loom in the world https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-lancashire-37512136

#5yrsago Facebook thrives on criticism of "disinformation" https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/30/dont-believe-the-criti-hype/#ordinary-mediocrities

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.

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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 28.09.2026 à 19:48

Pluralistic: Priceful (28 Sep 2026)


Today's links

  • Priceful: So worthless we can tell you what it's worth.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Nasdaq allows post-9/11 penny stocks; USAF can shoot down civilian aircraft; TSA bans calling Kip Hawley an idiot; Wells Fargo sued for firing fraud-refusing tellers; The real AI apocalypse; Encryption didn't cause 9/11; Bat-person costume; British Library on DRM and CC; NYT v OWS; "The Brave Little Toaster"; Bounty for Trump's tax return; Chinese real-estate bubble; Corbyn's Labour conference speech; HP blinks; "Are you calling me a racist?"; "Yuge"; Debts that can't be paid won't be paid.
  • Upcoming appearances: Edmonton, Boston, Brighton, Virtual, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Paris, OVancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Kilkenny, Montreal.
  • 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 pastoral landscape with a cablecar system running overhead. A procession of old-timey cash registers are being moved through the sky on it.

Priceful (permalink)

Digital rights activists have long railed at the use of the term "IP," criticizing it for being deceptively imprecise and also rhetorically dishonest. I get where these objections are coming from, but I think they're misguided.

Start with "deceptively imprecise." "IP" covers a lot of legal ground, from the "big three" of copyright, trademark and patent, to a whole arcane bestiary: anticircumvention, noncompete, trade secrecy, nondisparagement, database and publicity rights, and more. Each of these has a radically different policy basis and radically different contours.

Take copyright and trademark. Copyright is designed to allow companies (and the creators they hire or contract with) to commercially exploit creative works. In the US, copyright is a creature of the Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8:

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C8-3-2/ALDE_00013064/

Fun fact: there are only two clauses in the Constitution that include a rationale: the Second Amendment ("A well regulated Militia") and the copyright clause ("To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"). Everything else is one of those "truths" that the framers "held to be self-evident." In these two cases, they decided to explain their thinking.

So the point of copyright is to incentivize investment in creative works, and its mechanism is a set of limited rights over those works, for limited times. Copyright expires, and it is subject to "limitations and exceptions," including "fair use," a very broad set of highly situational rights to use works even if the rightsholder objects:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/07/aimsters-revenge/#effective-means-of-access-control

Now consider trademark: trademark could not be more different from copyright! Trademark is a consumer protection rule: it empowers companies to sue competitors who engage in deceptive conduct that could confuse their customers. The idea here is that if you get a pair of fake Nikes that fall apart within a matter of days, or eat at a fake McDonald's whose food is (somehow?) even worse than regular McDonald's food, you are unlikely to take action. You're not going to hire a lawyer over a hamburger.

So trademark deputizes companies to sue on behalf of customers who have been or might be deceived by unscrupulous competitors whose merchandising and marketing are likely to confuse the public. Unlike copyright's "fair use," trademark has other defenses, like "nominative use" ("This case fits an iPhone" is not a trademark violation, provided it's true). Also, many trademark claims can be dispensed through simple disclaimers: for example, my debut novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom features a prominent notice informing readers that it wasn't endorsed by the Walt Disney Company. No confusion, no problem.

Unlike copyright, which (eventually) expires, a trademark can carry on for so long as it is associated with a company's products or services. Procter & Gamble's moon logo has enjoyed trademark protection since the mid-19th century, 50 years before the first federal trademark law, and 100 years before the Lanham Act, the current federal trademark law.

This is where the imprecision comes in. There are many activities that are legal under trademark and prohibited under copyright, and vice-versa. By claiming an "IP" violation, you can induce confusion in your target's mind about which rule you're discussing.

If you say, "That's my copyrighted image and your use of it is confusing my customers," I might reply, "Well, that sounds like a trademark issue. Do you have a trademark, too?" Whereas if you say, "That's my IP and you're confusing my customers," that's some tactically useful ambiguity. I can't know if you're talking about copyright, patent, trademark, or, you know, a sui generis broadcaster's right under the Treaty of Rome.

I might walk away from my creative, expressive activity even though it's totally legal, because you've got me to conflate the restrictions of copyright and trademark. This makes "IP" a kind of bully's charter, whose imprecision lets you invoke all weird rights we call "IP," no matter whether they apply to the situation at had.

That's the first objection, then: this deceptive and corrosive imprecision. It's a fair point. But then there's the other objection: the use of the world "property" to describe this motley assortment of regulatory fiats.

"Property" is the established catechism of the Church of Late-Stage Capitalism. "Property" is the most sacrosanct right in public orthodoxy, elevated above every other right. My property right lets me destroy perfectly good food while you starve outside my door:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/08/wilhoitian/#human-rights-v-property-rights

Before "IP" came into wide usage, we didn't generally try to group this miscellany under one umbrella, but when we did, the term we used wasn't "IP," it was monopolies. These regulatory fiats were (correctly) considered to be government-granted, government-enforced monopolies. The adoption of IP was a branding exercise, a very successful attempt to transform the public's perception of these rules as natural, freestanding property rights that the law merely ratified – not a set of regulatory gifts designed to protect the self-interest of commercial firms.

I get it. Between the tactical confusion and the invocation of "property," "IP" feels like terrain worth fighting over. Once you let your adversary frame the debate in terms of property, you've already lost half the battle.

For many years, I bought into this. But lately, I've grown more skeptical of this matter. Back in 2020, I published a long essay proposing that far from being confusing or ambiguous, "IP" has a crisp, widely understood meaning: "Any law that lets me reach beyond the walls of my company to exert control over my competitors, critics and customers":

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

This is the common factor that binds together that mess of legal oddments, from trademark/copyright/patent to nondisparagement and noncompetes to anticircumvention and personality rights.

I think this is both true and a powerful framing. It correctly puts IP in the category of "things corporations do to control you and the rest of the world."

I've been trying this out for six years now, and I think it's a winner. But it was only a month or two ago that I realized there was a way in which the use of "property" can also be used to undermine the bullying, censorship and extraction of corporations wielding their IP.

Property rights may be our state religion, but they are also the worst tool for several important jobs that need doing. Think of privacy: the standard for privacy is for you to click through an "agreement" that nominally trades your privacy rights for some product or service. Google spies on you constantly for ad-targeting, you get to see Youtube videos (after watching a bunch of ads).

This is a catastrophe. Virtually every vendor you engage with, from your landlord to your corner deli, wants you to install an app whose terms of service requires you to sign away all of your privacy rights, forever, in exchange for nothing. You get the same sandwich, but you "pay" more, in the form of all your private data, which is flushed into the unregulated data-broker sector to be weaponized against you in a thousand ways, including higher prices and lower wages:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/11/your-risk/#my-reward

Worse: because you have "entered into a contract" to "sell" your privacy rights, anything you do to claw those rights back is violation of your end of the contract. Using a tracker blocker like Privacy Badger makes you the cheater:

https://privacybadger.org/

Even if you could get actually paid for the use of your private information, the sums involved would round to zero. Companies like Facebook make pennies from your private data, and inflict harm on you that totals up to hundreds of times more than they actually make. The commercial surveillance industry are poster children for corruption: concentrated gains that are far exceeded by diffuse harms:

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-zucks-empire-of-oily-rags/

But just because privacy doesn't fit well into a property rights framework, it doesn't follow that there's no way to do privacy well. We have lots of other rights frameworks besides property, and it's taken the concerted work of generations to get us to forget that these rights exist at all.

Imagine if our privacy regime was modeled on the human rights system we rely on when it comes to sex, bodily autonomy and consent. In this framework, no one is allowed to do anything to you unless you give your continuous, informed consent, which you can withdraw at any time. "I changed my mind" is a perfectly valid thing to say in the middle of a sexual encounter. It's not a violation of your contract. Quite the opposite: someone who ignores your withdrawal of consent is guilty of criminal assault.

If we apply a consent regime (not a property regime) to privacy rights, then the entire commercial surveillance industry would cease to exist. There's no way you can give "informed consent" to a laundry-list of terms of service that are as impenetrable as they are lengthy, and even if you did, you could withdraw that consent at any time, and Facebook et al would have to immediately stop processing your private information and disgorge it.

Like all forms of property rights, "IP" has severe limitations that can only be addressed by applying a different framework to your disputes. Think of the way that the expansion of copyright has failed creative workers. For 50 years, we've monotonically expanded copyright in every dimension, so that today, copyright covers more works, restricts more uses and inflicts higher statutory penalties.

Over those 50 years, media companies have gotten richer and more profitable while the creative workers whose art these media companies sell have gotten poorer, both in real terms and as a share of the earnings our labor generates for our bosses. This seems like a paradox at first, but really, it's just a built-in feature of property law: that people who have assets but lack bargaining leverage end up selling those assets for peanuts.

In a market dominated by five publishers, four studios, three labels, two app companies and one ebook/audiobook company, giving a creative worker more to bargain with is just giving them more to bargain away. Giving us more copyright is like giving a bullied schoolkid more lunch money: no amount of lunch money will get that kid fed.

This is why arguments about copyright and AI training are such a dead-end. Even if you stipulate that AI training isn't fair use (far from a certainty), or if you want legislative action to establish that every creator gets to decide whether their work can be used to train an AI, you won't help creative workers win the class struggle against AI companies.

Remember the Hollywood writers' strike? It's the only time in history that creative workers have defeated AI, so it's worthy of close study. Specifically, remember that workers on those picket lines weren't striking against the AI companies, they were striking against the studio bosses, artist-hating billionaires like Warner's David Zaslav and Disney's Bob Iger, whose careers have been defined by a relentless quest for ways to pay creative workers less. It was studio bosses, not AI bosses, who wanted to replace screenwriters with AI.

These are the same studio bosses who are now suing AI companies for copyright infringement. That's not because the studio bosses want to get rid of AI models or keep them out of the writers' room. They absolutely want to fire writers and replace us with AI. The studio lawsuits over AI training want to make training a licensable activity so that the studios can get paid for the use of "their" training data to make models that they absolutely want to use to fire most of their writers and then knock down the wages of the survivors of the AI layoffs.

Many creative workers have cheered on these media companies as they chase the AI companies through the courts, and some artists' groups have even submitted amicus briefs on their behalf. But the New York Times – a company that has repeatedly used the dirtiest union-busting tactics imaginable against its workers – is not suing OpenAI to ensure that creative workers don't lose wages to AI. They're suing to make sure that the Times gets a bigger piece of the action when that happens.

If the Times, Disney and Warner prevail, they will immediately amend their standard, non-negotiable contracts to require every creative worker who does any work for them to exclusively and irrevocably sign over the right to train AI with our labor, and the resulting models will be used to attack our jobs and wages.

In other words, the media company/AI company lawsuits are a fight to see who gets the biggest piece when creative workers get eaten for dinner. We don't want either side to win: we want to be taken off the menu altogether.

Which is exactly what the Hollywood writers accomplished, and they didn't use copyright to do it. They used something far more important and powerful: labor rights.

Like all the Hollywood guilds, the Writers Guild of America has a nearly unheard-of labor right. They are able to engage in something called "multi-employer bargaining," itself a weak form of "sectoral bargaining," which is when all the workers in a sector bargain with all the bosses in that sector. Sectoral bargaining was made practically illegal under the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, and its last vestiges are to be found in Hollywood.

But as vestigial as Hollywood's unique labor rights system may be, it was still enough to let thousands of freelancers beat back AI in their writers' rooms. Indeed, they even retained the right to use (or not use) AI if they chose, without any threat to their wages or headcount:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/

This is something you can only get with labor rights, not copyright and certainly not property rights. If we limit ourselves to property rights, the only question we need to ask is "Who owns that writers' room?" And since the answer is "the studio" then whatever the studio says goes.

It's precisely because labor rights get workers benefits at their bosses' expense (and copyright cannot) that we have been subjected to generations of pro-copyright messaging, told that we aren't workers at all – we're small businesses, LLCs with MFAs!

Creative workers have been taken for a ride. We've been told that we're not workers, so we shouldn't advocate for labor rights. We've been told that copyright is better than labor rights, because copyright is a property right. It puts a price on your work, which means you can get paid.

But prices are things we assign to things that are so worthless that we can say what they're worth. The most valuable things in the world aren't property, and describing them as property would cheapen them. Human beings aren't property. The fact that we're not property doesn't mean we're worthless, it means we're priceless. That's why "murder" isn't "theft of life" and "rape" isn't "theft of sex." Your life and bodily integrity are worth too much to be bought and sold.

Property rights have a role to play in the assertion of human rights and other rights, but it is a subordinate role. Property rights might someday end the barbaric practice of homeless encampment sweeps and the confiscation of all the worldly goods of the poorest, most vulnerable people in our midst:

https://projects.propublica.org/impact-of-homeless-sweeps-lost-belongings/

But property rights must be subordinate to human rights, otherwise they'll let landlords evict tenants willy-nilly.

Which is all to say, by all means, let our adversaries claim "IP." Let them admit that they have this doctrine by which they attempt to assert control over their critics, customers and competitors. They can assert control, and we'll keep autonomy and consent. Let them say that they have property rights over things so cheap they can have a price. They can be priceful, we can be priceless.

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 Nasdaq allows sub-$1 shares to avoid mass delisting after 9/11 https://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/28/business/moratorium-by-nasdaq-on-listing-rules.html

#25yrsago USAF makes it much easier to shoot down civilian aircraft https://www.chicagotribune.com/2001/09/28/rules-revised-for-downing-airliners/

#25yrsago Don't blame encryption for 9/11 https://web.archive.org/web/20010930005338/http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1272-210-7320099-1.html

#20yrsago Disneyland parking structure repeatedly robbed at gunpoint https://web.archive.org/web/20061031031505/https://www.ocregister.com/ocregister/homepage/abox/article_1291046.php

#20yrsago HOWTO: Make a bat-person costume out of an old umbrella https://www.evilmadscientist.com/2006/how-to-build-a-better-bat-costume/

#20yrsago American Airlines bans in-flight kissing https://web.archive.org/web/20061004214421/https://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/060925ta_talk_collins

#20yrsago British Library takes on Creative Commons and DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20061022143612/https://www.bl.uk/news/pdf/ipmanifesto.pdf

#20yrsago TSA: calling Kip Hawley an idiot is not allowed https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/checkpoints-borders-policy-debate/606142-i-detained-tsa-checkpoint-about-25-minutes-today.html#post6440005

#15yrsago Who’s occupying Wall Street, and why is the NYT only interested in the kooks? https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/nyregion/protesters-are-gunning-for-wall-street-with-faulty-aim.html?_r=2&hp

#15yrsago Podcast: my story “The Brave Little Toaster” https://dn710605.ca.archive.org/0/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_212/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_212_Brave_Little_Toaster.mp3

#10yrsago The dubious upsides of having a Syrian passport https://globalvoices.org/2016/09/29/i-am-lucky-to-have-a-syrian-passport/

#10yrsago State of California imposes 12-months’ worth of sanctions on Wells Fargo https://web.archive.org/web/20161003194157/http://www.treasurer.ca.gov/news/releases/2016/20160928.asp

#10yrsago 2600 Magazine offers $10K for Trump’s tax return https://web.archive.org/web/20160930162135/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/hacker-zine-says-it-will-pay-10000-for-trumps-tax-returns

#10yrsago Black voter registration is inversely correlated with black death at police hands https://www.wired.com/2016/09/intriguing-link-police-shootings-black-voter-registration/

#10yrsago Chinese real estate bubble is “biggest in history” https://web.archive.org/web/20160929135157/http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/28/investing/china-wang-jianlin-real-estate-bubble/

#10yrsago Notes from Jeremy Corbyn’s barn-burning speech at the Labour Party conference https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/8-key-points-jeremy-corbyns-8936364

#10yrsago Douglas County, OR using dirty ballot tricks to finish off the slow murder of its libraries https://web.archive.org/web/20160930155357/https://action.everylibrary.org/douglascounty

#10yrsago HP blinks, says it will restore printer functionality, but there’s a LOT more it needs to do https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/09/dont-hide-drm-security-update

#10yrsago The Doonesbury Trump retrospective proves that Garry Trudeau had Drumpf’s number all along https://memex.craphound.com/2016/09/29/the-doonesbury-trump-retrospective-proves-that-garry-trudeau-had-drumpfs-number-all-along/

#10yrsago Ex-Wells employees who were fired for NOT committing fraud launch $2.6B lawsuit https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/26/495454165/ex-wells-fargo-employees-sue-allege-they-were-punished-for-not-breaking-law

#10yrsago Inside a multimillion dollar fake Kindle book scam https://www.zdnet.com/article/exclusive-inside-a-million-dollar-amazon-kindle-catfishing-scam/

#10yrsago Wells Fargo execs will lose a few millions out of the hundreds of millions they got for abetting massive fraud https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/09/wells-fargo-ceo-stumpf-hit-with-41-million-in-clawbacks-head-of-community-bank-dinged-19-million.html

#10yrsago Youtube’s new “offline first” product for India treats telcos as damage and routes around them https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/youtube-go-youtube-reimagined-for-next/

#5yrsago Shelter is a toxic asset https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/27/lethal-dysfunction/#yimby

#5yrsago Democrats, health care monopolies, and market failures https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/27/lethal-dysfunction/#luxury-bones

#5yrsago Wells Fargo can't stop criming https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/29/jubilance/#too-big-to-jail

#5yrsago "Are you calling me a racist?" https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/29/jubilance/#tolerable-racism

#5yrsago Debts that can't be paid, won't be paid https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/29/jubilance/#debt

#1yrago The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/econopocalypse/#subprime-intelligence

#1yrago Plenty of room at the bottom (of the tech stack) https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/28/works-well/#fails-well

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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Recent appearances (permalink)


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Latest books (permalink)


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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. Friday's words: 525 (19747 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

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